| Excerpt from Los Angeles Daily News
Here's a sample of an Opinion-page commentary by Richard. This is a remembrance of actor Al Lewis, best known for the outlandish characters he played in the popular TV situation comedies Car 54 Where Are You? and The Munsters. Richard got to know Al during eight years (1980-88) spent covering show business in Hollywood for the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, and various trade magazines.
- "Grandpa Munster: One of a Kind," published in the Los Angeles Daily News; February 8, 2006:
"Richard, it's Al Lewis calling."
How I dreaded those five words. I heard them often during my 13 months as news director of KPFK, the left-leaning Los Angeles radio station.
"You oughta be ashamed of yourself," Al would scold in his nasal Brooklyn twang. "And you call yourself a journalist? Outrageous."
Coming from anybody else, Grandpa Munster's caustic critiques would have prompted me to mouth an insincere "thank you" and hang up the phone. But Al was different.
For one thing, he was a frequent and generous donor to a listener-supported station that was always begging for money. More importantly, Al's criticisms were usually on target. "Let's have lunch he'd suggest. "I wanna tell you a story."
Al would meet me at the shabby KPFK studio in North Hollywood and we'd dodge cars across Cahuenga Boulevard to Denny's. Between bites of a Reuben sandwich, Al would sign autographs and pose for pictures alongside adoring fans of The Munsters. He'd recollect his early years of political activism. In the 1930s, so Al claimed, he had protested persecution of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of black teens accused of raping two white women. All but one of the youths were given death sentences, but each was eventually cleared.
"I'll always fight against hate," Al once told me, in our corner booth. "And I'll always get plenty of love," he winked, as another delighted fan yelled "Grandpa!" and raced to our table.
Al always picked up the tab. Somehow he'd learned that my KPFK salary was $11,000 a year, barely enough to live on even during the Carter presidency. Al knew about poverty. He told me about fighting evictions while being raised by his mother, an immigrant sweatshop worker, during the 1920s. Al worked his way through Columbia University—taking odd jobs in vaudeville theaters and pool halls—before earning an PhD in child psychology and becoming a teacher. Looking for a bigger audience, he told me that at age 45 he decided to become an actor, sharing classes and discussing civil rights with fellow novice Sidney Poitier.
This was 16 years before Al's mock-serious 1998 campaign as the Green Party candidate for New York governor, during which he went to court to make sure his name appeared as "Grandpa" Al Lewis on the ballot.
I lost touch with Al when he returned to Manhattan, but it was obvious that he remained a pain in the butt. At a news conference, he suggested the best way to get PCB contaminants out of the Hudson River was the spoon-feed them to the top executives of General Electric. "You have to act a little crazy," he reportedly said at the time, "to get the media to write about you."
This insight came from an irrepressible character who worked as a clown, trapeze artist, waiter, and basketball scout before entering politics. Tired of fielding Al's pesky calls, Pacifica Radio finally gave Grandpa his own weekly program on its New York station, WBAI.
"Watcha starin' at?" Al barked at a stranger, the last time I saw him. He was smoking his trademark cigar outside a posh Tucson resort when our paths happen to cross in October 2001. "Yeah, it's Grandpa all right! They won't let me smoke inside this dump, so I gotta come out here and put up with gawkers like you."
A moment later Al had his arm around the startled tourist and both were smiling for the camera.
I stood flatfooted, caught between the impulse to hug my loquacious pal and the fear that I'd endure another withering lecture if I said hello. In Al's view, I'd sold out to the mainstream by switching from KPFK to National Public Radio. This was an unpardonable sin in the eyes of this lifelong anarchist.
"You oughtta be arrested," I could hear him fume, channeling Officer Leo Schnauzer from the only sitcom my father ever dropped his newspaper long enough to watch: "Car 54 Where Are You?" I chickened out and kept walking, but not before another stranger took a double-take at the big guy with the piercing voice, hawk nose, and salty tongue.
"You look like you just seen a Munster," Grandpa prompted, with an impish grin. "I still got the stogie, too."
Landing the wacky 1964-66 role may have been the best thing that happened to Al Lewis, but there was a lot more to this endearing curmudgeon than the campy Dracula costume suggested. In an era of manipulated sameness, Grandpa was an unpredictable original. I'm going to miss him.
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