Trivia

An actor until the end, Mr. Podewell was taken to Evanston Hospital after his stroke. The neurologists who were trying to gauge his coherence asked him to name the president of the United States and to tell them how many fingers they were holding up. At the urging of his daughter Polly, he instead regaled them with the Player's Speech, a soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet, which he last had performed in the 1930s.

Mr. Podewell struggled with crippling rheumatoid arthritis that left his hands and feet twisted. Despite that, his children recalled him as a father who practiced carpentry and was a handyman around the house.

Grandfather of Cathy Podewell.

Father of Polly and Bruce Podewell.

With the advent of TV, Lester did a two-year stint as the announcer for WLS-TV's Perspectives and appeared regularly on the local show Hawkins Falls. In the 1960s, Mr. Podewell taught at Patricia Stevens Career College. He also performed in local theater, including Sam Shepard's Fool for Love at Steppenwolf, The Sunshine Boys at Pheasant Run, and Arsenic and Old Lace at Arlington Park Theater with the Gabor sisters.

The Times-Picayune in 1979 described Podewell's role as the father of Huck Finn in the play, Mark Twain: Beneath the Laughter, as taking some amusing broad turns as an ill-fated drunk. It also mentions that in real life he is Tulane drama professor Buzz Podewell's father.

Lester Podewell became a member of the Chicago Art Theater repertoire company in September 1930. He had graduated from the Lindblom High School and as a student at the Englewood night school drama school took an active part in amateur theatricals. As director of the Amaplayers, he took part in six plays which were presented variously at the Goodman Theater and the auditorium of the Englewood High School during 1929.

One of the most unusual stage play roles for Lester was as a pitcher in the Clown Prince of Baseball Al Schact's 1946 Chicago Opera House world's premiere production of Second Guesser, a play by Harold M. Sherman. Lester played a pitcher, Speed Norton, who is pitching both for the championship and the hand of Al's daughter. After eight innings he develops a sore arm and Manager Sam Bumpus (Al Schact) comes in as the relief pitcher to win the pennant. Star pitcher Speed did win his daughter.

In Tennessee Williams' last play, A House Not Meant to Stand, Podewell's portrayal of a neighbor was deemed marvelous by Williams. The 1980 play at Chicago's Goodman Theater featured Podewell as "a lecher with the addled plans to build a Night of Glory motel.".

Director Harvey Medlinsky's adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1973 at the 11th Street Theater in Chicago included Les Podewell as one of the "lesser madmen.".

"He was a wonderful actor," Chicago writer Studs Terkel said of Mr. Podewell, who made occasional appearances during the 1950s on Terkel's Stud's Place live TV show, where Mr. Podewell's wife played Gracie the waitress.

Lester was a 1928 graduate of the Goodman School of Drama and a 1930 graduate of the Chicago Art Theatre. During the 1933 Century of Progress Fair in Chicago, he appeared with Tyrone Power in Hollywood at the Fair, a series of vignettes based on the movies. From 1934 to 1939, he played lead roles in 21 productions presented by the Federal Theater (part of the Works Progress Administration), working with such actors as E.G. Marshall and John Huston.