Mr. Peppermint Turns 80
By Tom Geddie
While Mr. Peppermint exists today in the memories of
countless fans who still treasure his gentle and caring ways, Jerry Haynes
just keeps rolling along as he approaches his eightieth birthday on Jan. 31.
Ten years after the children’s TV show ended, it’s
still impossible for many people from, say, 15 to 50 years old, to see Jerry
in street clothes or in a movie role without smiling warmly and wanting to
greet him as Mr. Peppermint. His red- and white-striped jacket, straw hat,
and candy-striped magic cane still cling to him.
“Mr. Peppermint” was on TV weekday mornings from 1961
to 1969, and again from 1975 to 1996 as “Peppermint Place” on WFAA-TV
Channel 8 in Dallas. That makes it, at 30 years, one of the longest-running
and most successful local children’s shows ever on TV. In Dallas, its
audience usually was bigger than the one for the national “Captain
Kangaroo,” and eventually it was syndicated on 108 stations across the
country.
Jerry’s TV partner and good friend Vern Dailey, whose
kids’ page and drawings grace the County Line every month, was an equal but
less visible part of the show, creating and voicing all of the puppets
including Muffin.
The impact Jerry and Vern had on so many children for
so long is really only measurable anecdotally. It’s easy to stab at a guess
on the number of impressions – five shows a week for 30 years in cities and
towns all across the United States – but that number is too big to grasp in
any meaningful way.
There’s the magic – to a child – of TV in the first
place, where some people thought Jerry and Muffin talked directly to them.
Some of those kids would get dressed behind the couch because they thought
Mr. Peppermint could see them.
There’s the little girl who went to White Rock
Elementary School in Dallas and told her teacher she studied French with Mr.
Peppermint.
There’s the man – one among many – who saw Mr.
Peppermint as a father figure.
“Because of the attitude Vern and I took on the show –
we treated it with respect and didn’t violate the viewer’s intelligence – we
believed in it, and so they believed in it, too,” Jerry said. “Over the
years, a lot of people said I was a part of their life. One fellow was so
moved he kinda broke into tears because it turned out I was his father
figure. He talked to my wife about that.
“This sounds awfully self centered, but I filled voids
in some kids’ lives,” Jerry said, almost shyly. “I guess I got them going
every morning. In a way, that’s kinda sad when an image in a machine means
that much to you, but I watch Leno every night, so there you have it.”
Although Mr. Peppermint doesn’t have a website of his
own, a fan put one together for his 79th birthday at
www.myspace.com/mrpeppermint , where other fans shared comments.
Here’s a sampling, with some of them writing directly to him through the
computer just like they spoke directly to him through TV:
“We are children of the Peppermint Kingdom!”
“No one rocked it like Mr. Peppermint!”
“I grew up on the ’Mint. My friends in North Carolina
thought I made him up, (but he’s) too cool to be make believe.”
“I love you, Mr. Peppermint!!! You brought me many
great childhood memories, not to mention the pleasure of letting me be on
your show one time when I was 5!!!! I love Muffin! Hope all is well.”
“I’ve always been a Mr. Peppermint fan. Always watched
every time he came on. And if Mr. Peppermint hadn’t sponsored my softball
team years ago we would not have been able to play. And it was really cool
to have ‘Peppermint Place’ written on our jerseys!”
While Jerry was the front man, Vern was responsible for
Muffin, Henrietta Cluck, Jingle the Dragon, Mr. Wiggly Worm, and others, as
well as the cartoon strip for the Gumdrop Gazette.
Muffin’s birth was a family project.
“I came home one day and my wife (Jimmie) had been in
her scrap bag and sewn together a few pieces of brown and tan fur. She asked
me if I could do something with it, and we put some eyes on it and used
Popsicle sticks for teeth, and that’s how Muffin was born.”
Kids and adults all loved Muffin from the beginning,
especially in New York, it seems.
