The News Clown

I married in 1981, after having been blacklisted from Ringling Brothers for my fight with Michu the World’s Smallest Man. After I attended Brown Institute of Broadcasting and obtained my FCC 3rd Class Engineer’s License, we settled down in the little town of Bottineau, amidst the pines and ponds of the Turtle Mountains in North Dakota. I did the news for KBTO Radio, and we bought our first house. When I dug up a garden in the backyard that spring I found half a dozen arrowheads. I became an expert bullhead fisherman. After I pulled their skins off with a pair of pliers and filleted them, Amy would fry them in butter and serve them with boiled new red potatoes and baked squash.

I was given carte blanche with the news department, as long as I delivered ten minutes of news at 6 am, noon, and 5pm. It wasn’t long before I started sprinkling my newscasts with non sequiturs and limericks.

“The broadest broadcasting in North Dakota” is how I pretentiously opened each newscast. I have no idea what that meant but the station manager liked it; he put the phrase up on a billboard on Highway 5 going east out of town.

When the city council debated adding a second traffic light on Main Street, I editorialized on-air:

We only need one traffic light.

There’s no need to get in a fight.

If driver’s want speed

Why should we impede

Their right to take split-second flight?

And when Grace Lutheran Brethren Church held their annual lutefisk dinner at Christmas, I did a live broadcast from their basement kitchen/social hall, asking participants such burning questions as:  “How can you eat that stuff?”

The station’s news/weather/sports department was housed in a mobile trailer set in a huge field of sunflowers. In the spring and summer there were days when we had to suspend newscasts and sportscasts until the large noisy tractors were done planting and ploughing. We just played country western songs. There was no place to put the large rattling AP machine, spewing out reams of yellow paper, except in the bathroom. I remember the triple bell alert going off on it when President Reagan was shot. I was shaving, and rushed into the studio with suds still on my face to break in with the shocking bulletin.

I was nostalgic for Ringling Brothers, so sometimes I would do my newscasts in full clown regalia, ending with a brief tune on my musical saw. Of course, being radio, no one but the staff could see my outrageous getup. But gradually word spread about the strange goings-on up at KBTO and we started to get crowds coming in to watch my newscasts on days when I was in makeup. The station manager put a popcorn machine in the lobby of the trailer.

Pretty soon I was doing all my broadcasts in clown makeup. The local newspaper, the Bottineau Courant, a venomous competitor with us for advertising dollars, actually ran a photographic essay on my bigtop broadcasts, mentioning that I handed out balloon animals to any child who came to see me. Several other newspapers in the area reprinted the story, and I was soon overwhelmed with grasping tykes and their parents.They even barged right into the studio during my broadcasts, interrupting me to demand a pink poodle dog or an elephant. When the local Dairy Queen reopened for business after adding indoor seating, I was naturally asked to cut the ribbon and throw a pie in the mayor’s face. When nearby Antler held a fundraiser for their Opera House, originally built along the lines of a National Guard Armory in 1905 during a railroad boom, they asked me to be the main attraction.

Continuing my annus mirabilis, our first child was born. We named her Madelaine. And my very first article appeared in print, in an LDS version of MAD Magazine called SunStone. It was called “Clinical Notes on the RM” and it detailed the pitfalls returning missionaries experienced when they tried to get married.  Even the Brussel sprouts in my garden, which the neighbors assured me would never prosper because we didn’t have the right kind of soil, outdid themselves in fecundity.  

I even learned how to drive. Up until then I had never been interested in driving. Why bother, when the circus train whisked me from city to city in comfort and convenience? I informed Amy that she would be lucky enough to be my instructor. She had gotten her bachelor’s degree in Education at BYU, and began teaching me with relish. Her enthusiasm quickly disappeared when I insisted on running down garbage cans and nicking telephone poles in astonishing numbers. By the time I was ready to take my driver’s test she was plucking grey strands out of her brunette hair.

That was my life without Ringling: A family. A house. A new career that didn’t require me to whip up soap suds every day.  Perhaps the blacklisting had been a blessing in disguise? But no, performing for a few dozen potato farmers at a time and announcing the daily pork belly prices from Chicago could not compare to the restless laughing crowds I had once cajoled in every major city in America.

God forgive me, but I was going to get back to that flamboyant and surreal world again -- no matter what it took. And, eventually, I did make it back there. And it did take everything I had.

Everything.