Our Own Hall of Fame

BOBBY CLARK

HAD A WONDERFUL TIME

Bobby Clark Never ‘Sad’ In Long Career as Clown

DAYTON DAILY NEWS   MARCH 20, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

     A pair of painted-on spectacles, an absurdly short top coat, a porkpie hat, a lighted cigar, a cane and an affectionate regard for the prattfall—those are the ingredients that Springfield’s Bobby Clark used to climb the show business ladder.

     When he died in 1960, he was mourned as one of America’s last great clowns.

     Clark came up on a route that no longer exists—minstrel shows, circus, vaudeville, burlesque.  He was born in the rectory of Springfield’s First Episcopal church where his grandfather was sexton.  (His father was a dour Pullman conductor who died when Bobby was six.)

     IN HIS boyhood he delivered papers, worked in a machine shop, sang in a boys’ choir (with all the enthusiasm he later used to render numbers like “I’m Robert the Roue from Reading, P-A” on Broadway) and brought home notes from his teacher like: “This boy is mischievous.”

     When Bobby was in the fourth grade, he met an eighth grader named Paul McCullough.  The boys became pals, took tumbling lessons at the YMCA and vowed to break into show business.

     THEY DID in 1905, leaving Springfield with a sinking fund of $30 to do an unpaid specialty act with a touring minstrel show.  Bobby was 17, Paul 21.

     After a few months, they caught on with a minor circus, added some gags to the act and within a year were show stoppers with Ringling Brothers.

     For six years they clowned under various names like the Jazzbo Brothers and Sunshine and Roses.  But their top paycheck was $100 a week for both.

     IN 1912 Clark and McCullough broke into vaudeville and were an immediate—if somewhat mysterious—hit with an act in which they tried (and failed) to hoist a chair onto a table top.

     The boys played the Keith circuit for five years, then hit burlesque where they used a clean act in a bawdy business and became internationally famous.

     In five years they were making an unheard-of $900 a week.  (Later, Clark explained he merely asked for a raise every payday because “I thought everybody did.”)

     CLARK and McCullough (by this time Bobby was the comic, McCullough “one of the best straight men who ever lived”) made their debut on Broadway in the “Music Box Revue” in 1922 and scored the first of many mainstem successes.

     After that they alternated between Broadway and Hollywood (where they made more than 70 shorts) until McCullough’s suicide in 1936 broke up the almost life-long act.

     A stunned Clark laid off for a few months and then, in the “Ziegfield Follies of 1936,” tried out his first single.

     AGAIN the squat, worried-looking little comic was a smash.

     Hit lined up after hit—“As the Girls Go,” “Mexican Hayride, “ Star and Garter,” and many revivals into which Bobby tore with small regard for tradition, but with hilarious results.

     His last appearance before his death (at 71 from a heart attack) was with the touring company of “Damn Yankees” which played Dayton in 1958.

     FOR ALL his slapstick, critics considered Clark’s comedy a running satire on human eagerness as he whizzed around the stage like a motorcycle, leering at the girls and threatening to smack them with his cane.

     Unlike most clowns, there was no sadness in him.  His message seemed to be that, despite all of mankind’s faults, it’s easy to have a wonderful time in life.  Bobby Clark did.

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