Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: August 28, 2020.

Friday, August 28th, 2020

Gerald D. Hines, prominent developer.

At his death, Mr. Hines’s company had built 907 projects around the world, including more than 100 skyscrapers, many of them designed by architects like I.M. Pei, Harry Cobb, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Robert A.M. Stern and the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox.
Hines built the Lipstick Building (officially 885 Third Avenue) in Manhattan and Pennzoil Place, Williams Tower and Bank of America Plaza in Houston, all designed by Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It was behind the Salesforce Tower, designed by Mr. Pelli, which is the tallest building in San Francisco; the DZ Bank in Berlin, designed by Mr. Gehry; the sprawling Porta Nuova complex in Milan; the Diagonal Mar project in Barcelona; and the Aspen Highlands ski area in Colorado, a favorite project of Mr. Hines’s. (He had a home in Aspen and continued to ski into his 90s.)
Architecture was his passion, although it would probably be more accurate to say that what he cared about most was fusing a point of intersection between serious design and profit-making real estate development. He took issue with colleagues who saw creative architects as dangerous to the bottom line. Spending a little more to create a better building would pay off in the end, he believed, because tenants would spend more to be in a better building that had a distinctive identity, and that would benefit both his tenants’ businesses and his own.

…

Ada Louise Huxtable, then the senior architecture critic of The New York Times, hailed Pennzoil in 1976 as a “rarity among large commercial structures: a dramatic and beautiful and important building.”
“It successfully marries art and architecture and the business of investment construction,” she added.Pennzoil was internationally acclaimed, and it led other developers to attempt the Hines formula of hiring celebrated architects and commissioning them to design one-of-a-kind towers that could be marketed as defining points of downtown skylines. (Not all of his peers were as good as Hines, however, in simultaneously encouraging creativity and controlling construction costs.)
The success of Pennzoil Place marked the beginning of a close and long relationship between Mr. Hines and the partners Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It would transform Mr. Johnson’s practice from a boutique firm designing mainly expensive civic and institutional projects into a major player in commercial architecture — one that would reshape skylines around the country. Hines also commissioned the Johnson firm to design Comerica Tower in Detroit, the Wells Fargo Center in Denver, 550 Boylston Street in Boston and 101 California Street and 580 California Street in San Francisco, among many others.
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hines made an unlikely pair: the intellectual architect who rarely stopped talking and loved gossip and controversy, and the buttoned-up developer so averse to grandstanding that he would keep a slide rule in his pocket and take it out and pretend to use it during a meeting to avoid having to speak. But before his death in 2005, Mr. Johnson told the writer Hilary Lewis that he considered Mr. Hines his “first and greatest client.”

Walter Lure. Interesting story: Mr. Lure was the rhythm guitarist for the Hearbreakers (also known as Johnny Thunders and the Hearbreakers, as opposed to Tom Petty’s Hearbreakers) one of those legendary NYC punk bands.

The Heartbreakers were together for a brief three years and recorded only one studio album, “L.A.M.F.,” released in 1977 on the British label Track Records. But among the bands that clustered around downtown clubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB during the early punk years, the Heartbreakers had an outsize reputation.
“They were probably the best band besides the Ramones and the Dictators,” Legs McNeil, a co-founder of Punk magazine and the co-author of “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” (1996), said in a phone interview. “But they’re kind of like mythical, you know, because no one ever saw them. And when they did, Johnny was usually too drugged out to perform.”

…

Mr. Lure had played mostly in cover bands before he joined the Heartbreakers in 1975, but he quickly bonded with the other members musically and otherwise. In his memoir, “To Hell and Back,” published in March, Mr. Lure wrote of his initiation into the band in Mr. Hell’s East Village apartment. His bandmates cut off his long hair, and Mr. Nolan cooked him up a shot of heroin.

…

He had strong opinions about how a rock band should sound. In his book he disparaged artier contemporaries like the Talking Heads and Television, writing: “It was as if everybody was so concerned about somehow sounding ‘unique’ that they forgot that, sometimes, the kids just wanna rock. That was the niche that the Heartbreakers slipped into, and that was why they’d excited me so.”

