What with him dying last week, I guess it's old news but I can't help linking to this funny and fascinating interview with Al Lewis, best known as Grandpa Munster, that originally appeared in the anarchist newspaper The Shadow.
Richard at Commie Curmudgeon already has the choice highlights from the interview, so I will only recommend that you go ahead and read the interview in its entirety. From having a quick google search about Lewis, I note that there is dispute in some quarters about the veracity of some of the details he gives about his past, but who gives a toss? The only thing I'm looking forward to in being an old codger is the leeway it will give me in embellishing the facts of my life when chewing the ear off of some nearby youngster. Anyway, it has an almost
Ben Traven quality to it.
What I really want to know, however, is what was it with radicalism and old actors who played crotchety old geezers on popular mainstream hit tv shows from the sixties and seventies? That's Lewis marked down as a self-described anarchist and one time Green Party mayoral candidate lining up alongside Max the Butler from Hart to Hart, Lionel "I was too left-wing for the Communist Party" Stander, and Grandpa Zeb Walton,
Will Geer, from the Waltons.
Anyone got any inside gossip on John Forsythe? Someone that smooth and well dressed could only have been a member of the SLP.
Hat tip to Commie Curmudgeon.