Heroes & Treasure Chests

Dial-twisting youngsters last week found two more programs to add to their list of favorites:

P:Baseball's Joe DiMaggio, taking a breather from the pennant race, made his bow on television with the Joe DiMaggio Show (Sat. 5:30 p.m., NBC-TV), first in a weekly series for a toymaker (Lionel trains). Looking handsome and assured, the Yankee Clipper showed flashbacks of the 1947 New York-Brooklyn World Series, interviewed teammate Phil Rizzuto on playing shortstop. For the last 5 minutes, DiMaggio turned the program over to a panel of goggle-eyed admirers, seemed to enjoy himself hugely watching Rizzuto answer questions from baseball-minded youngsters. As if Hero DiMag wasn't enough, the Lionel commercial showed off a line of electric trains that would make even grownups start counting the days until Christmas.

Between performances in Broadway's Peter Pan, Boris Karloff launched his Boris Karloff's Treasure Chest (over Manhattan's WNEW). Far from the creep-voiced menace of his early movie days, Karloff dished up nonsense (Lewis Carroll's double-talking Jabberwock), limericks, and songs (recorded by Groucho Marx and Burl Ives), gave a fatherly lesson in tolerance (the story of a Churkandoose, which was neither chicken, turkey, duck or goose: "I'm sure . . . you'll respect his right to be different"). It looked as though onetime Frankenstein Monster Karloff, who reported a "tremendous reaction from children and their mothers," might yet live down his bogeyman reputation.

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