SO LONG

I was saddened to pick up the newspaper this morning and see that writer John Hughes, age 59, had died of a heart attack yesterday while taking a stroll on the streets of New York City. I've long been a fan of his. He could take some mundane, everyday event and turn it into an outrageously funny piece of pandemonium.

Thirty years ago or so he wrote a little short story called "Vacation 58." It was based on his own family's summer road trip from their home in Chicago to Disneyland. Later, while a writer for National Lampoon magazine, he expanded on the story and it evolved into his first smash movie hit, National Lampoon's Vacation. You remember it, don't you? Clark Grisswold and his madcap family on their way to see Walley World and Marty Moose. Can't you still see the Grisswold family running slow motion in the parking lot to the tune of "Chariots of Fire," only to find that the amusement park is closed? Hughes followed that with a string of screenwriting gems like Ferris Beuller's Day Off, Home Alone, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, the list goes on and on.

When I was teaching, if there was time at the end of the school year, which there usually was, I'd throw in a short unit on humor writing. I'd drag out short stories and essays I'd saved over the years by contemporary writers like Dave Barry, Erma Bombeck, Lewis Grizzard, Jean Shephard (you've got to recall A Christmas Story and Ralphie's b-b gun--"You'll shoot your eye out!") and, of course, John Hughes. I'd have the kids read aloud a portion of his "Christmas '58" and tell them how this seemingly insignificant, but funny, little piece of writing made the author a rich man and spawned so many of the movies they loved.

John Hughes had the gift of making people laugh. I wish him a safe journey.