http://www.philly.com/inquirer/colu..._High_honoring_Three_Stooges__Larry_Fine.html
Posted on Mon, Oct. 12, 2009
Daniel Rubin: Central High honoring Three Stooges' Larry Fine
By Daniel Rubin
Inquirer Columnist
For the first time in its 171-year history, Central High School will induct several distinguished but dead Philadelphians into its Hall of Fame on Thursday, and the names are luminous:
Eakins, Barnes, Fels, Guggenheim, Feinberg.
Feinberg?
You may know Louis Feinberg, from the academic powerhouse's 132d class, by his stage name: Fine.
Or more likely, by the name he went by, Larry.
As in Larry, Moe, and Curly. The poodle-haired Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk was one of the original Three Stooges.
Which raises the question: How did a school known for academic achievement come to honor someone my mother wouldn't let me watch on TV for fear I'd grow up to be like him, a knucklehead?
"I don't think he spent a lot of time in class," says Gary Lassin, curator of the Stoogeum in Ambler, an open-once-a-month shrine to the slapstick arts of the comedy team whose roots extend back to vaudeville in the 1920s.
"Actually, I know very little about his time at Central," said Lassin, who presides over the Three Stooges Fan Club and is married to a niece of Fine's. "He never graduated, to the best of my knowledge. Not because academically he couldn't, but because he had a calling. He had bigger fish to fry."
No one's left to talk about those days, Lassin said. Fine was born in 1902 and died in 1975 in Los Angeles, where he lived most of his life. And Lassin waved me off Fine's autobiography. "It's almost impossible to read," he said. "It was put out by a vanity publisher with almost no proofreading. There's a comma inserted after almost every word."
Instead, he recommended Larry, the Stooge in the Middle, written by the performer's younger brother, Morris Feinberg, for insights into Larry the scholar.
Before I hung up I asked Lassin what his wife, Robin, remembers of her great uncle.
"She was scared to death of him," he said. "She was a little girl and the Stooges hit each other. When Uncle Larry would return to Philadelphia, her family couldn't tell her Uncle Larry was coming because she'd get upset. So they'd tell her 'Uncle Max' was coming."
Feinberg's book doesn't mention Central at all. It says that Larry Fine always fought with his father over school, and that Larry dropped out at age 14.
It was in his father's watch-repair and jewelry store, at 606 S. Third St., that Larry's show business career got its accidental start. He was 4 and picked up a bottle of acid used to identify gold. His father reached out, and a drop spilled on the boy's arm, burning him. The doctor recommended he gently exercise his arm by playing the violin.
The slight, blond child was 8 when he soloed at a children's concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Later, at local amateur nights, he'd dress up in a Buster Brown outfit, sing and dance, and, given his diminutive stature, the audience would think him a child prodigy.
Morris Feinberg describes how by 1919, the year he would have graduated from Central, Louis Feinberg was calling himself Larry Fine, playing violin, and telling jokes in a series of troupes. In 1928 he joined brothers from Brooklyn named Moses and Samuel Horowitz to form an act that would become the first Three Stooges, Moe, Larry and Shemp.
The trio (even though four different comedians would end up starring with Moe and Larry) made 190 short films for Columbia starting in 1934. They still air on television.
And while my mother forbade me to watch them, generations of Central boys were not so deprived.
"From time to time I have students come by looking for anything from Larry Fine's time here," said Robert Sanders, Central's archivist.
And he tells them what he told me: "There's not a sign of him having been here."
Not a photo, not an enrollment card. Central was in its third building, at Broad and Green, during the teens, Sanders said, and not just for the academically talented then.
"I imagine that while he was here he must have had a rather undistinguished career."
But not afterward.
Sanders, former chair of Central's English department, recalls seeing the Three Stooges in Boston with his aunt in the '30s.
"They were absolutely marvelous," he recalled.
As I was concluding my inquiries I got a call from Hy Lovitz, a lawyer who chairs the school's Hall of Fame committee. He wanted to make sure I mentioned some of the other famous people being honored, and he listed them all for me.
"I just wanted to give you an expanded view of the group," he said. "But thinking about this, Larry Fine's probably had more of an impact on generations than anyone."
Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk.
