[QuadList] Quad tape of Bozo

[Dave Sieg]

Well, this does have to do with Quad....
This story by Vince Staten from Sunday's Kingsport Times News tells part of
the story...

Johnny Carson used to rail against NBC, his employer, for its
shortsightedness in the sixties and early seventies.

Every afternoon the network would record his “Tonight” show on videotape for
replay later in the evening. The shows were saved for a time until sometime
in the early seventies when an employee, intent on saving the company money
on purchasing videotape, which was expensive at the time, recorded over the
Carson library.

Carson complained that much of his best work on the show was lost.

It was. In fact much television from the early years of TV is gone.
Broadcasters reused tapes again and again.

But there is surviving tape from Kingsport’s Bozo the Clown Show, thanks to
Dave Sieg, who was just a high school kid in 1969, working part time at
WKPT-TV after school.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s got back to 1967. “D-B was brand spanking new,” remembers Dave, “and
they had a TV studio!”

  Dave was trying to negotiate his way up and down the ramps of the new D-B
when he walked past a half-open doorway. “I got a glimpse of plastic-wrapped
racks of equipment and a guy scratching his head looking at some drawings.
Not being able to resist, I stepped in and asked him what all the equipment
was for. ‘This is going to be a TV studio! Do you want to help me put it
together?’ he asked. His name was Gary Smith and that invitation undoubtedly
changed the course of my life. I had always tinkered with old radios and
electronic kits, but this was on a completely different level! I thought I
had died and gone to heaven!”

Dave, who owns the technology consulting company ZFx, credits Gary Smith
with teaching him everything he knows about video.

“We had a great time playing video production and doing live homeroom
‘broadcasts’ every morning.”

When Kingsport’s local cable company was sold to United Transmission of
Kansas City, the new owner began originating local programming on cable
channel 12, KUTI-TV. It was mostly stuff like Felix the Cat cartoons and a
live newscast, which Dave says, “consisted of a guy reading the paper aloud
weekday afternoons.” But they needed workers. “I was hired with two other
guys. We lugged one of the cameras and a 100 lb videotape recorder to the
National Guard Armory and shot ‘Wrasslin’’ every Wednesday night and then we
did the same thing every Saturday night at the old Gem Theatre, shooting the
‘Lonesome Valley Jamboree.’”

Then when WKPT-TV signed on the air August 20, 1969, Dave got a job working
there after school on, among other shows, the Bozo the Clown kids’ show.
Also working on the Bozo show was George Hilton. “George had done lighting
at the Olde West dinner theatre and so he was our set and lighting man.”

Bozo made its debut the first week in September 1969.

Bozo was played by Rusty Cury, a WKPT deejay. “Rusty had been to Larry
Harmon’s ‘Bozo School’ where he learned to apply all the makeup, wear the
costume and talk like Bozo.  He took over the women’s restroom every
afternoon getting ready.”

The show featured a live studio audience of Kingsport kids who played games
for prizes and watched cartoons. The show ran for two years but George
Hilton left before the end of the run.

“On George’s final day at work, we convinced Bozo (Rusty Curry) to drag
George out in front of the camera and dance around with him during the
musical kiddy-pan.”

Dave recorded it on a two-inch videotape and then wound the tape up on a
pencil because video reels were expensive.

He put it away and forgot about it. “Then a couple of years ago, I visited
my friend Larry Odham [CQ], who has managed to keep some of the old 2-inch
quad videotape machines working in his basement lab. We unrolled the tape
onto a reel and lo and behold, it played perfectly!”

Dave later posted the clip, which runs almost three minutes, online.

The segment features Rusty Cury as Bozo dancing around and cavorting with
Hilton.

If you were on the Bozo show, you’ll want to check out the video because the
camera pans the studio audience, some twenty or so kids who look to be six
to ten. One of them could be you.

The clip is at www.vimeo.com/3814121. I have a link on my blog,
vincestaten.blogspot.com.

Those kids are now almost fifty. Let me know if you are one of them or if
you can identify any of the kids.


- And I KNOW the QuadGroup has some Bozo stories....
-- 
Dave Sieg
www.linkedin.com/in/davesieg
www.davesieg.com
www.scanimate. <http://www.scanimate.net>com
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