How about the ‘Tour de France Devil’, or the ‘Tour of California Raging Elk Man’?
(google the above terms to see them in action).
This fellow Eiler Larsen - Wikipedia was famous in the 1940s through 70s as the Laguna Beach “Greeter.” He’d stand on the main drag & wave to all the cars & pedestrians. There’s a larger-than-life statue of the guy near the spot he used to stand. My brother now lives about 2 blocks from there and we used to go to that beach often when I was a kid in the early 60s. We always saw the Greeter & said “Hi.”
This fellow Beatle Bob - Wikipedia is known throughout St. Louis as “Beatle Bob”. He’s an odd character who attends live music events and dances wildly to some tune in he head which doesn’t really match what the rest of us are hearing. He always dressed neatly, generally with a tie and wore a shaggy mop of black hair *a la *the early Beatles. Many folks believed the mop was a wig. Bob was doing his thing for many years in the 1990s & 2000s. He may still be doing it for all I know. I pretty well abandoned the St. Louis late night live music scene around 2005.
I’ve talked with him a bit and he seems driven / obsessed, but not loony.
There was another local character in St. Louis who burned very brightly for a couple of years back around 1998 then sadly moved away. He in fact lived for awhile in the same high rise I did. I saw him most mornings doing his thing.
He was a way-WAAY-over-the-top gay black guy about age 30. “His thing” was to wear home-made angel or fairy costumes and march around the neighborhood or stand on street corners. This was in our gentrified / gay zone older inner city neighborhood. (CWE for locals).
He’d be out there each morning annointing all and sundry with his wand with a big glittery star on the end. He had enough costumes that they didn’t repeat for months. He styled himself the Ambassador of Mirth or some such. All pretty harmless fun. Sometimes he’d have a Drum Majorette costume (heavy on the “ette” part) and lead an imaginary marching band up & down the streets.
He slowly got weirder and began parading about in a wedding dress with long flowing train. Eventually he got miffed that local businesses didn’t like him haunting their corners. The Catholic cathedral nearby also took to harrumphing in the local and alternative press about him. He was Not Amused by this.
I vaguely knew the guy who was the Ambassador’s boyfriend as he approached his eventual melt-down. He said the Ambassador’s increasing crazy eventually led to their breaking up, after which he really went off the deep end into dangerous crazy rather than mere eccentricity.
So the Ambassador took his tutus and his angel wings & his wedding dress and flounced off to IIRC Atlanta. Not sure how well he was received there.
I wrote all the above from my own experiences. It seems he’s gotten himself mentally back together & is still performing. Check it out: Baton Bob, The Ambassador of Mirth - Home He always did have *fabulous *legs.
I suppose it varies a lot depending on how big a region you consider.
A city I used to live in had a character named Pepper. Don’t remember her real name. Nice, oddball lady who was mentally ill one some interesting level. Harmless, but was known around town. I used to bump into her on the bus a lot, but when she wasn’t taking public transit one of the ways she got around was to wander up to a vehicle at a stop light, clamber in, and announce where she wanted to go. People usually took her.
Different times…
I shot an interview with Beatle Bob at the City Stages music festival in Birmingham, AL once.
When roughly was this? And how was he?
I think it was 1995. He was pretty cool from what I remember. A bit eccentric probably judging from how he was dressed and dancing, etc. He was friendly and didn’t seem to mind taking the time to talk to us.
One of the most famous examples of all was supposedly started by James Kilroy, a shipyard inspector in Massachusetts during WWII. He is generally credited with starting what would be called a meme today with his numerous inscriptions announcing ‘Kilroy was here’ with an accompanying crude doodle of a man peeking over a wall. His job was to count the number of rivets put in place by workers that were paid by the rivet. Many of the riveters liked to fudge their numbers to get more money so he started writing the phrase with the doodle with a wax pencil that wasn’t easy to remove to show that he had indeed inspected their work directly. He inspected unfinished ships so many of the marks were later spotted in impossible places during repairs or maintenance which led to a lot of speculation as to who Kilroy was and just how he could get into so many almost completely inaccessible places.
Servicemen adopted the idea as a joke themselves and spread all over the world by writing the phrase with the accompanying doodle in the most unlikely locations wherever they travelled. It became a global phenomenon in the 1940’s, lasted for decades and still exists to some degree today.
I’d argue that this is what Jeane Dixon (and her ilk though I guess she’s one of the most famous) did.
Very cool story. Thanks for sharing.
Much of what appears in The Guinness Book of Records is just someone doing something that anyone can do, but they do it more times than anyone else ever has.
I still see his name on walls along the Red Line.
We had a “Singing lady” until she was deported. She has a lovely voice and often sang on buses as well as in the city centre.