Bob Wall, noted ass kicker.
He was in three out of five Bruce Lee films post 1968: “The Way of the Dragon”, “Enter the Dragon” and “Game of Death”. (He played O’Hara, the bad guy’s bodyguard, in “Enter the Dragon”.)
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Monica Vitti, Italian actress. She was in Michelangelo Antonioni’s movies (“L’Avventura”, “La Notte”, “L’Eclisse”).
She was also “Modesty Blaise” in the 1966 movie.
Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub (United States Army – ret.) has died. He was 100.
General Singlaub trained resistance fighters in German-occupied France and rescued Allied prisoners of war held by the Japanese during World War II. He conducted intelligence operations during the Chinese Civil War and in the Korean War while assigned to the C.I.A., and he commanded secret Army forays into North Vietnam and neutral Laos and Cambodia during the 1960s to ambush Communist troops.
A sturdy 5-foot-7 with an enduring military brush haircut, General Singlaub seemed fit for combat long after his last war. He was “the kind of guy you’d like to have on your side in a barroom brawl,” Pat Murphy, an acquaintance and the publisher of The Arizona Republic at the time, told The New York Times in 1986.
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But for all his military feats, General Singlaub’s career ended over issues of grand strategy.Mr. Carter removed him as the military’s chief of staff in South Korea in May 1977 after he told a reporter for The Washington Post that the president’s plan to withdraw American troops there could lead to another North Korean invasion.
General Singlaub later maintained that his remarks were off the record, an assertion disputed by The Post. But Mr. Carter was outraged at what he perceived as a challenge to civilian authority.
His order recalling General Singlaub from Korea was the first action of its type since President Harry S. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the Pacific commander when MacArthur advocated extending the Korean War into China.
After being reassigned to Fort McPherson in Georgia, General Singlaub criticized the Carter administration’s military policies again in April 1978, in a talk before R.O.T.C. cadets at Georgia Tech. He called Mr. Carter’s decision not to produce a neutron bomb “ridiculous” and “militarily unsound” and criticized the administration’s efforts to give up control of the Panama Canal.
The Army ordered him to report to the Pentagon immediately, announcing a day later that it had accepted his request to retire.
He was also involved (as a private citizen) in the “Iran-Contra affair”.
General Singlaub told Congress that Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, while a National Security Council staff aide, had approved of his being highly visible in his support for the contras. The goal, General Singlaub testified, was to take public attention away from the secret government program. Colonel North was eventually convicted of obstructing Congress, destroying official documents and accepting an illegal gift, but the convictions were later overturned on appeal.
General Singlaub, who acted as a private citizen in helping the contras, was never accused of wrongdoing in the investigation. But in his 1991 memoir, “Hazardous Duty,” written with Malcolm McConnell, he bristled at what he considered the defaming of his character.
“For a decade I’d been smeared as a right-wing fanatic, even a crypto-fascist, by some members of the media,” he wrote. “I’d always found this ironic, considering the fact that I was one of a handful of American soldiers who had risked torture and execution by both German and Japanese fascists while serving behind enemy lines in Europe and the Far East.”
Moses J. Moseley, actor. He was a “pet zombie” in “The Walking Dead”.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
NYT obit for Howard Hesseman, which was not up when I posted yesterday.
Mike the Musicologist sent this over, with the observation that it had been posted yesterday:
Cheslie Kryst. She was Miss USA 2019, and worked as a lawyer and a correspondent on “Extra”.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Hargus Robbins, noted session pianist in Nashville.
A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio musicians, Mr. Robbins appeared on thousands of popular recordings made here between the late 1950s and mid-2010s.
Many became No. 1 country singles, including Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” (1962), Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” (1966) and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” (1974). Several also crossed over to become major pop hits, Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” (1961) and Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” (1978) among them.
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Mr. Robbins’s influence was maybe most pronounced as the Nashville Sound evolved into the more soul-steeped “countrypolitan” style heard on records like George Jones’s 1980 blockbuster single, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
Mr. Robbins’s rippling, jazz-inflected intros to Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” (1973) and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977) became enduring expressions of the Southern musical vernacular of their era. Both records were No. 1 country and crossover pop singles.
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Booger.
