Disturbing History - Happy Accidents

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Everyone knows the voice, the perm, and the happy little trees. Far fewer people know what happened to Bob Ross’s name after the cameras stopped rolling.In this episode, we trace the remarkable and deeply complicated story of Bob Ross, from his years as an Air Force first sergeant in Alaska, where he painted souvenir gold pans to earn extra money, to the television phenomenon that made him one of the most recognizable artists in American popular culture. Along the way, we look at the mentor who taught him the wet-on-wet technique he would eventually make famous, the relationship that fractured as Ross’s career took off, and the Virginia couple who recognized that Bob Ross could become something much larger than a television painter. At the center of the story is a corporate agreement signed in 1985. Four equal partners formed Bob Ross Inc., but a survivorship provision meant that when one partner died, ownership of that person’s shares passed to the surviving partners. What looked like a routine piece of corporate paperwork would eventually determine who controlled Bob Ross’s business, his likeness, and ultimately the commercial future of his name.Then Bob Ross got sick. Within days of his cancer diagnosis, a six-page fax arrived addressing the future of the company and the rights surrounding his name. During the final year of his life, Ross began recording telephone conversations. Five weeks before his death on July 4, 1995, he signed a trust stating that he wanted the rights to his name and likeness divided between his son, Steve, and his half-brother, Jimmie Cox.What followed was a legal battle that continued long after Bob Ross was gone.We examine the litigation that followed his death, including reimbursement claims calculated down to the dime for expenses incurred while Ross was traveling for cancer treatment, a dispute involving the children’s television project that became some of his final work, and a settlement that resulted in recorded tapes being destroyed. For years afterward, much of the conflict surrounding his estate remained largely outside public view.T hen, decades later, the fight resurfaced.Bob Ross’s son, Steve, discovered in his fifties that his father’s trust purported to leave him 49% of the rights associated with his name and likeness. That discovery eventually led to a federal courtroom in Virginia, where a judge reached a devastating conclusion: when Bob signed the trust, the intellectual property he attempted to leave behind was not actually his to give.From there, the story enters an afterlife Bob Ross could never have imagined. His television episodes became streaming marathons. His face appeared on waffle makers, lottery tickets, clothing, toys, and countless other products.A Bob Ross bobblehead entered the Smithsonian’s collection, while original paintings that had spent years stacked inside cardboard boxes became extraordinarily valuable pieces of American pop-culture history, with works eventually reaching prices above $1 million as part of efforts benefiting public television.This is not simply the story of Bob Ross the painter. It is the story of what happens when a person becomes a brand, what a famous name is actually worth, who gets to control it after its owner is gone, and how one of television’s gentlest personalities became the center of a decades-long battle over his own legacy.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

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See Draftkings.com slash sportsbook for details. Please play responsibly. Number one sports book for live betting based on available live market data. Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive.

From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian. investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us.

And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. We don't make mistakes. We just have happy accidents.

There are no limits here. Talk to a tree. Make friends with it. You can do anything you want to do. This is your world. Almost everybody in America can hear those lines in the same voice. Soft, unhurried, a little bit hoarse, coming out from under that halo of permed hair,

while a two-inch brush knocks a cloud into a wet canvas. That was 403 episodes across 31 seasons, 11 years of public television in which a man in a shambray shirt told the country over and over that nothing had gone wrong, that the mistake was actually a tree now, and that anybody watching could do this too. Last night, Danny and I watched a horror movie called The Passenger. I'm not going to spoil it.

What matters for our purposes happens in the first few minutes. The couple at the center of it are about to start van life, the whole full-time on the road thing. And the boyfriend gives the girlfriend a gift to mark the beginning of the adventure. It's a little Bob Ross bobblehead for the dashboard. The movie keeps going back to it. The bobblehead becomes a kind of character. Bob's face, Bob's hair, Bob's name, bouncing along on the dash while things go very badly for everybody in that van. And I sat there thinking about the licensing agreement behind that bobblehead.

because here's the thing that almost nobody watching that movie knows. Bob Ross died on the 4th of July 1995 at 52 years old, and by the time he died, he did not own the rights to his own name. He did not own the rights to his own face. He did not own the rights to his own voice. He had spent the last 18 months of his life while lymphoma was killing him, fighting the two business partners who had ended up with all of it, and he lost. His son sued to get it back 22 years later and lost. And every Bob Ross bobblehead, every Bob Ross Chia Pet, every Bob Ross Waffle Iron and Bob Ross Monopoly set, and Bob Ross Crocs, and Bob Ross scratch-off lottery ticket sold from 1995 until right now, this month in 2026,

has generated money that no member of Bob Ross's family has ever seen a dollar of. That isn't a rumor, and it isn't a fan theory. It sits in a federal court record in Alexandria, Virginia, and the party that walked out of that courtroom holding the rights to Bob Ross was not anyone named Ross. I want to walk through how it happened, because the how is the disturbing part. Nobody kicked in a door, and nobody has ever proven a forged signature. What happened to Bob Ross happened through a corporate bylaw, a stock transfer clause, a fax machine, and a settlement agreement signed by a grieving half-brother, 21 months after the funeral. It is one of the most efficient acts of dispossession I've ever read a court file on,

and the man had happened to spent his working life telling America there was no such thing as a mistake. Robert Norman Ross was born on the 29th of October 1942 in Daytona Beach, Florida, and grew up mostly around Orlando. His father, Jack, was a carpenter, and his mother, Ali, waited tables. There's no money in that story and no art in it either. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade and went to work with his father. Somewhere in that carpentry work, he lost part of his left index finger. He learned to hold a pallet in a way that hit it, and for 11 years of television, in front of millions of people at a distance of about 18 inches from a camera lens, almost nobody noticed. The other thing about the Orlando years that survives is the animals. As a kid, he took in

injured animals and nursed them. He kept armadillos, squirrels, snakes, and an alligator. That habit followed him his whole life, and anybody who watched the show will remember the squirrels that turn up in later seasons, riding around in his shirt pocket while he painted. At 18 years old in 1961, he enlisted in the Air Force, and he'd stay in for 20 years. His job was medical records at first. He rose to master sergeant, and he served as a first sergeant, which is a specific and unpleasant kind of job. A first sergeant is the enlisted man responsible for discipline. He's the one who tells people their bunk is wrong, their uniform is wrong,

their attitude is wrong. He's the one who scrubs the latrine detail into somebody's afternoon. Ross described it in interviews later as the job that required him to be a mean, tough person, and he said he got fed up with it and promised himself that if he ever got out from under it, he was never going to scream at anybody again. How much of that famous television voice traces back to that promise isn't something the record can settle. What's documented is that he made the promise and that he kept it on camera for 11 years without a visible crack. He was posted to Alaska, and that's where the paintings come from.

