Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: January 10, 2023.

Tuesday, January 10th, 2023

Quinn Redeker, actor.

He did a fair number of cop and PI shows, among other credits, including “The Rockford Files”, “Harry O”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Falling Star“, season 1, episode 15. He was “Jim Dancy”.)

Mike Hill, film editor. He won an Oscar for “Apollo 13”.

Diamond Lynnette Hardaway, of “Diamond and Silk”.

Timothy Vanderweert. He ran the “Leicaphilia” blog, which has been on the sidebar for a while now.

Adolfo Kaminsky. I swear I have written something about him before, but I can’t find it now.

He was a forger. Specifically, he forged documents to get people out of the hands of the Nazis.

The forged documents allowed Jewish children, their parents and others to escape deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and in many cases to flee Nazi-occupied territory for safe havens.
At one point, Mr. Kaminsky was asked to produce 900 birth and baptismal certificates and ration cards for 300 Jewish children in institutional homes who were about to be rounded up. The aim was to deceive the Germans until the children could be smuggled out to rural families or convents, or to Switzerland and Spain. He was given three days to finish the assignment.
He toiled for two straight days, forcing himself to stay awake by telling himself: “In one hour I can make 30 blank documents. If I sleep for an hour 30 people will die.”

…

Using the pseudonym Julien Keller, Mr. Kaminsky was a key operative in a Paris underground laboratory whose members — all working for no pay and risking a quick death if discovered — adopted aliases like Water Lily, Penguin and Otter, and often contrived documents from scratch.
Mr. Kaminsky learned to fashion various typefaces, a skill he had picked up in elementary school while editing a school newspaper, and was able to imitate those used by the authorities. He pressed paper so that it, too, resembled the kind used on official documents, and photoengraved his own rubber stamps, letterheads and watermarks.
Word of the cell spread to other resistance groups, and soon it was producing 500 documents a week, receiving orders from partisans in several European countries. Mr. Kaminsky estimated that the underground network he was part of helped save 10,000 people, most of them children.

Posted in 1970s, History, Mannix, Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits, Photography, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 9, 2023.

Monday, January 9th, 2023

Bernard Kalb, former foreign correspondent for CBS, NBC, and the NYT.

He reported for The Times from 1946 to 1962, for CBS during the next 18 years (during which he joined his brother, Marvin, on the diplomatic beat) and as NBC’s State Department correspondent from 1980 to 1985. Then, for nearly two years, he served in the Reagan administration’s State Department — a stint that ended contentiously.
As a CBS correspondent in 1972, Mr. Kalb accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on the trip to China that proved to be a major step in the normalization of relations between the two nations. He also made virtually every overseas trip with Henry A. Kissinger, Cyrus R. Vance, Edmund S. Muskie, Alexander M. Haig Jr. and George P. Shultz during their tenures as secretary of state.

…

After graduating from the City College of New York in 1942, Mr. Kalb spent two years in the Army, mostly working on a newspaper published out of a Quonset hut in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. His editor was Sgt. Dashiell Hammett, the author of the detective novels “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man.”

Russell Banks, novelist.

Joyce Meskis, former owner of The Tattered Cover.

In addition to creating a bookstore famed for its vast selection and bibliophile-friendly atmosphere, Ms. Meskis often took a stand in matters related to censorship and the First Amendment. Sometimes those positions were not easy ones to embrace.
In 1991, for instance, when she was president of the American Booksellers Association, she testified against the proposed Pornography Victims Compensation Act, a bill introduced by Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, that would have allowed victims of sex crimes to sue distributors of pornography, including bookstores, if they could demonstrate that pornography influenced their attacker. Opponents of that bill (which died in committee) were sometimes labeled pro-pornography, but Ms. Meskis knew the real issue was that the law would make bookstores wary of selling anything controversial.
Similarly, the case she took to the Colorado Supreme Court some two decades ago pitted her against law enforcement officials, who were trying to build a case against a customer suspected of making methamphetamine. In 2000 the police found two books on drugmaking in a trailer home used as a meth lab; they also found an envelope with Ms. Meskis’s bookstore listed as the return address. Hoping to link the drugmaking to the recipient whose name was on the envelope, they sought Ms. Meskis’s sales records — and, though her stand read as pro-drug to some, she again saw the bigger picture.
“This is about access to private records of the book-buying public,” she told The New York Times in 2000. “If buyers thought that their records would be turned over to the government, it would have a chilling affect on what they buy and what they read.”
In 2002 the State Supreme Court ruled that both the First Amendment and the Colorado Constitution “protect an individual’s fundamental right to purchase books anonymously, free from governmental interference.”

