The tale of Brakeman Bill’s show business success

by PETER CALLAGHAN
THE TACOMA NEWS TRIBUNE
Published: August 5th, 2007 01:00 AM
                                                                      
                                                                   “Brakeman Bill” McLain in 1964.  

It was something right out of show business legend.
The show was set to start in a few days and the star fell ill. Could he step in and do the show, which must – as we all know – go on?

Of course, said Bill McLain. He’d fallen in love with radio as a kid on McKinley Hill and in South Tacoma. He’d worked at stations in Ellensburg and Yakima and then at KTNT AM and FM in Tacoma (named KTNT because it was owned by the newspaper). In the same little building at South 11th and Grant was one of just two TV stations in the state.

In addition to being a disc jockey and sportscaster, McLain had done some work on the TV side, operating a camera and making on-air announcements.

“No one at the station had ever been in TV, so we learned as we went,” McLain said last week. If the station wanted him to put on the hat and overalls of a railroader and show cartoons, that was fine by him.

So on April 1, 1954, Brakeman Bill was born.

When the original host tried – and failed – to come back from an attack of polio, McLain became the permanent host.

“I could play golf during the morning and work in the afternoon,” McLain said. So what was not to like? For 20 years, on something like 5,000 shows, McLain was “Brakeman Bill.”

He ran a model train set and talked to visiting school groups and scout troops, he introduced cartoons and he served as the comic foil to a black sock puppet called “Crazy Donkey.”

The puppet, sewn by a station secretary, was on the arm of Warren Reed, who was the station’s main booth announcer and could do a thousand voices. Over time, McLain and Reed developed a shtick with the donkey misbehaving and making Brakeman Bill’s life difficult. The moral for the kids: Don’t be like Crazy Donkey.

At first, the show was in black and white. McLain remembers kids coming up to him at personal appearances – he thinks he made more than 2,000 – with pouts on their faces and hands on their hips.

“You’re not Brakeman Bill,” they’d tell him. “You’re not in black and white.” When the station began broadcasting in color, he wore a red scarf and a red jacket to take advantage of the new technology, but the show was the same.

Most of the early stations had kid shows in the afternoon.

KTNT stole its format from a Los Angeles station that featured “Engineer Bill.” The next year, a new Seattle station with the call letters KIRO debuted J.P. Patches, a clown who lived in the City Dump. KING had Wunda Wunda and KING’s Klubhouse with Stan Boreson, who played the accordion and interacted with a seemingly motionless basset hound named No Mo. And KOMO had Captain Puget.

Folks of a certain vintage, no matter where they grew up, can tell you the names of their kid show hosts. Most, like Brakeman Bill, had no script, no rehearsal and no second chances. Everything was live. And most, Brakeman Bill included, aimed some of the comedy at adults. McLain said some of their biggest fans were at colleges and at a logging camp near Morton.

“We didn’t make cutesy stuff. The adults could catch on to what we were doing,” he said.

McLain blames the end of his show – and shows like it – on federal broadcasting rule changes pushed by groups like Action for Children’s Television.

Hosts could no longer voice commercials and promote products, the rules said. It became easier and cheaper to run taped commercials between syndicated programs.

McLain became promotion manager for the station – by then changed to KSTW – and hosted the local programing for the Jerry Lewis telethon. He retired in 1993.

Last weekend, Bill McLain was the Prince of Mirth at the Seafair Torchlight parade in Seattle. It was his 10th appearance in the parade, the first being in 1962 during the World’s Fair. It also was his 80th birthday.

A party in a downtown hotel suite for family and friends included Chris Wedes (J.P. Patches), Bob Newman (Patches’ sidekick Gertrude) and some of the original Seafair clowns.

“We were competitors, but also good friends,” McLain said.

And what does he do now? He still lives in University Place with his wife, Jeanne. He travels, paints watercolors and plays golf.

“The only problem now is I don’t know where my shots go,” he jokes. “Every shot is an adventure.”

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

Ahhh, the golden age of TV.  Local stations did a whole bunch of interesting programming. Kids, variety, drama shows produced locally. There were people to build sets, and create neat worlds with gaffer tape and cardboard. You felt like, 'this is TV!'  Now small stations are even smaller. The only local programming is News. You can bet with technology soon there will be just some token on-air people feeding stock stories from a giant server in Calgary or Toronto. Stations lose their soul and local identity as the corporate office dictates the strategy from a tower back east somewhere.

Things change.

Evening Magazine on KING is featuring a series on JP Patches all this week. At least that's what they are promoting.

Quoted from ronrob

The tale of Brakeman Bill’s show business success

<story snipped>

Ron, thanks for the note on this. I used to watch the show every day. My dad especially liked Crazy Donkey (played by the late Warren Reed). It's nice to learn Bill's still around.

Bob Robertson, who was at KTNT at the time the show was on the air, told me Bill and Warren were really genuine, funny people. What you saw on TV was the way they were.

-OR60-

Quoted Text

Evening Magazine on KING is featuring a series on JP Patches all this week. At least that's what they are promoting.

Great--thanks for the heads up.

I was more of a Patches Pal myself. I vaguely recall but don't really remember watching Brakeman Bill. This may have been because,

-It was off the air by around 1973 or so; I was a little young. There were also a couple of years there when I lived outside the Pacific Northwest.

-Our TV antenna might not have received KTNT/KSTW that well.

-I might have been watching Mr. Dressup in the afternoons.

-I was on one of my mescaline/tequila jags.

It still amazes me that the affiliates dedicated hours of morning/afternoon airtime to these great local kids shows. It's unthinkable today in this era of three-hour news blocks and banal syndicated "talk" shows.

What really blows my mind is how much stations of today have overtly turned their back on these guys....although at the same time they do feature stories because it helps make the 'boomers AWARE of their station.  But when the feature is done, I have tried to secure dubs of these things to GIVE to the people who did those shows...and made wheelbarrows full of money for the stations....and they can't be bothered to do that.  Ya talk to the hosts who have tried to talk to the stations...they just roll their eyes at the treatment they get today.  Really gets under my skin when stations don't even honor their OWN historical legacies because they are busy paying homage to that "tower" that was mentioned a couple posts ago....