Street Gang (10 page)

Gibbon hoped spring would provide a freshening breeze to a career becalmed at NBC, where he was a low-paid page with no immediate hope of promotion. Just a week before this meeting with Murrow, arranged by a friend’s father who was an executive at CBS Radio News, Gibbon had been shown the door at the CBS personnel office. It must have been a buyer’s market in employment that spring, considering CBS was giving Fulbright Fellows the bum’s rush.

“When Murrow was done speaking, he reached out for my résumé, attached a note, and signed his name. I took it back to the office that had turned me down for a production assistant’s job just ten days before, with this note fluttering, and was hired instantly, much to the chagrin of the guy who had turned me down.”

 

Like everyone else who ever worked on
Captain Kangaroo
, Sam Gibbon immediately clicked with Lumpy Brannum, by all accounts as genial, generous, and kind a man off camera as he was while playing Mr. Green Jeans. The son of a stern minister, Brannum was born in Sandwich, Illinois, west of Chicago. The family moved to California where young Hugh acquired the nickname Lumpy. (In his memoir, Jon Stone claims to be one of the few people who knew the story behind the sobriquet. Apparently, an appropriate telling of the tale concludes with a wink and a belly laugh. “I will only say that the truth is perfectly disgusting,” Stone observed.)

As a child, Lumpy showed early promise in music and blossomed into a versatile instrumentalist, mastering tuba, trombone, and bass fiddle. On top of all that, he also played the guitar and had a pleasant singing voice. During the war, Brannum auditioned for a spot in a marine corps band and was shipped to the South Pacific with a gaggle of jazz musicians who had enlisted rather than wait to be drafted. Under the baton of Bob Crosby, Bing’s brother, Brannum’s lips were nearly worn out playing the marine corps hymn. “In relaxed moments in our studio, Lumpy told many tales about the reluctance of these musicians to play at parade-ground ceremonies or at officers club dances,” Keeshan said.
¹⁹
It may have seemed like cushy duty for Brannum in the South Seas, but over time, the
Captain Kangaroo
crew and production team learned otherwise. “When they weren’t playing for admirals and generals coming on and off aircraft carriers, the band members were assigned burial detail,” Sam Gibbon said. When their instruments were packed away, the boys in the band shoveled graves for the often mutilated corpses.

“Lumpy was such a gentle soul, he would never inflict any discomfort on another person, even if it was just letting him know what a difficult time he had during the war,” Stone said. “He saw the worst of the Pacific war and had come through it with humor and gentleness intact.”

Though not quite a farmer like Mr. Green Jeans, Brannum was an inveterate gardener who would cart in fresh-picked vegetables to the studio on Monday mornings from his home in the Poconos. “Lumpy was a leader in the ecology movement back in the 1950s, long before ‘environment’ became a buzzword in the American lexicon,” Keeshan said. “He would tell our audience about the need to share our Earth, protect our world, plan for the future. For these [segments], there was little, if any, preparation given to Lumpy; it all came from his mind and his heart. He had a genuine love for the Earth and all its creatures, great and small.”
²⁰

Though each episode of
Captain Kangaroo
was meticulously scripted and timed, the writers understood that Keeshan and Brannum could—and would—improvise to good effect. Keeshan, who shunned rehearsal, reserved the right to ignore scripts altogether, sometimes dismissing them out of hand with only minutes to spare before airtime. “Bob hated rehearsals for a combination of reasons,” Gibbon said. “It was partly laziness and partly because he loved winging it. He really enjoyed the aliveness of it and he felt that if he rehearsed it would take a lot of the freshness out of his performance. So he didn’t rehearse. During my days as studio producer I would stand in for him at rehearsal, making changes in the scripts as we went, depending on how the segments timed out and knowing what Keeshan would hate and not hate.”

