Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: June 21, 2021.

Monday, June 21st, 2021

George Stranahan, colorful figure.

His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.

Staring at a blank page one afternoon in 1959, he made a discovery: You can’t do physics alone. You need someone to talk to. Mr. Stranahan dreamed of creating a physics think tank in the Rockies.

So he did:

The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”

He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.

…in 1980, he opened a bar near Aspen, the Woody Creek Tavern, where he spent several years mixing drinks while also pitching in for humbler tasks like janitorial work. His daughter Molly Stranahan remembered him as a skilled cooker of soup for customers, including ranchers and cowboys.

He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.

As of last year, Flying Dog was the 35th-biggest craft brewing company in the United States, according to the Brewers Association. In 2010, a “beer panel” convened by the New York Times food critics Eric Asimov and Florence Fabricant to rank pale ales declared Flying Dog’s Doggie Style Classic its “consensus favorite.”

He also did some ranching:

In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.

Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.

Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”

For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.

Posted in 1970s, Explosives, Geek, History, Mixology, Obits, TV | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: June 18, 2021.

Friday, June 18th, 2021

Frank Bonner.

He was, of course, most famous as Herb Tarlek on “WKRP In Cincinnati” (and “The New WKRP in Cincinnati”, which I don’t think I ever saw an episode of).

But he had other credits.

His second credit in IMDB is “Equinox“, an odd film that we watched one Halloween season. I remember us saying, “Hey, is that Herb Tarlek? It sure looks a lot like him. Wait, it is!” (His first credit is “The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural”, the short film that was expanded into “Equinox”.) And somewhat oddly, he has some pre “WKRP” cop show credits…

…including, believe it or not, “Mannix”. (“Catspaw”, season 5, episode 13. He’s listed in IMDB as “Hypnotized man (uncredited)”.)

Heidi Ferrer, writer for “Dawson’s Creek”. She also wrote “The Hottie & the Nottie”. According to her family, she had been fighting COVID-19 for over a year, and took her own life.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Janet Malcolm, who you may remember from “The Journalist and the Murderer”.

Her essay began with one of the most arresting first sentences in literary nonfiction: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
Her pronouncement enraged the journalistic firmament. Many writers insisted that this was not how they treated their subjects and accused Ms. Malcolm of tarring everyone with the same broad brush.
But what galled some journalists about the piece the most, The Times reported in 1989, “was her failure, and that of her magazine, to disclose that Miss Malcolm had been accused of the same kind of behavior, in a lawsuit filed against her by the subject of an earlier New Yorker article.”
That earlier article, a 1983 profile of the flamboyant psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, led to a libel suit against Ms. Malcolm that hung over her during a decade of litigation and clouded her reputation even longer.
The legal allegations were different: The MacDonald suit accused Mr. McGinniss of fraud and breach of contract; the Masson suit accused Ms. Malcolm of libel. But both suits raised serious questions about journalistic ethics — Dr. MacDonald’s about the nature of writers’ obligations to their sources, and Mr. Masson’s about what constitutes quotations and what license, if any, reporters may take with them.
The journalistic community generally judged Ms. Malcolm harshly, mostly for the finding in the Masson case that she had cobbled together 50 or 60 separate conversations with the loquacious Mr. Masson and made them appear as if he had spoken them in a single lunchtime monologue.
“This thing called speech is sloppy, redundant, repetitious, full of uhs and ahs,” Ms. Malcolm testified in her defense in 1993 during the first of two jury trials. “I needed to present it in logical, rational order so he would sound like a logical, rational person.”

…

In the Masson suit, the jury ruled that while two of five disputed quotations that Ms. Malcolm had attributed to Mr. Masson were false and that one of those was defamatory, none were written with reckless disregard of the truth, the standard under which libel damages would have been allowed.

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

Obit watch: June 17, 2021.

Thursday, June 17th, 2021

Brigitte Gerney passed away a few days ago. She was 85.

