Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: May 19, 2024.

Sunday, May 19th, 2024

Brigadier General Clarence Emil “Bud” Anderson Jr. He was 102.

Gen. Anderson was the last surviving triple ace of World War II. He is credited with shooting down 16 German planes.

He was a squadron mate of Chuck Yeager.

In his 30 years of military service, General Anderson flew more than 130 types of aircraft, logging some 7,500 hours in the air.
Piloting P-51 Mustang propeller fighters in World War II — he named them Old Crow, for his favorite brand of whiskey — he logged 116 missions totaling some 480 hours of combat without aborting a single foray.

…

His decorations included two Legion of Merit citations, five Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Bronze Star and 16 Air Medals.

He went on to a distinguished post-war career as a test pilot.

“On the ground, he was the nicest person you’d ever know,” General Yeager said of General Anderson in reflecting on their wartime years.
But as he put it in his 1985 autobiography, “Yeager,” written with Lee Jonas: “In the sky those damned Germans must’ve thought they were up against Frankenstein or the Wolfman. Andy would hammer them into the ground, dive with them into the damned grave, if necessary, to destroy them.”

Posted in History, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 17, 2024.

Friday, May 17th, 2024

The great Dabney Coleman, who was also a good Texas boy.

IMDB. I’m riding shotgun on the way to dinner right now, so I’ll just note: he was, among all his other credits, a “Mannix” three-timer.

I always liked him.

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

Obit watch: May 14, 2024.

Tuesday, May 14th, 2024

David Sanborn, jazz saxophonist. NYT (archived).

Alex Hassilev, the last surviving original member of the 1960s folk group the Limeliters.

Before Beatlemania gripped America’s youth in 1964, the country fell in love with the tight harmonies and traditional arrangements of folk music — and few acts drew more adoration than the Limeliters, a trio made up of Mr. Hassilev, Glenn Yarbrough and Lou Gottlieb.
Mr. Hassilev played banjo and guitar and sang baritone, not only in English but in French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian, all of which he spoke fluently. His bandmates were equally brainy: Mr. Gottlieb had a doctorate in musicology and Mr. Yarbrough once worked as a bouncer to pay for Greek lessons.
Urbane and witty, they packed coffeehouses and college auditoriums with a repertoire that mixed straight-faced folk standards like “The Hammer Song” and cheeky tunes like “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear,” “The Ballad of Sigmund Freud” and “Charlie the Midnight Marauder.”

They broke up in 1965, but reformed in various arrangements through the years.

Mr. Hassilev retired from the Limeliters in 2006, though he continued to play with them occasionally, and the band remains active today. Though they never returned to their 1960s popularity, they continue to play to large and enthusiastic audiences.

Alice Munro, Nobel prize winning author.

Ms. Munro was a member of the rare breed of writer, like Katherine Anne Porter and Raymond Carver, who made their reputations in the notoriously difficult literary arena of the short story, and did so with great success. Her tales — many of them focused on women at different stages of their lives coping with complex desires — were so eagerly received and gratefully read that she attracted a whole new generation of readers.
Ms. Munro’s stories were widely considered to be without equal, a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes. She portrayed small-town folks, often in rural southwestern Ontario, facing situations that made the fantastic seem an everyday occurrence. Some of her characters were fleshed out so completely through generations and across continents that readers reached a level of intimacy with them that usually comes only with a full-length novel.
She achieved such compactness through exquisite craftsmanship and a degree of precision that did not waste words. Other writers declared some of her stories to be near-perfect — a heavy burden for a writer of modest personal character who had struggled to overcome a lack of self-confidence at the beginning of her career, when she left the protective embrace of her quiet hometown and ventured into the competitive literary scene.

…

The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien ranked Ms. Munro with William Faulkner and James Joyce as writers who had influenced her work. Joyce Carol Oates said Munro stories “have the density — moral, emotional, sometimes historical — of other writers’ novels.” And the novelist Richard Ford once made it clear that questioning Ms. Munro’s mastery over the short story would be akin to doubting the hardness of a diamond or the bouquet of a ripened peach.
“With Alice it’s like a shorthand,” Mr. Ford said. “You’ll just mention her, and everybody just kind of generally nods that she’s just sort of as good as it gets.”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 13, 2024.

