Making a Howdy Doody head

Okay this is going to be a long blog the process takes place over a month’s time.

I was supposed to go to work soon with a puppeteer named Pady Blackwood. Pady was the puppeteer on "The New Howdy Doody Show," the revised version that was done back in the eighties. David Eaton informed me that he and Paddy would teach me how to operate a marionette properly. Not being a “Marionettist”, not a real word, I decided I wanted to make myself a marionette to practice with and so I made a cartoon-ish and simplistically styled Clarabell Hornblower. It came out cute if not exactly functional.






I went to see Pady Blackwood give a talk at the Orange County Public Library's main branch. Pady performed a little but with a clown puppet who, while very handsome, was not Howdy Doody. Pady explained he no longer owned a Howdy, so sorry to disappoint.


Around that time a ventriloquist friend of mine, Margaret Davis, gave me a magazine with an cover article about Velma Dawson the person who sculpted Howdy in a hurry back in 1949. Howdy's creator was not the Roses, as many people seem to think. At any rate, I have fashioned soft figures from material and hard figures Brose kits and made a few from scratch with Al Stevens with whom I also made repairs on a few Marshall and one Mack figure. But I wanted to make one from scratch basically on my own. But I had no reason to make a hard figure; I mean what character would I make that I would enjoy owning, especially since ventriloquism has always been my direction. I have seen a few Howdy Doody puppets made by people and they always seemed a difficult choice due to the familiarity of face and figure. Oh wait did I just mentally challenge myself? I did! So Howdy Doody it was.



So I had some clay and I started to sculpt, well not exactly, first I made an armature out of two Styrofoam spheres. Not the best idea I ever had and knowing that I did it again but more on that later. So I sculpted in the flesh colored clay that I got from Al Stevens but it just seemed too “cartoon-ish.” And I realized the head I was making was too large, an honest mistake for someone used to making vent figures even if they are usually made from foam. So I stopped and started scouring the Internet for as many pictures of Howdy, from as many angles, I could find.





It was an interesting face so I kept it and went out and bought more clay, flesh colored as well, and started anew with a new foam form made from a Styrofoam block rather than spheres. Still not a good idea you see Styrofoam sheds bits constantly and picking them out of the clay is time consuming and frustrating. Still cartoon like but closer than the first attempt I could see Howdy but still knew it was all wrong. Howdy was mocking me, letting me know he would be as illusive as possible right from the word go.





Then I thought I had a wonderful idea and started blowing the bits off the clay with the keyboard air blaster stuff. Well I have a tendency to lick my fingers and smooth the clay in areas and well they put stuff in the “air” to keep people from inhaling the stuff. Who knew? It made me so sick with cramps I couldn’t do a thing for days.







Now, I know I said I wanted to do this ALL by myself but I needed help; my vision was skewed by the fact that using flesh colored clay gives the sculpture an immediate resemblance to a finished face. I had royally messed up! I started sending pictures to friends asking their opinion and a funny thing happened, looking at the photos I sent would clue me in to the errors I had in the face so that I often had fixed what my friends’ feedback told me was wrong. I could see the mistakes in the photos but not when I looked at the sculpture! I took the pictures with a photo of the real Howdy on my computer in the background so they could compare them but it helped me do it on my own more often than not. Somewhere in this process I realized that the jaw was too heavy to stay on so I used my pasta maker to make a smooth thin layer of Apoxie Sculpt over the jaw front to make a lighter version.





Then too was the problem of casting I had never been present for the whole process and while Al Stevens would give me the material to do the job he insisted I do this myself. It was kind of fun and fascinating but boy does it take a long time for this silicone stuff to set up. Allot of waiting with little to do but annoy Al and stand outside smoking. I know shame on me; I’m working on that, not hard, but I’m working on it.

So I made the mold and it was time to make what is called a mother mold. A mother mold holds the silicone mold ridged so when you cast the item it’s not distorted. I used what are presumed to be plaster bandages, and then when I thought it was dry enough I added plaster to the outside to thicken the mold. BAD idea! I would be willing to bet that what comes on the bandages is NOT really plaster because when I added plaster to them the bandages came apart! The back was salvageable but I had to redo the front part from scratch. I was right about one thing I did need the mother mold to be thicker cause when I made my casting it didn’t fair well. I decided to cast in paper maché like the real Howdy was made in but the pressure of pushing the stuff into the mold was a little more than the thin bandages could handle and I noticed some slight distortion after it was removed from the mold.


