Michael Landon

Michael Landon, 54, who championed simple values for 30 years on television and became one of its best-loved stars, died yesterday of cancer. Death came at his home in Malibu, Calif., less than three months after Mr. Landon was diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer. He drew more than 100,000 letters of support during his battle against the disease, and was praised by health experts as a feisty, positive-thinking role model. He made the covers of Life, People and TV Guide magazines in May and June.

It was night when Karen Gray reached Collingswood after a six-hour drive from New Carlisle, Ohio, but she was too excited to sleep. Instead, she went straight to the public library. There, a photo in the 1954 Collingswood High School yearbook was the best physical evidence Gray found during three days of research that television star Michael Landon grew up in Collingswood as Eugene "Ugy" Orowitz and was a track star by the time he graduated. "I don't know what I was expecting, but I was surprised that there was nothing in Collingswood that says Michael Landon is from there," said Gray, 31, a researcher for a Michael Landon fan club on the Internet who visited the town in October.

Michael Landon's widow, Cindy Landon, arrives at Knight Park, Collingswood, with her children to dedicate a swing set in his name. Landon grew up there as Eugene Orowitz, track star and '54 grad. The town also inducted him into the high school's Athletic Hall of Fame.

THE NATION Miles Davis, Jazz pioneer Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss Martha Graham, Dance innovator Red Grange, "Galloping ghost" Tennessee Ernie Ford, Balladeer Michael Landon, Television hero Floyd McKissick, Rights leader Gene Tierney, Film star John Tower, Military expert Colleen Dewhurst, Actress, activist Leo Durocher, Bane of umpires Redd Foxx, TV's junkman Arthur Murray, Teacher of...

No one would think of saying mean things about the dead, especially the nationally beloved Michael Landon. So get it straight that we're talking here about Landon's final TV movie, US (Channel 10 at 9 tonight). We're not talking about Michael Landon. We love Michael Landon, may he rest in peace. But US is a sappy dog - disjointed, unbelievable, searingly sweet. It's so sweet that the prostitute character goes on dates for free, so unbelievable that it's set in a Los Angeles that has no smog.

Michael Landon meant no more to me than Alf Landon, the Kansas governor who was clobbered by FDR in the 1936 presidential election. As Hollywood deaths go, I was much more concerned with Lee Remick's the same week. What class! But was Lee Remick ascending into Heaven on a Daily News front page? No, Michael Landon was - in a publicity still photo from the TV fantasy-drama series, "Highway to Heaven," unearthed from our files by editors Dan Hawkins and Rick Selvin. Yes sir, on Tuesday, July 2, there was Collingswood-born Michael all over our Page 1 . . . and Page 3 . . . and Pages 27, 28 and 29. You had to go inside the paper to read about the new Supreme Court appointee, another hat in the ring for Bill Gray's Congress seat, more on the continuing coverage of Philadelphia's newest cardinal, the never-ending deadlock over Pennsylvania's budget, the arrest of a cop for murder and Yugoslavia's ordeal.

James L. Brooks, Garry Marshall, Quinn Martin, Diane Sawyer and Grant Tinker have been selected for induction into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame, it was announced earlier this week. They are the 86th through 90th inductees into the Hall of Fame, which is at the Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, Fla. The five will be officially inducted in November in a ceremony at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theater in North Hollywood, Calif. Brooks ("Taxi," "The Simpsons," "The Critic")

Michael Landon made his doom public on April 8, calling reporters to his Malibu home and inviting millions to witness his dying. He did not put it quite that way. He said he hoped for a miraculous delivery from advanced, inoperable cancer. But he also said he'd "just had a lucky life," sounding the note of finality. And suddenly, it seemed, the world, or at least the country, was watching. Why did it mean so much? We get daily, casual exposure to celebrity sex and addiction, to diseases and troubles, whether we seek it or not. But death is different; it's unspeakable, the last taboo.

When he was diagnosed in early April with inoperable cancer of the pancreas, Michael Landon said, "I'm still hoping to beat it . . . but life has been good to me. " Landon knew the odds of conquering the killer were very small (only 5 percent of its victims are alive 5 years after diagnosis). As it turned out, he died within days of the three-month survival rate of pancreatic cancer patients. In Landon's case, the disease already had spread to his liver when it was discovered. He learned of his condition on April 5, after cutting short a skiing vacation in Utah because of stomach pains that had started six weeks earlier.

