Wowie Kazowee--She Is Bonkers for Bozo

It’s not easy being a collector. Whether it’s cowboy-themed dinnerware, G.I. Joes or Boy Scout slacks you collect, people are going to look a bit askance at you. When you obsess on obtaining stuff , friends treat you with patronizing bemusement, collectibles dealers mark up prices when they see you coming and relatives would just as soon shoot you.

And, in particular, if it’s Bozo items you collect, don’t expect to get much respect.

“One time, wearing a Bozo costume I’d made, I was driving from Anaheim to Costa Mesa to visit my sister,” said Bozo collector Edie Bonk. “And I was stopped by a Highway Patrol officer, because, he said, he’s always wanted to pull over a real Bozo. It’s scary being pulled over by the Highway Patrol. He didn’t want to ticket me for anything. He took a picture of me, and I found out later it was hung on the bulletin board at the patrol station.”

Family members laugh at her. Friends laugh at her. Strangers on the Metrolink train laugh at her Bozo pin. She has gone into shops specializing in clown items--that’s clown items , mind you--and been dissed.

“When I ask about Bozo in these clown stores I usually get laughed at. They say, ‘No, no, he’s not even a real clown! He sold out on us!’ Instead they’re really big on Emmett Kelly and Red Skelton. They just think Bozo is too commercial,” she said.

It’s difficult not to notice when you put the receiver of her Bozo phone to your ear, that, given where the mouthpiece is, you’re talking into a clown’s butt.

Respect or no, Bonk is proud of Bozo and her 200-piece collection of red-nosed, canoe-shoed memorabilia. She grew up loving Bozo, though at age 30 she isn’t sure why she feels driven to buy lunch pails and jelly jars bearing his likeness.

“I don’t know why other people feel they have to own things. And for me there’s no rhyme or reason to it. I don’t know how to explain it; I just see it and I’ve got to have it,” she said, which leads nicely into the title of the pending Fullerton Museum Center exhibit: “Gotta Have It! The Nature of Collecting.”

The exhibit, which opens Sunday, features Bonk’s Bozo collection along with the troves of 16 other county collectors--including several previous Fixations subjects--in a presentation designed to explore the relationships between those collections and their owners.

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It isn’t often that the Highway Patrol has occasion to catch Bonk in full regalia. She passes for normal most of the time. No life-size Bozo punching bags lurk in the ivy outside the condo she and her husband, Mike, share. The inside is given over to tastefully arrayed antique furniture, with nary a clown in sight except for their Bozo phone, which produces a grating laugh rather than a ring.

“That’s why it’s on my side of the bed, so if it starts laughing in the middle of the night I’m the one who has to wake up and answer it,” Bonk said.

Does it ever start to laugh at, shall we say, inopportune moments?

“Luckily we haven’t had anyone call late at night.”

She says her husband is supportive of her collecting and helps her find items, which she stores in boxes until the couple get a larger home with a room in which to display them. They collect the furniture together, as well as antique valentines, while Mike has a collection of children’s books.

They met in 1982 over trays of shrunken heads and rubber snakes while working at a Disneyland Adventureland souvenir stand. Today they both work for the Southern California Automobile Club’s Westways magazine.

Bonk became aware of Bozo while as a preschooler growing up in Garden Grove.

“By the time I was 5, I was watching Bozo a lot. It was my main staple, along with Sheriff John (she can still sing the Sheriff John birthday song). I loved Bozo. He always made me feel good. I’d sit right in front of the TV set until it was over. So my father bought me my first Bozo puppet when I was sick once. I had the chickenpox, but I was happy because I had my Bozo puppet with me. I slept with it for years, and I still have it.”

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Bozo wasn’t an escape for her, she said, because she had a happy childhood with a good home life. Garden Grove was not then the cultural bouquet it is today, and Bonk was the only Asian student in her grade school. When she saw this pointed out in a school census, “I asked my friends if they ever thought of me as being different, and they said no.”

She never got to be in the audience for Bozo’s TV show, nor did she ever meet him, though she did meet wiener rep Little Oscar once, as well as Mickey Mouse.

“My mother worked at Disneyland, and she brought me backstage this one time, right by where the characters came out of the park. And here comes Mickey Mouse, pops off his head and its a little old man with a real gravelly voice who sticks a cigar in his mouth and starts smoking away. I never looked at Mickey the same way again,” she said.

Bozo didn’t have much impact on her teen years, but once she was out of school she one day came across a small Bozo piggy bank for sale.

“I hadn’t thought about him for a while, but it all came back: the bright colors, the orange hair, the laugh, the good feelings I’d had watching him in my childhood. Once I saw the Bozo bank, something clicked inside and I wanted to start collecting,” she said.

