Labor Day Just Isn’t the Same Without Jerry Lewis

Labor Day weekend was a couple of weeks ago, and I really didn’t notice much.

I worked my usual weekend hustle with the Pine Mountain Wild Animal Safari, taking people through the park on the tour buses and doing an hour’s worth of information and comedy. Then on Monday, the actual holiday, I found myself in the office at the newspaper – deadlines don’t take holidays into account.

All in all, just another weekend.

But something was missing, something in the background, something I should have been enjoying.

There was DragonCon, the annual huge science fiction convention in Atlanta held that weekend, but I’ve only been to one and, while I did enjoy myself, I find it’s gotten too expensive to attend again.

No, that wasn’t it.

Then it hit me – where was Jerry Lewis and the Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Associoation? The one that had been on the air every Labor Day weekend since I could remember? The one that celebrated its 60th anniversary this year?

Since the Telethon came to an end in 2014, I have noticed a real void in that holiday weekend, one that is difficult to fill.

For about 25 years, I was a volunteer for MDA during the show. I started out answering phones and taking pledges at the Columbus pledge center in 1976, and then answered phones in LaGrange until becoming Pledge Center Coordinator and MDA Community Chairman in the mid 1980s.

My last Telethon was in 2001, because after that I found myself needed for family events that had been postponed far too long.  My then-wife and daughter also helped raise funds for “Jerry’s kids.”

But I watched it as much as I could every holiday weekend it was on, let me assure you of that.

When you do something like that for such a long time, it sticks with you.

Critics of the show, then and now, called it “schtick,” sleazy, entertainers from by-gone days, not funny, and they leveled the nastiest lines at Lewis himself. But the critics didn’t have the final say, and they never do – the man raised over $2 billion to research causes and cures for the 40 or so neuromuscular diseases grouped under the name Muscular Dystrophy.

Argue with success.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait while you lose that argument.

Jerry Lewis was fired as host of the Telethon – his own brainchild – in 2011. While nobody ever confirmed the exact reason why, the main points seem to center around the MDA Board of Directors’ desire to shorten the show and modernize it – both of which Lewis was strongly against. His argument was, as I mentioned before, why argue with success?

There had also been a subtle shift over the years regarding Lewis’ seeming reliance on pity-driven fundraising, which was and is viewed as patronizing toward people with disabilities. That, I can understand.

They didn’t even give him a proper send-off, though. I understand they were going to let him have a brief appearance on the 2011 show to say farewell, but they even took that away from him.

Some called the Telethon boring, some called it old-fashioned, some called it a pity party. I called it entertainment and the most successful continuous fundraiser ever created in the era of broadcasting.

Since Jerry Lewis’ death in 2017 at the age of 91, a lot has emerged about the man that is … well … not very complimentary. It is agreed that away from cameras and stages, he was not a nice man in any real way. He could be, and was, brusque and abrupt.  He could say things that would bring a person to tears, and then walk off without thinking twice about it.

That does not detract from the fact that he was also a very good entertainer, up until he wasn’t. When his routine got old, stale, tired, and people stopped responding to it like they once did.

It happens to all of us.

Times change, and tastes change. Great entertainers either change with them, or retire. Jerry did neither, and ended up a bitter old man.

Contrary to anything you may have heard, Jerry Lewis did not take one dime from MDA for the 50-plus years of work he did for them.  It was his life’s labor of love.

The Telethon made one show without him, and it flopped. Go figure.

Jerry Lewis raised over two billion dollars.

And in a microscopically small way, I helped.

Thank you, Jerry. You are missed, every Labor Day weekend.