Blinky the Clown can still tell a joke, but his working days came to an end Wednesday when movers began packing the contents of his crowded antique shop into a truck.
Blinky, a.k.a. Russell Scott, is known to thousands of Denver residents as the host of the children’s show “Blinky’s Fun Club,” which ran on KWGN-Channel 2 from 1965 until the show’s cancellation in 1998.
“He is a really sweet old man. My dad used to watch him,” said Amanda Broce, 18, who lives in the neighborhood and stopped by the shop on Wednesday to say goodbye.
Scott has been a fixture on South Broadway, selling antiques from Blinky’s Antiques and Collectibles for 22 years.
Sitting in front of his shop, an Army campaign hat perched on his head and a deep, rattling cough occasionally shaking his frame, Scott watched movers carry an assortment of old items from his shop.
“Each piece gives me a memory,” he said.
When Scott looks back on his days in the limelight, he sees a man doing what he was meant to do. As a boy, he loved circus clowns.
“Something just told me that that is what I want to do.”
So when he got older, he learned to apply makeup and craft a bulbous red rubber nose and began performing. He took the name Blinky, and one day after a show, a man asked if he was interested in being on television.
He refused until the television station sweetened its offer. For the next five years, Blinky was must-see entertainment for children in the Colorado Springs area, where he worked for KKTV-Channel 11.
In 1965, he went to work in Denver.
“We had no script. When he was doing the show, he would ad lib. Very rarely did we rehearse anything,” said Jim Nasi, 62, who directed “Blinky’s Fun Club” for 12 years.
The character whom shoppers found in the densely packed antique shop wasn’t so different from the Blinky that many of them remembered watching as kids, Nasi said.
“He was Blinky the Clown before he got to TV. I always thought that he was more Blinky than himself.
“At the shop, he always wore hats just the way Blinky did, and he had a picture of himself on the wall. He really appreciated people coming in and saying, ‘I was on your show in 1964.’ It gave him a sense of accomplishment,” Nasi said.
Scott plans to continue decorating the birdhouses that are sold at Steve’s Snappin’ Dogs, the East Colfax Avenue eatery owned by his son-in-law Steve Ballas, and the Breakfast Queen on South Broadway in Englewood.
The antiques from his store will be auctioned at Corbett’s Auction House, 4921 S. Santa Fe Drive, on Nov. 23.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
