Bob McAllister

Bob McAllister at the camera in Norfolk, Chauncey over his shoulder, mid-1950s. Photo via What Ever Happened to Wonderama?

Bob McAllister's mother paid forty five dollars for a stiff jointed dummy the year her son brought home good grades, and neither one of them had any idea what they had just started.^[1] A decade and a half later, after a couple of trips across the stage on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour, that same dummy, a wisecracking character named Chauncey, was riding along on one of the biggest children's shows New York had ever put on Sunday mornings. Then McAllister did something almost nobody else in this whole archive manages: he outgrew the figure, retired it, and kept right on working as a magician for another two decades without ever pretending Chauncey hadn't gotten him there.^[2] Pull up a chair. This is the story of a kid from Philadelphia who made it all the way to the top of children's television, then just as happily walked back down to street level, roller skates and all.

Norfolk, and the dummy that started it

He was born Robert Charles McAllister on June 2, 1935.^[3] By his own account he was a native of Philadelphia, but by the mid 1950s he had been living in Norfolk, Virginia for ten years, doing professional ventriloquism for eight of them.^[4] The dummy came first. Chauncey had been a reward for good grades in high school, and he stayed on the bench through most of McAllister's early career.^[1] Norfolk's newspapers spelled the name Clauncey at first.^[5] By the 1960s it had settled into Chauncey, and that is the spelling that stuck.^[6]

In 1953, still a teenager, McAllister won a spot on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour, not once but twice, and picked up a write up in the Richmond News Leader for it.^[7] He was a freshman at the Richmond Professional Institute that same year, and he turned down paid work in Canada and Florida to stay in school, which tells you something about a kid who could have skipped straight into show business and chose not to.^[7] The figure that traveled with him then, Clauncey DePue, was English made.^[7]

Norfolk gave him his first real television job anyway. He hosted his own program on WTAR-TV, went on staff there as a director, and by 1956 had made two guest appearances with Dave Garroway on the network Today show, with Clauncey dressed up to look like Dave for the occasion.^[8] On June 21, 1957, he married Nancy Judith Upshure.^[9] When the Bob and Chauncey Show had run its course, WTAR-TV had a new job waiting: Bob McAllister became the station's own Bozo the Clown.^[3]

The man who wrote the manual

In 1957 the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists made McAllister its television correspondent, and what he sent back to The Oracle is some of the plainest, most useful writing about working a figure for the camera that this archive has found anywhere.^[10] He explained the three lenses on a television camera, the fifty for a wide shot, the ninety for a waist up shot, the one thirty five for a close up tight enough to catch one eyeball, and he warned performers never to work off the studio monitor.^[4] He explained the floor manager's hand signals too: a closed fist to wind up the segment, a spinning arm to speed things along, a bent index finger for thirty seconds left, a C shaped hand for a commercial coming up.^[11] He laid out the wardrobe rules for the still new medium of color television (no white, no busy tweed, pastel over dark), and he was blunt about who took the blame for a bad shot: the director, never the cameraman.^[11]

But the rule that stuck hardest, and the one that says the most about this whole craft, is the simplest one he wrote: "Your job is to talk to him, and let him talk to you."^[4] A children's television host, writing home to a ventriloquism newsletter in 1957, had already worked out that the dummy was not a prop to hide behind. He was the one you were supposed to be watching.

Baltimore, then the biggest Sunday morning in New York

By October 1963, McAllister had moved to WJZ-TV in Baltimore, first as a comedy assistant, puppeteer, and magician on a program called The Lorenzo Show, then as host of his own program once the format grew around him.^[12] Chauncey came along, and so did a whole bench of new characters: Seymour the Snake doing the weather, Quigley the Cartoon Keeper, a country boy named Thurman, twin silent clowns Willy Winkie and Billy Blinkie, and eventually a superhero bit called Mike Fury.^[12]

An executive at WNEW-TV in New York took notice, and in August 1967 McAllister moved again, this time to take over Wonderama from its outgoing host, Sonny Fox.^[12][13] His first show aired August 13, 1967, and Wonderama ran three hours every Sunday morning for the next ten years, taped in marathon eight hour sessions out of a Metromedia studio on East 67th Street.^[14] He brought Chauncey with him and added a shaggy dog character of his own, Ralph.^[1][6]

At its best, Wonderama pulled in half of New York's entire Sunday morning television audience by Nielsen's own count: a hip Tonight Show for kids, built on games, magic, and guests who ranged from Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier shooting marbles before their title fight to Jim Henson trying out a brand new muppet on live tape.^[14][13] It ran until December 25, 1977, when falling ratings and friction with station management finally closed it out.^[14]

After Wonderama

ABC picked McAllister up in 1978 for Kids Are People Too, built on the same songs and games formula, aimed at an older crowd. The network and its producers wanted a different show than the one he knew how to run, and by November of that year he was out, replaced by two younger hosts. The show went on to win an Emmy. He was not there to collect it.^[3][15]

McAllister did not disappear. He picked up recognition from the Society of American Magicians, taught magic classes to students at Stuyvesant High School, and put together an instructional video called Bob McAllister's Amazing Magic to reach the next generation of kids the way Chauncey had once reached him.^[3][15] Around Manhattan he got where he was going on roller skates, in and out of the city's magic shops, and for a while he ran his own skating rink, called The People Palace.^[15]

He was still performing, as a magician, when he died of lung cancer on July 21, 1998, at the age of sixty three.^[2][3] Chauncey, the notice said, had been retired for years by then.^[2]

That is a pattern this whole archive keeps turning up once you start looking for it: the figure goes back in its case years, sometimes decades, before the performer ever stops working, which is exactly why so many of these figures survive in good shape with no paper trail attached to them at all. Bob McAllister just lived it out in front of more cameras than most of the people in these pages ever had pointed at them.

Forty five dollars for a stiff jointed dummy, and his mother thought she was rewarding good grades. She financed a decade of Sunday mornings and never once asked for a cut.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy