Where Are They Buried? (8 page)

In a 1977 match against Minnesota, he ran for 275 yards to set a single-game record that still stands. By the time of his 1987 retirement, Walter had played in 184 consecutive games and held the all-time rushing record with an incredible 16,726 yards—almost ten miles! But, of most importance to the city of Chicago, Walter led the once lowly Bears to a Super Bowl championship and gained them the status of respected adversary.

The team retired his number 34 uniform upon Walter’s own retirement and he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993.

In February of 1999, in an emotional press conference, Walter announced he was suffering from primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), a rare liver condition with no known cure but, if a suitable donor could be found, his life could probably be saved. While Walter languished with all the other waiting-list hopefuls, his liver condition deteriorated into a cancer, transplant became impossible, and he died at 45.

Walter was cremated and his ashes remain with his family.

JANUARY 8, 1935 – AUGUST 16, 1977

Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis Presley had a childhood that resembled those of all the other poor whites in the South. His father was a laborer who earned barely enough for the family to live on, and nowhere did there seem to be any hope for or indication of the kind of fame Elvis would later find. The family moved to Memphis and, after graduating high school, young Elvis got a job as a $41-per-week truck driver, a respectable enough career. That is, until Sam Phillips came along.

Under Sam’s direction at Sun Studios in 1954, the budding superstar recorded his first single, “That’s All Right Mama,” and, with his sexy sneer, suggestive hip gyrations, and breathy
vocals, Elvis was an instant phenomenon. As the eye of a musical hurricane, he turned the establishment on its ear with one hit after another, eventually recording more than 700 songs. By the time of his death, he had sold some 600 million records. Now, more than 25 years after his death, the number is beyond counting.

But Elvis’s appeal wasn’t just limited to his swiveling hips and rockabilly sound. He had personal charm and bedroom eyes that Hollywood could hardly ignore. After a two-year stint in the Army, fostering a clean, all-American image, he married the daughter of a military officer and gave up live concerts with the intent of leading a quiet family life. But Elvis was soon persuaded to sign a movie contract and he made a series of films, some of which are almost painfully unwatchable. In Elvis’ defense, though, his charisma made a few of them, such as
Jailhouse Rock
and
Viva Las Vegas
, genuinely entertaining.

In 1968, aware that his music career was foundering, Elvis went back on the road and jumpstarted the beginning of his tragic end with a period that bordered on self-parody as the burlesque “Las Vegas Elvis.” In rhinestone jumpsuits topped with sequined capes, an overweight, drowsy-looking, mumbling, and sweaty incarnation of his former vibrant self held onstage court over swooning fans in more than a thousand performances. At the start of this period, his returns to the stage were often exciting, over-the-top productions, but eight years later, he wallowed in the depths as a sagging, 275-pound caricature of “Elvis the Pelvis,” a pitiful reminder of the pitfalls of fame.

A new round of performances was scheduled for August 1977 and, as usual, they quickly sold out. In the week before the concerts began, Elvis hung around his Graceland mansion; he read his Bible, swam in the pool, played with his daughter, ate cheeseburgers, played racquetball, and took his ungodly regimen of assorted pills. After a 10:00 p.m. visit to the dentist for two porcelain fillings, Elvis returned home and, unable to sleep, batted a racquetball around with his cousin, Billy Smith, until about 4:00 a.m. Elvis then joined his current girlfriend, Ginger Alden, in bed and reportedly read for a couple hours. She fell asleep around six and upon waking at nine, saw that Elvis still hadn’t slept. In his best blue pajamas, he excused himself to the bathroom with the book
The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus
, and that’s the last time the 42-year-old King of Rock and Roll was seen alive. Around two that afternoon, Ginger found a bloated Elvis, with the book beside him, slumped in a fetal position on the brown shag carpet of
his bathroom floor, and he wasn’t breathing. Elvis had left the building.

A medical examiner declared that Elvis had died of cardiac arrhythmia—in layman’s terms, he had a heart attack—and there was no indication of drug abuse of any kind. However, when the laboratory studies of his autopsy specimens were finally completed by toxicologists at the University of Utah in January 1978, eleven drugs, all consistent with medical treatment, were found to be present in the singer’s system at the time of his death. Four of the drugs, all commonly known sedatives, painkillers, and depressants, were present in significant amounts. The remaining seven drugs were said to be present in insignificant amounts and one of them, morphine, has been trotted out as supposed proof that Elvis overdosed. However, toxicologists maintain that the trace amounts of morphine found in his system were solely a byproduct of the codeine sedatives; Elvis never actually ingested morphine. Well, not immediately prior to his death anyway.

Although there were a host of drugs in his system, Elvis actually died of heart disease. Though he would have been better off if he had laid off the drugs, Elvis had a weak cardiovascular system, and what he really needed was to lay off the cheeseburgers and play a lot more racquetball.

Dressed in a white suit, Elvis and his $3,600 copper casket were interred in a crypt at Forest Hills Cemetery for a short time. But in October 1977, two deranged fans attempted some manner of body snatching, and Elvis was removed from Forest Hills and buried at his fourteen-acre Graceland estate across town.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Just get yourself to Memphis and follow the tour buses to Elvis Presley Boulevard and Graceland. You won’t miss it.

At Graceland, everything Elvis is on display. Every hour of every day, monotone-voiced tour guides march wide-eyed visitors through the property to see his costumes and cars, platinum records, horse pasture, and, yes, the infamous Jungle Room. But, if you can do without the memorabilia sideshow, admission is waived every morning for those who desire only to pay respects at the King’s grave. To get in free, arrive before 9:00 a.m. and, later, take the twelve bucks you saved and treat yourself to an Elvis shot glass, potholder, thermometer, or plastic hatchet.

