Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: December 7, 2020.

Monday, December 7th, 2020

As previously noted, I got a little behind yesterday, so I’m playing catch-up.

David Lander, prominent TV actor perhaps best known as “Squiggy” on “Laverne and Shirley”.

Interesting connections:

He and his comedy partner, Michael McKean, were members of the cast of “Laverne & Shirley,” a sitcom about boy-crazy brewery workers in 1950s Milwaukee, from its debut in 1976 until it left the air in 1983.

…

Lenny and Squiggy were not the brainchild of the show’s creators. Mr. Lander and Mr. McKean invented them in college (Squiggy was called Ant’ny then) and had been performing as those characters with the Credibility Gap, a comedy performance ensemble that also included Harry Shearer.
The characters sometimes broke away from their own series. Mr. Lander and Mr. McKean appeared on the fictional talk show “America 2-Night,” hosted by Martin Mull.
Portraying two imaginary actors who supposedly played Lenny and Squiggy (but looked and talked just like them), they made small talk and sang “Creature Without a Head.” That song was also on the 1979 album recorded by Lenny and the Squigtones, their imaginary musical group (which included Christopher Guest on guitar). Principal Squiggy (Mr. Lander) appeared in “Scary Movie” (2000), and Squiggy himself turned up on a 2002 episode of “The Simpsons.”

Of course, Guest, McKean, and Shearer were all in Spinal Tap. I kind of wonder why Lander wasn’t involved. (According to Wikipedia, Guest was actually credited as “Nigel Tufnel” on the Lenny and the Squigtones album.)

Lawrence sent over an obit for Pamela Tiffin. She had what seems like an odd career: Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three”, “Harper” (a Ross MacDonald adaptation), “State Fair”. “The Hallelujah Trail”…and a bunch of Italian movies.

Paul Sarbanes, the man who put the “Sarbanes” in “Sarbanes-Oxley”.

Also by way of Lawrence, and this is breaking as I write it, so no links yet: Fred Akers. Links probably tomorrow.

For the historical record: NYT obits for Warren Berlinger and Walter E. Williams.

Posted in Law, Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 3, 2020.

Thursday, December 3rd, 2020

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing est mort.

I’ve seen very little reporting of this elsewhere, but Lawrence has posted a nice obit for economist Walter E. Williams.

Posted in History, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 1, 2020.

Tuesday, December 1st, 2020

I don’t have a good third party source to link, but Ben Bova, noted SF writer, has passed away.

Dr. Bova was the author of more than 200 works of science fact and fiction, including short stories, essays, newspaper articles, non-fiction works and novels. He was the six-time winner of the prestigious Hugo Award, the editor of Analog Magazine, and the editorial director of Omni Magazine. He was president of the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Edited to add: obit from Lawrence.

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Obit watch: November 30, 2020.

Monday, November 30th, 2020

Dave Prowse, former British heavyweight lifting champion.

In Britain, he became more widely known when he got the part of the Green Cross Code Man, a superhero who promoted road safety. He appeared as the character in a government television campaign and also toured schools to encourage children to stop, look and listen before crossing the street.

He also did a little bit of acting.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Jery Hewitt. Mr. Hewitt was a prolific stunt coordinator. Among his work: 14 of the Coen Brothers films, every episode of “Law and Order: Original Recipe”, and 22 seasons of “Law and Order: SVU”.

In 1977, he helped mountain climber George Willig scale the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Two years later, he landed his first feature film role as the leader of the Baseball Furies gang in the 1979 cult classic The Warriors.
Once described as “the thinking man’s stunt coordinator,” his hundreds of other coordinating credits include School of Rock, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Sopranos, Reign Over Me, The Manchurian Candidate, Tower Heist, The Birdcage and Angels in America. He also performed stunts on numerous other films, including Independence Day, Scent of a Woman, Ghostbusters II and Coyote Ugly.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 28, 2020.

Saturday, November 28th, 2020

Tony Hsieh, Zappos guy.

