Al Lewis
Grandpa Justice
An actor whose real life’s work was standing up for the powerless
By Barbara Raab
Right there, Riverside Drive just north of 120th Street, on the sidewalk outside the august Riverside Church, sat an elaborate gold coffin. On wheels. With an engine. And a vanity license plate that read: dragula. As soon as I saw it, I realized this wasn’t going to be your ordinary memorial service. But then again, Grandpa Munster wasn’t your ordinary grandfather.
That gold coffin was Grandpa’s famous Dragula dragster, which, diehard Munsters fans will recall, saved the day in Episode No. 36. That’s the one where Herman, decked out like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, loses a drag race in his Munster Koach, only to have Grandpa in his Dragula win the rematch.
On this cold and cloudy Saturday, the Dragula provided several hundred people an excuse for a quick smile as they steeled themselves against the chill wind and climbed the church steps to go within and celebrate the life of “Grandpa” Al Lewis, the actor who portrayed Grandpa Munster in the mid-1960s. This memorial service was billed as “home going” for Lewis, who died at his apartment on Roosevelt Island on February 3, 2006, at the age of 82. (First reports had listed him as 95, the result of Lewis’s longtime lie about his age, both charming and puzzling, since actors who fudge their age usually subtract years, not add them.)
Such is the power of the small screen that most of the world knows Al Lewis only as Grandpa Munster, or as Officer Schnauzer in the Bronx police sitcom, Car 54, Where Are You? But on this Saturday, with the exception of an all-grown-up Butch Patrick, a/k/a Eddie Munster, who in a quavering voice recalled how, during down-time on the set, Al Lewis would take the occasion to throw a baseball or toss a Frisbee with him, hardly anybody talked about Al Lewis’s work as an actor. Nor did those who knew him best speak much of his lesser-known stints as a basketball scout, or as the owner of the restaurant Grandpa’s Bella Gente on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, although one speaker, the pianist Terry Waldo, surprised the crowd with the little-known fact that it was Al Lewis who wrote the lyrics to the American-songbook classic “Blueberry Hill.”
Instead, what a long list of Grandpa Al’s friends and associates talked about, before a gathering crowd dressed in everything from tie-dye to business formal, was the way he used his celebrity to accomplish his real life’s work: speaking out for social change and standing up for the powerless. They spoke of his passion as a political activist, a crusader against racism, oppression, and ignorance. As his friend, Catholic priest Father Lawrence Lucas, put it, Grandpa Al Lewis used his fame to become “a drum major for justice.”
Alice Green, herself an activist from Albany, New York, recalled the way Lewis always “spoke out about racism, capitalism, and greed. He was never one to sugarcoat life for anyone.”
Ms. Green was Lewis’s running mate in 1998, when they went up against Gov. George Pataki – whom Lewis called “Potatohead Pataki” – on the Green Party ticket. As they traveled around the state, Alice Green says, “[e]verybody recognized Grandpa. Walking around town with Al was like being at the head of a parade that instantaneously formed around him.”
The Grandpa Al solution for solving the state’s toxic waste problem? Get a large spoon and force-feed sludge to the CEOs of large corporations. His definition of a campaign contribution? Green says Lewis would spell it out on the palm of his hand: b-r-i-b-e. But behind the political farce was a serious goal, and Al Lewis achieved it. His notoriety pulled in enough votes – more than 52,000 — to secure a ballot line in future elections, and a voice, for the New York State Green Party.
Person after person at the memorial service spoke of Lewis’s tireless campaign to abolish New York State’s harshly punitive Rockefeller drug laws, which he felt unfairly and disproportionately sent poor black men to prison for long periods of time. With his signature cigar, and what journalist Jimmy Breslin called “his freakin’ hair coming out,” Lewis would often protest with a group outside Rockefeller Center. He’d also rail about the drug laws inside New York State prisons, where authorities apparently thought Grandpa Munster was merely coming to entertain the inmates. Instead, Grandpa Al would politicize the prisoners with his scathing criticism of the system that had put them behind bars. Last year the Rockefeller drug laws were amended; activist and Lewis friend Randy Credico, who spoke at the memorial, believes the changes never would have happened without Lewis’s work. Al, Credico says, “knew the difference between those in the civil-rights movement, and those in the civil-rights business.”
Lewis also knew the difference between a pastrami sandwich that was full and one that might be minus, shall we say, a buddy’s little nosh. On a recent visit to see Grandpa Al at home, Credico brought along a favorite Lewis treat: an overstuffed hot-pastrami sandwich from Katz’s Deli. It smelled so good that Credico says he couldn’t resist unwrapping it, stealing a slice or two of meat, and wrapping it back up just so. When he presented it to Grandpa Al, however, the jig was up. Lewis looked at the sandwich, then looked at Credico, and shouted: “Ya pinched it!”
For years, Lewis had been host of a weekly radio program on Pacifica’s politically radical radio station WBAI-FM, whose program director Bernard White remembered him as “our gadfly” and “a guy who would fill up any room he was in.” Lewis, it seems, got the WBAI gig after constant phone calls by him to comment, correct mistakes, or complain about what was on the air.
Amy Goodman, host of WBAI’s Democracy Now, remembers those phone calls. “In the early years,” Ms. Goodman recalled from the pulpit, “we’d finish the broadcast and gather all our papers from the control room,” and a few minutes later “the inevitable phone call” would come from an agitated Al Lewis with demands of: “You’ve got to be kidding! Why didn’t you raise this, and why didn’t you raise that?” As unnerving as they were, Goodman admits she “counted on those phone calls so much. Grandpa educated me.”
Al Lewis was also eulogized as a devoted family man, a father of three and real-life grandfather of four.
“Growing up in our house was a very special experience,” middle son Ted Lewis recalled of their years in Los Angeles. “We had one radio that was never turned off, and were never allowed to change stations. It was always tuned to KPFK,” the local Pacifica outlet. The brothers say they were taught to “pick a side and argue it, get involved and not be a spectator, use facts and not emotion, and always ask why, or why not?”
“My father,” Ted Lewis said, “was many things to many people. He was like a very large diamond with different facets that would sparkle differently for each person.”