You probably never heard of her, but this is a great story. On May 30, 1985, she was pinned under a collapsed crane in New York City.

Mrs. Gerney was walking home to United Nations Plaza from her dentist’s office on East 69th Street, past the foundation for a 42-story apartment building on Third Avenue between 64th and 63rd Streets, when the 35-ton base of the crane tipped over onto the sidewalk, trapping her at the edge of the excavation.
“It was like an earthquake,” she testified a year later. “The pavement cracked up under me. I remember my bag flying out of my hands. I heard the noise of all the bones cracking in my legs. I’m sure I screamed, ‘Help me, help me, get me out!’ But I was alone.”
She continued: “I said, ‘Can’t you cut my legs off and take me out? I have two children. I have to live.’ But they said they couldn’t do that, that I would bleed to death.”
“I never believed I would get out,” she said. “I thought I was dying.”
She was asked if she wanted a priest, she added, “and I said yes.”
Three cranes were dispatched to help stabilize the toppled one while rescue workers extricated Mrs. Gerney, who remained conscious the entire time.

She was pinned for six hours.

James Essig of the 19th Precinct, among the first on the scene, was awarded a medal for valor. Paul Ragonese of the Emergency Service Unit was elevated to detective, retired from the bomb squad in 1988 and now handles security for the Durst Organization.
“What kept me alive is that he held my hand,” Mrs. Gerney said of Detective Ragonese.
He said at the time, “She is the most courageous man or woman I ever met.”

It took 13 operations (including skin grafts and microsurgery) but the doctors were able to save her legs, and she was able to walk again.

The accident and its aftermath were front-page news for more than a year. The contracting company and the construction foreman were convicted of assault and endangerment. The foreman was fined $5,000 and placed on five years’ probation. The crane operator, who was unlicensed and who had been ordered by the foreman to take over after the regular operator had left for the day, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault. He was spared a prison sentence after Mrs. Gerney urged compassion.
In 1988, she was awarded $10 million in damages, to be paid in monthly installments.

…

Mrs. Gerney’s first son drowned when he was a toddler. She was seriously injured in 1982 when the cable car she was riding at a Swiss ski resort disengaged and plunged to the ground. She survived lung cancer in 1980. Her husband died of colon cancer in 1983. After the crane accident, a doctor who had treated her, and whom she planned to marry, was shot dead by a retired fireman who had been awaiting a decision on his medical disability claim.
“Her reaction to this horrible litany of misfortune?” her son said. “She would say: ‘On the one hand, only in a place like New York does a crane fall on you when you are walking home from the dentist. On the other hand, only in New York would they shut down half the city, have these crazy, brave people crawl under a teetering crane to save you, and then have the best doctors in the world somehow rebuild your smashed legs.’”

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 15, 2021.

Tuesday, June 15th, 2021

Lisa Banes. She was “Marybeth Elliott” in “Gone Girl” and has a fair number of IMDB credits for TV work as well.

Mostly, I wanted to note this here because of the circumstances of her death: she was run over by a scooter driver in NYC on June 4th, and never regained consciousness.

Remember, tomorrow is not promised to anyone…

Edited to add: NYT obit, which was not present when I posted this.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 14, 2021.

Monday, June 14th, 2021

Ned Beatty. THR. Variety.

Damn. 165 acting credits in IMDB. The man worked. And as far as I’m concerned, he classed up everything he was in.

I apologize, but this is the best Big Man scene I can find on the ‘Tube.

John Gabriel, long time actor on “Ryan’s Hope”. He did a decent amount of other stuff, including several appearances on “77 Sunset Strip”. Interestingly, he was also one of the (uncredited) newsreaders in “Network”.

Lawrence forwarded me an obit for Douglas S. Cramer, TV producer. I wasn’t really planning on noting this, but Lawrence pointed out that his credits do include “Mannix”…

Mudcat Grant, pitcher for the Twins and the Indians.

