Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: August 24, 2026.

Monday, August 24th, 2026

Shelley Fabares, actress. THR.

Previously on WCD. Credits other than those in the headline and “Hello, Larry” include “The Incredible Hulk”, “The Rockford Files”, and “Longstreet”.

Her “Mannix” was “A Step in Time“, season 5, episode 3. She was “Gwen Townsend”.

(Edited to add 8/25: NYT share link, may require registration or an email address or something.)

Dave Marsh, cantankerous music critic. (NYT share link, may require registration or an email address or something.)

Another one of the publications that I used to read when I holed up in the UT library was “Rock & Roll Confidential”. I liked Marsh’s prose style, even if I would probably have disagreed with him on a lot of things. Then again…

In the same record guide, Mr. Marsh called the Grateful Dead, with their interminable space jams and druggy aura, an “assertedly major oeuvre that’s virtually worthless except for documentary purposes.”

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

Obit watch: August 21, 2026.

Friday, August 21st, 2026

I’ve been reading a fair number of books about shipwrecks recently. I owe everyone longer reviews, but The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald gets an unqualified rave from me, while Until the Sea Shall Free Them: Life, Death, and Survival in the Merchant Marine gets a slightly qualified endorsement.

I haven’t read this book yet, but when I saw the NYT obit for John Rousmaniere, I felt like I had to mention it. (Share link, may require you to register or put in an email address or something.)

He was an author and a sailing historian.

He wrote “The Annapolis Book of Seamanship,” a practical reference that has been used by the U.S. Naval Academy and many recreational sailors, first published in 1983 and now in its fourth edition. In a more lyrical vein, he wrote “The Golden Pastime: A New History of Yachting” (1986).

But his most famous book is probably Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing.

He was an experienced offshore sailor when he joined the crew of a 48-foot Swan sloop, one of 300 yachts entered in the Fastnet Race in August 1979, with a planned route of 605 miles from the Isle of Wight to Fastnet Rock off Ireland and back.
A freakish storm slammed the fleet with gale-force winds and 50-foot frothing waves. Mr. Rousmaniere was at the wheel of the vessel when the owner raised his head from monitoring radio traffic and said, “People are dying out here.”
Amid seas that flipped 35-foot yachts “like bathtub toys,” as Mr. Rousmaniere later wrote, 24 crews abandoned their vessels, and 15 sailors died. Helicopter crews and commercial and naval seamen rescued 136 sailors.

…

As Mr. Rousmaniere intended, the book helped spur changes that made yacht racing safer. Boats evolved to become less prone to capsize; harnesses that tether sailors to their boats became stronger; and education about the risks of offshore sailing, and how to survive life-threatening scenarios, became more than an afterthought. Mr. Rousmaniere also helped to create the U.S. Sailing Association’s Safety at Sea course, which some 2,500 sailors take every year.

Margo Howard, columnist. (NYT share link, you know the drill.) I used to read, and enjoy, “Dear Prudence” in Slate before they replaced her, and went off the deep end.

Posted in Boats, Books, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch: August 19, 2026.

Wednesday, August 19th, 2026

Frank Beard, drummer for ZZ Top. NYT (share link, but they’re going to want you to create an account or put in your Google or Apple address or something).

Beard isn’t technically a founder of ZZ Top (that’d be Dan Mitchell), though he joined the group in its infancy in 1969 and led its rhythm section for over five decades.

There are a lot of great Top songs, but I thought I’d go for a slightly deeper cut. Mostly because this video has been on my mind recently:

Peggy Webber, actress.

She also is known for her turn as the newlywed who moves into a mansion where her husband’s (John Hudson) first wife died under suspicious circumstances in the cult horror classic The Screaming Skull (1958). American International Pictures promised a free burial to anyone who died of fright watching the movie, a thinly veiled remake of Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

“The Screaming Skull” on the MST3K site.

She was also part of Jack Webb’s stock company. The obit mentions her role as “Ma Friday”, but she also appeared four times on the 1960s color “Dragnet”, twice on “Adam-12”, and one time each on “Emergency!” and “Project U.F.O.” She also did a “Quincy, M.E.” and two episodes of “Night Gallery”.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch: August 17, 2026.

Monday, August 17th, 2026

Violet Hensley, fiddler. (Share link, but they’re going to want you to create an account or put in your Google or Apple address or something).

