Gilligan’s Ship Sets Sail -- RIP

Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.
Joseph Addison (1672–1719), English essayist


Bob Denver, who played Gilligan on the 1960s television show ''Gilligan's Island,'' died Friday, but it was announced today. Gilligan made Bob Denver an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers. He was 70. According to the New York Times, Denver died at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina of complications from treatment he was receiving for cancer.

Denver also played Maynard G. Krebs, the beatnik friend of Dwayne Hickman's Dobie in the ''The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,'' which aired from 1959 to 1963. ''Gilligan's Island'' lasted on CBS from 1964 to 1967. It was a story about seven stranded travelers on a deserted Island after their small boat was wrecked in a storm during a three-hour cruise.