He loved theater, but Mister Ed didn’t put on an act. Ed Gotwalt really did live each day doing whatever he could to make both friends and strangers happy. He really was, as many people have put it, "larger than life." "There are people out there that work really hard at being characters, then there are some characters out there and that's what they are, they don't try at it. Ed was a showman. He was obviously an entrepreneur. He was always on. But there was something genuine about it," said Terry Burger, who got to know Ed over his decades working as a journalist in southcentral Pennsylvania.