Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: July 16, 2025.

Wednesday, July 16th, 2025

NYT obit for Martin Cruz Smith.

Mr. Smith’s initial evocation of Russia was all the more remarkable in that he had spent exactly two weeks in the Soviet Union, as a tourist, in 1973 and did not speak Russian. But he made up for it by frequenting libraries in the United States and talking to Soviet émigrés, who filled in the gaps in his knowledge. “A number of the Russians who helped me would in fact come and live with me and my family,” Mr. Smith told the reference guide Contemporary Authors in 1986.
With the character of Renko, he was also making moral and historical claims, ambitions he sometimes admitted to in interviews.
“He’s the truth-teller, the honest man in a dishonest system,” Mr. Smith said in an interview with CBS in 2009. At the same time, he discounted American fears of the Soviet Union. “It was an illusion that it was a threat to Americans,” he said. “The system was far more dangerous to its own people.”

Fauja Singh, runner. His age is unknown.

Mr. Singh gave his birth date as April 1, 1911, and said he was born in Beas Pind. The country was ruled by Britain at the time, and birth certificates were not regularly issued in villages. His parents were farmers.

…

On Oct. 13 [2011 – DB], at a meet in Toronto, he set eight world records for the 95-plus age group in events ranging from 100 meters to 5,000 meters, or 3.1 miles. Doug Smith, the co-chair of Ontario Masters Athletics, called it the “most astonishing achievement” he had ever witnessed.
“He rested between the events by sitting down and having a few sips of tea,” Mr. Smith said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “He was actually running — both feet off the ground. He was amazing.”
Three days after the track meet, Mr. Singh performed yet another rousing feat. He became the first reputed centenarian to complete a race of 26.2 miles by finishing the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in 8 hours 25 minutes 16 seconds. His actual running time was 8:11:05, but in the throng of runners, it took him 14 minutes to reach the start.

…

Dr. Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University, said in an interview in 2016 that it was possible that a centenarian could run 26.2 miles. Stressing that he had not examined Mr. Singh, Dr. Perls said: “I’m not saying he’s that age. All I’m saying is it’s conceivable to see a 100-year-old running a marathon.”

…

He was hit by a car while on his daily walk in his home village of Beas Pind in the Punjab region of India and died in a hospital, his former coach, Harmander Singh (no relation), said in a phone interview from London. He had returned to India to live during the pandemic.

Posted in Books, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 14, 2025.

Monday, July 14th, 2025

Martin Cruz Smith passed away over the weekend. The Rap Sheet has a short item, but I haven’t seen any other coverage.

I find the Arkady Renko books fascinating in the abstract, but I’ve never actually gotten around to reading any of them. (I did, however, see the film version of “Gorky Park”, but I don’t find it really memorable.) I guess he’s another one of those series authors where, now that there’s a defined end to the series, I can start reading…

Samuel Abt, writer for the NYT and The International Herald Tribune. Anong other work, he covered the Tour de France for the papers for close to 30 years.

For his first decade at the paper, Mr. Abt was assigned to cover the Tour; after that, he used his own vacation time and was paid as a freelancer.

I remember reading his coverage, back in the Lance Armstrong days when I followed the Tour.

In an Opinion article in The Times published shortly before Armstrong lost his titles, Mr. Abt expressed sympathy for the cyclist, whom he had known since the early 1990s and with whom he had had a sometimes friendly, sometimes strained relationship.
“The internet and mass media are in a frenzy of condemnation now,” he wrote. “I have not read or heard any sorrow or compassion about a man stripped of his honor.”

Posted in Books, Cycling, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 11, 2025.

Friday, July 11th, 2025

Rebekah Del Rio.

I don’t want to seem like I’m speaking ill of Ms. Del Rio: that sequence was one of the few good things in “Mulholland Drive”. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, much of the rest of the movie was pretentious crap.

Dave “Baby” Cortez. He did an instrumental, “The Happy Organ”, which was a hit in 1959. He also had a hit with “Rinky Dink” in 1962.

Then he became what the paper of record describes as “reclusive”, though it also states that he worked as a church organist, held down other jobs, and even recorded a new album in 2011. The way I read the obit, it seems like he was more “bitter about the music business” than genuinely reclusive.

