Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: April 13, 2020.

Monday, April 13th, 2020

Both of these are by way of Lawrence, originator of the Clown Unicycle Update.

Tarvaris Jackson, former NFL quarterback.

Anthony Causi, sports photographer for the New York Post. He sounds like a really good guy:

“He was a New Yorker,” said Jason Zillo, the Yankees’ vice president of communications and media relations. “Anthony was passionate, he grinded, he cared and was caring, and he wore his heart on his sleeve. And it was a huge heart. I don’t know how it fit on his sleeve. People gravitated towards him, but he had an edge to him and he never wanted to have the second-best photo of the day.”
Balancing that edge, bolstering that heart, was an innate generosity that Causi expressed most regularly with his work tools. Without prompting or requests, he typically took photos of co-workers and competitors in addition to his work subjects, offering them to folks for their personal collections. Causi’s uncle Joe Causi, an on-air personality for WCBS-FM Radio, said his nephew would often take photos pro bono at area Little League events.
“Anthony was kind, thoughtful and one of the best at what he did,” the Rangers said in a statement.

…

There are some people in our lives whose impact is so immediate, and so permanent, it’s all but impossible to remember a time when they weren’t a part of us. That was Anthony. If you worked at The Post, you were family. If you didn’t? That was just a detail. You were family, too.

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 12, 2020.

Sunday, April 12th, 2020

Stirling Moss died “quietly on Sunday at his home in London”. He was 90. McThag beat me on the tribute watch.

“To race a car through a turn at maximum possible speed when there is a great lawn to all sides is difficult,” he said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1961, “but to race a car at maximum speed through a turn when there is a brick wall on one side and a precipice on the other — ah, that’s an achievement!”
He raced for 14 years, won 212 of his 529 races in events that included Grand Prix, sports cars and long-distance rallying, in 107 different types of car.
He set the world land speed record on the salt flats of Utah in 1957. He won more than 40 percent of the races he entered, including 16 Grand Prix. For four consecutive years, 1955-58, he finished second in the world Grand Prix championship. And in each of the next three years, he placed third.

The man was a class act. And I don’t mean in terms of style (although he apparently was rather stylish):

He came closest in 1958, but testified on behalf of another driver, Mike Hawthorn, who was accused of an infraction in the Portugal Grand Prix. Hawthorn, as a result, was not disqualified. When the season ended, Hawthorn had 42 points, which are given for factors like fastest lap as well as finishing position. Moss — though he had four Grand Prix wins to Hawthorn’s one — finished second with 41 points.

…

In 1962 at the Goodwood Circuit racetrack in England’s West Sussex County, a plume of fire shot from his Lotus 18/21 car. The crowd gasped. As Moss tried to pass Graham Hill, his car veered and slammed into an eight-foot-high earthen bank.
It took more than a half-hour to free Moss from the wreckage. His left eye and cheekbone were shattered, his left arm broken and his left leg broken in two places.
An X-ray revealed a far worse injury. The right side of his brain was detached from his skull. He was in a coma for 38 days, and paralyzed on one side of his body for six months. He remembered nothing of the disaster. He considered hypnosis to recover the memory, but a psychiatrist said that might cause the paralysis to return.
When he left the hospital, he took all 11 nurses who had treated him to dinner, followed by a trip to the theater. A year later, he returned to Goodwood and pushed a Lotus to 145 m.p.h. on a wet track. He realized he was no longer unconsciously making the right moves. He said he felt like he had lost his page in a book.
Though he believed he remained a better driver than all but 10 or 12 in the world, that was not good enough. He retired at 33.
Moss was more than his talent. He was a beautiful name, one that still connotes high style a half-century after his crash, evoking an era of blazers and cravats, of dance bands and cigarette holders. One legend had him driving hundreds of miles in a vain effort to introduce himself to Miss Italy the night before a big race. His 16 books cemented his legend.

…

Stirling grew up excelling at horsemanship, but said he gave it up because horses were hard to steer.

…

…for a couple of generations, British traffic cops sneeringly asked speeding motorists, “Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?” (Moss, who had been knighted, was once asked that question, and answered, “Sir Stirling, please.”)