I’ve never bought shoes from Zappos, but as someone who tries to pay a little attention to what’s going on on the Internet, I’d heard about Mr. Hsieh, his leadership of Zappos, and his plans for downtown Las Vegas.

Also, this is shocking: he was only 46. The paper of record says that he died as a result of injuries sustained in a house fire.

If you didn’t check the batteries in your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors when the time changed, you might go do that now.

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Obit watch: November 26, 2020.

Thursday, November 26th, 2020

Dena Dietrich.

She had a strong TV career, and an interesting theater one:

What would have been her Broadway debut — “The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake” (1967), a generation-gap comedy — closed in previews, reportedly because its Hollywood star, Jean Arthur, was ill. Ms. Dietrich’s first official Broadway appearance was also brief: “Here’s Where I Belong,” a musical based on John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” opened and closed on March 3, 1968.
Then her luck changed. Ms. Dietrich played a sensible older sister in Mike Nichols’s Broadway production of Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” (1971). The play, starring Peter Falk and Lee Grant as Manhattanites struggling through a bad economy, ran for almost two years and won two Tony Awards.

She was most famous, though, as “Mother Nature” in those 1970s commercials for a margarine company. (“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”)

Ian Finkel, the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest xylophonist”.

Mr. Finkel’s path took him from the borscht belt resorts in the Catskills to playing with the New York Philharmonic. He also worked as a composer and musical arranger for stars like Sid Caesar, Tito Puente and Ginger Rogers, his brother, Elliot Finkel, said.
As a percussionist, he worked in orchestras that accompanied the likes of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Diana Ross and Tony Bennett.

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

Obit watch: November 25, 2020.

Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

For the historical record: Diego Maradona. ESPN.

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Obit watch: November 24, 2020.

Tuesday, November 24th, 2020

An obit roundup, because I’m a little behind.

Jan Morris, British writer and historian. I haven’t read any of Morris’s work, yet. But John Crowley in his beautiful novella “Great Work of Time” cites Morris’s history of the British empire as a major source, and I’ve been hunting for reasonably priced copies. (Like I need three more volumes of history to read, in addition to Gibbon and the two volume history of the Canadian transcontinental railroad.)

Ken Spears, co-creator of “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!”. The other creator, Joe Ruby, passed away in September.

Daniel Cordier, one of the legendary figures of the French Resistance. He was 100.

David Dinkins, former mayor of New York City.

Posted in Books, History, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 18, 2020.

Wednesday, November 18th, 2020

Vincent Reffet.

A free-flying world champion and avid BASE jumper (involving leaps from towering static objects rather than from a plane), Mr. Reffet had undertaken breathtaking feats including a record-breaking jump of over 2,700 feet from a platform above the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and a midair dive into a plane from a 13,000-foot mountain in Switzerland.

…

In Dubai, the group worked with XDubai, an extreme-sports brand that has been endorsed by the crown prince. In one stunt that went viral, the pair flew with jetpacks above Dubai beside an Emirates Airbus 380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft.

He was 36 years old. According to the NYT obit, he died in a training accident.

Ben Watkins. My feelings about reality TV are well known, but nobody should have that hard a life, and nobody should die at 14.

Posted in Food, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 9, 2020.

Monday, November 9th, 2020

A few obits from over the weekend. I’ll start by just quoting the lead from this NYT one:

Norm Crosby, the comedian known as the master of malaprop because he spoke from his diagram and related many funny antidotes, often to a standing ovulation, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 93.

