Topic : Fame

Father, where shall I work today'
And my love flowed warm and free.
Then He pointed me out a tiny spot,
And said, “Tend that for me.”

I answered quickly, “Oh, no, not that.
Why, no one would ever see,
No matter how well my work was done.
Not that little place for me!”

And the word He spoke, it was not stern,
He answered me tenderly,
“Ah, little one, search that heart of thine;
Art thou working for them or me'

Nazareth was a little place,
And so was Galilee.”

author unknown

• “The thrill of victory lasts about an hour. - Chris Evert quoted in Charles Leersen and Donna Foote, “The End of a Fairy Tale,” Newsweek, July 17, 1989, p. 47
• Don’t confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other. - Erma Bombeck, U.S. syndicated columnist, Bits & Pieces, March 30, 1995, p. 3
• All is ephemeral—fame and the famous as well. - Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Recognize any of these names: Owen D. Young, Pierre Laval, Hugh S. Johnson, James F. Byrnes, Mohammed Mossadegh, Harlow Curtis?

You should; according to Time magazine, these are all people who have been designate as “Man of the Year” by Time, indicating they had the greatest impact in that year of all persons living on Earth. The celebrity of today is all but forgotten tomorrow.

Around a man who has been pushed into the limelight a legend begins to grow as it does around a dead man. But a dead man is in no danger of yielding to the temptation to nourish his legend, or accept its picture as reality. I pity the man who falls in love with his image as it is drawn by public opinion during the honeymoon of publicity.

Dag Hammarskjold, quoted in C. Swindoll, The Grace Awakening, Word, 1990, pp. 238-9

The boxer Muhammad Ali was known as “the champ,” arguably the most famous athlete of his generation. He was on top, and his entourage of trainers and various helpers shared the adulation with him. But the party ended, leaving many of Ali’s loyal followers disillusioned—and in some cases, destitute. Ali himself, now halting in speech and uncertain in movement, says “I had the world, and it wasn’t nothin.’”

Today in the Word, October, 1990, p. 11

His initials were W.W., and in the 1930s and 1940s they were enough to identify him to most of America. He was widely considered the creator of modern gossip writing, and in his heyday this rude, abrasive, egotistical and witty man was the country’s best known and most widely read journalist and one of its most influential. In 1943, when there were 140 million people in the United States, more than 50 million of them read his gossip column every day in more than 1000 newspapers, including his flagship, The New York Daily Mirror. Even more people listened to his weekly radio broadcast. Hated, feared and revered, he presided over Table 50 of the Stork Club in New York, creating and destroying celebrities at the drop of his trademark gray snap-brim fedora.

Yet when he died in 1972, at age 74, he was practically forgotten. Only two people attended his funeral; his daughter, Walda, and the rabbi who officiated at his services. Today, not many people under 40 even know the name of Walter Winchell.

Mervyn Rothstein, in the New York Times, 6-24-1990.

Cato the Elder, on observing statues being set up in honor of others, remarked: “I would rather have people ask ‘Why isn’t there a statue to Cato? than ‘Why is there one?’”

Thomas Masson, The Best Stories in the World