Archive for the ‘1970s’ Category

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Obit watch: March 25, 2020.

Wednesday, March 25th, 2020

Terrence McNally, noted playwright.

Mr. McNally’s Tony Awards attest to his versatility. Two were for books for musicals, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “Ragtime” (1998), and two were for plays, and vastly different ones: “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1995), about gay men who share a vacation house, and “Master Class” (1996), in which the opera diva Maria Callas reflects on her career.
And those prize winners were only a small part of his oeuvre. With some three dozen plays to his credit, as well as the books for 10 musicals, the librettos for four operas and a handful of screenplays for film and television, Mr. McNally was a remarkably prolific and consistent dramatist.

Hattip on this to Lawrence, who also pointed out that Mr. McNally did a guest shot on “The Greatest American Hero”. He actually did guest shots on a small hand full of TV shows, including “Salvage I” (that sounds like a “blink and you’d miss it” appearance), “CHiPs”, and “The Young and the Restless”.

Speaking of hattips, great and good FOTB Borepatch sent over an obit for Albert Uderzo, co-creator (with the late René Goscinny) of Asterix and Obelix.

Edited to add: NYT obit.

A followup from “The Drive” that I’ve been meaning to post for a couple of days: Kenny Rogers, dirt racer.

Rogers paired up with Sprint Car Hall of Famer C.K. Spurlock and campaigned his own team for several years before the two formed Gambler Chassis Company. Taking its name from Rogers’ famous song The Gambler, this project was anything but a gimmick. The company would go on to win races with stars like Steve Kinser, Sammy Swindell, and Doug Wolfgang behind the wheel. Simply put, Gambler cars were consistently some of the fastest in the United States, taking victories at primetime events like the Knoxville Nationals.

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

Obit watch: March 24, 2020.

Tuesday, March 24th, 2020

Lawrence sent over an obit for prolific British actor David Collings, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation from another site.

Eric Weissberg, multi-instrumentalist musician, but perhaps most famous as a banjo guy. Specifically, “Dueling Banjos”.

As a session player he appeared on Judy Collins’s “Fifth Album,” contributing guitar to her 1965 version of “Pack Up Your Sorrows.” He played banjo on John Denver’s 1971 Top 10 pop hit, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” His fretwork was heard on albums like Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” (1974), Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) and the Talking Heads’ “Little Creatures” (1985). He collaborated with jazz musicians like Bob James and Herbie Mann as well.
“Dueling Banjos” did not, as the song’s title suggests, involve two banjoists pitting their skills against each other. Instead it showcased Mr. Weissberg’s three-finger Earl Scruggs-style banjo in a sprightly call-and-response — more of a dance than a fight — with the flat-picked acoustic guitar of his collaborator, Steve Mandell.

…

When it appeared on the soundtrack for “Deliverance,” a movie based on the James Dickey novel of the same name, it was mistakenly copyrighted to Mr. Weissberg.
A lawsuit was settled in Mr. Smith’s favor. Mr. Weissberg always maintained that Warner Bros. had credited him as the song’s composer without his knowledge or consent.

Eli Miller. No, you probably never heard of him. He was one of the last of New York City’s door to door seltzer delivery men, who worked “from 1960 until he retired in 2017.”

When Mr. Miller started his business, hundreds of seltzer men plied the streets; when he retired, there were only a handful. Through all of the intervening decades, he appeared at his customers’ homes bearing a wooden box of pewter-topped bottles filled with authentic seltzer.
“It’s not the stuff you buy in the plastic bottles in the store, which has about five pounds of pressure,” Mr. Miller said in a video that accompanied an article about him in The New York Times in 2013.
What Mr. Miller brought customers, he said, was triple-filtered New York City water, without salt, sugar or other additives, pressurized to about 60 to 80 pounds per square inch — perfect for enjoying plain or spritzing into an egg cream.

…

Mr. Miller was inducted into the Brooklyn Jewish Hall of Fame in 2017. His fellow inductees that year included the television personality Judge Judy Sheindlin and Ira Glasser, a former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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

Obit watch: March 18, 2020.

Wednesday, March 18th, 2020

Stuart Whitman, another one of those knock-around TV and movie actors. THR.

He was “Marshal Jim Crown” on “Cimarron Strip”, played a child molester in a British movie called “The Mark”, was “Sergeant Walters” on “Highway Patrol”, and did guest shots on a whole lot of 70’s TV. (No “Mannix”, though.)