Lawrence emailed an obit for Tim Brooke-Taylor, British comedian:

Brooke-Taylor was reunited with Cleese and Chapman on ITV’s At Last The 1948 Show, another collection of sketches and quick-fire repartee.
The first episode featured The Four Yorkshiremen sketch, co-written by Brooke-Taylor, which would later be revived by the Monty Python team.

I apologize for the quality. But: this is (according to YouTube) actually from “At Last the 1948 Show”.

Posted in Cars, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 11, 2020.

Saturday, April 11th, 2020

Colby Cave, forward for the Edmonton Oilers. He was 25. According to the reports, he had emergency surgery on Monday and was placed in a medically induced coma.

I am seeing unconfirmed reports that John Horton Conway, noted mathematician, has passed on, but I don’t have any links or anything that I’d consider confirmation yet.

Posted in Geek, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 10, 2020.

Friday, April 10th, 2020

Mort Drucker, one of the great Mad Magazine artists.

Tribute from Mad.

A self-taught freelance cartoonist who had worked on war, western, science fiction and romance comic books as well as personality-driven titles like The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and The Adventures of Bob Hope, Mr. Drucker came to Mad in late 1956, soon after Al Feldstein succeeded Harvey Kurtzman, the magazine’s founder, as editor. Mad had run only occasional TV and movie satires, but Mr. Drucker’s arrival “changed everything,” the pop-culture critic Grady Hendrix wrote in a 2013 Film Comment appreciation of Mad’s movie parodies.
“No one saw Drucker’s talent,” Mr. Hendrix wrote, until he illustrated “The Night That Perry Masonmint Lost a Case,” a takeoff on the television courtroom drama “Perry Mason,” in 1959. It was then, Mr. Hendrix maintained, that “the basic movie parody format for the next 44 years was born.”
From the early 1960s on, nearly every issue of Mad included a movie parody, and before Mr. Ducker retired he had illustrated 238, more than half of them. The last one, “The Chronic-Ills of Yawnia: Prince Thespian,” appeared in 2008.

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Obit watch: April 9, 2020.

Thursday, April 9th, 2020

Hal Willner, who the Times describes as “matchmaker, yenta, fan, longtime music coordinator for the sketches on ‘Saturday Night Live'”.

Mr. Willner was best known for assembling diverse casts of performers, including Rufus Wainwright and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, to play a slightly off-center body of work, such as the Disney songbook or the music of Nino Rota, who scored Federico Fellini’s movies. The music found a devoted following, but not breakout success.

I have a couple of those Willner tribute albums. “Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill” in particular is a swell album, and I wish someone would re-release that digitally.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Thomas L. Miller, TV producer. (“Full House”, “Family Matters”.)

Linda Tripp. For my younger readers, Ms. Tripp was a central figure in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal of the 90s.

When Ms. Lewinsky confided in Ms. Tripp that she had had a physical relationship with the president, Ms. Tripp got in touch with Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent who had once reached out to her for information on Vincent Foster, the White House lawyer who committed suicide in 1993.
More recently, Ms. Tripp had been working on a book proposal tentatively titled “Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw Inside the Clinton White House.” Now she had a hook.
Ms. Goldberg suggested, among other things, that Ms. Tripp tape her telephone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky. That was legal in the District of Columbia and in 39 states, but not in Maryland, where Ms. Tripp was living.
More than 20 hours of audiotapes were turned over to Kenneth Starr, the independent prosecutor handling the Clinton investigation.

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

Obit watch: April 8, 2020.

Wednesday, April 8th, 2020

Damn.

John Prine.

I wouldn’t say I was a big Prine fan, but he did a fair number of songs that I’m partial to. Here’s one of my favorites:

Edited to add: Borepatch has a nice tribute up, with some of Mr. Prine’s deeper cuts.

Robert Barth. He was a pioneering Navy diver: he was the only person involved with both the Genesis dry land test and all three iterations of the Sealab underwater habitats.

The dangerous experiments Mr. Barth took part in paved the way for exploits of deepwater espionage, undersea construction and demolition projects around the world.
He never achieved conventional fame, but he was the “ultimate aquanaut,” said Leslie Leaney, the executive director of the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame. “His contributions benefited the world of science and national security, but also the economies of all nations that explored for offshore oil.”
In 2010, the Navy named its aquatic training facility in Panama City for Mr. Barth. “Nothing that Navy divers do is one guy,” he said at the dedication. “There is always a whole bunch of people involved in it.”

