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Obit watch: February 26, 2024.

Monday, February 26th, 2024

I was running pretty much flat out from mid-Friday afternoon until late Sunday night, so this is the first chance I’ve had to post anything. But: the NYT finally ran an obit for Chuck Mawhinney. (Previously.)

After graduating from high school in 1967, Chuck wanted to become a Navy pilot. But a Marine Corps recruiter won him over by promising that he could delay his enlistment by four months, until the end of deer season.
The Marines had not had dedicated snipers since World War II, but by 1967 the corps had changed its mind. Mr. Mawhinney was among the first to complete the new Scout Sniper School at Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps installation in Southern California. He graduated at the top of his class.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Golden Richards, former Dallas Cowboy receiver.

Richards helped the Cowboys reach Super Bowl X and XII. Against the Broncos in Super Bowl XII, Richards caught a touchdown pass from running back Robert Newhouse (the first touchdown pass thrown in a Super Bowl by a non-quarterback) as Dallas recorded a 27-10 win.

José DeLeón, pitcher.

DeLeón was 86-119 with a 3.76 ERA in 264 starts and 151 relief appearances for the Pittsburgh Pirates (1983-86), Chicago White Sox (1986-87, 1993-95), St. Louis (1988-92), Philadelphia Phillies (1992-93) and Montreal Expos (1995). The right-hander struck out 1,594 in 1,897⅓ innings.

Jackie Loughery, actress (and Jack Webb’s third wife). Other credits include OG “Perry Mason”, “Surfside 6”, and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”.

Charles Dierkop, actor.

Other credits include “Matt Houston”, “Bearcats!” and…two episodes of “Mannix” (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6. “Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6).

Eddie Driscoll, actor. IMDB.

Chris Gauthier, actor. Fair number of genre credits, including “Supernatural”, “Watchmen”, and the “Earthsea” mini series.

Kenneth Mitchell, actor. Other credits include “NCIS”, “CSI: Cyber”, and “Detroit 1-8-7”.

Posted in 1970s, Guns, Heroism, History, Mannix, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 23, 2024.

Friday, February 23rd, 2024

It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.

Pamela Salem.

Yes, Miss Moneypenny counts as a Bond girl. Yes, “Never Say Never Again” counts as a Bond movie.

Other credits include “Magnum, P.I.” (original recipe), “The Great Train Robbery”, “God’s Outlaw”, and some “Doctor Who”. And “EastEnders”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: February 22, 2024.

Thursday, February 22nd, 2024

The paper of record finally got around to publishing an obit for Niklaus Wirth.

Ewen MacIntosh, British actor. IMDB.

Lefty Driesell, noted college basketball coach.

Robert Reid, one of the great Houston Rockets.

Lawrence sent over two obits:

Paul D’Amato, actor. IMDB.

Steve Miller, SF author.

While Miller is known in the science fiction community for the hundreds of stories he and [Sharon] Lee wrote together, he is best remembered for having co-authored the Liaden Universe, a series that now includes 25 books described as “space operas,” with stories emphasizing the interpersonal connections between characters, human or otherwise, within vast literary universes.

Posted in Books, Geek, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | No Comments »

Pop culture programming note.

Wednesday, February 21st, 2024

Tomorrow morning’s episode of “Perry Mason” (assuming METv sticks to their schedule) is “The Case of Constant Doyle”.

This is an interesting episode. This is not the same as saying it is a good episode, or one I recommend you watch. If you have not seen it previously, it might be worth your time.

During the filming of the sixth season, Raymond Burr was hospitalized for a period of time. I haven’t read any of the biographies, so I’m not sure exactly why. But his issue was serious enough that he was unable to film several episodes of “Perry Mason”.

There’s a four episode block (plus at least one more episode later in sequence) where they have “guest” lawyers, played by some of the best actors in Hollywood. Michael Rennie, Hugh O’Brian, Walter Pidgeon, and Mike Connors all did stints.

This is the first episode in that four episode block, and the guest lawyer is…Bette Davis, as the titular “Constant Doyle”.

The setup for this episode is that Constant and her husband Joe were both lawyers, and friends of Perry Mason. As the episode opens, it is established that Joe Doyle passed away a few months earlier, leaving Constant a widow. She gets involved in the case of “Cal Leonard”, a 17-year-old juvenile delinquent (played by Michael Parks) and friend of Joe’s. Constant ends up having to defend him from murder charges, even though criminal law is not her area of practice. But of course, Paul and Della are willing to help out. Perry even appears briefly (by telephone from his sickbed: they shot some scenes before Burr’s hospitalization and inserted them).

