The Steel Guitar Forum

Mary Travers of the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary, passed away after a long bout with leukemia. She had a bone marrow transplant that worked, but the chemo treatments caused problems with her lungs. She was 72.

There a good vintage video of PP&M on the Rolling Stone obit page:
click here

A little over 20 years ago, I made the second-most-disastrous decision of my life and took a job in the Television Department of the Old School Most Snootfacedest entertainment P.R. firm in Hollywood. I'm a writer and a pensive introvert by DNA and was completely out of place in the high-power, Type A image-driven hyperkinetic schmooze culture that's everything all the hoary cliches imply, except in real life, it's a hundred times worse.

One of my small blessings was a windowless office in the statusless center of the floor, next to the Xerox and clattering Nexus/Lexus printers, away from my insane screaming boss. My mantra had long since become "I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead..."

On a particularly dispirted day, I was a Life's Lowest Ebb, staring out into what is almost always an empty, untraveled hallway. I thought my depression had turned to psychotic hallucination, because...can that really be Peter, Paul and Mary walking past my door?

Indeed it was, as they were clients of the Music Department of said agency. Seeing PPM crossing my path lifted my spirits and gave me hope for the future. (This job ended with the onset of the March 1988 Writers Guild strike--don't need a PR TV department if no one's making TV shows. And it kicked off four years of un- and underemployment, directionlessness and poverty. (But at least I wasn't working for the damn PR abbatoir anymore.) Thanks, PPM, for the lifeline, however unwitting, while I was there.)

"Dragons live forever but no so little girls"
RIP Mary

After I got my drivers license in NYC A friend of mine pointed out a third floor brownstone Apt. while entering the upper level of the Williamsburg Bridge going from Manhattan to Queens.There was a stop light and If you looked into the third story Apt. you could see gold records on the wall,My friend had told me that's where Mary Travers from Peter, Paul,and Mary lived...I left NYC a long time ago but on trips back home I still liked to look up there at night and look at the gold records on the wall,What a voice she had,Puff is still one of my favorites.

Ben, you are a good writer! More! Send us more 'Tales from the Crypt'!