South Florida Television personality Chuck Zink dead at age 80

Known to thousands of South Floridians as Skipper Chuck, he hosted a popular children's television show. I remember him from his days of hosting the mid-day movie on Channel 6. There used to be a time when local programming was something other than syndicated talk and judging shows. RIP Chuck.

Open Post- Bright & Early

Chuck Zink, who donned a sea captain's hat and entertained South Florida kids for 22 years as host of local television's The Skipper Chuck Show, died Wednesday. He was 80.

He suffered a stroke in December and spent his final days at Hospice by the Sea in Boca Raton, not far from his home.

Mr. Zink worked on local radio and television for decades, serving as newscaster, show host, pitchman and charity fund-raiser throughout a broadcast career that began during television's infancy.

It was in the role of "Skipper Chuck" that Mr. Zink made his longest-lasting impression. He debuted as the skipper on Popeye's Playhouse in January 1957 on WTVJ, which at the time was the CBS affiliate station on Channel 4 out of Miami. He played the part until 1979, when Skipper Chuck went off the air.

His job, strictly speaking, was to introduce cartoons starring Popeye, the muscle-bound, spinach-chugging sailor man created by illustrator Max Fleishman. But Mr. Zink made more of the assignment than just segues between cartoons. He and his on-air nautical sidekicks regaled their television audience with friendly chatter, games and giveaways. Local children formed his live, in-studio audience.

Soon after the program premiered it was renamed The Skipper Chuck Show, an acknowledgement that the host was at least as popular as the cartoons he introduced. Entertainers such as Jackie Gleason and Danny Thomas, and sports stars including then-Miami Dolphins' coach Don Shula, would drop in to chat with the skipper and some of the estimated 14,000 children who sat in the studio bleachers during the show's run.

The Skipper Chuck Show also broke ground by putting children of different races together on the air at a time when integration was a bitterly contested idea in parts of the country.

"Colored and white children are now going to school together. They should be able to sit on my show together," Mr. Zink recalled in a 1999 interview.

After a while he began to end each broadcast by wishing his young audience "peace, love and happiness" and holding up three fingers. This variation on the two-fingered peace symbol became one of Skipper Chuck's signatures, and a gesture he often saw flashed back at him by fans who spotted him in public.

The Indiana native came to Miami in 1956 from a television station in Harrisburg, Pa., initially to do morning newscasts and assorted fill-in duties. Among other spot jobs, he hosted a late-night horror-movie program. He briefly played sidekick to another WTVJ recruit, Merv Griffin, who would soon leave to become a talk-show star with a national audience.

As in other markets, the relationship that developed between Skipper Chuck and South Florida superseded the show's purely functional uses.

"He was just, for want of another word, he was a great entertainer," said Bernie Rosen, who worked with Mr. Zink at WTVJ. "They had a waiting list to get on the show."

Changes in the business practices, programming and technology of broadcasting eventually drove local-market children's programs off the air.

But Skipper Chuck outlasted many of his peers, and Mr. Zink remained a popular and busy public figure in South Florida long after Skipper Chuck went into dry dock.