Archive for the ‘1970s’ Category

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Obit watch: December 3, 2021.

Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Alvin Lucier, “experimental composer”.

In “I Am Sitting in a Room,” Mr. Lucier began by quietly reading a short statement describing what he is doing. “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now,” the text begins. “I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.”
The room’s acoustics, as well as audio distortions that occur when a tape is rerecorded over and over, yields a gradually changing sound in which, after 10 minutes, the spoken text is buried in reverberation and overtones, and unintelligible. During the final section, high-pitched overtones coalesce into eerie, slow-moving melodies.

I used to have a CD of “I Am Sitting in a Room”, back when I was in my “difficult listening” phase. It was not something I spent a lot of time listening to, though I was happy to have it.

(See also.)

NYT obit for Curley Culp.

Eddie Mekka. Most famous as Carmine Ragusa on “Laverne & Shirley”. Other credits include guest shots on “The Love Boat”, “Fantasy Island”, and one of the “Rockford Files” TV movies.

Posted in 1970s, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 23, 2021.

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021

Lou Cutell, actor. Other than “Seinfeld” and “Gray’s Anatomy”, he did a few cop shows, including “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “T.J. Hooker”, “Barney Miller”, and the really obscure 1989 “Dragnet”. He also appeared on “Alice” and “The Bob Newhart Show”.

Malikah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter. She was only 56.

Bill Virdon, noted player and manager.

He remained with the Pirates through 1965, managed for the Mets in the minors, then returned to Pittsburgh as a player-coach in 1968, his last playing season. He became the Pirates’ manager in 1972, taking them to the National League East title, but was fired late the following season.

He also managed the Yankees for a time, until he was fired by Steinbrenner (“…though he was not supposed to be involved with running the team”, being under suspension at the time) in favor of…Billy Martin.

Posted in 1970s, History, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 12, 2021.

Friday, November 12th, 2021

Still on the road, but taking a few minutes to round up some obits from the past few days. Sorry if this seems compressed.

F.W. de Klerk.

John Artis, historical and legal footnote. He was the other guy convicted with Hurricane Carter.

“The police and Passaic County law-enforcement establishment was out to get Rubin, and I got tied in only because I was with him on the night of the shootings,” Mr. Artis told The New York Times in 1988. “I was always the guy in the background, the other guy in the case that no one knew or cared about.”

Jerry Douglas. He was most famous for “The Young and The Restless”, but he had a pretty extensive career. “Barnaby Jones”, “Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockleman, Private Eye”, “The Dead Don’t Die”…

…and he was a “Mannix” three-timer. Sadly, IMDB has messed up the site to where I can’t easily get a list of his episodes.

Posted in 1970s, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 9, 2021.

Tuesday, November 9th, 2021

Dean Stockwell. He was 85.

204 credits in IMDB, dating back to 1945. The man worked, and had been working since he was a child.

Yes, “Quantum Leap” and “Blue Velvet” and the Lynch “Dune”. Also the “Battlestar Galactica” revival, the original “Twilight Zone”, one episode of a spinoff of a minor 1960s SF TV show, “Beverly Hills Cop II”, “To Live and Die in L.A.”, “Paris, Texas”, “Wagon Train”, and the list goes on. He was no slouch when it came to movies, and if it was a TV series, he was almost certainly in it at some point.

And that includes “Mannix”. (“A Step in Time”, season 5, episode 3. He was “Chris Townsend”.)

Those close to the artist describe him as a rebel who loved to act, laugh, smoke cigars and play golf, Deadline reported.

Lawrence sent over a nice obit from National Review for Gerald Russello, NR contributor and editor of the University Bookman.

Edited to add: NYT obit for Dean Stockwell.

Max Cleland, former Senator from Georgia.

Stipulated: he was a liberal (according to the NYT, too liberal for Georgia), and we probably would have disagreed on many issues.

But: he also served honorably in Vietnam.

On April 8, 1968, just days before his tour was to end, Capt. Cleland was on a rescue mission in the village of Khe Sanh when he noticed a hand grenade on the ground. He picked it up and it detonated, instantly severing his right leg and right arm; his left leg was amputated within the hour. He was later awarded the Bronze Star and a Silver Star for meritorious service.
For three decades, Mr. Cleland blamed himself for his injuries, thinking the grenade had fallen off his own belt. But he later learned from a Marine who had witnessed the explosion that it had been dropped by an unnamed private who had manipulated the pins in a misguided attempt to make the grenade easier to use in combat.

