Peter White, actor. Other credits include “Crazy Like a Fox”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “I Want to Live” (the TV movie), and “The Bold Ones: The Senator”.
Evan Ellingson, actor. IMDB.
Robbin Bain (also Robbin Mele Gaudieri), former “Today Girl” and Miss Rheingold 1959.
David Kirke. The NYT calls him the first person to make a modern bungee jump, and he was a co-founder of the Dangerous Sports Club.
“We hadn’t tested it or anything like that,” Mr. Kirke told the news site BristolLive in 2019. “We were called the Dangerous Sports Club, and testing it first wouldn’t have been particularly dangerous.”
Clad in a top hat and tails, with a bottle of Champagne in hand, Mr. Kirke, who was nursing a hangover from an all-night party, was the first to take the plunge thatday. The other jumpers — Alan Weston, Tim Hunt and Simon Keeling — “waited to see what would happen to me,” Mr. Kirke told ITV News in 2019. “When I started bouncing up again, they all jumped.”
Police promptly arrested the jumpers, charged them with breach of peace and tossed them behind bars for a spell before letting them off with a small fine. Jail was hardly a traumatic experience. “They were the only police force I’ve ever known to bring half-empty bottles of red wine, from the party, in a brown paper bag and give it to us in prison,” he told ITV.
Tim Cahill did a memorable profile of Mr. Kirke and the DSC, which is reprinted in one of his books.
I have a recollection from Mr. Cahill’s profile of another incident involving a grand piano and a piano bench, both on skis, and a member of the DSC playing the piano as it skied downhill. These are the kind of gleeful British eccentrics that I wish I had been able to know while they were alive.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Peter S. Fischer, screenwriter and producer. He was already on my list, but I skipped over him yesterday.
Other credits include two out of five episodes of “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, “McMillan and Wife”, “Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo” (the “Columbo” TV movie: I wanted to specifically call that out, because at last week’s SDC we were discussing the odd history of “Mrs. Columbo“, the TV series, which has nothing to do with “Columbo”.), and ‘Ellery Queen” (the 1975 TV series).
Shannon Wilcox, actress. Other credits include “Jake and the Fatman”, “Alien Nation”, “Crazy Like a Fox”, “Magnum, P.I.”, “Mrs. Columbo”, and the good “Hawaii Five-O”.
Ken Mattingly, astronaut. NASA.
He was the command module pilot for Apollo 16 and commanded two shuttle missions (STS-4 and STS-51C). But he’s perhaps most famous for a mission he didn’t fly.
He was scheduled to be the command module pilot for Apollo 13, but was pulled from the mission at the last minute (after it was determined he’d been exposed to measles) and was replaced by Jack Swigert. We all know what happened next.
Commander Mattingly did not, in fact, develop German measles, and he played a significant part in the plan developed by the astronauts and mission control in Houston to get them home safely.
The three astronauts crowded into the undamaged lunar module, although it had been built to hold only two astronauts and was designed solely for landing on the moon and then returning to the orbiting mother ship.
Commander Mattingly read off a long and detailed list of instructions for the astronauts to follow as they used the lunar lander as a “lifeboat” to get them back toward Earth while short on power and food.
Interview with Mr. Mattingly:
Bobby Knight. NYT. ESPN.
Tribute from ESPN by Jay Bilas.
Don Laughlin. You may never have heard of him, but you’ve heard of the town he created: Laughlin, Nevada.
Taking chances seemed to come naturally to Donald. As a teenager, he stockpiled cash from trapping mink and muskrat and used it to buy mail-order slot machines, installing them himself in local pubs.
Demand was high, and before long he was making $500 a week (nearly $7,000 in today’s money).
The principal of the one-room schoolhouse he attended for high school was not amused. “He said to get out of the gambling business or get out of high school,” Mr. Laughlin told The Review-Journal. “I said, ‘I’m making three times what you are, so I’m out the door.’”
David Mitchell. Here’s another person who you may not have heard of. I had, because this is a great story.
