Hello and welcome back to Volume II of The Wall where we celebrate the lives of people we have lost. If you like this blog, please hit the follow button and tell your friends about it. I understand that this may not be everyone’s cup of tea but no one is getting out of this place alive so sooner or later we are all going to be there (or here if you are lucky) and I am sure we will want those we leave behind to celebrate our lives in much the way that we here celebrate the lives of those who have departed. So, the more who join in, the merrier, I say.
I’ll start with the loss of the Love Boat captain Gavin MacLeod. Not sure how we will all navigate life without the good captain Stebbing but we’ll just have to learn how to have fun on our own. I believe Julie, the cruise director, (played by Lauren Tewes) and Isaac, the bartender (Ted Lange) are still around so there is still a lot of party to be had. Sadly, though, Gohper (Fred Grandy – who graduated cum laude from Harvard and was the roommate of David Eisenhower Dwight’s grandson at Phillips Exeter Academy) is also in Davy Jones’ locker. MacLeod, in addition to the role of Captain Stebing, was Murray Slaughter, Mary Richards’ co-worker at WJM on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. He was originally supposed to try out for the role of Mary’s boss but felt the part of her co-worker suited him better. Ed Asner, a great actor, who is still going at 91, got the part of her caustic, yet lovable, boss. In a nice bookend to his Love Boat role, his first regular spot in a sitcom was on McHale’s Navy. He must have been fully stocked with Dramamine during his career.
Unlike in April, when we lost a lot of A-listers, May was quieter on that front. While we had one person who was the quintessential type of person for whom The Wall was created, after that, save for two, we have only had a lot of honorable mentions. Thus, we soldier on. As I have said in the first posting of this blog, there are too many people who have done great or small things that I think do not get enough credit. Spenser Silver is exactly the type of person the Wall was meant for. He invented a product we all use on a daily basis yet he lived in relative anonymity. Well, now in death doth he shine. You see, he invented the post-it, a simple product that has made our lives infinitely easier. While Henry Ford is known by all, how many of us actually hop in a Ford as much as we stick some yellow piece of paper to some object that heretofore we never could have done. What would I do with my very high-tech computer screen, if I couldn’t adorn its entire perimeter with Mr. Silver’s rather low-tech post-it notes? Thank God for the guy.
As with many a great invention, like ivory soap, which legend has it was the product of a technician leaving a machine on too long, the invention of the post-it was the product of inadvertence. Dr. Silver, who earned a doctorate in organic chemistry, worked for 3M developing adhesives. Unlike most of the people I grew up with who worked with adhesives by putting them in the bottom of a paper bag and huffing in order to get high, Dr. Silver was attempting to perfect an adhesive so strong it could be used in aircraft construction. It was during that failed attempt (thankfully for all of the riveters out there) that he came up with an adhesive that could easily be peeled off of a surface and reused. Known by its formal name: Repositionable Pressure-Sensitive Adhesive Sheet Material, the post-it wasn’t an instant hit. They were tested in four markets and shoppers showed little to no interest. Shows you what the knew. To market the product, what was known internally as the Boise Blitz was launched. 3M provided free samples of post-its to Fortune 500 CEO’s and their secretaries who came to find them indispensable. Good thing because how else would Carrie Bradshaw’s boyfriend have broken up with her on Sex in the City if not via a post-it note. Try as it might, technology still has not found a way to supplant the post-it. Just look at the many computer workstations that are festooned with them. Oh, irony of ironies. Perhaps as befits someone with such a scientific background, he didn’t die of something as pedestrian as a cold, or covid or cancer. No, he left us at 80 due to Ventricular Tachycardia. How appropriate.
Moving from science to language, another A-lister of the month is John Richards who spent a good portion of his life defending the oft-misused punctuation mark, the apostrophe. In 2001, along with his son, he formed the Apostrophe Protection Society which at its apex had 250 members, perhaps illustrating how little cared-about the apostrophe truly is. In one instance, Mr. Richards complained to a restaurant that advertised “coffee’s” and was told by the owner of the shop that it looked better with the apostrophe. Truly form over substance.
One fan of the punction was Frank Zappa, (unfortunately, also deceased), whose most commercially successful album in the United States was entitled Apsotrophe (‘). With compositions such as Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow, Nanook Rubs It and Stink Foot, the album rose to number 86 on the Billboard charts. I am sure that, were he aware of such things, Mr. Richards would have been proud.
Claiming that “the barbarians have won,” and noting that he was just not as enthusiastic about the apostrophe as he once was, he shut down the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2019. Perhaps also fittingly, he died at 97 of sepsis. The mantle of apostrophe protector however, will always be Richards’.
