Death
Jane Ace died in New York City in 1974 from cancer, aged 77. Goodman Ace composed a eulogy in a Saturday Review column:
Now alone at a funeral home ... the questions ... the softly spoken suggestions ... repeated, and repeated ... because... because during all the arrangements, through my mind there ran a constant rerun, a line she spoke on radio ... on the brotherhood of man ... in her casual, malapropian style ... "we are all cremated equal" ... they kept urging for an answer ... a wooden casket?... a metal casket?... it's the name of their game ... a tisket, a casket ... and then transporting it to Kansas City, Missouri ... the plane ride ... "smoking or non-smoking section?" somebody asked... the non-thinking section was what I wanted ... a soft sprinkle of snow as we huddled around her ... the first of the season, they told me ... lasted only through the short service ... snow stopped the instant the last words were spoken. He had the grace to celebrate her arrival with a handful of His confetti ...
That eulogy provoked hundreds of letters from current readers and old radio fans alike. With several hundred episodes of Easy Aces now circulating among old-time radio collectors (episodes the Aces syndicated through the Frederick W. Ziv Company in 1945), Jane Ace has been discovered by fans who weren't even alive before her own death. The National Radio Hall of Fame helped make sure of that, inducting Easy Aces and its co-stars in 1990.
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Famous quotes containing the word death:
“The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows for the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)