Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: April 24, 2023.

Monday, April 24th, 2023

I got a little behind while I was on vacation, so there’s a lot of catch-up here.

Ken Potts (USN – ret.) has passed away at the age of 102.

Mr. Potts was one of the two remaining survivors of the USS Arizona.

He was working as a crane operator shuttling supplies to the Arizona the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Pearl Harbor attack happened, according to a 2021 article by the Utah National Guard.
In a 2020 oral history interview with the American Veterans Center, Potts said a loudspeaker ordered sailors back to their ships so he got on a boat.
“When I got back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was afire,” He said in the interview. “The oil had leaked out and caught on fire and was burning.”
Dozens of ships either sank, capsized, or were damaged in the bombing of the Hawaii naval base, which catapulted the U.S. into World War II.
Sailors were tossed or forced to jump into the oily muck below, and Potts and his fellow sailors pulled some to safety in their boat.

This is the oral history referenced above:

USSArizona.org.

Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries.

Bud Shuster (R – Pennsylvania).

During his 28 years in Congress, including three terms as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Mr. Shuster managed to divert a disproportionately large share of federal highway trust funds into pedestrian crossings, access roads, interchanges, buses, road widening and the Bud Shuster Highway, which links State College, Altoona and the Pennsylvania Turnpike in southern Pennsylvania.
By 1991, he had perfected the earmarking of federal funds to his district so successfully that when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, was asked which state had reaped the biggest slice of the highway trust-fund pie, he replied, “The state of Altoona.”

Richard Riordan, former mayor of Los Angeles.

Posted in California Über Alles, Heroism, History, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 19, 2023.

Wednesday, April 19th, 2023

Tiger McKee, noted firearms trainer. American Handgunner.

I never had the pleasure of taking a course from Mr. McKee, but I did read his AH columns and The Book of Two Guns: The Martial Art of the 1911 Pistol and AR Carbine. (Amazon says I bought that in 2008. Wow.) And I think I knew that he was doing custom Smith and Wessons, but those were probably out of my price range.

This is a bad loss. And 61 seems a lot closer these days.

(Hattip to pigpen51 on this.)

Carol Locatell, actress. Other credits include “M*A*S*H”, “The Pretender”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”…

…and “Mannix” (“Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6.)

Almost a month ago, I posted an obit Lawrence sent me for Gloria Dea. Yesterday, the paper of record ran their own obit.

One of Ms. Dea’s last movie credits was in Ed Wood’s notoriously bad “Plan 9 From Outer Space” in 1957. She later sold insurance and then cars before settling back in Las Vegas.

IMDB. She’s credited as “Girl”.

Freddie Scappaticci.

During the Troubles (that is, the conflict in Northern Ireland), the British Army had a deep cover mole known as “Stakeknife”.

Stakeknife had penetrated the heart of the I.R.A.’s internal security unit, known as the Nutting Squad, a macabre sobriquet evoking the unit’s standard operating procedure — the execution of accused informers with two bullets to the “nut,” or head. Bodies were usually then dumped.

Mr. Scappaticci led that unit.

He was accused of overseeing the torture and killing of more than 30 suspected informers. If, at the same time, he was the British mole called Stakeknife, then he was a paid British agent killing fellow British agents.

There are a lot of people who believe he was Stakeknife. He consistently denied it.

Mr. Scappaticci may well have taken some of his secrets to his grave, shielding government intelligence and military handlers from one of the central moral conundrums of the case: Did the British state collude in the killings in order to protect Stakeknife’s identity?
British officials have described Stakeknife as the “golden egg” and “the jewel in the crown” of their infiltration of the I.R.A. They have said that intelligence he delivered alerted them to myriad I.R.A. operations, saving hundreds of lives.

…

In 2003, several British newspapers identified Stakeknife as Mr. Scappaticci. He denied the accusations publicly but then dropped out of sight. Several news reports said the British authorities had spirited him away, first to the Italian town of Cassino and then to a witness protection program in Britain.

There is an inquiry going on into Stakeknife. It’s been going on since 2016.

Mr. Boutcher, the head of the Stakeknife inquiry, promised on April 11 that investigators would publish an interim report on their findings this year. But families of victims greeted the news with skepticism.

Wikipedia entry. Why am I reminded of Whitey Bulger?

Posted in 1911, 1970s, Books, Guns, History, Law, Magic, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Smith and Wesson, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 18, 2023.

Tuesday, April 18th, 2023

The past few days on the obit front have been fairly quiet, but I do want to catch up on a couple:

Billy Waugh, legendary Special Forces and CIA operative. He was 93.