After the Hearbreakers, he went into product testing for the FDA (he had an English major and a chemistry minor from Fordham) and from there went into Wall Street.

It led to a position at a brokerage firm overseeing a team of 125 and a long career in finance that lasted until he retired, in 2015.

…

Mr. Lure remained a drug addict until sobering up in 1988. He continued to moonlight as a rock musician, playing reunions with the Heartbreakers throughout the 1980s and then touring and recording with the Waldos.

He was also the last surviving member of the Heartbrakers (with the exception of Richard Hell, who was briefly the Heartbreakers bass player. Hell left/was fired from the band and formed Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Heartbreakers entry from Wikipedia.)

After he heard the news of Mr. Lure’s death, Glen Matlock, the bassist of the Sex Pistols, who toured with the Heartbreakers in the 1970s, noted the end of an era, tweeting, “And then there were none.”

Posted in Art, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 26, 2020.

Wednesday, August 26th, 2020

For the historical record: Gail “Passages” Sheehy.

Justin Townes Earle, singer, songwriter, and son of Steve Earle. He was only 38.

Norman Carlson. He ran the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 1970 to 1987.

Starting in the early 1980s, government policies like the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing had led to mass incarceration, swelling inmate populations in both state and federal systems. Aiming to ease the stress on penitentiary inmates and staff, Mr. Carlson favored building more prisons; during his tenure, he created 20 new facilities, nearly doubling the existing number.
And in Marion, Ill., he established a tough new system of solitary confinement that became the model on which future supermax penitentiaries were based. These included the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo., known as the ADX; it is the toughest prison in the federal system, housing those who have been labeled the “worst of the worst.”

…

Mr. Carlson was credited with professionalizing the Bureau of Prisons. He disciplined officers who beat inmates, setting a policy of zero tolerance for prisoner abuse. Guards were to call themselves corrections officers, and assistant wardens were to wear suits and ties. He often ate with prisoners and brought along his wife and children, to show that prison food was good enough for his own family.
And he was a stickler for cleanliness.
“Mr. Carlson viewed a dirty prison as a sign of poor management; consequently floors were highly polished and walls kept painted,” Mr. Earley wrote. He said that one warden was so eager to please the director that when the snow outside had turned muddy and brown, the warden had his staff sprinkle flour on it to make it look whiter before Mr. Carlson arrived.

…

“We have to divorce ourselves from the notion that we can change human behavior, that we have the power to change inmates,” Mr. Carlson told Mr. Earley. “We don’t. All we can do is provide opportunities for inmates who want to change.”

(Pete Earley’s The Hot House is a swell book about Leavenworth specifically, and to some extent about the Federal prison system in general. I enthusiastically recommend it if you’re interested in prisons or criminal justice issues.)

Posted in Books, Law, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 24, 2020.

Monday, August 24th, 2020

Great and good FotB Borepatch has lost his mother.

If you haven’t already, please head over there to extend your sympathies.

Posted in Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 20, 2020.

Thursday, August 20th, 2020

Ben Cross. He was “Harold Abrahams”, one of the two runners in “Chariots of Fire”. He also had a part in the 2009 movie reboot of a second-rate SF TV series from the late 1960s.

Mary Hartline. My mother actually mentioned this to me the other day. She was one of the very early TV stars:

“Super Circus,” a live Sunday afternoon series on ABC, began in early 1949, when the television industry was still laying its coaxial cables. Ms. Hartline was a striking presence with her long, wavy hair, her majorette-style costumes — including her signature uniform, with musical notes on the thigh-high hemline — and white tasseled boots.
Between the show’s death-defying circus acts, she conducted the band’s lively musical numbers, performed comedy sketches with the clowns, guided young audience members through contest segments and delivered live commercials. (Everybody did it. The future newsman Mike Wallace, also a cast member, pushed peanut butter.)
Ms. Hartline, often called television’s first sex symbol (a lot of fathers, it seems, were watching, alongside their offspring), was a master of promotion. In addition to having her face on Kellogg’s cereal boxes, representing Canada Dry beverages and demonstrating the joys of the newest Dixie Cup dispenser, she had her own merchandise line.
Those three dozen products included the Mary Hartline doll (“all hard plastic with socket head, jointed arms and legs, sleep eyes, blond wig,” according to a recent auction-lot description), which can still bring hundreds of dollars at auction.