The writer who might have been most in tune with Keeshan’s needs as a performer was Connell, steady and supremely organized. His script pages were characteristically crisp, spare, and simple. “They seemed like they didn’t have a hell of a lot of imagination in them. But Dave understood Keeshan and
Captain Kangaroo
at least as well as anybody, and when a Connell script came into the studio, everybody heaved a sigh of relief because you knew Keeshan would be happy and the show would go swimmingly,” Gibbon said. “They were underwritten, which meant that if a bit went wrong that was fine, you didn’t have to cut anything. Dave just had a wonderful sense of what Bob would do. This was important because we didn’t know until five minutes before the show was to go on the air whether we would be doing it as written, with Bob in character and costume, or whether we were going to be winging it all the way with Lumpy, who never was particularly happy with that degree of uncertainty. He was the second banana and liked that role. He played off Keeshan absolutely beautifully. But he didn’t ever like being the first banana. That was not his comfort zone or his role on the program.”

However much Keeshan relied on Brannum, production colleagues believed the costar was granted too little respect. “Keeshan had a mean streak, in that he liked to let people dangle,” said writer Tom Whedon, who wrote for
Kangaroo
before moving on to greater success as head writer for
The Electric Company
and writer-producer for a string of prime-time comedies, including
The Golden Girls
. “Lumpy was on a one-year contract the entire time he was with
Captain Kangaroo
, so that he never, ever knew whether he was going to be back the next year.”

“Lumpy was always worried he wasn’t doing well enough,” said Bob Colleary,
Captain Kangaroo’
s head writer for twenty-three years. “He was insecure.”

Whedon said, “We were always hoping [Keeshan would] be in a good mood. Sometimes, when he arrived in a bad mood and saw a writer’s name on a script, he’d fire that writer on the spot. He did, after all, own the football.”

 

Like all participants in the CBS directors’ training program, Stone and Gibbon had to move on to other assignments to round out their experience and introduce new challenges.

Stone worked for two game shows that, as he recalled, bent the rules. On
Strike It Rich
, one of his duties “was to assist in providing the contestants with answers to questions they were likely to be asked.” On that show, destitute people who needed medical care or a windfall to head off foreclosure would be asked simple quiz questions. If they answered them correctly, they’d win money. If they came up blank, the emcee would take donations from viewers calling in.
TV Guide
called
Strike It Rich
“a despicable travesty on the very nature of charity.”

On
Stand Up and Be Counted
, another dubious sociology experiment, contestants would seek the advice of the audience to solve a real-life dilemma. “If you thought the poor soul should follow plan A, you stood up,” Stone said. “A state-of-the-art electronic-scanning device immediately registered the exact number of standees. Those favoring plan B would then stand.” The results would be calculated by a “computer,” which Stone described as “a large board with electric lights all over it. Behind it stood a producer with two stagehands. When the first audience group rose to be counted, one of the stagehands would turn a crank that caused the lights to flash. Peeking through a hole, a producer would eyeball the standees and then whisper to the other stagehand. ‘Call it thirty-nine.’ ”

Both Stone and Gibbon worked on the daytime
Jimmy Dean Show
, the easy-as-you-please afternoon variety series hosted by the likable Texan who would later become a baron of breakfast sausage. Dean, a boyish country singer with smooth skin and crossover appeal, concluded each show with a devotional. The stage lights would dim and, surrounded by the Noteworthys, a male-female singing group, Dean would offer a hymn and a homey benediction.

Gibbon dated one of the Noteworthys. “We used to get together and harmonize at the apartment of the group’s married couples,” he said. “Jimmy came over one evening, and we were all standing around the piano. He couldn’t read a note of music. I could, and Jimmy noticed. ‘You can read that shit?’ he asked.

“A week later, at the end of a broadcast, Jimmy said, ‘We’ve got a surprise for you and for our stage manager, Sam. He’s going to sing with the Noteworthys next week.’ I just about fell though the floor. I didn’t have any desire to do this, had never performed in public, and was
not
a singer. I just did it for fun. I said to the executive producer, ‘If you make me do this, I won’t show up that day,’ but my protests were to no avail. So I did a song, backed by the Noteworthys. And from that, fan mail began to show up, and I had to sing again. An entire fan club formed, and Jimmy would call me out on stage to his interview desk. He’d read the letters aloud while the camera stayed fixed on my face. It was absolutely awful.

“Then, the executive producer called me into his office one day and said, ‘Listen, I could make you a star. I have connections in the music business.’

“I said, ‘Forget it,’ and went back to being a stage manager again.”

