After the governor of a small town in Georgia is overthrown, his vain wife (the lusty Mary Testa), in her rush to flee, leaves her baby behind; one of her servants, Grusha (Elizabeth A. Davis), against her better judgment, takes pity on the poor babe (played by a black-eyed Howdy Doody-like doll), ultimately forsaking her engagement to her beloved fiancé, Simon Alex Hurtt).
On Saturday, Lloyd Ralston Gallery in Shelton, Conn., will auction a few hundred of Mr. Sakow's objects, specifically mid-20th-century Howdy Doody artifacts.
You trust that if you do it right, Generation X moviegoers, for whom the Muppets are the near-sacred equivalents of the baby boomers' Howdy Doody troop, will welcome them back with open arms and misty eyes and take their children.
Perry the cowboy coyote-killer, the lord of the Texas job-creation machine, the g-dropping glad-hander with a "howdy" for every stranger in the room.
Both were paradoxes: the taciturn Howdy Myers produced flamboyant football and lacrosse offenses, while the boisterous Butch van Breda Kolff exerted tight control over his basketball offense.
The 52-foot-tall mechanical cowboy towered over the State Fair of Texas in Dallas in bluejeans, size-70 boots and a 75-gallon hat, the city's very own Howdy Doody, if Howdy Doody were the size of a four-story building.
Despite the success of such programs as The Howdy Doody Show (1947 60) and Kraft Television Theatre (1947 58; another version appeared on ABC in 1953 55) and such stars as Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, NBC television perennially ran second in the ratings to CBS.
NBC as well as CBS broadcast lowbrow material for the masses; "The Howdy Doody Show" was one of the hit shows of television's infancy.
Though she's now a freelance public-policy and communications specialist, Gilbert spent many years as a high-school English teacher, and I wasn't surprised to find that she resembled a composite of my high-school English teachers — a neatly groomed sixty-one-year-old woman with big eyeglasses, wavy auburn hair, a pearly North Texas drawl, and a howdy-do affability.
There were karaoke nights and volleyball leagues, the Baghdad Regatta, and "Country Night — One Howdy-Doody Good Time".
Foxtrot, performance art, that I gaze on so fondly today — this hymn to dowdiness Howdy-Doody shaped . . .
