Malachy McCourt, Frank McCourt’s brother and (as the NYT puts it) “professional Irishman”.
I’m leaving out the overcoat story. Check the obit for that one.
Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category
Obit watch: March 11, 2024.
Monday, March 11th, 2024Obit watch: March 8, 2024.
Friday, March 8th, 2024Vice Admiral Richard Truly (US Navy – ret.), astronaut and former NASA administrator. NASA.
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But he returned to NASA as its associate administrator in charge of the shuttle program in 1986, less than a month after the Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight due in part to launching in too cold temperatures, killing its seven-person crew, which included a teacher, Christa McAuliffe.
A month into his new job, Captain Truly said that the next shuttle would be launched only in daylight and in warm weather (the Challenger was launched at 36 degrees Fahrenheit), and that it would land in California instead of Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“I do not want you to think this conservative approach, this safe approach, which I think is the proper thing to do, is going to be a namby-pamby shuttle program,” he said. “The business of flying in space is a bold business.”
He added: “We cannot print enough money to make it totally risk-free. But we certainly are going to correct any mistakes we may have made in the past, and we are going to get it going again just as soon as we can under these guidelines.”
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He remembered walking to his office on his first day as associate administrator to find people crying in the corridor “because of the pounding they had been taking in the media,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Colorado School of Mines, where he was a trustee at the time.
“By that time,” he added, “rather than an airplane accident, it had been portrayed as NASA killed its crew. It was the start of the most tumultuous engineering, political, cultural, social endeavor that I ever found myself in.”
He was appointed administrator by George H.W. Bush, but (according to the NYT) left after three years because of a dispute with “Vice President Dan Quayle and his staff at the National Space Council, of which Mr. Quayle was the chairman.”
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Steve Lawrence, of Steve and Eydie fame. NYT (archived).
FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Akira Toriyama, manga guy and creator of “Dragon Ball”.
John Walker, AutoCAD and Autodesk guy.
The idiosyncratic Mr. Walker put his mark on a company that was anything but corporate in spirit. A 1992 article in The New York Times described Autodesk under Mr. Walker as “a cabal of counterculture senior programmers” who “took their dogs to work and tried to reach a consensus on strategy through endless memos sent by electronic mail.” (In those days, email was still a novelty in the business world.)
That same year, The Wall Street Journal scored a rare interview with Autodesk’s “founding genius.” The resulting article noted his quirks, including the fact that he did not allow the company to distribute his photograph in any form. He was prickly in manner during the interview, the reporter noted, and insisted that it be conducted in front of a video camera, debated each question and claimed a copyright on the conversation.
Obit watch: March 4, 2024.
Monday, March 4th, 2024Brigadier General John C. Bahnsen Jr. (US Army – ret.) has passed away at the age of 89.
Gen. Bahnsen was a genuine, certified, American badass.
General Bahnsen was among the most decorated combat veterans in U.S. history. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest honor for heroism, behind the Medal of Honor; five Silver Stars; four Legions of Merit; three Distinguished Flying Crosses; four Bronze Stars (three for valor); two Purple Hearts; and the Army Commendation Medal with a “V” device for valor.
He earned most of those awards during the second of two Vietnam tours, when he led a troop in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment that was commanded by Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, the son of Gen. George S. Patton Jr. of World War II fame.
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Unlike fellow commanders who led from a desk, General Bahnsen led troops from his own helicopter — a tactic that allowed him to coordinate air and ground forces simultaneously, which he did while firing his rifle and dropping grenades from his window.
“We thought he had a death wish sometimes,” Mr. Noe said.
He did, but not for himself.
“The enemy of my country is my enemy, and our mission was to kill them,” General Bahnsen said in a 2013 interview with the American Veterans Center. “You could capture them if you could. We captured a lot of them in my units, but we also killed them. And my feeling was, that’s our job.”
He was unrelenting. He often landed his helicopter to fight alongside his ground troops. One day, he was shot down three times. Each time, he ordered delivery of a replacement helicopter so that he could return to attacking.
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General Bahnsen was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions during a battle in early 1969.After his crew chief was severely wounded amid heavy gunfire at low altitudes, General Bahnsen evacuated him, refueled and rearmed.
“I was mad as hell!” he wrote in his autobiography. “I thought those bastards had just killed my crew chief.”
Not knowing whether the crew chief was alive or dead — he survived but was paralyzed — General Bahnsen returned to the battle site.
“Forcing them to a confined area, he marked their position and directed five airstrikes against them, while at the same time controlling four separate rifle platoons,” his award citation reads.
Enemy fire crippled his helicopter, so he returned to his base and got another.
Upon returning, the citation says, he “landed to guide in the lift ships carrying an additional infantry unit, and then led a rifle platoon through dense terrain to personally capture two enemy who were attempting to escape.”
He ordered the captives to be evacuated by helicopter while he remained on the ground, and led his squad on foot for more than a mile to a safe position.
