One of the great examples of how astrology cuts like a double-edged sword is to be found in Art Linkletter, one of the oldest and longest-lasting television celebrities in history, who appeared at the dawn of the TV itself and is still with us. He is both the living embodiment of family values and an example of fate not always rewarding them.

Abandoned early by his real parents, he was adopted and brought up by an evangelical preacher and his wife, and with South Node the only occupant of the fourth house of home and family, his was often to be on the receiving end of what happened there, despite his efforts to control it. With Venus and Sun all smack on the Ascendant in nurturing Cancer, it would not be surprising that his image would come up mom, home, and apple pie. But having a bucket chart with the handle of Uranus, his life was always swung around by quirkiness and unexpected accidents. His shows People are Funny and Kids Say the Darndest Things were entirely based on innocent, family-based surprise, sometimes as close as you could get to shocking in the 1950s. And with his bounty-producing Jupiter in the fifth house of children, it’s no surprise that his fortune would come out of the mouths of babes.

But that Jupiter is also part of a T-cross with Saturn, Mars, and Moon, spiked by a Mars-Uranus quincunx, throwing unexpected and conflicting anger and sorrow into the mix — and if you want to add Chiron (at 10 Pisces), that makes it a particularly wounding grand cross. Despite the idyllic nature of his family life, including one of the longest celebrity marriages in history, his daughter committed suicide and his son died in a car accident. Perhaps it was his own 12th house Neptune that led him to believe his daughter’s suicide was the result of drug use (none were found in her system). He had already been on a campaign against permissiveness and drugs among youth, which had involved his daughter, only ratcheted up after her death. His record, We Love You Call Collect, recorded before her death, featured a discussion about permissiveness in modern society. It featured a rebuttal by the daughter, called “Dear Mom and Dad.” The record won a 1970 Grammy award for the “Best Spoken Word Recording.”

Current events: He went on to follow and capitalize on his own conservative muse and still does, becoming a political organizer and a spokesman for the United Seniors Association. He is currently the spokesman for USA Next, a conservative alternative to the AARP. It’s worth noting that his daughter’s death, which was so pivotal to reinventing his career, was marked only by a Jupiter transit to that pivotal South Node. Was this tragedy a gift from God, or seen that way? We will never know. Right now, he’s been under fire from Saturn transiting his personal planets, which will continue for another year, with a several-year hiatus until it hits that fateful South Node in 2011.