Archive for the ‘1970s’ Category

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Connections.

Monday, September 23rd, 2019

We watched the original “Night Stalker” Saturday night.

(Hi, Pat!)

That KL Studio Classics blu-ray is pretty awesome: the remaster is sharp and amazingly vivid. (I didn’t see “Night Stalker” when it was originally aired: I was (mumble mumble) years old and my parents wouldn’t let me watch it. This is actually the first time I’ve seen it, but my basis for comparison is the DVD of the TV series and the MeTV rebroadcasts: both seem a little muddy. If KL does a remaster of the series, I am there, man. And I plan to pick up the “Night Strangler” sooner rather than later now.)

The blu-ray also includes some good extras, including an interview with the director, John Llewellyn Moxey (who passed away in April of this year, at 94. I don’t recall seeing his obit reported.)

Anyway, Mr. Moxey was a prolific TV director: his credits include ten episodes of “Mannix”…

…including “End Game“, one of several episodes involving an old Army buddy of Mannix that’s out to get him…(“End Game” is a pretty tense and solid episode: it seems to show up a lot on the top ten episode lists I’ve seen.)

…and “A Ticket to the Eclipse“, another episode featuring an old Army buddy of Mannix that’s out to get him…

…and this time, the old Army buddy is played by none other than Darren McGavin his own self.

Just one of those curious connections that pop up sometimes. (Mr. Moxey seems to imply in his interview that he and Mr. McGavin didn’t know each other well, but they (and their wives) became close friends during the “Night Stalker” filming. Which is odd, because “A Ticket to the Eclipse” aired September 19, 1970, while “Night Stalker” aired January 11, 1972. So “Ticket” was probably filmed at least a year before “Night Stalker”. But, you know, maybe it took filming on location in Las Vegas to make them friends.)

(Lawrence: “Everyone in this movie looks hot.”)

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

Obit watch: September 17, 2019.

Tuesday, September 17th, 2019

Phyllis Newman, actress.

Ms. Newman won a Tony in 1962 as best featured actress in a musical for “Subways Are for Sleeping,” whose book and lyrics were written by her husband, Adolph Green, and his regular collaborator, Betty Comden. In the show, Ms. Newman played a long-term resident of the Brunswick Arms who, to stave off eviction, has shut herself in her room, a role that required Ms. Newman to spend the play in an unusual costume.
“Her line is that she is sick,” Howard Taubman wrote of the character in his review in The New York Times, “and to prove it she wears a towel wrapped around her excellently appointed torso. The only addition to her costume all evening is a pair of black gloves.”

Both my mother and the paper of record tell me that she was also a fixture on a lot of 70s game shows and talk shows, but I don’t remember that.

Cokie Roberts obit will probably be tomorrow, to give the dust time to settle.

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

Obit watch: September 7, 2019.

Saturday, September 7th, 2019

Carol Lynley, actress.

The paper of record seems rather dismissive of her acting career post 1967 or thereabouts (“..she was never directly in the public eye again”) but she did a lot of guest shots on various 1970s TV: “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Kojack”, “Quincy M.E”, “Police Woman”, “Hawaii 5-0”, multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, and the list goes on…

…and she was Kolchak’s girlfriend in “The Night Stalker”…

…and, yes, she did do a “Mannix” (“Voice In the Dark”).

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

Obit watch: September 2, 2019.

Monday, September 2nd, 2019

For the historical record: Valerie “Rhoda” Harper.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 22, 2019.

Thursday, August 22nd, 2019

Jack Perkins, NBC News reporter and former host of “Biography” on A&E.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 24, 2019.

Wednesday, July 24th, 2019

Art Neville, of the Neville Brothers.

Among those announcing the death was Louisiana’s governor, John Bel Edwards, who said in a statement that Mr. Neville “took the unique sound of New Orleans and played it for the world to enjoy.” Mr. Neville’s brother Aaron, in a post on his Facebook page, called him “the patriarch of the Neville tribe, big chief, a legend from way way back, my first inspiration.”

David Hedison, who had an interesting career. He played Felix Leiter in two Bond films, was pretty fly for a white guy in the 1958 “The Fly”, was in “The Lost World”, and turned down Robert Reed’s role in “The Brady Bunch”.

