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Editorial
RIP, Major Astro
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Kansas and Southwest Nebraska baby boomers lost a friend and father figure last week with the death of Tom Leahy Jr., better known to viewers in those black-and-white television days as Major Astro.
Leahy was 87.
An Army veteran who served in the Philippines in World War II, Leahy returned to Wichita to begin a 60-year career at local radio and television stations.
With the dawn of the space age, he created Major Astro in the early 1960s, introducing cartoons from a space station orbiting Earth, a moon base, then Venus and Mars.
The show ran from 1962 to 1973 on what is now KSN, and again for a short time in 1985 on KSAS.
When the space shuttle Challenger broke up in 1986, some of Major Astro's youngest fans were afraid he had been aboard.
Major Astro's most remarkable connection with McCook was the time in the early 1960s when hundreds of card-carrying Major Astro Club members swamped McCook Municipal Airport when he made a personal appearance.
They didn't notice another celebrity who arrived quietly at the airport that day, reportedly to check on an oil well investment or to go pheasant hunting.
Blogger Chris Pyle, son of McCook's city manager at the time, George Pyle, recalled being at the airport that day:
"Who was this stranger you ask? Only a real freaking astronaut. Only the first American to go into space. Only one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts. Only a man who would soon walk on the moon, actually walk on the moon, and return to Earth. Alan Shepard was in McCook and nobody paid any attention to him. We were all too busy with Major Astro.
"I do not tell that story to denigrate Major Astro. He really was more important in the lives of thousands of children. His show was something we don't see anymore. He was calm, polite and fatherly. Kids programming today seldom values such attributes. Thanks, Mr. Leahy."
You can read Pyle's entire blog at:
http://chrispyle.blogspot.com/2010/06/kinder-gentler-space-man.html