Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: May 9, 2025.

Friday, May 9th, 2025

For the historical record: David H. Souter, former Supreme Court justice. WP (archived).

James Foley, director. The Saturday Movie Group has seen “Glengarry Glen Ross” and I thought it was pretty good. Other credits include “At Close Range” and “After Dark, My Sweet”.

“Rescue: HI-Surf”, the lifeguard series on one of the broadcast networks. I never saw an episode, just promos. But it looked a lot like a version of “Baywatch” that took itself way too seriously.

Also among the dead: “Lopez vs. Lopez” and “Night Court”. I greatly admire John Larroquette. But I also greatly admired Harry Anderson, and I just couldn’t see watching a “Night Court” without him.

“The Real Housewives New York City”. Between Pope Leo XIV and this being cancelled, I think it’s been a good week.

Posted in Law, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 7, 2025.

Wednesday, May 7th, 2025

Dr. Philip Sunshine, one of the pioneers of neonatology and a big damn hero.

Before Dr. Sunshine and a handful of other physicians became interested in caring for preemies in the late 1950s and early ’60s, more than half of these unimaginably fragile patients died shortly after birth. Insurance companies wouldn’t pay to treat them.
Dr. Sunshine, a pediatric gastroenterologist, thought that many premature babies could be saved. At Stanford, he pushed for teams of doctors from multiple disciplines to treat them in special intensive care units. Along with his colleagues, he pioneered methods of feeding preemies with formula and aiding their breathing with ventilators.
“We were able to keep babies alive that would not have survived,” Dr. Sunshine said in 2000 in an oral history interview with the Pediatric History Center of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And now everybody just sort of takes this for granted.”

…

As chief of Stanford’s neonatology department from 1967 to 1989, Dr. Sunshine helped train hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of doctors who went on to work in neonatal intensive care units around the world. When he retired in 2022, at age 92, the survival rate for babies born at 28 weeks was over 90 percent.
“Phil is one of the ‘originals’ in neonatology, a neonatologist’s neonatologist, one of our history’s best,” David K. Stevenson, Dr. Sunshine’s successor as head of Stanford’s neonatal department, wrote in the Journal of Perinatology in 2011. “He stands comfortably among the great leaders in neonatology and is more than simply a pioneer. He is one of the creators of our discipline.”
Dr. Sunshine recognized that caring for preemies required both technical expertise and human connection. He urged hospitals to allow parents to visit neonatal intensive care units so they could hold their children, sensing that skin-to-skin contact between mothers and babies was beneficial.
He also gave nurses more autonomy and encouraged them to speak up when they thought doctors were wrong.
“Our nurses have always been very important caretakers,” Dr. Sunshine said in the oral history. “All through my career, I’ve worked with a nursing staff that often would recognize problems in the baby before the physicians would, and they still do that now. Well, we were learning neonatology together.”

Crew resource management: it isn’t just for airplanes.

For the historical record: NYT obits for Lulu Roman (previously):

“The next thing you know, I’m on a plane to Hollywood and riding a limo to the CBS studios,” Ms. Roman said in 2006. “The first person I saw was Carol Burnett, with my mouth wide open. She said, ‘Shut your mouth, child. You’re fixin’ to be one of us.’”

and Cora Sue Collins (previously).

As Miss Collins aged, her roles dwindled. Before her 17th birthday, she said, she was a victim of harassment when Harry Ruskin, a screenwriter at MGM whom she viewed as a father figure, offered her a big role if she would sleep with him. She turned him down, started to cry and left his office.

…

She reported Mr. Ruskin’s behavior to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where she was a contract player at the time. But, as she recalled, he said, “You’ll get used to it, sweetie.” Soon after, he threatened to keep her from ever working in movies again.
“Mr. Mayer, that’s my heartfelt desire,” she said she told him, adding, “It was the best decision of my life.”

Posted in Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 5, 2025.

Monday, May 5th, 2025

Charley Scalies, actor. Other credits include “12 Monkeys” (the movie), “Homicide: Life on the Street”, and “Law and Order” (also “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit”).

This one is for friend of the blog Dave: Will Hutchins, actor. He was a guest on some Westerns in the 1960s and even had his own show, which I’d never heard of, “Sugarfoot”. Other credits include “Perry Mason”, “The New Perry Mason”, “The Horror at 37,000 Feet”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, and “The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington”.

Posted in Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: May 2, 2025.

