Maine TV star Driscoll dies at 81 WLBZ host remembered for zany on-air characters

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Eddie Driscoll brought so many people so much laughter.

The unpredictable, nutty Driscoll, whose puppetry and tomfoolery as well as more serious broadcasting spanned more than three decades on television in Maine, died Saturday. He was 81.

Quiet and more reserved when not on camera, Driscoll morphed into another personality, dozens of personalities over the years, once he hit the stage.

“As soon as that camera came on, he just turned into a totally different person,” Margo Cobb, WLBZ-TV’s former general manager and vice president, said Sunday about her friend.

Through his slapstick, visual comedy style and quirky characters such as the baggy-dressed Margaret, the dim-witted Bruce Budworm and the lovable Mason Mutt, Driscoll became a household name in Maine and the Maritime Provinces.

“It was an important part of growing up; you watched him every day,” said Bill Green, who grew up in Bangor watching Driscoll from afar and for 21/2years in the early 1970s was a cameraman for Driscoll and his antics.

Green, host of “Bill Green’s Maine,” still can recite the introduction to Driscoll’s “Supper Time Super-Show” and he still has the code card used to send and receive coded messages from Driscoll’s show “Weird.”

The shows had lasting impact, even though many of them weren’t taped and are gone except for pictures and memories. During the 33 years Driscoll had been on the air, he was in 26 shows and amassed quite a following.

Driscoll’s other shows included “My Backyard,” “The Great Money Movie” and “Mason Mutt.”

Author Stephen King told Driscoll upon the broadcaster’s retirement in 1987 that his shows had warped King’s childhood.

Driscoll, who served in the Navy, worked for several years at Eastern Fine Paper Co. in Brewer before taking the leap into broadcasting in 1954, as an announcer.

A fan of vaudeville, Driscoll had been honing his repertoire in local service clubs such as the Kiwanis. Cobb said one bit had Driscoll playing all three of the Andrews Sisters.

He served as announcer, did voice-overs for commercials and read the news. But it was the offbeat shows that people most remember.

“Dialing for Dollars” had Driscoll calling numbers out of the phone book and asking questions for cash prizes. It had viewers glued to their television sets, ready to spring to the phone at any moment if the call came.

Green said the twice-daily dialing show had a 72 percent share of the audience, an unheard-of share.

Driscoll’s show “Weird,” on late Saturday night, featured campy low-budget films, from Japanese monster movies to Mexican films of women wrestling.

But the real star was Driscoll and the characters he played or who made an appearance in the breaks between the movies, such as Krandel the three-eyed alien and Uncle Gorey the hunchback.

Although planning was involved in the shows, Driscoll thrived on the uncertainty of live television during which anything could happen. Driscoll’s early shows were done without the safety net of taping, with no recording to review and redo.

“All of my shows were unscripted,” Driscoll told the Bangor Daily News in 1987, at his retirement. “We just went with the momentum.”

Many times, that led to unexpected adventures such as when Driscoll, as Chef Eduardo, cooked up a “Sesame Surprise Cake.” Instead of a lesser flash from the flash powder inside the makeshift cake, it exploded, temporarily blacking out the camera and sending frosting everywhere, Paul Salisbury, a longtime cameraman and photojournalist with WLBZ, recalled Sunday.

“There was frosting from one end of the studio to the other and on Eddie, too,” Salisbury said, remembering the incident, which was caught on tape.

Salisbury said Driscoll had a vast imagination from which to draw as well as a strong comedic sense.

“He could come up with shows that were crowd-pleasers,” he said.

Ruby Driscoll, his wife of 58 years, made some of the costumes and puppets for the shows and said her husband loved being an entertainer.

“He was quiet at home, but when the red light came on he was ready to perform,” she said.

Driscoll grew up in Brewer and served in the Navy until 1948. When he returned home he met Ruby and married her, and went to work at the Eastern Fine paper mill.

Driscoll retired from TV in 1987 when he began suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

In recent years, Driscoll lived at a nursing home in Portland.

He was inducted into the Maine Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1996.

In addition to his wife, Driscoll is survived by two children and two grandchildren.

A public viewing and memorial service is scheduled for Saturday at Dolby & Dorr funeral home in Gorham.

Cobb said Driscoll would be remembered for a long time to come.

“He will not be forgotten soon, I can tell you that,” she said. “He was one of a kind.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report