Linn Sheldon, Cleveland television pioneer
Joe Pucillo
leve_plaindealer/archives/2006_04.html#133973
TV's Barnaby dies at 86
Tom Feran
Plain Dealer Reporter
Entertainer Linn Sheldon, the Cleveland television pioneer who
made generations of viewers his "little neighbors" as the
children's host Barnaby, died Sunday at his home in Lakewood.
Sheldon, 86, died of complications from congestive heart failure.
Retired from broadcasting in 1990, he still appeared at events to
greet fans, tell stories and sign copies of "Barnaby and Me," his
locally best-selling memoir of 1999.
He was the last of the first performers on local TV and the last
of a breed whose work spanned vaudeville, nightclubs, radio,
theater and film. George Condon, the former columnist and first
television critic of The Plain Dealer, once hailed him as "the
only authentic genius I've seen on the air." "Linn could take 20
cents worth of props and make your imagination run," said actor
Tim Conway. "That's what talent is all about. He owned Cleveland.
He's a monument to the city."
Usually calling himself a comic, Sheldon acted, sang, danced,
played instruments, told stories, conducted interviews and was
the host of more than 30 shows on five stations from 1948 to
1990.
He liked to tell about the time doctors asked him to go to a
hospital to talk with a psychiatric patient no one seemed able to
reach. When the man looked up from a TV and asked where he lived,
Sheldon said North Royalton.
"That's where Barnaby lives," the man said.
"I'm Barnaby," Sheldon replied.
"Pal," the patient said, reaching to embrace him, "in here you
can be anybody you want."
The story always won a laugh, and Sheldon told a couple of
variations. Typically, when asked to clarify details, he would
laugh and answer, "How do you want it to have happened?"
But the story held more truth than it told. Sheldon did seem
capable of being anybody he wanted.
The birth of Barnaby
He created his signature role in 1956, when Channel 3, then KYW,
needed a host for daily "Popeye the Sailor" cartoons. Other
applicants auditioned using nautical themes. For his audition,
Sheldon adapted Og the leprechaun, his character in a production
of "Finian's Rainbow" at the Alpine Village nightclub. Wearing a
battered straw hat, string tie and pointed ears fashioned from
mortician's wax, he improvised a routine from props in the studio
and was hired on the spot.
But as the theme music was playing for his first show, he told
stagehand Bill Yeanert that his character still didn't have a
name.
"My dog's name is Barnaby," Yeanert replied. Moments later,
Sheldon smiled into the camera and said, "Hi. I'm Barnaby."
He ad-libbed stories, played the baritone ukulele he had used as
a clown named Uncle Leslie on WEWS Channel 5, and improvised from
a trunk of ever-changing props supplied by the crew. One day, he
pulled out an empty bird cage, tried a bit of ventriloquism and
created Longjohn the Invisible Parrot. Like Cicero the butterfly
and Sassafras the mixed-up dog, Longjohn became a fixture in
Barnaby's Enchanted Forest - sparking so much imagination that
8,000 children and parents turned out in 1964 for a downtown
parade of invisible pets.
Barnaby dominated daytime TV ratings through the early '60s,
receiving as many as 40,000 letters a week and topping Ron
Penfound's Captain Penny and Ernie Anderson's Ghoulardi as
favorite personality in a poll of local schools. Even adults in
large numbers watched the "Barn-Wood Playhouse," a raucous hour
of Saturday morning comedy that teamed Sheldon with Clay Conroy's
Woodrow the Woodsman.
Westinghouse, KYW's owner, syndicated his show to other cities
and sent Sheldon coast to coast , from Plymouth Rock to Seattle,
for prime-time specials. He helped numerous causes, enlisted
thousands of viewers into backyard carnivals for the Muscular
Dystrophy Association and narrated the talking storybooks that
were a fixture at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo from 1959 to 1980.
Another measure of his popularity came in the days when
children's hosts were permitted to deliver commercials on their
shows. Sheldon did one of the first for McDonald's one Thursday,
and some restaurants had to close on Saturday because they ran
out of food. Hosts for children's shows subsequently were
prohibited from doing commercials, and McDonald's came up with
its clown, Ronald.
Always a fan of signature closings, Sheldon quietly created
Barnaby's on the spot one day as his theme music, "The Clear
Fountain," was playing.
"If anybody calls," he said, "tell them Barnaby said hello. And
tell them that I think you are the nicest person in the whole
world. ... Just you."
A frightened child, a loving adult
By his own account, love was not part of Sheldon's own childhood.
"I knew what it was like to feel alone and scared as a kid," he
said. "When I was talking to children on television as Barnaby, I
felt what I was saying to them with all my heart."
