Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: August 5, 2021.

Thursday, August 5th, 2021

Col. Dave Severance (USMC – ret.) has passed away. He was 102.

The flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, captured by an Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, was taken when the battle for Iwo Jima was far from over. In the days that followed, Colonel Severance earned the Silver Star, the Marines’ third-highest decoration for valor after the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. The citation stated that in a firefight for a heavily defended ridge, he “skillfully directed the assault on this strong enemy position despite stubborn resistance.”
Colonel Severance, a captain at the time, commanded Easy Company of the 28th Marine Regiment, Fifth Marine Division — part of the 70,000-man Marine force that sought to seize Iwo Jima, 7.5 square miles of black volcanic sand about 660 miles south of Tokyo. The island, defended by 21,000 Japanese troops, held airstrips that were needed as bases for American fighter planes and as havens for crippled bombers returning to the Mariana Islands from missions over Japan.
Amid heavy casualties, the Marines by the fifth day of combat on Iwo Jima had silenced most opposition from Japanese soldiers dug into caves on Mount Suribachi, an extinct volcano 546 feet high at Iwo Jima’s southern tip.
In midmorning, a group of Marines from Easy Company raised a flag at the summit, a ceremony photographed by Sgt. Louis Lowery of the Marine magazine Leatherneck. When James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy, who was on the beach below, saw the flag, he requested that it be kept as a memento. After it was returned to the beach, Colonel Severance sent another group of his Marines to bring a larger flag to the mountaintop.
It was the raising of the second flag that was portrayed in Mr. Rosenthal’s dramatic photograph.

…

He was commissioned as a lieutenant and first saw combat as a platoon commander in the 1943 battle for the Pacific island of Bougainville. His platoon was ambushed and cut off by Japanese troops about a mile behind enemy lines, but fought its way out of an encirclement and wiped out the enemy with the loss of only one Marine, according to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

…

After World War II, Colonel Severance completed flight training and flew fighter aircraft during the Korean War. He completed 69 missions and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He was promoted to colonel in 1962. At his retirement, in May 1968, he was assistant director of personnel at Marine headquarters.

…

Colonel Severance was portrayed by Neil McDonough as a Marine captain and by Harve Presnell as an older man in “Flags of Our Fathers” (2006), Clint Eastwood’s film about the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Colonel Severance was a consultant for the movie.

…

Asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, “I never thought about it,” then added, “Just that I was a Marine for 30 years and I never ended up in jail.”

Alvin Ing, actor. He was in the original Broadway production of Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” and the revival in 2004. He also appeared in the 2002 revival of “Flower Drum Song”.

He also did some movie and TV work, including “The Final Countdown” and the bad “Hawaii Five-0”.

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

Interlude.

Sunday, August 1st, 2021

I’m taking a very short break (should be operational again late Monday or possibly Tuesday morning).

In the meantime, please to enjoy this: Dale “Snort” Snodgrass at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. (About an hour and 20 minutes.)

Bonus: Tomcat demo flight at the Cleveland Air Show, 1996.

Posted in History, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 1, 2021.

Sunday, August 1st, 2021

Austin Police officer Andy Traylor passed away last night.

His death came as a result of severe injuries sustained in a traffic accident on Wednesday.

APD said on Wednesday Traylor had been with the department for nine years and said in 2018 he served in the Navy for 10 years prior to becoming an officer. The Office of the Chief Medical Officer for Austin said he leaves behind a wife and five children.

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 31, 2021.

Saturday, July 31st, 2021

Carl Levin, Senator from Michigan.

Richard Lamm, Colorado governor.

As a state lawmaker from 1966 to 1974, he also campaigned against Denver’s hosting the 1976 Olympics even though the city had been awarded the Games. He argued that it would damage the environment and sap state funds. Colorado voters rejected spending government money on the Games, and the event was shifted to Innsbruck, Austria.
Denver voters later passed an initiative requiring voter approval for any future proposals to host the Olympics. Mr. Lamm once said that he had been treated as a “pariah” by the business community over the episode.

Posted in History, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 29, 2021.

Thursday, July 29th, 2021

Supplemental: NYT obit for Dusty Hill.

City Journal tribute to Jackie Mason. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Ron Popeil.

