Last Surviving

The day will come, and I know it, when the last surviving major cast member of M*A*S*H dies. We’re not talking Ron Howard, who did one episode when he was eighteen (and played fifteen, as I recall), or “Larry” Fishburne who did one episode when he was twenty and so forth. Loretta Swit died two years ago. William Christopher was one of the last people to die in the pain-o-rama that was 2016. Harry Morgan died in 2011. Kellye Nahakara died in 2020. David Ogden Stiers died in 2018. Larry Linville died in 2000. Wayne Rogers died exactly a year before William Christopher. McLean Stephenson died in 1996, the earliest of the major cast members to die. But Alan Alda, Mike Farrell, Jamie Farr, and Gary Burghoff are still alive. But Burghoff is the youngest and he’s 83.

It comes up a lot, when we talk about various TV shows. It was almost a countdown for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where the most notable person still alive is Joyce Bulifant, who played Marie Slaughter, Murray’s wife. The Simpsons made the joke about Bonanza. All four Golden Girls have died. For the most part, the cast of The Dick Van Dyke show was ridiculously long-lived, but still, the only two still alive are, well, Dick Van Dyke, of course, and Larry Mathews, who played Ritchie Petrie. I could keep looking these things up, but when you think about it, why do we care?

Imagine living four hundred years ago and wondering how many members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were still alive. It seems less likely. For one thing, fewer people would’ve even known about the existence of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Even if you did, let’s say you watched a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays in the 1590s. How likely is it that you would know their names thirty or forty years later to even discuss it? And your children would have no familiarity with them at all, because how would they?

But all four of the stars of I Love Lucy were dead by the time I finished sixth grade. George J. Lewis died in 1995 and Don Diamond made it to 2011, but a lot of the cast members of Zorro were dead by roughly the same time as the I Love Lucy cast. Three of the five main Perry Mason cast members were dead before I was born. And yet my children are, or at least can be, as acquainted with them as I was at their age. That Barbara Hale only died a few years ago, in 2017, gives something of a connection to it. She and my daughter missed overlapping on this Earth by a literal week.

Someday, one of my children could be writing about how weird it is to watch the cast of Saved by the Bell age and die, Gods help us. Or, to name a good show, Twin Peaks. (Yes, some of those cast members have already died, some too young. But still.) And their children, should they have children, will know that these are shows their grandparents watched when they themselves were young, and they’ll feel a slight connection not just to the show but to their grandparents. And that’s why I was so happy to learn that Robert Fuller is still alive.