Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: January 3, 2022.

Monday, January 3rd, 2022

Richard Leakey, paleoanthropologist.

One of his most celebrated finds came in 1984 when he helped unearth “Turkana Boy,” a 1.6-million-year-old skeleton of a young male Homo erectus. The other was a skull called “1470,” found in 1972, that extended the world’s knowledge of the Homo erectus species several million years deeper into the past.

…

His discoveries were almost as remarkable as his ability to evade death. He fractured his skull as a boy, almost died after receiving a kidney transplant from his brother Philip in 1979, lost both legs in a 1993 plane crash and was once treated for skin cancer.

Dan Reeves, former Dallas Cowboys running back and later NFL coach.

Reeves played and coached with the Dallas Cowboys during a stellar period when they won two Super Bowls, one when he was a player-coach and one when he was an offensive coordinator, working for Coach Tom Landry. After several seasons as an assistant to Landry, he was hired as the Broncos’ head coach in 1981, replacing Red Miller.
Over 12 seasons in Denver, his teams had a record of 110-73-1 and were among the best in the American Football Conference. Led by quarterback John Elway, they lost the Super Bowl in 1987, 1988 and 1990 by wide margins to the New York Giants, the Washington Redskins and the San Francisco 49ers.

…

Undrafted by any team in the N.F.L. or the American Football League, he signed in 1965 with the Cowboys, who converted him to a running back. He played eight seasons and accumulated 1,990 rushing yards, 757 of them in 1966, his best year.

Jeanine Ann Roose. She was the young “Violet” in “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and…that’s it.

She went on to attend UCLA, becoming a psychologist and later a Jungian analyst, according to TMZ, which quoted her as once having made a comparison between her life and the movie’s story line.
“It’s a Wonderful Life was the only movie that I was in and it been an amazing lifetime experience to have been in such a collectively meaningful picture. … It became clear that my desire was specifically to help others who were struggling with finding meaning in their life — not unlike Clarence in the movie who helps George see the meaning of his life,” she said.

Max Julien. He was “Goldie” in “The Mack” (opposite Richard Pryor). Other credits include “Mod Squad”, “The Bold Ones: The Protectors”, and “The Name of the Game”.

Posted in Movies, NFL, Obits, Science, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 31, 2021 (supplemental)

Friday, December 31st, 2021

Want to get this in now, since I don’t know what tomorrow is going to be like: Betty White. THR.

Tiffini Hale. She was a member of the “Mickey Mouse Club” cast from 1989 to 1995, and was only 46.

Posted in Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 31, 2021.

Friday, December 31st, 2021

I’ve written before about the NYT‘s ability to do touching obits for people who aren’t famous (outside of, perhaps, a limited cultural circle) but still led interesting lives.

Ben McFall, “the longest-tenured bookseller in the history of the Strand”.

Mr. McFall enjoyed duties and perks not given to any other Strand employee. For much of his tenure, he was the only person in charge of an entire section. Not only that, the fief he governed — the fiction shelves — provides the Strand with the core of its business in used books.
He determined the price of each used hardcover novel and book of stories and then affixed a Strand sticker to the dust jacket. On occasion, he’d assess a book newly purchased by the store and find inside his own handwriting with a price from the 1980s.
Pricing was one of many fields in which Mr. McFall’s experience enabled him to make quick, intuitive pronouncements. Without checking a computer, he would say he knew how many years it had been since he had last seen an obscure old novel, the number of days it had remained in stock, and its current value online.

…

Yet he did not trade this adroitness for a position in management. Instead, he remained among shoppers and Strand underlings on the ground floor, where he became the only employee to have a desk designated specifically for his use. It was at the back of the main aisle, the sort of placement a restaurateur might choose for the corner table he would occupy in his own establishment. Behind Mr. McFall lay a sign reading “Classics” and a shelf of leather-bound volumes.

