In 2021.
We lost the last four living stars
of the classic 1970s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Cloris Leachman who played Mary's
neighbor Phyllis Lindstrom, died in January.
Gavin MacLeod, who played writer Murray Slaughter, died in May.
Ed Asner who played Mary's boss, Lou Grant, died in August.
And Betty White, who played Sue Ann Nivens,
died on the last day of December.
It seems weird, doesn't it?
That one year would take
so many people who were connected by something they had in common.
The thing is, about 3 million Americans die every year.
And even just looking at celebrities, it's several hundred famous people who die.
With big numbers, some very unexpected patterns pop up.
Today, here are nine surprising facts like that.
About the celebrities and newsmakers who died in 2021,
in this special episode of Immortalized.
I'm Stephen
Segal from Legacy.com, the world's largest network of obituaries.
And I'm Linnea Crowther, Legacy's news editor and lead obituary writer.
So, yes.
We published almost 550 news obituaries in 2021,
and there's some really surprising stuff in there.
One odd fact that became really remarkable at the end of the year was,
there was an unusual cluster of great race car drivers who died. Yes.
And specifically, three of the Unser family,
the really notable family of racing champions who were known over the years
for winning at Indy 500 and in the Pikes Peak Hill Climb.
So Bobby Unser died in May, and then his son,
Bobby Unser Jr., died just a few weeks later in June.
And then Bobby's brother, Al Unser, died in December.
That is such a hard year for their family.
Yeah.
When you hear about a family experiencing so many losses in a short amount of time,
which a lot of us who aren't celebrities have also had to deal with,
it really drives home how precious our time on this earth is.
It does.
Another startling pattern we saw in 2021 was how many soap opera stars died.
Oh, yeah. For real.
I know not everybody follows soap operas, but if you do, I bet you noticed
how many classic leading men we lost this year.
General Hospital, I think, was hit the hardest.
Four actors from the show died last year, including Stuart Damon, who played Dr.
Alan Quartermaine for decades.
There was also Michael Nader from Dynasty, Jerry Douglas
from The Young and the Restless,
Ray McDonnell from All My Children, and John Gabriel from Ryan's Hope.
And it wasn't just the men either.
From Guiding Light, both Michael Tylo and Lisa Brown died.
They played the fan favorite couple, Quint and Nola.
All in all, there were 14 notable soap opera actors who died in 2021.
Wow. Soap stars were like their own whole section of the obituaries.
Yeah.
But that said, actors and athletes are definitely not
the only kinds of memorable people whose lives and deaths we report.
One thing we've seen in recent years is that a lot of Americans
who fought for our freedoms either in the armed forces during World War II
or in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s,
have been passing away recently.
Two of those people had something fascinating connecting them.
One of them was Martha White,
a black woman who set off a bus boycott in Baton
Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953
when she refused to give up her seat in the front of a bus.
That was two and a half years before Rosa Parks
did the same thing on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
And one of the reasons the Montgomery boycott was successful
is that they learned important lessons from Baton Rouge.
Every time I write an obituary like that one, I learn a little bit more
about our history.
And the interesting thing is that Martha White wasn't the only person who died
last year whose life overlapped with Rosa Parks' bus protest.
There was also Lucille Times who got into
not just a face-off, but a fistfight with the very same bus driver.
Six months before he had Rosa Parks arrested,
Lucille launched her own one-woman bus boycott.
She would drive around the bus, stops in her car
and offer rides to black passengers so they could just skip the bus.
That is just fantastic.
And they both lived such long, full lives.
I saw that Martha lived to be 99, and Lucille was 100 when she died in August.
So was it me or did we actually see a lot of headlines
in 2021 for people who lived to be 100?
Yeah, actually 16 of our news obituaries
were for centenarians, people who are 100 or older.
The very oldest was Ruthie Thompson, who was an animator on Disney's
Snow White way back in the 1930s, and she lived to be 111.
Wow. And there really were a lot of notable
people who lived very long lives before they died in 2021.
24% of our obituaries last year were for people who were 90 or older.
On the other hand, there was at least one group of newsmakers last year
with a large number of younger deaths from mostly natural causes,
and that was old school hip hop artists.
No fewer than eight notable rappers died in their fifties in 2021.
