Well, they're dropping like flies, aren't they? After the deaths of Don Knotts and Darren McGavin, Fort Wayne blogger Left of Centrist did a very nice post, with photos, of all the 1960s television stars who have died lately. And he did a new post to cover the loss of Dennis Weaver.
People die all the time -- that's our story, isn't it? -- and one generation always gives way to the next. But it has affected us more since the dawn of mass communications. Our leaders and mentors and role models and entertainers don't die alone, the dispatches making it across the sea in a few months or a couple of years. We are all part of each other's lives. We've gone through the deaths of most of our first generation of mass-entertainment stars -- the John Waynes and Bob Hopes and such who came up in the 1930s and '40s. Now we're in the middle of the second-generation deaths.
I hate to slam another hard-working local blogger, by the way, but if you read Left of Centrist, you'll notice that he is somewhat obsessed with the Beatles (second-generation stars, half gone). When I was in high school, there was always one group that asked, as if it mattered, "John or Paul, who's the best, John or Paul?" I ran with the crowd that usually answered either, "What does it matter on the planet where the Rolling Stones rule?" or, "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind."
