For some reason, I was thinking about Robert Palmer the other day (singer from the 80s, had big hits with “Addicted to Love” and “Simply Irresistable” and wondered what he had been up to lately.
He died in 2003 at the age of 54. I don’t remember hearing about it at the time, and if I did, it obviously didn’t stick.
It got me thinking about what other famous people had passed while I remain blissfully ignorant of it. Rather than look up random people on Wikipedia, I thought I’d see if this has happened to anyone else.
The last similar surprise I can remember is Steve Allen, but rather than almost a decade after the fact, I found out only a year or two after he’d passed.
When I was in my early teenage years, I thought Christopher Pettiet, who played Jesse James on Young Riders was about the most handsome boy alive. I was surprised and saddened when I decided to look him up on imdb a couple of years ago and learned that he died of a drug overdose in 2000.
If you would have asked me which one is dead, Gilligan or The Professor, I would have probably bet that it was The Professor.
How did I miss Bob Denver dying?
I usually keep up on these things via Celebrity Deathpool and People magazine and such.
But Jerry Reed slipped by me. He died in September 2008 when I was in the hospital and I never heard about it until a few months later when magazines were doing their end-of-the-year tributes to celebrities who had died that year.