Adam Rich. Other credits include “CHiPs”, “Silver Spoons”, and “Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star”.

Owen Roizman, cinematographer. “The French Connection”, “The Exorcist”, and “Network”? Wow.

Art McNally, NFL official credited as being “the father of instant replay”.

Earl Boen. Other credits (he has 291 as an actor: man worked) include video game spun offs from a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Battle Beyond the Stars”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, and “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Law, Media, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: January 6, 2023.

Friday, January 6th, 2023

Kenneth Rowe, also known as Lt. No Kum-Sok of the North Korean Air Force.

This is an interesting historical footnote (recommended for use in schools) that I was previously unaware of.

Lt. Kum-Sok was born in what was then “the northern part of the Japanese-occupied Korean Peninsula”. He became a navel cadet, transferred to the North Korean Air Force, and learned to fly MIGs.

He got his wings at 19.

…

Mr. Rowe had become a member of North Korea’s Communist Party and “played the Communist zealot,” as he put it, while serving in the Korean War. But he had been influenced by his anti-Communist father and his mother’s Roman Catholic upbringing to yearn for life in a democracy. He had been thinking of a way to get to America since Korea was divided after World War II and the Soviet-backed Kim Il-sung imposed Communist rule over what became North Korea.

On the morning of September 21, 1953, while flying in a patrol of 16 planes, he broke off from the formation and flew across the DMZ to Kimpo AFB in South Korea.

Luck was with him. The American air defense radar just north of Kimpo had been shut down for routine maintenance, and neither American planes aloft nor antiaircraft crews had spotted him.
During the late stages of the Korean War, the Air Force had dropped leaflets over North Korea offering a $100,000 reward to the first North Korean pilot to defect with a MIG. Mr. Rowe maintained that he knew nothing of that reward and said he had simply wanted to live a free life. But he accepted it.

This was the first intact MIG that the United States was able to analyze. (At least, according to the NYT: Wikipedia claims that Franciszek Jarecki, a Polish pilot, defected in one on March 5, 1953.)

Seeking to determine the MIG’s strengths and weaknesses in anticipation of future conflicts with the Soviet Union and its allies, the Air Force dispatched some of its most accomplished test pilots — including Maj. Chuck Yeager, who had gained fame in 1947 as the first flier to break the sound barrier — to put the MIG-15 through strenuous maneuvers. Their verdict: The F-86 was the superior warplane.

Again per Wikipedia (quoting Yeager’s autobiography), “the MiG-15 had dangerous handling faults…during a visit to the USSR, Soviet pilots were incredulous he had dived in it, this supposedly being very hazardous.”

He came to the United States in May 1954 and was something of a celebrity. He was introduced to Vice President Richard M. Nixon, was interviewed by Dave Garroway on NBC’s “Today” program and appeared on broadcasts for the Voice of America. He received an engineering degree from the University of Delaware, became an American citizen in 1962 and worked as an engineer for major defense and aerospace companies. He was later a professor of engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach.

He was 90 when he passed.

And his plane?

Seven decades later, that plane still exists, and resides at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force near Dayton, Ohio.
Its red star repainted, it is on display alongside an American F-86 Sabre jet, a remembrance of the dogfights of the Korean War in the swath of sky known as MIG Alley.

Posted in History, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 5, 2023.

Thursday, January 5th, 2023

Fay Weldon, British novelist. (The Life and Loves of a She-Devil).

In 2001, she struck an unusual brand-placement deal with the jeweler Bulgari, reportedly worth £18,000 (about $23,000), to mention the company’s name and products in a book. The ensuing novel, “The Bulgari Connection,” raised eyebrows among purists, but she brushed the criticism aside.
At first, she said, she thought: “‘Oh, no, dear me, I am a literary author. You can’t do this kind of thing; my name will be mud forever.’ But then after a while I thought, ‘I don’t care. Let it be mud. They never give me the Booker Prize anyway.’”

