Boxer George Foreman strikes a pose in 1976. | Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
A look back at the esteemed personalities who left us this year, who’d touched us with their innovation, creativity and humanity.
By CBSNews.com senior producer David Morgan. The Associated Press contributed to this gallery.
Boxer George Foreman (Jan. 10, 1949-March 21, 2025) rose up from poverty in a tough Houston neighborhood to become an Olympic gold medalist at 19, and heavyweight champion of the world twice. An uncommon man with the common touch, he also conquered success outside the ring as an advertising pitchman and star of infomercials.
In 1973, at age 24, Foreman defeated Joe Frazier to become world champion. The following year, he defended his heavyweight title against Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire, in one of the most touted boxing matches of all time, “The Rumble in the Jungle.” “I beat him up for the first three rounds, four rounds. I think I even beat him up the sixth round, too,” Foreman told “Sunday Morning” in 2005. “Then all of a sudden I hit him in the seventh round and he whispered in my ear, `That all you got, George?’ Oh, that was all I had. You’ve heard of the rope-a-dope? Well, here’s the dope!” Ali, then the underdog, won in the eighth round by a knockout; Foreman lost the title.
At the time, he was devastated. “I was young, only 25 years old. I didn’t know what to do. I thought my life was over, because when you lose the championship it’s not like you lost the title, you lose yourself, because it’s like you’re not a man anymore.”
Three years later, after another loss, Foreman had a religious experience that changed his life. He quit boxing and became an evangelist, preaching first on street corners, then in his own church. He opened the George Foreman Youth and Community Center, a safe place for kids to hang out. “For 10 years, I didn’t even make a fist,” he said. “I didn’t box, I didn’t try to box, I was done with it. I was a preacher, a happy, fat preacher.”
But money problems drove him back to the ring. So, at 37, Foreman began his comeback. He was ridiculed at first — too old, too fat, too slow, they said — but he was also too strong, and in 1994, more than 20 years after he beat Frazier for the title, Foreman knocked out the undefeated Michael Moorer. At age 45, Foreman became the oldest heavyweight champion ever.
That same year, Foreman agreed to help market a kitchen grill that few were buying, in exchange for a piece of the company. In the first 15 years, Foreman said they sold 100 million of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machines and its variations.
“When you go through the airport some time and people stop and say ‘George, we love the grill!’ that’s greater than them telling me, ‘George, you did a good job becoming the heavyweight champ of the world!'” Foreman said.
And he continued selling, not just grilling machines but also mufflers, chips, hot dogs, video games, home warranties, and a George Foreman clothing line.
“I’m driven,” he said in 2005. “I like the life I’m living, but I’m driven because there’s so much more to obtain. I’m one of those guys who’s going to have to fall out of the saddle. There’s always one more star to reach for and I’m trying to.”
Married five times, Foreman had 12 children. And yes, he did name all five of his sons George. “You got Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Kenny Norton, Ron Lyle, you let those people hit you on the head and see how many names you’re going to remember — it would be confusing,” he told “Sunday Morning.” “I kept it simple. I never forget a name!”
It also inspired a children’s book he wrote, titled, “Let George Do It!”
Alan Simpson
Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), at the National Press Club in Washington, March 8, 1996. | DENNIS COOK/AP Photo 
A political moderate, Republican Senator Alan Simpson (Sept. 2, 1931-March 14, 2025) served three terms representing Wyoming, from 1979 to 1997, and played a key role in rallying GOP support around the party’s legislative agenda.
At 6-foot-7 (he was the tallest Senator up to that time) with a quick wit, Simpson was able to bridge partisan impasses, and foster relationships across the aisle at a time of increasing political acrimony. “The word ‘politics’ is interesting,” he told “Sunday Morning” in 2018, “because it comes from the Greek, you know that? Poly, meaning many, and tics, meaning blood-sucking insects!”
Simpson maintained his own views even when they crossed Republican orthodoxy. A deficit hawk, Simpson also supported abortion rights. He served on the Immigration Subcommittee and the Veterans Affairs Committee, among others.
After leaving the Senate, Simpson taught about politics and the media at Harvard University and the University of Wyoming. In speeches he urged college students to become politically involved.
In 2022, President Joe Biden awarded Simpson the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
One of Simpson’s closest friends was a Democrat, Norman Mineta, a Congressman from California who also served as Commerce Secretary under President Bill Clinton and as Transportation Secretary under President George W. Bush.
The two had met as Boy Scouts when Mineta and his family were imprisoned as Japanese-Americans in the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center near Simpson’s hometown of Cody, Wyo., during World War II. Simpson and Menieta bonded over playing pranks on the other Scouts, including a bully whose tent they sabotaged: “It was raining to beat hell and we kinda channeled the water down into this guy’s tent,” Simpson told “Sunday Morning.”
