Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: January 19, 2023.

Thursday, January 19th, 2023

Yukihiro Takahashi, drummer and vocalist for the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Mr. Takahashi and Yellow Magic Orchestra, which he founded in 1978 with the musicians Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, were often ranked alongside the German electronic group Kraftwerk as pioneers in electronic music and significant influences on emergent genres like hip-hop, New Wave and techno.
Yellow Magic Orchestra was among the first bands to employ in live shows devices like the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer and the Moog II-C synthesizer, which they used to complement Mr. Hosono’s funky guitar and Mr. Takahashi’s tight, driving drums.
Unlike their German counterparts, who leaned into the avant-garde nature of electronic sound and referred to themselves as automatons, Yellow Magic Orchestra found ways to bend it toward pop music, blending in elements of Motown, disco and synth-pop.
In a 1980 appearance on the television show “Soul Train,” the band performed a souped-up version of Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up,” after which a bemused Don Cornelius, the show’s host, interviewed Mr. Takahashi. Kraftwerk, it might go without saying, never appeared on “Soul Train.”

Jonathan Raban, writer.

Mr. Raban’s literary narratives of the places he visited and the people he met combined travelogue, memoir, reportage and criticism. What he was not, he insisted, was a travel writer.
“Travel writing seems to me a too-big umbrella, full of holes to let the rain in,” he told Granta magazine in 2008. “Anyone commissioned by a newspaper to write up meals and hotels in foreign holiday resorts is a travel writer. Anyone who does a guidebook is a travel writer.”

David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills & Nash and The Byrds. This seems to be breaking news: hattip on this to Lawrence. (Edited to add: NYT obit.)

Arthur Duncan, noted tap dancer.

There were more renowned tap dancers during his long career — Bill Robinson, Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines among them — but only Mr. Duncan had a regular national television showcase like the one he had on Saturday nights on the popular if square Welk show, from 1964 to 1982.
“‘Lawrence’ was not the hippest show around,” Mr. Hines told The Daily News of New York in 1989, when he was headlining “An Evening of Tap” at Carnegie Hall with Mr. Duncan and other dancers, including Bunny Briggs, Brenda Bufalino and Savion Glover. “But I’ll tell you, when nobody was home, I’d tune in, hoping to catch Arthur.”
He added, “He’s one of the most underrated dancers around, and a lot of that has to do with the association of the show. But other dancers know he’s great — and for a while he was the only one keeping tap in the public eye.”

…

“He did a number almost every day, and he could always count on knocking me out when he did ‘Jump Through the Ring,’” Ms. White wrote in her 1995 autobiography, “Here We Go Again: My Life in Television, 1949-1995.”
But broadcast during the Jim Crow era, some Southern stations threatened to boycott the show because of Mr. Duncan’s presence on it, a response that came as a “frightfully ugly surprise,” she wrote.
In the 2018 documentary “Betty White: First Lady of Television,” Mr. Duncan said, “People in the South resented me being on the show, and they wanted me thrown out.”But Ms. White did not yield.
“I’m sorry, but, you know, he stays,” she recalled saying to NBC. “Live with it.”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 18, 2023.

Wednesday, January 18th, 2023

Lucile Randon, better known as Sister André. She was 118.

The French nun became the world’s oldest known person after the death of Japan’s Kane Tanaka, who died last year at 119, according to Guinness World Records. With Sister André’s death, the oldest known person, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which validates those thought to be 110 or older, is Maria Branyas Morera. She was born in the United States, lives in Spain and is 115.

…

She was known to be a gourmet. For her 117th birthday, she ate foie gras, roasted capon, cheese and a dessert similar to a baked alaska. She said in several interviews that she enjoyed a daily diet of wine and chocolate.

Frank Thomas, one of the original Mets.

