Sister Ruth sent me an obit with a familiar name, that of John Saunders – a man I met many times. He was a news broadcaster at WSPD who would host a little show just outside the Paramount Theater in Toledo, OH around noon each weekday. Whenever we were in Toledo, our Dad would make a point of being there and over time Mr. Saunders knew him by name. At the end of each broadcast, he would choose someone from the small crowd to select a key from a well-populated key ring and, if it opened the little treasure chest, you won what was inside. I lost count of the times Dad won and now I must confess I suspect that Mr. Saunders rigged it for him. I saw The Day The Earth Stood Still at the Paramount with free tickets from that little game.
According to the Toledo Blade, he was a war hero before I was even born:
Mr. Saunders was born in Crawfordsville, Ind., and his father moved the family to Toledo in 1927, when he was hired by the former Toledo News-Bee as a reporter and a cartoonist.
He graduated from Libbey High School in 1942 and attended Wabash College in Crawfordsville until he left to serve in the U.S. Army in 1943. Mr. Saunders was a staff sergeant and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, for which he received a Bronze Star, his wife said.
But I never knew he took over writing storylines for Mary Worth in 1979, shortly after he left WSPD.
In 1950, when Saunders was well into his own successful career as a broadcast journalist, his father, Allen, solicited his help with a Steve Roper sequence involving a fictional radio personality. The elder Saunders was impressed with his son's writing talents and offered him a part-time job as a ghostwriter. In 1955 John assumed full responsibility for Steve Roper. When his father retired in 1979, Saunders was selected to succeed him as the writer for Mary Worth.
Mary Worth, one of the classic soap-opera comic strips, was created in 1938 by Allen Saunders and artist Ken Ernst as a replacement for the Depression Era feature Apple Mary. The "new" Mary debuted as a widow of independent means, quick to dispense matronly advice to the lovelorn and offer homespun commentary on many subjects of public concern.
Before you turn up your nose at Mary Worth, be sure to read what Josh Ozersky has to say about Mary Worth and Nothingness:
The recent success of the Theatre de Complicité's brilliant production of Ionesco's The Chairs, though, suggests that there may indeed be a market for Absurdism in these United States! Why not? Who likes a gag more than we do? And it's not as if we have no precedents, either. There are the Marx Brothers, Apollo 13, Stanley Milgram's famous experiment, and of course John Saunders and Joe Giella's sublime Mary Worth.
Holy Toledo! This guy was Ohio’s Jean Paul Sartre – and I was only there for free tickets! Makes me want to scream “Johnny. We hardly knew ye,” but all that comes out is “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!”
8:14:38 PM 
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