Code blue: I fell asleep during the season premiere of "St. Elsewhere. " One minute, the soothing Nurse Rosenthal was offering the furious Mrs. Mark Craig "a hot, relaxing cup of coffee;" the next, I was so relaxed as to be unconscious. You could have put me in Mrs. Hufnagel's bed and folded me right up. I wouldn't have known a thing. ("St. Elsewhere" in-joke.) Next I knew, Jane Pauley and Deborah Norville were harmonizing sweetly through a Gumbleless "Today" show. An entire evening of my life was gone.

The relationship between Collingswood and hometown hero Michael Landon sometimes resembled the soap-operatic TV sagas that made Landon a star. The Little House on the Prairie actor has been dead for two decades, but the drama continues. Two days after Christmas, a plaque honoring Landon was brought to the office of a weekly newspaper in the borough by someone who claimed it had been headed for the scrap heap. The roughly 14-by-16-inch marker, which weighs more than 20 pounds, was removed in November during renovations to a Knight Park playground known as "the Little Treehouse on the Prairie.

Frank C. Beazley, 83, of Bala Cynwyd, retired president of Center City Film & Video Inc. and husband of former TV personality Jane "Pixanne" Norman, died of complications from Parkinson's disease March 4 at their winter home in Palm Springs, Calif. In 1961, Mr. Beazley was appointed general sales manager at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia. At the station he met his future wife, who was appearing in a children's program as Pixanne, the inhabitant of an enchanted forest. "Frank was very creative and innovative," Norman said.

HAVING lived in the Philadelphia area for 18 years and in Pittsburgh for five, I've attended Flyers and Penguins games and love both teams. But the difference between the teams lies in the fans who attend the games, and it's remarkable. Maybe the Flyers would have won if the fans embraced and supported them during the games instead of prioritizing negative energy toward the Penguins. Flyers fans, my advice is to cheer for your players who work so hard and let them know how much you appreciate and love them.

TED TURNER has the tendency to be nutty himself so it may not be surprising that the media mogul says the 9/11 attacks were an act of desperation, and the hijackers were "brave," but probably "a little nuts. " The AOL Time Warner vice chairman reasoned that the World Trade Center was attacked "because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life. " "I think they were brave at the very least," Turner said of the 19 airliner hijackers believed to have committed the attacks, adding that they "might have been a little nuts.

James L. Brooks, Garry Marshall, Quinn Martin, Diane Sawyer and Grant Tinker have been selected for induction into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame, it was announced earlier this week. They are the 86th through 90th inductees into the Hall of Fame, which is at the Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, Fla. The five will be officially inducted in November in a ceremony at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theater in North Hollywood, Calif. Brooks ("Taxi," "The Simpsons," "The Critic")

Michael Landon's widow, Cindy Landon, arrives at Knight Park, Collingswood, with her children to dedicate a swing set in his name. Landon grew up there as Eugene Orowitz, track star and '54 grad. The town also inducted him into the high school's Athletic Hall of Fame.

It was night when Karen Gray reached Collingswood after a six-hour drive from New Carlisle, Ohio, but she was too excited to sleep. Instead, she went straight to the public library. There, a photo in the 1954 Collingswood High School yearbook was the best physical evidence Gray found during three days of research that television star Michael Landon grew up in Collingswood as Eugene "Ugy" Orowitz and was a track star by the time he graduated. "I don't know what I was expecting, but I was surprised that there was nothing in Collingswood that says Michael Landon is from there," said Gray, 31, a researcher for a Michael Landon fan club on the Internet who visited the town in October.

The moon has apparently hit Julia Roberts' eye like a big pizza pie. We guess it's amore. Not with another actor, not with another singer, but with a taxi driver. A hunky Italian water-taxi driver named Mario Fontanello. Strapping Young Mario, described as resembling an Italian Charlie Sheen, was hired to chauffeur Julia around Venice. She's in town shooting a Woody Allen movie. Mario started out ferrying her from set to set, and the next thing you know they're having private little sightseeing tours all over town.

Thomas R. "Tommy" Burnley, a retired Army master sergeant and U.S. Postal Service letter carrier, died Monday. He was 64 and lived in Folsom, Delaware County. Burnley was employed as a mailman for 17 years, working out of the 30th Street station, the Morton post office and finally the Folsom post office. He retired in January. He was 17 when he ran away from home in Germantown to join the Army. He served in the Korean and Vietnam wars. He retired with the rank of master sergeant after 20 years.

The Duchess of York, already in hot water over those yet-to-be explained photographs of her vacation in 1990 with a Texas millionaire bachelor, got hit with another dose of media outrage yesterday for girlish behavior on a Monday flight back to London from a weekend in Florida. Among her on-flight offenses: putting a paper bag over her head and sticking her tongue out through a hole in it; throwing napkins and sugar packets about the first-class cabin; making faces at her father, and disturbing fellow passengers with birdlike noises.