If I don’t exactly sound enthusiastic about this episode, as I have with others, well…

Bette Davis is always worth watching. But the way she plays Constant Doyle in this episode is very much as a cougar. This was 1963, and the networks still had standards and practices, so there’s nothing explicit here. But the character very clearly comes across as desiring not just a client-lawyer relationship (and the big fee she’d get from defending a teenage deliquent), but something more: perhaps something to fill the void left by the death of her husband.

The long lingering looks, the touching…your mileage may vary, but for me, this is a really uncomfortable episode to watch.

This episode will be on at 0800 CST (0900 EST) Thursday morning, so if you want to watch Ms. Davis, consider yourself notified.

You could also wait until the evening and watch “All About Eve” again.

Posted in Mannix, TV | 1 Comment »

TMQ Watch: February 13, 2024.

Tuesday, February 13th, 2024

So. It has come to this. The last TMQ of the 2023 season, and the last TMQ Watch.

After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…

(more…)

Posted in NFL, Planes, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 2, 2024.

Friday, February 2nd, 2024

Colonel Roger H.C. Donlon (United States Army – ret.)

Col. Donlon was the first person, and first Special Forces member, to receive the Medal of Honor for action in the Vietnam War.

His Medal of Honor citation:

Rank and organization: Captain, U.S. Army. Place and date: Near Nam Dong, Republic of Vietnam, 6 July 1964. Entered service at: Fort Chaffee, Ark. Born: 30 January 1934, Saugerties, N.Y. G.O. No.: 41, 17 December 1964.
Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while defending a U.S. military installation against a fierce attack by hostile forces.
Capt. Donlon was serving as the commanding officer of the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment A-726 at Camp Nam Dong when a reinforced Viet Cong battalion suddenly launched a full-scale, predawn attack on the camp. During the violent battle that ensued, lasting 5 hours and resulting in heavy casualties on both sides, Capt. Donlon directed the defense operations in the midst of an enemy barrage of mortar shells, falling grenades, and extremely heavy gunfire. Upon the initial onslaught, he swiftly marshaled his forces and ordered the removal of the needed ammunition from a blazing building. He then dashed through a hail of small arms and exploding hand grenades to abort a breach of the main gate. En route to this position he detected an enemy demolition team of 3 in the proximity of the main gate and quickly annihilated them. Although exposed to the intense grenade attack, he then succeeded in reaching a 60mm mortar position despite sustaining a severe stomach wound as he was within 5 yards of the gun pit. When he discovered that most of the men in this gunpit were also wounded, he completely disregarded his own injury, directed their withdrawal to a location 30 meters away, and again risked his life by remaining behind and covering the movement with the utmost effectiveness. Noticing that his team sergeant was unable to evacuate the gun pit he crawled toward him and, while dragging the fallen soldier out of the gunpit, an enemy mortar exploded and inflicted a wound in Capt. Donlon’s left shoulder. Although suffering from multiple wounds, he carried the abandoned 60mm mortar weapon to a new location 30 meters away where he found 3 wounded defenders. After administering first aid and encouragement to these men, he left the weapon with them, headed toward another position, and retrieved a 57mm recoilless rifle. Then with great courage and coolness under fire, he returned to the abandoned gun pit, evacuated ammunition for the 2 weapons, and while crawling and dragging the urgently needed ammunition, received a third wound on his leg by an enemy hand grenade. Despite his critical physical condition, he again crawled 175 meters to an 81mm mortar position and directed firing operations which protected the seriously threatened east sector of the camp. He then moved to an eastern 60mm mortar position and upon determining that the vicious enemy assault had weakened, crawled back to the gun pit with the 60mm mortar, set it up for defensive operations, and turned it over to 2 defenders with minor wounds. Without hesitation, he left this sheltered position, and moved from position to position around the beleaguered perimeter while hurling hand grenades at the enemy and inspiring his men to superhuman effort. As he bravely continued to move around the perimeter, a mortar shell exploded, wounding him in the face and body. As the long awaited daylight brought defeat to the enemy forces and their retreat back to the jungle leaving behind 54 of their dead, many weapons, and grenades, Capt. Donlon immediately reorganized his defenses and administered first aid to the wounded. His dynamic leadership, fortitude, and valiant efforts inspired not only the American personnel but the friendly Vietnamese defenders as well and resulted in the successful defense of the camp. Capt. Donlon’s extraordinary heroism, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.