After Elvis’s death, it was reported that a few particularly heart-broken fans committed suicide, which is about par for the course.
Such reports are usually impossible to authenticate but, less than 48 hours after Elvis’s death, there were two other explicit casualties of his passing. As mourners congregated outside Graceland, two innocent Louisiana teenagers, Alice Hovatar and Juanita Johnson, were mangled beyond recognition when a car driven by a very drunk Treatise Wheeler smashed into the crowd of Elvis mourners at 50 miles per hour. After avoiding being lynched on the spot, Wheeler spent nine years in prison for the deaths. Incidentally, both of Alice’s parents had also been killed by a drunk driver back in 1965.

NOVEMBER 26, 1922 – FEBRUARY 12, 2000

Comic strip cartooning requires such a peculiar combination of talents that very few people are ever successful at it. Of those, Charles Schulz is in a league all his own. Reconfiguring and dominating the comic-strip landscape for fully half of its history, the importance of
Peanuts
to the genre, or even to popular culture, can hardly be overstated.

After seeing a “Do you like to draw?” advertisement, Charles took an art correspondence course, and from that dubious training created an indispensable cultural touchstone via a most unexpected medium: a comic strip called
Peanuts
. For 50 years, in an intensely
personal effort, Charles himself wrote and sketched every one of the strip’s panels; he even had a clause inserted into his contract preventing anyone else from releasing new
Peanuts
cartoons after his death.

The strip was introduced in 1950, at the height of the American post-war celebration, when being unhappy was considered an antisocial act rather than a personal emotion.
Peanuts
introduced to the world a group of children who told one another the truth. Charles dared to bring his own quirks, his lifelong sense of alienation, insecurity, and inferiority, into the strip—something new in a time when comics were dominated by action-adventure, melodrama, or slapstick gags.

His characters were contemplative, made smart observations, and broached with gentle humor and twinkling insight such previously taboo subjects as faith, depression, intolerance, loneliness, and despair. Charlie Brown became a real person with a real psyche and, when he first confessed, “I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel,” he spoke for people everywhere. Through the 1950s Charles provided unconventional commentary in the national margins, but in the next decade,
Peanuts
skyrocketed into a mainstream cultural powerhouse. As the politics of the 1960s intensified and nothing quite worked out,
Peanuts
became a refuge for people who were putting up with all they could take. With great deliberateness, the strip proved that you were not alone when you woke in the middle of the night, in the company of your failures, worrying that the world had gone mad.

In 1967, as the nation teetered, Charles soared to previously unknown heights of popularity when more than half the nation’s television audience tuned in to his animated special,
A Charlie Brown Christmas
, the success of which confounded network executives. By then, the long-suffering Charlie Brown, high-spirited Snoopy, contemplative Linus, and domineering Lucy had already become revered international figures, but on that night, Charles reached a more diverse, and perhaps larger, audience than any other American artist in history.

Many of the
Peanuts
characters were based on real people in Charles’ life. An uncontrollable childhood dog named Spike was behind Snoopy, and the little red-haired girl, Charlie Brown’s unrequited love, was based on a girlfriend who rejected Charles’ 1950 marriage proposal. Charles maintained that Charlie Brown was born from a friendship he made through the art instruction correspondence school, but ultimately, it seems that Charles Schulz was Charlie Brown.

Despite his fantastic success, stoicism and insecurity became Charles’ personal themes, and high anxiety dogged him all his life. Though the world begged him to move beyond gentle commentary to a role as a national observer, he had no itch to be a teacher or a guru. “I don’t know the meaning of life,” he once said, “and I don’t know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and tears and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it’s a complete mystery.” Instead, in his Santa Rosa studio at One Snoopy Place, everyday through the next three decades, he kept on drawing. He drew with the same old crow-quill pens dipped in ink and used the same drawing table; he liked to say he would remain at his desk until he wore a hole clean through it.

Though Charles took professional pride in the achievements of the strip, it did not automatically override his early disappointments, and he struggled to believe he was worthy of the admiration showered on him. “It is amazing that they think that what I do was that good,” his voice quavered in a 1999 interview. “I just did the best I could.”

By December of that year, a battle with colon cancer and a series of small strokes forced Charles to announce his retirement. Just hours before the final
Peanuts
installment appeared in newspapers around the world, a single-block Sunday strip featuring a reflective Snoopy typing Charles’ farewell letter, Charles died in his sleep of a heart attack at home.

Charles was 77 at his death and was buried at Pleasant Hills Cemetery in Sebastopol, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 101, follow Route 116 west for eight miles to the center of Sebastopol. At the traffic light, turn left onto Sebastopol Avenue, which will turn into Bodega Avenue after a short distance. After a mile, turn left onto Pleasant Hill Road and the cemetery is 1½ miles on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Pull into the cemetery’s first entrance and park at the triple fountains on the right. The stone bench near the top fountain marks Charles’ grave.

Back when the strip peaked in popularity with 355 million regular readers, the branding of everything
Peanuts
became an enormous business. In fact, the strip almost single-handedly created that form of merchandising. Worldwide, more than a quarter million different products have been licensed based on the strip’s
characters and their carefree images can be found on everything from shoelaces to underwear, wind chimes to candles, and cookie jars to clocks. After tallying his hundreds of sources of income (don’t forget advertising rights and even a Broadway production!), Charles’ personal income rivaled that of the Beatles and Elvis Presley. Soon, his “lifetime” income will exceed a
billion
dollars. After all, he’s posthumously making money—in 2001 alone, Charles’ paychecks totaled an estimated $28 million.