Dr. Jay Galst. Interesting sounding guy: he was professionally an ophthalmologist. But he grew up with a dad who brought bags of coins home from the grocery store for him to sift through (pulling out the rare ones), and he continued pursuing numismatics into his adulthood and professional career.

He specialized in coins and coin adjacent objects (“…tokens, medals and similar artifacts”) that were in some way related to eyes, and co-wrote a book on the subject with Peter van Alfen.

The volume, “Ophthalmologia, Optica et Visio in Nummis,” which translates as Ophthalmology, Optics and Vision in Numismatics, was 574 pages and had some 1,700 entries.

He also specialized in coins from ancient Judea.

“The last time we were together, back in pre-pandemic February, we were in the A.N.S.’s vault looking through trays and trays of 17th-century British farthing and halfpenny tokens,” Dr. van Alfen said by email, “trying to find an example produced by a London optician who also produced a different token he had just purchased in order to compare the two. I knew very little about 17th-century British tokens before that morning. In the hour it took to find the token, I received a crash course. His pure joy in such numismatic arcana was always irresistible.”

Marvin Creamer, who sounds like another interesting guy, and died at 104. He:

…taught geography for many years at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J.
His expertise helped him become a history-making mariner, the first recorded person to sail round the world without navigational instruments. His 30,000-mile odyssey, in a 36-foot cutter with a small crew, made headlines worldwide on its completion in 1984.

…

It is daunting enough to circumnavigate the Earth with the aid of modern global positioning technology, much less with medieval and Renaissance tools like a mariner’s compass and sextant.
But Professor Creamer, in the grip of an obsession that had held him for years, shunned even those newfangled contrivances, as well as a radio, a clock and a wristwatch. He chose instead to rely on his deep knowledge of the planet and its vagaries, and be guided by nothing more than wind, waves, the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night.
Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.

…

…when the 66-year-old Professor Creamer set sail from Cape May, N.J., in his cutter, the Globe Star, in late 1982, he was widely considered unhinged: No mariner in recorded history had traversed the globe without at least a compass, used by sailors since the 12th century if not before, or a sextant, introduced in the 18th.
His 513-day journey would entail nearly a year on the sea, plus time in ports for repairs and reprovisioning. It would take the Globe Star to Capetown, South Africa; Hobart and Sydney, Australia; Whangara, New Zealand; and the Falkland Islands off Argentina before its triumphant return to Cape May on May 17, 1984 — an event that Professor Creamer gleefully described as “one small step back for mankind.”

Posted in Boats, Coins, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 18, 2020.

Tuesday, August 18th, 2020

Great and good FotB Borepatch was kind enough to send over an obit for Don Williams. But I’m seeing other reports that Mr. Williams actually passed away almost three years ago, and I’m having trouble sorting out what’s what. I’m going to argue, though, that good music is timeless.

Speaking of good music: Julian Bream.

And not speaking of music at all: Charles Wetli. He was a forensic pathologist and medical examiner, first in Dade County, Florida, then as the chief medical examiner of Suffolk County, Long Island.

He’d been at that job for 18 months when TWA 800 happened. He took a lot of flack for some of his decisions:

When the bodies were not immediately recovered and identified, family members directed their fury at Dr. Wetli. They worried that swift action regarding their loved ones had become secondary to the retrieval of forensic evidence for a criminal investigation.
Beyond that, families and politicians accused him of making blunders that only compounded their grief — he did not immediately work around the clock, he initially refused the help of pathologists from other jurisdictions and he did not allow most family members to see what remained of their loved ones.

But the obit points out that a lot of those decisions were defensible: there was no point in doing autopsies around the clock if they didn’t have fingerprints or dental records, which it took time to get from the families. And he didn’t ask for help initially because he wanted to make sure he had a good process in place with his own people before bringing in others.