Grant led the American League in victories, winning percentage and shutouts in 1965 and pitched for 14 major league seasons.
He was remembered as a leading right-hander of his time, but also for his intriguing nickname, his second career singing and dancing at nightspots, and his book profiling outstanding Black pitchers.
Grant, a two-time All-Star, was a mainstay in the starting rotation for the Indians and the Twins for much of his career, then became a reliever, most notably with the Oakland A’s and Pittsburgh Pirates.
The Indians traded Grant to the Twins in June 1964. His best season came the following year, when he went 21-7, turned in a winning percentage of .750 and threw six shutouts. He pitched two complete-game victories against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, losing once, and hit a three-run homer as the Dodgers went on to win the series in seven games.
Cited by Sporting News as the A.L. pitcher of the year, Grant headed a staff that included Jim Kaat, Jim Perry and Camilo Pascual, backed by a lineup featuring Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Bob Allison and shortstop Zoilo Versalles, the league’s most valuable player.

…

As a youth Grant performed in a choir. Following the 1965 World Series, he founded Mudcat and the Kittens, a song and dance group that played at nightclubs and hotels during the off-seasons and that also gained international bookings.
“First his musicians — up to seven of them — begin, playing dance music and jazzier stuff, and then the Kittens, some very sexy girls in spare feline outfits, take over the stage to sing and dance and purr,” Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1968. “Then Mudcat comes on. He sings — everything from show tunes to rock ‘n’ roll — and tells jokes and dances.”
“I made way more money in music than I did in baseball,” Grant once said.

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

Obit watch: June 11, 2021.

Friday, June 11th, 2021

Gottfried Böhm, Pritzker Prize-winning Brutalist architect. He was 101.

Arguably the defining work of Mr. Böhm’s career was the Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Church at Neviges, known in German as the Wallfahrtsdom or the Mariendom, close to the city of Wuppertal in northwest Germany.
Completed in 1968, it is a monumental Brutalist Gesamtkunstwerk or total of work of art, whose jagged concrete roof has been likened to a tent, a crystal and an iceberg. Set at the top of a hill, the church rises imposingly above the picturesque houses of medieval Neviges.
Mr. Böhm lavished as much attention on the church’s forum-like interior as he did on its folding roof and sculptural facade, with their rough concrete textures and sharp angles. He designed the stained-glass windows, lamps and door handles and even the chairs. With room for 8,000 worshipers, it is the second largest church north of the Alps.

Posted in Art, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 10, 2021.

Thursday, June 10th, 2021

Claudia Barrett. She did some Westerns and detective shows (including an appearance on “77 Sunset Strip”, making her the second person from that series to get an obit this week), but was out of acting by 1964.

She may be most famous as the female lead in “Robot Monster“.

Ernie Lively. He knocked around quite a bit (his first credit was 1975, and his last was 2020). He appeared multiple times on “The West Wing”, “Murder She Wrote” and “The Dukes of Hazzard”. However, he seems to be most famous as the father of “Bridget” in the two “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” movies. (“Bridget” was played by his daughter, Blake Lively.)

Robert Hollander.

Professor Hollander joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1962 and taught beloved classes on Dante for 42 years. For medievalist scholarship, the three-volume translation he produced with Ms. Hollander found a wide degree of public interest, including two admiring reviews in The New Yorker.
In one, in 2007, the New Yorker critic Joan Acocella called all three volumes of their translation “the best on the market.” (The Hollanders produced “Inferno” in 2000, “Purgatorio” in 2003 and the last volume of the epic allegorical work, “Paradiso,” in 2007.)

…

The couple brought complementary strengths to the project. Ms. Hollander, the author of five books of poetry, attended to the music of the language. Professor Hollander ensured the translation’s accuracy and wrote introductions to each volume, along with notes to the text.
Ms. Acocella estimated that the notes amounted to 30 times the length of “The Divine Comedy” itself. That was Professor Hollander’s style. He interpreted moralistically and theologically passages usually appreciated for their beauty. His erudition wore down fellow scholars. He reported that A.B. Giamatti, the Renaissance expert and former president of Yale University, once asked him, “Are you going to try to ruin this scene for me too, Hollander?”

