Lots of people know who Bob Ross is.
Many viewers watched The Joy of Painting on PBS or came across his happy little trees
in some other way.
But Ross was intensely private and really kept his personal life hidden.
Here is what we know about him before he became famous.
We'll get this one out of the way right up front, so that you'll have some time to recover.
Bob Ross did not a natural afro.
It was actually a perm.
In truth, his hair was naturally straight.
He initially devised his now-iconic hairstyle as a cost-cutting measure.
He used to get regular crew cuts, but then he let his hair grow and got a perm so that
he would never need to pay for a haircut again.
So that decision immediately made sense from a budgetary perspective, but then Ross became
famous and his signature afro got incorporated into his logo.
Suddenly he was full of regret, reportedly lamenting that he could never go back to his
natural look.
Ultimately, though, keeping the curly hair was a smart business move.
Ross' signature hairdo is so iconic that everyone instantly knows him from his silhouette alone.
It should be noted that Bob Ross was a very private person.
In fact, he was so private that just about everything that is known about him comes from
sources other than himself.
Even the authors who wrote the book Happy Clouds, Happy Trees: The Bob Ross Phenomenon
had to include a disclaimer that they weren't entirely sure what they were talking about.
As they put it,
"If we had wanted to write an accurate biographical book on Bob Ross, that goal would be difficult
to accomplish."
Perhaps the closest thing to an official Ross biography is the documentary Bob Ross: The
Happy Painter, though it doesn't contain any particularly shocking or deeply personal revelations.
Ross once claimed that he never turned down interview requests and that he was just rarely
asked.
But another time, he admitted that he enjoyed staying hidden and that he was often, quote,
"sort of hard to find."
So hard to find, in fact, that he evidently once moved to Orlando without telling PBS
where he'd gone.
So perhaps that claim about Ross rarely being asked for interviews is more about him intentionally
not answering the phone.
Bob Ross was an animal lover, which is unsurprising given his famously soft-spoken demeanor.
In fact, it would make perfect sense if one day some archival footage were to surface
featuring him skipping through the forest, surrounded by chirping birds and baby animals.
His affection for all creatures great and happy dates all the way back to his childhood.
He even once tried to rehabilitate an injured alligator in his family's bathtub, which must've
gone over fabulously with his parents.
At one point he also had an armadillo, and other sources say he rescued birds with broken
wings and even kept an epileptic squirrel in his empty hot tub.
Ross sometimes even brought animals onto the set of The Joy of Painting, and he wasn't
shy about his fondness for feathered and furry things.
He once said,
"I guess I'm a little weird.
I like to talk to trees and animals.
That's okay though; I have more fun than most people."
"I just don't have the heart to shoot Bambi anymore once you hold one of these yeah, deer
hunting days are over."
Beyond the alligator-in-the-bathtub episode, little is known about Ross' childhood.
It is known at least that his mom was named Ollie and his dad was named Jack.
Ollie and Jack's relationship was kind of troubled, in the most confusing way possible
for their son.
Evidently they divorced, got remarried to other people, divorced again, and then got
remarried to each other again.
So Ross' childhood was probably a little bit unstable.
When he was in the ninth grade he decided to drop out of school and join his dad in
the carpentry business, which he didn't turn out to be very good at.
The decision left him without a high school diploma and also with a missing fingertip
on the index finger of his left hand, which was something he remained self-conscious about
for the rest of his life.
In fact, when he appeared on The Joy of Painting, he deliberately held his palette in such a
way that his injury was hidden from viewers.
Ross was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, and raised in Orlando.
If things had gone differently for him, he might've become famous for his paintings of
happy little hurricanes, happy little retirement homes, and happy little alligators instead
of those sweeping, mountainous landscapes he was so fond of.
So how did he end up with an interest in alpine forests and towering peaks?
Well, when he was 18, he joined the Air Force, which sent him to a military base in Fairbanks,
Alaska.
That must've been a difficult adjustment for someone used to moderate winters, but Ross
appears to have acclimated admirably.
He spent most of the next 20 years in the Land of the Midnight Sun, surrounded by natural
beauty, and that's what inspired him to become a painter.
It wasn't all happy trees and happy mountains, though.
When Ross wasn't painting, he was filing, spending most of his time in Alaska working
as an Air Force medical records technician.
He always spoke fondly of Alaska, even after he left.
He also had a sense of humor about the place and the circumstances that brought him there,
once saying,
"My favorite uncle asked me if I wanted to go there Uncle Sam.
He said if you don't go, you're going to jail.
That is how Uncle Sam asks you."
Despite his gentle reputation, Ross was known to some by the nickname "Bust 'em up Bobby."
It turns out that while he was in the Air Force he had a bit of a reputation as a person
of temper.
