Wallace and Ladmo: Thirty-Five Years of Phoenix Childhood

Every weekday for thirty-five years, children across the Phoenix metropolitan area came home from school and turned on KPHO Channel Five.

The Wallace and Ladmo Show ran from nineteen fifty-four to nineteen eighty-nine. Bill Thompson played Wallace, the straight-man host. Ladimir Kwiatkowski played Ladmo, a character who became the emotional center of what the show was. Pat McMahon rotated through dozens of recurring characters, some of them beloved, some of them menacing in the ambiguous way that children's television could be. The show mixed cartoons, comedy sketches, and guest appearances, and it ran every weekday, producing more than ten thousand episodes over the course of its run, a record for locally produced children's daily programming in American television history. It won nine regional Emmy Awards.

The records of those ten thousand episodes are scattered across institutions: the Arizona State Library, former KPHO files, and personal collections held by people who saved tapes and photographs over the decades. No centralized archive preserves the full record. What remains is the memory of multiple generations of Phoenicians for whom Wallace and Ladmo were as present in childhood as the summer heat.

Ladmo died of lung cancer in March of nineteen ninety-four, about four years after the show ended. Thousands of people attended his memorial service at Arizona State University.

A street in Phoenix was named Wallace and Ladmo Way in two thousand twenty-four, which is what cities do when they want to make the informal official.