Twenty-five years ago right around the time I write this I was sitting in my first college class.

Turns out, it was a key moment of my life.

It’s not often that something like this can be so easily pegged to a particular date. In this case I can recall it because bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughn had died the night before.

A quote from Vaughn was written across the blackboard of my Journalism 121 class. The professor, a blues fan, was especially hit. “Awful,” he said to the class. “And right after he’d cleaned up.”

Indeed.

The untimely death of... More