The passing of Lady Bird Johnson. The passing of an era, indeed.
The passing of editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette. Sad and sudden. I remembered reading his cartoons when he was in Newsday and when I was a Newsday reader. I never quite knew what to make of his comic strip “Kudzu,” but there were hilarious moments in examining Southern life (the Rev. Will B. Dunn and his Holy Rollers team; Kudzu and his friends’ foibles in PC speech or just trying figure each other out, including Kudzu’s perpetual unrequited love and his weird parakeet…). Check out Marlette’s work. Time Magazine’s Joe Klein had a lovely tribute in the latest issue, and he followed up on it in his Time tag-team blog, Swampland.