“There’s no point having everybody show up and wait around doing nothing or giving advice I don’t need,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “I don’t need 30 dentists at 8 o’clock in the morning.”

And as for letting family see the remains…

The explosion and a plunge of 13,800 feet into a wall of water had sheared the skin, clothes and limbs from many passengers, making them more difficult to identify — and more disfigured — than most bodies that end up in a morgue. He did not want families to see the gruesome remains.

In spite of all this:

Christine Negroni, a CNN journalist who covered the crash and was the author of “The Deadly Departure of Flight 800” (2000), wrote in a recent tribute: “Dr. Wetli should be remembered as a pioneering forensic physician who assembled an array of dentists, X-ray technicians, pathologists and tiny samples of DNA to put a name on every bit of human remains recovered.”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 13, 2020.

Thursday, August 13th, 2020

Sumner Redstone, media mogul.

Beginning with a modest chain of drive-in movie theaters, Mr. Redstone negotiated, sued and otherwise fought to amass holdings that over time included CBS, the Paramount film and television studios, the publisher Simon & Schuster, the video retail giant Blockbuster and a host of cable channels, including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. At their peak, the businesses were worth more than $80 billion.
Toward the end of his life, he controlled about 80 percent of the voting stock in Viacom and CBS, presiding over both through National Amusements. And almost to the end, his grip was tight and his enthusiasm undiminished.

I’d heard of the man, in the context of his recent legal struggles, but this was something I did not know:

It was in 1979 that Mr. Redstone almost died in a fire at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, started by a disgruntled former hotel employee late at night, when most guests, including Mr. Redstone, were asleep.
“I was enveloped in flames,” he wrote. “The fire shot up my legs. The pain was searing.” He staggered to the window and hung from a ledge on an upper floor until firefighters rescued him. He suffered third-degree burns over 45 percent of his body, and it took five operations over several months to restore him to health.

He was 97.

Kurt Luedtke. He was a journalist with the Detroit Free Press:

At The Free Press, Mr. Luedtke became the first writer of Action Line, a column that cut through red tape and helped solve readers’ problems. It ran on the front page for 14 years and was copied throughout the newspaper industry.
By 1967, he had been named assistant city editor. That summer, Detroit exploded in one of the most destructive periods of civil unrest in the nation’s history. Five days of violence, fueled by deep frustration with racism, unemployment and police brutality, left 43 people dead, most of them African-American. More than 1,300 buildings were burned, and the National Guard and Army were called in.
Mr. Luedtke joined his reporters on the streets, dodging bullets and bayonets. After the riots, he assembled notes from other reporters, who had conducted more than 300 interviews, and wrote a hard-hitting article that concluded that few of the 43 who died had been rioters and that their deaths had mostly been avoidable. The article was part of a Free Press package that won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.
He also wrote about how, during the rioting, the police had stormed the Algiers Hotel and killed three young Black men who were staying there. That infamous episode became the subject of a book, “The Algiers Motel Incident” (1968), by John Hersey, author of “Hiroshima” (1946), and of a critically acclaimed movie, “Detroit” (2017), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

He left the newspaper and went into screenwriting. His first produced screenplay was “Absence of Malice”, which you may remember for Wilford Brimley’s short but significant appearance. He was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, but lost to “Chariots of Fire”. He did win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “Out Of Africa”.

At the movie’s Detroit premiere, he was interviewed by an old friend, Mort Crim, a local television anchor. In an online tribute on Monday, Mr. Crim recalled their conversation:
“He said, ‘Crim, you and I both went to journalism school; I ended up kissing Meryl Streep, and you end up interviewing me. Where did you go wrong?’”

Bill Yeoman, noted University of Houston football coach.

