Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

Obit watch: May 27, 2021.

Thursday, May 27th, 2021

Eric Carle, children’s book author. He was perhaps most famous for “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”.

Noted:

But, as Mr. Carle told The New York Times in 2007, disaster struck when his father was drafted into the German army and soon became a prisoner of war in Russia. Eric, who was then 15, managed to avoid the draft but was conscripted by the Nazi government to dig trenches on the Siegfried line, a 400-mile defensive line in western Germany.
“In Stuttgart, our hometown, our house was the only one standing,” Mr. Carle told The Guardian in 2009. “When I say standing, I mean the roof and windows are gone, and the doors. And … well, there you are.”

Kevin Clark. He was the drummer in “School of Rock”. According to reports, he was hit and killed while riding his bicycle home.

Samuel Wright. He voiced “Sebastian” in “The Little Mermaid”, and also did a lot of Broadway work. He also played “Mufasa” in the original cast of “The Lion King” on Broadway.

Obit watch: May 26, 2021.

Wednesday, May 26th, 2021

Somewhat breaking news: John Warner, former Senator from Virginia and Elizabeth Taylor’s sixth husband.

Though a popular figure in his state, Mr. Warner was often at odds with Virginia conservatives. He became the Republican nominee in his first campaign only after the man who had defeated him at a state party convention was killed in a plane crash.
He angered the National Rifle Association with his backing of an assault weapons ban. He infuriated some state Republicans in 1994 when he refused to support Oliver L. North, the former White House aide at the center of the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration, in Mr. North’s bid for the Senate. And he opposed Reagan’s ultimately unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork.

Edited to add: My mother and stepfather lived in Virginia during part of the time John Warner was a senator. My mother is kind of upset at the press coverage: she feels it focuses too much on Sen. Warner being Number Six in the long line of Liz’s husbands, and not enough on his accomplishments as a Senator. One of the things she mentioned to me: there was a time when they were having trouble getting money out of SSI for my stepfather. She called Senator Warner’s office and spoke to one of his people, who said, “Oh, I know somebody over there. Let me make some calls.”

They had their check two days later.

Roger Hawkins, noted drummer.

An innately soulful musician, Mr. Hawkins initially distinguished himself in the mid-’60s as a member of the house band at the producer Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. (The initials stand for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises.) His colleagues were the keyboardist Barry Beckett, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and Mr. Hood, who played bass. Mr. Hood is the last surviving member of that rhythm section.
Mr. Hawkins’s less-is-more approach to drumming at FAME — often little more than a cymbal and a snare — can be heard on Percy Sledge’s gospel-steeped “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a No. 1 pop single in 1966. He was also a driving force behind Aretha Franklin’s imperious “Respect,” a No. 1 pop hit the next year, as well as her Top 10 singles “Chain of Fools” (1967) and “Think” (1968).

In 1969 Mr. Hawkins and the other members of the FAME rhythm section parted ways with Mr. Hall over a financial dispute. They soon opened their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, in a former coffin warehouse in nearby Sheffield.
Renaming themselves the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the four men appeared on many other hits over the next decade, including the Staple Singers’ chart-topping pop-gospel single “I’ll Take You There,” a 1972 recording galvanized by Mr. Hawkins’s skittering Caribbean-style drum figure. They also appeared, along with the gospel quartet the Dixie Hummingbirds, on Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock,” a Top 10 single in 1973.
Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Hood worked briefly with the British rock band Traffic as well; they are on the band’s 1973 album, “Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory.”
Mr. Hawkins and his colleagues became known as the Swampers after the producer Denny Cordell heard the pianist Leon Russell commend them for their “funky, soulful Southern swamp sound.” The Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd mentioned them, by that name, in their 1974 pop hit “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Obit watch: May 19, 2021.

Wednesday, May 19th, 2021

Charles Grodin. THR. Variety.

Paul Mooney.

After discovering he had a knack for comedy and writing, Moody moved to Hollywood where he would flourish as a writer for such classic TV programs as Sanford and Son and Good Times. Mooney also wrote a number of routines Pryor performed for his iconic albums, including Live on the Sunset Strip and Is It Something I Said. Mooney was also the head writer on the short-lived, cult classic, The Richard Pryor Show. He also had a short stint as a writer on In Living Color.

He also did some acting work (he appeared on “Chappelle’s Show” and as Sam Cooke in “The Buddy Holly Story”) and did stand-up comedy.

Obit watch: May 17, 2021.

Monday, May 17th, 2021

Sometimes I want to put up an obit just because the writer clearly had fun writing it.