He spent the bulk of those years at Ileson Air Force Base, outside Fairbanks. He'd grown up in central Florida, which is flat and green and wet, and Alaska gave him snow and it gave him mountains. And those two things show up in his work for the rest of his life. Somebody eventually went through 381 episodes of the show and counted what was in them. Trees show up in about 91% of the paintings. Clouds in about 44%, mountains in about 39%, and mountain lakes in about 34%.

The man painted Alaska for 11 years from a studio in Indiana. He was also broke. broken the way most career enlisted men with a kid is broke. He tended bar and he waited tables and he worked a second job for most of the time he was in uniform. He started painting Alaskan scenes on the little novelty gold mining pans they sell to tourists and selling them to make extra money. His first marriage to Vivian Ridge ran from 1965 to 1977 and produced his son, Robert Stephen Ross, who everybody calls Steve.

Steve's central to everything that comes after 1995. Sometime in the mid to late 1970s, Bob Ross saw a public television program called The Magic of Oil Painting, hosted by a German immigrant who went by the name Bill Alexander. Born Wilhelm Alexander in Berlin in 1915, he came from a family with roots in East Prussia. He apprenticed as a carriage maker and painted coaches and murals. He was drafted into the Vermeck in the Second World War.

was wounded, was captured, and spent time in a prisoner of war camp, where he painted portraits of the wives of allied officers. Those officers helped him get out of Europe afterward. He made his way to North America, spent years traveling around in a Volkswagen bus with his wife, painting in shopping malls and on street corners under a banner that called him the old master painter from the Faraway Hills. In 1974, K-O-C-E, a public station in Huntington Beach, California,

put him on the air. The magic of oil painting ran from February of 1974 to May of 1982, running to about 127 episodes. What Alexander taught was a fast oil technique, in which wet paint goes into wet paint and gets blended right on the canvas instead of waiting days between layers. He called it wet on wet, and for the rest of his life he said he invented it.

But Alexander didn't invent the technique. Painting wet into wet had been around for some. centuries. Art historians trace it back through the early Netherlandish painters, and John Van Ike was doing it in the 1400s. Franz Halse and Velazquez worked with that style of painting. After collapsible paint tubes showed up in the middle of the 1800s, it became a foundation of a lot of what people think of as modern painting, from Monet to Van Gogh to John Singer-Sargent. The Italian term is a la prima, meaning at the first attempt. What Alexander did invent was real, though. And it's the thing

everybody actually copied. What he actually invented was the product. He formulated a thin liquid white undercoat he called Magic White, which keeps the canvas slick and wet so the colors will move. And he designed his own palette knife to work it. Then he broke

the whole method down into repeatable teachable brush moves that could be demonstrated in 26 minutes on a television schedule. That package of paint, tools, patter, and pacing was the invention. Bob Ross saw it and it made him furious, and he said so years later. It almost made me angry the first time I saw Alexander on TV,

that he could do in a matter of minutes what took me days to do. By 1978, Ross was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base outside Spokane, Washington. A Spokane artist named John Tham has said publicly that he was the one who introduced Ross to Bill Alexander at a workshop over in Curedaline, Idaho, about an hour from the base. Ross took the class, and then he went to work for the man. He moved into Alexander's operation, the Alexander Magic Art Supplies Company, headquartered in Salem, Oregon, and he started at the bottom of it, mixing and canning paint on the factory floor. After a few months of that, he went out on the road as one of Alexander's traveling instructors,

teaching the Alexander Method around the country under the Alexander name, selling Alexander product. He retired from the Air Force in 1981 after 20 years and painted full-time. And he was, at that point, entirely a Bill Alexander product. He said so himself, on the air, at the top of his own second season. Years ago, Bill taught me this fantastic technique, and I feel as though he gave me a precious gift. I'd like to share that gift with you. He put it in print, too, in his second instructional book. In an age when it said there are no heroes, he wrote.

He felt fortunate to have been inspired and influenced by a giant in the field of art, Bill Alexander. Nine years after that book, Alexander told the New York Times that Bob Ross had betrayed him. The falling out that produced that line took about six years to build. In the summer of 1981, a couple in Virginia lost their oldest son in a car accident. The boy was 25 years old. His parents were Walt and Annette Co-Wall. Annette Kowalski went into a depression that she's described publicly, more than once,

in plain terms. She told NPR in 2016 that all she could do was lie on the couch and watch television. What happened to be on the television was Bill Alexander. Walt Kowalski called Alexander's company to find out where his wife could take a class from the man on the screen. Alexander wasn't teaching anything she could get to. What the company offered instead was one of Alexander's traveling instructors, a retired Air Force sergeant named Bob Ross, who was running a five-day seminar in a hotel conference room in Clearwater, Florida. The Kawaskis got in the car and drove roughly a thousand miles south. She said she cried the whole way down because she had no idea who this Bob Ross person was. Then she sat in that conference room for five days. I was so mesmerized

by Bob. Somehow, he lifted me up out of that depression. And this is the part of the part of the she's repeated in interview after interview for 40 years, cheerfully, as the founding legend of the whole enterprise. On the fifth day, she turned to her husband and said they ought to bottle whatever this was and sell it. Walt Kowalski is the other half of that couple. He'd worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. Friends of Bob's who met him later remembered a man who told agency stories at dinner. What they also remembered, uniformly, was that whatever Walt was, he was devoted to his wife and would do anything she wanted done. Annette wanted the thing bottled, so Walt went and bottled it. The proposition they made to Bob Ross in 1981 was straightforward

