Sunday, March 3, 2013

The ultimate cute kid

Don't mean to go overboard on old I've Got a Secret stuff. But it's my blog and I'll cry if I want to.

The October 19, 1960 IGAS episode featured one of the cutest kids ever unleashed on an unsuspecting audience. Older kid Clifton Kendrick came out with his baby brother, the ferociously cute Timothy Kendrick. Their secret? Clifton assembled a collection of forty insects for a school project. And then Timothy ate them all.

The panel had no chance to guess the secret. Timothy was monopolizing everybody's attention with smiles and spitting. He seemed really interested in flirting with Betsy Palmer. At one point Bill Cullen (unintentionally) brought down the house with a comment that Timothy was "catching flies." That's the old vaudeville term for distracting attention from other actors on stage.

The guy who uploaded the linked YouTube clip says that he contacted Clifton and Timothy in 2003 to give them a copy of the tape. Turns out that Timothy went on from his IGAS appearance to do some writing for Saturday Night Live.

One other odd note: Betsy asked if the audience's reaction to the "catching flies" comment meant that the secret had something to do with baseball. The secret didn't, of course, but the very next guest on the episode sure did. He was Bill Mazeroski, who had recently launched the seventh-game home run which won the 1960 World Series. I've Got a Secret is a history book, though an uncommonly entertaining one.

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