<P>Tribute to Bob Allard - Cactus Jim! WOC Radio 1420 and WOC Television Channel 6<P>
Tribute to Bob Allard and Cactus Jim!
WOC Radio 1420
WOC Television Channel 5 & 6
And as long as previous Channel 6 kid shows were mentioned, let's not forget Cactus Jim's Movie Matinee with Bob Allard. That show ran some of the best serials, one being "Tailspin Tommy." - WOC Alumni Dave Coopman
This brought back sooooo many memories! Thank you Don McGonegle for reminding me of so many people I knew way back in my early childhood. I not only was a child who watched the Captains of the Dixie Bell (I remember Ken Wagner the best), but I was often in the company of them. My dad was Bob Allard, aka Cactus Jim (picture attached, circa 1958 or 1959). Sadly, so many of the pioneers of programming in WOC's early days have gone to that great control room in the sky.
I couldn't stand Ray Guth, the station manager - until he gave me a doll. Then I though he'd hung the moon and was over at his house playing with his kids every chance I could. I was 4 or 5 when I got the doll, and I still have it. They didn't live but a few blocks away from my house in the Glen Armil area of Davenport. Ray had a huge model train layout in the basement and it was his. Children were not allowed to touch it. One time he let me throw the switch to start it up but touching the trains or even going near the layout when Ray wasn't around would result in you being banned from the basement.
I was called in to active duty several times when I was a child, making appearances on Cactus Jim. I was supposed to be his niece visiting from the city. My job was to sit quietly on a chair, dressed in poodle skirt with my hair in a pony tail - tres chic. The dog in the picture was our family pet and was also called into service. I think on the show he was called Digger and generally he would be sleeping on the floor beside my dad. That is until one of the camera men bounced a tennis ball. Then he was off like a shot to play. Cactus Jim would explain this sudden bolting by saying he was off chasing off a rabbit or something.
I also was on the air once with George Sontag. If I remember the story correctly, Marjorie Meinert was to sing and Ray Guth got it into his head that she needed someone to sing to. So he called my mother and told her to get me dressed in my Sunday best and down to the station. Oh and did I have a stuffed animal that looked vaguely real. So I was hauled out of bed, cleaned up and down to WOC I went. We were seated on a glider (one of those porch swing deals), George at the piano and she sang "Young at Heart" to me while I pet the pretend cat on my lap. At least it was made of white rabbit fur rather than pink fleece so I guess it looked vaguely real.
Promotional picture of Marjorie Meinert copyright WOC
At one time my mother had tons of pictures and memorabilia from the early days. Unfortunately it was all lost when the closet where the boxes were stored flooded. She was able to salvage a few things, mostly from the time Daddy worked in Minneapolis in the mid 1960s, but not much from the WOC days. I wish I had more of it.
Thank you for your web page. I have very much enjoyed the trip down memory lane. Next time you see Ernie, tell him Bob Allard's daughter Tracy says hi.
Tracy Allard
Dave Coopman, author of KSTT and WQUA books as well as WOC alumni, provides another great picture of Cactus Jim!
Here's another pic of Bob Allard as Cactus Jim. Bob was also a ham radio operator and this was the QSL or "call" card that he would send out to various contacts he made via his radio. It appears that Bob made the card from the publicity postcard sent out to viewers of the Cactus Jim show.
Regards,
Dave Coopman
This is a clip from WOC's 25th year anniversary celebration which aired on WOC's Noon Edition, the 12 o'clock news on WOC TV-6. Click on the player and listen to Ernie Mimms doing an incredible imitation of Cactus Jim!
Here's the pic of Bob Allard, circa 1961. It's not the greatest, but I think it gives a good representation of what the "young" Bob Allard looked like without his make-up as Cactus Jim.
- Dave Coopman, WOC Alumni and author of the outstanding book "Someplace Special... KSTT - A History of the Station and Its People"
Cactus Jim's program appeared in the early years of WOC programming. WOC had signed on the air in October 1949. A quick check of the Quad City Times television listings archives reveals that the Cactus Jim show appeared in what was to become the Cartoon Showboat's time slot in September, 1951;
3:30pm Howdy Doody
4:00pm Cactus Jim
4:30pm Kukla, Fran and Ollie
5:00pm Cowboy Ken - Ken Houchins
Following the hugely popular Howdy Doody must have been a ratings winfall for the show!
Cactus Jim's program also appeared on Saturday afternoons from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. on WOC TV-6 in the late 1950's!
04/19/06 Another great update from Tracy Allard!
Thanks for letting me know about the addition to the page. It's amazing what people hold on to over the years! I have the wallet card that I guess was his ham license. We had a huge antennae on the roof of the house and it got stuck by lightening a couple of times. No wonder I was scared of thunder as a kid! Antennas like that would never get past the neighborhood associations now.
Sometimes the radio signal would bleed into other electronics - like the neighbors' televisions. One woman a couple blocks away almost had a coronary when her electric organ started to talk to her. She thought her dead husband had come back to haunt her. (I'll admit that I don't know if this actually happened or not, but the story was told so many times there has to be some grain of truth to it.)
Oh, and I have a Wes Holly story too. He was the last cowboy to present cartoons on WOC before the show became The Cartoon Showboat with a captain. Wes had a cat as a pet. He had to go out of town suddenly and didn't have anyone to take care of her so my mother offered. How hard can it be to take care of a kitten? Except this wasn't an ordinary kitten - it was a lion cub. Ma thought it was a six or eight week old cub - a cute little fur ball. She was six months old and the size of a St Bernard. Her name was Kenya and she spent about two weeks in our back yard. Wes drove up in a convertible with this cat sitting in the front seat lounging over the door like a big dog.