…

Mr. McFall could gossip or banter without looking up from the books he was working through. He sometimes surprised people by halting a conversation, departing wordlessly and returning with a book that he would say his interlocutor had to read. He was known to stash books under his desk if he thought they were perfectly suited to any of his regular customers.

…

Back then, the Strand hardly sold new books. Now, in addition to the latest best-sellers, it gives space to socks, tote bags and mugs. Bibliophilic employees have complained about that evolution while also accusing management of mistreating workers, particularly during the pandemic, which led to mass layoffs and a warning from Ms. Wyden that “our business is unsustainable.”
Mr. McFall gave his blessing to commercialization — “I’m perfectly willing to sell low-end dresses here if it means keeping the Strand in business,” he told The Times — and throughout his tenure he commanded respect both from management and across factions of the rank and file.

…

When Mr. McFall was interviewed for his Times profile, he gestured toward a group of young Strand staffers and said, “I don’t have to have children because these are my children.”

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 29, 2021.

Wednesday, December 29th, 2021

Comment I made to Lawrence last night: “Sure,” the NYT reporter said, “I’ll cover the obituary desk between Christmas and New Year’s. Nothing ever happens between Christmas and New Year’s.”

I’m being kind of short with these first two because everyone is on them like a fat man on an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.

John Madden. ESPN. LAT.

Madden retired from coaching the Oakland Raiders in 1979, at age 42 and with a Super Bowl victory to his credit, but he turned the second act of his life into an encore, a Rabelaisian emissary sent from the corner bar to demystify the mysteries of football for the common fan and, in the process, revolutionize sports broadcasting.

“Rabelaisian emissary”. Gotta give that guy credit.

As inclusive as he was beloved, Madden embodied a rare breed of sports personality. He could relate to the plumber in Pennsylvania or the custodian in Kentucky — or the cameramen on his broadcast crew — because he viewed himself, at bottom, as an ordinary guy who just happened to know a lot about football. Grounded by an incapacitating fear of flying, he met many of his fans while crisscrossing the country, first in Amtrak trains and then in his Madden Cruiser, a decked-out motor coach that was a rare luxurious concession for a man whose idea of a big night out, as detailed in his book “One Size Doesn’t Fit All” (1988), was wearing “a sweatsuit and sneakers to a real Mexican restaurant for nachos and a chile Colorado.”

…

Madden ditched the dress code and encouraged individual expression, tolerating his players’ penchant for wild nights and carousing because, he knew, they would always give him their full effort — especially on Sundays. Unlike the disciplinarians of his day, he imposed few rules, asking them only to listen, to be on time and to play hard when he demanded it. Madden told The New York Times in 1969 that “there has to be an honesty that you be yourself”; for him, that meant treating his players as “intelligent human beings.”

I wouldn’t say I was ever a big Madden fan. I had nothing against him, it was more a matter of me not being a big football fan in general. But that seems like a good general leadership principle: be yourself, and treat your people like intelligent human beings.

But when Madden retired, having been pummeled by ulcers and panic attacks and what is now regarded as burnout, he could boast of a résumé that included a Super Bowl XI demolition of the Minnesota Vikings in 1977; a .759 regular-season winning percentage (103-32-7), best among coaches who have worked at least 100 games; and an on-field view of some of the most controversial and memorable moments in football history: the notorious “Heidi” game (1968), the Immaculate Reception (1972) and the infamous Holy Roller play in 1978, his final season.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Madden was offered the “Ernie Pantusso” role on “Cheers”, but turned it down.

Harry M. Reid. Las Vegas Review Journal.

Jeff Dickerson, ESPN reporter covering the Chicago Bears. He was only 44.

