" Less than two weeks after his departure from Canton, Bob Irwin would go from utter obscurity to nationwide notoriety. Izzy Demsky would always remember that tumultuous time in the life of the normally sleepy little college town. Twenty years later—long after he had changed his name to Kirk Douglas and achieved his own, far greater renown as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars—he would conjure up memories of his old college friend while making Lust for Life, the biopic of Vincent van Gogh that earned Douglas one of his three Best Actor Oscar nominations. “I felt sorry for him, a talented artist at the mercy of incomprehensible forces,” Douglas would write. “When I thought of Van Gogh, I thought of Bob Irwin.”7 "

― Harold Schechter , The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation