Where Are They Buried? (6 page)

NOVEMBER 30, 1929 – APRIL 18, 2012

With the boyish good looks of a junior executive and a ubiquitous on-camera presence, Dick Clark was among the most recognizable faces in the world, even if what he was first and most famous for—spinning records and jabbering with teenagers—seemed a bit insubstantial.

After studying at Syracuse University, where he was a disc jockey on the student radio station, Dick got a job as a news announcer. By 1952 he had his own easy-listening afternoon radio show,
Dick Clark’s Caravan of Music
and a few months later the station’s television affiliate began an afternoon show called
Bandstand
. In the summer of 1956,
Bandstand
’s host was fired and the station turned to the right man at the right time, young Dick Clark. “I was 26 years old, looked the part, knew the music, and was very comfortable on television,” he recalled. “‘They said, ‘Do you want it?’ And I said, ‘Oh, man, do I want it!’ ”

By the following October, the show was being broadcast nationwide with a new name,
American Bandstand,
and every weekday afternoon as many as 20 million teenage viewers eagerly watched their peers cut the rug with the newest moves like the Twist, the Pony, and the Watusi while the day’s hottest hits and newest singles blasted the studio room. At song’s end, a breathless raver often rated a record in a brief interview, and “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it!” became a national catchphrase.

Handsome and glib, Dick Clark, the man who would become “the world’s oldest teenager,” was the music-savvy older brother host, and from that position of authority he presided over this grassroots revolution in American culture.
American Bandstand
was the first show to use television to spread the gospel of rock ’n’ roll and introduced audiences to acts as varied as Dusty Springfield, Buffalo Springfield, and Rick Springfield. It helped give rise to the Top-40 radio format, made rock ’n’ roll a palatable product for visual media, convinced advertisers of the influence teenagers could have on steering popular taste, and became a cultural touchstone for the baby boomer generation. “I played records, the kids danced, and America watched and, at that moment in time, the world realized that kids might rule the world,” Dick said.

As much a businessman as a television personality, Dick was especially deft at packaging entertainment products for popular
consumption. For more than half a century he built a juggernaut empire, Dick Clark Productions, from the shoulders of
American Bandstand,
though even he acknowledged that many of his products were more diverting than ennobling. There were redundant awards shows like the
American Music Awards,
compilation shows like
TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes,
and painful-to-watch, campy television-movie dramas. “I owe my success to knowing the mind of the broad audience,” he said. “I’ve often dealt with frivolous things that didn’t really count. I’m not ashamed of that.”

Beginning in 1972 he became synonymous with one of the biggest nights of the year. His
Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve
became a tradition, with Dick hosting the festivities, introducing the entertainment acts, and, of course, counting down to midnight as the ball dropped in New York’s Times Square. But in 2004 he missed the festivities after suffering a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed with his speech affected. The following year he returned for an emotional appearance on the show, telling the audience of how the stroke impaired him and that his “speech is not perfect but is getting there.” Unfortunately, Dick’s speech never again really “got there,” though he continued taking part in the show in a diminished role. In 2006, Dick summed it up for us: “I accomplished my childhood dream, to be in show business. Everybody should be so lucky to have their dreams come true.” Indeed.

At 82, Dick died of a heart attack following surgery to fix an enlarged prostate. He was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

AUGUST 18, 1934 – DECEMBER 31, 1972

It was a long journey to the Baseball Hall of Fame for Roberto Clemente, and sadly, the star outfielder and humanitarian never even witnessed his own induction ceremony. After learning the game on a muddy field in Puerto Rico where a tree branch was used for a bat, Roberto graduated to the Major Leagues in 1954, and, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he became a cherished twelve-time All-Star who notched 3,000 hits and won eleven consecutive Gold Gloves.

But though his athleticism won him widespread admiration, Roberto’s most genuine affection was earned well beyond the white lines of baseball diamonds. He sought to be an authentic role model, not merely a guy who could hit and catch a ball pretty
well. To that end Roberto generously assisted charitable causes with hard cash, donated thousands of autographed pictures to juvenile facilities, and personally worked for the destitute during the off-season.

When a catastrophic earthquake hit Managua, Nicaragua, its neighbors and other organizations coordinated relief, but reports of Nicaraguan corruption resulting in the misdirection of supplies soon surfaced. Roberto was prompted to organize his own relief mission and, on the New Year’s Eve of 1973, he boarded a donated DC-7 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, bound for Managua. Packed with five men and over 16,000 pounds of supplies, the airplane bobbed, bucked, and wheezed after takeoff. Moments later, an engine burst into flames and the plane took a nosedive into the ocean off Isla Verde beach.

Rescuers rushed to the scene but there was nothing to be done. There were no survivors, and Roberto’s body was never found. He was 38.

JUNE 1, 1926 – JULY 3, 2012

When he was a teenager, Andy Griffith bought a Sears & Roebuck trombone, wheedled lessons out of a local pastor, became interested in singing, and for a while thought he might be an opera singer. Later he decided he wanted to be a Moravian preacher and enrolled as a pre-divinity student at the University of North Carolina, where he became involved in drama and musical theater, finally graduating with a degree in music. Next came the frustration of teaching high school music and phonetics, which he left after three years because as he explained, “First day, I’d tell the class all I knew and then there was nothing left to say for the rest of the semester.”

