Word: wettach
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Carl Adrian Wettach, 79, tragicomic, Swiss-born circus clown known as "Crock," who elevated pantomime to an art by playing a tiny fiddle with cotton gloves, moving a piano to a stool rather than stool to piano, shrugged off the world's perplexities with his famed exclamations, "Pourquoi?" (why?) and "Sans blague?" (no kidding?); of a heart attack; in Imperia, Italy...
...audience of 3,000 found it hard to believe that The Great Grock would ever give up the limelight and the sawdust, but the fact was that at 74, Europe's greatest clown was tired. As Adrian Wettach, the son of a Swiss watchmaker, he ran away from home at 14 to try his luck in greasepaint. For 60 years he played in circuses and music halls across the length and breadth of Europe and England. On a continent where clowns are universally rated as the top act in any circus, Grock was acclaimed as the greatest of them...