and on its face, generous. They'd arrange painting classes for him around Washington, D.C. They'd pay him a stipend. He could live at their house. They'd front the money to buy the Alexander paint supplies that got sold to students in the back of the room, which is where the actual margin in that business has always been. So a 50-something-year-old CIA man, his grieving wife, and a newly retired master sergeant with a perm, went on the road together. They worked Philadelphia and Baltimore and the Washington suburbs,

and then they pushed south into Florida and west into Indiana. Some of the seminars filled up, and plenty of them didn't. There was one class, where only one student showed up, and Bob taught the whole class anyway, for that one person. money was tight enough during this stretch that it shaped the way the man looked for the rest of his life and beyond it. Bob Ross got the perm because a perm was cheaper than getting his haircut every few weeks. It was a budget decision, and he grew to hate it. By the time he could afford any haircut he wanted, the perm was already on the packaging, on the logo, on the product line, and he was stuck with it.

The most recognizable head of hair in American television was a cost-cutting measure that its owner, didn't like and wasn't allowed to change. It's a small thing on its own, and it also happens to be the whole story in miniature. The television idea came out of that road grind. And honestly, nobody can say for sure whose idea it was in the first place. Annette's said it was born from her line

about bottling and selling it. Other accounts credit Walt with pushing the commercial version. The Daily Beast reporting says Bob pitched the show himself. What's documented is what happened next. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Football is back. Every game, every weekend,

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Call connects Ontario. 1866-531-260-19 and over. Physically present in Ontario. Eligibility and restrictions apply. See Draftkings.com slash Sportsbook for DECD. Please play responsibly. Number one sports book for live betting based on available live market data. In 1982, a public station in Falls Church, Virginia, put a Bob Ross pilot on the air, and a first run of 13 episodes got made there. By every description, including from people involved,

the production quality was poor, and it went nowhere. The second try is the one that mattered. In 1983, the show moved to WIPB in Muncie, Indiana. WIPB had better equipment and it had something else. It was one of a small number of public stations that had just been given permission to run, paid commercial spots. That mattered enormously to a business whose actual product was paint. The first season of The Joy of Painting premiered on the 11th of January, 1983. About 40 other PBS stations picked it up, which is a respectable start.

Within a few years, it was on more than a hundred stations. then more than 200. The studio was a converted living room on the ground floor of a big yellow brick Victorian house in Muncie that had belonged to a canning jar family named Ball. There's a piece of blue painter's tape stuck to the floor of that room marking the spot where Bob Ross stood, and it's still stuck there today. The production was brutally efficient, 13 episodes to a season. Each half-hour episode is one finished oil painting in 26 minutes of real time,

And Ross painted every one of them three times. There was a reference version he painted first, off camera, so he'd know where he was going. Inside the company, that version was called the Kowalski. There was the version he painted on the air. And there was a third, more finished version made for the companion books. The paintings in storage today are labeled that way, in his handwriting, on the back. The detail that surprises people every time is the money. Bob Ross wasn't paid for the joy of painting.

He said so himself, publicly, more than once. He did the show for nothing, and the money came from what the show sold, which was art supplies, instructional books, videotapes, and eventually a certified instructor program that trained and licensed people to teach the method under his name. That structure is the entire engine of what happens later. The television show was never the asset. The asset was the name.

and by 1985 the name was sitting inside a corporation. Bill Alexander's ending comes first, though, because what Bob Ross did to Bill Alexander is the rehearsal for what got done to Bob Ross. Alexander's company financed and sponsored Bob's early run on public television. Alexander Art shows up as a commercial partner on the joy of painting for the 1984 and 1985 seasons. The mentor was paying for the student show.

And then, at a trade show, A man named Dennis Cap, who ran an art supply company called Martin F. Weber, approached Bob Ross about doing a Bob Ross product line. The line they built looked a great deal like Bill Alexander's line. There was a Bob Ross version of the base coat. There was a Bob Ross lineup of brushes closely matching the brushes Alexander had developed over years of trial and error, and in late 1985, Bob Ross stopped saying Magic White on television,

which was Alexander's trademarked name. and started saying liquid white. A painter named Robert Warren, who co-hosted a later series with Alexander, described the effect in no uncertain terms. It was horrible. It was heartbreaking. It was like he lost his son.

And on the friendship, it broke his heart, and he never spoke to him again. On the 22nd of December, 1991, the New York Times ran a profile of Bob Ross, and the reporter went and got Bill Alexander on the record. record. What Alexander said has been quoted ever since. He betrayed me. I invented wet on wet. I trained him, and he is copying me. What bothers me is not just that he betrayed me, but that he

thinks he can do it better. The same profile put the question to Ross, who by then was the bigger star by an enormous margin, and asked him about the man who taught him. According to accounts of that article, Ross wouldn't say much. What he said was that Alexander was now there major competitor. Bill Alexander's company reached about $5 million in revenue around 1990. It was sold to an investment group in 1991. It filed for bankruptcy in 1994. Alexander himself died on the 24th of January 1997 in British Columbia at 81. Alexander Art still exists today. It got rebuilt out of the bankruptcy at the end of the 90s, and it still sells what it calls the Alexander Method.

The company's own published account of its own history, as it stands today, doesn't mention Bob Ross anywhere. I don't think Bob Ross stole wet on wet, because Bill Alexander never owned it in the first place. Van Eyck got there 500 years earlier. What Ross did take was the format, the product architecture, and the customer base of the man who had trained him, and he took them while that man's company was writing checks to keep his show on the air. Alexander's anger was about a business, not about art history, and the man who helped build the new business that replaced Alexander's was the CIA man from Virginia. On the 6th of February 1985, articles of incorporation were filed with the Commonwealth of Virginia

for a company called Bob Ross Incorporated. There were four shareholders, and each of them held 25%. They were Bob Ross, his second wife, Jane Ross, Walt Kowalski, and a Annette Kowalski. On paper that made four equal partners, in practice, by every account from people who were around it, Bob was the one making decisions. Because Bob was the product, and Bob knew it. Four equal partners in a small private company is an ordinary arrangement.

