Archive for the ‘1970s’ Category

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Obit watch: September 12, 2022.

Monday, September 12th, 2022

Marsha Hunt. She was 104.

Credits include “Harry O”, the 1940 “Pride and Prejudice”, “Run for Your Life”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Bo Brundin. Other credits include “The A-Team”, “Raise the Titanic”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, and “The Day the Clown Cried”.

Jack Ging. Credits include “Wings”, “The A-Team”, “B.J. and the Bear”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “The Six Million Dollar Man”…

…and eight appearances on “Mannix”. (“The End of the Rainbow”, season 2, episode 5. “Medal for a Hero”, season 3, episode 14. “The Sound of Murder”, season 5, episode 17. “Lifeline”, season 5, episode 21. “A Puzzle for One”, season 6, episode 11. “A Game of Shadows”, season 6, episode 15. “A Night Full of Darkness”, season 7, episode 17. “A Choice of Victims”, season 8, episode 12. It looks like he was “Lt. Dan Ives” in all but “The End of the Rainbow”, in which he played “James Spencer”.)

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Edited to add: better obit for Mr. Ging from THR.

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

Obit watch: August 31, 2022.

Wednesday, August 31st, 2022

Richard Roat, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Columbo” and “McMillan & Wife” (he missed “McCloud” for the trifecta, but also did “Hec Ramsey” and “Banacek”), and “Westworld” (1973).

William Reynolds. Where is my “The F.B.I.” box set, darn it? Other credits include “Dragnet 1967”, “Pete Kelly’s Blues” (the TV series), “All That Heaven Allows”, “Francis Goes to West Point”, and “Project U.F.O.”

Roland Mesnier, former White House pastry chef.

The French-born Mr. Mesnier served as a member of the chief executive’s kitchen cabinet for nearly 25 years. He catered to the idiosyncratic tastes of five presidents, their wives and their guests, an experience he chronicled in several books.
Mr. Mesnier was hired in 1979 by the first lady, Rosalynn Carter, and served until he retired in 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush. He worked from a modest space in the East Wing, armed with about 300 original pastry molds and an eclectic set of tools, including an ice pick, a coat hanger and a tire-pressure gauge.
Despite the president’s background as a legume farmer, he reported, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter disdained peanuts and sweets in their family’s recipe for a sticky cheese ring — a recipe, Mr. Mesnier said, “that no one tried to steal.” He rated it on a par with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “atrocious concoction of Coca-Cola-flavored jelly served with black glacé cherries.”
Nancy Reagan often skipped meals but partook of dessert. (She routinely denied her husband chocolate, but Mr. Mesnier smuggled mousse to President Reagan when the first lady was out of town.)

…

In 2001, Mr. Mesnier took three weeks and 80 pounds of gingerbread, 30 pounds of chocolate and 20 pounds of marzipan to construct a replica of the 1800 White House for the Christmas holiday.
He sometimes served flaming desserts — but, he said, he gave that up after a woman’s fox shawl caught fire when she leaned across the table at a holiday reception.

(Obligatory.)

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

Obit watch: August 26, 2022.

Friday, August 26th, 2022

Joe E. Tata, actor.

Credits other than “Beverly Hills, 90210” include “Monster Squad”, the 1966 “Batman” series, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “The Outer Limits”, “Mission: Impossible”, and “Lost in Space”.

He also did a fair number of cop/PI/procedural shows, including “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “The F.B.I.”, “Cannon”, “Quincy M.E.”, eight episodes of “The Rockford Files”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A World Without Sundays”, season 7, episode 8. “A Problem of Innocence”, season 6, episode 23. “What Happened to Sunday?”, season 4, episode 15.)

E. Bryant Crutchfield, inventor of the Trapper Keeper.

By way of Mike the Musicologist: a nice tribute to Richard Taruskin from Alex Ross. (Link goes to archive.is because I’m not sure how long that will stay available for non-subscribers.)

By way of The Mysterious Bookshop: Michael Malone, novelist and TV writer. He won a Daytime Emmy for “One Life to Live”, and an Edgar Award in 1997 (Best Short Story for “Red Clay”, in the anthology Murder for Love).

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

Obit watch: August 8, 2022.

Monday, August 8th, 2022

Clu Gulager, long time character actor. THR.

165 acting credits in IMDB. Man was in everything, from “The Virginian” to “The F.B.I” to “The Last Picture Show” to “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood”, with lots of stops along the way…

…including “Mannix”. (“The Man Who Wasn’t There”, season 6, episode 16.)

