Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: November 26, 2021.

Friday, November 26th, 2021

Noah Gordon.

He was an American writer. His first book, The Rabbi, was on the NYT bestseller list for 26 weeks in the 1960s. His other books didn’t do as well, in the United States…

…but he was a huge bestseller overseas.

Mr. Gordon’s “The Physician” (1986) — the first book in a dynastic trilogy that began in 11th-century Persia, continued during the American Civil War with “Shaman” (1992) and ended with a modern woman doctor dealing with the morality of abortion in “Matters of Choice” (1996) — had an initial print run of only 10,000 copies in the United States.
But it eventually sold some 10 million copies, including more than six million in Germany, where, in the 1990s, six of Mr. Gordon’s novels were on best-seller lists simultaneously.
In 2013, “The Physician” was adapted into a German film, in English, starring Tom Payne, Stellan Skarsgard and Ben Kingsley. An award-winning musical based on the book is about to tour Spain.

…

“While Gordon has been published in 38 countries, Spain and Germany, where he is most popular, are two countries that grapple with a history of anti-Semitism,” Andrew Silverstein wrote in The Forward this year. “While not all of Gordon’s eight books have Jewish themes, most do, and his Jewishness is well known, which may play a role in his popularity in these two countries.”
Mr. Gordon won Spain’s Silver Basque Prize twice for best-selling book, in 1992 and 1995. His novels were also popular in Italy and Brazil.

I read the Kindle sample of The Death Committee before I went to bed last night, and…it was interesting enough that I’m tempted to purchase the book.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 24, 2021.

Wednesday, November 24th, 2021

Ian Fishback. He was 42.

Major Fishback was one of three former members of the 82nd Airborne who said soldiers in their battalion had systematically abused prisoners by assaulting them, exposing them to extreme temperatures, stacking them in human pyramids and depriving them of sleep to compel them to reveal intelligence — or, in some cases, simply to amuse the soldiers. He said his complaints were ignored by his superiors for 17 months.

I wanted to note this because the circumstances seem particularly sad to me:

His family said in a statement that the cause had not been determined. He died in an adult foster care facility, the climax to a distinguished but abbreviated career that the family said had begun to unravel as a result of neurological damage or post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was admitted to the facility following court-ordered treatment with anti-psychotic drugs after he had become delusional and created public disturbances, his family said.

I’m reminded of a story I read several years ago about a young Green Beret who had a distinguished service record. Until he started going downhill: showing up late, not showing up at all, other issues which ultimately led to him being dishonorably discharged from the Army. He kept going downhill, was eventually institutionalized, and finally died. After his death, it was determined that he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (possibly picked up from eating sheep brains and eyeballs in the field with indigenous personnel). His family petitioned to have his discharge upgraded to honorable, and I believe they were eventually successful.

Peter Buck, co-founder of Subway.

Margo Guryan. I’d never heard of her, but this is another one of those stories with a hook. She was a talented musician and songwriter who, in 1968, released an album called “Take a Picture”. The album tanked, in large part because she wouldn’t tour…

Yet somehow decades later, with the digital age facilitating both word of mouth and the sharing of music, adventurous listeners discovered it — first in Japan, then in Europe, and finally in the United States, where in 2000 Franklin Castle Recordings rereleased it, followed the next year by “25 Demos,” a collection of other recordings of hers. Ms. Guryan, who by then was in her 60s and had settled into an anonymous career teaching music, had an unexpected burst of something resembling fame.
“It’s still amazing to me to have something resurface after 30 years,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2002. “People say I’ve been rediscovered. It’s not true — I’ve been discovered.”

NYT obit for Malikah Shabazz.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 23, 2021.

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021

Lou Cutell, actor. Other than “Seinfeld” and “Gray’s Anatomy”, he did a few cop shows, including “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “T.J. Hooker”, “Barney Miller”, and the really obscure 1989 “Dragnet”. He also appeared on “Alice” and “The Bob Newhart Show”.

Malikah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter. She was only 56.

Bill Virdon, noted player and manager.

He remained with the Pirates through 1965, managed for the Mets in the minors, then returned to Pittsburgh as a player-coach in 1968, his last playing season. He became the Pirates’ manager in 1972, taking them to the National League East title, but was fired late the following season.

He also managed the Yankees for a time, until he was fired by Steinbrenner (“…though he was not supposed to be involved with running the team”, being under suspension at the time) in favor of…Billy Martin.

Posted in 1970s, History, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 22, 2021.

Monday, November 22nd, 2021

Bob Bondurant, legendary racer and founder of The Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving.

