August 25 - Buzzy the Clown

Most of the other people in the circus didn't know his real name. Ted something? They called him by his stage name, Buzzy the Clown.
He hailed from Johnsonville, a small town outside of Wichita, and he joined the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus when he was 17 years old. After a couple of years of washing out the animals' carts, and feeding and washing them, he became a clown, modeling himself after Emmett Kelly. He had a perennially downcast expression; floppy, tattered clothes; and a drooping flower on his lapel. He was always the butt of the other clowns' jokes, and he was good at it.
To anyone in the audience who noticed him, he was the hobo clown, or the guy that got squirted in the eye with the gag lapel flower, or the guy that had the seat of his pants catch on fire and then ran around looking for a barrel of water to sit in to put it out. That was Buzzy.
At Ringling Brothers, clowns came and went all the time, but Buzzy was a journeyman, an institution. He was with the circus for five decades, and he never missed a performance, was never late. He was a professional. Never the star of the show, but always there if you needed him.
Nobody knew what he did between seasons. As far as anybody knew, he didn't have a family. He never mentioned a wife or kids.
He mentioned having visited New York City one time where he saw the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Radio City Music Hall.
At the beginning of every season, he was always one of the first ones back for rehearsal. All the clowns who knew him agreed they could count on him, and everyone else at the circus described him as dependable and solid, a good guy. Kind of quiet, though.
In his early days, after shows, he sometimes got together with Harvey the elephant trainer and some of the other clowns like Gus, Ward, and Fred to drink rye and talk about football. After those guys moved on to other things, he mostly kept to himself, doing crossword puzzles in his trailer and reading adventure novels he'd pick up at truck stops.
After 46 years with the circus, he decided it was time to move on. The rest of the circus threw a retirement party for him, complete with a cake from the local supermarket decorated with a frosting clown face that looked more like Bozo than Buzzy, but he didn't mind.
It was a rainy night, so everybody squeezed into the manager's trailer to eat corn dogs and drink Busch and Coors Lite. It was hot, loud, and crowded. A lot of people that Buzzy didn't remember ever talking to before asked him what he was going to do now that he was retired, and he had to lean in to hear them.
"Relax!" he would say every time and then laugh good naturedly. And then whoever it was who'd asked him would pat him on the back, wish him good luck, and then go talk to someone else. Everybody told him to keep in touch, and he said he would, but he didn't.
It was a few years later that he died in a Kansas City flophouse. They didn't find much in his room, just some old pictures from his circus days, a few used paperbacks, clothes, and a transistor radio. He was 66 years old.