Where Are They Buried? (88 page)

Decidedly not everyone’s cup of tea, Andy’s gripes sometimes landed him in hot water. He generated criticism in 2002 when he railed against having women work as sideline reporters at NFL games, and thousands of angry letters arrived when he said Kurt Cobain was a waste of humanity for taking his own life. Native Americans demanded apologies when he belittled their efforts to stop sports teams from using names like the “Braves,” and his essay in which he said God told him that the Reverend Pat Robertson was a “wacko” resulted in 20,000 complaints—the most response any
60 Minutes
issue has ever drawn. On many occasions, he read on the air the most cutting letters, sometimes admitting he was wrong.

Andy so dreaded the day he had to end his signature commentaries that he kept going until he was 92. For his final essay, he said that he’d lived a life luckier than most. “I wish I could do this forever, but I can’t,” he said. And then, “I’ve done a lot of complaining here, but of all the things I’ve complained about, I can’t complain about my life.”

Only a month after delivering his 1,097th and final commentary, Andy died after complications from an unspecified operation. He was buried at Rensselaerville Cemetery in Rensselaerville, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
The cemetery is located in the center of town on Methodist Hill Road, immediately north of the intersection of County Roads 85 and 351.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Drive through the stone-pillared entrance, turn at the first drive on the left, and proceed along that lane until the stone wall is on your left. Stop at the Vane stone that’s
along the wall, and twenty feet in front of it you’ll find Andy’s flat stone.

NOVEMBER 9, 1934 – DECEMBER 20, 1996

The scientist Carl Sagan was trained at the University of Chicago in both astronomy and biology, and during the 1950s he began researching the origins of life. By 1962 he was teaching at Harvard University while also working as an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Observatory, and in 1970 he settled at Cornell University as Professor of Astronomy and the Director for Planetary Studies.

From there, Carl used his natural gift for storytelling to extol the grandeur and mystery of the universe and to stimulate public enthusiasm for space science; the PBS television series,
Cosmos
, which he hosted, became the most-watched series in public-television history. Carl was perhaps the world’s greatest popularizer of science and shared his lifelong passion in more than 600 scientific papers in eight books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Dragons of Eden
.

Carl played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to other planets through his research on topics such as the greenhouse effect on Venus and windblown dust as an explanation for seasonal changes on Mars. He even detoured from space-based considerations to study what might be the long-term environmental consequences of nuclear war on our own Earth. But Carl’s unbridled enthusiasm was reserved for searches for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

“Are we an exceptionally unlikely accident or is the universe brimming over with intelligence?” he asked as radio telescopes funded by a program close to his heart listened for signs of life in the billions of stars and galaxies.

So far, no response is forthcoming, but Carl offered that, “it says something about the rarity and preciousness of life on this planet. The flip side of not finding life on another planet is appreciating life on Earth.”

Carl died of pneumonia at 62 after a two-year battle with a bone-marrow disease, and was buried at Lakeview Cemetery in Ithaca, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
On the north side of town, take the Stewart Park exit off Route 13 and head east on East Shore Drive for about a half-mile. Then turn left onto Kline Road, go up the
hill, and turn left at the stop sign. Take the next left onto Wyckoff Road, then turn left into the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and park in the first paved drive on the right, immediately after the Temple Bethel section. Down the hill on the left is a small chain fence, and on the other side of the fence you’ll find the flat stone that marks Carl’s grave.

SEPTEMBER 9, 1890 – DECEMBER 16, 1980

Harland Sanders grew up in the backwoods of southern Indiana and learned to cook while still a child. His father had died before Harland was three, and by the time he was six it was his responsibility to prepare the meals while his mother worked. After the sixth grade he dropped out of school to supplement the family’s meager income, and from his first job he brought home the bacon to the tune of $2 a week. By twelve he had left home to live and work on a farm, and from there he was able to provide the family with a more substantial amount of money. At sixteen Harland volunteered for a one-year stint in the Army during America’s intervention in Cuba.