James “Buster” Corley, co-founder of Dave and Busters. He was 72: according to his family, he suffered a stroke four months ago that caused “severe damage to the communication and personality part of his brain”, and his death was a suicide.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 4, 2023.

Wednesday, January 4th, 2023

Walter Cunningham, Apollo 7 astronaut. NASA.

Mr. Cunningham, a physicist and a former Marine pilot, joined with Capt. Walter M. Schirra Jr. of the Navy and Maj. Donn F. Eisele of the Air Force on a virtually flawless 11-day mission in October 1968. They completed 163 orbits of the Earth (four and a half million miles) in a reconstructed space capsule with many safety modifications and became the first NASA astronauts to appear on television from space.

…

Apollo 7 — which blasted off on Oct. 11, 1968, following unmanned Apollo flights in the wake of the disastrous fire — passed its maneuverability and reliability tests. The capsule rendezvoused with an orbiting stage of the Saturn 1-B rocket that had sent it into space, indicating that it would have no trouble docking with a lunar module that would carry two astronauts from the capsule to the moon and back. The Apollo 7 astronauts, who comprised NASA’s first three-man crew, also successfully tested an engine in the rear of their capsule designed to put the spacecraft into and out of lunar orbit on a future mission.
And for the first time, astronauts carried a camera providing TV images. They demonstrated how they could float in their weightless environment in what became known as “The Wally, Walt and Donn Show,” and they put together a hand-lettered sign that said, “Hello From the Lovely Apollo Room, High Atop Everything.”
There was a problem, though: Captain Schirra had a heavy head cold, Major Eisele had a lesser cold and Mr. Cunningham, as he would later recall, felt “a little blah.” NASA feared that the colds could result in the bursting of eardrums as the astronauts returned to Earth.
They were, in fact, just fine when they splashed down some 325 miles south of Bermuda, less than a mile off target. Their mission was so successful that Apollo 8 orbited the moon, another important prelude to the moon landing in July 1969.
But Apollo 7 had its blemishes. It would be remembered for Captain Schirra’s disputes with NASA controllers in Houston. Speaking on an open microphone monitored by the press, he protested the agency’s ambitious schedule for TV transmissions, which he felt took valuable time away from the astronauts’ work. He also insisted that the astronauts dispense with the rule requiring pressurized helmets on re-entry, fearing that this could damage their eardrums in light of their colds. He got his way.
Captain Schirra, who flew in the Mercury and Gemini programs, had told NASA he planned to retire after Apollo 7. That mission proved to be not just the first but also the last for both Mr. Cunningham and Major Eisele.

…

Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations for the Apollo program, wrote in his memoir, “Flight: My Life in Mission Control” (2001), that Mr. Cunningham and Major Eisele had supported Captain Schirra on the helmet issue. Mr. Kraft said he regarded their collective stance as “insubordinate” and recalled telling Donald Slayton, who selected crews for the Apollo missions, that “this crew shouldn’t fly again.”

…

The Apollo 7 crewmen did have to settle for NASA’s second-highest award, the Exceptional Service Medal, while subsequent Apollo crews and the crews of the Skylab program were given the top award, the Distinguished Service Medal.
NASA upgraded the Apollo 7 astronauts’ medals to the Distinguished Service citation at an October 2008 ceremony, citing the mission’s success, notwithstanding the arguments with flight controllers. But Mr. Cunningham was the only crewman alive by then. Major Eisele, who died in 1987, was represented by his widow, Susan Eisele-Black; Captain Schirra, who died in 2007, by the astronaut Bill Anders.
Mr. Kraft struck a conciliatory stance. “We gave you a hard time once, but you certainly survived that and have done extremely well since,” he told Mr. Cunningham in a recorded message. “You’ve done well by yourself, you’ve done well for NASA, and I am frankly very proud to call you a friend.”

Posted in History, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 3, 2023.

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023

Very quick roundups from the past few days:

Fred White, drummer for Earth, Wind and Fire.

Anita Pointer, of the Pointer Sisters.

Jeremiah Green, drummer for Modest Mouse.

Uche Nwaneri, former offensive lineman for the Jacksonville Jaguars. He was 38.

RoadRich sent over an obit for Ken Block, rally driver and YouTuber. He was 55, and died in a snowmobile accident.

