Who Should Have Gotten More Ink: Gordo or the Actress?

Two prominent seventy-seven year old Americans died on Monday.

One was an actor who appeared in movie and television productions.

The other one acted on the great stages of discovery and was a pioneer who helped open outer space to humanity, an activist who challenged himself and us to achieve great things.

Both actress Janet Leigh and former astronaut L. Gordon Cooper died on October 4. But I was a little disappointed that, whether on the network evening news or the pages of my local newspaper, Leigh's death received more mention than that of Cooper.

I take nothing away from Leigh. I've never seen Psycho and so, haven't seen her perfomance there, apparently her greatest. I have seen the original screen presentation of The Manchurian Candidate, but frankly, until I saw and heard the obituaries for her, hadn't remembered Leigh was a cast member. (I could only remember Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury as major players in that.)

I primarily knew Janet Leigh as the former wife of Tony Curtis and mother of Jamie Leigh Curtis. But nobody should hold the lapses in my cinematic knowledge against a film star who has passed from the scene. No doubt her career deserved prominent play in the media and of course, her death is a source of sorrow and grief for her family. They need and deserve prayers.

Nonetheless, if I were the managing editor of a news broadcast or a newspaper editor, I would have given more prominence to Gordon Cooper's obit. Cooper was one of the original seven Mercury astronauts. He flew the final Mercury flight, orbiting the earth 22 times. (Remember that John Glenn, in the third Mercury flight in 1962, only logged three orbits.) He flew on one other space mission, in the Gemini program.

But even beyond his achievements as an astronaut, Cooper is notable for spending a lifetime exploring. A wonderful obituary piece about him appears on the NASA web site. It points out that Cooper, in a full life, also was involved in, among other things, test piloting, archeology, and automobile racing. For several years, starting in 1975, he headed the research and development arm of the Disney organization.

While I love the movie, The Right Stuff, the screen adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book about the Mercury program, its seven astronauts are portrayed there as being more like cartoon caricatures than real people. Dennis Quaid turns in a good performance as Cooper. But it's far from the real astronaut with the right stuff.

I would have liked it if news outlets had talked about the real Cooper and the lessons of his extraordinary life on a day when they kept showing Leigh's shower scene from Psycho.

I suppose that the "play" given to each story reflects contemporary values and interests. People tend to be more interested in Hollywood than in the serious pursuits of science or in hardy adventuring. Again, I'm not denigrating Leigh or the entertainment industry. I like to be entertained as much as anybody else.

But if they'd had the media capabilities back in the 15th. and 16th. centuries that we have today, what would we say to editors who chose to barely mention the deaths of explorers like Christopher Columbus or Ferdinand Magellan? I think we'd see it as a colossal oversight.

Just a few thoughts which are nothing more than my opinion...and I might very well be wrong or be overreacting. What do you think? Use the comment button below to tell me your views.