"If one were to count up the number of times any American — or maybe anyone anywhere — laughed in the last half-century, the person responsible for more of those laughs than anyone else..."

"... might well be Garry Marshall, who died on Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. He was 81." — begins the NYT obit.

I wasn't going to blog this death. I don't blog every celebrity death, and I didn't think I cared much about the Marshall's work, but I went to IMDB and saw the list of shows he worked on, not just "Happy Days," "Laverne and Shirley," and "Mork and Mindy" — which happened in the 70s, when I didn't care about TV — but a whole slew of the 60s television that I lived with intimately: "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (18 episodes), "The Lucy Show" (10 episodes), "The Joey Bishop Show" (10 episodes), "Gomer Pyle: USMC" (2 episodes), "The Bill Dana Show" (2 episodes), "Make Room for Daddy" (5 episodes). He even wrote an episode of "Hank." Do you know what "Hank" was? I sure do! I blogged about it here.