I’ve heard time and time again that 2016 has been a really tough year for celebrity deaths. In my last blog, I wrote about Carrie Fisher’s sudden passing. Here’s a few more of this year death’s that immediately come to mind for me:

Florence Henderson – Awww, who didn’t like Mrs. Brady? Yes, I know Florence Henderson was a Broadway star long before she ever became Mrs. Brady, but to me. a child of the 1960s and ’70s, she will forever be remembered as the unflappable Carol Brady. The only thing she ever really got mad about was Peter breaking her favorite vase while playing ball in the house. “Mom always said don’t play ball in the house,” Peter’s five siblings taunted after it happened.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, the real Florence Henderson, newly divorced, visited “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” and boldly proclaimed, “Dating sucks.” The audience roared with laughter in response.

“It was so wierd hearing Mrs. Brady say something like that,” I later commented to my mother-in-law.

“But she’s not Mrs. Brady,” my mother-in-law replied.

Yes, she was.

Keith Emerson, Greg Lake – Two-thirds of the 1970s progressive rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer met their end within months of each other in 2016. Keith Emerson committed suicide in March after a degenerative muscle disease began hindering his keyboard abilities. Greg Lake died in December from cancer.

I first heard of ELP with their hit, “In The Beginning” in the summer of 1972. I remember it fondly because I was living in Rome then. “In The Beginning” and “Lucky Man” were two of many Top 40 hits that were played on my favorite radio station, WRUN in Utica My GE transistor radio faithfully picked up the signal in my cozy upstairs bedroom.

David Bowie – His music was at the height of its popularity when I was in my teens in the 1970s. My favorite song of his, “Fame” was co-written with John Lennon, who also performed on the recording. Ah, summer of 1975. I was between 9th and 10th grade at the Grier School, my beloved boarding school in Pennsylvnia.

 George Martin – I posted a blog here about the death of the great Beatles record producer right after it happened in March 8, 2016. A true gentleman who happened to be a genius and helped to make The Bealtes what they were.

Patty Duke – I also dedicated a blog here to Patty Duke after she died on March 29. Like Carrie Fisher, Patty Duke was a mental health advocate who lived with bipolar disorder. She knew of which she spoke. As one of my friends wrote on Facebook at the time, “We’re losing too many good people.”

This is by no mean a complete list of all the celebrities we lost this year who made a sizable mark on society. If I left out someone who was important to you, I apologize. Unfortunately, so many celebrities have passed on this year, it’s virtually impossible to list them all here.

Footnote: Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher’s mother and an iconic star of Hollywood’s Golden Age, died hours after I finished writing this blog on Dec. 28. Unbelievably, she died the day after her daughter died. My analytical 16-year-old son says there’s no such thing as dying from a broken heart, but I disagree. Debbie Reynolds’ last words were reportedly, “I want to be with Carrie. I miss her so much.”

I am very sad that Carrie Fisher died this week. With her death, we lost a one-of-a-kind free spirit who made us laugh at things once unmentionable in general society.

Fisher, the child of actress Debbie Reynolds and crooner Eddie Fisher, first acheived widespread fame as Princess Leia with the release of the initial Star Wars film in 1977, as many already know. I first saw the film in the theatre that year just before starting my senior year of high school. I already knew of Carrie as the daughter of her famous parents, so it wasn’t the first time I ever heard of her. It was, however, the first time I ever saw her as an actress. Even through she was only three years older than me, I was struck by Carrie’s regal bearing and her refined “movie star” voice in the film. I wished that I could have carried off that kind of image..

What really made me a Carrie Fisher fan, though, was her writing and advocacy of mental health and addiction issues. Of course, these all sort of blended in together in books such as “Wishful Drinking” and “Shockaholic.” Not only was Carrie brave enough to discuss how she abused drugs to self-medicate herself before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she somehow managed to make all this seem funny through her self-depreciating, sardonic wit.

Ditto for events from her upbringing. As some of us, ahem, older folks know, Carrie’s father, Eddie Fisher, left her mother, Debbie Reynolds, for Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth Taylor happened to be the widow of Mike Todd, the famous movie producer and Eddie Fisher’s best friend. The whole thing waa a big scandal in the late 1950s just before I was born.

The affair between Eddie and Liz reportedly started when Eddie spent time intending to comfort Mike Todd’s beatiful young widow. As usual, Carrie later offered a snappy retort about the situation in one of her books, stating that Eddie “comforted her with his penis.” That was one of my favorite Carrie lines.