Roger E. Mosley. Credits beyond “Magnum, P.I.” include “The Rockford Files”, “McCloud”, “McQ” (which Clu Gulager was also in), “The Mack”, and “The Sixth Sense” (the 1972 TV series).

As Mosley remembered it, his agent told him: ” ‘It’s starring this guy Tom Selleck. Tom Selleck has made about five pilot shows … and none of them has sold. So here’s what you do, Roger: Sign up for the show, go over to Hawaii, they’ll treat you good for the 20 days it will take to shoot the [pilot], you’ll get a lot of money, and then you come home. A show with Tom Selleck always fails, and you’ll be fine.’
“Well, 8 1/2 years later … “
Mosley in real life was a licensed private helicopter pilot (something the producers discovered after he was hired, he said) but not allowed to fly on the series.

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

Obit watch: July 26, 2022.

Tuesday, July 26th, 2022

Great and good FOTB RoadRich sent over a couple of obits for Tom Poberezny, former head of the Experimental Aircraft Association. He took over for his dad, Paul Poberezny, in the 1990s and ran EAA until 2010.

One of the most talented aviators of his day, Tom was world aerobatics champion as part of team USA in 1972 and was United States Unlimited aerobatics champion the next year. He went on to become part of the three-plane Red Devils aerobatic airshow act, later known as The Eagles, along with Gene Soucy and the late Charlie Hilliard.

Yoko Shimada. Credits other than “Shogun” include “Kamen Rider”, “Chicago Story”, and “We Are Youth”.

Paul Sorvino. THR.

He was another one of those people whose personal politics I have no idea about: he acted (and sang a little) and did it well. I was always happy to see him in something.

172 acting credits in IMDB.

I’ve said before that my ideal “Law and Order” lineup is Briscoe/Logan/Stone/Kincaid. But one of our local broadcast channels was re-running the early “L&O” episodes late at night a while back, and I recorded some of the ones with Sorvino as “Phil Cerreta”. He gets a lot of attention for playing mob guys, but he was really good in that role too.

There’s one episode in particular (“Heaven”, season 2, episode 10, based on the Happy Land Social Club fire) that stands out for me. Ceretta and Logan are looking at 53 bodies lined up outside the fire:

Det. Mike Logan: I’ve never seen this many. You?
Sgt. Phil Cerreta: Not in civilian life.

This is writing (the episode is one of my favorites) but it is also acting. I can’t find a clip online, but if you watch it, Sorvino’s delivery puts a lot across in four words: this is a man who saw some stuff during the war, and still carries those memories.

Tony Dow. THR.

Other credits include “Quincy, M.E.”, “Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star”, “Diagnosis Murder”, and “The Kentucky Fried Movie”.

Lawrence pointed out to me “Who Killed Maxwell Thorn?”, the final episode of “The Love Boat”, which features Wally, Beaver, June…and Peter Graves, Barbi Benton (hi, pigpen51!), Florence Henderson, Robert Reed, and Ted McGinley, among other stunt casting. I was never a big “Love Boat” fan, though I did watch it (three broadcast networks, people) but (as I told Lawrence) this whole episode is one giant wink at the audience. And (as Lawrence also pointed out) it ties in to the Tommy Westphall Catastrophe.

Edited to add: Well, crud, this is embarrassing, but I did have three sources, and they apparently made the same mistake. Tony Dow is NOT DEAD. Repeat: Tony Dow is NOT DEAD. But he is apparently in hospice care.

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

Obit watch: July 25, 2022.

Monday, July 25th, 2022

Man, it got busy up in here all of the sudden.

Bob Rafelson. THR. Other credits include the “Poodle Springs” TV movie (with James Caan as Marlowe, based on Robert Parker’s continuation of an unfinished Chandler novel), “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, and “The King of Marvin Gardens”.

The Saturday Movie Group watched “Five Easy Pieces” not too long ago. I think I echo the general consensus when I say that it was very much like “The Last Picture Show”: a good movie that none of us want to see again.

David Warner, British actor. In case you were wondering, he’s the photographer who loses his head in “Omen”. Other credits include “TRON”, “Time Bandits”, the “Hogfather” TV movie, and lots of genre stuff, including some appearances on spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Diana Kennedy. She was well known (at least to me and I think to other people who follow food) as the woman who introduced true Mexican cooking to the US.

