GRANDPA MUNSTER ONE OF A KIND.

Byline: Richard Mahler Local View

``RICHARD, it's Al Lewis calling.''

How I dreaded those five words. I heard them often during my 13 months as news director of KPFK, the left-of-center Los Angeles radio station.

``You oughta be ashamed of yourself,'' Al would scold me in his nasal Brooklyn twang. ``And you call yourself a journalist? Outrageous.''

Coming from anybody else, Grandpa Munster's caustic critiques would have prompted me to mouth an insincere ``thank you'' and hang up. But Al was different.

For one thing, he was a frequent and generous donor to a listener-supported station that was always begging for money. More importantly, Al's criticisms were usually on target. ``Let's have lunch,'' he'd suggest. ``I wanna tell you a story.''

Al would meet me at the shabby KPFK studio in North Hollywood, and we'd dodge cars across Cahuenga Boulevard to Denny's. Between bites of a Reuben sandwich, Al would sign autographs and pose for pictures alongside adoring fans of ``The Munsters.'' He'd recollect his early years of political activism: In the 1930s, Al protested prosecution of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of black teens accused of raping two white women. All but one of the youths were given death sentences, but each was eventually cleared.

``I'll always fight against hate,'' Al once told me, in our corner booth at Denny's. ``And I'll always get plenty of love,'' he winked, as another delighted fan yelled ``Grandpa!'' and raced to our table.

Al always picked up the tab for our lunches. Somehow he'd learned that my KPFK salary was $11,000 a year, barely enough to live on even during the Carter presidency. Al knew about poverty. He told me about fighting evictions while being raised by his mother, an immigrant sweatshop worker, during the 1920s. Al worked his way through Columbia University - taking odd jobs in vaudeville theaters and pool halls - before earning a Ph.D. in child psychology and becoming a teacher. Looking for a bigger audience, he told me how at age 45 he decided to become an actor, sharing classes and talking about civil rights with fellow novice Sidney Poitier.

This was 16 years before Al's mock-serious 1998 campaign as the Green Party candidate for New York governor, during which he went to court to make sure his name appeared as ``Grandpa'' Al Lewis on the ballot.

I lost touch with Al when he returned to Manhattan, but it was obvious that he remained a pain in the butt. At a news conference, he suggested the best way to get PCB contaminants out of the Hudson River was to spoon-feed them to the top executives of General Electric. ``You have to act a little crazy,'' he reportedly said at the time, ``to get the media to write about you.''

This insight came from an irrepressible character who worked as a clown, trapeze artist, waiter and basketball scout before entering politics. Tired of fielding Al's pesky phone calls, Pacifica Radio finally gave Grandpa his own weekly program on its New York station, WBAI.

``Watcha starin' at?'' Al barked at a stranger the last time I saw him. He was smoking his trademark cigar outside a posh Tucson resort when our paths happened to cross in 2001. ``Yeah, it's Grandpa all right! They won't let me smoke inside this dump, so I gotta come out here and put up with gawkers like you!''

A minute later, Al had his arm around the startled tourist, and both were smiling for the camera.

I stood for a moment, caught between the impulse to hug my loquacious pal and the fear that I'd endure a withering lecture if I said hello. In Al's view, I'd sold out to the mainstream by switching from KPFK to National Public Radio. That had been an unpardonable sin in the eyes of this lifelong anarchist.

``You oughta be arrested,'' I could hear him fume, channeling Officer Leo Schnauzer from the only sitcom my father ever dropped his newspaper to watch, ``Car 54, Where Are You?'' I chickened out and kept walking toward the lobby, but not before another stranger took a double-take at the big guy with the piercing voice and familiar face.

``You look like you just saw a Munster,'' Grandpa prompted, with an impish grin. ``I still got the stogie, too.''

Landing the wacky 1964-66 role may have been the best thing that happened to Al Lewis, but there was a lot more to this endearing curmudgeon that the campy Dracula costume suggested. In an era of manipulated sameness, Grandpa was an unpredictable original. I'm going to miss him.

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Photo:

``Grandpa Munster'' Al Lewis, left, who died last week at age 95, campaigned in 1998 against the New York governor.

Henny Ray Abrams/AFP/Getty Images