I wanted to note this, even though he wasn’t as famous as the other guys. The ESPN obit makes Mr. Dickerson sound like a really good guy who was taken too soon:

Even after being placed in hospice last week, he told colleagues he was there merely to humor his doctors. No one around him heard a word of self-pity, and he disarmed those who expressed concern by asking them about their own lives.
“JD always wants to know how you’re doing,” Waddle said. “I’d ask him how he’s doing and his first response is, ‘How are you doing? How are [Waddle’s daughters]?’ The dignity with which he has carried himself through some of the most difficult times any human being would be asked to go through, what his wife went through and the dignity and strength and grace that he showed at her side throughout all of this … I don’t know anybody I’ve met in my 54 years in life who has handled adversity over the last decade with more grace and strength and dignity than Jeff Dickerson. I know a lot of people go through [stuff]. I do. I’m sympathetic to all of it. But what Jeff Dickerson has had to go through the last decade is cruel.

…

Known for his friendly demeanor, clear voice and straight talk, Dickerson reported the facts but was not afraid to tell his listeners and readers what he thought about the Bears. He confronted team management when necessary, but never made a show of it.

…

“He always carried a care for the subject that he was going to write about,” said Gould, who co-hosted an ESPN 1000 radio show with Dickerson during a portion of his Bears career. “As a player you can appreciate that the wisdom he put on paper was as neutral and correct as it ever was going to be. It was always going to be your words. It was always going to be what the story was. It was never going to be someone filling in the blanks …
“Players definitely noticed. He always wrote a true story. He always wrote what was happening at the moment. He didn’t try to back the bus up over somebody. He tried to get it exactly how the story was. … I think you saw a lot of guys give him a lot of credit because they knew he would write it right.”

Posted in Leadership, NFL, Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 28, 2021.

Tuesday, December 28th, 2021

Relentless advocate for children, and author, Andrew Vachss has died. This is by way of Lawrence from Joe Landsdale, and I don’t have any more information than what’s there at the moment. I’ll follow up as more information is posted.

NYT obit for Sarah Weddington.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 27, 2021.

Monday, December 27th, 2021

Man, you take some time off for Christmas, and Death decides to be even busier than usual.

Edward O. Wilson.

As an expert on insects, Dr. Wilson studied the evolution of behavior, exploring how natural selection and other forces could produce something as extraordinarily complex as an ant colony. He then championed this kind of research as a way of making sense of all behavior — including our own.
As part of his campaign, Dr. Wilson wrote a string of books that influenced his fellow scientists while also gaining a broad public audience. “On Human Nature” won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1979; “The Ants,” which Dr. Wilson wrote with his longtime colleague Bert Hölldobler, won him his second Pulitzer in 1991.
Dr. Wilson also became a pioneer in the study of biological diversity, developing a mathematical approach to questions about why different places have different numbers of species. Later in his career, Dr. Wilson became one of the world’s leading voices for the protection of endangered wildlife.

Jean-Marc Vallée. THR. Credits include “Dallas Buyers Club” and the “Big Little Lies” series. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Desmond Tutu, for the historical record.

Sarah Weddington, attorney in the Roe v Wade case. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Wanda Young, of the Marvelettes.

Ms. Young (who was also known as Wanda Rogers) and Gladys Horton shared lead singer duties. “Don’t Mess With Bill,” which rose to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1966, was one of several hits written by Smokey Robinson on which Ms. Young sang lead. (Ms. Horton was the lead singer on “Please Mr. Postman,” “Beechwood 4-5789” and other songs.)

Richard “Demo Dick” Marcinko.

Commander Marcinko climbed the ranks to command Team 6 and wrote a tell-all best seller that cemented the SEALs in pop culture as heroes and bad boys. Though the highly decorated Vietnam veteran led Team 6 for only three years, from 1980 to 1983, he had an outsize influence on the group’s place in military lore.

I’ve read (and thoroughly enjoyed) Rogue Warrior and, believe it or not, Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior and The Real Team: Rogue Warrior (affiliate links). Oddly enough, though, I never met Mr. Marcinko. I say “oddly” because he was actually one of the guests of honor at a convention Lawrence and I went to years back, but I never sought him out. Both of us were busy hanging out with one of the other guests.

