Warren Christopher, 1925-2011, and Danny Stiles, 1923-2011

Warren Christopher and Danny Stiles were both men that either you’ve never heard of or you’ve forgotten about. Christopher was a public servant, and Stiles was a disk jockey, both for a long time. There was nothing to connect them in the course of their long, rich lives but for the coincidence of their passing — Christopher died last Friday; Stiles, a week ago — and the fact that they were both the last of their breeds.

Christopher left the bigger footprint. Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of State, Christopher bounced between law practice and public service. He was the head of what came to be known as the Christopher Commission, which suggested reforms to the LAPD following the Rodney King incident and everything that followed that, and, as SecState he was instrumental in both the Oslo Accords and the Dayton Agreement, the latter of which worked out pretty well. The consummate appointee, he was well-known for his equanimity — regarded “as every husband’s ideal for a wife’s divorce lawyer.”

Stiles, the Vicar of Vintage, Danny Stiles on Your Dials, playing some of the greatest music of the Twentieth Century! He was a DJ, and an itinerant one at that, as the Oldies radio format slowly evaporated. He, and his 78s and 45s, specialized in the music of a long time ago, the big bands and the crooners, pre-1950. In the NYC area, he was a fixture on the radio for over forty years, on whichever station would have him. He bounced from station to station, sometimes buying his own airtime, ultimately becoming the last to offer what was once considered the “Oldies” (a format which now encompasses Interpol and Jimmy Eat World). He evinced the broadcasting skills of a time when radio was king: poetry punctuating the who/what/when/where of cuts that hadn’t been played in decades, signing in and out with alliterative gorgeousness that was nearly as good as the forgotten platters he spun.

This is not to say that there will never be another gentleman diplomat, or another fierce torchbearer for a slowly receding genre of music, but the fact that the Platonic ideal of each passed within a week of each other marries them, briefly. They each speak, implicitly and expressly, of some of the finer qualities that we will grow nostalgic for.

Brent Cox is all over the Internet.

Christopher photo via Wikimedia Commons; photo of Stiles with Count Basie courtesy of his website.