And I wanted this thing out of that mold, all I had to do was wait a few weeks, yes I said weeks!


No way was I waiting that long so again I went on line and found that you could remove this stuff from the mold in hours if you freeze it. Yes I said freeze as in lying in the freezer for five hours. But it worked, when I took it out of the silicone mold it looked like it was going to talk to me.


Now I had to dry it in the oven. You may be thinking “John, your putting paper in the oven?” Well not only did I put it in the oven at 300 degrees but I fell asleep waiting and the buzzer was beeping away three hours later. But it was dry, or so I thought, and I set about fixing the visible flaws from the unsupportive mother mold. Not bad ones really! I thought the back of the head was flat and I used thickly mixed “Durham Plastic wood” to cover the back with a coating to alleviate the problem. Then I set out to fix the slight divots in the face, with Apoxy Sculpt, that paper maché will leave behind. When I finally picked up the back of the head again something was amiss. The paper maché continued to shrink while the Durham has the property of expanding just a wee bit. Ergo they were separating from each other by the hour. So I tore the Durham off and mixed up some Apoxie Sculpt, pulled out my pasta maker again to make smooth even layers and fixed the back of the head AGAIN.


I love Apoxie Sculpt and should have made the whole thing out of that but I had dismissed the idea as expensive. Maybe I should have considered the time saving value of the medium.

I fitted the jaw in place and the face to the back of the head with a rubber band to see how the fit was and it was great, just one problem Howdy’s mouth would never work like this. What was wrong with this thing! Now early on I had noticed a feature of Howdy’s head that I then totally forgot about. When I sculpted the head I made the head then added the neck at the end using stacked wood pieces, you know “round Tuits” the part left over when you cut a hole in a board. But Howdy’s neck is set back from his jaw. His jaw over hangs forward, the neck, connecting under the ears. So I took my Howdy to the bands saw and cut off his neck. Nerve-racking move I must say. Then after putting the front and back halves of the neck together I attached it to the back half of the head with what? Apoxie Sculpt of course.


Howdy’s eye are made from spheres painted white with blue paper pupils glued on and covered with clear acrylic. He has Apoxy Sculpt teeth.


It was at this point that an in scale casting of Howdy Doody original sculpture from the hands of Velma Dawson appeared on eBay and I considered buying it to start over but that would be just cheating and stupid. I did however glean the actual dimensions of Howdy Doody’s head from the sculptures posting: Howdy’s head is 7 " tall, 4 1/2" wide and 5 1/2" deep

I was close but his jowls were too long and I needed to fix that. I needed some pictures of Howdy from the side but there seem to be a real lack of those out there on the web. I got three responses to a call for help with that from Mike Brose, Les Lamborn and none other than Alan Semok, Howdy Doody’s personal physician!


The jowls fixed and Howdy’s eyes, teeth and jaw made, I primed the whole thing. Now I have been working with Al Stevens for a while and let me say that you find more mistakes and problems once you paint a head bright white then at any other time. Howdy was no exception to this rule. His nose was uneven, one nostril was higher than the other and his cheeks, while incredibly cute, were not accurate in that Howdy has a peak along his cheeks. Also his ears needed to be a little more rounded at the edges. All a total surprise to me till the paint dried.



Having fixed those discrepancies it was time to paint him. Howdy’s hair is darker than his lips in most of the pictures we see on-line. Howdy has 49 freckles, one or each state in the Union when the original show was on the air and there are two different patterns to those freckles; one from Velma’s early broader faced Howdy and one from Velma’s second version’s paint job. The early ones are heavy and vary more in size and while I was not making an exact copy I attempted to follow the simpler second pattern. She also changed the way Howdy is strung in that his head strings originally attached to his temples then on the later version they attach to his ears.


I’m working on the control bar and I plan to build a body; I already made a blue gingham seersucker shirt, red bandanna, and hands of real leather/suede and am attempting to carve the boots in Basswood.


It is so incredible to look at Howdy’s head in my workroom perched under my version of Grandfather Clock from Captain Kangaroo.

Merry Christmas from me and Howdy!