Then again…

…one of the reasons I wanted to note this obit is that it is one of the NYT‘s odd ones. Mr. Cortez actually passed away in 2022, but his death was not publicly disclosed until recently.

His body lies in Plot 434 on Hart Island, the potter’s field off the coast of the Bronx, where some one million bodies are buried in unmarked graves.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: July 9, 2025.

Wednesday, July 9th, 2025

Dr. Ivar Giaever, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.

I generally try to note Nobel Prize recipients, especially the physics ones. But Dr. Giaever’s obit stands out to me for two reasons:

It was 1956, and he was applying for a position at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. The interviewer looked at his grades, from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, where Dr. Giaever (pronounced JAY-ver) had studied mechanical engineering, and was impressed: The young applicant had scored 4.0 marks in math and physics. The recruiter congratulated him.
But what the recruiter didn’t know was that in Norway, the best grade was a 1.0, not a 4.0, the top grade in American schools. In fact, a 4.0 in Norway was barely passing — something like a D on American report cards. In reality, his academic record in Norway had been anything but impressive.
He did not want to be dishonest, Dr. Giaever would say in recounting the episode with some amusement over the years, but he also did not correct the interviewer. He got the job.

As a reformed “D” student, “D” students for the win, baby!

Dr. Giaever’s work was in quantum tunneling.

One of those weird things is the duality at the heart of quantum physics — namely, how particles, like electrons that orbit the nuclei of atoms, can also behave like waves. Based on this proposition, electrons can, in certain circumstances, “tunnel” through what otherwise is an impermeable barrier. Imagine a tennis ball bouncing off a wall a few times before it suddenly passes through the wall without leaving a trace.
The concept of tunneling had been predicted in the 1920s. In 1957, Leo Esaki, a scientist working at Sony in Japan, produced the first example of tunneling while experimenting with semiconductors, components that can conduct electricity with no resistance or loss of current. Dr. Esaki invented the tunnel diode, a type of semiconductor that is used in oscillators and amplifiers, among other devices.
Dr. Giaever later admitted that he had not been familiar with Dr. Esaki’s work and did not really understand it at first. But G.E.’s Research Lab employed more than 800 scientists, and it was at the suggestion of a colleague that he started working on tunneling experiments, using thin strips of metal separated by insulating layers.
In his classes at Rensselaer, he learned about a new theory of superconductors put forward by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer — an idea named B.C.S. after the three scientists’ initials.
Back at the lab, he decided to create a tunneling experiment using superconductors. He created a sample of two strips of lead separated by a very thin strip of lead oxide. He then immersed the sample in liquid helium attached to an electric current detector and began doing the same type of tunneling experiments that he had done on the other strips of metal.
At first, he failed, because the lead oxide was too thick. Finally, on April 22, 1960, the experiment succeeded, and the results conformed to the predictions of the B.C.S. theory. (Dr. Bardeen, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Schrieffer shared the 1972 Nobel in Physics for their theory, helped by Dr. Giaever’s proof.)

His co-recipients of the 1973 Nobel Prize were Dr. Esaki and Dr. Brian D. Josephson.

The other thing that stood out to me:

Dr. Giaever prided himself on his common-sense approach to science, but not all his ideas were welcomed by his peers. He became a prominent denier of climate change, referring to the science around it as a “new religion.” (“I would say that, basically, global warming is a nonproblem,” he said in a 2015 speech.) He based his opposition, in part, on his belief that it is impossible to track changes in the Earth’s temperature and that, even if it could be done, the temperature changes would be insignificant.
When the American Physical Society announced in 2011 that the evidence for climate change and global warming was incontrovertible, he resigned from the society in disgust, saying: “‘Incontrovertible’ is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.”

Posted in Obits, Physics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 4th, 2025.

Friday, July 4th, 2025

Happy Independence Day, everyone. Today marks 249 years of not giving a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what the British royal family thinks.

It is going to be a busy three-day weekend, but I did want to quickly note the death of Michael Madsen. NYT (archived).

NYT obit for Jim Shooter.

Kenneth Colley. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “The Bill”, and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (credited as “Jesus”).

Posted in Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 3, 2025.

Thursday, July 3rd, 2025

Robert Holton, big damn hero. He was 81.