The two friends would not see each other until decades later, when Mineta (who had become Mayor of San Jose, Calif.), won election to Congress. “And there we were, and we started right over just like that,” Simpson said.
Mineta said, “We’d have fights in the sub-committee, the full committee, and yet we’d slap each other on the back and say, ‘Come on, let’s go have dinner, let’s go have a drink.’ And they don’t do that [today]. They just don’t have that kind of personal relationship.”
In 1988 Simpson and Mineta joined forces to help pass the Civil Liberties Act, signed by President Ronald Reagan, which for the very first time formally apologized to Japanese-Americans, and granted reparations to those who had been imprisoned.
Joseph Wambaugh
Author Joseph Wambaugh attends the 13th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, April 26, 2008. | David Livingston/Getty Images 
Bestselling author Joseph Wambaugh (Jan. 22, 1937-Feb. 28, 2025), a former Los Angeles police officer, wrote 11 novels about crime and policing as well as non-fiction works, several of which were adapted for films and television, including “The New Centurions,” “The Blue Knight,” and “The Choirboys,” as well as the true-crime stories “The Onion Field” and “Echoes in the Darkness.” He was also the co-creator of the anthology series “Police Story,” which debuted on NBC in 1973.
Other novels included “The Black Marble,” “The Glitter Dome,” “The Delta Star” and “The Secrets of Harry Bright.” He was the winner of three Edgar Awards.
The son of a police officer, Wambaugh (a Marine veteran who originally intended to become an English teacher) drew on his own experiences as an L.A. police officer for his writing, as well as stories heard from other veterans of the force. He was a detective sergeant when his first novel, “The New Centurions,” was published in 1971.
By the time “The Onion Field” was published, his celebrity had become so great it interfered with his police work. He quit the LAPD after 14 years on the job and began writing full-time.
In a 1997 symposium at the University of California, Wambaugh said, “Police procedurals generally tell how a cop acts on the job, and I was more interested in how the job acts on the cop, and the cop’s head. So, from the very beginning that was my interest. That’s what I wrote about, and that’s what made my stuff different, because some of my stories, police stories, have virtually no action whatsoever. No gunplay. Nothing much happening, except what’s happening inside the head of the man or woman doing the job.”
David Johansen
Singer David Johansen, as his alter ego Buster Poindexter, in a 1989 portrait. | Al Pereira/Getty Images
Musician and vocalist David Johansen (Jan. 9, 1950-Feb. 28, 2025) was known both for his role in the glam-protopunk band the New York Dolls, and for his stage persona as an over-the-top pompadour-styled lounge singer who performed swing and blues-infused pop under the name Buster Poindexter.
While the New York Dolls didn’t achieve mainstream success (internal strife and addictions tore at the founding members, who produced two albums before breaking up), it influenced other groups in the ’70s, including the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Kiss and Guns N’ Roses. In 2004 Johansen reconstituted the Dolls with new players (four of its members had died by then) for England’s Meltdown Festival, which led to three more albums.
In the 1980s, Johansen, as Buster Poindexter, had a hit with “Hot, Hot, Hot,” and a cover of “Hit the Road, Jack.” By 2000, he was back to recording under his own name, with the albums “David Johansen and the Harry Smiths” and “Shaker.”
He also acted in the films “Candy Mountain,” “Let It Ride,” “Freejack,” “Married to the Mob,” the Bill Murray comedy “Scrooged” (as the Ghost of Christmas Past), and the TV series “Oz,” and hosted a weekly show on Sirius Satellite Radio.
In a 2014 profile for Interview Magazine, Johansen said he began the Buster Poindexter character while performing a series of cabaret shows at Tramps, a Lower East Side bar. “I used that moniker because I didn’t want people to be coming in and yelling for songs that I was famous for; I could just do what I wanted,” he said. Then, “without any publicity or anything, it became very popular, so I started doing weekends there. It wasn’t a plan or anything, it just happened.”
He was insouciant about reactions to the lounge music he performed as Buster: “Well, like a lot of stuff I do, 10 years later it becomes popular,” he told Interview.
Boris Spassky
Chess grandmaster Boris Spassky plays 41 competitors simultaneously at a tournament in New York City in 1974. | Bettmann Archive/Getty Images 
In 1972, Soviet-era world chess grandmaster Boris Spassky (Jan. 30, 1937-Feb. 27, 2025) lost his world championship title to American Bobby Fischer in a televised tournament in Reykjavik, Iceland, that became an international sensation during the Cold War.
Then 29 years old, Fischer, a chess genius from Brooklyn, lost and forfeited the first two games, then beat Spassky in the third. Fischer would overcome Spassky in the 21-game tournament, becoming the first American to attain the world chess title, after the Soviet Union had dominated the game for decades. [Fischer would later forfeit the title by refusing to defend it.]