Ms. Hensley made a clear distinction between a fiddle and a violin, even though they are essentially the same instrument. “If you can read music, you play the violin,” she told The Tulsa World in 1982. “I can’t read music, so I just play the fiddle.”
By the time she turned 99, Ms. Hensley had performed old-time mountain music — not bluegrass, which she deemed too fancy — at the Silver Dollar City theme park in Branson, Mo., for more than 50 years; played on radio stations and at schools; recorded at least two albums, one of them, with family members, called “Old-Time Hoedowns”; and appeared on TV programs like “Captain Kangaroo,” “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee.”
She also handcrafted 73 fiddles — she played No. 4, which she made in the 1930s — thus acquiring nicknames like “The Whittlin’ Fiddler” and “Stradivarius of the Ozarks.” She could have built more fiddles if not for time spent gardening, canning, sewing and cutting her neighbors’ hair, she told CBS News when she was 90. To make ends meet, she was a cleaning lady at a hospital for many years.

There was one thing she wanted to do: play the Grand Ole Opry.

When another fiddler, Tim Crouch, read about that desire in Ms. Hensley’s autobiography, “Whittlin’ and Fiddlin’ My Own Way” (written with Randall Franks and published in 2014), he called the banjo player Mike Snider, who brought her onstage at the Opry on Aug. 6, 2016.
“This little lady was born in 1916,” he said as he introduced her, to cheers. She played “Angeline the Baker” and “Black Eyed Susie” with Mr. Snider, Mr. Crouch and other fiddle players, and received three standing ovations, Ms. Flagg, her daughter, said.

…

She performed twice more at the Opry, in 2017 and in 2018, the year she was inducted into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame in Tulsa, Okla.

…

In addition to Ms. Flagg, Ms. Hensley is survived by two other daughters, Beatrice Porter and Lewonna Nelson; three sons, Marvin, R.G. and Eddie Hensley; Wilma Flagg, a family friend who came to live with her as a teenager; 32 grandchildren; 85 great-grandchildren; 29 great-great-grandchildren; and two great-great-great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 1997. Four of their sons — Calvin, Russell and Gary Hensley and Larry Hensley, who was stillborn — predeceased her.
Making fiddles was one of many skills Ms. Hensley developed over her lifetime. She also made lye soap, tanned leather, broke horses and tended crops.
“I always say,” she told The Tulsa World, “making a fiddle is a lot easier than plowing a field with a team of mules.”

She was 109 when she passed.

Mark Rydell, director. Other credits include “The Reivers”, “Harry and Walter Go to New York”, and “The Fugitive” (the original series). NYT share link for the record.

The NYT finally got around to running an obit for Zale Parry. (Previously.) (Share link, but they’re going to want you to create an account or put in your Google or Apple address or something).

What the NYT obit lacks in timeliness, it makes up for by covering another aspect of Ms. Parry’s life: she was involved in early LSD studies. The NYT obit also reproduces her SI cover, in color.

Tommy John, pitcher.

After suffering what had been up to then considered a career-ending injury, John, then 31, underwent ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction surgery on his left (pitching) elbow in 1974, with the revolutionary procedure being performed by Dr. Frank Jobe. The procedure was named after John and has since become commonplace, performed on thousands of players — not just pitchers — with a typical recovery time of a year to 18 months.
John, nicknamed “The Bionic Man,” went on to pitch for 14 more seasons after the surgery.

…

John had 124 wins in 355 games at the time of the procedure. He pitched in 405 more games, winning 164, and finished with a career record of 288-231 — the second-most wins of any pitcher since 1900 not to be elected to the Hall of Fame — with a 3.34 ERA and 2,245 strikeouts in 760 career appearances.
Besides eight seasons with the Yankees, for whom he won 91 games over two stints, John pitched for the Chicago White Sox, Dodgers, California Angels, Cleveland Indians and Oakland Athletics during his career.

He is tied for third on the list of most seasons played, with 26. Only Nolan Ryan and Cap Anson (27 seasons) are ahead of him.

NYT share link. Baseball Reference.

Hayden Panettiere. Everyone is on this, and I’ve got nothing to add. IMDB. NYT share link, for the record.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 13, 2026.

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

Noted fantasy and SF writer John Crowley passed away last Saturday. Michael Swanwick. Lawrence. And I will be sheep-dipped: NYT (share link, but they’re going to want you to create an account or put in your Google or Apple address or something).

The only Crowley work I’ve read is Great Work of Time and I agree with Lawrence: that is a fine novella.

