Maybe not a 'celebrity' in the typical sense, but raise your hand if you ever remember seeing advertisements in computer magazines for the "Valentine1 Radar Detector with Arrows" with this guy on the page:
Mike Valentine passed away a week ago from an aneurysm.
I was about eight years old, and though I really had no concept of what the hell "speeding" was or why someone would need to detect radar, the ads for the Valentine1 radar detector somehow made an impression on me. When I started driving and finally understood what radar detectors were for, the V1 is what I remembered as being touted as "the" radar detector to have.
Mike Valentine is essentially
the father of the modern police radar detector. He has countless patents to his name, he invented directional speed radar detection (rather than pure forward-facing proximity-based detection), and his detector was routinely at the top of the pack for range, sensitivity, and junk signal rejection in pretty much every radar detector shootout. He made one model and only one, priced it very reasonably relative to his competitors, and customers could send them in for upgrades instead of having to buy an entirely new model, until he released the V1 Gen2 a few years ago (which is what I run).