Eleven-year-old Skipper Goebel from Tehachapi: “We’re
going to bottle-feed baby camels”
And by “we” he means the panelists. It’s adorable. Skip’s family deals in exotic
animals, which they import and/or raise and then sell to zoos. He tells us a grown male camel might sell for
$1800 and a female for $2000, about half the price of a new car in 1972. The
Goebels have been in the exotic animal business for almost fifty years. In the 1920s, Skip’s grandfather Louis Goebel
founded Goebel’s Lion Farm with a menagerie of animals he acquired from
Universal Studios. That effort would
eventually become the amusement park Jungleland. (See
E516
of the original series.) Even after Jungleland closed in 1969, the Goebel
family continued to raise animals in a new facility in remote Tehachapi.
Dr Ralph Baker, a botany professor at Colorado State
University: “I fertilize plants with moon dust”
Between 1969
and 1972 six Apollo missions brought back 842 pounds of lunar rocks, core
samples, pebbles, sand and dust from the lunar surface. (At the time of this recording, the final
manned lunar mission, Apollo 17, was a few weeks away.) NASA supplied Dr Baker and his team with ten
grams of lunar dust to conduct experiments to find whether moon dust would make
plants grow any better than plain old earth dirt. After two years of study, they would report
in 1974 that the moon stuff didn’t appear to make any difference at all.
Special
guest Paul Winchell has a life-sized dummy of himself answering ‘yes’ and ‘no’
for him.
The dummy’s
responses were prerecorded and played back by the show staff. A full-sized replica of yourself is available
from Nieman-Marcus for $3000. The
Dallas-based department store has been famous for its Christmas catalog of
ridiculously extravagant items since the late 1950s, and the tradition
continues today with even more over-the-top gifts and experiences. The 2023 catalog included, for half a million
dollars, the opportunity to have yourself animated into a Disney short
film. In addition to his ventriloquism
(sidekick Jerry Mahoney is on hand here) Winchell lent his voice to numerous
cartoon characters. He also held a patent for an early version of an artificial
heart. Here, Steve introduces him as the
host of Runaround (1972-73) a Saturday morning kids game show that aired
for a single season. Steve further
shares that Winchell’s secret was spoiled in the morning paper by an LA
newspaper columnist, but that none of the panelists had seen the article.