Derrick Parker, former detective with the NYPD. He…

…was the former head of the NYPD’s rap intelligence unit when the city’s hip-hop scene exploded in popularity in the 1990s.
His work included monitoring high-profile artists and their entourages as they came and went from the Big Apple.
He said he shared his strategies to reduce violence in the music industry in other parts of the country, including in Miami and Atlanta.
He also served as a homicide and cold case detective during a career that spanned more than 20 years and worked alongside the US Marshals, the ATF, the DEA and the FBI, according to his website.

Notorious C.O.P.: The Inside Story of the Tupac, Biggie, and Jam Master Jay Investigations from NYPD’s First “Hip-Hop Cop” on Amazon.

Burning in Hell watch: Ward Churchill, disgraced plagiarist university professor. (NYT share link, but they’re going to want you to create an account or put in your Google or Apple address or something).

When he was dismissed, Mr. Churchill had been a tenured professor at the university’s Boulder campus since 1991 and had served as chairman of its ethnic studies department. In 2007, a faculty panel found that he had plagiarized and falsified parts of his research on Native Americans, prompting his dismissal.
He filed a wrongful termination suit against the university, claiming that the real cause for his firing was to punish him for an essay he had written on Sept. 12, 2001, and published online a few days later, in which he argued that the United States had brought on itself the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In the essay, he compared office workers who had been killed to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official whose later defense that he was merely “following orders” helped inspire the writer Hannah Arendt to develop the concept of “the banality of evil.”
In Mr. Churchill’s essay, titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” he wrote that the financial workers who died at the World Trade Center were not innocent bystanders, but “little Eichmanns” who were part of “a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.”

…

When the lawsuit went to trial in March 2009, Mr. Churchill’s lawyers described the university panel’s search for professional misconduct as a pretext for a foregone decision to dismiss him. Mr. Lane, his lawyer, said at the time that Mr. Churchill was the victim of a “howling mob” of university administrators, conservative media and politicians “falling over themselves” to secure his removal.
In April 2009, the jury found that Mr. Churchill had been wrongfully dismissed, awarding him a symbolic $1 in damages. It found that his political views had been a “substantial or motivating” factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed anyway for his academic misconduct.

…

A Denver District Court judge ruled that the university did not have to reinstate or compensate Mr. Churchill, a decision which was upheld by the Colorado Court of Appeals. In 2012, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts’ rulings.

Posted in Books, Cops, Law, NYPD, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch: August 11, 2026.

Monday, August 10th, 2026

Former Representative Ben Jones (D-Georgia). THR.

Most people would know him as “Cooter Davenport” on “The Dukes of Hazzard”. Other credits include “Movin’ On”, “Smokey and the Bandit”, and “The Lincoln Conspiracy”.

Tedde Moore, actress. Other credits include “Police Surgeon”, “Torso: The Evelyn Dick Story”, and “Odyssey 5”.

It has been a bad few days for people of the gun. One of my book buddies in the Association has been sending me obits.

Tom Marx passed away in February, but his death was announced only recently.

Tom was one of the true “industry insiders.” He began as a Chicago cop and then focused on the gun world, working at various times for Smith & Wesson, Ruger, and Blackhawk among others. His consulting encompassed design, engineering, and marketing. Marx specialized in handguns and particularly defensive handguns.

From the same obit (by Massad Ayoob in Backwoods Home), Greg Moats.

Greg had been at the legendary Columbia Conference held at world combat pistol champion Ray Chapman’s Chapman Academy in Columbia, Missouri in 1976 at which the International Practical Shooting Confederation was founded under the leadership of the legendary Jeff Cooper.

And Steven Dodd Hughes, gunsmith, author, and photographer.

I think I actually bought a gun from him about 14 years ago. I remember him being a pretty darn good guy and a pleasure to do business with.

Posted in 1970s, Guns, Movies, Obits, Politics, Smith and Wesson, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 4, 2026.

Tuesday, August 4th, 2026

Kay Granger, former Congresswoman from Texas.

Ms. Granger left Washington in 2024, during her final year in the House, and moved into an independent living facility in Fort Worth — an arrangement that her office did not disclose for months.
When a conservative website broke the news in December 2024, Ms. Granger’s son Brandon told The Dallas Morning News that she had been experiencing “dementia issues.” In a statement at the time, Ms. Granger said she had been navigating “unforeseen health challenges that have progressed since September and made travel to D.C. difficult.”
The news caused a stir in Washington, coming as several older members of Congress also faced health issues and the Republican majority in the House was razor-thin.

