Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: May 19, 2026.

Tuesday, May 19th, 2026

Mark Fuhrman.

This is a couple of days old, but worth noting: G. Robert Blakey.

He did the RICO.

In 1969, he was hired as the chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. It was there that he worked on the RICO law, under Senator John L. McClellan, the Arkansas Democrat who chaired the subcommittee.
The law — Title IX of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, for which Senator McClellan was the driving force — says that a person or group of people who commit certain crimes as part of a conspiracy or criminal enterprise can be charged with racketeering. And it allows those hurt by the enterprise to sue for three times their actual damages.
Previously, prosecutors would charge people for committing single crimes like murder, extortion or gambling, or for conspiracy to commit those individual felonies. “Bob took conspiracy law and broadened it to describe a pattern of racketeering that is committed in furtherance of an enterprise,” Ed Stier, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey, said in an interview.

…

Some critics have argued that the RICO law is too vague, that it is too widely used and that its penalties are sometimes out of proportion to the crimes being prosecuted.
“It is sort of the white-collar equivalent of capital punishment,” Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, told The Los Angeles Times in 1989 after the conviction of a New Jersey investment partnership for engaging in a racketeering conspiracy involving securities fraud.

Posted in California Über Alles, History, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 18, 2026.

Monday, May 18th, 2026

Peter G. Neumann, computer security guru and a hero of mine.

Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man), who has worked as a computer scientist and security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., since 1971, has long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a computer industry that has been prone to repeatedly make the same mistakes.
In 2010, Dr. Neumann launched a research project that investigated how to protect against the most common types of security vulnerabilities. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the program, known as Cheri, developed a new approach to computer hardware that restricts software programs so that malicious instructions are impossible to execute.
An analogy would be replacing a master key that opens every door in a building with a set of keys that each only open the specific rooms their holder is authorized to enter — and making it physically impossible to copy or modify them.

…

Beginning in 1985, Dr. Neumann served as editor for the Association for Computing Machinery Risks Forum newsgroup, an influential collection of emails from readers reporting computer failures and foibles that has an avid following of hundreds of thousands.
Since then, he has maintained the sprawling compendium of computer failures, flaws, foibles and privacy issues, annotating each of the 3,195 issues with wry comments and the occasional pun. In 1995, the list became the basis for his book, “Computer-Related Risks.”

…

“There’s no limit on the impact that a small team can have if they don’t care who gets credit,” said Patrick Lincoln, the office director of Darpa’s Information Innovation Office, who described Dr. Neumann as routinely working behind the scenes without credit. “The world is just so much a better place for having had Peter.”

Schlitz Beer.

I’m not much of a beer drinker, but this gives me a chance to embed my favorite Sven and Ole joke.

Posted in Geek, Mixology, Obits | Comments Closed

Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.

Friday, May 15th, 2026

It has been more than a minute since I’ve been scuba diving.

And my dive certification came from PADI (which, as we all know, stands for “Put Another Diver In”).

But these people were cave diving?

At 160 feet?

The fark?

I know, it is early, the investigation isn’t complete, and this is the NYPost. But right now, this sounds to me like criminal negligence.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 15, 2026.

Friday, May 15th, 2026

Joe Sedelmaier, commercial director.

Among his works:

And this one:

And this one:

I can’t embed it, but here’s a link to his Southern Airways “Steerage” commercial. For some reason, that commercial reminds me of…every Southwest flight I’ve been on.

Claudine Longet, actress and singer.

The enchanting, doe-eyed Longet recorded albums of breathy pop for A&M Records before she sang the Henry Mancini-Don Black song “Nothing to Lose” in Blake Edwards’ The Party (1968), in which she portrayed an aspiring actress alongside Peter Sellers.

I’ve heard this is actually a pretty good movie, but have never seen it.

A onetime Las Vegas showgirl, Longet had married “Moon River” crooner [Andy] Williams in December 1961 and appeared on his long-running NBC variety show and Christmas specials, often with their three children.

After she and Williams divorced (amicably), she took up with a skier named Vladimir “Spider” Sabich.