Bruce Todd, former Austin mayor.

Todd served two terms as mayor, first elected in June 1991 and retired in June 1997. In his time as mayor, he and the council considered issues such as airport relocation, wilderness preservation and transferring the city-run hospital to Seton. He also helped recruit major employers to the city, like Samsung, AMD and Applied Materials.
He also helped pass the city’s no-smoking law, banning cigars and cigarettes in all restaurants and bars.
Todd also led the effort to get the U.S. Airforce to transfer then-Bergstrom Air Force Base to the city when the base was being decommissioned. He succeeded and also worked to pass a $600 million bond election to transform the base into Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

This is a little old, and has been touched on by other folks, but I did not find a good obit until now: Edward D. Shames.

Mr. Shames’s Easy Company, Second Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division parachuted behind Utah Beach in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. It fought the Germans in France, jumped into the German-occupied Netherlands in Operation Market Garden and held off Hitler’s troops in their prolonged siege of the Belgian town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

…

Entering combat as a sergeant with Easy Company, he was among its many paratroopers who found themselves scattered and lost upon hitting the ground behind Utah Beach before dawn on D-Day.
“I landed in a bunch of cows in a barn,” he recalled in a July 2021 interview with the American Veterans Center. “I had no idea where I was.”
He rounded up his men and found a farmhouse. The farmer didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak French, but he took out his maps and, through the farmer’s gestures, found that he was in the town of Carentan, some five miles from a bridge where he was supposed to have touched down. When he got there with his men, he received a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant for his resourcefulness.

Mr. Shames was the last surviving officer of Easy Company.

Posted in Austin, Geek, History, Movies, Obits, Politics | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 24, 2021.

Friday, December 24th, 2021

Joan Didion. LAT. THR.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

By way of Lawrence: a selection of her writing from National Review.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 23, 2021.

Thursday, December 23rd, 2021

Nicholas Georgiade.

He was “Enrico Rossi” in 113 episodes of “The Untouchables”. Other credits include two episodes of “Get Smart”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Mission: Impossible”, “The Rockford Files”, four episodes of “Quincy M.E.”, the Andy Sidaris film “Picasso Trigger”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Deadfall”, season 1, episodes 17 and 18. We have not seen this yet, as we are saving season 1 until after we’ve watched seasons 2 through 8. But this is kind of a legendary episode: Joe Mannix gets into a bloody fight with his boss at Intertect.)

Robbie Roper. He was a high school quarterback in Georgia and one of the top recruits in this year’s class.

He was only 18 years old, and passed away after a routine surgery.

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

Obit watch: December 22, 2021.

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2021

Sally Ann Howes.

She was most famous as “Truly Scrumptious” in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”. She did some TV work, including “Mission: Impossible” and “Run For Your Life”.

She also did a fair amount of theater:

Ms. Howes moved to New York in 1958 when she married the composer-lyricist Richard Adler and made her Broadway debut in Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady.” She replaced the original star, Julie Andrews, in the role of Eliza Doolittle, the smudged Cockney flower girl who is transformed by the demanding speech lessons of Professor Henry Higgins to a radiant lady from a draggletailed guttersnipe.

…

Ms. Howes toured Britain in 1973 in “The King and I,” and the United States in 1978 in “The Sound of Music.” In the 1970s and 1980s, she sang operettas like “Blossom Time” and “The Merry Widow” in American regional theaters. A half-century after her triumph as Eliza Doolittle, Ms. Howes toured the United States in 2007 in “My Fair Lady,” playing Mrs. Higgins, the mother of Henry Higgins. It was her 64th year in show business.

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

Obit watch: December 16, 2021.

Thursday, December 16th, 2021

Elfrida von Nardroff, historical footnote.

She kept a low public profile for much of her life, but back in the 1950s, she was on television. Specifically, the quiz show “Twenty-One”.

