In 1966, the Seattle P-I revealed to Puget Sound area children, the identity of the beloved TV clown, JP Patches. When the actor was injured in a car crash, the paper ran an article, as did the Tacoma News Tribune, and his real name became public.
story at SEATTLE P-I
Video clip from a documentary called “Off The Air, But Still In Our Heart”.
Brakeman Bill, Bill McLain, KTNT TV, Crazy Donkry, Warren Reed, Dave Richardson
KQDE Rock N Roll owned by Wally Nelskog 1958 [910] KUDY 1960 Rock format continues under new call letters, KIXI 1961 Beautiful Music [910] also aired 18 hrs [each week] of Negro programming, as it was called.
Kids sometimes play themselves out. When complete exhaustion kicks in, they may not have enough energy to drag themselves to a bed or sofa. They fall asleep right where they are, for example, on the kitchen floor [Devyn-2010], or even in a wheelbarrow. [Stephanie-1978]
Growing up in the 60s, kids in the Northwest were hooked on Top 40 radio stations like KJR, KOL & KTAC. There are plenty of airchecks circulating the Internet that take us back to that special sound of AM radio, often listened to on pocket-sized transistor sets.
Though we had heard stories of the mega-bucks these guys were pulling down, the reality was, the pay wasn’t that great for most jocks. There were only a couple jocks in each major market whose salaries were in the six figures. The rest were getting by. It had always been a struggle to keep a job, while battling the competition, surviving format changes, drugs, alcohol, ex-wives, and sometimes erratic or unstable management. There was no sense of job security, and U-Hauls were most DJs other car.
When conversation gets around to “The Great Radio Personalities-Where Are They Now?”, it is often a case of “Who’s Dead or Alive”? The grim reaper has claimed many of them over the past forty or so years. So, when we think back on the glory days of Top 40 radio, we have to realize, the only true magic was the sound they presented on the radio.
Penny, played by ventriloquist Lamoyne Hreha (pronounced: “REE-uh”) was a pretty blond lady with a pony-tail who lived in a castle with a strange assortment of characters who became known as her “pals.” From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Tacoma’s KTVW Channel 13 (now KCPQ) was the place where the castle would magically appear every afternoon at 4:00 P.M. when the opening titles would roll for “PENNY and Her Pals”.
Penny’s “Pals” were non-human puppet characters given life and voice by Hreha, a master ventriloquist and puppeteer (although real humans other than Penny were occasionally included in the cast). Among the puppet characters was Hildegard the Witch (a crabby but good-hearted witch with a thorny personality), Dudley the Dragon lived in the castle mote and was more lovable than scary, Goldie was a silkworm and self-styled singer who lived in costume trunk in one of the castle’s towers and couldn’t sing a note but tried with all her might, Little Lilly Sue was the castle mouse and was extremely shy and scared of just about everything, Grumble VonGrouch was the town meanie and Chief Brokenpaddle of the Tippie Canoe Indian Tribe was the native American presence in the puppet cast. In addition to the puppets (and seen less frequently) were Captain Jack and Jefferson J. Jerkwater, both being full-sized ventriloquial figures.
Lamoyne Hreha, daughter of prominent Tacoma restaurateur Anton Barcott, learned to throw her voice while still in high school and acting as the assistant in the magic act of her future husband, John Hreha, well-known professional magician and mentalist. She created the “Penny” TV character with Hreha’s help in the late 1950s. Speaking of his wife’s TV persona, he would often say, “We both knew that “Penny” needed to be the ultimate Goodie-Two-Shoes that any parent would trust their child with for at least one hour.”
Like most local origination kiddie shows of the era, Penny showed cartoons, ran contests, interviewed guests to the castle, and hosted hundreds of kids groups who came to tour KTVW Studios and see the show which was performed live each day. There was never a written script. Each show was all improvisation. Hreha, a mother of three school-aged children herself at the time, would work out a general plot-line for each week of shows with heavy emphasis on messages kids needed to hear and every day, the kids viewing the show at home would learn lessons in generosity, sharing, kindness, diversity, inclusion, bravery, perseverance, and many other subjects through the misadventures of the show’s characters.
Penny and Her Pals was broadcast in glorious Black and White for the majority of its tenure and only went to color shortly before the show left the air in the early 1970s – having fallen like most other local origination kids shows of the day. KTVW was the last station in the Seattle-Tacoma market to re-tool itself with equipment capable of broadcasting in color and capturing its own broadcasts on video tape. And, even after the station’s owners purchased and installed video tape recording and playback equipment, video tape was still not used to archive the station’s on-air signal and was frequently re-used on a day-to-day basis. So, sadly, the only audio and video records of “PENNY and Her Pals” exist in the memories of her faithful and once-youthful viewers.
Source: http://wiki.verkata.com/en/wiki/Penny_&_Her_Pals [2010]
From the May 26, 1958 issue of LIFE Magazine, Warren Reed [with eye patch] and Paul Herlinger of KTNT TV Tacoma. The caption reads: Warren Reed puts on an eyepatch and uses a stooge named Frankenstein, played by Paul Herlinger, to help with the horror mood for the spook movies on Seattle’s KTNT. He addresses his colleague as “our boy Frankie” and reads passages from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” to teach him boyish pranks.
The article featured TV’s horror movie hosts from across the USA.
Originally published in the Tacoma News Tribune, August 2007
The tale of Brakeman Bill’s show business success
PETER CALLAGHAN
THE TACOMA NEWS TRIBUNE
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. read more
What the 4th of July Weekend is all about!
Here, still and motion pictures tell the story…
Saturday, May 19, 9:16 am
 Click the individual station links to find historical data regarding stations, personalities and formats at SeaTacRadio.com
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