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I enjoyed the Stooges from my earliest days watching TV.

When I was in HS, a few classmates and I would head to my parents’ house (short walking distance from school) during a free hour and watch Stooges shorts on the local UHF channel.

During my senior year in HS, the news broke that Larry Fine had passed away, and that left Moe as the surviving original Stooge. Somehow this inspired us to try and locate Moe, in order to speak with him.

This is prior to the World Wide Web, and everything we learned involved long-distance calls. My parents’ phone bill just exploded as we called NY and CA trying to find out how we could reach him. Finally, someone in NYC suggested a particular booking agency, and I called them and they were of no help. Then I realized I could call the Screen Actors Guild in LA and indicate I was calling from that booking agency looking for contact information on Moe. I did that expecting to get a phone number for his agent - and they gave me his home phone number (!)

We called and his wife answered - asking us to call back later after he finished his nap. We did and he got on the line and was very pleasant, had tremendous recall of having played vaudeville in Milwaukee (where we were calling from), spoke for 20 minutes, and at the end he very politely asked that we not call again. Which we did not do. It was like speaking to the President or the Queen, it was an incredibly special moment for us. He coughed a bit, but his voice was clear, and he was very sharp.

Less than 2 months later I was attending a concert in Milwaukee and the girl I was with turned to me during a break and asked if it was true that we had spoken to Moe Howard (word had made it around our school of our brush with celebrity greatness.) As I was confirming it to her, I felt a sudden sense of dread. I didn’t know it, but Moe died in LA at about that time, and it was reported in the next morning’s papers. I recall it as May 4, 1975, but I may be off a bit.

He had emphysema, was remarkably close to the end of his life, and 4 HS student fans from Wisconsin call him one Saturday afternoon at home and he takes the time and is courteous enough to reminisce with us for 20 minutes. Obviously, I did not know him well - but that tells me a lot.

I still enjoy their humor and often think of them as being the best example of creative talent that made mistakes in controlling the intellectual property of their creative work. All those shorts that were commissioned by Columbia, which will be in reruns forever, were things they did for some salary and no residuals, and they had absolutely no ownership. I have read that Moe sold real estate in his later years and overall, the group was paid modestly. So many laughs, so little compensation.