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For 17 years, from 1974 to 1991, the Nite Owl ruled the roost for late-night movie-watchers in the Columbus area.

A generation of viewers came to know films, good, bad and indifferent -- from classics of the horror genre to B westerns to modern screen gems -- courtesy of WBNS-TV and the host with the most outrageous eyewear, as well as some eye-popping special effects.

Among those viewers was that little boy from Wheelersburg. Now all grown up, married and an X-ray technician living in Simpsonville, S.C., Rome Maynard is still a major fan of the man whose real name is Frederick C. Peerenboom.

Maynard's family got cable television in the late 1980s, permitting him to watch Fritz the Nite Owl frequently.

"I always knew he was going to have a cool introduction," Maynard said in a telephone interview. "That's what really hooked me.

"It was a first-rate program. Fritz was unique. If you looked at a lot of your late-night movie hosts, particularly your horror hosts, they all looked the same. You either were a mad scientist or a vampire or a vampire chick. He was a unique entity. You could not quantify him."

Maynard maintains a number of personal-interest Web sites. Among them is one dedicated to his favorite science fiction film, director Fritz Lang's 1927 silent classic "Metropolis," which Maynard recalls seeing on "Nite Owl Theatre." Others focus on comic-book characters Maynard likes and one deals with his occupation of radiologic technologist.

But the lead site is all about Fritz.

"My own humble homage to The Owl," said Maynard, who developed an abiding interest in movies largely as a result of watching "Nite Owl Theatre."

The man who would one day become Fritz the Nite Owl was born in the paper mill town of Nekoosa, Wis., two days after Christmas in 1934.

His piano-teacher mother thought her middle son resembled one of the Katzenjammer Kids, then a popular comic strip, which is how he got the nickname Fritz.

Today, with his 71st birthday approaching, Peerenboom and his wife of 49 years, Patricia, reside in the Upper Arlington area. They have five grown sons -- Steven, Frederick II, Gregory, Christopher and Douglas -- who have presented them with 10 granddaughters and three step-grandsons.

And Peerenboom is still on the airwaves of central Ohio, as he has been more or less continuously since about November 1959. He hosts "Nite Owl Jazz: What's New in Jazz from the 21st Century" Sundays from 9 to midnight on WJZA-FM and WJZK-FM.

"I love it," Peerenboom said of his continuing radio work. "I've never considered radio or television a job. It's one area where I feel confident.

"I look forward to Sunday nights."

Peerenboom's father was a career Army officer who left for the war shortly after Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 31, 1941, and was only back for a few brief periods prior to 1946. Peerenboom's mother took her three sons to live with her parents in northern Minnesota for part of that time.

Upon his father's return from the war, he was stationed at a base near Baltimore until the early 1950s. By then a colonel, Peerenboom's father was transferred to Columbus to head up the ROTC program at Ohio State University.

Fritz Peerenboom graduated from North High School in 1952. He enrolled at Ohio State, where he eventually earned a degree in secondary education.

In 1954, Peerenboom began working part-time as a night switchboard operator for WBNS-TV. Bill Pepper, then the station's chief newscaster and head of announcers, liked the young college student's voice and encouraged Peerenboom to become an announcer, even staying late to provide lessons.

"I got SO hooked ... that I added speech to my majors," Peerenboom said.

He got his draft notice in April or May of 1957, but entered the Army Reserves to delay joining until after he graduated from college. He did so in June of that year, and also married Patricia.

After a brief stint as a lifeguard at a Walter Reed Army Hospital swimming pool, Peerenboom was transferred to the Signal Corps Pictorial Center on Long Island, which was in an old Paramount Pictures studio. He helped make training and promotional films for different branches of the military. Peerenboom and his wife lived in a basement apartment in Flushing, N.Y., and started their family there.

After his hitch was up, Peerenboom tried to get into radio or TV in New York City, "but never made the breakthrough," he said. His old job was available to him back at WBNS, so he returned in September 1959. Peerenboom worked full-time for a local advertising agency, part-time for his old TV station and in November, landed a third job as a 75-cents-an-hour announcer for WMNI. He signed the station off on Saturday nights and on the following morning, spending the hours in between sleeping on a couch in the Southern Theatre studio of the radio station. He auditioned frequently for announcer jobs at WBNS radio at a time when this medium, not TV, was the dominant force in broadcasting.

Eventually, he landed a job with the station.

"They just basically needed a warm body that could sound reasonably intelligent," Peerenboom said.

When WBNS-FM went on the air, Peerenboom was tapped to make the move from the AM side.

"I was the first FM stereo announcer in town," he said.

Peerenboom did various announcing duties for the two WBNS stations and part-time work for other local radio outlets until 1974, when he took a staff announcer job with his original employer, WBNS-TV.

John A. Haldi, who retired from WBNS the same year Peerenboom was let go, was the station's general manager at the time. He recalled Peerenboom as arriving "with this big voice of his and a body of about 135 pounds. We talked a little and I said, 'Gosh, what a voice!' "

Part of Peerenboom's announcer shift encompassed "Nite Owl Theatre," which did not then have a host but instead was represented by various drawings of an owl done by station art director Doug Wagstaff. The drawings frequently related to the genre of film being aired, and the show was named for an old streetcar, the last one that departed from downtown Columbus, according to Dublin resident Haldi, 81.