...Frank Thomas was an All-Star with the Pirates in 1954, 1955 and again in 1958, when he had his best season, hitting 35 home runs, driving in 109 runs and batting .281.
He later played for the Cincinnati Reds, the Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Braves, who traded him to the Mets in November 1961 when they were forming the roster for their National League debut.
Usually playing in left field for Manager Casey Stengel’s 1962 Mets team, which lost a record 120 games, Thomas drove in 94 runs in addition to his 34 homers — a club record that stood until Dave Kingman broke it with 36 in 1975 — taking advantage of the short left-field foul line at the Polo Grounds, the Mets’ home for their first two seasons.

…

He later played for the Houston Astros and again for the Milwaukee Braves before rejoining the Cubs, who released him early in the 1966 season, ending his career.
In addition to his 286 home runs, Thomas drove in 962 runs in his career and had a .266 batting average.

I encourage you to click over to the obit so you can read the “Yo la tengo!” story, which I think is too long to put here.

K. Alex Müller, winner (with J. Georg Bednorz) of a Nobel Prize for advances in high-temperature superconductivity.

Jay Briscoe, pro wrestler with Ring of Honor.

The Briscoes — Jay, and his brother Mark — are 13-time tag-team champions of the promotion, which included a present reign.

He was 38, and died in a car accident. He had two daughters in the car with him, who are currently hospitalized.

Wayne “Gino” Odjick, NHL player. The obit describes him as a “beloved enforcer”. He was 52, and died of a heart attack: he’d been diagnosed with AL amyloidosis in 2014. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Wear your seatbelts, people. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Obits, Religion, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 16, 2023.

Monday, January 16th, 2023

Gina Lollobrigida. THR.

A 1955 film, “La Donna Più Bella del Mondo” (“The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” — a term some in Hollywood came to use about Ms. Lollobrigida herself), released in the United States as “Beautiful but Dangerous,” brought Ms. Lollobrigida her first major acting award: the David di Donatello, Italy’s equivalent of the Oscar. She won the Donatello twice more, for “Venere Imperial” (1962), in a tie with Silvana Mangano, and for “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” in a tie with Monica Vitti.
Ms. Lollobrigida was always considered more a sex symbol than a serious actress — at least by the American press — but she was also nominated for a BAFTA award as best foreign actress in “Pane, Amore e Fantasia” (1953). She received Golden Globe nominations for “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell” in 1969 and for a recurring role on the prime-time television soap “Falcon Crest” in 1985.

Al Brown. Other credits include “12 Monkeys” (the Gilliam film, not the TV series), “Forensic Files”, “The F.B.I. Files”, and something called “Fartcopter”.

Charles White, 1979 Heisman Trophy winner with U.S.C.

White, who went on to play eight seasons in the N.F.L., was part of U.S.C.’s lineage of elite running backs, four of whom also won the Heisman: Marcus Allen, O.J. Simpson, Mike Garrett and Reggie Bush. White’s 6,245 rushing yards exceed the 4,810 gained by Allen, who ranks second on U.S.C.’s all-time list.
White was not especially big or fast; rather than elude defenders, he bulled his way through them. And he was a workhorse: In 1978, he rushed 374 times (65 more than anyone else in the N.C.A.A.’s top ranks) for 1,859 yards. The next year he ran for 2,050.

…

White was chosen by the Cleveland Browns in the first round of the N.F.L. draft in 1980, but in four seasons, he never rushed for more than 342 yards. After he was released by the Browns, he was signed by the Rams, who were then coached by Robinson, for the 1985 season.
His first two seasons with the Rams were uneventful, but he was spectacular in 1987, carrying the ball 324 times for a league-leading 1,374 yards and 11 touchdowns. However, the season was tainted by a 24-day players’ strike, during which games were played largely by nonunion replacements for three weeks. White was one of a group of players who crossed the union’s picket lines.
He started the 1988 season serving his four-game suspension and never regained his starting job. He gained only 323 yards that year, and Greg Bell led the Rams with 1,212 rushing yards.