Edited to add 2: THR obit for Dean Stockwell.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: November 4, 2021.

Thursday, November 4th, 2021

William Lucking, actor.

161 credits in IMDB. He did a lot of work on “Sons of Anarchy”: other credits include “The X-Files”, “Millennium”, two spinoffs of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, “Renegade”, “Columbo”, “Jake and the Fatman”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Desert Sun”, season 8, episode 10. And I have to update the list, because according to the IMDB reviews, this is another episode in which “Mannix gets a phone call from an old Korean War buddy…asking for help.”)

I wrote yesterday about Pat Martino (and please read the excellent comment left by pigpen51). This isn’t quite an obit, but it came across Hacker News today: a piece from Nautilus about Mr. Martino, his surgery, and his recovery. It was originally published in 2015, from what I can tell, but was updated with a new introduction.

It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and memory gone, but his guitar skills intact. In a 2014 report in World Neurosurgery, Galarza, of the University Hospital in Murcia, Spain, and colleagues from Europe and the United States, wrote, “To our knowledge, this case study represents the first clinical observation of a patient who exhibited complete recovery from a profound amnesia and regained his previous virtuoso status.”

…

Martino has also put on a show for neuroscientists. His case demonstrates neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable ability, during development and learning, to “optimize the functioning of cerebral networks,” wrote Hugues Duffau, a professor and neurosurgeon at Hôpital Gui de Chauliac at Montpellier University Medical Center in France, who studied Martino’s case. The guitarist’s recovery epitomizes the ability of the brain to improvise—to compensate for malformations or injuries by wiring new connections among brain regions that restore motor, intellectual, and emotional functions. For an encore, say neuroscientists, Martino’s story is about music and how it helped shape his brain in ways that revived his life.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 3, 2021.

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021

Linda Carlson, actress.

She was the TV station owner on “Newhart” and a judge on “Murder One”, among other roles. I was not aware there was a 1993 “Beverly Hillbillies” movie, nor did I know there was an attempt at an “African Queen” TV series. She also did an episode of “Space: Above and Beyond” and appeared in “Honey, I Blew Up The Kid” for those of you looking for genre credits.

Pat Martino, jazz guitarist. This is a little outside of my usual beat (ha!) but it sits at a point I find fascinating: the relationship between music and the brain.

In 1967, when he was in his early 20s, he released his first album, “El Hombre,” on the Prestige label, and a series of well-regarded records followed. At the start of his career he often drew comparisons to earlier jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, but by the 1970s he was forging his own sound. “Pat Martino: Breaking Barriers Between Rock & Jazz,” a 1975 headline in The San Francisco Examiner read.
On a tour supporting his first albums for Warner Bros., “Starbright” (1976) and “Joyous Lake” (1977), Mr. Martino began experiencing frequent headaches and seizures, something he had dealt with occasionally since childhood. One seizure came while he was onstage in France in 1976.
“I stopped playing and stood there for about 30 seconds,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Here and Now!” (2011, with Bill Milkowski). “During these moments of seizure, it feels like you’re falling through a black hole; it’s like everything just escapes at the moment.”

Cutting to the chase, he had brain surgery, but was left with total amnesia.

“When you don’t remember something, you have no idea of its existence,” he wrote. “And upon awakening after the surgery, I remembered nothing.
“But it wasn’t a disorienting feeling,” he continued. “If I had known I was a guitarist, if I had known those two people standing by my bedside in the hospital were in fact my parents, I then would’ve felt the feelings that went along with the events. What they went through and why they were standing there looking at me then would’ve been very painful for me. But it wasn’t painful because to me they were just strangers.”
His parents helped him relearn his past, showing him family photographs and playing him his own albums. Picking up the guitar again was another form of memory recovery.
“I had to start from Square 1,” he told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta, Canada, in 2004. “But once I made the decision to try, it activated inner intuitive familiarities, like a child who hasn’t ridden their bicycle for many years and tries to do so again to reach a destination. There are moments of imbalance, but it’s subliminal, and it emerges after some mistakes, and then it strengthens.”
By the mid-1980s he was performing again. Jon Pareles, reviewing one performance, at Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan in 1986, found Mr. Martino as virtuosic and unpredictable as ever.

