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Coach Clayton with Mickey and
Michelle Mud-turtle. "(Michelle never wore her shell...dresses were much more fun and prettier, she said.) This is the best picture of the Michelle puppet that I ever saw. No wonder that little girls were crazy about her. I sent her dress sizes to fans that asked and dress came in the mail from the mothers of fans. At one time, I had a wardrobe of over 150 dresses to put on the puppet...all from the mothers of the children watching. Sometimes, I would change her dress every time a cartoon came on... so that she was in a different outfit for each action segment. She would tell whom the dress was from...Actually four puppets were used in this show. Mickey and Michelle, Boris Bear and a scotch plaid snake called Scotty the Highland Viper. He was a grandfather figure complete with white beard. Boris Bear was always coming up with a new and very corny poem. Mickey hated his poems...Michelle encouraged him to write more. It was a fun bit." |
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Richard Clayton is probably most beloved to LA kid's from the mid-1960's as Coach Clayton who takes care of his adorable charges Mickey and Michelle Mud-Turtle. Mr. Clayton was kind enough to spend some time reminiscing with Local Legends about his life and career as a local TV personality. |
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I was in my senior
year at I jumped at the
chance. |
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I designed a possum
hand puppet with a material covered wire coat hanger tail...and decided to
call him "P.J. Possum"...he wore pajamas because he was always just
waking up or just going to sleep...actually he most of the time he was just
"playing possum." At personal
appearances, he would lightly bite the fingers of children and they were
called "possum kisses." I was on this show for eight months when I
got the opportunity for a job at KFJZ-TV in I graduated Baylor
in 1955 and was working as a film projectionist at channel 11 when I met
Hilda Cohen, who had graduated TCU the same year and was a copywriter in the
sales department. She was a drama major looking for a break into show
business. I convinced her that she should become a puppeteer. I took the
plans for PJ Possum, made another hand-held puppet, gave it long, yellow
string hair and in the hand of Hilda, became "Amanda Possum." I was an avid fan of
the comic strip by Walt Kelly called "The Adventures of Pogo" and
one of my favorite characters was Churchy LaFemme,
a turtle. What a great idea for a puppet. I cut holes in an army helmet
liner, added a wooden face plate onto it, painted
the shell green, with white and yellow trim. Made up a turtle like puppet,
complete with arms and legs...iron on patches for eyes, sewed in a red satin
mouth, put on short yellow string hair ...and Mickey
Mud-Turtle was born.
KFJZ-TV had a booth at the |
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The station was the
only independent station in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and used to sign on
with a movie at 2:30p.m. The new program director wanted to start signing on
at noon and wanted to do a children's show against the three network stations
that were all showing "soap operas." We promised the station that
doing this show would not interfere with our regular jobs and the first week
in January, 1957..."Mickey and Amanda" signed the station on the
air at noon with Cartoon Clubhouse. Four months later, again with a promise
that we could do it without interfering with our regular jobs, we went on the
air again from 3-3:30 showcasing cartoons and doing our bit. When the station
announced the fall programming for 1957...Mickey and Amanda were attracting
so many commercial sponsors...we found out that we would be on the air from
12:00 to 1:00 PM Monday through Friday and then again from 4:30 till 6:00pm.
And on Saturdays from 5:00-6:00pm. Well, we knew then
that the schedule would definitely interfere with our regular jobs, so we
negotiated an agreement with the station that we do the shows only. (We were
a non-union station.) Soon, the sales department sold a large grocery chain
on the idea of our doing personal appearances on the parking lots of their
stores on Saturdays, so we stopped doing the show on Saturday afternoons. But
every Saturday morning, we were at a grocery store in We were on the air
from 1957 until 1962...Channel 11 in To all whose birthday is today, Happy day, happy day, Mickey and Amanda say, Happy Birthday.
The cast of the Mickey and Amanda Show on the Cartoon Clubhouse Set
as seen from left to right: Boris Bear, Mickey Mud Turtle, Scotty the Snake,
Amanda Possum and the contest winner. A letter write-in contest was held to
see who ought to be the treasurer of the clubhouse. Thousands of letters came
in from children telling the kind of animal it should be and the animal's
name: Mary Jo Gorilla. |
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We never ever had a
single letter of complaint about this repeated programming, ten times a week.
Mothers would write in and say, "You read my child's name in your
birthday book and our telephone rang for an hour with his little friends
calling to see if he had hear it." Also, the
station allowed us to end every Friday's program with the salutation,
"And don't forget to go to Sunday School." Would not be allowed to
do that today. We had a live
audience in the station every afternoon with groups of cub scouts, campfire
girls, or girl scouts in attendance. As the camera panned the audience,
Mickey Mud-turtle would get their names wrong and Amanda would correct him as
she read the name and number of the visiting troop and where they were from. One of the secrets
of the show was that Mickey and Amanda were like brother and sister, but
friends. Mickey was five and always wrong. Amanda was seven and always right.
