Doug Richards’ Live Apartment Fire (Richards is another veteran Atlanta [granted not 50 years] long with WAGA, but currently at WXIA) is another great Atlanta media blog–and Richards recently directed folks to McClellan’s wealth of knowledge. So this time when I revisited McClellan’s blog (after my initial visit several months ago) I was pleasantly surprised to see he’d written a number of posts on Don Kennedy. For some of my older siblings, Kennedy was an important part of their childhood (through his alter ego, Officer Don) because of his live kids TV show on WSB-TV, The Popeye Club. (Really, one of these days I should do a post about my older sister, who had her appearance [the show was done with a live studio audience] on the Popeye Club preempted by coverage of the Six-Day War).

WSB-TV ended the show back in 1969, but I remember seeing Kennedy back on TV when he relaunched (as one of the owners of) WATL/Channel 36 in the mid-1970s. As a kid, it fascinated me to see the “birth” of a TV station, so Kennedy was an icon in my mind. In fact, Kennedy’s station was the home of a future Muppet talent when Steve Whitmire honed his early puppet skills with Otis–a 1970s beach bum puppet that hosted a kids show. As Whitmire described in this 1999 interview: “I filled two-and-a-half hours a day doing this by taking phone calls from children in the area who were watching the show. I loved doing it.” I was one of the kids that would call in almost every day. I remember meeting Steve and Otis as a kid at an appearance at Northlake Mall. Only in writing this piece, did I suddenly realize that Kennedy was indirectly a big part of my childhood entertainment fun.

It’s a pleasure to read these posts by McClellan about Kennedy (who currently hosts a successful syndicated musical show, Big Band Jump–a project that got its start at Album 88 back in the early 1980s [I remember briefly meeting Kennedy once or twice when I worked at GSU Music Library back in the late 1980s, in fact] and also does periodic voice work for Cartoon Network). You can find McClellan’s posts covering Kennedy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

One last thing, I was astounded to find this Officer Don clip on YouTube, where Kennedy did an amazing channeling of the spirit of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.

Jim Axel died on Saturday, after a long battle with cancer. AJC’s Rodney Ho and Doug Richards (former WAGA, currently WXIA). Both articles link to WAGA’s coverage of his passing, but I linked to Ho and Richards’ pieces mostly because of the tributes that flow out of the comments sections in both posts. I was pleasantly surprised to see a comment from Axel’s former co-anchor Chuck Moore (another name I grew up respecting).

A few things are clear in reading the comments, Axel cared about his friends and his co-workers — almost as much as he loved his family. And Axel was at peace with his passing and how he had lived his life. And not everyone can pull that off. It’s not easy–and there’s a lesson to be taken away from that. Yet again, years after leaving TV news, Jim Axel one last time gave this news junkie some information that he could use.