Thousands of businesses are set up exactly that way. What makes this one worth taking a look at is a single provision in the agreements that came with it. According to the legal commentary written about this company after the fact, The arrangement provided that if one of the four partners died, that partners' stock wouldn't go to a spouse, or a child, or anyone named in a will. It would be divided among the surviving partners. The actual text of that shareholder agreement isn't quoted in the federal court opinion. What we have is the provision as described by a state and business lawyers who have written about the case, and as reported in the business press. The description is consistent everywhere it appears.

The document itself isn't public. If that provision is what it's described to be, then Bob Ross, Inc. was a survivorship pool from the day it was created. Four people, 25% apiece, and the last one standing take the whole thing. That's either a completely standard small business buy-sell arrangement, drafted by a lawyer who had seen a hundred of them, or it's the most consequential paragraph in this entire story, and it can honestly be both at once.

structures like that exist for a good reason, which is to keep a working company out of the hands of heirs who don't work there and don't want to. The reason it turns into a horror story here is that the company's only real asset was one of the four partners. Then Jane Ross got sick. She'd married Bob in 1977, the year his first marriage ended. Steve, Bob's son from his first marriage, was in the house. Jane worked in the business alongside him for the entire arc of the show's success. She died of cancer in 1992, and her 25% of Bob Ross, Inc. didn't go to Bob. Under the structure, it was divided equally among the three surviving partners.

The arithmetic here is simple enough. Bob started with 25 points, and he picked up a third of Jane's 25. So call it 8 in a third points, which puts him at 33 and a third percent. Walt did the same, and Annette did the same. So together the Kawoskis went from 50% to 66 and two-thirds percent. From the day Jane Ross was buried, Bob Ross was a minority shareholder in Bob Ross, Inc. He could be outvoted on anything by two people in a company that existed for the sole purpose of selling his face. He couldn't sell his stake to anyone without the company's blessing.

He couldn't pass it to his son. The only thing that could ever change the ownership ratio again was somebody, dying, and if the somebody was him, the Kowalski's got all of it. He was 50 years old. He was a widower, and the paint company he'd built was now, functionally, theirs. In early 1994, Bob Ross was diagnosed with lymphoma. He was 51 years old, and he'd smoked for most of his adult life. He didn't tell the audience. There's no episode where he mentions being sick, no on-air farewell, no acknowledgement of any kind. He taped the last. He taped the last season of the joy of painting while he was in treatment, and the final episode aired on

the 17th of May, 1994, closing out 31 seasons and 403 episodes. There was no goodbye on it at all. And within days of learning his prognosis, a fax came through from Walt Kowalski. This is documented by Austin Ramsey and The Daily Beast, working from records and interviews, and it lines up with what Steve Ross and Bob's friends have said publicly since. The fax was a six-page contract. What that contract proposed was complete and permanent ownership by Bob Ross, incorporated, of Bob Ross himself. It covered his name, his likeness, his voice, and anything he'd ever made or ever would make, and it covered all of that permanently. In exchange, the offer on the table was 1% of revenues to Bob Ross or his heirs, running for 10 years. One percent of

revenue for 10 years, in exchange for all of it, permanently. Bob Ross refused to sign it. What he did instead, according to his son, was take phone calls in a back room of the house and come out of that room shaking. Steve Ross has described his father slamming a phone into its cradle and then ranting about how the Kowalskies wanted to own his name and everything attached to it. Dana Jester, who was one of Bob's closest friends, remembers Bob telling him the same thing in the same period. They're trying to steal my name on my deathbed. In the Netflix documentary released in 2021, Steve describes hearing his dad on the phone. You could hear him screaming. I'm not giving you my name.

You're not getting my name. Bob Ross, Inc. has publicly disputed the documentary's portrayal in the strongest terms, and their rebuttal is detailed and specific. One detail from this period is the one I keep going back to, though, because it tells me Bob Ross knew exactly what kind of fight he was in. In the last stretch of his life, Bob Ross started recording his own phone calls. A man dying of lymphoma, a man whose entire public identity was gentleness, set up a recorder on his telephone so that there'd be a record of what his business partners said to him.

That's not the behavior of a man having a misunderstanding with his business partners. That's a man collecting evidence. There's one more allegation from this period. In the 2021 documentary, Steve Ross says on camera that his father, and Annette Kowalski had an affair. He says he overheard his parents arguing about it when he was young. Bob Ross incorporated and the Kowalskies denied it to the filmmakers through their lawyer, and they also denied that there'd ever been a rift in the relationship at all.

I don't think it changes the ownership question. The paperwork works the same whether or not anybody was sleeping with anybody. On the 12th of May, 1994, about four months after his diagnosis, Bob Ross created a trust. That's a normal thing for a man with a terminal illness to do. What matters for this story is the amendment. On the 25th of May, 1995, roughly five weeks before he died, Bob Ross signed the first amendment to that trust.

The federal court quoted its language directly, so this isn't in dispute as to what the document says. The trustee, it says, shall assign to the donor's brother, Jimmy L. Cox, a 51% interest in all rights and interests in intellectual property, and shall assign to the donor's son, Robert Stephen Ross, a 49% interest in those same rights, 51% of it to his half-brother, and 49% to his son. And on the same day, the 25th of May, 1995, he signed a second document titled, Assignment of Rights and Interests in Intellectual Property,

granting the trustee rights to his name, his likeness, his voice, and his visual, written, or otherwise recorded works. He also, in that final restructuring, removed Annette Kowalski from the role she'd previously held in the administration of his estate. A lawyer involved in that estate work has said publicly that Ross was fully competent when he made those changes, that his reasoning was sound, and that he made them because he believed he was doing the best thing for his family.