One of the reasons I wanted to post this here (other than, he sounds like a really nifty guy: you should read the whole obit, especially the part about his stroke) is that I wanted to ask the huddled, wretched masses: does anybody have any experience with Dante translations, and can you recommend a good one?

Other than the Hollander one, Thomas Harris (yes, that Thomas Harris) likes the Robert Pinsky translation. Anthony Esolen (a writer I greatly admire) has also done a transalation

I could just read Rod Dreher’s book and see if he recommends one: I do want to read How Dante Can Save Your Life (and that’s actually what started me on this quest), but I’m having trouble finding a decent copy at a decent price.

(All links are Amazon affiliate links, for the record.)

Speaking of Rod Dreher, this is a beautifully written post about the death of a friend. Followup.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 9, 2021 (supplemental).

Wednesday, June 9th, 2021

Lawrence tipped me off to this: Chip McCormick, who I think can fairly be described as the father of the modern 1911.

Shooting Illustrated has a good article:

Before CMC (Chip McCormick Custom), there was no such thing as the now ubiquitous drop-in AR-15 trigger. Gunsmiths would put together a trigger with parts, often from a kit. McCormick created a single-unit trigger that installs in minutes; literally a “drop in.” Of course easy installation was not good enough for McCormick, he made it crisp, clean, with no creep….Match grade. Now dozens of imitators crowd the market, the market created by Chip McCormick.
Before Kimber, the 1911 had to be fitted from oversize parts. If you saw one in the gun store, it was usually a basic government model that the owner would have to customize. McCormick conceived of the “spec” 1911 with all parts being within specific tolerances so the gun could be assembled, instead of fitted. McCormick approached several companies, but they turned him away. Kimber’s Leslie Edelman saw the potential and quickly struck a deal for Chip to create a production gun. Unlike anything else on the market, it was fully accessorized with beavertail grip safety, extended slide release and ambidextrous thumb safeties. Not only was the Kimber handgun line born, but so was a new way of building the 1911. Now the production 1911 is the industry standard, as are fully accessorized guns.

…

While it is inarguable that McCormick left an indelible mark on the world of guns, let us also remember the manner in which he conducted himself. When he was rolling out the RPM magazine at SHOT Show, I worked in his booth and had the opportunity to observe him. Whether it was an industry titan, a fan of his products, or a competitor from his shooting days, they were all greeted like royalty. His warmth and welcoming nature was beautiful to watch.

…

The legacy that Chip McCormick leaves behind is truly enormous. It is hard to imagine anyone who has accomplished as much as he did. All of this done with honor, honesty and class.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. McCormick (though I swear by his 1911 magazines) but great and good friend of the blog (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl shot with him, and has a post up on Facebook:

During the 1990s, Austin was a hotbed of firearms development. If you follow the roots of the tree starting with CMC and STI, they lead to many other companies like Dawson Precision, LaRue, KR Training, ART Enterprises, Competition DVD, NTaylor, and the Ben Stoeger Pro Shop, just to name a few.

Posted in 1911, Guns, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 9, 2021.

Wednesday, June 9th, 2021

Erin O’Brien, actress. She appeared on several Western series, and in the pilot of “77 Sunset Strip” (among other credits).

NYT obit for Jim Fassel, which did not go up until late in the day yesterday.

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

Obit watch: June 8, 2021.

Tuesday, June 8th, 2021

Jim Fassel, former coach of the New York Football Giants. ESPN.

Fassel’s Giants lost to the Baltimore Ravens 34-7 in Super Bowl XXXV in January 2001, after going 12-4 and winning the NFC East that season. Fassel was 58-53-1 overall with the Giants.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 7, 2021.

Monday, June 7th, 2021

Clarence Williams III. THR.

Although “The Mod Squad” made Mr. Williams a symbol of the Vietnam War generation, he actually served in the military just before that era. He was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division in the late 1950s.

