Clown Graduation Celebration

My Mom is Angel the Clown. You can see her with the halo, just under the Giraffe's head. Mom had got a wild hair to become a clown the spring of our bicentennial year. She enrolled in the Clown College class offered at San Diego state University, and after weeks of make-up practice, costume creations, and clown parties with her classmates, she graduated. Their Picture, taken at the Balboa Park Carousel, took up much of the front page of the now-defunct San Diego Evening Tribune, Monday, August 2, 1976 paper. Cost: 15 cents.

Other interesting items on the front page include: "Colorado Flood: Screams filled night" Flashfloods over the weekend had devastated the area. 250 people were injured, 40 people were missing, and 60 confirmed dead. And they found a 5 month old baby boy, alive, lying on a rock in the middle of the Big Thompson River. (I wonder whatever happened to lucky little baby)

Also news on the front page. Mystery Deaths: 14 Conventioneers Succumb: Swine Flu called a possibility. (Now we all know these days that it wasn't the swine flu; it was Legionaires Disease, which is a pneumonia caused by germs that live in air conditioning water reservoirs.)

Also in the news, details of the July 15th kidnapping of a bus driver and 26 children by some nut who entombed the whole bus and its passengers in a Livermore rock quarry.

Mom met some really nice people who came from all walks of life. The instuctor was Curly, Fireplug, who was a fire fighter in real life, Dr All Thumbs, who was going to be a surgeon when she got out of college. I gave her a little duck that quacked, and she kept it on her shoulder. She said it was to remind her that she wasn't a doctor yet, just a quack. Poco, the clown taught me how to juggle. Poco was a dentist in real life, and was a really nice guy.

It didn't take long before mom decided that the whole family had to take up the clown act. Soon we were walking in parades, handing out balloons at Oktoberfest, visiting people in mental hospitals, and doing birthday parties.

I discovered that kids really like clowns or really are freaked out by clowns. And I learned that its really horribly hot when you do summer entertaining in El Cajon dressed in full wig, costume, make-up and gloves.