Mr. Waugh, a well-known, colorful and blunt-spoken figure in the intelligence community, was a Special Forces veteran by the time he first arrived in Laos in 1961, in the early days of the Vietnam War, as part of a United States military advisory mission called White Star.
Over parts of a decade in Southeast Asia, he helped train counterinsurgency forces in South Vietnam and Laos. He participated in parachute drops to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which required jumping from aircraft at altitudes of 20,000 feet or more, he said, free-falling in the nighttime to the lowest possible height before popping the chute, to avoid enemy detection.
And he served with the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, a clandestine unit that ran reconnaissance and rescue missions in South and North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

…

In June 1965, Mr. Waugh, then a master sergeant, was nearly killed when his team was overwhelmed by North Vietnamese forces in Binh Dinh Province, along the South Vietnam coast. He was shot in the knee, foot, ankle and forehead in a rice paddy. Thinking he was dead, North Vietnamese forces stripped him naked.
“I drifted in and out of consciousness, my body perforated with gunshot wounds, leeches feasting on every open wound with one thought jabbing at my semi-lucid brain,” he wrote in his 2005 autobiography, “Hunting the Jackal.” “Damn, my military career is finished. I’ll never see combat again.”
He was saved by two soldiers, one of them his commander, Capt. Paris Davis. Despite his own gunshot wounds, to an arm and a leg, Captain Davis helped Mr. Waugh crawl to a helicopter.
Those actions by Captain Davis earned him the Medal of Honor, which was belatedly presented to him by President Biden this year. Mr. Waugh received the Silver Star.

…

He retired from the Army in 1972, with the rank of sergeant major, and worked for two years for the United States Postal Service, sorting mail, which bored him.
Then a call came in 1977 to return to action in a murky assignment — training Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libyan commandos in infantry tactics — and he jumped at the chance. It wasn’t a C.I.A. job, but one organized by a former agency officer, Edwin Wilson, who would later serve nearly 22 years in prison for selling explosives to Libya before his sentence was overturned.
After the Libyan mission, Mr. Waugh became an independent contractor for the C.I.A. In Sudan in 1991 and ’92, he watched and photographed bin Laden, who, long before he masterminded the 9/11 attacks, was already on the agency’s radar as the founder of Al Qaeda. Mr. Waugh sometimes jogged past bin Laden’s compound.
“At the time,” he wrote, “bin Laden was not considered an especially high-level assignment, and Khartoum was so completely saturated with miscreants and no-good bastards that my hunting wasn’t limited to this one tall Saudi exile.”
Still, as he told the MacDill Air Force Base website in 2011, he came within 30 meters of bin Laden. “I could have killed him with a rock,” he said.
He also tracked down and monitored Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, taking photographs of him at his apartment in Sudan before French intelligence agents captured him in 1994.

…

After 9/11, Mr. Waugh, who was then 71, lobbied to be sent to Afghanistan.
“Billy got a folding chair and set it up opposite the entrance to my office and told my office manager, ‘I’m going to sit here until Cofer talks to me,’” said Mr. Black, who was director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the time.
Eventually, they talked. Mr. Waugh was still quite fit, and the next day, Mr. Black agreed to send him to Afghanistan, reasoning that his experience in unconventional warfare might help a young commander there.
During two months on Team Romeo, a combined Special Forces and C.I.A. unit whose mission was to root out Taliban soldiers and Al Qaeda terrorists, Mr. Waugh acted as a liaison between the soldiers and the C.I.A. operatives, advised Afghan troops and patrolled defenses.
“I was cold, filthy and stinky,” he wrote about his final days with the team, “but I was one of roughly 150 men who can say they conducted combat on the ground in Afghanistan during the initial — and pivotal — phase of Operation Enduring Freedom.”

Edward Koren, “New Yorker” cartoonist.

Posted in Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 13, 2023.

Thursday, April 13th, 2023

Anne Perry, noted mystery writer.

Ms. Perry’s books, including the Thomas Pitt and William Monk series of historical mysteries, have sold more than 26 million copies, according to her website. In 1998, when The Times of London named its 100 Masters of Crime of the past century, there she was on the list alongside Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Heroes,” set in the trenches of World War I, won the 2000 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best short story. In 2013 and 2020, she was a guest of honor at Bouchercon, the international convention of mystery writers and fans.

I hate talking about this, but there’s a huge elephant in the room that I can’t ignore. As a teenager, she was known as Juliet Hulme. Her family moved to New Zealand, where she met Pauline Parker. The two girls became very close friends and “invented an elaborate medieval-like fantasy world and worshiped celebrities, especially the opera singer Mario Lanza, as saints.”

Juliet’s parents decided to divorce and leave New Zealand. The two girls didn’t want to be split up:

In Victoria Park, in Christchurch, the girls — Pauline was 16, Juliet was 15 — struck Honorah Parker in the head repeatedly with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. The trial was a sensation, much of it focusing on Juliet and Pauline’s absorption with each other and their fantasies about becoming famous novelists.
Both young women were convicted of murder, and after five years behind bars (in separate prisons) they were given new identities and instructed never to meet again. If they violated that order, they were warned, they would return to prison and serve life sentences.

