Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: October 10, 2026.

Saturday, October 10th, 2026

Short and quick: Mike Ditka. NFL.com. ESPN. Chicago Tribune (archived). Chicago Sun Times. NYT (share link, may require).

Noted:

But Ditka became disenchanted in 1966, when he had just 32 receptions for 378 yards and two touchdowns, and claiming a “clash of personalities” with Halas, signed a three-year contract with the AFL’s Houston Oilers. Before the Bears could challenge the legality of that move — the AFL and NFL were in the process of a merger — Halas traded Ditka to the Eagles for quarterback Jack Concannon.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 9, 2026.

Friday, October 9th, 2026

I know about Mike Ditka, but in keeping with this blog’s policy, I want to wait until tomorrow to do a round-up.

In the meantime:

Margaret Hamilton. No, not that one (though I did say to my mother when she asked me if I’d heard of her, “Wasn’t she the Wicked Witch of the West?”). This one led the team that developed the software for Apollo.

She was the first female programmer hired to work on the Apollo project, housed at M.I.T.’s Instrumentation Laboratory, in 1965. Her skills led to her promotion to director of software engineering on the project, which developed the two 70-pound onboard computers for the Apollo flights: one in the command module, which carried the astronauts from Earth, and the second in the lunar module, which set down on the moon’s surface.

…

Ms. Hamilton worked on the six lunar landing missions from 1969 to 1972. Her programming also contributed to Skylab, America’s first space station, launched in 1973, and to the early design of the space shuttle. She left M.I.T. to found a company, Higher Order Software, in 1976, as well as a second firm a decade later, Hamilton Technologies.

Cecily Gemmell. You’ve never heard of her, but she was the last tie to a particular era of history.

She was Winston Churchill’s last surviving personal secretary.

Ms. Gemmell, known as Chips, first entered Churchill’s orbit in the summer of 1947 at the age of 18, arriving in the still-stunned aftermath of his 1945 general election defeat as Britain’s wartime prime minister. His reputation as the man who had saved the world from Hitler’s tyranny was titanic, but his electoral ejection from No. 10 Downing Street before final victory — Germany had surrendered, Japan had not — remained humbling.
Youth was a requirement for a Churchill stenotyping secretary. “The Old Man,” as he was known, dictated so long and so late into the night, as a rule, that stamina was essential. Ms. Gemmell joined a team of extraordinarily bright and capable, if often exhausted, young women, and a proud line of exceptional Churchill personal secretaries (all but one of them female) that extended back through both world wars to 1902. At her death, Ms. Gemmell was the last.

…

Ms. Gemmell was initially assigned to Churchill’s literary assistant, Denis Kelly, cataloging the prime minister’s World War II papers in anticipation of Churchill writing his war memoirs. The cache was housed at Chartwell, Churchill’s country home in the county of Kent, and so a place was found for Ms. Gemmell to live in the nearby village of Westerham. She bicycled back and forth to Chartwell, pushing the bike up “an incredibly steep hill” that, at least, “was a cinch coming back down.”
She worked in what she described as the semi-basement of the Muniment Room at Chartwell — “completely untrained,” but tasked with organizing the monumental paper trail of Churchill’s wartime existence. She saw virtually no one other than Mr. Kelly, along with “everybody’s socks — the socks of the famous,” from her obscured vantage. She would “look up and see Anthony Eden’s pink socks leaving the room,” she recalled, referring to the foreign secretary who would later briefly become prime minister. “All I saw of the famous were their socks.”

…

Ms. Gemmell was back again in London with Churchill when he was returned as prime minister in 1951. She accompanied her boss to the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street; to the racecourses where his thoroughbreds ran; to Monte Carlo, where he gambled; to Blenheim Palace, where he was born; to Marrakesh, Lake Como and the Dolomites, where he painted.

Posted in History, NFL, Obits, Science, Sports | No Comments »

Obit watch: October 7, 2026.

Wednesday, October 7th, 2026

Eva Marie Saint. NYT (share link, may require).