Friday, May 2nd, 2025

Ruth Buzzi. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “Night Gallery”, “Emergency”, “Medical Center” (“Ruth Buzzi and Don RIckles portray two comically depressive characters who fall in love at Medical Center.”), and, of course…

I missed this, but: Ted Kotcheff passed away on April 10th. NYT (archived).

He refused to direct the first, “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (1985), because of the violence that the character unleashes.
“I read the script, and I said, ‘In the first film he doesn’t kill anybody,’” he told Filmmaker magazine in 2016. “In this film he kills 74 people.’”

Other credits include “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?”, “Fun with Dick and Jane” (the 1977 one), and “North Dallas Forty”.

Odile de Vasselot passed away on April 21st. She was 103.

Ms. de Vasselot (pronounced de-VASS-euh-low) was one of thousands of young Frenchwomen and men who quietly went to war against the Germans invaders after the country’s defeat in 1940 during the Battle of France. She began modestly, chalking the Lorraine Cross, adopted by General de Gaulle as a symbol of the Resistance, on walls and tearing down the propaganda posters of the Germans and their French Vichy-regime confederates. By the war’s end, she was going on dangerous nocturnal missions.

…

Her chance came, she said, when a friend put her in touch with a member of a Resistance group known as the Zero network, in June 1943. (Other accounts offer a different chronology.) She was asked to deliver Resistance mail and newspapers to network members in Toulouse, taking the night train on Friday and returning the next day.

…

By the end of the year, arrests had made it dangerous to work with the Zero network. Ms. de Vasselot joined another group, known as the Comet network, and for two months, until early 1944, walked through mud and swamps at the Belgian front, meeting up with Allied airmen and parachutists, giving them money and forged papers, and accompanying them to France, where they could make their way to neutral Spain.

…

She rejoined the Zero network that summer, as the allies were creeping their way toward Paris, and was sent on new missions throughout France.

Bobby Torre, maître d’ at J.G. Melon. This is one of those “questionable notability” ones – a NYC bar guy? – but it is also the kind of obit the paper of record does well, and is kind of fun.

When he was on the job at Melon’s, leaning by the entry on a bar stool a little too tall for him, glasses pushed up on his head and a pencil behind his ear, Mr. Torre would chat you up while you waited for a table and your burger with cottage fries.
Something would remind him of a saloon regular nicknamed Ronda Lasagna. That produced tales of a place he called “the Yankee Stadium of belly dancers.” From there, his mind would travel to a gay bar known as “the Wrinkle Room,” where “every guy with a trick said it was their nephew,” as he recalled. (Mr. Torre had run a mob-connected gay bar himself at one point.)

…

In his heyday there, he could charm rowdy patrons into a bear hug. But he was also capable of pinning a purse snatcher against the bathroom door until officers from the 19th Precinct arrived.
His fervor extended to his Roman Catholic faith. Mr. O’Neill sometimes had to ask Mr. Torre to stop blessing everyone at the bar. But without his religiosity, it is hard to imagine Mr. Torre performing his acts of kindness so cherished by customers.
He covered checks. He made hundreds of annual birthday calls. Melon’s is near several hospitals, and he would spend hours sitting with the ill, relatives of the ill and new mourners. That patient sympathy, offered alongside free cheeseburgers and fries, became part of stories told and retold by families who visited Melon’s during a crisis.

…

Mr. Torre also claimed to be an expert in martial arts. Michael Burrell, a former Melon’s bartender, recalled ribbing him: “Yeah, Bob, you’re a black belt.”
In fact, Mr. Valenti confirmed, his uncle studied not only jiu-jitsu, but also judo, Wing Chun kung fu and hapkido.

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

Obit watch: May 1, 2025.

Thursday, May 1st, 2025

Julia Parsons passed away on April 18th at the age of 104.

A lover of puzzles and crosswords while growing up in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression, Mrs. Parsons deciphered German military messages that had been created by an Enigma machine, a typewriter-size device with a keyboard wired to internal rotors, which generated millions of codes. Her efforts provided Allied forces with information critical to evading, attacking and sinking enemy submarines.

…

The unraveling of the Enigma puzzle began in the late 1930s, when Polish mathematicians, using intelligence gathered by French authorities, reverse-engineered the device and began developing the Bombe, a computer-like code-breaking machine. The Poles shared the information with British authorities.

…

At the U.S. Naval Communications Annex in Washington, Mrs. Parsons and hundreds of other women used the Bombe to decipher German military radio transmissions, revealing information that was instrumental in shortening and winning the war, historians have said.
“We tried to figure out what the message was saying, then we drew up what we called a menu showing what we thought the letters were,” she told The Washington Post in 2022. “That was fed into the computer, which then spat out all possible wheel orders for the day. Those changed every day and the settings changed twice a day, so we were constantly working on them.”

