Known for his primal scream, comedian Sam Kinison spent his youth in East Peoria

It’s hard to imagine Sam Kinison growing old and mellowing out.

The infant Sam arrived in East Peoria nearly 62 years ago. That’s the minimum age to draw Social Security, a stage in life where few folks stomp and scream, “AUUUGH. AUUUGH! AUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGH!”

Then again, regardless of age, the world never saw anything quite like Sam Kinison — a foreboding mix of brooding, ranting, cajoling and preaching, with a cackling chuckle slipping out just enough to let the audience know that his mayhem was meant for merriment. Maybe.

“He was the Chuck Yeager of comedy,” Robin Williams said at Kinison’s 1992 funeral in Hollywood, days after a fatal car wreck. “He pushed the envelope.”

Kinison was born in Yakima, Wash., in 1953. His family moved to East Peoria when he was 3 months old. Kinison and his family (he was the third of four boys) lived above an East Peoria Pentecostal church where his father was a preacher.

“I used to hang out a little at the Steak ’n Shake in East Peoria,” he told the Journal Star in 1987. “Do a little swimming in the river there. Yeeaaah. Real nice.”

Kinison’s parents divorced when he was 12. He attended East Peoria Community High School, then left for a religious boarding school in upstate New York when he was 15. He left school at 16, hitchhiking and preaching along the East Coast.

His father died when he was 18. His mother married another preacher and moved to Tulsa, Okla. By Kinison’s late teens, he had almost no kin left in Greater Peoria.

Kinison’s itinerant preaching made for a lackluster paycheck. After he and his first wife were divorced, he decided to give comedy a try. After trying the clubs in Texas, Kinison moved to Los Angeles hoping to find work at The Comedy Store. He never seemed interested in winning over an audience, preferring to cut loose with shrieks and profanities — yet connecting with crowds who, though unsettled, recognized themselves in his projection of romantic rejection.

After he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield’s “Ninth Annual Young Comedians Special” in 1985, the New York Times noted, “The most interesting of the other eight comedians is the savagely misogynistic Sam Kinison. Mr. Kinison specializes in a grotesque animalist howl that might be described as the primal scream of the married man.”

Late that same year, Kinison made his network debut on “Late Night With David Letterman.”

Letterman sounded uncharacteristically wary in offering an introduction that sounded more like a warning or disclaimer: “He is one of the strangest and most original comedians working today. Brace yourself — and I’m not kidding — please welcome Sam Kinison.”

At Kinison’s best, his eyes would narrow as a snarl snaked across his face. With his brutal insight and fire-and-brimstone delivery, he would clamp his teeth onto a topic — news, celebrities, protesters (he had many), crowd chatter — and shake every last bit of comedy out of it. And with the knife ever-twisting, often at his own expense, he would leave audiences doubled-over, howling in a shared catharsis.

But as success came fast, a drug problem raged. Video of his late-1980s shows depicted a glassy-eyed and non-edgy Kinison. He was still funny, yet, uneven, no longer a dangerous observational pit bull, and his comedy lost some of its bite. Though he had a few TV projects and bit movie parts (his scene in Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School” just kills), he never caught the same kind of traction as Peoria’s greatest comedian, Richard Pryor.

By 1991, his career seemed to be on a downturn. In an interview that year, according to Entertainment Weekly, Kinison said, “It seems to be one tragedy followed after another. Just about the time you think life’s perfect, and you got it just the way you want it, something else comes up that breaks your heart, devastates you. And then you have to get over that, and try to trust again, believe again, and set up for the next tragedy.”

Still, by the spring of the next year, he seemed upbeat. In mid-April, he was supposed to have signed his first film contract in four years. On April 5, 1992, he married his girlfriend — they’d had a tumultuous relationship — in Las Vegas. After a Hawaiian honeymoon, they returned stateside for Kinison to tour.

On April 10, while driving his white 1989 Pontiac Trans Am on U.S. Route 95 near Needles, Calif., the 38-year-old Kinison was struck head-on by a pickup truck driven by a 17-year-old male who had been drinking alcohol. Witnesses said Kinison tried to get up from the wreck, saying, “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. How come?”

He died a few minutes later. His new wife, though wounded, survived, as did the other driver.

At Kinison’s funeral, pal Richard Belzer said in his eulogy, “The thing that strikes me most about his death is the tragic irony of the timing. … He had finally turned his life around — and now it’s over.”

Back in his hometown, promoter Jay Goldberg, who had booked Kinison multiple times, rued what might’ve been.

“I look at him like the Buddy Hollys in the world, or the Jimi Hendrixes, who had so much potential,” Goldberg said. “But we never found out what they could’ve done.”

PHIL LUCIANO is a Journal Star columnist. He can be reached at pluciano@pjstar.com, facebook.com/philluciano or (309) 686-3155. Follow him on Twitter @LucianoPhil. The book “101 Things That Play in Peoria” is available at the Journal Star offices, 1 News Plaza, Peoria, or online at www.createspace.com/5479904. The book costs $21.95, plus tax.

This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Sam Kinison spent his youth in East Peoria