FYI, there's a mural of Larry at 3rd & South.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/extrawack/150532213/
http://stoogeworld.com/_Whats New/Mural.htm
Posted on Mon, Oct. 12, 2009
Daniel Rubin: Central High honoring Three Stooges' Larry Fine
By Daniel Rubin
Inquirer Columnist
For the first time in its 171-year history, Central High School will induct several distinguished but dead Philadelphians into its Hall of Fame on Thursday, and the names are luminous:
Eakins, Barnes, Fels, Guggenheim, Feinberg.
Feinberg?
You may know Louis Feinberg, from the academic powerhouse's 132d class, by his stage name: Fine.
Or more likely, by the name he went by, Larry.
As in Larry, Moe, and Curly. The poodle-haired Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk was one of the original Three Stooges.
Which raises the question: How did a school known for academic achievement come to honor someone my mother wouldn't let me watch on TV for fear I'd grow up to be like him, a knucklehead?
"I don't think he spent a lot of time in class," says Gary Lassin, curator of the Stoogeum in Ambler, an open-once-a-month shrine to the slapstick arts of the comedy team whose roots extend back to vaudeville in the 1920s.
"Actually, I know very little about his time at Central," said Lassin, who presides over the Three Stooges Fan Club and is married to a niece of Fine's. "He never graduated, to the best of my knowledge. Not because academically he couldn't, but because he had a calling. He had bigger fish to fry."
No one's left to talk about those days, Lassin said. Fine was born in 1902 and died in 1975 in Los Angeles, where he lived most of his life. And Lassin waved me off Fine's autobiography. "It's almost impossible to read," he said. "It was put out by a vanity publisher with almost no proofreading. There's a comma inserted after almost every word."
Instead, he recommended Larry, the Stooge in the Middle, written by the performer's younger brother, Morris Feinberg, for insights into Larry the scholar.
Before I hung up I asked Lassin what his wife, Robin, remembers of her great uncle.
"She was scared to death of him," he said. "She was a little girl and the Stooges hit each other. When Uncle Larry would return to Philadelphia, her family couldn't tell her Uncle Larry was coming because she'd get upset. So they'd tell her 'Uncle Max' was coming."
Feinberg's book doesn't mention Central at all. It says that Larry Fine always fought with his father over school, and that Larry dropped out at age 14.
It was in his father's watch-repair and jewelry store, at 606 S. Third St., that Larry's show business career got its accidental start. He was 4 and picked up a bottle of acid used to identify gold. His father reached out, and a drop spilled on the boy's arm, burning him. The doctor recommended he gently exercise his arm by playing the violin.
The slight, blond child was 8 when he soloed at a children's concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Later, at local amateur nights, he'd dress up in a Buster Brown outfit, sing and dance, and, given his diminutive stature, the audience would think him a child prodigy.
Morris Feinberg describes how by 1919, the year he would have graduated from Central, Louis Feinberg was calling himself Larry Fine, playing violin, and telling jokes in a series of troupes. In 1928 he joined brothers from Brooklyn named Moses and Samuel Horowitz to form an act that would become the first Three Stooges, Moe, Larry and Shemp.
The trio (even though four different comedians would end up starring with Moe and Larry) made 190 short films for Columbia starting in 1934. They still air on television.
And while my mother forbade me to watch them, generations of Central boys were not so deprived.
"From time to time I have students come by looking for anything from Larry Fine's time here," said Robert Sanders, Central's archivist.
And he tells them what he told me: "There's not a sign of him having been here."
Not a photo, not an enrollment card. Central was in its third building, at Broad and Green, during the teens, Sanders said, and not just for the academically talented then.
"I imagine that while he was here he must have had a rather undistinguished career."
But not afterward.
Sanders, former chair of Central's English department, recalls seeing the Three Stooges in Boston with his aunt in the '30s.
"They were absolutely marvelous," he recalled.
As I was concluding my inquiries I got a call from Hy Lovitz, a lawyer who chairs the school's Hall of Fame committee. He wanted to make sure I mentioned some of the other famous people being honored, and he listed them all for me.
"I just wanted to give you an expanded view of the group," he said. "But thinking about this, Larry Fine's probably had more of an impact on generations than anyone."
Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk.
FYI, there's a mural of Larry at 3rd & South.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/extrawack/150532213/
http://stoogeworld.com/_Whats New/Mural.htm
