Childhood memories: The Wallace and Ladmo Show, a guest article by Lon Davis

Happy New Year, everyone! I'm delighted to start the new year off with a guest article by my friend Lon Davis. You may recognize his name from my review of his delightful book Stumbling into Film History; today he's here to share his memories of the legendary Phoenix children's show, The Wallace and Ladmo Show, which aired in Phoenix from 1954 to 1989. I'll now get out of the way and hand the controls over to Lon—take it away!

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One of the advantages of being a kid in Phoenix, Arizona, from the fifties through the eighties, was a daily children’s television program called The Wallace and Ladmo Show. Airing live at four o’clock on station KPHO, Channel 5, it began with a nonsensical theme song, the title and lyrics of which are "Ho Ho, Ha Ha, Hee Hee, Ha Ha," by Mike Condello. The series, I later discovered, began its long reign in January 1954 as It’s Wallace?, a cartoon show hosted by Bill Thompson, a somewhat nondescript-looking twenty-three-year-old former New Yorker in a loud Hawaiian shirt. Shortly thereafter he was joined onscreen by Ladimir Kwiatkowski, one of the station’s cameramen. Ohio-born Ladimir was a gifted baseball player, gifted enough to be scouted by the Cleveland Indians. Thankfully, he chose entertainment over professional sports. Now established as Wallace’s onscreen sidekick, he was identified by his nickname, Ladmo. When in character, he wore a top hat and a long black coat, and printed on his white T-shirt was a drawing of a psychedelic necktie. Although Ladmo was then in his early thirties, he acted more like a kid than most kids. He had a love of life that was infectious, and a wide grin to match it. Wallace, the more serious of the two, eventually settled on a bowler hat and a sport coat, with an actual necktie.

Although essentially the show’s resident straight man, Wallace occasionally parodied the station manager as the curmudgeonly Mr. Grudgemeyer, with whom Ladmo had an antagonistic relationship. The pantomime skits they performed were reminiscent of Laurel & Hardy’s slapstick "tit-for-tat" routine. The austere setting was that of a park, with a vaudeville-style painted backdrop and a park bench in the foreground. Enter Mr. Grudgemeyer, a strange-looking man with a curly black wig, googly eyes, a walrus mustache, a striped jacket, and wearing a boater hat. He appears exhausted as he carries a bag of groceries and plops down on the bench. Desiring a snack, he reaches into the bag and removes a single-layer cake, which he gingerly places beside him. Ladmo appears, tips his hat in greeting, and sits down uninvited, inadvertently squashing the cake. Mr. Grudgemeyer retaliates by emptying the bag completely, blowing it up like a balloon, and popping it loudly in Ladmo’s ear. It all unfolds in a wildly exaggerated manner, culminating in a chaotic battle of reciprocal destruction. Portraying the station manager as an odious cretin must have been cathartic for Thompson. When asked years later if there was a down side to doing the show, he answered, "Yeah, the money. Those cheapskates at Channel Five!"  

More dramatic conflict arrived in 1960 with a new cast member, the villainous Gerald. This was former Kansan Pat McMahon, a twenty-five-year-old disc jockey who had played a supporting role in his parents’ vaudeville dance act. As for Gerald, he was a somewhat androgenous spoiled rich kid (and reputedly the station manager’s nephew), who wore oversized eyeglass frames and a blond page-boy wig. Designed to elicit outright disdain from the show’s youthful viewers, Gerald was a sociopath whose unholy purpose was to get rid of Wallace and Ladmo and take over the show. This example of the Theatre of the Absurd—a grown man acting like a bratty school-aged child who wears a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit—brings to mind Joe Besser’s "Stinky" character on The Abbott and Costello Show. 

It was hardly the only unspoken reference to that comedy team. Remember the "moving candle bit" in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein? Lou, the short fat one, sees the candle slide atop Dracula’s coffin, indicating that the lid is slowly opening. Bud, the tall skinny one, doesn’t see it, and he rebukes his partner for insisting that the candle moved. In their version of this nightmarish dynamic, Wallace and Ladmo might be sitting next to each other, possibly reading a newspaper. Unbeknownst to Wallace, Gerald sneaks up behind him with a blunt object and conks him on the head, followed by his quick exit. With no one else in sight, Wallace, the clueless authority figure, automatically blames Ladmo for the sudden assault. This bit was done with innumerable variations over the years and it never ceased to provoke the horde of kids in the studio audience. In a sincere attempt to alert Wallace to this ongoing injustice, I sent in a drawing I made of a menacing Gerald holding a bat over an oblivious Wallace’s head. Wallace showed the picture on the air, commenting incredulously about the scene it depicted. At one point, he accidentally dropped the piece of paper and, when he bent to retrieve it, Gerald made a face and shook his fist directly at the camera—directly at me. This was interactive television at its best! In my naïveté, however, I was disappointed that my drawing hadn’t convinced Wallace of Ladmo’s innocence or of Gerald’s treachery. Clearly, it was too surefire a bit to drop from the act.