Chris Ledesma, music editor for “The Simpsons”. He worked on every episode through May of 2022.

Posted in Cars, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 31, 2022.

Saturday, December 31st, 2022

Wow. When it rains…

Joseph Alois Ratzinger, also known as Pope Benedict XVI. Vatican News Service.

Barbara Walters. THR.

I know I’m being short with both of these. Mike the Musicologist is up for New Year’s, and we have a long list of things to do. Also, both of these stories are being covered by everybody and his brother, so these obits are more for the hysterical record than they are hot news flashes.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 30, 2022.

Friday, December 30th, 2022

Pelé. ESPN.

“Pelé is one of the few who contradicted my theory,” Andy Warhol once said. “Instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.”

…

In his 21-year career, Pelé — born Edson Arantes do Nascimento — scored 1,283 goals in 1,367 professional matches, including 77 goals for the Brazilian national team.
Many of those goals became legendary, but Pelé’s influence on the sport went well beyond scoring. He helped create and promote what he later called “o jogo bonito” — the beautiful game — a style that valued clever ball control, inventive pinpoint passing and a voracious appetite for attacking. Pelé not only played it better than anyone; he also championed it around the world.

Dave Whitlock, fly fisherman.

“He was Everyman’s fly-fishing mentor,” Kirk Deeter, the editor in chief of Trout magazine, said in a phone interview. “He made fly fishing more accessible and tore down the notion that fly fishing was a stuffy sport. He just took the pins out from under that.”

…

In 2021, Mr. Whitlock, along with Lefty Kreh, Joe Brooks and Lee Wulff, was named to what Fly Fisherman called its Mount Rushmore of the sport. The magazine cited Mr. Whitlock for “his artistic creativity in his fly tying and his painting”; his love of teaching; and his improvements in the 1970s to the Vibert Box, an incubator and nursery for salmon and trout eggs that had been invented two decades earlier by Richard Vibert, a French fisheries researcher, to better stock streams. It is now called the Whitlock-Vibert Box.

Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer.

Ms. Westwood was just 30 when she and her boyfriend, Malcolm McLaren — who as a music impresario would go on to manage the Sex Pistols — opened a shop called Let It Rock at 430 King’s Road in London. The business, which had a pink vinyl sign out front, was an unconventional one, selling fetish wear and fashions inspired by the Teddy Boy look of the 1950s.
In shaping the look of the era, Ms. Westwood came to be known as the godmother of punk. After her partnership with Mr. McClaren ended, she began designing collections under her own name, and she soon established an international reputation. She went on to open more stores in London and across the globe; her provocative creations appeared on supermodels and celebrities and influenced mainstream fashion. The corsets, platform shoes and mini-crinis (a combination Victorian crinoline and miniskirt) became her hallmarks.
“People really associate her with punk and that whole aesthetic, which is accurate and how she made her name, but she’s so much more than that,” Véronique Hyland, the author of “Dress Code: Unlocking Fashion From the New Look to Millennial Pink” (2022), said in an interview for this obituary. “She was influenced by art history, old master paintings. She’s very focused on the English tradition of tailoring.”

…

Chrissie Hynde, who would later become the lead singer of the Pretenders, was an assistant at the shop. She was quoted in Ms. Westwood’s memoir as saying that “I don’t think punk would have happened without Vivienne and Malcolm.”
“Something would have happened,” she continued, “and it might have been called punk, but it wouldn’t have looked the way it did, even in America. And the look was important.”

…

They saw the store as a laboratory and a salon. When Mr. McLaren managed the Sex Pistols, Ms. Westwood dressed them in T-shirts from the shop and bondage pants accessorized with chains and razor blades. Their aggressively delivered songs, with names like “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen,” were a soundtrack to the nihilism of Britain in the 1970s.

Posted in Fish, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 29, 2022.

Thursday, December 29th, 2022

Daniel Brush, who the NYT describes as a “boundary-defying artist”.

He had become an artist known — at first to a small group of cognoscenti, but gradually to a wider circle — for one-of-a-kind works defined by their detail and the devotion that went into them. His jewelry was often intended not so much to be worn as to be cherished. His small sculptures drew comparisons to Fabergé eggs for their delicacy and their small-scale artistry. He made works inspired by rituals of the Tendai Buddhist monks of Japan and works inspired by watching his son dip animal crackers into milk.