Mr. Bondurant began attracting attention in the racing world in 1959, when he won 18 of the 20 races he entered behind the wheel of a Corvette.
“I am an original California hot rodder turned white hot when I started winning everything in my Corvettes,” he was quoted as saying by the National Corvette Museum, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2016.
He continued to win races regularly in Corvettes in the 1960s, but he also began to race successfully in other sports cars and open-wheeled Formula 1 machines, including for the elite Ferrari team from 1965 to 1966.
“He was top of the line,” said Peter Brock, who designed the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe that Mr. Bondurant raced with Dan Gurney to first place in the GT, or Grand Touring, class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in 1964.

…

Even before opening the school, Mr. Bondurant had some well-known students. He had coached James Garner and Yves Montand in driving Formula 1 cars for John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film, “Grand Prix.” Mr. Bondurant, who was a stunt man and technical adviser to the film, wore 16-millimeter cameras on the sides of his helmet to record racing action on the track while moving at 150 miles per hour.
Soon after Mr. Bondurant opened the school, Mr. Newman and Robert Wagner signed up as students. They had been cast as racecar drivers in the film “Winning” (1969), in which Mr. Newman’s character dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500.
“Paul has a knack of knowing how to learn,” Mr. Bondurant told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1988. “He’s like most actors — they know how to listen. He would move at his own pace, and wouldn’t go too quick. He took it step by step, and it came naturally to him.”

One of my lifetime ambitions has been to attend the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, though apparently it went bankrupt in 2018 and is now known as the Radford Racing School.

Robert Bly, the Iron John guy. Anyone else remember when Iron John was a thing? I do, though I never actually read it: I just remember a time when people talked about books, instead of what the Kardasians were doing yesterday.

Carolyn Watjen, aka “Caroline Todd“. You wouldn’t know her under that name: she and her son, David Watjen, write (wrote?) mystery novels under the pseudonym “Charles Todd”. I haven’t read any of them yet, but the Ian Rutledge novels sound interesting.

Jay Last. He was an early semi-conductor pioneer: specifically, he was one of the “traitorous eight” who left William Shockley and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. His death leaves Gordon Moore (yes, that Moore) as the last surviving member of the group.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Mick Rock, photographer of musicians.

Peter Aykroyd, Dan’s brother and “Saturday Night Live” cast member.

Art LaFleur, actor. Other than “The Sandlot”, his credits include episodes of “The John Larroquette Show”, two different remakes of television series that should never have been remade and which failed miserably (not due to Mr. LaFleur, they were just bad ideas), “Matlock”, “Field of Dreams”, and “Wizards and Warriors”.

Posted in Books, Cars, Geek, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 19, 2021.

Friday, November 19th, 2021

Wilbur Smith, author. He was another one of those guys whose books I often see in racks at the grocery store, which is a pretty good sign.

“I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women,” Mr. Smith said.

…

When he was 8, his father gave him a .22-caliber Remington rifle. “I shot my first animal shortly afterward and my father ritually smeared the animal’s blood on my face,” he wrote in his memoir, “On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures” (2018). “The blood was the mark of emerging manhood. I refused to bathe for days afterward.”

…

Mr. Smith had his detractors, who saw some of his writing as glorifying colonialism and furthering racial and gender stereotypes. And he was not always a favorite of critics.
He maintained, as he told the Australian publication The Age, that he paid little attention. “The snootiness of critics is so silly,” he said. “They’re judging Great Danes against Pekingese. I’m not writing that literature — I’ve never set out to write it. I’m writing stories.”

Lawrence sent over Ann Althouse’s obit for Justus Rosenberg yesterday. I can’t really do the man the justice she did, so I’ll just point you over there.

Posted in Books, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 18, 2021.

Thursday, November 18th, 2021

Philip Margo.

Mr. Margo had a varied career, performing with the Tokens and its offshoots, producing records and writing for television. But nothing had a bigger impact than the recording he was part of when he was 19: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” became one of the most recognizable songs in American music, instantly identifiable from Jay Siegel’s opening falsetto. Mr. Margo sang baritone.

…

Philip Margo and some of the others in the group didn’t have a lot of confidence in the resulting recording.
“We were embarrassed by it and tried to convince Hugo and Luigi not to release it,” he said in an interview quoted in “The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits” by Fred Bronson. “They said it would be a big record and it was going out.”
They were right. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart in December 1961, remained there for three weeks and became a cultural touchstone. A whole new generation was introduced to it in 1994 when a version turned up in the Disney movie “The Lion King.”
“Now that it’s current, we’re current,” Mr. Margo said at the time. “I am thrilled.”

