Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 12, 1990 TAG: 9007120124
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He has taught another frog to lift weights and yet a third to chin itself on a cross-bar.
And finally, as his show-stopper, he brings out a frog that models as a Dolly Parton look-alike, complete with . . . well, you know, complete.
Bill Steed, you say, is obviously a man with too much time on his hands.
Well, that's what more or less what Wife No. 1 said, too.
"My first wife told me either she or the frogs would have to go, so I still have the frogs," he says.
So who's that in the trailer home, stitching together a cowboy hat about the size of an amphibian's head? That's Wife No. 2, Charlotte. She scooped up a runaway frog at a show in San Diego a few years back and has been hopping around the country with Professor Bill Steed and His World Famous Frogs ever since.
Squeeze into the trailer - the one with the license plates "Frog Pad" - shove aside the frog coasters and other frog knickknacks - please watch out for the live frog on the floor, thank you - and listen to one of the more ri beting acts at the Salem Fair tell his tale.
The beginning, Steed says, was growing up near Toad Suck Ferry, Ark. - he swears it's a real place - and learning how to hypnotize frogs as they sunned themselves on the creek bank.
But that was a long time - he says only that he's in his 60s - so let's skip forward to the early 1970s, when Steed was living in California and trying to hawk his learn-while-you-sleep motivational tapes.
"I thought it would be real smackeroo to have a picture in the paper with a frog listening to one of my tapes with a speaker up to his ear," Steed says. Unfortunately, the newspapers didn't share Steed's sense of news judgment.
So Steed wrote the governor of his native Arkansas and asked if he could sponsor a frog at the Calaveras County frog-jumping contest in the governor's name. When Winthrop Rockefeller's hopper took a flying leap toward the finish line, Steed attributed the victory to the power of his motivational tapes. "That hit AP and I was off and running," he says, referring to The Associated Press news service.
Next thing he knew, he was giving an interview to a San Francisco newspaper columnist in which Steed, well, let's just say he exaggerated somewhat. Steed claimed he had a whole college set up to train jumping frogs. What the hey, the columnist was in San Francisco; Steed knew the guy wasn't going to drive all the way to Sacramento to check it out.
But the next day, when the story hit print, "my phone started ringing off the hook from TV stations wanting to come up," Steed says. "I said well, the pond broke. I was buying time. So a friend and I built Croaker College that night - Sears was open."
One thing led to another and by the early 1980s, Steed had quit selling motivational tapes and hit the fair-and-carnival circuit full time with his trained frog act.
He has performed - or rather, his frogs have performed - at weddings in California and in TV commercials in Japan.
A Stanford University faculty club meeting that started out as a sedate dinner to honor a scientist who had authored a scholarly treatise on frog skin endedup in a raucous frog-jumping contest, thanks to Steed and his students.
(Note to Gary Larson, the Far Side cartoonist: Is life imitating art or what?)
Professor Bill usually travels with 40 bullfrogs, which, when they're not on stage, do what frogs usually do: wallow in the mud.
Of course, Professor Bill's frogs do their wallowing in picnic coolers, but then you know how temperamental and demanding big stars can be.
"They're our little darlings," Charlotte says.
"All of our kids are grown up, so now we have frogs."
Which means Professor Bill has accumulated a fat folder with clippings of newspaper articles such as this one, while Charlotte spends her days on the road in a house trailer, sewing tiny outfits for show-biz frogs.
by CNB