In Canada, it’s possible to find a man lounging on a chesterfield in his rented bachelor wearing only his gotchies while fortifying his Molson muscle with a jambuster washed down with slugs from a stubby.

That’s the lead from the obit for Katherine Barber, founding editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. She was 61.

Chuck Hicks. He has 197 credits in IMDB as an actor…and 110 as a stunt person. He worked a lot with Clint Eastwood, was in “Cool Hand Luke”, “Dick Tracy”, and played the robot boxer in the “Steel” episode of “The Twilight Zone”…

…and among all of his other movie and TV credits, he appeared seven times on “Mannix”.

Obit watch: May 14, 2021.

Friday, May 14th, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit from one of the Indianapolis TV stations for Edgar Harrell and James W. Smith, both of whom passed away this week. They were 96 years old.

Both men were survivors of the USS Indianapolis sinking.

Harrell was the last surviving Marine. The Facebook page’s tribute to Harrell said, “During his time aboard ship, he helped guard components of the atomic bomb. After the torpedoing, he was a hero amongst his shipmates.”
Smith had served the longest aboard the ship, beginning in December 1943. The Facebook page’s tribute to Smith said, “During weekly zoom calls, James would regale the group with tales of wartime as a young sailor… tales filled with mischief, adventure, fear, heroism, and brotherhood… and of course girls and a few stashed bottles of moonshine that got him into trouble.”

I’ve been meaning to note this one for a couple of days now: Colt Brennan. He was a star quarterback at the University of Hawaii.

In 2006, he set what was then an N.C.A.A. record for touchdown passes — 58 — in a single season, raising the possibility that he would be recruited by the N.F.L. after his junior year.
Instead, he stayed on for his final year. The Rainbow Warriors finished the season 12-0 and made their only football bowl series appearance, in the Sugar Bowl, against Georgia on Jan. 1, 2008. Mr. Brennan was a Heisman Trophy finalist that season.

He was drafted by Washington in 2008 as a backup, was cut two years later, went to the Raiders, and was cut again.

According to his family, he was in a car crash in 2010 and was never the same: “…broke his collarbone and ribs, caused head trauma, and resulted in blood clots that would plague him the rest of his life”. He descended into addiction. Recently, he had spent four months in a rehab center.

Mr. Brennan tried to enroll in a detox facility over the weekend but was turned away because it was full, his father said.

Instead, he met up with some people at a hotel and (according to his family) overdosed on fentanyl. He was 37.

NYT obit for Billie Hayes.

Obit watch: May 12, 2021.

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021

Norman Lloyd. THR.

I think many people of my age remember him as “Dr. Auschlander” on “St. Elsewhere”, but man, what a career before that.

His first love was the theater, and he was asked by Welles and John Houseman to join their legendary Mercury Theatre in the mid-1930s. He played Cinna the Poet in Welles’ anti-fascist adaptation of Julius Caesar, the 1937 Broadway production that landed Welles, then 22, on the cover of Time magazine.

He would have been in Welles’ “Heart of Darkness”, if RKO hadn’t pulled the plug on that. He had a wife and a baby and needed work, so he left Welles before his next project: an obscure film called “Citizen Kane”.

His work as the bad guy Fry in Saboteur (1942) launched a relationship with Hitchcock that would span nearly four decades and include a role in Spellbound (1945) and work as a producer and director on the classic TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and its follow-up, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
On Hitchcock Presents, Lloyd directed a 1960 installment, “The Man From the South,” an adaptation of a Roald Dahl short story in which a young gambler (Steve McQueen) makes a bet that his cigarette lighter can work 10 straight times. If it does, he wins a car from Peter Lorre’s character; if it doesn’t, Lorre will chop off McQueen’s finger with a hatchet.

Lawrence sent me this obit: Neil Connery, Sean’s brother. Neil did a little acting himself, including “O.K. Connery”, aka “Operation Kid Brother”, aka “Operation Double 007”, aka “episode 508 of MST3K“.

Obit watch: May 10, 2021.

Monday, May 10th, 2021

Frank McRae, actor. He was in “License to Kill” and “Last Action Hero”, and did a few TV guest shots (“Quincy”, “Rockford Files”, etc.)

Pete du Pont, former Deleware governor and presidential candidate.

NYT obit for George Jung.

Obit watch: May 9, 2021.

Sunday, May 9th, 2021

Tawny Kitaen, 80s figure.

With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the music video for Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”

She once described working with Paula Abdul, who was a choreographer at the time, on the set of one video.
As Ms. Kitaen recalled, Ms. Abdul asked her what she could do, and Ms. Kitaen showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” And then, Ms. Kitaen said, she left.
“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”

She married David Coverdale, the frontman of Whitesnake, in 1989. The couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a pitcher with the Anaheim Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.