Monday, May 13th, 2024

Mark Damon, actor and producer. Other credits include “Pistol Packin’ Preacher”, “Ivanhoe, the Norman Swordsman”, and an uncredited role in “The Longest Day”, followed a year later by an uncredited role in “The Shortest Day”.

Tributes to Roger Corman.

Celebrity coroner Cyril Wecht.

A nationally known forensic pathologist with a law degrees from the University of Maryland and the University of Pittsburgh and a medical degree from Pitt, Dr. Wecht was one of the more vocal critics of the Warren Commission report that concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald alone was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

…

Months before his death, Dr. Wecht donated his massive cache of records and research to Duquesne in the months before his death.
The collection includes his case files on such high-profile killings as David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, JonBenet Ramsey, the Menendez brothers, Casey Anthony, Scott Peterson, and Chandra Levy.

(Hattip to my brother on this. Archived because the Post-Gazette really doesn’t like adblock.)

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 12, 2024.

Sunday, May 12th, 2024

Roger Corman. Variety. NYT.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. “King of the B’s” and all that crap. But it’s worth noting that he gave a lot of obscure filmmakers – Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, etc. – their starts in movie making. It’s also worth noting that his company took chances on a lot of foreign films that ended up doing well over here.

It’s also worth noting that (from what I hear) he was responsible for the only decent “Fantastic 4” movie.

Corman had certain aesthetic rules and qualitative guidelines, which he delivered with his characteristic insouciance: “In science fiction films, the monster should be always be bigger than the leading lady.” He pioneered such cinematic staples as the girls’ shower scene, usually the second scene in a Corman teen film. He insisted his directors practice proper professionalism: namely, always have the girls lather up their arms and stomachs so as not to obscure the integrity of the breast shots.

…

Ever restless, Corman ventured into weightier territory, producing The Intruder (1962), a hard look at racial prejudice. It was his first “message” film, and he financed it himself when the major distributors balked at the subject. The story centered on a hatemongering racist (William Shatner) who organized violent opposition to court-ordered school desegregation. It used the N-word in a realistic, non-gratuitous manner, but the film was denied the Production Code’s seal and screened in only a few movie houses in the country.
Although it received commendations from such critics as The Hollywood Reporter‘s Arthur Knight and The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, it was to be Corman’s first money-losing film. He vowed never again to make a movie with “so obviously a personal statement.”

I’m hoping Lawrence is going to do his own tribute to Corman later, and he’ll almost certainly talk about “The Intruder”, so I’ll just say: if you haven’t seen it, go watch it. Shatner is amazing.

Susan Backlinie. Other credits include “Two Minute Warning”, “The Fall Guy” (the TV show), and “Quark”.

Mary Wells Lawrence, noted advertising executive.

She splashed jazzy colors on Braniff airliners. She put the “plop plop, fizz fizz” into Alka-Seltzer. She warned Benson & Hedges smokers that long cigarettes might pop balloons or set fire to beards. And from Niagara Falls to Broadway, she reached millions with her “I ♥ NY” campaign.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2024.

Friday, May 10th, 2024

Dennis Thompson, drummer for the MC5. He was also the last surviving member.

Pete McCloskey (R – California). He may be more famous for having run against Nixon for the presidential nomination in 1972.

I’ve been holding this one for a few days for reasons, but KVUE has a nice tribute to Robert “Bob” Reale. Mr. Reale was the founder and owner of Reale’s Italian Cafe, which is a swell Italian restaurant and a favorite of both myself and Lawrence.

Posted in Food, Music, Nixon, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 8, 2024.

Wednesday, May 8th, 2024

Wow. Busy.

Susan Buckner, actress. We may have to add “Deadly Blessing” to the movie list. Other credits include “B.J. and the Bear”, “Switch”, and “Police Academy 6: City Under Siege”.

Judy Devlin Hashman, badminton champion.

