‘I am completely dead now': Pilot, 72, who died in a crash penned his own obituary detailing his close brushes with death
"I am completely dead now," Gary Wolfelt wrote in his obituary. "I am surprised that it took this long to happen."
On May 5, Wolfelt left Lafayette, Indiana, in a small plane that he spent 17 years building. The plane never made it back, and Wolfelt did not survive a crash in Ohio. When his obituary was published, readers were likely surprised to see that it was penned by Wolfellt himself.
'I had several close calls throughout my lifetime. I guess that I was just lucky that something didn't get me long before now,' he wrote.
According to Wolfelt, he'd had a "long series of events and mishaps" that "should have killed me long ago."
Wolfelt knew his audience would want some examples, and he delivered. In one story, he recounted taking a fly ball to his skull during a Little League game. Sadly, his bodily sacrifice for the game did not translate into luck for his team, which he said lost 20-0.
In another tale, Wolfelt describes an unfortunate encounter with his sister's horse. The animal kicked him in his gut noting that 'any lower and I'd be singing soprano for the rest of my life.'
Gravity almost got Wolfelt twice before his final plane right. In one instance a brick chimney collapsed and nearly crushed him. In another he took a tumble down the stairs, and a metal safe came tumbling down after him.
Despite the parade of mishaps, Wolfelt remained positive and gave thanks for the important things in life.
"Thank goodness for pain killing drugs," Wolfelt wrote.
Wolfelt isn't all jokes though. Buried beneath the humor, Wolfelt spends some time in his obituary pondering the decisions he made in life. For example, Wolfelt never had children, but he did love dogs.
'Generally a dog will only bite you when you have it coming. This is not the case with many people," he noted.
At one point, the 72-year-old apologized for past wrongs, noting that he "was far from a perfect human," and allowed that he did try to "learn from my mistakes and shortcomings as I grew older."
He also shared his pride at another decision he made — remaining faithful to his wife Esther for the entirety of their 40-year marriage.
"I stayed lovingly married to the same woman for a long time," he wrote. "Hopefully if there is a life after death, I will end up with Esther and all of our dogs in a sunny field of tall grass with music playing all around me."
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New York Times
3 days ago
- New York Times
Want to See Opera in the Home of Baseball? Get a Room.
In Cooperstown, most everyone loves baseball. How could they not? It's home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, a storehouse of lore and an economic engine that draws throngs to Main Street's emporia and souvenir shops. Every summer, youth baseball camps fill the town with hordes of bright-faced Little Leaguers who come to play in the shadow of the greats. And in July, when the Hall of Fame inducts a new set of the game's legends, the eyes of the world turn to this small, picturesque place set along a lake in bucolic upstate New York. But Cooperstown also draws baseball parents who arrive each week in overwhelming numbers — 100,000 strong over the course of some summers — intent on watching every inning of every game that their children play at the two local camps. This has become something of a problem for the many people who come to town to enjoy not baseball, but opera — at the Glimmerglass Festival, held in a 918-seat venue founded in 1975. Though many Glimmerglass patrons like baseball just fine, in recent years all those parents and grandparents have made it very hard for opera fans to find a local hotel room. Robert Ainsley, the Glimmerglass Festival's artistic and general director, doesn't blame the baseball parents per se, but he calls the accommodation situation the chief gripe of his customers. 'There are people who won't come,' Ainsley said in an interview. 'They are not content to stay at the local inn or B&B half an hour to 45 minutes away.' Some Glimmerglass devotees now book months and months in advance. Many are forced to find rooms a considerable drive from the venue. The festival attempts to address their concerns by posting long lists of accommodations on its website with helpful headings on their drive times: '5 Minutes or Less' — '15 Minutes or Less' — '20 Minutes or Less' — '30 Minutes or Less.' The final category is labeled 'Beautiful, Scenic Drive.' 'A pilgrimage to Glimmerglass has become exactly that,' Ainsley said. 'For those seeking cultural succor, the faithful will book their trips up to a full year in advance; for the curious, recent converts, and neophytes, the search for humble lodgings is part of the adventure.' Most everyone in Cooperstown has noticed the swarms of baseball families. 'In the last 20-ish years, the rise in popularity of the baseball camps has put pressure on everything,' said Jeff Katz, a former mayor of Cooperstown and executive director of the Community Foundation of Otsego County. 