Lyle Waggoner. Things I didn’t know: he tried out for “Batman”. He was the first “Playgirl” centerfold. He did guest shots on “Lost in Space” (the original) and “Supertrain”. And he was in “Catalina Caper“.

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

Obit watch: March 3, 2020.

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020

James Lipton. THR. I wish I had more to say about him, but my anti-cable TV policy means that I never saw an episode of “Inside the Actor’s Studio”, and I’m way too young to remember “The Lone Ranger” on the radio.

One thing I don’t think I was consciously aware of until I read his obit: he also wrote An Exaltation of Larks.

Claudette Nevins. She was one of those knock-around actresses: she was in the original production of “Plaza Suite” and toured nationally with “The Great White Hope”. She also did a lot of TV, especially in the 70s: “Barnaby Jones”, “M*A*S*H” (she was the woman Charles Emerson Winchester “married” while drunk in Tokyo), “Mrs. Colombo”, “Switch”, “Lou Grant”, “The Rockford Files”, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl”, “The F.B.I.”…and the list goes on. (She even did an episode of “Police Squad“. (“In Color”!)) Never did a “Mannix”, though, at least per IMDB.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 26, 2020.

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020

My brother sent out an obit watch for Clive “Raise the Titanic!” Cussler. I have not been able to find an obit to link to yet, but his passing seems to be confirmed by a post from his wife on his Facebook page. When I find actual obits, I’ll either update here or post another obit watch tomorrow.

Edited to add: Of course. Literally five minutes after I hit “Publish”, the paper of record posts their obit.

He began writing fiction at home in the late 60s, but his first two books, “Pacific Vortex” and “The Mediterranean Caper,” were repeatedly rejected. Unable even to get an agent, he staged a hoax. Using the letterhead of a fictitious writers’ agency, he wrote to the agent Peter Lampack, posing as an old colleague about to retire and overloaded with work. He enclosed copies of his manuscripts, citing their potential.
It worked. “Where can I sign Clive Cussler?” Mr. Lampack wrote back. In 1973, “The Mediterranean Caper” was published, followed by “Iceberg” (1975) and “Raise the Titanic!” (1976).
Despite an improbable plot and negative reviews, “Raise the Titanic!” sold 150,000 copies, was a Times best seller for six months and became a 1980 film starring Richard Jordan and Jason Robards Jr.

I actually kind of enjoyed the book “Raise the Titanic!”, but I was young at the time. I also paid actual money to see the movie in a theater, and that was a piece of s–t.

His books sales have been staggering — more than 100 million copies, with vast numbers sold in paperback at airports. Translated into 40 or so languages, his books reached The New York Times’s best-seller lists more than 20 times, as he amassed a fortune estimated at $80 million.

Ahem. Ahem.

While searching for his obit, though, I stumbled across the THR one for Ben Cooper. He was in a fair number of Westerns: “Johnny Guitar”, “Support Your Local Gunfighter”, “The Fastest Guitar Alive”. He also did a lot of TV guest spots: “Gunsmoke”, “Bonanza”, “The Rifleman”, “Death Valley Days”, and had regular spots on “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo” and “The Fall Guy”…

…and yes, he was on “Mannix” twice. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4, the same one Robert Conrad was in. That’s the next one we’re watching, Lawrence. Also “To Cage a Seagull”, season 4, episode 10.)

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

Obit watch: February 21, 2020.

Friday, February 21st, 2020

I can’t put this one any better than the paper of record did:

Sy Sperling, Founder of Hair Club for Men (and Also a Client), Dies at 78

Several people sent me obits for Lawrence Tesler:

Mr. Tesler worked at a number of Silicon Valley’s most important companies, including Apple under Steve Jobs. But it was as a young researcher for Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s that he did his most significant work: helping to develop today’s style of computer interaction based on a graphical desktop metaphor and a mouse.
Early in his Xerox career (he began there in 1973), Mr. Tesler and another researcher, Tim Mott, developed a program known as Gypsy, which did away with the restrictive modes that had made text editing complicated. For example, until Gypsy, most text-editing software had one mode for entering text and another for editing it.