Tawny Finley, in a declaration to the Orange County Superior Court, claimed Finley used steroids among other drugs. She also claimed he bragged about being able to circumvent MLB’s testing policy. When told of his wife’s accusations, which also included heavy marijuana use and alcohol abuse, Finley replied: “I can’t believe she left out the cross-dressing.”

Ed Ward, music critic. He wrote for “Crawdaddy” and “Rolling Stone”:

Mr. Ward’s review of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” (1969) in Rolling Stone demonstrated his tough side: He called “Sun King” the album’s “biggest bomb” and its second side “a disaster.”
“They’ve been shucking us a lot lately and it’s a shame because they don’t have to,” he wrote. “Surely they have enough talent and intelligence to do better than this. Or do they?”

Mr. Ward was fired from Rolling Stone after a few months (he didn’t get along with Jann Wenner, the publisher), then became the West Coast correspondent for the rock magazine Creem, a post he held for most of the 1970s. He left in 1979 to write about the thriving music scene in Austin as a music critic at The American-Statesman.
“Ed brought a reputation to Austin as an unflinching critic — Rolling Stone had a lot of clout — and he was not diplomatic in his writing,” said his friend and fellow writer Joe Nick Patoski, who described Mr. Ward as cantankerous and difficult. “Early on, there was a reaction to some of the things he wrote and it started a ‘Dump Ed Ward’ movement that had bumper stickers and T shirts.”

Over the next decade, Mr. Ward was a music and food critic (sometimes, while he was still at The American-Statesman, under the pseudonym Petaluma Pete) for the alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle; one of three authors of “Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll” (1986), in which he focused on the 1950s; and, in 1987, one of several founders of the South by Southwest music, film and technology festival in Austin.

He returned to Austin in 2013 and set to work on “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” which was published in 2016. A second volume, taking the music’s history up to 1977, was published in 2019. But his publisher declined to publish a third one because the second book’s sales had not been as good the first one’s.

Ernest Angley, televangelist. Or, as I liked to call him, “the man who took over Rex Humbard’s soup kitchen“.

These last two by way of Lawrence: George Jung, cocaine smuggler.

Japanese composer Shunsuke Kikuchi. Among his credits: “Dragon Ball”, “Dragon Ball Z”, and several “Gamera” films.

Obit watch: May 7, 2021.

Friday, May 7th, 2021

This has been well covered locally (and on ESPN) but for the historical record: Jake Ehlinger, linebacker for UT, was found dead in his apartment yesterday. He was 20 years old.

This one is for Lawrence: Milva. I’d never heard of her, either, but she was apparently a very prominent Italian singer.

Her deep, powerful voice garnered attention. But her short brown hair and slight build were far from the thick manes and full hourglass figures then in demand.
To compensate, she padded her bras and thickened her legs with three pairs of stockings. An agent recommended that she dye her hair red, a color that became her trademark and earned her the nickname La Rossa, or the Redhead.

NYT obit for Johnny Crawford.

Obit watch: May 5, 2021.

Wednesday, May 5th, 2021

Playing catch up once again:

Bobby Unser.

Unser conquered a fear of heights to capture the Pikes Peak climb a record 13 times, racing against the clock on a gravel road twisting through more than 150 turns with no guardrails overlooking drops of up to 1,000 feet. The previous Pikes Peak record of nine victories had been held by his uncle Louis.

He also won the Indianapolis 500 three times. Yes, three:

Unser bested Mario Andretti by 5.3 seconds in the 1981 race, but the next day officials gave the victory to Andretti after penalizing Unser one lap for illegally passing several cars under a caution. Had they imposed the penalty during the race, Unser might have made up the lap and won anyway, since he had the fastest car that season. An appeals panel reinstated Unser as the winner more than four months later but fined his team part of the winning purse.

Jason Matthews. This is a guy I’d never heard of, but am now intrigued by. He was a former CIA officer who wrote three spy novels (affiliate link) that are highly praised for their realism.

“I wake up every morning and I think, ‘Thank heavens for Vladimir Putin,’ ” Mr. Matthews told The Associated Press in 2017. “He’s a great character, and his national goals are the stuff for spy novels: weaken NATO, dissolve the Atlantic alliance, break up the European Union.”

Johnny Crawford. He was one of the original Mouseketeers, and later played Mark McCain, son of Lucas McCain, on “The Rifleman”.

Billie Hayes. Yes, “Witchiepoo”, but also “Mammy Yokum” in “Li’l Abner” (she replaced Charlotte Rae on Broadway, and played the role in the 1959 film version and the 1971 TV movie version).