In 1975, Mr. Mitchell and his then-wife bought a struggling weekly newspaper, the Point Reyes Light.
In 1973, a grand jury raised questions about fiscal improprieties and child abuse by Synanon, which had once been widely respected but had devolved into an authoritarian cult that declared itself a religion — the Church of Synanon — to become tax exempt. Later that year, reporters in San Francisco found that the Synanon drug rehabilitation center in Marshall, Calif., less than 10 miles from Point Reyes Station, was hoarding what turned out to be $60,000 worth of weapons.
Mr. Mitchell began his own investigation that same year, joined by his wife; their one reporter, John Maddeen; and Richard J. Ofshe, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who had studied Synanon. To them, it was a story in their own back yard that they couldn’t ignore.
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The Mitchells wrote articles and editorials reporting on violence, terrorism and financial improprieties at Synanon. There were accounts that its founder, Charles Dederich, had demanded that men enrolled in the program undergo vasectomies and that pregnant women have abortions, and that hundreds of married couples switch partners.
In 1980, Mr. Dederich pleaded no contest to charges that he and two members of Synanon’s security force had conspired to commit murder by placing a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had sued the organization. Synanon disbanded in 1991.
The Point Reyes Light won the Pulitzer for public service in 1979 for the Synanon stories.
The lawyer and the rattlesnake.
One other aspect of the story I remember: most of the Pulitzer prizes come with a cash award. The public service prize does not. Which was sort of unfortunate, as the Light was a constantly struggling newspaper. (The Times blames Mr. Mitchell’s divorce from his second wife on the financial pressures involved in keeping the paper alive.)
Dwight Twilley, musician. As I’ve said before, I’m not much of a music guy and rely on other people for music commentary, but the name rings a faint bell with me…
Tyler Christopher, actor. Other credits include “20.0 Megaquake”, “Super Volcano” (both of those were Asylum movies), “Boomtown”, “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy” of the 2000s except it sucked), and “CSI: Original Recipe“.
Frank Howard, player for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Washington Senators.
As a Dodger in 1960, he hit a ball over the left-field wall at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh that was found alongside a parked car some 560 feet from home plate.
Batting against Whitey Ford in Game 1 of the 1963 World Series, at the original Yankee Stadium, he hit a drive that landed, in fair territory, just to the left of the monuments to Yankee greats in center field, about 460 feet from home plate. He lumbered only as far as second base in what has been called the longest double in Yankee Stadium history.
In Game 4, he hit a 450-foot homer off Ford into the left-field mezzanine at Dodger Stadium, in a 2-1 victory that completed a Dodger sweep of the Series.
Howard drove in 1,119 runs in his long career. But he also struck out 1,460 times.
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Judy Nugent, actress.
Other credits include “The Greatest Show on Earth”, “77 Sunset Strip”, and the “The Thin Man” TV series.
It turned into a busier weekend than I thought it was going to be, and it also turned out that there was more going on this weekend than I expected. I wanted to get these up today, as I have an eye doctor’s appointment tomorrow and am not sure how things are going to go afterwards.
Richard Moll. THR. I’ve mentioned before how much I liked the original “Night Court” and what a great ensemble those folks were.
Moll had a shaved head — he did that to play the warrior Hurok in the sci-fi film Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) — when he auditioned for the role of Shannon on Night Court, created by Reinhold Weege.
“They said ‘Richard, the shaved head looks good. Will you shave your head for the part?” he recalled in a 2010 interview. “I said, ‘Are you kidding? I’ll shave my legs for the part. I’ll shave my armpits, I don’t care.’”
IMDB.
Joan Evans, actress who was shot by Farley Granger.
This is in the obit, but I did want to note that she was the love interest for Charles Drake’s character in “No Name On the Bullet“, about which I have written before and probably will again.
IMDB.
Matthew Perry. THR. IMDB. Everyone is on this like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation, and I don’t have anything to add.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Stephen Kandel, screenwriter.