Taxol is a hugely important drug in cancer treatment. It was originally isolated from the yew tree, but there just aren’t enough yew trees to go around. In order to isolate the drug, the trees had to be stripped of their bark, which killed them.

Dr. Holton was the first person to figure out how to synthesize Taxol in a lab, without killing yew trees.

“I have always been drawn to difficult problems, and synthesizing Taxol was a big one,” Dr. Holton said in 2018 during remarks at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Inventors in Washington, D.C. He was elected an academy fellow that year. “Seeing the drug’s success in treating so many patients has been an incredibly gratifying experience.”
The National Cancer Institute estimates that more than one million patients have been treated with Taxol. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1992 for ovarian cancer and, in 1994, for advanced breast cancer. The chemo agent is also used for the treatment of lung cancer and Kaposi’s sarcoma, among other malignancies, Dr. Boyd said.

…

In 1994, The New York Times called Dr. Holton’s synthesis of Taxol “arguably the most important drug cobbled together by human hands.” The article also noted “the cutthroat competition” to synthesize what everyone believed was destined to become a multi-billion-dollar medication. In 1999, Bristol Myers Squibb earned $1.5 billion from sales of the drug.

Barry Longyear, SF writer. I don’t have a formal obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick put up a tribute/obit on his blog.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 2, 2025.

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025

Jim Shooter, Marvel comics guy.

Shooter professionalized what had been a loose company in an even looser industry, making sure books were published on time, artists were paid on time and even given royalties and health insurance.
He also had a flair for developing talent, and under his aegis Marvel put out now-classic stories from writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne on Uncanny X-Men, Frank Miller on Daredevil and Walt Simonson on Thor, among others. While the artists became among the biggest names in the industry, X-Men became not only the most dominant and influential comic of the decade and beyond, but one of the first true franchises of the industry.
With 1984’s Secret Wars, a 12-issue miniseries that Shooter, Mike Zeck and John Beatty drew, he instituted the concept of publishing crossover events, a companywide initiative that saw one main story play out and influence many of the other titles coming out for months on end. Secret Wars was a massive publishing success and a toy bonanza. It’s a concept that is still being used by Marvel and DC to this day, in varying degrees.
He took fans seriously, and just like Weisinger, called and wrote readers out of the blue. Carter Beats the Devil author Glen David Gold wrote in his 2018 memoir, I Will Be Complete, of how in the summer before he entered high school in the late 1970s, Shooter phoned after reading a SHIELD story he had sent in. Perhaps seeing something of himself in a teen writing superhero stories, Shooter was encouraging, telling the auspicious writer to read as much as he could in high school and to study science.

…

Still, while many call Shooter a “complicated man,” Larry Hama, who was writing G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero for Marvel as well as editing titles, said that he believed Shooter was always trying to do the right thing. Hama recalled on Facebook how Shooter put a writer-artist on the company’s insurance plan the day after he died in order to help out his widow. (The talent had qualified for the health and insurance plan and wanted to sign up, but Marvel policy only allowed for sign-ups on Wednesdays. The man had died on the Tuesday.)
Hama wrote, “Without hesitation, Jim took the paperwork from me and went upstairs to push it through. He said, ‘They owe it to him, we just won’t mention that he already passed.’ I witnessed him doing stuff like that several times. None of it was made public for obvious reasons. It could have cost him his job, but he did the right thing.”

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 1, 2025.

Tuesday, July 1st, 2025

The last of the cousins has died.

Jimmy Swaggart.

As Jimmy Lee grew older and more certain that he was on the path of the righteous, he prayed for the salvation of his first cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, the early wild man of rock ’n’ roll who married several times (one bride was his 13-year-old cousin) and who thumbed his nose at conventional morality, as the writer Nick Tosches recounted in “Hellfire,” his biography of Mr. Lewis.
The country singer Mickey Gilley was also a first cousin to both Mr. Swaggart and Mr. Lewis. About the same age, the three boys were childhood companions. They learned to play an uncle’s piano and occasionally disobeyed their parents by going to a Black nightclub, where they were entranced by the music and dancing, Mr. Tosches wrote.

