Zero Dockus ...

Zero dockus, mucho crockus, hallabolooza bub,

That’s the secret password that we use down at the club.

            Almost every afternoon after I walked home from school I’d rush to my bedroom, turn the portable TV knob on, wait for a tiny point of light to expand into a full-screen image, and sing along with a local icon, Stan Boreson.  And then I’d settle in for an afternoon of stupid puns, parody songs, old movies and ethnic stereotyping. 

            In the 1950s, before the advent of telecommunication satellites and continental microwave relays, much of television was local.  KING, the first and, for four years, only station on the air in Seattle, was, at that time, an ABC affiliate, but that didn’t mean an awful lot.  Network programming had to be physically delivered by messenger from the production centers in New York and Hollywood, and ABC itself was a struggling, nearly bankrupt network without much to offer, at least until Walt Disney got involved.

            With a growing demand for more hours of programming, stations like KING enlisted local performers to host daytime chat shows for housewives and “educational” variety shows for children.  The sets were cardboard (on the same level of sophistication as 1920s German Expressionist films or early Dr. Who), and the performers came cheap—and the audience, entranced by the very existence of television, wasn’t very critical.  By the mid-fifties, almost all stations had hours of programming for children:  Wunda Wunda, a woman in a clown get-up who read stories; Captain Puget, a seafarer who showed old movies and told stories; Brakeman Bill, a railroad engineer who showed old movies and told stories; and, at the top, J.P. Patches, an improvisational clown, and King’s Klubhouse with Stan Boreson, a former radio performer of some renown.

            There were others as well, some supplied by the networks:  Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Howdy Doody,  Shari Lewis and Lambchop, and, of course, Mickey Mouse Club.  But, at least in the first years, it was the locals who “hooked” us on television, who gave us hours of entertainment, and who implanted corny skits and silly songs we can still recite verbatim after half a century.  And they gave us more:  these were the creators of an identity—the postwar, baby boom generation that first experienced the world through a medium totally foreign to anything their parents had known.  And they taught many of us what it meant to come from the Pacific Northwest.

            Stan Boreson, in particular, created the “Scandahoovian.”  Seattle, before the war, had been heavily dominated by immigrants from, primarily, Sweden and Norway, and Boreson developed an exaggerated Scandanavian persona, complete with exaggerated accent, ever-present accordion for accompaniment, and a plethora of “Scandahoovian” folk songs like The Lutefisk Song, Catch a Pickled Herring, I Just Go Nuts at Christmas, and Valking in My Vinter Undervear.  Even for those of us who were not Scandanavian, the Northwest became a place of immigrants who spoke something other than Harvard English.  His constant companion was a nearly-inert Bassett hound, No-Mo (even that name, a play on the Unlimited Hydroplane Slo-Mo-Shun IV, had regional meaning.)  His humor was broad, irreverent but gentle, and full of puns, and there was utterly no didactic content.

            Even with cardboard and plywood sets, it couldn’t last forever, and Boreson went off the air in 1967, replaced by nationally-syndicated and network shows and Hanna-Barbera cartoons. So, too, disappeared all of the local contemporaries, including, last of all, J.P. Patches.  There was still childrens’ programming, of course (at least while the F.C.C. still required it of licensees), but it was slicker, and the identity more urban and national.  As much as Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood have contributed, they could never have given a Seattle kid as strong a sense of regional identity as Stan Boreson and No-Mo did.

            And zero dockus, mucho crockus, hallabolloza ban,

Means now you are a member of King’s TV club with Stan.