The Happy Clown

								

and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly
spoon to play with. At meal-time he would not be parted from them, and
Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the
sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived
and grew fat.
Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang
him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until
they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement
trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months,
without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she
bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy
Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a
smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did
not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed
on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the
floor.
Harriet said worriedly to her husband, "I don't know what could be the
matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!"
Richard tried to comfort her. "Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it."



       *       *       *       *       *
Steven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon
and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau
drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate
them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from
the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the
evening Happy Clown.
The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He
was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets
and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand
of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been
several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed:
the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when
he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious
laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere.
He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers
to buy, and one was entirely certain that he used them all himself.
He gave one much more than advertising, though. Some of his nightly
gems of wisdom (he called them nuggets) were really wonderful; they
made one think. A favorite nugget, which people were always writing
in and asking him to repeat, went like this: "We're all alike inside,
folks, and we ought to be all alike outside." The Happy Clown's
viewers were not children and adults, they were kiddies and folks.
After the Happy Clown went off the air the happy kiddies went to bed,
to lie for a while looking at the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie,
until, lulled by the joggler, they went gently to sleep. After that