Over several months in 1958, Ms. von Nardroff charmed television viewers as she defeated one opponent after another on her way to winning $220,500 ($2.1 million in today’s dollars). That dwarfed the $129,000 (nearly $1.3 million) that the show’s most famous contestant, Charles Van Doren, an English instructor at Columbia University, had won in 1956 and 1957.

Of course, you know where this is going, right?

Within months after she took home the $220,500, Frank S. Hogan, the Manhattan district attorney, convened a grand jury to investigate quiz shows. Herbert Stempel, whom Mr. Van Doren had defeated on “Twenty-One,” had revealed that the producers had coached him extensively. An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight in 1959 followed. (The scandal became the focus of the 1994 film “Quiz Show,” directed by Robert Redford.)

…

Mr. Stone delved into Ms. von Nardroff’s claims of deep research and found them dubious. He saw little evidence for her claim that she had analyzed “Twenty-One” topics so extensively that she had filled numerous notebooks.
He sent investigators to the main branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, where they showed her picture to see if anyone recognized her from all the time she said she had spent there. They did not. (Ms. von Nardroff said she had taken out books but did not do research at the library, Mr. Stone recounted.) She admitted that the article in This Week was only “impressionistically true.”

…

She, Mr. Van Doren and 12 other contestants were arrested that October and charged with second-degree perjury, a misdemeanor. She and nine other contestants, including Mr. Van Doren, pleaded guilty in early 1962 and received suspended sentences.

For the historical record: bell hooks.

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

Obit watch: December 15, 2021.

Wednesday, December 15th, 2021

Frank “Frankie” Little Jr., a guitarist and songwriter with the O’Jays.

Little, born in 1943 and raised in Cleveland, was a guitarist and songwriter for The O’Jays in the mid-1960s. Eddie Levert, the lead singer for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band, told WEWS-TV Little moved with the group to California that decade, but didn’t stay on the West Coast.

…

“He could have been a great entity in the music business, but he was in love and love drove him back to Cleveland,” said Levert, who lost track of his one-time bandmate in the ensuing years.

…

Little was only with the band for a short time, The O’Jays said in a statement to Rolling Stone. He worked with Levert on a handful of songs, including 1964’s “Do the Jerk” and 1966’s “Pretty Words.”
“He came out with us when we first ventured out of Cleveland and traveled to Los Angeles, but was also in love with a woman in Cleveland that he missed so much that he soon returned back to Cleveland after a short amount of time,” the band said.

Mr. Little died sometime around or prior to February of 1982, but his death was not announced until recently, when his remains were identified.

The partial remains — first discovered in February 1982 in a garbage bag behind a now-shuttered business in Twinsburg, Ohio — were identified as Little’s using DNA provided by a close relative, police said in a statement Tuesday.
“In October 2021, the DNA Doe Project provided the names of potential living relatives, who were able to provide Frank’s name,” Twinsburg police said, adding that Little’s identity was later confirmed by a medical examiner who ruled his death a homicide.

…

Little’s partial remains were found in a garbage bag after a worker discovered a skull in snowfall behind the business, WEWS reported. The bones and body were “cut up” prior to being placed in bags, according to an original coroner’s report obtained by the station.

Cara Williams, actress. 55 credits in IMDB.

High points include “The Defiant Ones”, “We Go to Monte Carlo”, “The Man From the Diners’ Club”, and the wife of Harry Morgan’s character in “Pete and Gladys”.

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

Obit watch: December 12, 2021.

Sunday, December 12th, 2021

Anne Rice.

Everybody’s been on this like flies on a severed cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation, but I wanted to note it for two reasons:

1. The hysterical record.

2. When I looked early this morning (probably around 7:30 AM) the NYT had what I thought was a very brief and superficial obit up, with no mention that a longer one would be coming. When I checked later in the afternoon, that one has been slightly expanded and the usual “a fuller obituary will be published soon” note was there. The current obit seems to be the end product (modulo any corrections that come in).

