In 1953 or so, when this was important to me, my parents called it “duty” and said “do your duty” meaning poop.
Howdy Doody was on then, but we never watched it in our house.
Pretty similar to the recommended way of training guide dog puppies to go on command, which is “do your business.”
Howdy Doody was slightly before my time – at least, I was still too young to watch TV at the time it ended – but I had heard of the show. And “doody” was never used for “poop” where I grew up.
When I was a kid, we adopted a rehomed dog, who was three, and who had been very well-trained (I’m kinda surprised his owners rehomed him, but they divorced, and neither one could take him, was the story at the time-- anyway, we got a really fantastic dog, who we had for the next nine years). He had been trained to go to the phrase “Do your duty.” I’d never heard it before, but if it was used for a dog, it was probably used for children potty training around the same time and earlier. He was born the same year I was-- 1967.
Just more data that this is how “doody” came to mean “poop.”
Man, he was a great dog. He was a Basset Hound named Andy. Gentlest dog you could want for a family with little kids. He lived to be 12. I was so torn up when he died, I didn’t appreciate that that was a pretty long life for a Basset back then.
Maybe I’m imagining it but I think there was a HD show in the mid-70’s or so, starring the original Buffalo Bob Smith. I was in high school at the time but remember my younger siblings watching it. It was in color.
“Doody” was childish slang for feces since at least my toddlerhood, which was in the early 70’s, and I can’t imagine my parents would have taught it to me if they (born in the 40’s) weren’t familiar with it as such, though it’s possible that they picked it up after their childhood.
“Howdy Doody” never bothered me in that respect, since “he” was just a puppet. I’d always thought it strange, though, that one of the T-Birds in Grease was called Doody, and he didn’t particularly seem to be the object of derision in the film.
Nope – I recall seeing the revived “Howdy Doody” in syndication in the mid-70s. I was too young to have watched the show when it was first on, and was in college when it came around again.
The New Howdy Doody Show lasted less than a half year. But there were 130 episodes. Only a few of which got released on home media. Cozi supposedly reran them but I don’t recall that.
There was also a 40th anniversary show in the 80s.
And, I just realized that someone above me answered about Doody in Grease.
“Duty calls, you gotta answer the call of duty” (or “Doody”) - Ed Norton in The Honeymooners (“The Man From Space”, 20:10) (1955), when he has to rush off to fix a sewer emergency. I perked up at the audiences’s relatively few laughs to this compared to other lines. Was this a pun or an unintended coincidence? Perhaps the word was in circulation, but not prominent enough to jump to mind. (The audience was middlebrow, certainly not too snobby for such a joke.)
That was 1955. Perplexity AI says “doodoo” is first documented in 1954, in the Journal of Educational Psychology, but that “doody” as a “do your duty”/”did his duty” euphemism is attested in the 1930s, according to the OED - but it links to this thread, not OED 
. If that’s true, then, the “duty” adults-first explanation probably wins, but we’d need a confirmation about the OED on that.
The question, as I understand it, is still open as to whether adults were first with “duty”, and babies imitated with “doody” and (reduplicated) “doodoo”, vice versa. Or, conceivably, it could’ve been overdetermined, if both were in minor use independently, and they reinforced each other.
I say “in use” rather than “in circulation” because either or both might’ve been invented many times, in many households, for centuries (in the same way that many families have their own names for gramma and grampa based on baby talk) - before somehow catching on and entering circulation proper.
Such a takeoff might well have come from demobilized WW2 soldiers starting families, asking the wife “has he done his duty yet?”. But the supposed OED claim of 1930s, if not a hallucination, would put that earlier, perhaps even with WW1 vets.
Gonna go torrent the OED…..(it’s only $10/month, which I’ll be happy to fork over once I get a job, but I’m procrastinating the job hunt with this. Catch-22.)
Surprisingly, the OED has no entry for “doody”. It has 18 definitions for “duty”, one of which is
to do (one’s) duty: euphemism for ‘to defecate, urinate’.
with the earliest quotation from 1935:
The lamb ran away and stood in the middle of the field doing duties at an adjacent haystack.
Its entry for “doo-doo” has the earliest quotation from 1954. It says the etymology is a reduplication of “do”, whose earliest quotation in the sense of “feces” is from 1930.
The possibility that “doo-doo” had only been around for 10 years when I was born makes me feel old. As for doody, I certainly said it it the late sixties. An alternate form was “dookie”.
In a case of a slang term that is long forgotten, “dookie” originally was a word for train lunches.
The Big Show pulled up stakes tonight and will take off on a dookie jump for Houston Sunday afternoon. Any long trip while en route is called a dookie jump because the cooks always put up lunches called dookies to be eaten on the train. Why lunches are called ‘dookies,’ no on knows.
–San Antonio Light, Sept. 29, 1935
As noted, “doody” is/was a somewhat common surname. Two of the notable things that showed up in my searches:
“Wee Willie Doody” (5’4") was sentenced to death in 1929 for murder. The Supreme Court granted him a new trial, in which he was given a life sentence. He died in prison in 1955.
In 1903, Illinois Central Railroad watchman Thomas Doody caught two “negroes” hauling a wagon with stolen crossties. They “resisted violently” when he put them under arrest.
About this time, Henry Green and Cecelia Bently, a notorious woman, and urged the two blacks to continue the resistance. The woman, to encourage the men, drew a knife and threatened to cut Doody’s heart.
One of the thieves then pulled a pistol and shot four times. All missed except the last one, which struck Green in the left forearm. Doody also shot four times, one strking one of the thieves in the left forearm.
–Times Picayune, New Orleans, April 14, 1903
Wee Willie Doody? Poor kid never stood a chance.
Probably a reference to playing Post Office, a slightly naughty game where kids would kiss each other.
As terentii said, possibly “Pissed Off,” a term my teenaged sisters and their friends used in the 50’s.
As for doody, I never heard that term used as a term for feces when I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s. When I was young, “B.M” was actually a fairly common term where I lived. By the 60’s most of the teenagers had settled on the all-purpose “turd.”
But the spread of naughty words wasn’t as instantaneous in the ye olde days. A disk jockey in 1955 in Memphis might have gotten away with saying “doody” on the air, but it wouldn’t necessarily spread to Dallas, where another disk jockey was naughtily saying “boom-boom.”