…

The Gypsy program offered such innovations as the “cut and paste” analogy for moving blocks of text and the ability to select text by dragging the cursor through it while holding down a mouse button. It also shared with an earlier Xerox editor, Bravo, what became known as “what you see is what you get” printing (or WYSIWYG), a phrase Mr. Tesler used to describe a computer display that mirrored printed output.

…

It was Mr. Tesler who gave Mr. Jobs the celebrated demonstration of the Xerox Alto computer and the Smalltalk software system that would come to influence the design of Apple’s Lisa personal computer and then its Macintosh.

The NYT ran a nice obit for Kellye Nakahara Wallett. There’s also a very good tribute to her on Ken Levine’s blog.

Esther Scott, actress. (“Boys N the Hood”)

Ja’Net DuBois, “Willona Woods” on “Good Times” and co-writer and performer of the theme for “The Jeffersons”.

Bonnie MacLean, another one of the 1960s San Francisco psychedelic poster artists.

Posted in 1970s, Apple, Geek, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 18, 2020.

Tuesday, February 18th, 2020

Charles Portis, author (True Grit, Norwood, The Dog of the South).

A lot of people I know (especially in the SF community) praise Portis. He’s on my list, but so far I’ve only read parts of True Grit. I need to go back and read the whole thing: the use of voice in this novel is fascinating.

The narrative voice of “True Grit” is that of a self-assured old woman, Mattie Ross, as she recalls an adventure she had in Arkansas’s Indian Territory when she was 14, on a quest to track down her father’s killer with Cogburn’s help.
Mr. Portis wanted her to sound determined to “get the story right,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. The book has virtually no contractions, and the language is insistently old-fashioned.

I think more to the point that this is a book written from the point of view of a determined older woman, recounting a formative experience of her youth, and Portis manages to capture both the teen and the adult.

Mr. Portis shrank from the attention his more celebrated novels attracted. He steadfastly refused to be interviewed, although he made himself available to talk about his life for this obituary. When drawn into public gatherings, he dodged photographers. But he didn’t like to be called a recluse or compared to the likes of J.D. Salinger. He pointed out that his name was in the Little Rock phone book.

…

Mr. Portis’s reluctance to talk to the news media may have been traceable to his days as a reporter, when intruding on people’s lives was part of the job description. Mattie, his narrator in “True Grit,” may be voicing Mr. Portis’s own feelings when she speaks of the reporters who had sought her out to tell them her story of Rooster Cogburn.
“I do not fool around with newspapers,” Mattie says. “The paper editors are great ones for reaping where they have not sown. Another game they have is to send reporters out to talk to you and get your stories free. I know the young reporters are not paid well and I would not mind helping those boys out with their ‘scoops’ if they could ever get anything right.”

(Interestingly, this is another NYT obit where the subject outlived the obit writer.)

It may be kind of a cliche, but this section is quoted in the NYT obit. I’m also a sucker for John Wayne, and this is one of my favorite Wayne moments.

(“Fill your hand, you son-of-a-bitch!” Such a useful phrase.)

Kellye Nakahara Wallett. As Kellye Nakahara, she was perhaps best known as “Lt. Kellye Yamato” on M*A*S*H, a character who was mostly a bit player (though the character was featured in one episode near the end of the run). M*A*S*H Wiki entry.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 13, 2020.

Thursday, February 13th, 2020

Paula Kelly.

Ms. Kelly burst into the movies in 1969 in “Sweet Charity,” an adaptation of the stage musical about an ever-hopeful taxi dancer — a dance partner for hire — in a run-down Times Square dance hall. Ms. Kelly played the dancer Helene, one of two best friends of the title character, Charity Hope Valentine, played by Shirley MacLaine. Chita Rivera played the other.
Although lesser known than the movie’s big stars — Sammy Davis Jr. also had top billing — Ms. Kelly more than held her own, especially in the seductive number “Big Spender” and the energetic “There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This,” in which the three dance-hall girls express their determination to get respectable jobs.
Onstage, Ms. Kelly played Helene in the London production of “Sweet Charity” (with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and a book by Neil Simon). The director, Bob Fosse, who also directed and choreographed the show on Broadway, asked Ms. Kelly to reprise the role for the movie, which was to be his feature-film directorial debut.
He called her “the best dancer I’ve ever seen.”

