Penny & Her Pals
Penny and Her Pals was a children's TV program broadcast by KTVW Channel 13 (now KCPQ) in Tacoma, USA, every afternoon at 4:00 p.m. from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Penny, played by the ventriloquist Lamoyne Hreha (pronounced: "REE-uh"), was a pretty blonde lady with a ponytail who lived in a castle with a strange assortment of characters who became known as her "pals".
Content
Like most local origination children's shows of the era, Penny showed cartoons, ran contests, interviewed guests to the castle and hosted hundreds of children's groups who came to tour KTVW Studios to see the show which was performed live each day. There was never a written script - each show was all improvisation. Hreha, a mother of three school-aged children herself at the time, worked out a general plot line for each week of shows with a heavy emphasis on messages that she thought that children needed to hear. Children viewing the show at home were given lessons in generosity, sharing, kindness, diversity, inclusion, bravery, perseverance, and many other subjects through the misadventures of the show's characters.
Talent
Hreha, daughter of a Tacoma restaurateur, Anton Barcott, learned to throw her voice while still in high school and acted as the assistant in the magic act of her future husband, John Hreha, a well-known professional magician and mentalist. She created the Penny TV character with Hreha's help in the late 1950s. Speaking of his wife's TV persona, he would often say, "We both knew that Penny needed to be the ultimate Goodie-Two-Shoes that any parent would trust their child with for at least one hour."
Characters
Penny's "pals" were non-human puppet characters given life and voice by Hreha, a master ventriloquist and puppeteer, although real humans other than Penny were occasionally included in the cast. Among the puppet characters were Hildegard the Witch (a crabby but good-hearted witch with a thorny personality), Dudley the Dragon (who lived in the castle moat and was more lovable than scary), Goldie (a silkworm and self-styled singer who lived in a costume trunk in one of the castle's towers and could not sing a note but tried with all her might), Little Lilly Sue (the castle mouse who was extremely shy and scared of just about everything), Grumble Von Grouch (the town meanie). Chief Brokenpaddle of the Tippie Canoe Indian Tribe was the Native American presence in the puppet cast. In addition to the puppets, and seen less frequently, were Captain Jack and Jefferson J. Jerkwater, both being full-sized ventriloquial figures.
Leaving the air
Penny and Her Pals was broadcast in black and white for most of its life and only went to color shortly before the show left the air in the early 1970s, having fallen like most other local origination children's shows of the day. KTVW was the last station in the Seattle-Tacoma market to re-tool itself with the equipment capable of broadcasting in color and capturing its own broadcasts on video tape. Even after the station's owners purchased and installed video tape recording and playback equipment, video tape was still not used to archive the station's on-air signal and was frequently re-used on a day-to-day basis, so there are no recordings of Penny and Her Pals.