At first she was chained to the elm tree in the back yard but the flies and gnats in the grass bothered her so she was moved into the garage and was much happier. My parents had checked with the police and there wasn't any ordinance at that time against having a big cat as long as it was confined and we took "reasonable" precautions. We posted no trespassing signs on the chain link fence that surrounded our back yard, chained the gates shut and locked the garage door. She never bothered anyone. In fact the neighbor boy slept out in his back yard in a tent all week so that he could get a scout badge and said he never heard a sound out of her.
We didn't have problems with any of the kids in the neighborhood, it was the parents. "Just climb over the fence, Johnny - when will you ever have another chance to pet a lion!" I wouldn't go near her, but one of my friends pet Kenya and seemed to be just fine - picture attached. The picture is dated 1961 and the note my mother wrote on the back says Kenya ended up in the Peoria Zoo when she got too big for Wes to handle.
Oh the crazy things we did way back then! I'm still digging thru boxes to see if I can find anything else. Thanks!
Tracy
UPDATE!!! 04/25/2006... Tracy did find something! A COLOR PICTURE OF HER DAD - CACTUS JIM!
Alas, found only one picture in all of my boxes. There was only one scrapbook/photo album from way back when and it was all stuff from when my father was in Minneapolis.
There was another one that just had pictures in it - but it must have been lost when our storage closet flooded.
I'm attaching the only other photo I found, it's a color picture that appears to have been taken at the same time as the post card pictures. Also sending a picture of me reacting to my dad in full Cactus Jim make up! I must have been about 3.
At one time there was a series of pictures - he was putting his make up at one end of the kitchen table and I was eating breakfast at the other end. I was getting progressively more agitated until I finally screamed and took off for parts unknown! This is the only picture that seems to have survived.
Tracy
Outstanding Tracy! What are the odds that any color picture still exists of your father as Captain Jim!?!
04/04/06 Don McGonegle adds more to the story of Cactus Jim on WOC!
I enjoyed reading the comments from Bob Allards daughter. I remember her and her sister as well as her mother Marie who was a wonderful warm person. A fellow floor crew member of mine by the name of Bill Kelly used to baby sit them whenever Bob and Marie were looking for a night out. I also had a terrific steak dinner that Marie fixed for Bill and I. Their home in Glen Armil was near the Guth's and another WOC staffer by the name of Dave Hauser who became the Chief Engineer of WOC for a period of time.
I worked on the floor crew when Bob did the Cactus Jim show. His set was a large, drywall flat that Ken Wagner painted on a front of a desert shack. There was a a plywood cactus cutout that sat in the foreground and a wicker rocker with an old orange crate beside it. Bob would walk on set from off camera with his opening line "Hi there Bucker-inos..." then sit down in the chair and introduce the cowboy serial episode for the day.
One day I held up a printed sign that said "Bob Your Fly Is Open!!!!" as he walked out (it wasn't). He quickly bent over, doubled up, sought refuge behind the cactus cut-out, then hobbled over to the rocker and sat down. He took a stealth like glance, saw it was not open, realized he'd been had, then broke up laughing.
Bob also did talk radio at night on WOC AM and replaced Bill Gress on TV doing "COMMENT" a brief editorial comment at the end of the 10 pm news before he went to Minneapolis. I even remember when he drove his black and red Ford Victoria convertible into the lot the first day he came to work at WOC from South Dakota. Please say hello to her. I am sure that she won't remember me but she might remember Bill Kelly.
Bob Allard out of Cactus Jim's Character rehearsing for the Hollywood Supper Club with the Ruthie James Trio. - Don McGonegle - Special thanks to Don for this picture!
Special thanks to Tracy Allard for the following pictures and articles of her Father, Bob Allard. Thank you again to WOC alumni Dave Coopman for passing along memories of Mr. Allard.
My memories of Bob on radio are somewhat sketchy. I know that occasionally he had some rather interesting guests, via the phone, that he would interview and then have his audience interact with through their calls. Some guests were extremely liberal in their views, some very conservative for the time, some were just plain weird. If he read about something that really stood out in his mind, he would try to arrange an interview or at least conduct a show around that subject. No matter how offbeat the subject might have been, he always treated his "guests" courteously. And while he was courteous, he didn't mind really taking a guest or caller to task. He'd ask very penetrating questions and play devil's advocate with them to get them to really express themselves.
I know he was a voracious reader. On the occasions that I would see him in the station's coffee room, he generally had a book or some newspapers with him... always looking for show material. When he did TV booth, there were many times that he only needed to read the opening or closing for the news. On those occasions, he spent the remainder of the booth shift reading a book.
Bob was a man who loved to engage you in a conversation. He'd ask if you heard a particular show and what you thought of it, or perhaps he'd bounce a future topic off you for your thoughts. In those moments, he really got you to think and express yourself.
I wish I had had more opportunity to speak with Bob, but our shifts never really allowed for it. I'd be in the control room when he had free time or was through with my shift when he was starting his. I'm sorry he's still not around. - Dave Coopman
Special thanks to WOC alumni and nationally renowned broadcaster Doug Dahlgren for this audio clip of Doug introducing Bob Allard's Contact WOC Show which aired after dark on WOC 1420 AM!
05/15/2009 ...I was doing some re-organizing which got me looking at all my old photo albums and I found this. Looks like the kids from A Christmas Story - all we need is Ralphie and his b-b gun! - Tracy Allard
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