…

And he could be a hypnotic speaker. “I don’t know of anyone in America, religious or secular, who can hold a crowd better,” William Martin, a Rice University sociologist who has studied the evangelical movement, told The New York Times in 1988. Mr. Martin said a friend who was a lawyer had told him, “I don’t believe a word he says, but I don’t know anyone in the world who’s better with a closing argument.”

Posted in Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 27, 2025.

Friday, June 27th, 2025

Fred Espenak, astrophysicist. He was known as “Mr. Eclipse”.

During five decades of chasing eclipses, Mr. Espenak wrote several books about them, notably “Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses” (2006), ​​a two-volume, 742-page treatise written with the Belgian meteorologist Jean Meeus; operated four websites devoted to celestial statistics, including MrEclipse.com; and witnessed 52 solar eclipses, 31 of which were total.

…

In the early 1990s, Mr. Espenak began writing NASA’s eclipse bulletins with the Canadian meteorologist Jay Anderson. He also started a website for the space agency devoted to eclipse data. His goal: simplify and democratize complicated data so nonscientists sky gazers could geek out on the data, too.
All the while, he kept chasing eclipses — traveling to Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Aruba, Turkey, Zambia, Antarctica, Spain, Libya and beyond.

Lalo Schifrin. He was 93, and dang, what a career.

(Edited to add 6/28: NYT obit, which just went up today.)

The workaholic Schifrin received Oscar nominations for his scores for Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Fox (1968), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Sting II (1983) and for the song “People Alone” from The Competition (1980).
He scored Dirty Harry (1971) and the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), all starring Clint Eastwood — the filmmaker presented him with his Oscar — and served as the composer on all three of the Rush Hour films.

…

His résumé also included work on Coogan’s Bluff (1968) — that kicked off his long association with Eastwood and director Don Siegel — Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Charley Varrick (1973), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Telefon (1977), The Nude Bomb (1980), Black Moon Rising (1986), Money Talks (1997), Something to Believe In (1998), Tango (1998), Bringing Down the House (2003) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004).
An inspired Bruce Lee worked out to the show’s score in his gym in Hong Kong before signing Schifrin as the composer and orchestrator on Enter the Dragon (1973). As a bonus, Lee gave the musician his first martial arts lessons, for free.
Schifrin concocted a jazz waltz in 3/4 time for the theme to the Mike Connors series Mannix — also produced by Geller — and played the Moog synthesizer on the opening music for another 1960s’ CBS drama, Medical Center.
Schifrin also was responsible for the themes for T.H.E. Cat, Petrocelli, Starsky & Hutch, Bronk and Most Wanted. And his “Tar Sequence” music from Cool Hand Luke was adopted by ABC affiliates for their Eyewitness News broadcasts.

IMDB.

Bill Moyers.

But he resisted opening up about himself. He occasionally spoke about his Johnson years, but he never consented to be interviewed by Robert A. Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent more than 40 years on his five-volume Johnson biography.

Rick Hurst, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Return of the Killer Shrews”, “Supertrain”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.

Carolyn McCarthy, former Congresswoman from Long Island and prominent gun control advocate.

I bet you thought I wasn’t going to post this, didn’t you? Yes, I’ve used it before (though not in this version) but for my money, I think this is the greatest TV theme of all time. (Though I admit it does have some stiff competition.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Guns, Mannix, Music, Obits, Politics, TV | 5 Comments »

Administrative note.

Thursday, June 26th, 2025

It got really busy up in here in terms of obits, especially late in the day.

I’m going to wait until tomorrow, as is this blog’s policy, to let things shake out. The paper of record has probably had Bill Moyers in the can for years, but I’m sure there’s going to be some sort of update or correction.

Posted in Admin, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 24, 2025.

Tuesday, June 24th, 2025

Bobby Sherman. NYT (archived). Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, and “Flying High”.

NYT obit for Blake Farenthold.

Aki Aleong, actor. He was “Colonel Quoc” in an episode of “Airwolf” and “General Quoc” in “Braddock: Missing in Action III”, so he must have gotten promoted a few times in four years. Other credits include “Mancuso, FBI”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “The Wackiest Ship in the Army”, and three episodes of “Babylon 5”.

Posted in Music, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 23, 2025.

Monday, June 23rd, 2025

NYT obit for Fred Smith, which went up sometime yesterday after I posted.

