Bob McGrath, who played the sweater-clad music teacher and general counselor on Sesame Street for nearly half a century, passed away Sunday at his home in northern New Jersey. He was 90.
His daughter Cathlin McGrath said the cause was complications after a stroke.
Mr. McGrath was not particularly interested when an old sorority brother told him about his new project, a children’s show on public television. But he had never heard of Jim Henson, the puppeteer, and he had never seen a Muppet. After meeting for the first time and watching some of the animation, he knew this show would be different.
“Sesame Street” premiered in November 1969, when Mr. McGrath and other cast members gathered around an urban brownstone sidewalk, in front of the building’s dark green doors, next to the ubiquitous collection of metal garbage cans. His character, who just so happened to be named Bob, was reliably smiling, easy-going and polite whether singing about “People in Your Neighborhood” (the butcher, the baker, the lifeguard), discussing everyday concerns with young people and Muppets, or a day trip to Grouchytown with Oscar the Grouch.
Viewers were outraged when Mr. McGrath and two other longtime cast members – Emilio Delgado, who played Luis, and Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon – were fired in 2016. When HBO took over the broadcasting rights to “Sesame Street”, their contracts were not renewed. (Mr. Delgado died in March.)
But Mr. McGrath graciously took the news, expressing his gratitude for 47 years of “working with phenomenal people” and for an entire post-Sesame Street career of performing family concerts with major symphony orchestras.
“I’m really excited to be able to stay home with my wife and kids a little bit more,” he said later in 2016 at Florida Supercon, an annual comic book and pop culture convention. “I’d be so greedy if I wanted five more minutes.”
Robert Emmett McGrath was born on June 13, 1932 in Ottawa, Illinois, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. He was the youngest of five children of Edmund Thomas McGrath, a farmer, and Flora Agnes (Halligan) McGrath.
Robert’s mother, who sang and played the piano, recognized his talent by the time he was 5. He was soon entering and winning competitions in Chicago and appearing on the radio. He studied privately, but practically intended to study engineering.
But he was invited to a music camp outside of Chicago the summer after graduating from high school. Teachers there encouraged him to change his plans, and he “turned around,” he recalled in a 2004 video interview for the Television Academy Foundation.
He studied voice at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1954. He spent the next two years in the military, mostly in Stuttgart, Germany, working with the Seventh Army Symphony. He then went to New York, where he received a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music.
He took a job at St. David’s, a private boys’ school in Manhattan. Freelance singing jobs, obtained through a vocal contractor, paid the bills until 1961, when “Sing Along With Mitch” appeared. He was one of 25 male singers to perform each week on that show, seen on NBC, performing traditional favorites such as “Home on the Range,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” and ‘I’ I’ll take you home again, Kathleen.
As St. Patrick’s Day approached, the show’s host Mitch Miller asked Mr. McGrath if he knew the song “Mother Machree.” He was so impressed with Mr. McGrath’s portrayal and his nimble tenor – he had been singing the sentimental Irish-American number since he was a little boy – that he doubled his salary and made him the show’s male soloist.
After “Sing Along With Mitch” ended in 1964, the cast played in Las Vegas and did a 30-stop tour of Japan. That led to an unusual chapter in Mr. McGrath’s career: teen idol.
Schoolgirls chanted his name at concerts and organized fan clubs. Their request brought him back to Japan nine times over the next three years, and he recorded nine albums there, singing in both English and Japanese. His repertoire included Japanese folk ballads accompanied by a shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. At home, he amused the American television viewers by singing “Danny Boy” in Japanese.
When ‘Sesame Street’ started, it led to a very different collection of albums for Mr. McGrath, with names like “Sing Along With Bob” and “Songs and Games for Toddlers.”
The show was originally aimed at children aged 3 to 5, but it also attracted older boys and girls from the start. Adult sensitivities were also taken into account, even when teaching the letters of the alphabet. At the Florida Supercon event, he and Mr. Delgado recalled that the sentiment “I love my X” made adults laugh and that the song “Letter B” was a parody of a Beatles song.
He also learned American Sign Language, which he regularly used on camera with Linda Bove, a cast member who was born deaf.
When asked about significant memories from his years on the series, Mr. McGrath often mentioned the 1983 episode devoted to the reactions of children, adults, and the Muppets to the death of Will Lee, who had played Mr. Hooper on the show for 13 years. Another favorite was the Christmas special “Christmas Eve on Sesame Street” (1978), especially the Bert and Ernie segment inspired by the O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi”.
In 1958 Mr. McGrath with Ann Logan Sperry, a preschool teacher he met on his first day in New York City. Besides his daughter Cathlin, he is survived by his wife; four other children, Liam, Robert and Lily McGrath and Alison McGrath Osder; an older sister, Eileen Strobel; and eight grandchildren. His family declined to say where he lived specifically in New Jersey.
“It’s a whole different kind of fame,” Mr. McGrath said in the Television Academy interview about his association with “Sesame Street.”
He remembered a little boy in a store who came up to him and took his hand. At first he thought he had been mistaken for the child’s father. Realizing that the boy seemed to think they knew each other, Mr. McGrath asked, “Do you know my name?”
“Bob.”
“Do you know where I live?”
“Sesame Street.”
“Do you know any of my other friends on Sesame Street?”
“Yes,” the boy replied, and promptly gave an example: “Oh, the number 7.”
Livia Albeck-Ripka reporting contributed.