…

He began his acting career on Broadway, where his grandfather had appeared as early as 1908. The young Mr. Williams appeared in three plays, including “Slow Dance on the Killing Ground” (1964), for which he received a Tony Award nomination and a Theater World Award.

…

After the show ended, Mr. Williams dropped out of sight for a while, expressing disappointment in the kinds of roles available to Black men. He returned to Broadway, appearing as an African head of state, with Maggie Smith, in a Tom Stoppard drama, “Night and Day” (1979).
Beginning in the 1980s, he had a busy film career. He played Prince’s abusive father in “Purple Rain” (1984) and Wesley Snipes’s heroin-addicted father in “Sugar Hill” (1993). He was a crazed blackmailer in John Frankenheimer’s “52 Pick-Up” (1986) and a wild-eyed storytelling mortician in “Tales From the Hood” (1995). He had small roles in the blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” (1988) and in Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (1987).
Television brought Mr. Williams new opportunities too. He was a leader of the Attica prison riots in HBO’s “Against the Wall” (1994); a segregationist governor’s manservant in the mini-series “George Wallace” (1997); Muhammad Ali’s father in “Ali: An American Hero” (2000); and a retired C.I.A. operative in 10 “Mystery Woman” movies (2003-07). He did guest appearances on close to 40 series, from “Hill Street Blues” to “Empire.”

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

Obit watch: June 4, 2021.

Friday, June 4th, 2021

F. Lee Bailey.

What a career:

Mr. Bailey flew warplanes, sailed yachts, dropped out of Harvard, wrote books, touted himself on television, was profiled in countless newspapers, ran a detective agency, married four times, carried a gun, took on seemingly hopeless cases and courted trouble, once going to jail for six weeks and finally being disbarred.

And props to him for honorable service in the military:

Francis Lee Bailey was born on June 10, 1933, in Waltham, Mass., the oldest of three children of an advertising salesman, whose name he was given, and a nursery-school teacher, Grace Bailey Mitchell. He graduated in 1950 from Kimball Union Academy, in Meriden, N.H., and enrolled in Harvard but dropped out after two years to join the Navy. He transferred to the Marines and became a fighter pilot and an officer representing servicemen in courts-martial, although he had no legal training.

The NYT obit hits all the high points of his legal career: Dr. Sam Sheppard, the Boston Strangler, Patty Hearst, Capt. Ernest L. Medina, O.J….

In 1977, Mr. Bailey, a master of turning simplicity into complexity, successfully defended a racehorse veterinarian, Mark J. Gerard, from two felony charges in a notorious racetrack fraud at Belmont Park. The defendant was accused of switching two look-alike horses — a top 3-year-old, Cinzano, for a long shot, Lebon, that the New York Times sports columnist Red Smith said “couldn’t beat a fat man from Gimbels to Macy’s.”
The switch produced 57-to-1 odds, and Mr. Gerard won $80,000. But the strands of the case proved too hard for prosecutors to untangle in Nassau County Court on Long Island, and Dr. Gerard, who had tended Secretariat and Kelso, got off with a misdemeanor and a few months in jail. “The record,” an appeals court said, “reveals a factual scenario that might have been authored jointly by an Alfred Hitchcock and a Damon Runyon.”

I have a vague memory of seeing F. Lee Bailey’s “Lie Detector” when I was younger. And this is a good story:

Bailey was featured in an RKO television special in which he conducted a mock trial, examining various expert witnesses on the subject of the “Paul is dead” rumor referring to Beatle Paul McCartney. One of the experts was Fred LaBour, whose article in The Michigan Daily had been instrumental in the spread of the urban legend. LaBour told Bailey during a pre-show meeting he had made up the whole thing. Bailey responded, “Well, we have an hour of television to do. You’re going to have to go along with this.” The program aired locally in New York City on November 30, 1969, and was never re-aired.

Lawrence also mentioned that he voiced himself in an episode of the animated “Spider-Man” series.