Dave Frishberg.

Mr. Frishberg, who also played piano and sang, was an anomaly, if not an anachronism, in American popular music: an accomplished, unregenerate jazz pianist who managed to outrun the eras of rock, soul, disco, punk and hip-hop by writing hyper-literate songs that harked back to Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, by way of Stephen Sondheim.
His songwriting wit was for grown-ups, yet he reached his widest audience with sharpshooting ditties for kids as a regular musical contributor to ABC-TV’s long-running Saturday morning animated show “Schoolhouse Rock!”

Among his credits: “I’m Just a Bill”.

Lawrence sent over an obit from Slam Wrestling for Joe Cornelius. In addition to his wrestling work, he helped with fight coordinating on “The Avengers” and also made some uncredited movie appearances. Perhaps his best known work was as the titular character in “Trog”.

Heath Freeman. He had some roles on “Bones” and “NCIS”. According to THR, he was only 41.

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

Obit watch: November 17, 2021.

Wednesday, November 17th, 2021

Still playing catch up on obits. Please to excuse the shortness here.

Terence Wilson, of UB40.

Graeme Edge, of the Moody Blues.

Clifford Rose, noted actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He also did some movie and TV work, including “Doctor Who”.

Geir Vegar Hoel, Norwegian actor. Lawrence and I knew him from “Dead Snow“, a fun little horror movie about Nazi zombies.

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

Obit watch: November 14, 2021.

Sunday, November 14th, 2021

Another quick obit roundup while I’m still on the road.

Sam Huff, linebacker for the New York Football Giants.

Playing for the Giants in their glory years of the late 1950s and early ’60s, Huff came out of the West Virginia coal country to anchor a defense that gained the kind of renown that had previously been reserved for strong-armed quarterbacks and elusive runners.
He played in six N.F.L. championship games in his eight seasons with the Giants. He was named to the all-league team three times and played in five Pro Bowls.
Huff was remembered for his head-on duels with two of the game’s greatest fullbacks — the Cleveland Browns’ Jim Brown and the Green Bay Packers’ Jim Taylor — but he also had 30 career interceptions. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1982.

Jonathan Reynolds. He was a playwright and wrote a food column for the NYT. I wanted to note his passing because he was also a screenwriter. His first script was “Micki + Maude”, a Blake Edwards/Dudley Moore movie that I was unfamiliar with, but which was apparently well received. But…

His next Hollywood experience, though, was not received so warmly. He was the screenwriter who adapted a story by Bill Cosby into a secret-agent comedy called “Leonard Part 6.” The movie, which starred Mr. Cosby and was released in 1987, came out so poorly that Mr. Cosby himself denounced it. In The Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel called it “the year’s worst film involving a major star.” Others have put it on lists of the worst movies ever made.

He also did “Switching Channels”, “My Stepmother Is An Alien”, and “The Distinguished Gentleman”.

Gavan O’Herlihy. He had a fair number of credits, including “Willow” and “Lonesome Dove”, but seems to be most famous for playing “Chuck Cunningham” in nine episodes of “Happy Days”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 12, 2021.

Friday, November 12th, 2021

Still on the road, but taking a few minutes to round up some obits from the past few days. Sorry if this seems compressed.

F.W. de Klerk.

John Artis, historical and legal footnote. He was the other guy convicted with Hurricane Carter.

“The police and Passaic County law-enforcement establishment was out to get Rubin, and I got tied in only because I was with him on the night of the shootings,” Mr. Artis told The New York Times in 1988. “I was always the guy in the background, the other guy in the case that no one knew or cared about.”

Jerry Douglas. He was most famous for “The Young and The Restless”, but he had a pretty extensive career. “Barnaby Jones”, “Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockleman, Private Eye”, “The Dead Don’t Die”…

…and he was a “Mannix” three-timer. Sadly, IMDB has messed up the site to where I can’t easily get a list of his episodes.

Posted in 1970s, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 9, 2021.

Tuesday, November 9th, 2021

Dean Stockwell. He was 85.

204 credits in IMDB, dating back to 1945. The man worked, and had been working since he was a child.

Yes, “Quantum Leap” and “Blue Velvet” and the Lynch “Dune”. Also the “Battlestar Galactica” revival, the original “Twilight Zone”, one episode of a spinoff of a minor 1960s SF TV show, “Beverly Hills Cop II”, “To Live and Die in L.A.”, “Paris, Texas”, “Wagon Train”, and the list goes on. He was no slouch when it came to movies, and if it was a TV series, he was almost certainly in it at some point.

