This Thanksgiving, Peoria should be grateful for having shared a time and place with Richard Pryor, who died 14 years ago next month. And to help the community remember that blessing, the all-star “Night for Richard” featuring Cedric “The Entertainer,” Mike Epps, D.L. Hughley, Eddie Griffin and George Lopez is scheduled for 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 2 at the Peoria Civic Center Arena to benefit the Richard Pryor statue being created by sculptor Preston Jackson.
“Richard Pryor deserves a statue in his hometown,” Lopez said, “I am honored to be involved in making that happen.”
Other comics who appreciate Pryor or were influenced by him range from Chris Rock and Lewis Black to Dave Chappelle and Bob Newhart – who on a PBS “American Masters” show described the Peoria-born comic, actor and director as “the seminal comedian of the last 50 years.”
When I interviewed Pryor the day before he left Peoria after filming local scenes for “Jo Jo Dancer: Your Life is Calling,” he felt good about his hometown.
“Peoria really came through,” he said in a soft-spoken, almost timid tone in that 1985 conversation. “The studio didn’t want me to use Peoria; they didn’t want me to use Peoria people. They wanted me to do it out of Chicago. But I said, ‘Hey!’ And everyone here has really come through.”
A struggling Midwestern kid becoming a world-famous entertainer is some of the story. Pryor insisted there was more.
Richard Franklin Lennon Thomas Pryor was born in 1940 and grew up on North Washington Street with an influential grandmother, Mamie Carter Pryor, and his parents, Gertrude and LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor. He once told a reporter that he got his sense of humor from his dad.
“He was seriously funny [and] he had a lot of heart,” Pryor said. “That’s where I get most of my humor, from people with heart that stand up for what they are.”
His national TV debut was in 1964 with CBS’ “On Broadway Tonight.”
Eventually, Pryor became a Grammy Award-winning performer, who also shared an Emmy Award (for co-writing a Lily Tomlin TV special) – and deserved Oscar consideration for co-writing “Blazing Saddles” and his acting in “Lady Sings The Blues” – and who hosted a well-received kids show on CBS: “Pryor’s Place” (which echoes in the name the City gave the stretch of road between Jefferson and Romeo B. Garrett Avenues).
Pryor expanded the boundaries of American humor, drawing from everyday racism he felt, but he had a bleak side. Married nine times to seven women, Pryor was an admitted alcoholic and drug abuser seriously burned in a drug-related suicide attempt in 1980, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986, and underwent a quadruple bypass operation in 1991 after repeated heart attacks.
Oddly, what seemed to be the most controversial was his often coarse (if familiar) language.
But people confused Pryor’s roles in routines or in films with him, he told me.
“I’m not ‘Richard Pryor,’ the person you see,” he said 29 years ago. “It’s an image. People don’t go up to me; they go up to the celebrity.”
(As far as objections to a Pryor street or statue: “Let him who’s without sin cast the first stone,” as it’s said.)
Pryor marveled at the difference between Peoria’s own image and reality.
“From the [Pere Marquette] hotel to the river is only three blocks!” he told me then. “I thought it was four miles! I remembered it as a long way. I [walked down Main Street and I] was there before I knew it. I said, ‘Wait a minute; this can’t be! Not from the Madison Theater to the river!”
Jackson’s seven and a half-foot statue of Pryor is scheduled to be unveiled in the Warehouse District this year, a time for fond memories. And fun.
“I like to bring joy,” Pryor once told newswoman Jane Pauley. “That’s how I’d like to be remembered.”