He also struggled with substance abuse and dementia (possibly caused by CTE). He was 64 and died of esophageal cancer.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 14, 2023.

Saturday, January 14th, 2023

Robbie Knievel, daredevil and Evel’s son. He was 60: pancreatic cancer got him.

In one of his best known jumps, in 1989, Mr. Knievel, decked out in a star-spangled, white-leather suit, vaulted 150 feet over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. It was a kind of tribute to Evel Knievel, who had cleared the same fountains in 1967, only to land in a bone-breaking crash that horrified viewers.
“When I made the jump and said, ‘That was for you, Dad,’ he ran up and hugged me, with tears in his eyes,” the son recalled years later. “I had never seen him so emotional.”

Robbie Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

Hannes Keller, one of the pioneers of deep diving.

On December 3, 1962, he dived down 1,000 feet.

Mr. Keller and his expedition partner, Peter Small, a journalist and a veteran diver, knew that critical to the mission would be how well the gas they breathed mitigated the possibility of getting “the bends” — the potentially deadly decompression sickness caused when bubbles of nitrogen form in divers’ bodies during rapid ascents.
Mr. Keller enlisted the help of a cardiopulmonary specialist in Zurich and an IBM computer to conceive a secret formula of oxygen, nitrogen and helium, as well as a plan to dispense it at different mixtures at different depths.
The descent, on Dec. 3, 1962, went well — “Anybody can go down,” Mr. Keller told Life magazine in 1961 — but when Mr. Keller exited the Atlantis on the floor of the Pacific Ocean to plant Swiss and American flags, his breathing hoses became entangled with them. He dropped the flags and returned to the vessel. But he started to feel dizzy and soon fell unconscious. So did Mr. Small.
When the mission’s operations crew was pulling up the vessel, they saw the unconscious men on a television feed and sent two divers to investigate. One of them was able to shut the vessel’s hatch after cutting away a piece of Mr. Keller’s flipper, which had become stuck between the door and its frame, allowing pressure to build inside the bell. The other diver went missing. His body was never found.
Mr. Keller revived while still inside the bell. Mr. Small woke up, too, but he was weak, thirsty and sleepy, and eventually Mr. Keller had to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Mr. Small died of decompression sickness before he could be transported to a hospital.

…

Despite the deaths on that dive, Mr. Keller and Dr. Albert Buhlmann, the cardiopulmonary specialist who had helped Mr. Keller design his gas mixture, signed a contract in 1964 with Shell International Petroleum to continue their research.
“Hannes Keller’s prominence in the world of deep diving was relatively brief but definitely bold,” Mr. Hellwarth said in an email. “His thousand-foot dive turned into a Houdini-like spectacle, unfortunately with disastrous consequences.”
Mr. Keller moved on. In the late 1960s, he and a business partner, Hans Hess, developed a deep-sea diving suit and an aerodynamic ski-racing suit. Over the next few decades he started a line of computers, developed software programs and created an online art and photo museum.

He was also “a classical pianist who occasionally appeared in concert”, but I’ll leave that story for the reader.

Posted in Geek, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 13, 2023.

Friday, January 13th, 2023

Paul Johnson, noted conservative British historian.

A writer of immense range and output, capable of 6,000 words a day when in harness, Mr. Johnson modeled his career after earlier English men of letters, like Thomas Babington Macaulay and G.K. Chesterton. With an affable prose style and supreme confidence in his own opinions, he was happy to deliver forceful judgments on almost anything: the tangled politics of the Middle East, his personal quest for God or the cultural meaning of the Spice Girls.
The author or the editor of more than 50 books, Mr. Johnson alternated between large histories (of Christianity, Judaism, England, the United States, the middle years of the 20th century, art) and slim biographies of eminences from the ancient or more immediate past (Socrates, Jesus, Edward III, Elizabeth I, George Washington, Mozart, Napoleon, Darwin, Churchill, Eisenhower, Pope John XXIII.)
Writing more for a popular audience than for the approval of specialists, he filtered his wide reading through an ethical lens. As a historian, he looked back to the Victorians, for whom readable prose was as crucial as archival research, and, like those old-fashioned moralists, he was fond of hierarchies. Whether the subject was Renaissance sculptors or American humorists, no era, nation, religion, politician, event, building or piece of art or music was safe from his need to compare and rank.