Other credits include “Grand Prix”, “The Last Days of Patton”, “When Hell Was in Session”, and “The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming”.

Burning in Hell watch: Bill Harris. You may remember him from hits like the Symbionese Liberation Army, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the murder of Myrna Opsahl.

During the holdup, Emily’s shotgun went off, killing Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was depositing church collections, according to the New York Times.

Nice use of the passive voice there, NYPost. “…shotgun went off”.

NYT (share link, may require).

“What Was the Symbionese Liberation Army?” (NYT share link, may require).

Posted in California Über Alles, Law, Movies, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: October 6, 2026.

Tuesday, October 6th, 2026

Jim Bakker. NYT (share link, may require).

By any measure, he and his wife enjoyed a life of opulence, which he defended by saying that they needed “good bait” to be effective “fishers of men.” Their bait included six-figure salaries and bonuses for themselves, a 55-foot houseboat, a mini-fleet of Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces, diamonds and gold jewelry, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, an air-conditioned dog kennel, and homes and apartments in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Palm Springs, Calif. The spending was so lavish, and the appeal for contributions so insistent, that some critics recast PTL as standing for Pass the Loot.

No offense intended, but I honestly thought he had died several years ago.

Jeffrey Archer, writer and convicted perjurer.

His jail term had its roots in a case in 1987, when Mr. Archer filed a libel suit against the tabloid Daily Star after it reported that he had slept with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan. The judge, Bernard Caulfield, described Mr. Archer’s wife, Mary, as having “elegance” and “fragrance” and asked whether the writer would have needed “cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel room.” Mr. Archer won the case and was awarded £500,000 in damages.

Sometimes, it seems like the judges in sketches on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” are uncomfortably close to reality. “Fragrance”?

…another newspaper, The News of the World, reported allegations that Mr. Archer had committed perjury at the original libel trial in 1987, forcing him to withdraw from the mayoral race.
Those charges came to trial in September 2000, and in July 2001, he was given a four-year jail term for perjury and perverting the course of justice. After two years in a variety of correctional institutions, he was released, resuming his career as a prolific writer. He kept his title and retired from the House of Lords in 2024.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Politics, Religion | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 5, 2026.

Monday, October 5th, 2026

Marjoe Gortner, who had one of the oddest career arcs in entertainment history.

He spoke eloquently as a child, so his parents, Vernon, a Christian evangelical minister, and mother, Marge, had him ordained as a preacher at age 4, when he performed a marriage ceremony for a Paramount newsreel.
Now a celebrity, the long-haired Gortner delivered gyrating, dramatic sermons at revival meetings across the U.S. as his family amassed a fortune estimated to be worth $3 million, but he said his father took off with the money shortly before Gortner turned 16.
He rejoined the ministry as a way to earn a living and in 1971 granted a film crew access to him during his final revival tour. The resulting 1972 documentary, Marjoe, produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan, debuted at Cannes and won the Oscar for best feature documentary. (The poster called it “a real story millions of people refuse to believe.”)

He went on to become an actor. Other credits include “Starcrash”, “Acapulco Gold“, and “American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt”.

Burning in Hell watch: Dennis Hastert (R-pedo).

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | No Comments »

Travel notes: Springfield, MO.

Friday, September 18th, 2026

Mike the Musicologist and I were in the middle of a used bookstore in Springfield, Missouri, browsing the shelves. MtM came up to me and said “Let’s go.” in that tone of voice. You know the one I’m talking about: not mean, not angry, but that tone of voice that tells you “Some s–t has gone down and we need to leave right now.”

He told me in the parking lot as we were heading to the car. It was in a Signal group chat we both belong to, but I hadn’t been looking at my phone. It seems to me like we spent a couple of hours (but it may not have been that long) in the cafe at a Barnes and Noble making calls to other people and trying to figure out next steps.

===

We had dinner with Lawrence and some other mutual friends of ours and Andrew’s on Monday night, the night we got back to Austin. I remember thinking to myself, “If ever there was an appropriate time for the ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?’ joke, this would be it.” Then Lawrence walked in and made that joke.

