Along the Way

Chance Meeting with Comic Red Skelton Captivates Boy on Cross-country Train Trip

When the boy wearing a suit and cowboy boots entered the dining car of the Santa Fe Chief in Chicago's Dearborn Street Station, the red-haired man in the Army uniform made a joke directed at him. It was not malicious. Just something said to be funny. To make people laugh. I was that boy. I asked the lady with me what was so funny. It had something to do with my boots. "Don't you know who that is?" she asked. I didn't. It was September, 1945. I was about to meet Red Skelton. Just past my 10th birthday, this was already my third cross-country trip by train. It had begun the previous February when my mother accompanied me from New York to Ash Fork, where we were met by Charles H. "Uncle Chick" Orme, who drove us through the night to the Quarter Circle V Bar Ranch School. As an asthmatic from Connecticut, I would become a fourthgrader in the Ormes' one-room adobe school. In May, when school was out, I joined several other students, boarding the Santa Fe's Grand Canyon Limited in Ash Fork for the trip east. The journey is marked in memory by aging chair cars jammed with servicemen, a coal-burning locomotive speeding across Iowa and whipping black smoke and cinders into the opened windows of the coaches, and by crossing the Mississippi at Madison, Iowa, and into Illinois where corn seemed to grow from horizon to horizon. Now, in September, the war was over. Lydia "Cookie" Mitchell had been sent by the Ormes to accompany me from Chicago to Arizona. Cookie became part of the Orme extended family during the Depression when she came to the ranch to work as the cook and raise her daughter. As we ordered lunch, and the Chief eased its way out of Chicago, my eyes were on Red Skelton. I found him somewhere west of Joliet, Illinois. He sat alone in a bedroom compartment. The door was partially open. I knocked. He recognized the boy with the boots. He invited me in. So for me and Red it began. Red Skelton was then 32 years old. He had already starred in 14 motion pictures, become an annual fixture at President Roosevelt's birthday parties, and had created a host of characters among them Cauliflower McPugg; Willie Lump Lump; San Fernando Red; Clem Kadiddlehopper; Junior, the Mean Widdle Kid; and Freddie the Freeloader who made millions laugh each week on network radio. Cookie and I shared meals with Red in the dining car. Iowa became Kansas. In the club car, I sat beside him as he entertained the passengers. We all laughed together. Kansas became Colorado, dropping down into New Mexico. Other times were spent in his compartment. What we talked about is long forgotten; just a brief time spent together between the boy and the man. Crossing New Mexico, moving toward Arizona, Red Skelton, sitting in that bedroom compartment, took one of his campaign ribbons from his Army jacket, and gave it to me. And we said good-bye. Soon darkness, and Ash Fork. Cookie and I left the Chief. Red Skelton moved on with his life, and I with mine. For me, there would be many more train trips; trains with a litany of names: The Commodore Vanderbilt, The California Limited, The Twentieth Century Limited, The Broadway Limited, The Sunset Limited, The Golden State Limited. For Red Skelton, radio became TV, and 20 years of network television. There would be 22 more films and a successful career as an artist, a painter of 1,000 oils, all of them of clowns. We would meet one more time. In 1962, as a young advertising executive whose agency sponsored Skelton's television program, I went backstage before his weekly show. He was in his dressing room, resting in the shadows, on his back, an enormous unlit cigar in his mouth. I introduced myself as the boy on the train. He seemed distant with only a faint recollection of my time with him on the train. I left his dressing room, remembering a son was born to him three years after we had met, a boy he lost to leukemia at the age of nine. Only when Red Skelton died in September, 1997, at the age of 84, did I learn the man with whom I shared that train ride was recovering from a breakdown that had hospitalized him for three months, a man emotionally spent from entertaining troops, doing 15 shows a day. In the same month we met, he had been discharged from the Army with the rank of private. Perhaps for him, returning from the war, the boy was innocence, seen and met through the eyes of a gentle clown.

moved on with his life, and I with mine. For me, there would be many more train trips; trains with a litany of names: The Commodore Vanderbilt, The California Limited, The Twentieth Century Limited, The Broadway Limited, The Sunset Limited, The Golden State Limited. For Red Skelton, radio became TV, and 20 years of network television. There would be 22 more films and a successful career as an artist, a painter of 1,000 oils, all of them of clowns. We would meet one more time. In 1962, as a young advertising executive whose agency sponsored Skelton's television program, I went backstage before his weekly show. He was in his dressing room, resting in the shadows, on his back, an enormous unlit cigar in his mouth. I introduced myself as the boy on the train. He seemed distant with only a faint recollection of my time with him on the train. I left his dressing room, remembering a son was born to him three years after we had met, a boy he lost to leukemia at the age of nine. Only when Red Skelton died in September, 1997, at the age of 84, did I learn the man with whom I shared that train ride was recovering from a breakdown that had hospitalized him for three months, a man emotionally spent from entertaining troops, doing 15 shows a day. In the same month we met, he had been discharged from the Army with the rank of private. Perhaps for him, returning from the war, the boy was innocence, seen and met through the eyes of a gentle clown.

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