Former host of "Press Your Luck" finds a Whammy

You may not realize this yet, but this title is in extremely poor taste. Yet, I could not resist, so here it is.

When people from my era were children, dinosaurs roamed the earth (but that's another story). When we were sick and stayed home from school, we would stay at home and watch daytime game shows like Press Your Luck. This was one of my favorite gameshows because of the presence of the Whammy, a character one could get instead of dollar values on a sort of slot machine who would banrukpt anyway contestant who got him amidst extremely amusing animations with accompanying sounds. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you owe it to yourself to catch a rerun of the show on the Gameshow Channel.)

OK, so a few days ago, Peter Tamarken (the host of this show) and his wife were tragically killed when their plane crashed. (They were on this plane as part of a volunteering program, so this wasn't anything like a stunt where death happens to be a pricey stupidity tax.) That's why the title of this entry is in bad taste.

What I had forgotten (or possibly never realized; I think I just forgot it) is that Tamarken is a fellow Beverly High alum (call of 1960). In fact, his three children are also Beverly High alums. Two of them overlapped with me, although I don't know if I knew/know them. (I do know people who have those first names, but I don't know if it's them.)

Anyway, my title isn't meant to belittle what happened, and I do feel sort of bad for using it (but I can't resist, as I mentioned).