Before badminton established a world championship or joined the Olympics, the All England Open Badminton Championships was the sport’s pinnacle. Hashman won the women’s singles title in that event for the first time in 1954 at age 18. Then she added her record-setting nine more, the last in 1967.
She also won seven women’s doubles titles, six of them with her sister Susan Devlin, later known as Susan Peard.

Ian Gelder, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Father Brown”, and “Rumpole of the Bailey”.

The paper of record finally ran an obit for Dick Rutan.

Steve Albini. NYT (archived).

Milton Diamond, who the NYT describes as a “sexologist and advocate for intersex babies”.

I probably would have skipped this one for notability, but the obit starts off with an account of the 1973 International Symposium on Gender Identity, at which Dr. Diamond got into a confrontation with Dr. John Money. Dr. Money was an advocate of “genital correction” surgery, while Dr. Diamond advocated leaving them alone.

Dr. Money rushed over to Dr. Diamond, getting in his face, furiously insisting he was right.
Dr. Diamond only replied, “The data is not there.”
At one point, eyewitnesses reported that Dr. Money slugged Dr. Diamond, though Dr. Diamond later said he didn’t remember it.

Turns out Dr. Diamond may have been right, and Dr. Money was (at best) a crank and possibly worse.

Since the 1990s, Money’s work and research has been subject to significant academic and public scrutiny. A 1997 academic study criticized Money’s work in many respects, particularly in regard to the involuntary sex-reassignment of the child David Reimer. Money allegedly coerced David and his brother Brian to perform sexual rehearsal with each other, which Money then photographed. David Reimer lived a troubled life, ending with his suicide at 38; his brother died of an overdose at age 36.

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

Obit watch: May 7, 2024.

Tuesday, May 7th, 2024

Both Lawrence and Joe D. sent over additional obits for Dick Rutan: AP. AVWeb (which was not there when I looked yesterday). Air Force Times. My thanks to both gentlemen.

C.J. Sansom, mystery author. I’d never heard of him, but now I want to read his books. He specialized in historical mysteries, and had an ongoing series with “Matthew Shardlake”, a “hunchbacked lawyer-turned-detective” in Tudor England.

His first book, “Dissolution,” is set in a remote monastery in 1537, as Henry VIII is dispossessing Catholic monks of their lands and riches after the king’s rupture with Rome. Shardlake is sent there by his patron, Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, to investigate a murder. He finds corruption, sexual depravity and more suspicious deaths.
Published in 2003, “Dissolution” was a popular success, and Mr. Sansom was signed to a multibook deal. He went on to publish six more Shardlake mysteries over 15 years. More than three million copies are in print.
His second installment, “Dark Fire” (2005), set during a sweltering London summer, includes child murder and culminates in Cromwell’s real-life execution in 1540. A reviewer, Stella Duffy, writing in The Guardian, praised Mr. Sansom for offering a dizzying window on the times: “Tudor housing to rival Rachman, Dickensian prisons, a sewage-glutted Thames, beggars in gutters, conspiracies at court and a political system predicated on birth not merit, intrigue not intelligence.”

You know, I feel like between Mr. Sansom and Hilary Mantel, at some point, I’m going to have to go to the Cromwell…

Posted in Books, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 6, 2024.

Monday, May 6th, 2024

Bernard Hill. NYT. IMDB.

Frank Stella, artist.

Mr. Stella was a dominant figure in postwar American art, a restless, relentless innovator whose explorations of color and form made him an outsize presence, endlessly discussed and constantly on exhibit.
Few American artists of the 20th century arrived with quite his éclat. He was in his early 20s when his large-scale black paintings — precisely delineated black stripes separated by thin lines of blank canvas — took the art world by storm. Austere, self-referential, opaque, they cast a chilling spell.

Jeannie Epper, stuntwoman. 161 stunt credits in IMDB (and another 39 actress credits). Seems like she was working pretty steadily from 1964 all the way to 2021, including “Play Misty For Me”, “Soylent Green”, “Blazing Saddles”, “The Blues Brothers”, and “Road House” (the good one).

