It's been a little over two years since Houston legend Marvin Zindler took his shock wig, blue-tinted eyeglasses and excessively nipped-and-tucked face to that great Ice Machine in the Sky.
For a while after his demise, KTRK kept alive his Angels in Action program, where doctors and other professionals would volunteer services to help down-on-their-luck kids or adults who needed eye surgery, wheelchairs, clothes, etc.
Now it's gone. Laurie Kendrick Lori Reingold, the longtime assistant who helped him run the program, no longer works at the station.
"Why they didn't carry on the tradition, I don't know," Dr. Irving Wishnow, an eye doctor and close Zindler friend, tells Hair Balls. "His angels, all the people he recruited, still wanted to help out any way they could."
It would seem a no-brainer: The program was voluntary, so it didn't cost the station much; it would be a way of keeping the Zindler name alive; and what TV news show doesn't love feel-good stories of helpless kids made happy?
There are rumors that some KTRK brass had grown tired of Zindler's ego, though, so maybe that's why the plug was pulled.
Station spokesman Tom Ash tells us it was simpler than that. "Well, he died," Ash said. "That was the main reason we stopped. There was a lot of stuff Marvin was doing that went with him."