A life spent keeping the Stooges story alive
Paul Howard, whose father Moe Howard was one of the Three Stooges, died earlier this week in Manhattan at the age of 91. For much of his life he acted as a custodian of the comedy team's history, appearing at conventions and events where he recounted family memories and personal anecdotes about his father to successive generations of fans.[S1][S2][S3][S4]
In 2015 he presented a nine-episode docuseries titled Hey Moe, Hey Dad!, which traced the Stooges' career using archival material, accounts from relatives and conversations with the families of Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Curly Howard, Shemp Howard and Curly Joe DeRita. C3 Entertainment, Inc. produced and distributed the program, which is now available on the Three Stooges+ channel on YouTube and included interviews with celebrity admirers such as Whoopi Goldberg, Billy West and Leonard Maltin.[S1]
The story of a birth timed to vaudeville
His niece, Tessa Maurer, shared a passage from Growing Up Stooge, a book by Paul Howard's sister Joan Howard Maurer, describing how he arrived in the world. According to the excerpt, Moe had long hoped for a son he could take fishing and play baseball with, and when his wife Helen told him in late 1934 that she was expecting, he joked that if the child were a boy he would have to be dragged out of the gutter in celebration.[S1]
Helen arranged the birth around a vaudeville tour in the east so that Paul could be delivered at Doctor's Hospital in New York, and he was born on July 8, 1935, eight years after his sister. Moe, performing that day with Larry and Curly at Boston's Metropolitan Theatre, received a telegram from the hospital announcing a healthy eight-pound boy born at 9:45 a.m. and urging him to stay out of the gutter; the account notes that Moe, a non-drinker, was giddy with pride.[S1]
Days later, while driving through heavy rain to collect his wife and newborn, Moe crashed a rented car into a cement lamppost that toppled across the hood and shattered the windshield, leaving him with facial cuts and a black eye. His pregnant sister-in-law Clarice, riding in the back, went into labor at the scene, and the family account recalls Moe laughing that such a turn could only happen in a Stooge comedy; Clarice gave birth to a cousin, Carole, two months early.[S1]
Paul Howard is survived by his wife, Joanne, and a daughter, Jennifer.[S1]