Five weeks from death, a man sat down with a lawyer and tried, in writing, to hand his name to his son and his brother, and to take it out of the reach of his partners. It didn't work, and the reason it didn't work is stranger, and in some ways, worse than a forged signature would have been. He died on the 4th of July 1995 in Orlando at 52 years old. The funeral was small, about 25 people at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Gotha, Florida, west of Orlando. None of the Kowalski's came to the funeral, not Walt, not Annette, and not their daughter Joan. They did send flowers to the service. The Kowalskies threw Bob Ross Incorporated, when after the estate for the physical property. The demand, as it was filed, covered Bob Ross's art,

all finished paintings, all the work copies used in developing those finished paintings, and all the paints, brushes, easels, canvases, and other supplies, materials and tools used by Bob Ross. That covered everything he'd ever painted and every brush he'd ever held. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Football is back. Every game, every weekend, Draft King's Sportsbook has you covered. Every snap matters. Every comeback can shift the game. And every fourth quarter moment can change everything. Follow the action with Draft Kings, the number one sports book for live betting. Built to keep up with the speed of sports. Built with Canadian sports fans in mind.

brings the action together in one easy-to-use app. Follow the biggest matchups, build your parlayes, and explore live betting markets as the game develops. So you can focus on the football and enjoy the action with confidence. Download the Draft Kings app today and see what everyone is talking about.

Draft Kings, the number one sportsbook for live betting. In partnership with Draft Kings, the crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call connects Ontario. 1866-531-260-19 and over. Physically present in on. eligibility and restrictions apply.

See draftkings.com slash sportsbook for details. Please play responsibly. Number one sportsbook for live betting based on available live market data. They also filed reimbursement claims against the estate for expenses going back 15 months from the period when Bob was sick and traveling for treatment. Some of the line items on that claim have survived into the public reporting, and they're the kind of detail that no amount of corporate statement can really smooth over. $41.63 for a travel lodge in Jacksonville.

$14.10 at a Shonies. $16.92 at a cracker barrel. $17.50 at a Denny's. That's a claim filed against a dead man's estate. Itemized down to the dime for what he ate on the way to cancer treatment. Then there's the matter of the Elmer lawsuit. In the last months of his life, too sick to travel much, Bob Ross taped appearances for a children's television program,

called The Adventures of Elmer and Friends. He shot his parts from Florida against a green screen. The producer was a dermatologist in Indiana named Terry Marsh, and by every account this show was something Bob had wanted to do for years. Hosting a children's program was a thing he talked about for a long time. It was the last work he ever did. Less than a month after the episode aired, Bob Ross, Inc. filed a federal lawsuit against WIPB,

the Muncie Public Station that had carried the joy of painting for 11 years and against Terry Marsh personally. They wanted $500,000. The theory was that Marsh had encouraged, assisted, and cooperated with Bob Ross and Bob Ross's breach of his fiduciary duty of loyalty to Bob Ross Incorporated. The company's position was that Bob Ross, by appearing on a children's show while dying, had betrayed Bob Ross, Inc., and that the doctor who produced it owed them half a a million dollars for helping him do it. They also threatened to pull WIPB as the presenting station for the joy of painting, which is to say they threatened the public television station that had made the show for over a decade. Annette Kowalski's stated position at the time was blunt. We own that night. They're using his name without permission. The lawsuit had a problem in it. The company's filing asserted that

Bob Ross, Inc. had not consented to the production, and the company had to the production, and the company had, in fact, consented. Somebody there had given Bob permission on the telephone. And Bob, in that last stretch of his life when he was recording his phone calls, had it on tape. Terry Marsh's attorney believed he had a clean shot at going after the Kowalskies for filing a frivolous lawsuit. Marsh didn't want any part of that. He just wanted to be finished with them. Years later, Marsh described what the fight had actually been over. It was the last work Bob did in his life, he said. fulfillment of a lifelong dream to host a children's television program. Bob was very proud of the show

and would have been heartbroken had he known his partners had sued to have it destroyed. In April of 1997, the fight ended in a room nobody was watching. Jimmy Cox was Bob Ross's half-brother. Under the amended trust, he was the trustee, and he held the 51% interest in the intellectual property that Bob had tried to give him. He wasn't a businessman. He wasn't a businessman. and by every account he wasn't equipped for a war of attrition against a corporation with lawyers on retainer. 21 months after the funeral, Jimmy Cox signed a settlement agreement with Bob Ross Incorporated on behalf of the trust and the estate.

That agreement is the single most important document in this entire story, and almost nobody's ever heard of it. Its operative language quoted later by a federal judge is that Bob Ross Incorporated has sole and exclusive ownership of all rights in and to all of the creative works of Robert and Ross. The trust and the estate agreed to convey, transfer, and assigned to the company whatever rights they held, and both sides signed mutual releases covering any and all claims, suits, liabilities, complaints, losses, damages, and charges of every kind and character. One of the key clauses of that settlement was the destruction of Bob Ross's audio tapes. The recordings a dying

man made of his own business calls, the ones that had already blown a hole in the Elmer lawsuit, were destroyed as a term of the deal. I've read a lot of settlement agreements. Destruction of evidence clauses aren't exotic, and they aren't automatically suspect. Parties trade them all the time, but the effect here isn't in dispute. Whatever Walt or Annette Kowalski said to Bob Ross on the telephone in the last year of his life is gone, permanently, by agreement, and the only people who know what was on those tapes are the people who were on the calls. So by the spring of 1997, less than two years after the funeral, the position was this. Bob Ross, Inc. owned the name, it owned the likeness, and it owned the paintings. The trust had signed away whatever the

amendment had tried to give it, and the tapes were gone by agreement. For about 20 years after that, nothing happened at all. Steve Ross went quiet for two decades. He'd been on the show himself, He'd guest-taped episodes. He'd taught the method. He was very good at it, and he walked away from all of it. He'd later say that a phone call from Annette Kowalski in 1995 set the terms of that silence. His account of what she told him goes like this.

I want you to listen to me carefully. Any Bob Ross art products, anything related to art or painting, you can never ever make those, distribute those, create a business around those, nothing. But if you would like, you could do anything not painting or art related that you want. Bob Ross's son, one of the best wet-on-wet teachers alive, understood himself to be barred from teaching painting. He worked other jobs, and for a stretch of about 15 years,

he didn't teach a single class. Meanwhile, Bob Ross, Inc. kept selling paint, kept certifying instructors, and kept the show in reruns. The company would later state in its own public response that it never pursued or threatened legal action against Steve Ross, and that it had no contact with him for nearly two decades until he sued them. Both of those things can be true at the same time as Steve's account of that 1995 phone call. A threat that works doesn't have to be repeated.