He was most famous as the submarine captain (opposite Richard Basehart’s admiral) in “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” (which you can still catch very early Sunday morning on ME TV). He also did some soaps, “Love Boat”, and “Fantasy Island”.

Oddly, from my point of view, he apparently never did a “Mannix”, though he did do other 70s cop shows. Both Mr. Hedison and Mike Connors were of Armenian descent: I’m sure he didn’t directly control the casting, but you’d figure Mr. Connors would want to help a brother out.

I don’t want to seem obsessed, but I thought this tribute from Stephen Wolfram to the late Mitchell Feigenbaum was worth sharing, especially since it gives a good explanation of the math behind his work.

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

Obit watch: July 11, 2019.

Thursday, July 11th, 2019

I am not a musician or a musicologist. I have no talent for music, and I try to leave the musicology to Mike.

But there’s something about the obit for Vivian Perlis that I find touching and interesting. Back in the day, she was a research librarian at the Yale School of Music. She went to pick up some archival material from one of Charles Ives’s business partners.

Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder. She was fascinated by the stories that Mr. Myrick, an elderly, hard-of-hearing former Southerner, told about the iconoclastic, curmudgeonly Ives.
This led her to conduct a series of more than 60 interviews over several years with people who had known and worked with Ives. A nephew in Danbury, Conn., Ives’s hometown, recounted playing baseball with “Uncle Charlie.” The composer Lehman Engel recalled hearing Ives talk about the “old days,” when the “sissies,” meaning timidly conservative performers, refused to play Ives’s flinty music.

This was the seed crystal from which grew the Yale University Oral History of American Music.

The oral history project includes some 3,000 recordings of interviews with composers and other major musical figures, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Duke Ellington to John Adams. The eminent musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock described it as an “incomparable resource.”

…

“Most composers are part of a neglected minority and are very grateful to have the opportunity to speak,” she told The Times in 2005. “They don’t have another chance to answer critics and say what they think and feel.”

Also among the dead: Jim Bouton. WP (and a tip of the hat to Borepatch for the heads-up.) He was a pitcher with several teams (Yankees, Seattle Pilots, and even the Astros). Apparently, he was not an outstanding pitcher (the paper of record uses the phrase “a pitcher of modest achievement but a celebrated iconoclast”).
He went on to greater fame as the author of Ball Four, one of the early “inside baseball” books.

When it was published in 1970, “Ball Four,” which reported on the selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy’s game very well, was viewed by many readers, either approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the so-called sanctity of the clubhouse.

…

In Bouton’s telling, players routinely cheated on their wives on road trips, devised intricate plans to peek under women’s skirts or spy on them through hotel windows, spoke in casual vulgarities, drank to excess and swallowed amphetamines as if they were M&Ms.
Mickey Mantle played hung over and was cruel to children seeking his autograph, he wrote. Carl Yastrzemski was a loafer. Whitey Ford illicitly scuffed or muddied the baseball and his catcher, Elston Howard, helped him do it. Most coaches were knotheads who dispensed the obvious as wisdom when they weren’t contradicting themselves, and general managers were astonishingly penurious and dishonest in dealing with players over their contracts.

…

“Ball Four” is “arguably the most influential baseball book ever written,” baseball historian Terry Cannon told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2005, “and one which changed the face of sportswriting and our conception of what it means to be a professional athlete.”
Sports Illustrated named it the third-best book written on sports, after A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science,” about boxing, and Roger Kahn’s elegy to the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer.”

I’ve never read Ball Four, though I’ve heard it described as sceamingly funny. But the obits make it sound like the book is as much about a man struggling to hold on to his dream of being a major league pitcher as much as it is a tell-all about the wild antics of players in the late 60s – early 70s.

“I feel sorry for Jim Bouton,” Dick Young wrote in The Daily News. “He is a social leper. His collaborator on the book, Leonard Shecter, is a social leper. People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.”

As a side note, Mr. Bouton has a limited career as an actor: there was apparently a short-lived “Ball Four” TV series in 1976 that I don’t remember. He was also “Terry Lennox” in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye“, a movie you do not want to get me started on.

