A Detroit-area staple for us Boomers. Thanks for the memories, Art.
“He seemed like he was having a good time,” said Ed Golick, curator of the detroitkidshow.com site. “That wasn’t always true with everybody who played the character. Some of these guys looked like they wanted to be anywhere but out in front of the kids. Art enjoyed that.”
I definitely remember watching Bozo in the mornings before school as a young kid growing up in Ohio. RIP :(
All the local TV personalities from my youth are gone. Even the great Ron Sweed, for whom Middle School me was forever grateful to Ohio and Kaiser Broadcasting, passed in 2019.
Our local Bozo Frank Avruch died a couple of years ago
Huh. I thought there were a bunch of different Bozos.
Wait…Bozo was a franchise?!
Yeah, I looked it up. According to his wiki page, there were looks like hundreds of them.
Perhaps I should edit the title to “One down, hundreds to go.”
I had no idea, I grew up watching Bozo on WGN and never came across any of the local Michigan versions.
TV used to be a lot more local than it is today.
Growing up in Chicago I also watched on WGN. Had no idea it was a bunch of local franchises either
I was on the Bozo show in Providence when I was a kid, and I won a Macho Man Randy Savage sweatshirt and the giant tootsie roll.
The giant tootsie roll was a fake plastic tootsie roll full of smaller, normal sized tootsie rolls.
Larry Harmon was our local Bozo. And apparently he started a big franchise.
In 1956, Harmon purchased the licensing rights to the Bozo character from Capitol Records and marketed the property aggressively. By the late 1960s, Harmon had licensed local Bozo TV shows in nearly every major U.S. market, as well as in other countries.[3] He also produced a series of Bozo animated cartoons intended to be shown with the live-action show, performing Bozo’s voice himself.
It was “Hoho the Clown” in OKC when I was growing up. Guess they didn’t want to pay for the rights.
RIP One Bozo: The Clown Meets his Maker sounds like the strangest technothriller ever.
Loss of innocence.
We’re all Bozos on this bus.
I thought we were more like Killer Klowns from QT3.