Friends and family buried Russell Scott on Tuesday and remembered who watched his show for decades.
Those arriving at the funeral, held at the Scottish Rite Center in Denver, were greeted with plastic buckets filled with red, sponge clown noses and were asked to wear them periodically throughout the service.
Emmanuel Luna, 24, wore the nose as he left the service. “I was on his show when I was a child,” he said. “I have a photo with him. It means a lot. And my mother was on the show when she was a child. I felt like he gave a lot of joy to everybody. We will always have fond memories of Blinky.”
Blinky’s trademark plaid jacket, bowler hat and white gloves were on display near the flag-draped coffin for the U.S. Army Air Corps veteran.
Scott was on the air for 40 years, greeting children each day with a “Good morning/Glad to see you!” song and regaling them with safety tips between the cartoons and slapstick gags that marked “Blinky’s Fun Club” show. He did more than 10,000 shows, hosting between 50 and 100 children at each one.
“Some of you knew Russell Scott, some of you knew Blinky,” Scott’s son-in-law, Steve Ballas, told mourners. But the two were the same, inseparable pieces of one personality, he added. “This is a celebration of a great showman — please laugh and cry and celebrate a great life.”
Shannon Schrum,a ventriloquist who designs puppets and opens shows for country-and-Western performers in Nashville, credited Scott with inspiring him to enter show business.
“We loved him so much that when the cartoons came on, we couldn’t wait until Blinky came back,” he said. “He manufactured a million smiles a day.”
Scott died Aug. 27 at age 91. His career as a clown grew from sketches he performed for children who came to see an elaborate miniature circus at his home.
His boss at a Sears store in Colorado Springs heard about the circus and asked him to display it in the appliance department, where he worked. During that period, Scott developed a clown he called Sears-O, the prototype for Blinky.
His television career began in 1958, when Blinky aired on KKTV in Colorado Springs. In 1966 he moved to Denver’s KWGN-TV, where he hosted “Blinky’s Fun Club” until 1998. Children would celebrate their birthdays on the show, with Blinky singing “Happy Birf-Day to You.”
