Don Kennedy, known as Officer Don on the long-running Atlanta children’s TV show, “The Popeye Club,” in the 1950s and 1960s, died Thursday at age 93.
Kennedy was suffering from dementia following a stroke in 2015, according to his daughter Rebecca Maple, who confirmed his death Friday.
No memorial service is planned, Maple said.
“He raised an entire generation of Atlantans,” said Aron Siegel, who appeared on the show twice as a child and posted “Popeye Club” specials on YouTube a few years ago that he digitized from a 1987 VHS tape he found at a Blockbuster in the 1990s.
“He had a special way with children,” Maple said. “He didn’t talk down to them. He treated them like they were intelligent.”
Bill King, a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter who got to meet Kennedy as a child, then interview him as an adult, said while Kennedy often acted like a “wacky overgrown kid” on the show, he would unfailingly call the boys and girls “sir” and “madam.”
Kennedy grew up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and had an early love for radio, working at a local station as a teenager. He pursued communication studies at nearby Geneva College.
After working at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the Army during the Korean War, Kennedy landed a job at WSB-TV in 1953 doing voice-over work, news reading and booth announcing.
Management in 1956 drafted Kennedy to take over as host of a children’s show called “The Clubhouse Gang,” which he didn’t actually want to do, telling them he didn’t like kids. Kennedy also inherited the policeman’s uniform from prior host Gary Stradling, who was known as “Officer Joe.”
The show’s name was changed for a short time to “Big Adventure” featuring Jungle Jim movies.
“They wanted to dress me in a leopard skin, but I prevailed on them to keep Officer Don,” Kennedy recalled in 1983 to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Eventually, it became “The…
Read the full article here
