Re: Wally pass away. Bozo the Clown, dead at 83

On Jul 4, 9:56 am, old.s...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Larry Harmon wasn't the original Bozo the Clown,
but he was the real one.

Harmon, who portrayed the wing-haired clown for more than half a
century, died Thursday of congestive heart failure, said his
publicist, Jerry Digney. He was 83.

As an entrepreneur, Harmon licensed the character to others,
particularly dozens of television stations around the country. The
stations in turn hired actors to be their local Bozos.

"Bozo is a combination of the wonderful wisdom of the adult and the
childlike ways in all of us," Harmon told The Associated Press in a
1996 interview.

Pinto Colvig, who 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.

"You might say, in a way, I was cloning BTC (Bozo the Clown) before
anybody else out there got around to cloning DNA," Harmon said in the
1996 interview. "I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this
planet, (people) would never be able to forget those footprints."

Susan Harmon, his wife of 29 years, indicated Harmon was the perfect
fit for Bozo.

"He was the most optimistic man I ever met. He always saw a bright
side; he always had something good to say about everybody. He was the
love of my life," she said Thursday.

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.

"I'm looking for that sparkle in the eyes, that emotion, feeling,
directness, warmth. That is so important," he said of his criteria for
becoming a Bozo.

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.

http://apnews.myway.com//article/20080704/D91N0SN00.html
--
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If you would like to buy one, e-mail me, prints up
to 30x20 inches.

I didn't know that,thanks for the info.I remember watching him when i
was a little child every morning before i went to school
.

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