Big Brother Bob Emery and the Lowell Avenue Kids

 Big Brother's photo from the internet

One of our favorite TV shows as kids (television had just come into our homes) was Big Brother Bob Emery's FAMILY FUN!  And even more fun was the fact that Big Brother Bob Emery lived in Newton, Massachusetts, within a 10 minute bike ride from our houses on Lowell Avenue in Newtonville!!!  One summer's day, we kids decided to take advantage of that fact and all of us, cousins and young neighbors, gathered and headed to Newton Highlands in a cavalcade of bikes.  We had an idea: we wanted to be on Big Brother's television show and we had an exciting plan for the show, "Family Fun".  We kids used to make our own puppets, fashioning the heads with paper mâché which we painted when dry, and creating the outfits from roughly sewn cloth cut from our outgrown clothing.   We would then put on puppet shows of our own creation.  The puppet shows themselves were not of interest to Big Brother, but he loved the idea of three families gathering to create the puppets used for the kids' puppet shows.  And so it was.  Our three families, moms included, appeared on his show, all lined up from the beginning of the process. . . clipping newspaper into small bits to be used in creating the heads of the puppets with home-made paste from flour and water,  drying the heads, painting the dried heads of the puppets,  and cutting and fashioning the puppet clothing from our no longer wearable hand-me-downs!  The show was a big success and we kids never got over the fact that we had been on Big Brother Bob Emery's FAMILY FUN television program for all to see!