Garry Shandling. NYT. A/V Club.LAT.
Earl Hamner Jr. I knew he was responsible for “The Waltons”, but I wasn’t aware that he also did “Falcon Crest”, and I don’t think I knew he’d written “Twilight Zone” episodes.
Did you think I was going to pass up a chance to work in a Heidi Bowl reference?
Ken “The White Shadow” Howard. A/V Club.
I had completely forgotten he was Jordan’s father in “Crossing Jordan”, and didn’t know that gig only lasted two seasons. Then again, I checked out of “Crossing Jordan” after the first season: my fondness for Jill Hennessy couldn’t overcome the stupidity of the show.
Joe Garagiola. I think everyone of my age remembers him from television, but I’m too young to remember his baseball career, such as it was:
“Senator, how can you tamper with a .250 hitter?” Garagiola said.
And that wasn’t intended as a cheap shot: he was amazingly self-deprecating.
George Kennedy. NYT. A/V Club.
Yes, yes, Naked Gun. But also “Cool Hand Luke”.
And this thought isn’t original to me, though I don’t remember where I first encountered it: Joe Patroni had a rather interesting aviation career. He started out as a mechanic in “Airport“, and wound up pilot in command (?) of the Concorde nine years later. (I honestly don’t remember what he did in the other two “Airport” movies, but he was in them, and was the only actor to appear in all four.)
(Interestingly, Wikipedia says Kennedy was a pilot in real life.)
Edited to add: I intended to also mention (but ran out of time) Kennedy’s two police series:
…Good for a few chuckles, at least. For example, the entry on “Eastern Caribbean University”: “…master’s degrees were offered in “Classical Studies” which actually was the study of any ‘classic’ TV or movies series such as ‘I Love Lucy’ or the James Bond movies. Closed by action of the CB.”
I also like “Irish International University”: “The Irish government has requested that Malaysia close this entity on grounds that it is neither Irish nor a university.”
(“The Partridge Family were neither partridges, nor a family. Discuss.”)
I really like this remembrance of Marvin Minsky by Stephen Wolfram.
Edited to add: By way of Lawrence, Kevin D. Williamson in National Review on Minsky and economics.
Not Minsky, but worth linking to: Hal Linden on Abe Vigoda.
For the historical record, Abe Vigoda: NYT. A/V Club. abevigoda.com.
I loved “Barney Miller” (and really need to pick up the complete box set when it gets cheap), and I don’t remember being a fan of “Fish”. And I actually saw the Broadway revival of “Arsenic and Old Lace” with Vigoda and Jean Stapleton the last time I was in NYC. That was a lot of fun.
But the one thing that stands out for me when I think about Vigoda is this:
It might be because I saw it again recently, but I think this is an amazing scene. Watch Vigoda’s face, and the range of emotions he goes through: shock, disappointment, resignation, and that heartbreaking last line: “Tom, can you get me off the hook? For old times’ sake?” Who else could have played that scene?
Catching up on a few from the past couple of days.
Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty, for the record. NYT. A/V Club.
Both of the times Mike the Musicologist and I have gone up to Tulsa, Haggerty was a “special guest”. I thought about getting an autograph and maybe even a photo with him – if nothing else, as a present for my brother – but somehow, in all our wanderings around the show (and remember, it is a huge show) we never made it past where he and the other guests were sitting. I kind of regret that now…
Noted Austin public radio personality Paul Ray died on Friday. Statesman. KUTX.
I’m still kind of hoping for an obituary from a more mainstream news source, but Florence King, writer and National Review columnist, has died. Tributes from Tam and Lawrence.
This was a little surprising:
Amen. Florence King was the cat's meow, which would have meant something to her. https://t.co/8MVKXMs1M9
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) January 7, 2016
I’m not going to say she was as influential on my writing as P.J.: I came to her relatively late in life. But she was a damn funny writer (even if I can’t quote some of my favorite lines here), and the world is a lesser place for her passing. Frankly, we could do a lot worse than a monarchy. Especially one run by Florence King.
Interesting career. He started out on “The Jack Paar Show” (or “The Steve Allen Show”, depending on which obit you read).
Of course, he was most famous as Schneider on “One Day at a Time”.
Ashraf Pahlavi, sister of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Really? I wonder where the NYT got access to this “internal secret history”.
Unfortunately, his death seems to have fallen into the holiday gap, so everyone’s running the same AP obit. The LAT link above seems to be the most complete version.
Irwin Schiff, noted tax protester.
Mr. Schiff was serving a 14-year prison sentence when he died.
