Henry Maar - Joseph Maar's Account

Joseph Maar's Account

Joseph Maar is the three time Emmy Award Winning Coordinating Director formerly with ESPN who worked on several shows including "Sports Center", "Sports Century", "Pardon the Interruption", "Around the Horn" and many other shows. He is also a client of some of the largest ballooning stores in the country. His story of his father has been picked up by several sources as the story of the origins of Balloon Twisting.

According to Joseph Maar, his father had pleurisy as a child and spent several years at a TB Sanitorium in Milwaukee. To develop his lungs, the facility had Henry blow up balloons. In the 1930s Henry became a vaudeville magician. While preparing for a show in 1938 or 1939, Joseph writes, "he came back to the car to get the rest of his magic tricks only to find the vehicle had been broken into and everything was gone." With his magic tricks stolen, Maar went on stage and performed a show consisting primarily of balloon twisting. "Afterward, the agents went nuts and told him to forget the magic and to start doing the balloons. That 'everyone's doing regular magic tricks but no one is doing the balloon tricks.'"

Henry spent the next ten years performing under the stage name of "Johnny Ford" and entertaining GI's with the USO. After World War II an agent offered Maar twice his rate to wear a clown suit while performing his act. Joseph Maar states "that was the advent of a clown doing balloons." From the late 50s to mid-70s, Joseph and a 1968 article from the Waukegan Sun-Times cites that his father was a regular on "Bozo's Circus" and other children's shows. Two of these episodes reside with BalloonHQ and in IMDb he is listed in the credits of the March 16, 1977 episode of "Bozo's Circus."

Joseph Maar also credits his father with inventing 'face painting.' According to Joseph, his father would sometimes have trouble with his makeup during long summertime events. To cover his own need to touch up his clown make up, he would invite kids up on stage where Henry Maar would "make them up" like a clown.