She went on to other movie roles, including “The Andromeda Strain” (the original), “Soylent Green”, and “The Spook Who Sat By the Door”. She also did guest spots on a lot of 70s TV that wasn’t “Mannix”: “Cannon”, “Police Woman”, “The Streets of San Francisco”. She also played a public defender on “Night Court”.

Despite her many acting roles, Ms. Kelly’s first love was dance.
“The only time I feel complete expression is when I’m dancing,” she told the black weekly The New Pittsburgh Courier in 1968. “Then I feel I have no problems, no worries, no hangups. I feel I could do anything in the world.”

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

Obit watch: February 9, 2020.

Sunday, February 9th, 2020

Let’s get down to it.

Paul Farnes. He was 101, and the last surviving RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

…for three months, through the end of October, the R.A.F. battled the Luftwaffe for supremacy in the skies over Britain. Flying a Hurricane fighter for the 501 Squadron, Mr. Farnes, a sergeant pilot, proved supremely adept at attacking German aircraft.
In August alone he shot down three Junkers Ju Stuka bombers, a Dornier 17 light bomber and a Messerschmitt 109E fighter.At the end of September, as Mr. Farnes maneuvered his malfunctioning Hurricane back to the R.A.F.’s Kenley base, he spotted a German bomber flying directly at him at about 1,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘Good God,’ so I whipped out and had to reposition myself and managed to get ’round behind him,” he said in an interview with the website History of War in 2017. “I gave him a couple of bursts, and he crashed at Gatwick just on the point between the airport and the racecourse.”

…

Aerial warfare against the Germans meant breaking away from the squadron, finding something to shoot at, firing away, then breaking away to safety. But by Mr. Farnes’s account it was also enjoyable, because he was able to combine his love of flying with the mission to protect Britain.
“The C.O. would quite often pick the next members of the squadron that had to be at ‘readiness,’ and the two or three who weren’t picked would be pretty fed up,” he told History of War. “If you weren’t picked, you’d think, ‘Why can’t I go?’ I’m sure one or two must have felt, ‘Well, thank God I’m not going!’ But a lot of us were quite happy to go.”

Robert Conrad. THR. Variety.

I was a little young for “Wild Wild West” in first run; if it was syndicated in Houston when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. It could have been on the station we were never able to pick up (the same one OG “Star Trek” was on). And “Hawaiian Eye” was before my time. But if you’re my age or a little on either side of it, this was like candy for us:

He also appeared multiple times on “Mission: Impossible” and other series, either as the lead of some less than successful ones (“High Mountain Rangers”) or doing guest shots. He did do a “Mannix”. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4.) And I didn’t know this, but he played G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.

Orson Bean. Variety. THR. Interesting guy: I remember him from “Being John Malkovich” and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some of those old game shows on Buzzr. In the 1960s, he founded a progressive school in New York City.

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)
When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

In the 1980s, he settled down again and resumed acting. He was 91 years old when he died: he was hit by a car while walking, fell, and was run over by a second car (according to Variety).

After the jump, more obits.

(more…)

Posted in 1970s, Books, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Nixon, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: February 6, 2020.

Thursday, February 6th, 2020

I wish I had something wise or profound or witty to say about Kirk Douglas beyond, “Man, what a career. Heck, what a life.”

The one thing I can say is: we’ve been lucky enough to watch a few Kirk Douglas movies recently during Saturday movie night, and I look forward to watching more. “Ace In the Hole” is a very under-rated but excellent movie about the power of the mass media to create circuses: in some way, I think it’s actually almost a prequel to “Network” (one of my top ten films). As for “Spartacus“, yes, it is a long movie, but I can’t think of anything I’d cut out of it. “Paths of Glory” is shorter, and is another Douglas movie that I think is under-rated. (I also think it may be Kubrick’s most overlooked film).

We haven’t watched “Lonely Are the Brave” yet, but it is on the list, and I may move the priority on that one up…

NYT. LAT. Variety. THR.

Man, what a career. What a life.

Also among the dead: Gene Reynolds, co-creator of “M*A*S*H” and creator of “Lou Grant.”

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

Obit watch: January 31, 2020.

Friday, January 31st, 2020

Fred Silverman, famous TV executive at CBS, ABC, and NBC.

At 25, Mr. Silverman was made head of daytime programming for CBS, and in 1970, in his early 30s, he landed the network’s top programming job, putting him in charge of the prime-time schedule.

