Calling All Angels
When Robin Williams died, it was the second time I openly grieved a celebrity. The first was a lesser-known, but still lovable actor from the soap opera of my youth and one of the two our antennae could clearly display. It was on that same NBC channel that I had once served as a Junior Weather Forecaster. At the ripe age of 12 and standing alongside Paul Barys of WRCB Chattanooga, I delivered a few lines about the rest of the week’s temperatures and took a tour backstage where I learned that journalists who sit behind full desks often wear jeans and sneakers with their blazer.
Two years after my television debut, however, there was that first celebrity death.
It was more the character, less the celebrity. Tom was the patriarch of the Horton family on NBC’s longest running soap opera, Days of Our Lives. He was a physician, a husband, a father and grandfather and great-grandfather, and the voice that still greets devoted fans…
“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”
I adored Tom Horton. I wanted him to be my grandpa or great-grandpa. I wanted his wife, Alice, to share her homemade doughnuts with me. I wanted to sit among the many who listened to him read the Christmas Story at University Hospital then joined in the tradition of hanging my own ornament on the Horton family Christmas tree.
I didn’t know Macdonald Carey, the man who played that beloved character from 1965-1994, but when his actual death meant Tom’s death, too, I wept. The Hortons had been part of my childhood, part of my summer afternoons and holiday afternoons and, assuming we had power, snow day afternoons. It was a 1:00p.m. ritual, and it still is for my mom. Continue reading “Red Line: Alewife”
Kitty Eveling 