You know me, I never miss Joe Franklin’s birthday. He would have turned 98 years old today

You know me, I never miss Joe Franklin’s birthday. He would have turned 98 years old today.

My words from January 25, 2015:


I got the news about Joe Franklin last night. Strangely enough I was out with a friend having a drink and we were talking about Joe and I looked on my phone to drum up some info about him and there it was - JOE FRANKLIN DEAD AT 88.

Like most cities, NYC is changing fast but with every bar, restaurant or mom & pops business that disappears and for every insipid, generic yogurt shop that springs up in it’s place, it was at least comforting to know that high above 43rd St., in an office slowly avalanching under the detritus of 20th Century showbiz history, was Joe Franklin, working two telephones with the eternal half-eaten chicken salad sandwich in front of him, some crumbs of which were on his sweater.

For close to half a century, with the voice of a twitchy carny, Joe presided over his bargain-basement TV show, interviewing the has-beens and barely-wases of stage, screen and radio, peppered, surprisingly, by the occasional bonafide famous person who always seemed as mystified as us viewers as to how life had brought them to the public access Altar of Joe.

To me, the mere continued existence of Joe was a big part of what was still cool about NYC. As Josh Alan Friedman said upon Joe’s demise, “As long as Joe Franklin was around, New York still had a soul. Now Times Square is finished.”

Thanks to Drew Friedman for giving me Joe’s phone number which resulted in me taking this photo of Joe in his NYC office in May of 2010.

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