The was dramatized in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”, which I strongly recommend if you can see it. (I checked Amazon: home video copies of this seem very hard to come by.)

Once her murder conviction was revealed, Ms. Perry did not shy away from acknowledging her guilt. She excused herself only by saying that she had been afraid that if she did not go along with the murder plan, her distraught friend might kill herself.
Ms. Perry’s regret did not extend to self-condemnation, however.
“In a sense it’s not a matter — at the end — of judging,” she said in the documentary. “I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?”
“It’s in the end, Who am I? Am I somebody that can be trusted? Am I someone that is compassionate, gentle, patient, strong?” She mentioned other traits: bravery, honesty, caring. “If you’re that kind of person — if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed.”
She concluded, “It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”

Someone sent me Virginia Norwood’s obit the other day, but I don’t remember who, and I can’t find it now. USGS.

Ms. Norwood pioneered the scanning technology used on the Landsat satellites.

Ms. Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution and geology. She concluded that a scanner that recorded multiple spectra of light and energy, like one that had been used for local agricultural observations, could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind.

…

Ms. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.
Ms. Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.
The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.
A senior engineer from Hughes took the device out on a truck and drove around California to test it and convince the doubters that it would work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of the images, of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, on the wall of her house for the rest of her life.

Her tech was so good, it pretty much completely replaced the main Landsat system. (That system was actually shut down two weeks after the first Landsat launch because of problems.)

Over the next 50 years, new Landsat satellites replaced earlier ones. Ms. Norwood oversaw the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Currently, Landsat 8 and 9 are orbiting the earth, and NASA plans to launch Landsat 10 in 2030. Each generation satellite has added more imaging capabilities but always based on Ms. Norwood’s original concept.

Alicia Shepard, former NPR ombudsman (ombudsperson?).

In June 2009, she wrote on her blog that she had received a “slew of emails” that took issue with NPR News’s use of the phrases “enhanced interrogation tactics” and “harsh interrogation techniques” instead of “torture” to describe what terrorism suspects held by the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq war had been forced to endure.
“Some say that by not using the word ‘torture,’ NPR is serving as right-wing apologists for waterboarding and other methods of extracting information,” Ms. Shepard wrote. President Bush refused to call waterboarding torture, but in April 2009 President Barack Obama did.
Ms. Shepard suggested that rather than labeling enhanced measures as torture, reporters should simply describe the tactics — saying, for example, that “the U.S. military poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds” or forced detainees “into cramped confines crawling with insects.”

…

Soon after writing her blog post, Ms. Shepard told Bob Garfield, the co-host of the NPR program “On the Media”: “If I were asked personally whether or not pouring water down someone’s nose and throat for 20 seconds constitutes torture, I would say personally that I think it does. I totally understand, though, that a news organization needs to be as neutral as possible, and putting out the facts and letting the audience decide whether something is good or bad, right or wrong.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Media, Movies, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 11, 2023.

Tuesday, April 11th, 2023

This is one I’ve been holding for a couple of days because I am lazy and shiftless: James Bowman. countertenor.

When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.
“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”

…

“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”
He was invited to audition.
“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”
Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.

…

Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”
His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.
“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”

…

“He was such a brilliant, instinctive singer and musician, a huge character and incredibly kind and generous,” Mr. Short wrote, “but my fondest memories will always be of him giggling and snorting loudly at something totally outrageous he’d just whispered in the ears of anyone standing close by.”

…

“We’re a down-to-earth bunch who just happen to like singing in a high register,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 1996. “When I look around at my colleagues, I’m struck by how normal most of them are.”

Al Jaffee has passed at 102. THR. Tribute from Mad.

For those who don’t know, he was one of the great old-time “Mad Magazine” guys, perhaps most famous as the creator of the “fold-in” and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”.

Al was named the Reuben Awards’ Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 2008 and was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame in 2014. He holds the Guinness World Record for the longest career as a comic artist, beginning with his first publication in Joker Comics in 1942 and continuing through his time at MAD until his retirement last year.

“I had two jobs all my life,” Jaffee told the Times upon his retirement. “One of them was to make a living. The second one was to entertain. I hope to some extent that I succeeded.”

Myriam Ullens. Noted here because this is an odd story.

She was a single mom and successful pastry chef when she went looking for investors to expand her business. One of the people she went to seek investment from was the billionaire Baron Guy Ullens de Schooten Whettnal (who apparently prefers “Ullens” as the short form).

They fell in love and married. The two of them got out of the business world and into philanthropy, founding (among other ventures) the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

According to reports, Ms. Ullens and her husband were shot by her stepson while sitting in their car. Her husband was wounded in the leg.

According to the prosecutor’s statement, Nicolas attributed his actions to a family fight over money and said that moments before he shot his stepmother he had been arguing with her and his father at their home and had been asked to leave. He was being held in jail and has been charged with premeditated murder and violating weapons laws, the prosecutor’s office said.

