Up, Up, and Away (1974-1975), WAST, Channel 13, Children's Show

by G. Jack Urso

Mac, Bob, and Rosco the Clown, hosts on Up, Up, and Away (credit: Bob Carroll).

“The World's a Nicer Place in My Beautiful Balloon”

This year is the 50th anniversary of a fondly remembered TV show from my childhood. In 1974, WAST (now WNYT), Channel 13, Albany NY, premiered a short-lived children’s show, Up, Up, and Away, it featured three performers, Rosco (Steve Roz), a clown; Mac (Mark Macken), who played guitar; and Bob Carroll, who performed magic and ventriloquism. Opening up with The Fifth Dimension’s hit, “Up, Up, and Away,” the show was as gentle as its theme song. It was a quiet spot for young children in a world that seemed increasingly confusing and chaotic in the early 1970s.

The 5th Dimension perform “Up, Up, and Away” on the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.

Rosco, Mac, and Bob were performers from Gaslight Village, in Lake George N.Y. A 1890s-era theme park designed by the legendary, and later Disneyland designer, Arto Monoco, and constructed by the equally legendary theme park entrepreneur Charles Wood. Gaslight Village was a more gentle experience than the large high-energy amusement parks today. Featuring vaudeville shows, clowns, Keystone Cops, silent movies, a movie car collection (including the car from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), and some generally tame rides, Gaslight Village was a fairly mild amusement park experience. My other favorite childhood destination, Fort William Henry, was located directly right next door. With Lake George only about an hour away from where I lived, between school field trips, scouting excursions, and dragging my dad, I enjoyed many a visit in my youth.

Nov. 9, 1974 TV listing from the Albany Times Union.

According to one advertisement, the show premiered Sat., Nov. 9, 1974, at 7:30 p.m. Bob Carroll, in response to one of my questions also remembers a slot on Fridays at 4:30 p.m. as a running time as well. That also fits in with my memory as I remember watching it after school. A look at the Albany Times Union microfilm record reveals a 4:00 p.m. Friday start time (see image below) though it is possible the show got shifted to a later start time during the course of its run.

From the Albany Times Union, Feb. 3-7, 1975, TV listings.

In a Facebook post, Bob Carroll noted that he, Rosco, and Mac, each received $30 per show ($191.18 in 2024 dollars) and that the show was sponsored by Sears.

These types of locally-produced children’s shows were a staple of television stations beginning in the 1950s. The other one that comes to mind from this era is The Magic Garden (1972-1984) on WPIX, Channel 11, NYC, with Carole Demas and Paula Janis. These shows were low budget productions driven by the hosts’ personalities and talents. Nothing overly stimulating took place. With gentle humor and low-key laughs, these were just peaceful diversions for children, not the high energy advertising platforms more common today.

“It Wears a Nicer Face in my Beautiful Balloon”

Frankly, it was just what I needed as a kid. The years leading up to 1974 were confusing for any child. I was still 9-years-old at the time of show’s premiere and the previous two years were confusing, to say the least. Several incidents stood out to me at the time and affected me deeply.

  Credit: Bob Carroll

First, the infamous Pulitzer Prize winning photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc in 1972. My brother paid me 25 cents to help him deliver newspapers and sometime shortly after the photo was taken on June 8, 1972, it appeared on the front page of the local Knickerbocker News. Phan was naked and covered in burns, running away from a South Vietnamese napalm attack on her village — napalm provided courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. It was the first time I ever saw anyone naked, let alone a 9-year-old girl burned and running for her life. We were nearly the same age. I was absolutely terrified.

Then, there was the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics when members of the Pro-Palestinian terrorist group Black September attacked and murdered 11 Israeli athletes. American swimmer Mark Spitz, in the middle of a seven gold medal run, is Jewish. I had to wonder if he would be next.

Then, in 1973, there was the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, which, although touted as “Peace with honor,” sounded suspiciously like we lost the war, and the United States never loses a war, right? 

Then, also in 1973, came the Watergate Hearings and President Nixon resigning. I thought the president was supposed to be the most trusted man in America. What was going on?

Finally, the Patty Hearst kidnapping in 1974. As the local Albany newspapers were Hearst-owned publications, it got a prominent coverage. It was getting hard to keep up. My 8- and 9-year-old brain couldn’t process all the tragedy, not to mention the complication of my own family’s dysfunction.