Edited to add 7/12: Wow. Neil deMause over at “Field of Schemes” has a really nice tribute to Mr. Bouton up.

The image I’ll always retain of Jim, though, was of getting ice cream with him near his home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and him looking at my cup and exclaiming, “Sprinkles! That’s a great idea!” and then sprinting back into the shop to get some added to his as well. To the end, Jim Bouton remained boyishly intense about things that were truly important, whether fighting General Electric to save an old ballpark or eating ice cream, and that’s a rare and precious gift.

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

Obit watch: July 10, 2019.

Wednesday, July 10th, 2019

RIP Rip Torn. THR.

…As he once acknowledged, “I get angry easily.”
In what is probably the most famous example, in 1968 Mr. Torn was filming “Maidstone,” an underground film written and directed by Mailer. Mailer was also the star, playing a writer running for president. Mr. Torn played his half brother. In a decidedly unscripted moment, Mr. Torn struck Mailer with a hammer; Mailer responded by attacking Mr. Torn and biting his ear. The fight became the centerpiece of the film.

…

…Dennis Hopper told a story on “The Tonight Show” in 1994 about how Mr. Torn had pulled a knife on him during an argument in the 1960s. (It was apparently as a result of this argument that Jack Nicholson and not Mr. Torn was cast as the Southern lawyer in Mr. Hopper’s hit film “Easy Rider.”) The way Mr. Torn remembered it, Mr. Hopper had pulled a knife on him, not the other way around, so he sued for defamation. He won.

I’m probably being unfair by highlighting the more colorful aspects of his life. He was apparently a rather talented movie and theater actor, and a good Texas boy (born in Temple, went to both Texas A&M and UT). For some reason, I keep thinking he was on a lot of game shows when I was a kid: am I confusing him with someone else? (I know I’m not confusing Rip Torn and Charles Nelson Reilly.)

Eva Kor.

Ms. Kor took young people on annual summer tours of Auschwitz. While conducting a tour, she died on Thursday at 85 at a hotel in Krakow, Poland, near the site of the former death camp. It was there that she and her twin, Miriam, had been among some 1,500 sets of twins who were victims of experiments, including the injections of germs, overseen by the German doctor Josef Mengele.

…

“Miriam and I were part of a group of children who were alive for one reason only — to be used as human guinea pigs,” she wrote. “Three times a week we’d be placed naked in a room, for six to eight hours, to be measured and studied.
“They took blood from one arm and gave us injections in the other. After one such injection I became very ill and was taken to the hospital. If I had died, Mengele would have given Miriam a lethal injection in order to do a double autopsy. When I didn’t die, he carried on experimenting with us and as a result Miriam’s kidneys stopped growing. They remained the size of a child’s all her life.”

…

Ms. Kor, who worked in real estate for many years, traveled to Germany in 1993 to meet with a former doctor at Auschwitz, Hans Münch, who had been acquitted of war crimes. He accepted her invitation to go to Auschwitz with her and sign a document acknowledging the existence of the camp’s gas chambers. On the 50th anniversary of its liberation, they stood together before the charred ruins of its crematories.
Ms. Kor composed a letter to Dr. Münch expressing her belief in forgiving tormentors, as a thank you for his gesture.
“Dr. Münch signed his document about the operation of the gas chambers while I read my document of forgiveness and signed it,” she recalled. “As I did that, I felt a burden of pain was lifted from me.”
“Some survivors do not want to let go of the pain,” she wrote in her Forgiveness Project remembrance. “They call me a traitor and accuse me of talking in their name. I have never done this. I do it for myself. I do it not because they deserve it, but because I deserve it.”

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: July 6, 2019.

Saturday, July 6th, 2019

Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum, theoretical physicist.

