The recent death of Jerry Harrell, who played Bozo the Clown on Richmond’s WTVR channel 6 from 1968 to 1974, has reminded some folks of a boomer-era urban legend that will not go away.
Harrell, a Vietnam veteran who earned a Purple Heart serving as an interpreter for Air Force Intelligence, was also an accomplished magician and ventriloquist. His family moved to Richmond where he portrayed Bozo as well as Ronald McDonald, before eventually settling in Norfolk, where he died on Feb. 16.
The original Bozo first appeared on television Friday nights at 7:30 p.m. in 1949 at KTTV in Los Angeles, with actor and cartoonist Pinto Colvig under the makeup. Larry Harmon purchased the rights to the character in 1956, renaming him “Bozo, the world’s most famous clown,” which quickly became an enormously popular TV franchise from 1958 into the late 1970s, with locally produced shows and performers in an estimated 57 cities, including Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Jacksonville, Memphis and many smaller markets, such as Richmond. For cities that did not produce their own Bozo show, Harmon created “Bozo’s Big Top” in 1965 for syndication under the Larry Harmon Pictures Corporation.
Former “Today Show” meteorologist Willard Scott (an Alexandria, Va. native) was not only Washington, DC’s Bozo from 1959 to 1962, but he also created and performed the original Ronald McDonald in 1963 for a series of commercials in DC.
Legendary Bozo shade
The legend goes something like this, as explained by Harmon in the July 25, 1998 edition of TV Guide: On Boston’s defunct WHDH (now WCVB), a boy played the “Bozo Treasure Chest Game” with numerous toys as the grand prize. After the boy failed to bounce three ping-pong balls into a barrel, the show’s ringmaster allegedly exclaimed, “You’re never a loser on the Bozo show, you’re just an almost winner,” and handed the boy a Bozo towel as a consolation prize. The boy allegedly looked at the towel and replied, “Cram it, clown.”
Bozo then reportedly delivered the reprimand, “That’s a Bozo no-no!”
Harmon’s story, however, is suspect. Although he stated that he’s been “asked about the story for years,” he apparently didn’t start claiming it was true until it had been circulating for nearly three decades, so he may have seen an opportunity to simply spark nostalgia for the show. Most importantly, details of the incident are inaccurate: the Boston Bozo show had no “ringmaster,” and the man who portrayed the Boston Bozo from 1958 to 1970, Frank Avruch, did not recollect it. Also, Harmon claimed that people from as far away as El Paso and Orlando claimed to have witnessed the incident, but the show was only broadcast in Boston.
In an October 1986 Chicago Tribune article, Bob Bell, who played Bozo for 24 years on WGN-TV, claimed that “the great story about a kid missing Bucket No. 6 and telling Bozo to perform an impossible act is a myth.”
Nonetheless, the story persisted, and over 50 years later numerous people still recall second-hand variations of it. One version claims that Bozo himself uttered that phrase or a similar curse while addressing a difficult studio audience member. Others recall the incident occurring in San Francisco, Chicago, even Richmond.
Some claim it happened during a bucket game, a block-building contest, or a quiz game. And while there are many classic episodes of Bozo on video and DVD, sadly there is no video or station record of this legendary incident, and no one has come forward and admitted to being the infamous “cram it, clown” kid.
After leaving Bozo and WTVR in 1974, Harrell went on to Norfolk, where he created the late-night horror host, Dr. Madblood, among other characters, on various stations until 2007. He was 78 when he died.
His family asked that donations be made to the SPCA “in support of the animal friends he loved so much.”