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

Obit watch: June 2, 2021.

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021

Arlene Golonka. She did a fair amount of Broadway work, and a lot of TV. She was “Millie Swanson” on “Mayberry R.F.D.”, and did a lot of guest spots on other shows.

Noted:

Golonka played several characters on a 1965 comedy album, You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, which soared to No. 9 on the Billboard charts. When she couldn’t do the follow-up record, she recommended [Valerie] Harper for the job.

Also:

She portrayed another prostitute opposite Clint Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High (1968) and was the wife of a CIA agent (Peter Falk) in The In-Laws (1979).

Robert Hogan. Man, he was in every damn thing: as the headline notes, his career stretched from “Peyton Place” to “The Wire”, with stops along the way at the various “Law and Order” franchises, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Alice”, “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, the good “Hawaii Five-O” and many other series…

…yes, including “Mannix”. (“The Crime That Wasn’t”, season 4, episode 18)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 1, 2021.

Tuesday, June 1st, 2021

Buddy Van Horn. He has 109 credits in IMDB for stunt work: many of those were as Clint Eastwood’s stunt double or as a stunt coordinator on Eastwood movies.

He also directed three Eastwood movies: “Any Which Way You Can”, “Pink Cadillac”, and “The Dead Pool”.

Romy Walthall. She was in “Face/Off”, the 1989 “The House Of Usher”, and “The Howling IV: The Original Nightmare”, and a fair number of 1980s and 1990s TV series.

By way of Lawrence: Foster Friess, “successful investor, Republican donor and onetime Wyoming governor candidate”.

Thomas Sullivan. He was a Federal prosecutor in Chicago, and Diogenes would likely have been glad to meet him.

As federal prosecutor, Mr. Sullivan embarked on an audacious plan to root out bribery and case-fixing in the Cook County Circuit Court system. It included installing listening devices in judges’ chambers and creating fabricated cases that would be tried before judges who were under investigation. The sting came to be known as Operation Greylord.
“If we used real cases,” he said in an interview on his law firm’s website in 2014, and the prosecutor or judge “takes a bribe and a guy is released from a minor crime and then goes out and commits a really horrible crime, I’m going to get blamed for it. So you can’t use real cases; you have to use fake cases.”
As part of the sting, F.B.I. agents who were lawyers established legal practices to gain access to judges.

…

“He said, ‘See that box on the left?’” Mr. Webb recalled Mr. Sullivan telling him on his first day in office. “‘That is an undercover project investigating the circuit court of Cook County. The box on the right is about an investigation of John Cardinal Cody, who’s under investigation for stealing from the church. Because your wife is Catholic, she will probably want a divorce — so you will not only be unemployed, you will be divorced.’”

(John Cardinal Cody from Wikipedia.)

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

Obit watch: May 30, 2021.

Sunday, May 30th, 2021

Gavin MacLeod. THR. Variety.

As he told the story, one night he was driving, while drunk, on Mulholland Drive in the hills above Los Angeles when he impulsively decided to kill himself by driving off the road. But he stopped himself, jamming on the brakes at the last moment. Shaken, he recalled, he made his way to the nearby house of a friend, the actor Robert Blake, who persuaded him to see a psychiatrist.

…

After his divorce, Mr. MacLeod married Patti Kendig, a dancer, in 1974. They also divorced, in early 1982, but remarried in 1985, by which time they had both become born-again Christians. Mr. MacLeod documented their story, as well as his decades-long struggle with alcoholism, in a 1987 book, “Back on Course: The Remarkable Story of a Divorce That Ended in Remarriage.”

B.J. Thomas.

Mr. Thomas placed 15 singles in the pop Top 40 from 1966 to 1977. “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” a monument to heartache sung in a bruised, melodic baritone, reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts in 1975. “Hooked on a Feeling,” an exultant expression of newfound love from 1968, also reached the pop Top 10. (Augmented by an atavistic chant of “Ooga-chaka-ooga-ooga,” the song became a No. 1 pop hit as recorded by the Swedish rock band Blue Swede in 1974.)

