Where Are They Buried? (87 page)

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This celebrated graveyard is marked by signs from the Phillipe-Auguste stop of the Metro.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Once inside the cemetery, just follow the camera-toting throngs to see all the favorite corpse resting places.

OCTOBER 31, 1943 – JUNE 16, 1970

Though he was the nation’s leading rusher in college football during the 1964 season, Brian Piccolo was not even drafted by the NFL after his final year at Wake Forest University, as he was deemed too slow and small for the league. Brian instead joined the Chicago Bears as a free agent and spent the next few seasons on the team’s practice squad, watching from the sidelines as his roommate Gale Sayers put together consecutive seasons as the team’s star running back.

But in 1968 Gale suffered a knee injury and Brian tenderly assisted him through rehab—and played in Gale’s starting position for the season’s final five games. During the off-season, Gale was cleared to return for the 1969 season and Brian was relegated to his familiar second-string position, but after a starting fullback was injured, Brian was called up again and, in a storybook scenario, started alongside his best friend Gale.

After just one game together, Brian developed breathing problems and doctors soon diagnosed him with embryonal cell cancer. After surgery and chemotherapy it seemed he’d beaten the disease, but it returned the following winter. By summertime the cancer claimed Brian Piccolo at the age of 26.

A movie of his life,
Brian’s Song
, was released in 1971, and its touching story of courage and humanity is an enduring tearjerker.
The embryonal cell carcinoma that was almost always fatal 30 years ago is now often curable, partly through the generosity of the Brian Piccolo Cancer Research Fund, which was established after his death.

Brian is buried at Saint Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Evergreen Park, Illinois.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Saint Mary’s Cemetery is on 87th Street, four miles west of I-94.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and take the first right turn behind the office so that Section HG is on the right and Section AM is on the left. A hundred feet on the left, stop in front of the Tarantino mausoleum and you’ll find Brian’s flat stone just to the left of this mausoleum.

DECEMBER 1, 1940 – DECEMBER 10, 2005

Growing up in the shadow of an Illinois bordello run by his pimp father and enterprising mother, Richard Pryor was raised among an assortment of drunks, whores, hustlers, and losers. Though the whole sorry and sordid upbringing did yield a lifetime of comedic material, the antics he picked up early didn’t translate well to the classroom and he was expelled in the eighth grade.

From 1958 to 1960 Richard served in the Army but, aside from boot camp, almost his entire stint was spent in a military prison after he and a few brothers beat a particularly racist white serviceman. Putting the time to good use, he developed a comedy routine while incarcerated. Upon returning home, Richard cut his teeth on the “chitlin’ circuit,” a string of wrong-side-of-the-track venues catering to black entertainers during segregation, and he quickly earned notoriety for an expletive-laced routine. Toning his act down to secure bookings at fancier clubs and on television, he forged a more vanilla-flavored format and by the mid-1960s was a reasonably successful mainstream comic.

Despite his success, he was frustrated. “I made a lot of money being Bill Cosby,” he recalled. “But I was hiding my personality and being a robot comic, repeating the same lines.” The dam finally broke in the middle of a 1967 gig when, without any apparent provocation, Richard slammed the microphone to the floor and screamed, “What am I doing here?!”

Casting off the chains of his white-bread act, Richard took on a new persona and steered a fresh course straight into uncharted comedic waters. He summoned from memory the galaxy of nefarious characters he’d known from his youth and reincarnated them as his own. Embracing the stereotypes and adopting the blunt cadences and lingo of the street (including an unabashed use of the word “nigger”), he explored all conceivable embarrassments of every societal posture and unleashed an act chock-full of uproarious monologues. With socially and politically conscious opinions woven into his innovative “comedy without jokes,” Richard’s retelling of escapades and street characters culled from the misadventures of the black experience were side-splittingly hilarious and transcended traditional boundaries. Richard was rewarded with admirers up and down the American demographic.

