Thirty years before he met Lucille Ball, William Frawley toured in vaudeville with his wife, Edna Louise Broedt.  He called her “Red” because of her red hair.  Her middle name also became the middle name (the first of three) of his TV wife, played by Vivian Vance. The couple went through a bitter divorce in 1927.  It is ironic that a red-haired woman and a character named Ethel Louise would be inextricably tied to his memory.