Remembered by co-workers and friends for his kindness and gentle spirit, he was a daredevil when it came to his columns.

Longtime Palm Beach Post columnist Ron Wiggins, the try-anything-once, part-time sage, full-time court jester for more than three decades, died Monday. He was 77.

Wiggins was a kind of mad scientist of journalism, always willing to try something out in the hopes that it might make an interesting newspaper column.

If it took being pummeled by two female mud wrestlers, or getting drunk enough to knock over 10 cones on a driving course, he was game.

If it meant wondering whether Purina dog chow was fit for human consumption, or “surviving” Munyon Island by climbing trees to eat prickly pears, it was just a day’s work for Wiggins.

PHOTOS: A TRIBUTE TO RON WIGGINS

Would you sit inside your car for 26 minutes with the windows rolled up on a steamy June afternoon, to the point when the temperature inside got to 147 degrees?

Wiggins did. After all, what better way to impress upon readers not to leave their dogs or kids in parked cars?

Wiggins' columns were experiential, whimsical and improvisational. And sometimes off-kilter.

“Anybody with a harebrained idea could get a hearing from Ron,” said Tom Giuffrida, the Post’s publisher through much of Wiggins’ tenure at the newspaper. “The crazier the better. That was his forte.”

Star-struck to meet the great Wiggins

Readers remember him for his writing, but co-workers and friends remember him for his kindness and gentle spirit.

“When I first started at the Post in 1977, I was star-struck to meet Ron Wiggins,” said Pete Ebel, who began as a sports stringer at the newspaper and went on to become a deputy metro editor. “I remember telling my mom, 'I met Ron Wiggins.'

“I was a $10-a-game sports stringer, the lowest of the low in the newsroom, but Ron treated me with so much respect,” Ebel remembered.

Wiggins, a Florida native who grew up in Gainesville, came to The Palm Beach Post in 1974 after getting a journalism degree from the University of Florida and working as a reporter at the Orlando Sentinel and a columnist for the St. Petersburg Evening Independent.

He introduced himself to Post readers by holding a contest for one of them to show him how to make a key lime pie.

It was the start of 32 years of columns, at a clip of sometimes five per week, mostly in the newspaper’s feature section, but also for a time on the local news page.

“He was game for anything,” remembers Sam Pepper, a former Post managing editor during the early years of Wiggins’ stint at the newspaper.

“He reminded me of Jerry Seinfeld in that he could take the basic things in life and turn it into a funny column,” Pepper said. “Seinfeld just made a hell of a lot more money doing it.”

Wiggins described his columns as “first-person experience adventures” mixed with parody, bad jokes and silly contests.

He was part of an odd couple columnist act

He was quickly taken under the wing of Steve Mitchell, an edgier metro columnist, who used the younger Wiggins as a comedic foil.

“Mitchell was smart, hard-drinking, wry, bold, savagely clever and greatly amused by my answer to stress: a trip to the cafeteria for milk and chocolate cookies,” Wiggins remembered. “Sometimes, I would go into the men’s room to see how many times I could ricochet a Superball off the tile.

“People in the stalls complained.”

The two columnists would set off together and write dueling columns, with Mitchell playing the role of bad influence on the goody-two-shoes Wiggins.

“We would go fishing on Lake Okeechobee, and Steve would get the paper to pay for supplies, which to him was cigarettes and alcohol,” Wiggins remembered.

Their odd couple act became a beloved feature of the paper.

“I was working at Pratt-Whitney in those days, and that’s what people would talk about at work. ‘Did you read the Mitchell-Wiggins columns today?’” remembered Pat Crowley, who went on to become a cartoonist at the newspaper and frequent collaborator with Wiggins.

By the time that Mitchell died in 1982, Wiggins had found his solo voice, which was relentlessly cheery, and confident in the general goodness of people.

“He had a different perspective at looking at things,” remembered former Palm Beach Post columnist Thom Smith. “He had that Southern Gothic kind of humor, but with a lighter twist.”

He was convinced everybody had a worthy story to tell

The Post would sometimes send Wiggins off on adventures, both local and distant. He’d wander Southern Boulevard picking up trash, or he’d rent a motor home and drive to Alaska.

Either way, he was the same jovial explorer, marveling at the world around him.

One of his recurring columns was to randomly pick a name out of the phone book, then write a story about that person, convinced that everybody had a worthy story to tell.

Or he would write about people — not when they were doing something for the first time — but when they were doing something for the last time.

When Wiggins turned 60, he began a series of columns called “Attitude Aging.”

He never had trouble talking to people.

“He was nice to everybody, and even though he knew a lot, he was very self-deprecating,” said John Parker, a local lawyer who became best friends with Wiggins.

“He was a marvelous companion,” Parker said. “He always had interesting things to say.”

Wiggins, who was married four times, had two children with his first wife. His son, Lee, 50, lives in Atlanta, and his daughter, Chani, 48, lives in Washington, D.C.

The daughter remembered her father as a man who was constantly on a path of self-improvement. Traveling in the car with him as a child meant listening to Spanish-language tapes.

And when Chani went to work as an aide to two U.S. Senators, her father would call her with whatever new idea was percolating in his head.

“Dad had a solution or a policy idea for everything,” she said. “Twenty years ago, he would call me and tell me that he had figured out a way to fix climate change.

“He would say, ‘All we need to do is to put a bunch of ping-pong balls in the ocean and they would reflect the light and that would overcome climate change.”

He pitched at a senior-league softball game last week

Former Palm Beach Post editor Eddie Sears arrived at the newspaper in 1985, when Wiggins was already a fixture.

“I was lucky enough to inherit Wiggins,” Sears said. “A guy like him is a treasure. He loved the area and he would give speeches to groups too.”

Sears still remembers one of Wiggins jokes, one he told about how the then-new Lion Country Safari didn’t seem to have enough animals.

“But they had a pig who was a master of disguises,” Wiggins would quip.

“He’d use the line while talking to a group, then would work it into a column,” Sears said.

Wiggins retired in 2006, and kept physically fit, always willing to show off his biceps. Sunday, he had a massive stroke, and died the next morning.

It was unexpected. Two weeks ago, he was dancing at his birthday party, and last week he pitched at his senior-league softball game.

While Wiggins hadn't been writing columns anymore, he had begun writing long love letters to his wife, Marybeth, whom he had met while taking up ballroom dancing years ago.

Here's, in part, what Wiggins wrote to his wife last month on Valentine's Day.

"You make every outing, every bike ride, every scooter ride, every road trip to Publix or Ikea an adventure," Wiggins wrote. "These are riches, enjoyable forever, self-renewing and gift-wrapped in the kindness that is the essence of you.

"I see you rhapsodize over the swirls of color in an artisan coffee cup and I learn that enjoying a cup of coffee is not only a sipping experience, but is visual, social, and with you, very special."

The words of the writer live on.

MORE: READ RON WIGGINS' FINAL COLUMN

fcerabino@pbpost.com

@FranklyFlorida