CNN.com – Grandpa ‘Munster’ dies at age 82 – Feb 5, 2006:
Al Lewis, the cigar-chomping patriarch of “The Munsters” whose work as a basketball scout, restaurateur and political candidate never eclipsed his role as Grandpa from the television sitcom, died after years of failing health.
I’d have included the years in the header to make Aaron happy, but there’s some argument as to when he was born– somewhere between 1910 and 1923.
I briefly met Grandpa in 1987, at “Late Night at Rubin Hall”, a dorm at NYU, where Dave Mack and I wrote some of the jokes, including most of the Top 10 list they used. It was his looking up at a tall RA and his saying “Boy, you’re a long stream of piss, aren’t you?” that stood out in the minds of just about everybody there. Grandpa Munster cursing? Shocking, and yet perfectly right.
Another New York original. I look forward to his eventual return from the grave in three nights or so.
For what it’s worth, the majority of citations of Al Lewis’ age that I’ve seen over the years (particularly when he ran for office in the early ’90s) point to 1910 being his correct year of birth. The CNN obit (which Yahoo! picked up) is the only place I’ve seen 1923 indicated.
Paul
Storehouse of useless information
And, just that fast, I see on Mark Evanier’s blog that the news services are adjusting their Lewis obits to list his age at death as 82. So it appears that 1923 is correct, and it was someone else in showbiz who was named “Al Lewis” who was born in 1910.
The “Car 54, Where Are You?” still Evanier posted on his site shows Lewis looking like he could be anywhere between his mid-40s and mid-50s, so I guess the confusion is understandable.