≡ Menu

Paying My Respects to Another Stooge

I promised, after my visit to Curly’s grave in Boyle Heights almost a year ago, that I’d make it to the rest of The Stooges’.

Today, running around town taking care of errands, I passed right by the entrance to Hillside Memorial Park on Centinela. Ordinarily, I zip by on the freeway with a nod to Al Jolson, in whose memory there’s a landmark mausoleum with a waterfall. But today, there I was at the front gate with a couple of extra minutes in the schedule.

The guard directed me to Moe Howard‘s tomb, but I wasn’t able to find it, so I headed for the office. The woman there was kind enough to point me in the right direction, give me a map, and a bottle of water.

It was a short walk from the office to the Alcove of Love. And the crypt was right where the woman told me it would be—C-233.

I sat down for a few minutes on one of the benches in the Alcove and pondered this man I didn’t know and about whom the marker said next to nothing. Born Moses Harry Horwitz, he had an incredible show-business career. A high-school dropout, he supported himself for almost a half-century doing schtick with his brothers (Curly and Shemp) and their friend Larry Fine. His career was buoyed along by technological changes—when Columbia Pictures stopped making shorts in the late 1950s, those shorts found a market in the emerging television medium. They also found a whole new audience in Baby Boomers.

Was making people laugh a fun career? Did it make Moe happy? No telling. I didn’t know the man. According to Wikipedia, when show-business evaporated for Moe in the 1970s, he went into real estate. Would you buy a house from this man? He was married for more than 50 years to the same woman, and had two children. That’s an accomplishment!

As with my visit to Curly’s grave last February, I came away from the Alcove of Love without any deep thoughts, no great insights on the Meaning of Life. What I saw was an unadorned monument to a man who spent 77 years on the Earth. I don’t know if he met his own expectations in life. But he has given me hours and hours of laughter. And that is a greater marker than can ever be made of brass.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • YMC January 28, 2012, 7:50 am

    Nice piece. By the way, Larry’s last name was spelled Fine. Loved Moe and Curly, still do! I never liked Shemp, maybe because he wasn’t the same as Curly, but, it always seemed as though he would rather have been someplace else(he had a good solo career before rejoining the Stooges in 1947). To me, to leave the gift of laughter for all these years, and still hold up more than 80 years after they made their film debuts, is special.

  • Paul Skolnick January 28, 2012, 8:32 am

    YMC, I have changed the spelling of Larry’s last name. l guess I got caught up in the trap of his birthname, Louis Feinberg.

  • Carl P. Pugliese January 28, 2012, 8:25 pm

    The Stooges were the greatest, I lauhged so much and they were a part of me growing up. They still are a part of me and always will be now and forever. Wish I copuld find a channel that still played their stuff…