“CBS News Sunday Morning” correspondent Mo Rocca has always loved obituaries. Each episode of Mobituaries covers his favorite dearly departed people and things. This season profiles legendary athlete Jim Thorpe in "Death of an All-American", iconic singer/songwriter Peggy Lee in "Death of Cool", and even the death of the mid-Atlantic accent, best known from the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Franklin Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy. Mo even has a few new things in store including an episode that looks back at folks who "Died on the Same Day.” Think: Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett; John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; Jim Henson and Sammy Davis, Jr. – and then there’s Margaret Thatcher and Annette Funicello? Tune in for fresh takes on famous legacies and tributes to people who never got the sendoff they deserved. Even if you know the names, you’ve never understood why they matter until now!
Long before her turn as the sermonizing Aunt Esther on “Sanford and Son,” LaWanda Page was dazzling Black nightclub audiences – first as the flame-swallowing “Bronze Goddess of Fire”. Then, following in the footsteps of her childhood friend and eventual costar Redd Foxx, she became a queen of raunchy, tell-it-like-it-is stand up comedy. (Let’s just […]
Between 1854 and 1929, 250,000 orphans and abandoned children were placed on East Coast city trains and sent west to live with new families. A desperate solution to a desperate problem, some of the stories turned out well and some far from well. The remarkable stories of these riders live on through their descendants, many […]
There’s no shortage of sports teams that change cities or names over the course of their franchise history. But what about the teams that just cease to exist? Perhaps no team story packs more drama into one year of existence than that of Los Dragones de Ciudad Trujillo. It’s a story that combines one of […]
If you were a kid watching TV in the 1980s and 1990s, you probably saw a fair number of “Very Special Episodes,” when the usual blissful bubble of the sitcom world was punctured by real-world issues for a half-hour. Drugs, drinking and driving, stranger danger, even AIDS. But never fear, all would be resolved by […]
Starting in the early 1970s, Norman Lear changed the face of television, fusing comedy with social commentary. Lear died on December 5th at the great old age of 101. Mo revisits their 2015 conversation for CBS Sunday Morning.
For centuries European royals married only each other. It was believed to be the best way of consolidating power. But rampant royal inbreeding had increasingly negative consequences––including genetic abnormalities (like the protuberant “Habsburg Jaw”), the dying off of whole lines, and eventually serious geopolitical instability that culminated in World War I. Mo and Barnard College […]
“Nepo Baby” is a term popularly used to describe the celebrity children of celebrity parents. But family connections affect every field of work, and always have. And where family is involved, so is drama. Mo tells the stories of three of history’s biggest Nepo Babies: Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford; President John Quincy […]
November 22, 2023, marks 60 years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the end of one of the era’s biggest comedy acts. During Kennedy’s term, Vaughn Meader’s impersonation of the president made him a household name. The comedy album “The First Family,” in which Meader uncannily played JFK, broke sales records and […]
When Candice Bergen describes her childhood as weird and eccentric, she isn’t exaggerating. She grew up with a world-famous sibling, who met presidents and movie stars. He was also a dummy – the kind made of wood. Charlie McCarthy was the creation of her ventriloquist father Edgar Bergen. Candice tells Mo what life was like […]
On this podcast we’ve honored some of our past’s most outstanding and underappreciated people and things. May they live on in memory. But let’s face it, some things deserve to disappear and be consigned to the dustbin of history. In this episode, Mo nominates three things that he’d like to see go the way of […]