A reunion for all who can sing `Zero Dachus'

There they were backstage yesterday in all their goofy glory, these television heroes from a tamer time--Stan Boreson, accordion at the ready, J.P. Patches and sidekick Gertrude in full clown regalia, Brakeman Bill in his trademark overalls and engineer's cap.

They bantered, they reminisced and they joked. The mild-mannered Boreson, 75, shook his head and chuckled when J.P., 72, egged on by 68-year-old Gertrude, told a couple mild ones he wouldn't be telling when the curtains parted minutes later.

And they talked about their old shows:

"I had Crazy Donkey and the Three Stooges and Bugs Bunny and Popeye cartoons," said Brakeman Bill--Bill McLain, 73--whose show aired on Channel 11 for 20 years starting in the mid-1950s.

"I had `Out of the Inkwell,' when it first came out," said Patches, whose show ran from 1958 to 1981 on KIRO. "Then I had `Pow Wow the Indian Boy.' And I had the craziest one--`Clutch Cargo.' Remember that?"

Yesterday's Northwest TV Holiday Reunion at the Museum of History and Industry was part of a 51-day celebration of the holiday season. It looked back to the 1950s, when locally produced children's programs ruled the airwaves of commercial television in cities around the country, before going the way of the mom-and-pop groceries.

The audience had more Patches Pals with paunches than little kids, though there were some children who clowned onstage with the clowns.

Boreson, Scandihoovian as ever, told jokes about his Uncle Torvald and squeezed out the "Zero Dachus" theme song, which every baby boomer native to these parts can recite by heart:

Zero dachus, mucho crackus

Hallaballooza bub

That's the secret password that we

Use down at the club, and

Zero dachus, mucho crackus

Hallaballooza fan

Means now you are a member of

King's TV club with Stan.

He joked about his lazy basset hounds, No-mo-shun and Slo-mo-shun. "No-mo lived 16½ years because she didn't wear out anything," he said. "She slept her whole life."

Linda "Mrs. Captain Puget" McCune was there for her late husband, Don McCune, and storyteller Wunda Wunda was remembered in song. Brakeman Bill talked about the Crazy Donkey, his hand puppet. "He was wild and sassy. The kids loved him."

The idea for the reunion came from the museum's spokesman, Feliks Banel, who was too young to watch Boreson"s "King's Klubhouse" but grew up listening to his "I yust go nuts at Christmas" album with his parents and eight siblings.

"We literally wore that record out," he said "We played it over and over and over."

"These guys are all TV legends and they are all still around," he said. Each has worked closely with the museum over the years, "but we have not done anything to pull them together."

Banel added that the museum has been talking to the person who owns Crazy Donkey, hoping to persuade him "to give it to us or at least loan it to us. You can't hoard a treasure like that."

Pat Dunn, 54, a lobbyist from Olympia, was in the audience yesterday. He remembered the thrill of attending a Brakeman Bill show as a child and getting called onstage "just like these little kids are now. It was so exciting. These guys are great." His own kids, though, wouldn't get it, he said. "They'd have been bored to tears by this."

Gertrude--Bob Newman in real life--and J.P., who is really Chris Wedes, still perform locally, for businesses and local charities, mostly winging it.

"We've never had a script on the program, and we don't have one now," Wedes said. "We go out there, and we create pandemonium."

Brakeman Bill--McLain--is retired, teaching Sunday school in Tacoma.

Boreson continues to perform internationally--he and his wife returned from Switzerland and the French Riviera--and locally.

He keeps his acts wholesome, just like back when. It was a compliment to him, he said, when a reviewer in the Midwest wrote, "This is a show you could take your sister to if she was a nun."