…

In his autobiography, he described the process of recovering the ability to play.
“As I continued to work out things on the instrument,” he wrote, “flashes of memory and muscle memory would gradually come flooding back to me — shapes on the fingerboard, different stairways to different rooms in the house. There are secret doorways that only you know about in the house, and you go there because it’s pleasurable to do so.”
The records he made after his surgery included “All Sides Now” (1997), on the Blue Note label, an album on which he shared tracks with other famed guitarists, including Mr. Paul. Two of his albums, also on Blue Note, were nominated for Grammy Awards, “Live at Yoshi’s” (2001) and “Think Tank” (2003).
His surgery and the recovery period, Mr. Martino said, changed what he was after in his music.“It used to be to do everything I possibly could to become more successful in my craft and my career,” he told the Edmonton paper. “Today, my intention is to completely enjoy the moment and everything it contains.”

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Neuroscience, Obits, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Gratuitous Mannix, some filler.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

By way of The Rap Sheet, through my mother: the cars of Joe Mannix.

Also from the same source: “Curbside TV – The Cars Of Mannix“.

Posted in 1970s, Cars, Mannix, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 27, 2021.

Wednesday, October 27th, 2021

Mort Sahl.

Gregarious and contentious — he was once described as “a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily” — Mr. Sahl had a long, up-and-down career. He faded out of popularity in the mid-1960s, when he devoted his time to ridiculing the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; then, over the following decades, he occasionally faded back in. But before that he was a star and a cult hero of the intelligentsia.
He had regular club dates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with audiences full of celebrities. He recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record,” the album “At Sunset.” (Though recorded in 1955, it was not released until 1958, shortly after the release of his official first album, “The Future Lies Ahead.”) By 1960, he had starred in a Broadway revue, written jokes for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, hosted the Academy Awards, appeared on the cover of Time and been cast in two movies (he would later make a handful of others).
An inveterate contrarian and a wide-ranging skeptic, Mr. Sahl was a self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy who cast a jaundiced eye on social trends, gender relations and conventional wisdom of all sorts. Conformity infuriated him: In one early routine he declared that Brooks Brothers stores didn’t have mirrors; customers just stood in front of one another to see how they looked. Sanctimony infuriated him: “Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they can feel good for 10 minutes.”

…

His own political leanings were difficult to track. The left wanted to claim him, especially early in his career, but they couldn’t quite do so. Among other things, he could be crudely sexist and, though he supported civil rights, he was acerbic in confrontation with knee-jerk liberal dogma on the subject. Over the course of his life he kept company with politicians of varying stripes, from Stevenson, Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Alexander Haig and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He said he had voted for Ross Perot; he praised Ron Paul and defended Sarah Palin; he cast a skeptical eye on Barack Obama’s presidency and was as scathing about Hillary Clinton as he was about Donald Trump.

…

Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was an obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, and who accused a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence, secret or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw’s trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.
“I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,” Mr. Sahl wrote in “Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. I don’t think Gene McCarthy is bad company. I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don’t think that Garrison is bad company.
“I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.”

Richard Evans, actor. He was “Paul Hanley” in the first season of “Peyton Place”. Other credits include a lot of 1970s cop/PI shows, “Lancer”, “Bonanza”, one episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series…

…and “Mannix”! (“Bird of Prey”, season 8 episodes 20 and 21. He played “Victor Valdek”.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 24, 2021.

Sunday, October 24th, 2021

Two different people sent me this one, and neither one mentioned my hot button.

Val Bisoglio, actor.

He began acting under the tutelage of Jeff Corey and appeared on the New York stage in productions such as “Kiss Mama,” “A View from the Bridge” and “Wait Until Dark,” as well as in New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park with Arthur Penn.

He has 65 credits in IMDB. High points include: “Saturday Night Fever” (he was the father of Travolta’s character), “Cover Up” (ahem), “M*A*S*H” (he played “Sal Pernelli”, the cook. Not Igor, the guy who served the food, but the cook.), “B.J. and the Bear”, “Rockford Files”, “St. Ives” (the Charles Bronson movie based on a pseudonymous novel by Ross Thomas), “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (“The Zombie“: if memory serves, he was a lower level mob thug), and “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”.

