“Young people come up to me at events like this and say, ‘You’re history!’” says Jack Mulqueen. He waits a perfect vaudeville beat, then adds, “That’s also what my wife tells me when I do something wrong.”
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Led by Pandora, a harlequin in mod couture played by Elaine, the kids flailed and wiggled with the sublime balance of abandon and awkwardness that’s only possible between the ages of five and twelve. There were countless local dance shows at the time, but the absence of self-conscious teens posturing for the cameras made Kiddie a-Go-Go more about the joy of dancing than any of its peers. Not long after its launch, the show had nearly 250,000 viewers. “We had sponsors standing in line,” Mulqueen says. “It was tremendous.”
Jack Mulqueen was born in Woodlawn in 1933. Enamored of show business at an early age, he spent his youth frequenting south-side movie theaters, sneaking in to meet stars visiting for promotional appearances. At Chicago Vocational High School he became active in theater and journalism, and he used his high school newspaper credentials to get into celebrity press conferences that aired on the local ABC affiliate. After graduation he worked for two years as a page at WBBM radio. In 1953 he was drafted for the Korean war. He managed to turn even that into an opportunity.
Though the show became a smash with its new name and new dance format, Kiddie a-Go-Go faced the wrath of antirock crusaders. WLS TV station manager Dick O’Leary believed the show was vulgar because it associated innocent children with the Whisky a Go Go nightclub (the LA establishment that popularized go-go dancing had a satellite club in Chicago). O’Leary canceled the show the same week Carson Pirie Scott began selling Kiddie a-Go-Go “Swinging Sweatshirts.”
Mulqueen is more certain about the morality of the content he served the kiddies in the 60s. “I knew that the music was OK for the children,” he says. “I really felt that the songs and the dances were extremely juvenile and that it was just kids having fun–as innocent as you can get.
