Gumby Animator Dies

Art Clokey, the animator who created Gumby a half-century ago, died on Friday at 88. Gumby debuted on the Howdy Doody Show in 1956 and received his own show the following year. The original show was short-lived, but Gumby reappeared in the '60s and the '80s, by which time he was famous enough to be satirized by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live. Clokey was born in 1921 and, after some time in a children’s home, was adopted by the composer Joseph Waddell Clokey. Gumbey’s assymetrical head, Clokey liked to say, was a tribute to the pompadour of his biological father, who died in a car accident when Cokley was nine.