When the Kansas City Star recently ran a list of celebrities that had died this past year I decided to share some random thoughts and I’m writing this to kill time because KC got hit by a winter storm on New Year’s Eve and the Chicago Blackhawks could play hockey on my driveway and it’s 16 degrees out (feels like 1) and the first bowl game hasn’t started yet.
And away we go.
Bob Dole
Bob Dole’s right hand got injured during WW2 and according to the internet he carried a pen or a pencil or a rolled up piece of paper in it so people wouldn’t try to shake his hand which reminds of a trick I learned from Big League Ballplayers who don’t want to sign autographs:
Pretend you just got a cell phone call.
Let’s say you’re about to be asked for an autograph or panhandled for money or attacked by a group of Hell’s Angels; you just hold up your finger in the international sign for “wait a minute” and pretend you got a call from your sick mother or the President of the United States and right now is a good time to use that last one because Joe Biden is president and Joe probably doesn’t remember who he’s talked to recently and won’t deny your story.
Also:
When I still worked at the Star there was a group of panhandlers who used to hang out by the employee entrance and beg money off us and one of them was in the process of asking for some money when his cell phone rang.
Cell phones were a new thing at the time and since I didn’t have one yet, I figured this guy was doing better than me and probably don’t need any of my money which to be honest is an excuse because I wouldn’t have given him any even if he didn’t have a cell phone. Panhandling is an interesting social dilemma because if you don’t give money to a panhandler, you feel like an asshole when he or she is the one who asked you for some of your money.
Hey, if they don’t feel bad about asking, why should the rest of us feel bad about saying no?
(A comment that indicates I may not actually be a full-blown sociopath, but I’m working on it.)
Hank Aaron
I once read that Ted Williams said all he ever wanted was for people to look at him walk down the street and say, “There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived” and when I read that I thought:
“That’s too bad because the greatest hitter who ever lived is Hank Aaron.”
(Feel free to disagree and leave a comment which I promise from the bottom of my heart I won’t read or care about.)
Hank Aaron drove in 100 or more runs 11 times, hit 30 or more home runs 15 times and when he got a chance to play in the postseason hit .362, had an on-base percentage of .405 and slugged .710; Ted Williams played in one World Series and hit .200, had an on-base percentage of .333 and slugged .200.
So if you’re wondering what makes Hank Aaron better than Ted Williams, what they did when it counted most pushed me over the edge, plus Henry broke Babe Ruth’s home run record while Racist Assholes threatened to shoot him which I’ve gotta think is slightly more pressure than playing in a World Series.
Cloris Leachman
This is undoubtedly some sort of deeply-rooted and unexamined sexism on my part, but I’ve always admired beautiful women who put their ego to one side and let themselves look awful in some role especially if they do it for laughs and Cloris Leachman fits the bill because she could look like this:
But would allow herself to look like this:
And this:
Young Frankenstein’s Frau Blucher is one of the funniest characters to ever hit the silver screen and her reaction whenever someone would say “Frau Blucher” and a horse would whinny in fear is pretty much a comedy classic.
Dusty Hill
I watched a documentary about ZZ Top and Dusty Hill was their bass player and the story that stuck with me is one of them (I forget which one) was watching a music special on TV and called the other guys in the band and said you gotta watch this thing, it’s great.
So now they’re all watching and the special is going on and on and on and they’re calling each other and asking just how long is this special anyway?
Turns out it was the first night MTV was on the air.
Michael Collins
Michael Collins is the Pete Best of NASA because while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got famous walking on the moon, Michael was circling the block waiting for those two showoffs to quit playing golf and get their asses back to the Starship Enterprise.
(I may have my space history a bit garbled because when I double-checked it was Alan Shepard who played golf on the moon and the NASA space craft was actually the Millennium Falcon.)
I don’t really have a Michael Collins story, but since he got pretty much ignored in Life I didn’t think it was fair for him to be ignored in Death as well.
Don Everly
There is a musical theory that nobody can harmonize quite like siblings because their voices are so similar and the Everly Brothers offer pretty good proof this is true in this clip from the early day of American Bandstand which is notable for the Almost Completely Horseshit songs that made up the Top 10 at that time.
Which goes a long way in explaining why the Beatles and I Want to Hold Your Hand were such a breath of fresh air because your alternative was listening to that Number One tune: Alley Oop a heart-rending ballad about a cartoon caveman sung by the Hollywood Argyles.
The following clip is amazing for the Everly Brothers uncanny ability to sing and play loud enough to be heard without microphones or guitar amplification and pay attention somewhere around the 2:34 mark because they show a young woman who appears to be trying to decide which Brother to screw, stalk and then stab to death; an analysis which says way more about me than this apparently perfectly innocent girl I’ve just libeled.
