February 6, 2006
History in the Making: How Old Was Al Lewis Anyway? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:30 PM EST We learned this weekend the sad news that the actor Al Lewis, best known as Grandpa on The Munsters, had died at 95. Then we learned the sad news that Al Lewis had died at 83. Or maybe 82. Then we kept learning that he had died at both ages. As of this writing, no one seems to know to within a decade when Al Lewis was born. His son says he was born in 1923. He himself always claimed he’d been around since 1910. There’s one theory that he lied about his age to get the Grandpa job, feeling that someone in his fifties had a better shot at the part than someone barely forty. The search for Al Lewis’s true age has been feverish in the several days since his death, and it’s a fascinating close-up case study in the difficulty of doing history even about someone very well known in the very recent past. Moreover, was he really a circus performer when he was six? A Ph.D. from Columbia? A member of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee? To check out some of the research that has gone on, and the back and forth in historical consensus it has produced so far, visit the “talk page” that accompanies Wikipedia’s fast-changing biography of the man, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Al_Lewis.
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