My wife and I happened to catch his final report under very weird circumstances. On a whim, we decided to take our daughter and check into the Hilton Americas downtown – do that tourist in your own hometown thing. (Hey, I Pricelined the room – it was about $60.)

Back before Discovery Green opened, there was absolutely nothing to do with your kids downtown on a Saturday evening, so after an early dinner at Josephine’s, we headed back to the room to watch the news. Dave introduced Marvin, who was flat on his back in M.D. Anderson, looking every bit like the man who would die that very night.

But he was still strong enough to excoriate, in that now all-but-extinct genteel Southern accent you used to hear all the time here, a bunch of places for having “rodents, rrrooooaches and even slime!” on the premises. And with one final “Marr-vin Zindler EYE-WIT-NESS NEWS” he left the building permanently, leaving our TV news scene as bland and generic as that of Orlando, Florida. (Below that clip is part one of the pretty great 11-part tribute Channel 13 put together a a week or so after he died):

My only close encounter with the man himself came second-hand, via my son John Henry. One day Marvin came by to do a remote at John Henry’s Pre-K, and later that night, John Henry was trying to tell us what had happened at school that day. “That white man came to my school,” he said.

So head on over to the recently renamed Bellaire Zindler Park and pour one out for the man. And then go play some good golf, good tennis, or whatever makes you happy. – John Nova Lomax