The other day Genevieve was telling me about Art Bell , her favorite syndicated radio wingnut who she used to listen to late at night on long road trips in the midwest while he vindicated the beliefs and perhaps encouraged the delusions of his probably insane callers. They would phone-in with comments like "NASA put microphones in my teeth because I know about the chupacabra!", and he would calmly reply "Ah, yes, the chupacabra. Of course they don't want people to know that it is really a reverse engineered alien clone made from an alien which crash landed in Puerto Rico."*
After she'd told me all about her man Art, I hipped her to my favorite radio freak-Grandpa Al Lewis , (yes, the guy from The Munsters, you fool) who was the reining king of radical left wing nutters on WBAI, Brooklyn free radio. That night I Googled his name on a whim, to see what was up with Grandpa Al. It turned out he had died a month ago before.

The tribute page for Grandpa Al (notice I don't use the quotation marks- he insisted on it as his real name) from the staff of WBAI is sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious. The first fond remembrance starts

"Yes, I do credit him (he insisted that we do) for my reading of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I feel that I have a better understanding of just what is happening in these United States at this present time."

What a sentimental eulogy! But Grandpa Al wouldn't have it any other way. He was an avowed New York Jewish leftist freak. He would advocate rioting in the streets, violence against police, and the overthrow of the government. He was like my Dad with a microphone. Jay Lawrence, who introduced me to Al, had a favorite story that Al would tell constantly about his time as a de facto bodyguard for W.E.B. Dubois in the height of the Civil Right conflicts-

"I had to make sure that nobody messed with William Edward Burghardt DuBois. So, as we say in them old westerns, you know, we goin’ round up a posse, somebody’s gotta ride shotgun. Well, Al Lewis rode shotgun. And I always said, man, any mother's son put his foot on that running board knows he's the running board. I want to know if he could swallow the 45 that go right in his mouth. That's it."
(from an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!)

he would claim that this made him a black activist akin to the Panthers or Black Guerilla Family.
Al was a freak of another sort as well- a regular at porn conventions in Las Vegas. He was a dirty old man, memorably caught in the act of hitting on female Daily Show correspondent Beth Littleford while she was covering a sleazy beauty pageant that he was one of the judges of. This side of his public persona isn't mentioned on the BAI page. I would be interested how his colleagues, or indeed Al himself could reconcile his revolutionary ideals with the billion dollar porn industry. Perhaps he thought of himself as a perfect mix of Abby Hoffman and Screw magazine founder Al Goldstein.
Not that any of this is meant to demean him. I wish that more celebrities had the balls to be as outspoken as Al Lewis. If Alec Baldwin would just come out and say "Go out and throw a bomb at a cop!" instead of appearing in psuedo-subversive tripe like Fun With Dick and Jane, I would like him a whole lot more.
So, please pour out a little and find out more about your boy Grandpa Al Lewis.

*I didn't just get this idea from nowhere, it's based on a widely held and whispered about belief in P.R.- that the US Government has a secret bunker under El Yunque, the revered and feared jungle in the center of the island where locals refuse to go after dark. Any Puerto Rican will tell you never to go off the path in El Yunque and never to stay overnight. The realistic and practical will say that there might be fugitive rapist degenerates hiding out in there. The mystical might talk about El Yunque's holy significance in the pantheon of Santeria, how it shouldn't be disturbed lest Chango might send some snakes after your ass or something. The superstitious will tell you simply that there are "G-G-Ghosts!" about. And a surprising amount of people will tell you about strange late night noises heard by locals. Noises coming from inside the mountain. And mysterious lights appearing to rise up out of and return to the dense jungle at the heart of El Yunque. The more credible of these types will suggest that maybe the Air Force has some prototype aircraft lab down there. A special breed of Boriquas, though, will tell you about the UFOs that the government has there, and aliens which they are experimenting on, some of which escaped and created the Chupacabra (thats "Goatsucker" for the uninitiated) story which has become famous throughout the world. Like everybody didn't know that already.