As well as the conductor Sir Georg Solti.
Movie producer Cecil B. DeMille died the same day as Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer from Our Gang. Switzer was shot to death, but apparently DeMille’s death overshadowed Alfalfas’.
J.P Richardson’s death was somewhat overshadowed by Ritchie Valens’s, and Valens’s by Buddy Holly’s.
Coincidences? I think not.
A quibbling nitpick: the TV series was MASH*, but the 1970 movie (and the novel that inspired it) were spelled MASH.
I hadn’t known this but Helen Keller died the same week Robert Kennedy was assassinated. I hadn’t realized she had lived until 1968.
Wow, that one is really interesting, I think.
The situation reminds me of Kevin Bacon’s tale of filming Apollo 13.
For Apollo 13, all the weightless scenes where filmed in the Vomit Comet. Bacon wasn’t thrilled with the idea but went because his co-stars Tom Hanks and Bill Paxton thought it great.
Bacon expected that in event of a crash “the headline will read: ‘TOM HANKS KILLED IN PLANE CRASH, turn to Page 6 to see who else was aboard.’”
Kinda surprised nobody remembers this one from the Straight Dope column itself (date 14 November 1997): What’s up with the strange end of country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons?
Parsons wasn’t a suicide, but he killed himself all right. Blessed with charm and cash (his mother’s family had made a pile in the citrus business), he got into booze and drugs early. In September 1973 he finished recording an album and went with some friends to an inn at Joshua Tree National Monument, one of his favorite places. The group spent much of the day by the pool getting tanked. By evening Gram looked like hell and went to his room to sleep. Later, on their way out for some food, his friends were unable to rouse him, so they left, returning a little before midnight. By that time Parsons was pretty far gone. Taken to a hospital, he was pronounced dead shortly after midnight on September 19. A lab analysis found large amounts of alcohol and morphine in his system; apparently the combination killed him. News coverage of his demise was eclipsed by the death of Jim Croce around the same time. Parsons was 26 years old.
Strangely, the only reason I remember this column is, I was going through some of my stuff in my old bedroom at my parents’ place and I had clipped this column, for reasons that escape me now.
KISS drummer Eric Carr died the same day as Freddie Mercury.
Talk about rotten timing. Drummers always get the short end of the stick.
I see what you did there
Ray Rayner died two days before Captain Kangaroo. I heard about it at the very bottom of a full page retrospective on Bob Keeshan, practically in fine print.
110 years ago there was a pitcher named Ed Reulbach for the Chicago Cubs who was always being slighted. He pitched 44 scoreless innings, including the only time anyone pitched two complete game shutouts in a doubleheader in the famous 1908 pennant race and was ignored. Led the league three times. When he died in 1961, the baseball community focused on Ty Cobb who died the same day.
Even in 1976 an “Esquire” magazine article cited him as a great Jewish athlete. Reulbach was Roman Catholic.
Film composer Henry Mancini died the day after the OJ murders and 3 days before the Bronco chase. Pretty much ignored at the time. I didn’t realize he was dead until some year-end retrospective mentioned it.
That said, Ray was a local performer; Bob Keeshan had been on national TV for decades. Unless you grew up in Chicago in the 1960s or 1970s (or had kids during that era), you would have had no idea who Rayner was. (I would imagine that the Chicago media had more extensive coverage of Rayner’s passing, as well.)
In a dead pool that I play, this happens with surprising regularity, and is always referred to as the less famous person “being Huxleyed” by the more famous one. Just a few of the recent ones:
Gil Scott-Heron and Jeff Conaway, May 27, 2011
Stan Musial and Earl Weaver, January 19, 2013
Annette Funicello and Margaret Thatcher, April 8, 2013
William Manchester wrote of the reporter aboard Air Force One who jokingly asked JFK, “What happens if the plane crashes?”
The President thought for a moment and said, “You’ll be in tomorrow’s paper, but in very small print.”