I just read the sad news that Joey Bishop, last survivor of Frank Sinatra's famous Rat Pack, is dead at 89. For years, I had a picture on my office bulletin board of the five Rat Packers: Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Bishop. They all looked young and handsome in front of the Sands in Vegas. Joey — I called him Mr. Bishop — had signed it as a thank you to me because he thought I'd done him a good turn. Really, I was just doing my job.

I came in one Monday morning 11 years ago to a voice message that began like this: "Miss Lynch, this is Joey Bishop, from Newport Beach, California." He took issue with something I'd written in the magazine the previous Sunday. It was an item on Sinatra, who was then still alive, but in it I said Sinatra was the last of the Rat Pack, and I unintentionally slighted Mr. Bishop by saying he was a "junior member" of the pack along with Shirley MacLaine. I called back. We had a long conversation in which he told me stories about how he'd become part of the group, his friendship with Frank and more. I told him I wanted to make it up to him by doing a piece on him in the column. He said he didn't call to get a write-up for himself; he just figured I was probably too young to even know about the Rat Pack or his talk show (he was wrong about that), and he just wanted to tell me for future reference. I finally did get him to let me do a short piece on him, but not until August of the next year, 1997. Here's what I wrote.

Bishop, 79, lives on an exclusive island in Newport Beach, Calif. He still cracks jokes and still gets fan mail four decades after Sinatra drew him into a circle that included Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Dean Martin. "I think fondly about those days," Bishop tells us. He says the Pack's reputation for "boozing and chasing women" was undeserved. "I've been married to the same woman for 56 years and don't drink."