I didn’t watch “Head of the Class”, and, while I may have watched the original “One Day at a Time”, I’m pretty sure I had checked out by season 9. (We were actually discussing that show last night at dinner: I believe we all watched it, but with the mitigating excuse that there were only three channels at the time.)
I can’t find my favorite Dr. Johnny Fever moment online. (Johnny takes a sobriety test, and the drunker he gets, the better his reaction time gets. This is the kind of humor you could get away with in the late 1970s/early 1980s, before joyless fun suckers sucked all the fun out of everything.) And I don’t want to use the turkey drop stuff, because overused and it isn’t Thanksgiving.
So here’s a nice golden moment for you.
Edited to add 2/7: Lawrence pointed out something over the weekend that was quite a surprise to me (I should have checked his credits more closely): Howard Hessman did a “Mannix”. (“A Ransom for Yesterday“, season 8, episode 17. We watched it Saturday night: given that it was so close to the end of the series, it is actually a pretty good episode, and Hessman’s role is substantial. It also isn’t an old Army buddy episode, thank Ghu.)
Today is just quick follow ups from the paper of record:
And, astonishingly (to me), the NYT actually ran an obit for Ron Goulart. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but this is the same paper that still (to the best of my knowledge) has never run an obit for Gardner Dozois.
Dr. Johan Hultin. He was 97.
Back in 1950, Dr. Hultin, a pathologist, was having lunch with William Hale, a microbiologist. As the conversation often does, it turned to the 1918 flu pandemic.
Dr. Hale mentioned that there was just one way to figure out what caused the 1918 pandemic: finding victims buried in permafrost and isolating the virus from lungs that might be still frozen and preserved.
Dr. Hultin, a medical student in Sweden who was spending six months at the university, immediately realized that he was uniquely positioned to do just that. The previous summer, he and his first wife, Gunvor, spent weeks assisting a German paleontologist, Otto Geist, on a dig in Alaska. Dr. Geist could help him find villages in areas of permafrost that also had good records of deaths from the 1918 flu.
So Dr. Hultin went north to Alaska in 1951.
Three villages seemed like they might have what he wanted, but when he arrived at the first two, the victims’ graves were no longer in permafrost.
The third village on his list, Brevig Mission, was different. The flu had devastated the village, killing 72 out of 80 Inuit residents. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave with a large wooden cross at either end.
When Dr. Hultin arrived and politely explained his mission, the village council agreed to let him dig. Four days later, he saw his first victim.
“She was a little girl, about 6 to 10 years old. She was wearing a dove gray dress, the one she had died in,” he recalled in an interview in the late 1990s. The child’s hair was braided and tied with bright red ribbons. Dr. Hultin called for help from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the group eventually found four more bodies.
They stopped digging. “We had enough,” Dr. Hultin said.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Dr. Hultin wasn’t able to culture virus from the samples he collected at the time. But in 1997:
…sitting by a pool on vacation with his wife in Costa Rica, he noticed a paper published in Science by Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, now chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
It reported a remarkable discovery. Dr. Taubenberger had searched a federal repository of pathology samples dating to the 1860s and found fragments of the 1918 virus in snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers who had died in that pandemic. The tissue had been removed at autopsy, wrapped in paraffin and stored in the warehouse.
Dr. Hultin got in touch with Dr. Taubenberger.
“I can’t go this week, but maybe I can go next week,” he told Dr. Taubenberger.
He went back and recovered more samples.
Dr. Taubenberger got all of the packages. The lung tissue from the Brevig woman was invaluable, he said, because the snippets of lung from the soldiers had so little virus that, with the technology at the time, the effort to get the complete viral sequence would have been delayed by at least a decade.
Using the tissue Dr. Hultin provided, Dr. Taubenberger’s group published a paper that provided the genetic sequence of a crucial gene, hemagglutinin, which the virus had used to enter cells. The group subsequently used that tissue to determine the complete sequence of all eight of the virus’s genes.
One of the things that truly impresses me about this story (besides the scientific angle) is Dr. Hultin’s interactions with the villagers of Brevig Mission. They let him dig up the graves and take samples: and they let him do this because he treated the bodies with honor and respect.
Don Wilson, of the Ventures.
In addition to their success in the United States (where their other hits included “Walk — Don’t Run, ’64,” a remake of their own hit that also made Billboard’s Top 10), the Ventures became wildly popular in Japan — so much so, Mr. Wilson said, that numerous bands there took to imitating them. That led to an uncomfortable surprise when the band made its second trip there, its first as headliners, in 1965.
