“Jesus answered and said
unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do
hear and see.” St. Matthew 11:4
They ran a
picture with his obituary in The
Washington Post on Tuesday, “Star of the Green Hornet Dies at 82.” I’d never seen Van Williams, the masked man
with his gun pointed at the camera. His
starring role lasted only one season, back in 1966, more than a decade before I
was born. That had been the high point
of his acting career, one show that no one really liked as much as Batman.
Williams had played a character here and there after that, and then hung
it up to be a deputy sheriff and then a fireman in Southern California.[1]
I’ve read
quite a few stories like this lately, as we slowly bid farewell to so many who
stepped briefly into the public eye in that great flourishing of popular
culture in the decades after World War II.
A few weeks ago, there was a famous dancer who had married a respectable
dentist in her early twenties. He didn’t
like the way men looked at her on the stage, and she hung up those satin
slippers for decades of ferrying children to music lessons and a hand of bridge
once a week at the country club. There
was a man a few months before that who hit 23 home runs one golden summer in
the mid-fifties. He hurt his shoulder,
and spent the rest of his life selling insurance in Western Nebraska.
Second acts
can be very hard indeed. Our talents
fade. Public taste is fickle. The next generation always seems a little
more clever and ambitious. We wonder
about the thoughts running through their minds as they watched the stop light
and turned over restlessly in bed. Was
it all worth it? Did I do something
wrong? Who am I now? What will I do with the rest of my life?
