![[photo of Super Host]](superhost.jpg)
That friendly atmosphere was what encouraged Sullivan in 1969 to first don a baggy suit, cape and red nose to host the station's Saturday afternoon monster movie. "Supe" would be around for the next 20 years, erasing Sullivan's anonymity as a booth announcer. "You couldn't really go in a restaurant without someone wanting an autograph," he said. "But I didn't mind."
Sullivan, 63, now lives in Brookings, Ore., with his widowed sister. He moved there after leaving WUAB in 1993, just before the station vacated its Day Drive offices to merge with Channel 19 in a Cleveland studio. The WUAB building was razed last month to make way for an OfficeMax store.
When Sullivan was hired at Channel 43, Cleveland's first independent station, in 1968, that building hadn't been constructed yet. The studio operated out of the Parmatown Lanes on Day Drive, with the booth located next to a bathroom. "There was a sign that said, "Don't flush this when the announcer's talking,"' Sullivan recalled.
By the time the building went up the next year, Sullivan was directing, running cameras and doing "a little bit of everything" for the station.
He was working one day as floor director for the "Big Beat Dance Party," an oldies rock 'n' roll show, when he got a message. "Somebody shouted over the headset that I was unzipped," he said. "I could hear raucous laughter in my ears." His reaction must have been entertaining. After the show, management called him in and told him to come up with a character for a new show he would host. Supe was born.
"Life hinges on strange little things," Sullivan said with a laugh.
At the time, Big Chuck and Hoolihan and The Ghoul hosted popular TV shows, breaking into movies with comedy bits.
"I thought, I'm not as talented as those people, so I decided to be a bumbling character in a baggy suit -- the antithesis of Superman," Sullivan said. At noon on Saturdays, he'd greet fans with his trademark "Hello, dere" and follow with ad-libbed jokes and skits like "The Moronic Woman" and "Fat Whitman."
He attracted a mixed following. "The show was aimed at kids, but strangely enough, a lot of young adults, people 18 to 45, watched it," Sullivan said. It actually "became kind of a cult thing." Sullivan said many musicians watched -- they'd play late jobs on Friday nights, get up about noon and turn on Supe with their coffee. The show ran continuously for 20 years, although toward the end most viewers lost track of it as its time slot changed repeatedly. After Super Host hung up his cape, Sullivan continued his voice-over duties and became the station's coordinator of public service spots.
Super Host might never have laced up a high top if an art school hadn't closed. A native of Michigan, Sullivan was attending college in Windsor, Ontario, when he was drafted into the Navy, served four years, and then enrolled in an art school on the GI Bill. When the school closed before he finished, he fell back on an announcing course he had once taken. "I decided to cast around for a job in broadcasting," he said. He landed a radio job -- the show was called "2 to 5 Party with Marty" -- in Peru, Ind., in 1959.
From there he bounced around Michigan -- to WGPR, Detroit's first FM station, WJR and a TV station in Jackson, Mich., where he remembers covering the shooting of President Kennedy. "We stayed on the air all weekend covering that," he said. He came to Cleveland to take a job in the news department at WGAR-AM, left broadcasting briefly to work in an advertising agency, but "I didn't have enough bandit in my soul to be an ad man," he said. He returned to the airwaves when WUAB started in 1968 and never looked back.
It wasn't smooth sailing for the independent station. For years, WUAB struggled to make itself known. Viewers used to channels 3, 5 and 8 suddenly learned there was a "UHF" channel to watch. The confusion was evident when a patron at the bowling alley once wandered into the control room. The crew told him he was in a TV studio for Channel 43. "He said, "Oh, yeah, I get that on my UFO at home,"' Sullivan recalled.
Maybe the most famous Super Host bit was a takeoff on "Convoy," the then-popular trucker song. Supe also got big laughs when, after a technical problem pre-empted a promised showing of "Little Shop of Horrors," he ran the movie the following week -- at fast speed. "We kept our word," he told viewers.
During his years at Channel 43, Sullivan lived in Parma, first on Stumph Road and then on Millerwood Lane. He moved to Peninsula, looking for a more rural atmosphere after doctors advised him to walk more for his heart.
He continues to walk today, either to a nearby harbor or on his treadmill. He also works around the yard and experiments with his computer -- in fact, he stays in touch with some of his former co-workers by e-mail.
Last month, someone sent him a brick from the rubble of the WUAB building, which he keeps as a memento. "When they tore the building down, it jogged a lot of memories," he said. "It was a great place to work."