In a 2016 interview with Sport-Express newspaper, Spassky said that when he played his third match against Fischer, he was pressured by the chairman of the Sports Committee to stop the tournament early: “He instructed me what to do: ‘File a protest against this, against that, then just fly away …’ But I resisted – I wanted to play! What a fool I was.”
In 1974, in New York City, Spassky simultaneously played 41 competitors, ranging from chess experts to novices (including a six-year-old). Beginning each game with the move Pawn-to-King 4, Spassky won 40 matches and drew one.
He emigrated to France in 1976, but in 2012 he returned to Moscow.
In his 2016 interview, Spassky said his years in the late 1960s and early ’70s as world champion were his unhappiest, because of the responsibility he held from winning: “You can’t imagine how relieved I was when Fischer took the title off me,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t recall that day as unhappy. On the contrary, I’ve thrown off a very strong burden and breathed freely.”
Gene Hackman
Gene Hackman as wiretap expert Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation.” | Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images 
Two-time Oscar-winner Gene Hackman (Sept. 1, 2023-death announced Feb. 27, 2025) was a consummate actor renowned for playing complicated figures in such classics as “The French Connection,” “The Conversation” and “Unforgiven,” and who also delighted superhero fans as the comical villain Lex Luthor in three “Superman” films.
Hailed as one of the best actors of the era, Hackman moved easily among genres, from heart-wrenching family stories (“I Never Sang for My Father”), crime dramas (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “Mississippi Burning”), thrillers (“The Conversation,” “No Way Out”), and triumphant tales of sports (“Hoosiers”), to comedies (“Get Shorty,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”). Rough-hewn and flinty, a movie star without stereotypical movie-star looks, Hackman gave even his humorous roles a sinister, unforeseeable edge, the way an animal’s behavior is not entirely predictable.
“The French Connection” would cement Hackman’s position as a movie star. The film’s brash, documentary-style production perfectly captured Hackman’s character, a seething, sadistic NYC cop seeking to bust a ring of heroin smugglers — like Ahab on the hunt for the white whale. He won his first Academy Award, and his star power led him to both big-budget studio fare (headlining an all-star cast in the 1972 disaster film “The Poseidon Adventure”), and small character dramas (such as “Scarecrow,” opposite Al Pacino).
In 1992, the year he appeared in Clint Eastwood’s revised western “Unforgiven” (as the brutal sheriff “Little” Bill Daggett), he also starred on Broadway in “Death and the Maiden” with Glenn Close and Richard Dreyfuss, under the direction of Mike Nichols.
Hackman was less “method-y” than some of his peers, though he admitted that the ways in which he would behave on-screen and off as he inhabited a character — fueled by memories of his dysfunctional family growing up and the slights he faced during his struggling early years – took their toll. Temper tantrums earned him a nickname: “Vesuvius.”
When he met up with Daniel Lenihan for some scuba lessons, the two got to talking about adventure books they grew up with, and decided to try writing one — a pirate story. Picking different starting points, Hackman wrote his chapters longhand in spiral notebooks; the two would then meet up at a café to go over their work. “I would have some pages, he would have some pages,” Hackman told “Sunday Morning” in 2000. “We would trade. And we’d read them over while we were ordering and eating, and by the end of that couple of hours, we would have critiqued each other’s work, and decided where we were going to go from there.”
“The Wake of the Perdido Star,” a tale of shipwrecks and piracy set in 1805, was published in 1999. It sold well, but received mixed reviews. He told “Sunday Morning,” “The fact that you’re being judged on your intelligence and your skill as a writer, and your skill as a storyteller, that was very tense for me — and being criticized, and finding that you’re vulnerable to the critics, in a way that I hadn’t experienced before.”
He retired from the screen in 2004, and would only return as narrator on a pair of documentaries about the Marines. He turned down most interview requests, but in 2021, to mark the 50th anniversary of “The French Connection,” he shared with the New York Post the revelation that he’d only watched the film once. “Filmmaking has always been risky — both physically and emotionally — but I do choose to consider that film a moment in a checkered career of hits and misses,” he wrote in an email.
Michelle Trachtenberg
Actress Michelle Trachtenberg in New York City in 2009. | Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
As a child actress, Michelle Trachtenberg (Oct. 11, 1985-Feb. 26, 2025) starred in 1996’s “Harriet the Spy,” playing Louise Fitzhugh’s diminutive detective. She went on to star in two popular TV series, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Gossip Girl.”
Trachtenberg was 8 years old when she began playing Nona Mecklenberg on “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” which ran from 1994 to 1996 on Nickelodeon. She also appeared with Matthew Broderick in the film “Inspector Gadget.”
