Others may remember Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer as the funny Our Gang kid with the cowlick, but I remember him as the Little Rascal who was shot in the groin and killed by his friend over a coonhound.
Len Bias is a good one! All these years later, I still remember he died of a cocaine-induced heart attack. Couldn’t tell you what school he player for, or anything else about him, but the coke death sticks with me.
I haven’t thought of Len Bias in years. I had heard of him before his death because he was such a hot NBA prospect but his death was unfortunately the high point of his fame. It was a big moment, someone assumed to have a huge future in the NBA ahead of him overdoses from cocaine in the midst of a US coke epidemic, many news specials to follow.
I honestly think his death is the reason I never touched coke (or anything harder than pot). As an 11-year-old, hearing all these news stories about how this otherwise-healthy athlete used coke one time (not sure if that’s actually true, but that’s what the reports were saying at the time) and croaked, well, that scared the crap out of me.
Payne Stewart, the golfer who was killed in an airplane incident. I don’t think many remember his golf career, but the circumstances of his death are remembered. An recent incident like his was in the news and people were invoking his story.
Author J.I. Rodale who died at the age of 72 during a taping of The Dick Cavett Show after joking with the host by saygf “I’ve decided to live to be a hundred” and “I never felt better in my life!”
The manner of their death certainly is.
For anyone who didn’t read the spoiler, they were the victims of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Were they famous apart from that? Some were associates of Bugs Moran, during the height of the Chicago gangster era; they may have been known in the same way someone like John Gotti is now.
I don’t. I mean, I’m reasonably well read, so I know about Camelot, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Bay of Pigs, and other stuff about his presidency, but far and away the most notable thing about him was getting shot, and then the endless conspiracy theories that sprung up around it.
I suspect that this is more and more true for people the further you get from the '60s. I was born more than a decade after his death - I suspect the assassination overshadows the rest of his life even more for people younger than me.
That, and his moonshot speech
For classic gangster fans, with some of the whacked people, their deaths come to mind before anything else.
Maranzano and Masseria were the biggest Italian bosses until Lucky Luciano took them both out. The guy who Maranzano hired to kill Lucky, Mad Dog Coll, was machine gunned in a drugstore phone booth. Big boss Albert Anastasia was plugged in a Manhattan barbershop, in the same building where Arnold Rothstein was shot years earlier. Dutch Schultz got his in a New Jersey chop house. Lepke Buchalter went to the chair, notable for being the only big boss to ever be executed.
I just finished reading Gelsey Kirkland’s first memoir (Dancing on My Grave), and I’m amazed she didn’t die in the early 80s. She had several brain seizures and was shovelling the stuff up her nose. Very happy she cleaned herself up though!
That all assumes that every president would be treated the same way. JFK was just Generic President X that was assassinated and his other qualities didn’t matter. I don’t think that’s true.
I don’t think that anyone looks at Lincoln’s assassination and think that it changes who he was. Since I think most people feel he’d done enough. Sure it would have been nice to see him handle the post-Civil War period, but he’d seen us through the Civil War, that’s enough.
You can’t separate how JFK’s assassination from his persona. He wasn’t just Generic President X.
Paul Walker. Given how he rose to fame it was an ironic way of dying. I was reminded of his death when it was mentioned in a book I’m reading, The Last Days of Jack Sparks.
In the book it was described as the death of an actor famous for fast car movies who died in a real life car crash. His name was deliberately not mentioned in the book, but I knew right away who it was referencing.
I absolutely do. There’s very little in his presidency that’s really that noteworthy, other than the way it ended. Largely, of course, because his life was cut short, and possibly he would have done great things had he survived to the end of his term, but more likely, he’d just fade into the line of post-war presidents, not much more notable than the men who immediately preceded and succeeded him.
William Henry Harrison wasn’t just Generic President X in his time. His untimely death did not provide an opportunity for his presidency to be noted, but he was the 9th POTUS ever and a war hero, famous in his own time, which is how he became president.
OTOH, JFK will eventually be remembered mainly as the guy that was assassinated by a cooperative effort of the FBI, CIA, Fidel Castro, USSR, the mafia, aliens, the father of piano player, and the father of an actor.
And he not only killed himself, but led to the death of the tree. It was cut down and removed. 
Never mind. I don’t want to hijack the thread 
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True, the importance of event’s during Kennedy’s time in office are relative to ones age, I suppose.
The 13 day Cuban Missile Crisis/Standoff between the Soviet Union and the US. in October ‘62 evoked palpable fears that the world was on the brink of nuclear war. If you lived through that, I’m confident it is at least as defining an event as Kennedy’s assassination and his to-the-moon speech.
I was 5 at the time, but I recall the somber dread of the folks around me during that time. Of course, I also recall the melancholy of folks after the assassination, so maybe it’s a wash.
But, sure, people born afterwards would most likely rank the assassination as the more defining occurrence. The POTUS was shot and killed by a sniper…and I think he was also involved in some sort of crisis with Cuba during his time in office.
What makes JFKs death so iconic was that it was recorded - at a time when television was in its infancy.
Absent the Zapruder film, and the flurry of television coverage of the events surrounding the murder, I don’t think that you would have this longstanding interest in what happened, or the cottage industry of conspiracy theories that keep the memory alive.