Jaleel White remembers his Urkel days in new memoir

Jaleel White is feeling great. “My wife turned on the air conditioning,” he says from his New York hotel room while on tour to promote his new memoir, “Growing Up Urkel.” But Steve Urkel, as any consumer of '90s pop culture can tell you, was anything but cool. The character White played from 1989 to 1998 on the hit comedy “Family Matters” defined the black nerd for television viewers: saddle shoes, suspenders, thick glasses, high-pitched, nasal voice. Sure, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” had Carlton (Alfonso Ribeiro), but he was more of an entitled, clueless posh guy. Urkel was the personification of Poindexter.

White, now 47, will forever be connected to the character he created in a series he essentially took and put on his shoulders; Urkel didn't arrive until midway through the first season, but he quickly became the main attraction. He doesn't hide from it; that would be useless. “Growing Up Urkel” is not “I Am Not Spock,” Leonard Nimoy's insistent memoir about what set him apart from the logic-obsessed Vulcan he played in “Star Trek.” Rather, it's a rare thing: reminiscent of a remarkably well-adjusted and good-humored former child star who still manages to tell a few stories about what he calls “the shark-infested waters of show business.”

Her main reason for writing the book, she says, was quite simple: “I wanted to give my parents flowers while they are still here. All I see are these stories of showbiz tragedies. My parents didn't know what the hell they were doing, but the most important thing was that they had good intentions for me. My family and I really had very little understanding of what leverage is. We were stuck in appreciation mode. And I think that's good to a certain extent.”

Born in Culver City and raised in a middle-class Pasadena family, White was taught to work hard and be grateful for what he had. He recalled that his mother made sure to prevent his head from getting big, asking people on the “Family Matters” set to constantly check on him. Expensive cars and designer clothes were not an option; When he learned to drive, he was driving the family's used Acura. He was happy if he could keep himself outfitted in Nike gear (which became easier when professional sports teams found out he was a basketball fan and sent him boxes of the latest stuff).

“When I started on the show, I was a 12-year-old kid who wanted to audition and I wanted to get the job so my parents would give me a Sega Genesis,” he said. Polite and chivalrous (his parents sent him to etiquette school to learn how to be a gentleman), he writes about his early dating experiences with a mix of laughter and disgust: “My mom had done such a miraculous job of protecting me from the negative influences. I had effectively become an overconfident, generous-minded fool that teenage girls could turn around on.”

In short, he was a good kid with good parents, qualities that didn't always come in handy when it came time for ABC to pay him the same amount as other television stars. He writes that the show's producers discouraged him from pursuing ancillary opportunities for Urkel for fear of being “overexposed.” In one of the most telling anecdotes in the book, a 14-year-old White is punished by his mother after an argument. When his parents inform “Family Matters” producers that he is sick and can't go to work, a series of gift baskets arrive at the White family home, along with an offer to send a doctor. White writes that ABC assumed her family was “sickly,” a common ploy used by parents of child stars seeking more money. But when White returned to work the next day, his family made no demands. Turns out they were just disciplining their son.

“That was probably my biggest moment of influence that we never realized,” White writes. “All those gifts were received by me and my parents very seriously. My parents may have even felt bad that a family dispute had led so many people to worry about my health.”

White has worked hard in the years since “Family Matters.” He voiced Sonic the Hedgehog in a series of Sega games; more recently he has had roles in the television series “The Afterparty” and opposite Adam Sandler in the underrated basketball movie “Hustle” (a shoot he fondly remembers for his basketball games). He knows he'll always be Urkel to fans of a certain age, but he's happy when someone on the street recognizes him from something else, like his current gig as host of the CBS game show “Flip Side.” “Now I host game shows for the Boomers who called me Urkel,” he says.

And millennials, who have grown up Googling everything, often call it something else. The name he grew up hearing.

“They call me Jaleel,” he says.