'In the old days, people would come for two days, one night at a hotel, and go to the Hall of Fame. Now because of the camps, people stay for a week.' When it opened in 1996, Dreams Park, the camp located just outside downtown, drew 30 teams for a weeklong tournament. Now each week between June and August, more than 100 teams from across the country rotate into the compound, which features 22 fields on 165 acres. They play against one another in a tournament format. The owners of the Dreams Park declined to address questions about the dearth of accommodations, but a parent sitting outside Maskots restaurant opposite the busy entrance gates sought to explain why so many families are drawn to experience the visit together. 'Many of these children have been playing together for five to six years,' said Andrew Bannoura, from Michigan. 'This is the last big chance to play together. It's once in a lifetime.' He said he would be back again in two years with another son. The players at Dreams Park, mostly 12-year-olds, stay in bunkhouses on site. But their parents face the same pressure to find a hotel room as everyone else. 'When I told people the prices, they said, 'Are you kidding?'' said David Simpson, who traveled from Hawaii with a ballplayer son and his older brother, who came along for the experience. He found a spot in an inn about a 20-minute drive from the fields. Still, it was worth it, he said. 'There's a very special connection with baseball,' he said. 'To be able to stand on a field at Cooperstown, to give him that memory. We had that opportunity this year. So we said, 'Let's go.'' Matt Hittleman, the owner of the Brookside Inn at Laurens, about 17 miles from Cooperstown, said he puts up many baseball families, and some of the 'Glimmerglass people' stay with him too. 'They ding me on the review because it's so far away,' he said of the opera patrons. 'I didn't tell them it was close.' Katz, the former mayor, and many others recognize that all the visitors fuel a welcome seasonal economic boom. When they are not on the fields, the families are shopping or visiting other attractions like the Fenimore Art Museum or the Fenimore Farm. (Cooperstown is named after William Cooper, father of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and there remain strong associations.) 'It infuses life, and if you don't have that then your glory days are 150 years ago,' Katz said. But the families also crowd sidewalks and roadways to the point where the county tourism agency posts a schedule of Dreams Park weekly changeover dates so that residents know to alter their driving routes when new teams are coming in and can decide when it is safe to pop out to the post office. 'It's chaotic,' said Riley Jubar, a legal assistant who lives in town. 'I try to stay out of their way. Dining out is definitely hard. Parking is hard. Especially when celebrities visit. It's cool to watch. It's just hard to be around.' Don Murphy, a postal worker for 27 years, has a good vantage point for gauging local sentiment from the counter of the post office opposite the Hall of Fame. 'I hear mostly complaining,' he said, then mimicked what a town resident might theoretically say: ''I am glad the Dreams Park people are here'? No, I don't hear that.' Indeed, the county posts a countdown clock online that shows Cooperstown's 1,800 residents when the camp season will finally come to a close and the crowds recede. Baseball fans have been making the pilgrimage to Cooperstown since the Hall of Fame opened in 1939. On an average day in summer, it will draw 2,000 visitors. The Hall's nearby stadium is called Doubleday Field, though the myth that Abner Doubleday invented the game in a cow pasture there has been thoroughly debunked. Brad Rivenbark of North Carolina was walking near the museum one day last month when he stopped along Main Street with his wife and two children. 'It's the home of baseball,' Rivenbark said of Cooperstown. 'Everybody we talked to who had been here before said, 'That was the best experience of my life.'' Additional hotels have been built in recent years in the environs of the town in an effort to meet the expanded demand. Lucrative rents have also persuaded some locals to offer their homes on Airbnb for thousands of dollars each week. But it's still a tough market in which to find an affordable room. Hotel occupancy rates for the county in peak season push above 90 percent, according to data provided by the town tourism bureau. The intensity of the hotel hunt is hardly apparent, though, once one ventures onto the pastoral setting of the Glimmerglass Festival, which sits aside Lake Otsego on the site of a former turkey farm. Glimmerglass is what James Fenimore Cooper called the lake in his 'Leatherstocking Tales,' and on a recent evening, concertgoers mingled outside the theater near the fountain and fields, some enjoying chicken sandwiches and white wine. This season's musical fare features several productions including Puccini's 'Tosca' and, on this evening, Stephen Sondheim's 'Sunday in the Park with George.' David Huffman, 74, had driven up from Orange County, just north of New York, to see it. 