His most famous role (and the hot button one): he played “Danny Tovo”, the restaurant owner, on 138 episodes of “Quincy, M.E.”

And yes! He did do a “Mannix”! (“Run Till Dark”, season 5, episode 7.)

Paul Salata. He originated the “Mr. Irrelevant” award for the last player drafted in the NFL college draft.

He wanted to celebrate the unheralded honor of being picked last because players at the end of the line rarely get noticed — even though one might have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than of being picked by an N.F.L. team. Mr. Rozelle blessed the idea, and Mr. Irrelevant was born.
“Everyone who is drafted works hard, and some of them don’t get any recognition,” Mr. Salata told The New York Times in 2017. “They do their work and should be noticed.”

…

Starting in 1976, Mr. Salata and his friends in Orange County raised money to fly the last player picked in the draft to Southern California, where he would receive a champion’s welcome. In the years since, the players — some of whom who had never been to California — have been paraded through Newport Beach, taken to Disneyland and feted at a banquet, where they received the “Lowsman Trophy,” which depicts a player fumbling a football.
Mr. Salata and his team also fulfilled some of the players’ requests, including surfing lessons, visits to the Playboy Mansion and being a guest announcer on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Many Mr. Irrelevants never made it past their first season or even past their first training camp, but a handful have stuck around in the N.F.L. In February the Tampa Bay Buccaneers kicker Ryan Succop became the first Mr. Irrelevant to score in and win a Super Bowl. He had been drafted last in 2009 by the Kansas City Chiefs.

James Michael Tyler, “Gunther” on “Friends”. I’m sorry if I am giving him the short end of the stick here, but this just came in, and I have never seen an episode of “Friends”.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Really, really dumb trivia.

Wednesday, October 13th, 2021

What started this: McLean Stevenson was on one of the “Match Game” reruns last night.

I got to wondering: what was the motivating concept behind “Hello, Larry”? I knew he was a single dad raising two daughters, but was he a widower, or divorced?

(I also knew that this is more thought than my entire readership combined has put into “Hello, Larry” since I started this blog. Onward!)

Answer: he was divorced, and his ex-wife (played by Shelly Fabares, who is still alive, and a “Mannix” alumnae) shows up in season 2.

But that’s not the dumb trivia. Here’s the dumb trivia: “Hello, Larry” was not a “Diff’rent Strokes.” spinoff.

Even though there were “Diff’rent Strokes”/”Hello, Larry” crossover episodes, “Hello, Larry” was not conceived of as a spinoff. The crossover episodes were intended to increase “Larry”‘s ratings, so the showrunners decided that Larry Alder and Mr. Drummond were…

…wait for it…

…Yes! “old Army buddies”! (“with Drummond’s company becoming the new owners of Larry’s radio station”).

I wonder if they got the idea from Shelly Fabares.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 12, 2021.

Tuesday, October 12th, 2021

Bob Herron, stuntman. He was 97.

His career began in the 1950s working on “Winchester ’73” and “The Flame and the Arrow.” He would work steadily over the years on across TV and film. One of his earliest film credits was as an actor was “Four Guns to the Border,” directed by Richard Carlson. In TV, he worked on hundreds of shows including “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Rockford Files,” “The A-Team” and Kojak.” In film, he also worked on “Pale Rider,” “The Goonies,” “Rocky” and “Earthquake.” With over 342 credits to his name including “Airwolf,” “The Green Hornet” and “Stagecoach,” much of his work went uncredited.

Other work included “L.A. Confidential”, “Diamonds Are Forever”, “Bearcats!”…and “Mannix”! (“Deadfall: Part 2”, season 1, episode 18. “Eight to Five, It’s a Miracle”, season 1, episode 21.)

Ruthie Tompson, Disney animator. She was 111.

Over time, she worked on nearly every one of Disney’s animated features, from “Snow White” to “The Rescuers,” released in 1977.

