Andrew Prine, actor.
Interesting set of credits. Quite a few Westerns, and quite a few cop/law shows: “The F.B.I.”, “Banacek”, “Quincy M.E.”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”.
Also: “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” and “Barbary Coast”.
Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category
Obit watch: November 4, 2022.
Friday, November 4th, 2022Obit watch: November 3, 2022.
Thursday, November 3rd, 2022George Booth, New Yorker cartoonist.
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(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Erica Hoy, Australian actress. IMDB. She was 26, and died in a car crash.
Ray Guy, punter. He was a first round draft choice for the Raiders in 1973:
It was the first time a punter had ever been picked in the first round, and it’s only happened one other time since — Steve Little, in 1978 by the Cardinals, and he was also a kicker.
Guy played with the Raiders, who moved to Los Angeles in 1982, through the end of his career in 1986. He made the Pro Bowl seven times and was a first-team All-Pro in six different seasons. He played a role in three Super Bowl championships.
Obit watch: November 1, 2022.
Tuesday, November 1st, 2022Gael Greene, noted restaurant reviewer for New York magazine.
After graduation, she was hired by United Press International, which on one memorable occasion sent her to cover a show by Elvis Presley in Detroit. She wangled an invitation to the singer’s hotel room, where one thing led to another. As she left, Presley asked her to order him a fried egg sandwich from room service.
Later, she wrote in her 2006 memoir “Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess,” she could not remember much about the sex, but the sandwich stayed in her mind: “Yes, the totemic fried egg sandwich. At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn’t know it yet.”
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In no time, her swaggering, fearless style made her one of the magazine’s star writers. She made short work of the Colony, an old society standby, and skewered the snobbery of Manhattan’s finer French restaurants.
In a town where snob, snoot and snub flower in perpetual renaissance, Lafayette is the ‘most,’” she wrote in one review. “Here the spleen is infinitely more memorable than the sweetbreads.”
Julie Powell, of the “Julie/Julia Project” and later Julie and Julia: My Years of Cooking Dangerously (affiliate link). She was 49.
In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”
To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.
In a blog for Salon.com that she called the Julie/Julia Project, she wrote long updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and filled with entertaining, profane tirades about the difficulties of finding ingredients, the minor disappointments of adult life and the bigger challenges of finding purpose as a member of Generation X.
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Ms. Powell’s second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession,” published in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which sometimes flourished and sometimes faltered. She described in detail her struggle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the food connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the marriage.
Without the sauciness and celebrity connection of her first book, “Cleaving” was not well received, and although Ms. Powell continued writing, it was her last book.
“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” said Judy Clain, editor in chief of Little, Brown, who was Ms. Powell’s editor. “I only wish she could have found the next thing.”
Obit watch: October 30, 2022.
Sunday, October 30th, 2022Thomas Cahill, author. (How the Irish Saved Civilization)
D.H. Peligro, drummer for the Dead Kennedys. (Actually, he replaced the original drummer, “Ted”, in early 1981. Also, if you haven’t looked at the recent history of the Dead Kennedys, it’s a pretty sad story.)
Obit watch: October 29, 2022.
Saturday, October 29th, 2022Jerry Lee Lewis. THR. Variety. Pitchfork.
Noted: Jimmy Swaggart is still alive. (As you may recall, Mickey Gilley died in May.)
I feel like I’m not giving the Killer the coverage he deserves, and I’m sorry for that. At the same time, I’m really not a music guy and don’t have the knowledge to put him in context. Plus, everyone is on this story like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation.
“Patrick”, also known as “Patrick Non-White” formerly of Popehat. He passed away in September, and I had noticed his Twitter feed had been silent for a while. But I did not become aware of his death until yesterday.
I feel like Patrick and I would have disagreed somewhere between 25% and 50% of the time. But our disagreements would have been based on reason, not personalities. Patrick was incredibly kind to me when I first started out blogging, and I regret having lost touch with him. I knew he was having health problems, but I thought he was over the hump on those. I regret that I never got to eat barbecue with him.
Thinking about him, I kind of like this as a eulogy:
I didn’t know Patrick, but I doubt that he ever in his life glanced around him to see what other men would do before doing what he thought was right.
Obit watch note.
Friday, October 28th, 2022While the death of Jerry Lee Lewis is being reported, it was also reported earlier in the week by an unreliable source I don’t link to, and that report turned out to be false.
The latest report is apparently from the AP, and seems more reliable. But I am still going to wait until tomorrow to post the obit watch.