…

He had an eye for the telling fact: “Between 1800 and 1835 Parliament debated no less than 11 bills seeking to make the deliberate ill-treatment of animals unlawful; all failed, mostly by narrow margins.” And: “In 1730 three out of four children born in London failed to reach their fifth birthday. By 1830 the proportion had been reversed.”

Lawrence emailed an obit for William Consovoy, prominent lawyer.

Over the course of a relatively short career, Mr. Consovoy established a reputation as one of the best and most dogged conservative litigators before the Supreme Court, with a penchant for cases aimed at making major changes to America’s constitutional landscape.He clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas during the 2008-9 Supreme Court term, and he came away with the conviction that the court was poised to tilt further to the right — and that constitutional rulings that had once been considered out of reach by conservatives, on issues like voting rights, abortion and affirmative action, would suddenly be within grasp.

…

In 2013, in one of his early cases before the Supreme Court, Mr. Consovoy successfully argued the Section 4 case, Shelby County v. Holder, persuading the Court to get rid of the requirement that several states and counties, mostly in the South, had to receive federal clearance before changing their election laws.

…

Mr. Consovoy often led the charge in attacking existing laws in court or defending new ones. In 2020 alone, he argued against an extension of the deadline for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin, the re-enfranchisement of felons in Florida and a California plan to send absentee ballots to all registered voters.
He was equally involved in efforts to strike down affirmative action by colleges and universities. He played a supporting role in Fisher v. the University of Texas, a case that originated in 2008 and came before the Supreme Court twice. In both instances, the university successfully defended its plan to automatically admit in-state students who had graduated in the top 10 percent of their class.
Mr. Consovoy then worked closely with Mr. Blum on cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that their affirmative action programs — and, by extension, college and university affirmative action programs generally — were unconstitutional.
Those cases, brought on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions, an organization that Mr. Blum founded, reached the Supreme Court last fall. By then, Mr. Consovoy was too ill to argue them himself, so two of his partners did instead. The court is widely expected to decide in favor of Students for Fair Admissions before the end of the term, most likely in June.

…

The new firm took on a variety of cases, not all of them concerned with constitutional matters but most of them in service of conservative causes and ideas. After Uber announced in 2020 that its food-delivery branch, Uber Eats, would waive fees for Black-owned businesses, Consovoy McCarthy arranged for some 31,000 complainants to claim reverse discrimination through arbitration, leaving the company owing as much as $92 million.

Lisa Marie Presley. THR. Pitchfork.

Constantine II, Olympic gold medalist (sailing, 1960) and the last king of Greece.

A lot of this took place shortly before or shortly after I was born, but it’s an interesting story I was previously not aware of.

…public support faded after he tried to influence Greek politics, machinations that led to the collapse of the newly-elected centrist government of Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou.
Constantine appointed a series of defectors from Mr. Papandreou’s party as prime minister without holding elections, a widely unpopular chain of events that became known as “the Apostasy.”
The increasing instability culminated in a coup led by a group of army colonels in 1967, considered one of the darkest moments in Greece’s modern history. It set off seven years of a brutal dictatorship for which many Greeks still blame the former king.
Constantine initially accepted the junta before attempting a counter-coup in December of the same year. When it failed, he was forced to flee to Rome, where he spent the first years of his exile.
After the dictatorship ended in 1974, Greece’s new government called a referendum on the monarchy, and 69 percent of Greeks voted to abolish it. The vote effectively deposed Constantine and ended a monarchy that had ruled Greece since 1863, except for the period from 1924 to 1935, when it was first abolished and then restored.

