I learned of Floyd’s passing the way one learns most things now: on Facebook. The world felt instantly less rubber-chicken-shaped. If you ever watched The Uncle Floyd Show, you know what I mean. The show was gloriously chaotic, proudly ridiculous, and stitched together with a sense of humor that felt like it had been assembled from spare parts at two in the morning. And yet—like so many things that look slapdash—it was held together by real craft, real money, and one very real human being: Uncle Floyd.

I must be a Friend of Floyd. I appeared on the show in the spring of 1983 with my band, Dizzy and the Romilars. Floyd looked at me with that deadpan twinkle and asked, “Are you dizzy?” Without missing a beat, I said, “No—are you?” Hahahaha! This is the level of intellectual discourse that built an empire. Or at least a very beloved weekday television show.

For the uninitiated, The Uncle Floyd Show began in the mid-1970s and ran for decades on New Jersey television, five days a week, with no reruns. That alone should qualify it as either a miracle or a cry for help. Its reputation? Cheap, amateurish, slapdash. The reality? Professional equipment, professional studios, and cameras so tall and heavy they had wheels because no human spine should be asked to lift them. If you saw a snowy, blurry picture at home, that wasn’t Floyd—it was your reception. The signal leaving the antenna was crystal clear.

And here’s the part people miss: Floyd paid for it. With his own money. He didn’t just host the show. He produced it. He financed it. Studio time, airtime, videotape stock—it came out of his pocket. Did he have a side job underwriting this televised circus? If he did, I don’t know what it was. 

The tapes tell the real story. Two-inch open-reel videotape, reels about a foot in diameter. When the crew played softball, they used an old tape in a shipper for home plate. Each reel cost about $200 in 1975 dollars. Five shows a week meant $1,000 a week just for tape. Adjusted for inflation, that’s nearly $6,000 a week in today’s money. 

With roughly 240 new shows a year and no reruns, it made sense to erase and reuse the tapes. Sometimes they erased them before the show aired. Twice. This was not carelessness; it was survival math. Archiving everything would have required climate-controlled storage and about $52,000 a year for blank tape back then—over $300,000 annually in today’s dollars. That’s a lot of cannolis. So, tapes were reused until they were truly ragged, then retired and stored. Hundreds of these worn-out tapes piled up at Channel 68, until one day they were tossed into a dumpster.

Enter Mugsy, performing a feat of dumpster diving worthy of myth. The tapes were rescued and stored, eventually finding their way into Floyd’s warehouse alongside his most treasured possessions: scrapbooks, family photos, puppets, costumes, a piano. And then fate—never a fan of comedy—intervened. A truck went into the Passaic River, the river overflowed, and eight feet of muddy water tore through the storage space. Much was lost. 

But wait—an angel appeared. An archival company took possession of a truckload of wet, moldy, muddy tapes and drove them cross-country to California. Painstaking restoration began. Some tapes play. Some play poorly. Some won’t play at all. Even the drier ones were fragile from years of being reused. If they’re ever fully restored and digitized, they may be licensed—at a cost, because miracles still have invoices.

Meanwhile, another miracle persists. Many of us taped the show at home on Betamax or VHS. The quality isn’t broadcast-worthy, but it’s good enough for memory. That’s what’s streamed every Tuesday night in the watch party “This Was The Uncle Floyd Show” on StageIt. Grainy, wobbly, imperfect—and absolutely right.

So yes, I’m a Friend of Floyd. We all are. We laughed, we taped over, we forgot, we remembered. And somehow, against all odds—and occasionally against the Passaic—the show goes on.