If the people here achieve immortality, it will be as answers to trivia questions. Yet they deserve better journalistic burials than they received. So before they slip into the past, let’s celebrate the Almost Famous who crossed the bar in 1997, carrying to the other side some small yet luminous distinctions.
savings of $3 into his pocket and roller-skated from Charleston, South Carolina, to the University of Pittsburgh, where he pursued graduate studies.
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Harold Brill, Highland Park: An innovator in technical procedures, he may have been the first dentist in Chicago to use nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Next time you pass the Pittsfield Building, where Brill’s drill delivered painless dentistry for 43 years, open up and present your widest smile of thanks to Dr. Harold.
Claro Duany, Evanston: He led a quiet life in Evanston as a self-employed truck driver. But in the 1940s he was celebrated in Cuba as “El Gigante,” the huge, power-hitting right fielder who spent his summers playing for the New York Cubans of the Negro League.
Billy Leech, Deerfield: Early on, Leech was a vocalist with the Raymond Scott and Guy Lombardo orchestras as well as a singer and producer for CBS Radio in New York. He later settled in Chicago, where he sang on the Mal Bellairs morning show and his own early TV show, Luncheon With Billy. From 1946 to 1967, he was several times voted Chicago’s most popular radio vocalist. Still, Leech earns his pop culture wings as the vocalist who warbled the deathless, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent”–in nine languages, no less.