For the record: NYT obit for Michael Lerner.

Elizabeth Hubbard, actress. She doesn’t have that many screen credits beyond the two soaps (“As the World Turns” and “The Doctors”) she was in, but she also did a fair amount of work on Broadway.

Posted in Art, Law, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 10, 2023.

Monday, April 10th, 2023

NYT obit for Craig Breedlove.

Michael Lerner, actor. 186 credits in IMDB (counting the three upcoming), including “Mayor Ebert” in “Godzilla”, “Today’s F.B.I.”, four “Rockford Files”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Banacek”.

Francesca Cappucci. She worked for KABC-TV in LA.

Out of the blue, Quentin Tarantino named the glamorous Italian movie star wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton after her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Jacques Haitkin, cinematographer. Other credits include “Fist of the North Star”, “Team Knight Rider”, and “The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything”.

Hobie Landrith.

The Mets and the Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros), founded as 1962 National League expansion teams, began stocking their rosters in an October 1961 draft. They alternated in selecting players whom the eight N.L. teams viewed as too young, too old or too ordinary to keep.
Houston chose Eddie Bressoud, a shortstop with the San Francisco Giants, as the first pick of the draft. The Mets chose Landrith, also a Giant, as their first selection.
When reporters asked Mets Manager Casey Stengel why Landrith, 31 years old, was anointed as the first Met, he replied: “You gotta have a catcher or you’d have a lot of passed balls.”

(Side note: as best as I can tell, Eddie Bressoud is still alive at 90. He was traded to the Red Sox before he played a game with Houston, and then went from the Red Sox to the Mets.)

Landrith had a career batting average of .233 with 34 home runs and 203 runs driven in.
“I was in the major leagues more because I was a good defensive catcher, and the fact that I was good at handling pitchers,” he once told the baseball history website This Great Game. “I always thought I was a fairly decent hitter, but I realized that I wasn’t in the big leagues for my bat.”

Posted in Cars, History, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 8, 2023.

Saturday, April 8th, 2023

Today is a busy day. As it turns out, though, I have a few minutes to try and sneak some obits in.

Benjamin B. Ferencz has died at 103. The significance: he was the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials.

Fulfilling an Allied pledge to bring war criminals to justice, 13 trials were held in Nuremberg, where Nazi rallies had celebrated Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s. In the first and most important trial, held in 1945 and 1946, the International Military Tribunal convicted 24 of the Third Reich’s senior leaders, including Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor, who committed suicide on the eve of his execution, and the military commander Wilhelm Keitel, who was hanged. The chief prosecutor was Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson of the United States Supreme Court.
A dozen subsequent trials at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg put German judges, doctors, industrialists, diplomats and less senior military leaders in the dock in cases supervised by Justice Jackson’s successor, Gen. Telford Taylor. Mr. Ferencz was assigned to prosecute the notorious Einsatzgruppen case, which for its staggering volume of victims has been called the biggest murder trial in history.
It was the case against 22 Nazis, including six generals, who organized, directed and often joined roaming SS extermination squads — 3,000 killers, aided by the local police and other authorities, who rounded up and slaughtered a million specifically targeted people, or groups, in Nazi-occupied lands: the intelligentsia of every nation, political and cultural leaders, members of the nobility, clergy, teachers, Jews, Gypsies and other “undesirables.” Most were shot, others gassed in mobile vans.
They were crimes that beggar the imagination — 33,771 men, women and children shot or buried alive in the ravine near Kyiv called Babi Yar; the two-day liquidation of 25,000 Latvian Jews from Riga’s ghetto, forced to lie down in pits and shot; the spectacle of a barbarian in Lithuania who killed Jews with a crowbar while crowds cheered and an accordion played marches and anthems.
Unfolding in 1947 and 1948, the Einsatzgruppen trial was Mr. Ferencz’s first court case. But the evidence — mostly detailed records of killings kept by the Nazis themselves — was overwhelming and irrefutable.
“In this case, the defendants are not charged with sitting in an office hundreds of miles away from the slaughter,” the court said in a unanimous judgment. “These men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing and taking an active part in the bloody harvest.”
All the defendants were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Fourteen were sentenced to death and two to life in prison. Only four executions were ultimately carried out, however, which was typical of the Nuremberg trials: convictions, heavy sentences and later commutations. Analysts said leniency arose because the new realities of the Cold War with the Soviet Union meant that the Western powers needed Germany politically.

