The Bozo Show

History

The first version of the show on WGN-TV was a live, half-hour program called Bozo, which aired weekdays at noon starting June 20, 1960. It featured Bob Bell, a character actor and staff announcer, as the title clown, performing comedy bits between cartoons. This run lasted six and a half months. After a brief pause while WGN-TV moved from Tribune Tower to a new studio on Chicago’s northwest side, the show returned in an expanded one-hour format as Bozo’s Circus, premiering at noon on September 11, 1961. The live broadcast included Bell as Bozo (though he did not appear on the first episode), host Ned Locke as “Ringmaster Ned,” a 13-piece orchestra, comedy sketches, circus acts, cartoons, games, and prizes, all performed before a studio audience of over 200 people. In the early months, an English acrobatic clown named “Wimpey,” played by Bertram William Hiles, brought legitimate circus experience and performed comedy sketches opposite Bell’s Bozo. Hiles made periodic guest appearances into the mid-1960s.

Don Sandburg joined the show in October 1961 as producer and main sketch writer, also appearing as the mute clown “Sandy the Tramp,” a character partly inspired by Harpo Marx. By November 1961, actor Ray Rayner joined the cast as “Oliver O. Oliver,” a country bumpkin from Puff Bluff, Kentucky. Rayner was already hosting WGN-TV’s Dick Tracy Show, which premiered the same day as Bozo’s Circus, and later took over Breakfast with Bugs Bunny from Dick Coughlan, renaming it Ray Rayner and His Friends. The WGN Orchestra, led by musical director Bob Trendler, was called the “Big Top Band.”