…

He had a morning ritual of sweeping the loft for several hours, “just as a Buddhist monk might sweep the temple ground in meditation,” The Times wrote in 2020. The loft held antique scissors, an 18th-century lathe and assorted other vintage objects and machines, a testament to Mr. Brush’s self-taught mastery of techniques like the aforementioned granulation — visitors who took a magnifying glass to some of his jewelry and other pieces saw that they were adorned with strings of grainlike bits of gold.
“What struck me in his work is his demanding nature and his ability to work gold, aluminum and steel with absolute precision,” Nicolas Bos, chief executive of Van Cleef & Arpels, the French jewelry company, wrote in the preface to the 2019 book “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture.” “He claims to be a goldsmith, a jeweler and a metalworker, but I think, before everything, there’s a sort of magician within him.”

…

“I am available, and people can come and they can look, and every once in a while they come,” he said. “So what happened in the past 30 years is I became immensely famous to 10 people, and five died.”

I wasn’t familiar with Mr. Brush and his work until I read the obit. There are some photos in the obit, and I confess: his art impresses me.

Posted in Art, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 27, 2022.

Tuesday, December 27th, 2022

Stephen Greif, British actor.

Other credits include some “Doctor Who” related shows, some “Judge Dredd” related work, “EastEnders”, “Drop the Dead Donkey”, and “The Last Days of Pompeii”.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Michael Reed, noted director of photography. Other credits include “The Groundstar Conspiracy”, “Rasputin: The Mad Monk”, and “God’s Outlaw“.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 23, 2022.

Friday, December 23rd, 2022

Ali Ahmed Aslam.

He is frequently credited with inventing chicken tikka masala.

In Aslam family lore, it was a local bus driver who popped in for dinner and suggested that plain chicken tikka was too spicy for him, and too dry — and also he wasn’t feeling well, so wasn’t there something sweeter and saucier that he could have instead? Sure, why not. Mr. Aslam, who was known as Mr. Ali, tipped the tandoor-grilled pieces of meat into a pan with a quick tomato sauce and returned them to the table.

…

Chicken tikka masala boomed in the curry houses of 1970s Britain. Soon it was more than just a dish you could order off the menu at every curry house, or buy packaged at the supermarket; it was a powerful political symbol.

…

As the curry house established itself as a British institution, more flourished around Shish Mahal. In 1979, when Mr. Aslam renovated the place, he reopened with a clever gimmick: all of the original 1964 prices, for a limited time. This led to long, frenzied lines down the block. In photos taken around this time, Mr. Aslam is handsome and beaming, in a tuxedo jacket and bow tie, with the thick, floppy hair of a movie star.

…

Though two of his sons took over ownership of Shish Mahal in 1994, Mr. Aslam never officially retired, and he continued to drive his white Jaguar to work and to wear the exquisite suits he had tailored on Savile Row. Known for his relentless work ethic, he considered himself a proud Glaswegian, a Scotsman through and through.

Maggie Thrett, actress. Credits other than that minor SF TV show from the 1960s include “Run, Joe, Run”, “I Dream of Jeannie”, and ‘The Wild Wild West”.

Posted in 1970s, Food, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 22, 2022.

Thursday, December 22nd, 2022

Diane McBain, actress.

Other credits include “Airwolf”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Barbary Coast”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Blind Mirror”, season 3, episode 17. She was “Stella Diamond”.)

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

Obit watch: December 21, 2022.

Wednesday, December 21st, 2022

Franco Harris, one of the great Steelers. Archive version, but the NYT keeps saying “This is a developing story. A full obituary will be published soon.”

The 6-foot-2 running back won four Super Bowls with the Steelers as they established themselves as the N.F.L.’s dominant team of the 1970s, and he was named to the Pro Bowl in each of his first nine seasons. But it was a single, heads-up play that more than anything defined his career.
On Dec. 23, 1972, the Steelers were trailing, 7-6, in a divisional round playoff game against the Oakland Raiders. With less than 30 seconds to play in the fourth quarter, the Steelers quarterback, Terry Bradshaw, lofted a desperation pass to John “Frenchy” Fuqua, only to see the ball deflect toward the ground. But Harris scooped the ball out of the air just inches from the turf and ran untouched for the game-winning touchdown, a miraculous finish that has been replayed thousands of times since.
Five decades later, Harris, who played college football at Penn State, remained one of the most beloved Steelers players, an instantly recognizable face in Pittsburgh. He rushed for 12,120 yards over 13 seasons, 12 of which were with Pittsburgh, and was a linchpin of the Steelers’ most successful era, winning Super Bowls in the 1974, 1975, 1978 and 1979 seasons.

