Did you have one of those, I asked the man idling in front of his tables of vintage toys in a far corner of the main ballroom at the nostalgia convention. He had been sitting behind the tables when I first walked up to browse his wares, including a Mickey Mouse Club ears hat resting atop a boxed Superman.
“I had one when I was a child,” he said, smiling, remembering no doubt.
I didn’t have one of those hats or watched the show that spurred children from all over to get a black felt hat with two mouse ears to wear on their heads. When the Mouseketeers appeared on the ABC network every day after school Monday through Friday, I was likely outside playing hopscotch. I grew up in a rural area – not a big metropolitan city – so outside was where we did our play.
But the Mouseketeers and the popular Annette Funicello found a ready and eager audience among millions of children for four years starting in 1955, becoming one of ABC network’s top-rated shows. Each day, children were entertained with dancing, singing, cartoons, serials and guest stars. The cast was led by Jimmy Dodd and Roy Williams, a big burly man who was dubbed the “Big Mooseketeer.”
Williams came up with the idea of having the cast members wear Mickey’s ears. So, the Disney wardrobe department put the hats together, using wire to reinforce the ears and rubber bands to hold the contraption under the dancers’ chins. He was said to have gotten the idea from a scene in a 1929 Mickey animated short film “The Karnival Kid” in which Mickey tipped his ears to Minnie.
Some of the male Mouseketeers didn’t necessary like the hat because it messed up the hair they had spent so much time styling. “All the guys hated the ears,” Lonnie Burr said in an interview in the 2010 book “Why? Because We Still Like You: An Oral History of the Mickey Mouse Club” by Jennifer Armstrong. “They’d always want us to wear it like a monk.”
The show was seen five days a week Monday through Friday at 5 p.m., and began with the theme song – “Who’s the leader of the club, That’s made for you and me. M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.” Each day of the week had a different subject – from music to guest star to anything can happen to circus to talent roundup. ABC dropped the show in 1959, and it was revived several times up until the mid-1990s.
The show made names for some of its Mouseketeers, especially Funicello, who was said to have gotten the most fan mail. She eventually got her own show and remained with Disney under contract when the show was canceled.
The cast was largely white, and that raised some questions. One website devoted to the club noted that there were some ethnic – but and racial minorities – on the show.
“Two of the Mouseketeers are Hispanic, three are of Jewish heritage, and a number are Italian-Americans, a rarity in US television during the fifties. One of the serial hosts was Asian-American, and at least a dozen of the talent winning acts were African-American, Hispanic, and Native American.”
Several of the Friday Talent Roundup Winners were African American children. The website had photos of singers/dancers Cheryl Weinberg, Ronnie Wilson and Riley Wilson from a 1957 show; the Hall Johnson Singing Sprites (1955, organized by the renowned choral director, composer and arranger); concert pianist Jon Robertson (1955; he appeared again in 1958), sister-singers Gayle and Saundra Smith; the tap-dancing Covan Kids and singer Carolyn Jean Hill (all in 1957).
The issue of black kids on the show also came up in a column in the Washington Afro-American newspaper in 1958. A columnist had questioned the lack of black children on the show. A publicist for the Disney Studios wrote a letter taking issue with the column, and the newspaper wrote a story with the rebuttal. The publicist mentioned Robertson, Hill and the Covans – along with photos of them from the show. Could the Covans have been associated with the tap king Willie Covan? I could not find a connection in my Google research.
Did you have a Mickey Mouse Club ears hat? Tell me your story about it.
The nostalgia convention held some other goodies, including a Betty Crocker Junior Baking Kit and news – for me, at least – of a 1940s black radio series called “Destination Freedom.”
