By Robert Medley
Managing Editor
There are those who may be old enough to remember an Oklahoma clown icon, Ho Ho the Clown, and who watched his KOCO TV shows with his sassy sidekick Pokey the Puppet, and all the slapstick and silliness on live TV of the past.
Ho Ho, Ed Birchall, and Pokey, Bill Howard, were Baby Boomer hits in Oklahoma and they were on the air until the 1980s. Birchall died in 1988, his clown funeral live on channel five.
There is a Youtube video that can be seen today of a Ho Ho show from 1978.
Not long ago, my son Sam, 6, asked me what clowns were like when I was young. I went to Youtube.
Of course, I thought of Ho Ho since I grew up in Oklahoma City. And that dream I had once when I had a fever about age 5 and thought Pokey had appeared at the foot of my bed and was trying to bite my feet. Sam has already watched Killer Klowns from Outer Space, so I didn’t tell him about that dream.
YouTube is a good source, if you haven’t owned encyclopedias in decades and may tend to go to Wikipedia instead of a reference book.
On the Youtube video, the one that shows Ho Ho talking about the “name the shark contest,” the jolly clown holds up a copy of a newspaper. Look close, and you can see it too. Ho Ho is holding the Piedmont-Surrey Gazette.
“Look Sam, there is the newspaper I work for!” Feeling like my life does have meaning, I watched the entire Youtube video. The action from decades ago wasn’t quite the same for Sam as his modern Minecraft or Youtuber stuff, and as he lost interest mine was piqued. I had to know where Ho Ho had gotten the paper, founded in 1976 in Piedmont.
The story is told by Billie Horn in the Dec. 21, 1978 edition of the Piedmont-Surrey Gazette.
Ho Ho told Horn, “I’ve wanted to be a clown since the day after I was born.” He also was quoted saying, “Every day is Christmas on the show. Not just one day in December.” Ho Ho aired on Saturday mornings in 1978.
So that explained why Ho Ho held up the Merry Christmas edition of the Piedmont-Surrey Gazette. But how did he get it? Did he subscribe?
Turns out there was a KOCO-TV cameraman named Pat Phinney. Phinney moved his family to Piedmont in 1972, back when there was not much developed west of N. MacArthur Boulevard along the Northwest Expressway. Phinney and his family have roots at Piedmont United Methodist Church.
And Phinney also worked as a Piedmont police dispatcher. He was a true moonlighter, starting an early shift at 5 a.m. and then getting off work to go work as a police dispatcher.
You can bet that Phinney saw some things, and heard some things, in a career as a news cameraman and a police dispatcher. Phinney died in January 2017. Phinney had many stories to tell.
One story was that Phinney took a copy of his hometown newspaper to work at KOCO and gave it to Ho Ho.
The comedic segments with the newspaper followed, and they featured the quick-witted puppet Pokey as Ho Ho often pretended to read stories in the paper.
Ho Ho told Horn in the Piedmont-Surrey Gazette feature the reason he showed off the Christmas edition every Saturday morning.
“Every day is Christmas on this show, not just one day in December,” Ho Ho said.
Ho Ho also had a hopper he would spin and then reach inside and find a name of a person to call. I don’t remember if it was for a prize or what, but one morning in 1971 Ho Ho was on weekday mornings and the telephone rang. Dad, Bob Medley, was not happy to get a call while trying to get kids to school, so he was a bit short with Ho Ho. He hung up on Ho Ho. That went live.
And Ho Ho did make my brother Daniel’s birthday, as Ho Ho would for hundreds and hundreds of kids a year.
So today, as I celebrate my 57th birthday, and what a better way to have Ho Ho at my birthday than to write about him. So here’s to Ho Ho, and that newspaper where I work.
Every day is a good day to remember Ho Ho.
Robert Medley is managing editor of the Piedmont-Surrey Gazette and can be reached at cancountynewsman@gmail.com.