What broke the 20 years of quiet was a business proposition and a document Steve hadn't seen. Lawrence Cap, whose father Dennis had built the original Bob Ross paint line back in the 80s, wanted to launch a new paint line with Steve Ross as the face of it. Steve's immediate reaction was that they'd get sued. And then somewhere in working that out, Steve Ross learned for the first time that his father had amended his trust five weeks before dying,

and that the amendment named him. 49% of his father's intellectual property in writing signed. Nobody had ever told him about it, and he was in his 50s before he found out. Steve, Lawrence Cap, and Dana Jester formed a company and hired an intellectual property lawyer. On the 27th of October 2016, Jimmy Cox transferred whatever rights he held to Steve Ross.

On the 10th of February, 2017, Steve transferred those rights into a limited liability company called RSR Art. And on the 25th of September, 2017, RSRRRRRT sued Bob Ross, Incorporated in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. The complaint carried three counts against the company, false representations under the federal trademark statute, misappropriation of Bob Ross's right of publicity, and cancellation of the

trademark registrations that Bob Ross incorporated held on Bob Ross's name and face. The case landed in front of Judge Liam O'Grady. Steve Ross's side had a signed document from his father, dated five weeks before his death, saying in plain language that the intellectual property goes to his brother, and his son. That feels like it should be the end of the argument. In a case about a house or a bank account, it very nearly would be. The problem is that a man can only give away what he still has. Bob Ross incorporated's defense was that by 1994, Bob Ross had nothing left to put in that trust, because he'd already given it all to the company over the course of a decade through conduct.

The court agreed with that argument. Judge O'Grady's opinion entered at the end of March and filed on the 1st of April 2019, laid out the evidence. Between 1986 and 1992, Bob Ross, Inc. registered five trademarks on Bob Ross's name and likeness, with Bob Ross's written consent. The company sold products using his name and face for years, with his knowledge and his active encouragement. The company entered licensing agreements with outside parties stating that it held exclusive rights to Bob Ross's intellectual property. And Bob Ross knew that and kept working. And there's one more piece of evidence in that file that I think is the hinge of the whole case, because it's in Bob Ross's own words.

In company documents, Bob Ross himself wrote that the greatest asset the company owned was the Bob Ross name and image. That sentence is his, not theirs. And it did a great deal of work in that courtroom 24 years after he died. So the court's holding was that there'd been in substance, a transfer during his lifetime. As the opinion puts it, there is ample evidence in the record demonstrating that Bob Ross gave the company the rights

to his intellectual property and right of publicity during his lifetime and before he created the trust. Which means, the judge wrote, that Bob Ross did not have any rights to transfer through the trust. The trust was empty when he signed it. And then the second hold, the one that closed the door and locked it. Even if there were rights to fight about the 1997 settlement agreement had disposed of them.

The trust and the estate had themselves signed a document affirming that the company owned everything and had released all claims. Jimmy Cox's signature in April of 1997 finished the argument 20 years before it was made. The court also held in the alternative that the claims were time-barred anyway because Bob Ross and Corporate had been openly asserting exclusive ownership since at least 1997. The court granted summary judgment to Bob Ross Incorporated. RSR Art filed an appeal to the Fourth Circuit on the 2nd of May 2019. It never got decided because the appeal was dismissed at RSR Art's own request after the two sides reached a settlement.

Steve Ross and his partners didn't have the money to keep fighting a company that had by then been monetizing his father for 24 years. The settlement terms are under non-disclosure agreements, so the full deal isn't public. What's been reported is the shape of it. Steve received what's been described as a modest payment. He gave up his claims to his father's intellectual property permanently, and in return, Bob Ross, Inc. granted him clearance to use his own name in business. That last clause gets me every time. Bob Ross's son had to reach a legal settlement with a corporation in order to be allowed to use his own

last name. Bob Ross, Inc. has an answer to all of this. They put out a detailed public statement on the 25th of August, 2021. The day the Netflix documentary dropped, here's what they had to say. They say the film is inaccurate and heavily slanted, that the final narrative lacks considerable nuance and accuracy and carries a clear bias in favor of the people who agreed to be interviewed. They say the filmmakers contacted them twice in 2020, never posed. specific questions and never gave them a real opportunity to respond and that a statement they provided in May of 2021 went unused. They say they never sued Steve Ross and never threatened to. They point out correctly that the claims brought in 2017 were rejected by a court of law

in 2019 and that the appeal was dropped by the other side. And they make a structural argument that is, I think the strongest thing they have. The company's statement says that Bob Ross may not have shared the inherent structural features of his company with family and friends, features which the statement notes are very common in small private companies. In other words, their position is that the survivorship clause wasn't a trap. It was boilerplate. It was the sort of thing that shows up in small, closely held corporations all over the country, and that Bob signed it with his eyes open in 1985 and simply never explained it to his son. They also stressed that the four founders, Bob and Jane Ross and Walt and Annette Kowalski,

shared the same goal, which was to promote and support the value of painting around the world. And they pointed what the company's done since, including a partnership with the Smithsonian, work with the Air Force Academy, and support for a museum in Muncie. Joan Kowalski, Walt and Annette's daughter, who's run the company since 2012, has put it more directly. We know what we're doing and we know what we're doing is what Bob wanted. And on the documentary, there's so many missing facts and there's so much in it that isn't true. And elsewhere, on whether she's carrying out the founder's intent, this, I know that I'm doing exactly what was intended by Jane, Bob, Walt, and Annette. My read on all of that for whatever

it's worth is that the legal argument is sound. Judge O'Grady got it right on the law as it was presented to him, and I don't think that ruling is some miscarriage. Bob Ross did let his company trademark his face for a decade. He did write in his own company documents that his name was the company's greatest asset. Those facts are real, and they're his own. But the company's account requires one thing to be true that the record makes very hard to believe, which is that there was no fight going on and the relationship was fine. If the relationship was fine, then a 51-year-old man with a

fresh terminal diagnosis had no reason to record his phone calls, no reason to strip Annette Kawalski out of his estate administration, and no reason to sit down five weeks before dying, and sign a document specifically routing his name away from his partners and toward his brother and his son. He did all three. A man who thinks everything's fine with his business partners doesn't do any of them. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Football is back. Every game, every weekend, Draft King's Sportsbook has you covered. Every snap matters. Every comeback can shift the game and every fourth quarter moment can change everything. Follow the action with Draft Kings, the number one sports book for live betting.