At a time when most Americans’ concept of Mexican food was limited to tacos and enchiladas, Ms. Kennedy unfurled an ornate culinary tapestry, exploring the distinctly regional nature of Mexican cooking, defined, like the cuisines of Italy and China, by local geography, climate and ingredients.
“The regional dishes of Sonora, or Jalisco, have practically nothing in common with those of Yucatán and Campeche; neither have those of Nuevo León with those of Chiapas and Michoacán,” she wrote in the book’s first chapter. In Oaxaca, she explained, “certain chilies are grown and used that are found nowhere else in Mexico.”
The Mexican food known to most Americans, she wrote, was a travesty: “a crisp taco filled with ground meat heavily flavored with an all-purpose chili powder; a soggy tamal covered with a sauce that turns up on everything — too sweet and too overpoweringly onioned — a few fried beans and something else that looks and tastes like all the rest.” This state of affairs she hoped to correct.

…

In “The Tortilla Book” (1975) and “My Mexico” (1998), Ms. Kennedy continued the journey begun in “The Cuisines of Mexico,” elaborating on her findings as she roamed the country in her pickup truck, quizzing local cooks, taking notes and developing, as a side project, an atlas of indigenous herbs and plants.
Along the way, she clued readers in on the secrets of making wasp’s nest salsa, roasting a whole ox or cleaning black iguana for a special Oaxacán tamale.
“There is always someone who wants to know how to clean an iguana, so why not?” she told an interviewer for the journal Writing on the Edge in 2011. All three books were gathered in one volume in 2000 under the title “The Essential Cuisines of Mexico.”

…

Ms. Kennedy spared no effort to track down information. She served an apprenticeship in a bakery before writing her tortilla book. She traveled dusty back roads by bus or in her truck, sleeping in the back, en route to remote villages in search of obscure recipes, questioning saleswomen at local markets or wangling invitations to home kitchens.
“I’m out to report what is disappearing,” she told The Times in 2019. “I drive over mountains, I sit with families, and I record.”
She took a dim view of chefs and writers who did not do the same, and her criticism could be withering. “They’ve not done the travel and the research that I’ve done,” she told Saveur. “None of them, not one. I have traveled this country, wandering — it’s why I’m not rich! — and taking time, and nobody else has done that. Nobody else has seen a certain chile at a certain stage in a market in Chilapa, and then gone back in six months and seen other chiles.”

…

In 2010, she gave The Chicago Tribune a terse assessment of her work. “I am tenacious,” she said. “And I love to eat.”

Johnny Egan, coach of the Houston Rockets from 1972-1976. He was 129-152 overall during his tenure.

The Hartford, Connecticut native played for six NBA teams: Detroit Pistons (1961–63), New York Knicks (1963–65), Baltimore Bullets (1965–68), Los Angeles Lakers (1968–70) and San Diego/Houston Rockets (1970–72). The guard played with the Cleveland Cavaliers for the 1970-71 season.

Melanie Rauscher, who was on “Naked and Afraid”. She was 35, and the circumstances seem particularly sad.

Corey Kasun, a rep for the Prescott Police Department, confirmed to TMZ that the reality star was dog sitting in the city while the homeowners were out of town. Upon their return, they discovered Rauscher dead in their guest room, near several cans of dust cleaner containing compressed air.
It remains unclear if Rauscher consumed the cans’ contents.

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

Obit watch: July 21, 2022.

Thursday, July 21st, 2022

Rebecca Balding, actress.

Other credits include “Supertrain”, “The Rockford Files” (“Dwarf in a Helium Hat“), “Lou Grant”, and “MacGruder and Loud”.

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

A horse is a horse, of course, of course…

Tuesday, July 19th, 2022

…and no one should flee from a horse, of course,
Especially (of course) if the NYPD owns that horse.

Somebody in the thread responded with a still, but what the heck, let’s go to the ‘Tube:

(Jessica Walter! Damn!)

Posted in 1970s, Horses, Law, NYPD, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 8, 2022.

Friday, July 8th, 2022

For the historical record, since everyone is on this like a fat man on an all you can eat buffet: Shinzo Abe. Alt link. The Mainichi. Japan Times.

Larry Storch. 249 acting credits in IMDB: beyond “F-Troop”, they include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp”, “Airport 1975″…

…and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit“, season 1, episode 20. “Portrait in Blues“, season 8, episode 1.)

Edited to add: NYT obit for Mr. Storch, which probably went up as I was writing this.