'We are staying in Oneonta because it's so difficult to find a place around here,' he said. Glimmerglass now takes additional steps to address the hotel room situation, including publishing its programming a year in advance so that patrons can plan ahead. (This poses a challenge at a moment when many performing arts organizations find that audiences are less likely to make plans in advance and more likely to buy tickets at the last minute.) It has also shifted some performances to be matinees so that opera lovers have enough time to make a round trip in a single day. But on induction weekend at the Hall of Fame every July (this year Ichiro Suzuki, the first Japanese inductee, was a main draw), the festival knows better than to fight the crowds that flood the town. It simply shrugs and closes its doors. 'We tried a few years ago, but counterprogramming doesn't make any sense,' said Kira DeLanoy, the director of communications for the festival. On those weekends each year, as evidence that Glimmerglass is itself a fan of baseball, the festival offers up its theater as a venue for a Hall of Fame award ceremony for sportswriters and broadcasters, and as a backup location for the induction ceremony in case of rain. The accommodation squeeze extends to the festival's own staff. It puts its roughly 45 resident artists up for the season at a community college 45 minutes away. Some other apprentice workers stay in a renovated motel and apartments owned by Glimmerglass. For the rest of the performers and production crew, the festival's own housing department finds accommodation in the market. 'We have to house 400 people for the season,' Ainsley said. Wendy Curtis, a member of the festival board, has been visiting for 25 years from Millerton, N.Y., and has tried all kinds of approaches — historic inns, the local Holiday Inn, a bed-and-breakfast, a home she rented. It's always been hard, she said, but now it's gotten harder. 'You have to plan ahead,' she said. 'I sign up the previous summer. I am an early bird.' She sees the flip side to the hotel hunt, though, in all the bonds of kinship that the camp crowds seem to be experiencing. Concertgoers like her can persevere. 'If we have to take a back seat, that's just the way it works,' she said of the baseball parents. 'Families coming in because somebody is dedicated to some kind of sport, that's just fantastic.'
Los Angeles Times
01-08-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Mutton bustin': the Little League of rodeo country
SANTA FE, N.M. — It's 30 seconds before his big rodeo ride, and Julian Apodaca looks like he wants to disappear under the wide brim of his white cowboy hat. He's staring down at his boots, tugging at his lower lip, rubbing at his teary eyes. Julian's father, a former junior bull-riding champion, has a hand on each of his 5-year-old son's shoulders. 'It's OK, hijo,' Vince Apodaca says as somebody plucks the hat off the boy's head and replaces it with a helmet. 'Cowboy up, OK? I don't want no crying when you get on there.' This is the world of a little-known but beloved rodeo event where kids a couple of years out of diapers ride sheep just like the big boys ride bulls. Suburban parents put their kids in Little League. In the country, where rodeo is king, parents sign up their kids for mutton bustin'. In a flash, a rodeo hand lifts Julian from his father's arms and swings him onto the back of an unhappy sheep, which is jerking around in a small pen. 'I love you!' Vince calls out as the gate comes up. The sheep shoots into the arena, and there's Julian, clinging tightly to its neck. Suddenly the animal cuts right and Julian slips left, tumbling into the dirt. As if that wasn't bad enough, the sheep kicks him with a hind hoof as it stumbles away. There are gasps all around. Then Julian stands up, wobbles a bit, and grins. Kids have probably been climbing on the backs of sheep for as long as there have been ranches. But it was in last 30 years or so that mutton bustin' started appearing at rodeos in the West. Here at the 60th annual Rodeo de Santa Fe, which has held the event since the mid-1990s, the rules are pretty simple: If your child is between 4 and 8 years old and weighs less than 65 pounds, you can sign a liability waiver, pay 30 bucks, plop him on a sheep and tell him to hang on. Twenty kids will participate tonight in two groups, one before the rodeo begins and the second as halftime entertainment. The ride rarely lasts longer than a few seconds (sheep may not buck, but they sure can wiggle), and every boy or girl walks away with a shiny silver belt buckle stamped 'Champion.' It's not a competition, but don't tell that to the parents, especially those who want their kids to grow up to be professional bull riders. Observes Jamie Neal, who has organized the event for the last several years: 'It can get intense.' Stone T. Smith may only be 5 years old, but he's got pedigree. The sturdy blond comes from the best-known roping family in the Texas Panhandle. His father, Stran T. Smith, is a world-champion tie-down roper (he'll be riding here later tonight), and the Smith clan has relatives in the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. As his father prepares to compete, Stone's older cousin Sawyer Vest frets over some bad news. The sign-up sheet for the next round of mutton bustin' is full, and Stone might not be able to ride. 