About two-thirds of the way into the CBS Evening News, after the chilling reports about what happened in Brussels continued, anchor Scott Pelley came back with a teaser as they went to a commercial.
"Remembering Joe Garagiola," he said, and a collective "aah" went through me.
Garagiola, one of the most popular TV personalities of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, passed away at the age of 90, and even though I hadn't seen him on TV for years, it was like an old friend had left the building.
Garagiola grew up in the same neighborhood as Larry Berra, better known as Yogi, and this Italian-American St. Louis neighborhood ended up turning out two of the most ubiquitous presences that the sport of baseball has ever produced.
Both Joe and Yogi were superior ballplayers, each made it to the major leagues, and while Yogi carved out an incredible Hall of Fame career with the New York Yankees, Joe was pretty much a nondescript player, good but never great.
He got into broadcasting in the 1950s, and his all-American personality and charm later transferred to the national stage, mainly on NBC, and for about three decades, this guy was everywhere, on TV just about seven days a week, whether co-hosting "The Today Show," emceeing the old "Concentration" game show, or doing "The Game of the Week" for Major League Baseball.
He also did plenty of local broadcasting during his career, and was an announcer for the New York Yankees for three years in the mid-1960s, probably my first encounter with him over the airwaves.
If ever there was an All-American success story, it was Garagiola, and he, along with his lifetime buddy Yogi, both ended up in baseball's Hall of Fame.
All the tributes are pouring in, and while most of us didn't know Garagiola personally, it is quite evident that the "Mr. Nice Guy" personality that he had on the air was who he really was in real life, one of the all-time nice guys at that.
After the mention of Garagiola's passing on the broadcast. Pelley quickly brought up another passing, that of actor Ken Howard.
Howard had a long career as an actor, performing on TV, the movies and the stage, but I want to focus on one thing that he did, the one acting gig that cemented his status and became his most famous role.
He was Ken Reeves, the ex-pro basketball player turned coach on the 1978-1981 TV series "The White Shadow," an hour long CBS dramedy about a white coach leading a bunch of inner-city youth on the basketball court and also in life.
The show was funny, touching and while it was only kind of a TV version of such a situation--where a white coach takes over a team made up mainly of blacks and Hispanics, with one or two white kids thrown in for good measure--the show really went beyond sports and the basketball court, and demonstrated how teamwork could make you an All-Star on the court and in life.
(As a side note, I went to high school with one of the white kids on the show, Timothy Van Patten, who played "Salami" on the program.)
Howard simply brought just the right touch to the show. He looked like he could have been a former player, and a coach, and the actors who portrayed his players looked like high school basketball players.
Whether talking about such topics as drug use or the outer skin of people versus how they were on the inside, "The White Shadow," which was only on for a few years and is hardly ever rerun, really was an excellent show, sort of a "Room 222" on the basketball court.
All told, the two personalities will be missed, but their legacy is there to be revisited for those who remember these two people, or investigated by those who never heard of either of them.
But at least to me, both Garagiola and Howard touched me during my life, and may both rest in peace.
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