Garfield Goose and Friends
A puppet king ruled Chicago children's television for two decades.
For over two decades starting in 1955, Chicago's WGN-TV aired Garfield Goose and Friends, a puppet show hosted by Frazier Thomas. The title character, a clacking goose, believed he was the King of the United States. Before Sesame Street, it held the record as television's longest-running puppet program.
Quick Facts
- Genre
- Children's program
- Creator
- Frazier Thomas
- Director
- Ron Weiner
- Starring
- Frazier Thomas; Roy Brown
- Country
- United States
- Language
- English
- Seasons
- 24 (2 on WBKB/WBBM, 1 on WBKB (now WLS), 21 on WGN)
- Theme music
- Ethel Smith
Facts from the source article.
History
Frazier Thomas first brought Garfield Goose to life on a local Cincinnati TV show he hosted. The idea came from Catholic nuns who used a sock puppet shaped like a goose to ask children to "feed the goose" with charity donations. Wanting a special way to give prizes to kids on his program, Thomas created his own goose puppet. He named it after the station's telephone exchange, "Garfield." In Cincinnati, the puppet lived inside a cuckoo clock because he dreamed of being a cuckoo bird. The goose first appeared on Thomas's variety show, Petticoat Party. Once the character proved popular, Garfield Goose and Friend launched on September 29, 1952, with Chicago puppeteer Bruce Newton. The very first puppeteer for Garfield was a WBKB secretary, Lee Ann Prineas, who stepped away from her desk job during broadcasts. The show aired directly against NBC's Howdy Doody. When the American Federation of Radio Artists became the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, TV performers had to join the union and earn at least union scale wages. The station agreed to pay union scale for only one performer—Frazier Thomas. This meant Bruce Newton had to stay off-camera and remain silent, working without union pay.
Aftermath
After quitting the show early on, Bruce and Claire Newton mounted a live, traveling Garfield Goose Telepuppets show at neighborhood events for many years after the series ended, using other non-Garfield Goose puppets they built for other shows. WGN-TV management chose not to pursue the matter, to the chagrin of Frazier Thomas and Roy Brown. After Thomas's death, Newton attempted to claim that Garfield Goose was entirely his idea, but the general manager of WBKB-TV at the time the program first aired, Sterling 'Red' Quinlan, said it was Frazier Thomas who came up with the concept. Garfield Goose and Friends aired live for much of its history, as was common in the 1950s and early 1960s. The special earned #1 ratings in Chicago and is rerun annually during the holiday season.
More in 1950s American Children's Television Series
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