The Bob Ross most people know was famous for his quiet, soothing tone, so it's hard to
imagine he could've ever raise his voice.
But in one of the few interviews he gave over the course of his career, he admitted that
yelling had been a part of the job description.
He explained,
"I was the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy
who screams at you for being late to work.
The job requires you to be a mean, tough person.
And I was fed up with it.
I promised myself that if I ever got away from it, it wasn't going to be that way anymore."
Ross remained in the Air Force for twenty years and eventually reached the rank of master
sergeant.
And when he finally left the service he seems to have kept his promise to himself.
"Over and over again, I say, 'We don't make mistakes.
We have happy accidents.'
So today, let's have a happy accident and see what we can make out of it."
Ross wasn't an artist when he got to Alaska.
Most sources seem to agree that he got his start at the Anchorage U.S.O. club, where
he took an art class.
He became hooked and eagerly sought out more classes, but he disagreed with the teaching
styles of a lot of his instructors.
He told The New York Times in 1991,
"The schools I went to, the professors were mostly into abstract talking all about color
theory and composition.
They'd tell you what makes a tree, but they wouldn't tell you how to paint a tree."
Ross didn't really hide his disdain for abstract art and once even went so far as to diss Jackson
Pollock's abstract expressionism.
As he put it,
"If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is."
Everything changed when Ross learned the "wet on wet" method that he would later become
famous for.
He took one class and went crazy for it and he soon knew that was what he wanted to do.
After Ross learned to create a painting faster than most people can get ready for work in
the morning, he started to see the business potential of his hobby.
He once explained,
"I developed ways of painting extremely fast.
I used to go home at lunch and do a couple while I had my sandwich.
I'd take them back that afternoon and sell them.''
So evidently he was not just a prolific painter, he was also a sales and marketing genius.
At that point he realized that he could earn more money as an artist than he did in the
military, so off he went in pursuit of his dream.
He got in touch with an artist named Bill Alexander, who hosted two PBS programs called
The Magic of Oil Painting and The Art of Bill Alexander.
Ross studied under Alexander, then went on to teach his technique to the PBS television
audience, much to his former mentor's chagrin.
Alexander claimed that he invented wet-on-wet and accused Ross of copying him.
But those claims should be viewed quite skeptically, as wet-on-wet has been around for centuries,
almost as long as oil painting itself.
Ross had a business partner named Annette Kowalski, and he basically wooed her into
betting her future on him.
At the time just before they met, Kowalski was grieving her oldest child, who had just
been killed in a car crash.
She was reportedly so devastated that all she could do was lie on the couch and watch
TV, including Bill Alexander's painting show.
Kowalski's husband wanted to do something to get his wife off the sofa and back to life,
so he decided to sign her up for one of Alexander's in-person classes, which were 900 miles away
from the couple's home.
But Alexander was no longer teaching them.
Instead it was his protege, Bob Ross.
At first, Kowalski was disappointed, but then, she experienced what millions of PBS viewers
have experienced.
As she told NPR, she was mesmerized by Bob, who somehow lifted her up out of her depression.
"I was so mesmerized by Bob that I couldn't paint."
Kowalski became Ross' manager, and it might seem like everything was smooth sailing from
here, but they initially struggled to gain momentum.
She bought newspaper ads and booked seminars in shopping malls, but hardly anyone showed
up.
There was even an 800 number: 1-800-BOB-ROSS.
It wasn't until Ross filmed a TV commercial that things really started to happen.
The ad featured Bill Alexander handing Ross a paintbrush, as a sort of symbolic passing
of the torch.
The pair took the spot to PBS, but only because they wanted help getting it ready for the
air.
But when PBS saw it, they knew Kowalski was on to something, and they signed Ross up to
be their next on-screen art instructor.
"I just think that Bob knew how to woo people.
I said, 'Let's put it in a bottle and sell it.'"
Bob Ross paintings are really hard to come by, even though he did 403 episodes of The
Joy of Painting, which equals about 1,209 paintings, since he always did three versions
for each show.
Ross claimed he donated most of his show paintings to PBS stations to help with fundraisers.
Those pieces were auctioned off, so presumably that means one thousand or so original Bob
Ross paintings are hanging in homes and businesses around the world.
But Ross also claimed to have created roughly 30,000 paintings over the course of his lifetime,
and no one really knows what became of the rest of them.
There are also some really unique Bob Ross paintings that date to way, way back, to his
life before the fame.
While he was still living in Alaska, he used to paint gold pans and sell them for extra
cash.
These pans still turn up occasionally.
According to an NBC station in Fairbanks, two of them were acquired by a local antiques
store in 2018.
The previous owner purchased the pans in 1971 for $25 apiece.
Today they're worth about $3,500, and they were sold within one day.
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