…

In exile he lived mostly in London, where he is said to have developed a close relationship with his second cousin, Charles, now King Charles III. He was chosen to be one of the godfathers to Prince William, heir to the British throne.

…

His relationship with the Greek authorities after his dethroning remained prickly. In 1994, the Socialist government passed a law stripping him of his nationality and expropriating the former royal family’s property. Constantine took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, which in 2002 ordered Greece to pay him and his family nearly $15 million in compensation, a fraction of what he had sought. He accused the government of acting “unjustly and vindictively.”
“They treat me sometimes as if I’m their enemy,” he said in 2002. “I am not the enemy. I consider it the greatest insult in the world for a Greek to be told that he is not a Greek.”
The former king could have regained a Greek passport by adopting a surname, which the government demanded that he do to acknowledge that he was no longer king. But he insisted on being called only Constantine, and continued to cast himself as king and his children as princes and princesses.

…

In 1964, he married Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark, who became queen.
She survives him, as do their five children: Alexia, Pavlos, Nikolaos, Theodora and Philippos; nine grandchildren; and two sisters, Sofia, the former queen of Spain, and former Princess Irene.

Posted in Books, Elvis, History, Law, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 12, 2023.

Thursday, January 12th, 2023

Jeff Beck. Pitchfork.

I find it difficult to write about music: I just don’t know enough. Perhaps one of my commenters will have something more to say about Mr. Beck.

Dorothy Tristan. Other credits include “Fear on Trial”, “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”, and “Rollercoaster”.

Carole Cook. Other credits include “The Gauntlet”, “Quincy M.E.”, and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”.

Ben Masters. Other credits include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “Petrocelli”, and “Noble House”.

Barrie Youngfellow. Other credits include “Carter Country”, “The Eddie Capra Mysteries”, and “WKRP in Cincinnati”.

Hubert G. Wells, noted animal trainer.

“Sheena was a bad picture, almost painful to watch, but for me and my crew, it was fun to do and financially rewarding,” he wrote in his 2017 memoir, Lights, Camera, Lions: Memoirs of a Real-Life Dr. Doolittle.

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

Obit watch: January 11, 2023.

Wednesday, January 11th, 2023

George Pell, Cardinal and former Vatican treasurer.

From 2014 to 2019, Cardinal Pell was the church’s financial czar and third-in-command, and he tried to push through reforms to make its finances more transparent. Those efforts were truncated in 2017, when he was forced to return to Australia to face trial on charges of sex abuse dating to the 1990s. The case transfixed Australia — cameras met Cardinal Pell at the airport when he arrived from Rome.
In December 2018, he was convicted by an Australian jury of five counts of child sexual abuse of two choir boys that were said to have occurred in 1996, during his time in Melbourne. Less than two years later, in April 2020, Australia’s highest court overturned the conviction, saying that there was “a significant possibility” that he was not guilty.
Throughout the proceedings, Cardinal Pell maintained his innocence. At a news conference in Rome in 2017, he said he had been a victim of “relentless character assassination.” He said, “The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me.”
At the time of his death, Cardinal Pell faced a civil suit by the father of a now-deceased choir boy who alleged that the cleric had abused the boy when he was archbishop of Melbourne. In a statement, the claimant’s lawyer said the suit would continue, adding: “There is still a great deal of evidence for this claim to rely upon.”
Separately, a 2017 Australian government inquiry into the abuse of tens of thousands of children in churches, schools and other institutions over a period of decades found that Cardinal Pell had been aware of the sexual abuse of children by other Roman Catholic priests as early as 1974, but failed to take action.

Blake Hounshell, NYT reporter and editor.

His family said in a statement that he had died “after a long and courageous battle with depression.” The police in Washington were investigating the death as a suicide, a police official said.

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.

Posted in Media, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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

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