Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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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.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 27, 2021.

Wednesday, October 27th, 2021

Mort Sahl.

Gregarious and contentious — he was once described as “a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily” — Mr. Sahl had a long, up-and-down career. He faded out of popularity in the mid-1960s, when he devoted his time to ridiculing the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; then, over the following decades, he occasionally faded back in. But before that he was a star and a cult hero of the intelligentsia.
He had regular club dates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with audiences full of celebrities. He recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record,” the album “At Sunset.” (Though recorded in 1955, it was not released until 1958, shortly after the release of his official first album, “The Future Lies Ahead.”) By 1960, he had starred in a Broadway revue, written jokes for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, hosted the Academy Awards, appeared on the cover of Time and been cast in two movies (he would later make a handful of others).
An inveterate contrarian and a wide-ranging skeptic, Mr. Sahl was a self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy who cast a jaundiced eye on social trends, gender relations and conventional wisdom of all sorts. Conformity infuriated him: In one early routine he declared that Brooks Brothers stores didn’t have mirrors; customers just stood in front of one another to see how they looked. Sanctimony infuriated him: “Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they can feel good for 10 minutes.”

…

His own political leanings were difficult to track. The left wanted to claim him, especially early in his career, but they couldn’t quite do so. Among other things, he could be crudely sexist and, though he supported civil rights, he was acerbic in confrontation with knee-jerk liberal dogma on the subject. Over the course of his life he kept company with politicians of varying stripes, from Stevenson, Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Alexander Haig and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He said he had voted for Ross Perot; he praised Ron Paul and defended Sarah Palin; he cast a skeptical eye on Barack Obama’s presidency and was as scathing about Hillary Clinton as he was about Donald Trump.

…

Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was an obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, and who accused a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence, secret or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw’s trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.
“I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,” Mr. Sahl wrote in “Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. I don’t think Gene McCarthy is bad company. I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don’t think that Garrison is bad company.
“I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.”

Richard Evans, actor. He was “Paul Hanley” in the first season of “Peyton Place”. Other credits include a lot of 1970s cop/PI shows, “Lancer”, “Bonanza”, one episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series…

…and “Mannix”! (“Bird of Prey”, season 8 episodes 20 and 21. He played “Victor Valdek”.)

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

Supplemental obit watch.

Tuesday, October 26th, 2021

The NY Post is reporting the death of Carl Madsen.

Mr. Madsen was a long-time NFL official: he worked on-field from 1997 to 2008, then worked as a replay official from 2009.

He worked the game between the Titans and the Chiefs on Sunday. According to the report, he was driving home to Mississippi when he had some kind of medical problem. The police responded, pulled him out of the car and did first aid, and transported him to a hospital where he passed away.

He was 71. Our condolences to his family.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 26, 2021.

Tuesday, October 26th, 2021

Francis Wayne Alexander. Mr. Alexander is believed to have died sometime between 1976 and 1977, but his death was not announced until Monday.

Mr. Alexander moved to Chicago from New York with his wife in 1975, officials said. The couple divorced months later, and Mr. Alexander remained in Chicago.
He lived on Winona Street on the North Side of Chicago, in a neighborhood where Mr. Gacy was known to have targeted other victims, including William Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.

…

The Sheriff’s Department was aided by a nonprofit organization, the DNA Doe Project, whose all-volunteer staff tries to match unidentified remains with genetic profiles that had been uploaded to an open-source genealogy database.
Using DNA from one of Victim No. 5’s molars, the DNA Doe Project found connections to Mr. Alexander’s family. Detective Moran followed up with research, interviews and further DNA testing before confirming that he had found the identity of the victim.

The confirmed identification of Mr. Alexander leaves five remaining unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office is actively working to identify those as well.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 24, 2021.

Sunday, October 24th, 2021

Two different people sent me this one, and neither one mentioned my hot button.

Val Bisoglio, actor.

He began acting under the tutelage of Jeff Corey and appeared on the New York stage in productions such as “Kiss Mama,” “A View from the Bridge” and “Wait Until Dark,” as well as in New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park with Arthur Penn.