Monty Roberts, horse trainer. I remember vaguely hearing about him around the time the “Horse Whisperer” was big, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do an obit watch. Then I read the article:

“You have to give him credit. He was one of the first people to get away from the rough stuff, tying a horse to a pole and sacking it out,” Temple Grandin, the noted animal behaviorist and proponent of the humane treatment of livestock, said. “He was really observant out in the field and got to thinking about what a horse really has to say to you. A lot of people are good at reading horses, but he was a pioneer in telling people there were better ways to train horses.”
And unlike some trainers, she said, he demonstrated his methods.

…

When he was just 7, he showed his father how effective it was to treat a young stallion with kindness to instill trust.
His father, he said, flew into a rage and beat him so severely with a chain that he had to be hospitalized. He vowed never to share his unconventional ideas with his father again. But he remained convinced that there was a better way to work with horses.

…

Among his admirers was Queen Elizabeth II, who had read articles in equestrian magazines about Mr. Roberts’s methods and had longed to find a less violent method for training horses.
In April 1989, she invited Mr. Roberts to visit her and demonstrate his unconventional ideas. She was so impressed that she brought him into her royal equestrian orbit as an adviser, and he became a friend.
“She believed that no one should ever say to any human being or animal, ‘You do what I tell you to do or I’ll hurt you,’” Mr. Roberts told The New York Times in 2022.

Scott Hylands. You know, I’d never actually even heard of “Night Heat”, which surprises me: I thought I had a pretty good knowledge of cop shows. Other credits include “Blue Thunder” (the series), “Today’s F.B.I.”, “Harry O”, and “The Magician”.

For the record: Vincent Pastore, of “The Sopranos” fame. IMDB. You know, I might actually watch “Wu-Tang: An American Saga”, if I can find it.

Posted in Horses, Obits, Politics, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 27, 2026.

Monday, July 27th, 2026

Lawrence sent me this a few days ago, but I didn’t have a link I felt like using until now: John C. Dvorak, prominent computer columnist.

I almost want to make an argument that Dvorak was a “troll” in the Internet sense of the word before there was an Internet. I’m not sure I can or want to defend that argument, but people who were around at the height of Mr. Dvorak’s career might remember some of his more trollish moments.

E.J. Peaker, actress. No “Mannix”, but she had a lot of other cop and cop-related credits: “Quincy, M.E.”, “Get Christie Love!”, and “The Streets of San Francisco”, among others.

Zale Parry. She didn’t have a lot of credits beyond “Sea Hunt”, but she was an early scuba pioneer:

In 1953, the couple helped launch Scientific Underwater Research Enterprises, which tested underwater equipment that would be sold to consumers. Two years later, she became the third woman certified as an underwater instructor in Los Angeles County.
Parry said she attempted her record-setting dive in August 1954 “to prepare a technical paper on the subject of nitrogen narcosis since we could not find enough subject matter. We wanted to give a good, true picture of what happens. The event changed my life.
“All it took was three miles off the shores of Avalon, Santa Catalina Island with a slight afternoon chop and a dive to 209 feet to a sandy rippled bottom with a strand of bull kelp and one discarded Schlitz beer can … From there on, the radio, television, newspapers and magazines had agents calling for interviews and fun game shows.”

Posted in 1970s, Media, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: July 22, 2026.

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2026

Hal Williams, actor. Other credits include “Quincy, M.E.”, “Harry O”, and “Sanford”.

(Did you know they tried to make a sequel to “Sanford and Son” without Lamont? I did not.)

He was 91.

I saw this story earlier today, but didn’t make the connection until Lawrence sent me an obit: Kaylee Hottle. She was 18, and died in a car accident.

I usually try to stay away from the credits in the headline, but her only other credit in IMDB is an episode of the “Magnum, P.I.” remake. (Something called “What Doesn’t Kill Us” is listed in pre-production.)

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

Obit watch: July 20, 2026.

Monday, July 20th, 2026

It has been a bad few days for sports.

Garfield Sobers, cricket player.

Although initially considered primarily a spin bowler, Sobers, who was known as Garry, swiftly showed himself to be a brilliant batsman as well. He scored 365 runs against Pakistan in 1958 at just 21. It was the highest total in the history of Test matches, the most important games in international cricket. The feat took 10 hours.
Scoring 100 runs in an innings is considered a spectacular performance, while 50 is a great one. Sobers had an average score of 57 runs per innings in his 93 Test matches. He finished his career with 8,032 runs in Tests from 1953 to 1974, a record at the time.
As a bowler, he also excelled. He could bowl both fast balls and slower, spinning balls and get batters out by taking their wickets both ways — an unusual feat in the sport. He took four wickets on his debut and kept them coming throughout his career. He finished with 235 wickets in his 93 Test matches, the sixth-highest career total at the time.

