Bonnie Tyler has Left the Stage

by Pa Rock

Music Lover

I remember well the first time I heard Bonnie's Tyler's powerful love ballad, "Total Eclipse of the Heart."  It was in the mid-1980's, so the song, which was recorded in 1983 had been around a couple of years, but my taste in music ran to the "oldies" of my generation, American rock and British Invasion songs from the 1960's.  Ms. Tyler represented "modern" music, and artists like her and Hall and Oates had yet to hit my radar.

Our family had a new (well, lightly used) full-sized Chevy van which we had just purchased and were anxious to take on a road trip.  I'm fairly certain it was Thanksgiving weekend in 1985 and we had only had the big car for a couple of months and were anxious to put it to use on a long roadtrip.  I was an elementary school principal and. my wife taught at a neighboring school in the same district, and we had three children, roughly ages 6-12, who were all in school.

We selected Chicago (where my wife had relatives who would host us for a couple of days) as our destination.   Road distance from Noel Missouri, to Chicago, Illinois, was over 600 miles which put St. Louis as about the halfway point at a little over 300 miles - mostly a straight ride along Interstate 44.  Our family departed Noel as quickly as we could after school let out on Wednesday and drove straight through, managing to hit St. Louis as rush hour was ending, though it was getting dark and the traffic was still heavy.  One of the sights we saw in St. Louis that night, in addition to the Arch, was a fuel tanker that had just crashed on a busy overpass.   The tanker portion of the vehicle was still on the overpass, but the cab was over the edge and dangling precariously above several lanes of traffic.   I read about it the next day in a Chicago newspaper and learned that the driver had died in the accident.

Things slowed down considerably after St. Louis, and as all of the passengers in our van began falling asleep, I navigated the long and lonely road from St. Louis to Chicago by my lonesome listening to radio - and at some point during the night Bonnie Tryler sang "Total Eclipse of the Heart" to me and left an impression that has lasted forty years.  

What a singer!  What a song!

The gravelly-voiced Welsh singer, Bonnie Tyler, died yesterday at a hospital in Portugal, after waging a losing battle against an undisclosed illness.   Alexa and I remain big fans of her music, and we often find ourselves trying to sing along to her breakout song "It's a Heartache" (1978) and "Holding Out for a Hero" (from the movie "Footloose" in 1984"), and, of course, "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

What a voice!  What a loss!