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Chris Mortensen, ESPN guy.
David Bordwell, film scholar. He did a lot of work for the Criterion Collection.
Interesting list. I kind of feel like calling “Song of the South” one of your favorite films in this day and age is just setting yourself up for cancellation. But then again, he’s dead, so what does he care if he gets cancelled? (And to be frank, the Criterion Collection could probably do a great job of preserving and showing “Song” in a historical and scholarly context.)
Mark Dodson, voice actor. Other credits include a video game inspired by a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Darkwing Duck”, and “Legend of the Superstition Mountains”.
Obit watch: March 1, 2024.
Friday, March 1st, 2024Mr. Abath was one of the two guards on duty at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum early in the morning on March 18, 1990. He was the one who let the two robbers, disguised as police officers, into the museum.
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All together they took some $500 million in art, the equivalent of $1.2 billion today, making it by far the biggest art heist in history.
Suspicion immediately turned to Mr. Abath. City and federal investigators zeroed in on important details, like the coincidence of the thieves arriving so soon after the second guard left to make the rounds. A video camera outside the museum showed Mr. Abath briefly opening a side door not long before the robbery occurred.
Mr. Abath maintained his innocence throughout the rest of his life, and he was never named as an official suspect. He said that he regularly opened the side door to make sure it was locked and that while museum protocol forbade him from letting anyone in after hours, there was no contingency should the visitors be uniformed police officers.
“You know, most of the guards were either older or they were college students,” he told NPR in 2015. “Nobody there was capable of dealing with actual criminals.”
Brian Mulroney, former Canadian PM.
Obit watch: February 29, 2024.
Thursday, February 29th, 2024Richard Lewis. Tributes. (The one from Jamie Lee Curtis is particularly nice.) NYT (archived).
Anne Whitfield, actress. Other credits include “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Dragnet 1967”, and “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”.
Obit watch: February 28, 2024.
Wednesday, February 28th, 2024Ole Anderson, one of the Four Horsemen.
That’s the Four Horsemen of professional wrestling.
Through the 1970s and early 1980s, he was a member of the tag team known as the Minnesota Wrecking Crew, which over the years included Gene, Lars and Arn Anderson, who called themselves brothers and were popular around the Midwest. They were part of regional circuits like Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling and Georgia Championship Wrestling that were united under the National Wrestling Alliance, which regularly crowned them tag-team champions.
In the 1980s, Mr. Anderson teamed up with Arn Anderson, Ric Flair and Tully Blanchard to become the Four Horsemen, who went on to dominate the N.W.A. and later World Championship Wrestling, which competed with the W.W.F.
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Brian Stableford, noted author, passed away a few days ago. I don’t have a direct obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick posted a nice tribute to him on his blog.
Obit watch: February 26, 2024.
Monday, February 26th, 2024I was running pretty much flat out from mid-Friday afternoon until late Sunday night, so this is the first chance I’ve had to post anything. But: the NYT finally ran an obit for Chuck Mawhinney. (Previously.)
After graduating from high school in 1967, Chuck wanted to become a Navy pilot. But a Marine Corps recruiter won him over by promising that he could delay his enlistment by four months, until the end of deer season.
The Marines had not had dedicated snipers since World War II, but by 1967 the corps had changed its mind. Mr. Mawhinney was among the first to complete the new Scout Sniper School at Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps installation in Southern California. He graduated at the top of his class.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Golden Richards, former Dallas Cowboy receiver.
José DeLeón, pitcher.
Jackie Loughery, actress (and Jack Webb’s third wife). Other credits include OG “Perry Mason”, “Surfside 6”, and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”.
Charles Dierkop, actor.
Other credits include “Matt Houston”, “Bearcats!” and…two episodes of “Mannix” (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6. “Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6).
Eddie Driscoll, actor. IMDB.
Chris Gauthier, actor. Fair number of genre credits, including “Supernatural”, “Watchmen”, and the “Earthsea” mini series.
Kenneth Mitchell, actor. Other credits include “NCIS”, “CSI: Cyber”, and “Detroit 1-8-7”.
Obit watch: February 23, 2024.
Friday, February 23rd, 2024It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.
Yes, Miss Moneypenny counts as a Bond girl. Yes, “Never Say Never Again” counts as a Bond movie.
Other credits include “Magnum, P.I.” (original recipe), “The Great Train Robbery”, “God’s Outlaw”, and some “Doctor Who”. And “EastEnders”.
Obit watch: February 22, 2024.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2024The paper of record finally got around to publishing an obit for Niklaus Wirth.
Ewen MacIntosh, British actor. IMDB.
Lefty Driesell, noted college basketball coach.
Robert Reid, one of the great Houston Rockets.
Lawrence sent over two obits:
Paul D’Amato, actor. IMDB.
Steve Miller, SF author.
Obit watch: February 16, 2024.
