Captain Kangaroo’s Comment For Parents: All TV Sends A Message

The half-shy smile is still there. The voice is still gentle and warm and kind.

These days, though, Bob Keeshan doesn’t need the wig and makeup to play Captain Kangaroo.

“I’ve grown into the part,” the soft-spoken Keeshan acknowledged wryly, thumbing his databank wristwatch to extract a phone number.

The Captain has a data watch?

“I’ve always had a terrible memory for numbers,” he said.

Keeshan was a plumpish, dark-haired 28-year-old when he first donned the Captain’s gray wig, mustache and bigpocketed greatcoat to jangle his key ring throughout the sacred coziness of the Treasure House.

That was Oct. 3, 1955, on CBS. What followed were decades of Mr. Green Jeans, Bunny Rabbit, Grandfather Clock, Mr. Moose and more kinds of animals than could fit inside any zoo.

For the 30 years on CBS and six seasons on PBS, Keeshan presided over what became the longest-running and most beloved children’s show in TV history.

A generation of American kids loved him, grew up and had kids who loved him.

“That’s one of the nice things about my ‘advancing’ age,” Keeshan said. “Almost universally, the expressions are the same: ‘You were always my friend. You made me feel good about myself.’

“That was precisely what we were attempting to do,” he said. “So it’s nice to have confirmation, 20 or 25 years later, that we were achieving those goals.”

Today, after a two-year absence from TV, Keeshan once again wants to produce quality TV for children. If he can find the right partners, he’ll make “Tinker’s Workshop,” the local TV show that prefigured the Captain.

“I’ve been away from it for almost two years now and I’m pained, because nothing’s happened in this business,” he said. Even if the Federal Communications Commission mandates more “quality” shows for kids, he said, “Who’s going to supply it? Certainly not the people who give us the Power Rangers.”

“I think I do a pretty good job with those programs, and I think that I ought to be back there doing it,” he said.

Keeshan’s last TV project was co-starring with Shelley Fabares in an infomercial for TV Time, a $100 box that allows parents to specify when the TV is inoperable and to set up a “TV allowance” for their children.

“It’s a nice device,” he said. “What it doesn’t face is the question of what they’re watching, which has very great implications, particularly in today’s world.”

Keeshan lamented the weary working parent too tired to cope with chatterbox tykes who park them in front of the tube for unsupervised, adult television.

“So we’re watching Grandma working in a strip-joint or cross-dressers or a soap opera,” he said.

“A 4-year-old watches a soap opera and he says to himself, ‘Oh, so that’s the way we treat women!’ And 10 years later, he exhibits behaviors that are disturbing to us and we wonder, where in the world did he learn that?

“All television is educational. And I say that unequivocally. All television,” he said.

“I think we’re seeing some of the results of a complete generation of television children, and they’re not making us too happy.”

Keeshan has always been an outspoken activist for children, and he’s particularly discouraged by the shape our political debate has assumed on children’s issues.

“We don’t, in this country, think very much of doing the important work up front - the first six years of life,” he said. “If we can identify and intervene with children at risk in the first few years of life, we can set them on the right track, and there will be a happy ending.

“They’ll end up with something I call a taxpayer, rather than a illiterate, or a substance abuser, or a teenager who’s pregnant - all of those very expensive conditions that won’t be stopped by Congress passing legislation.”

Keeshan, who makes his home in Vermont, was en route to Georgia to give a speech for The Bridge, a shelter for children at risk. It is a speech in which he contends that “compassion is a false currency in the United States.”

“I don’t talk sympathy any more. I don’t talk about feeling sorry for kids. It’s strictly economics with me, because America votes its pocketbook,” he said.

Keeshan believes that failing to invest in our children, with basic health care and education and failing to reach to those at risk will create only more and more expensive government programs.

“If you want sympathy, have sympathy for yourself as a taxpayer and forget about kids. Hate kids if you want to. But be smart as a taxpayer,” he said.

“Say, ‘I can’t afford illiteracy and drugs and teenage pregnancy.”’

Keeshan was no longer smiling and, for once, his voice was cold and a little angry.

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