Life is full of uncanny moments that can leave us in awe, prompting us to reflect on the interconnectedness of our experiences. Recently, I stumbled upon one such moment when I found out about the passing of Bob McDermott, an actor who portrayed the lovable Bob Merona on my web series, CUPIC: Diary of an Investigator. Learning of his death nearly a decade later filled me with a blend of nostalgia, shock, and an unsettling realization of how our lives were, quite literally, intertwined during a time of tragedy.

Bob McDermott: A Rhythmic Force of Nature

Bob McDermott was more than just an actor to me—he embodied the very spirit of what CUPIC aimed to capture. His portrayal of Bob Merona brought warmth and levity to an often serious series focused on exploring the unexplained. Bob infused his character with his own life experiences, and his ability to resonate with audiences was one of the many reasons he was so beloved.

Beyond acting, Bob was a man of many talents. He worked at Best Buy in various capacities and later transitioned into running his own pest control business. This versatility exemplified his boundless energy and commitment to crafting his own path, whether it be on-screen or off.

The Unforeseen Loss

It was a jarring revelation to learn that Bob had passed away in 2015, the very same year tragedy struck my life. Just a day before Bob’s untimely death, I was plunged into grief and heartache with the passing of my younger sister on September 27. I had been unaware of Bob’s fate at the time, and it’s haunting how the timing of our losses converged.

As I prepared to resume filming CUPIC in late October, I reached out to Bob to schedule filming. His silence felt unusual, but I chalked it up to his busy schedule—a common occurrence for someone navigating the world of pest control during peak season.

The oddity started gnawing at me, however. As two weeks passed with no word from him, I began to suspect he might not be interested in the project anymore. Eventually, I had to recast the role with another talented actor, John Euber. Little did I know, I was making decisions in a world where the man who had breathed life into Bob Merona was no longer with us.

The Eerie Intersection of Coincidences

Reflecting on the simultaneous losses in my life, I can’t help but feel unnerved by the string of coincidences that unfolded. The intertwining of Bob’s death and my sister’s disappearance from my life produces an unsettling overlap that prompts deeper questions about fate, timing, and the threads that connect us all.

Coincidences like these invite us to ponder the mysteries of our existence. Are they mere accidents, or do they highlight a greater interconnectedness we often overlook? The notion of coexistence—of lives brushing against each other, only to part ways—evokes a raw vulnerability that lingers long after the moment has passed.

A Shared Journey of Discovery

The Central Unidentified Phenomenon Investigation Committee (CUPIC), as depicted in the series, embarked on quests to explore the mysteries of the universe with dedication and fervor. Similarly, Bob’s portrayal of Bob Merona mirrored this quest for truth, showcasing the beauty of the unknown in a way that made viewers question the world around them.

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In piecing together the threads of our respective lives, I realize that both Bob and I were on unique journeys filled with the unexplained—a fact that amplifies the eeriness of our shared timeline.

Taking it all in…

As I navigate the maze of memories and emotions surrounding Bob McDermott’s passing, I find myself confronted with the curious intersection of our lives. His unassuming yet profound impact as an actor and friend reminds me that the connections we forge are often integral to our experience of life itself.

Reflecting on Bob’s legacy evokes not only a sense of loss but also a renewed appreciation for the fleeting nature of existence. Life is a series of intricate, beautiful coincidences, and in the wake of sorrow, we learn to cherish the everyday magic that binds us all. Rest in peace, Bob. Your vibrant spirit and unmistakable charm will always remain a part of my journey.

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Aram Goudsouzian, University of Memphis

In the summer of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. introduced the keynote speaker for the 10th-anniversary convention banquet of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Their guest, he said, was his “soul brother.”

“He has carved for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of our nation’s history,” King told the audience of 2,000 delegates. “I consider him a friend. I consider him a great friend of humanity.”

That man was Sidney Poitier.

Poitier, who died at 94 on Jan. 7, 2022, broke the mold of what a Black actor could be in Hollywood. Before the 1950s, Black movie characters generally reflected racist stereotypes such as lazy servants and beefy mammies. Then came Poitier, the only Black man to consistently win leading roles in major films from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. Like King, Poitier projected ideals of respectability and integrity. He attracted not only the loyalty of African Americans, but also the goodwill of white liberals.

In my biography of him, titled “Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon,” I sought to capture his whole life, including his incredible rags-to-riches arc, his sizzling vitality on screen, his personal triumphs and foibles and his quest to live up to the values set forth by his Bahamian parents. But the most fascinating aspect of Poitier’s career, to me, was his political and racial symbolism. In many ways, his screen life intertwined with that of the civil rights movement – and King himself.

An age of protests

In three separate columns in 1957, 1961 and 1962, a New York Daily News columnist named Dorothy Masters marveled that Poitier had the warmth and charisma of a minister. Poitier lent his name and resources to King’s causes, and he participated in demonstrations such as the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage and the 1963 March on Washington. In this era of sit-ins, Freedom Rides and mass marches, activists engaged in nonviolent sacrifice not only to highlight racist oppression, but also to win broader sympathy for the cause of civil rights.

