Boomer alert: An affectionate video scrapbook of hosts

Our gal Sal has wrinkles now.

Lots of wrinkles.

At 84, she doesn't try to hide them.

"My wrinkles are having wrinkles. . . . " the TV cowgirl says kind of proudly in Philly's Favorite Kids Show Hosts, which debuts at 8 tonight on WHYY TV12. "I lived long enough to see these wrinkles. These are my memories."

But back in the 1950s and '60s, Sally Starr was the six-shooter-totin', horse-ridin', cartoon-showin' TV aunt to a whole generation of youngsters in the Philadelphia area.

TV12 is hoping a lot of them will tune in tonight, which happens, not by chance, to be the third night of the station's March fund drive. WHYY learned long ago that nostalgia sells. Shows like the station's 1993 tribute to vanished Philly landmarks, Things That Aren't There Anymore, have become pledge-drive staples.

Favorite Kids Show Hosts is the work of TV12 producer and announcer Ed Cunningham, who wrote the script and did most of the research, with help from associate producer Mark Baker.

Longtime Philadelphia TV news reporter Dick Sheeran narrates.

The framework of Hosts is loosely historical, taking the audience from the earliest days of TV, after World War II, when local stations provided much of the programming, to the mid-1990s, when the broadcast networks and cable dominated children's programming.

But this show is not really documentary history. It's a lighthearted and loving scrapbook session for the first generation raised in front of the tube. That includes the 60-year-old Cunningham.

"This is something I wanted to do for years," he said in a recent phone interview. TV was a "a big part of my growing up" and some of his earliest memories were of the kids-show hosts.

Everybody who was anybody in the local kiddie-host universe appears in Cunningham's hour-long documentary:

Sally Starr, Chief Halftown, Gene Crane, Gene London, Lee Dexter and Bertie the Bunyip, Pixanne, Happy the Clown, Mr. Rivets, Roland, Dr. Shock, Willie the Worm, Pete Boyle, Bill Webber, Matt Robinson, Capt. and Mrs. Noah - and Ed McMahon, who played a clown on The Big Top, which Channel 10 broadcast for CBS each week from the 32d Street armory.

There are lots of clips from the old shows, which would be enough to keep an audience of boomers mesmerized even without narration.

After all, how long has it been since anyone has turned on the TV and seen Willie the Worm, the cartoon character who had his own show on Channel 10 in the early 1950s?

"It's just so neat to hear Willie the Worm," Cunningham says. "He had a great voice for a worm."

Some of the stars - Boyle, Dexter, Howard Jones (Happy the Clown), Joe Zawislak (Dr. Shock) and Traynor Halftown- have died, but the survivors have plenty to say.

John Zacherle, who played "the Cool Ghoul" Roland on Channel 10's Shock Theater in 1957-58, looks so good at 88 and laughs so maniacally that you'd swear he really is half-vampire.

"We beat Kate Smith in the ratings," he chortles.

Jane Norman, who played Pixanne on Channel 10 from 1960 through '76, reveals that she taught herself by trial and error to fly across the stage using just one wire. She didn't want to use four wires, as Mary Martin had in the famous TV production of Peter Pan, because she didn't want the audience to see what was holding her up.

It took eight hours to figure it out and six months for the bruises to heal, she recalls.

Gene London, whose artistic and narrative talents carried him to an 18-year run as a kids-show host at Channel 10 in the '60s and '70s, longs for the return of storytelling to TV.

And, of course, there's Sally Starr, who reigned over local kids' TV from 1955 through '71 at Channel 6, introducing Popeye cartoons and Three Stooges shorts.

"She was the biggest personality on any of the stations when she was in her heyday," former Channel 6 producer/director Lew Klein tells the viewers.

Sal's style was inimitable. "It was all ad-libbed," she recalls. "I didn't have a script, nothing."

What she did have, and all she really needed, was an incredible rapport with her audience.

TV12 fund-raisers can only hope some of that rubs off on their pledge drive.