Goodbye, Ted and Ellie

When someone famous dies, we like to say on the news that the nation or the world or music fans or whatever is relevant to the decedent -- are “mourning” the loss. Like so much else expressed in the language of “news-ese,” it’s an unwieldy generalization that either exaggerates or minimizes the truth of the situation. In my view, you “mourn” a celebrity death based on some emotional, feeling-based connection you made with that person, either from a moment you had meeting them personally, or from having their work or their art touch you and shape your life in some way. It’s when a death is felt, not just noted. Not to sound cold about it, but the vast majority of famous people deaths I’ve reported on the news, I was just noting.

It probably would have been that way for Ted Kennedy, also. Great legislator, part of a famous family (something he had no choice about), a flawed human being like all of us, (but one who made one big whopper of a bad choice). It seemed like his was a life well-lived, and one which ended well, also. But it was one time meeting him personally that has me doing a little mourning this week, and it gets back again to that legendary Kennedy love of family. Around 1990 I was a co-host of the “Evening Magazine” television show at WBZ-TV in Boston. Kara Kennedy, Ted’s daughter, was a producer on the show, and I worked with her on a few pieces during the years we were colleagues. One of them was about Boston Light, the famous and beautiful lighthouse in Boston Harbor. Kennedy was sponsoring legislation to both preserve and upgrade the monument, AND make it the only one of the 278 federally-operated lighthouses in the nation to have a full time attendant.

I went with Kara to interview the senator in his Boston office about his efforts for the lighthouse, and we had a fine talk. But what I really remember about the experience is the way father and daughter interacted. He was just so glad to see Kara come walking into his office; he bounded out of his chair and rushed to hug her, and she was just as happy to see her dad. I remember her as a bit shy, but she glowed in the presence of her father, a father glowing with pride about his girl’s professional endeavor. That memory came back this week, as I was reading this, about something that happened 13 years after I last saw Kara, when she was in her early 40’s:

“Kara Kennedy was sitting in a doctor's office at Johns Hopkins Hospital with her father, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, when she got the news. Not only did she have cancer of the lung, it was inoperable. The doctor told her she might have less than a year to live.

For Senator Kennedy, the prognosis was unacceptable. Kennedy thanked the doctor and headed out the door. Over the next several days, he feverishly immersed himself in the subject of his daughter's cancer, and ultimately found a Boston surgeon who operated on her. Five years later, she is cancer-free and runs 5 miles a day, her mother said.”

Senator Kennedy, the love and kindness you showed your daughter makes me feel your loss, and I mourn your passing.

(For anyone who wants to leave a comment about Senator Kennedy—especially a very hateful one like those I’ve been seeing on other blogs and news sites since his death—I urge you to read the above article in its entirety. If you still have to express your joy that he’s gone, do me a favor and don’t write it here.)

The other person I’m mourning this week, I never met at all, but she played a roll in my life starting in 1966. I was at summer camp, and on a counselor’s radio there was this crazy song playing, “Hanky Panky,” by Tommy James and the Shondells. It’s a totally ridiculous, absurdly simple and repetitive, slightly dirty, and compulsively catchy tune. In other words, it was the moment I discovered rock and roll, and I’ve been rolling with it ever since.

That song was written by Ellie Greenwich, who died this week in Manhattan at the age of 68, and it’s hardly her best effort. She wrote some of the greatest songs of the early rock era, including the Phil Spector-produced Wall of Sound masterpieces like “Be My Baby,” “River Deep, Mountain High,” and “Da Doo Ron Ron.” Also some of rock’s most fun songs, like “Leader of the Pack” and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” (Here’s an obituary, and here’s a rundown of her incredible body of work.)

Thank you, Ellie Greenwich, for putting together those words, chords, and notes, that came over the radio that one moment all those years ago, and turned me on to a kind of music that makes me happy to this day. I mourn your passing.