More:

He was trying to develop new material when a club owner made an offhand comment about one of the club’s cabaret dancers. The owner, who had given the young woman a ride, “came into my dressing room and he said to me, ‘Find out if the girl is staying over or if she communicates,’” Mr. Crosby recalled. “I said, ‘My God, a lot of people talk like that. Maybe that would be fun.’ So I started the play on words.”
He tried it in Massachusetts, he added, “and the places I worked, unfortunately, people didn’t get the difference.”
Because of the particulars of his Latin Quarter booking, Mr. Crosby’s routine was not an immediate breakthrough with Times Square audiences either. He started out performing 12-minute filler sets between stage acts during his weeklong engagement, and his jokes were largely ignored. “I was on for five minutes before anybody knew I was out there,” he said.
At the end of the week, a dejected Mr. Crosby packed his bags and went to pick up his check from the manager, who apologized for the difficult assignment and promised him a better slot in the show. Once audiences had a chance to get the joke, he was a hit. He stayed at the Latin Quarter for 18 weeks, after which the prestigious William Morris Agency began representing him.

…

Speaking of Senator Goldwater, he said, “When President Johnson declared war on puberty, it was Senator Goldwater who said, and I quote, ‘Wherever there is unemployment, you’ll find men out of work.’”
He was a pitchman in the late 1970s and early 1980s for Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light beer, appearing in commercials with Mickey Mantle, Henny Youngman and Joe Frazier.
In one commercial, he declared, “I always keep Natural on hand while I watch these athletes perspiring to achieve victory, cause these sporting computations make me so dehybernated.”

Robert Sam Anson, noted magazine writer and author.

Marguerite Littman.

By all accounts hypnotically charming, Ms. Littman, who landed in Los Angeles at midcentury, counted among her closest friends the writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy, as well as Gore Vidal, David Hockney and, famously, Truman Capote, who is said to have distilled that charm into his most famous character, Holly Golightly of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

…

An oft-told story about Ms. Littman goes like this: Mr. Capote and Ms. Littman were sitting at the pool at Cipriani’s in Venice in the late 1970s when Ms. Littman pointed out an extremely thin woman. “That is anorexia nervosa,” she declared. And Mr. Capote replied, “Oh Marguerite, you know everybody.”

Finally, Eddie Johnson. My feelings about the NBA are well known, but this is a depressing story.

Johnson, who was nicknamed Fast Eddie for his explosive first step, was drafted out of Auburn University in 1977 by the Atlanta Hawks. He soon became one of the team’s top players and started the 1980 and 1981 All-Star Games.
“He was built like a linebacker and was as fast as they come with the ball in his hands, putting it on the floor, attacking someone off the dribble,” Mike Fratello, who coached the Hawks during some of Johnson’s nine seasons with the team, said in a phone interview. “And he could defend because of his strength and his ability to move his feet.”

But he also got into cocaine.

Johnson began to use cocaine in college and continued using it during his N.B.A. career. During his professional playing days, he was charged with cocaine possession, writing bad checks and car theft; he was hospitalized at least twice for treatment of manic-depressive disorder; and he successfully fled two men shooting at him in a motel parking lot after what the police said was a drug deal gone wrong.
In 1981, Johnson discussed his cocaine use in an interview with Sports Illustrated. “I partied a little extensively, but I wasn’t abusing it,” he said. “The whole idea of me abusing drugs is outlandish.”

He was traded to Cleveland, went to Seattle briefly, and was banned by the NBA in 1987.

When there were no games left to play, Johnson’s life unraveled. By his own count, he was arrested at least 100 times. Between 1987 and 2001, he was convicted, among other crimes, of burglary, battery, drug sale and possession, violently resisting arrest and grand theft.
He committed his most serious crime in 2006. Prosecutors said he had entered the unlocked front door of an apartment in Ocala where an 8-year-old girl and her three brothers were alone watching television; a babysitter had stepped outside.
The girl testified at Johnson’s trial in 2008 that he had followed her to her bedroom, locked the door and pushed a dresser in front of it before sexually assaulting her. He was convicted of sexual battery and molestation. He received a mandatory life sentence.

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 8, 2020.

Sunday, November 8th, 2020

Alex Trebek. Jeopardy. Variety. THR.

The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research.

Alex is survived by his wife of 30 years, Jean, and children Matthew, Emily, and Nicky. The family has announced no plans for a service, but gifts in Alex’s memory could go to World Vision.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 6, 2020.

