It just so happened that I was watching the documentary “Paper Clips” with some students this afternoon when I heard Tom Bosley had passed away. It was a bittersweet moment as I watched Tom Bosley reading his eloquent letter out loud only to have my students ask, “So who is Tom Bosley?”
But then again, I am not sure Tom Bosley would mind. It seems as if Bosley was perhaps content to live out his values with a quiet humility and integrity his generation often embraced. In the documentary, a portrait of a group of students who create a Holocaust memorial from paper clips, Bosley , who was raised Jewish, tells them “In the future I will remember your project with every paper clip I come in contact with…I am moved by your endeavors.” He later explained in an interview his part in the film by saying “It was important for me as a Jew to do it; I had lost a great uncle–whom I never met–in the Holocaust.”
So while many of us do indeed remember him fondly as “Happy Days” Mr. Cunningham, I think in his honor we also need to remember the other, not-so-famous side of the star