NYT obit for John Langley, which (as usual) went up after I posted the other day.
Stuart Damon. He played “Dr. Alan Quartermaine” on “General Hospital” basically forever. He has a few other credits – mostly soaps – beyond that, including “Space: 1999” and “Star 80”.
Robert Sacchi, most famous for “The Man With Bogart’s Face”.
NYT obit for Frederic Rzewski, which went up after I posted yesterday.
John Langley. He was perhaps best known as the creator of “COPS”.
He also was involved in off-road racing, and apparently did quite well at that:
He died of an apparent heart attack while his team was competing in the “Coast to Coast Ensenada-San Felipe 250” this past weekend.
I have not seen this elsewhere, but “Reason” is reporting the death of libertarian economist Steve Horwitz.
Mike Gravel, former Senator from Alaska and (later) presidential candidate.
Frederic Rzewski, noted pianist. I probably would not have made note of this, but Mike the Musicologist sent me this tweet:
I will write an obit tonight, but for now, the greatest gig poster in history: pic.twitter.com/aeyi0HvCrZ
— Ethan Iverson (@ethan_iverson) June 26, 2021
Ethan Iverson’s tribute. MtM notes: “And while ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated‘ is grotesque source material, the piece is stunning.”
There’s an abundance of John McAfee obits out there on the web. Take your pick from Hacker News: for the hysterical record, I’m linking to the NYT obit.
Promoted from the comments, and by way of great and good FotB Joe D.:
Edited to add NYPost headline:
John McAfee hideout traced to Spanish ‘ghost hotel’ with a bitcoin farm
Biden administration cracking down on ghost hotels in 3, 2, 1…
I am seeing reports that John McAfee has committed suicide in a jail in Spain. I have not been able to confirm those reports: they currently trace back to one Spanish newspaper.
Edited to add: the NYPost has the story, but they are crediting it back to that same Spanish newspaper.
Joanne Linville, actress.
84 credits in IMDB. She did a few 70s cop shows (“The Streets of San Francisco”, “The Blue Knight”, “Barnaby Jones”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, “Columbo” and “Mrs. Columbo”, etc.). She also did a “Twilight Zone” (“The Passerby”), “The Invaders”, and an episode of a minor 1960s SF series.
Sang Ho Baek. He played baseball for George Mason University as a freshman this past season. After the season, he decided to have Tommy John surgery. He had the surgery on June 8th, and passed away on June 12th from complications.
He was 20 years old.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.”
…
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.’”
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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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:
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.