| Don Herbert | |
|---|---|
| Born | Donald Jeffrey Herbert Kemske July 10, 1917 Waconia, Minnesota |
| Died | June 12, 2007 (aged 89) Bell Canyon, California |
| Website | |
| http://www.mrwizardstudios.com/ | |
Donald Jeffrey Herbert (born Donald Jeffrey Herbert Kemske;[1][2] July 10, 1917 – June 12, 2007), better known as Mr. Wizard, was an American television personality. He hosted two television shows about science aimed at children.
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Herbert was a general science and English major at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (then called La Crosse State Normal College) who was interested in drama. His career as an actor was interrupted by World War II when he enlisted in the United States Army as a Private. Herbert later joined the United States Army Air Forces took pilot training and became a B-24 bomber pilot who flew 56 combat missions from Italy with the 767th Bomb Squadron, 461st Bomb Group of the Fifteenth Air Force. When Herbert was discharged in 1945 he was a Captain and had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters.
After the war Herbert worked at a radio station in Chicago where he acted in children's programs such as the documentary health series It's Your Life (1949). It was during this time that Herbert formulated the idea of Mr. Wizard and a general science experiments show that used the new medium of television. Herbert's idea was accepted by Chicago NBC station WNBQ and the series Watch Mr. Wizard premiered on March 3, 1951. The weekly half hour show, co-produced by Jules Power,[3] featured Herbert as Mr. Wizard, with a young boy and girl who watched while Herbert performed interesting science experiments.[4] The experiments, many of which seemed impossible at first glance, were usually simple enough to be re-created by viewers. Each show ended the same way: with an experiment that somehow displayed the letters "FCMBB", which Mr. Wizard reminded us stood for "Fruit, Cereal, Milk, Bread and Butter, the five elements of a healthy breakfast." The show was very successful. 547 live episodes were created before it was canceled in 1965. Herbert won a Peabody Award for his work on the program in 1953.[5]
In the mid 1950s Herbert also appeared on the General Electric Theater as the "General Electric Progress Reporter" and would introduce spokesman Ronald Reagan and his family to the viewing audience. In some episodes he would appear alongside Reagan and demonstrate to the audience how General Electric was helping people to, "Live better electrically."
After his show was canceled Herbert produced films for junior and senior high schools, wrote several books on science and in 1969 developed a Mr. Wizard Science Center located outside Boston, Massachusetts. (The center no longer exists.)
The show was briefly revived in the 1971–1972 season as Mr. Wizard, produced in Canada by CJOH-TV in Ottawa; this series was seen on NBC as well as CBC Television in Canada.
In 1982, Don Herbert was a guest on the first episode of Late Night with David Letterman.
In 1983 Herbert developed Mr. Wizard's World, a faster-paced version of his show that was shown three times a week on the cable channel Nickelodeon. The show ran until 1990 and reruns were shown until 2000.
In 1993 children's science show Beakman's World paid homage to Herbert by naming its two penguin puppet characters "Don" and "Herb" after him.
In 1994 Herbert developed another new series of 15-minute spots called Teacher to Teacher with Mr. Wizard. The spots highlighted individual elementary science teachers and their projects. The series was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and was shown on Nickelodeon.
In 1999 Stephen Gordon (founder of company called Restoration Hardware) teamed up with Renee Whitney (general manager of a toy company called Wild Goose) to recreate the chemistry kits marketed by "Mr Wizard" in the past; however, they found most of the items in it are now illegal to sell and the resulting product they ended up marketing only contained just 5 chemicals ("including laundry starch, which was tagged with an ominous warning: HANDLE CAREFULLY. NOT EXPECTED TO BE A HEALTH HAZARD").[6]
Herbert died of multiple myeloma on June 12, 2007, four weeks before what would have been his 90th birthday, at his home in Bell Canyon, California.[5]