Healthy Dose of Gumdrops Sure Cure for the Blues

I was feeling kinda down, so I went to see Gumdrops the Clown. He lives in a house on Swallow Lane in Garden Grove. One time when he went to visit his dying mother in the hospital he noticed that visitors in the intensive care unit seemed depressed. He asked them if they wanted to see his pride and joy, and they said OK. Gumdrops pulled out a picture showing a bottle of Pride furniture polish and Joy detergent.

Everybody I know either wants a new job or a new spouse or a new direction in life. Gumdrops doesn’t have any of those problems. He’s been married for 32 years, has a job he loves and, at 55, has never had a midlife crisis.

I asked Gumdrops to start at the beginning. He said he was a magician in Montana when he and his wife moved to Long Beach. He answered an ad for a clown to do birthday parties. He went to a guy’s house to audition, did a few tricks and got the gig.

“I went to work for him as a cowboy, Marshal Joe the Comedy Cowboy,” Gumdrops said. “I wanted to be a clown but he was Jingles the Jester and I got the feeling he didn’t want another clown around because he avoided the subject every time I mentioned it. Then I met Orbit Orby at a big country club deal and he said he knew a woman, Princess Whitefeather, and that she was looking for a clown. She put me to work as a clown.”

Through trial and error, he developed his signature costume: yellow wig, red bow tie, blue suit, little circles on the cheeks. His costume had little round dots on it, and a 6-year-old girl who used to visit Princess Whitefeather said they looked like gumdrops. “I said, ‘Hey, that’s a good name, I’ll use that. I always liked the name Gumdrops, and I’ve never run across another Gumdrops. I’ve come across a Jellybeans, but not another Gumdrops.”

I asked if he were the kind of clown who’s crying on the inside. “I’m so happy at this, I wouldn’t want to do anything else. I love it, it’s rewarding. People say they hate their jobs. I can’t say that ever. Even when my dad was dying, I was depressed between shows, but when I got into the shows, the Gumdrops came out in me.”

It became obvious to me Gumdrops and I don’t share similar traits. I wanted to find out just how dissimilar we are.

Do you like people? I asked.

“No man walks this road alone,” he said. “That’s my feeling as far as people go. I just love people. In fact, a lot of times before I do a show, I’ll say, ‘I love my audience, I love my audience, I love my audience,’ just to convince myself that I do.”

Is there a standard clown personality?

“A clown has to be a person who’s giving. I think clowns who want the money first and do the show later are wrong. I’ve always done my shows on a money-back guarantee--if you don’t like it, don’t pay me. I’ll go on that theory as long as I live.”

Another rule, Gumdrops said, is that he won’t stiff a client even if someone comes along with a better offer. “If the President of the United States called me and said, ‘Gee, Gumdrops, we need you in Washington, D.C.,’ I’d say, ‘No, I’ve got this show already booked here. If you’d called earlier, I would have been there.’ ”

I pressed him on the dark side of clowning. Surely, I said, he must get down sometimes. “People pick me up. Clowning picks me up. Being able to make other people laugh makes me laugh. A lot of times I’ll be doing a show and I’ll laugh to myself and say, ‘Geez, this is funny. This is great.’ ”

Gumdrops and his wife, a reading specialist with the Garden Grove Unified School District, have raised more than two dozen foster children in addition to their own two children. For the most part, the kids have liked his clowning, he said, except for one son who was dismayed when playmates would come over to the house and ask to play with his dad instead of him.

I asked if he ever wished he’d taken another road in life--the road leading away from the greasepaint and fright wigs and big noses. “When I’m with all these clowns in competitions, I walk in there and it’s like I died and went to Clown Heaven,” he says. “Big shoes all over the place. People walking around, talking. It’s like you’re in a world of clowns. I think if I died, that’s where I’d like to be--in Clown Heaven with a bunch of other clowns.”

Leaving Gumdrops’ house, I had to admit: I was feeling a whole lot better. And he talked me into something else: when I die, I want to go to Clown Heaven too.