The Absent Friends of 2020

  

When I began The Grandstander way back in 2010, I had no way of knowing that obituaries, or tributes to Absent Friends, would become such a central part of it, but so it has come to pass.  It is no secret that 2020 has been a pretty rotten year on so many levels, and the deaths of so many notable people only adds to it.

On a personal level, death claimed several people close to me this past year.  Most notably, Billy Dinnin, my nephew, was called home to Heaven, a cancer victim at the way too young age of 54.  He was the first of that generation in my family, my parents' grandchildren, to die, and it was a very difficult thing to experience.  If there is any solace to be taken in such events, it happened at the gathering after his funeral in June, when many of the family gathered together to say good-bye and share in lots of great stories and memories from the past years.  As I said at the time, Billy did us all one last favor by bringing so many of us together that day.

Death also claimed two friends of mine from my working days at Highmark, Les Leonetti and Michael Tarabay.  Again, it is always sad when friends leave us, but the memories of good days and experiences are always there to sustain us.

Now, as to the Absent Friends that were noted in The Grandstander this year.  I always choose to honor people who were significant in their fields, who were important figures culturally, or whose life stories just plain interested me.  There were fifty of them this year, an extraordinarily large number.  There were honest-to-God American heroes such as John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as sports Hall of Famers, giants of the stage and screen and television, and people who may have no profile at all outside of the confines of the Pittsburgh area.  You can read what I wrote of them by typing their names into the search box of this blog.

For one last time, a tribute to the Absent Friends of 2020:

David Stern

Don Larsen

Sam Wyche

George Perles

Buck Henry

Hal Smith

Kobe Bryant

Bob Shane

Kirk Douglas

Roger Kahn

Orson Bean

Robert Conrad

Dan Radekovich

Woody Widenhofer

Al Kaline

Tom Dempsey

Honor Blackman

Mort Drucker

Don Shula

Little Richard

Jerry Stiller

Fred Willard

Phyllis George

Ken Osmond

Herb Stempel

Johnny Majors

Jean Kennedy Smith

Vera Lynn

Carl Reiner

Nick Cordero

John Lewis

Olivia de Havilland

Chadwick Boseman

John Thompson

Tom Seaver

Diana Rigg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Gale Sayers

Bob Gibson

Eddie Van Halen

Whitey Ford

Joe Morgan

Herb Adderly

Sean Connery

Alex Trebek

Eleanor Schano

Tom Heinsohn

Paul Hornung

Rafer Johnson

Richie Allen

In all, since I began formally writing of them in 2011, there have been 374  Absent Friends recognized by The Grandstander.