…

Once he began playing more organized cricket, his bowling was honed by the profit motive: A coach would put a shilling on the stumps that bowlers aimed at and give it to young Garry if he knocked it off. “That was a lot of money in the early ’50s, especially for a young boy who was given four cents a day for his lunch,” he wrote in a 2002 memoir, “Garry Sobers: My Autobiography.” “A penny equaled two cents, so a shilling was worth 24 cents. Riches indeed!”

…

Of all of his performances, the one that is perhaps most remembered came in 1968, not for the West Indies but for a club team, Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, in England. Facing the first of the six balls that make up an “over,” Sobers smacked the ball out of the field of play to score six runs. He did the same on the next five balls as well.
Six balls, six sixes. Perfection. It was the first time in the long history of top-level cricket that it had ever been done.

ESPN.

Hannah Rapp, boxer. She was 26.

Authorities said [a driver – DB] passed two bicyclists, Rapp and her boyfriend, at high speed and with just a foot to spare, causing the boyfriend to raise his arms and yell toward the vehicle, reported KBTX, citing an affidavit.
He then allegedly slammed on his brakes, skidded to a stop, put the vehicle in reverse, and rapidly accelerated backward, striking Rapp and knocking her into the roadway, deputies allege.
The rear hatch of [the driver’s -DB] car was crushed inward, and the rear window was completely shattered, while investigators also found separate skid marks at the scene caused by the vehicle apparently braking and then backing up, the affidavit notes.
[The driver – DB] claimed he heard the cyclists yell and throw their hands up, and, believing they were trying to flag him down, braked hard to come to a stop, according to the affidavit.
He told investigators he started backing up and didn’t see Rapp until the last moment before hitting her.
When asked how fast he was reversing, [the driver] said, “15 miles per hour,” according to the affidavit.
Physical evidence at the scene, including the skid marks and severity of the damage, didn’t match [the driver’s – DB] claims and indicated heavy impact, investigators wrote.

I’m not naming the driver here (though he is named in the article) as I believe he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. However, the Post claims he has a lengthy criminal record.

He has been charged with manslaughter: frankly, given the described circumstances, I would think a murder charge is justified. But I Am Not A Lawyer.

Posted in Cricket, Cycling, IANAL, Law, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 17, 2026.

Friday, July 17th, 2026

Brenda Fricker, actress.

Other credits include “A Time to Kill”, “Quatermass” (1979), “The Quatermass Conclusion” (1979), and “Angels in the Outfield”.

I’m a little behind on this, but: Janice McNair, co-founder of the Houston Texans. NFL.com. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 14, 2026.

Tuesday, July 14th, 2026

Sam Neill. Other credits include “Event Horizon”, “The Hunt for Red October”, and “In Cold Blood” (the 1996 mini-series: he was Alvin Dewey).

I have not seen this anywhere else, but Smith and Wesson posted a nice tribute to the late Dr. Roy Jinks on Linkedin.

Posted in Guns, Movies, Obits, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Random notes: July 12, 2026.

Sunday, July 12th, 2026

A catch-all for several things:

Happy 46th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night! I think I may have used this before, but it has been a minute I believe:

Obit watch: Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). NYT. WP (archived). Lawrence.

You know, for a movie that is often called one of the worst movies to win the Academy Award for Best Picture1…”The Greatest Show On Earth” is actually pretty swell. Is it better than “High Noon”? I don’t know that you can make a head-to-head comparison, but I thought “Show” was much more fun. And sometimes that’s what you want out of a movie: fun. (And I say this as a person with conflicted views about circuses.)

While we were watching it, I mentioned that Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had gone out of business in 2017. I went to double-check my dates…and ran into an interesting philosophical question.

While RB&BB closed in 2017, they restarted in 2023 according to Wikipedia. But: the new shows do not have clowns, animals, or a ringmaster.

Which raises the question: if you don’t have animals, clowns, or a ringmaster, are you still Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus? Heck, are you even still a circus at all?

The long version of the Lucille Ball story from IMDB.

We all know that Jimmy Stewart was one of the greats, but he’s brilliant in this. Especially since he spends the entire film in clown makeup, for reasons.