Obit watch: October 28, 2022.
Friday, October 28th, 2022Lucianne Goldberg, literary agent who was behind the Lewinsky scandal.
It was Ms. Goldberg who advised Linda Tripp, a Pentagon aide, to record her conversations with her young co-worker Monica Lewinsky, who as a White House intern had an affair with President Bill Clinton.
Those recordings became crucial evidence in the special counsel investigation that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment for lying under oath in claiming that he had not had an affair with Ms. Lewinsky.
Rod Dreher put up a very nice tribute to her, and links to John Podhoretz’s equally nice tribute.
Robert Gordon, musician.
Mr. Gordon had been the frontman for the buzzy CBGB-era band Tuff Darts when he traded his punk attitude for a tin of Nu Nile pomade and released his first album, a collaboration with the fuzz-guitar pioneer Link Wray, in 1977. At the time, 1950s signifiers like ducktail haircuts and pink pegged slacks had scarcely been glimpsed for years outside the set of “Happy Days” or the Broadway production of “Grease.”
But, turning his back on both the pomp of ’70s stadium rock and the rock ’n’ roll arsonist ethos of punk, Mr. Gordon helped seed a rockabilly resurgence that would flower during the 1980s, with bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters hitting the charts and punk titans like the Clash and X also paying their respects.
Lawrence emailed an obit for Edward Dameron IV, SF and fantasy artist. He did illustrations for The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and designed the base for the 1988 Hugo Awards.
Ian Whittaker, set decorator. Among his credits: “Alien”, “Tommy”, and “Highlander”. He did also do some acting. IMDB.
Obit watch: October 27, 2022.
Thursday, October 27th, 2022John Jay Osborn Jr., author. (The Paper Chase.)
Between 1978 and 1988, Mr. Osborn was credited with writing 14 episodes of “The Paper Chase” and one episode apiece of “L.A. Law” and “Spenser: For Hire.” In that period, he also wrote his fourth novel, “The Man Who Owned New York” (1981), about a lawyer trying to recover $3 million missing from the estate of his firm’s biggest client.
In the 1990s, he became a private estate planner and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and then at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he taught contract law until his retirement in 2016.
Mike Davis, author. I’ve heard a lot about City of Quartz, and should probably read it one of these days.
Detractors questioned the accuracy of some of Mr. Davis’s assertions and the hyperbole of his prose. That criticism seemed to peak after he won a $315,000 MacArthur “genius” grant in 1998.
“A lot of writers are tired of Mike Davis being rewarded again and again, culminating in the MacArthur fellowship, for telling the world what a terrible place L.A. is,” Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian, told The Los Angeles Times in 1999.
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Signed by Capitol Records as a folk singer, Ms. Miller released her first album in 1963 and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 the next year with the pop song “He Walks Like a Man.”
Her career took off in 1965 when Capitol, seizing on the popularity of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” had her hastily record “Queen of the House,” which set distaff lyrics by Mary Taylor to Mr. Miller’s melody and finger-snapping rhythm.
Where Mr. Miller (no relation to Ms. Miller, although they both grew up in Oklahoma) sang of “trailers for sale or rent; rooms to let, 50 cents,” Ms. Miller rhapsodized in a similarly carefree fashion about being “up every day at six; bacon and eggs to fix.”
“I’ll get a maid someday,” she sang, “but till then I’m queen of the house.”
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Obit watch: October 26, 2022.
Wednesday, October 26th, 2022Michael Kopsa, actor.
Other credits include “Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail”, “The Dead Zone”, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show”, and lots of voice work, especially on “Mobile Suit Gundam” related properties.
Jules Bass, the “Bass” in “Rankin/Bass Productions”, the folks who brought you such timeless classics as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Frosty the Snowman”, and “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”.
“Mad Monster Party?” on IMDB. Oddly, it seems to be available on blu-ray (affiliate link).
Lawrence emailed an obit for Ashton B. Carter, defense secretary under Obama.
Obit watch: October 25, 2022.
Tuesday, October 25th, 2022Dietrich Mateschitz, Red Bull guy. He didn’t invent it, but he adapted and “Westernized” an existing Thai energy drink.
Obit watch: October 23, 2022.
Sunday, October 23rd, 2022Ian Hamilton, historical footnote.
Mr. Hamilton was the last survivor of the four men who stole the Stone of Destiny on Christmas Day in 1950.