Built to keep up with the speed of sports. Built with Canadian sports fans in mind. Draft Kings brings the action together in one easy-to-use app. Follow the biggest matchups, build your parlays, and explore live betting markets as the game develops. so you can focus on the football and enjoy the action with confidence. Download the Draft Kings app today and see what everyone is talking about. Draft Kings, the number one sportsbook for live betting. In partnership with Draft Kings, the crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call connects Ontario.

1866-531-260-19 and over. Physically present in Ontario. Eligibility and restrictions apply. See Draftkings.com slash sportsbook for details. Please play responsibly. Number one sports book for live betting based on available. live market data. For a long time after 1997, none of it mattered very much, because Bob Ross wasn't worth much. That's the part of this story people forget. The company sold paint and it sold

instructional videos. It's certified instructors, and it still does. And the certification course has run somewhere around $400 for a three-week program, not counting materials or lodging, with thousands of certified Ross instructors working in dozens of countries. That was the whole business, and it was steady and small and unglamorous. In 2012, Walt and Annette Kowalski retired and handed the company to their daughter Joan. In that year, Bob Ross Incorporated took in less than $200 in licensing revenue outside of its paint products, which isn't a typo and not a rounding error. Then came the Twitch Marathon, and everything changed shape. On the 29th of October 2015, which was,

would have been Bob Ross's 73rd birthday. The streaming platform Twitch launched a new non-gaming category by playing all 403 episodes of the joy of painting back-to-back for more than a week. The numbers Twitch reported afterward are still hard to get my head around. 5.6 million unique viewers tuned in. 545 million minutes were watched. 183,000 people were watching at the same moment during the final episode. and the chat ran to 7.6 million messages.

Joan Kowalski told a reporter at the time that Twitch woke up the world and that they made everybody remember their childhood. She was right, and the financial curve after that is nearly vertical. Licensing revenue outside of paint, according to reporting in The Daily Beast, drawing on records from the litigation, went from under $200 in 2012 to about $40,000 in 2015, to $460,000 in 2016, to well north of a million dollars in 2017.

That revenue is close to pure profit because licensing generally is. Nothing's being manufactured and nothing's being shipped. What's being rented out is a dead man's face. The company brought in an outside licensing agency, Firefly brand management, to run the program. In June of 2021, Firefly announced the 100th Bob Ross licensing partnership. partnership. The catalog of what's been licensed since then makes the case better than I can. There's a Bob Ross Chia Pet from 2017. A Bob Ross Funko Pop figure the same year. A Bob Ross board game called The Art of Chill. A Bob Ross waffle maker that burns his face into the waffle. A Bob

Ross bobblehead given away at a Cincinnati Reds game in 2018. There are Bob Ross energy drinks and Bob Ross Cosmetics. There's a Bob Ross Monopoly set, licensed through Hasbro in 2020. A Bob Ross Magic, The Gathering Card set, released as a two-week drop in December of 2020, using his actual paintings as the artwork on the lands. There are Bob Ross Crocs, Bob Ross socks, and Bob Ross suits. There are Bob Ross greeting cards, desk mats, bookmarks, wall decals, fabric by the yard, plush toys, vinyl figures, advent calendars, and building bricks. In 2022, a company put out a licensed line of Bob Ross house paint and deck stain. In March of 2021, Mountain Dew put out a 40-minute recreated Bob Ross tutorial,

made with the company's cooperation, in which a digitally reconstructed Bob Ross paints happy little droplets of Mountain Dew. In July of this year, 2026, Bob Ross, Inc. licensed his name, his likeness, and the audio and video library to Pollard Banknote for a line of scratch-off lottery tickets. Bob Ross is now a state lottery product. In August of this year, LG and Cineverse put the Bob Ross painting collection onto LG Art televisions, so his paintings display on the screen when the set is idle. And somewhere in that 100-plus partner catalog is a bobblehead.

And somebody bought one, and somebody put it on a shelf. in a props department, and it ended up on the dashboard of a van in a horror movie that Danny and I watched last night. In 2026, 31 years after the man in the bobblehead was buried in Gutha, Florida, under a stone that says television artist. In August of 2020, Bob Ross incorporated suit a streetwear brand called Rip and Dip and the retailer Zumis in the same federal court in Alexandria that would later here Steve Ross's case. The complaint was about unlicensed shirts and air fresheners. The company's filing described the offending artwork as Bob Ross in his signature

permed afro and button-down shirt, painting a mountain landscape stylized to include a cat's face. That case settled at the end of 2021 with a consent judgment. No admission of liability, no disclosed dollar figure, and a permanent injunction barring the defendants from using Bob Ross. intellectual property, including his name, image, and likeness, and from selling that mountain design or any variant of it. Two years before that, the company had been on the other end of the same kind of lawsuit. In August of 2018, the Carfresener Corporation, which makes the little

pine tree air fresheners that hang from every rearview mirror in America, sued Bob Ross incorporated in federal court in New York. The complaint was that Bob Ross incorporated was selling pine tree-shaped car fresheners with Bob Ross's face on them and a happy trees line printed alongside. Carfreshner claimed trademark infringement and dilution and asked for damages and an injunction. I couldn't find a reported outcome for that one in any accessible court record, so I'm leaving it where it sits. Joan Kowalski has talked openly about how the enforcement side works now, and her description of how it works is worth hearing. She said that the company's fans function as its police force, that they know the goal is to keep Bob as wonderful as he is,

and that they report violations. She's also said the company is deliberately choosy about who gets a license, because being choosy makes the assets easier to protect. That's a coherent, professional intellectual property strategy. It's also a sentence about protecting a man from the people who love him, written by people he was fighting when he died. There's a symmetry in the merchandise story that I don't think anybody planned. In March of 2019, Bob Ross, Inc. donated a collection to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Four paintings, including three versions of the same scene.