“We got more mail from Channel 2 in New York from kids
and teachers, especially the grown ups, because Muffin could lead Jerry into
anything,” Vern said. “Jerry would really get into the role and try to give
Muffin a bite before he realized he couldn’t chew or swallow it.”
The show, which was born as a mandate from the Federal
Communications Commission for TV stations to do more local programming for
children, finally ended in July 1996.
“We’d been on a long time, and I guess they thought it
was time,” Vern said. “I was 66 and Jerry was around 70. We missed it and
hated to see it go, but in a way we were ready.”
As public as his professional life has been, Jerry has
never sought attention.
“I just kinda let it happen,” he said. “Thirty years is
a long time to be in the public eye. It’s just got to be natural, got to be
real.”
Mr. Peppermint was good for Jerry Haynes.
“Doing a children’s show keeps you in that proper frame
of mind and relaxes you and you forget about the rest of your life without
having your work problems interfere because there aren’t any.”
The Dallas native continues to enjoy life with his
wife, Doris, their three children (Gibby, a musician who lives in Austin;
Carla, who lives in Longview; and Andy, who lives in New York) and four
grandchildren.
Vern remains active, too. In addition to his
contributions to the County Line, he’s been named songwriter of the year by
the Dallas Songwriters Association the past three years, and several of his
songs have been recorded by other people. Widowed twice, he has three
children, six grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
Among the many memories of Mr. Peppermint, there are
only a handful that Jerry would just as soon forget, but they help him keep
perspective on that success.
“I was at a birthday party once early on, and a little
girl said she watched me every morning but that her mother was sick of me,”
he said. “I was at a zoo toward the end of the show and a little boy came up
and looked at my face, got real close, then backed off and said, ‘Man, you
are old.’”
As far as Jerry knows, there’s not going to be a big
public party, like there have been for the past several years, to celebrate
his eightieth birthday. He did enjoy last year’s bash at the Granada Theater
in Dallas.
“I think the fellow who put those on lost money on it
last year. We all had too much fun,” Jerry said, laughing. Then he pointed
out that the man has a new job and that “the stars aren’t in the right
alignment.”
That’s okay with Jerry, who’s never actively sought
either the warmth or the glare of the spotlight.
There is life beyond Mr. Peppermint, after all. Jerry
just completed filming for what he believes is his fifty-third movie. In the
movie, tentatively titled “Gary the Tennis Coach,” Jerry plays a man who
strings tennis rackets. The coach of an underdog team asks him to shave the
strings of the rackets used by the favored team, so that they will break
during the match. But the coach, gently admonished by the stringer and by
images of people from his past, has a change of heart and decides that if
he’s going to win, he needs to win fairly.
Jerry’s movies range from the Robert Duvall film
“Places in the Heart” to “Crisis at Central High” to “RoboCop” to the
controversial “Boys Don’t Cry.” In the “Dallas” TV show, he played a “good
ol’ boy” who sold the Ewings some swamp land. In 1996, the year “Peppermint
Place” went off the air, the Lone Star Film & Television Awards honored him
with its lifetime achievement award.
Jerry also does stage work. In December, for the third
year, he and two other actors did a version of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas
Memory” at Theatre Three in Dallas. In March 2006, at the Van Zandt
Community Theatre, he did a dramatic reading of the works of long-time
Dallas Morning News columnist Paul Crume.
He studied drama at SMU, then at the American Theater
Wing in New York before returning to Dallas in 1952 to work at Channel 8 and
was doing a show called “Haynes Almanac,” which Vern produced, before Mr.
Peppermint.
Station management “called us in and said they were
taking the almanac off the air and said we could do a new one if we wanted
to,” Jerry said.
“They dropped the bomb and said it would be a
children’s show. I had never done a children’s show before, and was kinda
reticent because if you didn’t make it with a kids’ show, they’d kind of put
you back in the corner. I’d probably have been long gone,” he said, “except
for Mr. Peppermint.”
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