Friday, November 6th, 2020

Elsa Raven.

She was the real estate agent in “The Amityville Horror” and “Clocktower Lady” in “Back to the Future”. She also did a bunch of TV: no “Mannix”, but “Quincy, M.E.”, “The A-Team”, “Wiseguy”, and one of the “Rockford Files” movies, among other credits.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 2, 2020.

Monday, November 2nd, 2020

Great and good FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for actor Eddie Hassell. HouChron.

The Dallas Morning News is basically unreadable if you are not a subscriber, so I can’t link to that. According to the reports I’ve seen, Mr. Hassell died as a result of an apparent carjacking.

Nikki McKibbin. She finished third in the first round of “American Idol”.

Ms. McKibbin rose to national fame in 2002 as a contestant on “American Idol,” the Fox reality show in which singers competed for a record deal. Appearing with an unabashedly punk style, complete with a shock of dyed red hair, she was praised for her soulful covers, including “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler, “Black Velvet” by Alannah Myles and “Piece of My Heart,” which Janis Joplin made famous with Big Brother and the Holding Company.

She was only 42, and passed away due to complications from a brain aneurysm.

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Obit watch: October 31, 2020.

Saturday, October 31st, 2020

Sean Connery. Man, I love that photo. Borepatch. Variety. THR.

I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t been better said by other people. Borepatch beat me on “The Wind and the Lion“. “The Untouchables”. “The Man Who Would Be King”.

And “Zardoz“.

Edited to add: “15 Sean Connery Movies to Stream” from the NYT. Which includes a couple of Bond films, a couple of movies I mentioned above, “The Hunt For Red October”, some other interesting stuff…

…and “The Rock” and “Zardoz”.

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Obit watch: October 30, 2020.

Friday, October 30th, 2020

Dan Baum, journalist and author.

He was somewhat famous for being fired by the New Yorker: more specifically, for tweeting about being fired by the New Yorker.

Over three days in May 2009, he tapped out his saga in more than 350 tweets, each less than 140 characters.
The media world, which always paid close-attention to Twitter, hailed the result as a breakthrough in storytelling: Not only was Mr. Baum pulling back the curtain on an august legacy publication; he was also unspooling his tale in real time, one tweet after another. (He learned as he went along not to do things like break up sentences between entries.)
Mr. Baum ended up producing one of the first examples of what is now called a Twitter thread, in which multiple tweets are linked together to provide more information than can be captured in one entry; today, entire novels are written in threads.

He went on to write several books. The NYT singles out Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans (affiliate link) as his “most acclaimed” book. Among his other books is Gun Guys: A Road Trip (affiliate link), a book that great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn recommends.

NYT obit for Billy Joe Shaver.

Travis Roy.

In the opening seconds of a televised college hockey game on Oct. 20, 1995, Roy, a forward, skated in to body-check an opposing defenseman, crashed into the boards and fell to the ice.
“It was as if my head had become disengaged from my body,” he recalled in a book, “Eleven Seconds: A Story of Tragedy, Courage & Triumph,” written with E.M. Swift. “I was turning the key in the ignition on a cold winter morning, and the battery was completely dead. Not a spark. Just click, and nothing. And right away it passed through my mind I was probably paralyzed.”
He had shattered his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. The injury left Roy a quadriplegic. Eventually he regained some movement in his right arm, which he used to work the joystick on his wheelchair.
College hockey is held in awe in Boston, its athletes worshiped and its fallen participants mourned. Shortly after Roy’s accident, more than 200 special church masses and prayer services were held in his honor, according to his father, Lee.
That reverence for the younger Roy grew as he gave motivational speeches and raised money to help those with spinal injuries and to fund research.
The Travis Roy Foundation, established in 1996 to support people with spinal cord injuries, has given nearly $5 million in research grants and helped more than 2,100 quadriplegics and paraplegics, according to its website.

Posted in Books, Guns, Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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