He has 65 credits in IMDB. High points include: “Saturday Night Fever” (he was the father of Travolta’s character), “Cover Up” (ahem), “M*A*S*H” (he played “Sal Pernelli”, the cook. Not Igor, the guy who served the food, but the cook.), “B.J. and the Bear”, “Rockford Files”, “St. Ives” (the Charles Bronson movie based on a pseudonymous novel by Ross Thomas), “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (“The Zombie“: if memory serves, he was a lower level mob thug), and “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”.

His most famous role (and the hot button one): he played “Danny Tovo”, the restaurant owner, on 138 episodes of “Quincy, M.E.”

And yes! He did do a “Mannix”! (“Run Till Dark”, season 5, episode 7.)

Paul Salata. He originated the “Mr. Irrelevant” award for the last player drafted in the NFL college draft.

He wanted to celebrate the unheralded honor of being picked last because players at the end of the line rarely get noticed — even though one might have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than of being picked by an N.F.L. team. Mr. Rozelle blessed the idea, and Mr. Irrelevant was born.
“Everyone who is drafted works hard, and some of them don’t get any recognition,” Mr. Salata told The New York Times in 2017. “They do their work and should be noticed.”

…

Starting in 1976, Mr. Salata and his friends in Orange County raised money to fly the last player picked in the draft to Southern California, where he would receive a champion’s welcome. In the years since, the players — some of whom who had never been to California — have been paraded through Newport Beach, taken to Disneyland and feted at a banquet, where they received the “Lowsman Trophy,” which depicts a player fumbling a football.
Mr. Salata and his team also fulfilled some of the players’ requests, including surfing lessons, visits to the Playboy Mansion and being a guest announcer on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Many Mr. Irrelevants never made it past their first season or even past their first training camp, but a handful have stuck around in the N.F.L. In February the Tampa Bay Buccaneers kicker Ryan Succop became the first Mr. Irrelevant to score in and win a Super Bowl. He had been drafted last in 2009 by the Kansas City Chiefs.

James Michael Tyler, “Gunther” on “Friends”. I’m sorry if I am giving him the short end of the stick here, but this just came in, and I have never seen an episode of “Friends”.

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

Obit watch: October 23, 2021.

Saturday, October 23rd, 2021

Your Peter Scolari roundup: NYT. THR. Variety.

Mr. Scolari’s stage work over the years included two Broadway plays in which he portrayed sports figures. In “Magic/Bird” (2012), about the basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, he played several characters, including the basketball coaches Pat Riley and Red Auerbach and the team owner Jerry Buss.
Two years later he played the Yankee star Yogi Berra in “Bronx Bombers,” a role that required him to spout Yogi-isms. The critic Charles Isherwood, in The Times, wrote that he “delivers these in a nicely offhand style that manages to keep the zing without turning each verbal pratfall into a cartoon caption.”

Posted in Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 22, 2021.

Friday, October 22nd, 2021

Halyna Hutchins, cinematographer. She was 42.

Information about this is still coming in, but the reports so far are that Ms. Hutchins was killed when Alec Baldwin discharged what is being described as a “prop firearm” on the set of a movie he was working on in New Mexico (“Rust”). The movie’s director, Joel Souza, was also injured: the last reports I saw were that he was in critical condition.

Deadline. NYT.

I don’t have a lot to say about this right now because I don’t think there’s enough information. I have no special fondness for Alec Baldwin (though I think he was good in “Hunt For Red October”) but I want to give him and everyone else involved the same benefit of the doubt I’d give anyone else in this situation.

Earl Old Person, chief of the Blackfeet Nation.

Beginning in 1954, when he was first elected to the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, the tribe’s governing body, Chief Old Person positioned himself as a go-between linking his isolated, impoverished Native American community with the rest of the country and beyond. At his retirement from the council, in 2016, he was the longest-serving elected tribal leader in the country.
He was a regular witness at congressional hearings and a frequent guest of heads of state around the world. He drank tea with the shah of Iran and spoke at the 1988 Republican National Convention. He urged his tribe to be more entrepreneurial, and he persuaded government officials and venture capitalists to provide seed money for Blackfeet-owned businesses.
“His message is plain,” the magazine Nation’s Business wrote in 1981. “‘We don’t want your help, we want your business.’”

