Category Archives: Uncategorized

Many sites seem to be discussing the raging controversy over the true birthdate of the late Al Lewis. A consensus seems to be emerging that he was definitely born in 1923, and he began saying 1910 when he did The Munsters. He was playing the father of Yvonne DeCarlo, who was born in 1922 and either (a) Lewis was afraid someone would think he was too young for the part so he fibbed or (b) the studio thought it might bother someone and they asked him to lie. I'm not sure either would be a very good reason but his being younger than Ms. DeCarlo seems to have been part of the reason.

Actually, there are plenty of instances of actors playing parents where the real ages don't match up. Maureen Stapleton was the same age as Dick Van Dyke when she played his mother in Bye Bye Birdie, and I'm sure other examples will come to me later. There might even have been something colorful about Al Lewis being younger than the woman playing his daughter when they were both portraying vampires. Maybe it's that they feared it would call attention to Yvonne DeCarlo's age and she (or the studio) didn't want that.

I agree with Bill Sherman's statement of political intent.

Browsing my e-mail, I sometimes wonder if some people understand that a weblog is something you do when you have time, and only when something pops into your head that you think is worth sharing with the world. My penchant for obits has caused some readers here to presume that if someone famous dies and I don't respond immediately with an anecdote, it must be that I have something against that famous person. No, I just may not have an anecdote or anything to say beyond the obvious or the time to write something.

Here's a big reason people thought "Grandpa" Al Lewis was born in 1910 when he was actually, they're now telling us, born in 1923. Kip Williams sent me a link to this interview in which Lewis was asked his birthdate and he gave it as April 30, 1910. And if he said it in one interview, he probably said it in others.

So what happened here? It's possible that whoever transcribed the interview misheard him but that sure doesn't sound likely. So either his family, which announced the 1923 date, is wrong…or Lewis, for whatever his reason, chose to lie about his age. But why lie to add thirteen years? And if that's wrong, a lot of stories he told are probably wrong too, including his war stories and his tales of getting involved in politics in the thirties. Among many other accounts that don't fit the corrected timeline is that he sometimes claimed to have been involved with the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, who were executed in 1927. (Hey, maybe that's why they got the chair. They had a four year old kid defending them.)

My hunch is that the family is not wrong; that Al just thought it made him more colorful to have all those colorful experiences in his past and that he had to lengthen his past a bit to accomodate them all. But we may never know for sure.

Testifying today before the Senate committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale."

Right. Washington was sending eels to spy on the British.

No wonder they didn't dare put this guy under oath.

The New York Times has a nice article on DC Comics head honcho Paul Levitz. Why is it a nice article? Because it quotes me, of course.

Many years ago, Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania was one of the main architects of the "single bullet theory" of the Kennedy assassination. I happen to believe that theory is correct and I have a new one. It's the "double Arlen Specter theory." My theory is that there are two senators from Pennsylvania named Arlen Specter who look exactly alike but who have totally different sets of principles and moral conduct.

Anyone who has followed this man's career (or rather, these men's careers) could cite many examples. No representative who has held office for any length of time has had quite the capacity to get both parties mad at him, often for the same actions. Browse Democratic websites and you'll see people cursing him as a Republican. Browse Republican sites and you'll see them cursing him louder as a "RINO" (Republican in Name Only). Ordinarily, I'd admire the seeming unwillingness to toe any party's line. But in this case, it's mostly a matter of one Arlen Specter subverting the other's agenda, making sure that any stand that puts principle over partisan concerns is soon neutralized.

The other day, UPI reported…

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program appears to be illegal. Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, Specter called the administration's legal reasoning "strained and unrealistic" and said the program appears to be "in flat violation" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Now, the lede is a bit overstated, given that Specter also said the problem may have been with the law itself. But it takes a certain amount of political courage to say as much as he did, and to make all those other statements about pursuing the truth, no matter who it embarrasses.