'I'm going to be so mad if he can't rock it tonight,' says Vest, 20. 'He's never been that interested in rodeo, but today I finally convinced him to do it.' Vest and Stone are standing next to the sheep pen, sizing up the animals. This flock -- which will be used for shearing, not eating -- comes from a spread up north, where the rancher lets the sheep's wool grow long so the kids will have something to hold on to. Tonight it's matted in long dreadlocks. 'All you got to do is bear-hug it,' Vest is telling Stone. 'Just get a grip on 'em.' Stone, who seems more interested in fiddling with his sunglasses than discussing grip technique, soon wanders away to climb beneath the bleachers with another little boy. Mutton bustin' is the first notch in a cowboy's belt, says Vest, who is slim and broad-jawed with curly, reddish-blond hair. As he talks, he hooks his thumbs behind his own big belt buckle, which he won a few years back at a calf-roping competition. 'This is where you start,' he says. 'I always did sheep-riding. I have lots of mutton bustin' buckles.' Vest plays safety for the Texas Tech football team, so he doesn't have much time for rodeos anymore. But he sure would be glad if Stone got into it. That just might depend, Vest says, on whether Stone gets to ride tonight. Up in the bleachers, Neilly Busch, 6, is squeezing at a dusty scrape on her forearm, trying to make it bleed. 'She's a tough girl,' says her father, Rowlie Busch. Neilly and her older brother, Ridgewalker, rode in the first round of mutton bustin'. (At 9, Ridgewalker is technically too old to ride. This is one of the little secrets of mutton bustin' -- some kids who are too old or too heavy still end up on sheep.) They both got bucked pretty quickly. 'The sheep was like, 'Get off me!' ' Neilly says. 'He was kind of scary, but he was kind of cute.' From his spot in the top row of the risers, Rowlie can look down on the staging area, where the bull riders are getting ready. They're stretching out their hamstrings, wrapping tape tight around their hands, and throwing back cans of energy drink. A couple of them have knelt down in the dust to pray. 'Rodeo's a dying thing,' says Busch, who lives in Santa Fe. 'It's good to come out here and see the real deal. These are real cowboys.' The rodeo queen rides out, the national anthem is sung, and the announcer says he's going to lead a prayer. Everybody stands up, places their hats over their hearts and closes their eyes. When it's over, the announcer calls out the words everybody's been waiting for: 'Are you ready for rodeo on a Friday night?' The crowd responds with a roar. As the night wears on, rain clouds move in. The announcer breathlessly talks his way through the steer wrestling and saddle-bronc riding, and the crowd kicks back with popcorn, Indian tacos and Frito pies. For the uninitiated, the Frito pie is a favorite Southwestern snack of ground beef, chopped onions and loads of red and green and chiles piled on a bed of Fritos corn chips, sometimes served in the bag. Dominick Lopez, 5, is clutching his tummy. 'I've got a stomachache,' he says. 'Those are butterflies,' says cousin Manuel Cavanaugh -- an old hand at mutton bustin' at age 10. His advice for his cousin, who is wearing child-sized silver chaps, and for his friend Maureen Martin, 8, another first-timer: 'Just inhale and exhale.' Manuel, who has ridden the woolly beasts five times, tells the kids that he hung on best when he gripped the sheep's shoulders. But Maureen has a different technique in mind. 'I'm gonna grab it around the waist,' she says. Each kid wears a protective helmet, a vest, long pants and a long-sleeved shirt -- safety measures that were introduced a few years ago after one child who caught a hoof in the stomach had the air knocked out of him. As for the sheep, which weigh about 70 to 100 pounds each, organizers say they have never been harmed. But animal rights groups -- frequent critics of rodeo sports -- have condemned mutton bustin' as animal abuse. They've also called it child abuse. At tonight's rodeo, Maureen and Dominick's names are called and their parents hand them up to the platform next to the bull chutes, which rodeo hands have stuffed with bawling sheep. Neal, the organizer, is going from kid to kid, making sure each has the proper safety gear, when Sawyer Vest taps on her back. 