Paul Newman died...

It's the end of an era. How many of us were influenced by his many movies? By his charitable works? By his insistence on privacy in a very public business? He was 83, and of course it was cancer. Early reports don't identify it as lung cancer, but I suspect that was the culprit.

He died at his home in Connecticut, yesterday (Friday). By all accounts, his long marriage to Joanne Woodward was a good one, although both said there were harsh words at times, and he would retreat to "his part of the house" until everything cooled down. How normal is that?

We'll miss him. I last saw him in Empire Falls, playing the role of Ed Harris' scalawag of a father to perfection. I'd read that he loved the role, so entirely different from any kind of heroic do-gooder. He also played in Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool.

Our Book Club is getting ready to read Russo's Empire Falls; Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for writing that book. No wonder Paul Newman was eager to play those parts...the dialog and characterizations were perfect for him.

I'm sure TV will be playing all Newman's movies now and we can again enjoy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the rest of his amazing roles.

Off the screen, he quietly changed lives with his "Hole in the Wall" kids' camps around the world, using his profits from salad dressings and pasta sauce to establish the camps for disabled children. OK, y'all know all of this already. I'm sure there's a lot we don't know about this private person.