On the other hand…
The scariest movie I ever saw did not feature vampires, zombies or space aliens, it was Play Misty For Me which starred Jessica Walters trying to kill Clint Eastwood and it sacred the living shit out of me because back in 1971, vampires, zombies and space aliens were not part of my social circle, but I knew plenty of Batshit Crazy Women with access to high-quality cutlery.
Other sibling singing groups include The Jackson 5, The Beach Boys, The Lemon Sisters, The Kinks, The Isley Brothers, The Bee Gees, Heart, The McGuire Sisters, The Mills Brothers, The Osmonds, The Pointer Sisters, The Staple Singers and I could go on because the list is really long, but I need to call my brothers and immediately form a singing group even though none of us can sing and may not even get the lyrics right, which immediately reminds me of the time one of my younger brothers walked through the room singing the words to Crystal Gales’ huge hit, which he mistakenly thought were:
“Donuts make my brown eyes blue.”
Willard Scott
Business executives hire consultants as a way to avoid decision-making responsibility which is kind of odd because the same business executives make a lot of money, supposedly for their decision-making ability, and then do their level best to avoid what they’re getting paid for. (A sign of intelligence that I have yet to demonstrate which is probably why I’m not a business executive.)
Hiring consultants is smart because if what the consultant advises the business to do works out the executive can take credit for having the good sense to hire a consultant and if the consultant’s advice doesn’t work out, the executive can blame the consultant, who by this time has cashed the check and gone on to a different city to solve somebody else’s problems.
Anyway…
No idea if they still do this, but apparently at some point in television history, TV news stations were advised to form their local news casts around the concept of a TV family that viewers would want to spend time with because they hated the family they had in reality.
The male anchor would be “big brother” and the female co-anchor would be “rebellious little sister” and the sports caster would be “over-opinionated asshole” (I made that last one up because I couldn’t remember the sports guy’s role) and the weatherman would be “crazy uncle” so anytime you see a weather guy acting like a binge-drinking fraternity brother who just did two lines of coke at a strip club, you can thank TV consultants and the man who clearly embraced his role as a TV clown, Willard Scott.
Frankly, Willard is not alone and it’s amazing how low TV requires people to stoop to stay on the air and right now I’m thinking of Hall of Fame athletes who have to clown around and do embarrassing promos to keep getting a paycheck.
It may be a living, but it’s a humiliating living.
Michael Nesmith
Michael Nesmith’s mother was named Bette and she invented Liquid Paper because she was working as a typist, but was also a commercial artist and realized artists don’t erase, they paint over mistakes and she could do the same thing as a typist.
So she mixed some tempera water-based paint in a bottle and took it to work and her bosses (showing the same kind of business foresight as the airlines who encouraged their workers to quit at the beginning of the pandemic and now don’t have enough people to fly their airplanes) criticized her for using it, but her coworkers asked if Bette could mix some up for them, so she started her own company and got rich.
None of which has anything to do with fellow Monkee Peter Tork (real name Peter Halsten Thorkelson) who I saw hitch hiking on a back road while I was driving to Mill Valley and being a kind of a dick and not wanting to get raped and murdered (and possibly not in that order) by some killer hippy, I flew right by him, but then thought:
“Wait…wasn’t that Peter Tork?”
And stopped to give him a ride.
So clearly the lesson here is if you want to hitchhike it would pay off to become a celebrity first. Peter’s hair was about 3 feet long and he was on his way to chiropractor and we talked while I drove, but I never got around to asking him what I was dying to know:
“So you didn’t save any money?”
Which may be unfair; maybe Peter just liked hitch hiking.
More Dead Celebrities from 2021
John Madden, Cicely Tyson, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Walter Mondale, Rush Limbaugh, Ned Beatty, Charlie Watts, Norm Macdonald, Phil Spector, Larry King, G. Gordon Liddy, Bernie Madoff and Betty White who would have been 100 years old on January 17th and she probably thought she was going to make it and the obvious lesson here is none of us are guaranteed anything so if you’ve got something you’ve always wanted to do (assuming it doesn’t involve killing a hobo, although it would depend to some degree on what hobo you have in mind) do it now.
And finally, I included this picture of Betty when she was young because we look at people once they get older than a Dead Sea Scroll and sometimes wonder what’s the big deal and how did she get famous, but the Young Betty White was a smoke show.
So have fun while you’re young and still look great and once you get old and have the same skin texture as a well-used road map, try to have a sense of humor about it, which Betty did as well as anybody.
Happy New Year and remember to hydrate because that will help alleviate your hangover and if you don’t want to do that, now might be a good time to start drinking again.
A completely random list of celebrities who died in 2021
Lennon Sisters. Did you just put them in to see who would comment?
Just helped young son scrape his car off..too cold..Peter Tork was the one true musician with the Monkees..