So that would put Mr. Rodgers simultaneously playing drums and bass? 
I’ve always wondered whether or not Freddie knew he was HIV+ when he gave ‘that speech’ (below) live at Wembley in '86 and now I know that he was just being unfortunately prophetic instead of wickedly morbid, something which I wouldn’t have put past him.
Sheepish admission from the OP:
Reading through this thread, I’ve been bemused by the number of people listing persons they’ve never met whom they mourned for. Oh, please, I thought, these are complete strangers–how could they have had any real effect on your lives?
But I too felt like weeping when I read about Dr. Gould’s death.
Ohhhh. I was fine…just fine until reading this line.
Good thing I have the office to myself.
Can’t believe I missed this line until I saw Faruiza’s quote/reply:
Similarly, the “Speechless” image created in memory of Mel Blanc stopped me in my tracks and choked me up the first time I saw it hanging on the wall of a Warner Brothers store in NYC, shortly after Blanc’s death. Seventeen years later it’s still just as effective.
Robert Heinlein
Warren Zevon
Johnny Carson
Not anyone I ever met, unfortunately.
Isaac Asimov.
Karen Carpenter.
Erma Bombeck and Stephen Jay Gould.
The Kennedys and Martin Luther King were the early “big ones.” Their passing in such relatively quick succession killed the hope and optimism of a nation. I often wonder where the world would be today had they lived out their lives.
John Lennon was also a really soul-shattering death. For me, it really was “the day the music died.”
A bunch of people already mentioned- Spalding Gray, Johnny and June, Jerry Orbach, but the one that actually made me cry was Paul Wellstone. I grew up in the twin cities and my mom took my sisters and I to his 1996 campaign kickoff rally- I wore the shirt for pretty much the whole election season. When he died I was working in a bakery halfway across the country and a coworker with a daughter in MN told me about it that night- I just sat down on the floor and sobbed.
John Ritter.
I thought for sure that I had misheard. I cried for several days and submitted to the self-torture of all the Three’s Company reruns. At that point I also set the TiVo for 8 Simple Rules and saw the pain that the actors were going through at the time as well.
Definitely cut down in his prime. 8SR was a really cute show and he was typically great in it. Huge loss. And completely pointless.
I was quite saddened when I heard of the deaths of Karen Carpenter and John Denver. But there have been two non-family members whose deaths made me cry.
Elizabeth Montgomery. I’ve told the story in other threads; in a nutshell, I met her when I was 15 and she made a monumental impression on me.
Grand Master Haeng Ung Lee. Founder of the American Taekwondo Association. A gentle man who was a warrior in the classical sense. His contributions to martial arts in general and Taekwondo in particular are colossal. His efforts towards the reunification of the Koreas will be missed.
Jerry Orbach and Julia Child for me, too. Jim Henson and Douglas Adams to a lesser extent, probably because they weren’t in my living room on a regular basis.
Mine, too. He was everything that was right about the entire entertainment industry.
Oddly enough (since I wasn’t a rabid fan or anything), Princess Diana.
I just remember having the weirdest, quasi-sci fi feeling, that it was NOT supposed to happen. As if somewhere in time or some such, something had gone really badly wrong.
And I’m not given to flights of imaginary fancy like that.
I really can’t find it in me to get emotional about the deaths of people that i never knew, even if i was a big fan of their work. I literally cannot envision ever being able to cry or actually mourn the death of a stranger.
That said, there are people whose deaths i regretted because they died too young, and i felt they had much more to give the world. In some cases, this feeling was fairly inconsequential (as in the deaths of musicians or movie stars); in other cases, it was somewhat more poignant due to a combination of circumstances.
I think that my most acute feeling of disappointment at hearing of an individual’s death (at least in my recent memory) came when i learned of the plane crash that killed Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. I remember thinking, quite literally, that of all the 535 members of both houses of Congress, this was the one person we could least afford to lose, especially at a time (about a year after 9/11) when right wing ideology was in the ascendancy and there were very few true leftists trying to plug the dam in Washington.
Being a gay man of a certain age, and having lived in NYC for 25 years, I have lost literally hundreds and hundreds of lovers, friends, and acquaintances to the AIDS epidemic. My entire generation has been virtually wiped out; all the guys who were supposed to grow old with me. Not to mention the ones who died before I had a chance to meet them.
As far as celebrities are concerned, I was a teenager when Marilyn Monroe died. Her name was synonymous with the ultimate in female beauty. Even people who were attracted to a different type of person, couldn’t deny that there was something purely magical about that woman. The public knew nothing about her personal life – the insecurities, the alcohol, drugs and sexual addictions; all we knew was the radiance that she portrayed in movies. And then to learn that she took her own life, it was totally incomprehensible.
Ditto, both men had a way of making you want to learn more. Asimov was already dead by the time I discovered his books, but Sagan was part of my children’s and my life…We still feel the loss.
Princess Diana. I stayed awake and glued to the news channel until the announcement of her death was made. I was in shock–I wanted to cry, but it was all locked up for those first few minutes. Then they showed film footage of her when she’d returned from some trip and her sons were rushing into her arm. Their embrace was so joyous, and all of a sudden, the tears were pouring down my face. It took some time for the sadness to dim.
I cried the day I read about Don Knotts’ death. I loved him as Barney, and it was hard to think about him not making us laugh anymore!
My ex-BIL, Jerry. He was already divorced from my SIL when he committed suicide. To this day, the George Jones song He Stopped Loving Her Today is too painful for me to listen to.