How Fort Worth’s ‘greatest showman’ helped build WBAP-TV from the test pattern up

Bobby Peters: Kids Show Host, Musical Madman, Silver-Haired “Daddyo”

He had a look: His hair was prematurely silver, his tan deep, his convertible white. He had a sound: As a bandleader, singer and musician he was hip from his baton to his banter (he called everyone “cat”; everyone called him “Daddyo”).

But more important, he had a role in local broadcasting history as one of the pioneers who built WBAP-TV from the test pattern up.

Star-Telegram entertainment columnist Elston Brooks called Bobby Peters Fort Worth’s “greatest showman.”

Brooks recalled: “He called himself a drummer, but he played just about any chair in the band. ... He liked his Scotch, he wrote the book on hip talk and he thrived on the wee hours of the nightclub and touring band business.”

Robert George Peters was born in Pennsylvania in 1912. At 16 he began performing a nightclub and vaudeville act. Peters formed an orchestra in 1939 and performed at New York’s Village Barn club in Greenwich Village.

But later that year Peters came to Cowtown and decided to stay a spell. He began performing at clubs on Jacksboro Highway. Peters and his dance orchestra also performed on KFJZ radio.

When war came Peters served in the Special Services of the Army Air Forces. He emceed the “What’s Your Name?” radio program from Love Field in Dallas. Love Field was an Air Transport Command airfield during the war.

After the war came another medium for Peters to master. On Sept. 28, 1948 WBAP-TV went on the air. Two years later Bobby Peters brought his talent and energy to WBAP’s Broadcast Hill.

In the new medium Peters and other television pioneers were making it up as they went along. And they were making it up on live TV.

In May 1950 Ira Cain, the Star-Telegram’s pioneer television writer, wrote that Peters was performing a feat that even “Mr. TV,” the “inexhaustible Milton Berle,” would not attempt: hosting an hour-long live TV program five days a week. Officially Peters’ “On the Record” show was a “disc-jockey program.” But, Cain wrote, “Appearing every day in a new costume — so far he’s been everything from a lion-tamer to an Arabian sheik — Bobby Peters falls back on an unending repertoire of gags and antics to keep his ‘Madman’s Matinee’ going.”

Cain wrote: “Most of his performances, including the pantomime lyrics for records he plays, are scripted entirely in his mind. His 20-year background of show business is responsible for that faculty, Peters says, explaining that a lot of novelty acts with which he built a national reputation for his bands fit nicely into television.”

By 1951 Peters was on WBAP-TV with “On the Record” at noon and on WBAP radio at 3:45 p.m. with the “Bobby Peters Show” (“with music and fun”).

In 1952 Bobby Peters began yet another experiment in early TV: He began hosting “Bobby Peters Jamboree,” “a new show for the kids.”

Boys and girls who today are grandparents fondly remember having been members of the studio audience of “Bobby Peters Jamboree.”

But in 1954 Bobby Peters’ health began to fail. He kept “Bobby Peters Jamboree” on the air into 1957.

But for Robert George Peters — showman and “Daddyo” to his generation, TV pioneer to later generations — the stage went dark on February 13, 1961. He died at 48.

Mike Nichols blogs about Fort Worth history at www.hometownbyhandlebar.com.