DEAR PROFESSOR: I read your reply to Bozo the Clown supporting his claim that he was never bumped from the air for cussing the kids or being cussed by kids. But how can you say this never happened to Uncle Don when I've heard it with my own ears on a blooper record? - UNCONVINCED
DEAR UN: I get a dozen letters like yours a year, and many of them are accompanied by taped copies of portions of various blooper records that do, indeed, seem to contain dubs of the infamous Uncle Don on-air goof. I've analyzed these recordings, and I've sought other evidence for their reliability, and here's what I've found:First, let me say once again that I believe it is very likely that the version of the "Bozo's Blooper" legend, in which the children's television show host makes an unprintable remark on the air, was transferred to Bozo the Clown from an event attributed to an early children's show radio host who called himself Uncle Don.
"Tune in Yesterday," John Dunning's history of old-time radio, reports that the story of the host's signing off by saying, "That'll hold the little bastards" was merely "a delightfully unsubstantiated story" that became attached to a former vaudeville musician named Don Carney who adopted the name Uncle Don for his broadcasts.
"Carney swore in every interview that it never happened," Dunning writes, "and once suggested that the story had been started by one of his rivals."
If so, it was to no avail. Although Uncle Don's popularity peaked in 1928 and 1929, the show stayed on the air until 1949. It was never dropped, as the legend claims, because the host broadcast an off-color remark.
Other books on radio agree that Uncle Don did not utter the alleged blooper. For example, Frank Ruxton and Bill Owen's "Radio's Golden Age" reports: "The one story about Uncle Don that has been told the most never even happened."
Beginning in 1952, Kermit Schafer - who founded an empire on publishing blooper records and books - regularly issued what he claimed were direct recordings of the Uncle Don blooper, and printed "verbatim transcripts" of the incident.
I've identified three different versions of the blooper recording, each purporting to be from the original broadcast. One, with dim and scratchy sound, offers the farewell "Goodnight kiddies," followed by what sounds more like "That ought to hold the little youngsters" than like any off-color remark.
The other two are clear recordings. After the goodnight song - one ending "Goodnight friends" and the other "Goodnight kids" - a voice asks, "We're off?" What follows is a crystal clear "little bastards" remark. But the voice sounds as if it was dubbed in, and is not Uncle Don at all.
Perhaps there's a hidden clue in the introduction to the anecdote repeated in every blooper book and recording: "A legend is Uncle Don's remark after he had closed his famous children's program (saying) . . . ."
Did Schafer mean that a real event had become a legend, or was he admitting that the supposed event was really nothing but a legend?
It's unlikely that the blooper recordings are authentic. Are we to believe that Uncle Don made the same goof more than once? And even if one of the three is actually Uncle Don speaking, there's no proof that the remark went out over the air.
It's more likely that Carney was telling the truth. I believe in Uncle Don, friends, because I know that there was a tradition of apocryphal anecdotes about other children's-radio hosts who made off-color remarks.
One such anecdote dates from the same period. A Los Angeles Examiner column dated May 31, 1928, featured a letter from a supposed "radio station Big Brother" who supposedly read bedtime stories over the air.
One night, this Big Brother confessed, he muttered, "That ought to put the little this-and-thats to sleep!" over an open mike.
So "Bozo's Blooper" (previously "Uncle Don's Blooper"), which has been a legend for 60 years or so, probably tells us more about every broadcaster's worst nightmare than it does about actual broadcasting history.