Gregory Itzin. Credits other than “24” include “Airplane!” (and “Airplane II: The Sequel”, but he went uncredited in that), “Street Hawk”, “Lou Grant”, and “FBI: The Unheard Music Untold Stories”.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | 7 Comments »

Thing I did not know.

Friday, June 24th, 2022

The director of Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback special (Steve Binder) also directed…”The Star Wars Holiday Special”.

Posted in 1970s, Bagatelle, Elvis, Music, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2022.

Tuesday, May 10th, 2022

Lawrence sent over an obit for James R. Olson. He passed away on April 17th, but I haven’t seen anybody else cover this. (THR put up a story literally as I was writing this.) Which is odd, because he had a pretty interesting career before he retired in 1990.

After serving in the U.S. Army, Olson moved to New York to study in Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. He subsequently starred in several Broadway productions in the 1950s and 1960s, including J.B. (1958), Romulus (1962), The Three Sisters (1964), and Of Love and Remembrance (1967). He also appeared in numerous touring productions throughout North America.

He also did a lot of TV and movie work. He was another one of those actors who hit the NBC Mystery Movie trifecta: appearances on all three of the original series (“McCloud”, “Columbo”, “McMillan and Wife”). Other credits include “Moon Zero Two”, “The Andromeda Strain”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, “Lancer”, “Ironside”, “The Rookies”, “Police Story”, “The F.B.I.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Game Plan“, season 8, episode 2. “Odds Against Donald Jordan“, season 2, episode 21.)

Jack Kehler. Other credits include “Karen Sisco”, “NYPD Blue”, “NCIS: Original Recipe”, “NCIS: Los Angeles”, and something called “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”.

Midge Decter.

Ms. Decter was in the forefront of an ideologically evolving generation of public intellectuals. Cutting their teeth on leftist politics in the 1930s and ’40s, they settled into anti-communist liberalism in the 1950s and early ’60s. Jolted by the turbulence of the student and women’s movements, they later broke from liberals to embrace a new form of conservatism — championing traditional social values, limited free-market economics and muscular American foreign policies — that reached its zenith in the early 21st century in the administration of President George W. Bush.
Ms. Decter wielded her influence as editor of Harper’s and other magazines, as an author and book editor, and as a political organizer and frequent speaker.

…

Ms. Decter’s ideological shift in the late ’60s stemmed from a rising concern that she expressed in her 2001 memoir, “An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War.” Liberalism, she said, rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into “a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live.”
She and her husband, the writer and fellow former liberal Norman Podhoretz, worried about the effect the new thinking, particularly that of the counterculture, might have on their children and succeeding generations.

Also by way of Lawrence: Adreian Payne, basketball star at Michigan State.

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

Threads from Twitter that amused me.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

By way of President Dawg, a long thread on “Convoy” (the song and the movie) and the ’70s trucker/CB culture:

Includes bonus “Phantom 309”, MST3K, and “B.J. and the Bear” references.

I’m a little old for this, but:

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

Obit watch: May 3, 2022.

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

I know this sounds like the setup to a joke, but it isn’t: Ric Parnell has passed away.

Mr. Parnell was perhaps best known as “Mick Shrimpton”, one of Spinal Tap’s many drummers.

Parnell played in multiple bands, including Horse, Atomic Rooster, Nova and Stars. He claimed he declined invitations to play in Journey and Whitesnake, but is credited with playing drums on Toni Basil’s song “Hey Mickey” in 1981.

David Birney.

Mr. Birney’s theater career began in earnest in 1965, when he won the Barter Theater Award, enabling him to spend a season acting in shows at the prestigious Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va. He moved on to the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and in 1967 he played Antipholus of Syracuse in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “A Comedy of Errors.”
Mr. Birney made his Broadway debut two years later in Molière’s “The Miser.” And in 1971 he starred in a Broadway production of J.M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Mr. Birney played Christy Mahon, who enters an Irish pub in the early 1900s telling a story about killing his father.

…

Over the rest of his theatrical career, Mr. Birney played a wide variety of roles, including Antonio Salieri, as a replacement, in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” on Broadway; Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; Hamlet at the PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria, Calif.; and James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at the Miniature Theater of Chester, Mass.

He also did a lot of TV work, including a recurring role on the first season of “St. Elsewhere”. Credits other than “Bridget Loves Bernie” include one of the spin-offs of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, “FBI: The Untold Stories”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, Serpico on the “Serpico” TV series, “McMillan & Wife”, and “The F.B.I.”

