About a quarter century ago, when I was a writer at the NBC affiliate in San Francisco, one of my duties was to produce the “year-ender” — the compilation of noteworthy news and events that would be played on all of our New Year’s Eve newscasts. It meant combing through the headlines and news clips and deciding which ones would make the cut for the four or five-minute piece that provided the retrospective on the year. One of the features within that feature was called “Passages,” a silent tribute to the people we had lost that year, usually a compendium of movers and shakers and movie stars.
I remember one really jam-packed news year — one of those in the mid-1980s. I was hard-pressed to limit that year-ender to the time budgeted, and my producer told me to cut out 30 seconds. An edited piece is like a baby if you are the producer. Cutting out moments of history is like being given a King Solomon-like choice to cut the baby in half. It’s emotionally impossible.
So I sliced and diced into the area that meant the least to me, the 20-something who was all about the here and now and the living: the Passages section. I can’t remember which deceased celebrities I edited onto the cutting room floor. I will never forget the look on my 60-something-year-old news director’s face nor that on my 50-something executive producer’s face when I showed them the newly edited version.
Very quietly, but without any room for argument, the news director told me to restore the missing sections. I complied, outwardly acquiescent, inwardly rebellious. I just didn’t get it. My much younger news producer explained that old people liked to be reminded of the bright lights lost, that they liked paying tribute to the heroes and icons of their own youth. Huh?
Fast forward to the 50-something I am today and the light of understanding now shines brightly in this older and wiser brain. It is only the second month of 2014 and I have already mourned some of the heroes and icons of my own personal history, and now, yes, I get it. The death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman from a drug overdose is shocking on its own so it falls outside this particular category. I’m talking about the loss of people like Shirley Temple, Sid Caesar, Ralph Waite, and Russell Johnson who all lived into ripe old age. But their lives and roles marked the milestones of my childhood, so their deaths diminish me — all of us — by reminding us that time passes by swiftly and spares no one.
My brother and I used to watch Shirley Temple movies together when we were newly arrived in America. My parents would leave us alone on Saturday mornings while they did the grocery shopping together, and in addition to cartoons, standard entertainment fare was the old black and white movies we would find when we turned the channels. Shirley Temple was fascinating to us, her blond corkscrew curls, dimples, and shining face so different from most of the other faces in our very small world, especially in Korea, which we had just left. She radiated sunshine and happiness to us in our early childhood and continued to do so as we grew up.
Russell Johnson, though I admit I had to look up his name, was another one of our childhood staples. Ruggedly handsome and smart, he fascinated me as one of the castaways on Gilligan’s Island. (Though if he really was that smart, how come he couldn’t figure out how to get everybody off that island?) I loved his relationship with the pretty and perky Mary Ann and the glamorous Ginger, the movie star. And though we would never know which girl would win him over, I always secretly hoped it would be me, as he was yes, another one of my childhood crushes.
Ralph Waite played the patriarch of the Walton Family on television from the time I was 12 to just before my college graduation. That’s a hugely formative period in anyone’s life, and though the details of the show escape me now, I will never forget the values of hard work and family strength that shone through in that Depression-era family drama. The lights at the end of the show and sign-off with that signature “Good night, John-boy” still resonate with me and set the standard for our own family goodnights, a sweet farewell to slumber and the promise of a new day.
I was too young to remember Sid Caesar in his stand-up comic days, but I do remember him vividly from one of my favorite movies of all time, Grease, which came out in 1978 when I was graduating from high school. He was the sweet, fun Coach Calhoun at Rydell High, respected by almost everyone, a hard feat for any high school administrator at any time. I loved the “Hand Jive” dance in the gymnasium and his amused disapproval of the ensuing antics.
At my age, it’s inevitable that the stars of my childhood should start falling from the night sky. But especially at this dreariest time of the year, it makes me sad and reminds me of my own advancing age. Summing up my mood just perfectly are the last lines of John Donne’s poem, “No Man Is An Island:”
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
