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Monday, September 19, 2011

Death of Charles Percy

U.S. Sen. Charles Percy has died. NY Times obit is here.

Percy is mentioned in The Universe Next Door, the first book of the Schroedinger's Cat trilogy, in the Boston Cream Pie chapter, describing Benny "Eggs" Benedict's attempt to cope with the grief from the murder of his mother:

Then, one day looking through the old files in the newspaper morgue, Benny found an interview with Senator Charles Percy given in 1970, two years after the murder of his daughter. "For the first year after the murder," Senator Percy said, "my whole family lived in terror."

(Page 20 of the omnibus volume; page 32 of the 1979 Pocket Books first printing.)

Percy was a U.S. senator from Illinois when Wilson lived there as an editor for Playboy magazine. Grief over the murder of his own daughter is one of the major themes of Wilson's trilogy. (Hat tip: Michael Johnson in altfanrawilson.com).

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