Chris Foran
For more than a decade, one of Milwaukee's best-loved celebrities was a cat puppet that did the weather on TV.
What, or who, was Albert the Alley Cat? How did a cat puppet become a fixture on Milwaukee television? Why did he leave the air? And what happened to Albert?
As part of the Journal Sentinel's What the Wisconsin? series — where reporters take on questions about our state, our communities and the people in them — we looked at the story behind Albert the Alley Cat, and what happened to the famous TV puppet.
Meet Albert the Alley Cat (and the man who created him)
Albert the Alley Cat was the creation of Jack DuBlon, a broadcaster and puppeteer who joined Milwaukee's WITI-TV (Channel 6) in 1960. He brought with him several puppets and an idea for a kids show, "Cartoon Alley," that he developed at a station in his native Texas.
Among "Cartoon Alley's" characters when it debuted on Channel 6 in April 1961 was Albert the Alley Cat, a wisecracking feline who hung out with DuBlon's other creations, including Rocky the Gorilla and Lucius the Lion, as well as the show's host, Barbara Becker. Becker also did the weather on Channel 6's newscasts; until the early 1970s, most TV stations had a personality do the weather instead of a trained meteorologist.
In 1965, when Becker dropped the weather gig, Channel 6 General Manager Roger LeGrand decided to replace her with staff announcer Ward Allen — and Albert, with DuBlon doing the voice and manning the puppet just like on "Cartoon Alley." While Allen played it straight reading the weather, Albert the Alley Cat provided the comic relief, tossing in corny jokes and mispronouncing weather terminology (example: humidity, from Albert, came out "humidiry").
In a 1982 interview with The Milwaukee Journal, DuBlon — whose roles at Channel 6 also included hosting a horror-movie show, "Shock Theatre," as Dr. Cadaverino — said he was dubious about having Albert join the station's 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts.
"It was not my idea, and I did not want to do it," DuBlon said. " … I thought Albert was too outlandish for the newscast." Instead, he suggested using another of his "Cartoon's Alley" puppets, Waldo the Bear.
"But Roger (LeGrand) was bent on Albert's personality," DuBlon said. "He thought there was something smart-assed about Albert and Waldo was too loving."
Albert the Alley Cat: America's No. 1 weather cat
Viewers didn't know what to make of a cat puppet on the local news. But it wasn't long before Channel 6 had Milwaukee's most-watched newscasts — and in Albert, a bona fide local celebrity.
Viewers sent hundreds of knit hats and sweaters — Albert's uniform — to the station. The cat puppet was in demand: In 1971, Albert (with DuBlon, of course) performed with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, narrating a performance of Saint-Saens' "The Carnival of the Animals." The station gave out copies of "Did'ya Hear the One About … Albert's TV6 Joke Book."
It wasn't just Milwaukee TV viewers who rooted for Albert. In 1968, he and Allen were named the nation's No. 1 weather show by the National Association of Television Program Executives.
Albert the Alley Cat causes trouble
As with so many celebrities, Albert sometimes got himself, and his employer, in hot water.
After rival WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) hired a trained meteorologist, Paul Joseph, Channel 6 in 1975 hired Tom Skilling, who also had the seal of approval from the American Meteorological Society. Skilling was to do its 10 p.m. weather forecast, with Allen relegated to the noon and 6 p.m. newscasts. Albert worked with both of them.
The AMS told Skilling he would lose the group's seal of approval if he continued to work with, well, a cat puppet. Station management stood with Albert; Skilling lost the seal.
(Skilling left Channel 6 three years later — not because of Albert or the seal of approval, but in a dispute over how much time weather forecasts received on the station's newscasts. Not long after, Skilling was hired by WGN-TV in Chicago, where he was a weather-forecasting fixture for the next 45 years; he retired this year.)
When word got out that Channel 6 might drop Albert, the station received more than 10,000 letters from viewers backing the weather cat.
The same year Skilling left Channel 6, Albert — actually, DuBlon — got in trouble for meddling in Wisconsin politics.
In 1978, Lee Dreyfus, then chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, was running for governor as a Republican against acting Gov. Martin Schreiber; the symbol of Dreyfus' campaign was the red vest he wore on campus. DuBlon reportedly reached out to the campaign and offered to give Dreyfus a boost — by dressing Albert in a red vest for his stints on camera on Channel 6.
Albert donned the red vest on just two newscasts before Jill Geisler, Channel 6's news director, told DuBlon the vest had to go. DuBlon protested, but, after both he and Albert boycotted one broadcast, they both returned the next day — minus the red vest.
Albert the Alley Cat signs off
In mid-1981, Channel 6 bowed to years of reports from consultants saying a cat puppet doing the weather hurt the station's credibility and shifted Albert to sports, where he bantered with longtime sportscaster Earl Gillespie. But by the end of that year, Albert was off the newscasts for good. He remained on Channel 6's Saturday morning kids show, "Albert and Friends," and continued to do promotional segments and events for the station.
But the viewers didn't forget the cat puppet who did the weather.
To mark Albert's 25th "birthday," in August 1985 the station held a party at the Milwaukee County Zoo, where people stood in line in the rain to wish the cat puppet well. That fall, DuBlon and Albert received the Semi-Sacred Cat Award from the Milwaukee Press Club (the Press Club's mascot is a mummified cat).
DuBlon left Channel 6 at the end of 1985, returning to his hometown of San Angelo, Texas. He died in 1988 of pancreatic and liver cancer; he was 58.
So, where did Albert the Alley Cat go?
In that 1982 interview with The Journal, DuBlon said the then-current Albert the Alley Cat puppet was actually the eighth one. "Throughout the years, I had to get new ones made because the puppet wore out," DuBlon said. "All the other puppets that wore out I usually threw out, but I just couldn't do that to Albert — he's that special. I always thought Albert had nine lives; I guess he is on his last one."
But when DuBlon went back to Texas, he took all of his puppets with him, including Albert, seemingly never to be seen again.
Until 2017, when Channel 6 reporter Brad Hicks set out to "find" the missing Albert. He tracked down one of DuBlon's daughters, Michelle DuBlon, in Prescott, Arizona. She not only had Albert; he was sitting on her couch. Hicks and photojournalist Jeff Frings put together a segment about Albert's "retirement" days, including FaceTime-ing with Ward Allen. (Allen died in 2022 at age 87.)
You can find the segment, along with archival clips of some of Albert's "performances," at fox6now.com.
Sources: Journal Sentinel archives; "Milwaukee Television History: The Analog Years" by Dick Golembiewski (Marquette University Press); fox6now.com.
I loved watching Albert make Tom Skilling uncomfortable on weather forecasts.
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