Rush Limbaugh. Because I think the last thing in the world El Rushbo would want me to link to is the NYT, especially since the obit that’s up now is both incomplete and kind of insulting.
The website, which seems to be under heavy load right now.
I wish I could say more, but I was never a Rush listener, or really a talk radio listener after I left high school.
Edited to add: Lawrence. Also, thank you, Chris.
Over the weekend, FotB RoadRich sent an obit for Lt. Col. Thomas Robert ‘Bob‘ Vaucher (USAF – ret), certified American badass, who passed away on February 7th at the age of 102.
What did LTC Vaucher do? He flew B-29s. More specifically, he delivered the first B-29 from the factory to the military. He also led the flyover of the USS Missouri during the surrender ceremony. Additionally:
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Weak brakes, a lack of reversible props, and a nosewheel collapse cut one wartime B–29 mission short. During another, Vaucher’s heavily laden long-range bomber struggled to gain altitude when one of the four supercharged 2,200-horsepower Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone engines feathered unexpectedly on takeoff. “I staggered out” as the 138,000-pound aircraft slowly gained altitude, he recalled to Zimmerman. “What happened was that when the co-pilot ganged the power down from our takeoff engine speed of 2,900 rpm to 2,600 rpm or so, one of the toggle switches stuck and an engine went into feather mode. I could barely keep the airspeed up above a stall. Fortunately, we took off at sea level and remained at sea level for the next 10 miles, so I was able to baby the thing up to get going.”
“I flew it so much it was second nature to me,” Vaucher said from the pilot seat of the B–29 during a video recounting his wartime flying experience. “I have 3,000 hours sitting in this chair—a year and a half of work.”
This is a 2016 talk LTC Vaucher gave to the Air Force Association NJ Chapter 195 about his experience flying the B-29.
Another shorter video from AOPALive:
Lawrence sent over an obit for Lynn Stalmaster, Hollywood casting director.
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For John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), Stalmaster set up a casting call at a Georgia elementary school and found Billy Redden to play the quirky youngster in the movie’s famous banjo scene. And he suggested that Ned Beatty (making his film debut) play one of the businessmen who takes that fateful canoe trip down the river.
Stalmaster also was instrumental in the career of William Shatner (Judgment at Nuremberg); discovered LeVar Burton, then a sophomore at USC, for the landmark ABC miniseries Roots; cast country singer Mac Davis to play a pro quarterback in North Dallas Forty (1979); and insisted that eventual Oscar nominee Sam Shepard portray Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff (“It’s the only time I thought the film couldn’t be made without one specific actor,” he once said). He cast more than 100 roles for that movie alone.
He also was responsible for getting Dustin Hoffman into “The Graduate”, Christoper Reeve into “Superman”, and John Travolta into “Welcome Back, Kotter” among almost 400 credits in both movies and TV. He was the first casting director in history to receive an Academy Award.
Brayden Smith. He was a recent five-time “Jeopardy” champion:
He was only 24.
I planned to post this last night, but we had multiple power outages through the day yesterday (as other people have noted, it is cold here: right now, my phone is calling for a low of 10 on Sunday and a low of 3 (yes, THREE) on Monday), the last one lasting until well into the evening.
So I’m playing catch-up today.
The NYT got around to publishing a respectful obit for James Gunn yesterday.
Chick Corea, jazz guy.
In case you were wondering, I believe this is the complete list.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Leslie Robertson, structural engineer for the World Trade Center.
Mr. Robertson designed the structural systems of several notable skyscrapers, including the Shanghai World Financial Center, a 101-story tower with a vast trapezoidal opening at its peak, and I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, a cascade of interlocking pyramids. His projects included bridges, theaters and museums, and he helped install sculptures by Richard Serra, some weighing as much as 20 tons.
But the project that came to define his career was the World Trade Center. He was in his early 30s and something of an upstart when he and his partner, John Skilling, were chosen to design the structural system for what were to be the time, at 110 stories, the world’s tallest buildings. He was in his 70s when the towers were destroyed.
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“The responsibility for the design ultimately rested with me,” Mr. Robertson told The New York Times Magazine after the towers were destroyed. He added: “I have to ask myself, Should I have made the project more stalwart? And in retrospect, the only answer you can come up with is, Yes, you should have.”
