Enotes

Which Dick Van Patten would you like to remember and mourn today? Is it the actor Van Patten, who most famously seeped into our consciousness as Tom Bradford, the patriarch of the TV family on ABC's "Eight is Enough" from 1977-81? Is it the tennis player Van Patten, whose sons got some of the old man's genes and did pretty good on the court as well? Is it the animal activist Van Patten, who worked tirelessly for our furried and feathered friends, including founding National Guide Dog Month in 2008? Is it the entrepreneur Van Patten, who co-founded Natural Balance Pet Foods in 1989? Take your pick---or take them all, if you'd like. Van Patten passed away on Tuesday at age 86. Some reports blame the cause of death on complications related to diabetes. There was some juice to the Van Patten name in the entertainment industry. There was Dick, of course, and there was his younger sister Joyce, a fellow actor. There were the Van Patten boys---Vincent, Nels...

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm 51 years old. I only tell you this because, when she was my age, Jeralean Talley was living in the year 1950. And she continued to live, some 65 more years, until passing peacefully the other day in her home in Inkster . Jeralean was 116 years, 25 days old when she slipped away, ending her two-month reign as the world's oldest living person. I wonder what it would have been like to be my age now, in 1950. Harry S. Truman was president. Television was still a relatively new thing and lots of folks didn't even own one. And if they did. it broadcast everything in beautiful, gorgeous, vivid...black and white. The NHL had six teams. Major League Baseball had all of 16. The NFL was still finding its audience as teams were experimenting with something called the forward pass. The NBA was four years old. The only phones we had were mounted on our kitchen walls. You had to actually read the hands of a clock or wristwatch to tell ...