Goodbye to Nichelle Nichols at the age of 89.
Nichols, of course, is best remembered for her role as Nyota Uhura for the three seasons of the original Star Trek on NBC as well as the Trek animated series and six of the Star Trek films.
Nichols had a long and varied career in film, television, and stage but her legacy will always be with Star Trek with two interesting notes from the show off-screen.
The best-known is her interaction with Martin Luther King near the end of the first season of Star Trek, where Nichols had just decided to leave the show in order to take a role on Broadway and had turned in her resignation paperwork to depart but met King at an NAACP event and told him of her decision to leave the show.
King told her that she could not and told her of Uhura's importance and that because her role of Uhura was not a specific role to her race, that should she leave Uhura could be replaced by anyone-including an alien race.
Nichols decided then to remain on the show for the duration, which leads to the other note that I wasn't aware of until writing this, as Nichols claims that she was offered the role of "Peggy Fair" on "Mannix" which was preparing for its second season on CBS but was not allowed out of her contract with Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry.
Star Trek was nearly the end of what proved to be its third and final season but Roddenberry believed it would be renewed for a fourth season at the time and refused, which cost Nichols the role that would be cast with Gail Fisher and would run for another seven seasons.
As a fan of the original Star Trek since I was a small child, it's sad as another member of the Trek cast passes away, and a little ironic to me personally as I had just a few days after her passing finally landed her Mego action figure from the seventies for my collection from a road trip to an antique market.
Goodbye to Judith Durham at the age of 79.
Durham was the lead vocalist for The Seekers, the first Australian group to succeed in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the top five songs "I'll Never Find Another You" and the theme song to the 1967 film "Georgy Girl".
It's Durham's beautiful voice that carries those songs and makes them so memorable even as you listen to them today
Georgy Girl was listed as number one in the USA on the Cashbox chart and number two on the Billboard listings.
Cashbox became defunct in 1996 but at the time of The Seekers, it was equally important as the Billboard listings.
The Seekers are to this day, the unofficial band of Australia, and it would be very difficult for another group to reach the same level there and have sold over fifty million records worldwide.
Goodbye to David McCullough at the age of 89.
The two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Presidential biographies for Harry Truman and John Adams, McCullough also is known for hosting the American Experience series for years on PBS and for his voice work that included the Ken Burns series "The Civil War".
McCullough also was the narrator of the film "Seabiscuit", both of his Pulitzer victors were adapted for films on HBO and he was the subject of the documentary "David McCullough: Painting With Words".
McCullough's thirteen books also include biographies on Theodore Roosevelt and the Wright Brothers, and books on 1776, the Brooklyn Bridge, Panama Canal, and the Johnstown Flood.
Goodbye to Bernard Shaw at the age of 82.
The long-time lead anchor at CNN, Shaw retired earlier than he could have and was quoted as saying that his success wasn't worth the cost of what he missed from his personal life.
Shaw is most remembered for his controversial question to Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis in a 1988 debate that used his wife Kitty in a hypothetical question that concerned the death penalty stance of the then-Massachusetts Governor.
Dukakis's passionless answer sent his candidacy into decline and he would lose the election to George Bush.
Shaw is also remembered for his Gulf War coverage in which he was the rare journalist to honestly convey their unease at being in a war zone Shaw reported being under a desk in his hotel as missiles whizzed by and stating that he felt like he was in the middle of hell.
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