By way of Lawrence, Allen Garfield. He was in a whole bunch of stuff, including “The Conversation” and “Nashville”.

Also by way of Lawrence, George Ogilvie, co-director of “Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome”.

For the 1985 “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” Ogilvie focused on working with the cast on dialogue and dramatization while co-director Miller focused on the action sequences. He had previously worked with “Mad Max” star Mel Gibson in the Nimrod Theatre Company’s “Death of a Salesman.”

The paper of record finally got around to publishing an obit for Ira Einhorn.

He preached peace, love and environmentalism. Then he killed his girlfriend, stuffed her body in a steamer trunk and fled to Europe.

…

It was a measure of his ability to make important connections that after he was charged with murder, his lawyer was Arlen Specter, the city’s former district attorney who was then in private practice and who went on to become a United States senator.
Mr. Specter managed to get Mr. Einhorn’s bail reduced to $40,000. To be released from custody, Mr. Einhorn had to put up only 10 percent, or $4,000. It was paid by a Canadian socialite, one of several well-off people who supported him financially and who doubted he could have been involved in murder.

…

But his darker side and a monumental ego were emerging, most noticeably during the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, when 20 million people across the country gathered to draw attention to environmental problems.
As two environmental activists later wrote in an op-ed in The Inquirer, Mr. Einhorn had made himself unwelcome at organizational meetings in advance of Earth Day, and then, at the actual event, he “grabbed the microphone and refused to give up the podium for 30 minutes, thinking he would get some free television publicity.”
He later falsely claimed to have been a founder of Earth Day, a title generally accorded to Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat.

…

As a condition for his extradition, he was granted a second trial, during which he took the stand. He said that the C.I.A. had killed Ms. Maddux and planted her body in his apartment in an attempt to frame him because he knew too much about military research into the paranormal.

Posted in History, Law, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 7, 2020.

Tuesday, April 7th, 2020

Wow. Yesterday was a day.

In no particular order of importance (and I may be a day or three behind on some of these):

Julie Bennett. She was primarily known as a voice actress: she did a lot of animated stuff, including voicing “Cindy Bear” in the “Yogi Bear Show”. (And “Aunt May” in “Spider-Man: The Animated Series”.) She also did guest shots on a few of my favorite shows: “Adam-12”, “Dragnet 1967”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Get Smart”.

James Drury. He was famous as the lead in “The Virginian”, but he had a solid body of work outside of that. (Lawrence pointed out that one of his early roles was “Crewman Strong” in “Forbidden Planet”.)

Bobby Mitchell. He played with the Cleveland Browns and the Washington Redskins, and was a Hall of Fame player:

Fast, elusive and versatile, he scored 91 touchdowns, amassed more than 14,000 net yards, was named to the Pro Bowl four times and was voted to the N.F.L.’s all-decade team for the 1960s.
…
“Bobby Mitchell was one of the greatest all-around ballplayers,” Lenny Moore of the Baltimore Colts, a contemporary and fellow Hall of Famer, was quoted as saying on the Redskins’ website. “Anybody who can transition himself and be one of the best in the business at both positions, that’s saying something.”

Forrest Compton. Another knock-around guy: he was most famous for playing “Mike Karr” on “The Edge of Night” soap, but he also was a semi-regular on “Gomer Pyle: USMC”, appeared multiple times in “Hogan’s’ Heros” and “The F.B.I”…

…and, yes, he did do a “Mannix”. (“One for the Lady”, season 4, episode 2. He was “Elgin Bonning”.)

Ed Biles, former coach of the Houston Oilers. He started out as a defensive coordinator:

When [Bum] Phillips was fired after a loss at Oakland in the first round of the playoffs in 1980, Biles was promoted to replace him. His first team finished 7-9. The Oilers were 1-9 during the strike-abbreviated 1982 season. When they started 0-6 in 1983, he was forced out and replaced by defensive coordinator Chuck Studley.

…

Among the players Biles coached were defensive end Elvin Bethea, nose tackle Curley Culp and outside linebacker Robert Brazile, each of whom is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Shirley Douglas, who seems to be consistently described as a “Canadian actor and activist”. Among other roles, she was in the original “Lolita”, the pilot of “The Hat Squad” TV series, the “Flash Gordon” TV series, and “Dead Ringers”.

