"I was a serious career woman and I wasn't into all that other crap."

The first time June Bowers saw comedienne Phyllis Diller on the tube, sometime in the 1960s, she was horrified. The fright-wig hair, the cigarette holder, white boots, the staccato goose-honk of a laugh: it was all too much. "I thought she was terrible," Bowers says.

But then one night Diller was on TV again and Bowers' mother insisted she pay attention.

"I said, 'That ugly old pig? What do you want to watch her for?'" Bowers, 90, remembers. "She said, 'Well, she's your aunt and you're just like her.'"

Bowers' blood ran cold, but you can guess the rest — the two would become fast friends, as a handful of sympathy cards at Bowers' Sarasota home attest. When Diller died on Aug. 20 at 95, Bowers was left with a literal gallery of memories, from countless personal photos to Diller's own paintings mounted on the walls.

Read more at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.