… Longet and the kids were living with the California-born Sabich at his chalet in Starwood, Colorado, when she shot him on March 21, 1976, in his bathroom with a .22-caliber German‐made gun that had been purchased by his father. She claimed the gun accidentally discharged as he was showing her how it worked.

He died on the way to the hospital. She was criminally charged, but local law enforcement completely botched the case. She ended up being convicted of “criminally negligent homicide”.

She was given two years’ probation, fined $250 and sentenced to 30 days in jail (she was able to serve most of her sentence on weekends).
The Sabich family later filed a civil suit against Longet for $1.3 million, but the case was settled out of court. Longet agreed not to speak publicly about Sabich or the murder and to never publish a book about her life and the trial, and her career as a singer and actress was done.

@jack.hutton

The Claudine Longet Ski Invitational 1976 SNL A classic. #SNL #classic #1976 —

♬ original sound – Jack Hutton

Edited to add: I know the NYT is watching this space. Because as soon as I put up my own obit for someone, the NYT puts up theirs. Guys, let’s not fight. I’d be willing to entertain a job offer, though I would insist on working remotely.

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

Obit watch: May 13, 2026.

Wednesday, May 13th, 2026

Betty Broderick passed away last week. She was 78.

Some folks may remember this from the late 1980s. Ms. Broderick’s husband dumped her for a younger woman.

On Nov. 5, 1989, Ms. Broderick entered the home of her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, a prominent malpractice lawyer in San Diego, and Linda Kolkena Broderick, a former flight attendant who became his legal assistant and, while he was still married to Ms. Broderick, his lover, and shot them in bed with a .38-caliber pistol.
Ms. Broderick, then about to turn 42, immediately turned herself in to the police, and never denied firing the fatal shots at her former husband, 44, and his second wife, 28. But she denied committing murder, claiming in media interviews and in the courtroom to have been a victim of years of psychological abuse.

It was one of those minor sensations at the time.

Ms. Broderick spoke to magazines and newspapers before and after her trials, and twice appeared from prison on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” angrily venting about her husband.
“He went off with the bimbo at 40, driving a red Corvette — haven’t we heard this before?” she told The Los Angeles Times three weeks after the killings.

…

At her first trial, mental health specialists called by both the prosecution and the defense testified that Ms. Broderick was narcissistic and histrionic. Melvin G. Goldzband, a psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution, refuted her claims of emotional abuse.
“She wanted not to be rejected,” he said, adding that she would have been angry even if her husband had agreed to an extravagant monthly support settlement.
“People extend battles because it’s the only form of the relationship that they have,” Dr. Goldzband said.
Ms. Broderick was sentenced in 1992 to the maximum possible term: 32 years to life in prison. She was twice denied parole.

Rex Reed, noted (and I kind of want to say “notorious”) movie critic.

His 1967 Times article on Michelangelo Antonioni — “If there is anything more excruciating than sitting through a Michelangelo Antonioni film, it’s sitting through a Michelangelo Antonioni interview” — led the Italian director to write a letter to the editor disputing Mr. Reed’s characterization of him. To Mr. Reed, Bette Midler was “a zaftig waif,” Peter Lawford a low-I.Q. “court jester” and Warren Beatty just plain insufferable.

…

An oft-quoted Reed takedown was his skewering of Barbra Streisand in 1966 after she kept him waiting longer than a David Lean epic. “Three-and-a-half hours late,” he wrote for The Times, “she plods into the room, falls into a chair with her legs spread out, tears open a basket of fruit, bites into a green banana and says to the reporters, ‘OK, you’ve got 20 minutes.’ ” What Ms. Streisand had to say about him later is best suited for impolite company.

…

He lived in the Dakota, one of New York City’s most prestigious buildings, in a two-bedroom apartment that he had bought in 1969 for $30,000. He even had a brief film career in the 1970s and ’80s, most notably in the gender-bending comedy “Myra Breckinridge,” where Mr. Reed played Myron, who was transitioning to Raquel Welch’s Myra. The movie was universally panned. It was so bad that Mr. Reed put it at the top of his own list of the 10 worst films of 1970.

