Over two years ago, on this very website, I posted an article about how weird it was that nobody seemed to know who played Gordon in Sesame Street‘s first test pilot episode way back in 1969. A few months after that article, in the official coffee table anniversary book A Celebration of 40 Years, there was one page containing a tiny photo of the guy with a caption revealing that even the folks at Sesame Workshop don’t know who he was.
And still the hunt continues. Recently, the Sesame people created a page on their website called “The Case of the Missing Gordon,” in which they request that anyone who might have any information on the identity of the mysterious proto-Gordon come forward. Apparently they’ve already asked Bob McGrath, Loretta Long, and Caroll Spinney (whose name is spelled wrong on the page — whoops), but none of them remember his name.
In today’s information age (Are we still calling it that?), it seems unthinkable for anyone who worked on a major television production to be completely impossible to track down, so hopefully Sesame’s public plea will yield results, and then we can all be satisfied. Until then: Everybody dance!
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by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com
