WGN-TV went on the air 75 years ago, and for decades its biggest star was a clown

About the time WGN-TV went on the air 75 years ago, Larry Harmon was starting to make appearances as the clown that later helped make the station a lunchtime and then an early morning destination for generations of Chicago-area children.

In the 1950s, Harmon acquired the rights to “Bozo the Clown” and began licensing exclusive broadcasting rights to local television outlets. Tribune-owned WGN-TV bought those rights for Chicago from the West Coast actor-turned-promoter.

“Bozo the Clown” debuted on Ch. 9 in 1960. The show was the yardstick of a Chicago childhood for the next 40 years, except for a brief timeout the year after it first aired when WGN-TV’s studios were moved from Tribune Tower to a spacious facility just north of Lane Technical High School. The expanded hourlong show became “Bozo’s Circus.”

The show capitalized on the foothold TV gained in the 1950s, when Chicago stations started competing for the dollars of merchants hoping to reach into the wallets of parents pestered by children to buy some tchotchke advertised on television. One children’s show of the era, “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie,” was creative and subtle, featuring a pair of sock puppets and a comedienne trading ad-libs.

There is nothing subtle about clowning. It reaches down to the taproot of the tragedy underlying comedy since the days of Greek playwright Aristophanes. In some cases, it is marked by the downcast eyes and frown painted on a clown’s face. Harmon’s task was to get a battalion of clowns ready to play Bozo before TV audiences across the country.

“Over the years, my staff and I trained 203 men to wear the Bozo costume in communities all over the globe,” Harmon wrote in his autobiography “The Man Behind the Nose: Assassins, Astronauts, Cannibals, and Other Stupendous Tales.”

Harmon received a Lifetime of Laughter Award from the International Clown Hall of Fame in Wisconsin in 1990. But in 2004, it was revoked upon the discovery that Pinto Colvig, who did voice-overs for Goofy at Disney Studios, had a Bozo act before Harmon. (The creation of Bozo The Clown is credited to Alan Livingston, a writer and producer at Capitol Records.) Colvig was then posthumously inducted into the Clown Hall of Fame.

“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,” Harmon lamented. He died four years after the rebuke, in 2008.

Chicago’s Bozo show had similar moments of the victory and defeat, some of which involved simply trying to get a seat in the show’s grandstand. At one point the waiting list for Bozo tickets reached 10 years, and parents who came through could hardly be blamed for crowing a bit.

“Remember those two darling children you saw recently on Bozo’s Circus?” the Tribune’s Carol Kleiman wrote in a 1967 piece about her own Bozo experience. “Well, they’re MY kids.”

At some point, tickets were doled out through a lottery. On the day in 1990 that reservations were resumed, the phone company reported that 27 million attempts were made to reach the station, The Associated Press reported in Harmon’s obituary. In five hours the waiting time for tickets reached five years.

It was hard to imagine Col. Robert McCormick wanting a clown to be the biggest star on a Tribune station. The newspaper’s publisher, who died in 1955, was a cultivated officer and a gentleman. Bozo was wondrously vulgar.

When the show marked its 1,000th broadcast in 1965, the Tribune reported that Ray Rayner (Oliver, the loquacious clown) and Don Sandburg (Sandy, the silent clown) had squirted 700 bottles of seltzer and thrown 800 cream pies at each other. The pies were actually filled with shaving cream.

On one show a character shouted: “The elephants are loose! The elephants are loose!” Staring into the camera, Bozo quipped: “Give them some Kaopectate.”

WGN’s “Bozo’s Circus” had its detractors. The New Yorker magazine’s critic once faulted the show “for purveying “a particular spirit of carnival cheapness” and a “quaintly primitive exploitation of children and parents.”

But being decried by smug East Coast literati, the sort of elites McCormick had famously blamed for America’s ills with a parochialism inherited by some successors, could have been seen as a plus in Tribune Tower.

Harmon, Bozo’s biggest promoter, oozed Hollywood’s free-spirit vibes. He majored in theater at the University of Southern California, and he answered a casting call from Capitol Records for a clown to promote book-and-record packages with titles like “Bozo At The Circus.” By Harmon’s account, he fleshed out Bozo’s character, without acknowledging his debt to Colvig.

Recognizing television’s potential, within a decade of buying Bozo from Capitol Records he built an empire, centered on Los Angeles, where his Bozo Boot Camp trained clown clones.

Bob Bell, WGN-TV’s Bozo, didn’t need much tutoring.

“He was a natural Bozo,” Harmon later recalled. “Bob was able to jump into my soul.”

The two Bozos were not close. “Even if he is in the station contracting for his cartoons, he never stops in and says hello, " Bell told the Tribune in 1984. ‘’Never.”

For 22 years, Bell kick-started each broadcast, as the Tribune observed, “flailing wildly to Sousa-style music as the children in the audience go slack jawed.” In 1984 he retired, explaining: “I don’t want to go into a pratfall and just never get up.”

Joey D’Auria, a voice-over actor, seamlessly took over Bell’s role. The show’s format seemed graven in stone. Children still won prizes for throwing Ping-Pong balls into buckets, a competition rooted in a bar stool sport. Magic acts and cornball humor remained staples.

Cooky the Cook (Roy Brown): “I’ve broken my arm in three places. Bozo (D’Auria): “Then don’t go into those places.”

Yet America was in flux. When Bozo first went on the air, grade-school students went home for lunch. That gave the noon-hour broadcast the kind of audience numbers advertisers drool over.

When Ringmaster Ned (Ned Locke) blew his whistle, myriad kids munched a peanut butter sandwich or a bowl of SpaghettiOs while watching Bozo.

But as society grew coarser, school doors were locked until classes ended in midafternoon. That sent WGN management on a quest for a new time slot for Bozo. A Sunday morning broadcast was tried.

Meanwhile its age was showing. “Sesame Street” had shaken up children’s broadcasting by offering educational content — number counting, reading skills. “Mister Rodger’s Neighborhood” substituted concern for others for stunts like dumping a bucket of confetti on them.

Successive WGN-TV station managers wrestled with a dilemma: Ledger book reality versus the desire to be remembered for something other than euthanizing a hallowed tradition.

Terminally ill children had fulfilled their wish to visit Bozo. Cast members had guided blind children’s hands so they could touch the faces of Oliver the Clown and Sandy the Clown.

“Bozo and Ch.9, it’s sometimes said it’s like the Chicago River being green on St. Patrick’s Day,” general manager John Vitanovec told the Tribune in 2001. “It’s just part of what Chicago’s about.”

Still, Vitanovec had to announce that the final episode of Bozo would be telecast that August.

“There will be absolutely no educational content in this show whatsoever, “D’ Auria told the audience at the show’s final taping. “No clowns with books. No clowns at museums. Just a lot of great memories.”

His promise was verified in the next morning’s Tribune.

“History will note that the last airborne pie made contact with its human target at 7:29 p.m. Tuesday.”

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