Faye Schulman.

The Germans enlisted her to take commemorative photographs of them and, in some cases, their newly acquired mistresses. (“It better be good, or else you’ll be kaput,” she recalled a Gestapo commander warning her before, trembling, she asked him to smile.) They thus spared her from the firing squad because of their vanity and their obsession with bureaucratic record-keeping — two weaknesses that she would ultimately wield against them.
At one point the Germans witlessly gave her film to develop that contained pictures they had taken of the three trenches into which they, their Lithuanian collaborators and the local Polish police had machine-gunned Lenin’s remaining Jews, including her parents, sisters and younger brother.
She kept a copy of the photos as evidence of the atrocity, then later joined a band of Russian guerrilla Resistance fighters. As one of the only known Jewish partisan photographers, Mrs. Schulman, thanks to her own graphic record-keeping, debunked the common narrative that most Eastern European Jews had gone quietly to their deaths.
“I want people to know that there was resistance,” she was quoted as saying by the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. “Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter. I was a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof.”

Rusty Warren.

In the wholesome era of “Our Miss Brooks” and “Father Knows Best” on television, Ms. Warren, who died at 91 on Tuesday in Orange County, Calif., developed a scandalous comedy routine that was full of barely veiled innuendo about sex, outrageous references to breasts and more, much of it delivered in a husky shout.
With that new risqué routine, she began packing larger clubs all over the country. The release in 1960 of her second comedy album, the brazenly titled “Knockers Up!,” only increased her fame.
It was a booming time for live comedy and comedy records — “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” Mr. Newhart’s Grammy-winning breakthrough, was released the same year — and Ms. Warren emerged as a star in an out-of-the-mainstream sort of way.

…

She released more than a dozen albums, including “Rusty Warren Bounces Back” (1961), “Banned in Boston” (1963), “Bottoms Up” (1968) and “Sexplosion” (1977), selling hundreds of thousands of copies (“Knockers Up!” was a longtime resident of the Billboard 200 chart) even though for much of her career some retailers wouldn’t display them prominently and television producers wouldn’t give her the bookings that more mainstream comics got.

If it hasn’t already been written, somebody could get a good book out of the history of comedy records roughly mid-century (I’m guessing 1950-1975, maybe slightly later). Especially if they went into the history of “blue” or “party” records: not just Ms. Warren, but Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Rudy Ray Moore, and lots of other now mostly forgotten folks.

Lawrence sent over two: Shane Briant, British actor. (“Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell”, “Cassandra”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”)

Paul Robert Soles.

Best known today for portraying Hermey the Elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Peter Parker and his crime-fighting alter ego in the 1967 cartoon Spider-Man he worked extensively in every medium, his favourites being radio drama and live theatre.

…

Among his many memorable dramatic performances three stand out: the lead in the Canadian premiere in 1987 of ‘I’m Not Rappaport’; the first Jewish Canadian to play Shylock in the 2001 production of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ at the Stratford Festival and the Dora-nominated role in the 2005 two-hander ‘Trying’.

…

Beyond work and family he had three life-long passions: sports cars, music and flying. A racing nut he drove the winning foreign entry in the American International Rally (1959) speaking only German and passing himself off as a factory driver from Mercedes in a zero-mileage model W120. A bigtime jazz fan, particularly of the big-bands, he was a fixture at clubs on both sides of the border and he forged friendships with a number of performers. An aviation enthusiast and pilot he owned two RCAF primary trainers, first a Fleet 16-B Finch open cockpit biplane acquired to barnstorm across the continent as part of The Great Belvedere Air Dash of 1973 and later a DeHavilland DHC-1 Chipmunk. He was a performing member of the Great War Flying Museum (Brampton), an air show participant for 20 years and a perennial volunteer for the Canadian International Air Show.

Posted in 1970s, History, Music, Nazis, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

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