She was also married to Donald Sutherland: Kiefer Sutherland is her son by Donald. (She also had a daughter, Rachel, with Donald, and another child with her second husband Timothy Emil Sicks.)

Al Kaline, All-Star outfielder for the Detroit Tigers.

He became the youngest batting champion in major league history in 1955 when he hit .340 at age 20. He had 3,007 career hits, the 12th player to reach the No. 3,000 milestone, and he hit 399 home runs, a Tiger record.
Renowned for his powerful arm, Kaline won 10 Gold Glove awards for his play in right field and sometimes in center. He set an American League record for outfielders by playing in 242 consecutive games without an error. He played in 2,834 games from 1953 to 1974, the most of any Tiger, and only Ty Cobb equaled his 22 years with the team.

…

Billy Martin, his manager late in his career, referred to Kaline as Mr. Perfection, but his achievements came in the face of twin obstacles. He encountered the pressure of comparisons with Cobb, one of baseball’s greatest players, and he had been hampered since childhood by the bone disease osteomyelitis.

…

Kaline had a .297 career batting average, with 1,583 runs batted in and 1,622 runs scored.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 6, 2020.

Monday, April 6th, 2020

It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit watch.

Honor Blackman, “Pussy Galore” in “Goldfinger”. She also preceded Diana Rigg as Patrick Macnee’s partner on “The Avengers”, but left the show for the “Goldfinger” role.

Before “Goldfinger,” she made dozens of appearances on British television and more than 20 feature films, among them “A Night to Remember” (1958), Roy Ward Baker’s drama about the sinking of the Titanic; “The Square Peg” (1959), a comedy with Norman Wisdom set during World War II; and “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), in which she played the goddess Hera.
Ms. Blackman continued her screen acting career well into her 80s, including taking a small part as a glamorous party guest in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001) and a recurring role on the classic British soap opera “Coronation Street” in 2004.
She worked in the theater for decades as well. In the 1980s she did a British tour of “A Little Night Music” (she deemed Madame Armfeldt in that show her favorite role — “That part just fit me like a glove,” she told the British Huffington Post) and played Captain von Trapp’s child-averse love interest, the Baroness, in a West End revival of “The Sound of Music.”

Ms. Blackman was 94 when she passed.

Her final movie was the 2012 horror comedy “Cockneys vs. Zombies,” in which bank robbers unwittingly unleash an army of the living dead in East London. Her last screen role was in a 2015 episode of the British sitcom “You, Me & Them.”

You know, Lawrence, when things get back to normal, “Cockneys vs. Zombies” might be worth putting on the list.

Speaking of Lawrence, he also tipped me to the death of actress Lee Fierro at the age of 91. She has three credits as an actress: two of those were “Mrs. Kintner” in “Jaws” and “Jaws: The Revenge”.

(“Mrs. Kintner” is the woman whose child is gobbled up by the shark in “Jaws” and then slaps Chief Brody.)

Posted in Admin, Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 5, 2020.

Sunday, April 5th, 2020

Tom Dempsey, legendary placekicker for the New Orleans Saints.

Nicknamed “Stumpy’’ by teammates, Dempsey seemed an unlikely football hero. He was born without fingers on his right hand or toes on his right foot. He wore a small, flat shoe on his kicking foot that is now on display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

On November 8, 1970, Mr. Dempsey kicked a 63 yard field goal on the last play of the game to beat the Detroit Lions 19-17. It was one of two wins for the Saints that year. It was also a NFL record which stood for 43 years: several other players tied it in that time, but it wasn’t until 2013 that Matt Prater of the Broncos kicked a 64 yard field goal in Denver.

The broadcast of the play, along with the play call from CBS commentator Don Criqui, still makes Saints fans misty-eyed.
“I don’t believe this …,” Criqui said as the ball sailed nearly two-thirds of the field, then added as the ball cleared the bar by a yard, “It’s GOOD! I don’t believe it!”
The miraculous moment so moved powerful Louisiana Congressman F. Edward Hebert that he had an account of “The Kick” by Dempsey inserted into the Congressional Record.

According to the statement from his family, Mr. Dempsey died of corona virus complications. He was 73 years old and in a nursing home after being diagnosed with dementia in 2012.