This morning, chairing the committee investigating these charges, we got an Arlen Specter who didn't feel the Attorney General needed to be sworn in before testifying. If you or I testified in a case involving a discrepancy of twenty dollars somewhere, we'd have to be sworn in and say whatever we said under oath. Judge Judy puts people under oath before she'll let them state their names in her TV court. Today, rather than spend the thirty seconds necessary to do that, Specter spent many long minutes defending that decision. He stated that the Attorney General had said he was quite willing to take the oath but that this particular Arlen Specter decided it wasn't necessary because, if I understand him correctly, somewhere there was precedent that showed this occasionally was not done and he didn't feel like doing it this time.

Sorry…I don't get it. The only conceivable reason to not take any kind of testimony under oath is to give the witness a smidgen of wiggle room if later, it's necessary to prosecute them for lying. This should not even be an option and I'll bet you that one of the Arlen Specters agrees. At least one of them must remember John Mitchell, a former attorney general who was convicted and sent to prison on charges that included obstruction of justice and perjury.

Some of you may be skeptical of my theory, and I can certainly understand that. You might be thinking, "Hey, how can Pennsylvania have two Senator Specters? States only get two senators and don't they have another one? No, not really. Take a look at some of the posturings and contradictions of this Rick Santorum guy who is sometimes passed off as "the other" senator from Pennsylvania. That's not a real senator. He's just some sham someone arranged to mask the fact that there are two Arlen Specters.

Come back later and I'll tell you about the three Joe Bidens. That's how many there'd have to be for there to be that many Joe Biden speeches and Sunday morning news show appearances.

Jay Shull, who reads this site, sends me a link to the work of another great pavement artist, Kurt Wenner.

The press services are now correcting their obits on "Grandpa" Al Lewis, saying he was born in 1923, which would have made him 82 at the time of his death, not 95. I seem to recall a number of past instances where press reports confused his past with that of a couple of other gents in show business with the same name, and several Internet sites clearly had it wrong. So that may have been the source of the error.

On a number of comic books I wrote years ago, I had the pleasure of working with Paul Norris, a fine artist and gentleman. Paul, who is 91 and sharp as ever, has many credits but I'll just mention two. He was the artist creator of Aquaman and then later, he wrote and drew the Brick Bradford newspaper strip for a little over 35 years. Others have said that Paul never missed a deadline in his life and while I can't attest to that, I can tell you that when we worked together, he was never not early with whatever he was drawing.

A few years ago at a San Diego Con, Stan Lee and I were wandering around, talking about something or other, and we wandered into a big auditorium where a panel of veteran comic artists was in progress. Stan mentioned he'd worked with everyone on the panel except one gent and asked who it was. When I told him it was Paul Norris, he said, "You mean, the guy who did Brick Bradford?" And then, with the exact same tone that some geeky fanboys have had when they asked me to introduce them to someone like Stan Lee, Stan asked me to introduce him to Paul Norris. Which I did. Paul couldn't believe that Stan Lee wanted to meet him and Stan couldn't believe that he was meeting Paul Norris.

Paul is a graduate of Midland Lutheran College in Fremont, Nebraska. Opening this week there is an exhibit of his artwork. Here's an article about his life and career, and there's some info there about the exhibit. If you're anywhere near Midland, check it out. But since you probably aren't, just read the article.

Nat Hentoff on the Imperial Presidency. I have the feeling that a lot of people who insist on the right of the president to trump certain laws won't feel that way the next time we have a Democratic president.

Has anyone sent you a sample of Julian Beever's art? Mr. Beever does these remarkable chalk drawings on sidewalks that, when viewed from a certain angle, take on a 3-D effect. This website displays some of them. Take a look at the photos that show what the drawings look like when viewed from the wrong angle in order to fully understand what this man does. It's not humanly possible.

Animator and animation director Myron Waldman died Saturday morning at the age of 97. His career dated back to working as a cel-painter on Betty Boop and Koko the Clown cartoons in 1930. The eminent cartoon historian, Mr. Jerry Beck, has posted a better obit than I could possibly produce. Go here to read it.

Here's a review of a stage production you can't go and see. In fact, I think the last performance is starting just as I'm posting this report on the matinee I saw this afternoon.