…

More than 100,000 women joined the WAVES during the war. In 1943, she left Pittsburgh for officer training at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she took courses on cryptology, physics and naval history. After her training, she was sent to the Naval Communications Annex, in Washington.
One day, an officer there asked if anyone could speak German. She had taken two years of the language in high school, so she raised her hand.
“They shot me off to the Enigma section immediately, and I began learning how to de­code German U­-boat message traffic on the job, Day 1,” Mrs. Parsons said in an interview with the Veterans Breakfast Club, a nonprofit organization. “Enemy messages arrived all day from all over the North Atlantic, plus the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay.”

…

In 1997, Mrs. Parsons visited the National Cryptologic Museum near Washington, just another tourist interested in American history.
“The exhibits there astounded me,” she said in the Veterans Breakfast Club interview. “Here was every sort of Enigma machine — early models, late models — on display for all to see, with detailed explanations of how they worked.”
She asked a tour guide why the machines were on display. The guide replied that the Enigma work had been declassified in the 1970s. Mrs. Parsons hadn’t known. She spent rest of her life visiting classrooms and giving interviews, eager to tell her story.“It’s been good to break the silence,” she said. “Good for me, and for history.”

Posted in Cryptography, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 30, 2025.

Wednesday, April 30th, 2025

David Horowitz, noted conservative commentator. Twitter X. NYT. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Priscilla Pointer, actress. Other credits include “Blue Velvet”, “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “McCloud”, and “Mrs. Columbo”.

Andrew Gross, thriller writer. He may have been best known for the books he wrote with James Patterson.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 29, 2025.

Tuesday, April 29th, 2025

The paper of record ran a nice obit for Peter Lovesey. (Previously.)

Except for the grumpy part, Mr. Lovesey’s son said, Superintendent Diamond was a stand-in for his creator, who was bitterly opposed to technology. Mr. Lovesey wrote in longhand for decades before briefly and reluctantly switching to an electric “golf ball” Olivetti typewriter and then, finally, a word processor, which threw him entirely. During the pandemic, his son said, he mistakenly downloaded Zoom 25 times.

Cora Sue Collins, actress. She was 98.

Collins was born on April 19, 1927, in Beckley, West Virginia. Her mom brought her and her older sister to Los Angeles just before Collins turned 4.
“On the third day we were here, I went with my mother to enroll my older sister in school,” she told Danny Miller in a wonderful 2015 interview. “We were walking up to the entrance of the school, my sister and I each holding one of my mother’s hands, when this huge car came screeching up.
“A woman jumped out of the car and said, ‘Excuse me, would you like to put your little girl in pictures?’ Of course my mother said, ‘Yes!’ The woman said, ‘Get in the car with me, there’s a big casting going on right now at Universal.’”
They made it on their own to the studio, where Collins was quickly tapped to play Pudge in the 1932 comedy The Unexpected Father, starring ZaSu Pitts and Slim Summerville. “Wait till you see Cora Sue,” wrote one reviewer of her performance. “Just four, she walks away with everything.”

…

…Collins portrayed Sylvia Sidney’s daughter in Jennie Gerhardt and was the main attraction at the premiere of Queen Christina at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where she was accompanied by MGM chief Louis B. Mayer after arriving in a miniature coach pulled by Shetland ponies. (Garbo refused to do any publicity for her films.)
Collins signed a contract with MGM in 1934 for $250 a week — about $5,900 in today’s dollars — and appeared in 10 features that year, including Black Moon with Fay Wray, The Scarlet Letter with Colleen Moore, The World Accuses with Dickie Moore and Treasure Island with Jackie Cooper.

…

She played the juvenile delinquent daughter of a court judge in Youth on Trial (1945) and appeared in Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), then retired from acting at age 18. “I wanted to enjoy the luxury of anonymity,” she said.

IMDB.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 28, 2025.

Monday, April 28th, 2025

David Paton, big damn hero, died on April 3rd. He was 94.

I take blindness kind of personally. Dr. Paton was a prominent ophthalmologist. In the early 1970s, he started thinking about blindness in developing countries: there were a lot of folks, he believed, that were losing their eyesight because of things that could be prevented or treated. But how to get doctors and training to the developing world?

