[QuadList] Quad tape of Bozo

[COURYHOUSE at aol.com]

I want to  episode out of the LA market Bozo where the kid  says... cram it 
Clown!
 
Thanks,

Ed  

 
In a message dated 3/28/2011 9:06:51 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,  
dave at zfx.com writes:

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_ (http://www.vimeo.com/3814121) . I 
have a link on my blog, _vincestaten.blogspot.com_ 
(http://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_ (http://www.linkedin.com/in/davesieg) 
_www.davesieg.com_ (http://www.davesieg.com/) 
_www.scanimate._ (http://www.scanimate.net/) com




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