He conceded that he had not considered the possibility of fire raging through the buildings after a plane crash. But he also said that that was not part of the structural engineer’s job, which involves making sure that buildings resist forces like gravity and wind. “The fire safety systems in a building fall under the purview of the architect,” he said.
In an interview in 2009 in his Lower Manhattan office, Mr. Robertson wiped away tears as he recalled the victims of 9/11. He talked about the family members who had come to see him, hoping he could say something to help them with their grief. But he also said he was proud of the design of the twin towers.
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According to Mr. Robertson, the buildings had been designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, but the planes flown into the towers were heavier 767s. And his calculations had been based on the initial impact of the plane; they did not take into account the possibility of what he called a “second event,” like a fire.
When the planes struck the towers, they sliced through the steel frames, but the buildings remained standing. Many engineers concluded that conventionally framed buildings would have collapsed soon after impact. The twin towers stood long enough to allow thousands of people to escape.
But the fire from the burning jet fuel raged on. The floor trusses lost strength as they heated up, and they began to sag. The floors eventually began pulling away from the exterior columns before the buildings fell. A total of 2,753 people were killed, including 343 firefighters.
Mr. Robertson said he received hate mail after 9/11. But on a flight to Toronto one day, an airline employee gave him an unexpected upgrade to first class. When he asked for an explanation, he recalled in the 2009 interview, the employee said, “I was in Tower 2, and I walked out.”
The infamous Larry Flynt. As my mother said, “I thought he was dead already.”
S. Clay Wilson, underground cartoonist. I went back and forth on whether I wanted to include Mr. Flynt and Mr. Wilson, but I decided that Mr. Flynt’s celebrity was too great to ignore. As for Mr. Wilson, you have to like a guy who says:
“I’m just a big kid,” Mr. Wilson told him. “I like toys, firearms and hats.”
Finally, also by way of Lawrence, British actor Harry Fielder, who was in pretty much every darn thing in Britain, passed away February 6th. Seriously, his IMDB entry has 279 credits as “actor” (though it looks like many of those were small roles).
This just in: Marty Schottenheimer, NFL coach.
Schottenheimer coached the original Cleveland Browns from midway through the 1984 season to 1988, the Kansas City Chiefs from 1989 to 1998, the Washington Redskins in 2001 (the team dropped that name last July) and the San Diego Chargers from 2002 to 2006.
His teams went 200-126-1 over all, and he was named the 2004 N.F.L. coach of the year by The Associated Press when his Chargers went 12-4 after finishing the previous season at 4-12. But they were upset by the Jets in the first round of the playoffs.
Schottenheimer’s squads had a 5-13 record in playoff games.
Mary Wilson, of the Supremes.
Joe Allen, NYC restaurateur. Noted here because he was the guy who hung posters of Broadway flops on the wall of Joe Allen’s.
Ron Wright, Texas Congressman. (District 6, which is in North Texas.)
By way of Lawrence, a burning in Hell watch: Anthony Sowell, Ohio serial killer.
Leon Spinks, former heavyweight champion of the world.
Leon had fought professionally only seven times, with six victories and a draw, before facing Ali at the Las Vegas Hilton on Feb. 15, 1978, in a bout arranged by Bob Arum, one of boxing’s leading promoters.
Ali held the World Boxing Association and World Boxing Council titles. But at 36, though an overwhelming betting favorite, he was past his prime. He weighed in at 224 pounds to Spinks’s 197.
Spinks was a hard-charging brawler, but when he pressured Ali in the ring, the champion resorted to his rope-a-dope strategy, which was aimed at letting an opponent exhaust himself with punches that seldom did damage while Ali rested on the ropes.
The Spinks corner had a strategy of its own, aimed at weakening Ali.
“Jab, jab, jab, that was the plan,” Spinks’s trainer, George Benton, said in the dressing room afterward. “Hit him on the left shoulder all night with that jab.”Ali rallied in the 15th round, but Spinks warded him off and won a split decision.
He lost the WBA title to Ali in September of 1978: the WBC stripped him of the title because he wouldn’t fight Ken Norton.
Spinks’s last fight came in December 1995, when he lost a unanimous decision to Fred Houpe in an eight-round bout. Spinks was 42; Houpe was 45 and had not fought since November 1978.
Spinks retired with 26 victories (14 by knockouts), 17 losses and three draws.
George P. Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state and Nixon cabinet official.