He considered shipping trunks of equipment — almost the way a circus would — but that presented logistical challenges. He pondered the possibility of using a medical ship like the one that the humanitarian group Project Hope sent around the world. That was too slow for him.
“Shortly after the first moon landing in 1969, thinking big was becoming a reality,” Dr. Paton wrote.
And then a moonshot idea struck him: “Could an aircraft be the answer? A large enough aircraft could be converted into an operating theater, a teaching classroom and all the necessary facilities.”

…

In 1980, Mr. Trippe helped persuade Edward Carlson, the chief executive of United Airlines, to donate a DC-8 jet. The United States Agency for International Development contributed $1.25 million to convert the plane into a hospital with an operating room, a recovery area and a classroom equipped with televisions, so local medical workers could watch surgeries.

This was the birth of Orbis International.

…the organization is on its third plane, an MD-10 donated by Federal Express.
From 2014 to 2023, Orbis performed more than 621,000 surgeries and procedures, according to its most recent annual report, and offered more than 424,000 training sessions to doctors, nurses and other providers.

David Thomas, of Pere Ubu and Rocket From the Tombs, and a good Cleveland boy.

Lar Park Lincoln, actress. Other credits include “Space: Above and Beyond”, “House II: The Second Story”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.

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

Obit watch: April 25, 2025.

Friday, April 25th, 2025

Lawrence sent over an obit for Steve McMichael, legendary Chicago Bear.

Though somewhat small for a defensive lineman at 6 feet 2 inches and 270 pounds, McMichael possessed immense strength and slippery quickness. He starred on a defense that included three other future Hall of Famers: the defensive ends Hampton and Dent and the linebacker Mike Singletary. He played in 191 consecutive games for the Bears and 12 more in the playoffs, a franchise record.

…

McMichael reveled in an exaggerated, untamed persona. His nicknames included Ming the Merciless, after the tyrant in “Flash Gordon,” and Mongo, after the dimwitted ruffian who punches out a horse in the Mel Brooks comedy “Blazing Saddles.”

Lulu Roman, perhaps most famous for “Hee Haw”.

Roman appeared on the first episode of CBS’ Hee Haw in June 1969 and on the last one, with the show in syndication, in June 1993. During its impressive run, she reinvented herself as a gospel singer, and she would release more than a dozen albums, perform in concert and record with the likes of Dolly Parton. (Watch and hear her sing “Crazy” here).

IMDB.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 21, 2025.

Monday, April 21st, 2025

For the historical record: Pope Francis. Vatican News. L’Osservatore Romano (English).

The NYPost handicaps the leading candidates.

The Diocese of Austin is currently without a Bishop, as of March 25. Its former Bishop, Joe Vasquez, is now the Archbishop of Galveston-Houston. Since the Pope appoints new Bishops to a diocese, Vasquez’s replacement in Austin will be prolonged until the new Pope is appointed.

Posted in Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 18, 2025.

Friday, April 18th, 2025

Joe Nickell, paranormal investigator, passed away on March 4th. I wasn’t aware of this until the NYT ran a very respectful and lengthy obit today.

Working for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a program run by the nonprofit group Center for Inquiry, and as a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer, the organization’s magazine, Mr. Nickell investigated ghosts, poltergeist activity, apparitions, the Loch Ness monster, crop circles and multiple reappearances of Jesus, including one on a tortilla.
“Some of it is like satire,” Mr. Nickell told The New York Times in 1997, “almost like it’s reached a comic level.”

Back in the day when I read SI, Mr. Nickell’s articles were always a high point. He was one of the greats, right up there with Martin Gardner and James Randi, and his passing leaves a hole in the world.

(The only reason I stopped reading SI was that I just didn’t have time to read it. Nothing else, I just couldn’t keep up with that and everything else, too.)

The paper of record also ran a long, respectful, and very well illustrated obit for Robert E. McGinnis. (Previously.)

Posted in Art, Books, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 16, 2025.

Wednesday, April 16th, 2025

Wink Martindale. NYT (archived).

Martindale said he became interested in hosting a TV game show in 1965 when he learned that Password‘s Allen Ludden would “go in two days a week and tape five shows one day and five shows the next and the other five days play golf. I went to my agent and said, ‘How about sending me on a game-show hosting interview?’”
He eventually landed at NBC’s What’s That Song? (billed as Win Martindale) and worked for a year on that, the first of the 20 game shows that he hosted (only Bill Cullen did more). He was on Tic-Tac-Dough for a decade, did two shows for producer Chuck Barris (How’s Your Mother-in-Law? and Dream Girl of ’67) and produced game shows as well.

