If you were a young kid anytime between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, you probably remember him. He had a funny haircut and a mustache, and he wore a jacket with enormous pockets. He welcomed you every morning at eight o’clock into a place he called the Treasure House, a friendly space that included some unusual but endearing friends: a dancing bear, a rabbit with glasses, a goofy moose, a talking grandfather clock, and an amiable right-hand man named Mr. Green Jeans.
This eccentric looking host of the Treasure House was Bob Keeshan, a veteran of children’s television since television began, but kids knew him as Captain Kangaroo. He showed up on their TV screens for the first time seventy years ago this week – on Monday morning, October 3, 1955 – and spent the next 6,090 episodes over twenty-nine years helping them start their day with stories, songs, funny skits, cartoon shorts and other bits of entertainment. For more than a dozen years before anyone outside of Pittsburgh had heard of Mr. Rogers, Captain Kangaroo was the friendliest guy on TV.
Keeshan was born in 1927. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves during World War II but was still stationed in the States at the end of the war. He was working on a bachelor’s degree in education at Fordham University when he became part of the fledgling medium known as television in early 1948, appearing as Clarabell the Clown in the early years of the popular Howdy Doody show on the NBC network. He later worked in children’s programming at WABC in New York for a couple years before developing the Captain Kangaroo concept and pitching it to CBS.
Don’t ask me when I started watching the captain. It’s a time I can no longer remember. My two sisters had a few years’ head start on me, and they were both fans of the show. It was on every morning in our house, so it was inevitable that I would be too.
He was part of the morning routine throughout my pre-school and kindergarten years. In addition to enjoying him and his ensemble cast, I was fascinated by the Magic Drawing Board that drew pictures on its surface without assistance from any artist. I giggled at the recurring gag that started with a knock-knock joke and ended with ping-pong balls falling from the rafters of the studio and showering everyone below. And I discovered classic children’s stories like Curious George, Caps for Sale and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel for the first time when the captain read them on the air.
I also remember a fleeting visual nod – eight or ten seconds at most – to one of the program’s primary sponsors, Kellogg’s. It was a promotional display of a glass bowl filled with cereal and a spoon balanced on the rim. Next to the bowl was a Rice Krispies box. The entire setup was perched on a flatbed rail car of a model train, with the captain himself delivering the voiceover: “Welcome back to the Treasure House, this part of which is brought to you by all those good Kellogg’s cereals.”
Brief but mesmerizing. You have to understand: My father had been a railroad worker several years earlier, and images of trains – on the TV screen or anywhere else – had become iconic in our house. The promotional segment was momentary cathode-ray magic.
And then life happened. When I started grade school in the fall of 1970, my mornings were suddenly more structured and hectic. The days of sitting around in my pajamas all morning were no more. I had entered the era of dress pants, white shirt and clip-on tie (per the dress code of my Catholic school), a hurried breakfast, and the hustle to the bus stop. Leisurely visits to the Treasure House were no longer part of the morning itinerary.
Captain Kangaroo was still on the air when I was in high school, although by then I hadn’t thought about him for years. In 1981, the network moved his time slot from 8 am to 7 am, cut the show’s running time in half, and retitled it Wake Up with the Captain. The show was moved again in the spring of 1982, this time to 6:30 am.
The shuffling and reshuffling continued for a couple more years until Keeshan reached a limit and pulled the plug. He walked away at the end of 1984 with three Emmy Awards, just nine months shy of the show’s thirtieth anniversary.
Keeshan took on a few short-lived projects in children’s television in the late 1980s and ‘90s, and he became an outspoken advocate for reducing violence in children’s television and video game content. In that time, PBS aired reruns of Captain Kangaroo from 1986 to 1993.
He died in January 2004 at age 76. I think it’s fair to say that he helped cut a path for Fred Rogers, who invited young public television viewers into his neighborhood for the first time in 1968. By all reports, the two hosts were good friends in real life, and they were both fiercely committed to their respective missions.
“Play is the work of children,” Keeshan once said. “It’s very serious stuff.”
Maybe so, but the captain made it serious fun.