It’s 10 p.m., do you know where your children are? If you grew up in New York and had channel 5 (not to be confused with Chanel No. 5) on the television at 10:00 you heard that every night. It was the lead-in to the Ten O’clock News. My parents were avid watchers and in a household with one television, as their kids, we all were as well. The alternative was going to bed which no kid ever wanted to do. A staple on that broadcast was Bill McCreary, a pioneering black journalist who won several Emmy awards for his work over the years. He began in 1967 on what was then WNEW and rose to be co-anchor of the popular news report as well as anchoring Black News and the McCreary Report. During his career, he interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela amongst others. He worked in an era when news reporters and anchors gave the facts and not their opinions. As a kid, I didn’t know him as black man so much as I knew him as a comforting presence on my television. Perhaps that’s how it ought to be.
While we are out of top line people, we lost many folks who still meant much in May. I will blame this on my parents, who didn’t pressure me to read as a youth, that I never heard of Eric Carl until he died. To all of you whose reaction to his name was who(?), I thank you for not making me feel incredibly stupid and for supporting my parents’ (note the apostrophe) way of child-rearing. In any event, he wrote, if one can describe them as such, picture books, including the famous, but unbeknownst to me, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Perhaps not reading it, or at least gazing at is pictures, is where I first went wrong. I’ll never know if that was the trigger point. I note his passing only because I do not want to offend the entomologists among you.
Now onto the arena of music. Drummers, of which I am one, (I am using the term loosely) are sort of like the apostrophes of musicians. Just Google drummer jokes and you’ll see why. Anyway, Roger Hawkins was one of those drummers that you heard plenty of but never heard plenty of. He was the drummer on tunes such as Percy Sledge’s, When a Man Loves a Woman, and Aretha Franklin’s, Respect. I attribute the song to her although Otis Redding wrote it and, blasphemous as this may be to most, I prefer his version to hers. He also played on the Staple Singers’ (there’s that pesky apostrophe again) hit I’ll Take You There and really shines on Wilson Pickett’s (I won’t say it) Land of a Thousand Dances. He was in the band Traffic for a time, recording the album Shootout at the Fantasy Factory, and in addition to playing on Paul Simon’sLove Me Like a Rock, he played on what is purported to be the number one played jukebox tune, Bob Seeger’s, Old Time Rock n’ Roll. In an era when many rock drummers, like those in Spinal Tap, spontaneously combust at a young age, Mr. Hawkins made it to 75.
And speaking of the Staple Singers, Pervis Staples, who was in and out of the group during the course of his life, died at 85. Interestingly enough, unlike Roger Hawkins, Pervis Staples was not on the group’s hit, I’ll Take You There, which is somewhat akin to Vinny Lopez not being with Springsteen when he finally made it to the Promised Land, or at least Born to Run.
Also, Lloyd Price, who wrote the song Lawdy Miss Clawdy and was a music entrepreneur, starting several record labels, died at 88. He also made hits of the songs Personality (You’ve got, personality, walk the personality …) and Stagger Lee, neither of which he wrote. In addition to his musical endeavors, he paired with Don King to promote Muhammad Ali (sadly also gone) and George Foreman’s Rumble in the Jungle and Ali and Joe Frazier’s (like Ali gone as well) Thrilla in Manilla.
B.J. Thomas, who if for no other reason deserves to be here because he sang at the memorial service for Elvis, died at 78. He was a staple of AM radio with songs like Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head (a Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition) and Hooked On a Feeling. He did Country as well with songs like Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song but it was hard to tell the difference between his Country hits and his other work. Regardless, even though I may be loathe to admit it, I still sing along with some of those tunes.
Lastly, for this category, Lori Burton, who co-owned the Record Plant, where many a hit was recorded, and where John Lennon spent part of the day on which he was shot to death working, died at 80. Burton, wrote a few hits herself, including I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore which the Young Rascals, who subsequently dropped the Young from their name made famous. She also sang background on many of the songs that came out of the Record Plant, including some of Lennon’s. For a woman to both survive working with Morris Levy and to own a recording studio, showed her strength and put her well ahead of her time.
In sports, we lost Bobby Unser. I write this on Memorial Day weekend which to many is about the Indy 500. Bobby won it three times and was part of a storied family of race car drivers responsible for nine Indy 500 victories. Neighbors took me to the Indy 500 when I was in eighth grade and it was one of those experiences I will never forget. Unser was big then so I always followed his career. Last month I wrote about Arlene Pieper Stine the first woman to complete an officially sanctioned marathon when she ran the Pike’s Peak Marathon, and this month I write about Unser who took the faster way up, winning the Pike’s Peak Climb a record 13 times. While Pieper Stein took the more arduous path up the mountain, in a race that rewards the fastest driver up a gravel road with over 150 turns where the drop-off is as much as 1,000 feet with no guardrails, Unser clearly took the more dangerous one. And he was scared of heights. He made it to age 87 and according the New York Times, his closest brush with death came not in a car but while operating a snowmobile in a National Wilderness Area where he nearly froze to death in a blizzard. His snowmobile driving record was hence blemished when he pled guilty in federal court to unlawfully operating a snowmobile in such an area. He was fined $75.00. Who knew?
