Hamilton resident recalls the time he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show
In February, the nation celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Closer to home, Hamilton residents have cause for their own Sullivan-centric celebration this month.
Sept. 19 will mark the 60th anniversary of the Three Kings appearance on Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town” show. The Three Kings were an acrobatic troupe from the Navy that won a regional talent show contest in Philadelphia that qualified them for the All-Navy Show national finals on the Sullivan show.
On that eventful evening in September, the Three Kings act took first place in front of the entire nation. The trio included George King, Angelo Lococo and Bob Shinkle, a lifelong Hamilton Township resident.
“That was pretty good,” said Shinkle, now 82 and living in a cozy, well-kept house in Hamilton Square. “We didn’t have to have a booking agent anymore, I’ll tell you that.”
Indeed, the Three Kings were overnight sensations who returned to the Sullivan show several more times and even got to perform before President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife Mamie.
“We did the Navy relief ball down in Washington, D.C.,” Shinkle said. “They held the ball in the sail loft, and we went down in front of the stage. Sitting right in the front row was Mamie and Ike. If I dropped somebody, they’d be sitting in Mamie’s lap.
“No pressure there,” he added with a laugh. “No pressure at all.”
The real pressure came when trying to appease a Navy admiral in attendance.
“Ike and Mamie were both nice people, they would sit and talk to you,” Shinkle said. “There was an admiral sitting next to Ike, and he bought us drinks. That was bad.
“He asked us what we wanted, and we tried to be political and said, ‘We’ll have the same thing you’re drinking.’ He was drinking Old Bushmill and Coke. So he nods to the girl, and she comes over with drinks for us… oh man, that was bad stuff.”
But Shinkle wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. After all, how many guys can say they hoisted Bushmill with the president?
For Shinkle, those things were a way of life after graduating from Hamilton High in 1951. As sophomores, Shinkle and his friend George Moser realized they both had an interest in gymnastics.
“Neither of us liked the program in our gym class playing kickball and what I considered kids games,” Shinkle said. “They had some tumbling mats that were stacked up in a closet. We got permission to go use them out in a hallway. We went out, and started doing our thing.”
The school held a talent show, and the two did so well that someone entered them as an act on the Paul Whiteman Show, a Saturday night TV show on Channel 6 in Philadelphia.
“They had a talent contest, and we went on and did that,” Shinkle said. “That got us started, I guess.”
Being on TV at such a young age hardly gave Shinkle the jitters.
“I was too dumb to be nervous,” he said. “I wasn’t nervous at all. I don’t know about my partner. I had been performing, doing local stuff. I started in minstrel shows around here.”
Moser and Shinkle added a woman named Alice Thompson to their show, and “we threw her all over the place.”
They worked up an act on ice skates, and were booked on the Arthur Godfrey Show, which back then was as big as Sullivan.
The Korean War was in full force, however, and in an effort to avoid being drafted in the Army, Shinkle joined the Navy reserve. He was activated and got his orders to report to boot camp in Maryland on Jan. 21, 1953, one week before the Godfrey show.
“I contacted Godfrey to tell him,” Shinkle said. “He was a retired marine colonel so he understood. And that was it. I went in the Navy.”
Shinkle never knew how it happened, but someone from the Navy Reserve put in his file that he was in show business. During boot camp, they made him the athletic petty officer, while he also taught seamanship and naval history.
From there he went to the Great Lakes Navy Training Station in Michigan, and attended electrician’s school. He and two other buddies started to do acrobatics off a diving board, and were asked if they wanted to take their act to the officer’s club.
“I said sure, it’s close to the barracks, I don’t even have to take a bus,” Shinkle said.
The boys impressed the admiral, who got them into movies and took them on several trips.
From there, Shinkle went to the Naval Air Station in Atlantic City, which is where he met Angelo Lococo and George King. Shinkle was always on the bottom of all the tricks, pretty much doing all the grunt work, and King provided some flash at the top of the routine.
“He did handstands, so we became the Three Kings,” Shinkle said. “We worked together in the hotels on the boardwalk. We did pretty good around the hotels.”
They did well enough to get out of the usual mundane work servicemen must endure.
“This whole Navy talent contest came up, and an officer told us we were going to be in the regional thing in Philadelphia,” Shinkle said. “He said, ‘You’ll still be where you’re working now, but I want you to have at least seven hours a day to practice for the talent show.’ We’d go up for our assignment, and then say ‘See ya later,’ and we’d go out and practice. We got out of a lot of work that way.”
It paid off handsomely as the Kings won their regional and headed for the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York City. The show was entitled “The Toast of the Town,” but by then most of America just called it the Ed Sullivan Show, and that became the official name a year later.
And while Shinkle loved the experience, he was less than enamored with the legendary host.
“He was a snot-nosed bastard,” Shinkle said. “He would first show up right around 7 o’clock on Sunday night (the show started at 8). We had to be there at 9 o’clock in the morning and had rehearsals. They would go through all these things with cameras and the sound and the lighting. We went through all these different rehearsals just to make everybody happy.
“Then we’d come in with his producer, Marlo Lewis. He gave Ed a list of the program with the actor going on and two sentences about him. That was Sullivan. When you’re going on, he acts like he’s known you for six months but he’d never met you and you never met him.”
Despite Sullivan’s coldness toward the Three Kings, he still had them back for a few more shows. And while it may have appeared glamorous, it was a lot of hard work for Shinkle.
“I was always the bottom man,” he said. “I had two guys over me, and we were doing all kind of different balances and different stuff. I would launch guys.
“There were a lot of things I did that were much harder than the guys jumping rope on me. I used to expand and put my arms straight out. I’d have a 180-pound guy stand on my arms like parallel bars, and muscle up in a handstand. It was amazing. I’m holding this 180-pound guy out with arms straight out.”
By the end of the year, Shinkle got to wondering how long he could remain in the business and remain healthy.
“I decided I’m not going to make my life’s job out of this,” he said. “I went over to the Trenton Fairgrounds to watch the circus. I’d see those guys, and they grew old fast. I didn’t want to do that.”
The Three Kings went back on TV when they appeared on the Sealtest Ice Cream Big Top Circus Show in Philadelphia. Told he would need a new union card the next day to work in Philly, Shinkle also realized he needed a card to work in New York, as well. After the Sealtest show, he tore up his union card and walked away from show business.
He went on to a life of numerous occupations, working as a TV repairman, working for IBM and spending most of his life with AT&T.
His body did take a beating through acrobatics, as he has had both hips and both knees replaced. He is also pondering neck surgery. But he is still going strong at 82, making jewelry and raising tropical plants in his backyard.
Shinkle’s memory is still sharp, though.
“I can tell you stories all day,” he said. “You tell me what part of my life you want to talk about, and I can tell you stories.”
And one of the most impressive stories of all happened 60 years ago this very month, when Bob Shinkle and his partners were the Toast of the Town.
Hamilton resident Bob Shinkle (right) holds Angelo Lococo up as part of their acrobatic act. Sixty years ago—Sept. 19, 1954—Shinkle and two of his friends appeared on Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town” TV program to compete in the All-Navy talent contest.,