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“You sort of know that when you take a crowbar to a side door of Westminster Abbey and jimmy the lock that there really isn’t any going back, don’t you?” Mr. Hamilton told British newspaper The Telegraph in 2008.
They moved swiftly into the darkness of the abbey and found their way to the Coronation Chair. They pried off a wooden retaining bar across the front of the chair, but freeing the stone was more difficult. They pushed and jimmied it until they were able to lift it and carry it for a yard before realizing that it was too heavy to take any further.
They then heaved the stone onto Mr. Hamilton’s coat, hoping to slide it to freedom. But as he pulled at one of the stone’s iron rings, it came apart, one chunk of about 100 pounds, another more than double that weight. Mr. Hamilton ran outside, almost giddily, lugging the smaller piece. The fourth member of the group, the getaway driver, Kay Matheson, drove up, and Mr. Hamilton laid it on the back seat.
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Mr. Hamilton returned later with the other car, dragged the remaining stone to it, and drove off.
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The four plotters were interrogated by a Scotland Yard detective in March 1951, but they denied any involvement and none were arrested.
In April, deciding that he had done all he could to advance Scottish nationalism, Mr. Hamilton decided to surrender the stone anonymously. He, the politician who had repaired it and another nationalist friend laid it at the altar in the ruins of the Abbey of Arbroath, about 100 miles northeast of Glasgow.
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Obit watch: October 21, 2022.
Friday, October 21st, 2022Ron Masak, actor.
He had a pretty extensive movie and TV career. Beyond being the guy who let Jessica Fletcher get away with all those murders, he was in “Laserblast”, “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, and “Ice Station Zebra”. TV credits include late period “Columbo”, “McMillan & Wife”, “Mission: Impossible”, multiple appearances on “Police Story”, “Quincy M.E.”…
…and “Mannix”. (“The Sound of Murder“, season 5, episode 17. He played “Barry Gates” in an unaccredited appearance.)
Obit watch: October 19, 2022.
Wednesday, October 19th, 2022Sergeant Major Dean Walton, of the British Army.
Sgt. Walton was a member of the Red Devils parachute demonstration team, and died during a training jump.
Obit watch: October 18, 2022.
Tuesday, October 18th, 2022General James A. McDivitt (USAF – ret.), Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 astronaut.
When he joined the Air Force in 1951 as an aviation cadet after attending junior college, Mr. McDivitt had “never been in an airplane, never been off the ground,” as he recalled in an interview for NASA’s Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.
He went on to fly 145 fighter missions during the Korean War, became an Air Force test pilot, then was selected by NASA in September 1962 as one of nine astronauts for the Gemini program, the bridge between the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the Apollo missions leading to the moon landings.
Mr. McDivitt was in command of the Gemini 4 capsule, which orbited the earth for nearly 98 hours over four days in June 1965, a record for a two-person spaceflight.
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Mike Schank, from “American Movie”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Obit watch: October 14, 2022.
Friday, October 14th, 2022He wasn’t someone whose work I have a lot of familiarity with, though I’ve heard good things about “Cracker”. Other credits included some “Blackadder”s, “The Pope Must Diet”, Falstaff in “Henry V”, and “Frasier”.
Dr. Vincent DiMaio, forensic pathologist. He was the chief medical examiner of Bexar County (which covers San Antonio) from 1981 to 2006. In that capacity, he testified for the prosecution against Genene Jones, who was convicted of killing a 15-month-old baby, and may have killed up to 60 other children.
Dr. DiMaio, who had been a medical examiner in Dallas from 1972 to 1981, was later called on to look into allegations that President Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a look-alike whom Soviet officials had trained to assume his identify. Michael Eddowes, a British lawyer and restaurateur, had made the allegations in a 1975 book, “Khrushchev Killed Kennedy,” which he published himself.
After the author persuaded Oswald’s wife, Marina, to have his body exhumed in 1981, Dr. DiMaio was recruited to help examine the remains. But his team quickly debunked the theory, confirming through forensic dentistry that the physical characteristics of the man buried as Oswald matched those on Oswald’s passport and his Marine Corps records.
As a private consultant, he also worked with the authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh and came to the belief that Vincent van Gogh’s death was murder, not suicide. He also testified for the defense in the George Zimmerman trial.
He also wrote four books: Morgue: A Life in Death (with Ron Franscell) was nominated for a “Best Fact Crime” Edgar award. (The NYT says it won, but the Edgar Awards database says The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale was that year’s winner.)
Bernard McGuirk, Don Imus’s producer.