Yeoman was the man responsible for turning the University of Houston football program from relative obscurity into national prominence in two-and-a-half decades. He guided the Cougars to four Southwest Conference championships and 11 bowl games, posting a 6-4-1 mark in postseason competition.
Off the field, Yeoman played a key role early in the integration of college athletics with the signing of running back Warren McVea in 1964 as the Cougars’ first African-American Football student-athlete.
The Cougars had 17 winning seasons under Yeoman, including nine campaigns with at least eight victories. UH finished nationally ranked 11 times, concluding the 1976 season with its highest national ranking at No. 4 by both the Associated Press and United Press International.

Posted in Media, Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 12, 2020.

Wednesday, August 12th, 2020

Joan Feynman, noted astrophysicist. She was 93.

Over the course of her career, Feynman made many breakthroughs in furthering the understanding of solar wind and its interaction with the Earth’s magnetosphere, a region in space where the planetary magnetic field deflects charged particles from the sun. As author or co-author of more than 185 papers, Feynman’s research accomplishments range from discovering the shape of the Earth’s magnetosphere and identifying the origin of auroras to creating statistical models to predict the number of high-energy particles that would collide with spacecraft over time. In 1974, she would become the first woman ever elected as an officer of the American Geophysical Union, and in 2000 she was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal.

…

“Joan Feynman made important contributions to physics,” said APS President Philip Bucksbaum. “Her work on solar wind and the earth’s magnetosphere led to the discovery of the cause of auroras. She also developed a method to predict sunspot cycles. Her efforts in the geophysics community for fair treatment of women, together with her own example as a leader in solar physics, helped to change society’s attitudes in the mid-20th century about the contributions that women can make in physics.”

…

In 1971, Feynman accepted a job at the NASA Ames Research Center, where she developed a way to detect solar coronal mass ejections from the sun by searching for the presence of helium in solar wind. She would go on to hold positions at the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado; the National Science Foundation; and Boston College. In 1985, Feynman accepted a position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where she would conduct research until her retirement.
As part of her research at JPL, Feynman identified the mechanism that leads to the formation of auroras and developed a statistical model to determine the number of high-energy particles expelled from coronal mass injections that would hit a spacecraft during its lifetime. After her retirement from a senior scientist position in 2003, Feynman continued to conduct research on the impact of solar activity on the early climate of the Earth and the role of climate stabilization in the development of agriculture.
“Joan Feynman leaves a legacy of exemplary scientific research, having made important contributions to our understanding of the solar wind, the earth’s magnetosphere, and the origin of auroras,” said APS CEO Kate Kirby. “Despite being discouraged to pursue science by women in her family, she persevered, and her accomplishments serve as an inspiration to women who wish to pursue a career in science.”

For the record, she was Richard Feynman’s younger sister. There’s a story:

Her pioneering work on these processes led to an understanding of the mechanism responsible for auroras. She found this work wonderful, and her immediate reaction was to tell her brother, who’d first introduced her to these beautiful phenomena all those years before.
But then a second thought crossed her mind. “Richard is pretty smart, and if I tell him about an interesting problem, he’ll find the answer before I do and take all the fun out of it for me.” So Joan decided to strike a deal with him. “I said, Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe. And he said OK!”

…

Her brother Richard had kept his original promise to her not to work on auroras. Despite an impressive polymath career in which he applied his genius to a spectacular spectrum of problem-solving across the fields of maths, physics, chemistry, and biology, he had never turned his attention to Joan’s chosen field.
But then he traveled to Alaska, an important centre for aurora studies. On a tour of the facility, the head of the lab pointed out many of the interesting geophysical phenomena that were yet to be explained. “Would you be interested in working on it?” he enquired. Richard responded that he would, but added that he’d have to ask his sister’s permission. Joan remembers that he came back and told her the story. “I’m sorry Richard,” she replied, “but I’m not giving you permission.” Richard duly reported back that his sister had refused to allow him to study auroras!
Word of this story eventually got round, and people would come up to Joan at conferences and ask her if it was true. At one meeting, a colleague from UCLA told the gathering that he wanted “to publicly thank Richard Feynman for not studying aurora, so that we can all have some fun!”

Posted in Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 11, 2020.

Tuesday, August 11th, 2020

Wayne Fontana, of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, one of those British Invasion bands that was (sadly) before my time.