The quirky products certainly sounded like inventions Americans could live without — an Inside-the-Shell Electric Egg Scrambler, spray-on fake hair in a can, the Pocket Fisherman (“the biggest fishing invention since the hook … and still only $19.95!”), and the counter-size Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ (“Set it and forget it!”), one of his biggest successes.
His redesigned 1975 Veg-O-Matic is enshrined in the Smithsonian’s American Legacies collection alongside the Barbie doll, and comedian Dan Aykroyd vigorously parodied both salesman and machine in Bass-O-Matic skits on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1970s.

“I’ve gone by many titles: King of Hair, King of Pasta, King of Dehydration, or to use a more colloquial phrase, a pitchman or a hawker,” Mr. Popeil said in 1995. “I don’t like those phrases, but I am what I am. Pick a product, any product on your desk. Introduce the product. Tell all the problems relating to the product. Tell how the product solves all those problems. Tell the customer where he or she can buy it and how much it costs. Do this in one minute. Try it. You know what it sounds like? It comes out like this: Brrrrrrrrrrr.”

George Rhoads. I had not heard of him previously, but his work sounds really cool.

Mr. Rhoads’s colorful “audio-kinetic ball machines,” which evoked the workings of watches and roller coasters, were built of comically designed tracks and devices like loop-the-loops and helical ramps, and were usually six- to 10-feet high. Scores of the machines have been installed in children’s hospitals, malls, science museums and airports and elsewhere in a dozen countries, but mostly in the United States and Japan.
“Each pathway that the ball takes is a different drama, as I call it, because the events happen in a certain sequence, analogous to drama,” he said in an interview in 2014 with Creative Machines, which makes ball machines based on and inspired by his designs. “The ball gets into certain difficulties. It does a few things. Maybe there’s some conflict. They hit or they wander, whatever it is and then there’s some kind of dramatic conclusion.”
One of his most frequently viewed machines, “42nd Street Ballroom,” was installed in 1983 in the lobby of Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, where it remained. Eight feet tall and eight feet wide, the sculpture shows its plates spin, its levers flip and its 24 billiard balls roll down ramps. As was typical of his machines, numerous balls move independently, letting gravity guide them and, when they reach the bottom, they are returned to the top by a motorized hoist.

Joey Jordison, drummer and founding member of Slipknot.

Rick Aiello, actor. (“Do The Right Thing”, lots of TV credits including “18 Wheels of Justice”)

For the record, he was Danny Aiello’s son.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 28, 2021 (supplemental)

Wednesday, July 28th, 2021

I am seeing reports that Dusty Hill of ZZ Top has passed, but I have not yet found a reliable source for this.

I’ll update here if I do find one.

Edited to add: short preliminary obit from the Statesman. Variety.

EtA2: NYPost.

EtA3:

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 28, 2021.

Wednesday, July 28th, 2021

Jimmy Elidrissi.

This is another one of those NYT style obits for someone who wasn’t so famous, but was still a figure worth noting. Mr. Elidrissi emigrated from Morocco to the United States in 1966 and got a job as a bellhop at the Waldorf Astoria…

…where he worked until 2017.

On the day he retired after 51 years, he was its longest-serving employee and probably the longest-serving living bellhop in Manhattan, according to his union, the Hotel Trades Council.

…

He remembered encountering Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter.
“‘Here you go, Mr. President,’” he recalled saying in greeting the candidate, “and he goes, ‘No, no, don’t call me that yet!’ So I say, ‘Look, Mr. President, you’re going to win and when you win send me something for my son.’ Later that year, he sent us a signed picture made out to my son.”
When Reagan returned to the hotel years after leaving office, he greeted Mr. Elidrissi by saying, “‘You’re still here, Jim!’”

Stretching the definition of an obit just a wee bit…

Five high-ranking military leaders died in the span of just 10 days, according to the Cuban government — though it’s remained mum on the causes.

Spoiler: it looks like pretty much all of these guys were older than dirt.

Posted in History, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 27, 2021.

Tuesday, July 27th, 2021

Michael Enzi, fomer Senator from Wyoming. He’s the second prominent person I’ve seen recently who has died as a result of a bicycle accident (the other one was Greg Knapp, an assistant coach for the Jets).

I guess the moral is: be careful out there.

Dale “Snort” Snodgrass was killed in a plane crash over the weekend. The Drive put up a very nice obit for him.

You may not have heard his name, and you wouldn’t recognize him from this photo. But if you follow military aviation at all, you will recognize this photo.

