The Peculiar Truth about the Comedian Panhandler
Published in
3 min readAug 8, 2023
- From the late 1990s to 2016, daily automobile commuters who emerged from the Queens tunnel into midtown Manhattan would often see an old man on the corner at East 35th Street.
- The tiny, withered, white-haired fellow — usually wearing a white baseball cap bearing a slogan slamming big government — would beg for spare change.
- Each afternoon, he collected money from strangers who had no idea who the old man was.
- They didn’t know, for instance, that in 2014 the beggar turned 100 years old.
- Or that he never kept the money for himself but gave it to his favorite charity, the plight of children in Cuba.
- Or that he lived nearby in a multi-million-dollar Manhattan home.
- But the man’s neighbors knew all about him and his life as a famous comedian.
- They knew him as Professor Irwin Corey.
- He was born Irwin Cohen in Brooklyn, NY in 1914. When his father abandoned the family, Irwin’s mother sent him to an orphanage where he lived until he was a teenager. While there, he told jokes to cheer the other kids.
- Young Irwin then rode the rails as a hobo across the US to Los Angeles and received a high school diploma.
- In adulthood during the Great…