Mr. Fontana, who made a name performing as Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, found brief success with the band when “The Game of Love” hit No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard chart the week of April 24, 1965.

Trini Lopez.

His interpretations bridged two prominent trends of the day. At a commercially rich time for folk music, Mr. Lopez drew on the beauty of the genre’s tunes while souping them up with the sharp rockabilly beats employed by hitmakers like Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins.
“Making songs danceable helped me a lot,” Mr. Lopez told The Classic Rock Music Reporter in 2014, adding, “Discotheques back in those days were not only playing my songs, they were playing my album all the way through.”
For yet another draw, Mr. Lopez punctuated many of his songs with joyous hoots and trills drawn from Mexican folk, emphasizing his ethnic heritage at a time when many Latin performers kept theirs hidden. “I’m proud to be a Mexicano,” he told The Seattle Times in 2017.

He also did some acting:

He also appeared in the hit 1967 movie “The Dirty Dozen,” in a role that was meant to be large but that got cut down after Mr. Lopez left the shoot before it ended, frustrated by production delays. He had the lead role in “Antonio,” a 1973 movie about a poor Chilean potter who befriends a rich American (Larry Hagman) passing through his village.

(We finally watched the movie of “The Dirty Dozen” a few weeks ago. I have to admit: it is much better than the book, especially since the movie actually has an ending, and the people responsible for the movie actually bothered to film it.)

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 10, 2020.

Monday, August 10th, 2020

For the record: William English (one of the people who helped build the first mouse) and Frances Allen, noted computer scientist and researcher. Both of these have been extensively covered in a lot of places, which is why I’m only noting them here.

Terry Cannon. My feelings about baseball are well known, but Mr. Cannon sounds like my type of person. He founded the Baseball Reliquary:

…a nonprofit organization that comprises a disarming collection of unusual objects and includes the Shrine of the Eternals — individuals elected annually more for their unique characters and achievements than for their statistics or their official place in baseball’s history.

…

A puckish historian, Mr. Cannon opened every shrine induction ceremony by leading the audience in a Pasadena library in the banging of cowbells, in tribute to Hilda Chester, the leather-lunged Brooklyn Dodger fan known for pounding a cowbell at Ebbets Field. The reliquary’s Hilda Award is given to distinguished fans.

…

The first induction, in 1999, exemplified the shrine’s type of inductee: Curt Flood, who helped pave the way for free agency by challenging baseball’s reserve clause, which tied a player to his team year after year unless an owner traded or released him; Bill Veeck, the maverick owner of several teams; and [Dock] Ellis, a thoughtful, idiosyncratic Black pitcher, mostly for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who spoke out on racial issues.
Ellis attended his induction ceremony and wept, saying that Major League Baseball had never honored him. He recalled receiving a letter from Jackie Robinson (a 2005 shrine inductee) urging him to continue to push for change in baseball.
“He was crying his eyes out,” Ms. Cannon, who is also the reliquary’s artistic director, said in an interview. “I had to reach over and pat his hand to bring him back.”

…

Mr. Cannon was, indeed, a serious scholar, but the artifacts he collected invariably prompted a smile — as did his use, at his wife’s suggestion, of the word “reliquary,” which means a container for holy relics.
There is the jockstrap worn by the 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel, who appeared as a pinch-hitter for the St. Louis Browns in 1951 in a stunt conceived by Mr. Veeck. And there is the sacristy box that a priest used in 1948 to give the last rites to Babe Ruth, who died nearly a month later.
Then there are the curlers that Ellis wore on the field during batting practice at Three Rivers Stadium after Ebony magazine wrote about his hairstyle.
“I was interested in things that other museums weren’t interested in collecting,” Mr. Cannon told Pasadena Weekly in 2017. “Like, if they wanted bats and gloves, I wanted things to keep famous stories alive. It was more interesting to find a desiccated hot dog that Babe Ruth partially digested than a signed baseball or bat.”

Richard Lapointe. This is an incredibly sad story worth noting here.