…

Ms. Tompson joined Disney as an inker and painter. She later trained her eye on the thousands of drawings that make up an animated feature, checking them for continuity of color and line. Still later, as a member of the studio’s scene planning department, she devised exacting ways for its film cameras to bring those flat, static drawings to vivid animated life.
“She made the fantasies come real,” John Canemaker, an Oscar-winning animator and a historian of animation, said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “The whole setup then was predigital, so everything was paper, camera, film and paint.”
Among the totemic films into which Ms. Tompson helped breathe life are “Pinocchio” (1940), “Fantasia” (1940) and “Dumbo” (1941), along with countless animated shorts, including the anti-Nazi cartoon “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” which won a 1943 Academy Award.
In 2000, Ms. Tompson was named a Disney Legend, an honor bestowed by the Walt Disney Company for outstanding contributions. (Previous recipients include Fred MacMurray, Julie Andrews and Angela Lansbury; later recipients include Elton John and Tim Conway.)

…

In 1948, she was promoted to the dual role of animation checker and scene planner. As an animation checker, she scrutinized the artists’ work to see, among other things, that characters literally kept their heads: In the animators’ haste, different parts of a character’s body, often done as separate drawings, might fail to align.
The scene planner was tasked with working out the intricate counterpoint between the finished setups and the cameras that photographed them: which camera angles should be used, how fast characters should move relative to their backgrounds, and the like.
“She really had to know all the mechanics of making the image work on the screen as the director, the layout person and the animator preferred: how to make Peter Pan walk, or fly, in the specified time,” Mr. Canemaker explained. “What she did ended up on the screen — whether you see her hand or not — because of the way she supported the directors’ vision.”
In 1952, Ms. Tompson became one of the first women admitted to the International Photographers Union, an arm of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees representing camera operators. She retired in 1975 as the supervisor of Disney’s scene planning department.

Iohan Gueorguiev. I had not heard of him previously, but he had a popular YouTube channel.

Mr. Gueorguiev made his name overcoming challenges hurled at his body and spirit. He was a star in the world of “bikepacking,” long-distance bike travel conducted off main roads. Calling himself the Bike Wanderer, he stood out for his Beatnik-like romanticism about the open road, in contrast to the competitiveness of many bike jocks and gear heads.
Though Mr. Gueorguiev’s exact movements could be hard to pin down, it seems clear he spent from April 2014 to March 2020 biking from the Canadian Arctic Circle to its South American antipode, the icy mountains and valleys of Patagonia. It was not a straight path. Mr. Gueorguiev occasionally flew back to Canada to earn money planting trees, he said. While biking, he would get sidetracked by serendipitous encounters and eccentric trails.

…

He shot his videos with a simple GoPro camera charged by a portable solar panel. He would sometimes position the camera at a distance, making it appear as if he traveled with a cinematographer. He earned about $3,000 a month through the funding website Patreon and received bikepacking sponsorships, enabling him to exchange the basic touring bike he started with for one with fat tires designed for riding off-road.
However much Mr. Gueorguiev tried to cast the obstacles he encountered as part of a grand adventure, his videos showed genuine hardships. Headwinds on desert plains required him to take long breaks sheltered behind rocks and make a campsite in a stray shipping container, which itself shook from powerful gusts. He would go as long as 30 days without seeing a fellow cyclist and, when biking was not feasible, could wait two days on the road to get picked up as a hitchhiker.

…

With the onset of the pandemic, Mr. Gueorguiev found himself stuck in Canada, unable to cross borders because of travel restrictions. His videos grew shorter, and he ceased appearing onscreen as an enthusiastic narrator of his own experiences. Abiding by social distancing guidance, he avoided his habitual short stays at the homes of new friends he had met on the road. In his online journal, he described biking in the cold for days on end and spending nights without indoor heating.
“I had big expectations for the Farewell Canyon,” he wrote about a scenic area in British Columbia a few days before he died, “but it was very empty, gloomy and void of all traffic.”

…

Mr. Gueorguiev (generally pronounced gyor-ghee-ev) died on Aug. 19 in Cranbrook, British Columbia, where he had been using the home of friends as a base for travel during the pandemic. He was 33.
The cause was suicide, said Matthew Bardeen, a friend who was helping to oversee Mr. Gueorguiev’s affairs. His death was announced on biking websites late last month.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources. The Canada Suicide Prevention Service. La prévention du suicide et le soutien.

Posted in 1970s, Cycling, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 6, 2021.

Wednesday, October 6th, 2021

Eddie Robinson has passed away. He was 100.