…

When Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, won best actress at the 1987 Academy Awards for “Children of a Lesser God,” Mr. Reed wrote that she had benefited from a “pity vote.” Bizarrely, and wrongly, he insisted that Marisa Tomei did not really win the 1993 Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in “My Cousin Vinny” and that the presenter, Jack Palance, had read the wrong name. Mr. Reed once mixed up Benicio del Toro, a Puerto Rican actor, and Guillermo del Toro, a Mexican filmmaker, misspelling Benicio to boot.

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 9, 2026.

Saturday, May 9th, 2026

Philip Caputo, author and Vietnam vet.

The Vietnam War, which cost the lives of at least one million Vietnamese and 58,000 American service members, generated an outpouring of fictional and nonfictional books, by some reckoning more than 3,500 titles.
A few works came to be widely regarded as classics because their authors captured unflinchingly the peculiar mix of boredom and terror in combat, the ambivalence about fighting a war that often seemed pointless and unwinnable, and the disheartening malaise that followed America’s first military defeat.
The standouts include works of fiction, including Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (1990), and nonfiction ones like Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” (1977), Ron Kovic’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1976) and Mr. Caputo’s “A Rumor of War” (1977), which sold two million copies and was translated into 15 languages.

…

Mr. Caputo wrote in “A Rumor of War” that his book was about “the things men do in war and the things war does to them.” It opens with an account of Mr. Caputo’s enthusiastic enlistment in the Marine Corps as a 24-year-old Midwesterner, driven by a need to prove his courage and manhood, followed by his 16-month tour of duty as a platoon commander and infantry lieutenant.
He vividly recorded the toll on the soldier’s spirit of the punishing heat, dust, malarial mosquitoes, disease-laden water and minimal hygiene. Those physical challenges were augmented by the confusion about what the platoon under his command was supposed to accomplish in its daily patrols — purportedly to secure the perimeter around the Danang airstrip essential to the safe passage of supplies and soldiers.
It was especially difficult to pinpoint an enemy, hidden and shielded as they were by the thick growth of jungle and by their deadly mines and booby traps. The Vietcong — guerrilla fighters supporting the Communist government in Hanoi — were experienced at warfare, and the periodic skirmishes were bloody, costing the lives of men to whom Mr. Caputo had grown close.

…

After troops under his command intentionally shot two civilians suspected of having Vietcong loyalties, Mr. Caputo took responsibility for the killings and wrote that he was “almost court-martialed” in 1966 before the charges of premeditated murder were dropped; Mr. Caputo left the service with an honorable discharge. He told the story as an illustration of how war can warp the moral codes of even ethical men.

Alex Zanardi has passed away at 59.

For those who may not remember, Mr. Zanardi was a prominent and talented racing driver.

On Sept 15, 2001, he entered an Indy-style race near Klettwitz, Germany. Originally called the German 500, it was renamed the American Memorial 500 in honor of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks four days earlier. Zanardi was leading with 13 laps remaining, when he appeared to accelerate too quickly while exiting a pit stop.
He lost control, and his car swerved across a grassy area and onto the track. He spun into the path of an oncoming driver, Alex Tagliani of Canada, who broadsided Zanardi’s car while traveling roughly 200 miles per hour.
Zanardi’s chassis was split in two, and debris scattered across the track. He said in a 2004 appearance on “The Late Show With David Letterman” that he was administered last rites with the oil of his car’s engine. He was airlifted by helicopter to a Berlin hospital, and doctors amputated both legs above the knee. Tagliani was not seriously injured.

My understanding is that what the doctors did was less “amputation” and more “cleaning up what was left” and replacing Mr. Zanardi’s blood. His legs were scattered all over the track.

I’ve mentioned this book before, but the first chapter of Stephen Olvey’s Rapid Response: My Inside Story as a Motor Racing Life-saver describes the accident and the medical response. Nobody, ever survives a bilateral traumatic amputation of both legs. The fact that Mr. Zanardi did is a tribute to excellent medical planning, especially by Dr. Olvey, some luck, and Mr. Zanardi’s toughness.

