Edmond Life and Leisure - July 24, 2025

Krazy Daze’s colorful past

By Ray Hibbard

The Downtown Edmond Business Association will host their annual Krazy Daze Sale in historic downtown Edmond this Saturday July 26 all day long.

For the whole day. Edmond downtown merchants will offer their biggest markdowns of the year during the sidewalk sale.

You can thank the late Morris "Hoot” Gibson at the former McCalls in downtown Edmond for this big event. Sometime back in the 1960’s he was returning from a vacation and passed through a town that was having a big sale in their downtown area. The streets were packed with shoppers and he decided it might be a good idea for something like that to take place in downtown Edmond. At that point, Krazy Daze was born and spread throughout the city.

Back in the day, the merchants would dress up in silly costumes and make it a really giant celebration. Over the years, the costume participation has dwindled some but the sales are still in place. .

Being in the dunk tank isn’t the Kraziest thing I’ve done for Krazy Daze I hate to say. The first year I was working in Edmond for the Livermore family at the Sun, Publisher Ed Livermore instructed me to pump up ad sales for the annual Krazy Daze issue. It seems some of the advertisers were purchasing other forms of advertising such as radio.

That just was not allowed in the world according to Livermore.

My creative idea was to pre-purchase some radio time and include it

in the advertising package we sold to our customers. It kept them from buying radio time on their own and purchasing too much radio time. We made profit on both the ad space we sold to customers and the radio time. It only worked one year because the next year the radio stations were on to me and would not sell me the time again. They hadn’t planned on me reselling the time.

The look on Livermore’s face was priceless when I told him I had just spend a few thousand dollars of his treasure chest on radio advertising. I promised him we would sell it back to customers as part of a package and it would make even more money. Our package included signs for the windows. I don’t think he became a believer until after the numbers were totaled at the end of the month

That was a time when Krazy Daze always had a theme. That year the theme was "Edmond’s Gone Bananas.”

The sales team had me dress up in a gorilla suit and go with them on the Krazy Daze sales calls. It seemed like a good idea when we were planning the event in March of that year. Of course, it wasn’t as hot in March as it was in late June when the average temperature in Edmond was 100 plus. The gorilla suit was like an oven with all that fake fur attached to it. The advertising executives were nice enough to keep me hydrated when I would be out all afternoon making calls. I will say it did get the attention of business owners and their customers when we walked through the door. It was a fun promotion but I was much younger back then.