I want to mention pigpen51’s obit for Les Lowery, leather and saddle maker. I was unfamiliar with him until pigpen posted, but he sounds like a really good guy: anybody who helps people walk is doing a mitzvah in my book. I spent some time trying to find more about Mr. Lowery online, but everything I did find was paywalled.

Mike Hodges, director. Other credits include “The Terminal Man”, “Morons From Outer Space”, and “A Prayer For the Dying”.

Frank “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, notorious New England mobster.

Posted in Law, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: December 20, 2022.

Tuesday, December 20th, 2022

I have spent the past few days running around with Mike the Musicologist, so I haven’t really had a chance to post obits. Not that I’m complaining, but I did get a little behind.

Marion Smith, cave explorer.

…he was roundly considered the Greatest of All Time. He explored 8,291 separate caves — far more than anyone on record, ever. He climbed up and down some two million feet of rope.
He was especially taken with vertical caving: He descended more than 3,000 underground pits deeper than 30 feet, often dangling freely in the abyss on a rope no thicker than a thumb.

…

Mr. Smith developed a reputation as the guy who seemed to be everywhere, every weekend, constantly announcing new finds, pushing into unknown spaces without a whiff of fear. In 2014 he was pinned under a boulder for nine hours. Three years later he was hit in the temple by a fist-size rock that fell from 40 feet. In both cases he went to the hospital, and in both cases he was back underground within days.

…

In 1998 Mr. Smith was part of a team of cavers who discovered a 4.5-acre, 350-foot-tall underground chamber in East Tennessee they named the Rumble Room. They kept it secret for four years while they explored and mapped it, and they revealed it to the public only when a nearby town threatened to use an adjacent cave as part of a new sewage system.
“I didn’t want to let the cat out,” Mr. Smith told The Tennessean newspaper in 2002. “I wanted to keep it in the bag longer.”

…

Caves were his life, but exploring them was not his only passion. He was perhaps the world’s leading expert on the history of mining for saltpeter, a primary ingredient in gunpowder, which in the 19th century was often harvested from caves.
In the 2010s he joined with Joseph Douglas, a historian at Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin, Tenn., in a project to document the thousands of signatures left by Confederate and Union soldiers in Mammoth Cave, in central Kentucky. Mr. Smith was particularly taken with researching the men themselves, and he ultimately wrote about 80 miniature biographies.
“He called it the history of the obscure, but it took a great level of patience and attention to fine detail,” Dr. Douglas said in a phone interview.

Dino Danelli, drummer for the Rascals.

Sonya Eddy, actress.

Tom Browning, pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds.

On September 16, 1988, Browning tossed a perfect game against the Dodgers in a 1-0 victory, striking out Tracy Woodson to ensure his place in history.
Browning was 123-90 in his 12-season career, with his first 11 seasons in Cincy and two starts at the end of his career with the Royals. Browning was inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame in 2006.

Terry Hall, of The Specials and Fun Boy Three.

Stephanie Bissonnette. She was in “Mean Girls the Musical” and died at 32.

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

Obit watch: December 14, 2022.

Wednesday, December 14th, 2022

Curt Simmons, pitcher.

Simmons was the last survivor of the mostly young 1950 Phillies team known as the Whiz Kids, who captured the National League pennant on the final day of the season, only to be swept by the Yankees in the World Series.
While pitching for the Phillies, Simmons was a three-time All-Star. In his mid-30s, after coming back from elbow surgery, he pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals’ 1964 N.L. pennant winners and started twice in their seven-game World Series victory over the Yankees.
Relying on his fastball early on and later reinventing himself with a variety of pitches that kept batters off stride, Simmons had a career record of 193 victories and 183 losses.

Stephen “tWitch” Boss.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline. If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

For the record: NYT obits for Stuart Margolin and Mike Leach.

Posted in Obits, Sports, TV | 3 Comments »

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