Her written assessment of her mother’s second husband was just as on-the-spot funny, but I can’t quote her verbatim because it’s probably not suitable for this community newspaper. Let’s just say Carrie Fisher’s stepfather spent a lot of time around the house wearing nothing more than a shirt.

I identified with Carrie Fisher. We were both around the same age and broke out as writers later in our lives. We both grew up under difficult circumstances. I was never was drug addict, but I applaud the honesty Carrie gave us about her addiction and recovery. Mental illness runs in my family, so again, I am thankful the insights that Carrie Fisher gave us about living with bipolar disorder.

I’m going to miss you, Princess Leia. Too sudden, too soon.

On this Christmas Eve, our thoughts often turn to loved ones who are no longer with us. For some, the pain is sharp and fresh as their loss is recent. As for me, I still miss my mother with a sad longing even through her last Christmas with us was on December 25, 1972. Forty-four years have passed.

The photo above, taken on that Christmas, shows my Aunt Jackie, my mother’s sister, on the far left and my mother, Chris, on the far right. Their mother and my grandmother, Helen, stands between them. By the looks of it, the three women were about to embark upon a walk around the Turin Towne development where my Aunt Jackie lived in the Town of Lee just outside of Rome.

I’m pretty sure that my aunt and my grandmother had no idea that this would be my mother’s last Christmas. I know that I didn’t. In hindsight, of course, I can see the red flags that indicated my mother was at the end of her days, but as a 13-year-old, no I didn’t.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back in my mind and kicked myself for not paying more attention to my mother then and not saying the things that I should. Now that I’ve raised four of my own children, of course I realize that 13 years olds often don’t go out of their way to be nice to their mothers. Still, I wish I had been given a chance to to give a proper goodbye.

My mother committed suicide on June 1, 1973. As the photo shows you, she was young. She was two months away from her 38th birthday.

Mom’s death came after years of fighting the schizophrenia that continued to dog her despite several hospitalizations. Medical science was a lot more limited then. Another thought I’ve often replayed in my mind is what if Mom had lived long enough to reach the time when better treatment became available?

Sometimes I feel her spirit blend with mine at moments, even to this day. In some ways, she has never left me.

I still have two of my parents’ old Christmas ornaments that they hung on our tree in Rome each year as I was growing up. Those ornaments hang on my tree today.

This is what life looked like on Christmas 1972. It was the year I was 13 and sporting a fashionable “shag” haircut as the photo above illustrates. I was visiting my Aunt Jackie and Uncle Wendell’s house that evening in the Turin Towne development in the Town of Lee just outside of Rome. Lake Delta is nearby, but its definitely too cold for a swim.

In this photo, I am playing the board game,”Battleship” that my cousins Dan and Dave got as a present that day. For you younger folks out there, there were no video games then. Those primitive electronic Atari tennis games wouldn’t even be around for a few more years, but those were boring, anyway. It wasn’t exactly thrilling to bat an electric tennis ball back and forth across a TV screen, That was a good as Atari tennis got. Obviously, Battleship was more entertaining because it’s still around today. I gave it to my son Sean for Christmas five or six years ago and of course, thought of this photo.

In the early 2000s, my older daughter was working on a “Family” badge for Girl Scouts and used this picture as part of a family story she was required to write. One of the other girls in my daughter’s troop asked if I was using a laptop computer is this photo!

The neck of my Uncle Wendell’s guitar is peeking out from behind my chair. Actually, this was HIS chair. My uncle must have been busy at the moment because I actually scored a seat in HIS chair. My Dad had a HIS chair, too, at our house. Didn’t all dads?

Here is our Grandpa Kitney overseeing Cousin Dave’s assembly of his brand-new Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot game. The game was hot then and a quick check on the internet tells me that the game still is sold today. Apparently, it also has fared much better than Atari tennis over the years.

Dave was 9 years old here. Our grandfather was 67. Now that I’m 44 years older, I can feel his pain seeing him stiffly crouch on the floor. I wish I didn’t.

On a side note, dig that big console television behind Grandpa and Dave. That was my aunt and uncle’s first color TV.

This morning I trolled the internet for vintage Trolls.

