I was born in 1961, and didn’t have any real idea of what was happening in the world until, say, 1966.
Between 1961 and 1965, the following notable people died:
Ernest Hemingway
Dag Hammarskjöld
William Faulkner
Robert Frost
John F. Kennedy
Herbert Hoover
Winston Churchill
Yes, of course.
I’m pretty sure I was aware of Helen Keller by the time she died.
I turned 1 in 1968. The events of that year made my parents fear for my future. So off the top of my head, MLK and RFK.
It still astonishes me that Mark Twain’s second daughter, Clara Clemens, died as recently as 1962, well within my lifetime. She broke out of Twain’s controlling atmosphere* to marry concert pianist Ossip Gabrilowirsch. After his death in 1936 she married another Russian musician, Jacques Samossoud.
Twain’s grand-daughter, Nina Clemens Gabrilowirsch, died just four years later in 1966. She was only 56 (!), and very little is written about her life. I’ve seen pictures of her judging “Tom Sawyer Loookalike contests” and the like, but she stayed pretty much out of the spotlight. She reportedly had a drinking problem. apparently she never married (though there wrre rumors), and she died without children, making her the last direct descendant of Twain.
*Much as I love Twain’s writing, I’d have hated to have been his child. He was a control freak and prone to violent temper tantrums.
An SMBC comic that some people may find disturbingly relevant.
The most surprising was Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was born in 1867 and died in 1957, when I was 3 years old.
Others of note:
Henri Matisse
Enrico Fermi
Machine Gun Kelly
Charlie Parker
Albert Einstein
Cy Young
Humphrey Bogart
Oliver Hardy
W.C. Handy
Frank Lloyd Wright
Ernest Hemingway
Ty Cobb
Churchill, Macarthur, Kennedy, Lindbergh, Tolkien, Rand, Brando, R. Harris, Sinatra, Tracy, Astaire, Kelly, Dempsey, Lennon, Presley, B. Russel (flrt.)
I didn’t hear of, or learn who Margaret Sanger was, until I was an adult and was watching an episode of Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds”, in which Sanger was one of the guests. (Played by Jayne Meadows of course)
She died in 1966 when I was not quite twelve. Few women have had such an influence on women’s rights and women’s health, as Margaret Sanger did. Many women owe their lives and health to her, as she championed the fight for safe, easy, and inexpensive birth control. The term “birth control” itself was her invention.
Kurt Cobain’s the big one. I was almost eleven when he died, but I had no musical exposure. I didn’t really know who he was, and didn’t get into Nirvana until about five years after he’d died.
Also, Raymond Carver. He died when I was five, and he’s my favorite short story writer. I also started reading Andre Dubus about a year after he died.
John F. Kennedy died when I was one year old.
My heroine Helen Keller died when I was 5. I’m still amazed that I could conceivably have met her.
And as I first learned here on the Dope, John Tyler still has two living grandsons, so we are all alive at the same time as grandchildren of the 10th president.
Born in early 1972. My list:
J Edgar Hoover
Igor Sikorsky
Lon Chaney Jr
John R R Tolkien
Duke Ellington
Wernher von Braun
Agatha Christie
It’s amazing when you consider that Tyler was born when George Washington was President and his grandchildren are alive when Barack Obama is President.
More interesting when you realize Tyler was a slaveholder, who repudiated the Union shortly before his death.