Edited to add 4/6: as Lawrence points out, while YouTube will let you embed the videos, you can’t play them here because the NFL is a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. I’ve left the embeds in place because you can click through and watch them on YouTube directly. Sorry about that: I should not have underestimated the stupidity of professional sports leagues.

Also: NYT obit for Mr. Dempsey, which (of course) went up after I posted yesterday.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 4, 2020.

Saturday, April 4th, 2020

Rear Adm. Edward L. Feightner (United States Navy – ret.).

In his 34 years of Navy service, as a combat pilot in the Pacific, an instructor and a test pilot, Admiral Feightner flew more than 100 types of planes.
While he was a junior Navy officer, he twice shot down three Japanese planes on a single day and took part in battles in the Caroline Islands, the Marianas and the Philippines.
In the late 1940s, he became one of the early test pilots at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. He flew or analyzed the systems for fighters, transports, helicopters and just about any other type of aircraft envisioned by the Navy.
He became the head of the Navy’s fighter design program and was twice awarded the Legion of Merit for his testing and administrative activities. He received four Distinguished Flying Crosses for his combat exploits.
In the early 1950s, Admiral Feightner was a member of the Navy’s Blue Angels, whose close-formation flying and acrobatics thrilled crowds at air shows.

…

Admiral Feightner was credited with his first “kill” when he shot down a Japanese dive bomber off the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942. He downed three torpedo bombers off Rennell Island on Jan. 30, 1943, and became an ace (a pilot with at least five kills) when he shot down a Zero fighter off the Palau island chain in March 1944.
He shot down another Zero off Truk in April 1944 and downed three Zeros off Formosa (now Taiwan) on Oct. 12, 1944.

Admiral Feightner was 100 when he passed.

Ira Einhorn is burning in hell.

Einhorn was found guilty of fatally bludgeoning his girlfriend, Helen “Holly” Maddux, 30, in 1977 and stuffing her body into a trunk that he kept in his Powelton apartment for 18 months. In 1981, just before his trial, he fled to Europe, and he remained on the lam for two decades. He was extradited from France in 2001, and a Philadelphia jury convicted him of first-degree murder in 2002 in Maddux’s slaying. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Steven Levy’s book on the case, The Unicorn’s Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius is available in a Kindle edition, and that’s probably the way to go if you want to read it. (As far as I know, that’s the only book about the case, though it was written before Einhorn’s capture and extradition: I don’t know if Levy updated subsequent editions or the Kindle version.)

Posted in Heroism, History, Law, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 3, 2020.

Friday, April 3rd, 2020

Great and good FOTB Borepatch tipped me off to the death of Bill Withers. The paper of record has a preliminary obit up, which will probably be replaced with a full one later.

The NYT does have what I think is a fascinating obit for William Frankland. Dr. Frankland was a pioneering allergist.

Dr. Frankland was best known in professional circles for a number of groundbreaking clinical studies. In 1954, he proved that pollen proteins were the parts of plants most useful in preseason allergy inoculations, and in 1955, he debunked the efficacy of treating asthma with bacterial vaccines.
He was an early proponent of using allergen injections to desensitize patients with severe allergies and developed immunotherapy serums for hay fever sufferers with pollen from one of the world’s largest pollen farms, which he operated outside London until the late 1960s.
It was while investigating desensitization to insect bites that Dr. Frankland allowed the South American insect Rhodnius prolixus to bite his arm at weekly intervals. The eighth bite sent him into life-threatening anaphylaxis, from which a nurse revived him with repeated shots of adrenaline.

…

Dr. Frankland had a pollen trap installed on the roof of St. Mary’s and began distributing daily pollen counts to the British news media in the early 1960s, one of the first allergists to do so. Pollen counts are now a staple of weather reports around the world.

He worked with Alexander Flemming, treated Saddam Hussein, and spent time during WWII as a Japanese prisoner of war.

Dr. Frankland was 108 when he died.

Over his career, Dr. Frankland published more than a hundred articles and academic papers on allergies, including four that he wrote after turning 100. He accumulated many honors, including being named a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2015.

Rod Dreher has a nice post up about Terry Teachout and the death of Mr. Teachout’s wife.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 2, 2020.

