I remember waking up on a saturday morning as a child and being excited to turn on the television. Not to watch cartoons or some cheesy kids show. I would flip it straight to CNBC and see what new amazing products were out on the market. I would sit there for hours periodically switching over and watching cartoons for a while. I could rarely last through the repetetiveness of a full length infomercial. There was one voice, however, that kept my hand away from the remote for a full 30 minutes.

In a world dominated by men like Ron Popeil and Anthony Sullivan, one man stood apart and made a name for himself in a new way. Yelling at the top of his lungs the whole time. I remember first noticing him on an oxyclean commercial when I was at the tender age of 9. My mom ended up ordering a giant tub of oxyclean as well as some orange glo. The products never seemed to work like they did on the infomercials, but that’s not Billy’s fault. Not everyone can have his magic touch.

On a recent episode of the show Pitchmen, Billy was pitched a product by a teenage boy. It was a good product, but his family didn’t have enough money to develop the invention. Billy and his partner on the show, Anthony SUllivan, gave the boy and his family money out of their own pockets to develop the product. If there’s anything I took out of the show Pitchmen about Billy, it’s that he had pride in his work. Too often today you see people doing a half-bumed job just so they can get it over with and get paid. Not Billy. If a product didn’t do what it said it would do, he’d turn it down. That’s a lesson that kids today could stand to learn.

As I sit here, I can’t help but contemplate how quiet my Saturday mornings will be from now on. Without Billy Mays there to keep me company, it won’t really feel like the weekend at all. The world of infomercials has lost its king today. Ijust feel blessed that I was able to spend so many Saturday mornings with Billy when I was younger. That’s why Billy’s death has effected me the most out of all of these recent deaths (Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson). Billy Mays touched me as a child in a place that Michael Jackson never could. My heart.