Mickey thought boys were smarter than girls, but Amanda knew that girls were
smarter than boys. We would do this routine at every personal appearance and
get loud calls from the children watching. After doing our
puppet show on stage, we would walk out into the audience with the puppets on
our hands and talk to each and every child. The children would look directly
at the puppets and talk to them as though they were real. Once a little child
looked into the face of Mickey Mud-Turtle and said, "You aren't real.
You're only a puppet and he operates you," as she pointed at me, still
looking at the puppet. And Mickey replied, "Actually, I'm real and he's
just a big dummy that I operate." She put her hands on her hips, looked
up at her mother and said, "That's not true, is it mama?" Mama was
laughing so hard she couldn't speak.
Hilda Cohen
holding her hand puppet Amanda Possum and Dick Clayton holding Mickey Mud
Turtle, in front of the Cartoon Clubhouse set in 1958. Hilda had been a drama
major at TCU and was raised as a dancer. She had a dynamic personality and as
you can see, was very attractive. However, when we decided to do a puppet
show, it never occurred to us that we could have done a Kukla-Fran-and-Ollie-type
format with Hilda, as herself, out front and Dick acting as the only
puppeteer. But then, it wouldn't have been "Mickey and Amanda," the
puppet show that set all kinds of ratings records. Our contract ran out
at channel 11...Hilda married the news director at WFAA-TV in |
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"Sales sheet made
up by the Channel 13 promotions department for the local salesmen to carry
with them when calling on the various ad agencies that might choose to place
commercials on the program. I had forgotten that I was on a 90-minute show.
Live and in color. Wow! This was the program where every Friday, we had a
puppet newscast that we titled, "Zoo's News." We reported the
arrival of various new-born animals at the San Diego Zoo and the Los Angeles
Zoo. The zoo's would bring in live animals from time
to time to show on-air with Coach Clayton. I would call the zoo offices each
week to get updated information. I did personal appearances at the zoos from
time to time, as well." |
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I went to work for
3M in When I had my
interview with the program director, I learned much to my great surprise that
I was to be a live, on-camera host, as well as a puppeteer. I had never stood
up in front of the camera in my life. Talk about stage fright. |
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"Mickey and
Michelle Mud-Turtle dressed as Sonny and |
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"Coach Clayton and
his cranky landlord (played by Jim Cotton) got to ride as the grand marshals
in the Fourth of July fireworks show at the coliseum...1966." |
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"Michelle
Mud-Turtle greeted the princess from |
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We decided I should
become Coach Clayton in Mickey's |
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After a year with
fairly good ratings, the sales manager thought it would be fun if we did a
show that was aviation minded. He was an aviation enthusiast, as were two of
the producers, so they came up with "The Black Baron and the Flying
Circus." I was dressed in an old helmet with goggles, boot pants and
riding boots...World War 1 style ace. I spoke with a sort of German accent
and I was a buffoon. The show introduced
a new puppet character, a flying tiger that was actually the same sized as a
small boy. He flew in an open air cockpit in this old auto-gyro... looked
just like an airplane, but had a large spinning propeller on top like a
helicopter. We took it out to Van Nuys Airport and did a simulated take-off
of it flying... Put it on film and it was used in the opening credits of the
show. The character spoke like Buddy Hackett with the We made a set with seats in it as though it were the cabin of the airplane and children came on as guests to sit in the seats and the Black Baron would talk to them. The show seemed very stiff and disjointed to me, but the following was there. |
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"The Black Baron
received a lot of flack from the Jewish community...rightly so. It was
short-lived and led to the third and best show in my segment of doing live
children's entertainment in |
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With a year left on
my contract, I talked the programming department into changing characters and
setting. I put clown white in my hair, bought some Ben Franklin glasses,
bought a red and white striped coat, wore a red vest, white shirt with black
bow tie and black pants...and became Mr. Poppatobi.
