It's said that fans start out identifying with Curly's childishness, then grow to Moe's bossiness, and end up as Larry, forever caught in the middle, coming up smiling no matter what catastrophic fate has seen fit to inflict upon his preposterously frizzy-haired head. Or the rest of him, for that matter.
Because he wasn't just a sort of straight man, though he often was, reacting more than acting. He wasn't just a stooge, though of course that would have been plenty. Born Louis Feinberg in Philadelphia in 1902, the child of Russian Jews, he was badly injured in a childhood accident — his arm was burned by acid used by his father, a jeweler — and to help heal and strengthen the damaged limb, his parents signed him up for violin lessons, according to his biography at the Jewish Virtual Library. He became quite proficient at the instrument, too, and early on hit the vaudeville circuit as a violinist. Larry also turned to athletics to help recover from the injury, and had a short, but successful, career as a boxer, with one professional win to his record. You have to wonder if that was in the "strengths" column of his resumé — "can take a punch."
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