Emmett
Some would say we had it all. Others not so much. I didn't get to see all the New York sports teams in color in 1969 when the Knicks, Jets, and the Mets all won championships. We didn't have Apple music, but I did get my first Beatles album in 1965, Help. I saw the circus at the original Madison Square Garden on East 23rd and Madison. I can't imagine how much better I would have done in school if I had Google. We had some fun times. We were the children of the greatest generation, so that should count for something. If I were to add it all up, my boys of Generation Z have it much better today in many ways. But not in one way in particular. Baby boomers generally don't fear clowns. The first time someone tried to explain their "clownaphobia," I thought they were kidding me. I loved clowns at the circus, and the only thing better than the circus was a baseball game at Yankee Stadium.
When I was around four years old, I first encountered the sad-sack antics of the unkempt, downtrodden hobo called Emmett Kelly. It isn't easy groking most things at four years old but watching him trying to sweep away, with his broom, a moving spotlight was gleeful magic for me. He'd try and step out of the spotlight, and it would move back under him. He'd try and sweep the spotlight down to just a flashlight size, but then it would get entangled with his leg, and he'd try and shake it off. Eventually, he'd swept the spotlight under the rug, and even at four, I'm pretty sure I got the joke. This was great stuff, even for a four-year-old.
I didn't know who this clown, Emmett Kelly, was, but my mom made a great deal over a picture someone captured of Emmett Kelly and me. She thought he was a big deal, so I guess he was. Having grown up in Brooklyn, my mother was a huge Dodgers fan. She probably was mainly interested in Kelly because his "Weary Willie" character inspired the 1930's "Gotta Love Dem Bums" cartoon. You could say Emmet Kelly was my first celebrity encounter.
So in 1982, when a clown doll comes to life and tries to pull people under a bed in the movie Poltergeist, I just thought of it as just another bad guy—sort of like the Joker in the 1960's Batman series. The Joker wasn't scary. Let me rephrase that, Cesar Romero wasn't frightening, Heath Ledger maybe so. The clown in Poltergeist wasn't a clown; a real clown was like the lovable Ronald McDonald, the Hamburger-Happy Clown. Clownaphobia definitely couldn't be a real thing. In the 1988 comedy horror film "Killer Klowns from Outer Space," the title should have been evident to everyone that this was a joke gone too far. I guess not; in 1990, Stephen King's "It" miniseries was quite freaky, but again there are clowns, and there are "clowns."
Unfortunately, the poor millennials and generation Z didn't see it that way. In the 1990s and 2000s, the hits kept coming. There were clown serial killer movies and even cross-over horrors with evil clowns and zombies in 2009's Zombieland. Don't get me wrong, I capital "L" love horror movies, but I have never associated these evil clowns with the likes of my beloved Emmet Kelly.
In the 1990s, coulrophobia started showing up as an actual medically defined phobic disorder. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) does not recognize coulrophobia under its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). However, actual psychotherapy strategies started to appear in medical journals. Coulrophobics are advised to stay away from clown parties, billboards, advertisements, and clown movies after 1982. Some fast-food restaurants have clowns lurking in the shadows, so please be advised. Coulrophobic's should never go to a circus and under no circumstances ever be allowed out on Holloween. Symptoms of coulrophobia may include fast breathing and increased heart rate, profuse sweating, nausea, trembling, or shaking.
All joking aside, there is a sad part of Americana lost in all of this evil clown madness. Emmet Kelly played himself in the original Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. The screenplay was written by the "Ten Commandments" writer Fredric Frank. If that's not enough American for you, Fredric Frank wrote the first episode of the TV show Hazel.
Emmet Kelly was the original carney. He worked for carnivals and circuses as a laborer and eventually trained as a trapeze artist. He and his wife performed a trapeze act together in 1923. He later took on the role of the clown. In the Great Depression, Kelly's sad clown character became popular because he connected with the poor and disenfranchised people who struggled during that difficult time. He played a sad-faced, silent hobo clown called "Weary Willy," the perpetual underdog who never gave up.
There's another reason for my affection for Emmett Kelly. My dad died in my late teens, and I never really knew him very well. A few years back, an older cousin told me that my father was a hobo during the 1930s. When I was younger, he said that he had visited every state in the US but never really talked about how. According to my cousin, my dad traveled for free by freight train. The number of hoboes increased significantly during the Great Depression-era of the 1930s. A syllabic abbreviation of "homeward bound" or the railroad greeting, "Ho, beau!" may have given the term hobo its origin in Bill Bryson's book "Made in America." My father, being a hobo, puts him in line with other notable American hobo's, including the fighter Jack Dempsy, novelist Jack London, and "This Land is Your Land," song author Woody Guthrie. You can't get more apple pie than Charlie Chaplin's characters in "The Tramp." Whenever I hear Glen Cambell's "Gentle on My Mind," it conjures up the same feelings I get when I read Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."
It's knowing that your door is always open
And your path is free to walk
That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag
Rolled up and stashed behind your couch
And it's knowing I'm not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that are dried upon some line
That keeps you in the backroads
By the rivers of my memory
That keeps you ever gentle on my mind
One of my all-time favorite movies is the 1941 Sullivan's Travels. Sulivan is a fictional Hollywood comedy director who is tired of making comedies and wants his next movie to be a profound exploration of the plight of the marginalized. He sets out to live as a hobo to gain life experience for his next film. In a series of unfortunate events, including someone stealing his shoes, he winds up in a prison work camp doing hard labor. A rare treat for the prisoners, he attends a showing of Walt Disney's 1934 Playful Pluto cartoon in the work camp and is surprised to find himself laughing along with the other prisoners. When he realizes that making people laugh during the worst of times isn't such a bad thing, he eventually finds his way back home and continues to make comedies. The title Sullivan's Travels refers to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, about a journey of self-discovery. The best line in the movie comes at the end, when Sullivan says, "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan." The Coen Brothers pay tribute to Sullivans Travels in their 2000 film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
Probably the most famous hobo in recent times in Alexander Supertramp (aka Chris McCandless) as the main character in Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild." McCandless starved to death in the wilderness of Alaska in the summer of 1992. They say the best days on the Modern Family set were when Eric Stonestreet, Cam Tucker, played his beloved Fisbo clown. When Stonestreet was 11 years old, he performed at birthday parties as a clown. Like Kelly, Stonestreet, a Kansas native, said he wanted to be a clown in the circus when he grew up.
In the 1940s, Emmet Kelly worked for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. Kelly heroically saved countless women and children when the circus tent caught fire in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1944. Ralph Emerson immortalized Kelly's actions that day with a photograph of him running toward the burning tent while dressed as a clown holding a bucket of water.
The Hartford Circus Fire
Captured by Ralph Emerson
Having remarried again in 1955, Kelly probably decided it was time to retire when he left Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus in 1956. In 1963, I saw him perform in New York. Kelly worked as a clown until he died of a heart attack on March 28, 1979, at his home in Sarasota, Florida.
