The Jingeling Christmas Thing – How a Message Became a Tradition
[By Howard Fencl, APR] At our annual staff holiday luncheon this year, I did what I invariably do – dredge up a TV news war story and serve it up with our entrée. My TV news career stretches all the way back to 1978, so I have a few tales to tell. Because it’s the holiday, I summoned a Christmas chestnut: I was (I believe) the last producer of the Christmas “Mr. Jingeling” segment to run regularly on Cleveland TV.
If you’re a baby boomer from Northeast Ohio, you know that Mr. Jingeling is one of Cleveland’s cherished Christmas traditions. He is one of Santa’s Christmas elves. He’s the keeper of the keys to all the North Pole Toys and once saved Christmas, as the storyline goes. Truth be told, he was a marketing device created by a Chicago agency in 1956 for Halle’s, a long-gone Cleveland department store. Kids lined up to see the actor playing Jingeling in the store, give him their wish list, and walk away with a souvenir cardboard key – hopefully dragging mom and dad right into the store’s toy department.
Mr. Jingeling was designed to be a one-season stunt, but he became an instant sensation with kids, and an annual fixture at Halle’s. It wasn’t long before he was signed to bring his act to kids on a local TV station. A number of actors played Jingeling over the years. A TV director, Earl Keyes, had the longest run. He was the Jingeling I grew up with. Year after year, my only wish was to meet Jingeling in person. For whatever reason, that never happened.
Fast forward 20 years, and I’m a cigarette-smoking, coffee-swilling TV news producer cranking out an hour of live news every day at 6 p.m. on WKYC-TV. Those were the days of fast-paced, blood-n-guts local news. So you can only imagine my reaction when our News Director sat me down in mid-November in the early 1990s and proclaimed:
“Fencl, starting the day after Thanksgiving, you’re losing the last five minute news block of your show.”
“So how am I filling that hole?” I puzzled, with a dyspeptic grimace seizing up my face.
“You’re producing a five-minute Jingeling segment at the end of your show. Every day until Christmas.”
“You mean Mr. Jingeling? As in Earl Keyes Mr. Jingeling? That’s how we’re handing off to Nightly News? You’re kidding.”
“It’s sold. One sponsored internal break. Done deal. Just do it.”
I never welcomed anyone messing with the content of my show. But walking out of the News Director’s office I couldn’t suppress my ridiculous grin or turn off the Mr. Jingeling theme song that began playing over and over in my head.
On Thanksgiving Day, I walked into the station’s dressing room to find Earl Keyes in full elfin green Jingeling garb smearing TV makeup base all over his face. After more than 20 years, I finally had my chance to meet Mr. Jingeling.
I shook off my inner 6-year-old.
“Hi Earl, I’m your producer. We’ll take to you cold out of the break. You get five minutes with one internal. We’ll give you a minute, thirty and a wrap. We can’t upcut Nightly.”*
“Got it,” said Jingeling, and he toddled off to the plywood North Pole our stagehands banged together in Studio A.
Earl Keyes died fifteen years ago, on the day after Christmas. But the Jingeling thing lives on for Cleveland kids even today, nearly 60 years since some unnamed marketing guy had an inspired idea for a one-off publicity campaign. So how did Mr. Jingeling cut free of the commercial clatter and become a Cleveland Christmas tradition? Maybe it was his message of kindness and hope and compassion. Maybe it was his gentle way of communicating with kids. Maybe a little bit of both.
And though my own work with Mr. Jingeling came and went in the wink of an eye, I am immensely grateful I could, in my own small way, help keep Mr. Jingeling’s message alive on the air and pay a little bit of his legend forward to a whole lot of hopeful kids out there in TV land.
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* TV JARGON TRANSLATION: “We will start your segment immediately out of a commercial break with no introduction. The segment will run for five minutes with one commercial break in the middle. You’ll know when your segment is ending because we will count you down with a one-minute cue, then a thirty-second cue. Then we will wrap you up, because your segment can’t run over the beginning of NBC Nightly News.”
Mr. Jingeling (played by Earl Keyes) photo courtesy: Cleveland State University Library, Cleveland Press Collection