In 1968, one of the most awful years in the history of America, Dick Richards donned a red nose and red hair. He became Bozo. In Michigan. Well, in Grand Rapids.
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“The other day” was the day that Richards’s show, Bozo’s Big Top, was taped (in the local baseball stadium) for the last time. Last Saturday WZZM in Grand Rapids aired the final show, and WGN’s Bozo Super Sunday Show became the one and only surviving vestige of the most prolific children’s franchising effort of our time. Created as a cartoon by Capitol Records’ Alan Livingston in 1946, Bozo gained serious fame after Larry Harmon bought television rights to the clown in 1956 and began to franchise him to stations across the country. The result was more than 100 locally produced variety shows that mixed in-studio antics with old cartoons.
Richards, who’s now 60, joined Bozo’s Big Top as ringmaster in 1967 and took over the lead role in December 1968. WZZM, which is the ABC affiliate in Grand Rapids, had him on the air five afternoons a week, opposite a kiddie host on the local NBC affiliate who vanished in 1971. “After a couple of years,” Richards says, “Bozo pretty much knocked him out of the saddle. And he was a cowboy. No pun intended.”
“Most people when they saw us used to say, ‘Are you still doing the show?’ Or ‘I remember when you used to be Bozo. Are you still doing it?’ Or they’d say, ‘We watch you every Sunday morning.’ In other words, they’d be watching the Chicago Bozo on cable without realizing they had their own Bozo here in Grand Rapids.
