“Good Night and May God Bless” Red Skelton

This well-known quote was the nightly closing remark to twenty years of beloved television. Red Skelton was a part of America’s evening routine. His voice also rang out over the radio and his face romped across the movie screens. But nothing would have been viewed or heard from Red without his early training in 1920’s Vincennes Indiana.Skits formed at the street corner while hawking newspapers, dressing as a clown for the local YMCA circus, and pratfalls from a Medicine show wagon or a Vaudeville stage were all early training. In the 1930’s, Showboat cruises, Walkathons and Nightclub work had him creating humor night and day. These experiences and his teenage marriage to his first wife Edna Stillwell would lead to a partnership that created his best known skit, a skit that would catapult them to fame in every medium available at the time. And it all started in his boyhood home on Lyndale Avenue.