…

After earning his law degree in 1943, he enlisted in the wartime Army and became a private in an antiaircraft artillery unit. He joined the Normandy invasion in 1944 and fought across France and Germany. In 1945, his legal training and war-crimes expertise were recognized by the Army, and he was assigned to General Patton’s Third Army headquarters and then to investigate newly liberated concentration camps for evidence of war crimes.
What he witnessed was seared into memory. At Buchenwald, he said, “I saw crematoria still going. The bodies starved, lying dying, on the ground. I’ve seen the horrors of war more than can be adequately described.”
At Mauthausen, he found incriminating ledgers kept by the Nazi commandant on the number and manner of prisoners killed each day, on starvation rations and on horrific conditions in the lice-infested barracks. Sergeant Ferencz mustered out of the Army in Germany late in 1945.

I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere, or I would have been on it like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation. But Lawrence sent over an obit from Road and Track for Craig Breedlove, land speed record setter.

In a three-year span from 1963 through 1965, Breedlove’s successive conquering of the 400-, 500-, and 600-mph barriers made him a household name. Blessed with the looks of a movie star, his LSR exploits caught the attention of Hollywood and New York where television appearances and cover features in sports and lifestyle magazines and routine newspaper coverage brought him the same kind of fame that elevated fellow racers Dan Gurney, A.J. Foyt, and Mario Andretti to national acclaim.

…

Along with Walt and Art Arfons, Gary Gabelich, and other domestic land-speed heroes and record-setters, Breedlove took pride in defending America’s ownership of all major LSR speed titles. Breedlove’s 600.601-mph blast stood until 1970 when Gabelich’s Blue Flame moved the new standard out to 622.407 mph. As the 1970s beckoned, the country’s fascination with land-speed daredevils started to wane, but that didn’t stop England’s Richard Noble from chasing history at Bonneville in 1983.

Harry Lorayne, memory expert.

Fleet of mind and fleet of mouth, Mr. Lorayne was a sought-after guest on television shows and a particular favorite of Johnny Carson’s, appearing on “The Tonight Show” some two dozen times.
Mr. Lorayne had begun his professional life as a sleight-of-hand artist and well into old age was considered one of the foremost card magicians in the country. As both magician and mnemonist, he was a direct, gleeful scion of the 19th-century midway pitchman and the 20th-century borscht belt tummler.
By the 1960s, Mr. Lorayne was best known for holding audiences rapt with feats of memory that bordered on the elephantine. Such feats were born, he explained in interviews and in his many books, of a system of learned associations — call them surrealist visual puns — that seemed equal parts Ivan Pavlov and Salvador Dalí.
Mr. Lorayne demonstrated his act on the night of July 23, 1958, when, in his first big break, he appeared on the TV game show “I’ve Got a Secret.”
While the host, Garry Moore, was introducing members of the show’s panel, Mr. Lorayne was at work in the studio audience, soliciting the names of its members.He was then called onstage. Mr. Moore asked the audience members who had given Mr. Lorayne their names to stand. Hundreds did.
“That’s Mr. Saar,” Mr. Lorayne began, pointing to a man in the balcony. (The transcriptions here are phonetic.)
“Mr. Stinson,” he continued in his rapid-fire New Yorkese, gathering speed. “Miss Graf. Mrs. Graf. Miss Finkelstein. If I can see correctly, I believe that’s the Harpin family: Mr. and Mrs. Harpin; there was Dorothy Harpin and Esther Harpin. Mrs. Pollock. And way in the corner — it’s a little dark there — but I believe that’s Mrs. Stern.”
And so it went, through scores of names, each impeccably recalled.

…

Absent the time constraints of television, Mr. Lorayne often said, he could handily memorize the names of 500, or even a thousand, people in a single outing. Over the years, he said, he had met and recalled the names of more than 20 million people.
To naysayers who contended that he routinely seeded his audiences with friends, Mr. Lorayne’s reply was unimpeachable: “Who’s got 500 friends?”

…

At the height of his renown, Mr. Lorayne traveled the country demonstrating his prowess on theater stages, at trade shows and in corporate training seminars.
During the 1960s, he ran a memory-training school in New York. In later years, he starred in TV infomercials for his home memory-improvement system. His scores of books were translated into many languages.

Maybe this is a silly thought, but I like to think of Mr. Lorayne pulling up a chair and joining the conversation at the table with Ricky Jay, Harry Houdini, and all the other greats.

Ethan Boyes, cyclist. He was 44.

According to USA Cycling, Mr. Boyes was the reigning masters track world champion in the men’s 40-44 age group for the time trial and sprint events, and he held several records in his age group, including from a flying start race (when cyclists start already in motion as opposed to from a standstill) in Aguascalientes, Mexico, in 2018, at a high-altitude track.

He was struck by a car and killed while riding in San Francisco. (I apologize for using the NYT obit, but the SF papers are virtually unlinkable without a subscription.)

For the record: Bill Butler and Nora Forster.

The Hello Deli. At least in current form.

“Dave always joked that whenever they were out of ideas, they’d come to the deli,” he said.

Posted in Cycling, History, Magic, Nazis, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 7, 2023.

Friday, April 7th, 2023

Mimi Sheraton, former food critic for the NYT. “Remembering Mimi Sheraton’s Writing and Cooking“.