Born Sept. 20, 1919, in Norwalk, Linn Richard Sheldon called
himself the "illegitimate son of my legitimate father." His
mother, Lena, died soon after he was born, and his grown brothers
and sisters so resented their father, George, a hard-drinking
railroad worker, that they listed Sheldon's father as unknown on
his birth certificate. They named him Linn for the doctor who
delivered him.
He lived with his grandparents until he was 8, then was left to
fend for himself, living with friends and foster families. At 15,
figuring his only skill was entertaining, he hitchhiked to
Florida, paying his way by playing the banjo.
He worked briefly as a bellboy in a residence hotel, set out for
California and found a job along the way washing dishes at a
Grand Canyon lodge. A guest, novelist and screenwriter William
Saroyan, heard him practicing the banjo outside one day and said
to look him up in Hollywood.
Sheldon did. He became a bit player and gofer at MGM Studios,
rubbed elbows with stars, appeared as an extra in "The Painted
Desert" at 17 and thought his future was in film. The Army
intervened. The skinny 6-footer was drafted in 1943. He was
discharged as a sergeant in Cleveland a year later and became the
first person to enroll in classes under the GI Bill at the
Cleveland Play House, where his contemporaries included actor Ray
Walston.
He was working as a nightclub comic and master of ceremonies
early in 1948 when he heard that WEWS, on the air only a few
weeks as the first TV station between New York and Chicago, was
hiring. His first job there was to announce the day's program
schedule. Newspapers did not run listings, he recalled with a
laugh, "because we really didn't know what we were going to do."
There were only 300 TV sets in the state.
"The joy of working was unbelievable," he said. "We'd come early.
We had no one to copy, and the ideas just flowed. In 1948, I was
doing the opening and telling people what's coming up, and I did
a lip-sync of Jimmy Durante. A guy walked in a couple of days
later and said, 'Can you do that three times a week for 15
minutes?' His name was Fred Shaw, from Rogers jewelry stores, and
that was the first sponsored show in Cleveland - I lip-synced
records three times a week."
He quickly became Channel 5's on-air everyman, serving as host of
shows as varied as "Charades" and "The Big Wheels Club," which
gave children a taste of jobs they hoped to have. A few years
later, he had the title role in a dramatic production of
"Everyman" that was broadcast on Westinghouse stations.
Sheldon, who had worked briefly in Dallas and for WJW Channel 8
before creating Barnaby, cut back on the character after NBC took
over Channel 3 in 1965, saying he wanted to return to adult
programming. He left the station in 1968 for the old WKBF Channel
61, then joined WUAB Channel 43 and revived Barnaby a year later.
Performing the character was not all sweetness and fun. Sheldon
wore a hairpiece to conceal the scar from the time a kid in a
Baltimore grocery beaned him with a ketchup bottle. A gun-toting
stalker, who admitted threatening to kill Sheldon, was arrested a
few feet from the entertainer during an appearance at Cedar
Point.
Dark moments, then sobriety
And he made no secret that his life and career had a troubled
side. He struggled with depression that he partly attributed to
his "double life" as Barnaby and as the heavy-drinking carouser
who squandered much of what he earned as one of Cleveland's best-
paid broadcasters. Drinking contributed to his divorce from his
first wife, Ruth, the mother of his daughter Linda, and from his
third wife, Marjorie. His second wife, Vivian, mother of his
children Abigail and Perry, died of cancer.
He stopped drinking in 1974 and worked to help others overcome
alcoholism.
"They say if you have two drinks a day, it helps you live
longer," he said. "By the time I was 55, I had had enough drinks
to live to be 3,000. I decided that was enough." If he could do
one thing over, "I never would have taken a drink in my life." He
retired in 1990 to Florida, where his son lived, partly hoping to
escape the shadow of Barnaby. Within six months, he found it was
not for him."I thought, 'Does anybody remember me here?' A lady
came up and said, 'My God - Soupy Sales!' I was 70 years old, and
I was the youngest guy in Florida."
Back in Cleveland, he renewed his acquaintance with Laura
Kempert, a KeyBank administrator who once worked at WKBF. They
were married on Christmas Eve 1991 and were seldom apart. "She
made me whole," he wrote in his memoir.
Though he once rued lost opportunities, Sheldon said he had no
regrets. He enjoyed jazz and horseback riding and said he would
have liked being a cowboy if he weren't an entertainer.
He said, "Nobody had a better life than I did."
Linn Sheldon 1919 - 2006
Survivors: wife, Laura; daughters, Linda Melville , a fashion
industry executive in New York, and Abigail Chizmar, a nurse in
Cleveland; son, Perry, a television producer in Orlando, Fla.;
four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Memorial
services: will be private. Arrangements: Malloy Memorial
Services, Cleveland.