Not long after the death of Tommy Bond, who played the bully in the Our Gang comedies, we now have word of the passing, on October 16, of the actor who played Porky. He was known off-screen as both Eugene Lee and Gordon Lee…born in 1933 in Ft. Worth, Texas. He joined the Our Gang troupe at the age of two, chosen for his resemblance to George "Spanky" McFarland, who had become the real star of the series. Porky (as they called him on-screen) never had a lot of dialogue and when he did speak, it was usually to mispronounce "okay," which came out, "otay." It became a kind of catch-phrase both for him and Bill "Buckwheat" Thomas.
He stuck around until he was six, which is when he left Our Gang, and his place was more or less taken over by a young actor named Mickey Gubitosi. (Mickey later became more famous under the name, Robert Blake.) Lee's parents took him back to Texas and he eventually grew up to become a school teacher living in Minnesota and to occasionally turn up at autograph conventions and Our Gang reunions.
Over the years, there have been quite a few Our Gang impostors — adults who make personal appearances and who sign autographs claiming falsely to have been in the films. Usually, they make up a character name but sometimes, they insist on having been a specific on-screen player. In the sixties, Mr. Lee's earlier, brief moments of stardom were stolen by an unusually brazen identity thief who not only claimed to have played Porky but actually published an autobiography based on that premise. The fraud was finally unmasked by several film buffs who reminded the world that there was only one "Porky" Lee. Sadly, today we don't even have that.