In the 12 years since, she and her husband have found the clown at swap meets, antique shops and other locales.

“I was at a fair in Victorville once, and there was a small Bozo doll as a prize at one of those carnival skill games, which I’m really rotten at,” she said. “I didn’t want to go up and say, ‘I collect Bozos. I want that.’ So I pumped in $5, then $8.

“Finally the carnival guy looks at me and says, ‘Why are you playing this game? You’re really lousy at it.’ He asked what I was trying to win, probably thinking it would be one of the big prizes. “I told him ‘the Bozo’ and he walked over, handed it to me and said, ‘Here. Don’t tell anyone.’ It was a pity prize.”

A few Bozo items have gotten away, such as a 1950s brass Bozo clock and a Bozo phonograph, priced at $500 and $175 respectively, that she couldn’t afford when she found them. Once, she and Mike found a Bozo Buckets game (a version of the ball-toss game featured on the TV show) in an arcade in Hawaii.

“I already have a small home-game version, but this was a huge arcade one, four feet wide, five tall, eight feet long. You put money in, and try to get balls in these six buckets. When you do, Bozo lights up,” she said, with an odd gleam in her eye.

She wasn’t especially daunted by the $1,100 selling price. “But can you imagine having to ship it from Hawaii? And there’s no room in our home. The car would have to go outside, and maybe Mike too.”

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She’s yet to meet another Bozo collector, though she’s heard there are some out there. There is no support group for Bozoholics, no fan magazine, no price list or compendium of the Bozo items extant in the world. She sometimes has gone a year without finding anything, and she gets depressed.

There are advantages to being on your own, though. The prize of her collection is a 1940s Bozo rag doll. She bought it from a dealer who had been asking $150 for it. “It took me nearly two years to acquire this, because I waited him out. He finally came down to a reasonable price, around $50. I didn’t worry about anybody else buying it, because I don’t know who else would want to,” Bonk said.

Without books to turn to, she’s had to do her own Bozo research, and she has scrapbooks filled with yellowed clippings from sources such as a 1949 issues of Radio and Television Life magazine.

Much of Bozo’s history is hazy, Bonk said. As far as she can tell Bozo was created in pre-television times by Capitol Records to be the figurehead of its line of children’s records. They hired circus clown Pinto Colvig (who also was the voice of Goofy in the Disney cartoons) to play Bozo. The Bozo most Southern Californians are familiar with, though, Larry Harmon, has claimed he originated the character, which was then appropriated by Capitol.

In any event, it was Harmon who bought the rights from Capitol and in the ‘60s built Bozo into a franchised empire, which still continues in some U.S. cities. The most popular is in Chicago, and Bonk has often watched the current show on cable superstation WGN when she rises at 5 a.m.

Among the little-known Bozo facts she can share is that Bozo was once a shill for McDonald’s, before the fledgling chain realized it could save bucks by creating its own clown. TV personality Willard Scott was once a Bozo and was hired away by McDonald’s to be its first Ronald.

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One of the prevailing urban myths among ‘60s Southern California youth was that, on one televised Bozo show, things got out of hand. A child playing Bozo Buckets reputedly accompanied a missed shot with a choice swear word. To which Bozo replied, “That’s a Bozo No-no.” To which the child then reportedly responded, “Aw, cram it, Clownie!”

It seems everyone “knows someone” who saw this transpire, though no one, it seems, actually saw it. Bonk, too, grew up with that story but has been unable to substantiate it.

She has a custom license plate that reads “KAZOWEE,” which combined with its frame, completes the message “Wowie KAZOWEE, I’m BONKers for Bozo.”

She didn’t want the plate itself to say BOZO, since she doesn’t want other motorists pegging her or Mike as Bozos. It’s tough enough, she says, being a Bonk--Mike’s name, which she took in marriage.

“Most people think it’s a Chinese name. It’s Polish. I get lots of letters where they must think they have the spelling wrong, so instead we get Bank, Bink. I once got one that read Boink.

“Someone told me that, in England, bonk means to have sex. Mike thinks its a great name, but, after 10 years, I find it hard to live with,” she said.

She doesn’t have any reservations about sharing her Bozo affinity with the world in the museum exhibit, though. It is being displayed as a Bozo bedroom, revolving around a Bozo bedspread.

“I’m proud of my collection,” she said. “I’ve never seen a collection of stuff like this. I want to share the fun that Bozo is. To me he represents a morality, because he was always doing good deeds, and a time when you could be silly and fun, as opposed to nowadays, when everything is so serious.”