FedEx was conceived in a paper that Mr. Smith wrote as a Yale University undergraduate in 1965. He argued that an increasingly automated economy would depend on fast and dependable door-to-door shipping of small packages containing computer parts. He got a C.
Today, FedEx employs more than half a million people and operates the world’s largest fleet of cargo aircraft. On an average day, the company ships more than 16 million packages in about 220 countries and territories.

The story about Mr. Smith getting a “C” goes around a lot, but I haven’t seen a reliable citation for it. Wikipedia (I know, I know) has it flagged as “citation needed”. You would think if it was true, the NYT would have more detail.

Gunilla Knutson, model. You probably don’t remember the name, but if you are of a certain age (Hi, pigpen51!) you remember the commercial.

Great and good friend of the blog Joe D. pointed out in comments that Blake Farenthold, former Congressman and Austin BBS personality, has passed away. AP obit.

Posted in Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 22, 2025.

Sunday, June 22nd, 2025

Frederick W. Smith, founder and former CEO of FedEx. NYPost. Nothing in the paper of record yet.

Lynn Hamilton, actress. Other credits include “Hunter”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Lady Sings the Blues”, “The Marcus-Nelson Murders” (the pilot for “Kojak”)…

…and “Mannix”. (“Tooth of the Serpent“, season 3, episode 15. This is actually a pretty solid episode.)

Jack Betts, actor. Other credits include “The Assassination of Trotsky”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Dead Men Don’t Die”.

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

Obit watch: June 17, 2025.

Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

William Langewiesche, writer.

He wrote a fair amount of stuff about aviation, especially a famous piece on EgyptAir 990.

Mr. Langewiesche’s account of the EgyptAir crash in 1999, which was profoundly enriched by his own aviation background, blamed a suicidal co-pilot. Egyptian officials refused to accept that conclusion, a response, he wrote, that was rooted in political and cultural chauvinism.

I used to be an admirer of his work, especially his aviation stuff. I generally try to avoid speaking ill of the dead when I write these obits, but there are some things I think need to be said about Mr. Langewiesche’s work.

Writing about Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III’s famous landing of a commercial airliner in the Hudson River in 2009, Mr. Langewiesche made the case that that injury-free belly flop was a testament more to modern airplane technology than to the heroism of the pilot.
Captain Sullenberger took issue with that account, telling The New York Times that Mr. Langewiesche’s book about the episode, “Fly by Wire,” contained “misstatements of fact.”

…

His 2002 book, “American Ground: Unbuilding The World Trade Center,” based on a three-part series in The Atlantic, was reported over six months at ground zero as he meticulously covered the cleanup after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Unmentioned in the obit: his accusation that members of the NYFD looted stores at ground zero before the towers collapsed. I think it is fair to say that accusation has been refuted.

Mr. Black, who sent his report to Mr. Langewiesche’s publisher, included a letter in which he asserted that Mr. Langewiesche ”passed off demonstrably unfounded rumor as plain fact, with a reckless disregard for both elementary procedures of verification and the likely harm his reporting would cause.”

Also unmentioned in the obit: his involvement in the Chevron Corp. v. Donziger pollution case.

Posted in Media, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 11, 2025.

Wednesday, June 11th, 2025

Brian Wilson. THR.

Playing catch-up, since this fell into the awkward “while I was traveling” gap: Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone.

Harris Yulin, actor. Other credits include “S.W.A.T.” (the original), “Barnaby Jones”, “Kojack”, and “Little House on the Prairie”.

Chris Robinson, actor. Other credits include “Young Doctors In Love”, “Murder She Wrote”, and “The Streets of San Francisco”.

John L. Young. He was one of the early Cypherpunks, and founded Cryptome.

Cryptome, which Mr. Young and Ms. Natsios, the daughter of a C.I.A. officer, founded in 1996, offers up a grab-bag of leaked and obscure public-domain documents, presented in reverse chronological order and in a bare-bones, courier-fonted display, as if they had been written on a typewriter.
The 70,000 documents on the site range from the seemingly innocuous — a course catalog from the National Intelligence University — to the clearly top secret: Over the years, Mr. Young exposed the identities of hundreds of intelligence operatives in the United States, Britain and Japan.

Posted in Cryptography, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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