SPACE INTERVIEWS
Ellen Caddigan Lyner (2/2001)
Roaring Rockets:Welcome to our site, and we are delighted to hear from
another of James Caddigan's children about his career. You
said you had quite a bit to add to our interview with James
L. Caddigan, Jr.?
Ellen Lyner: Yes, Jim's
interview was very nice, but not correct so far as what
happen to Dad after DuMont. You see, Jim is 20 years older
then myself and was part of Dad's life day-to-day during his
DuMont career. So too was my sister Judy, but she was quite
young, she was born in 1949. Craig and I were born later,
Craig in 1954 and myself in 1956, so we only know of Captain
Video by what we were told.
RR: You and Craig were
still teenagers when your father died, is that right?
EL: My father did
pass away in 1972, when I was 16 years of age, but before
that he did much in many other areas. As far as I have been
told, after DuMont folded, Dad was the Producer for the
Lowell Thomas TV series, Highways To Adventure, for about a year. He
traveled the world with this job. Then he went to St. Louis
to set up a local TV station. He designed the station and
staffed it himself. The station is still on the air and the
biggest independent in the country, Channel 11. There were
some differences and disagreements between my father and the
owners of the station at that time, mainly concerning what
should be brought into the homes of America. Dad felt you
had to be very careful insofar as content in programs that
could be viewed by children, and in finding suitable hours
when adult material could be allowed on. The difference
could not be resolved so there was a parting of the ways.
RR: Your Dad showed
incredible talent as a designer and inventor; the
Electronicam system was a major achievement in its day. I
assume his career as an inventor continued after the DuMont
era?
EL: Yes, after his
work on the St. Louis station, Dad went back to the drawing
board, and with a partner, Hugo Harper, he developed what
they called "Mark 8," and created a new 8 mm film format
based on 16 mm film; "Mark 8" would become the famous
Super 8 motion picture format. This was the first one of
its kind. This was used for many industrial films shot in
the St. Louis area.
RR: For those too
young to remember Super 8, I might say that it
revolutionized home movies in the period 1965 - 1980.
Simple, cassette-loading Super 8 cameras and projectors
offered the first practical way for your typical mom and pop
to make sound movies at home, of everyday events, and the
images were quite sharp. It quickly became the standard
format for TV news spots and features, and industrial films
of various kinds until it was replaced by the video
recorder/cameras that have been used over the past two
decades. But Super 8 is still very much alive in university
film schools, and among amateur movie makers. Even today,
Super 8 is the cheapest way to make a professional-quality
motion picture.
Getting back to your father's broadcast career and
interests, around here we all know that your father was a
pioneer in TV religious programming, something almost
forgotten elsewhere today. He made Bishop Fulton J. Sheen a
superstar of early 1950s TV, for instance! I assume
religion, and religious programming, continued to be
important aspects of his life and career.
EL: Dad was also on
the St. Louis Archdiocese Radio and TV Board, and was very
active there. Dad worked for one of the large school
districts, R-6, and helped develop and get their bond issues
passed. Meanwhile, my mother, Aneita Cleary Caddigan, had
gone back to teaching in St. Louis.
She and Dad met in New York when she was working at NBC
Radio, where she was manager of advertising and promotion.
The whole family was involved in broadcasting, during that
time of the Golden Age. My mother's sister, Lynn Cleary, was
the lady who put pro football on the air at ABC. She worked
out all the different live feeds across the country for the
games to be aired. And at the time for she and my mother to
hold the kinds of jobs they did was not normal, for it was
very much a man's world in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Their careers are a whole other story!
Anyway, when Mom went back to teaching, she and Dad got
involved with the educational community and school
activities of all kinds, and they helped put on some of the
largest high school musicals you have ever seen--- they were
picked up by the UPI press agency. Mom and Dad did
King And
I,
Oklahoma, and
Pajama
Game (Mom
taught music). Dad was then made Vice President of Gardner
Hauseman Advertising. He was developing a product called
"Desk Top Merchandising" (brief case with a video player
inside to pop up and allow the salesman to show a video tape
at meetings). He was developing this idea with companies
like Sony when he got cancer and was gone in a week.
The week of his 65th birthday, he died surrounded by his
family on April 16, 1972. Dad was a true inventor of our
time--- when going through his files we came upon drawings
for electric eye alarms done in the 1930s, along with many
other things way ahead of their era. He never rested, it
could always be done better. The sad part is, as history so
often tells, these types of men that change our lives don't
make the profit off their creations, others do. I just know
that the gifts of wonder and music and imagination my father
gave to myself and my brothers and sister have been a
greater gift than all the money in the world.
RR: What became of the
Caddigan siblings in later years?
EL: My brother Craig
is one of a select few, who pilots a four-man submersible, a
miniature submarine, for Harbor Branch Oceanographic based
in Florida. It goes down to 3000 ft. Craig is married to a
scientist, Dee, who currently teaches biology. He has
worked on developing many of the improvements to the sub and
has been part of a lot of the important Oceanographic
history we have all seen unfold over the past 20 years. He
and the men he works with are to be seen on DISCOVERY and
NOVA all the time.
My sister Judy is a mother of four and lives outside of
Boston. She has been very involved in her community theater
groups and developed many new programs for children for the
theater. Her son is very active in the local theaters, and
her oldest daughter is an artist and works at the Wang
Center for Young at Arts. Her other two daughters are
college students working on their futures.
For myself, I am married to a photographer and have three
daughters, one 30 years old (from my husband's first
marriage), and two of ours, ages 13 and 9. I am a working
designer. I trained in the theater and do work for amusement
parks, retail, advertising and the toy industry.
RR: Any show business work?
EL: Yes, for
example on one of my assignments I was doing make-up for an
HBO special in the late 1970s, starring 1950s TV comic Red
Buttons. I came into his dressing room to start and he
asked my name, I told him and he said "What! Who did you
say you were?" And I said Ellen Caddigan. He looked
shocked. "No, you are too young to know him," he said.
"Who?" I asked. "James Caddigan, a great man! I worked
for him at a station called DuMont," he went on. I told him
Caddigan was my father, and that he had passed away a few
years before. He was so sorry to hear it, but he went
running around to tell Joey Faye, who was also in the show,
who I was. They treated me like royalty. I was very proud
of Dad that day. For so many had forgotten him when he
needed help and here years later he was remembered with such
admiration.
Thank you for your efforts in keeping the history of those
days alive. Because the pioneers really were a group of
remarkable people, and should not be forgotten or lost to
time. Too few come up the way they did, or have had the
impact they had. Many of the sets might have been made of
cardboard as my older brother said, but that cardboard
created more magic at the time than many of the high-tech
special effects of today.
RR: You're welcome.
And thanks for getting in touch with us, Ellen. Please stay
in touch.