The linked NYT obit provides a little more color. This was a wild battle.

Years later, Mr. Donlon said that among the fighters the Green Berets were training were many Vietcong sympathizers. When the shooting began, he told the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, the attackers made an announcement over a public address system in English and Vietnamese telling the sympathizers: “Lay down your weapons. We just want the Americans.” He estimated that there were only 75 dependable fighters to defend the camp.

He wrote two books. I think his first, Outpost of Freedom, was a pretty big seller at the time. We had a version of that in a “Reader’s Digest Condensed Book” at my house when I was a little kid, and I remember reading it pretty regularly. (That same Condensed book also had The Century of the Detective and The Yearling.) His other book was Beyond Nam Dong, about his post-war return.

In a 1995 return trip to Nam Dong, Mr. Donlon visited the overgrown graves of the South Vietnamese soldiers under his command who died in the battle. Beside him was Nguyen Can Thu, a former Vietcong political officer who had helped plan the attack. It was Mr. Thu, Mr. Donlon later said, who told him that 100 of the 300 Vietnamese he was training in the camp were Vietcong infiltrators.

David Kahn, cryptographic historian and author. (The Codebreakers.)

I read The Codebreakers (the original edition, the one with the key on the cover) when I was in middle school, and it was a big influence on me. I suspect there are a lot of other folks out there who can say the same thing. (Hattip: Bruce Schneier.)

Carl Weathers. THR. IMDB. Pretty well covered elsewhere, and I don’t have much to add.

Don Murray, actor. Other credits include “T.J. Hooker”, “Ghosts Can’t Do It”, and “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes”.

Jennell Jaquays, prominent D&D creator.

Over nearly five decades, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D&D and other role-playing games. In one of them, a red dragon roars while perched in front of a snow-capped mountain; in another, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a third, two Ghostbusters prepare to tangle with a field of animated jack-o’-lanterns.
Ms. Jaquays also crafted scenarios of her own. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are renowned for their pathbreaking designs.

…

In the early 1980s Ms. Jaquays went to work for Coleco, and she eventually oversaw the teams that designed games for the Coleco Vision, an early home video game console; one notable project was WarGames, an adaptation of the 1983 film.
Long after leaving Coleco, when video games were vastly more sophisticated, Ms. Jaquays designed levels for the first-person shooters Quake II and III and the military strategy game Halo Wars. She also made The War Chiefs, an expansion pack that let users play as Native American cultures vying for power against European civilizations in Age of Empires III.

Posted in Books, Cryptography, Heroism, History, Movies, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 24, 2024.

Wednesday, January 24th, 2024

Dr. Arno A. Penzias has passed away at the age of 90.

While this is another one of those obits for a relatively obscure figure, I feel there’s a good chance many of my readers have actually heard of Dr. Penzias.

Dr. Penzias (pronounced PEN-zee-as) shared one-half of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery in 1964 of cosmic microwave background radiation, remnants of an explosion that gave birth to the universe some 14 billion years ago. That explosion, known as the Big Bang, is now the widely accepted explanation for the origin and evolution of the universe. (A third physicist, Pyotr Kapitsa of Russia, received the other half of the prize, for unrelated advances in developing liquid helium.)

…

In 1961, Dr. Penzias joined AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., with the intention of using a radio antenna, which was being developed for satellite communications, as a radio telescope to make cosmological measurements…
In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer who was new to Bell Labs, encountered a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from everywhere in the sky, detected no matter which way the antenna was pointed. Perplexed, they considered various sources of the noise. They thought they might be picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or might pigeon droppings be the culprit?…
The cosmological underpinnings of the noise were finally explained with help from physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that there might be radiation coming from all directions left over from the Big Bang. The buzzing, it turned out, was just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe wasn’t infinitely old and static but rather had begun as a primordial fireball that left the universe bathed in background radiation…
The discovery not only helped cement the cosmos’s grand narrative; it also opened a window through which to investigate the nature of reality — all as a result of that vexing hiss first heard 60 years ago by a couple of junior physicists looking for something else.

