Ernie "Mr Dressup" Coombs, 1927-2001

After the tragic events last week a more personal loss. Today, September 18th, Ernie Coombs, also known to generations of Canadians as Mr Dressup, died in hospital after suffering a stroke. He was 73.

While the show Mr Dressup began way back in 1967 as Canada turned one hundred years old, we all watched Mr Dressup as children. I didn't have a television at home but I went to my friends' house on the street and we watched a great deal of TV. There were Sesame Street, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, an animated Peter Pan show, the Fred Penner show, Polka Dot Door, but of course there was also Mr Dressup.

I am old enough to remember a time when Mr Dressup had Casey and Finnegan. I remember watching the show many times but I don't remember the disappearance of Casey and Finnigan as it happened when I was about five or six and I guess I watched the show less. If Canadian television did anything right it was children's shows.

It's only recently that I saw a Life in Times special about Mr Dressup, The Friendly Giant and Fred Penner.

Another memory is about a kid in grade six who let us "recycle" copies of scripts of Mr Dressup after Ernie Coombs retired that his mother gave us, as she worked at CBC.

It feels weird to know that Mr Dressup is gone. Ernie Coombs, originally born in the United States, arrived in Canada in 1963 with another American host of a Canadian show, Fred Rogers. Ernie Coombs worked on Mister Rogers (which later moved to the States under the name Mr Rogers' Neighborhood) as a puppeteer. In 1964, he appeared for the first time as Mr Dressup on another new CBC show called Butternut Square which also featured Casey and Finnegan.

Mr Dressup became its own show in 1967 after Butternut Square was cancelled. In 1989 (I was five) puppeteer Judith Lawrence retired along with Casey and Finnegan. The show continued with new puppets, new people, and Coombs and his show remained until 1996 when he retired. The show still continues to be aired as reruns (or as CBC probably calls it, Encore Presentations).

Mr Dressup and Ernie Coombs won many prestigious awards such as the Earle Grey Award in 1994, and he became a member of the Order of Canada in 1996.

Ernie Coombs will be forever remembered by those who grew up watching him for over 45 years doing what every kid does, draw, do arts, and dress up, and hopefully by those young kids of today who continue to watch the reruns. It was a great show, and unlike many shows we watched as kids which we may now find stupid and juvenile, while Mr Dressup is juvenile, in the greatest possible way, stupid it is not and it will never be; it will never grow old and the memories will always keep us young at heart.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic