The Best Medicine : Bozo the Clown Offers a Load of Joy to Hospitalized Children

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer will certainly have no problem landing. There’s a helicopter pad on the roof.

Still, this is the toughest time of the year for a child to be in the hospital. Just ask LaTasha Harris.

“Mom, when are we going home?” the 6-year-old pleaded the other day from her sixth-floor bed at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles. “I want to go home.”

Just then, into her room burst a jolly fellow wearing a red Santa hat and carrying a bag of gifts.

St. Nick? Nope. “It’s your old pal Bozo!” shouted the man, a huge grin painted on his face.

LaTasha’s eyes got big as Bozo the Clown--the real one--knelt by her bed. He reached into his bag, pulled out a giant clown nose and attached it to her face.

“Oops, I have the nostrils upside down! Can you breathe?” Bozo asked with a chuckle.

Hospitals try to send as many children home as possible at Christmas--”even if it’s just for the night,” said Childrens Hospital spokesman Steve Rutledge. But 175 youngsters may be too weak to leave their Sunset Boulevard sickbeds Friday.

So hospital workers try their best to cheer up the tiny patients with visits from Santa Claus and others, nurse Denise Sherwood explained as Bozo marched into the surgery ward. He was walking slowly as he helped an 8-year-old push her rolling IV stand through the hallway.

“Happier kids heal better, eat better and recover faster,” Sherwood said.

Bozo popped into room after room. “It makes my heart as big as my shoes,” he said, laughing and slapping his red, yard-long soles against the floor. “I wish I could do this every day! Of course, I can. I’m Bozo!”

Back in LaTasha’s room, she talked excitedly of telling her sisters and brother back home in Lubbock, Tex., about her big day: Not the day that Los Angeles surgeons “harvested” bone marrow from her lower back for use in future treatments in her two-year fight against cancer. But the day she met Bozo.

“It really lifted her spirits,” said her father, Freddie Harris. “It lifted mine, too. I’ve gone through so much depression.”

Down the hospital corridor, giggles came from another room.

“Just remember,” said a familiar, cheerful voice. “As Bozo always says: ‘Keep laughing!’ ”