Posts
Growing up w/Ghoulardi, Cleveland’s Great Horror Movie Host
The favorite scary character of my youth was the TV prankster Ghoulardi (real name Ernie Anderson, the father of film director Paul Thomas Anderson). The interesting doc here—based on the 1997 book, Ghoulardi: Inside Cleveland’s Wildest TV Ride, brought out by Gray & Company, an enterprising Cleveland publisher doing books of local interest—shows how Hollywood studios’ rediscovery and repackaging of their old horror classics for local TV stations in the late 1950s and early ’60s prompted many local TV stations to program horror movie shows, often known by names such as “Shock Theater.” In Cleveland, where I grew up, we were fortunate to have one of the most colorful and interesting of these early horror film hosts. Ghoulardi. Watching him during my childhood, though it be would be many years until I ever heard the term “meta,” I instinctively loved how he inserted himself in to whatever monster or horror film he was showing, somehow putting his own image on to the TV screen, jousting with, say, “Cyclops,” trying to subdue the creature with his a cane and rancorous insults. His outrageous schtick—in a a gray sweatshirt and scraggly goatee, with dangling cigarette-holder—made him an early iconoclast of ’60s pop culture. Ghoulardi was a kind of low-rent Professor Irwin Corey, if you remember “The World’s Foremost Authority,” some before years Corey, turning 100 this year, took his act to the Tonight Show.
As with the attempted bans of comic books, chronicled in David Hadju’s Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America, Ghoulardi was condemned by goo-goo parental groups who tried getting him off the air. Despite this, his usual Friday night slot, coming after local news, around 11:30pm, grew to include a Saturday afternoon show. The decency crowd might have succeeded in sidelining him, during this pre-cable era, with only three TV stations in Cleveland, but he was so popular with kids, and his audience was so large, there was no way the station would’ve dropped his show in its prime. When Ghoulardi did finally go off the air, it was because Anderson moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in TV with his longtime pal, and earlier sidekick, Tim Conway, later of “McHale’s Navy.”
“Baby, I Can Drive a Car!”
As a Manhattanite I don’t get behind the wheel much these days, but I sure enjoyed it when I was younger, growing up in Cleveland. I remember the sneakers I had on—I pedaled the little car with them, Fred Flintstone-style. “Yabba-dabba-do!”
Fifty Years Ago Today–Where I Was & What I Remember
Fifty years ago today–also a Friday–the principal at Mercer School in Shaker Hts. Ohio, Mrs Van Dusen, came in to my third grade classroom in the early afternoon and had a whispered and worried-looking conversation with my teacher, Mrs. Vaughan. A few minutes later Mrs Vaughan told us we were being excused early. Parents who normally picked us up at 3:15 would be coming for us soon. Elation I might’ve felt at getting out early was tempered by uncertainty at the earlier whispering and an unspoken urgency. I went out to the school oval and saw my mom in our car waiting to pick me up. I got in and before I could ask what was going on, she said, “The president’s been shot.” I think she didn’t want to tell me just yet that he was dead.
Thus beginning at age 9 was triggered in me a tragic period of my childhood, with violence and political killings that followed in the wake of JFK’s assassination, including events two days later, when, taking a break from a dolorous family meal, I got up from the table and walked in to the TV room. Within seconds I found myself watching a black&white TV picture as CBS broadcast the moment Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. What a weird sad time.
In the years that followed I observed the urban riots that afflicted many cities, including my hometown of Cleveland; deaths in Vietnam that numbered in the tens of thousands; the political murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy; and the shootings at Kent State. In some ways, I feel like I’ve never really gotten over the shock of the weekend JFK was killed.