He has 103 credits as a writer in IMDB. Man wrote for everything. “Harry O”. “The Magician”. “Bearcats!”. “Banacek”. “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”. “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”. The good “Hawaii Five-0”. Two episodes of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, and two episodes of the animated spinoff…
…and eleven episodes of “Mannix”, which is more than I want to list here.
I’m not a big fan of posting obits for children of celebrities just because of their relationship. Generally, when I post one, the person has to be interesting for some other reason.
I think that qualifies. Also, someone close to me called out the paper of record’s use of the word “peripatetic“. I personally think that’s a perfectly cromulent word, and, much like “gargantuan“, is one that I rarely have an opportunity to use in a sentence.
Murray Newman has a very nice obit up for Skip Cornelius:
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Dr. Donlin Long, big damn hero.
Dr. Long was one of the pioneers of the insulin pump.
He was a neurosurgeon.
As an accomplished practitioner of skull base surgery, Dr. Long was also instrumental in the first successful separation of twin infants born conjoined at the head. The operation, performed in 1987, involved 70 surgeons, nurses and assistants and lasted 22 hours.
The twins’ brains were separated, and one of the infants’ skulls was closed by Dr. Benjamin S. Carson, whom Dr. Long, the founding chairman of the department of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, had recruited to the university…
…Dr. Long, Dr. Carson’s mentor, closed the other boy’s skull during the operation.
Drs. Long and Carson had just one hour to accomplish final separation, to reconstruct the divided brain cavities and veins, and to restart the hearts in the infants, both of them boys.
And he was a mentor to people other than Dr. Carson:
Many of the surgeons trained during Dr. Long’s tenure at Johns Hopkins were hired as full professors, as leaders of neurosurgery departments at hospitals and universities, and as heads of professional associations.
“Neurosurgeons everywhere stand on his shoulders,” Dr. Connolly said.
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Elizabeth Hoffman, actress. Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “Cutter to Houston”, “Blue Thunder”, and a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
Angelo Bruschini, guitarist for Massive Attack.
Bobby Charlton, English soccer player. He was 86.
Worthy of note: he was also a survivor of the 1958 Manchester United plane crash.
Elaine Devry, actress. Other credits include “Project U.F.O.”, “The Boy Who Cried Werewolf”, “Cannon”, and three appearances on the 1960s “Dragnet”.
Vincent Asaro, mobster. Readers of this blog with an excellent memory may recall that he was charged in the 1978 Lufthansa robbery…and was acquitted in 2015. However, he was convicted in 2017 of having a guy’s car set on fire. He got eight years for that, but was released in 2020 for “health reasons”.
Other credits include “The Rockford Files”, “Once Upon a Time in America”, “Miami Vice”, and “Pig Pen” in “Convoy”.
Dr. James Irving Wimsatt, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, passed away Sunday morning, He was 96.
Dr. Wimsatt was a personal friend of mine, and of many other readers of this blog. I met him through his son, Andrew.
He was a great guy. I always felt intimidated by him: I described him to someone (no disrespect intended, Andrew) as “scary smart and tough as a bus station steak”. He was walking several miles a day on a regular basis well into his 90s. And he remained in full possession of his facilities pretty much right up until his death (though he’d been in and out of hospitals and rehab).
I thought this was kind of a neat entry from encyclopedia.com:
He wasn’t just a Chaucerian, though my understanding is he was a damn good one. He also wrote a lot about other poets. Dr. Wimsatt was kind enough, at one point, to give me a copy of his Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech Sound. I haven’t read it yet, being backlogged, but I wish I had before he passed.
He also served honorably in the US Navy. And he was a pretty regular member of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.
“He that loveth God will do diligence to please God by his works, and abandon himself, with all his might, well for to do.”
–Geoffrey “Big Geoff” Chaucer
I believe that Dr. Wimsatt did indeed please God by his works, and he’s up there laughing with all those other English professors of that generation.
(Crossposed to the Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.)
Lara Parker, actress.
Other credits include the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “Sword of Justice”, “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”.
Joanna Merlin, actress. Other credits include “All That Jazz”, “The Killing Fields”, and “City of Angels”.