BILL HEYWOOD, a fixture on Phoenix’s AM band since the 1960s, checked into a room at the Scottsdale Homewood Suites with his wife a few days after the 2012 New Year. The inseparable pair checked out shortly thereafter. The disc jockey, morning guy, talk show host, and broadcast jack-of-all-trades consummated a suicide pact with his wife with matching gunshot wounds to the head.

After a career that approached the top of the ratings heap across five decades, and boasted interviews with everyone from John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Frank Sinatra, the flailing talker had departed the flailing industry in 2005 for a field that looked more promising: real estate. Phoenix homebuyers didn’t see it that way. The bubble, real estate’s and Heywood’s, soon burst. In 2006, a local home section reported that “the Heywoods have succeeded marvelously” in their “redesign and renovation of their cozy villa in the Biltmore neighborhood.” But after downsizing into that “cozy villa,” the bank foreclosed. The bad news didn’t stop there. The couple filed for bankruptcy. Susan Heywood, living with a heart condition at 70, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Seventy-five-year-old Bill Heywood loved his wife even more than he loved the microphone. It appeared that he would have neither. So, with professional, financial, and medical problems looming, the couple meticulously planned a nightmare ending to their storybook marriage. They left detailed instructions for their funeral and even a warning courteously posted on the door for the hotel maid.

It’s hard not to see Bill Heywood’s demise as a metaphor for the industry that helped make and break him.
...
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/08/0 ... igning-off