Obit watch: May 3, 2021.

Monday, May 3rd, 2021

Getting caught up:

Pete Lammons, tight end for the New York Jets. He was 77, and participating in a fishing tournament in East Texas.

Major League Fishing, the sponsor of the tournament, said that Lammons, who was participating in the event, had fallen out of his boat on the Sam Rayburn Reservoir, a popular spot for bass fishing, and that the other man in the boat tried to rescue him. A team equipped with sonar recovered Lammons’s body a few hours later.

Olympia Dukakis, for the historical record. THR. Variety.

Jill Corey. This was a little before my time, but still an interesting story. She grew up in Avonmore, Pennsylvania (literally a coal miner’s daughter) but was discovered at 17 and went on to a career in music.

Before the end of the decade, Ms. Corey had a spot on the “Johnny Carson Show” (a variety show precursor to his late-night talk show) and the NBC series “Your Hit Parade,” in which a regular cast of vocalists sang the top-rated songs of the week.
For a time Ms. Corey even had her own show, 15 minutes of song that followed the news once a week, a programming format that placed many popular singers in similar slots across the networks.
She recorded many records and performed at Manhattan nightclubs like the Copacabana and the Blue Angel. (Mr. Miller, in tight control of her career, turned down Broadway roles for her because her nightclub work was more lucrative.) And she was courted by heartthrobs like Eddie Fisher and Frank Sinatra (as he and Ava Gardner were divorcing).
She also made a “terrible movie,” in her words, called “Senior Prom” (1958).

In one of those odd cases that seem so common during that decade, where the line between “romance” and “creepy stalking” becomes blurred, she was pursued by Don Hoak of the Pittsburgh Pirates (even though she was already engaged) and married him in 1961. She gave up singing, but Mr. Hoak died in 1969 and she went back to performing.

Obit watch: April 27, 2021.

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021

The NYT has published an obit for Dan Kaminsky that’s both respectful and timely.

His childhood paralleled the 1983 movie “War Games,” in which a young child, played by Matthew Broderick, unwittingly accesses a U.S. military supercomputer. When Mr. Kaminsky was 11, his mother said, she received an angry phone call from someone who identified himself as a network administrator for the Western United States. The administrator said someone at her residence was “monkeying around in territories where he shouldn’t be monkeying around.”
Without her knowledge, Mr. Kaminsky had been examining military websites. The administrator vowed to “punish” him by cutting off the family’s internet access. Mrs. Maurer warned the administrator that if he made good on his threat, she would take out an advertisement in The San Francisco Chronicle denouncing the Pentagon’s security.
“I will take out an ad that says, ‘Your security is so crappy, even an 11-year-old can break it,’” Mrs. Maurer recalled telling the administrator, in an interview on Monday.

When his talk was complete, Mr. Kaminsky was approached by a stranger in the crowd. It was the administrator who had kicked Mr. Kaminsky off the internet years earlier. Now, he wanted to thank Mr. Kaminsky and to ask for an introduction to “the meanest mother he ever met.”

Obit watch: April 26, 2021.

Monday, April 26th, 2021

Les McKeown, of the Bay City Rollers.

I have not found a mainstream source for this yet, but it seems to have been confirmed in various places: Dan Kaminsky, noted security researcher.

His politics were not mine, and he was not a personal friend or even acquaintance of mine. But I was lucky enough to see him speak at DEFCON and Black Hat a few times, and the guy was wicked smart. Especially when it came to TCP/IP and DNS: man probably forgot more about DNS than I’ll ever know. (One of my favorite talks involved him demonstrating how he could run streaming audio, in real-time, over the Internet…by embedding data in DNS queries. I believe this was that talk.)

There’s a good Hacker News thread here, and an obit from The Register here.

When your Register hack asked Kaminsky why he hadn’t gone to the dark side and used the flaw to become immensely wealthy – either by exploiting it to hijack millions of netizens’ web traffic, or by selling details of it to the highest bidders – he said not only would that have been morally wrong, he didn’t want his mom to have to visit him in prison.

The Reg obit also includes a link to a playlist of Mr. Kaminsky’s talks on YouTube.

Obit watch: April 22, 2021.

Thursday, April 22nd, 2021

Tempest Storm.

I went back and forth on posting this, even though Lawrence sent me the obit from the Las Vegas paper. But what pushed me into posting this was that the NYT obit was from Margalit Fox, and she clearly had some fun writing it.