A 1988 landscape called On a Clear Day, deliberately chosen to show how the three painting production system worked, plus a 1994 painting called Blue Ridge Falls. They also gave the museum the easel Bob Ross built himself out of a step-lapse. his palette, boxes of his brushes, his production notebooks from seasons two and three, and fan letters. And in the same accession, into the permanent collection of the National Museum of American History, they also donated the merchandise. The Funko Pop went in, and so did the Art of Chill Board Gang, the Waffle Maker, and the Cincinnati Reds bobblehead. The paintings themselves are the last piece of this, and they're where the story

gets strange in a way I didn't see coming. Bob Ross, Inc. holds roughly 1,165 original Bob Ross paintings. They sit in a warehouse in Herndon, Virginia. For decades, the company wouldn't sell them. Joan Kowalski's stated reasoning is consistent with everything Bob said on the air, which is that he wasn't in the business of selling paintings, he was in the business of teaching people to make their own. For 30 years, a Bob Ross painting was essentially not a thing,

anyone could buy. When one did surface at auction in March of 2023, it brought $11,700. Then, in 2025, the federal government rescinded more than $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting. And Bob Ross, Inc. donated 30 original on-air paintings to American public television, with 100% of net proceeds going to public television stations. Bonham's estimated the whole group at somewhere between $850,000 and $1.4 million. The first three sold in Los Angeles on the 11th of November 2025. A 1993 painting called Winters Peace, estimated at $30,000 to $50,000, sold for $318,000. Home in the Valley brought $229,000. Cliffside brought $114,000. Three paintings, $662,000 from $350,000,000. registered bidders. Two weeks later in a separate benefit auction run through John Oliver's

show for a public media relief fund, a 1987 painting called Cabin at Sunset sold for $1.04 million. That's the current record for a Bob Ross. In January of this year, a second bottom sale in Massachusetts brought another $1.27 million. In April, a third sale in New York brought roughly 929,000 more. Ten of the 30 donated paintings have now raised somewhere around $2.86 million for public television, which has already double the high estimate for all 30 of them. 20 paintings are still to come. So the market answer to what a Bob Ross is worth, 30 years after his death,

is that a single one of them can bring more than his entire estate was valued at when he died. His estate came to about $1.3 million, and roughly half of that was his one-third stake in the company. Bob finished seven paintings for a 32nd season of The Joy of Painting that he never got to tape. They went into storage in 1995 and they stayed there for nearly 30 years. In 2024, Bob Ross Incorporated brought them back out. A certified Ross instructor named Nicholas Hankins hosted a new series, distributed by American public television and carried on public television stations

in which he recreates those seven paintings on camera the way Bob would have, plus six of his own. It was filmed at a station attached to Daytona State College about 20 minutes from where Bob Ross was born. Joan Kowalski, talking about those seven canvases, said that he was so sick, but he was still working on his next series because he wanted to keep going.

And she said she thought Bob would be incredible. incredibly proud of how they were doing it. She might well be right about that. A man who spent 11 years insisting that anybody could do this would probably not object to somebody else finishing his season. The part that doesn't dissolve is that the seven paintings were made by a man in the last year of his life, at a point when he was recording his own phone calls because of the people who now decide what happens to them. Steve Ross went back to teaching in September of 2019, after the ruling and after the settlement that let him use his name. His first workshop in 15 years was at a fairground in Winchester, Indiana,

with Dana Jester, his father's old friend, standing next to him. Afterward, he went online and read what people had written about the class, and about him, and what he said about that has stuck with me more than anything else in the research. I didn't realize that people missed me or wanted to have me do this again. I always knew, but what I mean is, is. Maybe I didn't want to know. Maybe I reserved the right to remain ignorant. He described the feeling as being like the first time he'd had the sun on his face in a thousand years. He taught for a few years after that, workshops around the Midwest, $150 a seat. As of the most recent version of his own

website, he isn't teaching. He had a heart attack in late 2022, and the site says he's recovering and hopes to return, and points students toward another instructor in the meantime. In Muncie, Indiana, the yellow brick house where the joy of painting was filmed from 1983 to 1988 is now a museum exhibit called the Bob Ross Experience, run by Minatrista Museum and Gardens. It opened in late 2020. When they restored the room, they found the blue painter's tape still stuck to the floor. It's an X, and it marks the exact spot where Bob Ross stood for five years while he told America there was no such thing as a mistake. The museum's vice president has said that visitors cry when they see it

and that people ask if they're allowed to stand on it. The exhibit operates under a license. At the bottom of the museum's own web page in the small type is the line that Bob Ross and Bob Ross experience are trademarks of Bob Ross Incorporated, licensed to the museum. So the floor where the man stood is a licensed exhibit. The stone over him in Gotha, Florida, gives his occupation as television artist. And the name carved above those two words.

The one he built out of 20 years in the Air Force and a mentor he outgrew, and 11 unpaid years on public television, belongs to a corporation in Virginia that his own son had to settle a federal lawsuit with before he was allowed to introduce himself. I grew up watching Bob Ross on television. I loved watching him paint. I've got nothing but fond memories of him. and no argument at all about how talented he was,

because he could put a whole mountain range on a blank canvas in about four minutes, with a knife and a quarter inch of paint, and make it look like anybody in the room could do the same thing. I also understand that the way he lost his name, his likeness, his voice, and every painting he ever made may have been completely legal. A federal judge looked at all of it and said so in writing. I still won't buy anything with his name or his face on it, not the bobblehead, not the mug, not the lottery ticket, not any of it.

That's my own line, and I'm not asking anybody else to draw it in the same place. I just won't spend the money on principle. There's something I say pretty often, and I think it's the right way to close this one out. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Football is back. Every game, every weekend, Draft King's Sportsbook has you covered. Every snap matters. Every comeback can shift the game, and every fourth quarter moment can change everything.

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