Two icons of my youth have passed away.
Of course, everybody knows Ann B. Davis, world renown as Alice on the Brady Bunch, and to the generation before me as Schultzy on The Bob Cummings Show. Her stock in trade was being a good egg. To the kids who watched The Brady Bunch, she represented the adult that they could really talk to without being judged. Also, and I say this without making any assumptions about her personal life, even though her characters often had opposite sex significant others (Sam the Butcher), they were gay coded. In her real life she was never married and devoted herself to the Episcopal Church.
Marilyn Beck was not as famous as Ann B. Davis, but she played an important role in my life. Her nationally syndicated Hollywood news column ran in The Cedar Rapids Gazette, and hundreds of other newspapers, and in the time before the internet, and until the Cedar Rapids Public Library got a subscription to Variety, was my main source of reliable news about the entertainment industry. She also did TV, and was an internet pioneer, but it was her newspaper column, which I read with great care, that I will remember her by.