The Reprise! company in Los Angeles does these low-rehearsal, low-budget, high-talent interpretations of great Broadway musicals and they're just now finishing two weeks of City of Angels, a very fine show with a book by Larry Gelbart, lyrics by David Zippel and music by the late (and much-missed) Cy Coleman. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it's about a writer in the forties who's not unlike Raymond Chandler. They're turning one of his hard-as-nails detective novels into a movie and he's selling out a bit of his soul for Big Bucks, working for an a-hole producer-director who's demanding change after change for no good reason. Anyone who's heard Mr. Gelbart discourse on what know-nothing execs have done to his own work will recognize a large part of the passion in his witty dialogue.

The stage is usually bisected. On one side, we see scenes from the novel as ace gumshoe Stone functions in a film noir environment, with costumes and sets in black-and-white to suggest that kind of world and movie. On the other, we see novelist Stine, who leads a more-or-less full-color existence, battling the idiot producer, cheating on his wife, breaking up with that wife and wrestling with his own rather confused conscience. Most of the actors in the show play at least two roles, one on each side of the stage, and both narratives get quite complicated, especially when one mirrors the other or they outright intersect. Somehow, the storylines resolve each other and the audience goes home very happy. At least, all the folks this afternoon who fled the Super Bowl to see City of Angels up at U.C.L.A. did. Gelbart's words are extremely clever and Zippel's music matches him, pun for pun and double entendre for double entendre. I think he even managed to get some triple and quadruple entendres in there.

Stephen Bogardus was Stine, Burke Moses was Stone and they both were terrific. So was Stuart Pankin, who played the producer who glories in messing with the writer's prose. I'd rave further but it would just make you sorrier you can't go see it. I'd go back and see it again if I could.

I've had the time to read up on the situation with the Danish cartoonists and I still don't have anything to write here apart from the obvious. What's more, I haven't seen any other bloggers write anything that I wanted to link to or even pass off as my own observations. Yes, cartoonists everywhere have a right to draw what they want. No, it may not be the smartest thing in the world to publish drawings that are going to get that many people that mad. Those two thoughts are not mutually exclusive.

I won't be watching the Super Bowl today. Carolyn and I are going to a play. You can get real good seats when you go on Super Bowl Sunday.

Sorry to read of the passing of Sonny King, a great entertainer who worked with Jimmy Durante and was a Vegas fixture for many years. He is most often mentioned for the historic achievement of introducing a kid named Jerry Lewis to a singer named Dean Martin. But Sonny, who I saw perform a few times when I first started trekking to Nevada, deserves to be remembered for more than that.

Lastly for now, this reminder: The WonderCon convenes in San Francisco this coming Friday. Unlike last year, when rain made for a messy weekend, the forecast calls for naught but sun, at least through Saturday. So that's a good sign. I'll be moderating a (for me) modest slate of panels and since I went to the trouble of making up the banner, I'm going to post it again…

I never had the opportunity to really meet "Grandpa" Al Lewis, who has just passed away at the age of 95. [Correction: He was 82.] For several years, he fronted a restaurant in Greenwich Village where the main attraction was not the food but being seated and insulted by the man who'd played Grandpa Munster on The Munsters. On one trip to New York, the fine cartoonist Carol Lay took me there because, she said, all her friends loved going there and bantering with Grandpa. As it turned out, we arrived at the place only hours after it had closed forever.

It was a disappointment because I'd always found Al Lewis to be a crusty but colorful character. This obit will tell you the story of his career but basically, there were two high points: Car 54, Where Are You? and The Munsters. Car 54 was one of my favorite shows and Lewis was brilliant on it playing the chronic kvetch, Officer Leo Schnauzer. He was so good that at several points during the show's two season run, when the producers were having troubles with co-star Joe E. Ross, the decision was made to fire Ross and to elevate Lewis to co-star. Had the series returned for a third season, that would probably have happened.

It was The Munsters that made him famous and gave him his lasting nickname. I remember taking the Universal Studios tour at the time and seeing Grandpa Munster, in full blue-green make-up, coming out to sign autographs for folks on the tram. He managed to act quite cranky while obviously loving every second of it. Before and after that series, he had some fine screen roles, especially that of the hanging judge in Used Cars, a 1980 comedy that didn't get nearly enough attention.

Even into his nineties, Lewis remained an outspoken pain-in-the-butt to many, running for public office, broadcasting a local radio show in New York, and giving outrageous and outraged interviews whenever possible. It's sad to lose someone like that because he really was one of a kind.