Friday, February 16th, 2024Both the NYPost (archived for your pleasure) and Task and Purpose are reporting the death of Sgt. Chuck Mawhinney (USMC – ret.).
For those unfamiliar with Sgt. Mawhinney, he is considered to be the most successful sniper of the Vietnam War.
From 1968 to 1969, Mawhinney — still only a teenager — was credited with 103 confirmed kills.
An additional 216 kills were listed as “probable” since the enemies’ bodies were risky to verify in the active war zone.
Mawhinney had confirmed kills over 1,000 yards, with the average kill shot for snipers during the Vietnam War taken at a distance of 300 to 800 yards.
After the war, he kept his head down.
He worked for the Forest Service for 27 years.
Joseph Ward, one of his spotters, wrote a book in 1991. (Dear Mom: A Sniper’s Vietnam. Affiliate link.) The book didn’t get a lot of attention at first, but people found Ward’s mention of Sgt. Mawhinney’s record, and it rapidly became public knowledge.
Jim Lindsay, author of “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time,” met Mawhinney in 1979 at the Idle Hour tavern in Baker City, Oregon. Lindsay said that people seemed to not believe Mawhinney, but he confirmed that he did, in fact, have 103 confirmed kills and 216 unconfirmed kills during his 16 months of duty in Vietnam.
“Chuck’s platoon leader had kept track of the kills. He had the kill sheets and verified Chuck’s numbers,” Lindsay said. “So, there was no argument then. His life changed overnight. All of a sudden, everybody knew him.”
The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time on Amazon. (Affiliate link.)
Peter Senich, a military historian and author specializing in sniping and small arms, went to verify Ward’s claim in the Marine Corps archives and found he was wrong. Mawhinney didn’t have 101 kills — he had 103.
Mawhinney, a man who valued his privacy and was not seeking any fame for his actions in Vietnam, agreed to an interview with Senich in 1997, which was featured in the Baker City Herald.
“It’s an opportunity for me to get some recognition for a lot of the Vietnam vets that didn’t receive any recognition,” Mawhinney said.
“We were all there together. If I have to take recognition for it, that’s OK, because every time I talk to someone, I can talk about the vets. It gives me an opportunity to talk about what a great job they did.”
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“He was a good man,” said Lindsay in an interview with The Oregonian Wednesday, sharing that Mawhinney never boasted about his kills and said he “did what I was trained to do.”
“He was a good father, a good husband and an asset to the community. He was a pretty cool cat.”
Not a bad way to be remembered.
Obit watch: February 15, 2024.
Thursday, February 15th, 2024Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, soprano.
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…it was merely a prelude to a long career that included her New York City Opera debut in 1982, once again as Musetta in “La Bohème,” as well as performances throughout Europe.
In addition to making Musetta her own, she also made the title role in Verdi’s “Aida,” an Ethiopian princess held captive in ancient Egypt, a signature. At one point she even performed the role amid the temples of Luxor in Egypt itself.
In 1992, Ms. Fernandez won a Laurence Olivier Award, the British equivalent of a Tony, for best actress in a musical for her rendition of Carmen in “Carmen Jones.”
The prelude was her role in a movie, which is what she may be most famous for.
“Diva” was considered a high-water mark in the movement known as the cinéma du look, a high-sheen school of French film often centered on stylish, disaffected youth in the France of the 1980s and ’90s. A film with all the saturated color and gloss of a 1980s music video, it was an art-house hit that became a cult favorite for the initiated.
The story revolves around a young opera fan named Jules (played by Frédéric Andréi) who grows so infatuated with an American opera star named Cynthia Hawkins that he surreptitiously tapes one of her performances — despite her well-known decree that none of her work be recorded, since it would capture only a part of the power and immediacy of her grandeur.
Ms. Fernandez played Cynthia, and the tape plays the MacGuffin.
When this came out in 1981, Siskel and Ebert reviewed it, and I wanted to see it. A moped chase through a subway? I was there, man. But at that time, it was hard for me to see foreign films in a theater, or on home video. I don’t recall “Diva” being re-released or playing anywhere when I was in college, even at the Union when they still had a film program.
Now, of course, I have “Diva” on blu-ray from Kino Lorber. And it is on our big movie list. I’ve been waiting until we can watch it as a group.
“Diva” was her only film role as an actress, though IMDB also credits her with a 1980 “TV movie” of “La Bohème” in which she sang “Musetta”. (Kiri Te Kanawa sang “Mimi”.)
Obit watch: February 14, 2024.
Wednesday, February 14th, 2024William Post, one of nature’s noblemen.
Mr. Post was the creator of the Pop-Tart.
Post did numerous interviews about his invention during his lifetime and every time he said the credit was shared.
“Bill would say, ‘I assembled an amazing team that developed Kellogg’s concept of a shelf-stable toaster pastry into a fine product that we could bring to market in the span of just four months,’,” his death notice states.