In 2000 Trachtenberg joined the cast of “Buffy,” playing Dawn Summers, the younger sister of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s vampire slayer. (She and Gellar had both worked together on “All My Children” in the mid-’90s.) Trachtenberg received a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2001 for hosting Discovery’s “Truth or Scare.”
On “Gossip Girl,” Trachtenberg played the scheming Georgina Sparks. “It’s definitely a lot more fun than playing the good girl,” she told Seventeen magazine in 2009. “I never understood why some actors don’t want to play villains or evil characters.”
Her other TV credits included “Six Feet Under,” “The Circuit,” “Mercy,” “Love Bites,” “Weeds,” “NCIS: Los Angeles,” “Criminal Minds,” and “Sleepy Hollow.” Movie roles included “Euro Trip,” “Ice Princess,” “Beautiful Ohio,” “17 Again,” “Black Christmas,” “Mysterious Skin,” “Sister Cities,” and “Killing Kennedy,” in which she played Marina Oswald, wife of the president’s assassin.
Roberta Flack
Singer Roberta Flack pictured in London in 1976. | Dick Barnatt/Redferns/Getty Images 
Grammy-winning singer and pianist Roberta Flack (Feb. 10, 1937-Feb. 24, 2025) was one of the top recording artists of the 1970s, with such hits as “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and “The Closer I Get To You.”
Classically trained, Flack earned a full scholarship at age 15 to Howard University, then taught music in D.C.-area junior high schools and performed in jazz clubs. She was discovered in the late 1960s by jazz musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known.” With her soft soprano voice, Flack’s performances were measured and reflective, turning up-tempo songs into warm, soulful ballads.
Signed to Atlantic Records, her debut album, “First Take” — a blend of gospel, soul, flamenco and jazz – was released in 1969. One track was a love song by English folk artist Ewan MacColl — music Flack had taught during her years as an educator.
“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” would make her a star, when her cover of the song, used in the Clint Eastwood film “Play Misty for Me,” was released in 1972 as a single and spent six weeks at No. 1. It won her a Grammy for record of the year. The following year she became the first artist to win consecutive Grammys for best record with “Killing Me Softly With His Song.”
Flack had a hit in the 1980s with the Peabo Bryson duet “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love,” and in the 1990s with the Maxi Priest duet “Set the Night to Music.” In the mid-’90s, the Fugees won a Grammy for their cover of “Killing Me Softly.”
In 2015, Flack talked with the Guardian about the cover of “Killing Me Softly”: ” I love hip-hop. In fact I love music, period. Lauryn Hill recorded ‘Killing Me Softly’ [with the Fugees] and did an excellent job. She’s a genius musician and so is Wyclef Jean who co-produced it. I’m not going to hold on to that song with my heart and bleed to death while someone else covers it; I’m a music lover who has enough experience and common sense to know that it’s good they recorded it and had a hit.”
Overall, Flack won five Grammys and eight more nominations, and received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2020. She also devoted extensive time to the Roberta Flack School of Music in New York.
Clint Hill
Secret Service Agent Clint Hill protecting first lady Jacqueline Kennedy after shots were fired at President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade, in Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963. | James W. Ike Altgens/AP 
On Nov. 22, 1963, Secret Service Agent Clint Hill (Jan. 4, 1932-Feb. 21, 2025) was accompanying the presidential motorcade when shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, striking President John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly. Images from that day show Hill jumping atop the presidential limousine to protect first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who had begun climbing out of the open-top vehicle.
Hill, assigned to the first lady, was riding on the left running board of the follow-up car when he jumped off, and pulled himself onto the trunk of the limousine as the driver accelerated. He forced Mrs. Kennedy back into her seat as the limousine sped off to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
Haunted by memories of the assassination, Hill, who’d joined the Secret Service in 1958, retired early, and in a 1975 interview with “60 Minutes,” told Mike Wallace he blamed himself for JFK’s death, saying that if only he’d reacted “five-tenths of a second faster,” the president would be alive. “And I’ll live with that to my grave.”
Twenty years later, in a follow-up interview for “60 Minutes,” and in a book, “Five Days in November,” Hill shared his sense of failure in protecting the president that led him, in 1990, to return to Dallas. “I walked the area of Dealey Plaza, I went up into the School Book Depository, I went up to the sixth floor, and I did everything I could to examine exactly the situation: the angles, the weather, all the conditions that existed that day. I came away with the conclusion that on that particular day, all the advantages had gone to the shooter — we didn’t have any — and that I had done everything I could to try to prevent the assassination from happening. But I still feel today a sense of failure and responsibility because that was our job: to keep the president safe, to protect him at all costs. And on that particular day, we were unable to do that.”