Charles Osgood. THR. I feel like I’m giving him the short end of the stick, but there’s really nothing I can add to what others have said about him.

Gary Graham, actor. Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy” of the 2000s except it sucked), “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and the 2003 “Dragnet”.

Melanie (aka Melanie Safka), who sang at Woodstock. This is another one where there’s not much I can say: pigpen51 may be more familiar with her music than I am.

Posted in Geek, History, Music, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 17, 2024.

Wednesday, January 17th, 2024

Professor Peter Schickele, of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.

Damn it.

I was a big fan of Prof. Schickele and his interpretations of P.D.Q. Bach when I was younger. I still am, but I was when I was younger too. (If it’s been a while since I bought a PDQ Bach album, well, it’s been a minute since I bought any albums.)

Fun fact: he stole Philip Glass’s woman. (Well, okay, only sort of. You’ll have to read the obit for the full story. And that is supposedly a NYT “gift” link: please let me know if you have a problem.)

Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICK-uh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.

Worth noting: he wrote the score for “Silent Running”.

Crucially, there was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.
Designed to be appreciated by novices and cognoscenti alike, P.D.Q.’s music is rife with inside jokes and broken taboos: unmoored melodies that range painfully through a panoply of keys; unstable harmonies begging for resolutions that never come; variations that have nothing whatever to do with their themes. It is the aural equivalent of the elaborate staircases in M.C. Escher engravings that don’t actually lead anywhere.

True story: once upon a time, I had just bought the new Schickele recording of a recently discovered P.D.Q. Bach work. Lawrence and I were sitting around our apartment listening to it when a friend came over for a visit. Said friend was (like us) a big fan of Glass and other minimalist composers. So we told our friend we had a new Philip Glass recording, and we wanted to play the first track for him.

He was fooled. Right up to the point where the slide whistle came in.

I was lucky enough to see him in performance…

In his early, supple years, he often slid down a rope suspended from the first balcony; on at least one occasion he ran down the aisle, vast suitcase in hand, as if delayed at the airport; on another he entered, pursued by a gorilla.

…when he could still climb down a rope.

“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”
That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”
“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”

Prof. Schickele also gave me a quote I have been known to use from time to time:

“Truth is just truth – you can’t have opinions about truth.”

John Brotherton, owner and pitmaster at Brotherton’s Black Iron Barbecue. The Saturday Dining Conspiracy has been there twice, and eaten there once. That’s not a shot at Mr. Brotherton, just a statement of reality. When you run a really good barbecue restaurant (which Brotherton’s is), your customers run the risk of the barbecue selling out before they get there.

Dejan Milojević, assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors. He was 46.

Lynne Marta, actress. Other credits include “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Then Came Bronson”.

Some followups: Tom Shales in the NYT. And an appreciation of him by one of the NYT writers.

Nice obit for Terry Bisson by Michael Swanwick.

Michael Swanwick also has a touching piece up about his friend of 50 years, Tom Purdom, which I encourage you to go read.

Posted in Beef, Food, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 15, 2024.

Monday, January 15th, 2024

Tom Shales, former TV critic of the Washington Post and Pulitzer prize winner. WP (archived).

I was a big fan of his TV criticism when he was with the WP. Especially (as I’ve noted before) his reviews of Kathy Lee Gifford’s Christmas specials. I also thought Live From New York was a pretty spiffy book. (I haven’t read the expanded edition, or the ESPN book.)

Joyce Randolph. IMDB. NYT.

Alec Musser, actor. IMDB.

Peter Crombie. Other credits include “Se7en”, “Spenser: For Hire”, and a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Noted SF writer Howard Waldrop, who was also a personal acquaintance, apparently passed away yesterday. I am putting this at the bottom of the obit watch because, so far, the news is just circulating among the Austin SF community and my circle of friends. I don’t have anything to link to right now. Also, I want to spend some time and write a longer obit for him, possibly tomorrow.

Posted in Books, Media, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 12, 2024.

Friday, January 12th, 2024

Russell Hamler, the last surviving member of Merrill’s Marauders.

After Pearl Harbor, Japan’s armed forces overran Southeast Asia, capturing Hong Kong, Singapore and Indochina. An American general, Joseph Stilwell, was forced into a humiliating retreat from Burma (now Myanmar). Allied leaders agreed in 1943 to send a force back into Burma, into what Winston Churchill called the “most forbidding fighting country imaginable.” It would be a long-range penetration unit, challenging Japanese control of the northern half of the country. The men would have only the weapons and supplies they could carry on mules or on their backs, with additional supplies dropped occasionally by parachute from planes.

