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Goodbye Betty White
2021 isn’t quite done with us yet.
This article was originally titled “Goodbye Harry Reid,” but 2021 has been a year such as to make the passing the Hollywood’s favorite golden girl on the very last day par for the course.
Of course, we lost plenty of shining stars in 2020, too.
Fans of the long-running popular quiz show, Jeopardy!, were heartbroken at the passage of its host Alex Trebek in November of 2020 after his long battle with pancreatic cancer. The beloved Hollywood nice guy got quite a send off, and even the stage of Jeopardy! was renamed the Alex Trebek Stage in his honor. Still, Jeopardy! producers haven’t managed to fill his admittedly big shoes more than a year later.
Current temporary host Ken Jennings, one of the winningest contestants in Jeopardy! history, is filling in but the search continues.
The world said goodbye to basketball legend Kobe Bryant in 2020, after a fatal helicopter crash tragically killed him, his young daughter and several other passengers back in March 2020. Judging by some of the trials and travails of humankind since then, Kobe Bryant may have been holding the fabric of the universe together.
Bluegrass legend Tony Rice died in 2020. The world of country music said goodbye to Charlie Pride, John Prine and Kenny Rogers. Rock lost Eddie Van Halen. The soccer world mourned the legendary Diego Maradona. Hollywood lost Chadwick Boseman and Sean Connery.
2021, far from the return to normalcy we’d all hoped, has instead proven to be a kind-of 2020, part II. As the long months of 2021 marched on, even more luminaries disappeared from the constellations of politics, business, literature and the arts.
The world lost Colin Powell in 2021, a soldier and a diplomat who served his country with distinction. Baseball trailblazer and legendary slugger Hank Aaron left the sports world to mourn him in 2021. Rap lost legends DMX and Biz Markie, both of whom were heavy influences in the genre.
Beloved children’s book author Beverly Clearly broke hearts in 2021, when the creator of such memorable characters as Ramona and Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby passed away at the age of 104.
