This Guy Never Met a Stooge By Steve Blow / The Dallas Morning News
Many people were shocked to hear last week that more American teens can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government - 59 percent vs. 41 percent. Bob Bernet of Dallas was shocked, too. He thinks everyone ought to know the Stooges. "They're the best!" he said. One of the Stooges also happens to have been Bob's boyhood friend. Just for the record, the three branches of government are the judicial, the legislative and the sexecutive. And the Three (Best) Stooges were Larry, Curly and Bob's old friend, Moe. At 43, Bob is among those of us raised during the heyday of television's finest cultural programming. Yes, Icky Twerp's Slam Bang Theater. And the best part of Slam Bang Theater was those old, scratchy Three Stooges episodes. "I loved them," Bob said. "My mother was watching The Joey Bishop Show one night in 1968," he said. "She called me to the television because the Three Stooges were on. They were old men, but it was great to see them." Pen Pals Bob was 12 at the time. And on a whim, he wrote a letter to Moe. He expressed his admiration for the Stooges and asked when they might be on TV again. In return, he got a nice handwritten letter from Moe. "Dear Friend Bobby," it began. Bob was thrilled. "I thought, well, if he wrote me once, maybe he will write me twice." And so Bob sent another letter. If you are a cyber type, you can go to Bob's Web site on the Internet at web2.airmail.net/willdogs and see all 28 letters that Moe sent over the following years. When Bob graduated from Hillcrest High School in 1973, he and friend Bill Janin decided to take a road trip. Their destination was California - to meet Moe. "By this point, I had really begun to think of him as a friend," Bob said. Moe graciously invited Bob and Bill over to his home in the Hollywood Hills. "I couldn't believe how short he was!" Bob said. "I was a foot taller. When he came to the door, he said, 'Who the hell put you way up there?' " Bob said all the original Stooges were about 5-foot-1, which made it very hard to find replacements after Curly had a stroke in the mid-1940s and Shemp died suddenly in the mid-'50s. (To my mind, replacements Joe and Curly Joe just never did measure up anyway.) Incidentally, Moe, Curly and Shemp Howard were all brothers. Moe, Shemp and Larry Fine first appeared together in the 1920s in a vaudeville act known as The Three Knockabouts. Curly's Cue Shemp left for character roles in the movies, and so Moe brought in another brother, Jerry. "But he said he feared that Jerry wasn't very funny, so they shaved his head and gave him the name 'Curly' to help him along," Bob said. Bob said he visited with 76-year-old Moe and his wife, Helen, for an hour and a half. Helen served them sandwiches and soft drinks. Bob showed me some old home-movie footage he shot of Moe clowning around in his backyard with the boys that day. It was classic stuff - eye pokes and all. Moe had the familiar bowl haircut, but his hair was white. After that visit, Bob and Moe dispensed with the letter writing and began talking periodically on the phone. "He was a genuinely nice man," Bob said. "And he loved to reminisce about things. I began to feel toward him like I would an elderly uncle." Bob said he gave up telling people about his friendship with Moe. "I found out that people either didn't believe me or they didn't care," he said. One evening in 1975, Bob got home from his grocery store job and announced to his younger brothers that they should stay off the phone because he was about to call Moe. "My mother started crying and showed me the newspaper. There was an article saying Moe - the last of the Three Stooges - had died. "I didn't cry," Bob said. "But I really felt like a door had closed." But, of course, the spirit of the Three Stooges lives on - in the three branches of government. |