During his adult years, Harland toiled as a streetcar conductor and an insurance agent, a tire salesman and a railroad fireman. He operated an Ohio River steamboat ferry and, after a law correspondence course, he practiced as a justice of the peace. But it was his fate to be the owner of a service station in Corbin, Kentucky.

To augment the station’s sparse gas receipts, Harland began cooking for hungry travelers. He didn’t actually have a restaurant, so he served folks in his family’s dining room. When more people began dropping by for the food than the gasoline, he knew he was on to something. In 1930, he bought the motel across the street and converted it into a 142-seat restaurant, Sanders Court.

Over the next decade, Harland perfected his secret recipe of “eleven herbs and spices” used in the preparation of his Kentucky Fried Chicken, and his Sanders Court restaurant became known for having the best food, and especially the best chicken, for miles around. Business boomed, and the governor even named Harland an honorary Kentucky “Colonel” to recognize his contributions to the state’s cuisine.

In the 1950s though, a new interstate highway was built bypassing Corbin, business dried up, and the value of his property plummeted. At 65, the dejected Colonel auctioned everything off and, after paying the bills, found himself penniless and reduced to living on a $105 monthly Social Security check. But remarkably, in the twilight of his life, Harland decided that instead of sitting in a rocking chair feeling sorry for himself while waiting for government checks, he’d start anew.

The Colonel and his wife, Claudia, hit the road. Traveling around the countryside by car, they visited roadside eateries and cooked batches of chicken for the restaurant owners and their employees. If the reaction to the chicken was favorable, the Colonel entered into a handshake agreement that stipulated a payment to him of a nickel for each chicken the restaurant sold.

By 1964, when he sold his interest in the company for $2 million, the Colonel had more than 600 franchised outlets for his chicken. He stayed on with the new Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation as a spokesman and advisor for the next decade, but in 1975 the relationship strained when he publicly denounced some of KFC’s fare, especially its gravy, which he derided as “sludge with a wallpaper taste.” Nonetheless, his spectacled caricature today watches over each of the six million people who eat in one of KFC’s 12,000 restaurants every day.

Colonel Sanders died of leukemia at 90 and was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take Exit 16 off of I-264, follow Bardstown Road north for 3¾ miles, and you’ll see the cemetery on the right at the Broadway Street intersection.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and follow the solid line painted in the middle of the road. At the end of the line, the Sanders plot is on your right.

Also nearby is the Kentucky Fried Chicken Visitor Center, which houses a museum of memorabilia telling the story of the Colonel’s life. It’s quite interesting and well worth a visit. To get there, take Exit 14 off of I-264, turn south onto Poplar Level Road and, at the first light, turn left onto Sanita Road, which turns into Gardiner Lane. Go past the Colonel Sanders Technical Center and the next building on the left, the one that looks like the White House, is the visitor’s center.

AUGUST 20, 1923 – JULY 4, 1954

MARCH 15, 1924 – APRIL 6, 1970

In the early morning hours on the Fourth of July, 1954, a pregnant, 30-year-old Marilyn Sheppard was bludgeoned to death at her home in a quiet Cleveland suburb. Her successful physician husband, Sam Sheppard, was soon arrested and charged with her murder, though he steadfastly maintained his innocence, claiming he’d wrestled with a “bushy-haired stranger,” was knocked unconscious, and woke up to find his wife dead.

Sam was convicted of Marilyn’s murder in December 1954 and sentenced to life in prison, only to be freed in June 1966 after his saucy attorney, F. Lee Bailey, appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled the verdict against Sam was unconstitutional because his trial had been a “carnival.” In November of 1966, after a retrial, Sam was found not guilty.

We know all of the preceding to be true, but virtually everything else of substance in the Sheppard murder case seems to be either theory, conjecture, half-truth, or outright lie. The case has proved a resilient whodunit and after almost a half-century of speculation the courts finally put the matter to rest in 2002.

