I have two. Neither of them are conventional “celebrities” but both affected me a lot.
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Eric Woolfson, the other half of the Alan Parsons Project. APP is my favorite band, and I’ve always loved Eric’s voice. Even after he left the Project to pursue his Broadway musicals, I continued to follow his career. He died way too young and I’m sad every time I’m reminded of him.
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Steve Jobs. I know a lot of people didn’t like him and he could be a real ass, but I’ve always admired him. He was a visionary who always seemed to be able to tell what the “next big thing” was going to be before anyone else could see it. Like Eric, he died way too young and it makes me very sad that if he hadn’t spent a year chasing ineffective cures for his rare form of cancer, we’d probably still have him.
Count me in with the Jim Henson crowd. I heard of his death while I was moving my parents from my boyhood home. I had to pull the car over for a moment to gather myself.
When Steve Irwin died, I made a bee-line for the local zoo with its walaby enclosure. I knelt down and told those guys that they’d just lost the best friend they’d ever had.
A few weeks ago I watched a WWE retrospective on World Class Wrestling, the Von Erich pro wrestling promotion from Denton, TX. Most WWE retrospectives like this will feature the wrestlers giving commentary on the angles they participated in. The World Class show was different, with only a few wrestlers (like Michael Hayes). As it reeled on, I realized why: the place was a maelstrom of drug use, including steroids and anything else they could think of. As a result, almost everyone associated with that promotion is dead now.