“We had an opening group,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, “and they played all of our songs before we went on.”
We’re talking about the Ventures, so you know what that means, right?
Jim Drake, one of the old time Sports Illustrated photographers. I wanted to mention this here because there’s a lot of classic Drake photos reproduced in the obit, including the one of Broadway Joe in Times Square.
Morgan Stevens, actor. He was “Nick Diamond” on “Melrose Place”. He was also “David Reardon” in “Fame” and did other TV guest spots.
Kevin Ward, the mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland, which is a DC suburb. He was found dead in a park: his death is suspected to have been a suicide.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
He voiced Charlie Brown in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”. According to reports, he was 65 years old, and died by suicide.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Kathryn Kates, actress. Roles include “Seinfeld”, “Orange Is the New Black”, and “Law and Order: Sport Utility Vehicle”.
This got past me yesterday, though I did intend to mention it: Sheldon Silver, former leader of the New York State Assembly who was serving time in prison on corruption charges.
She was “Harriet Conklin” in “Our Miss Brooks”, a series I hate to say was before my time. Other credits are pretty limited: she appeared in the “Centennial” mini-series, Michael Ritchie’s “Smile”, and some TV guest shots.
I think a lot of people (outside of firefighting) have forgotten that name, but Report from Engine Co. 82 was a huge deal back in the day.
The book sold some three million copies, ennobled Mr. Smith as a champion of his profession and inspired countless men and women to become firefighters.
“The author’s pride clearly derives not from his writing, but from his job as a firefighter — the most hazardous job of all, according to the National Safety Council,” Anatole Broyard wrote in his Times book review. “The risk one takes in, writing a book — and there are those who will tell you that this is the most hazardous occupation — must seem comparatively small to him. One hopes he will go on taking it.”
I read it at an inappropriately young age. I won’t say how old I was, but “Emergency” was on first-run network television at the time. The thing that sticks with me all these years later is how much abuse Smith and his colleagues took from the people they were trying to help.
Mr. Smith was a Renaissance firefighter.
He played eight musical instruments; founded Firehouse magazine in 1976 (and sold it in 1991 and made $7 million); was the founding chairman of the New York City Fire Museum and was instrumental in converting the Engine Company 30 firehouse in SoHo as its site; was president and chairman of the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club, which moved from Manhattan to the South Bronx; and was a chairman of the New York Academy of Art.
He was the first chairman of the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ Near Miss task force, focused on preventing firefighter injuries and deaths, and won awards from the Congressional Fire Services Institute and the National Fire Academy, and the New York Fire Department.
Any man who tries to prevent deaths and injuries in his chosen occupation, no matter what that is, deserves mad props in my opinion.
In a Times opinion essay in 1971, Mr. Smith recalled his ebullience at the prospect of becoming a firefighter: “I would play to the cheers of excited hordes — climbing ladders, pulling hose, and saving children from the waltz of the hot masked devil. I paused and fed the fires of my ego — tearful mothers would kiss me, editorial writers would extol me in lofty phrases, and mayors would pin ribbons to my breast.”
After eight years, he wrote, the romantic visions had faded.
“I have climbed a thousand ladders, and crawled Indian fashion down as many halls into a deadly nightshade of smoke, a whirling darkness of black poison, knowing all the while that the ceiling may fall, or the floor collapse, or a hidden explosive ignite,” Mr. Smith added. “I have watched friends die, and I have carried death in my hands. With good reason have Christians chosen fire as the metaphor of hell.”
“There is no excitement, no romance, in being this close to death,” he wrote, later adding: “Yet, I know that I could not do anything else with such a great sense of accomplishment.”
I’ve gone back and forth for a few days about whether I should include the obit for Ann Arensberg. There was finally one thing that tipped me over the edge.
That wasn’t the tipping point. This was:
I’m sorry to laugh at someone’s obit, but “As You Like It” with seals kicks over my giggle box. Indeed, it has me thinking about a whole line of Shakespeare productions with animals. An all-racoon production of “Macbeth”?
Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk. Tricycle:
Known to his thousands of followers worldwide as Thây—Vietnamese for teacher—Nhat Hanh was widely considered among Buddhists as second only to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in the scope of his global influence. The author of some 100 books—75 in English—he founded nine monasteries and dozens of affiliated practice centers, and inspired the creation of thousands of local mindfulness communities. Nhat Hanh is credited with popularizing mindfulness and “engaged Buddhism” (he coined the term), teachings that not only are central to contemporary Buddhist practice but also have penetrated the mainstream. For many years, Thich Nhat Hanh has been a familiar sight the world over, leading long lines of people in silent “mindful” walking meditation.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Thich Nhat Hanh’s role in the development of Buddhism in the West, particularly in the United States. He was arguably the most significant catalyst for the Buddhist community’s engagement with social, political, and environmental concerns. Today, this aspect of Western Buddhism is widely accepted, but when Nhat Hanh began teaching regularly in North America, activism was highly controversial in Buddhist circles, frowned upon by most Buddhist leaders, who considered it a distraction from the focus on awakening. At a time when Western Buddhism was notably parochial, Nhat Hanh’s nonsectarian view motivated many teachers to reach out and build bonds with other dharma communities and traditions. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his inclusive vision laid the groundwork for the flourishing of Buddhist publications, including Tricycle, over the past 35 years.
I am not a Buddhist, and I am spectacularly bad at Zen. But I enjoy reading about Zen, and I was familiar with him from my reading.
Thich Nhat Hanh dismissed the idea of death. “Birth and death are only notions,” he wrote in his book “No Death, No Fear.” “They are not real.”
He added: “The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is.”
“Nhat Hanh is my Brother” by Thomas Merton.
Breck Denny, writer and actor. He was only 34: according to his family, he died of a “rare spontaneous splenic artery rupture”.
Marvin Lee Aday, also known as “Meat Loaf”. THR. NYPost. IMDB.
(I can’t confirm it now, but I remember a legend that the NYT did a story about Meat Loaf…and, as is their custom on second and subsequent reference, referred to him as “Mr. Loaf”.)
Edited to add 1/22: Since I posted this obit, the NYT has added a note to their coverage discussing the “Mr. Loaf” story. They assert it is not true. And apparently he preferred to be called “Meat”:
A Hollywood Meatloaf story on the day of his departure.
So, in the early naught years I managed a softball team named The Big Walrus (just because) and on said team was friend, actor and musician @WEarlBrown.
He played first base for us.
Well, one day… (1of3)
— Jeffrey Lieber (@JeffLieber) January 21, 2022
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I covered the firing of Kevin Ollie as men’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut when it happened.
Now…
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Irvings ruled that Ollie is due $11,157,032.95 within next 10 business days, Parenteau said.
Interestingly, though, those recruiting violations did pan out:
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Parenteau and co-counsel William Madsen had argued that UConn failed to meet its burden under an agreement between the school and the American Association of University Professors, of which Ollie is a member. That agreement required a showing of serious misconduct in order to fire an employee for “just cause” and also affords Ollie other union protections.
The school had argued that Ollie’s transgressions were serious and that his individual contract superseded those union protections.
Hardy Kruger (also billed as Hardy Krüger). Sloppy obit from THR.
His character in “The Flight of the Phoenix” was not a German solider or a Nazi baddie, and that movie came out in 1965, not 1975. But he was excellent in it. (Noted: Criterion is releasing it on blu-ray in March. Affiliate link.)
Edited to add: THR corrected their obit shortly after I posted this. It no longer refers to Kruger’s character in “Phoenix” as a German solider, and has the correct date for the movie.
Edited to add 2: NYT obit, which was not up when I first posted.
He was also good in “Barry Lyndon”. I’ve seen “The Wild Geese”, but cut up for TV a long time ago, and I’d like to watch it again.
Carol Speed. Credits include “The Mack” and “Disco Godfather”.
Ron Franklin, fomer ESPN announcer.
Other than “Weena” in the 1960 “The Time Machine” and “Where the Boys Are”, credits include “Jackson County Jail”, “The Black Hole”, “Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell”, “Diamond Head” (opposite Cheston!) and a “doomed surfer” in “Dr. Kildare”.
Gaspard Ulliel. He was the young Hannibal in “Hannibal Rising”, and is in the coming Marvel series “Moon Knight”. He was only 37, and died as a result of a skiing accident.