The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 187

SUNDAY AT BOB'S One more adventure with Uncle Walt I ft 1 ZY The years have passed and Uncle Walt's kids are no longer kids. But that doesn't mean they've forgotten him. They confided in Uncle Walt. "I told him I wanted to be an archaeologist because that was the biggest word I knew," says Sarah Hague White, a Day-tona Beach attorney. "My girlfriend told him she wanted to be a giraffe." "I told Uncle Walt I wanted to be a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary.

Didn't quite work out that way," says Bill Sheaffer. He's an attorney in Orlando. The kids remember how Uncle Walt gave them good things to eat. "Best hot dog I ever had," says Dan O'Brien, an Ocala photographer. "Except when I got home my dad gave me heck for talking to Uncle Walt with my mouth full." They remain impressed with the way Uncle Walt always remembered them.

"I still have the last birthday card Uncle Walt sent me," says Joy Willeford of Palm Bay, project manager for the South Brevard "Habitat for Humanity," which helps build homes for the needy. "I received those cards for years. Uncle Walt never forgot." And they find themselves thinking about Uncle Walt at the most peculiar times. "I'll be getting ready to go out to the store and 111 think: 'Gee, wonder if 111 bump into Uncle Walt? Wonder if I'll actually see Just like when I was a kid and Orlando was a small town," says Neal Carris, an Orlando accountant. "For many of us, he was our first real hero." in 1926 and, after World War II, helped him land a job at Orlando's WORZ-AM.

It was there that Adventures with Uncle Walt had its beginning with children's music and storytelling. When WDBO-AM Down by received federal permission to start a television broadcast, Sickles was hired as program director. He set aside the hectic managerial duties each afternoon to slip into costume (first a safari suit, later an astronaut outfit) and talk with the kids. There was no script. The shows were unrehearsed.

In the beginning, he used to let young guests talk about anything on their minds. "But then, one afternoon, I asked a boy why he was laughing so much and he said, on camera for all to hear: 'My brother just After that," says Sickles, "I pretty much stuck to name, age and what they wanted to be when they grew up." His endearing philosophy was to "recognize each day as many children as possible." When mothers wrote to report their children had been good about eating meals, the kids' names were added to Uncle Walt's "Clean Plate Club." If you were sick you could call WDBO and Uncle Walt would read your name on his "Get Well List." And each show featured a "Birthday List" so that dozens of children celebrating at home could see their names scroll across the screen. Sickles and his wife kept track of all the birthdays and forwarded them to Tarnow Sausage, which mailed each child a birthday card. At its height the birthday list contained 64,000 names. But on Feb.

27, 1967, without any forewarning and just moments before the show was to be aired, Sickles was fired. It was one of those fickle television management shakeups. Adventures with Uncle Walt was no more, which is all that concerned the children of Central Florida. Sickles went on to teach for 11 years in Orange County before retiring. Nowadays, between occasional recording stints, he has the time to reminisce.

"Uncle Walt was nothing fancy. I just tried to encourage goodness and respect," he says. "All those children. I am touched that they remember." How could we forget? Bob Morris is a columnist for Florida magazine and The Orlando Sentinel. SENTINEL FILE PHOTO TINTED BY MELISSA SLIMICK favorite chair by the fireplace, welcomed Central Florida children to Adventures with Uncle Walt The half-hour show was meant to be both a vehicle for cartoons Rabbit," and a chance to plug the sponsors T.G.

Lee Bob Morris Dairy and Tarnow Channel 6 studios. The show began with a letdown: I wanted a hot dog. I got milk. But then the camera closed in and, wonder of wonders, for a few fleeting, glorious seconds my image appeared alongside my hero, Uncle Walt. Adventures with Uncle Walt ran for nearly 13 years.

In that time, some 53,000 kids appeared on the show. "All those children. Just to know that they are out there and occasionally remember. Well Walt Sickles lets his smile complete the sentence. He is 82 and lives with his wife, Georgine, in a rustic, cypress log home on Long Lake, between Lockhart and Clar-cona.

The black hair has gone half gray, as has his dapper, trademark mustache. But the voice the voice seems not to have changed at all. Rich and mellifluous. But with an added timbre. Gracious.

Trustworthy. Abidingly kind. It is a voice still heard on the airwaves. Sickles is sought after to record everything from radio commercials for Pizza Hut to spots for political candidates to voice-overs for Smithsonian Institution documentaries. It is a voice that got him his start in radio, at Pittsburgh's WWSW Sausage.

But to us kids who sat there watching, enchanted and amazed, the real allure was obvious: Here was our chance to actually be on TV. Just write to Uncle Walt, we were told, and we might be picked as one of his daily guests. We'd be given either a glass of T.G. Lee milk or a Tarnow hot dog. Then Uncle Walt would talk to each and every one of us.

On I HAVE ONLY THE BLURRIEST memories of that momentous day when Orlando's first television station went on the air. "Before then, people used to call us up and ask: 'How's the reception tonight? Are you picking up And if the reception was good, then they'd come over and watch it with us," my mother tells me. "The nearest station was Jacksonville, and we had to keep adjusting the antenna. It could be pretty fuzzy." But all that changed on July 1, 1954 when WDBO-TV, Channel 6 (now WCPX) issued forth its first broadcast. And at 5 p.m.

that day, from the studios on Tampa Avenue, a smiling, mustachioed gentleman with a voice as warmly familiar as a I HAD TO WAIT TWO EXCRUCIAT-ingly long years until about the time of my sixth birthday before I received the postcard telling when to report to the 70 FLORIDA MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 4, 1990.