Things You Probably Didn't Know About Bozo the Clown · 3:22am Dec 5th, 2023
from The Man Behind the Nose by Larry Harmon & Thomas Scott McKenzie, 2010
- Larry Harmon, aka Bozo the Clown, stuttered as a child.
- He became the drum major for Cleveland Heights High by lying about his age and auditioning with a broken leg.
- During WW2, he was in the US Army, and was accidentally sent to train in the cavalry. Not armored cavalry; he was training to charge machine-gun nests on horseback. He performed in front of Al Jolson at an Army show for the troops, who told him that instead of becoming a doctor, he should be a doctor of laughter.
- He once helped Fred Astaire work out a tricky dance routine (p. 69).
- In the 1950s, before NASA even existed, Larry wrote and directed an episode of Commander Comet in which he described how the lunar landing module of a moon mission would work.
- Bozo was the property of Capitol Records. Larry was one of their Bozos. But he thought he could do more with the character, so he bought the rights to Bozo and redesigned the character.
- During his early years scrounging for jobs and trying to start up Bozo, he slept about 4 hours a night.
The first non-Larry "new" Bozo was Willard Scott, who was later the weatherman on The Today Show and the first Ronald McDonald. Willard skipped his honeymoon in order to prep for his first Bozo show, which had to begin 15 days after Larry pitched the show idea to NBC in Washington DC.
- There were eventually 203 Bozos besides Larry, each performing a different local show. Larry created a Bozo Boot Camp to train most of them.
- Bozo's wig was made of yak hair (p. 95).
- Bozo filmed a show with the US Navy in which he cut a hole in the side of a sunken gunboat with a blowtorch at the bottom of the Potomac while wearing a 185-pound diving suit (the kind with a huge metal helmet) over his Bozo costume. (p. 167)
- Some time in the 1960s, he went to Papua New Guinea to visit a tribe of "cannibals" [1] and try to make them laugh, even though no one could translate their language, and the last group of anthropologists who'd visited them, never came back.
- They laughed.
- He was the producer of many episodes of Popeye the Sailor.
- He bought the rights to the characters of Laurel and Hardy, to make animated cartoons using them.
- He filmed an episode about astronauts on NASA's "vomit comet" in 1969.
In the 1970s, he was almost killed by a python, which tried to eat him during a show in Laos. The audience kept laughing; they thought it was part of the show.
- He was saved because his shoes were too big for the snake to get its mouth over.
He ran for President of the US in 1984–not to win, but to encourage people to vote.
- During his campaign speeches, at least 5 different people tried to assassinate him.
Also in 1984, he threw the "first pitch" at a Cleveland Indians game. And the second, and the third. He insisted on pitching from the mound, to a real (Detroit Tigers) batter.
He got one ball and two strikes.
- (He got the first strike because the batter was laughing too hard to swing.)
[1] They were very possibly technically cannibals, but would probably have disagreed about that.
Didn't Willard Scott go on to the role of an early Ronald McDonald?
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Wikipedia says yes!
Our local Whizzo the Clown in Kansas paralleled much of the same history, writ small. The Wiziarde family performed in the 30s in the Westmoreland area (my old stomping grounds) and still has some memorabilia in the museum there. Frank Wiziarde also served in the Army, then went into TV, eventually to become a clown in 1954 and performed on the air until his death in 1987 (thankfully, not on the air). Watched him every Saturday morning on WIBW channel 13. Very giving individual.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Did he inspire Ray Bradbury's famous novel?
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Are you thinking of "It" by Stephen King?
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No, to ‘Something Wicked this Way Comes’ by Ray Bradbury.
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Ah! I don't think there's a clown in that, though. At least, not as a major character. Man, I love Bradbury.
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I agree. He’s probably one of the best contemporary writers. Somehow, I fear that the end of Fahrenheit 451 becomes more and more relevant to our present society :/