Dick Beach and Jerry Carr had always wanted to be TV newsmen.

Instead they became Salty the Clown and Captain Cotton, spending most of the 1960s as hosts of a popular children's television show and finding more success than they ever did in a newsroom.

By 1959, Mr. Beach had already spent nearly seven years at Toledo's WSPD-TV, Channel 13, much of which involved cleaning sets, putting up props, and holding up signals when on-stage actors were running out of time.

Mr. Beach slowly worked his way to director of news, and during that time the host of a children's show, Fun Farm, took a vacation. A station manager asked Mr. Beach if he would like to fill in for a few weeks as a clown.

Soon Mr. Beach was in the local library, poring over books of famous clowns to emulate, applying his own haphazard makeup over the course of an hour. Within days he was in front of the cameras, trying to remember to look at the right lens when a red light glowed just above it.

"In those days, you didn't need a lot of perfection to entertain a little child," said Mr. Beach, who maintains a high degree of modesty about his career. "Nowadays they're an expert in everything. If they think your nose is phony, they'll tell you. I don't think I could do it now."

When the other host came back, Mr. Beach was back to his old job behind the cameras. It could have been the end for the clown, until Mr. Carr's career as a rising news anchor ended abruptly when he referred to a woman near a bishop as the bishop's wife. The station's manager angrily pulled Mr. Carr out of the news desk, and said he had to try his hand at something else.

As Mr. Carr struggled to invent a new role, the host of Fun Farm left for good, and suddenly the two co-workers hashed out a brand-new children's show that started in 1960 and eventually would be called The Adventures of Salty and Friends.

Mr. Carr would be Captain Cotton, a craggy old ship commander named for the texture of his fake beard, and Mr. Beach would be a clown named Salty, with a tiny whistle sitting on his tongue that rendered his voice in a wildly high pitch.

During their hourlong show, which took place aboard their fictional ship, the Toledo Queen, the pair performed live skits that introduced prerecorded cartoons, including Popeye. It seemed Salty would always get into trouble, and it was always Captain Cotton's job to get him back on track.

Salty was quickly defined by his squeaky whistle. It was invisible to fascinated children, and yet it transformed the clown's every word into something mysterious. The whistles could get blocked midsentence by moisture, or swallowed -- during one skit, while imitating a toy saxophone to the tune of "Yakety Sax," Mr. Beach sucked in air and the whistle went with it.

From the show's first run, hundreds of letters from children poured into the station. A news release from the station in 1962 called their show the most popular daytime children's program in the city. Mr. Beach bought more whistles from the magic shop where he had found them, and then he said he bought more than 1,000 of them from the shop's wholesaler in Pittsburgh, so he would never have to buy more again.

"Doing this kids' show in full makeup turned out to be a bigger success story than being a newsman," Mr. Carr said.

Mr. Beach is almost aggressively humble about his work. Through all his years in Toledo, Salty's real name was kept a secret to all except his family, the TV crew, and a few of Mr. Beach's friends at church. Later on in his career when he collected thank-you plaques from various charities, he kept them in stacks because he "didn't want [his] head to get too big."

After a few years together, Mr. Carr accepted a program director's job in Rochester, N.Y. Back in Toledo, other characters passed through while Salty stayed -- and then a new station in Boston wanted Salty's character. Mr. Beach moved in 1967 but had to change Salty's name to Willie Whistle, because Salty was the nickname for one of Massachusetts' U.S. senators, Leverett Saltonstall.

In his new, larger market, Willie's persona took off more than ever, and Mr. Beach received nearly 2,000 letters a week. He spent 20 more years on television there, even after a traffic accident left him with a chronic back pain. After five years of working through the injury, doctors told him he should live in a warm, dry climate and Mr. Beach retired at the age of 55.

Mr. Carr became chief executive officer of a modest-sized network in Miami and later managed and rebuilt a handful of stations until he retired in Boca Raton, Fla., in 2009. He added he always wanted to stay on the air, and his voice can still be heard in public service announcements at the stations he managed.

These days Mr. Beach, 82, and his wife pass the time in Bardstown, Ky., volunteering at Red Cross blood drives, managing tickets at an open-air theater, and planting more seeds in their garden than they can tend.

He keeps his remaining whistles and clown makeup in a locked tin box in his closet. Mr. Carr said he left Captain Cotton's outfit in the dressing room in Toledo.

Mr. Beach said, "I loved doing [TV] because I knew I was talking to somebody, although I couldn't see them. I still would have liked to be a big newsman, but it didn't work out that way. So what? I liked my job … I made thousands of friends just by putting on makeup."

Contact Daniel Bethencourt at: dbethencourt@theblade.com or 419-724-6050.

First Published July 11, 2011, 4:15 a.m.