Over dinner this evening, my mother reminded me of the existence of a certain iconic local television skit.
Up in Cleveland, the local B-movie presenter Ghoulardi (Ernie Anderson, the same one from
The Love Boat and Saget-era
America’s Funniest Home Videos) was extremely popular. Despite only being active in the role for a handful of years in the early ’60s, his Ghoulardi is still referenced to this day. There have been some successors: The (late) Ron Sweed, “The Ghoul”, a crewman on the project who became an ascended fanboy with permission from Anderson himself; some bloke called “Son of Ghoul”, about whom I know little because he wasn’t on our local broadcast channels; and Svengoolie, who has seen reasonable success are likely the most well-known examples.
One of Anderson’s Ghoulardi crew was a guy named Chuck Schodowsky. He went on to sort of fill the niche that Ghoulardi had occupied, though he went about it a little differently. Regardless, a local weatherman named Houlihan ended up joining him, making it Big Chuck and Houlihan the Weather Man. Houlihan departed at some point and was succeeded by John Rinaldi. Rinaldi is a little person and Schodowsky is tall himself, so they naturally became Big Chuck and L’il John.
They were active until fairly recently, still hosting shows. When I was in high school, my family and I were on it once. (My father also appeared on the Ghoul’s show once thanks to someone spotting his and his friend’s Halloween costumes and Sweed writing a bit about it.) I’ve met them, and once, when I was in college, I wrote a letter to Big Chuck, and I came back from a trip across the state shortly thereafter to find a very nice handwritten reply.
They worked with a number of others—mundane, famous, and infamous; local or not—to various degrees. (The now late) Dick Goddard, a legend of local weather reporting, was a frequent collaborator (I sort-of met him too once; freshman year one of the band shows got rained out, so they put us all in this cramped, half-size gym and had us do the show in there. I was on the drumline, and in our opener, we had to modify one of the formations due to the space issues, and I basically ended up catty-corner to Goddard by less than 10 feet), as was Art Lafredo, and—yes, really—the notorious
Dr. Robert J. White. Lafredo is relevant here.
Some of their skits have aged poorly, but most of them haven’t. Perhaps their most well-known skit (and my favorite of theirs) was “
Chase”. Lafredo is the motorcycle cop, and the other two should be obvious.