An adventurer with a passion for offbeat experiences, an eclectic taste for foods and the independence to defy pressures from restaurateurs and advertisers, Ms. Sheraton was the first female food critic for The Times. She pioneered reviewing-in-disguise, dining in wigs and tinted glasses, and using aliases for reservations, mostly in high-end places where people knew her from repeat visits and lavished their attentions on her.
“The longer I reviewed restaurants, the more I became convinced that the unknown customer has a completely different experience from either a valued patron or a recognized food critic,” she wrote in her memoir, “Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life” (2004). “For all practical purposes, they might as well be in different restaurants.”
Colleagues and other restaurant critics described her reviews as tough but fair and scrupulously researched. The Times required three visits to a restaurant before publishing a review; she dined six to eight times before passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in one day to evaluate the meat and sandwich-building techniques.

…

Another of her reviews, based on blind tastings by several Times staff members, favored private-label liquors over popular brand names of Scotch, bourbon, rye, vodka and gin. The review ran weeks before Christmas, the busy liquor-selling season.
“I heard that two million dollars’ worth of advertising had been canceled,” Ms. Sheraton recalled in her memoir. She approached the executive editor. “I asked Abe Rosenthal if that was true. He said, ‘That’s none of your business. It was a great story.’”

…

In her Greenwich Village townhouse, she had 2,000 cookbooks and a spacious kitchen overlooking a backyard where she grew chives, tarragon, mint, sage, rosemary and basil. And she read other restaurant critics, with whom she often disagreed.
“Well, whether they’re right or not, which means they agree with me,” she told The Times wryly in 2004, “food writers in general devote too much space to chefs’ philosophies. They’re not Picasso, after all — this is supper. So I don’t want to hear about a chef’s intentions. Call me when it’s good.”

Bill Butler, noted cinematographer. Other credits include “Raid on Entebbe”, “Capricorn One”, and “Hot Shots!”.

Nora Forster, John Lydon’s wife.

The punk rock icon and Forster met in 1975 at Vivienne Westwood’s famed punk shop Sex and married in 1979, according to Rolling Stone.
The two remained married till Forster’s death and did not have children.

Paul Cattermole, of S Club 7.

Posted in Food, Media, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 5, 2023.

Wednesday, April 5th, 2023

Klaus Teuber, creator of “Settlers of Catan” (which I guess is just called “Catan” now).

In that game, players build settlements in a new land by collecting brick, lumber, wool, ore and grain. Trading with other players is part of the strategy, lending a social element to the game play. In 1995 the game won both the game of the year award and the Deutscher Spiele Preis, the German Games Award. It caught on, first in Germany and then, as editions in other languages became available, all over.

…

Catan has been widely hailed as being challenging yet intuitive — children play it — and has been credited with jump-starting a new era of board games, which moved beyond the staid confines of Scrabble and Monopoly. Instead of sitting idly while other players take their turns, as in Monopoly, Catan invites constant wheeling and dealing.

Judy Farrell. Credits other than “MASH” include “Quincy, M.E.”, “Get Smart”, “The Rookies”, and an uncredited role in the original “The Andromeda Strain”. She also did some work as a TV writer.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 4, 2023.

Tuesday, April 4th, 2023

Sister Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou.

She was a world-class pianist:

…music that drew on her classical training but seemed to partake of rhythm and blues, jazz and other influences. The relatively few who discovered it knew they had found their way to something singular.
The musician Norah Jones was one who did, especially after hearing the album “Éthiopiques 21,” a collection of Sister Guèbrou’s piano solos that was part of a record series spotlighting folkloric and pop music from Ethiopia.
“This album is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard: part Duke Ellington, part modal scales, part the blues, part church music,” Ms. Jones told The New York Times in 2020. “It resonated in all those ways for me.”

As you may have guessed from the “Sister”, and the categories on this post, she went in a different direction:

She had a chance to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and seemed on the way to a career as a concert pianist, the BBC documentary says, but that prospect fell through for reasons Sister Guèbrou would not detail. That led her to a spiritual reassessment of her life, and by her early 20s, she was a nun. She spent 10 years in a hilltop monastery in Ethiopia.
“I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she told Ms. Molleson. “No shoes, no music, just prayer.”
She returned to her family and by the 1960s was recording some of her music; her first album was released in Germany in 1967, according to the website of a foundation established in her name to promote music education.
She made several other records over the next 30 years, donating the proceeds to the poor. In the mid-1980s, she left Ethiopia and settled into an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, spending the rest of her life there. Information on her survivors was not available.

She was 99.

Sharon Acker passed over the weekend.

