Talk:Lou Holtz (actor)

San Francisco?

According to an article in TIME in 1944, he was born in Manhattan?! --Orange Mike 18:06, 3 April 2007 (UTC) Holtz was born "Elia Goldberg" in Manhattan to a poor Russian/Jewish immigrant who had been in the country for not much more than a year. Goldberg's father stole whatever money his wife had and left before Goldberg was born, forcing Goldberg's mother to work as a maid until she went into labor. When he was only a few years old, Goldberg's mother moved them to San Francisco where she opened a tiny grocery store (whose backroom also served as their home) shortly before the turn of the century. It was located very close to The Presidio. Goldberg's mother then remarried a man named "Holtz" and Goldberg took the name "Holtz" before he started school. Until the day he died in 1980, Holtz had never met, spoken, or corresponded with his real father (Goldberg), and he lost all contact with his stepfather Holtz, when he and his mother divorced after only having been together for a couple of years. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.109.148.125 (talk) 05:39, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Holtz and Robert Bloch

From a response to a question about Bloch's involvement in vaudeville comes this anecdote about Holtz:

According to his autobiography, Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography, he appeared once on an "amateur night" in Milwaukee in order to get the attention of a pro playing in town, to whom he was trying to sell some material. As a result of that appearance, he got a few gigs as what we would now call a stand-up comedian, purely locally "at the kind of bar that advertised 'Entertainment Nightly'"; his agent got half of his $10 fee, and he didn't pursue this line of work for long. He also sold a few jokes to performers (local and national); and tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade vaudeville veteran Lou Holtz that there was more market for an autobiography of his colorful career than for a "novel" based on his Jewish dialect material about "Sam Lapidus" (which was already on the path to 'no-longer-acceptable'). That was about the extent of his "vaudeville" career. --Orange Mike 17:41, 3 April 2007 (UTC) (typing this a couple of blocks from one of Bloch's old apartments in Milwaukee)

FYI! *Exeunt* Ganymead | Dialogue? 13:51, 4 April 2007 (UTC)