"Penny and Her Pals" was a children's TV program broadcast by KTVW Channel 13 in Tacoma, USA, every afternoon at 4:00 p.m. from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Penny, played by the ventriloquist Lamoyne Hreha, was a pretty blonde lady with a ponytail who lived in a castle with a strange assortment of characters who became known as her "pals".
Hreha, daughter of a Tacoma restaurateur, Anton Barcott, learned to throw her voice while still in high school and acted as the assistant in the magic act of her future husband, John Hreha, a well-known professional magician and mentalist. She created the Penny TV character with Hreha's help in the late 1950s. Speaking of his wife's TV persona, he would often say, "We both knew that Penny needed to be the ultimate Goodie-Two-Shoes that any parent would trust their child with for at least one hour."
Like most local origination children's shows of the era, Penny showed cartoons, ran contests, interviewed guests to the castle and hosted hundreds of children's groups who came to tour KTVW Studios to see the show which was performed live each day. There was never a written script - each show was all improvisation. Hreha, a mother of three school-aged children herself at the time, worked out a general plot line for each week of shows with a heavy emphasis on messages that she thought that children needed to hear. Children viewing the show at home were given lessons in generosity, sharing, kindness, diversity, inclusion, bravery, perseverance, and many other subjects through the misadventures of the show's characters.