Noted:

By her late teens, she had become disillusioned with the Catholic faith.
“I have a great deal of anger against a church that would teach kids a 7-year-old could burn in hell for French kissing, right alongside a Nazi sadist,” she told The Times in 1988. In the late 1990s, though, she would return to a belief in God after decades of atheism; over the next several years she wrote two novels inspired by the life of Jesus, as well as a memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Journey” (2008).

Posted in Books, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 11, 2021.

Saturday, December 11th, 2021

Michael Nesmith, of the Monkees.

The four members were picked to fit types. Davy Jones, a British vocalist, was the cute scamp; Micky Dolenz, the drummer and primary lead singer, was the wild jokester; and Peter Tork, the bass player, was the lovable dim bulb. Mr. Nesmith, a guitarist and occasional singer, was variously described as the cerebral Monkee, the introspective Monkee, the sardonic Monkee, the quiet Monkee.
“He has that dry Will Rogers sense of humor,” Mr. Dolenz told Rolling Stone in 2012, characterizing Mr. Nesmith’s real persona. “That’s probably one of the reasons they cast him.”

He was also a music video pioneer:

In 1977 he recorded a song called “Rio” for the Island Records label, which asked him to make some kind of promotional film for it.
“They wanted me to stand in front of a microphone and sing,” Mr. Nesmith was quoted as saying in the 2011 book “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. But he did something different.
“I wrote a series of cinematic shots: me on a horse in a suit of light, me in a tux in front of a 1920s microphone, me in a Palm Beach suit dancing with a woman in a red dress, women with fruit on their head flying through the air with me,” he said.
“As we edited these images,” he added, “an unusual thing started to emerge: The grammar of film, where images drove the narrative, shifted over to where the song drove the narrative, and it didn’t make any difference that the images were discontinuous. It was hyper-real. Even people who didn’t understand film, including me, could see this was a profound conceptual shift.”
Almost by accident, he had made one of the first music videos as that term came to be understood. It got some play in Europe, but Mr. Nesmith was struck by the fact that there was no outlet in the United States for showing such works, which a few other pop and rock stars were also beginning to make (and some, like the Beatles, had made earlier).
In 1979 he and the director William Dear developed a TV show, “Popclips,” for Nickelodeon, a recently inaugurated channel for children that was looking to add teenagers to its audience. “Popclips” showed nothing but music videos, introduced by a V.J. The show is often said to have helped inspire the creation of MTV in 1981, although accounts of the various people who claim to have had a role in MTV’s emergence differ widely.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 10, 2021.

Friday, December 10th, 2021

Al Unser Sr., one of the greatest racing drivers ever.

Unser’s four Indianapolis 500 wins came in 1970, 1971, 1978 and 1987. The final victory made him the oldest driver, at 47, to win the United States’ premier auto race.

…

Al Unser first competed in the Indianapolis 500 in 1965, running the race 27 times, the third-most in history. He led for 644 laps over his career, which remains a record.
“His quiet and humble approach outside of the car, combined with his fierce competitive spirit and fearless talent behind the wheel, made Al a fan favorite,” J. Douglas Boles, president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, said in a statement.
Unser’s four wins at the Indianapolis 500 is a record shared by A.J. Foyt, Rick Mears and Helio Castroneves, who won this year’s race.

Demaryius Thomas, former wide receiver with the Denver Broncos. He retired earlier this year, though he did not play in 2020.

Noted here because he was only 33. I don’t want to speculate, but other reports I’ve seen quote his family as stating he was having medical issues.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 9, 2021.

Thursday, December 9th, 2021

Lina Wertmüller, Italian director.

In the broad sense, Ms. Wertmüller was a political filmmaker, but no one could ever quite figure out what the politics were.

By way of Lawrence, Christos Achilleos, SF artist.

Posted in Art, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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