Red Skeleton

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" height=169 style=" border-bottom: 1px solid #CCCCCC;" BGCOLOR="#111111" TEXT="#F7F7FF" bgproperties="fixed" background="017a0ad1dyxtip.jpg"> <bR> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="698" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="VOID" RULES="NONE" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=CENTER HEIGHT= 111 ><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="00d69690.jpg" border=0 width="105" height="105" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </NOBR></tD> <tD VALIGN=CENTER><NOBR><div> Waxahachie Independant School District    <FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#00FF00" FACE="Comic Sans MS" >               Waxahachie, Texas</FONT></div> <div> <B>Waxahachie High School Alumni 1962</B></div> <div> <B>WHS Seniors '62</B></div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" height=268 BGCOLOR="#111111" TEXT="#F7F7FF" bgproperties="fixed" background="01f9b9c3.jpg"> <div>                                                   </div> <div> <B><SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">  </SCRIPT> </B></div> <bR> <div> <B> <TABLE BORDER="5" CELLPADDING="12" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="560" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#00FF00" BORDERCOLORDARK="#00FF00" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" BGCOLOR=#000000 > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP COLSPAN=2 HEIGHT= 2378 WIDTH="498"><div> <I><B> </B></I></div> <div> <I><B> <TABLE BORDER="3" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="350" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#FFFFFF" BORDERCOLORDARK="#FFFFFF" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" BGCOLOR=#000000 > <tR> <tD VALIGN=CENTER HEIGHT= 339 ><NOBR><div> <A HREF="laughter_2.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Laughter 2"><B><IMG SRC="0d44b4b0.jpg" border=0 width="331" height="331" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></A></div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> </TABLE></B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Red Skelton</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <B>Richard Bernard "Red" Skelton (July 18, 1913 – September 17, 1997) was an American comedian who was best known as a top radio and television star from 1937 to 1971. Skelton's show business career began in his teens as a circus clown and went on to vaudeville, Broadway, films, radio, TV, clubs and casinos, while also pursuing another career as a painter.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Skelton was the son of a Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus clown who died shortly before he was born. Skelton himself got one of his earliest tastes of show business with the same circus as a teenager. Before that, however, he had been given the show business bug at age ten by entertainer Ed Wynn, who spotted him selling newspapers trying to help his family. After buying every newspaper in Skelton's stock, Wynn took the boy backstage and introduced him to every member of the show with which he was traveling. By age 15, Skelton had hit the road full-time as an entertainer, working everywhere from medicine shows and vaudeville to burlesque, showboats, minstrel shows and circuses.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>fter 1937 appearances on The Rudy Vallee Show, Skelton became a regular in 1939 on NBC's Avalon Time, sponsored by Avalon Cigarettes. On October 7, 1941, Skelton premiered his own radio show, The Raleigh Cigarette Program, developing routines involving a number of recurring characters, including punch-drunk boxer Cauliflower McPugg, inebriated Willie Lump-Lump and "mean widdle kid" Junior, whose favorite phrase ("I dood it!") became part of the American lexicon. There was con man San Fernando Red with his pair of crosseyed seagulls, Gertrude and Heathcliffe, and singing cabdriver Clem Kadiddlehopper, a country bumpkin with a big heart and a slow wit. Clem had an unintentional knack for upstaging high society slickers, even if he couldn't manipulate his cynical father: "When the stork bought you, Clem, I shoulda shot him on sight!" Skelton also helped sell WWII war bonds on the top-rated show, which featured Ozzie and Harriet Nelson in the supporting cast, plus the Ozzie Nelson Orchestra and announcer Truman Bradley. Harriet Nelson was the show's vocalist.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Skelton was drafted in March, 1944, and the popular series was discontinued June 6, 1944. Shipped overseas to serve with an Army entertainment unit as a private, Skelton had a nervous breakdown in Italy, spent three months in a hospital and was discharged in September, 1945. He once joked about his military career, "I was the only celebrity who went in and came out a private." On December 4, 1945, The Raleigh Cigarette Program resumed where it left off with Skelton introducing some new characters, including Bolivar Shagnasty and J. Newton Numbskull. Lurene Tuttle and Verna Felton appeared as Junior's mother and grandmother. David Forrester and David Rose led the orchestra, featuring vocalist Anita Ellis. The announcers were Pat McGeehan and Rod O'Connor. The series ended May 20, 1949, and that fall he moved to CBS.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>In 1951 (the same year the network introduced I Love Lucy) CBS beckoned Skelton to bring his radio show to television. His characters worked even better on screen than on radio; television also provoked him to create his second best-remembered character, Freddy the Freeloader, a traditional tramp whose appearance suggested the elder, gray-haired brother of the famous Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus clown Emmett Kelly. Skelton's weekly signoff -- "Good night and may God bless" -- became as familiar to television viewers as Edward R. Murrow's "Good night and good luck" or Walter Cronkite's "And that's the way it is."