With Paul Newman’s death comes the need to check the list again. It isn’t a long list, but every time I try to put it together I probably forget a name or two. I’ve never written down the names.

Putting the list together is one of those exercises that comes with getting a little bit older than we used to be. It is something to do with old friends as we get a little mellow in the late evening.

So who are the people who have mattered, who have claimed our respect and affection with style and grace and that elusive ability to do it right? Who are the people who have carried their fame in a way that makes us feel a kinship, even if we’ve never met them? It’s not what they do but the way they do it that keeps them close. They have made us laugh and cheer and occasionally just sit back and slap ourselves in amazement. They have known when to leave the stage and when to stay.

I’m looking at the last half century here, at Americans who are still among us. Muhammad Ali has got to have a place on the list because of his athletic elegance and his handling of injustice and his enduring ability to inspire, even in a wheelchair with Parkinson’s disease. And Sandy Koufax, Jimmy Carter, Bruce Springsteen, Cindy Sheehan, John Lewis, Joan Baez, David Letterman, Dave Brubeck, Studs Terkel, Lily Tomlin …

And Paul Newman, of course. I had heard he had cancer and I knew I would be saddened by his death. But when the news came over the radio Saturday morning, it stopped me with a sense of loss that I wouldn’t have expected. He really was a vital piece of the world as many of us have known it.

He was our movie star, playing people we wanted to have a beer with and people we wanted to watch in action from a safe distance. He should have won the Academy Award for Nobody’s Fool and Cool Hand Luke. He made the best buddy movie ever and he did it all with a smile that seemed to invite us inside his characters. He ate 50 eggs in an hour when he was Luke Jackson and we could almost feel ourselves filling up.

And Slap Shot is the most fun you can have watching a movie.

I saw him only once. It was at the Massachusetts State House, which was being used for some scenes in The Verdict. The inevitable meeting with the governor had been arranged and as Newman walked down a hallway to the executive offices, it was clear it was not something he really wanted to do. It was part of the celebrity thing, and the celebrity thing was something he casually dismissed or politely endured. He was the East Coast guy in a West Coast business. He had a sense of humor about showbiz success.

But perhaps it was the food that really put a lock on Paul Newman’s place on the list. The story is that it started with a batch of salad dressing mixed with a canoe paddle, then given to friends in old wine bottles. That was allegedly the beginning of Newman’s Own, a food business that started as a lark and ended up taking in millions in profits. And the only way Newman could make sense of all that money was to give it away. He gave more than $200 million to charity. He started a camp for seriously ill children, and now there are more camps just like it.

And he raced cars and supported Eugene McCarthy and was married to Joanne Woodward for half a century and lived a fabled American life with classic understatement.

There’s not going to be another one. And there’s no one appearing on screens out at the megaplex who will make us forget him. We can just be grateful that he was here when we were.

The list grows shorter, as it will continue to do.

bkerr@projo.com