 

The hour-long program wasn’t made up entirely of such routines; it also featured a host of cartoons, from Bugs Bunny and Popeye to the more recent Roger Ramjet, voiced by my future good friend Gary Owens. Another sizeable chunk of the show was devoted to commercials, usually for kid-friendly food items, with Ladmo as pitchman. He was highly effective, as I recall, so much so that my younger brother Chris and I insisted our mother specifically buy Cudahy Bar-S brand hot dogs, Shasta soda pop, and snack cakes called Zingers, featuring the mega-popular Peanuts characters on the wrappers. And then there was the Holy Grail, the coveted Ladmo Bag. This was basically a small brown paper sack filled with chips, cans of soda, candy, and coupons for area businesses. Beginning in the mid-sixties, scads of Ladmo Bags were handed out to those kids whose names were picked at random in daily drawings and as contest prizes. Chris and I actually prayed the Rosary before bedtime in the hopes of winning one. (Today, empty, original Ladmo Bags sell on eBay for hundreds of dollars. "Nostalgia," as a friend of mine recently said, "ain’t cheap.")

In addition to his vivid portrayal of Gerald, the versatile Pat McMahon played secondary characters such as Captain Super. Explained McMahon: "A superhero on The Wallace and Ladmo Show need only be two things: not super in any way, nor a hero." His tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the vain, terribly insecure Captain Super, who wore football-player’s shoulder pads under his jersey to replicate muscles, was awfully funny. So were Marshall Good, a washed-up B-Western actor, and Boffo, a depressed, down-and-out clown. His old-lady character Aunt Maude was an imitation of Johnny Carson’s Aunt Blabby, which was itself an imitation of Jonathan Winters’s Maude Frickert.

While little kids accepted these characters at face value, teens and adults appreciated them for their subversive humor. Rock star Alice Cooper and Steven Spielberg, both residents of Phoenix, were dedicated viewers. As Spielberg said in an interview, “The show was Saturday Night Live before Saturday Night Live and Second City before Second City." Even Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker responsible for Citizen Kane, was a fan, particularly of Pat McMahon’s work. Welles, who was stationed for a time in the Phoenix area while making The Other Side of the Wind, even gave the television actor a one-line cameo in his film-in-progress. McMahon, a dedicated cineaste who idolized Welles, was thrilled. He moonlighted one summer by hosting a television movie program, introducing such timeless classics as Lost Horizon, Arsenic and Old Lace, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and White Heat. No one else in my age group seemed to be watching, which made me feel like a lone adventurer, digging in the studio vaults to rediscover these diamonds of cinematic art.

Wallace and his partners-in-comedy were clearly dedicated to their fan base. In addition to creating five hour-long episodes per week, they made personal appearances on weekends at such local venues as charity events, children’s hospitals, the Legend City theme park and the Christown movie theatre. The latter was a Saturday matinee aimed at kids, with door prizes, a stage show, a feature film, popcorn and a Coke, and all for fifty cents. Chris and I always showed up early to locate adjoining seats in the packed movie theater. The films we saw in that free-wheeling environment remain favorites to this day, including The Ghost and Mr. Chicken and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. They also occasionally showed Robert Youngson’s wonderful silent film compilations, such as The Golden Age of Comedy, featuring hilarious scenes from the brilliant two-reel shorts produced in the 1920s by Mack Sennett and Hal Roach. It may have been educational, but we were laughing too hard to notice.

 

The show’s three leads had the talent to move to a national market, but they realized that what they had in Phoenix was unique. They actually looked forward to going to work each day, putting on those familiar costumes and exciting their audience, both on the air and in the studio. Long after I stopped watching the show in the early seventies, they were entertaining a new generation of kids, and they continued doing so until the program’s final taping, on December 29, 1989. A devastated Gerald appeared alone on the set to say goodbye. He tearfully admitted that Wallace and Ladmo were his friends, his only friends in fact, a statement that must surely have dampened the eyes of thousands of longtime viewers. 

Ladimir "Ladmo" Kwiatkowski, a married man with five children, died of cancer at the age of sixty-five in 1994. Also a family man, Bill "Wallace" Thompson died of undisclosed causes in 2014; he was eighty-two. As of this writing, Pat McMahon ► is still with us at eighty-nine, hosting a television talk show on AZTV. He has stated proudly that he, Bill, and Ladmo never had a single argument in all their years of working together; there was only mutual respect and much shared laughter. The Wallace and Ladmo Show has gone down in history as the longest-lasting, and the most beloved, local children’s television show in American broadcasting. It won numerous awards, including nine regional Emmys, and some of the ten thousand episodes are still rerun on Phoenix television. Individual clips from the show have been posted on YouTube. 

When looking back to that simpler time, I am grateful for the fond memories and for the love those three gentlemen showed their fans, both young and old alike.

Lon Davis is a film historian, author, editor, documentarian, and lecturer. Originally from Upstate New York, he and his family were residents of Phoenix between 1969–1974. He and Debra LaCoe, his wife and co-author of more than forty-years, currently reside in the Pacific Northwest. Lon’s brother Chris, an RN, and his wife Jennifer live in Southern California; they have three grown sons.

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Thanks again, Lon; hopefully we'll see more from you in the future. Do any of you out there remember Wallace and Ladmo? If so, or if you have memories of the kids' shows you grew up with, share them in the comments! TV