The huge barreling Tomcat screams by in a right-hand knife-edge pass so close to the ship people think the picture was photoshopped. In reality, it was a well-practiced maneuver with specific airspeed, altitude, and angle of bank performance metrics briefed before the flight and debriefed after.

…

The list of Snort’s career accomplishments is long. First nugget pilot selected for training in the F-14 Tomcat along with the most hours in the F-14 Tomcat for a pilot. A TOPGUN graduate and US Navy Fighter Pilot of the Year in 1985, plus a tour as Commanding Officer of VF-33 during Operation Desert Storm leading combat missions into Iraq. He rounded out his active duty career as Commander Fighter Wing Atlantic where he spearheaded adding precision strike capability for all Tomcats. In retirement, he would go on to fly some of the world’s most legendary aircraft on the air show circuit and was a founding member and pilot for commercial adversary services provider Draken International. But Snort stands above everyone else in one area: King of the Airshow circuit in the F-14 Tomcat.

I have not had a chance to watch this yet, but Ward Carroll did a live stream tribute to Mr. Snodgrass on Sunday night. Here it is for bookmark purposes (about 40 minutes):

Posted in Obits, Planes, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 26, 2021.

Monday, July 26th, 2021

Supplemental Steven Weinberg obits: NYT. Statesman.

Jackie Mason, comedian.

Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.
“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”
The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”

…

After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”
Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.
The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”
“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”

…

A play he starred in and wrote (with Mike Mortman), “A Teaspoon Every Four Hours,” went through a record-breaking 97 preview performances on Broadway before opening on June 14, 1969, to terrible reviews. It closed after one night, taking with it his $100,000 investment.

For the record (and per Wikipedia), “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went through 182 preview performances.

He also invested in “The Stoolie” (1972), a film in which he played a con man and improbable Romeo. It also failed, taking even more of his money. Roles in sitcoms and films eluded him, although he did make the most of small parts in Mel Brooks’s “History of the World: Part I” (1981) — he was “Jew No. 1” in the Spanish Inquisition sequence — and “The Jerk” (1979), in which he played the gas-station owner who employs Steve Martin.

…

Appearances on the cartoon series “The Simpsons,” as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown, confirmed his newfound status, and earned him a second Emmy. Not even the 1988 bomb “Caddyshack II,” in which he was a last-minute replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, or the ill-fated “Chicken Soup,” a 1989 sitcom co-starring Lynn Redgrave that died quickly, could slow his improbable transformation from borscht belt relic into hot property.

Laura Foreman. She was a prominent and well-regarded reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s: so much so that she got hired by the NYT.

Her focus was Philadelphia’s 1975 mayoral race, in which the brash and cocky incumbent, Frank L. Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was seeking a second term.
One of Mr. Rizzo’s close allies was Mr. Cianfrani, a longtime ward boss who became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential lawmakers. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer.
Rumors began circulating that the two were involved romantically, but Ms. Foreman denied them, and the editors discounted them.

After she got hired by the NYT, it came out that the rumors were true: “…the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car.”

The Times told her she had to resign, even though the conduct in question had occurred at another paper. The Times, in fact, said initially that her work had comported with the highest ethical standards. But according to an account that Ms. Foreman wrote in The Washington Monthly in 1978, A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’s executive editor, told her that because the paper was writing tough stories at the time about conflicts of interest involving Bert Lance, a close Carter adviser, it couldn’t very well harbor a conflict of its own.
To others, Mr. Rosenthal uttered an unforgettable comment that has been rendered several different ways but in essence said that he didn’t care if his reporters were having sex with elephants — as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Roberts, the Inquirer editor, appointed the paper’s top investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to dig into the affair. They produced a 17,000-word article, published on Oct. 16, 1977, that exposed internal rivalries at the paper and found that editors had looked the other way to protect a favored reporter, Ms. Foreman. It was among the first instances of a newspaper turning its investigative artillery on itself.

She married Mr. Cianfrani, but never worked in journalism again. Ms. Foreman actually passed away over a year ago, but her death was only recently reported.

A burning in Hell watch, by way of Lawrence: Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game” killer.

A longhaired photographer who lured women by offering to take their pictures, Mr. Alcala was convicted of killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in Orange County, Calif., and two women in New York, all between 1971 and 1979, the authorities said.
Investigators had also suspected him of, or had linked him to, other murders in Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona, New Hampshire and Marin County, Calif., the department said.

