Farewell to a great lady

We're losing our icons from a great era.

Bea Arthur died the other day, and in addition to being a great actress who created iconic characters, she was also one of the survivors of an era when television still tried to say something.

Arthur was 86, and a family spokesman said only that she died of cancer. Most of us will remember her as Dorothy from "The Golden Girls," but it was her earlier role as Maude -- first on "All in the Family" and later on her own show -- that made her a household name.

Maude was a big brassy woman, an early feminist who took no crap from anybody. What made her a memorable character was that she was a female lead who wasn't there for her sex appeal, and she was anything but subservient to the men in her life.

Her biography on the Internet Movie Database contains a fascinating fact I never knew about her, one that if it were on Wikipedia I would assume was a hoax. According to IMDB, Arthur served in the United States Marine Corps, presumably when she was much younger. She was also a qualified medical technician, which might have been what she was doing in the Corps.

Her first show was one of those great Norman Lear comedies that actually tried to say something. That may be hard to believe in this era of shows that go out of their way not to offend anyone, but on "Maude," they actually did a show about the title character having an abortion.

Yes, there were numerous complaints.

I'm sure Lear -- and Arthur -- wore those complaints as a badge of honor.

Nearly 40 years later, those Lear shows seem impossibly dated, but compare them with more recent "iconic" shows such as "Seinfeld," and you'll see similar levels of humor in shows that aren't even in the same universe when it comes to having meaning.

Yeah, I'm old.

But I'll miss Bea Arthur, and I have a feeling we will not see her like again.