The sense of failure fueled a depression that he said damaged his relationships with his family and friends and contributed to the demise of his marriage. “I drank heavily and I smoked a lot,” he said. “It was the only thing that would relieve the pain and the anguish that I had, thinking about what had happened in Dallas in 1963. A friend of mine was a doctor, came to me and said, ‘Look, Clint, if you don’t change what you’re doing, you’re going to die. You have a choice to make: live or die.’ And I chose to live. And so, it was those words from that doctor that made me realize life was too precious to give up on.”
Hill co-authored several books, wrote a 2005 memoir, “Between You and Me,” and became a public speaker about his experiences. He also remarried.
In his follow-up conversation with “60 Minutes,” Hill read a letter that had been written to him by a viewer following his 1975 interview: “It is a day I shall never forget, nor shall I forget the people so deeply involved in the events of that day. And as I watched you on ’60 Minutes,’ I wanted to reach out and wrap you in my arms to offer some comfort. But no one who suffered that tremendous loss that day can even feel comfort, and I know you feel that.”
Tom Robbins
Author Tom Robbins poses at the book fair in Chateau de Candz, in the Loire region of France April 21, 2007. | Ulf Andersen/Getty Images 
Author Tom Robbins (July 22, 1932-Feb. 9, 2025) was a literary prankster whose screwball novels included “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” “Another Roadside Attraction,” “Still Life with Woodpecker,” “Jitterbug Perfume,” and “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas.”
A dropout from Washington and Lee University (Tom Wolfe was a classmate), Robbins joined the Air Force for a tad, and moved to the Pacific Northwest in the early 1960s. He was writing for the Seattle Times when a Doubleday editor advanced him $2,500 for what became “Another Roadside Attraction” (published in 1971). It became a hit in paperback, and was followed by “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” featuring Sissy Hankshaw, a young lady with ridiculously enormous thumbs who becomes a proficient hitchhiker. It sold more than 1 million copies.
Labeled “the perennial flower child and wild blooming Peter Pan of American letters” by People magazine, Robbins produced farcical works that captured the wide-open spirit of the 1960s. He understood the era, having lived it so fully — dropping acid, hitchhiking coast to coast, and traveling from Tanzania to the Himalayas. He published eight novels, a novella, and a 2014 memoir (“Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life”). His last novel was 2003’s “Villa Incognito.”
“Faulkner had his inbred Southern gothic freak show, Hemingway his European battlefields and cafes, Melville his New England with its tall ships,” he wrote in “Tibetan Peach Pie.” “I had, it finally dawned on me, a cultural phenomenon such as the world had not quite seen before, has not seen since; a psychic upheaval, a paradigm shift, a widespread if ultimately unsustainable egalitarian leap in consciousness. And it was all very up close and personal.”
In the 1990s, when the FBI sought clues to the identity of the Unabomber, they happened upon Robbins’ 1980 novel “Still Life with Woodpecker,” whose plot features an outlaw bomber. Robbins alleged that the agency sent two agents, both attractive women, to interview him. “The FBI is not stupid!” he liked to say. “They knew my weakness!”
Tony Roberts
Actor Tony Roberts poses before announcing nominations for the 49th annual Drama Desk Awards, at the New York Friars Club, April 29, 2004, in New York City. | Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images
Beyond his frequent appearances on the New York stage, Tony Award-nominated actor Tony Roberts (Oct. 22, 1939-Feb. 7, 2025) was familiar from acting in several Woody Allen films, including “Annie Hall.”
He made his first Broadway appearance in “Something About a Soldier,” in 1962. When his then-girlfriend got the position of understudy to Elizabeth Ashley in “Barefoot in the Park,” she convinced producers to hire Roberts as the understudy to Robert Redford’s understudy. Then came a fateful Broadway Show League softball game: “The guy I was understudying got up at the plate and hit a single, but he tried to stretch it into a double, slid into second base, and then was holding onto his ankle in great pain. His broken ankle was my big break,” he told Broadway World in 2015. “I played Redford’s role for two weeks and when he left the cast sometime later, I replaced him.”
Roberts earned a Tony nomination for the musical “How Now, Dow Jones,” and a second for the Woody Allen-scripted “Play It Again, Sam.” Other stage credits included “Take Her, She’s Mine,” “Never Too Late,” “The Last Analysis,” “Don’t Drink the Water,” “How Now, Dow Jones,” “Promises, Promises,” “Sugar” (an adaptation of the film “Some Like It Hot”), “Absurd Person Singular,” “They’re Playing Our Song,” “Doubles,” “Arsenic and Old Lace,” “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” “The Seagull,” “The Sisters Rosensweig,” “Victor/Victoria,” “Cabaret,” “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” “Xanadu,” and “The Royal Family.”
