r***@yahoo.com
2006-09-11 04:04:30 UTC
If you were a kid in the Baltimore area in the '60s, you undoubtedly
watched "Pete the Pirate," a show featuring cartoons and the wild
antics of Lary Lewman who played the captain of the Fair Wind. I wish I
knew where the article came from but it was sent to me without
attribution.
Here, then, is a little trip down memory lane for you.
Pete The Pirate
"Ahoy buccaneers, come aboard, me hearty!"
Lary and Nancy Newman came to Baltimore from Terre Haute, IN, during
the late 1950's. Hired by WBAL-TV when their studios were located on
North Charles Street, Lary and his wife hosted "What's New" from June
1959 to August 1960. When Mrs. Lewman dropped off, Lary became the
show's solo host. For the next three months, in his words, "there was
no evidence in the rating book that anybody EVEN IN THAT BUILDING was
watching it." It was then that station officials asked him to consider
doing a kid's show. Since this beat unemployment, Lary agreed, and
proceeded to develop five different program proposals. One of the
ideas submitted, a pirate show, was accepted by the station. Thus
"Pete The Pirate" was born, and the program debuted on WBAL-TV on
August 22, 1960. Lary remembers:
"The funniest thing about the beginning, we had a black and white set
up in Studio H. Roy Rogers had called his listeners 'buckaroos,' you
know. I thought, that's a good idea. We were all upset about the fact
that pirates were criminals, I mean that was a thing we had to walk a
wide circle around. So I didn't want to say 'buccaneers' because
buccaneers really were bandits. So I decided to call them 'lads and
lasses' and use the prefix from buccaneer. So when we went on live the
first time, I said 'Ahoy there buccalads and buccalasses,' and the
cameramen just toppled over. Everybody just folded over in the whole
studio. So that was the last time I called them 'buccalasses.'"
Since Lary made his entry each day swinging from a rope, the set for
"Pete The Pirate" was the largest in local television, bigger even than
the news set at Channel 11. "And when we moved from the old building
to the new one it got even bigger," Lary recalled.
In June 2001, I asked Lary Lewman if there was any reason why "Pete The
Pirate" didn't have a studio audience like Stu Kerr had at Channel 2
for "Bozo" and "Professor Kool."
"You betcha," he replied with a laugh. "I winced at the idea of having
a room full of children and thought if I can work this out so that we
don't have an audience, I will have won the game because I felt like
this was an enormous element that had to be managed. I mean you had to
generate these audiences--you had to bring them in and get them
out--and I'm sure Stu overcame that with just pure work and he figured
out how to do it, but I was glad I didn't have to do it. Stu did that
well--he worked well with live audiences."
Besides designing his own costume and makeup, Lary Lewman came up with
storylines for "Pete The Pirate," laboring for hours a day on material
that was used up in 30 minutes. Ron Spangler co-produced the show and
frequently worked with Lary on stories. Props were alphabetized and
carefully stored at the station. Commenting about the creative
process, Lary recently said, "Television just eats it up. I tended to
write it between midnight and 4 am." And about that "swinging"
entrance each day, "Once a day I'd come out and support my own weight
on a rope--not a big deal. But when I stopped doing that (vacations,
etc.) the muscle tone in my body changed completely. So I put a bar up
in the doorway of my kitchen and would chin myself up once a day."
And of course, things didn't always go as planned. Lary remembers:
"We spent a full day rigging paper sails on a model ship. The idea
was--I was always worried about violence, there shouldn't be too much
violence--instead of having these cannonades with other ships, I would
take lodestone which is a natural magnet and rub the cannonballs to
make them magnetic, sort of a version of the 'Star Wars' defense.
Captain Awfulmean would fire at me and I would fire back, and the
magnetic cannonball would keep that one from hitting me. So we were
eventually going to show that we'd set his sails on fire--the variation
being we dipped the cannonballs in whale oil to ignite the sails so
that he couldn't chase us. So rather than sink the ship, we were going
to burn the sails. So we had this big model of the Cutty Sark I
think--I can't believe we were going to burn it. We had a cloud rear
screen that had this model on a rocker. And the idea was we'd ignite
these paper sails and take to a shot of the sails burning, showing we'd
won the battle with Captain Awfulmean. So what happened was I dipped
the thing (in whale oil) and all that and fired--it was tricky firing
cause a guy was rolling the audio sound of the cannon and we were
trying to sync that with the smoke puff out of the mouth of the
cannon--and they take to a shot of the model and catch the technician's
hand with a match carefully lighting the sails! It flashed through my
mind that we should have giants and Lilliputians in the story, but I
thought, aw screw it and I ignored it!"
Then there's the age-old show business rule, "Never work with children
or animals." Unlike Washington kid's show host Lee (Cap'n Tugg)
Reynolds, whose feathered sidekick Fantail was a puppet, "Pete The
Pirate" worked with real parrots. Lary remembers:
"I killed two or three parrots before I realized they couldn't stand
the air-conditioning in the building. He'd take off his perch or my
shoulder and start to fly and slowly go down because we clipped his
wings. But then of course they grew and we never paid close enough
attention, so there was always the day when instead of going down he
was slowly spiraling UP. And it's five minutes to four or just before
we went on the air, and the bird that we built the show around is now
sitting on the light grid and it takes cherry pickers and three hours
to get him out of there!"
"Pete The Pirate" went off the air in September, 1965. "I was 23 when
I started and 28 when I finished, and it was like playing pirates every
day. It was just an incredible thing to be able to do that for a
living." Lary went on to a lucrative career in voiceovers, and hosted
"Consumer Survival Kit," a national show produced at Maryland Public
Television in the 1970's. Slowed in recent years by health problems,
Lary Lewman, now 65 and semi-retired, continues to make his home in the
Baltimore area with wife Nancy.
watched "Pete the Pirate," a show featuring cartoons and the wild
antics of Lary Lewman who played the captain of the Fair Wind. I wish I
knew where the article came from but it was sent to me without
attribution.