And that includes “Mannix”. (“A Step in Time”, season 5, episode 3. He was “Chris Townsend”.)

Those close to the artist describe him as a rebel who loved to act, laugh, smoke cigars and play golf, Deadline reported.

Lawrence sent over a nice obit from National Review for Gerald Russello, NR contributor and editor of the University Bookman.

Edited to add: NYT obit for Dean Stockwell.

Max Cleland, former Senator from Georgia.

Stipulated: he was a liberal (according to the NYT, too liberal for Georgia), and we probably would have disagreed on many issues.

But: he also served honorably in Vietnam.

On April 8, 1968, just days before his tour was to end, Capt. Cleland was on a rescue mission in the village of Khe Sanh when he noticed a hand grenade on the ground. He picked it up and it detonated, instantly severing his right leg and right arm; his left leg was amputated within the hour. He was later awarded the Bronze Star and a Silver Star for meritorious service.
For three decades, Mr. Cleland blamed himself for his injuries, thinking the grenade had fallen off his own belt. But he later learned from a Marine who had witnessed the explosion that it had been dropped by an unnamed private who had manipulated the pins in a misguided attempt to make the grenade easier to use in combat.

Edited to add 2: THR obit for Dean Stockwell.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: November 8, 2021.

Monday, November 8th, 2021

Camille Saviola, actress.

Onstage, she was best known for originating the role of Mama Maddelena, a spa manager, in the original production of “Nine,” the Arthur Kopit-Maury Yeston musical about a film director having a midlife crisis, which opened on Broadway in May 1982 and ran for almost two years. She was featured in a comic number, “The Germans at the Spa.”
But she wasn’t limited to comedy. In 2005, for instance, she starred in a production of “Mother Courage and Her Children,” Bertolt Brecht’s famed antiwar play, in Pasadena, Calif.

She also did some TV and movie work, including multiple appearances on a spinoff of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s.

JoAnna Cameron. Lots of TV work as well, including “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Columbo”, and most famously, “Isis” on the Saturday morning series.

Aaron Feuerstein. Some of you may remember him from 1995, when he was in the news.

Mr. Feuerstein owned Malden Mills, which made Polartec fabric.

Then, on the night of Dec. 11, 1995, a boiler in one of the factory’s five hulking plants exploded. The shock wave knocked out the state-of-the-art sprinkler system Mr. Feuerstein had just installed, and 45-mile-an-hour winds blew the ensuing fire to three other buildings. The blaze burned for 16 hours, injuring more than 30 workers.
Three days later, most of the plant’s 1,400 workers lined up to receive their paychecks, figuring it might be their last from Malden Mills. Mr. Feuerstein joined them. He handed out holiday bonuses and then announced an even greater gift: He would immediately reopen as much of the plant as he could, replace the buildings he had lost and continue to pay the idled workers for a month — a promise he later extended twice.
Working nonstop, he and his workers got the surviving building, the finishing plant, back in operation just one week later. Mr. Feuerstein bought an empty factory nearby to hold new equipment. By the first weeks of January, hundreds of his employees were back at work. And just 20 months later he opened a gleaming new $130 million complex.

…

But no good deed goes unpunished, and Mr. Feuerstein’s rebuilding efforts left Malden Mills saddled with debt, even as Polartec sales soared in the late 1990s. In 2001 the company went into bankruptcy; it emerged, two years later, with a restructuring plan that stripped Mr. Feuerstein of his management roles. His attempt to buy the company back was rejected by the new board, and he left in 2004.

…

Malden Mills did not survive long after Mr. Feuerstein left. The new owners moved Polartec production to New Hampshire and Tennessee in the late 2000s, and in December 2015 — on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the fire — announced that the factory would close at the end of the year.

Posted in Leadership, Obits, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: November 4, 2021.

Thursday, November 4th, 2021

William Lucking, actor.

161 credits in IMDB. He did a lot of work on “Sons of Anarchy”: other credits include “The X-Files”, “Millennium”, two spinoffs of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, “Renegade”, “Columbo”, “Jake and the Fatman”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Desert Sun”, season 8, episode 10. And I have to update the list, because according to the IMDB reviews, this is another episode in which “Mannix gets a phone call from an old Korean War buddy…asking for help.”)