From what I’ve noticed, Troll dolls are the “new” craze this Christmas. How do I know this? Because each time I played a free game on MSN last month, I first was bombarded with a commercial for Trolls at Walmart. Evidently, the dolls tie in to a 2016 “Trolls” movie.

Of course, I find all this rather ironic because Troll dolls were the craze in the  1960s when I was in elementary school. In fact, the one present I still can remember getting for Christmas 1966 was a Troll doll house from my Grandma and Grandpa Webster. I was all of 7 years old, but I must have been very excited because I can still see what the Troll house looked like while it was still wrapped under our tree in Rome. It was the one present my mother let me open on Christmas Eve because my curousity about the large package was driving both of us nuts. This is what it looked like:

No, this isn’t a photo from my family’s 1966 Christmas. This Troll Shanty Shack by the Ideal Toy Company (remember them?) is currently available on Ebay for $21 and some odd cents. Amazing.

It’s too bad my father threw out all of my old toys when we moved in the 1970s. Little did he know that 40 years later, my old Troll paraphernaila would be hot Christmas items once again.

By the way, I also looked up the Ideal Toy Company this morning since I haven’t heard anything about them for a while. The original company I also knew in the 1960s as the manufacturer of my “Tammy” doll never really went away. It just continued on through severali incarnations of company mergers.

I know that right about now, a lot of people — men in particular — are wondering what in the holly they’re going to buy their significant other for Christmas this year.

(For those of you of differing faiths or nationalities, feel free to replace the word Christmas here with the appropriate occasion.)

Well, as a public service to all of you folks out there who haven’t yet bought your Christmas gifts — not meaning men, of course! — here are some gifts for women featured in vintage 1950s and ’60s ads that definitely wouldn’t go over too well today.

I think many would agree: Being gifted with vacuum cleaner for Christmas would suck in more ways than one.

OK, maybe getting the new transistor radio or electric percolator wouldn’t have been so bad, but keep that aluminum tree away from me!

And finally, here’s the vintage ad that tops all:

The subhead in the upper right corner reads: “Hotpoint believes that holidays are for women, too. That’s why we’re having a holiday values month.”

Wasn’t that darned nice of Hotpoint to realize that maybe women might want to enjoy the holidays just like everyone else? And what better way to enjoy the holidays than stay working in the kitchen with new appliances?

So all this is what my holidays have been missing. I never would have guessed.

A passing thought: Remember when “Password” was a TV game show hosted by Allen Luden and not something that frustrates people when attempting logging into their website accounts?

Five bonus points if you remember that Allen Luden was married to Betty White. Ten bonus points if you’re under 40 and know this anyway even though Allen Luden died in 1981.

…

Also, happy birthday to Kirk Douglas, who turned an amazing 100 on Dec. 9. Too bad the two online articles I read about this today  list his birthplace as a vague “upstate New York.” It’s Amsterdam, darn it!

It drives me nuts when the general media lists anyplace in New York State that’s not New York City as “upstate New York,” if any town outside of NYC is nondescript and doesn’t matter. I’ve heard this way too many times. However, I will make an exception for Upstate University Medical Center in Syracuse because that really is its name!

…..

I felt this same indignation a couple of months ago when watching an episode of the History Channel’s “American Pickers.”  Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz — otherwise known as those two guys who are always driving around looking at other people’s stuff — happened to be in New York State for one episode. Where exactly were they? Beats me. Mike’s voiceover announced that they were in — guess where? — upstate New York.

I guess I need to get a better state map because the one I have doesn’t list any town named “Upstate.”

…

December 8 marked the 36th anniversary of the day that John Lennon was killed, a day that many of us who were alive then will never forget.

Of course, I remember exactly what I was doing when I found out. Strangely enough, I was listening to Beatles records at the time that the murder occurred at approximately 10:50 p.m. that Monday night. I still was listening to records when my fiance came home from his job at around midnight and told me the devastating news. I absolutely couldn’t believe it. It was so unbelievable that I immediately turned on the radio to see if it was true. Of course, it was. An announcer’s voice thrust through my stereo speakers in the midst of a report about someone’s chest wounds and being dead upon on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. The he concluded the report with, “John Lennon, dead at 40.”

I was an idealistic 21-year-old Beatles fan who was so horrified by the murder, I literally couldn’t sleep that night. Every time I tried closing my eyes to sleep, I kept seeing what the scene must have looked like hours earlier when John was ambushed in front of his apartment building. I stayed in the living room of my apartment with the lights on because I was too frightened to go into the dark bedroom where my fiance slept.

