Rant #2,584: The "Wonder" Of You

Happy Groundhog Day!
 
This is the day that we give over to the groundhogs to determine whether our winter will be a short or long one.
 
As it goes, if the groundhog sees its shadow due to clear weather, it will retreat to its hole in the ground and winter will persist for six more weeks.
 
If the groundhog does not see its shadow because of cloudiness, spring will arrive early.

 
I don’t know about where you live, but where I am, winter came in full force yesterday. We must have gotten about a foot or more of snow, and soon, my wife and I are going to have to venture out into the whiteness and get rid of it so she can get to work and we can get back to our normal activities.
 
At long last—and with the work gods seemingly listening to our prayers—she did not have to go into work yesterday, and pretty much all we did was try to clean off our cars while it was still coming down in buckets and that was that for the day.
 
So whatever the groundhog sees today will not cover up the fact that winter has already come, so whatever the groundhog sees won’t amount to a hill of beans, or at least the mountain of snow that we have outside.
 
I just hate snow and what it does, but I guess that when you live in the northeast, this is the true “white privilege” that we all have to deal with just about every winter whether we like it or not.
 
My thoughts go to sunnier days … and that brings up a personality who died recently who just happened to be named “Sonny.”
 
Back when I was a kid and loved the snow, there were personalities on local television that brought the world to us each and every day, including on the weekend.
 
Every major city in the country had kid show hosts of every form and stature, and in New York City, we had some of the best of them, some of whom went on to national notoriety, like Soupy Sales, who actually came to us from I believe Detroit, but once he got to the Big Apple, he became one of the biggest things on TV and making a long-lasting career for himself.
 
But we also had the guys who were local people who just happened to fall into these kid TV host roles for one reason or another, and they were huge locally, but never really broke out on a national level.
 
In New York, we had Jack McCarthy, who hosted the St. Patrick’s Day Parade every year on Channel 11. He was the brother of former New York Yankees skipper Joe McCarthy, but to us kids, he was Captain Jack McCarthy, showing the cartoons we loved, including Popeye, each and every day.
 
And we had Joe Bolton, who I believe began his life on Channel 11 as a reporter or a weatherman or something in the news division, who somehow morphed into Officer Joe Bolton, the TV cop who showed us all the Little Rascals and Three Stooges shorts we could muster, with the warning before each showing of the Stooges, in particular, that we should not do what they showed us in these shorts at home.
 
And we had probably the best of all the kid show hosts, Chuck McCann, making us laugh and laugh and laugh some more on the weekends with his Ernie Kovacs-esque blackouts, and his impersonations of Oliver Hardy and Little Orphan Annie were so spot on that he was able to migrate out to Hollywood and make quite a career for himself as a character actor.
 
There were so many others, including the circus ringleader, Claude Kirshner and Sandy Becker and Beachcomber Bill and countless others, and, or course, I am not including the horror movie hosts such as Zacherle into the mix, but boy, was it fun growing up in the 1960s when you had New York television as your electronic babysitter!
 
And then there was the most intellectual of the kid show hosts. He did not dress up in funny garb to reflect his personality’s occupation; he just carried around a microphone and asked kids whet they thought about things that might have been on their mind, and he did it in a way where you really thought that he cared about what they had to say … and he did.

 
I am talking about Sonny Fox, the original and erstwhile host of “Wonderama” on Channel 5, who passed away the other day. He lived into his mid-90s, and while only a TV kids show host for a few years, he made an indelible impression on anybody who watched the show, which was so popular that there was a five-year waiting list to get on the show in the gallery.
 
And this was not a gallery like “Howdy Doody,” the grandfather of these types of shows.
 
Sure, Fox would give away prizes to kids, and sure, like “Bozo,” he showed cartoons and had celebrity guests visit, but “Wonderama” was more cerebral than the other kids TV shows, but not cerebral in the sense of “Romper Room” or “Ding Dong School” or even “Captain Kangaroo.”
 
With the level of questions that Fox asked his audience, he was really asking young viewers to think, and smile, at the same time.
 
Back in those days, my young neighbor across the hall, Joyce., was a huge fan of the show, and she tried to get into the gallery for years, finally getting her call.
 
I remember we all gathered around the TV in my house to see her on the show, and I don’t remember if Fox ever came over to her to ask her anything, but she was on the show after waiting years to get on.
 
Fox went on to a number of non-viewing executive positions in television for the test of his career after handing off the “Wonderama” hosting duties to Bob McCallister, who I don’t personally think had much of a handle on what set the show apart from the other kid TV shows.
 
And “Wonderama” has been revived several times, but never lasted very long in each reincarnation, simply because the producers bought the name but didn’t get what made the original show so successful.
 
So Sonny Fox has left us, joining the other kid TV show hosts of yore in our collective memories, since little footage of what these guys did actually still exists.
 
Yes, I do wish for “sunnier” days … and now onto the white stuff, stuff which I can’t question and stuff that I have to remove as an impediment as soon as possible.
 
And there is no “Wonderama” in that pursuit at all.
 
(P.S.: If you want to see some of these kid TV hosts in action on a more national level, watch any of the movies that Soupy Sales made during his heyday, and also see his appearances doing “The Mouse” on shows like “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Chuck McCann also did several films, including “The Projectionist,” and then we had Joe Bolton in the Three Stooges film “The Outlaws Is Coming” and Sonny Fox in “The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t.”
 
It is not the same as seeing them in action on their TV shows, but with so little of that footage still available, YouTube is the place to see this stuff.)