Town Clown recognizes essential workers with plaque

MT. PLEASANT — The Mt. Pleasant Town Clown, Chad Fountain, has bought and dedicated a plaque to all of the essential workers in Mt. Pleasant that have kept the town running during a pandemic.

With funds from donations to the “clown fund” by local residents and local businesses Fountain decided he wanted to dedicate all of those who have served Henry County even through the pandemic.

Fountain decided to dedicate the plaque to essential workers because he believes that they are people that history should remember.

“Two hundred years from now I want everyone to remember 2020 and how the essential workers sacrificed and put themselves in harm’s way everyday to help with [the pandemic],” Fountain said.

Not only are they now heroes in today’s world, Fountain’s mother runs an assisted living facility in town. At 70 years old she was on the front lines of the pandemic’s most vulnerable population.

“I wanted to do something to honor everybody’s sacrifice because up until 2020 no body had thought about essential workers and what they mean to the community,” Fountain said.

This Saturday at 2 p.m. there will be a dedication ceremony for the plaque on the square in Mt. Pleasant. The ceremony will include an introductory speech by Fountain, a lunch provided by Hy-Vee and food donations from local residents, a free raffle with prizes donated by local businesses, and a silent auction to raise money for a scholarship fund in the Fountain family name to go to a deserving student life.

Fountain started all of this back in March 2020 when he noticed that people were feeling down after the pandemic began ravishing and destroying the economy and people’s lives.

So to help put a smile on people’s faces Fountain decided that he would dress up in an old clown wig, and clown nose that he had lying around.

Then after getting lots of smiles and love from customer’s, Fountain decided to do it every weekend and added some clown makeup to go with it.

“When the shutdown happened everybody’s attitude’s got awful and for all we knew it was the end of the world. So as a goof I threw on the old clown outfit to try and get one person to smile. I just wanted one person to smile that day because everybody had been in such bad moods for weeks,” Fountain said.

Then he started to get donations and support from the community, and he wanted to do something good with the money. He remembered all of the struggles and sacrifices essential workers like himself and his mother had to go through during the pandemic.

“ I just wanted to give back to the community that has shown us so much support and love for all of the goofy stuff I do because they could have easily rejected me,” Fountain said.