===

I’ve been running flat out for the past couple of days. I got up Tuesday morning, after a short sleep, to find out that I had to deal with an Internet outage (that Spectrum didn’t fix until Wednesday morning) and also with our trash. I paid someone to deal with the trash so I didn’t have to deal with it when I got back. They failed. Enough said.

So this is really my first chance to catch up and explain myself and my adventures last week. Of course, it has taken me a few days to write this.

(more…)

Posted in Boats, Books, Food, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Mixology, Obits, Smith and Wesson, Travel | 2 Comments »

Quotes of the day.

Thursday, September 17th, 2026

“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”

–Sir Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

While I was trying to find that quote, I ran across another Pratchett quote:

“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”

—Reaper Man

Posted in Books, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch: September 16, 2026.

Wednesday, September 16th, 2026

Annie Dillard, author. (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

With the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in 1974, Ms. Dillard, just 28, was recognized as a major new voice in American letters. It was only the beginning of her career: In the years to come, she would publish essays, meditations on religion, poems, a theory of literature, two novels, journalism, a best-selling autobiography and another best seller, “The Writing Life,” about what it takes to put words into a world that has more than enough of them.

…

Unlike Thoreau, Ms. Dillard didn’t build a cabin in the woods and live there through the seasons of a year. Though her writing could convey the sense of a solitary life in the wilderness, she was mostly a day-tripper. After her forays into the Roanoke Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains — which was, after all, her neighborhood — she would return home to the suburban house she shared with Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor she had married at the end of her sophomore year at Hollins.

…

Forty-two years later, in a sweeping appraisal of her work, the author and critic William Deresiewicz noted in The Atlantic that “Dillard, like Thoreau, is never shy about pronouncing wholesale condemnation on the way her fellows live.” He thought that the alternative she represented smacked of spiritual snobbery and hypocrisy — a mystical way of life for the few who could afford it; like, for instance, the daughter of a wealthy family who became a success before she turned 30.

I have several of her books, but haven’t really dipped into them. I feel like I need to be in the right place and right frame of mind for this kind of work. But I do find this quote (from For the Time Being) quite striking:

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time– or even knew selflessness or courage or literature– but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

While we were driving home on Monday, Mike mentioned a headline on his phone about the death of a “legendary” designer, and asked if any designer was truly “legendary”.

Bob Mackie. Even I have heard of Bob Mackie. Among his credits: Carol Burnett’s curtain dress.

Over the show’s 11 seasons, he created an average of 60 costumes a week for Ms. Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway and Lyle Waggoner, as well as the show’s guest stars and supporting performers.

Jay Maisel, photographer.

Mr. Maisel’s picture of Mr. Davis reveals him in a splash of light and shows his fingers moving in a blur on his trumpet. Mr. Maisel had taken it for himself; months later, Columbia Records asked if he had any photos of Mr. Davis that could be used for “Kind of Blue,” which the music historian Ashley Kahn, writing in The New York Times in 1999, said “floats above jazz history in an ether all its own.”

…

For a dozen years, Mr. Maisel worked out of a studio at 122 Second Avenue. Then his rent went up, prompting him to buy the abandoned Germania Bank building at 190 Bowery for $102,000 in 1966. Forty-nine years later, he sold it to a developer for $55 million.

The “On Taking Pictures” podcast devoted much of an episode to Mr. Maisel. I think he was also featured prominently in the OTP drinking game, but I seem to have lost my copy of that.

Peter Max, 1960s “counterculture” artist.

His simple graphic images, brightly colored and infectiously happy, lent themselves to a long list of licensed commercial products, from sheets and glassware and shower curtains to airplanes and, on one occasion, a stamp for the Postal Service.
Incorporating Art Nouveau, Op Art and psychedelic motifs, Mr. Max’s designs offered instant visual gratification and a cheery endorsement of the generational politics of love, joy and universal consciousness. His “panopticon” images repeated visual elements in tight formation, producing a kaleidoscope effect that recalled Easter mandalas.

