Baby's First [Programming] Language

I'm an advocate of teaching programming with a language that Does Not feature garbage collection or any other forms of high-level programming magic. As such, I was quite thrilled to come across an article on that very topic. In particular, it singles out Java as the culprit to the general dumbing-down of CS students - because Java is so prevalent as a "first language" in universities. So what language should one use? My vote is for C, but there are several other languages well suited for the task. Now, I admit that I didn't start with C ... I used HyperTalk ... if that even qualifies as a programming language. It was sure fun though.