RIP – BIL KEANE

EXPIRED: 11/08/11 – Bil Keane, 89, was a cartoonist who’s first regular comic strip was called Silly Philly which only ran in the Philadelphia Bulletin from 1946 to 1959. A syndicated strip, Channel Chuckles, premiered in 1954 and ran until 1977. But it was in 1960, when he moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona that he created the long-running newspaper comic The Family Circus. That makes it 51 years old and it’s still in syndication.

Believe it or not, Keane started by mimicking cartoons in The New Yorker, a magazine that would never touch The Family Circus.

Although he started out as “Bill Keane”, he dropped the second L from his name “to be distinctive.” What he should have done was to use his more distinctive middle name, Aloysius.

His son Jeff is expected to take over daily production of strip.

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RIP – DON LAPRE

EXPIRED: 10/02/11 – Don Lapre, 47, had dropped out of his Massachusetts high school only to find success and fame as the ‘King of Infomercials’. He’s the guy who peddled get-rich-quick schemes, showing you his secrets for making $50,000 a week by “placing tiny classified ads in the newspaper.” Remember him?

Well, after the ‘tiny classified ad’ thing wore out its welcome, Lapre was pitching “The Greatest Vitamin in the World.” That, too, was also a sham and the FDA was on his case for years trying to get him to stop claiming that the worthless pills could do things that it couldn’t. His last attempt at business was duping people into letting his ‘company’ make one minute TV ads that “you could put up on YouTube to reach millions of people to buy your product or service.”

Eventually he was accused on 41 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud and promotional money laundering. Basically, the guy defrauding at least 220,000 people out of nearly $52 million.

He was arrested this past June for failing to appear for his arraignment. US Marshals found Lapre hiding in the locker room of a Life Time Fitness location in Tempe, Arizona. He had reportedly lived in the Life Time Fitness location for two days, and was suffering from serious self-inflicted knife wounds to his groin as he tried to sever his femoral artery.

He was thrown into a holding cell to await a trial that was to begin today. The charges carried potential fines of between $250,000 and $500,000 per count and federal prison terms of between five and 25 years.

But Lapre had other ideas and took his life. He wrote on his website, donlapre.com, “I am left to fight a battle that will for sure destroy what energy I have left inside.” And with that, he took his life.

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RIP – JERRY STARK

EXPIRED: 05/19/10 – Jerry Stark, 55, would have probably died while working on the assembly line at General Motors if it weren’t for croquet.

He was invited to a company picnic in his hometown of in his native Kansas City, Missouri, and quickly got hooked on the game.

While visiting Jim Bast, a high school friend, who was also the 1984 USCA National Singles Champion, at his home in Phoenix, Arizona, Stark discovered “real croquet.” He quit GM and moved to the desert.

RIP – VIVA LEROY NASH

EXPIRED: 02/12/10 – Viva Leroy Nash, 94, was, as his attorney claimed, a “doddering old man, who can’t hear, can’t see, can’t walk, and is very, very loony.” That may be so, but in reality Nash held the record as the oldest American on death row, a record he relinquished due to his death from  natural causes. Sly little fucker.

RIP – MIRIAM COHEN

EXPIRED:   11/11/09 – Miriam Cohen, 101, was born in Brooklyn and got a degree at Smith College. She had planned to do a lot in life, probably the last of which was to fight a war. But when Uncle Sam called on women to help battle Hitler, Cohen, a woman of proud Jewish heritage, answered the call.

RIP – PEARL STEVENS

EXPIRED: 08/18/09 – Pearl Stevens, 106, Arizona’s oldest woman never considered herself old. She saw Halley’s Comet twice and she did the breakfast dishes every morning. She had a certain way to do them, too, and she didn’t want you in her way!