The “Perry Mason” mentioned in the headline was actually “The New Perry Mason”, in which she played “Della Street” opposite Monte Markham’s Perry Mason. It lasted one season. Other credits include three “Quincy, M.E.” appearances, “The Rockford Files”, “Hec Ramsey”, “The Bold Ones: The Senator”, and a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Roy McGrath. Mr. McGrath was the former chief of staff for the governor of Maryland. Three weeks ago, he went on the run: the day his corruption trial was supposed to start. He was charged with “wire fraud, embezzlement, misconduct in office and improper use of state funds”.

Authorities tracked him down in Tennessee yesterday. There was a confrontation with FBI agents, and Mr. McGrath was shot. He died in a local hospital. At this point, it isn’t clear if his wound was self-inflicted or if he was shot by the FBI.

Posted in 1970s, Cops, FBI, Law, Music, Obits, Politics, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 3, 2023.

Monday, April 3rd, 2023

Ryuichi Sakamoto, Japanese musician. THR.

Cool story, bro:

In summer 2018, it emerged that Sakamoto had found the music so bad at his favorite Japanese restaurant in Manhattan (he had long divided his time between Tokyo and New York) that he contacted the chef and offered to create a playlist. He went on to do the same for a new bar and restaurant the chef opened, without payment or fanfare.

More:

Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.
His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.
“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”

He also acted a little:

Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.
The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.

…

He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)
Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.

…

In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)
The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”

Lawrence mentioned that we’ve actually seen two films scored by Mr. Sakamoto in the past 12 months (“The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant”).

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 31, 2023.

Friday, March 31st, 2023

Mark Russell. THR.

Presidents from Eisenhower to Trump caught the flak. He sang “Bail to the Chief” for Richard M. Nixon, urged George H.W. Bush to retire “to a home for the chronically preppy,” likened Jimmy Carter’s plan to streamline government to “putting racing stripes on an arthritic camel,” and recalled first seeing Ronald Reagan “in the picture-frame department at Woolworth’s, between Gale Storm and Walter Pidgeon.”
Did he have any writers? “Oh, yes — 100 in the Senate and 435 in the House of Representatives.” The true meaning of the Cold War? “In communism, man exploits man. But with capitalism, it’s the other way around.” Gun control? “I will defend my Second Amendment right to use my musket to defend my Third Amendment right to never, ever allow a British soldier to live in my house.”

I was a big Mark Russell fan when I was in high school, but I lost touch with his work after I went to college the first time.

Critics said that the political satire of Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer had more cutting edge, but Mr. Russell thrived on subtler material that went over with students, politicians and public television audiences. He exploited popular presidential images: Gerald R. Ford’s stumbling, Bill Clinton’s sexual foibles, Reagan’s jelly beans. But he also struck a balance between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, with humor that required a certain familiarity with national and international affairs, if not political sophistication.

Michael Blackwood, filmmaker. He wasn’t someone I’ve heard of before, but I want to find some of his work.

He followed the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk on tour in Europe. He tagged along as the minimalist composer Philip Glass prepared for the 1984 premieres of his opera, “Akhnaten,” in Houston and Stuttgart, Germany.
He observed the creative process of the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Christo during his creation of epic environmental projects like “Running Fence” and “Wrapped Walkways.” And he let Isamu Noguchi explain his approach to his art as they walked among his sculptures.

…

His fascination with architecture led him to make films about some of its stars, including Louis Kahn, Richard Meier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry.
In his review of “Frank Gehry: The Formative Years” (1988) in The New York Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Mr. Blackwood “has built up an admirable oeuvre of films about architects and architecture,” and that Mr. Blackwood has Mr. Gehry “ramble though his work in a way that is both inviting and informative.”

…

In a 1993 film, “The Sensual Nature of Sound,” Mr. Blackwood examined four distinctive performers and composers — Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros — devoting significant time to their discussions of their own work.

…

Mr. Blackwood also made films about subjects who were not artists, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe and the diplomat George F. Kennan, and several about Germany and German Americans.

Posted in Art, Christo, Gehry, Movies, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 30, 2023.

Thursday, March 30th, 2023

As most of my readers know, I am something of a greedy gut. So here’s a semi-obscure food related obit that’s relevant to my interests: Yang Bing-yi.

He founded Din Tai Fung: they didn’t invent the soup dumpling, but they popularized it.

Mr. Yang and his wife, Lai Pen-mei, opened their first modest storefront in 1958, laying the foundation for what would become a franchise that their children and grandchildren have expanded to more than 170 locations across Taiwan, mainland China and 13 other countries, including the United States, Japan, Australia and the United Arab Emirates, with a menu that includes such specialties as wontons in red chili oil, shredded tofu and seaweed salad, and steamed truffle-and-pork dumplings.
A Hong Kong branch has been awarded a Michelin star five times.

…

The secret to the seemingly miraculous stuffing of soup in a dumpling is mixing a scoop of cold, gelatinized broth with the meat or vegetable filling. After the dumplings are placed into bamboo baskets and steamed, the broth melts, forming a rich, fatty soup within a pliant, paper-thin wheat skin. Biting into one delivers a piping hot explosion of flavors and textures.

