Can you think of any notable people who lived into your lifetime, but you were too young to appreciate who they were, or learned the fact years later? For me, it’s Salvador Dali. (I was born in 1978)
Pancho Barnes.
I met her son though, and her daughter-in-law was very nice.
Right off the top of my head:
Charles Lindbergh, who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean nonstop.
Philo T. Farnsworth, the “Father of Television” who is recognized as the inventor of electronic television transmission.
I think I understand the spirit of the OP. When I was a kid, anyone who was dead died “a long time ago”- this would be particularly true of world figures / famous people.
I got into The Beatles when I was about 11 years old in 1986.
I was aware that John Lennon was dead, which to me meant he died “a long time ago”.
I was probably close to 30 before I realized two of my all-time favorites, Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx, both lived into my lifetime. I watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” every December while I was growing up (one of my mom’s favorites)- if you told me then that Jimmy Stewart was still alive, I would have looked at you like you were insane.
Igor Stravinsky
Dmitri Shostakovich
Winston Churchill
Pablo Picasso
A. Einstein.
M. Gandhi.
Is there some sort of age limit on this? Many people famous people died before I was five years old, when I didn’t know who anyone was outside of my own family and Captain Kangaroo.
I looked up some famous people who died in 1967, when I was ten. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know the importance of any of them at the time:
Billy Strayhorn
Dorothy Parker
John Coltrane
Carl Sandburg
René Magritte
Henry J. Kaiser
Che Guevara
My parents might have told me about Oppenheimer when he died that year, but I don’t have any memory of it.
I’m sure I could come up with similar lists for other years. One question is how old you should be to know the importance of major cultural figures when they die. I don’t think it’s too surprising that I didn’t know about Magritte when I was ten.
Here’s a similar list of people who died in 1975, when I was eighteen:
Walker Evans
Haile Selassie
Noble Sissle
Bernard Herrmann
Some famous people still living when I was born:
Black Elk - famous Sioux Medicine Man who was present at the Battles of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee.
George Bernard Shaw - playwright, whose earliest writings were in 1870’s.
William Randolph Hearst - publisher, who took control of The San Francisco Examiner in 1887.
Philippe Pétain - “Lion of Verdun”, Commander-in-Chief of the French army in 1917
The famous rock trio of Jimi, Janis, and Jim died during the first few months of my life. And the Beatles broke up (a death of sorts). Since that hippie rock era was such a big influence on my cultural development, this is pretty significant.
(In a related vein, I sometimes find it amazing that I was alive during the last four of the six moon landings, because it’s always been something “from the past” for me.)
While I was alive during JKF’s Presidency, I was only eight when he was assasscinated and did not realize the historical extent of it.
If that’s the criterion, then Harry Truman would probably be the first historical figure to die whose relevance I understood at the time.
Some people of note who died after I was born, but before I was out of diapers:
Science, mathematics, etc.:
Albert Einstein
Alan Turing
Enrico Fermi
Alexander Fleming
Hermann Weyl (a big name if you’re a math geek, otherwise “huh?”)
Emile Borel (ditto)
Thomas J. Watson (founded IBM)
Savilly Tartakower (chess grandmaster)
Baseball:
Cy Young
Honus Wagner
Connie Mack
Literature:
Colette
Thomas Mann
Wallace Stevens
A.A. Milne
H.L. Mencken
Bertholt Brecht
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Art, Music, Acting:
Henri Matisse
Charlie “Bird” Parker
James Dean
Carmen Miranda
Jackson Pollock
Bela Lugosi
Humphrey Bogart
Arturo Toscanini
Other:
Alfred Kinsey
Tielhard de Chardin
My cut-off would be grade-schooled aged (give or take 9)
I remember the news of Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight in 1961. That was probably the first ‘in the news’ thing whose importance I recognized at the time. And when the first two Mercury missions (Shepard’s and Grissom’s) went up shortly afterwards, I was keenly aware that these were suborbital missions while Gagarin had orbited the Earth, so we still hadn’t equaled the Russians’ achievement.
Four out of six of the Three Stooges.
Albert Hoffmann
Margaret Hamilton
I’m sure there’s quite a few, but the first one I can think of without looking it up is C.S. Lewis.
I was not quite nine when he died(same day as JFK, which I DID notice). I didn’t actually read any of his stuff until young adulthood.
Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Joe DeRita, and Joe Besser? I was a kid when their shorts were first shown on TV and I remember Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe still making feature films such as “The Outlaws Is Coming!”
I also remember Margaret Hamilton making Maxwell House commercials as Cora, the storekeeper.
Henry Miller.