Levenson, Sam, 1911-1980

Humorist, author, television personality.

Sam Levenson (1911-1980) was a humorist, raconteur, teacher, and writer. He was born in 1911 in New York City to Rebecca and Hyman Levenson, an immigrant tailor. The youngest in a family of eight, Sam grew up in the Lower East Side, East Harlem and in Brownsville, Brooklyn. He attended local public schools and received his B.A. in Spanish from Brooklyn College and an M.A. in Romance Languages from Columbia University. In 1934, Sam Levenson began to teach Spanish in Brooklyn high schools. He developed an interesting technique by incorporating humorous personal tales as he taught his classes, mostly about his every day life and personal experiences. Throughout the years that Sam Levenson taught, he also entertained the public; he performed monologues at after school teas, luncheons, dinners, fund-raising events and at hotels in (New York's) Catskill Mountains. He very much enjoyed making people laugh with his consummate storytelling. His tales, as he once said, stemmed from experiences and relationships of that basic unit of American life--the family. It was these keen observations that appealed to his students and audiences. In 1945, Sam Levenson took a leave of absence from teaching to see whether he could actually make a living as a full time performer. His popularity quickly increased and he made regular appearances in nightclubs and on television shows (like Ed Sullivan, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin shows) which soon lead to his being cast in his own prime time television show. In addition to his success as a performer, Levenson wrote several humorous books again drawing from personal experiences which delighted his readers. His books included A Time for Innocence, Everything But Money (on the best seller list for 56 weeks), In One Era and Out of the Other, Sex and the Single Child. You Don't Have to be in Who's Who to Know What's What. In Everthing But Money, Levenson described the small New York City tenement he shared with his parents, six older brothers and sister as a life of plenty-plenty of relatives, neighbors, boarders, janitors, bugs, soap, books, music, weddings illnesses, cats, dogs, but also plenty of hope, ambition, energy, family pride, discipline, and above all, faith in education as the key to freedom. Sam Levenson died in 1980 at the age of sixty-eight. His wife Esther, son Conrad and daughter Emily survive him.