 

In 1960, Gibbon took some needed time off. “I didn’t let anyone know where I was going,” he said, “not my parents, my friends, anybody. I was just going to go as far west as I could get, then turn around when half my vacation was gone.” He got as far as Tahiti, a distance of nearly 5,500 nautical miles from Manhattan.

“I was living in a hotel that had thatched huts by the water, having an idyllic time. Then, one morning, one of the hotel employees came racing, saying there was a wire waiting for me at the local telegraph office. I jumped on a motorbike and raced through town, thinking anybody who had figured out where I was had to have some emergency reason to contact me.”

Gibbon tore into the telegram, the first sentence of which read, “LAST CHANCE TO AVOID 42.”

It was a mood-shattering reminder of what awaited Gibbon in New York. After a succession of enjoyable studio assignments in daytime television, progressing from production assistant to stage manager, his number had finally come up for duty at CBS, the network nerve center within an area of Grand Central Terminal. Like those lonely NATO outposts where faceless government drones monitor defense systems, associate directors (ADs) at Master Control—Studio 42—oversaw the network’s precise, second-by-second system of program coordination. (Jon Stone described the first six months of service at Master Control as “the most terrifying, nerve-wracking responsibility imaginable.”)
²¹

The AD was responsible for making sure every program and commercial went on the air as scheduled. It was also his job during network-identification breaks to cue the always unseen studio announcer who would intone “This . . . is CBS.”

“At the time I was on the job, President Eisenhower had had his first heart attack,” Stone said. “Standing by, we had an extremely complicated obituary to be aired immediately in case a second heart attack should, without warning, fell the president. For six months I lived in dread that Eisenhower might die while I was on duty.”

Gibbon dreaded the idea of being sequestered at Studio 42 altogether, tucked away in the broadcasting equivalent of a bunker. The first line of the telegram came like an abrupt tap on the shoulder. The second and third lines provided the
“Psssst.
” They read: COME WORK ON CAPTAIN KANGAROO. WE HAVE AN OPENING ON THE STAFF.

It was signed DAVE CONNELL, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, CAPTAIN KANGAROO.

Gibbon could not imagine how Connell had tracked him down and was furious that he had. “I was so annoyed at having gone through terrible anxiety, thinking that someone from my family had died,” he recalled. “I sent him back a very rude telegram saying that I wasn’t interested. I finished my vacation, came home, and went to work at Studio 42.” After six months in the dark, Gibbon cooled off, and Connell renewed the offer. “By then, the charm of working all night and doing late, late movies had worn off,” Gibbon said, sheepishly. He joined Robert Keeshan Associates, the production company responsible for
Captain Kangaroo
, as an associate producer and writer.

Not long after returning to the show, bachelor Gibbon became smitten with Connell’s secretary, Carol Jorjorian. They kept their relationship secret, lest Keeshan learn of it and subject them to teasing.

Meanwhile Gibbon’s roommate, Jon Stone, had his eye on Beverley Ogg, a fresh-faced blonde from the Midwest who looked as if she had just stepped out of a Tab Hunter movie.

Raised in Ottumwa, Iowa, Ogg came to New York City in 1959 after graduating from the University of Michigan. Upon arrival in the city, she stowed her bags, caught a cab, and was off to meet Dave Connell over at the production office of
Captain Kangaroo.
Months before, she had written a letter of introduction to Connell, on the advice of Ed Stasheff, a professor of television arts, under whom both she—and Connell, a few years earlier—had studied. Connell responded with a cordial letter that included the line, “When you’re ready to come to New York, let me know.”

In person, Connell shared the sad truth that even though Ogg had the academic credentials and experience in a college television studio, the gate-keepers of television in New York were not considering women for production jobs. “I had actually gotten into production at Michigan because my father insisted I had to earn a living,” she said. “I had really wanted to be an actress.”

Connell sent her to the CBS personnel office, where Ogg learned of a secretarial job in the casting department. Though her typing skills were questionable and she was untrained in dictation, she was hired for the position. It didn’t take long for Ogg to realize that throughout CBS were overqualified secretaries just like herself, women whose ambitions were thwarted purely on the basis of gender. “We weren’t trained to be secretaries,” she said. “We had liberal arts degrees. We had come to New York to do something exciting, wanting to work in television. But they just weren’t hiring women to do much.”