In no particular order of importance:
Bill Fries, also known as “C.W. McCall”. He’s been reported dead before, but this time it seems to be confirmed.
Mr. Fries was working as an ad executive at Bozell & Jacobs in Omaha in the 1970s, when he helped to create a series of television commercials for Metz Baking Company about a trucker named C.W. McCall hauling Old Home bread in an eighteen-wheeler and a gum-snapping waitress named Mavis at the Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep On A-Truckin’ Cafe.
The ads — including one that ended with the tagline “Old Home is good buns” — became wildly popular and helped pump up Old Home bread sales as they told the story of a diesel-scented romance between Mavis and C.W., who spoke in a formidable twang voiced by Mr. Fries.
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With a record deal from MGM, Mr. Fries spawned a cultural phenomenon with “Convoy,” an ode to renegade truckers driving across the country, written with Chip Davis, who had also written the music for the Old Home bread ads and who went on to found the group Mannheim Steamroller, known for its Christmas music.
Crackling with CB radio lingo, the song tells the story of the truckers Rubber Duck and Pig Pen who are “puttin’ the hammer down” as they thumb their noses at speed limits, industry rules and law enforcement officers — “bears” and “smokies” in CB parlance. Along the way, they end up leading 1,000 trucks and “11 longhaired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus.”
Originally recorded merely as an album filler, “Convoy” tapped into the surging popularity of trucker culture and CB radio, which truckers used to communicate during long, lonely hours on the open road. It was part of a boom in trucking-themed country songs like “Roll On Big Mama” by Joe Stampley and “Willin’” by Little Feat.
“Convoy” spent six weeks at the top of the country charts and crossed into the top of the pop charts for a week, according to The World-Herald. More than 20 million copies of the single have been sold, according to Bozell. In 1978, Mr. Peckinpah turned the song into a movie, “Convoy,” starring Kris Kristofferson as Rubber Duck.
People who know me well know this story. For the rest: when I was younger (around the time “Convoy” was a hit) I owned a 45 RPM record (kids, ask your parents about 45 RPM records) of “Convoy” that I literally wore the grooves off of. (Kids, ask your parents about record players, needles, and grooves.)
We also owned an 8-track tape (kids, ask your parents…) with that song on it, that had the track break conveniently located at about the 2:27 point in that video.
Estelle Harris. Other credits include “Once Upon A Time In America”, “Mrs. Potato Head” in the “Toy Story” sequels, a guest appearance on a spinoff of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, and “Futurama”.
Thomas F. Staley, who built up the Harry Ransom Center.
Dr. Staley, a scholar of James Joyce, arrived at the university in 1988. Over the next 25 years, he brought a literary sensibility and a competitive zeal to acquiring collections — and keeping them from going to universities like Harvard and Yale.
Stephen Enniss, who succeeded him as the Ransom Center’s director, said Dr. Staley had been adept at persuading university administrators, donors and the public at large to preserve literature that he saw as of lasting value.
“Tom’s enthusiasms became everyone’s enthusiasms,” Dr. Enniss said by phone.
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Not long after being hired to run the Ransom Center, Dr. Staley learned that the archives of Stuart Gilbert, Joyce’s translator and friend, were available. According to The New Yorker, the papers, which cost the Ransom Center $265,000, came with an unexpected find: Joyce’s handwritten edits of the first chapter of “Finnegans Wake.” Dr. Staley estimated that those pages alone were worth $750,000.
In the 25 years that followed, he acquired the papers of dozens of literary luminaries, including Doris Lessing, Jorge Luis Borges, J.M. Coetzee, Penelope Lively and Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as the archives of Robert De Niro and the Life magazine photojournalist David Douglas Duncan. Dr. Staley also continued to teach English.
When Dr. Staley visited the playwright Tom Stoppard at his home in England, he found his papers scattered in his study and in another building on his property. As Dr. Staley recalled to The Times, Mr. Stoppard told him, “What you want is mostly stuff I would throw away: notes on this and that.” But there were also drafts of his plays, notes on revisions and drawings of stage sets.
On another trip, to Arthur Miller’s house in Connecticut, Dr. Staley learned that in a box Miller thought had been filled with roofing nails, he had discovered valuable notebooks and a short story — the very type of items that help fill an archive. Although parts of Miller’s archive had been at the Ransom Center for decades, a formal deal to acquire the collection, for $2.7 million, was not made until 2017.
General Charles G. Boyd (USAF- ret.).
In 1966, General Boyd, who was a captain at the time, volunteered for a dangerous mission in Vietnam — attacking surface-to-air missile sites around Hanoi. After repeated passes through enemy fire, his F-105D plane was hit and set ablaze. He had to eject, and, shortly after landing in a rice paddy, he was captured.
He spent the next 2,488 days enduring torture, isolation, malnutrition and interrogation in various squalid prisons, including the so-called Hanoi Hilton; for 18 months, he was imprisoned in a cell next to the Navy flyer John S. McCain, who would go on to become a United States senator and presidential candidate.
After his release…
He swiftly ascended in the Air Force chain of command, becoming the only former prisoner of war from the Vietnam conflict to achieve four-star rank. He also served as director of plans on the Air Force staff and as commander of the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. He finished his much-decorated 36-year Air Force career as deputy commander in chief of the United States European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, where he helped oversee the drawdown of forces at the end of the Cold War.
After he retired from the Air Force in 1995, he took on several civilian roles that built on his expertise in homeland security and foreign policy.
Among the most notable was his tenure as executive director of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission, headed by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. Barely eight months before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the commission warned — in a report that was largely ignored — that the gravest threat to the United States was the likelihood that a terrorist attack would take place on American soil and would kill large numbers of people.
Barrie Youngfellow, TV actress. (“It’s A Living”. Other credits include some cop shows, “Fernwood Tonight”, “Emergency”, and “WKRP In Cincinnati”.)