Today’s dose of chicken soup for the you-know-what (because I’m pretty sure the actual term is trademarked, and I’ll hear about it from those people just like if I don’t refer to today’s game as the Superb Owl): Frank Shankwitz, former Arizona Highway Patrol motorcycle officer.
In 1980, he was introduced to a 7-year-old boy named Chris Greicius. Chris had terminal leukemia, and he desperately wanted to be a motorcycle officer when he grew up. He idolized Ponch and Jon from “CHiPs”.
The department had decided to make Chris’s wish come true, if just for a few days. A police helicopter ferried him to police headquarters from the hospital where he was being treated. Mr. Shankwitz was to greet him out front, next to his motorcycle.
“Figuring he’d be brought out in a wheelchair, I was surprised when the door opened and a pair of sneakers emerged,” Mr. Shankwitz wrote in his memoir, “Wish Man” (2018). “Out stepped Chris, an excited 7-year-old boy who seemed so full of life it was hard to believe he was sick.”
Mr. Shankwitz showed Chris his motorcycle, and after he and the other officers gave him a badge, the head of the department made him an honorary officer. Chris was feeling well enough to go home that night, and the next day the officers brought him a custom-made uniform.
To become a motorcycle officer, though, Chris had to pass a driving test — which he did, in his front yard, on his small battery-powered motorcycle. Mr. Shankwitz promised to bring him a special badge worn by motorcycle cops; he also called NBC, the network that aired “CHiPs,” and asked for the show’s stars, Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox, to autograph a photo.
The next day Chris was back in the hospital, and by the time Mr. Shankwitz arrived with the badge and the picture, he had fallen into a light coma. Chris had hung his uniform by the bed, and as Mr. Shankwitz pinned the badge on his shirt, the boy woke up.
“Am I an official motorcycle cop now?” Chris asked.
“You sure are,” Mr. Shankwitz replied.
Chris died later that day. Mr. Shankwitz and a colleague attended his funeral, in Southern Illinois, borrowing a pair of Illinois Highway Patrol motorcycles to accompany the hearse.
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Christopher Plummer. THR. Variety.
He also had charm and arrogance in equal measure, and a streak both bibulous and promiscuous, all of which he acknowledged in later life as his manner softened and his habits waned. In one notorious incident in 1971, he was replaced by Anthony Hopkins in the lead role of “Coriolanus” at the National Theater in London; according to the critic Kenneth Tynan, who at the time was the literary manager of the National, Mr. Plummer was dismissed in a vote by the cast for crude and outrageous behavior.
For years, until he came to share the widely held opinion of his best-known film — the beloved 1965 musical “The Sound of Music,” in which he starred as the Austrian naval officer Georg von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews — as a pinnacle of warmhearted family entertainment, Mr. Plummer disparaged it as saccharine claptrap, famously referring to it as “S&M” or “The Sound of Mucus.”
“That sentimental stuff is the most difficult for me to play, especially because I’m trained vocally and physically for Shakespeare,” Mr. Plummer said in a People magazine interview in 1982. “To do a lousy part like von Trapp, you have to use every trick you know to fill the empty carcass of the role. That damn movie follows me around like an albatross.”
To be fair:
Despite all the recognition he received as an octogenarian, Plummer is probably most widely recognized for his performance as Captain Von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965), the syrupy family classic that he once referred to as “The Sound of Mucous.”
“It was so awful and sentimental and gooey,” he told THR in 2011. “You had to work terribly hard to try to infuse some minuscule bit of humor into it.” He also said most of his singing parts in the movie were performed by someone else.
Plummer, however, had changed his tune when he appeared with Andrews before a screening of the musical at the 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood and added his hand- and footprints to the collection outside the TCL Chinese Theatre.
“The world has lost a consummate actor today and I have lost a cherished friend,” Andrews said Friday in a statement. “I treasure the memories of our work together and all the humor and fun we shared through the years.”
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He played Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Mark Antony and others of Shakespeare’s towering protagonists on prominent stages to consistent acclaim, and he starred in “Hamlet at Elsinore,” a critically praised 1964 television production, directed by Philip Saville and filmed at Kronborg Castle in Denmark, where (under the name Elsinore) the play is set.
But he also accepted roles in a fair share of clinkers, in which he made vivid sport of some hoary clichés — as the evil bigot hiding behind religiosity in “Skeletons” (1997), for example, one of his more than 40 television movies, or as the somber emperor of the galaxy who appears as a hologram in “Starcrash,” a 1978 rip-off of “Star Wars.”