We decorated the set to look like a part of the |
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"We had five children in the toy shop each day as guests. Mr. Poppatobi showed the children how to fold paper objects...including paper airplanes. He did various simple art projects for the children to be able to do at home. And the puppets had lots of segments." |
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Mr. Poppatobi came in and unlocked the toy shop each
day...spoke to the TV audience and went to the first cartoon. Came back with
Mickey and Michelle for a bit and to another cartoon. Came back with Mr. Poppatobi welcoming the day's live guests... we limited
it to six children a day to be on...sitting on little chairs at a table and
they were coloring and doing paper folding and all sorts of things. It was
like a combination of Romper Room and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. |
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"The personal
appearance photos are from an all day session at the |
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"Well, my head is full of sweet memories from that time when there were so many of us live hosts. It was a great time to be on television. Best of all was the fun rapport that we had with the stage crew...they liked the shows and would often time contribute ideas for me to do. The puppets had nicknames for the various guys on camera, in the lighting booth, the sound engineer and the director. Often, a camera would swing over to show one of them as Michelle would tell the children his nickname and a funny little anecdote about him. There were no union problems doing this, in those days." |
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The station
programming department were impressed with the
numbers that Hobo Kelly was getting across town on channel 11. So, they hired
her to come over to KCOP and be my replacement. She had numbers from doing
pre-school shows...and was now doing her show to an after-school audience.
She did an outstanding job and was actually much better at being a live-host
entertainer than I could have ever been. I was never quite as comfortable on
camera as a person as I was as a puppeteer. |
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Let me share with
you a touch of irony. I decided to do a
contest on Mickey's Two years after my show was over,...coincidentally, the Ice Capades came out with an extravaganza called "Disney On Parade" with the skaters all dressed up as Disney Cartoon Characters. Friends told me I could sue them for royalties, but I said that I was just flattered that the idea came into being and that so many children could be entertained. |
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A year later, I ran
a contest six weeks before Easter telling the children to draw an egg shape on a piece of paper and then to decorate it anyway
they wanted to. There were four different age groups and again I remember that on
Christmas Day, 1966, I showed up at the Children's Hospital with Mickey Mud-Turtle
and got permission to wander down the hallway and go into children's rooms to
say hello with the puppet. It was a very rewarding experience to do that
unannounced with no Promotions people going along with a photographer. I
don't think the hospital would allow a performer to do that today. I did a Christmas
program in 1967 over at UCLA in a ward...I had the complete puppet set and
sound system and did a 20-minute show for about 90 children, ranging in ages
from five to nine, if I remember right. Then I went out with the puppet and
talked with each child and passed out pictures. Later, as I was packing up my
set getting ready to depart, I asked one of the nurses, who was helping me, what ailments most of the children had.
She said, matter-of-factly, "These children are all terminally ill heart
patients. None of them will be alive in the Spring." That was back
before heart transplants and such. I was shook all
the way home. I told her I was glad that I hadn't asked before the show. |
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I remembered back to
1963 when I was doing a solo act in I told him that I
did Mickey Mud-Turtle on the air at channel 11 and that I would like to show
the puppet to his daughter in hopes of cheering her up. The father said,
"Just a minute," and disappeared. Five minutes later
he came to the door and said, "My daughter would like to see the puppet,
come in." I walked into a drawing room that looked like a hotel and we
walked down the stairs into a beautiful basement apartment. The girl was on a
bed in front of the television. I took the puppet out of the bag I was
carrying and proceeded to talk to the little girl with Mickey Mud-Turtle’s
voice. She was laughing and asking questions and it was delightful. All the
time, the father was taking flash pictures and the mother was sitting on the
end of her daughter’s bed and also asking questions of the turtle. I told the
little girl to be sure and watch the show at 3 o’clock that day and Mickey
Mud-Turtle would tell her hello on the screen. As her father and I
were walking back up the stairs for my exit, he slipped an envelope into my
shirt pocket. I took it out and handed it back to him. I told him that he
didn’t owe me a thing and that her smile was payment enough. He said, with a
tear in his eye, "But, you don’t understand. Today was the first time we’ve
seen her smile in over two weeks. We didn’t think we would ever hear her laughter
again." That afternoon,
Mickey Mud Turtle and Boris Bear told her hello and that we hoped she would
get better very soon. Got a letter from the girl’s mother telling that their
phone rang for an hour with friends of the daughter calling to see if she had
heard her name on Mickey Mud-Turtle. A few weeks later, the little girl passed away. |
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I think that there
were two factors that did the live TV hosts in. First was when the Action for
Television Group deemed it unfair to the children for the live hosts to
endorse commercial products. The local station management then thought that
it would just be cheaper to run the cartoons without a host. The second death
nell to the live TV hosts was the improvement of
video tape and the advent of color. The color tape added too heavy a cost to
the productions to make the shows affordable. Also, shows on tape weren't as
local as the live hosted ones. The birthday books went out the window with
the advent of taped shows...in my opinion. Those were great
years. In the two years that I was on TV in |
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Richard Clayton
later went on to become a traffic manager at KCOP and has since retired. He'd
love to hear from any of his fans. Just click here to say |
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return |
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