Lawrence sent over an obit for Edgar Lansbury. I had seen this elsewhere and didn’t think he was noteworthy enough, but Lawrence pointed out that he produced “Squirm“.

Lawrence also sent over an obit for Dick Rutan, legendary pilot. He’s the guy who, with Jeana Yeager, flew non-stop around the world in nine days, three minutes, and 44 seconds in “Voyager”. Unfortunately, the obit Lawrence sent me came from a blog by way of a blog, and I’d rather have something more substantial to link to: none of the flying news publications I know of have this story yet. I’ll link to a better obit when I find one.

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

Obit watch: May 3, 2024.

Friday, May 3rd, 2024

The NYT ran two obits recently for people who were a little outside the mainstream of celebrity.

Larry Young passed away in March at the age of 56. Dr. Young was a neuroscientist, who got his PhD from UT Austin.

Professor Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, used prairie voles in a series of experiments that revealed the chemical process for the pirouette of heart-fluttering emotions that poets have tried to put into words for centuries.

…

With their beady eyes, thick tails and sharp claws, prairie voles are not exactly cuddly. But among rodents, they are uniquely domestic: They are monogamous, and the males and females form a family unit to raise their offspring together.
“Prairie voles, if you take away their partner, they show behavior similar to depression,” Professor Young told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2009. “It’s almost as if there’s withdrawal from their partner.”
That made them ideal for laboratory studies examining the chemistry of love.
In a study published in 1999, Professor Young and his colleagues exploited the gene in prairie voles associated with the signaling of vasopressin, a hormone that modulates social behavior. They boosted vasopressin signaling in mice, which are highly promiscuous.

…

Professor Young followed up with other prairie vole studies that focused on oxytocin, a hormone that stimulates contractions during childbirth and is involved in the bonding between mothers and newborns.
“Because we knew that oxytocin was involved in mother-infant bonding, we explored whether oxytocin might be involved in this partner bonding,” he said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019.
It was.

…

“Love doesn’t really fly in and out,” Professor Young wrote in “The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction” (2012, with Brian Alexander). “The complex behaviors surrounding these emotions are driven by a few molecules in our brains. It’s these molecules, acting on defined neural circuits, that so powerfully influence some of the biggest, most life-changing decisions we’ll ever make.”

Frank Wakefield, mandolin guy.

In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Wakefield played with a host of bluegrass luminaries, including Jimmy Martin and the Stanley Brothers.

…

While still a teenager, Mr. Wakefield mastered the heavily syncopated “chop” chord of the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, whom he met in 1961 and who immediately recognized Mr. Wakefield’s prowess as a mandolinist.
“You can play like me as good — or near as good — as I can,” Mr. Wakefield, in a 2022 interview with the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, recalled Mr. Monroe saying at their initial meeting. “Now you’ve got to go out and find your own style.”
Heeding Mr. Monroe’s advice, Mr. Wakefield did exactly that. He devised his own sound by alternating up and down strokes on his instrument with equal force to produce a clear, ringing tone and sustained rhythm, which he likened to a sledgehammer striking a steel rail in a 1998 interview with the bluegrass website Candlewater.com.

…

David Grisman, a student of Mr. Wakefield’s and a mandolin virtuoso in his own right, said in an often quoted passage from Frets magazine that Mr. Wakefield had “split the bluegrass mandolin atom” by taking the instrument beyond where Mr. Monroe had.
“Bluegrass,” the album that Mr. Wakefield made with Mr. Allen for Folkways Records in 1964 (and that a 19-year-old Mr. Grisman produced), proved ample confirmation of that claim: It featured versions of two of Mr. Wakefield’s most enduring originals, “New Camptown Races” and “Catnip,” both of which, with their developments in melody, tunings and chord changes, pushed the limits of what then constituted bluegrass.
Mr. Wakefield’s innovations didn’t stop there, though. By the mid-1960s he had begun composing sonatas for the mandolin and arranging classical pieces for traditional bluegrass ensembles. He performed with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1967 and made a guest appearance with the Boston Pops orchestra the next year.

Posted in Geek, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 2, 2024.