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I enthusiastically recommend “The Man Who Would Be King”. I have not seen “Star Trek VI”, but I know some other readers of this blog have and may be able to comment upon that film.
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Mr. Plummer made notable Broadway appearances in works by Archibald MacLeish (the Devil-like Nickels in “J.B.” in 1958), Bertolt Brecht (the Hitler-like title role in “Arturo Ui” in 1963), Peter Shaffer (the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” in 1965), Neil Simon (the Chekhov-like narrator in “The Good Doctor” in 1973) and Harold Pinter (“No Man’s Land,” opposite Jason Robards, in 1994).
He won a Tony in the title role of “Cyrano,” a 1973 musical version of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” and in 2007 he was nominated for a Tony for the Clarence Darrow-like role of Henry Drummond, opposite Brian Dennehy, in “Inherit the Wind,” his final Broadway appearance.
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“The performance of a lifetime,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times of Mr. Plummer’s “King Lear,” which arrived on Broadway in 2004 after first being produced at the festival. “He delivers a Lear both deeply personal and universal: a distinctly individual man whose face becomes a mirror for every man’s mortality.”
Ms. Taylor, his wife, said that at his death Mr. Plummer had been preparing to appear as Lear on film for the first time, under the direction of Des McAnuff.
But it was his portrayal of Iago in a 1981 Connecticut production of “Othello,” which starred James Earl Jones in the title role and came to Broadway in 1982, that defined his reputation as a Shakespearean of profound depth, worthy of comparison to the likes of Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud.
“He gives us evil so pure — and so bottomless — that it can induce tears,” Frank Rich wrote in The Times. “Our tears are not for the dastardly Iago, of course — that would be wrong. No, what Mr. Plummer does is make us weep for a civilization that can produce such a man and allow him to flower.”
The praise was amplified by the senior Times critic of the day, Walter Kerr, who wrote, “It is quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time.”
Noted: THR claims he was a die-hard “Star Trek” fan, even before doing “Star Trek VI”. The THR story includes a clip from “The Captains” with Mr. Plummer and William Shatner talking.
The full obit for Christopher “Starcrash” Plummer will more than likely be tomorrow, to give the various papers of record a chance to react. The current NYT obit is a preliminary one, and I feel sure there will be corrections.
(And if ever Wikipedia needed a “[citation needed]” or [by whom?]” tag, it is for the statement “It is considered a cult classic.”)
Eugenio Martinez has passed away at the age of 98.
Mr. Martinez was the last surviving Watergate burglar.
In January 1973 four of the five burglars — members of the so-called plumbers, an informal White House team assigned to plug information leaks — pleaded guilty so as to avoid revealing details of the bungled operation. They were convicted of conspiracy, theft and wiretapping.
The others, also Cuban-born, were Bernard L. Barker, a former Miami real estate agent and C.I.A. operative, who died in 2009; Virgilio González, a Miami locksmith, who died in 2014; and Frank A. Sturgis, a soldier of fortune, who died in 1993. (In 1971, the four had taken part in the break-in at the Los Angeles office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who disclosed the Pentagon papers to the press.)
E. Howard Hunt, who allegedly recruited them, served 31 months in prison.
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In 1983, after his requests for clemency had been rejected by Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, Mr. Martinez — who, it turned out, had still been on retainer to the C.I.A. at the time of the Watergate break-in — was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.
The pardon, which was granted because Mr. Martinez had been regarded as the least culpable of the defendants, restored his right to vote. Despite the ordeal, he prided himself on one Watergate keepsake — a golden lucky clover inscribed, in Spanish, with the words “Good luck, Richard Nixon.”
Hal Holbrook. He was 95, but still, this stinks. THR. Variety.
Mr. Holbrook never claimed to be a Twain scholar; indeed, he said, he had read only a little of Twain’s work as a young man. He said the idea of doing a staged reading of Twain’s work came from Edward A. Wright, his mentor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. And Mr. Wright would have been the first to acknowledge that the idea had actually originated with Twain himself — or rather Samuel Clemens, who had adopted Mark Twain as something of a stage name and who did readings of his work for years.
Mr. Holbrook was finishing his senior year as a drama major in 1947 when Mr. Wright talked him into adding Twain to a production that Mr. Holbrook and his wife, Ruby, were planning called “Great Personalities,” in which they would portray, among others, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Mr. Holbrook had doubts at first. “Ed, I think this Mark Twain thing is pretty corny,” he recalled telling Mr. Wright after the first rehearsals. “I don’t think it’s funny.”
