Today
we celebrate “The World’s Foremost Authority” on
NATIONAL PROFESSOR IRWIN COREY DAY!
Born in Brooklyn on July 29, 1914, Irwin Corey lived an eventful century plus.
Raised in a orphanage because his parents were poverty stricken, he took off at age 13, riding the rails to California, where he enrolled in high school. During The Great Depression, he worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and worked his way back home, becoming an amateur Featherweight Boxing Champion in New York City’s Golden Gloves tournament.
He was also active in left-wing politics and would remain so all his life, even though it cost him dearly when he was blackballed from the upper echelons of show business as a result of the Congressional witch hunts of the 1950s.
Corey ran for president in 1960 on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Ticket, only half in jest. It took Johnny Carson, with multiple bookings on “The Tonight Show” in the late 1960s and ’70s, to lift the embargo on Corey’s wickedly hilarious comedy and double-talking zany professor shtick.
This led to numerous film and TV show appearances, which allowed him to purchase a converted carriage house in Manhattan, his home until he passed away peacefully in January of 2016 at age 102, having outlived every one of Joe McCarthy’s jingoist louts.
Irwin Corey had honed his act in a thousand nightclubs, and gave his time and money to worthy causes, from struggling political movements to children’s hospitals. On his 108th birthday, let us recall The World’s Foremost Authority’s words of wisdom: “If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going.”
•Suggested Activities: Putting the horse before the hypotenuse.