…

In 1978, six years after he was convicted of molesting [removed – DB], Mr. Alcala appeared in a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar as “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game.”
The host described him as “a successful photographer,” according to a YouTube video. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”
Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on a date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Geek, Law, Media, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 24, 2021.

Saturday, July 24th, 2021

I am seeing reports that Steven Weinberg, one of the great physicists, has died.

The University of Texas has a tribute up, but I have not found a mainstream news source reporting this yet.

In 1967, Weinberg published a seminal paper laying out how two of the universe’s four fundamental forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — relate as part of a unified electroweak force. “A Model of Leptons,” at barely three pages, predicted properties of elementary particles that at that time had never before been observed (the W, Z and Higgs boson) and theorized that “neutral weak currents” dictated how elementary particles interact with one another. Later experiments, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, would bear out each of his predictions.

…

By showing the unifying links behind weak forces and electromagnetism, which were previously believed to be completely different, Weinberg delivered the first pillar of the Standard Model, the half-century-old theory that explains particles and three of the four fundamental forces in the universe (the fourth being gravity). As critical as the model is in helping physical scientists understand the order driving everything from the first minutes after the Big Bang to the world around us, Weinberg continued to pursue, alongside other scientists, dreams of a “final theory” that would concisely and effectively explain current unknowns about the forces and particles in the universe, including gravity.

…

“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art,” he once told PBS. “Although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves.”

Posted in Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 23, 2021.

Friday, July 23rd, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit for Joe McKinney. He was a San Antonio based horror writer who won two Bram Stoker awards.

McKinney, who also worked as a San Antonio Police Department sergeant, frequently set his work in the Alamo City and incorporated elements of police procedural into his novels and short stories. He died in his sleep on Tuesday, according to multiple online posts by friends, and is survived by a wife and two daughters.

…

As an author, McKinney was known for brisk, action-oriented prose. His first novel, Dead City, came out in 2006, amid a wave of zombie pop culture, and it’s been cited in academic papers as a canonical work in modern zombie fiction. The book, which follows a San Antonio patrol cop as he tries to survive an undead apocalypse, spun into a four-novel series for Pinnacle Books.

He was 52.

The Cleveland Indians.

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Obit watch: July 21, 2021.

Wednesday, July 21st, 2021

Rick Laird, noted musician.

The guitarist John McLaughlin called Mr. Laird in 1971 with an invitation to join a group he was forming with the goal of uniting the jazz-rock aesthetic — which Mr. McLaughlin had helped establish as a member of Miles Davis and Tony Williams’s earliest electric bands — with Indian classical music and European experimentalism.
The new ensemble, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which also featured the drummer Billy Cobham, the keyboardist Jan Hammer and the violinist Jerry Goodman, became one of the most popular instrumental bands of its time. It released a pair of studio albums now regarded as classics for Columbia Records, “The Inner Mounting Flame” (1971) and “Birds of Fire” (1973), and one live album, “Between Nothingness & Eternity” (1973).

After leaving Mahavishnu, he went on to tour with other artists and did one solo album. But he decided in 1982 that he needed a backup career path. So he became a professional photographer. (The NYT says that he did continue to write and perform music, but none of it has been “officially released”.)

My feelings about baseball are well known, but I did want to highlight the passing of Marjorie Adams. She spent a lot of time researching and lobbying for her great-grandfather’s (Daniel Adams) place as a founding father of baseball.

Making the case for her great-grandfather, who was known as Doc (he came by his nickname legitimately, having received a medical degree from Harvard in 1838), became Ms. Adams’s consuming passion. She advocated for him on a website, at conferences, at meetings of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and at vintage baseball festivals, where fans play and celebrate the sport, as if it were the 19th century. She nicknamed herself Cranky, for “cranks,” a period term for fans.
“Baseball is the national pastime,” she said in an interview in 2014 with SABR’s Smoky Joe Wood chapter. “It’s important that the historical record is correct.”
That record was a lie for a long time, according to John Thorn, baseball’s official historian. Abner Doubleday was for many years falsely cited as baseball’s inventor. And Alexander Cartwright, who played a role in the sport’s evolution, was credited on his plaque at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., with some of the innovations that, it turned out, were actually conceived by Adams.