Another one that would have got past me if it wasn’t for “The Rap Sheet” (and I haven’t seen an obit anywhere else): Peter Lovesey, one of the great British crime writers.

Wikipedia:

He was also one of the world’s leading track and field statisticians.

Interesting, as his first novel (which was re-issued in a 50th anniversary edition late last year), Wobble To Death, is a Victorian era murder mystery…set against a speed walking marathon.

In addition to the scope of his unparalleled crime fiction career, Peter Lovesey will be remembered by his many grieving friends as the paragon of decency, compassion, loyalty, self-discipline, and pride in good work—in short, a human example of what it means to live a good life.

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

Obit watch: April 14, 2025.

Monday, April 14th, 2025

Mario Vargas Llosa.

Mr. Vargas Llosa was never fully enamored, however, by his contemporaries’ magical realism. And he was disillusioned with Fidel Castro’s persecution of dissidents in Cuba, breaking from the leftist ideology that held sway for decades over many writers in Latin America.
He charted his own path as a conservative, often divisive political thinker and as a novelist who transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.
His dabbling in politics ultimately led to a run for the presidency in 1990. That race allowed him to champion the free-market causes he espoused, including the privatization of state enterprises and reducing inflation through government spending cuts and layoffs of the bloated civil service.
He led polls for much of the race, but was roundly defeated by Alberto Fujimori, then a little-known agronomist of Japanese descent who later adopted many of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s policies.

Jean Marsh, actress. NYT. Other credits include the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Eagle Has Landed”, and “See China and Die”.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 11, 2025.

Friday, April 11th, 2025

I missed this, and it hasn’t been reported in the usual places I check. I only know about it thanks to a story in the Rap Sheet.

Ken Bruen, the great Irish mystery writer, passed away on March 29th.

My late lamented friend Willie Siros (of the late lamented Adventures in Crime and Space) gave me an advance reading copy of The Guards because he thought I might like it. I loved it. It was something new and stunning and frankly brutal, especially the ending. I haven’t gone back to the Jack Taylor books since, though, and I don’t know why, other than not having enough time to read everything. But with a hard stop in place, now I can catch up.

I’ve read A Fifth of Bruen (and I have the promotional Zippo that was issued with it). You can see the Jack Taylor in these early stories, but you can also see more depth to Bruen. For example, one of the stories is a very gentle mainstream story about a couple dealing with the birth of a child with Down syndrome.

Bruen was, to my mind, a good and underappreciated writer, whose death leaves a hole.

Also by way of the Rap Sheet, also among the dead, and also no obit in the usual places: Robert McGinnis, artist. Quoting from his obit:

Bob was one of the most prolific illustrators of the 20th century. It’s likely you have seen one or more of his artwork images somewhere. They appeared in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest and Guideposts; on very many book covers (especially paperback books, spanning many genres, from Detective to Mystery to Gothic to Historical Fiction to Romance to Fantasy); in the form of personal-project paintings that included many Old West scenes; and also on movie posters for culturally significant movies (and also on soundtrack album covers). In our biased opinion, Bob was the very best of the James Bond/007 artists, having created exciting images for the posters for movies such as Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale (parody movie), and Live and Let Die.

Not exactly an obit, but this is a swell…tribute? to John Taffin from the Revolver Guy blog.

Posted in Books, Guns, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 3, 2025.

Thursday, April 3rd, 2025

I was busy traveling in elephants yesterday. By the time we got in, got unpacked (do you know how long it takes to unpack an elephant?) and got something to eat…it was late.

So: Val Kilmer, for the historical record. NYT. THR.

Not much to say, really, except that I think both “Heat” and “Tombstone” are pretty good movies. I actually like “Tombstone” better than “My Darling Clementine” (which we watched last week) on the OK Corral movie front.

Charlotte Webb has passed away at 101.

Ms. Webb was one of the last surviving Bletchley Park codebreakers.

Ms. Webb, known as Betty, was 18 when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, and was assigned to work at the base in Buckinghamshire where Bletchley Park was located. From 1941 to 1945, she helped in the decryption of German messages, and also worked on Japanese signals.
In 2015, Ms. Webb was appointed as Member of the Order of the British Empire and in 2021 she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious honor.

Sian Barbara Allen, actress.

Other credits include “Sword of Justice”, “The Rockford Files”, “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, and “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Patty Maloney. Other credits include one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Trapper John, M.D.”, and voice work in the 1978 “Lord of the Rings”.

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

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