…

In the 1980s, the Department of the Interior began to lease land to oil and gas prospectors in the Badger-Two Medicine region, adjacent to the Blackfeet reservation, in northwestern Montana. The land is sacred to the Blackfeet, but an 1896 treaty ceded it to the federal government.
Chief Old Person insisted that the tribe had given only the land rights, not the mineral rights, and he helped lead a 40-year campaign to render the region off limits to outside interests (leaving open the possibility that the tribe might one day get into the energy business itself). Last year a court ruling closed the last of the leases on the land.
“Chief Old Person was a fierce advocate for the Blackfeet Nation and all of Indian Country for his entire life,” Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, said in a statement after the chief’s death. “The world is a better place because he was in it.”

Edited to add: current reports are that Joel Souza is out of the hospital. I wish him a speedy recovery.

Peter Scolari has passed away at 66. Since this is breaking, I’ll plan to do a more complete post tomorrow.

Edited to add 2: “How can a prop gun used on a movie set be deadly?” I feel like most of my readers know all this already, but this is a decent explainer for anybody who does not. Also, somebody tweaked me for not referencing Jon-Erik Hexum (which I didn’t do because it isn’t clear if the Baldwin situation is anything like the Hexum one, or the Brandon Lee one), so here’s your reference.

Edited to add 3:

The 28-year-old son of martial arts icon and legendary screen star Bruce Lee was killed in a freak accident on the set of “The Crow” on March 30, 1993, when fellow actor Michael Massee was supposed to shoot him at close range with a harmless pistol.
But when Massee fired the .44 Magnum revolver, the gunpowder in the blank cartridge ignited a bullet fragment that became embedded in the barrel — propelling it into Lee’s body about 15 feet away at the Carolco Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina, the Sun reported.

Posted in Guns, History, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 18, 2021.

Monday, October 18th, 2021

Colin Powell. Everybody is on this like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition, but for the historical record: NYT. WP. (Edited to add: Lawrence.)

Betty Lynn. Her most famous role was as “Thelma Lou”, Barney’s girlfriend on “The Andy Griffith Show”.

Posted in History, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 15, 2021.

Friday, October 15th, 2021

Gary Paulsen, author.

I was a little old for Hatchet (affiliate link) when it came out, and haven’t gotten around to reading it. But whenever I see discussions of young adult books people liked, or liked when they were that age, Hatchet always comes up. It seems to have had a strong influence on many young people.

And he was the kind of guy who could write that book.

When Gary was 4, his mother, Eunice (Moen) Paulsen, moved with him to Chicago, where she got a job in an ammunition factory. An alcoholic, she would dress Gary in a child-size soldier’s outfit and take him to bars, where she made him sing on tables as a way to get men to pay attention to her.
She could also be fiercely protective. Once he sneaked outside their apartment when she was sleeping. A man dragged him into an alley and began to molest him. Suddenly his mother appeared, beating and kicking the assailant into unconsciousness.
Eventually, her own mother forced her to send Gary to live with an aunt and uncle in northern Minnesota, where he learned to hunt, fish and live outdoors for long stretches.

…

In “Gone to the Woods,” a memoir published this year, Mr. Paulsen recalled how at one point the passengers watched in horror as a plane crash-landed nearby. As the plane’s passengers struggled in the water, a pack of sharks descended on them, pulling men and women and children below the water.
His family later returned to Minnesota, where his parents drank and fought constantly. To get away from them, Gary would take to the woods, exploring, hunting and trapping, or wander around their small town, Thief River Falls, near the Canadian border. He worked odd jobs, like setting pins at a bowling alley and delivering newspapers, and used the money to buy his own school supplies, as well as a .22-caliber rifle.
One day he ducked into a library to get warm. A librarian asked if he had a library card. When he said no, she gave him one, along with a Scripto notebook and a No. 2 pencil, with instructions to read everything he could and write down everything he thought.

…

When he was 14 he ran away and joined a carnival. He returned home just long enough to forge his father’s signature and join the Army.
The Army trained him in engineering, and he later tracked satellites for a government contractor at a facility in California. He also spent time in Los Angeles, writing dialogue for television shows like “Mission: Impossible.”
All along, he had been reading and writing, and one day in 1965 he decided to try his hand at a novel. He moved back to Minnesota, where he rented a cabin and went to work.
For several years he wrote westerns for adults under a pseudonym. He made just enough money to sustain a simple rural life, living off what he could grow and hunt.

