Today should be a national holiday in honor of the birthday of my namesake Mr. Wizard.
Donald Jeffry Herbert (born Donald Herbert Kemske and better known as Mr. Wizard, July 10, 1917 – June 12, 2007) was the creator and host of Watch Mr. Wizard (1951–65, 1971–72) and Mr. Wizard’s World (1983–90), which were educational television programs for children devoted to science and technology. He also produced many short video programs about science and authored several popular books about science for children. It was said that no fictional hero was able to rival the popularity and longevity of “the friendly, neighborly scientist”.
In Herbert’s obituary, Bill Nye wrote, “Herbert’s techniques and performances helped create the United States’ first generation of homegrown rocket scientists just in time to respond to Sputnik. He sent us to the moon. He changed the world.” Herbert is credited with turning “a generation of youth” in the 1950s and early 1960s onto “the promise and perils of science”.
Born in Waconia, Minnesota, Herbert was a general science and English major at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (then called La Crosse State Teachers College) who was interested in drama. His career as an actor was interrupted by World War II when he enlisted in the United States Army as a Private. Herbert later joined the United States Army Air Forces, took pilot training, and became a B-24 bomber pilot who flew 56 combat missions from Italy with the 767th Bomb Squadron, 461st Bomb Group of the Fifteenth Air Force. When Herbert was discharged in 1945 he was a Captain and had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters.
I’m old enough to admit that I saw the last couple of years of the original TV show as a wee child, and was pretty intrigued by it. I even duplicated a couple of his experiments much to my dad’s dismay. My Mom just about passed out when my dad told her there was a radio antenna 50 ft up in a tree in our backyard. There was another episode when my best friend Mark jumped off the roof of our 2 story house with a fighter drogue chute and drifted about 3 blocks away before coming down across a 4 lane main drag in our neighborhood. I think we were grounded for 8 years over that one (which really lasted a week or two). This Wiz was smart enough to talk Mark into doing it first, he was probably 70 lbs at the time.