DMX, Biz Markie, Prince Markie Dee from the Fat Boys,
Shock G from Digital Underground, Gift of Gab from Blackalicious, Black Rob,
Kangol Kid from GTFO, and Deezer Dee,
who a lot of people remember from his acting role on E.R.
Right.
And then Duke Bootee who wrote and rapped the classic song The Message
for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, died too.
He was 69.
And their causes of death are sobering.
Three heart attacks, two with congestive heart failure,
diabetes, colon cancer, kidney failure.
It was so sad to watch these deaths just keep coming in 2021.
And I know fans of classic hip hop were really hit hard by it.
Now, Linnea,
I know that every January you put together some statistics
on the past year's obituaries,
and this is one of the most interesting things you find each year.
Which groups of people in the headlines die younger versus older?
Right.
And one thing we consistently see every year is that certain
categories of celebrities tend to live a lot longer than others.
Can you guess which type of celebrity lived the longest on average in 2021?
So in past years, it's been writers hasn't it? Yes.
Which made us both feel good about our choice of career.
And writers were up there again this year.
But actually the people who lived longest in 2021 were politicians.
Somebody somewhere is formulating a joke about that right now.
I'm sure they are.
Well, if they want more details for their joke.
The average age of the politicians we featured last year in our obituaries
was 83 and a half compared to the average age across
all of last year's notable obituaries, which was 76 close behind the politicians.
Business leaders had an average age of 83 and both writers
and scientists lived to an average age of 82.
Those are pretty similar numbers to what I saw in the last few years.
So it's definitely a trend.
But on the other side of that there are some groups of notable
people who we see tending to die tragically young.
And the youngest last year averaged just 47 and a half years old.
And that was reality stars. Right.
And that's a catch-all term.
We use four stars of reality TV as well as people who are Internet
famous, like YouTubers and Instagram influencers.
So there were several who died in their 60s
last year, like Alaskan Bush People star, Billy Brown.
But then we saw people like YouTuber Lee MacMillan and Baldwin Hills reality star
Gerren Taylor, dying so young, just 28 and 30 years old.
But the reality stars didn't actually make up
a large percentage of our notable obits last year, did they?
No, although they are certainly dying young, they're not dying in large numbers.
Only about 3% of the obits we wrote last year were for reality stars.
You know, I remember a year ago when we did this, we talked about
how the largest number of famous deaths in 2020 were musicians.
It felt like so many incredible musicians had died
in 2020, at all ages and from all genres.
Absolutely.
And when I look back at the numbers from 2020, that's right.
22% of last year's notable obituaries were for musicians
compared to athletes at 18.5%
and actors at 16.5%.
What's interesting though is that this year looking at 2021 again,
musicians made up 22% of the obituary headlines,
exactly the same percentage as last year.
But it didn't feel like the biggest category in 2021, did it?
It did not.
I would have said that we wrote a ton of obituaries for actors this past year.
That's right.
There were still a lot of musicians, but the number of actors who died
in 2021 jumped up substantially.
About 22.5% of our notable obits
were for actors last year, and 9% of those were soap opera stars.
But you
know what is interesting there is that overall we did write fewer
total news obituaries in 2021 than in 2020.
About 8.5% fewer.
But we still wrote more obituary
for actors last year than we did in 2020.
So the percentage jump from 2020 to 2021 for actors was a big one.
When we look at these patterns in who died,
I think it's natural and we see a lot of people online
trying to find some deeper meaning in them.
Oh, totally.
You know, as human beings with hopefully some common sense,
when we see patterns, we look for reasons they're there
and death is such a profound thing that sometimes people wonder
if there's something mysterious or even sinister that they're missing.
The real invisible connection, though, isn't really a secret.
It's just a fact we forget sometimes, which is people
die every day, millions of people every year,
because death is part of everyone's life eventually.
And if you look at large enough numbers, some of those people
are connected to each other because that's how life works.
We're all connected to each other,
and I actually don't find that disturbing at all.
I find it really inspiring.
On that note, that's our show for today.
Thank you to my co-host, Linnea Crowther, and to our producer, John Maxwell.
Thank you, also to Legacy.com, where you can
now honor a loved one's memory by planting memorial trees in their name.
Just visit Legacy.com/trees.
If you enjoyed today's episode, you can subscribe
to Immortalized on your favorite podcast app.
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Just look up Legacy.com on YouTube.
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Thanks for watching.