One night, Peerenboom recalled, the film being shown was a 1955 western, "Treasure of Pancho Villa," starring Rory Calhoun and set during Mexico's civil war. Just prior to a commercial break, Calhoun rides his horse past a wall on which, incongruously, there is an advertisement for Coca-Cola.

"Why didn't Rory stop for a Coke?" Peerenboom mused.

The Owl had spoken.

From then on, at every commercial break, Peerenboom's off-camera voice, with one of Wagstaff's owl drawings being shown, would offer some commentary on the film.

"He was interested in the movies and watched the movies with people at home," recalled Haldi, who is to be honored Nov. 12 with a Silver Circle Award from the Ohio Valley Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

"It was not boiler-plated," Haldi added. "He actually watched the movies with the people at home."

These comments, some of which Peerenboom described as "zingers," began to draw some favorable audience response. Haldi came up with the idea of creating a character to take the place of the owl drawings.

"Haldi had this enormous, wide-open imagination when it came to doing new shows," Peerenboom said.

Early on, station executives kicked around the idea of an entire owl suite, a la the San Diego Chicken, but eventually, Wagstaff got some oversized sunglasses from Revco and created the distinctive owl's horns from pieces of a broken mirror.

Peerenboom is just as happy they went that route.

"I know how hot an owl suit could be," he said.

As the years went on, with Peerenboom hosting movies seven nights a week, five of them live, the crew began adding special effects to the Nite Owl's commentaries. Often using stills from the films being shown, Fritz would pop up in a scene, practically interacting with the characters.

One memorable intro, to the movie "Marathon Man," has the Nite Owl showing up in Dustin Hoffman's mouth just as Sir Laurence Olivier is about to begin his dental torture ("Is it safe?").

"We had all sorts of funny little touches that he would do for vignettes leading into and from commercials," Haldi said. "It was very original. The station was known for that kind of originality."

"Haldi was a film junkie, so he always had the best packages," Peerenboom said.

"Everything I did, when possible, related to the movie," he added. "A lot of people watched the show just for the visuals."

Friday night's show was "Double Chiller Night" with horror or science fiction films.

"People remember me more for the Friday night 'Chiller' than they do for any other night of the week," Peerenboom said. "The monster movie was a big event.

"To this day, people recognize my voice."

Fritz the Nite Owl hosted 6,000 straight shows.

"Hell, he had a great run," Haldi said. "Eventually, with the movies being used on cable, the selection as far as the local affiliates, became few. It kind of faded out, other than a few 'Chiller Theatres.'

"We were running programs that people had already seen."

For Peerenboom, his abrupt dismissal on June 24, 1991, by the station's new general manager still stings more than 14 years later.

"It came completely out of the blue, in the sense that I had just gotten a raise from the old program director about two months before for outstanding work and everything was going well and I was nominated for an Emmy," he said.

In all, Peerenboom won five local Emmy Awards for his work as a TV movie host, the last one after his firing.

For Rome Maynard, fresh from graduating from Shawnee State University and once again in possession of the time to watch "Nite Owl Theatre," the cancellation came as a major disappointment.

"It was devastating," the Fritz fan said. "I turned on Channel 10 and there's Dave Letterman, and I couldn't care less about him."

Suddenly, The Owl had been pushed from his perch and for a time, it felt like he was in free-fall.

Peerenboom sent out something like 500 resumes and demo tapes to stations all over the country and only got three acknowledgments back.

"That was sort of discouraging," he said. "With five Emmys under your belt, it does show you know your way around the block."

Eventually, he landed as a jazz disc jockey for CD-101, a frequent columnist for ThisWeek Newspapers and even a movie host for some local low-power stations.

The jazz program he hosts on WJZA and WJZK is now in its 14th year, having moved over from CD-101 in January 2003.

So Fritz the Nite Owl is still on the air.

In a sense, Fritz the Nite Owl TV movie host lives on, too, not only through Rome Maynard's Web site and others devoted to such persona, but also in various books about the men and women who brought terror and terrible films to millions of viewers dating as far back as the 1950s.

Among these volumes is "Shock Theater: An Illustrated History," put out in 2001 by the Abingdon, Md.-based publishing house Monsters from the Vault, which editor Jim Clatterbaugh described as a "self-published labor of love done in what little free time I have from my 'real' job."

"Because he performed live, Fritz magically made viewers feel as though they had a friend right at home with them to enjoy the movies," wrote contributor Mark A. Miller, author of a book on the joint film appearances of horror stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

Miller, an English teacher at Lincoln High School in Gahanna, concluded his entry with the following:

"On a personal note, during three particular years, 1976-78, I spent lots of lonely times as a patient in University Hospital at the Ohio State University. Yet, one friendly visitor showed up unfailingly every night, on 'Nite Owl Theatre.' In fact, Fritz's soothing, familiar voice could be heard echoing up and down the sterile hospital hallways from many a room.

"Sadly, that sense of fun and camaraderie is missing from television today."

<center>kparks@thisweeknews.com

Frederick C. Peerenboom is better known to a generation of central Ohio television watchers as "Fritz the Nite Owl." He poses with the five local Emmy awards he won for his television show.