He joined Allen and Diane Keaton in the film version of “Play It Again, Sam” (directed by Herbert Ross), and went on to appear in “Annie Hall,” “Stardust Memories,” “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” and “Radio Days.”
Other film credits include “Serpico,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” “Just Tell Me What You Want,” “Amityville 3-D,” and “Seize the Day.”
He recounted his long career in a 2015 autobiography, “Do You Know Me?”
David Edward Byrd
Examples of posters by graphic artist David Edward Byrd. | CBS News 
The poster designs of graphic artist David Edward Byrd (April 4, 1941-Feb. 3, 2025), for artists like The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Traffic, Ravi Shankar, The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Prince and Van Halen, perfectly captured the psychedelic era of the 1960s and ’70s. Byrd also created ovation-worthy posters for Broadway, for the musicals “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Follies,” “Godspell” and “Little Shop of Horrors.”
One admirer described Byrd’s work as “kind of like Art Nouveau on acid.”
Born in Tennessee and raised in Florida, Byrd studied at the Boston Museum School and Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He later taught at the Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
In 1968 he was asked to create a poster for Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York’s East Village. This led to a series of graphics for concerts, tours, and record albums. He won a Grammy for the packaging of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s version of The Who’s “Tommy.”
The “Follies” poster was inspired by an evocative portrait of Marlene Dietrich, painted in bright colors with a crack through her face. It led to numerous Broadway assignments. He also designed the movie poster for the 1975 film version of Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust.”
Beginning in the 1980s, he served as the art director for The Advocate. He published an autobiography, “Poster Child,” in 2023.
In a 2016 interview for Carnegie Mellon University, Byrd said, “When you created a rock poster, the subject matter was neither here nor there. It had to be wild, it had to be mysterious, it had to have fantastic colors, and it had to be difficult to read. I wanted to establish a look that really punched you in the face.”
Dick Button
A 1950s portrait of American figure skater Dick Button. | Von der Becke/ullstein bild via Getty Images 
One of the most accomplished men’s figure skaters in history, Dick Button (July 18, 1929-Jan. 30, 2025) was also familiar as a broadcaster, covering skating and Olympic events for more than four decades.
In 1946, at age 16, he was the youngest U.S. men’s champion, and two years later he won gold at the St. Moritz Olympics — the first American to win the men’s event. The winner of five consecutive world championships (1948-1952), Button performed the first double axel in any competition.
In 1952, Button (then a student at Harvard, where he earned a law degree) won a second gold at the Oslo Games, with the first triple jump in competition. He also invented the flying camel spin. He gave up his eligibility as an amateur to perform in the Ice Capades.
After the 1961 world championships were canceled following a plane crash that killed the entire U.S. figure skating team, Button persuaded ABC Sports executive Roone Arledge to televise the 1962 event on “Wide World of Sports.” Button joined the network as a commentator, bringing figure skating to a mainstream TV audience as an Emmy-winning sports analyst.
Button later ran professional skating events, including the World Professional Figure Skating Championships, and the Challenge of Champions. His company, Candid Productions, helped to produce programs such as “Battle of the Network Stars” and “The Superstars.”
In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, Button said he never tired of talking about skating: “Skating encourages you to learn about so many art forms: dance, performance, athleticism, history, choreography, even haute couture. How could anyone tire of it?”
He didn’t tire of describing his own legacy: “I was a skater with a lot of hair who too frequently wore sassy jackets,” he said.
Marianne Faithfull
Singer and actress Marianne Faithfull in February 1965. | Mirrorpix/Getty Images 
She was the archetypal Sixties rock chick; a pop star at 17; Mick Jagger’s muse at 19; and by 24, a junkie on the streets. But Marianne Faithfull (Dec. 29, 1946-Jan. 30, 2025), who burst out of the ’60s British Invasion with the hit “As Tears Go By,” launched a second act in the late 1970s. Her lithe voice, later weathered from surviving sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, was brought forth in such albums as “Broken English,” “Dangerous Acquaintances,” and “Easy Come, Easy Go.”
The daughter of an eccentric British professor and an Austrian baroness, Faithfull was just out of convent school, and was performing as a folk singer, when she was discovered at a party by the manager of the Rolling Stones. Jagger and Keith Richards wrote her breakthrough hit, “As Tears Go By.”
Just as her career exploded, at 18, she married a London art dealer and had a baby. “I was very overenthusiastically eager for life,” she told “Sunday Morning” in 2009. “I wanted to just bite into it and swallow it whole.”
She then left her marriage for Jagger. They became one of Swinging London’s most photographed couples. Then, in February 1967, British police barged into a Rolling Stones party at Richards’ home. The police found drugs, and Marianne naked in a fur rug. Though charges were later dropped, Faithfull’s image was disgraced. She felt she’d let her parents down: “I think that’s the worst feeling in the world,” she told Anthony Mason.