All of the world's problems got played out not just in the news but also recycled in popular media on sitcoms of the time like All in the Family and M*A*S*H. Heck, even comic books were not safe. In 1971 Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy developed a heroin addiction and in 1973 Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy died while he was fighting the Green Goblin.

It was almost enough to make me want to read Richie Rich. 

Is it any wonder why a 9-year-old me found Up, Up, and Away to be a peaceful place of escape amidst all the turmoil I knew would be waiting me when I grew up?

“Way Up in the Air in My Beautiful Balloon”

Bob Carroll at his magic shop In Albany, early 1970s (credit: Bob Carroll).

Then, in late 1974, came Up, Up, and Away. Harmless, and probably boring for teenagers, the show was a sort of Zen-like break from reality for me. A budding ventriloquist and magician myself, I watched Bob closely for tips, but despite my Charlie McCarthy doll and magic kits, I was never very good at either. I bought my share of tricks off ads on TV commercials (like the Marshall Brodien TV Magic Kit) and from the back pages of comic books, such as the ventriloquist’s mouth aide, a small piece of metal you were supposed to slip under your tongue. It never worked, and I was afraid of swallowing it, so it got little use.

At the time of the show, I was also a frequent customer of the House of Magic at the now long-gone Northway Mall in Colonie, NY. One showpiece trick at the store was the guillotine. They would dare customers to put their heads in it. No matter how many times I saw them use it, and understanding it was a trick, I could never convince myself to stick my head in it.

Marshall Brodien TV Magic Kit.

In the intervening years, I often thought of that magic store and wondered what happened to it. As it turns out, Bob Carroll himself worked there! He later opened up MCM Magic a little further down from Northway Mall near Redwood Lanes in Colonie, just a half mile from where I live today. All these years of me wondering what happened to two fondly-remembered things from my childhood — Up, Up, and Away, and the House of Magic at Northway Mall — and it turns out both were connected.

The House of Magic listing in the 1973 Albany, NY, phone directory.

According to Carroll, Up, Up, and Away, came to an end about ten months later when Mac decided to move to New York City. Steve Roz continued on as Rosco for Gaslight Village and elsewhere, as did Bob Carroll, who continues to post online his memories of Gaslight Village, Charles Wood, and others from that era. Indeed, it was in looking up old photos of Gaslight Village in a bit of nostalgia when I discovered the theme park, the magic store, and Up, Up, and Away, were all related.

“We'll Chase Your Dream Across the Sky for We Can Fly”

Promotional advertisement (credit: Bob Carroll).

I spoke to a few others my age who recall the show but remember little else except for the opening theme, the hosts, and the channel it played on. Anyone younger than their mid-50s would not remember the show. Given it was a local show, short-lived, and the passage of fifty years, I doubt that more than a few thousand people alive today probably even recall it.

However boring and inane they might seem to grownups, there is a value to these types of innocent children's shows, whether it is Up, Up, and Away, The Magic Garden, Barney & Friends, or Teletubbies. Children are more observant than we give them credit for. They know how confusing and scary the world they’re going to inherit from us is going to be. Is it too much for us to give them a safe place for a few years?

Gaslight Village poster.

Gaslight Village closed down in 1989 and Rosco the Clown was there to the end. Times had changed. The small locally owned upstate tourist-trap theme parks that opened up in the immediate post-war Baby Boom era of the 1940s and 1950s had by the 1980s begun to give way to large nationally owned amusement parks. Restricted by its plot of land located inside the village of Lake George itself, Gaslight Village could not grow. Combined with changing demographics and consumer tastes, higher ticket prices, and fewer customers, Gaslight Village, like Frontier Town and other local theme parks, closed down. The other local Charles Wood-owned theme park Storytown USA, also originally designed in part by Arto Monaco, survived — now known as Six Flags Great Escape.

As is the great tragedy for locally produced shows from the pre-home VCR era, footage from shows like Up, Up, and Away is probably lost unless the station saved a copy, which is unlikely. The tape format used in 1974 would have been 2-inch reel-to-reel tapes which take up a lot of storage room. It is unlikely the station would have any 2-in VTRs available to play the tapes even if any had survived.

Nevertheless, it is important to preserve those unrecorded memories of our youth in some form, even the most fleeting and ephemeral like a short-lived children’s show, a magic store, or a long-gone, old fashioned, theme park, elsewise when the last person to remember it disappears so too will the show itself, like a puff of magician’s smoke, and float . . . Up, Up, and Away.

 

●             ●             ●