Stynlie Herbert, 'Doctor Shroud' of '50s childrens' TV, at 89

 

The news came in. The great man was dead. Stynlie Herbert, a.k.a. Dr Light Shroud, the host of the local kid’s science show in my old hometown of Torpie, Wis. Shroud, as he let me call him, worked on the A-Bomb. My guess is on the detonator. He worked on radar too, but that I can’t begin to figure. I know math was involved. I got to know him well, as my father hooked me up with several co-hosting stints on the show – Dr Light Shroud’s Atelier. My job was my jaw’s and that was to drop on queue, which was no problem. If I wasnt a guest I was home glued to the tube. 7 am, Saturday morning. Before Eddy Arnold. After the Big Picture, the National Anthem and the dousing of the street lights. He was a great man, but the name Shroud was apt. You could stand next to him, but couldn’t get close to him. Yes, he’d had a lab accident, and a feint glow that acted as a kind of buffer.

After World War II – and well before I was born – he’d done the grand tour, raced foreign sports cars in the amateur ranks. Then returned to Torpie, a kind of technocrat, or military-industrialist, regularly travelling. But here in Torpie, his work was about testing tooth pastes, dsigning mosquito coils, refining glass cleaning formulas, mostly. Shroud would shrug, a heavy thinker, I suppose. The show was early Saturday mornings, and it was all about lens polishing, pond scum diffusion, and acoustic experiments. That and dry ice, sterno, magnets, and saran wrap How-Tos.

My father worked down the hall from Shroud at Continental Gleam, a long Honeywell computer separated their offices. My father kindly introduced me to Shroud, and then headed back to his ledgers – which he and others were loading into the Honeywell. Dad’s off hours were about cocktails, Beethoven and the lawn, and the home ledger, which he managed well. If I took to science, fine. Especially chemistry.  But don't think you can escape numbers. As with other companies that advertised in the new TV Medium, Better living through chemistry was Continental Gleam’s theme song. It was computers rather than chemistry that forged my path, a pretty straight path excepting a binge of record buying during the Summer of Love. The obituary in the Kenosha Journal opened a Hoover Damn deluge of synatic boings.