ZapTown

Back in 1973, when I was around 5 years old, my mother took me to see Santa Claus.  Seeing as this was the man with a workshop full of elves who could make anything I could think of, I asked him this:  “I want a toy haunted house and when I press a button, Sammy Terry comes out the front door.”  My mother was a bit nervous to say the least, and the Christmas was pretty good even without the toy I’d asked for.  One gift I received that year was a coffee mug with a skull face. I’m not sure if it was a conscious choice on the part of my parents, but the mug reminded me of Sammy Terry’s skull necklace. There are pictures of me holding the mug immediately after unwrapping it, and by the look on my face (somewhere between a smile and fright) I was a little hesitant about the gift.  I instructed my parents that the mug would probably be better suited to sit in a cabinet high above the refrigerator, out of my reach.  You see, this thing scared the shit out of me yet I would, on occasion, ask my parents to open the cabinet for just a moment…long enough for me to freak myself out.  This little story pretty much defines my childhood relationship with Sammy Terry.

Sammy Terry was Indiana’s “Shock Theater” host who really hit his stride in the 70s.  Looking like a cross between the scariest clown you’ve ever seen and a zombie beatnik, Sammy Terry was the skull cup I couldn’t bear to watch but also couldn’t help from trying.  For most of my early childhood years, I would beg to stay up and watch Sammy’s show regardless of the movie they were playing.  And even though my parents were really cool about letting me, the ritual always ended the same way:  me in the fetal position in an attempt to block out the voice and any glimpse of the scariest thing I’d ever seen.  It didn’t matter who was around, because I clearly recall collapsing into a ball on the floor in front of a room full of aunts, uncles, and cousins.  I’d happily watch whatever Hammer flick was on, but as soon as it looked like we were going to commercial, the sensory deprivation position was assumed.  This went on for years.  The spell was finally broken at around age 9 when my dad’s date brought her daughter over to the house and decided we were going to watch Sammy Terry.  What was I to do?  I couldn’t very well assume the fetal position in front of this girl who I thought was pretty cute and I wanted to impress, so I toughed it out and watched my very first episode of Sammy Terry from front to back.  And what a show it was too!  It was a Christmas episode and Sammy (along with George, his pet spider) was decorating a tree that would make Charlie Brown puke in disgust.  The climax of the tree trimming involved Sammy placing a glove (similar to the yellow dish washing gloves he wore on the show) atop the tree in place of an angel.  The other episode that stands out in my mind is the one where he had a “Feed the Blob” party which consisted of nothing more than Sammy taking partygoers tickets one at a time as they then jumped into the ever expanding Blob. 

Sammy was the gateway to a lifelong love of horror film, and I rarely see a skull without unconsciously thinking of Sammy’s necklace.  Back in the early 90s, I contacted the editor of Scary Monsters Magazine about running an interview with Sammy Terry.  The magazine ran an ongoing feature on the various Shock Theater hosts across the country, so this one was a no brainer.  My job at the time involved my making sales calls, so my confidence was high.  I contacted Carter’s Music (where Sammy’s alter-ego “Bob Carter” worked) and asked to speak to Mr. Carter himself.  The minute he took the phone, the baritone voice that haunted my Friday nights hit me like a scared little 5 year old and I nearly crapped myself.  Confidence shot, I sputtered out a feeble request for an interview, which was unbelievably granted.  With the appointment set, I borrowed Andrew’s tape recorder and made the phone call the following week.  He talked of his early days in live television and his sincere belief that he invented the slogan “Finger Lickin’ Good” while sampling some of the Colonel’s finest chicken during a live broadcast.  He talked for an hour and it was amazing.  Imagine my horror when I played back the cassette only to learn that the batteries in the recorder were bad and everything was recorded at half speed and was worthless.  Hell, I even converted the cassette over to reel-to-reel an attempted to manually speed things up by hand.  No luck.  I was crushed and depressed for a long time over that lost moment.  Luckily, Andrew had a chance to interview the man for the IUPUI Sagamore and I was able to feed him a few questions to help coax out some of the same stories. 

In 1998, my wife talked me into going to the State Fair.  Not wanting to go in the first place, I grumbled the whole way in.  The place was packed that day and we had to go in through the back entrance.  No sooner did we walk into the fair that a loudspeaker unexpectedly announced that WTTV 4 was having their 50th anniversary and Sammy Terry himself would be appearing on the main stage.  My mood changed from grumpy to giddy, as did my relative age drop to 5 years old again.  We waited patiently for the man to appear, and despite the hot sun beating down on us all, he eventually took the stage.  The next 15 minutes appeared to be more of Sammy’s unique free-style monologue that you typically heard during the extended breaks of his television show.  The tale he wove involved his journey down the Amazon with his trusted companion.  As they were beset upon by natives, his companion was taken hostage and eventually decapitated, with his head shrunken by the local witch doctor.  The punch line to the story was that his companion was “the first person to lose their head over Sammy Terry” (boo!).  Despite the bad joke, this was in fact the story of how Sammy came to get his skull necklace.  It wasn’t lost on me that I’d just heard the official “origin” story of the skull necklace that haunted me since my youth and manifested itself as a mug that I could only bear to look at on rare occasion.  Luckily, the Ghoul himself has a permanent place in the haunted house of my memory and I’m still waiting for Santa to come through with that gift.