In March of 1987, Bernice Martin was raped and murdered, and her apartment was set on fire. She was 88 years old, and the grandmother of Mr. Lapointe’s wife. Mr. Lapointe, who was born with a brain malformation that left him with limited mental capability, was interrogated by the police. Eventually, he signed three confessions to the crime, “though their legitimacy was open to debate“.

He was convicted in 1992 and sentenced to life. But almost immediately people raised questions about the conviction.

Among those who smelled a miscarriage of justice from the start was Tom Condon, a columnist for The Courant. Ten days after the conviction, he began his column this way:
“Richard Lapointe is short, chubby and owlishly homely. He wears a hearing aid and thick glasses. He is meek and deferential. He is not very bright.
“Watching him on the witness stand and examining the record, it is hard to believe that on one night in his 46 years, and one night only, he turned into a crazed psychopathic sex killer.
“It is so hard to believe, that maybe he didn’t.”

…

“The Richard Lapointe case was a top-to-bottom failure of the Connecticut criminal justice system, compounded by some bad luck,” Mr. Condon, who covered the case extensively for The Courant and now writes for The Connecticut Mirror, said by email. “He never should have been arrested, he never should have been convicted, and he certainly never should have spent 26 years in prison while the state circled the wagons and tried to protect a bad conviction.” (Mr. Lapointe spent three years in prison before his conviction.)

Among other issues, Mr. Lapointe’s disability may have left him particularly inclined to please others, including pleasing the police by signing confessions. And his disability may also have left him so poorly coordinated that he was physically incapable of doing the crime.

It was not until 2015 that the Connecticut Supreme Court intervened, examining an argument that exonerating evidence had not reached the defense. Its ruling reversing the conviction did not mince words.
“The petitioner was forty-two years old when he allegedly committed one of the most brutal crimes in our state’s history — the rape, torture and murder of a defenseless eighty-eight year old woman, a person who, by all accounts, was like a grandmother to him,” the majority opinion read. “Although there is abundant evidence in the record concerning the petitioner’s simplemindedness, his peculiarities and his very rigid way of thinking, one searches the record in vain for evidence that he ever was physically violent, that he suffered from a mood disorder, psychosis, drug addiction or anything else that could explain why, after visiting the victim every Sunday for years, he suddenly went back to her apartment on the Sunday in question and brutally murdered her, without his wife noticing either that he had left their house or any change in his demeanor or appearance upon his return.”

He lived for five years after his release. According to people who knew him, he had dementia and had been hospitalized with COVID.

Posted in Law, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 7, 2020.

Friday, August 7th, 2020

Dr. William Aprill, noted trainer, has passed away. FotB Karl has a very nice tribute to him up at his blog. LawDog has another nice tribute up at his place.

Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to President Ford and President Bush Sr.

Posted in Guns, Law, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 6, 2020.

Thursday, August 6th, 2020

Pete Hamill, famous NYC journalist.

Mr. Hamill became a celebrated reporter, columnist and the top editor of The New York Post and The Daily News; a foreign correspondent for The Post and The Saturday Evening Post; and a writer for New York Newsday, The Village Voice, Esquire and other publications. He wrote a score of books, mostly novels but also biographies, collections of short stories and essays, and screenplays, some adapted from his books.
He was a quintessential New Yorker — savvy about its ways, empathetic with its masses and enthralled with its diversity — and wrote about it in a literature of journalism. Along with Jimmy Breslin, he popularized a spare, blunt style in columns of on-the-scene reporting in the authentic voice of the working classes: blustery, sardonic, often angry.

…

He idolized Hemingway and covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. He lived in Dublin, Barcelona, Mexico City, Saigon, San Juan, Rome and Tokyo. But his roots were in New York, where he pounded out stories about murders, strikes, the World Series, championship fights, jazz or politics, and then got drunk after work with buddies at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village.

…

He was widely respected in newspaper circles, not only for his innovative writing and advocacy of underdogs, but for promoting higher tabloid news standards and for standing up to publishers in squabbles over pay and treatment of employees and his own autonomy as an editor.