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Mr. Holbrook began developing his one-man show in 1952, the year Ms. Holbrook gave birth to their first child, Victoria. He soon looked the part, with a wig to match Twain’s unruly mop, a walrus mustache and a rumpled white linen suit, the kind Twain himself wore onstage. From his grandfather, Mr. Holbrook got an old penknife, which he used to cut the ends off the three cigars he smoked during a performance (though he was not sure whether Twain ever smoked onstage). He sought out people who claimed to have seen and heard Twain, who died in 1910, and listened to their recollections.
He had more or less perfected the role by 1954, the year he began a one-man show titled “Mark Twain Tonight!” at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.
Two years later he took his Twain to television, performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show.” In the meantime he had landed a steady job in 1954 on the TV soap opera “The Brighter Day,” on which he played a recovering alcoholic.
The stint lasted until 1959, when, tiring of roles he no longer cared about, he opened in “Mark Twain Tonight!” at the Off Broadway 41st Street Theater.By then the metamorphosis was complete. With his shambling gait, Missouri drawl, sly glances and exquisite timing, Hal Holbrook had, for all intents and purposes, become Mark Twain.
“After watching and listening to him for five minutes,” Arthur Gelb wrote in The New York Times, “it is impossible to doubt that he is Mark Twain, or that Twain must have been one of the most enchanting men ever to go on a lecture tour.”
This is not intended as a shot at Mr. Holbrook, but I do wonder how much of our popular conception of Mark Twain is shaped by Holbrook’s performances.
Another film role that he doesn’t seem to be getting much credit for: “Lt. Briggs” in “Magnum Force”.
Mr. Holbrook had a long and fruitful run as an actor. He was the shadowy patriot Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” (1976); an achingly grandfatherly character in “Into the Wild” (2007), for which he received an Oscar nomination; and the influential Republican Preston Blair in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012).
He played the 16th president himself, on television, in Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln,” a 1974 mini-series. The performance earned him an Emmy Award, one of five he won for his acting in television movies and mini-series; the others included “The Bold Ones: The Senator” (1970), his protagonist resembling John F. Kennedy, and “Pueblo” (1973) in which he played the commander of a Navy intelligence boat seized by North Korea in 1968.
I caught a few episodes of “The Senator” back when RetroTV was airing in Austin, and I thought it held up well. The whole series is on DVD (affiliate link) and it looks like there are full episodes on the ‘Tube.
Harlan Ellison was particularly fond of these episodes (it was a two-parter).
He didn’t do a lot of ’70s detective shows, but, oddly, he did some in the 21st century: “NCIS”, “Bones”, and the bad “Hawaii 5-0”, among other credits.
In other news: Jamie Tarses, prominent TV executive.
Finally, Jack Palladino, who the NYT calls a “hard-charging private investigator”.
What makes this interesting is: he worked for the Clintons. Specifically, Bill:
During the 1992 presidential campaign, he was hired by the Clinton campaign after Gennifer Flowers released tapes of phone calls with Mr. Clinton to back up her claim that they had had an affair.
Mr. Palladino embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.”
“Every acquaintance, employer and past lover should be located and interviewed,” Mr. Palladino wrote. “She is now a shining icon — telling lies that so far have proved all benefit and no cost — for any other opportunist who may be considering making Clinton a target.”
He also did work for R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein.
In his work for the Clinton campaign, Mr. Palladino’s staff scoured Arkansas and beyond, collecting disparaging accounts from Ms. Flowers’s ex-boyfriends, employers and others who claimed to know her, accounts that the campaign then disseminated to the news media.
By the time Mr. Clinton finally admitted to “sexual relations” with Ms. Flowers, years later, Clinton aides had used stories collected by Mr. Palladino to brand her as a “bimbo” and a “pathological liar.”
In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious Black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned Black people. She urged Black colleagues to do the same, and often went without work. She was critical of films and television programs that cast Black characters as criminal, servile or immoral, and insisted that African-Americans, even if poor or downtrodden, should be portrayed with dignity.
Her chiseled face and willowy frame, striking even in her 90s, became familiar to millions in more than 100 film, television and stage roles, including some that had traditionally been given only to white actors. She won three Emmys and many awards from civil rights and women’s groups, and at 88 became the oldest person to win a Tony, for her 2013 Broadway role in a revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.”
