BUFFALO BOB, CREATOR AND HOST OF TV'S HOWDY DOODY SHOW.

Byline: Richard Severo The New York Times

Buffalo Bob Smith, a singing piano player and chatty radio disc jockey who created Howdy Doody and then teamed up with the puppet on one of early television's most enduring children's shows, died Thursday at a hospital in Hendersonville, N.C. The cause was cancer, said his family. Smith was 80 and lived in Flat Rock, N.C.

``Hey, kids, what time is it?'' Buffalo Bob would ask his Peanut Gallery of children ages 3 to 8 years, gathered in an NBC studio in New York at 30 Rockefeller Plaza every afternoon, five days a week, in the late 1940s and 1950s.

``It's Howdy Doody time,'' they'd respond with the lung power that only children of that age can demonstrate.

And then they'd sing their Howdy Doody theme, set to the tune of the French ditty, ``Ta-ra-ra-Boom-der-e:''

``It's Howdy Doody time/It's Howdy Doody time/Bob Smith and Howdy, too/Say `howdy doo' to you/Let's give a rousing cheer/Cause Howdy Doody's here/It's time to start the show/So kids, let's go!''

Such doings made ``Howdy Doody'' one of the first shows NBC ever produced in color.

For many years in the 1950s, Buffalo Bob and Howdy were on Monday to Friday at 5:30 p.m. After the theme, they'd be joined for an hour by their friends, some human, some made of wood. These included Clarabell the Clown, human, (he said nary a word but hopped around honking a Harpo Marx-type horn stuck in his belt, which he would remove to honk in Buffalo Bob's ear, which he usually also sprayed with seltzer); Chief Thunderthud, human, official representative of the Ooragnak Indians (``Ooragnak was kangaroo spelled backward); Princess Summerfall Winterspring (she began as a puppet, then was transformed into a human because Buffalo Bob, who hired actress Judy Tyler, wanted something beautiful and life-size for girls to identify with and Tyler was all of that); and such puppets as Phineas T. Bluster, the always grumpy but never evil mayor of Doodyville, his Latin and Anglo brothers, Don Jose Bluster and Hector Hamhock Bluster, and Flub-a-Dub, a meatball-eating wild animal made up of eight different animals that Buffalo Bob claimed he had caught in a jungle in South America.

There was also a machine of sorts, a Super Talkscope, that enabled Buffalo Bob and Howdy to instantly see what was going on any place in the world, any time they wanted to. There were songs, too, one of which was ``Iggily Wiggily Spaghetti,'' a big hit with the Gallery.

Smith was a big man with an easy smile who almost always wore a fringed cowboy outfit. At first Howdy called him ``Mr. Smith,'' but as the years progressed, he became known to one and all as Buffalo Bob, a name that had nothing to do with the Wild West but rather with his hometown in upstate New York.

Howdy started as an unprepossessing piece of wood in 1947 after Smith talked NBC into letting him do a children's show. He grew out of a character Smith had created on his radio show, ``Triple B Ranch,'' called Elmer, who would greet Smith with a ``howdy doody.'' His audiences soon came to call the puppet Howdy Doody. That first Howdy was quickly retired when NBC and Smith got into a dispute with Frank Paris, the puppet-maker, who declared that Howdy was and forever would be his property and nobody else's, the creative fortunes of Buffalo Bob and his writer notwithstanding.

Smith then sought out some artists at Walt Disney's studios in California, who refined Howdy into a freckle-faced kid, 27 inches tall, with prominent ears who wore jeans, a bandanna and a checked shirt. His delivery sounded suspiciously like that of Mortimer Snerd, a dummy hayseed who had been created on radio by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen for the madcap top-hatted wiseacre, Charlie McCarthy. The second Howdy was so successful that Smith commissioned a second puppet as a stand-in, whom he called Double Doody, and a third puppet with no strings attached who posed for photos. He was called Photo Doody.

But Buffalo Bob was neither a ventriloquist nor a puppeteer and he never tried to engage in the kinds of pungent exchanges that occurred between Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Professional puppeteers off camera manipulated Howdy's movements whenever he and Smith had a conversation. Smith pre-recorded all Howdy's responses; when they were on television, the exchanges between Buffalo Bob and Howdy were all controlled by an engineer who simply put his finger on the record and stopped the turntable when Smith was talking, then took his finger off and let the turntable roll when it was Howdy's turn. Not exactly high-tech.

The first Clarabell was Bob Keeshan, who went on to become Captain Kangaroo. Clarabell never had a line to say until the show went off the air (after 2,343 performances) on Sept. 30, 1960, at which time he looked into the camera and said simply and wistfully, ``Goodbye, kids.''

Bob Smith is survived by his wife, Mildred, to whom he was married for 57 years; his three sons, Robin, Ronald and Christopher; three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

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Photo

Photo: Buffalo Bob Smith is shown in this 1976 file photo with Howdy Doody, center, and Flub-a-Dub.

Associated Press