UPDATE: Here’s a terrific piece of video of Billy and Sully with Neil Cavuto. Looks like Billy was a Republican, but both most certainly come across as genuine, warm, positive class acts. Some sites describe Mays as a “pop-culture icon.” Well, we could use a hundred more like him. Terrible loss. END UPDATE

Sometime last night or this morning St. Peter was greeted with the famous words, “Billy Mays here!” Fox News is reporting that television pitchman Billy Mays is dead. He was only 50.

Just last month I posted a review of “Pitchmen,” an entertaining and compelling Discovery Channel reality show starring Mays and his friend and fellow pitchman Anthony Sullivan. In the weeks since, the show only improved becoming much more than a celebration of American ingenuity, but also of family, friendship and generosity.

Obviously we can never truly know someone through a television program, but that Mays was a self-made man who loved having his son close by and enjoyed a lasting and close friendship with Sullivan isn’t in doubt. The show also displayed an individual who took great joy in using his fame to help others and who put the integrity of the product above the quick buck.

Good-humored, fiercely intelligent, a lover of life, and the best in the world at what he did …  if I could snap my fingers and make it so, this would be the life capturing the world’s imagination today.