Bill Moyers left us on June 26 at the age of 91.[1] His declining health over the past few years, and now his death, have left us longing for more of what he gave so generously in life: insatiable curiosity, clarifying insight, empathy grounded in respect, courage tempered by humility, and optimism anchored in realism.
Because of his life’s work—and because his career spanned a remarkable era in mass communication, from the birth of television to the rise of the internet—we are fortunate to have an extraordinary archive of his spoken and written words. These will continue to inform, inspire, and challenge future generations.

As the fourth-born kid of five, like anyone from a big family, I grew up in an ensemble. We were spread enough in years that school kept us segregated by age, so we had two main gathering sites. The first was the dinner table, where the social task was to make a worthy offering to the highly opinionated conversation. Maybe there was no offering within reach, other family members being older and more experienced. Maybe you stood to underscore a point or fetched a dictionary to prove that “flaccid” is pronounced with a “k” in the middle or happened on a witty remark and sparked a few laughs or tried to vanish into the wallpaper to avoid negative attention.

In 2022, I wrote an essay for Soundboard: The Journal of the Guitar Foundation of America, but my name was misprinted in the print edition as Vish S. Watson. No great tragedy, these things happen.
In 1907, Israel Baline, a singing waiter in the Bowery, penned “Marie, From Sunny Italy,” but when the handbills accidentally attributed it to I. Berlin, Baline liked the name, thought it had a classy ring, and promptly adopted it, upgrading the “I” to Irving.
I myself have no aspirations for fame or fortune and no thoughts of upgrading my name.