07/26/2026
Every Friday night for six seasons, millions of Americans said his name out loud.
Fred Sanford. The junkman. The heart-attack faker. The man hollering up at his dead wife Elizabeth.
What almost nobody watching knew: that name belonged to a real person. And he never lived to see it.
Redd Foxx wasn't born Redd Foxx. He came into the world as John Elroy Sanford, raised on Chicago's South Side after his father walked out when he was four.
His older brother, Fred, stepped into that gap. Fred was the one who raised him, in a lot of the ways that mattered.
Fred could also play ball. He was a first baseman — good enough to dream about it seriously. But this was the 1930s and 40s, and Black players didn't get looked at, no matter how good they were.
That door never opened. And somewhere along the way, Fred ended up on the wrong side of the law. He spent much of his adult life behind bars.
He got out. And then, not long after, he died.
Seven years later, NBC came calling for Redd Foxx.
They wanted him to headline a new sitcom, built around a cranky, quick-witted junk dealer in Watts. They asked what he wanted the character's name to be.
He didn't need to think about it.
Fred G. Sanford. His brother's full name, handed to a television audience of millions.