When Feigenbaum began his career in the early 1970s, the term “chaos theory” did not exist. Generations of scientists dating back to Isaac Newton had worked on problems related to the predictability of complex systems, such as the orbits of the planets in the solar system. By the middle of the 20th century, physicists and mathematicians—inspired by the pioneering work of the French physicist and mathematician Henri Poincaré—had succeeded in characterizing chaotic states, often enabled by computers, by framing such questions as geometric problems. But the boundary between regular and chaotic behavior remained fuzzy, particularly as it applied to real physical systems.
Feigenbaum stepped into this foggy arena, developing methods capable of computationally modelling the period-doubling transition to chaos, which proceeds in a series of geometrically focused steps that remain similar when scaled across orders of magnitude, an example of so-called fractal geometry. He first studied a simple iterated algebraic equation known as the logistic map, and was later able to demonstrate that these steps are “universal:” all physical systems that become chaotic via this period-doubling route to chaos exhibit the same behavior. Feigenbaum also found that this behavior is determined by two universal constants, now known as the Feigenbaum constants.

Gene Pingatore, Illinois high school basketball coach. He holds the state record for most wins, but is perhaps more famous as the coach in “Hoop Dreams”.

Mickey Kapp. No, I hadn’t heard of him before, either, but the story is interesting: he was the provider of mixtapes to the astronauts through the Gemini and Apollo programs.

And it all started with José Jiménez.

At Mr. Kapp’s urging, Mr. Dana booked an appearance at the Kings Inn in Cocoa Beach, Fla., near where the astronauts trained. He usually did the astronaut bit with a straight man acting as interviewer, but for Cocoa Beach he was working alone.
“A few minutes into the routine, a guy in the front row began yelling out the straight man’s lines,” Mr. Thompson wrote. It was Mr. Shepard, who joined Mr. Dana onstage but was laughing so hard that another Mercury astronaut, Wally Schirra, who was there, took over, followed by another, Deke Slayton.

Paul Benjamin, actor. He knocked around quite a bit from the 1970s through to 2016: never did a “Mannix”, but he was in various other 70s cop shows, “Escape From Alcatraz” and was one of the guys on the corner in “Do the Right Thing”.

Sid Ramin.

Mr. Ramin (pronounced RAY-min) was one of two orchestrators — three, if you count the contributions of the composer, Leonard Bernstein, a lifelong friend — on the original Broadway production of “West Side Story,” which opened in 1957. According to “The Sound of Broadway Music” (2009), by Steven Suskin, Mr. Ramin worked on the haunting ballad “Somewhere,” the evocative “Something’s Coming,” the sweetly comic “I Feel Pretty,” the bravado-of-youth anthem “Here Come the Jets” and the irreverent “Gee, Officer Krupke.”

…

Shows whose orchestrations he worked on, in addition to “West Side Story,” included “Gypsy” (1959), “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” (1962), “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), Bette Midler’s “Clams on the Half Shell Revue” (1975), “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” (1989) and “Crazy for You” (1992).

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

Obit watch: July 5, 2019.

Friday, July 5th, 2019

For the historical record: Arte Johnson, of “Laugh-In” fame.

His success on “Laugh-In” led to a half-hour special in 1971; stints hosting other programs, including the short-lived game show “Knockout;” and repeat appearances on series like “The Love Boat” and “General Hospital.” He voiced a character named Tyrone on the cartoon series “Baggypants and the Nitwits,” which also featured the voice of Ruth Buzzi, in 1977, and played Renfield in the vampire movie comedy “Love at First Bite,” with George Hamilton as Count Dracula, in 1979.

You know, I’d never even heard of “Baggypants and the Nitwits” until now…

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Quick obit watch update.

Wednesday, May 15th, 2019

The NYT updated their Tim Conway obit in place (and included the dentist sketch, which they didn’t previously).

I was going to link to the LAT obit…but I couldn’t find one. Mr. Conway’s death (in LA) got no play on the LAT homepage. I finally found, by searching the site, that they’d run the generic AP obit and apparently a few photos, but all of this was buried.

Cleveland Plain Dealer.

“Here’s this fellow from this town outside of Cleveland, Chagrin Falls,” Harvey Korman said of his friend and “Carol Burnett Show” co-star before they brought their “Together Again’’ show to Cleveland’s Palace Theatre in 2003. “His mother is a Rumanian seamstress. His father is an Irish groom. And their issue, one child, is this comedy genius. How does that happen? He is indeed one of the most inventive and innovative comedy minds in our business.
“I truly believe he was born too late. I think if he were born in the era of the Chaplins, the Keatons and the Lloyds, he would have been right up there with the great silent clowns.”

