Generally speaking, it’s not ghosts that make Halloween scary for Chicago schoolkids–it’s bombers, kids who lie in wait with eggs and shaving cream for younger, weaker prey. When I was growing up, it was whispered that some bombers had filled Super Soakers with a potion of Nair: if you got shot in the head, that was it–you were bald.
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But the Homey we feared was a man dressed as a clown who’d supposedly been roaming the neighborhood and luring children into his white van–or maybe just snatching them and throwing them inside. No one at Murphy was too sure about the details.
“I remember the kids talking about it–somebody going around dressed up like Homey the Clown,” says David Allison, 25, a friend who was also in the fifth grade at Murphy that year. “I want to say that he was a rapist or something.”
Homey didn’t leave many traces in the media. The few clips I could find report sightings of a stubbornly mobile clown and the police force’s increasing exasperation. On October 9, 1991, WFLD TV ran a 30-second news spot saying that police were treating Homey the Clown as an urban legend. Two days later the Trib ran an article headlined “Police taking clown sightings seriously.” On the same day the Defender quoted a south-sider who insisted she’d seen Homey. On October 16 Oak Park’s Wednesday Journal ran the headline “Police dismiss youth sighting of deviant clown as unfounded.”
Cleo the Clown is less grave, but he agrees that the Homey era was a hard time for people in his line of work. “I do remember kind of a rise, especially in black and Latino neighborhoods, of backlash or negative response,” he says. “It was discrimination against clowns in general.” People crossed the street when they saw him coming and called him names, including “Homey.”
