So long to Trivial Pursuit marketing whiz Chris Haney…along with a couple of guys who did good after getting sober.
Sometimes, it takes an addict:
Chris Haney, a former Canadian journalist who with Scott Abbott, a sports writer for the Canadian Press, co-created the best-selling board game Trivial Pursuit, dead at age 59 after a long illness, which included kidney and circulatory problems. Haney often described himself as “a beer-swilling high school dropout” whose biggest mistake was quitting school at 17 because, as he’d tell reporters, “I should have done it when I was 12.” He and Abbott were housemates in the late 1970s when he complained about paying $11 for a Scrabble set, saying, “There must be a lot of money in games. Why don’t we invent one?” Haney soon quit his day job to work full time on the game and helped raise $40,000 by selling shares to 32 people. At the time his personal finances were so unstable he supplemented his income by redeeming beer bottles for cash and, along the way, suffered a “nervous breakdown” (which is often a euphemism for “alcoholism”). He was often described as scraggly looking and dressed in jeans with burn holes from, apparently, his own cigarettes. While we can’t be sure, the story of Chris Haney—from taking risks that others wouldn’t consider, to an early demise—makes more sense with addiction than without.
David Lewis, an ex-con who got sober and co-founded a nationally-recognized drug treatment and prisoner rehabilitation program, dead at age 54 of a bullet wound to his abdomen in what police are calling a targeted attack. Lewis was a heroin addict at age 15 and in prison by age 19 and for most of the following 17 years. After he got out he co-founded East Palo Alto, California’s “Free at Last,” which is considered a highly successful re-entry program, credited with greatly reducing crime in the area by providing life-skills training and temporary jobs for sober ex-cons. Lewis worked hard to turn wayward lives around and will be sorely missed.
So long as well to David Martinez, pastor of Victory Outreach Church of the San Fernando Valley, who died of a heart attack at age 67. The Church, which he founded in 1975 after, as he put it, roaming the streets of San Fernando for 10 years as a drug addict, operates a gang intervention program and separate rehab programs for men and women. Martinez is another hero whose positive contributions will live on.