Where Are They Buried? by Tod Benoit Read Free Book Online

made a full recovery and returned to acting, making a triumphant return to TV stardom as Matlock, a crafty and rumpled but good-natured defense lawyer in the series of the same name.
    To viewers, Andy’s portrayals seemed so effortless they presumed he was simply playing himself. He wasn’t, he insisted; he was always acting, but took that misimpression as a compliment to his artistry. “You’re supposed to believe in the character,” he said. “You’re not supposed to think, ‘Gee, Andy’s really acting up a storm.’”
    At 86, Andy died of a heart attack at home. He was buried at the Griffith family cemetery on his Roanoke Island ranch in North Carolina. The private estate is not amenable to visitors.

BOBBY FISCHER
    MARCH 9, 1943 – JANUARY 17, 2008

    Brooklyn-bred genius Bobby Fischer made history in 1972 when he wrested the world chess title from four decades of Soviet domination, beating world champion Boris Spassky in the “Match of the Century” that came to be seen as a proxy for the Cold War.
    A petulant and loutish Bobby pitted against an elegant Spassky made for an unforgettable spectacle and captured headlines around the world. Incensed by every condition under which the match was played, particularly offended by the whirr of television cameras, Bobby lost the first game and boycotted the second, insisting the remaining three games be played in an isolated roomthe size of a janitor’s closet. Roaring back from what is a sizable deficit in chess, Bobby trounced Spassky and his small army of master strategists, 12½ to 8½.
    His victory was widely seen as a symbolic triumph for Democracy over Communism, and it turned the tantrum-prone rebel into an unlikely American hero. Capturing the world’s imagination, the public recognized that chess at its highest level was as thrilling as a duel to the death or as intellectually demanding as any scientific conundrum and, for the first time in the United States, the game became cool. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed along with the prestige of scores of formerly poverty-stricken chess teachers.
    But Bobby was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight and soon withdrew into a weird, contrarian solitude that he maintained for the remainder of his life. Tithing to a fringe church, he spent his days locked in a room playing chess against himself and reading Nazi literature. Offered huge financial incentives to defend his title, Bobby made ridiculously extravagant demands that, when met, were countered with even more preposterous terms. Becoming violently anti-American and a vicious anti-Semite (though his mother was Jewish), he spent years in far-flung countries alienated from all but a small band of friends and chess enthusiasts.
    He finally emerged from his mysterious two-decade-long seclusion in 1992 and played a $5 million match against his old nemesis, Spassky. After Bobby won handily he dropped out of sight again, emerging now and then on scattered foreign radio stationsto rant in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and Jews. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he rang up a Filipino radio station to hail the “wonderful news” and launch a profanity-laden tirade.
    In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was playing, that he was training, or that he was about to make a comeback, but it was all nonsense. Instead, Bobby Fischer became a poster boy for the adage about that fine line between genius and madman and, it seems, ultimately the burden of his 181 IQ permanently blurred that line.
    At 64, Bobby died of degenerative renal failure, swearing off Western medicine to the end, and his last words were said to be, “Nothing soothes pain like the touch of a person.” He was buried in the Cemetery of Laugardaelir Church in Laugardaelir, Iceland.
    CEMETERY DIRECTIONS: Laugardaelir is a quiet and tiny village thirty miles from Reykjavik that doesn’t appear on most maps. If you can instead get to the booming