Posted in Art, Books, Obits, Photography, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: September 13th, 2026.

Sunday, September 13th, 2026

Friend of the blog, and a close personal friend of mine before there was a blog, Andrew Wimsatt, was murdered on Labor Day. His death was the one I referenced in a post earlier this week.

I’m still on the road (Mike the Musicologist and I head home tomorrow) but that’s only part of the reason I haven’t been able to put anything up before now. The other part of the reason is that this is sad and awful and emotionally devastating. I haven’t really been able to put words to it. I’ve had people die on me – we all have – but I’ve never had someone close to me murdered.

Lawrence has put up a series of posts rounding up the knows, the known unknowns, and a lot of tributes from Andrew’s friends, which I will send you in the direction of for now while I try to wrap my mind around this:

My Friend Was Murdered On Labor Day
Updates On The Murder Of Andrew Wimsatt
Remembering Andrew Wimsatt: “The Coolest Dude Ever”

The one thing I will add, which I have not seen anyone else mention, is: Andrew never forgot a kindness rendered to him. A few years ago, I drove him to a surgical appointment and waited for him to get out of durance vile. He reminded me of that multiple times over the years, always with gratitude. (And he drove me to appointments, too. As a matter of fact, he drove me to get 9,000 miles of hose shoved up my behinder region just a couple of weeks ago. And he didn’t want to accept lunch or dinner as payment: I had to force it on him.)

I think Andrew would have enjoyed the things I’ve picked up while I’m on the road. I wish he were still here to see them.

I will probably have more to write after I get home.

Posted in Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch.

Tuesday, September 8th, 2026

Still on the road, but I want to get a quick post up now.

I just found out that one of my close friends was murdered yesterday.

I don’t have a lot of details. There have some press reports, but they don’t name the victim. Law enforcement is still carrying out the notification of the family, as far as I know.

Once I have more details, I’ll post a full obit here and at the SDC blog.

Posted in Admin, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: September 1, 2026.

Tuesday, September 1st, 2026

Roger Beasley, prominent Austin automotive dealer.

Wendell Berry, agrarian writer. NYT (share link, may require registration or an email address or something). I’ve never read any of his books, but he published articles in the old “Country Journal” back when my people subscribed to it. I thought he was an interesting guy, but frankly kind of a crank.

“What Wendell is talking about is a primitive agriculture,” Dr. Barnhart told The Times in 1988. “It’s a nice way of life if you have a rich father and you’re a tenured member of the faculty at a university. But I don’t see a great proportion of the American public returning to farms. And I don’t see it as an industry that would ever be capable of feeding 225 million people.”

Not quite an obit, but:

Posted in Books, Cars, Obits | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: August 30, 2026.

Sunday, August 30th, 2026

Borepatch put up an excellent obit for Dolly Parton, much better than anything I’ve written or could write. I strongly, strongly encourage you to go over and read it.

(I’d never heard the “my aunt had a sofa just like it” story before. And it made me laugh. Hard.)

The NYT has a nice obit for Azriel Blackman (may require registration or an email address or something).

Mr. Blackman is another one of those people who wasn’t necessarily famous, but who the paper of record does a good job of covering.

He was an airline mechanic for American Airlines. He worked for them for 80 years.

No, that’s not a typo. Eighty years. Eight. Zero.

The first aircraft he worked on was the amphibious Sikorsky flying boat. He serviced more than a dozen kinds of planes over the next eight decades, including the Douglas DC-3, the Convair CV-240, the Lockheed Constellation, the Boeing 377 and the McDonnell Douglas MD-80.
After enlisting in the Army, he served in the Korean War, repairing helicopters for Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals. Following his discharge in 1952, he returned to American at LaGuardia, then moved as a crew chief to New York International Airport, better known as Idlewild Airport, in 1960, three years before it was renamed for President Kennedy.

…

Mr. Blackman’s love of airplanes continued in volunteer work on his days off, like helping to restore aircraft for an ongoing project at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and a Sikorsky flying boat at the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Conn., near Hartford.