…

Doc Adams began playing for the pioneering New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club in 1845. While with the team, he created the shortstop position — as a relay man from the outfield, not a fielder of ground balls and pop flies. He made his most critical contributions to the game in 1857 at a rule-making convention of which he was chairman.
There he codified some of the fundamentals of the modern game, setting the distance between bases at 90 feet, the length of a game at nine innings and the number of men per side at nine.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 20, 2021.

Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

Dr. Paul Auerbach, one of the pioneering figures in “wilderness medicine”.

A medical student at Duke University at the time, he went to work in 1975 with the Indian Health Service on a Native American reservation in Montana, and the experience was revelatory.
“We saw all kinds of cases that I would have never seen at Duke or frankly anywhere else except on the reservation,” Dr. Auerbach said in a recent interview given to Stanford University, where he worked for many years. “Snakebites. Drowning. Lightning strike.”
“And I just thoroughly enjoyed it,” he continued. “Taking care of people with very limited resources.”
Back at Duke he tried to learn more about outdoor medicine, but he struggled to find resource material.
“I kept going back to literature to read, but there was no literature,” he said. “If I wanted to read about snake bites, I was all over the place. If I wanted to read about heat illness, I was all over the place. So I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’ll do a book on wilderness medicine.’”

…

The resulting book, “Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies,” which he edited with a colleague, Edward Geehr, was published in 1983 and is widely considered the definitive textbook in the field, with sections like “Protection From Blood-Feeding Arthropods” and “Aerospace Medicine: The Vertical Frontier.” Updated by Dr. Auerbach over 30 years, it is in its seventh edition and now titled “Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine.”
“Paul literally conceived of this subspecialty of medicine,” said Dr. Andra Blomkalns, chair of emergency medicine at Stanford. “At the time, there wasn’t a recognition that things happen when you’re out doing things. He developed this notion of, ‘Things happen to people all the time.’ Which is now a big part of our identity in emergency medicine.”

John P. McMeel, co-founder of Universal Press Syndicate (later Andrews McMeel Universal).

Indefatigably sunny, Mr. McMeel had the optimism — and the stamina — of a true salesman. Jim Davis, the creator of the misanthropic cat Garfield, first met Mr. McMeel at an American Booksellers Association convention in 1981. Mr. McMeel approached him for an autograph, brandishing a Garfield book with a contract tucked inside. But Mr. Davis had a long-term contract with United Media, which had been syndicating his strip.
“It became a running gag,” Mr. Davis said. “Every time we met he’d hand me a newspaper or something with a contract inside.” After 15 years, Mr. Davis was finally free to sign with Universal.
“The thing with John,” he said, “is it didn’t feel like business. I once did an interview and the reporter asked me why Gary Larson had retired and I was still going. I said: ‘Well, Gary works so hard and he puts so much pressure on himself. Me, if I feel that kind of pressure, I lower my standards.’ It was that kind of air that John encouraged.”

For the record: NYT obit for Kurt Westergaard.

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Obit watch: July 19, 2021.

Monday, July 19th, 2021

William F. Nolan, SF writer. His most famous work (co-authored with George Clayton Johnson) was Logan’s Run, basis for the movie of the same name.

[Ray] Bradbury introduced Nolan to the man who would become his best friend for 10 years, until his untimely death: Charles Beaumont. Nolan, Johnson, Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Chad Oliver, Charles E. Fritch, Kris Neville, John Tomerlin, Mari Wolf and several others eventually comprised “The Group,” which met to discuss stories. Nolan would shortly thereafter flourish as a writer and later a screenwriter, primarily for director Dan Curtis.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Kurt Westergaard, cartoonist.

He gained global notoriety in 2005 for his controversial depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten, which published 12 editorial cartoons of the principal figure of Islam under the headline, “The Face of Mohammed.”
Westergaard was behind the most controversial of the cartoons published by the paper, showing the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, according to the BBC. The cartoon intended to make a point about self-censorship and criticism of Islam.

He was 86, and died in his sleep.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 17, 2021.

Saturday, July 17th, 2021

Quick roundup, in some haste:

Biz Markie. 57. Damn.

Dennis Murphy, founder of the American Basketball Association. Also the World Hockey Association, the International Women’s Professional Softball League, and Roller Hockey International.

“He was fun and creative,” Mr. O’Brien said, “and he was always hustling somebody.”

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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