Tommy Chong

About Tommy Chong

Thomas "Tommy" B. Kin Chong (born May 24, 1938) is a Canadian-American comedian, actor and musician who is well-known for his stereotypical portrayals of hippie-era stoners. He is most widely known for his involvment in the marijuana-themed Cheech & Chong comedy movies with Cheech Marin. He played Leo Chingkwake on FOX's That '70s Show.

Chong was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, the son of Lorna Jean (born Gilchrist), a waitress, and Stanley Chong, a truck driver. Chong's father was of Chinese descent and his mother was of Scots-Irish ancestry. Chong graduated from Victoria Composite High School, a school now recognized in Edmonton as a major performing and visual arts K-12 IB school. When Chong was still young, the family moved to Calgary, Alberta, to a neighbourhood Chong refers to as the Dog Patch. He says that his father had "been wounded in World War II, and there was a veterans' hospital in Calgary. He bought a five-hundred dollar house in Dog Patch, and raised his family on fifty dollars a week". He later went on to graduate from Victoria School back in Edmonton, Alberta.

By age eleven Chong was playing guitar, chiefly country-and-western music. Soon, he was introduced to rhythm and blues, became a professional musician. He formed one of Calgary's earliest rock and roll/rhythm and blues bands, the Colors or the Shades, but was eventually requested by the police to leave town after a particularly rowdy gig, according to his account. Chong and the Shades then left for the closest metropolis, Vancouver, where Chong bought a club, the Elegant Parlour, and played guitar and sang in the house band, a Motown-style band named Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers. It has been incorrectly reported that Jimi Hendrix played with the group. Hendrix did briefly visit Vancouver in 1965, but did not appear with Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers. Chong disputes this ever happened and that any such appearance is a product of Taylor's "imagination."