After assembling a traveling variety show routine with his wife, Barbara, who was a fellow UNC drama grad, he eventually caught the attention of entertainment agent Richard Linke who secured Andy a semi-regular spot as a monologist on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. That led to a role as Will Stockdale in the Broadway play
No Time for Sergeants
, which got Andy nominated for a Tony Award. But it was a guest appearance as a small-town mayor on the sitcom
Make Room for Daddy
that in 1960 led CBS to give him his own sitcom,
The Andy Griffith Show
. The show, in which he played the gentle and philosophical small-town Sheriff Andy Taylor of the make-believe town of
Mayberry, imagined a reassuring world of ice cream socials and rock-hard family values. Among the show’s delightful yet oddball characters were Andy’s jittery sidekick, Deputy Barney Fife, and a simple-minded gas station attendant named Gomer Pyle. Andy Taylor, a widower, often philosophized with his young son Opie at local fishing holes. The show was a quiet reprieve from a decade that grew progressively tumultuous and it consistently ranked among the most popular sitcoms during the entirety of its run. After the run ended with episode 249, the show lived on in spinoffs, endless reruns, and even Sunday school classes organized around its rustic moral lessons.

The Andy Griffith Show
went off the air in 1968, and Andy appeared in several feature films, but in 1983 he was suddenly stricken with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a crippling muscular disease that left him partially paralyzed. After six months of private rehabilitation, he made a full recovery and returned to acting, making a triumphant return to TV stardom as Matlock, a crafty and rumpled but good-natured defense lawyer in the series of the same name.

To viewers, Andy’s portrayals seemed so effortless they presumed he was simply playing himself. He wasn’t, he insisted; he was always acting, but took that misimpression as a compliment to his artistry. “You’re supposed to believe in the character,” he said. “You’re not supposed to think, ‘Gee, Andy’s really acting up a storm.’”

At 86, Andy died of a heart attack at home. He was buried at the Griffith family cemetery on his Roanoke Island ranch in North Carolina. The private estate is not amenable to visitors.

MARCH 9, 1943 – JANUARY 17, 2008

Brooklyn-bred genius Bobby Fischer made history in 1972 when he wrested the world chess title from four decades of Soviet domination, beating world champion Boris Spassky in the “Match of the Century” that came to be seen as a proxy for the Cold War.

A petulant and loutish Bobby pitted against an elegant Spassky made for an unforgettable spectacle and captured headlines around the world. Incensed by every condition under which the match was played, particularly offended by the whirr of television cameras, Bobby lost the first game and boycotted the second, insisting the remaining three games be played in an isolated room
the size of a janitor’s closet. Roaring back from what is a sizable deficit in chess, Bobby trounced Spassky and his small army of master strategists, 12½ to 8½.

His victory was widely seen as a symbolic triumph for Democracy over Communism, and it turned the tantrum-prone rebel into an unlikely American hero. Capturing the world’s imagination, the public recognized that chess at its highest level was as thrilling as a duel to the death or as intellectually demanding as any scientific conundrum and, for the first time in the United States, the game became cool. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed along with the prestige of scores of formerly poverty-stricken chess teachers.

But Bobby was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight and soon withdrew into a weird, contrarian solitude that he maintained for the remainder of his life. Tithing to a fringe church, he spent his days locked in a room playing chess against himself and reading Nazi literature. Offered huge financial incentives to defend his title, Bobby made ridiculously extravagant demands that, when met, were countered with even more preposterous terms. Becoming violently anti-American and a vicious anti-Semite (though his mother was Jewish), he spent years in far-flung countries alienated from all but a small band of friends and chess enthusiasts.

He finally emerged from his mysterious two-decade-long seclusion in 1992 and played a $5 million match against his old nemesis, Spassky. After Bobby won handily he dropped out of sight again, emerging now and then on scattered foreign radio stations
to rant in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and Jews. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he rang up a Filipino radio station to hail the “wonderful news” and launch a profanity-laden tirade.

In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was playing, that he was training, or that he was about to make a comeback, but it was all nonsense. Instead, Bobby Fischer became a poster boy for the adage about that fine line between genius and madman and, it seems, ultimately the burden of his 181 IQ permanently blurred that line.

At 64, Bobby died of degenerative renal failure, swearing off Western medicine to the end, and his last words were said to be, “Nothing soothes pain like the touch of a person.” He was buried in the Cemetery of Laugardaelir Church in Laugardaelir, Iceland.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Laugardaelir is a quiet and tiny village thirty miles from Reykjavik that doesn’t appear on most maps. If you can instead get to the booming metropolis of Selfoss, you’ll easily find Laugardaelir by following the road along the river for a few miles northeast, and then the church and cemetery are on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Bobby’s grave is the first one after the gate in front of the church.

NOVEMBER 27, 1942 – SEPTEMBER 18, 1970

Jimi Hendrix’s career and life were tragically brief, but his impact on music has spanned generations. The marriage of blues and rock that he initiated was a direct precursor to music as diverse as that of The Who and Prince, his guitar innovations set the stage for the heavy-metal movement, and he inspired guitarists from Jimmy Page to Eddie Van Halen.

Jimi was of mixed heritage, black and Cherokee Indian, and after a shy and quiet adolescence he quit school and served in the Army for three years as a paratrooper. In 1964 he moved to New York and formed a band called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, and after two years of playing Greenwich Village coffeehouses, Chas Chandler, the former Animals bassist, recognized Jimi’s talent and moved him to London.

There, in 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience was born. Within six months, aided by the release of their epochal debut album,
Are
You Experienced?
, and a ferociously climactic performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, the band had become one of the biggest rock acts on either side of the Atlantic.