I’m not going to snark here. He was part of baseball for 60 years, as a player:

At 6 feet 2 inches and 210 pounds — good size for his era — the left-handed-hitting Robinson clubbed 16 home runs and drove in 83 runs to help the 1948 Indians capture the team’s first pennant since 1920 en route to defeating the Boston Braves in a six-game World Series. Playing in every Series game, Robinson batted .300.
He drove in more than 100 runs and played in the All-Star Game in three consecutive seasons in the early 1950s, with the Chicago White Sox and the Philadelphia Athletics, and in 1951 became the first White Sox player to drive a home run over the roof of the old Comiskey Park.
The Yankees obtained Robinson before the 1954 season in a multiplayer trade with the Athletics. He pinch-hit and played behind first basemen Joe Collins and Bill Skowron and flashed his power when 16 of his 36 hits in 1955 were home runs. He played in his second World Series when the Yankees lost to the Brooklyn Dodgers in seven games that October.

As a scout:

In his memoir, “Lucky Me” (2011, with C. Paul Rogers III), Robinson wrote how the Yankee owner George Steinbrenner offered him the team’s general manager’s post in June 1982 and related that he “considered George one of my real friends in baseball.” But he decided to work as a Yankee scout and consultant instead, since he was well aware of Steinbrenner’s reputation as a difficult boss.
“It didn’t take long for George and me to get crossways,” Robinson recalled. He told how Steinbrenner had cooled to him after he agreed only reluctantly to be present for an October 1982 draft session; he and his wife had had a trip to Europe planned. He continued as a Yankee scout through 1985.

…

After his playing days, Robinson was a coach for the Orioles, a farm director for several teams, the general manager of the Atlanta Braves and the Texas Rangers, and a scout for the Red Sox, whom he worked for in 2004, his last year in baseball, as well as for the Yankees before that.

How long was he in baseball? This long:

Robinson played a role in a poignant baseball event in the summer of 1948.
When Babe Ruth, dying of cancer, was about to take the field at Yankee Stadium on the afternoon of June 13 for a ceremony retiring his No. 3, Robinson was in Cleveland’s dugout.
“He looked like he needed help physically, and I took a bat out of the bat rack and gave it to him,” Robinson told Major League Baseball in a 2020 interview. “He carried it up to home plate, and he used it as a kind of a crutch. When he came back, I got the bat and had him sign it.”
Nat Fein of The Herald Tribune in New York won a Pulitzer Prize for his rear view photograph depicting Ruth in Yankee pinstripes leaning on the bat, which belonged to Feller.

Cynthia Harris.

A veteran of the New York stage, Harris joined the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company in 1971, playing the role of Sarah originated by Barbara Barrie, and in 1993 co-founded The Actors Company Theater, where she served as artistic director and appeared in dozens of productions.

She also knocked around TV a bit: she was Wallis Simpson in the “Edward and Mrs. Simpson” mini series, played Dr. Asten’s wife on a couple of episodes of “Quincy”, and the mother of Paul Reiser’s character on “Mad About You”, among other roles.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2021.

Thursday, September 23rd, 2021

Melvin Van Peebles.

A Renaissance man whose work spanned books, theater and music, Mr. Van Peebles is best known for his third feature film, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” which drew mixed reviews when it was released in 1971, ignited intense debate and became a national hit. The hero, Sweetback, starred in a sex show at a brothel, and the movie sizzled with explosive violence, explicit sex and righteous antagonism toward the white power structure. It was dedicated to “all the Black brothers and sisters who have had enough of The Man.”

…

In addition to making movies, Mr. Van Peebles published novels, in French as well as in English; wrote two Broadway musicals and produced them simultaneously; and wrote and performed spoken-word albums that many have called forebears of rap.
Over the course of his life he was also a cable-car driver in San Francisco, a portrait painter in Mexico City, a street performer in Paris, a stock options trader in New York, the navigator of an Air Force bomber, a postal worker, a visual artist and, by his own account, a very successful gigolo.

…

…Columbia Pictures then hired him to direct “Watermelon Man” (1970), a satirical comedy about a white bigot, played by Godfrey Cambridge, who turns into a Black man.
Columbia wanted Mr. Van Peebles to shoot alternative endings — one in which the protagonist becomes a Black militant, and another in which he discovers that it was all a dream. Mr. Van Peebles said he “forgot” to shoot the second ending.
Disliking working for a studio, he set out to be an independent filmmaker. To make “Sweetback,” for $500,000, he combined his $70,000 savings with loans, used a nonunion crew and persuaded a film lab to extend him credit.
The plot of the movie concerns a man who attacks two crooked police officers and then escapes as a fugitive to Mexico, vowing to return and “collect some dues.” Only two theaters, in Detroit and Atlanta, would show the movie at first, but it caught fire and for several weeks outgrossed “Love Story.” Its American box office exceeded $15 million (about $100 million in today’s money), a bonanza for an independent film at the time.

