Smith's Absence
In September 1954, Bob Smith suffered a heart attack and was ordered to recover at home. NBC managed to keep the show going with guest hosts, including Gabby Hayes and New York disc jockey Ted Brown as Bison Bill, explaining that Smith was vacationing at Pioneer Village. While kids generally were satisfied with the explanation, show sponsors insisted that they wanted Smith himself to hawk their products. In response, NBC set up a special studio at Smith's home so that he could appear live "from Pioneer Village" to do commercials. During Smith's absence from the show, Howdy was voiced by Allen Swift. Swift continued to voice the character for a short time even after Smith's return to the show in September 1955.
Read more about this topic: Howdy Doody
Famous quotes containing the words smith and/or absence:
“If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.”
—Alexander Smith (1830–1867)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)