Charming, optimistic and an easygoing storyteller, Zanardi often joked about making himself taller with his prosthetics. In his droll appearance with Letterman, who is co-owner of an IndyCar team, he said that he no longer had to worry about washing his socks, and that he received so much German blood during transfusions in Berlin, he should have been given a German passport.
Then he swiveled his left prosthesis to eye level and placed a drinking cup on the bottom of his shoe.
Some people wondered whether he was scared to drive again, Zanardi told Letterman, but he considered himself less vulnerable than before his accident. “If I break one of my legs, I only need a 4-millimeter screw and I can fix it very rapidly,” he said to laughter from the audience.

…

In May 2003, 20 months after losing his legs, Zanardi returned to the same German speedway and, in a specially adapted car, drove the final 13 laps to symbolically complete the race he didn’t get to finish.

…

He began competing in touring car championships — street cars modified for racing — along with sprint series races. In 2019, he drove the prestigious 24-hour endurance race at Daytona with three teammates, using a modified BMW steering wheel that permitted him to drive without wearing his prosthetics.
“I feel a bit like Jimi Hendrix,” he told The New York Times before the race. “I play with both my hands.”

He also became a competitive hand-cyclist.

In 2011, he won the handcycle division of the New York City Marathon and followed by winning two gold medals and a silver medal at both the 2012 Paralympics in London and the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro.
He was credited in 2017 with becoming the first adaptive athlete to break nine hours in an Ironman Triathlon: swimming 2.4 miles with a buoyancy device and without his prosthetics; using a handcycle to bike 112 miles; and completing the 26.2-mile marathon in a racing wheelchair. He finished in 8 hours 58 minutes 59 seconds.

…

Zanardi sustained serious head injuries in a second crash, in 2020, when he collided on his hand bike with a truck during a road relay in Tuscany. He was placed into a medically induced coma and withdrew from public life during a long rehabilitation process.

Posted in Books, Cars, Cycling, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 6, 2026.

Wednesday, May 6th, 2026

Screenshot

NYT.

Mr. Turner put together a top-notch crew that helped him win the 1977 America’s Cup races off Newport, R.I. But he did so only after coming close to being thrown out of the races once he had been accepted. “During the Cup eliminations,” Time magazine reported, “he flirted with every girl in sight, crawled pubs with his crew, got tossed out of chic clubs and restaurants for boozy behavior and turned Newport’s blue bloods positively purple.”
The Cup organizers forced Mr. Turner to apologize publicly to one elite club, the Spouting Rock Beach Association, for accosting female members. “I wish to apologize profusely because I certainly did have a couple drinks too many that Saturday night,” Mr. Turner wrote to the club president.
But on winning the Cup, he surrounded himself with young, attractive women and was too drunk to finish a victory speech at a nationally televised news conference.

…

Still crushed by debt, Mr. Turner sought to squeeze profits from his MGM library by colorizing classic black-and-white movies in what turned out to be a misguided attempt to increase their appeal among younger viewers. He was attacked by the press, filmmakers, movie buffs and politicians as a cultural philistine. Stung, he ended up colorizing only a few films, among them the 1941 Humphrey Bogart detective movie “The Maltese Falcon,” before abandoning the plan amid condemnation by many actors and directors, including the filmmakers Billy Wilder and Woody Allen.

…

He wooed [Jane Fonda – DB] — just after her divorce from the liberal activist and California state legislator Tom Hayden — by emphasizing their similarities, including as the children of a suicidal parent (in Ms. Fonda’s case, her mother) and their friendships with icons of the far left, like Mr. Castro. She later wrote in a memoir that she had been dazzled by his charisma, which she likened to “a 3-D stereophonic, Shakespearean-level, sound-and-light show.”
The couple married in 1991 — the third marriage for each — and in subsequent years, Mr. Turner devoted more of his time to environmentalism and global peace, while Ms. Fonda virtually retired from Hollywood to devote herself to Mr. Turner and his new causes.
Their marriage lasted 10 years, with Ms. Fonda saying his insatiable need for other women and her own deepening spirituality, including an embrace of Christianity, were underlying causes.

Posted in Boats, History, Media, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 30, 2026.

Thursday, April 30th, 2026

David Allan Coe, the man who wrote what should be our national anthem.

The first of those recordings, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” a droll sendup of honky-tonk clichés written by the folk singers Steve Goodman and John Prine, reached the country Top 10 in 1975.