Sam Reese Sheppard, the son of Sam and Marilyn, who was seven years old and sleeping upstairs at the time of his mother’s murder, had begun a crusade in 1990 to dispel any lingering doubts about his father’s innocence. In 2000 Sam Jr. brought to the courts a “third trial”—a civil suit to declare his father “innocent” rather than merely “not guilty”—and in this trial, because Sam Sheppard was the plaintiff instead of the defendant, the burden of proof was reversed; Sam Jr. needed to demonstrate his father’s innocence by a preponderance of the evidence. In the end the verdict was for the state, unanimous and signed
by all eight jurors, and as newspapers across the country put it, Sam Sheppard was found “not innocent,” meaning that the evidence suggests he probably committed the murder. In August of 2002, the matter met its absolute finality when the Ohio Supreme Court, in a one-sentence ruling, refused to hear Sam Jr.’s appeal of the civil-suit verdict.

After 48 years it was all over for everyone. For Sam Sheppard himself, it had been over since April 1970, when he died of liver disease nearly penniless at age 46. Upon his release from prison in 1966, he’d gone back to medicine only to lose his business due to a malpractice suit. As a semi-celebrity with no other real options, the doctor resorted to making appearances as “Killer Sheppard” in professional wrestling matches; his gimmick was that, with his knowledge of anatomy, he could render an opponent helpless.

In the same way that the O.J. Simpson murder trial permeated popular culture in the mid-nineties, the Sheppard case enjoyed its own “heyday” in the sixties. And in 1965, at the height of the case’s “popularity,” a new television series,
The Fugitive
, later remade into a film of the same name in 1993, caused a sensation with a storyline said to be inspired by the Sheppard case. But upon closer inspection, the correlation is limited, at best. In contrast to the television series, Sam Sheppard never escaped from the law’s grasp, he never engaged in a manhunt for the “real” killer, and he never maintained that it was a one-armed man who ran from the crime scene.

After a 1997 exhumation to acquire DNA samples from his corpse, Sam Sheppard was moved from the Columbus, Ohio, cemetery where he had resided to Knollwood Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, where he now shares a mausoleum crypt with wife Marilyn.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-271, take exit 34 and follow Mayfield Avenue (Route 322) a couple hundred yards east to Som Center Road. Turn right and the cemetery is a short distance ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and drive all the way to the rear, where you’ll see a large mausoleum. Enter the mausoleum and you’ll immediately be in a small chapel. Proceed up to the altar and walk down the hall to your right. Turn at the next left, then turn left again, and then, 25 feet to the left, along the second row from the bottom, is the Sheppard crypt.

JANUARY 26, 1946 – FEBRUARY 20, 1999

JUNE 18, 1942 – APRIL 4, 2013

In 1975, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were film critics at rival Chicago newspapers, the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Chicago Sun-Times
respectively, when they were asked to collaborate as co-hosts on a new movie-review program for the local public broadcasting station. Years later Ebert confessed, “The answer was at the tip of my tongue: No,” while Siskel also said he initially did not have any desire to team up with “the most hated guy in my life.” Nonetheless, both did ultimately agree to work together and the show, originally titled
Sneak Previews,
was a hit. Three years later PBS began syndicating it nationally and by 1986 the duo had signed a mega-deal with a television arm of Disney to produce
Siskel & Ebert at The Movies
. The program soon became known simply as
Siskel & Ebert
and the award-winning show was among the most-watched entertainment series for more than a decade.

The men perfectly balanced each other—Siskel was trim and balding while Ebert was larger with owlish glasses—and their format featured them as intellectually engaged but often contentious friends, sitting in cozy armchairs and ad-libbing about popular movies. The pair purposely dressed in casual clothes just as most people do when they go to the movies, because, as Siskel explained, “We’ve always wanted viewers to feel as if they’re just eavesdropping on a couple of guys who loved movies and were having a spontaneous discussion that’d be ongoing even if they weren’t watching.”