…

“He represents a valuable institutional memory that says, ‘This is how we do it at American,’” Robert L. Crandall, the president of American from 1980 to 1998, said at Mr. Blackman’s 75th anniversary ceremony. “He’s the guy who sits with the new kids at lunch and passes it on.”

…

In 2012, American honored Mr. Blackman’s tenure by flying him around New York City in a restored, propeller-driven DC-3, part of the airline’s fleet that carried passengers between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s. He sat in the cockpit as it flew along the Hudson River, over Central Park and past the former site of Aviation High.
“He was taken aback by all of that,” his son said. “He didn’t really know how to accept praise of that magnitude. In his mind, he didn’t feel he had done anything extraordinary. He loved going to work. He considered the people he worked with family, and it was enjoyment to him. That was his real reward.”

He was 100 when he passed.

Posted in Music, Obits, Planes | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 28, 2026.

Friday, August 28th, 2026

I am reliably informed by a reliable source who sent me a private message (that I don’t have permission to share here) that “Rocky Horror Picture Show” is actually still a thing, in Austin and in Washington, DC. (“The wash dc monthly showings still draw hundreds of people.”)

It is nice to leave a legacy behind you.

NYT obit for Jaye P. Morgan, for the record. (May require registration or an email address or something.)

King Harald V of Norway (NYT share link, yadda yadda.)

This is an interesting obit. The king’s daughter-in-law was close to Jeffrey Epstein. Her son is serving time for rape. And his daughter married “a self-proclaimed shaman who counted Gwyneth Paltrow among his celebrity clients and friends.”

Their relationship brought hostile attention to some of Mr. Verrett’s past utterances, including his claim that he had used an amulet — which he sold for $222 on his website — to combat Covid-19, and his assertion that cancer is a choice. The princess had also been criticized for many years for claiming to be clairvoyant and for urging others to contact “the angels and the divine universe.”

Several people sent me obits for voice actor Peter Cullen: NYT (you know the drill). The Internet Movie Voice Actor Database.

And a burning in Hell watch: Ratko Mladic, the “Butcher of Bosnia”.

On the eve of the Srebrenica massacre, he promised to avenge the conquest of Serbia centuries before by the Ottoman Muslim Turks. Over 10 days, his soldiers hunted down, captured and summarily executed thousands of Bosnian Muslims, lining them up with hands tied behind their backs and shooting them. Women were raped. International pleas for restraint were ignored.
Serb forces buried the remains, dug them up again and scattered them in distant mass graves in an organized effort to hide damning evidence of war crimes.

Posted in 1970s, Horses, Movies, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: August 27, 2026.

Thursday, August 27th, 2026

Tim Curry. NYT share link (may require registration or an email address or something).

Oddly, I have never seen “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. I didn’t move in the right circles when I was in school, and now it seems like that particular moment has passed.

Other credits include “Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties”, the 2000 “Charlie’s Angels”, “The Blues Brothers Animated Series“, and “Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain”.

The NFL Pro Bowl. Awful Announcing. Enough said.

Posted in Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports | No Comments »

Obit watch: August 26, 2026.

Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

Dolly Parton. NYT share link (may require registration or an email address or something).

Everyone was on this yesterday: I held off, per the policy of this blog, and I think pretty much everything that can be said has been, or will be. I only have two thoughts:

1. I know this isn’t original to Ms. Parton (it’s actually a cover of a Neil Young song, with a slightly modified lyric) but I find this to be incredibly haunting.

2. She was a zealous advocate of literacy. She wanted to put books in kid’s hands. I swear I read somewhere (but can’t find it now) that she believed books were the best way for kids to broaden their horizons and lift themselves up from poverty.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. You know, just in case you feel like tossing a few bucks in.

Dolly Parton’s letter to Eminem.

In other news: Jaye P. Morgan. Yes, from “The Gong Show”. (Kids, ask your parents about “The Gong Show”.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Music, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

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