I wrote yesterday about Pat Martino (and please read the excellent comment left by pigpen51). This isn’t quite an obit, but it came across Hacker News today: a piece from Nautilus about Mr. Martino, his surgery, and his recovery. It was originally published in 2015, from what I can tell, but was updated with a new introduction.

It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and memory gone, but his guitar skills intact. In a 2014 report in World Neurosurgery, Galarza, of the University Hospital in Murcia, Spain, and colleagues from Europe and the United States, wrote, “To our knowledge, this case study represents the first clinical observation of a patient who exhibited complete recovery from a profound amnesia and regained his previous virtuoso status.”

…

Martino has also put on a show for neuroscientists. His case demonstrates neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable ability, during development and learning, to “optimize the functioning of cerebral networks,” wrote Hugues Duffau, a professor and neurosurgeon at Hôpital Gui de Chauliac at Montpellier University Medical Center in France, who studied Martino’s case. The guitarist’s recovery epitomizes the ability of the brain to improvise—to compensate for malformations or injuries by wiring new connections among brain regions that restore motor, intellectual, and emotional functions. For an encore, say neuroscientists, Martino’s story is about music and how it helped shape his brain in ways that revived his life.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 3, 2021.

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021

Linda Carlson, actress.

She was the TV station owner on “Newhart” and a judge on “Murder One”, among other roles. I was not aware there was a 1993 “Beverly Hillbillies” movie, nor did I know there was an attempt at an “African Queen” TV series. She also did an episode of “Space: Above and Beyond” and appeared in “Honey, I Blew Up The Kid” for those of you looking for genre credits.

Pat Martino, jazz guitarist. This is a little outside of my usual beat (ha!) but it sits at a point I find fascinating: the relationship between music and the brain.

In 1967, when he was in his early 20s, he released his first album, “El Hombre,” on the Prestige label, and a series of well-regarded records followed. At the start of his career he often drew comparisons to earlier jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, but by the 1970s he was forging his own sound. “Pat Martino: Breaking Barriers Between Rock & Jazz,” a 1975 headline in The San Francisco Examiner read.
On a tour supporting his first albums for Warner Bros., “Starbright” (1976) and “Joyous Lake” (1977), Mr. Martino began experiencing frequent headaches and seizures, something he had dealt with occasionally since childhood. One seizure came while he was onstage in France in 1976.
“I stopped playing and stood there for about 30 seconds,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Here and Now!” (2011, with Bill Milkowski). “During these moments of seizure, it feels like you’re falling through a black hole; it’s like everything just escapes at the moment.”

Cutting to the chase, he had brain surgery, but was left with total amnesia.

“When you don’t remember something, you have no idea of its existence,” he wrote. “And upon awakening after the surgery, I remembered nothing.
“But it wasn’t a disorienting feeling,” he continued. “If I had known I was a guitarist, if I had known those two people standing by my bedside in the hospital were in fact my parents, I then would’ve felt the feelings that went along with the events. What they went through and why they were standing there looking at me then would’ve been very painful for me. But it wasn’t painful because to me they were just strangers.”
His parents helped him relearn his past, showing him family photographs and playing him his own albums. Picking up the guitar again was another form of memory recovery.
“I had to start from Square 1,” he told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta, Canada, in 2004. “But once I made the decision to try, it activated inner intuitive familiarities, like a child who hasn’t ridden their bicycle for many years and tries to do so again to reach a destination. There are moments of imbalance, but it’s subliminal, and it emerges after some mistakes, and then it strengthens.”
By the mid-1980s he was performing again. Jon Pareles, reviewing one performance, at Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan in 1986, found Mr. Martino as virtuosic and unpredictable as ever.

…

In his autobiography, he described the process of recovering the ability to play.
“As I continued to work out things on the instrument,” he wrote, “flashes of memory and muscle memory would gradually come flooding back to me — shapes on the fingerboard, different stairways to different rooms in the house. There are secret doorways that only you know about in the house, and you go there because it’s pleasurable to do so.”
The records he made after his surgery included “All Sides Now” (1997), on the Blue Note label, an album on which he shared tracks with other famed guitarists, including Mr. Paul. Two of his albums, also on Blue Note, were nominated for Grammy Awards, “Live at Yoshi’s” (2001) and “Think Tank” (2003).
His surgery and the recovery period, Mr. Martino said, changed what he was after in his music.“It used to be to do everything I possibly could to become more successful in my craft and my career,” he told the Edmonton paper. “Today, my intention is to completely enjoy the moment and everything it contains.”

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Neuroscience, Obits, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 30, 2021.

