Happy's Party

Happy's Party was a children's television show that first aired locally on Pittsburgh's WDTV on March 1, 1951, and is believed to have ended on August 13, 1955, by which point the station had been bought by Westinghouse and renamed KDKA-TV. The program ran for a single season on the DuMont Television Network, from September 6, 1952, to May 9, 1953, offering a 30-minute network segment plus an additional 30-minute segment for the local Pittsburgh audience. It also reportedly aired on Pittsburgh's WQED in 1959. The show featured a dog puppet named Happy, who interacted with host Ida Mae Maher. Maher, a dental hygienist for the Pittsburgh Board of Education, also made public-service visits to local elementary school classrooms, using a puppet called "Happy Tooth" to teach children about good dental hygiene.

The series was Maher's idea: she wanted to use a puppet dog on television to teach kids about dental health in an entertaining way. Happy was described as a "champion of good health, good manners, and good citizenship." Besides Maher's exchanges with Happy, each episode included a panel of four children answering questions from adult guests, as well as short plays written by viewers.

For years, no episodes were thought to survive. In 2015, however, Clarke Ingram, who runs a DuMont historical website, announced he had found a partial show. This fragment, aired on February 5, 1955—just six days after WDTV became KDKA-TV—is the only known footage of the program. In 2019, it was digitized and uploaded to YouTube, and the original film is now held at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.