Ron Galella, photographer and historical footnote. He was one of the early “paparazzi” – indeed, it seems to me that he was one before the term came into common use.

He was perhaps most famous for relentlessly photographing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Mrs. Onassis waged a running court battle with him throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, testifying in one court hearing that he had made her life “intolerable, almost unlivable, with his constant surveillance.” Mr. Galella in turn claimed the right to earn a living by taking pictures of famous people in public places.
In 1972, a judge ordered him to keep 25 feet away from Mrs. Onassis and 30 feet away from her children. A decade later, facing jail time for violating the order — hundreds of times — Mr. Galella agreed never to take another picture of them. And he never did.

…

Reviewing “Smash His Camera,” a 2010 documentary about Mr. Galella, the critic Roger Ebert articulated the ambivalence many felt toward him, whether or not they knew the name of the photographer behind the memorable pictures he took. “I disapproved of him,” Mr. Ebert said, “and enjoyed his work.”

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

Obit watch: May 2, 2022.

Monday, May 2nd, 2022

It was a busy weekend, so I’m playing catch-up on a lot of stuff here.

For the record: Naomi Judd. THR.

Klaus Schulze, musician.

He played drums on the debut albums of the German bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before starting a prodigiously prolific solo career. In 2000, he released a 50-CD retrospective set of studio and live recordings, “The Ultimate Edition.” But he was far from finished.

Jacques Perrin, French actor. Credits include “Z”, “Cinema Paradiso”, and “The Young Girls of Rochefort”.

Neal Adams, comics guy.

During his Batman run, Adams and writer Dennis O’Neil brought a revolutionary change to the hero and the comics, delivering realism, kineticism and a sense of menace to their storytelling in the wake of the campy Adam West-starring ’60s ABC series and years of the hero being aimed at kiddie readers.
He created new villains for the rogue’s gallery — the Man-Bat and Ra’s al Ghul as well as the latter’s daughter, Talia, who became Batman’s lover. The father and daughter, played by Liam Neeson and Marion Cotillard, were key characters in the trilogy of Batman movies directed by Christopher Nolan.

Joanna Barnes. Beyond “Parent Trap” and “Auntie Mame”, she had a fair number of 70s TV credits, including “The Name of the Game”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “McCloud” (and, interestingly, “Cool Million”, a short-lived show in the “Mystery Movie” wheel), “Quincy M.E.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Fear I to Fall“, season 2, episode 12.)

Jossara Jinaro. Credits other than “ER” include “Doctor Who: Alternate Empire” and “The Devil’s Rejects”.

Rachelle Zylberberg, aka “Régine“, disco entrepreneur. At one point, she supposedly owned 23 clubs. (“Some of her clubs, she explained, were franchises owned by local entrepreneurs who paid up to $500,000 and gave her cuts of the action to use her name.”)

Régine made exclusivity an art form. She attracted privileged classes by selling 2,000 club memberships for $600 each, and by requiring tuxedos and evening gowns to get in. She installed a flashing “disco full” sign outside to discourage the hoi polloi and a slide-back peephole at the door to inspect supplicants for admission to the pounding music and gold-plated glamour of her Valhalla.

…

Saluting Bastille Day in New York, the patriots included Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Ethel Kennedy, Margaux Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner (at the time, the chairman of the United States Bicentennial Commission), and Senator George S. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate.
“If anyone had second thoughts about celebrating an event that theoretically ended the privileged class, in a room some 40 times as crowded as the Bastille dungeon on that fateful day, no one made them audible,” The New York Times reported. “To be fair, it was somewhat difficult to make anything other than isolated words audible.”

Kathy Boudin is burning in Hell. Peter Paige, Edward J. O’Grady, and Waverly L. Brown were unavailable for comment.

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

Obit watch: April 29, 2022.

Friday, April 29th, 2022

Harold Livingston, screenwriter. It doesn’t seem like he was terribly prolific (21 writing credits in IMDB) but there’s some gold.

His biggest credit seems to be the screenplay for the first movie based on a minor SF TV show from the 1960s. Other credits include “Run For Your Life”, nine episodes of “Mission: Impossible”, “The Bold Ones: The Protectors”, “The Name of the Game”, “Banacek”, “Archer” (the 1975 “Archer”), “Barbary Coast”…

…and “Mannix”. (“The Girl from Nowhere“, season 7, episode 19. “A Small Favor for an Old Friend“, season 8, episode 7, one of the “old Army buddy” episodes.)

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

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