She played up the “bad girl” image by acting in the film “Girl on a Motorcycle.” But she miscarried Jagger’s child after eight months, and while on a trip to Australia with Jagger, she swallowed 150 sleeping pills. She spent six days in a coma. Faithfull recovered, but her relationship with Jagger did not.
She fell into heroin addiction. She said, “It’s certainly not what I was dreaming of when I was 8 or 10 – I’m going to grow up and become a junkie and live on the street!” she said. She would lose custody of her son, Nicholas, and the damage began to show in her singing voice. But in 1979, she pulled herself together to release a raw and daring comeback album, “Broken English.” “I became myself,” she said, “and it was not a person people thought I was. It was more intelligent, stronger, ravaged in its own way, but very quite interesting.”
It would be several more years before she freed herself of addiction, and in 2008 recorded “Easy Come, Easy Go,” with Sean Lennon, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Cat Power, and Keith Richards. She also returned to acting, in “Paris, Je T’aime,” “Marie Antoinette,” and “Faces in the Crowd.”
Faithfull said she appreciated the long, hard road she’d traveled: “I think I’ve been very unconscious for a long time, and only now have I begun to get it. As long as I got it before I croaked, I think that’s the main thing.”
Jules Feiffer
Cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer, photographed in New York City in 2007. | Scott Gries/Getty Images 
The works of the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and humorist Jules Feiffer (Jan. 26, 1929-Jan. 17, 2025) included a long-running comic strip, plays, screenplays and children’s books in which he chronicled childhood, urban angst, politics, sexism, war, and other topics. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political quandaries that colored 20th century life.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with “communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority.”
After attending the Pratt Institute in New York City, Feiffer drew his first comic strip, “Clifford,” from the late 1940s until he was drafted in 1951. After leaving the Army, he returned to cartooning, and joined The Village Voice beginning in 1956. Feiffer became a fixture of the New York City alternative weekly newspaper. His satirical strip, “Feiffer,” ran there for more than four decades.
He also wrote novels, plays and screenplays, to convey ideas, he told Time magazine, that he felt he couldn’t address “in six panels of a cartoon.” His book “Passionella” became the basis of the musical “The Apple Tree.” He won an Obie Award for 1967’s “Little Murders,” and wrote “The White House Murder Case,” “A Think Piece,” “Knock Knock,” “Grown Ups,” and “A Bad Friend.” He wrote “Carnal Knowledge” as both a play and a film, directed by Mike Nichols. He also scripted Robert Altman’s film based on the “Popeye” comic strip.
One of his most enduring works was his illustrations for “The Phantom Tollbooth,” published in 1961. The adventure story of a bored child who is transformed upon entering a magic tollbooth, it was written by Feiffer’s friend, Norton Juster. “Norton would read me what he had written,” Feiffer told “Sunday Morning” in 2012, “and in order to avoid doing the work I was supposed to doing, I began sketching characters for the ‘Phantom Tollbooth.’ And as it evolved, it just seemed like a natural act, that if this book was going to be Illustrated, why not by me?”
Bob Uecker
Sportscaster Bob Uecker at County Stadium in Milwaukee in the 1980s. | Ronald C. Modra/Getty Images 
In six undistinguished seasons as a catcher in the majors, Bob Uecker (Jan. 26, 1934-Jan. 16, 2025) played for four teams, with a career batting average of .200. But for a half-century as a play-by-play announcer, the Milwaukee native was a mascot for his city, and for the sport at which he never quite excelled, his enthusiasm and humor earning him the nickname “Mr. Baseball.”
Hired by the Milwaukee Brewers as a scout, Uecker demonstrated his lack of ability in that department. But then, the team’s owner moved him to the broadcast booth, where Uecker stayed for 54 years.
A favorite Uecker line? “‘Juuuuust a bit outside.’ That’s where my wife put me a lotta times!”
His dry wit fueled his second career as an actor, comedian, commercial pitchman, and perennial guest on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” He notably played announcer Harry Doyle in the “Major League” movies.
In 2024, Uecker told “Sunday Morning” he shared a bond with players on the field: “I played the game. So, I know how hard it is. I know how tough it is. … The game celebrations, when we win, that’s a big part of it, man, to be able to walk into that clubhouse and be with ’em.”
David Lynch
A portrait of filmmaker David Lynch in Los Angeles, 1989. | Anthony Barboza/Getty Images 
Writer, director and painter David Lynch (Jan. 20, 1946-Jan. 15, 2025) was a remarkable cinematic visionary, whose films “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Lost Highway,” and the TV series “Twin Peaks” were highly stylized dream states, evoking lost innocence, eroticism, and the roiling mysteries that exist underneath placid, peaceful exteriors. His films’ interior logic would invariably prompt more questions than answers, but the imagery and sonic sensations he mastered would generate a tremendous devotion from his fellow filmmakers and audiences.
