Doctors, clowns, and cowboys

Howdy vaqueros! January marks the 49th anniversary of a rite of passage for television and young children throughout Eastern Iowa, parts of Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and Minnesota. It marks the debut of the Doctor Max program on WMT TV in Cedar Rapids.

Broadcast every weekday afternoon, hundreds of thousands of young children were raised and influenced immediately after school by these locally hosted and produced serials that allowed area actors to perform skits and gags in between or as introductions to popular cartoons and syndicated shows of the era.

In the mid to late 1950s, new network television affiliates were opening stations in Iowa including KCRI (KCRG), WMT (KGAN), and KWWL. Each received feeds from the networks for the evening hours, but that left dead air, or time to fill, in the afternoons.

Every affiliate had a responsibility for developing its own programming for these time slots, and since students were just returning home from school, shows were introduced to appeal to kids.

One of the most prominent was the Marshal J Show. It debuted in 1954 and ran until 1961. The program was hosted by Alexander Kotkis, a radio announcer from St. Louis who had performed in regional and professional rodeos.

He was hired by KCRI (KCRG) in 1953 as a local announcer, but when the area CBS affiliate, WMT TV, needed a host for an afternoon children’s show, he was brought on as Marshal J and rode into Midwest homes on horseback to tend to his tack shop in the studios of Broadcast Park each weekday afternoon.

Dressed as a cowboy, complete with a real Colt .45 pistol at his side, he would teach the fundamentals of roping and cowboy life and later used the theme as a set up for introducing Bugs Bunny and other major cartoon shorts that had been provided by Warner Bros. and the network.

Changing his name to Jay Alexander, the Marshal J character endeared himself to juvenile audiences in five states WMT’s 100,000 watt transmitter could reach. He became a staple attraction at county fairs and other special events covering the region.

In real life, he raise cattle and horses on a ranch near Walker. His cowboy persona, was carried a little too far when he and a group of others staged a spontaneous gunfight in the streets of East Dubuque, scaring residents of the community into a panic. On another occasion, allegedly under the influence of alcohol, he accidentally shot his own foot with his signature revolver.

Gaining national headlines, Alexander then, in 1960, was invited to bring his character to KPIX, a San Francisco CBS affiliate operated as a division of Paramount Productions. A contract was signed for the show to run eight years and it premiered in the 1961 season.

Residing full time in California, he rose to celebrity status on the West Coast and brought famous guests to his show such as Gabby Hayes, Gene Autry, and Clint Eastwood. Within two years, the “Cowboy Extraordinaire” was recognized as equally as handy with the horses and ropes as his renowned guests, and Alexander was offered roles in the network TV western series “Gunsmoke” and hired as the model for the legendary Marlboro Man, the masculine symbol of the West.

The fame and glamour, however, led to an increasing reliance on alcohol, and, with a few questionable incidents indicating a possible dependency, the show was canceled in 1964. It was picked up by another affiliate, KGO on the West Coast, but the demand for the cowboy characters in children’s shows was declining and the program was removed from the air in 1967.

He sought bit parts in B spaghetti westerns or similar themed TV shows, but by the late 1970s. At nearly 60, he found little work for actors that age and he retired from acting. His last public interview was with the San Francisco Examiner in 1978 when he bemoaned the loss in popularity of his genre and professed his affinity for the stage. “Television wasn’t a job for me,” he proclaimed, “it was a love.”

Alexander maintained that love until his death, at San Diego, on Jan. 18, 1983 at the age of sixty-one. His ashes were scattered at sea off the California coast.

Throughout much of the winter of 1960, station managers at WMT had time to plan for a replacement of the Marshal J program. When Alexander announced his decision to leave for San Francisco, the Cedar Rapids’ station manager contacted a respected community theatre actor, Max Hahn, and asked him to develop a character to replace the cowboy.

Hahn created a figure who would wear a khaki jacket as a world traveler and introduce the cartoon shows. The station’s programmers named the character Doctor Max (which Hahn himself didn’t care for), but the character debuted on the Doctor Max Show Jan. 23, 1961.

During the live show, a prop was dropped on the floor off camera making a loud noise and Hahn yelled, “Keep quiet, Mombo!” Children started writing to Doctor Max wanting to know who Mombo was, so he reached out to fellow local actor and magician, Fred Petrick, to have him make an appearance on the program as Mombo.

Petrick, who had added a clown outfit to his magic show in the 1930s because he said his magic wasn’t very good, dressed in white face with large red painted lips, and wore a patched saggy jumpsuit, and was an instant hit. He performed magic acts that often intentionally failed, sometimes at the expense of the show’s host, and was an entertaining, colorful foil to the more serious traveling doctor.

Their combined zany antics continued to delight children (and adults) after school every afternoon for twenty years until Hahn, in declining health, signed off for the last time with his inimitable moniker, “Take it easy, play it safe, and be careful.”

Hahn died in 1984 at age 73 and was buried at Cedar Memorial Park in Cedar Rapids. Petrick continued entertaining and was cofounder of the St. Luke’s Clown Connection in the early 1990s. In 1995, he was inducted into the National Clown Hall of Fame in Wisconsin and was an Honored Guest of that year’s Freedom Festival.

In the early 2000s, he suffered a stroke, but was known for keeping the props of his magic act in his pockets for impromptu demonstrations to children even in his declining state of health. The author of this column can attest to his love of entertaining and of his Mombo character to the very end when my own father was undergoing cancer treatment at St. Luke’s Hospital and Petrick happened to be admitted to a room directly above.

I walked upstairs, not knowing if he would receive me, strolled into Petrick’s room where his family was present, and asked them if I could say “Hi.” They told me he would love it and I explained to him how I had grown up watching the show and enjoying his act.

He quickly sat up, thanked me, modestly saying that the visit meant more to him than it did to me, and, of course, we both smiled for a photograph, automatically flashing the same grin he had dawned on the show for two decades.

It may have been one of the last of the thousands of photos of birthday parties and special events throughout his lifetime. He passed away not long afterward at the age of 93 in November 2001.

Fifty years ago, Eastern Iowa enjoyed the last year of Marshal J in the Midwest. As he rode off into our sunset. The sun then rose and shone brightly upon Doctor Max and Mombo. In memory of them, this January, and all year, take it easy, play it safe, and be careful.

David V. Wendell is a Marion historian, author and special events coordinator specializing in American history.