Television

LOS ANGELES – Larry Harmon, who turned the character Bozo the Clown into a show-business staple who delighted children for more than a half-century, died Thursday of congestive heart failure. He was 83.

FILE 1996/The Associated Press

Larry Harmon and a man dressed as Bozo the Clown celebrate the character's 50th birthday.

His publicist, Jerry Digney, told The Associated Press that Mr. Harmon died at his home.

Although not the original Bozo, Mr. Harmon portrayed the popular clown in countless appearances and, as an entrepreneur, he licensed the character to others, particularly dozens of television stations around the country. The stations in turn hired actors to be their local Bozos.

"You might say, in a way, I was cloning BTC [Bozo the Clown] before anybody else out there got around to cloning DNA," Mr. Harmon told the AP in a 1996 interview.

"Bozo is a combination of the wonderful wisdom of the adult and the childlike ways in all of us," he said.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Mr. Harmon became interested in theater while studying at the University of Southern California.

Pinto Colvig, who also provided the voice for Walt Disney's Goofy, was the first Bozo the Clown, a character created by writer-producer Alan W. Livingston for a series of children's records in 1946. Mr. Livingston said he came up with the name Bozo after polling several people at Capitol Records.

Mr. Harmon would later meet his alter ego while answering a casting call to make personal appearances as a clown to promote the records.

He got that job and eventually bought the rights to Bozo. Along the way, he embellished Bozo's distinctive look: the orange-tufted hair, the bulbous nose, the outlandish red, white and blue costume.

"I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this planet, [people] would never be able to forget those footprints," he said.

Susan Harmon, his wife of 29 years, said Mr. Harmon was the perfect fit for Bozo.

"He was the most optimistic man I ever met. He always saw a bright side; he always had something good to say about everybody. He was the love of my life," she said Thursday.

The business – combining animation, licensing of the character and personal appearances – made millions, as Mr. Harmon trained more than 200 Bozos over the years to represent him in local markets.

"I'm looking for that sparkle in the eyes, that emotion, feeling, directness, warmth. That is so important," he said of his criteria for becoming a Bozo.

The Chicago version of Bozo ran on that city's WGN-TV for 40 years and was seen in many other cities after cable television transformed WGN into a superstation.

Bozo – portrayed in Chicago for many years by Bob Bell – was so popular that the waiting list for tickets to a TV show eventually stretched to a decade, prompting the station to stop taking reservations for 10 years. On the day in 1990 when WGN started taking reservations again, it took just five hours to book the show for five more years. The phone company reported more than 27 million phone-call attempts had been made.

By the time the show bowed out in Chicago, in 2001, it was the last locally produced version. Mr. Harmon said at the time that he hoped to develop a new cable or network show, as well as a Bozo feature film.

Besides his wife, Mr. Harmon is survived by his son, Jeff Harmon, and daughters Lori Harmon, Marci Breth-Carabet and Leslie Breth.

Associated Press writers Polly Anderson in New York and Robert Jablon in Los Angeles contributed to this story.