Pat Woodell, aka “Bobbie Jo Bradley” of “Petticoat Junction”.
There’s a really nice obituary in today’s NYT (written by Bruce Weber, one of the paper’s best obit writers) for Sybil Stockdale.
Mrs. Stockdale was the wife of James B. Stockdale. You may remember him as Ross Perot’s vice presidential candidate in 1992. But before that:
During his captivity, Mrs. Stockdale became a leading advocate for the POW/MIA cause. She also worked with the CIA to gather information. This story brings a smile to my face:
Speaking of the CIA and other bits of history, Ken Taylor has also passed away. Mr. Taylor was the Canadian ambassador to Iran during the hostage crisis:
When the U.S. embassy in Tehran was stormed by Islamist students and militants, six American diplomats escaped and found sanctuary in the homes of Taylor and his first secretary John Sheardown. In addition to shielding the Americans from Iranian capture, Taylor also played a crucial role in plotting their escape.
Working with CIA officials and Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark, Taylor obtained for the Americans six Canadian passports containing forged Iranian visas that ultimately allowed them to board a flight to Switzerland. He undertook all these covert actions at a high personal risk, as he and his team would have been taken hostage themselves in the case of discovery by the Islamist militants.
Last, but by no means least: “fresh-faced ingénue” of the 1940s, Joan Leslie.
At 9, touring with her sisters, she played Toronto. Their act included her impression of Durante.
One night after the show, her dressing room door opened to reveal a man armed with nothing but criticism. Her Durante was all wrong, he told her. Unbidden, he showed her the right way to do it.
Read the obit for the punchline, if you haven’t already guessed it.
Judy Carne. WP. She’s just at the fringes of my memory: I remember watching “Laugh-In” with my parents, and I remember “sock it to me”, but she left the show when I was four…am I inventing these memories?
Martin Milner. “Route 66” went off the air a year before I was born, but I loved “Adam-12” when I was a wee lad. I have the first season on DVD, and you know, it still holds up well.
The FARK thread is actually pretty respectful, and worth reading if you were a fan of “Adam-12”, “Emergency”, and “Dragnet”. It reminds me that I want to write a re-evaluation of both “Dragnet” and “Adam-12”, arguing that what Jack Webb was trying to represent was his vision of how policing in general, and the LAPD specifically, should work. Not the way it really did work, but the ideal that he felt they should strive for; in a way, you might say that Webb was trying to represent on television Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing.
I was too young to remember Frank Gifford‘s playing days, but I do have fond memories of him from Monday Night Football in the 1970’s.
Interesting bit of trivia:
…I am absurdly happy to learn, by way of a comment in an article at the A/V Club, that Shout! Factory is issuing DVDs of both “The Bold Ones: The Senator” and “The Bold Ones: The Protectors“.
I’m sure I’ve written about this before (and some of you may remember it first hand) but: “The Bold Ones” was one of those wheel shows. (The other parts were “The Lawyers” and “The New Doctors”.) When RTN was an over-the-air network in Austin, they used to run “The Bold Ones” episodes on weekends; I recorded all that I could, but they kept running the same ones over and over, and then the hard drive died, and then RTN went cable-only in Austin…
Anyway, Hal Holbrook was “The Senator”, trying to navigate Washington politics and advance his agenda. I’m excited about this one because the DVDs include the two part “A Continual Roar of Musketry”; I’ve never seen that episode, but Harlan Ellison praised this episode highly in one of the “Glass Teat” books, and I look forward to finally watching it.
“The Protectors” starred Leslie Neilsen as a conservative white chief of police in an unnamed midsized California town, and Hari Rhodes as the liberal black district attorney. Honestly, you can see a lot of where “Police Squad” came from in Neilsen’s performance. But there’s also some good stuff there: “Memo from the Class of ’76”, while it has a few unfortunate cliches, is also a surprisingly successful attempt to ask hard questions about the War on Drugs before that war was even declared.
Now, if we could just get “The New Doctors” and “The Lawyers” as well, I’d be a happy man.
This has been semi-well reported elsewhere (except, oddly, in the paper of record); James Horner. (Edited to add 2: NYT obit. In fairness, it appears that they were waiting for official confirmation from Horner’s people that he was actually flying the plane; other sources seemed to be basing their reports on “well, it was his plane, and he hasn’t called anybody since it went down to say ‘I’m alive!’, so…”)
Dick Van Patten: LAT. A/V Club. (Edited to add: NYT.)
(He was in “Soylent Green”? I need to watch that movie “again”, as I’ve only ever seen parts of it in the “edited for television” version.)