It doesn’t have to be from show business, but I’ll put it here since some of mine are.
I was helping a business student find info on consumerism and noticed that the author of the book I pulled looked familiar and had the same name of who he looked like. The book is by Eric Brown, bka dorky teenager Buzz in the first season or two of Mama’s Family (bottom left) or the kid who got Private Lessons in 1981. He left show biz, became a political speech writer and a writer of scholarly/academic books on the economic dangers of consumerism.
Danielle Spencer, bka (only known as, for that matter) Dee on What’s Happening?, also left the business altogether and became a veterinarian in Los Angeles. Her only link to show biz is that she acts as resident vet for the animals on TV shows and movies.
Lyle Waggoner of Carol Burnett and Wonder Woman fame retired (other than the very rare Carol Burnett reunion) when he invested in customized RVs/trailers of the sort used for actors on movie sets. He made gazillions from the business and from the investments he made from the fortune he made in trailers.
Some historical interesting WHTs:
Jesse James’ brother and partner-in-crime Frank became a shoe salesman, tour guide (of his brother’s homestead) and security guard in later years, hustling for a buck with his fading celebrity after a long imprisonment.
Geronimo became one of the first “washed up celebrities” (if you can call him that) to make a good living selling autographs and taking photos with tourists at World Fairs and other gatherings, but only because the U.S. gov’t. (including Teddy Roosevelt, who he personally appealed to) refused to allow him to return to the southwest. He was allowed to go as far west as Oklahoma, where he died at a Federal fort in 1909. (A sad denial to the old chief, though it’s understandable why the government did not regard him as a harmless old man.)
Wyatt Earp ended up in Hollywood as an old man trying to peddle his life story to the studios. He lived to see talkies but died many years before My Darling Clementine became a blockbuster.
Themistocles, leader of the Athenian resistance to the Persian emperor Xerxes, a soldier at Marathon and architect of the upset victory against the Persians at Salamis, was famously ostracized by his own people and ended up a very wealthy loyal subject and governor for his former archenemy, Xerxes.
Alexander Kerensky (however you want to spell it) and Alamo conqueror/Crockett killer Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna are two of the foreign enemies of the U.S. who ended up living simple lives in NYC. (Santa Anna, who at the height of his power lived like a shah [among other luxuries he had a bathtub, bed, and artificial leg that were all made of silver], returned to Mexico when he was old and blind and there died in poverty in a thatched roof peasant hut, while his former secretary in America, Thomas Adams, patented a flavored version of the chicle [tree resin] the general had chewed and earned a fortune by calling it chewing gum.)
Some Civil War Whatever Happened To’s of note:
Joseph Johnston, the Confederate general who negotiated the largest surrender ever on American soil when he surrendered 70,000 troops from Virginia to Texas at Durham, NC, served as pallbearer to the man he surrendered to, General Sherman, in 1891. The funeral was in winter and Johnston was an octogenarian and bald but he refused to wear a hat as a matter of respect. He died of pneumonia within the month.
Joseph Wheeler, the Confederate cavalry general who inflicted millions of dollars of destruction on Union supply lines and was pretty much the only person to harass Sherman on his march, became a politician and businessman (not surprising) and later a general in the United States Volunteer Corps (that’s what was surprising- he’s the only man to have donned a Union general’s uniform after the rebel general’s uniform). He was present at San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, who worshiped him. (Roosevelt’s mother, the former Georgian “belle” Martha Bulloch, was a good friend of Wheeler’s sister [who, like most of Wheeler’s family and Wheeler himself before the war, lived in NYC] and thus he was a frequent guest in the Roosevelt home.)
The widow of John Brown ended up living comfortably (far moreso than she had with her frequently impoverished husband) in a vineyard in California owned by her sons. She received constant gifts of money from her husband’s supporters and fans long after he was dead; when there was a return address she returned it as she was not indigent.
General James Longstreet enraged many southerners when he was among the first Confederate memoirists to openly criticize Lee in his writings as an old man. He enraged his children when as a 76 year old widower he married a woman 50 years his junior in a very high profile ceremony. The bride, Helen Dortch Longstreet, lived until 1962, the last surviving widow of a Civil War general.