</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Skelton was inducted into the International Clown Hall of Fame in 1989, but as Kadiddlehopper showed, he was more than an interpretive clown. One of his best-known routines was "The Pledge of Allegiance," in which he explained the pledge word by word. Another Skelton staple, a pantomime of the crowd at a small-town parade as the American flag passes by, reflected Skelton's rural, Americana tastes.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>In his autobiography Groucho And Me, Groucho Marx, in asserting that comic acting is much more difficult than straight acting, rated Red Skelton's acting ability extremely highly and considered him a worthy successor to Charles Chaplin. One of the last known on-camera interviews with Skelton was conducted by Steven F. Zambo. A small portion of this interview can be seen in the 2005 PBS special The Pioneers of Primetime.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Skelton returned to live performance after his television days ended, in nightclubs and casinos and resorts, as well as performing such venues as Carnegie Hall. Many of those shows yielded segments that were edited into part of the Funny Faces video series. He also spent more time on his lifetime love of painting, usually of clown images, and his works began to attract prices over $80,000.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>In Death Valley Junction, California, circus performers painted by Marta Becket decorate the Red Skelton Room in the 23-room Amargosa Hotel, where Skelton stayed several times in Room 22. The room is dedicated to Skelton, as explained by John Mulvihill in his essay "Lost Highway Hotel":</B></div> <div> <B>Marta Becket is the magic behind the Amargosa Hotel. For the past 32 years it has provided both a home and a venue for her lifetime ambition: to perform her dance and pantomime works to paying audiences. Since 1968 she's been doing just that, twice a week, audiences or no. The hotel guest’s first encounter with Marta is through her paintings in the lobby and dining area. Once she and her husband had upgraded the structure of the hotel and theatre, she make them unique by painting their walls with shimmering frescoes (not real frescoes but the effect is the same) in a style uniquely hers. Some of the paintings are deceptively three-dimensional, like the guitar leaning against a wall that you don’t realize is a painting until you reach to pick it up. Some are evocative of carnival art from the early part of this century. All are vibrant, whimsical. If you’re lucky, your room will be graced with similar wall paintings. Room 22 is where Red Skelton used to stay. He visited once to catch Marta’s show, and like so many others, fell victim to the Amargosa’s enchantment and returned again and again. He asked Marta to illustrate his room with circus performers and though he died shortly thereafter, she did so anyway. Staying in this room, with acrobats scaling the walls and trapeze artists flying form the ceiling, is a singularly evocative experience, one I wouldn’t trade for a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. </B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Near the end of his life, Skelton said his daily routine included writing a short story a day (he collected the best ones in self-published chapbooks) and composing a piece of music a day (which he would then sell to providers of background music such as Muzak). Among his more notable compositions was his patriotic "Red's White and Blue March."</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Red Skelton died in a hospital in Palm Springs, California from an undisclosed illness on September 17, 1997. At the time of his death, he lived in Anza, California. He is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>In 2002 during the controversy of the phrase "Under God" in the US Pledge of Allegiance, a recording of a monologue he performed on his 1969 television show resurfaced. In the speech, he commented on what each line of the plegde symbolizes. At the end, he commented that "Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that would be eliminated from schools too?" With the pledge under attack as being "religious", he suddenly regained popularity among those who opposed the lawsuit. See his pledge speech </B><FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#00FF00" FACE="Comic Sans MS" ><A HREF="pledge.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Pledge"><B>HERE</B></A></FONT><B>.</B></div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <B>God Bless....and Good Night</B></div> </tD> </tR> </TABLE></B></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="laughter_2.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Laughter 2"><B>Back</B></A></div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" height=42 style=" border-top: 1px solid #CCCCCC;" BGCOLOR="#111111" TEXT="#F7F7FF" bgproperties="fixed" background="0182a2f1dyxtip.jpg"> <div> <A HREF="http://whs62.net" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://whs62.net">Home</A>     <A HREF="http://whs62.net/Roll" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://whs62.net/Roll">Roll Call</A>    <A HREF="http://whs62.net/In_Memory" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://whs62.net/In_Memory">In Memory</A>   <A HREF="http://whs62.net/Long_Ago" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://whs62.net/Long_Ago">Long Ago</A>    <A HREF="http://www.whs62.net/Our_50s/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.whs62.net/Our_50s/">Our 50's</A>   <A HREF="http://whs62.net/Reunions" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://whs62.net/Reunions">Reunions</A>   <A HREF="http://whs62.net/Today" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://whs62.net/Today">Today</A>    <A HREF="http://whs62.net/Contacts" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://whs62.net/Contacts">Contacts</A>    <A HREF="http://whs62.net/Links" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://whs62.net/Links">Links</A></div> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>