Barbara Campbell Cooke. She actually passed away in April at 85, but her family didn’t make an announcement until recently.

Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs. Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.

She married Sam Cooke in 1959 (or 1958, according to Wikipedia). When he died in 1964, she married Bobby Womack (who worked with Sam Cooke) three months later. He was 19, she was 29, and a lot of fans were not happy.

But it upset many people to see Mr. Womack, sometimes in Mr. Cooke’s clothes, squiring Mr. Cooke’s widow about. The couple received hate mail, including a package containing a baby doll in a coffin. At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Ms. Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Mr. Womack, goaded by his new wife, took to cocaine. He also began a sexual relationship with the Cookes’ daughter, Linda, by then a teenager. When Barbara found them in bed, she shot Mr. Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. (Ms. Cooke was not charged, according to Mr. Womack’s book.) They divorced in 1970.

The sad goes on. The Cookes had a son who died at 18 months. Ms. Cooke and Mr. Womack also had a son who strugged with addiction and killed himself at 21.

Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.
“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”

Al Harrington. He was “Ben Kokua” in the good 5-0 (his character replaced Kono), and was a surf shop owner in the bad 5-0. Also a couple of appearances on “Jake and the Fatman”, among other credits.

When Harrington left the show in 1975, he launched a second-act career as a Waikiki showroom headliner and recording artist known affectionately as “The South Pacific Man.” He retired from the stage in 1992, and spent the next 13 years living on the mainland doing film work in Utah and California.

Roger Michell, director. Most of his films were British, but he’s perhaps best known for “Notting Hill” (that Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant movie) and “Changing Lanes” (the Ben Affleck/Samuel L. Jackson movie).

Later films included Hyde Park on Hudson, a historical drama starring Bill Murray as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and The Duke, a real-life art heist story starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren that premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.

NYT obit for George Holliday.

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Obit watch: September 21, 2021.

Tuesday, September 21st, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit from – I kid you not – the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services” for actor Tim Donnelly.

He only has 19 credits in IMDB. No “Mannix” but he did appear on the 1960s “Dragnet” multiple times, and also did a guest shot on the good “Hawaii 5-0”. Other credits include “Adam-12”, “Parts: The Clonus Horror”, and “Project U.F.O.”

Why the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services”, though? Mr. Donnelly’s most famous role was “Chet Kelly” in “Emergency”.

That was one of the great ‘staches in 1970s TV.

More seriously, I loved “Emergency” as a child, and I’m sad to see him go. (Kevin Tighe and Randolph Mantooth are both still alive, though.)

FotB RoadRich sent over the obit for George Holliday. Mr. Holliday was the man who filmed the Rodney King beating.

Reuben Klamer. Mr. Klamer was an inventor and toy creator: among other things, he invented “The Game of Life”.

His creations included his own version of the hula hoop and a variation on the Erector Set. He came up with a Pink Panther show car built on an Oldsmobile chassis and rode around in it to promote the “Pink Panther” cartoon series.
He also worked closely with television producers and built props for popular shows, including the Starfleet phaser rifle, which could stun or disintegrate living creatures, for the original “Star Trek” series. (He said he had an agreement for the toy rights to the rifle, but it fell apart and his toy phaser was never produced.) He made a special Napoleon Solo gun for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” that was so popular, the gun itself received fan mail. (He successfully created a toy version of that one.)

Anthony Johnson, “Ezal” in “Friday”.

This isn’t exactly an obit, but I think it’s worth noting.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: September 14, 2021.

Tuesday, September 14th, 2021

This one goes out to FotB Dave: Don Collier. He did a lot of work on Westerns: “The High Chaparral”, “Bonanza”, “Death Valley Days”, “Branded”, and so on. He also did some movie work, including “Seven Ways from Sundown” (with Audie Murphy) and “Tombstone” (credited as “High Roller”).

NYT obit for Art Metrano.

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