Shelly Saltman talks about the loss of the talented Mary Tyler Moore
This week America lost one the greatest and most talented entertainers in Mary Tyler Moore. Shelly Saltman who serves as News and Sports Talk Florida’s historian knew Moore.
In his weekly podcast that normally looks at sports he talks about how talented Moore was. How she was a guest star on the Andy Williams Show, a program that he served as a producer on.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, ran seven seasons and won 29 Emmys, a record that stood for a quarter century until “Frasier” broke it in 2002.
Moore endured personal tragedy in real life, too. The same year “Ordinary People” came out, her only child, Richard, who’d had trouble in school and with drugs, accidentally shot himself at 24. Her younger sister, Elizabeth, died at 21 from a combination of a painkillers and alcohol.
In her 1995 autobiography “After All,” Moore admitted she helped her terminally ill brother try to commit suicide by feeding him ice cream laced with drugs. It failed and her brother John, died three months later in 1992 of kidney cancer.
Moore herself lived with juvenile diabetes for some 40 years and told of her struggle in her 2009 book, “Growing Up Again.” She also spent five weeks at the Betty Ford Clinic in 1984 for alcohol abuse, writing that they “transformed my life — and gave me a chance to start growing up — even at my advanced age … of 45.”
Shelly, also talks about tennis star Coco Vandeweghe and how she battled all the way to this week’s Australian Open semi- finals where she lost to Venus Williams. Coco, could be on her way to breaking through and Shelly talks about her family.
It was her grandfather Ernie Vandeweghe, long time team doctor for the Los Angeles Lakers that set the tone for Coco’s gifted family.
