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May 10, 1966 TRIBUTE TO ED WYNN FROM RED SKELTON I?╟╓m just driving along in the car talking into my little recording machine, and I got to thinking of Ed Wynn. So I started rambling away about Ed and clowns in general: To me, Ed Wynn is the great warrior that fought gloom. He proved with his wit and wisdom that the dignity of man did not have to be ridiculed with vulgarity. His whimsical ways, gestures, and childlike laugh were like a passport into every heart. He was the word ?╟╓?╟╓funny?╟Ñ spelled with all capitals. He taught a nation to laugh. In radio, he was the first to put an audience in the studio. Radio - that little box, that magical box - that afforded each person an opportunity to use his own imagination as to what he heard. The audience and their laughter was merely an echo from their own living room. And, while that audience laughed, it gave those at home a chance to understand the wit and wisdom which flowed from the lips of this ingenious little man. In his stage productions, he surrounded himself with beautiful women and beautiful jokes. He respected the dignity of those who came to laugh, and he resented those who used his living room, the theater, as a place to exploit their shortcomings by offering presentations without dignity or taste. His funny shoes will now have to be placed in an art museum for posterity to gaze upon, for never will there be another to wear that size shoes. God saw fit to give him a long life without the rigors of senility, blessed with a keen wit and applying the wisdom he learned when he was twenty. A great clown has great tragedies, for he hears the laughter that he gets when he struggles, and then the guffaws and belly laughs when he is successful. Then it diminishes into polite laughter, then ingratiating giggles into a bene- volent smile. But this clown?╟╓s greatness was too good ...the lovable way that he stepped off his pedestal to make room for younger clowns by announcing that he would play straight dramatic roles. But his humor and wisdom embraced each performer. The audience now laughed with an agreeable nod. He was still the funny little fellow, now play-acting at life, but graciously accepting the