…

He also fell in love with dog-sledding. He took part in the Iditarod, the grueling 1,000-mile race across Alaska, three times before giving up the sport in 1990, citing heart problems.
“When you run a thousand miles with a dog team, you enter a state of primitive exaltation,” he said in an interview with the American Writers Museum in January. “You go back 30,000 years, you and the dogs, and you’re never the same again.”

…

A proud Luddite and misanthrope, he considered the internet “just stupid, faster,” and said organized sports had become a perverse form of religion.

For the historical record: Sir David Amess, Conservative MP. Everybody’s covered this by now, and I don’t have anything to add.

Well, okay, perhaps one thing: I don’t mean to make fun of our friends in the UKOGBNI, nor do I mean to seem provincial. But “constituency surgery” is such an interesting term…

Posted in Books, Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 14, 2021.

Thursday, October 14th, 2021

Anne Saxelby. No, you probably never heard of her if you didn’t live in New York.

She was one of the people responsible for the growth of American cheese and American cheese making.

In 2006, when Ms. Saxelby opened Saxelby Cheesemongers, the American cheese industry was largely just that: industrial and mass market. Her shop was a daring enterprise that carried only American-made cheeses from small producers.
The space was hardly more than a nook with a refrigerator in the original Essex Market on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Almost immediately, Ms. Saxelby attracted attention among cheese lovers, and especially among chefs in the growing farm-to-table movement.

…

“Her passion for celebrating American farmstead cheese influenced a generation of cheese makers, chefs, cheese enthusiasts and friends and changed the way we engage with American foods,” Michael Anthony, the executive chef of Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan and a regular customer, said in an interview.
Steven Jenkins, a former cheesemonger at Fairway Market, said in a statement: “Anne Saxelby was the U.S. ambassador for American cheese makers and their handmade cheeses. Her yearslong, tireless effort to promote them and make them mainstream will forever have its effect, and will long be remembered.”

…

During the coronavirus pandemic Ms. Saxelby led virtual cheese tastings, sending tasting kits to participants. The store also sells crackers, charcuterie, condiments, beer and cider. (However, Mr. Martins said, Ms. Saxelby never considered carrying vegan or nondairy cheese.)

She was 40.

Two by way of Lawrence: Brian Goldner, CEO of Hasbro. He was only 58: cancer got him.

Timuel Black, Chicago activist, historian, and war hero. He was 102.

While enduring racism in the military during his two years of service, he’d participate in two of the war’s decisive battles — the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge — as well as the liberation of Paris, earning four Battle Stars and the French Croix de Guerre.
“We went all the way from Normandy up onto the front line of the extermination camps,” he said in that interview on his 100th birthday. “At Buchenwald concentration camp, I saw human beings systematically being cremated.”

…

He returned to civilian life with militant views, working as a social worker, high school teacher and as an organizer — with a prominent role in just about every labor, civil rights and political justice movement of the next six decades.
He worked with activists Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois in the 1940s and 1950s, and alongside King in the 1960s. He helped establish the Congress of Racial Equality and the United Packinghouse Workers of America.

…

Mr. Black spent most of his life working to fulfill King’s dream. For nearly 30 years, he was a social worker and teacher at Farragut, DuSable and Hyde Park high schools, fighting segregation and discrimination within the school system and helping establish the Teachers Committee for Quality Education. He went to City Colleges of Chicago in 1969, initially as a dean at Wright College. He was vice president at Olive Harvey from 1971 to 1973, and head of communications systemwide from 1973 to 1979. Then he taught cultural anthropology at Loop College until his retirement in 1989.
In 1994, Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett wrote of Mr. Black: “Tim was of a generation that viewed education not only as a vehicle for personal elevation but also as instrument for a people’s liberation … Whenever there was a good crusade against Jim Crow housing, segregated public beaches, job discrimination or the shortchanging of Black students in public schools, there was Tim Black.

Posted in Cheese, Food, Obits | Comments Closed

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