In that same vein, Poitier deliberately chose to portray characters who radiated goodness. They had decent values and helped white characters, and they often sacrificed themselves. He earned his first star billing in 1958, in “The Defiant Ones,” in which he played an escaped prisoner handcuffed to a racist played by Tony Curtis. At the end, with the chain unbound, Poitier jumps off a train to stick with his new white friend. Writer James Baldwin reported seeing the film on Broadway, where white audiences clapped with reassurance, their racial guilt alleviated. When he saw it again in Harlem, members of the predominantly Black audience yelled “Get back on the train, you fool!”

King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. In that same year, Poitier won the Oscar for Best Actor for “Lilies of the Field,” in which he played Homer Smith, a traveling handyman who builds a chapel for German nuns out of the goodness of his heart. The sweet, low-budget movie was a surprise hit. In its own way, like the horrifying footage of water hoses and police dogs attacking civil rights activists, it fostered swelling support for racial integration.

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A better man

By the time of the actor’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference speech, both King and Poitier seemed to have a slipping grip on the American public. Bloody and destructive riots plagued the nation’s cities, reflecting the enduring discontent of many poor African Americans. The swelling calls for “Black Power” challenged the ideals of nonviolence and racial brotherhood – ideals associated with both King and Poitier.

When Poitier stepped to the lectern that evening, he lamented the “greed, selfishness, indifference to the suffering of others, corruption of our value system, and a moral deterioration that has already scarred our souls irrevocably.” “On my bad days,” he said, “I am guilty of suspecting that there is a national death wish.”

By the late 1960s, both King and Poitier had reached a crossroads. Federal legislation was dismantling Jim Crow in the South, but African Americans still suffered from limited opportunity. King prescribed a “revolution of values,” denounced the Vietnam War, and launched a Poor People’s Campaign. Poitier, in his 1967 speech for the SCLC, said that King, by adhering to his convictions for social justice and human dignity, “has made a better man of me.”

Exceptional characters

Poitier tried to adhere to his own convictions. As long as he was the only Black leading man, he insisted on playing the same kind of hero. But in the era of Black Power, had Poitier’s saintly hero become another stereotype? His rage was repressed, his sexuality stifled. A Black critic, writing in The New York Times, asked “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?”

That critic had a point: As Poitier himself knew, his films created too-perfect characters. Although the films allowed white audiences to appreciate a Black man, they also implied that racial equality depends on such exceptional characters, stripped of any racial baggage. From late 1967 into early 1968, three of Poitier’s movies owned the top spot at the box office, and a poll ranked him the most bankable star in Hollywood.

Each film provided a hero who soothed the liberal center. His mannered schoolteacher in “To Sir, With Love” tames a class of teenage ruffians in London’s East End. His razor-sharp detective in “In the Heat of the Night” helps a crotchety white Southern sheriff solve a murder. His world-renowned doctor in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” marries a white woman, but only after winning the blessing of her parents.

“I try to make movies about the dignity, nobility, the magnificence of human life,” he insisted. Audiences flocked to his films, in part, because he transcended racial division and social despair – even as more African Americans, baby boomers and film critics tired of the old-fashioned do-gooder spirit of these movies.

Intertwined lives

And then, the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sidney Poitier intersected one final time. After King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Poitier was a stand-in for the ideal that King embodied. When he presented at the Academy Awards, Poitier won a massive ovation. “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” captured most of the major awards. Hollywood again dealt with the nation’s racial upheaval through Poitier movies.

But after King’s violent murder, the Poitier icon no longer captured the national mood. In the 1970s, a generation of “Blaxploitation” films featured violent, sexually charged heroes. They were a reaction against the image of a Black leading man associated with Poitier. Although his career evolved, Poitier was no longer a superstar, and he no longer bore the burden of representing the Black freedom movement. Yet for a generation, he had served as popular culture’s preeminent expression of the ideals of Martin Luther King.

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Aram Goudsouzian, Bizot Family Professor of History, University of Memphis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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John J. Winters, Bridgewater State University

Sam Shepard

When Sam Shepard died on July 27, 2017, the world lost one of the greatest playwrights of the past half-century. He was an artist renowned for bravely plumbing his own life for material, spinning much of his own pain into theatrical gold. His best work revealed the hollowness behind the idea of the happy family and its corollary, the American dream. Subversive and funny, Shepard had the soul of a poet and an experimental streak that never faded.

The American family was, no doubt, Shepard’s great subject. His quintet of family plays that premiered between 1978 and 1985 – “Curse of the Starving Class,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child,” “Fool for Love,” “True West” (both nominated for Pulitzers) and “A Lie of the Mind” – form the foundation of Shepard’s lofty reputation.

