The Crimson Pirate Was Pink

The Crimson Pirate was on the other night. Like the previously mentioned Sea Hawk, it dwarfs The Pirates Of The Caribbean in moviemaking. Burt Lancaster also did all of his own stunts. Lancaster was quite an interesting man who had a great deal of integrity and very progressive beliefs. He was a big contributor the ACLU as well as to the causes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a New Yorker, from East Harlem, who found his talents develop at the Union Settlement House. He's also a son of the LES, since his grandfather lived for a time at 40 Essex Street! Selections from Kate Buford's bio of Burt :"His paternal grandfather James emigrated to New York in the mid-1860s, more than a decade after the Great Famine, part of the human migration to America that provided labor for the vast technological changes that swept the country after the Civil War. James had two key advantages as an Irish Protestant: he was educated enough to read and he was a skilled worker, a cooper, having served a five-to-six-year apprenticeship before landing in America. He settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at 40 Essex Street (now the the handball courts of Seward Park. In the twisting streets and dark brick buildings lived harness makers, peddlers, grocers, bakers, carpenters, and barbers, Germans from Hesse-Darmstadt and Bavaria, Russians, Austrians,and thousands of Irish — one of the most horrific concentrations of tenement-jammed humanity in the world.....In 1900 James Roberts (Burt's father) — a widower now, with two more children, Minnie and Stephen — rented an apartment at 2068 Second Avenue, near the corner of 106th Street in the shadow of the El. Lizzie, twenty-four, took on the responsibilities of mother of the family. Four years later, James bought what his grandson would call a "very poor little house," a narrow four-story brownstone down the street at 209 East 106th Street between Second and Third Avenues (now part of the Franklin Plaza housing complex), built around 1880 on the north side of the street. The house had been divided into three rental floors, with a moving business on the ground floor. As one of the periodic broad streets that broke up the narrow Manhattan grid, 106th, even with the superstructures of the two Els marking both ends of the block, was less confined and claustrophobic than other nearby streets." I put together a Burt slide show, using part of an old Lux Radio Show with Burt performing in "Broken Arrow."