…

Mr. Hom, the chef and writer, said in an interview that Mr. Yang’s drive for precision — down to the diameter of the wrappers and the weight of each soup dumpling — set a standard that has stood the test of time and transcended borders.
“It’s consistently good, no matter where I’ve eaten, in Singapore, Bangkok, L.A., London,” he said. He added that he had made a practice of eating the dumplings slowly, leaving some in the bamboo basket where they are served to observe whether the soupy filling would hold up within the thin skin. They always did.

D.M. Thomas, author. I never read it, but I remember back in the day The White Hotel was a huge deal.

FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for local figure Murray Callahan. He used to own Callahan’s General Store, which is kind of a famous local spot. It seems tourist oriented to me these days, but I think back in the day before Austin sprawled out that way, it was more of a feed and seed kind of place: a very early version of Tractor Supply Company, if you will. (I went out there once with my folks some years back, which is what I base my impressions on: while Austin has expanded in that direction, it’s still kind of off the beaten path for me.)

Posted in Books, Food, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 29, 2023.

Wednesday, March 29th, 2023

Bill Zehme, noted biographer.

Mr. Zehme’s biography of Mr. Sinatra, “The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’” (1997), was a best seller. He also shared the author credit on best-selling memoirs by Regis Philbin (“I’m Only One Man!” in 1995 and “Who Wants to Be Me?” in 2000) and Jay Leno (“Leading With My Chin” in 1996).
His other books included “Intimate Strangers: Comic Profiles and Indiscretions of the Very Famous” (2002), “Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman” (1999) and “Hef’s Little Black Book” (2004), a stream-of-consciousness collaboration with Hugh M. Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy magazine.

…

“Bill didn’t dig around for dirt or comb through the proverbial closet hunting for skeletons,” David Hirshey, a former deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said by email. “What interested him was more subtle than that. Zehme looked for the quirks in behavior and speech that revealed a person’s character, and he had an uncanny ability to put his subjects at ease with a mixture of gentle playfulness and genuine empathy.”

…

Mr. Zehme provided tips from Mr. Sinatra about what men should never do in the presence of a woman (yawn) and about the finer points of his haberdashery: “He wore only snap-brim Cavanaughs — fine felts and porous palmettos — and these were his crowns, cocked askew, as defiant as he was.”
“Mr. Sinatra’s gauge for when a hat looked just right,” Mr. Zehme wrote, was “when no one laughs.”

George Nassar is burning in Hell. The name might ring a bell for some of you: he was Albert “The Boston Strangler” DeSalvo’s cellmate, and DeSalvo supposedly confessed his crimes to Nassar.

In 1995, Mr. Nassar recalled in an interview with The Boston Globe that Mr. DeSalvo had described the killings 30 years earlier as they walked along a concrete hallway at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts, where both men were incarcerated and undergoing mental health evaluations. Mr. DeSalvo was being held on unrelated charges of armed robbery, assault and sex offenses involving four women.
“He began describing a crime and watching my reaction to see if it was too abhorrent to listen to,” Mr. Nassar said. “Some of it was horrible, particularly the crimes of stabbing a woman under her breasts in Cambridge. But I wasn’t there to condemn.”

…

Mr. Nassar told his lawyer, the famed criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, about the confession and recruited him to represent Mr. DeSalvo.“We were setting it up,” he told WBZ, “saying, ‘Al, you’re going to confess, you’re going to trial, you’re going to do your book, we’re going to take care of your family,’ and he was saying, ‘OK, OK, OK.’”
Mr. DeSalvo subsequently confessed to Mr. Bailey and gave his account to psychiatrists, a state investigator and the Boston police, but for reasons that are unclear he was never charged with any of the killings. He later retracted the confession.
In 1967, Mr. DeSalvo was convicted of the robbery, assault and sex offenses he had been charged with and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the trial, another inmate, Stanley Setterlund, testified that Mr. DeSalvo had confessed to the murders “and laughed.”

This is one of those odd obits: Mr. Nassar actually died in December of 2018, but for various reasons, his death only became public knowledge recently.

Posted in Books, Clothing, Hats, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 28, 2023.

Tuesday, March 28th, 2023

Things have been quiet on the obit front the past few days. Now watch as someone prominent dies later on today. (I don’t want this to happen, but it seems that whenever I’m thinking things have been quiet, something happens.)

In the meantime, Lawrence sent me a couple of obits a few days ago:

Michael Reaves, writer. He worked on “Batman: The Animated Series”, wrote some “Star Wars” novels, and had a lot of other credits.

Eric Brown, SF author and critic for The Guardian.

Great and good FotB Borepatch lost his beloved dog, Wolfgang. Those of you who are familiar with Borepatch and Wolfgang might want to send condolences his way.

Posted in Books, Mammals, Obits | 1 Comment »

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