While researching my recent biography of Shepard, I found that most critics and scholars focused on the playwright’s relationship with his father. Rightly so: Samuel Shepard Rogers suffered from alcoholism and his only son grew up bearing the brunt of his abuse. Shepard’s family plays turn on the collateral damage of the fathers.

Less frequently examined is the playwright’s fixation on the land, and the ways in which this plays out in his work. Both as a writer and in his personal outlook, Shepard drew deeply from the old trope that nature and innocence are intertwined. And according to critic Harold Bloom, Shepard saw doom in the “materialistic and technological obsessions of modern society.”

Throughout his work, Shepard decried so-called progress, especially the rampant development of open space. Whether it was the forced sale of a family farm (“Curse of the Starving Class”) or Native Americans being driven off their reservation (“Operation Sidewinder”), it all came to no good.

To Shepard, a relationship with the land was nothing short of existential. As the playwright told an interviewer in 1988:

“What’s most frightening to me right now is this estrangement from life. People and things are becoming more and more removed from the actual. We are becoming more and more removed from the earth to the point that people just don’t know themselves or each other or anything.”

Shepard arrived at this impulse naturally. When he was in elementary school, his family settled in a small house on Lemon Street in Bradbury, California. An orchard of 80 avocado trees attached to the house meant that Shepard – then known by his birth name, Steve Rogers – was kept busy irrigating and harvesting the crop. He also raised dogs and sheep, and when he had free time he worked the fields belonging to his neighbors. During high school, he was an eager member of the 4-H Club and Future Farmers of America, and spent his summers tending to the thoroughbreds at nearby Santa Anita Park.

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In college, Shepard’s major wasn’t theater but education. As he once wrote to a friend, back then he wanted to become a “veterinarian with a flashy station wagon, and a flashy blond wife, raising German shepherds in some fancy suburb.” He never finished college nor became a vet. Instead, Shepard left home and made his way across the country to New York City and the East Village, where he would quickly transform himself into the brightest light of the nascent off-off-Broadway scene.

But even as his reputation grew, he never left his agricultural roots behind. In fact, one of Shepard’s early one-act plays was titled “4-H Club” (1965).

Other plays from the 1960s combine his old life with his new one. Rural scenes are full of characters who talk in the hip argot of the Village streets, characters caught in an absurdist situation go “fishing” off the edge of the stage, and Native Americans, by their very presence onstage in plays like 1970’s “Operation Sidewinder,” stake a claim to the land that’s been stolen from them.

With time, the playwright would more directly address the scourge of overdevelopment that he saw happening around him. It would become a running theme of sorts, as Shepard saw the nation growing and changing – but not for the better.

“One of the biggest tragedies about this country was moving from an agricultural society to an urban, industrial society. We’ve been wiped out,” he told Playboy in 1984.

Shepard’s characters embody this loss. In “Geography of a Horse Dreamer” (1974), one character is a gambler who can predict tomorrow’s winners at the racetrack, but loses that power once he’s physically forced from his usual haunts to a new, strange locale. In “Buried Child” (1979), the land holds the answer to the play’s central mystery: At play’s end, the fallow backyard gives up a baby from a shallow grave, shining a light on the incestuous relationship that has led to the ruination of this family – as if the purity of nature had been offended by a terrible transgression. And in Shepard’s late masterpiece, “Ages of the Moon,” two old friends finally find solace by communing with nature at a small, remote campsite.

Nowhere in Shepard’s oeuvre does land play a bigger role than in 1978’s “Curse of the Starving Class.” The Tate family’s farm stands between husband and wife: He wants to unload it to pay off his gambling and drinking debts; she wants to sell it and use the money to escape her marriage and take the children to Europe. The culminating scene features the husband, Weston, coming to his senses after sobering up and walking around his property. Reconnecting with his land, Weston turns his life around, “like peeling off a whole person.”

Shepard’s love of the country and its open spaces would mark all aspects of his career. Also a celebrated actor, he favored “rural” dramas, those set on farms, racetracks or some windswept piece of desert. In his screen debut, Shepard starred as the doomed farmer in Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978). In his screenplay for the cult classic film, “Paris, Texas,” (1984) Shepard mirrored the desolation of the South Texas desert in the soul of his protagonist, Travis, a man suffering from a malady that Shepard often said he himself felt: “lostness.”

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Shepard felt most at home traversing what one western historian called this “strange land full of mystery.” He took pride in being a western writer.

“I was never interested in the mythological cowboy. I was interested in the real thing,” he once said.

“He would call me late in the night,” Patti Smith wrote in a loving tribute, “from somewhere on the road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling. But most often he would call from his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could hear the stars breathing…”

She knew, better than anyone, that such places constituted Shepard’s emotional and physical territory. He adored the vastness of the plains, the green of loping pasturelands; he cherished his time running the highways and byways in his pickup, or sitting next to the campfire on a real-life cattle drive, and reveled in the grit of this country’s less-traveled corners.

Shepard loved America for its beauty, its danger and its promise, forever transforming her in our imaginations.

John J. Winters, Adjunct Professor of English, Bridgewater State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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