Thursday, May 2nd, 2024

Duane Eddy. NYT (archived).

Posted in Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 1, 2024.

Wednesday, May 1st, 2024

Paul Auster, author. (The New York Trilogy)

I wish I could say more about this. I know Auster was an important mainstream writer, but I’ve never read anything by him.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 23, 2024.

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024

Playing catch-up from the past few days:

Terry Anderson, journalist who was kidnapped and held for six years by Shia Hezbollah militants of the Islamic Jihad Organization in Lebanon.

While he had not been tortured during his captivity, he said, he was beaten and chained. He spent a year or so, on and off, in solitary confinement, he said.
“There is nothing to hold on to, no way to anchor my mind,” he said after the ordeal. “I try praying, every day, sometimes for hours. But there’s nothing there, just a blankness. I’m talking to myself, not God.”
He found some consolation in the Bible, though, and added: “The only real defense was to remember that no one could take away my self-respect and dignity — only I could do that.”

Roman Gabriel, quarterback for the Rams and Eagles.

He was voted the N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player when he led the league in touchdown passes, with 24, in a 14-game season with the 1969 Rams.
He was also named the comeback player of the year by pro football writers in 1973, his first season with the Eagles. Coming off knee problems and a sore arm, he led the N.F.L. in touchdown passes (23), completions (270) and passing yardage (3,219) that season.
He played in four Pro Bowl games, three with the Rams in the late 1960s and another with the Eagles in 1973. But he reached the postseason only twice, and his Rams were eliminated in the first round both times.

Terry Carter, actor. This is buried a bit in the article, but he was McCloud’s partner and played “Colonel Tigh” on the original “Battlestar Galactica”.

Other credits include “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Search”…

…and “Mannix” (“Medal For a Hero”, season 3, episode 14).

And in a wayfaring six-decade career, he was a merchant seaman, a jazz pianist, a law student, a television news anchor, a familiar character on network sitcoms, an Emmy-winning documentarian, a good will ambassador to China, a longtime expatriate in Europe — and a reported dead man; in 2015, rumors that he had been killed were mistaken. It was not him but a much younger Terry Carter who had died in a hit-and-run accident in Los Angeles by a pickup truck driven by the rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight.
Slightly misquoting Mark Twain, Mr. Carter posted on social media: “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Frederick Celani, serial con man. He conned people into thinking he was going to build a package delivery hub in Springfield (Illinois), conned inmates into giving him money to have their convictions overturned (he wasn’t a lawyer), and ran various real estate cons.

Fred Neulander. You may recall that name, as his trial was a brief sensation back in the 1990s.

The rabbi and his wife, Carol Neulander, 52, were well-known in the community through both the shul and Classic Cakes, the popular bakery Carol co-founded, CNN reported.
The mother of 3 had just returned from the bakery when she bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe in the couple’s Cherry Hill home on the evening of Nov. 1, 1994, the outlet said.

…

Neulander was indicted for the murder in 1999, but the case did not come together until the following year, when private investigator Len Jenoff told police that the rabbi paid him and another man, Paul Daniels, $30,000 to kill his wife.
At trial in 2001, prosecutors argued that the rabbi wanted to get rid of Carol to continue his two-year affair with Philadelphia radio host Elaine Soncini.
Soncini, who was Catholic, had even supposedly converted to Judaism to be with the rabbi, whom she met when he performed funeral rites for her late husband.

…

When the first trial ended in a hung jury, the 2002 retrial was moved from Camden County to Monmouth County to downplay the local scrutiny.
Following the retrial, Neulander was convicted of Carol’s murder. He narrowly avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison.
Soncini testified against Neulander at both trials, as did two of his three children.

Posted in 1970s, Law, Mannix, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 20, 2024.

Saturday, April 20th, 2024

In haste: Death finally caught the Midnight Rider.

Dickey Betts. THR.

Daniel C. Dennett, author.

An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.
According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.
For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.
Mr. Dennett irked some scientists by asserting that natural selection alone determined evolution. He was especially disdainful of the eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose ideas on other factors of evolution were summarily dismissed by Mr. Dennett as “goulding.”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 17, 2024.

