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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by Lon Davis

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  

Book review: Stumbling into Film History, by Lon Davis

Last week, I mentioned Ernie Kovac's1961 series Silents Please, and how it paralleled the resurgence in silent movies that was taking place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, thanks in large part to the movies being shown on local television. Silents Please was a labor of love for Kovacs, a true aficionado of early film history, and a good number of viewers were surprised at the absence of oddball humor that they had come to expect from a Kovacs program; for Ernie, it was all about the movies and the people behind them.

Which leads to a question that many people have wondered about, namely: how and why do historians become interested in the topics that they study? For some, it's a reflection of the environment in which they grew up; others discover their interest by accident while researching tangential topics. For me, television history has combined my interest in cultural and social history with an attempt to understand, and in some way relive, those early, pre-comprehending years of my life. In the wrong hands, trying to explain these passions can leave the reader feeling like someone being forced to look at their next-door neighbors' vacation pictures. Fortuantely, that's not always the case, and if you need any proof of that, look no further than film historian Lon Davis and his latest book, Stumbling into Film History. 

Stumbling into Film History

by Lon Davis
BearManor Media, 240 pages, $29.00

My rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★)

Davis has authored or co-authored several books on early film history (including Silent Lives and Silent Vignettes) which focused on the personalities and acts that personified those first groundbreaking decades of the industry, from Francis X. Bushman (Ben-Hur) to the Three Stooges and the Keystone Cops. But in Stumbling into Film History, Davis focuses on his own story, in a delightful and affectionate recounting of his journey through the "golden age" of cinema, and the various people he meets along the way.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Why, you wonder, is Hadley reviewing a book about classic film history on a classic television blog? Well, besides the fact that (full disclosure) I know and like the author, the truth is that television has had a lot to do with keeping this history alive. As recently as 1958, the major studios "conspired" to keep any movie made after 1948 from appearing on television, and it wasn't until NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies in 1961 that post-1950 movies became prominent. That, combined with an increasing demand from viewers for more and more movies, meant that early movies, both silent and sound, enjoyed a visibility they wouldn't again have until the heydays of AMC and TCM. For many, it was the repeated showings of these movies that would spur a lifelong interest in the industry, and keep alive the history of their times. Once again, credit television for documenting times that might otherwise be forgotten.

As is so often the case, it was an unlikely combination of circumstances that gave birth to Davis's love of early movies—a display of boxes of 8mm films bearing the images of Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, and the Universal monsters, that the author ran across while waiting for his father at a camera store; a PBS series on silent movies hosted by Orson Welles that Davis and his father watched weekly; a great-uncle who lived in the Motion Picture Country Home in Los Angeles, home to many of the stars of the early era; and a young teenager's initiative to learn more about the now-forgotten stars that he'd met through these films. The result is a fascinating look at the lives and times of the people who made the movies. But more than that, it's the author's personal journey, a fond recollection of his friendships and interactions with these figures; and just as they shared their stories and perceptions with him, he now shares the same with us.

And while any (good) historian can write a history of early film, only a very few are privileged to have, in a way, become a part of this history; certainly, Lon Davis is one of those who can make that claim, for Stumbling into Film History is his story as well as theirs, offering a personal perspective that comes from firsthand knowledge of the people he writes about. There are, for example, his stories of spending time at the Motion Picture Home with Three Stooges member Larry Fine; again, there are many interviews with various Stooges (I just read one in an old TV Guide), but they won't give you the personal insight that Davis can, including his unfortunate attempt to set up a movie projector in Fine's room which, predictably, included a clash of heads that could have come right out of a Stooge short. While Davis couldn't help but be amused by the irony, Fine wasn't quiet as sanguine; "At least I got paid to make an ass of myself," he said.

Often, the teenage Davis would form connections with these old stars simply by looking up their numbers in the phone book and calling them; many of them were delighted to talk about the past, so pleased that someone as young as Davis would take an interest in their work. In doing so, Davis provides a lesson from which we could all learn: don't be afraid to take a chance; the worst thing that can happen is for someone to say "no." That's a lesson that it took me a long time to learn, and there's something bittersweet for me in reading about how Davis's enthusiasm propelled him to reach out and make these contacts. He well knew that these people wouldn't be with us for long, and that once gone, their stories would die with them. Of course, you can't invest in retrospect; even had I had as much nerve as Davis had at that age, I hadn't yet determined on my future course as a television historian. Still, it's hard not to wonder about how many opportunities were lost, how much insight went missing, how many questions were left unanswered. The truth is that, even though times have forever changed, many of these figures are still more approachable than we might imagine. Again, what's the worst that can happen? You probably have a better chance of success than you do winning that $1.3 billion lottery jackpot. 

Davis saves the best chapter for last, as he writes of how a mutual love of old movies led to what would become a lifelong friendship with a fellow college student, and how that friendship would eventually result in marriage. Not only is it charming (and surely any scriptwriter from the Golden Age would be pleased to pen such a happy ending), it shows how important a shared interest is in forming the bonds that lead to a successful relationship. (And you thought messages like that only came from MST3K shorts!)

Of course, that's the message that runs through the various essays that make up Stumbling into Film History. It's that personal perspective that lifts this book above the typical film book; reading it, I was reminded of a similar feeling I got from Andrew Lee Fielding's The Lucky Strike Papers, which I reviewed several years ago. Part memoir, part history lesson, books like this share one important quality: a passion for the subject that becomes contagious, that urges the reader forward into a world that they may not have previously been interested in; or, if they had, it turns that interest into something more, something that can enrich your life. (Note: there's no guarantee that you'll meet your future spouse, but it's almost a certainty that you'll make lifelong friends while you're at it.)

(By the way, some of you might notice that this is the third consecutive book review in which I've given a five-star review. That doesn't mean I'm free with my stars; it does mean that I've been fortunate to have encountered some excellent books recently. And at my age, when it comes to books on TV and movies, it becomes harder and harder to spend my reading time otherwise.)

Lon Davis has been called a "Champion of the Silent Cinema," but more than that, he also tells quite a story, one you'll want to read—whether you realize it now or not. TV