The Littlest Wino

 

As you may recall, after passing through at least two different rural families—first the one with a single mom and a boy named Jeff, played by Tommy Rettig; then a rather less lugubrious family with two whole parents and a younger boy named Timmy, played by Jon Provost—the noble television collie Lassie took to the road and sought out adventures on her own. For a while she hooked up with a ranger and helped him put out forest fires. But then it was back to the road again, moving on, searching for the one-armed man.

We say "she" even though we all know Lassie was actually a boy dog, not a bitch. Something about how Rudd Weatherwax found male dogs easier to train. I think he ran through five or six of these Rough Collies in the course of the Lassie show's 20-year television run. So if you ever thought it was awfully unlikely that a big 15- or 20-year old collie could be still out there solving murder mysteries and rescuing people from canyons, well that's how they did it.

Rudd Weatherwax and "Pal"

The "wandering Lassie" motif was copied by Canadian television in the 1960s, this time with an odd-looking German Shepherd, or series of German Shepherds. The show was called The Littlest Hobo. It would open with the dog wandering the streets of suburban Vancouver, and singing the theme song in a kind of "Mister Ed" voice:

I find adventure everywhere

And friends with whom I'd like to share

This is my stop along the way

Don't really know how long I'll stay

You didn't actually see the dog singing that song. These German Shepherds were talented, but not that talented. No, you heard the song over visuals of the dog wandering through alleys, rooting through trash cans, doing normal dog things that were suitable for a family television show. 

Hobo dogs and trainer

The program was syndicated through much of North America in the mid-1960s. I was watching Philadelphia television then, and as I recall they ran The Littlest Hobo on Sunday evening, a little before the NBC's Branded with Chuck Connors. Branded had a memorable theme song too:

All but one man died

At Bitter Creek

And they say he ran away

The premise of Branded was that the Chuck Connors character was so disgraced as a coward that he had to wander the country, move from town to town, work many jobs, and inevitably get discovered as the famous coward who ran away. So then he'd run away again, ready for new friends and adventures the following week.

This was a popular format for TV drama in the 1960s. A program like this could be very cheap to produce, particularly if you didn't have to pay big stars like Chuck Connors or David Janssen or all those special featured guests who turned up on The Fugitive or Route 66. You didn't need a sound stage or have to build sets; you just scouted for locations, most of then outdoor, often in rather desolate places. And if your star happened to be a dog, you saved on scriptwriting, since there was little need to write clever dialogue. Not even for the human extras, since they couldn't very well upstage the star.

Low budget? I should say.

Inspired by the economics and success of The Littlest Hobo, Winsome Productions of Seattle decided to produce a similar syndicated drama. Instead of a German Shepherd dog that roams from town to town—that would be too obviously derivative, even if they substituted a French poodle—they would find themselves a midget, or perhaps a dwarf, and have him play a hobo who wanders from town to town. 

They spitballed a few possible names. The Tiniest Transient. The Bite-Sized Bum. The Derelict Dwarf. Finally they settled on The Littlest Wino. That title came to them one day when they arrived at their production office near Pioneer Square, and found three winos sleeping in the doorway. Now it occurred to them that they wouldn't even have to drive all the way down to Tacoma or Burien to find a suitably squalid location. They could shoot most of the action, at least at first, right here, appropriately enough near the original Skid Row. 

Pioneer Square in the 60s.

Now: as to casting. They considered trying to hire a very small bum in the neighborhood, preferably one who didn't have a SAG or AFTRA card. They did find a couple of individuals who were willing to work "for a bottle a day and a warm place to sleep it off," as the saying goes, but they were both over five feet tall. Winsome Productions really had more of a Munchkin in mind. 

Finally they bit the bullet and asked a local casting agency if there were any old midgets available, maybe one who hadn't worked in years and would work for less than scale. The casting agent said she had "just the ticket." Delbert Rioux, a longtime midget cast member from the Patches the Clown kiddy show, had let his union dues lapse and was now living in a flophouse in nearby Chinatown. He was living on Social Security and would probably work for $50 a day. Best of all, he was only thirty-four inches high. 

"Why, that's less than a yard," said the agent, "and since he's getting old he's probably shrunk even more!" 

Delbert Rioux did indeed seem to be "the ticket." The Winsome producers took him out to a cheap Chinese dinner and then to the Salvation Army, where they found him a well-worn little grey suit that would normally fit a young boy of perhaps three or four. It was apparently manufactured thirty or forty years ago, as the trousers weren't trousers exactly, they were short pants. But the suit came with a cute little visored beanie in the same material, so Delbert was happy. On Patches the Clown he'd often played a smartalecky little kid who would kick Patches in the shins. So he felt back in his element.

For the first episode of The Littlest Wino, Delbert wore dark glasses and a white-tipped cane, and stood in front of the Arctic Building, selling pencils. He wore a sign: POOR BLIND BOY / ADOPT ME PLS. Really, until you were about six feet from him, you might really this this was a very young child. A few people, tourists mostly, came up close to investigate. They were horrified at seeing him up close, so shoved a few dollar bills into his cup and ran away. Delbert took his dark glasses off and pulled a half-pint of cheap booze from his pocket, took a long swig, and waited for the next customer, who wasn't long in coming.

The Winsome people were delighted with the footage. They didn't get much else shot that day, though, because Delbert had a kind of Kid Shelleen problem. He needed a drink to work, but after a half-pint or so (as he was very small) he wasn't worth a durn. He bought another bottle with the money in his cup and then went back to the flophouse to sleep it off.

Slowly but surely,Winsome Productions had enough "adventures" in the can to show their reel to a big syndication outfit in Seattle. The Seattle people didn't understand it at all (they'd never seen The Littlest Hobo). And they told the Winsome people they thought it was very bad public relations for Seattle. "Most people think we're the Space Needle," said an intense curly-headed fellow chain-smoking True cigarettes. "You make us look like Tacoma!"

Not to be fazed, they took the train up to Vancouver (very cheap in those days) and shopped it around the big producers and syndicators on Robson Street. Here everybody got the reference right off the bat. There were questions, though.

"Why did you want to make it with a midget?" someone asked.

"Cheaper than a dawg!" the Winsome people brightly answered.

The same syndication company that had sold The Littlest Hobo said they'd buy 13 episodes, just for starters, but there was one big "but." They wanted all the episodes to be reshot around Vancouver. "It'll work here too. We have winos galore. Just bring your midget up here, and we'll sign the deal."

The Winsome people trained it back to Seattle, very excited, and rushed to tell the news to Delbert Rioux. But as luck would have it, he was dead. Too much excitement!

They repaired to a local dive and had a few drinks. The place had originally been a vast oyster bar, and still had an 1890s black-and-white octagonal-tiled floor, and great big steel vats behind the bar. Another memento of the lurid past was in the Gents' lavatory, where instead of urinals lay a huge bathtub-like trough. The male Winsome producer tried to encourage the female Winsome producer to put her hair up under a hat, and come in and see it. But she was having none of it.

"Tomorrow," she said, "we must phone Vancouver and have them find us a new midget. A little younger, less excitable."