Howdy Doody will awake from 30-year Rip Van Winkle nap

The one and only Buffalo Bob Smith is on the phone from his lakeside cottage near Princeton. He’s mulling over a possible TV special, convinced it could wring nostalgia from the hearts of aging Howdy Doody fans across the country.

The plot goes like this: the puppet Howdy Doody, once as big a TV star as Milton Berle, has been locked up in a box since the day he went off the air in 1960. After enchanting a generation of kids during his 13-year reign on the tube, the freckled-faced, cowboy-suited marionette is supposed to have dropped off to sleep like a wooden Rip Van Winkle.

After 30 years, Buffalo Bob opens the box on camera. Howdy wakes up. It’s 1990 in America, a strange place. Howdy’s eyes are full of wonder, his gap-toothed smile as broad as ever.

“So Howdy says, `My gosh, Buffalo Bob, what’s happened to your hair? It’s silver,’ ” says Smith, his voice building with enthusiasm. “Howdy says he’s hungry, so I say I’ll whip something up in the microwave. Howdy says, `What’s a microwave?’ Then I tell him about Vietnam, see? I tell him about all the things that the alumni of the show have lived through since they were kids. It’s an idea that a friend of mine, the executive producer of the Sally Jesse Raphael show, is working on now. I’m sure it would hit the show’s alumni right between the eyes.”

You’d think that after 30 years of living very comfortably in Maine and Florida, Smith wouldn’t care about attracting audiences anymore. You’d think he’d tire of putting on the buckskin suit and playing straightman to a stable of puppets and a seltzer-squirting clown named Clarabell who helped make Buffalo Bob one of the most famous faces in America at one time.

You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. At 72, Smith is still a showman with an act to perform. He’s a popular speaker on the lecture tour, talking about TV’s pioneer days and doing slapstick with Clarabell for Fortune 500 executives who grew up with the show.

“And today’s kids never heard of Howdy Doody,” Smith says, “but when we appear at a mall somewhere they laugh at the same routines that kids laughed at 40 years ago.”

There have been unsuccessful attempts over the years to revive Howdy for new TV audiences. In 1976, NBC jazzed up Howdy’s hair, moved his mouth electronically, and taped some new shows. Everyone tried hard, maybe too hard, to recapture the old magic, Smith says. It didn’t work. The charm — corny and unsophisticated — was missing.

A couple of years ago, a book called “Say Kids! What Time Is It?” appeared. It was written by Stephen Davis, the son of a part-time director of the Howdy show named Howard Davis. Although largely affectionate, the book told a few scurrilous behind-the-scenes tales that angered Smith. Excerpts appeared everywhere, depicting a less-than-virginal Princess Summerfall Winterspring, played by a beautiful young actress who was killed in a car wreck in 1956 after filming “Jailhouse Rock” with Elvis Presley. It told of lewd rehearsals in which Doodeyville puppets supposedly did naughty things to each other.

In interviews, Smith called the book a pack of lies. I asked him if he still felt the sting.

“Hey, it was an absolute flop, so I’ve tried to forget it,” he says. “It was sour grapes. The old man tried to write a few shows for us, failed miserably, and was fired by NBC. So through his son he tried to attack us. I guess he figured he’d try to knock Howdy and Buffalo Bob off the pedestal.”

Smith says he’s written his own book, which Penguin will publish in November.

“It’s called `Howdy and Me,’ and it’s the true story,” he says. “I’m certainly not going to attack Davis in the book. No point. His book was just a lot of lies and sensationalism. I’m telling an interesting story of how it all started, the success of the show, my years on the college tour, and what we’re all doing now. And there’ll be an awful lot of Maine in it.”

He’ll be leaving Maine for California next week, where he’ll tape an episode of a sitcom for the Fox network. In December, Smith will don his buckskins and embark on a 12-city publicity tour for his book. He’s scheduled to appear on Johnny Carson and Larry King and the other big talk shows.

Smith already knows how the interviews will go; he’s done hundreds of them since the show first aired in 1947. The interviewers will ask him about a time, long ago, when he played a character named Buffalo Bob and became a TV legend. They’ll ask him what he’s been up to since then, as if he left Buffalo Bob somewhere in the past.

That’s the interesting part. Unlike Howdy Doody, the ageless All-American Boy who is enshrined in a glass case at the Smithsonian Museum, the man who gave him life has always preferred to be more than a memory.