Farewell to a '70s icon

If you are say, 50, you know the kind of hold Farrah Fawcett had back in the mid-1970s. She was the Betty Grable of the 1940s and the Marilyn Monroe of the 1950s.

Fawcett died just a few hours ago from a rare anal cancer. It was a little bit surprising that she was 62, but not sure why it should be. The boys who fawned over her are all in their late 40s and early 50s now.

Fawcett, a Texas beauty, was a bigger pinup queen than anything now or in previous years. She was one of the stars of the cheesy TV series, "Charlie's Angels." She was an undercover detective who would do stuff like masquerade as a go-go girl (that's what they called them back then) to find out why girls were disappearing from a certain dance club.

Now that's good TV.

Fawcett was a bigger star than any beauty today because network TV had five times the hold that it does now. Because there was so fewer viewing options in that era, the stars were just that much bigger, and in the mid- to late-70s, none were bigger than Farrah.

I could not walk past very many dorm rooms in college and not see the pinup that you see now. That pinup was virtually a cultural phenomenon and a symbol of the 1970s. Many of us reached puberty because of her.

She was often made fun of later in her up-and-down career, but there was no denying her impact in the decade of the 1970s. She was huge.