He was responsible for the success of “All in the Family”:

“I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing,” Mr. Silverman recalled in an oral history recorded in 2001 for the Television Academy Foundation. “Compared to the crap that we were canceling, this was really setting new boundaries.”
He credited Robert Wood, president of CBS at the time, with putting the show on the air in January 1971. But it was Mr. Silverman who rescued it from its original, deadly Tuesday night time slot, stacking it on Saturday nights with another savvy series, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
“These were the first building blocks,” Mr. Silverman said, leading to other successes like the spinoffs “Maude,” from “All in the Family,” and “Rhoda,” from “Mary Tyler Moore.”

He went on to ABC:

By the time he left in 1978 to become NBC’s president and chief executive, ABC was No. 1 in the Nielsen rankings, on the strength of shows like “Laverne & Shirley” (a spinoff of “Happy Days”), not to mention the landmark mini-series “Roots” (1977).

At NBC. he was responsible for airing hits such as “Supertrain”, “Hello, Larry”, and “Pink Lady”. He also gave us the Jean Doumanian era of SNL.

Okay, that wasn’t 100% fair. He was also responsible for David Letterman’s daytime show, “Hill Street Blues”, and “Shōgun”.

After NBC, he went on to become an independent producer, whose credits included “Matlock”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “In the Heat of the Night”, and “Diagnosis: Murder”.

I actually managed to find a video of the legendary “A Limo for a Lame-O” sketch. I can’t embed it, but you can find it here. I can embed this:

Remember when Al Franken was funny?

John Andretti, member of the Andretti racing family. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

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

Obit watch: January 30, 2020.

Thursday, January 30th, 2020

Marj Dusay.

She knocked around episodic television a lot:

The Kansas native stepped in for the late Carolyn Jones as Myrna Clegg on CBS’ Capitol in 1983 and went on to play Pamela Capwell Conrad on NBC’s Santa Barbara, Vivian Alamain on NBC’s Days of Our Lives, the evil Vanessa Bennett on ABC’s All My Children and Alexandra Spaulding on CBS’ The Guiding Light.

She also played Blair’s mother on “The Facts of Life”, and Mrs. MacArthur in “MacArthur”. She also did guest shots on things like “Quincy, M.E.”, “Petrocelli”, “Cannon”, “Streets of San Francisco”, the good “Hawaii 5-0″…

…but she was perhaps most famous for playing “Kara”, the woman who steals Spock’s brain, in the “Spock’s Brain” episode of “Star Trek”…

…and yes, she appeared on “Mannix” twice. (“A Gathering of Ghosts”, season 4, episode 19, and “Mask for a Charade”, season 7, episode 21.)

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 23, 2020.

Thursday, January 23rd, 2020

Wow. It got busy up in here all of the sudden.

Jim Lehrer. I feel like I should have more to say about this, but I was only an occasional “NewsHour” watcher. And I think the papers for the next day or so are going to be filled with eulogies that are probably better than I could write.

John Karlen, working actor. He was Willie Loomis on “Dark Shadows” and Lacey’s husband on “Cagney and Lacey”, among his 117 credits…

…which do include “Mannix”. (“Quartet for Blunt Instrument”, season 8, episode 19. He was “Hood #1”.)

Jack Kehoe, who never did “Mannix”, but was the “Erie Kid” in “The Sting”, the book keeper in “The Untouchables” (the DePalma one) and had roles in “Serpico”, “Melvin and Howard”, and a bunch of other films.

Jack Van Impe, televangelist.

Mr. Van Impe promoted a view of the end of the world known in evangelical circles as dispensational premillennialism, which teaches that Christians will be raptured, or taken up to heaven, before a period of tribulation, a final battle called Armageddon and the return and rule of Jesus on earth.
His sermons had titles like “The Coming War with Russia, According to the Bible. Where? When? Why?” (In that sermon he warned of a coming world dictator and a Russian invasion of Israel.) In his final broadcast, on Jan. 10, he discussed relations between the United States and Iran and predicted “the bloodiest war in the world,” saying it would result mostly in the deaths of “Muslim terrorists.”

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

Obit watch: January 22, 2020.

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020

I’m slightly behind the curve on the Terry Jones obits because my office is like Australia at the moment. (Everything’s on fire.)

This is actually a good thing, as Borepatch has a much better obit up than I could have written.