'Excuse me, ma'am. You don't happen to have an extra spot?' he asks. 'Can we get Stone in? Stone Smith?' She looks at him for a long second and then bends down to Stone. 'Are you sure you want to ride?' she asks. The boy shakes his head no and then buries his face in his cousin's knees. 'Yes, he does,' Vest says. 'He does. He's been talking about it all day.' Jamie looks again at Vest, who is nodding his head earnestly and patting Stone on the head. 'OK,' she says. 'Get him ready.' Big drops of monsoon rain are starting to fall, and the wind is picking up from the south. The kids are getting lowered down, one by one, onto the sheep. 'Dominick Lopez!' the announcer cries, and out sprints a sheep carrying Dominick, his chaps flapping. He's so tiny and hangs on so well that the crowd of about 1,000 cheers him as loudly as they might a bull rider approaching his eighth second. When Dominick finally falls, he stands up right away and walks chin-up out of the arena. 'Maureen Martin!' the announcer calls out, and her sheep flies into the middle of the ring. As the sheep circles back, Maureen is still on top, her arms clutched around its belly. Her technique pays off: She stays on 10 seconds, longer than anyone else. Finally, it's Stone's turn. He looks at the sheep he's about to ride with quivering lips. Just before he gets lifted up, the rodeo hand stops him. 'No spurs,' the man shouts. The spurs are stripped from the boots and Stone is plunked onto the sheep. 'This is us right here, big dog!' Sawyer calls out to Stone. 'You got this.' The gate comes up and the sheep streaks out. Almost immediately, Stone rolls off onto the ground. He sits up, lets out a mouthful of dusty spit and starts to cry. Later, he poses for a photograph between his cousin and father, their hands on his shoulders. He's beaming. So are his father and Vest. Like every other mutton buster, he walks away with a belt buckle -- his first. The sheep are herded back to their pens for some feed and some peace. The bull riders fall to defeat or ride to glory. And the kids go home, to grow a little taller, and maybe try again.
Yahoo
24-07-2025
- Yahoo
Hulk Hogan, a polarizing wrestling star, always belonged to Tampa Bay
Like Bigfoot in a bandana, Hulk Hogan was the stuff of Tampa Bay legend. Locals traded stories of seeing the WWE hall of famer around town, locking eyes with him over the eggs at Nature's Food Patch in Clearwater or spotting his glistening blonde mustache as he zipped across a causeway in a convertible. Fans — of both wrestling and celebrity gossip — rushed to ogle Hogan slinging cans of his Real American Beer at Doc Ford's in St. Petersburg in 2024. When a teenager flipped her car on the Veteran's Expressway later in the year, two men pulled over, stabbed her airbags with a ballpoint pen and dragged her from the wreckage. One of them was Hogan. Hogan, born Terry Gene Bollea, died Thursday morning in Clearwater, according to city officials. He was 71. To some, Hogan was a campy cartoon superhero come to life. He sprung off television screens to T-shirts and action figures and lunch boxes, so popular in the 1980s and '90s that Make-A-Wish sent him to visit 20 sick kids per week. To others, he was a polarizing figure known for his vaccine denialism and his racial slurs caught on tape. He dabbled in politics, hopping onstage at Madison Square Garden in October in a feather boa to cheer for Donald Trump with a throaty 'Let's win this, brother!' Through it all, Hogan always belonged to Tampa Bay. 'He made his home here for so many years. He was a local celebrity for so many years,' said Barry Rose, who archives professional wrestling history in Florida. 'He was always portrayed as a kind of Florida guy.' A very Tampa childhood Like many Floridians, Hogan was born somewhere else. He entered the world at a Georgia hospital in August 1953, weighing 10 pounds and 7 ounces. He moved to Tampa as a child, where he became a junior bowling champion and imposing Little League pitcher. According to a story from Knight-Ridder Newspapers in 1987, Hogan weighed 190 pounds by the time he was 12. Hogan told the Tampa Bay Times in 2014 that he grew up 'south of Gandy by like two blocks, right behind the ABC Liquors.' On many a Fourth of July, he lit sparklers and watched fireworks through the palm trees at Ballast Point Pier. When an elbow injury ended his sports career at age 14, Hogan swapped his bat for a guitar. 'He rocked, playing bass guitar in bands called Koco, Ruckus and Infinity's End,' the Knight-Ridder story said. 'One memorable evening his junior year, he streaked stark naked across the dimly lit football field where Robinson High seniors were receiving their diplomas.' After graduating from Robinson High School, Hogan studied music and business at the University of South Florida. It was his bass guitar that brought him back to sports. Wrestling brothers Jerry and Jack Brisco saw Hogan slapping the bass at a Tampa bar. They recognized the bronzed behemoth, who was a regular in the audience at local wrestling matches. 