Four years ago I went looking around these here internets for links to Maine TV personality, Eddie Driscoll. He died last Saturday at the age of 81.
Eddie was a local television icon in Bangor, putting on all kinds of wacky costumes and goofing it up for the camera in a plethora of low-budget shows, like Dialing for Dollars (a game show where he grabbed random phone numbers out of a barrel and called whoever he found, then asked them trivia questions for small cash prizes) and “Weird” (a late-night movie show that was about 40 years ahead of MST3K).
Eddie would have worn the bunny ears. That’s for sure.
Damn straight!
And a damn shame. He was a part of my (our) childhood, him and that damned funky one-piece standup telephone he used on Dialing For Dollars.
I never got the call, either.
Thanks, Eddie.
I can remember in NM as a child my mom hushing me when our Dialing for Dollars came on and she was always mad at the people who shared our phone line because she was sure our guy was calling our home and the phone was busy!
We only knew of Eddie by reputation in Southern Maine. Even though Channel 2 and Channel 6 were owned by the same family for years and years, there was little on-air acknowledgement that the other even existed.
There were a lot of fellows like him in early TV. Probably most of them are gone now.
Trust me, Channels 2 & 6 certainly acknowledge each other these days…. especially since we get Portland news from Ch 6 at 11PMand on the weekends here in Bangor on Ch 2.
The other stations let us know that, too! 🙂
When we were growing up, we had an agreed-upon “signal” to Mother and Father Ju that we had arrived somewhere safely: We would dial 0 then our home number and tell the operator that we wanted to make a person-to-person call to Eddie Driscoll. When my parents answered and the operator announced the call, they would say there was no one there by that name, but the message was received. We never knew who Eddie Driscoll was. I could swear my dad said it was some guy who had once worked for my grandfather, but I’ll bet it really traced back to this guy. (And who knows? Maybe he did work for Ju Motors at one time or another ….)
Well, that’s a bummer.
I remember he hosted a show on 9am every day that showed Bugs Bunny Cartoons and he had a dog puppet, Mason Mutt. I watched it all the time during the summers.
Of course Dialing for Dollars was great.