Here, then, is a little trip down memory lane for you.
Pete The Pirate
"Ahoy buccaneers, come aboard, me hearty!"
Lary and Nancy Newman came to Baltimore from Terre Haute, IN, during
the late 1950's. Hired by WBAL-TV when their studios were located on
North Charles Street, Lary and his wife hosted "What's New" from June
1959 to August 1960. When Mrs. Lewman dropped off, Lary became the
show's solo host. For the next three months, in his words, "there was
no evidence in the rating book that anybody EVEN IN THAT BUILDING was
watching it." It was then that station officials asked him to consider
doing a kid's show. Since this beat unemployment, Lary agreed, and
proceeded to develop five different program proposals. One of the
ideas submitted, a pirate show, was accepted by the station. Thus
"Pete The Pirate" was born, and the program debuted on WBAL-TV on
August 22, 1960. Lary remembers:
"The funniest thing about the beginning, we had a black and white set
up in Studio H. Roy Rogers had called his listeners 'buckaroos,' you
know. I thought, that's a good idea. We were all upset about the fact
that pirates were criminals, I mean that was a thing we had to walk a
wide circle around. So I didn't want to say 'buccaneers' because
buccaneers really were bandits. So I decided to call them 'lads and
lasses' and use the prefix from buccaneer. So when we went on live the
first time, I said 'Ahoy there buccalads and buccalasses,' and the
cameramen just toppled over. Everybody just folded over in the whole
studio. So that was the last time I called them 'buccalasses.'"
Since Lary made his entry each day swinging from a rope, the set for
"Pete The Pirate" was the largest in local television, bigger even than
the news set at Channel 11. "And when we moved from the old building
to the new one it got even bigger," Lary recalled.
In June 2001, I asked Lary Lewman if there was any reason why "Pete The
Pirate" didn't have a studio audience like Stu Kerr had at Channel 2
for "Bozo" and "Professor Kool."
"You betcha," he replied with a laugh. "I winced at the idea of having
a room full of children and thought if I can work this out so that we
don't have an audience, I will have won the game because I felt like
this was an enormous element that had to be managed. I mean you had to
generate these audiences--you had to bring them in and get them
out--and I'm sure Stu overcame that with just pure work and he figured
out how to do it, but I was glad I didn't have to do it. Stu did that
well--he worked well with live audiences."
Besides designing his own costume and makeup, Lary Lewman came up with
storylines for "Pete The Pirate," laboring for hours a day on material
that was used up in 30 minutes. Ron Spangler co-produced the show and
frequently worked with Lary on stories. Props were alphabetized and
carefully stored at the station. Commenting about the creative
process, Lary recently said, "Television just eats it up. I tended to
write it between midnight and 4 am." And about that "swinging"
entrance each day, "Once a day I'd come out and support my own weight
on a rope--not a big deal. But when I stopped doing that (vacations,
etc.) the muscle tone in my body changed completely. So I put a bar up
in the doorway of my kitchen and would chin myself up once a day."
And of course, things didn't always go as planned. Lary remembers:
"We spent a full day rigging paper sails on a model ship. The idea
was--I was always worried about violence, there shouldn't be too much
violence--instead of having these cannonades with other ships, I would
take lodestone which is a natural magnet and rub the cannonballs to
make them magnetic, sort of a version of the 'Star Wars' defense.
Captain Awfulmean would fire at me and I would fire back, and the
magnetic cannonball would keep that one from hitting me. So we were
eventually going to show that we'd set his sails on fire--the variation
being we dipped the cannonballs in whale oil to ignite the sails so
that he couldn't chase us. So rather than sink the ship, we were going
to burn the sails. So we had this big model of the Cutty Sark I
think--I can't believe we were going to burn it. We had a cloud rear
screen that had this model on a rocker. And the idea was we'd ignite
these paper sails and take to a shot of the sails burning, showing we'd
won the battle with Captain Awfulmean. So what happened was I dipped
the thing (in whale oil) and all that and fired--it was tricky firing
cause a guy was rolling the audio sound of the cannon and we were
trying to sync that with the smoke puff out of the mouth of the
cannon--and they take to a shot of the model and catch the technician's
hand with a match carefully lighting the sails! It flashed through my
mind that we should have giants and Lilliputians in the story, but I
thought, aw screw it and I ignored it!"
Then there's the age-old show business rule, "Never work with children
or animals." Unlike Washington kid's show host Lee (Cap'n Tugg)
Reynolds, whose feathered sidekick Fantail was a puppet, "Pete The
Pirate" worked with real parrots. Lary remembers:
"I killed two or three parrots before I realized they couldn't stand
the air-conditioning in the building. He'd take off his perch or my
shoulder and start to fly and slowly go down because we clipped his
wings. But then of course they grew and we never paid close enough
attention, so there was always the day when instead of going down he
was slowly spiraling UP. And it's five minutes to four or just before
we went on the air, and the bird that we built the show around is now
sitting on the light grid and it takes cherry pickers and three hours
to get him out of there!"
"Pete The Pirate" went off the air in September, 1965. "I was 23 when
I started and 28 when I finished, and it was like playing pirates every
day. It was just an incredible thing to be able to do that for a
living." Lary went on to a lucrative career in voiceovers, and hosted
"Consumer Survival Kit," a national show produced at Maryland Public
Television in the 1970's. Slowed in recent years by health problems,
Lary Lewman, now 65 and semi-retired, continues to make his home in the
Baltimore area with wife Nancy.