…

Mr. Coe wrote or helped write most of his material, but had his greatest success with songs he wrote for others, notably Tanya Tucker’s “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)” (1973) and Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” (1977). Both records were No. 1 country singles, and “Take This Job and Shove It” inspired a 1981 movie in which Mr. Coe had a minor role. He also wrote for the punk rock band Dead Kennedys and Johnny Cash.

…

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Coe released two albums — “Nothing Sacred” and “Underground Album” — that were later reissued as a compilation called “18 X-Rated Hits.” In 2000, the music writer Neil Strauss of The New York Times described the material as “among the most racist, misogynist, homophobic and obscene songs recorded by a popular songwriter.”
For years, Mr. Coe distanced himself from those songs. “Anyone that would look at me and say I was a racist would have to be out of their mind,” he insisted in a 2004 interview with the site Swampland.

J. Craig Venter, the guy who decoded the human genome.

In the 1990s, Dr. Venter, a risk-taker and intense competitor, made a bold move when he decided that the Human Genome Project, a $3 billion government program for decoding the human genome, was moving slowly enough that he could enter the race late and beat it with a much faster method.
His gamble paid off. In 2000, his company, Celera, made a joint announcement with a rival group saying that they had assembled the first human genomes, a landmark step toward uncovering the genetic basis of human disease and origins.

Posted in Music, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 14, 2026.

Tuesday, April 14th, 2026

Sid Krofft. THR.

The shows could feel hallucinogenic, and many older viewers read drug references into them that the Kroffts maintained were not intentional. (Titles like “Pufnstuf” did not make that argument more believable.)
“If we did the drugs that we’ve been accused of doing all these years, we wouldn’t be here answering your questions,” Mr. Krofft said in an interview with The Washington Post in 2009.

Lawrence sent over an obit for noted SF writer Ian Watson. I don’t have much to add to this, as I have not seen this reported elsewhere.

Valerie Lee. She was one of the children who played Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz”. It gets a little confusing, at least for me, but as best as I understand it: they recruited some child actors to play adult Munchkins alongside the actual little people in “Oz”.

About a dozen children of average height were hired so they could be used for background fill. Sources differ on the number of children used for these roles ranging anywhere from 10 to 12. The names used for the women are maiden names with known aliases present in italics and quotation marks.

According to Cox, Priscilla Montgomery Clark, 96, another child Munchkin, is the last surviving person to have appeared in The Wizard of Oz.

John Nolan, actor. Other credits include “The Sweeney”, “The Prisoner”, and “Return of the Saint”.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 10, 2026.

Friday, April 10th, 2026

Afrika Bambaataa, early rap/hip-hop guy. (Edited to add: NYT (archived). This wasn’t working for me earlier today.)

(I actually asked ChatGPT to explain the difference between rap and hip-hop to me last night. I don’t trust the results.)

By way of Lawrence: Thomas Tessier, horror writer.

Jim Whittaker. He was the first American to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

On May 1, 1963, a decade after Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest, and at a time when fewer than 10 people were known to have matched that feat, Mr. Whittaker set out into a storm with his climbing partner, Nawang Gombu, a Sherpa guide.
The conditions on the South Col of Everest were less than ideal for a summit push, but Mr. Whittaker did not hesitate.
“You always start up,” he told The Seattle Times in 2013. “Because you can always turn around.”
Mr. Whittaker became the first American to top Everest at about 1 p.m. local time on May 1. He and Mr. Gombu were the 10th and 11th climbers known to have gotten there and part of the only expedition to reach the summit that season.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 30, 2026.

Monday, March 30th, 2026

Dr. Henry C. Lee, forensic scientist. He may have been most famous for testifying at the OJ trial.

Dr. Lee testified for the defense, saying that there was “something wrong” with the way the Los Angeles Police Department had handled the blood that was collected as evidence.
His testimony supported the defense team’s suggestion that the evidence could have been tampered with and that officers might have planted Mr. Simpson’s blood at the crime scene.

…

In the mid-1980s, in the so-called preppy murder case, Dr. Lee was hired by the team defending Robert E. Chambers Jr., who was accused of murdering Jennifer Levin in Central Park. Dr. Lee was never called to testify because he told Mr. Chambers’s lawyer, Jack Litman, that his client was “guilty as hell.” Mr. Chambers pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1988.

