Al Lewis

Al Lewis earned lasting fame as Grandpa on the TV show "The Munsters." Unlike most actors who try to shave years off their age, he did the opposite, claiming a 1910 birth year rather than the actual 1923. This fabrication may have originated in 1964, when he was competing for the Grandpa role and worried that being younger than Yvonne De Carlo, cast as his daughter, could cost him the part.

Over time, he elaborated on those 13 invented years. According to his account, he was born Alexander or Albert Meister in 1910 in the upstate town of Wolcott, though no official record confirms this. He claimed careers as a radio actor, circus clown, trapeze artist, medicine show "professor," and union organizer in the South. After relocating to Brooklyn, he said he served on the defense committee for Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists executed in 1927.

He also said he appeared in Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin', the Broadway hit of 1938, and championed the cause of the Scottsboro Boys — nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women in a deeply flawed case. Further claims included surviving a torpedoed ship as a merchant seaman and earning a doctorate in child psychology from Columbia University. Columbia has no record of this.

In his later years, Al Lewis put both his presence and his money behind his convictions. He advocated prison reform, vigorously opposed the Rockefeller drug laws as unnecessarily punitive, and argued against police brutality while supporting police salary increases. He opened Grampa's Restaurant in New York City, produced a children's video, appeared in a series of Saturday morning kids' shows, hosted a radio program on WBAI-FM in New York City, and ran as the Green Party candidate for governor in 1998.