My Life as a Furry Red Monster - Kevin Clash [48]
When I finally got my break in local television, it was due to the generosity and encouragement of Stu Kerr, my first mentor. Stu was a television fixture in Baltimore on the local CBS affiliate WMAR, where he was more than the news announcer and weatherman, though that was how he started his career there.
Stu had a flair for improv and comedy, and was a popular children’s entertainer because of his weekend children’s variety show—Professor Kool’s Fun School—which featured games, activities, and live entertainment. (He also had been our local “Bozo the Clown” on that syndicated program, and was always developing characters that young viewers would respond to.) Before I met Kermit Love, before I met Jim Henson, I met Stu Kerr.
When I was fifteen, I performed at the annual Heritage Fair in Dundalk, where Stu was also doing a show. During a break, he came to see me do my thing, though I didn’t know he was in the audience. I had brought along several puppets, including my mother-and-daughter skunks who belted out Helen Reddy’s “You and Me Against the World.” I also did spoofs of popular commercials from the 1970s. My mummy puppet sang the old Band-Aid’s song, “I am stuck on Band-Aids brand, ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me…”; my hamburger puppet had fun with the famous McDonald’s jingle, “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.”
After I was done, he approached my parents and me and explained that he was auditioning performers for a new show. “I’m impressed with what I just saw, Kevin,” he said. “I think you’d be good for what we have in mind.”
Because of my age, I had to have my parents’ approval, but they readily agreed to let me try out. This was a big deal, my first break into a regular gig on local television. Up to now, I’d had bits and pieces of my shows broadcast on the local news; “the kid with the puppets” often made for good copy in the local papers, as well. Under Stu’s tutelage, I honed my puppetry skills and was soon performing with him on the new show he created, wrote, and starred in, Caboose, where I would work off and on as I finished up high school. We would shoot every Friday after school, and Stu went out of his way to work around my schedule.
Stu was a wonderful man with a marvelous sense of humor, and he was the perfect teacher for me. Before working with Stu, I had never used a script. I simply had an outline in my head for what I was planning to do in any given show, a fine improvisational style since I was working alone. Television, however, was another matter entirely. Stu taught me about comic timing and how to interpret a writer’s words. He also taught me a lot about the business, which involved the cooperative efforts of many.
As an amateur, I had to work with lots of people behind the scenes to get my shows off the ground, but I still was more of a solo artist. I was not used to working with writers, directors, producers, and other performers. I’d never had a boss before. I had to learn the elaborate dance of give-and-take that all performing artists must do in order to succeed. Stu had the perfect combination of patience and experience to help me gain a firm foothold in the medium of television and in the grown-up world of work.
Stu had been in the military with Bob Keeshan of Captain Kangaroo fame, and they later worked together at NBC as pages. When it came time for this fledgling to fly, Stu not only nudged me out of the nest, he found a safe place for me to land—on one of the best-known children’s shows in the history of television. Through Stu’s efforts, Bob Keeshan saw a few of the Caboose shows I’d done and he liked my work—enough to hire me. I was still very young, but because of Stu, I was working on Captain Kangaroo.
Captain Kangaroo was, of course, a national show, and that meant jumping out of the small pond and diving into a very big, very