32 Years
I was 6 years old, just 3 months shy of my 7th birthday, and my family and I were on a vacation down the central California coast to check out Hearst Castle. We were driving from our home in San Francisco in our 1969 Buick Skylark coupe, listening to the AM band, when the news came over the radio that Elvis had died.
The quintessential pop icon of my parents’ generation had gone.
Twenty years later, over Labor Day weekend, I was in Las Vegas with Will and a cast of other young twenty-something men for a bachelor party weekend. We had piled into 2 cars that Saturday morning to tour Hoover Dam, and upon our return, after a dinner at a nearby In ‘N Out Burger joint, we got ready for a night of gaming at the Hard Rock Hotel. Television tuned to CNN, we saw the breaking news…Princess Diana had been killed in an auto accident.
The princess who’d had the storybook royal wedding when I was 10 years old had gone.
Twelve years later, sitting in a cubicle high above downtown San Francisco, I learned that Farrah Fawcett, one of the blonde bombshells whose beauty marked my childhood and adolescence, passed on after a battle with cancer.
Jill Munroe, an original Angel, had gone.
And on that same day, sitting in that same cubicle high above downtown San Francisco, following the Twitter feed of a couple of friends, I learned that the King of Pop, Michael Jackson had died.
The “Thriller” will thrill no more.
Four pop icons, whose lives have left their mark on global pop culture, have passed within a 32 year span. Who could forget the royal wedding in 1981? Who could forget Jill, Sabrina, Kelly, and later Kris, in various syndicated repeats? Who could forget the moonwalk, the lighted sidewalk in the Billie Jean video, the Eddie Van Halen solo in Beat It?
A large piece of my generation’s pop culture history passed today.
Farewell.
3 Responses to “32 Years”
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By Jen, June 25, 2009 @ 10:12 pm
Nicely said.
By Will Robison, June 26, 2009 @ 7:57 am
You know, I had the exact same feeling and connection to Elvis. This feels Elvis big. I remember when Elvis died. I had just started to know who Elvis was and BAM he was gone. I’m wondering what the death of MJ will do to the kids who are just 7 or 8 year’s old now. They will never know MJ as anything but that guy from the videos, just like my only recollection of Elvis is that guy from the Oldies Station and Movies (and a brief appearance in Forrest Gump).
By Andy, June 26, 2009 @ 8:14 am
I think the difference between the kids today (like Hank and Marg) and you and me, Will, is that weird as he was, we’d seen a fair bit of Elvis on TV during that time on variety shows. MJ has been pretty absent for some time…