…

The dense bamboo, tangled vines and banyan trees of the jungle, where men marched single-file in stifling tropical heat and humidity, was as much an enemy as the Japanese. Dysentery and malaria were endemic and rendered many men unfit for combat.
Mr. Hamler trekked until he wore holes in his boots, then walked on bare feet before receiving new footwear in one of the parachute drops, he recalled in an interview published in 2022 with Carole Ortenzo, a retired Army colonel and a member of Mr. Hamler’s extended family. Leeches sucked blood from his limbs and bugs “bored into your arms,” he recalled.
The Army supplied mostly K-rations, providing just 2,830 calories a day to men who were burning far more energy. Famished soldiers, Mr. Hamler recounted, dropped grenades into rivers, skimmed the dead fish and cooked them in their helmets.
“There had to be absolute silence at night in the jungle because any noise invited shelling from the Japanese,” Mr. Hamler said. Pairs of men dug foxholes nearby so one could sleep while his buddy stood sentry. When it was time to switch roles, the sentry tugged a rope attached to the sleeping man to wake him without uttering a sound.

…

Early in the fighting at Nhpum Ga, Mr. Hamler was hit in the hip by a mortar fragment and lay immobilized in his foxhole for more than 10 days, until Americans from the Third Batallion broke through to the village — by that point christened “Maggot Hill” by the Americans — and the Japanese retreated. The Marauders counted 400 enemy corpses. The Marauders lost 57 men, with 302 wounded. General Merrill himself suffered a heart attack just before the siege and was evacuated.

…

In May 1944, three months after the Marauders entered Burma, the airstrip in the town of Myitkyina, the mission’s key objective, fell to the Americans and Chinese troops who had reinforced them. In August, the heavily fortified town itself was captured. The Marauders were disbanded one week later. All told, the unit suffered 93 combat fatalities in Burma and 30 deaths from disease. Another 293 men were wounded and eight were missing. Most startling, an additional 1,970 men at one point were hospitalized with sicknesses, including 72 with what was described as “psychoneurosis.”
Mr. Hamler had been evacuated after the battle of Nhpum Ga in April to northern India, where he spent five weeks recuperating in a hospital. He was transferred back home to Pennsylvania and served as a military policeman until he was discharged in December 1945. He was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

He was 99.

It has been a bad few days for writers.

Lawrence sent over a report that David J. Skal died after a car accident on January 1st. I can’t find a trustworthy link for this, though it is confirmed by Wikipedia and the SF Encyclopedia.

Skal was a prominent cultural critic, who specialized in the horror genre. I was a pretty big fan of what I’ve read of his work: I particularly liked Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen and Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, but I feel like just about anything he wrote is worth picking up. (I haven’t read his Claude Rains book yet. I actually didn’t know he’d written one.)

He also appears in a lot of DVD commentary tracks. His Wikipedia entry has a good list. And he was from Garfield Heights, so he counts as another good Cleveland boy.

Terry Bisson, prominent SF and fantasy writer, although that may be minimizing his work somewhat.

Three things I want to link to:

  1. “They’re Made Out Of Meat”, a Bisson story that I find absolutely hilarious.
  2. Michael Swanwick’s profile of Terry Bisson.
  3. I didn’t know that the New Yorker had profiled him, but they did back in October.

(This is another obit where reliable links have been hard to find, and a second one Lawrence tipped me off to.)

Edward Jay Epstein, writer who the NYT describes as a “professional skeptic”. His first book was Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth which started out as his master’s thesis:

His book raised doubts about the commission’s finding that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin, basing them largely on what Mr. Epstein considered serious deficiencies in the panel’s investigation. “Inquest” was published a few months before “Rush to Judgment” by Mark Lane, another in a tsunami of books that suggested that the commission had been hampered by time constraints, by limited resources and access, and by Justice Warren’s demand for unanimity to make its conclusions more credible.
“It was the only master’s thesis I know of that sold 600,000 copies,” Professor Hacker, who now teaches at Queens College, said in a phone interview.

