What a heavy message that title denotes.
Maybe it is a little too heavy for the day after Labor Day, but it is true.
While we were all off, swimming and having barbecues, and not paying attention at all to the reason that we had off, people were born, and people died during the last unofficial weekend of summer 2015.
Of those that died, since many of you were away, you might have missed three notables, in particular, who have left this earth, and did it during the Labor Day weekend.
Baby Boomers will probably remember them fondly.
Martin Milner will forever live in TV reruns as the veteran cop on "Adam-12," as will Kent McChord's portrayal of his sidekick, the younger cop of a duo patrolling Los Angeles in the 1970s.
He had a long and varied career, including one another classic TV show, "Route 66," but "Adam-12" was such a popular show--supposedly thousands of today's police officers, most of whom are now ready for retirement, decided on a police career after watching that show--that the rest of his career is nothing but a footnote.
He had pretty much laid low since the 1980s and 1990s, but the influence on that show--produced by Jack Webb as something of a reverse followup to "Dragnet," showing patrol cops rather than detectives--resonated with a country that was torn by the war in Vietnam, the rise of youth culture, and drugs.
As I said, his portrayal will live on in reruns.
The next notable death is of someone who wasn't really that notable, unless you were a fan of the "Our Gang" comedies, and even then, she appeared so briefly in those shorts that if you blinked, you probably missed her.
Jean Darling, was the pretty, curly haired little girl that had all the answers in a handful of these shorts. What is most interesting is that while alive, she might have been the last "Rascal" to appear in both the silents and the talkies of the series.
She wasn't in the series long, and later married and moved to Europe, where she spent a good portion of her life.
Again, she wasn't on the par of Darla Hood or many of the other girls in the series, but another "Our Gang" cast member has now been lost, and there are so few that are still with us.
Finally--and this was actually breaking news on the CBS Evening News yesterday--Judy Carne has passed away.
The "Sock It To Me" girl on "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" resonated with audiences way back when on that loony show, a program which captivated audiences in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was wild, crazy, irreverent and topical, and turned the variety show format on its ear.
Carne was part of the troupe of comics who peopled the show, but early on, she was the focus, especially during the short romps where she danced in a bikini with phrases written all over her body.
She was eventually usurped in popularity by Goldie Hawn, but that didn't minimize her place on the show, which she only stayed with for a season or two. She had often complained that she hated the bikini blackouts, which often ended with her being drenched with water.
She had been a popular, up and coming actress before the show, on a number of sitcoms and a number of movies, and even on Broadway. She was British, and with the rise of the Beatles, everything British was in, and she was the "It" girl for a while, both for positive and negative reasons. She was on the top TV show of the era, but she was also in the gossip columns as Burt Reynolds' wife and with her various skirmishes with the police and her drug use.
After he stint on "Laugh-In," she never was able to duplicate her popularity, and kind of faded away.
R.I.P. to Milner, Darling and Carne, and their deaths prove that life does go on--and even death--during holidays.
We will miss them all.
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