The radio, of course, was playing a constant stream of Beatles and John Lennon solo works all night. It became a communal spot for listeners to call in and expressing their shock and grief. Somehow this helped.

When I turned on the “Today” show at 7 a.m. the next morning, then-host Tom Brokaw relayed the awful news to Americans who perhaps were sleeping at the time Lennon’s death initally was announced. Co-host Jane Pauley abruptly turned her head away from the camera, looking like she was doing all she could to keep her composure. She returned her gaze to the camera just as quickly and somehow managed to paste on a sickly-looking smile.

Sixteen years into the new millennium, the music of John Lennon and The Beatles remains in the forefront of our culture. It’s been than 50 years since The Beatles exploded into the public’s consciousness and forever altered the face of popular music, style and culture and still remain relevant today.

Imagine.

For those of you, err, mature enough to remember the winter ice skating rinks at  Rome’s Franklyn’s Field, this one is for you.

This photo of myself at Franklyn Field isn’t noted with a year, but it looks like I’m about 5 years old, which would make this in the winter of 1964-65. While I have no memory of this photo being taken, I have plenty of memories of skating at Franklyn Field while I was growing up. Sorry to say that the first memory that comes to mind for me is falling on the ice, but it couldn’t have been all that bad. After all, I kept going there.

The ice skating rink was set up each year over Franklyn Field’s tennis courts. Although my family lived only two blocks from the park, my father once tried to make a skating rink for me in our backyard the winter that I was either 8 or 9. From what I remember, this involved lots of shoveling and hooking up a garden hose to our laundry sink and leading it out the cellar window. Unfortunately, this project quite didn’t work out as my father planned. Our so-called skating rink froze to the consistency of a 7-Eleven Slurpee and not fit for use.

Needless to say, I continued skating at Franklyn Field.

I don’t know when Rome’s Parks and Recreation stopped constructing a skating rink at Franklyn Field each year. It was one of those mysteries that happened after I moved from the city, like the demise of the pedestrian mall on West Dominick Street and the closing of Stars, Grandway and Neisners.

One of my happiest moments as a student at Fort Stanwix Elementary School in Rome was when our music teacher selected me as a member of the sixth-grade choir at the beginning of the school year.

I have to admit, I’m not a particulary gifted singer, but I like music and I like to sing, so this made me very happy. In fact, I was so happy, I practically skipped along Linden Street and Black River Boulevard on my way home, mounting our  home’s front stoop on Riverview Parkway North with a joyful leap. I couldn’t wait to tell my parents the good news.

Our music teacher, Miss Lanning, said she selected me for the chorus because she was looking for students who really liked music class and I fit the bill. I must have liked it because I still can remember some of the songs we sang in music class, such as the Erie Canal folk song, “Low Bridge, Everybody Down.” That was one of my favorites because one of the verses mentioned making it to Rome on the canal by 6 o’clock.

Anyway as the date of our Christmas concert approached, Miss Lanning told the choir that the boys were required to wear dark blue pants and white shirts for the performance and the girls must wear dark blue shirts and white blouses. I had a white blouse but needed to get a blue skirt.

This presented a problem for my parents in the late fall of 1970. My father’s workplace, Mohawk Airlines, was at the beginning of what would become a six-month pilot strike that eventually bankrupted the airline. My father, a Mohawk maintenance foreman and later supervisor at the Oneida County Airport, couldn’t work because there was no work.

For you aviation trivia buffs, here is my father’s business card from 1967 when there was still a Mohawk:

As the second Mohawk pilot strike dragged on in late 1970 (the first was in 1967), times were becoming a bit tough in the Webster household. I don’t ever remember going hungry, but my parents were using food stamps to make ends meet. The most pressing matter that I personally remember is that we had a gaping hole in the back of our house covered by tarps. My father had just started a large-scale upstairs dormer project that September and it would take him three years to have enough money to finish everything.

With all this going on, a new dark blue skirt was at the bottom of my parents’ list of priorities. Thanks to my mother’s talent and ingenuity, however, I didn’t go without. Mom cut off the top of a dark blue dress that I had outgrown, inserted an elastic waistband, and voila! A new dark blue skirt.

I don[‘t think Miss Lanning and the other kids ever knew the difference.