Geeky Drunk

I happened to be in Chicago as a kid when one of the most famous Bozo the Clowns died. No, it wasn’t Willard Scott (who also played Ronald McDonald for a short while before his long lived weatherman career.) I believe it was Bob Bell, who was one of the most famous hosts of the Bozo the Clown Show on the local WGN 9 station out of Chicago. Although there is some dispute, one of the original Bozo the Clowns, who was responsible for signing up over 200 other Bozos for other local television stations, passed away today of congestive heart failure. Larry Harmon was 85.

Although not the original Bozo, Harmon portrayed the popular clown in a ton of appearances and he licensed the character to others, including dozens of television stations around the country. The local stations hired actors to be their local Bozos.

Pinto Colvig, who also provided the voice for Walt Disney’s Goofy, was the first Bozo the Clown, a character created by writer-producer Alan W. Livingston for a series of children’s records in 1946. Livingston said he came up with the name Bozo after polling several people at Capitol Records.

Harmon would later meet his alter ego while answering a casting call to make personal appearances as a clown to promote the records. He got that job and eventually bought the rights to Bozo. Along the way, he embellished Bozo’s distinctive look: the orange-tufted hair, the bulbous nose, the outlandish red, white and blue costume.

The business — combining animation, licensing of the character, and personal appearances — made millions, as Harmon trained more than 200 Bozos over the years to represent him in local markets. The Chicago version of Bozo ran on WGN-TV in Chicago for 40 years and was seen in many other cities after cable television transformed WGN into a superstation. Bozo — portrayed in Chicago for many years by Bob Bell — was so popular that the waiting list for tickets to a TV show eventually stretched to a decade, prompting the station to stop taking reservations for 10 years. On the day in 1990 when WGN started taking reservations again, it took just five hours to book the show for five more years. The phone company reported more than 27 million phone call attempts had been made.

By the time the show bowed out in Chicago, in 2001, it was the last locally produced version. Harmon said at the time that he hoped to develop a new cable or network show, as well as a Bozo feature film.

He became caught up in a minor controversy in 2004 when the International Clown Hall of Fame in Milwaukee took down a plaque honoring him as Bozo and formally endorsed Colvig as the first. Harmon denied ever misrepresenting Bozo’s history. He said he was claiming credit only for what he added to the character — “What I sound like, what I look like, what I walk like” — and what he did to popularize Bozo. “Isn’t it a shame the credit that was given to me for the work I have done, they arbitrarily take it down, like I didn’t do anything for the last 52 years,” he told the AP at the time.

Harmon protected Bozo’s reputation with a vengeance, while embracing those who poked good-natured fun at the clown. As Bozo’s influence spread through popular culture, his very name became a synonym for clownish behavior.

“It takes a lot of effort and energy to keep a character that old fresh so kids today still know about him and want to buy the products,” Karen Raugust, executive editor of The Licensing Letter, a New York-based trade publication, said in 1996. A normal character runs its course in three to five years, Raugust said. “Harmon’s is a classic character. It’s been around 50 years.”

On New Year’s Day 1996, Harmon dressed up as Bozo for the first time in 10 years, appearing in the Rose Parade in Pasadena. The crowd reaction, he recalled, “was deafening.” “They kept yelling, `Bozo, Bozo, love you, love you.’ I shed more crocodile tears for five miles in four hours than I realized I had,” he said. “I still get goose bumps.

I still remember how excited I was when I walked into Showbiz Pizza and saw the Bozo the Clown game for the first time. You know the game: the ping pong ball, the buckets farther away from each other, and Bozo making the game so much fun . . . yup, The Grand Prize Game! Kids loved you Bozo, so thanks to Larry Harmon for making Bozo a lot bigger for a lot more kids around the country.

Filed under: Entertainment