Kathleen Duey, children’s book author. I was unfamiliar with her, but she sounds like an interesting person. The NYT obit describes her as not just an author, but a mentor to other authors as well.

“One student said for the longest time that she had one of Kathleen’s words of wisdom on her desktop: ‘Every artist of every kind takes a leap,’” Ms. Zarins said. “That’s what she did for my students. She showed them how to leap.”

…

Ms. Duey gained a reputation within the organization as someone who lent her time and talent to aspiring writers, said Bruce Coville, a fellow author of children’s literature. He got to know Ms. Duey in the 1980s, when she was the one starting out and in need of a confidence boost.
“She didn’t yet understand how incredibly talented she was,” he said.

She was 69, and according to the obit, had been suffering from dementia.

Posted in Books, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 2, 2020.

Sunday, August 2nd, 2020

Your Wilford Brimley obits: NYT. Variety. THR.

Thing I did not know #1: he was, at one point (and “briefly”) a bodyguard for Howard Hughes.

Thing I did not know #2:

He had a pleasant singing voice and recorded several albums of jazz standards, including “This Time the Dream’s on Me” and “Wilford Brimley With the Jeff Hamilton Trio.” He could more than hold his own as a guitarist too.

The Brimley/Cocoon Line. (Lawrence told me about this last night.) Not to be confused with the Mendoza Line, or the Vicky Mendoza Diagonal.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 31, 2020.

Friday, July 31st, 2020

Alan Parker, director. (“Midnight Express”, “Mississippi Burning”, “Fame”, “Birdy”, “Angel Heart”).

For the record: Herman Cain.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 29, 2020.

Wednesday, July 29th, 2020

NYT obit for John Saxon.

Lawrence sent me this story, which was also covered by Second City Cop: Dion Boyd, a Chicago PD officer (recently promoted to “deputy chief of criminal networks”) apparently committed suicide yesterday.

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.

Please don’t fucking kill yourself. Entirely aside from the fact that you’ll miss all the movies of the next few decades, that you’ll miss the chance to fake your own death and escape to a South American country and become the mysterious foreigner who lives in the jungle, that you’ll leave behind a body that somebody has to clean up… you have a pretty significant chance of ending up in a nursing home, just conscious enough to feel pain and humiliation, for the rest of your life.
Give it another year. Do something different. Talk to somebody about it. Don’t end up on my unit with ARDS from inhaling your own vomit when the pills kick in. If the Huntington’s is closing in and you really gotta go before you turn into a slack-lipped veggie on a vent, plan that shit out and have your family by your bed. If you don’t think you could convince someone to sit by your bedside while you die, it’s not time for you to die yet.

Posted in Cops, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 26, 2020.

Sunday, July 26th, 2020

Yesterday and today were big news days.

Olivia de Havilland. THR. Variety.

She was known for her sincerity, fragile beauty and beautiful diction, and for bringing dimension to sympathetic characters. When she made a rare foray into villainous roles, she was expert. But the public preferred her as a heroine, which suited her well, since she said it was harder to play “a good girl” rather than a bad one.

I did not know she was in “Airport ’77”. Not that that was a highlight of her career. Or Joseph Cotton’s. Or anybody else’s. But the “Airport” movies are on our list.

Regis Philbin, for the record. THR. Variety.

I’m probably giving him short shrift, but everyone has covered his death. And I never watched a single episode of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” or “Regis and (x)”.

Peter Green, founder of Fleetwood Mac.

John Saxon, working actor. THR. No obit from the Times yet. 198 credits in IMDB. I guess he might be most famous for his roles in “Enter the Dragon” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, and possibly “Mitchell”. I also remember him from “The New Doctors” segment of “The Bold Ones” wheel.

And he had guest shots in every damn thing in the 1970s: the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “The Rockford Files” (we watched “A Portrait of Elizabeth” last night: it’s a fun episode), “Banacek”, “Banyon”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, “The Six Million Dollar Man”…

…oddly, though, he’s another one of those guys who seem to have done everything except “Mannix”.

The paper of record did finally get around to publishing an obit for Ronald Graham. (Previously.)

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

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