Saturday, October 30th, 2021

Jo-Carroll Dennison was born on Dec. 16, 1923, in a men’s state prison in Arizona.

She died on October 18 at the age of 97. She was the oldest living Miss America.

With World War II raging, she visited military bases on the home front, sang and danced for the troops and sold war bonds. According to Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, photos of her in Life magazine made her the G.I.s’ second most popular “pinup girl,” after Betty Grable.
And Hollywood came calling. Ms. Dennison landed small parts in numerous movies, notably in the war propaganda film “Winged Victory” (1944) and “The Jolson Story” (1946), about the entertainer Al Jolson. She appeared on television with Frank Sinatra and Ed Sullivan and in a few episodes of the series “Dick Tracy” in 1950.
While she never achieved stardom as an actress, she spent decades in the company of Hollywood royalty. Through her brief marriage to the comedian Phil Silvers, she became a regular at Gene Kelly’s Saturday night parties and song fests, where André Previn played the piano and she rubbed shoulders with Judy Garland and Gregory Peck. Writers like Ray Bradbury gave her guidance on what books to read; Leonard Bernstein took her to concerts and advised her on which recordings to buy.

…

In addition to entertaining the troops, her reign as Miss America called for her to appear in her swimsuit. She felt this would be demeaning, she wrote, especially in some of the low-rent venues where she was sent; she refused to do it and even cut her tour short, though this received little public notice. The rebellious Yolande Betbeze Fox, Miss America 1951, got far more attention for rejecting swimwear on her tour because the pageant was sponsored by a bathing suit company, but Ms. Dennison preceded her by almost a decade.

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 29, 2021.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

Richard Hammer, author. He wrote two books on the My Lai massacre:

Mr. Hammer’s account of the My Lai slaughter in 1968, “One Morning in the War: The Tragedy of Son My” (1970), was frequently reviewed alongside one by Seymour M. Hersh, who had broken the story — “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath.” (The village of Son My included the hamlet of My Lai.)
“Richard Hammer — knowing perhaps that Hersh had the jump on him — tried to put the incident in perspective and thereby ended up writing the better book,” the book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times.“He took the time,” he added, “to explain the gradual depersonalization of the Vietnamese in American soldiers’ eyes — to make us understand how even women and children begin to seem hated and dangerous.”
Mr. Hammer followed up that book with another centered on the massacre, “The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley,” which John Leonard of The Times numbered among “a handful of public-affairs books published in 1971 that people will be reading a generation from now.” William Styron, writing in The Times Book Review, called it “an honest, penetrating account of a crucially significant military trial.”

…

Mr. Hammer also wrote and narrated the film “Interviews With My-Lai Veterans” (1970), which won an Oscar for best documentary (short subject).

Additionally, he was a two-time winner of the Edgar award for “best fact crime” for books unrelated to My-Lai: The CBS Murders: A True Account of Greed and Violence in New York’s Diamond District and The Vatican Connection: The True Story of a Billion-Dollar Conspiracy Between the Catholic Church and the Mafia (affiliate links).

Viktor Bryukhanov, the guy who took the rap for Chernobyl.

After serving five years in prison, Mr. Bryukhanov returned to government service in Ukraine to head the technical department in its Economic Development and Trade Ministry.

It really was a different country, wasn’t it?

Sonny Osborne, of the Osborne Brothers.

Best known for their 1967 hit “Rocky Top,” the Osborne Brothers pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing in which Bobby Osborne sang tenor melodies pitched above the trio’s other two voices, instead of between them, as was the custom in bluegrass. Sonny Osborne sang the baritone harmonies, with various second tenors over the years adding a third layer of harmony to round out the bright, lyrical blend that became the group’s calling card.
The Osbornes broke further with bluegrass convention by augmenting Mr. Osborne’s driving yet richly melodic banjo playing — and his brother’s jazz-inspired mandolin work — with string sections, drums and pedal steel guitar. They were also the first bluegrass group to record with twin banjos and, more alarming to bluegrass purists, to add electric pickups to their instruments, abandoning the longstanding practice of huddling around a single microphone.

This is in the NYT article, and I’ve posted this before, but fark that: I’m in the mood right now for some insurrectionist music.

Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, of the von Trapp family.

Mrs. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.
Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Mrs. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.

Martha Henry. She was 83.

For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”
As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.

David DePatie, co-creator (with Friz Freleng) of “The Pink Panther”.

George Butler, documentary filmmaker. Among his credits: “Pumping Iron”, aka “the movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star”.

NYT obit for Val Bisoglio.

In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.
“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”

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