Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Would You Trust This Man With Your Kids?
Posted on December 17, 2003 in Childhood
If you’ve wondered about me, you might ask what this man had to do with my character formation.
Sheriff John came on at the noon hour. You could draw a picture and send it to him. And he’d put it on the air and tell people that you’d drawn it. So when I was three or four, I drew this picture. I had my brother (he was eight or nine at the time) sign it for me and put it in the envelope to send to Sheriff John.
A couple of weeks later, I was watching Sheriff John. There was my picture. And Sheriff John said “Here’s a picture that Robbie Sax sent in”. That bastard of a brother of mine signed HIS name on my work!
I went crying to my mother about it. To comfort me she kept saying “He said JOEL, he said JOEL.” I knew what I’d heard. She often defended him.
Sheriff John was just one of many Los Angeles area kiddy shows. Hobo Kelly was another one I inflicted on my parents and older brother (because he deserved them after what he did to me on Sheriff John!) The one he hated the most was Winchell-Mahoney Time, an afterschool torture that I applied as often as I could. (My revenge for the whole Sheriff John incident was not yet complete!) The tantrums he would throw when I turned it on were something to see. If we were alone in the house he would threaten me with physical violence if I tuned in to KTTV-11 to watch it.
His idea of high children’s culture was Buffalo Bob and his inbred pine tree compatriot Howdy Doody. In the tyrannical mind of the Older Sibling, the days of cheap cardboard sets and black and white viewing were superior to the technologically superior 1960s. To tell the truth, however, forty years later, it all sounds like Barney to me.
But let me put this to you: What has Buffalo Bob done to compare with the achievements of Paul Winchell?
Perhaps it is an evil scheme by the Howdy-Doodists: all the videotapes of the Winchell-Mahoney Hour were wiped by Metromedia. I bet my brother had something to do with it.