At 93, she won an honorary Oscar, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2018 and into the Television Hall of Fame in 2020. She also won a career achievement Peabody Award in 2020.
So she was a “G” short of an EGOT, but picked up the “P” to make her a PEOT.
For many Americans, Ms. Tyson was an idol of the Black Is Beautiful movement, regal in an African turban and caftan, her face gracing the covers of Ebony, Essence and Jet magazines. She was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a runner, a meditator and, from 1981 to 1989, the wife of the jazz trumpeter and composer Miles Davis. Since the ’60s she had inspired Black American women to embrace their own standards of beauty — including helping to popularize the Afro.
“She’s our Meryl Streep,” Vanessa Williams told Essence in 2013. “She was the person you wanted to be like in terms of an actress, in terms of the roles she got and how serious she took her craft. She still is.”
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In January 2021, when she was 96, her memoir, “Just as I Am,” appeared, and in a pre-publication interview with The New York Times Magazine, she was asked if she had any advice for the young.
“It’s simple,” she said. “I try always to be true to myself. I learned from my mom: ‘Don’t lie ever, no matter how bad it is. Don’t lie to me ever, OK? You will be happier that you told the truth.’ That has stayed with me, and it will stay with me for as long as I’m lucky enough to be here.”
…between 1972 and 2011 she was nominated for 22 Primetime Emmys and won eight.
(Of course, she won an Oscar as best supporting actress for “The Last Picture Show”. Interestingly, she beat Ellen Burstyn who was also nominated for the same film.)
A number of those Emmys were for dramatic work, including her performance as a woman who finds herself pregnant at 40 in the made-for-TV movie “A Brand New Life” (1973). But comedy was her forte.
She was nominated four times and won twice for her performance on the hit CBS sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as Phyllis Lindstrom, the scatterbrained landlady of Mary Richards, the plucky TV news producer played by Ms. Moore. She went on to play the same role from 1975 to 1977 on the spinoff series “Phyllis,” for which she received another Emmy nomination and won a Golden Globe.
And, yes! She did do a “Mannix”! (“The Need of a Friend“, season 2, episode 9.)
Bruce Kirby, another one of those knock-around actors who was in just about every 1970’s detective show except that one.
Most notably, he was Sgt. Kramer in “Columbo”. He also had several guest shots on “The Rockford Files”, and appeared on “Banacek” and “McCloud” among many other credits. (He was also the police captain on “Holmes and Yoyo”.) And his credits go all the way back to “Car 54, Where Are You?”
Antonio Sabàto. He was most famous as one of the drivers in “Grand Prix”. He did a lot of Italian movies including “Escape from the Bronx” and “Ritornano quelli della calibro 38”.
Jimmie Rodgers, crossover singer probably most famous for “Honeycomb”.
Then something happened.
Mr. Rodgers said he was under consideration for a featured role in the 1968 movie musical “Finian’s Rainbow” when the encounter on the freeway derailed his career. In his telling, he was driving home late at night when the driver behind him flashed his lights. He thought it was his conductor, who was also driving to Mr. Rodgers’s house, and pulled over.
“I rolled the window down to ask what was the matter,” he told The Toronto Star in 1987. “That’s the last thing I remember.”
He ended up with a fractured skull and broken arm. He said the off-duty officer who had pulled him over called two on-duty officers to the scene, but all three scattered when his conductor, who went looking for Mr. Rodgers when he hadn’t arrived home, drove up.
The police told a different story: They said Mr. Rodgers had been drunk and had injured himself when he fell. Mr. Rodgers sued the Los Angeles Police Department, prompting a countersuit; the matter was settled out of court in his favor to the tune of $200,000.
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Three brain surgeries followed, and he was left with a metal plate in his head. He eventually resumed performing, and even briefly had his own television show, but he faced constant difficulties. For a time he was sidelined because he started having seizures during concerts.
“Once word gets out that you’re having seizures onstage, you can’t work,” he told The News Sentinel of Knoxville, Tenn., in 1998. “People won’t hire you.”
Mr. Rodgers was found to have spasmodic dysphonia, a disorder characterized by spasms in the muscles of the voice box, a condition he attributed to his brain injury. Yet he later settled into a comfortable niche as a performer and producer in Branson, Mo., the country music mecca, where he had his own theater for several years before retiring to California in 2002.