…

In 2007, the judge in the murder trial of Mr. Spector ruled that Dr. Lee, a consultant for the defense, had removed something from the crime scene and hidden it from the prosecution.
Prosecutors contended that it was a piece of fingernail that would have shown that the actress Lana Clarkson had resisted having a gun placed in her mouth before being shot at Mr. Spector’s California home. The defense claimed that she had shot herself.
The judge did not hold Dr. Lee in contempt, and Dr. Lee denied taking anything from the crime scene. After the first trial ended in a hung jury, Mr. Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009.
In 2023, Connecticut’s attorney general agreed to a $25 million settlement with two men who had spent three decades in jail after being convicted of murder. Those convictions, which were overturned in 2020, had been based in part on testimony by Dr. Lee regarding the supposed presence of blood on a towel. A federal judge ruled that Dr. Lee had fabricated the evidence, saying that there was no corroboration that he had conducted any blood tests on the towel.
Dr. Lee defended himself in a statement, saying, “I have no motive nor reason to fabricate evidence.”

Mary Beth Hurt. Other credits include “Law & Order”, “Law & Order:SVU”, and “Lady in the Water”.

James Tolkan. Other credits include “They Might Be Giants”, “Bone Tomahawk”, “Serpico”, “Prince of the City”, and “The Hat Squad”.

Letizia Mowinckel, historical footnote. She bought clothes for Jacqueline Kennedy.

Impressed by her friend’s style and thrift, Mrs. Kennedy enlisted Mrs. Mowinckel to obtain clothes discreetly from French designers and send them to the White House. During the election, the press had criticized the chic Mrs. Kennedy for favoring foreign designers. She chose the American designer Oleg Cassini, long known for his work with Hollywood stars, as her personal couturier during her husband’s presidency, but her taste for Parisian fashions was unabated.

Among the clothes she bought: the pink Chanel suit.

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One just before it returned to Washington, and Mrs. Kennedy, who stood next to Mr. Johnson, refused to remove the suit. Mrs. Johnson recalled, “Then with something — if you can say a person that gentle, that dignified, had an element of fierceness — she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”

Posted in History, Law, Movies, Obits, Science, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 25, 2026.

Wednesday, March 25th, 2026

Tracy Kidder, author.

I read The Soul of A New Machine, but in a Reader’s Digest condensed version, back in the day. I should really pick up a copy and read the real book.

When The Detroit Free Press offered Mr. Kidder a reporting job, he told Mr. [Richard] Todd [his editor – DB], “Maybe I can get a Pulitzer if I work really hard.” Mr. Todd responded, “You can get a Pulitzer staying here in Western Massachusetts and writing books.”

(For those who may not know, Soul did win a Pulitzer.)

Mr. Kidder wrote in endless drafts. “Tracy throws up on the page and cleans up afterward,” said Jonathan Harr, author of the best-selling book “A Civil Action.” “He was absolutely indefatigable in the writing.”

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 24, 2026.

Tuesday, March 24th, 2026

For the record: NYT obits for Valerie Perrine and Brian Doherty.

Burning in Hell watch: Kermit Gosnell. I have my own opinions about abortion, which I’m not going to impose on anyone here. But the Gosnell case, as I recall, made even people who were pro-abortion sit up and say, “Hey, wait a minute, this is going too far.”

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

Obit watch: March 23, 2026.

Monday, March 23rd, 2026

Valerie Perrine, actress. Other credits include “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and “W.C. Fields and Me”.

For the historical record: Robert S. Mueller III. WP.

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 20, 2026.

Friday, March 20th, 2026

Chuck Norris. THR. “The World Bows: Remembering Chuck Norris 1940-2026” from Black Belt.

Other credits include the bad “Hawaii Five-0”, “Sons of Thunder”, and “Firewalker“.

Ed Bernard, actor. Other credits include “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Shaft” (the movie), “Cool Million”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Murder”, season 7, episode 22. He was “Bull Evans”.)

Jane Lapotaire, British actress.

For the historical record: NYT obit for Alvin Greene. (Previously on WCD.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

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