Richard’s newfound skin lent him a fresh confidence and a self-assured stage presence overtook him. Alternately volatile then vulnerable, or crass one minute and sensitive the next, Hollywood took notice of the streetwise yet diffident funnyman and it too soon came knocking. Hit comedies and concert films followed, including
Stir Crazy
,
Silver Streak
, and
Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip
, making Richard one of the highest-paid stars of the day.

But he didn’t tone things down after he became famous, and episodes of self-destructive behavior dogged him, jeopardizing his career as well as his life. In 1974 he spent ten days in jail for an income tax quandary, four years later he rammed his Mercedes into a car containing his wife’s friends and then pulled out a gun and shot it. After a marathon drug binge in 1980, paramedics found him walking in a daze, strung-out and seemingly oblivious to third-degree burns covering more than half his body. Widely reported as a cocaine free-basing accident, Richard later confessed he had poured 151-proof rum on his body and lit it afire in an effort to commit suicide.

Following the suicide attempt, Richard got clean by an extended visit at a drug rehab and soon after mellowed considerably. In 1981 he even swore off use of the word “nigger” after an epiphany during a trip to Africa when he saw black people running governments and businesses. “I realized that I did not see anyone there I could call by that name,” he recalled. Mellowing is one thing, but a complete metamorphosis eventually enveloped him and by the mid-’80s Richard was just plain lazy. After inking a five-year $40 million contract with Columbia Pictures, his robust film catalog work gave way to such dogs
as
Brewster’s Millions
and
Hear No Evil, See No Evil
. “I knew
Brewster’s Millions
was no good to begin with,” Pryor confessed. “But I was a pig, I got greedy.”

The softening of his character may have been attributable to a middle-aged maturity or a realization he was driving too fast down a wrong-way street, but a 1986 diagnosis of multiple sclerosis was certainly a factor too. Owing a few films to Columbia, he directed himself in a semi-autobiography named
Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling
, a film he said refused to be written as a comedy. But the nervous system disease’s cruelest symptoms—vertigo, tremors, and muscle weakness—slowly encroached and by the time of 1992’s
Another You
, a frail and hesitant shell of the former Richard Pryor struggled to deliver his lines. No longer able to stand on stage, he tried delivering his monologue from an easy chair during a tour the following year, but ultimately was forced to cancel.

“I had some great things and I had some bad things. The best and the worst,” he said in 1995. “In other words, I had a life.” Richard passed away at 65 and was cremated.

DECEMBER 12, 1937 – AUGUST 21, 1974

In the early 1970s, the
Walking Tall
true-life movie series lent Hollywood romance to the exploits of a Tennessee sheriff, Buford Pusser. He was canonized as a friend of every honest man and true-grit peacemaker who levied a brand of personal justice against any who might attempt to upset bucolic Southern tradition. Though entertaining, the
Walking Tall
features didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, and Buford’s larger-than-life legend thrived.

Before his career in law enforcement, Buford was discharged from Marine boot camp for an asthma condition, and he followed that stint with a short-lived career as “Buford the Bull” on the Chicago professional wrestling circuit. In 1962 he became the police chief of Adamsville, Tennessee, after his father arranged for Buford to succeed him upon his own retirement. In 1964 he won the seat of McNairy County Sheriff when the favored incumbent was killed in an auto accident before the voting day. It was shortly thereafter that Buford and his trademark Big Stick waged a campaign to rid the county of moonshiners and mobsters. His unorthodox law enforcement practices won him a number of enemies.

In 1967 Buford was called out on a middle-of-the-night emergency that turned out to be bogus and instead, he found himself in an ambush, presumably by folks who were unimpressed by his manner of applying the law. For reasons unexplained, his wife, Pauline, had accompanied him on the call, and she was killed in a hail of bullets while Buford was lucky to escape with just two bullet holes in his face and jaw. After the attack, Buford redoubled his efforts to clean up the county and sought to avenge his wife’s death, but no one was ever brought to trial for the incident. At least one prime suspect shortly wound up dead.

