Lew Anderson, who died Saturday at 84, was known most recently for his big band’s regular Friday night gig at Birdland, but in the 1950s, he burned his way into the psychic landscape of millions of boomer kids as Clarabell the Clown on the “Howdy Doody Show.”

Dressed in a striped clown suit, big clown shoes, and a clown nose, and armed with a trademark bottle of seltzer to facilitate carbonic interplay, Anderson was a jolly, unpredictable presence on the Howdy Doody set, and a foil for the more rational, reassuring Buffalo Bob. Clarabell did not speak, and like another silent clown, Harpo Marx, he was fond of communicating via squeeze horns. It thus came as a shock when, on the show’s final day in September of 1960, Clarabell turned to the camera, and said, “Goodbye, kids.”

“Howdy Doody” was an atypically silent interlude in an otherwise fairly mainstream pop music career. Anderson grew up in Kirkman, Iowa, and after attending Drake University on a music scholarship, joined the Lee Barron band, touring Midwestern venues by bus. He played reeds, mainly alto sax, and was beginning to learn to arrange music when he entered the Naval Air Corps in 1942. Anderson spent the bulk of the war on a Pacific submarine tender, and assembled his own big band in free moments.

After the war, Anderson joined the Carlos Molinas Latin Orchestra, where he created American-style dance arrangements. From the late 1940s,Anderson toured with a vocal group called the Honeydreamers, which developed a wide radio following. It was during an appearance on a variety show with the Honeydreamers that Anderson came to the attention of “Howdy Doody’s” producers, in 1955.

The man who was later to achieve fame as Captain Kangaroo, Bob Keeshan, created the role of Clarabell. Accounts of why the clown was mute vary – some authorities hold it is because Keeshan, a stagehand with no training, lacked the acting chops, others that it was an NBC network decision to save money, because actors with speaking roles got higher salaries. But the accoutrements of the role were all in place, including the striped suit, the dual squeeze horns indicating yes and no, the seltzer bottle, and the tuft of presumably fire engine red hair (Howdy Doody was in black and white). Keeshan and a brief replacement had set the stage, but aficionados in the Doodyville Historical Society, and even Buffalo Bob himself (in his memoir) agree: Anderson was the greatest Clarabell. He is the one who will be re membered until they pry the remote from the cold claws of the last boomer.

It took awhile for Anderson to realize just how popular he was. When he went on publicity tours of new NBC stations he found, according to the Chicago Tribune in 1958, “The tots will tear his costume off as readily as a mob of teenagers after their favorite crooner.”

After the show was canceled, in 1960, Anderson returned to music, and turned to writing jingles to make money. He is reputedly responsible for “Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick?” and others. He also played in Broadway orchestras and did session recording work. In the early 1970s, he began to organize and create arrangements for his own 16-piece band, and eventually had a regular eight-year gig at the Red Blazer nightclub. In 1998, he began a regular Friday show at Birdland, which is ongoing. The band released three CDs in the 1990s.

He continued to stay in touch with Buffalo Bob (Bob Smith, who died in 1998) and “Howdy Doody” fans, and when the nostalgia boom started up, Anderson developed a sideline making appearances in Clarabell get-up at shopping malls and college campuses. He lived in Westchester and bred golden retrievers.

Although he had been ailing with kidney and heart problems, Anderson sat in with the band on April 5, Birdland owner John Valente said. The band’s last number was “Brazil,” an uptempo number.

Lewis Anderson
Born in 1922, in Kirkman, Iowa; died Saturday at a hospice in Hawthorne, N.Y., of kidney disease and cancer; survived by his wife and four children.