The yellow cab pulled up on a sidewalk in downtown Milwaukee. It was Friday afternoon, the weekend before Thanksgiving, and the traffic was heavy.

A 27-year-old man jumped inside. As he sped away, the cabbie asked, “Have you heard of Kennedy in Dallas?” Believing it to be the start of a new joke, the young man eagerly leaned forward and smiled. “No, I didn’t. How’s it going?”

What followed was not funny. The president had been assassinated in Dallas. And while it was a tragedy for the nation, it was a personal blow for that young man from Milwaukee. When November 22nd dawned, the taxi driver’s passenger was famous. He slept that night a has-bea.

Vaughn Meader was born in 1936 to a working-class family in Maine. When he was a toddler, his father broke his neck and drowned in a diving accident. His widowed mother took a job as a cocktail waitress in Boston, leaving the child with relatives. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meader was a troubled child. Unruly at times, he was shuttled between his mother (who was sinking into alcoholism) and various orphanages.

He also enjoyed the limelight. He did a stint in the army after high school. Stationed in West Germany in the late 1950s, he formed a country music group GI, with him also doing impressions of famous singers.

Meader married a German woman, returned to the United States and entered the entertainment field in New York. His comedy act featured a spectacular impersonation of President John F. Kennedy, who was just taking the national stage. Handsome and with similar features, he copied Kennedy’s mannerisms and even looked a bit like him. The public liked it. When JFK moved into the White House, Meader found his calling.

He made history on October 22, 1962, when he and a small cast recorded “The First Family.” The album charted new territory by gently parodying the Kennedys. There had never been anything like this before. (“Saturday Night Live” was still 13 years away.) The record was an overnight hit, selling 1.2 million copies in just the first two weeks. Sales eventually totaled 7.5 million LPs, a record – until the Beatles came along and obliterated it.

Kennedy, on the other hand, relished the attention the album unexpectedly brought him. Asked at a presidential news conference if he heard it, JFK said he did, adding, “I thought it sounded more like Teddy than me.” He gave the album to close friends that Christmas and even joked at a Democratic Party gathering, “Vaughn Meader was busy tonight, so I came myself.”

Overnight, Vaughn found himself “the second most famous man in the country,” according to one newspaper. He was the toast of the entertainment world, appearing on the biggest TV shows of the era (Ed Sullivan, Jack Paar, Andy Williams, “To Tell the Truth” and “What’s My Line?” among them). Frank Sinatra even invited him to join the Rat Pack. Those were the glory days for Meader.

Then Kennedy went to Dallas.

Iconoclastic comedian Lenny Bruce didn’t let the assassination keep him off the stage on the night of November 22. He stepped up to the microphone, was silent for a long time, then finally said, “Boy, Vaughn Meader is totally nuts.”

Bruce was right. All TV appearances and concerts have been cancelled. Although Meader was already working on a second non-Kennedy album, it was immediately abandoned. In the deep national grief after the murder, Americans did not want to hear from a comedian who reminded them of the lost leader.

That’s when Meader’s life went downhill.

New album – “Have Some Nuts!!!” — bombed when it came out in 1964. The depression began. His drinking was out of control. His wife left him. He slept and turned to drugs (which got harder and harder). On the few occasions he was able to get gigs, fellow comedians described him as “unbearable”.

There were three more marriages. He got lost in religion. He made another album, this one called “The Second Coming”, about Jesus Christ returning to earth in the days of “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Sales were back in the cellar.

In the 1970s, he was living in his last wife’s hometown of Louisville, Ky., playing piano and singing as Abbott Meader (his first name), hosting whatever honky-tonk he could get his hands on. He also practiced bluegrass music in his native Maine. But it was nickel and dime stuff, and he existed on the financial side.

Meader made a few late-night cameo appearances (including the 1976 film Linda Lovelace for President ) and even had a small spot on the 1981 Ronald Reagan-bashing comedy album The First Family Rides Again with Rich Little. It was a modest success… but nothing spectacular like the original.

By the end, Meader could barely breathe as he battled chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was toothless, bearded and still trying to make a comeback until he died aged 68 in 2004.

Despite being little more than the answer to today’s trivia questions, he had been a pioneer. He paved the way for Little, “SNL” and a wide range of presidential impressionists.

They all owe their success to Vaughn Meader, the comedy pioneer who lost everything in an instant on a November afternoon.