A Montana native, Lynch studied at the American Film Institute and turned his thesis project into his first feature, “Eraserhead,” a black-and-white experimental film about parenthood. Its exceptional photography and sound design made it a cult favorite. On the basis of “Eraserhead,” Lynch was hired by Mel Brooks’ production company to write and direct his first Hollywood feature, “The Elephant Man.” Lynch earned two Oscar nominations.
He turned down George Lucas’ offer to direct the third “Star Wars” film, “Return of the Jedi,” and instead tackled Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” A visual feast, the film was a critical failure. But his relationship with producer Dino de Laurentiis got him his next major film, “Blue Velvet,” an idiosyncratic murder mystery starring Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper.
Lynch’s subsequent films, for the most part, were similarly dream-like in their narrative and presentation: “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Inland Empire.” But his biggest imprint on the popular zeitgeist was with the 1990 TV series “Twin Peaks,” about the investigation into a teenage girl’s murder. A wonderfully moody drama, it blended the form of TV soap operas with the paranormal, all in the deceptively tranquil setting of a Pacific Northwest logging town. Though only on ABC for two seasons, it spawned a feature film spinoff, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” and a follow-up series on Showtime, in 2017.
Despite being the director of some dark movies, Lynch called himself a “bliss ninny.” A longtime practitioner of transcendental meditation (or TM), in 2005 he began the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. One of its goals: to teach students how to meditate.
Lynch told “Sunday Morning” in 2016 that he vividly remembers his very first experience with TM: “I started meditation on July 1, 1973, on a sunny Saturday morning at 11 o’clock. I remember it as if it was yesterday. And it was so beautiful. I’ve been meditating twice a day for over 41 years and never missed a meditation.
“People see things like stress, traumatic stress, tension, anxiety, sorrow, depression, hate, anger and fear start to lift away,” Lynch said. “So, it’s like pure gold coming in from within, and garbage going on.”
Sam Moore
Sam Moore performs at the Apollo Theatre Hall of Fame in 1994. | NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images 
In the 1960s, Sam Moore (Oct. 12, 1935-Jan. 10, 2025) was one half of soul music’s most explosive duo, Sam & Dave, who were known as “double dynamite” and “the sultans of sweat.” Their string of 10 straight Top 20 R&B hits included two soul masterpieces, “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” “and “Soul Man.”
Moore developed his pleading tenor voice while singing in church (he initially wanted to become a preacher). In 1957, he was set to travel to Chicago to replace the great Sam Cooke in a gospel group, The Soul Stirrers. But then, he told “Sunday Morning” in 2014, he attended a Jackie Wilson concert: “He was singing and winking and blinking and gyrating the body. … I saw men screaming, women, and I said, I want to do that!” laughed Moore. He ended up hiding from the gospel group, who left for Chicago without him. “They had to, because they couldn’t find me!” he laughed.
Moore met Dave Prater at a Miami nightclub, and their routine came together by accident. The two didn’t even rehearse. “It was all spontaneous. … We used the stage in the nightclubs like a pulpit. I preached. You would hear people from the audience go, ‘Say it, Sam. Tell the truth, Sam.'”
Producer Jerry Wexler later caught their act, signed the duo to Atlantic Records, then sent them to Memphis, where Stax Records paired Sam & Dave with two young songwriters, Dave Porter and Isaac Hayes. The team turned out such hits as “Soul Man,” “You Got Me Hummin,'” “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody,” “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” “I Thank You,” “Everybody Got to Believe in Somebody,” and “Soul Sister Brown Sugar.”
Moore’s relationship with Prater was tumultuous, and never recovered after Prater shot and wounded his own wife in a domestic dispute in 1968. Moore recalled that he told Prater, “‘I’ll sing, I’ll even record with you. But I’ll never talk to you again. Never. And I didn’t for 12-and-a-half years. Didn’t.” (Prater died in a car accident in 1988.)
Moore continued to tour, and in 2006 released the album “Overnight Sensational,” in which he performed alongside such artists as Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Mariah Carey, Sting, Billy Preston and Eric Clapton. He also recorded a tribute to George Jones with the country band Nu-Blu.
In 1992 Moore and (posthumously) Prater were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
He told “Sunday Morning” that he had always been uncomfortable being called the original “Soul Man.” “But I know this: at the end of the night, before I leave the stage, I better do ‘Soul Man.’ Gotta do it. Do I get tired? Ya, but you know what? When they go into it and I look up and see them jumpin’ up and down, it all leaves.”
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