Routinely named in the same ardent breath as the great 20th-century ecdysiasts Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr and Gypsy Rose Lee, Ms. Storm was every inch as ecdysiastical as they, and for far longer. Almost certainly the last of her ilk, she was, at her height in the 1950s and early ’60s, famous the world over, as celebrated for her flame-red tresses as for her vaunted 40-inch bust.

Playing burlesque stages in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Bay Area, London and elsewhere, she was reported to earn $100,000 a year in the mid-1950s (the equivalent of about $950,000 today). Her breasts were said to be insured with Lloyd’s of London for $1 million. “Tempest in a D-Cup,” the headlines called her; “The Girl Who Goes 3-D Two Better.”
Visiting the University of Colorado in 1955, Ms. Storm precipitated a riot among eager male students that caused hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage — by doing nothing more than removing her mink coat.

Along the way she acquired four husbands and many lovers, among whom she said were John F. Kennedy (“He was a great man in everything he did,” she said) and Elvis Presley (“He really was the King”), while losing, night after night, her mink, gloves, gown, pearls and hat — though retaining her G-string and fishnet bra, and with them her virtue.
“I think taking off all your clothes — and I’ve never taken off all my clothes — is not only immoral but boring,” Ms. Storm told The Wall Street Journal in 1969. “There has to be something left to the imagination. If you take everything off, you please a few morons and chase all the nice people away.”

Peter Warner, sailor. You probably never heard of him, but his story is fascinating.

Especially the part about the shipwrecked boys.

The story of the 1966 rescue, which made Mr. Warner a celebrity in Australia, began during a return sail from Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, where he and his crew had unsuccessfully requested the right to fish in the country’s waters. Casually casting his binoculars at a nearby uninhabited island, ‘Ata, he noticed a burned patch of ground.
“I thought, that’s strange that a fire should start in the tropics on an uninhabited island,” he said in a 2020 video interview. “So we decided to investigate further.”
As they approached, they saw a naked teenage boy rushing into the water toward them; five more quickly followed. Recalling that some island nations imprisoned convicts on islands like ‘Ata, he told his crew to load their rifles.
But when the boy, Tevita Fatai Latu, who also went by the name Stephen, reached the boat, he told Mr. Warner that he and his friends had been stranded for more than a year, living off the land and trying to signal for help from passing ships.
Mr. Warner, still skeptical, radioed Nuku’alofa.
“After 20 minutes,” he said, “a very tearful operator came on the radio, and then amongst tears he said: ‘It’s true. These boys had been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. And now you have found them.’”

The boys had been shipwrecked for 15 months.

At first the boys lived off raw fish, coconuts and birds’ eggs. After about three months, they found the ruins of a village, and their fortunes improved — among the rubble they discovered a machete, domesticated taro plants and a flock of chickens descended from the ones left behind by the previous inhabitants. They also managed to start a fire, which they kept burning for the rest of their stay.
They built a makeshift settlement, with a thatched-roof hut, a garden and, for recreation, a badminton court and an open-air gymnasium, complete with a bench press. One of the boys, Kolo Fekitoa, fashioned a guitar out of debris from the boat, and they began and ended every day with songs and prayer.
They established a strict duty roster, rotating among resting, gathering food and watching for ships. If a fight broke out, the antagonists had to walk to opposite ends of the island and return, ideally having cooled off. When Stephen broke his leg, the others fashioned a splint; his leg healed perfectly.

Mr. Warner was 90.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Janet Warner, who said he had been swept overboard by a rogue wave while sailing near the mouth of the Richmond River, an area he had known for decades. A companion on the boat, who was also knocked into the water, pulled Mr. Warner to shore, but attempts to revive him were unsuccessful.

For the record, NYT obits for Felix Silla and Richard Rush.

Obit watch: April 21, 2021.

Wednesday, April 21st, 2021

Jim Steinman.

He had a fascinating career, which is detailed to some extent in his Wikipedia entry.

Todd Rundgren eventually agreed to produce the record, but no big label wanted it; Mr. Sonenberg often joked that he thought people were creating new record labels just for the purpose of rejecting “Bat Out of Hell.” Eventually Cleveland International Records, a small label distributed by CBS, took a chance.

One little known fact: he was working on a “Batman” musical. A stage musical, not a movie musical. But there were plans for Tim Burton to direct.

Steinman said about Burton and the project, “It’s more like his first two movies than any of the other movies. It’s very dark and gothic, but really wildly funny. It was my dream that he do this.”

I think a musical interlude is fitting here.

Monte Hellman, director. We haven’t seen “Two Lane Blacktop” yet, but we have watched “Cockfighter”. I can really only recommend that one to fans of Charles Willeford, but it seems like there are a lot of those folks out there…