And that was all of his patrimony.

Well it certainly takes some doing but you get your info dump on Mr. Happy for what it’s worth. It ain’t much.

The Mr. Happy Hour ran from 1970 to 1975 on local access in the Twin Ports area. From the few clips you’ve managed to dig up it was kind of like Captain Kangaroo if Bob Keeshan had never given up being Clarabell. The titular character was silent and wore a makeup pattern that looked remarkably like Sid Haig’s Captain Spaulding from the Rob Zombie movies (an interview with Zombie reveals that Spaulding was inspired by a children’s show that horrified him as a child, so that kinda makes sense). You spend 20 minutes watching clips of a banal inoffensive children’s show with unimaginative characters named Mr. Mailman and Miss Teacherlady pontificating on the necessities of saying please and thank you, and lecturing children on the importance of not biting their friends.

You then spend another ten on watching just the endings of the shows. This is where the true horror comes to life. The camera focuses in on the clown. Zooms in on his face. His painted on smile. His eerily intense dark eyes. The hitherto silent lips move and whisper the most threatening words you’ve ever heard from a children’s television character.

“I’ll see you soon.”

After the second repetition you’re pretty sure you won’t be sleeping for at least a week.

The video is a full four hours of the endings of different broadcasts. You’re actually not sure if you’re more disturbed by the clown or the fact that someone actually edited this together. It’s almost as bad as the 10 hour loop of “The Song That Never Ends” (You used that one on a job. Got paid six grand for making sure that someone was on edge during a board meeting. Piping that through his heating ducts at really low volume after he went to sleep did the trick). The show ran for five years, so that four hours is just about every single ending ever broadcast. The internet is a scary fucking place.

The Duluth News Tribune and Superior Telegram produce much more solid data. The fire that burned down the studio made the papers, as did the demise of Happy’s producer. The actual strangulation and arson were broadcast live. The studio took an entire West End block with it. The producer, one Ford Harrison (you can’t help but laugh at that) was pronounced dead on the scene. A dual state manhunt failed to recover the eloped clown, who was assumed to have fledTo Canada. And that’s all there is to it. Aside from a name. Greg Novak.

The ancients knew what they were talking about. Names have power. Using all the resources you have, you attempt to conjure with the name Greg Novak. If someone’s out to kill you or yours you want all the information that you can get on them. Sadly this particular power word is a dud. Greg Novak seems to have appeared overnight in 1969.

At this point you’re interrupted by the girls coming back with bags from what looks like every store at the mall, and are dragged away to help them unload Beth’s RAV. You take a quick glance at the time, and realize you’ll have to run if you want to catch Miller in Moose Lake.

Eliciting a promise of a fashion show when you get home, you cadge a ride from Beth and hit the road.