Rennie Stennett, one of only two people (the other is Wilbert Robinson who did it in 1892) to get seven hits in a nine-inning game, died at the age of 72. He was hitting lead-off for the Pirates on September 16, 1975 when he got two hits in the first inning as the Pirates batted around, scoring nine runs. He got another hit in the third inning and two more in the fifth when the Pirates batted around again. He got his sixth hit in the seventh inning and then tripled in the eighth, lifting the Pirates to a 22-0 win over (thankfully not the Mets) the Chicago Cubs. A Panamanian who was with the Pirates for two World Championships, he earlier made history by being in baseball’s first all black and Latino starting lineup in 1971. He had his best year in 1977 when he batted 336. He fractured his right leg and dislocated his ankle sliding into second base, twelve at-bats short of the necessary trips to qualify for the batting title, which was won by his teammate Dave Parker who batted 338.
Politics is like sports to me and this month we lost Buddy Roemer. Anyone involved in Louisiana politics lived a life worth noting. Even though he was styled a reformer, which, in Louisiana, is relative, he undoubtedly took many secrets to the grave. John Warner also died. He did not follow the adage that politics is showbiz for ugly people, once marrying Elizabeth Taylor. And speaking of actresses (why are they called actors now? What was incorrect about actress?) Olympia Dukakis, who won an Oscar for Moonstruck, and who was a truly a regal person in my mind, died at 89. I believe she lived for a time in the People’s Republic of Montclair. She was a cousin of Michael Dukakis who ran for President in 1988. Perhaps he should have used her for debate prep.
Mixing sports and politics, Lee Evans, a two-time Olympic gold medal runner, who protested racism at the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, died at 74. After he won the 400-meter race, he and two other Black Americans, Larry James and Ron Freeman, who took silver and bronze respectively, stood on the podium with berets and raised fists in protest. However, out of respect, they lowered their fists and took off their berets when the National Anthem was played. Earlier in that those same Olympic Games, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, also winners in their event, raised their clenched fists during the National Anthem and that caused the bigger stir. Nevertheless, while many were outraged, many were supportive and it was another step forward in the civil rights movement that continues today.
Being a big Johnny Carson Fan I will note that Charles Grodin died at 86. Growing up that was the only thing I knew him for. He was on 36 times and on Letterman more than 40 according to his New York Times obit. The obit did not note that he and Johnny had a falling out for a time and he was banned from the show. I also learned that he turned down the part in the Graduate that ultimately went to Dustin Hoffman. Poor choice but a life worth celebrating nonetheless.
While I am not a fan of fishing, which I believe to be even far more barbaric than hunting (although I happily eat what others catch), in my older years, I have become a fan of clothing that I pick from the Orvis catalogs that I receive on an almost daily basis. Orvis was founded in 1856 by Charles Orvis, thus making it the oldest mail order catalog business in the Country, besting Sears & Roebuck by some 20 years. It remained a backwater for a long time until Leigh Perkins bought in in 1965 for a mere $400,000. He took it from a company of 20 employees with yearly revenue of $500,000 to a retail juggernaut with 700 employees and sales of $90 Million when he stepped down in 1992. Now, over 2,000 people work there and sales are nearing $400 Million. Take that Jeff Bezos. Disproving the adage that when the cat is away the mice will play, he hunted and fished 250 days a year throughout his career at the company. Okay, now I’m envious. He claimed to have missed only two weekends of bird hunting in season, one when he got married and the other when he was recovering from Polio. Given he was married three times, perhaps he should have only missed once. Mr. Perkins was 93.
Okay.That’s it for the month.I am looking for some feedback.Is this too long?Should it be bi-weekly rather than monthly?Are there people missing?If so, let me know and if they meet my standards (which admittedly are ever-shifting) they will be noted.In essence, I am seeking your feedback.Should the format be altered?Should I add certain features that you would like to see?I prefer this to be collaborative with me being the final arbiter of course.It’s the beauty of being the author, I get the final say.As usual, the typos and blunders are mine.Hit the follow button and share it with your friends or at least the one’s you don’t really like. Thanks.
I am enjoying this, as I am not always up to date on who's passed (notice the use of the apostrophe). I guess the length should be determined by the number of people who die. If you've reached mid-month and see that 20 noteworthy people have passed, than you should do two blog posts for the month.