'It looked really strange,' Jerry Brisco told Knight-Ridder Newspapers. 'Here was this huge guy, 6 foot 8, with what looked like a toothpick in his hands, playing bass guitar. He had blond hair, plenty of it and a headband.' Hogan started working out at the Tampa Sportatorium, a wrestling training facility. 'They exercised me till I was ready to faint,' Hogan told the Times in 2021. 'And then they got me in the ring, and Hiro Matsuda sat between my legs. He put his elbow in the middle of my shin, and he grabbed my toe, and he broke my leg. He just snapped my leg in half. So that was my introduction to wrestling.' By the mid-1980s, Vince McMahon brought wrestling, once a regional phenomenon, to the national level. Hogan was the perfect star to unite the country, with his matches airing on MTV and soundtracked by Cyndi Lauper. 'The other aspect was the merchandise,' Rose said. 'So you're bringing a lot of kids to professional wrestling. They've got a Hulk Hogan T-shirt, they've got the giant foam fingers, they're eating ice cream bars.' He was able to create a persona that people bought in right away, Rose said. 'I think if he had lived another 20 years or so, he would have still been 'Hulk Hogan.'' When he was wrestling, Hogan easily charmed crowds as the 'babyface,' or the good guy. He also could just as well play the 'heel,' wrestling's bad guy. The same could be said for his life outside the ring. A muddled legacy If Orlando has Mickey Mouse, Clearwater had the Hulkster. That's the thinking behind the wrestler's decision to open up Hogan's Beach, a restaurant on the Courtney Campbell Causeway. After the VH1 reality show 'Hogan Knows Best' showcased Hogan's life in 2005, swarms of fans started showing up to get a peek at his Clearwater house. 'My partner, Ben Mallah, has put his heart and soul into this place,' Hogan told the Times in 2014. 'He goes, 'You need a presence in Tampa. The tourists all come to Universal and Disney, and they're all looking for you.' And it's true.' Other local businesses followed. Hogan himself flexed his oily muscles at every 'brother!' that passed by. He posed for photographs and signed autographs (one viral photo, not necessarily taken in Clearwater, shows his signature in a copy of 'The Illead'). Hogan told the Times that he didn't want people to come all the way to his restaurant and not get a photo with him. 'This whole Hulkamania thing is international,' Hogan said in 2014. 'Sometimes that doesn't sink in with me. I think, 'American icon? Oh, okay.' To me, I'm still Terry from Tampa.' Then came the scandals. Among them: a leaked 2006 sex tape with the wife of Todd Clem, aka radio host Bubba the Love Sponge, that Gawker posted in 2012. Then another bombshell tape was posted in 2015. The second video, according to former Times columnist Daniel Ruth, showed Hogan 'engaging in a profanity F-bomb (laden) rant in which he repeatedly dropped more racist N-bombs than an Aryan Nation convention.' When online news outlets posted the clip, World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. severed ties with Hogan. But the local sightings — and signings — continued. Hogan ventured to Sunset Music Festival (he liked to work out to dubstep music). He apologized profusely and publicly, with a special nod to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Tampa Bay, who he often worked with locally. Not everyone accepted his words, but within a few years, Hogan had patched up his public image enough to rejoin wrestling royalty. He once again became the face of WWE and Wrestlemania. 'This is special to me because I've lived here my whole life. I've traveled the whole world, lived in California, lived in Japan. This place, the quality of life, the people that live here, this is the greatest-kept secret,' Hogan told the Times in 2021, after being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame and before hosting WrestleMania 37 with Titus O'Neil. In fall 2023, Hogan wed yoga instructor Sky Daily at Indian Rocks Baptist Church. His engagement announcement at downtown St. Petersburg's Birchwood Inn two months prior had gone viral. 'The 70–year–old wore a black tuxedo with a black headband as he greeted his bride, 45, who was clad in a strapless lace gown," wrote the Times. 'My new life starts now,' Hogan posted on social media. In the hours following reports of Hogan's death, reporters, tourists and locals flooded Clearwater Beach. At Hogan's Beach Shop, supporters laid bouquets as tribute. Some passersby stopped to take pictures of the shop and its large Hogan mannequin inside. A woman held the hand of a young child, and stopped in front of the doors. 'Say goodbye?' the woman asked. The toddler looked up at the Hogan mannequin. 'Goodbye,' the toddler said. Times staff writers Lizzy Alspach, Alexa Coultoff and Christopher Spata contributed to this report. Information from the Tampa Bay Times archive was used. Solve the daily Crossword
