RIP Bozo the Clown (Boston edition)

Wait, what? [/childhood misunderstandings]

 

Emmy Jo....mmmmmm mmmm. Didn't realize she was married to Doug (off screen).

 

Holy shit, I'm glad I had Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry.

That might be the worst thing I've ever seen.

 

Man, that clown is a real pissah!

 

Preferred this clown, personally.

 

We all had Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry. We also has stuff like New Zoo Revue. And the local shows like "Officer Don and the Popeye Club" (featuring Orville the Green Dragon) in Atlanta.

 

I had one of those when I was a kid.

 

Two pages on a Boston topic and Gee hasn't weighed in yet?

 

There was a Bozo in each market
Detroit's Bozo was Art Cervi, who worked at CKLW in Windsor
Besides Bozo, CKLW also had live kids shows featuring Captain Jolly and Johnny Ginger
Supposedly there was an old Bozo show in Chicago where a kid starting crying after losing a race
Bozo tried to console the kid, who looked up through his tears and said on live TV: "Fuck you, Bozo!"
Bozo's response:
"Whoa nelly!!!"

 

The version I heard growing up: Kid starts cursing because he missed a shot in this Bozo Buckets game. To which Bozo replied, “That’s a Bozo Nozo.” To which the child then reportedly responded, “Cram it, clown!”

 

There was Skipper Frank in L.A. A kid won a bunch of prizes. The mic is still live, he said, "What am I supposed to do, I rode here on my bike." Skipper Frank said, "Get outta here you little asshole."

Yesterday, some friends on Facebook are recounting Soupy Sales and when he told the audience to "get a dollar out of mom's purse and mail it to me." That was before he flipped off his producer.

 

Growing up in the Chicago area in the '60s and '70s, we always heard the "Cram it Clown" version of the Grand-Prize Game story. Sadly, there's no record of this ever happening, and most accounts of the show's history in the Chicago papers treated it as an urban legend.

The Bozo show from noon-1 p.m. on WGN was a real Chicago phenomenon back then. There was a multiyear waiting list for tickets and parents would mail in requests when their kids were toddlers in hopes of getting tickets a few years later. Those of us who lived within five minutes or so of our grade schools (as I did) walked home for lunch hour to watch the show.

Bozo was portrayed by a WGN employee named Bob Bell who also did the station's first newscast of the day at 6:30 a.m.