Douglas Adams
Mar. 11, 1952 - May 11, 2001
You gotta love Douglas Adams. No, really. You are required to love Douglas Adams. It's a law now. He was the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and the Dirk Gently books, all of which are hilarious. Died of a heart attack at a private gym at age 49. Had a huge influence on fandom, and quite a few writers (this one included) spent their formative years ripping him off. Currently, there is a movement underway to get city planners to rename 42nd Street in Portland, Oregon "Douglas Adams Way". There is no real reason for this, other than the significance of the number 42 in the Hitchhiker's books and the fact that Portland is filled with silly, silly people. Adams would have been proud.
Morton Downey, Jr.
Dec. 9, 1933 - Mar. 12, 2001
Without Morton Downey, Jr. the world wouldn't have The Jerry Springer Show, or any of the "tabloid trash" talk shows like it. Downey essentially pioneered the genre in the mid-1980s. Morton perfected this bit in talk radio, where he insulted pinhead liberal callers on a nightly basis. I used to catch the show on KHTV Houston, where I got my fill of Nazis, strippers, and various other white trash trailer park bastards. It was a good time, but the show ended in the late-1980s and Downey took various small villain parts in movies and TV shows, developed lung cancer from his chronic smoking, and finally died at age 67 in 2001. Interesting to note that he had also pursued a career in music (as had his father) and had a song in the Billboard Top 100, a country song ("Green Eyed Girl", which went as high as #95) in 1981.
John Holmes
Aug. 8, 1944 - Mar. 13, 1988
John Holmes (John Curtis Estes) was born in Ohio in 1944. Not long after that it was discovered that he had a huge schlong and he began a career in porn films. Something like that, anyway. By 1978 Holmes was making as much as $3000 a day in porn films, but he was putting it all up his nose. Holmes spent some time in jail and was tried and acquitted of being involved in some drug-related murders, and somewhere along the line he contracted A.I.D.S. and died from it in 1988. The film Wonderland is directly based on his life and Boogie Nights is a more loose adaptation. Holmes was reputed to have slept with more than 3,000 women in his life. Well, I doubt that number. I don't know how much sleep was really going on, and that's difficult to prove. Also, it must be noted that he wasn't really a very good looking man at all. Giant penis, yes...attractive, not so much. It's a good thing that Neil Young doesn't have a giant penis and an inclination to do porn, or it could have been so much worse.
Hank Ketchum
Mar. 14, 1920 - June 1, 2001
Created the comic strip "Dennis the Menace". Drew it for years. It was never funny, ever. Dennis the Menace character goes to TV and comics, remains unfunny. Dennis the Menace character is made into movies in the 1990s by Home Alone creator John Hughes, and it wasn't funny then. It just never, ever got to be funny to me. Also, it was kind of a rip-off as a comic strip. It was just a single-panel drawing (Family Circus-style), with some semi-humorous dialog below it. Did I mention it wasn't funny? Hank Ketchum had a real-life son named Dennis. For some reason (I can't imagine what) they became estranged and never spoke to each other again. Now that's funny.
Macdonald Carey
Mar. 15, 1913 - Mar. 21, 1994
Played a doctor on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, which I never watched. He would introduce and close the show, and his voice is still heard in the opening credits today. Had a long, long career in radio and TV. I mostly remember him from a low-budget movie made in the late-1970s which I think was called Starship Invasions, but I couldn't find it in the IMDB. He plays "Dr. McCarey", and he mostly stands around looking worried while the real action happens elsewhere. It was an awful movie, and I watched it late at night because I was always awake in the 1980s. I'll spoil the ending for you. The aliens are repelled, but at the very end a nurse enters the room and says "Dr. McCarey...it's starting again." And he looks really, really worried. Must have been hard to refuse a check with his name on it.
Arthur Godfrey
Aug. 31, 1903 - Mar. 16, 1983
I don't think there were a lot of tears shed when Arthur Godfrey died in 1983. He had been a TV pioneer, sure, but he was also (by many accounts) an absolute jerk. No matter what he did or said during his life, there is no denying that he fired Julius LaRosa on live television in 1953 allegedly because the singer had gotten an agent and the controlling Godfrey wasn't "down with that", as the kids say. But consider this: Godfrey is now dead, and LaRosa (now 78) has had a full Godfrey-free quarter century to dance on his grave. Godfrey was also allegedly the model for the character "Lonesome" Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd, about a friendly and popular TV host who is a mean-spirited, manipulative bully off-screen. Take that, Arthur Godfrey.
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