Thanks for the Watery Beer.

Pat McCormick
June 30, 1927 - July 29, 2005

Before the microbrew revolution, people did what they had to do to get good beer, or what they thought was good beer. Sometimes they'd have no choice but to employ a country trucker, his moustachioed, Firebird-driving accomplice, and a future Oscar winner to help bring that shipment of Coors to Georgia. Or was it Alabama? Same thing, really...shoeless, toothless people on porches playing banjos. That kind of thing.

One thing's for certain: Big Enos and Little Enos loved beer. But not good beer. Things were different, way back when.

Pat McCormick, who played Big Enos, was born on this day in 1927. He was best known by most for his portrayal of Big Enos in Smokey and the Bandit and its two inferior sequels. But to people like me he'll always be the Professor reading from The Big Book of Vampires at the beginning of 1989's Beverly Hills Vamp. Because people like me are weirdos, that's why.

But he spent most of his career as a top gag writer, working on The Tonight Show for twelve years. He once streaked completely naked across the stage behind Johnny during a 1974 monologue. That's comedy. McCormick also had an identical twin brother who became a police sergeant in Chicago.

He also apparently became involved with busty show regular Carol Wayne. They both served as judges in the 1984 straight-to-video Best Chest in the West, where he jokingly stated "This lady will never drown". On January 13, 1985, she drowned while on vacation in Mexico. Oops. He served as host for Best Chest in the West 2 when Dick Shawn, the host of the first one, dropped dead of a massive heart attack on stage in 1986. These are important things to know, and only I seem to know them.

Sadly, McCormick had a stroke in 1998 and was forced to retire. He spent the last seven years of his life at a Hollywood retirement home and could barely speak. Guys like Pat McCormick fall through the cracks in Hollywood and never get the recognition they deserve. But from me, they get all the love.

This is your day, Big Enos...let's have a beer. No, not that bat's piss Coors you like so much...let's have a Summit Pale Ale.

The Other White Meat.

Jayne Mansfield
April 19, 1933 - June 29, 1967

Supposedly Jayne Mansfield, like her contemporary Marilyn Monroe, was a very smart, deeply introspective, serious actress. She spoke five languages and had a genius IQ. She was a classically trained violinist and pianist, and she turned down the iconic role of Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island because she didn't like being stereotyped as shallow or dumb. By all accounts she was a good mother, a dynamic entertainer, and a hard worker.

Also, did you get a look at those jugs!?!

Look, I'm just saying.

You know, when I started Dead Person of the Day back in 2008, I began it on the first anniversary of the death of one of America's hottest blonde bombshells, Anna Nicole Smith. I compared her death to Marilyn Monroe's at the time, but in truth Anna has more in common with Jayne Mansfield. While all had seen their careers come and go, Monroe's life never became the traveling three-ring circus/freak show that the others slipped into. She simply overdosed and became legend. There was even a beautiful song, Candle in the Wind, written for her. Any songs written for Anna Nicole Smith? None that I can recall (Siouxie and the Banshees apparently wrote Kiss Them For Me about Mansfield's death, though). Smith had the bizarre reality show and court battles, Mansfield had indecency arrests and the $25,000-a-week Vegas show. Their lives became public spectacle, they were held up for ridicule, and then they died.

Even the details of their deaths are freakish. Did Anna only have one nipple, owing to a plastic surgery snafu? Was that Jayne's severed head on the road in that photo, next to her dead dog?* Marilyn's overdose death seems pretty tame when you compare it to hitting a mosquito-spraying truck in a convertible in the middle of the night on a Louisiana highway with three of your kids in the back seat (the kids lived, by the way...one of them is Mariska Hargitay of Law and Order).

Call me shallow and single-minded, but if I had a time machine I'd make four stops. Only Four. One to visit Marilyn Monroe, one to solve the JFK assassination, a stop at Anna Nicole Smith's place, and then on to visit Jayne Mansfield (I guess there would technically be a fifth stop, to return to the present). I'd try to get them when they were at their hottest, and not pregnant or dead yet. I'd say the right things and hit on them, maybe get them drunk (apparently they all enjoyed a pill or a drink or two, so it would be fairly easy). When I got back to the present I'd destroy the machine. Or maybe go visit Russ Meyer starlet Kitten Natividad, circa 1970. Something like that. Maybe I'd just travel through time, hitting on big-boobed starlets and solving mysteries, kind of like an R-rated version of Quantum Leap.

Yep. Time travel, boobs and conspiracies, that's what makes life worth it.



*Answer: no. Apparently it was a wig that Jayne was wearing. The truck that the '66 Buick Electra hit also killed her driver and her boyfriend/manager. She may have been scalped, but she wasn't completely beheaded. The decapitation speculation came from Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon, but it doesn't appear to be true at all. Facts take all the fun out of life.