…

Mr. Epstein had an insatiable curiosity, writing about anything and everything, from the economics of Hollywood to the rape accusation against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, by a Manhattan hotel maid in 2011. (Mr. Epstein suggested that it had been a political setup staged to embarrass him. Mr. Strauss-Kahn and the maid ultimately settled her lawsuit against him.)

Bud Harrelson, shortstop for the Mets. (Hattip to pigpen51 on this.)

Harrelson played in the major leagues for 16 seasons, 13 with the Mets; he appeared in 1,322 games with the team, the fourth most in franchise history. (Ed Kranepool tops the list with 1,853 games played, followed by David Wright and Jose Reyes.)
Standing 5 feet 10 inches and weighing between 145 and 155 pounds at varying times, he wasn’t much of a threat at the plate. He had a .236 career batting average and hit only seven home runs. But he possessed outstanding range in the field and a strong arm. He won a National League Gold Glove Award in 1971 for his fielding, appeared in two All-Star Games and was inducted into the Mets’ Hall of Fame in 1986.

He played on the 1969 “Miracle Mets” team, and famously got into a brawl with Pete Rose in 1973.

Adan Canto. THR. IMDB.

Georgina Hale, British actress. Other credits include “The Bill”, “Doctor Who”, several “T.Bag” TV movies, and “Voyage of the Damned”.

Brian McConnachie, comedy writer and occasional actor.

Tracy Tormé. I usually don’t do obits for celebrity children just because they are celebrity children, but Mr. Tormé seems to have carved out a niche for himself as a TV and film writer.

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 8, 2024.

Monday, January 8th, 2024

Norby Walters, famous sports and entertainment agent. I wanted to note this for a few reasons:

Is it just me, or did he look an awful lot like Paul Shaffer?

Mr. Walters and Mr. [Lloyd] Bloom were convicted of mail fraud and racketeering in 1989. Mr. Walters was sentenced to five years in prison and Mr. Bloom to three, but neither served a day.
An appeals court reversed the racketeering convictions in 1990, ruling that the trial judge had not instructed the jury that the two men’s actions had been guided by their lawyers’ advice that the signings were legal.

Also:

In 1993, the mail fraud convictions were also overturned.
“Walters is by all accounts a nasty and untrustworthy fellow,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in the 1993 ruling, “but the prosecutor did not prove that his efforts to circumvent the N.C.A.A.’s rules amounted to mail fraud.”

That’s Judge Frank Easterbrook, TMQ’s brother.

Mr. Bloom was shot to death at his home in Malibu, Calif., later that year.

…

From 1990 to 2017, he organized an annual Oscar viewing party, which he called Night of 100 Stars, in hotel ballrooms in Beverly Hills. It drew stars like Jon Voight, Shirley Jones, Charles Bronson, Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau. He was also the host of a regular poker party at his condos in Southern California, where the regulars included Milton Berle, Bryan Cranston, Richard Lewis, Jason Alexander, James Woods, Charles Durning, Mimi Rogers and Alex Trebek.
“It was $2 a hand,” Robert Wuhl, the actor and comedian, said by phone. “So the most anybody lost was $250 and the most anybody won was $300 to $400. It was all about the kibitzing. Buddy Hackett would come to kibitz.”

You know, I’d probably put out $250 to sit at that table.

Joe D sent over a link to The Register’s obit for legendary computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, and Borepatch also ran an obit. I’ve had this in my back pocket for a few days, as I was hoping that a more mainstream source than El Reg would run an item.

Fred Chappell, author and former poet laureate of North Carolina. (Dagon, More Shapes than One) (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Cindy Morgan, actress. Other credits include “Beverly Hills Buntz”, “Mancuso, FBI”, and “She’s The Sheriff”.

Posted in Geek, Law, Movies, Obits, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 6, 2024.

Saturday, January 6th, 2024

David Soul. THR.

Shoutout for his work in “Magnum Force”. Other credits include “Jerry Springer: The Opera” (the TV movie: he played Jerry Springer), “Murder, She Wrote”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Unsub” (an interesting failed series from the late 1980s), “Casablanca” (the short-lived TV series: he played “Rick Blane”), “In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I. Murders” (he played “Michael Lee Platt”, one of the killers), and a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Christian Oliver. Other credits include “Alarm für Cobra 11 – Die Autobahnpolizei”, “Ninja Apocalypse”, and “Christmas in Vienna”.

Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of the NYT.

Posted in 1970s, Media, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

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