I rather liked this:

There were camps and alliances within the Pythons. Mr. Jones generally wrote with Mr. Palin. He was said not to get along with Mr. Cleese, although he shrugged off such claims.
“I only threw a chair at John once,” he told Vice in 2008. In a different interview his recollection was “John Cleese only threw a chair at me once.”

And now for something completely different: Egil Krogh, one of Nixon’s “Plumbers”.

In November 1973, Mr. Krogh, known as Bud, pleaded guilty to “conspiracy against rights of citizens” for his role in the September 1971 break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding in Beverly Hills, Calif.
The Plumbers, a group of White House operatives, were tasked with plugging leaks of confidential material, which had bedeviled the Nixon administration. Mr. Ellsberg, a military analyst, had been responsible for the biggest leak of all: passing the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret government history of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times earlier that year.
The Plumbers were hoping to get information about Mr. Ellsberg’s mental state that would discredit him, but they found nothing of importance related to him.

…

He was the first member of the president’s staff to receive a prison sentence; he was given two to six years but was released after four and a half months.
Mr. Krogh was disbarred in 1975 but was readmitted to the bar in 1980. Thereafter he concentrated on issues and clients related to energy.

Historical side note: Mr. Krogh was also an advisor to Nixon on drug policy…and, in that capacity, he arranged the legendary December 21, 1970 meeting between the president and Elvis Presley.

Mr. Krogh wrote a book about the moment, “The Day Elvis Met Nixon” (1994). In a 2007 speech at the Nixon library in California, hecalled it “the one completely fun day I had on the White House staff.”

Posted in 1970s, Elvis, Nixon, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 10, 2020.

Friday, January 10th, 2020

Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, noted for “77 Sunset Strip”. NYT.

Broadcast on ABC from 1958 to 1964, “77 Sunset Strip” starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Roger Smith as a pair of suave Los Angeles private eyes and Mr. Byrnes as the parking-lot attendant at the restaurant next door to their office.
As he ministered tenderly to the Thunderbird convertible driven by Mr. Zimbalist in the show, Kookie (né Gerald Lloyd Kookson III) ran his omnipresent pocket comb through his lush ducktailed pompadour, cracked his devil-may-care grin and spouted aphorisms that even at midcentury had all the gnomic obscurity of Zen koans:
“A dark seven” (a depressing week); “piling up the Z’s” (getting some sleep); “headache grapplers” (aspirin); “buzzed by germsville” (to become ill); and, most emblematically, “Baby, you’re the ginchiest!” — a phrase of the highest Kookian approbation.

His character evolved from parking attendant to junior partner in the detective agency, but he was pretty much typecast after that. Deadline suggests that he partially inspired the Rick Dalton character in “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood”. He did go on to play the dance host in “Grease” and did a fair number of guest shots on TV shows…

…yes, including “Mannix”. (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6.)

Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, Texas sculptor of giant objects.

Iggy wound up at the Lone Star, a Texas-themed honky-tonk, in the 1970s after Mr. Wade had shown it at an exhibition in western New York, near Niagara Falls. Impetuously picking up the phone one day at 2 a.m., he called Mort Cooperman, the club’s owner, and asked him if he would like to install the sculpture on the roof of the Lone Star building, at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street. Mr. Cooperman said yes, agreeing to pay Mr. Wade $1,000 a year for Iggy — the deal was originally for five years — and $1,000 a year for his bar tab.

…

The iguana was Mr. Wade’s opening act. There would be many more gigantic, kitschy installations: A sextet of 10-foot-tall dancing frogs and an alligator made of Altoid tins. A New Orleans Saints helmet made largely out of an old Volkswagen. A hog-shaped motorcycle made from salvaged Harley-Davidson parts. A colossal pair of simulated ostrich-skin boots. (They’d fit a cowboy with size 500 feet, he estimated.)

…

A few years after the boots were disassembled and moved to a mall in San Antonio on three flatbed trucks in 1980, Mr. Wade got a phone call from the mall’s manager. A homeless man had found his way into one of the boots and cooked his lunch there. The boot was on fire.
“It was the size of a small apartment, kind of a nice spot, and he was cooking lunch with cans of Sterno, and smoke was emerging from the top of the boots,” Mr. Wade said in “Too High, Too Wide and Too Long.”

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

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