In 1970 Buford stepped down from his post as sheriff, as state law prohibited anyone from holding an elected office for more than three consecutive terms, and he later lost a reelection bid. In 1973,
Walking Tall
, starring Joe Don Baker, was released, and on its heels came a sequel and a song,
The Ballad of Buford Pusser
. Buford’s exaggerated exploits soon became bartalk legend.

On the day it was announced that Buford would star as himself in a third
Walking Tall
movie he was killed in a single-car crash. Just that day, Buford had taken delivery of a new Corvette and, while on his way home, lost control at over 100 m.p.h. He was killed instantly.

Buford was 36 at his death, and was buried next to his wife, Pauline, at the Adamsville War Memorial Park in Adamsville, Tennessee.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
The cemetery is located on Route 64 just a short distance west of the Route 22 junction.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
The Pussers’ plot is easy to find, marked by a tall granite slab in the cemetery’s northwest corner.

JANUARY 14, 1919 – NOVEMBER 4, 2011

Andy Rooney was known best as the prickly witted, inquisitive, but cranky philosopher who delivered homespun commentary on
60 Minutes
each Sunday night for thrity-three years, but he was also a newspaper columnist and author and enjoyed considering himself a writer rather than a talking head—a role in which he was never comfortable, he said.

Drafted into the Army during his junior year at Colgate University, he was part of a generation of reporters who got their start
as military correspondents during World War II. Though he did not know much about reporting, Andy managed to get himself assigned to the G.I. newspaper
Stars and Stripes
and for three years covered the war from the front, flying with the Army’s Eighth Air Force on bombing raids over Germany and covering the Allied invasion of Europe. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his reporting under fire at the battle of Saint Lo, France, and a year later was among the first Americans to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp.

After his discharge Andy worked as a freelance writer, but in 1949 he happened to encounter radio star Arthur Godfrey in an elevator and, with bluntness millions of people would learn about later, he told the biggest radio star of the day that his show needed better writing. Andy’s nerve moved Godfrey to hire him and, by the time the show was moved to CBS television in 1953, Andy was its only writer. In short time, Andy’s name was a familiar credit at the end of CBS News programs and in 1964 he wrote his first television essay, an original genre he is credited with developing. Given a challenge to write on any topic, he wrote “An Essay on Doors” and continued with award-winning contemplations on bridges, hotels, and chairs. “It was the best work I ever did,” he said in 2002. “But nobody knows I can do it or ever did it. Nobody knows that I’m a writer and producer. They think I’m this guy on television.”

True enough, but it was his television role that made him a cultural icon. In fall 1978, “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” was a regular
60 Minutes
segment, and the next season Andy had the end of the broadcast to himself, the last word on the most-watched television program in history. Delivered from behind a desk that he hewed himself, his frequently parodied essays and humorous soliloquies about aspects of the modern world he found bothersome brought forth tears of laughter, and occasionally, even tears of rage or sadness, to his 40-million-strong audience.

With his jowls, bushy eyebrows, deeply circled eyes, and advancing years, he addressed mostly mundane subjects with varying degrees of befuddlement, vexation, and sometimes pleasure. He admitted to loving football, Christmas, tennis, woodworking, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. He also claimed to like shined shoes and properly pressed pants and had machines in his office to take care of those functions, although somehow he always managed to look rumpled.

But he was better known for the things he did not like. He railed against “two-prong plugs in a three-prong society,” the
incomprehensibility of road maps, New Year’s Eve, waiting in line for any reason, wash-and-wear shirts “that you can wash but not wear,” and the uselessness of keys and locks. He observed that “there are more beauty parlors than there are beauties” and that “if dogs could talk, it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.” He made clear that he thought General George S. Patton and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom he had known personally, were gasbags and, on the subject of higher education, he declared that most college catalogs “rank among the great works of fiction of all time.” Mainly, his essays struck a chord in viewers by pointing out life’s unspoken truths or complaining about its subtle lies, “I have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn’t realize they thought … and they like that,” he said.