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Not exactly an obit watch…

Tuesday, May 14th, 2019

…but I wanted to post this now, in memory of Tim Conway. Fuller obits will come, probably tomorrow.

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

Obit watch: May 13, 2019.

Monday, May 13th, 2019

Doris Day.

I can’t find a good clip, but I rather liked Ms. Day in the 1956 version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. (I liked Jimmy Stewart in that movie, too, but I think the 1934 version moves faster and has a more satisfying climax. Don’t get me wrong: both are good Hitchcock films.)

Peggy Lipton, of “Mod Squad” and “Twin Peaks” fame. I wish I had more to say about her, but I was just a little too young for “The Mod Squad” and pretty much missed “Twin Peaks” the first time around.

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

Obit watch: May 10, 2019.

Friday, May 10th, 2019

Jim Fowler, Marlin Perkins’s sidekick on “Wild Kingdom” and later frequent late-night talk show guest.

Here’s something we hope you really like:

Posted in 1970s, Mammals, Obits, Reptiles, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 25, 2019.

Thursday, April 25th, 2019

Wow. Lots going on.

This is breaking news: Lawrence beat me to it (because I had to wait for my lunch hour to post).

Former Williamson County DA Jana Duty was found dead in a South Texas condo yesterday.

I have a WCDA tag for reasons: if you go back and look, or read Lawrence’s post, you’ll see that former DA Duty was controversial and apparently had some issues during her tenure. But this is still a sad and awful thing.

Mark Medoff, playwright. He was best known for “Children of a Lesser God”, which won multiple Tony awards and was the basis for the Oscar winning Marlee Matlin movie.

This one is for Mike the Musicologist: Heather Harper, soprano.

An unanticipated performance in 1962 brought Ms. Harper international attention when, on 10 days’ notice, she substituted for Galina Vishnevskaya in the premiere of Britten’s “War Requiem.” The work was written to dedicate the new Coventry Cathedral in England, the original 14th-century structure having been bombed into ruin during World War II.
As a gesture of reconciliation, Britten, a pacifist, had intended the soloists to be the tenor Peter Pears (an Englishman), the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (a German) and Ms. Vishnevskaya (a Russian). But the Soviet government refused to allow Ms. Vishnevskaya to travel to Coventry for the premiere. Ms. Harper, just turned 32, took her place and triumphed.

She did a lot of work with Britten (including Ellen in the 1969 BBC production of “Peter Grimes”) but she had a larger repertoire, including singing “Lohengrin” at Bayreuth.

Fay McKenzie, actress. Her story is interesting:

Ms. McKenzie made her screen debut in 1918, when she was 10 weeks old, cradled in Gloria Swanson’s arms in “Station Content,” a five-reel silent romance. Her last role was a cameo appearance with her son, Tom Waldman Jr., in “Kill a Better Mousetrap,” a comedy, based on a play by Scott K. Ratner, that was filmed last summer and has yet to be released.

She was also in five Blake Edwards movies and five Gene Autry movies. Ms. McKenzie was 101 when she passed.

Ken Kercheval. He did a lot of TV work (no “Mannix”, though) and was probably most famous as Cliff Barnes on “Dallas”. (He was also in “Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell“, which I’d kind of like to watch. Lawrence, however, does not seem to care much for movies involving demonic dogs.)

Finally, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg. Noted:

As the crown prince, he fled Luxembourg with the grand ducal family after Germany invaded the country in May 1940 and found refuge in France, Portugal, the United States and Canada before moving to Britain to join the Irish Guards, a regiment of the British Army, as a private in 1942.
He participated in the Allies’ invasion of Normandy in 1944 and fought in the Battle for Caen there. Three months later he took part in the liberation of Brussels.
Among other honors, he received a Silver Star from the United States, a War Medal from Britain and the French Croix de Guerre. He was promoted to colonel in the Irish Guards in 1984 and was made an honorary general of the British Army in 1995.

Posted in 1970s, Cops, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV, Wagner, WCDA | 2 Comments »

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