260:"Edward Kean dies at 85; head writer for 'The Howdy Doody Show': Kean created storylines and characters and wrote songs for the wildly popular half-hour children's show, which ran five days a week throughout the 1950s. He also invented the word 'cowabunga'".
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Kean left the show in 1955 and went to work in the public relations field and as a stockbroker along with writing a newspaper column called The
Consumer Madvocate for a number of years. He was also a lounge pianist in
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in 1947 to create a television program for children, he came along to create "something that will keep the small fry intently absorbed, and out of possible mischief, for an hour" as he told
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on
December 27, 1947, as a Saturday morning program and was aired as a half-hour program five days each week at 5:30 PM from 1948 through 1956 on 200 television stations nationwide.
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236:"Edward Kean, Chief Writer of ‘Howdy Doody’, Dies at 85"
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Stephen Davis, a historian who wrote the 1987 book,
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