Wednesday, April 17th, 2024

Man, it has been a rough few days for baseball.

Whitey Herzog.

Signed by the Yankees in 1949, he never made it out of their minor league system, though he picked up a lifetime of baseball knowledge from Manager Casey Stengel at spring training camps. He played the outfield for four American League teams over eight seasons with only modest success.
But Herzog found his niche as a manager with what came to be called Whiteyball, molding teams with speed, defense and pitching to take advantage of ballparks with fast artificial turf and spacious outfields, first at Royals Stadium in Kansas City and then at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.
Herzog managed the Kansas City Royals to three consecutive American League division championships in the 1970s, then took the Cardinals to the 1982 World Series title with a team he had built while general manager as well. And he managed the Cardinals to pennants in 1985 and 1987.
He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 2009.

He was 92, and the second oldest member of the Hall of Fame (behind Willie Mays). Baseball Reference.

As Bruce Sutter, the Cardinal reliever and also a Hall of Famer, once told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “How many managers can you blow a game for and go out fishing with him the next morning?

Carl Erskine, pitcher.

Erskine was the last survivor of the 13 Dodger players of his time who were profiled by Roger Kahn in his 1972 book, “The Boys of Summer,” telling of their exploits on the field and the lives they led when their baseball years had ended.
Although struggling with a sore pitching shoulder throughout his career, Erskine, an unimposing presence on the mound at 5 feet 10 inches and 165 pounds, employed a superb overhand curveball to help the Dodgers capture five pennants (the first in 1949 and the rest in the 1950s) and the 1955 World Series championship, the only one in their history before they moved to Los Angeles in 1958.
His 14 strikeouts in Game 3 of the 1953 World Series against the Yankees, a complete-game 3-2 victory, has been eclipsed only by the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax, who had 15 strikeouts against the Yankees in 1963, and the St. Louis Cardinals’ Bob Gibson, who struck out 17 Detroit Tigers in 1968.
In the 1952 World Series, also against the Yankees, Erskine pitched an 11-inning complete game, retiring the last 19 batters in the Dodgers’ 6-5 victory.
He pitched no-hitters against the Chicago Cubs in 1952 and the New York Giants in 1956, both at Ebbets Field. His best season was 1953, when he was 20-6 and led the National League in winning percentage at .769.

Baseball Reference.

Ken Holtzman, the “winningest Jewish pitcher in Major League Baseball”. He played for the Cubs and the Oakland A’s.

Holtzman won 174 games, the most for a Jewish pitcher in Major League Baseball — nine more than the Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, who is considered one of the best pitchers ever and who had a shorter career.
In addition to his win total, Holtzman, who at 6 feet 2 inches and 175 pounds cut a lanky figure, had a career earned run average of 3.49 and was chosen for the 1972 and 1973 All-Star teams.
Holtzman, at 23, threw his first no-hitter on Aug. 19, 1969, a 3-0 victory over the Atlanta Braves — a performance distinguished by the fact that he didn’t strike out any Braves. It was the first time since 1923 that a no-hitter had been pitched without a strikeout.
“I didn’t have my good curve, and I must have thrown 90 percent fastballs,” Holtzman told The Atlanta Constitution afterward. “When I saw my curve wasn’t breaking early in the game, I thought it might be a long day.”
His second no-hitter came on June 3, 1971, against the Cincinnati Reds at their ballpark, Riverfront Stadium, where he struck out six and walked four.

…

Holtzman left the Cubs in 1971 with a 74-69 record. He fared substantially better with the A’s, a 1970s dynasty whose players included Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers. In Oakland’s World Series championship years, from 1972 to 1974, Holtzman had a 59-41 regular season record. In World Series games, he was 4-1.

Baseball Reference.

Bob Graham, former Florida governor and US Senator.

Ron Thompson, actor. He did a lot of theater work, and some movies and TV. Other credits include “Quincy, M.E.”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, “Baretta”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Death Has No Face”, season 8, episode 6.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, Politics, Sports, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

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