And how many movies can you think of that have a love…pentagon? Brad is in love with Holly, who loves him. But she takes up with The Great Sebastian, who returns her affections (though, honestly, it seems like The Great Sebastian would return the affections of anything female). He also has a past with Angel, who also falls for Brad, but is claimed by the pathologically jealous elephant trainer Klaus. (I wonder if this is patient zero for the evil elephant trainer in fiction. See also.)

This film is listed among The 100 Most Amusingly Bad Moves Ever Made in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson’s book “The Official Razzie® Movie Guide.”

John Wilson should go eat a bowl of something disgusting.

(more…)

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Politics, Sports | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: July 11, 2026.

Saturday, July 11th, 2026

Antoinette Bower, actress. Other credits include “The Starlost”, “The F.B.I.”, “Mission: Impossible”…

…and three episodes of “Mannix”. (“Deadfall“, parts 1 and 2, season 1, episodes 17 and 18. She was “Gail Mason”. “Shadow of a Man“, season 2, episode 16. She was “Barbara Sanderson”.)

Randolph Mantooth. NYT

The pair took paramedic classes, where they learned how to insert an IV, and trained with the fire department. Cinader wanted the show to be funny but told his actors that “when the [station alarm sounds], funny is left at the door. You are now a professional,” Mantooth noted. “We never got away from that.”
He added: “We never went home with Johnny Gage, we never went home with Roy DeSoto, we didn’t hear about Johnny Gage’s drunk father beating his mother. Who cared about that? [The show] was about the job.”

While that may be technically correct, there was certainly a lot of discussion of Roy DeSoto’s home life and Johnny Gage’s dating life. Their personal lives were not complete ciphers.

After “Emergency!,” Mr. Mantooth was an advocate for emergency medical workers, speaking at firefighter and paramedic symposiums across the country. He was given an award by the International Association of Fire Chiefs in 2022 honoring his work to promote the profession.

…

He and Tighe had the same agent, shared a motor home during the entire run of their show and became great friends. The series ended, Mantooth said, because his and Tighe’s original seven-year contracts had expired, Tighe didn’t want to continue and Mantooth didn’t want to go on without him.
When Mantooth raced home in 1978 to find his ranch in the Lobo Canyon area of Agoura Hills engulfed in flames, Tighe was already there, trying to get the animals safely off the property. Tighe later served as the best man at Mantooth’s 2002 wedding to actress Kristen Connors.

…

In his TV Academy Foundation interview, Mantooth got emotional talking about how in the ’70s he was saved by paramedics who figured out he had carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a malfunctioning house furnace and how other emergency personnel brought his sister back from the dead after she was injured in a car accident in the ’80s.
“Do I respect paramedics? Do I respect firefighters?” he asked. “There’s a debt I owe them that I probably can’t ever pay back. But I’m gonna try.”

Other credits include “Walker, Texas Ranger”, “Battlestar Galactica” (1979), and “The Bold Ones: The Senator” (the two-part episode “A Continual Roar of Musketry”: as I’ve noted before, Harlan Ellison praised this episode highly in one of the “Glass Teat” essays).

Peter Van Norden, actor. Other credits include “The New Odd Couple”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, and “Madman of the People”.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 9, 2026.

Thursday, July 9th, 2026

Bonnie Tyler. NYT.

Things I did not know, sort of in order of surprise:

  • Jim Steinman wrote “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.
  • He wrote it for Meat Loaf.
  • As part of a vampire musical.

After seeing Meat Loaf singing on TV, she told Muff Winwood, a producer at the label, that she should work with Mr. Steinman, who wrote all the tracks on Meat Loaf’s blockbuster 1977 debut album, “Bat Out of Hell,” including the hits “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.”
“Muff looked at me like I was barmy and told me that Jim would never do it,’” Ms. Tyler later recalled. “‘I just want you to ask him,’ I said.”
Intrigued by her voice, Mr. Steinman invited her to his apartment in Manhattan to run through “Total Eclipse of the Heart” — which, he told her, he had originally written for an unfinished musical about the vampire Nosferatu.
With its rock-opera bombast bordering on the Wagnerian, the song seemed like a natural fit for Meat Loaf. But “around the time we were recording,” Ms. Tyler later told The Guardian, “Meat Loaf had lost his voice.”

…

The accompanying video, extravagant even by 1980s standards, was shot in a former asylum in Surrey, England. Conjuring a mood of gothic horror with ninjas, half-clad football players and altar boys with glowing eyes mixed in — “turn around, bright eyes,” indeed — it seemed to play once an hour on MTV, at the height of that network’s influence.

Posted in Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

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