Thursday, April 2nd, 2020

I’ve been an irregular reader of Terry Teachout’s “About Last Night” blog for a while now. I don’t watch that much theater, in NYC or elsewhere, but I enjoy reading his writing. And I also enjoy the historical videos he posts on a regular basis.

I’ve been following him more closely in the past few weeks. Mr. Teachout’s wife has been mortally ill with pulmonary hypertension, and (after months of waiting) received a double lung transplant in early March.

She passed away on Tuesday. I’m heartbroken for Mr. Teachout (even though I don’t know him personally), and extend my condolences to him from afar.

Lawrence sent over the obit for Adam Schlesinger, Fountains of Wayne guy and film and television composer.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 30, 2020.

Monday, March 30th, 2020

Krzysztof Penderecki, noted contemporary classical composer.

Mr. Penderecki was most widely known for choral compositions evoking Poland’s ardent Catholicism and history of foreign domination, and for his early experimental works, with their massive tone clusters and disregard for melody and harmony. Those ideas would reverberate for decades after he himself had pronounced them “more destructive than constructive” and changed course toward neo-Romanticism.
(His decision to move on was partly political: The Polish avant-garde movement had created an unhealthy illusion of freedom in a country living under Communism, he said. But it was also artistic: Experimentation had reached an impasse, he told a Canadian interviewer in 1998, because “we discovered everything!”)
Still, it was compositions from the wild first decade of his career, including “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (1960), “Polymorphia” (1961) and the “St. Luke Passion” (1966) that brought him lasting international recognition while he was still a young man.
The threnody, in particular, is a much-studied example of startling emotional effects created from abstract concepts. Following a score that often looks more like geometry homework than conventional notation, it forces an ensemble of 52 string instruments to produce relentless, nerve-jangling sounds that can suggest nuclear annihilation. Yet it was said that Mr. Penderecki dedicated it to the victims of Hiroshima only after hearing the piece performed.

John Callahan, soap opera actor. (“Falcon Crest”, “Santa Barbara”, “All My Children”, “Desperate Housewives”, “Days of our Lives.”)

David Schramm. He was “Roy Biggins” on “Wings”, and also did some Broadway and off-Broadway work.

Joe Diffie, country music star. Borepatch has a much better tribute than I could write.

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

Obit watch: March 27, 2020.

Friday, March 27th, 2020

The gentleman who blogs at “Say Uncle” lost his wife earlier this week.

I check out Uncle’s site somewhere between every other day and every day: he’s been on top of what’s going on in the gun sphere for as long as I’ve been following him. I join with everyone else in that sphere in extending my condolences to him and to his people.

Fred “Curly” Neal, legendary Harlem Globetrotter.

In one of the most highly anticipated elements of the Globetrotters’ routine, Neal would dribble all over the court, frequently sliding on his knees, never losing control of the ball no matter how close to the hardwood he had lowered himself. Then he would bounce the ball through a flailing defender’s legs near the free-throw line and dribble in for an uncontested layup to finish off the move.
“Oh my gosh, he revolutionized ball handling,” Nancy Lieberman, who played for the Generals against the Globetrotters in 1988, said in a phone interview. “Everything you see Kyrie Irving doing and Steph Curry doing now, all of it started with the Trotters. The Trotters made dribbling a show.”
Neal’s trickery and showmanship established him as one of the team’s foremost stars, alongside the likes of Meadowlark Lemon and Hubert “Geese” Ausbie. Known for wearing ever-present white pads over his knees and an array of red, white and blue wristbands, Neal helped the Globetrotters’ barnstorming ensemble become a regular feature of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” in an era when the National Basketball Association did not have a robust national television presence as it does now.

Mark Blum, knock-around actor. He worked on Broadway, was in “Crocodile Dundee”, did some other movies, and a non-trivial number of TV guest shots.

Mr. Blum was an omnipresent figure in the Off Broadway world for decades, but his biggest moment in the spotlight came in 1989 after he played a time-traveling 20th-century playwright who befriends Gustav Mahler, in the Playwrights Horizons production of Albert Innaurato’s “Gus and Al.”

…

He had a notable Broadway career as well, appearing in nine productions over three and a half decades. He made his Broadway debut as a particularly versatile theater professional — playing an unnamed Venetian (one of four), understudying two roles and acting as assistant stage manager in “The Merchant” (1977), set in 16th-century Venice and inspired by a certain Shakespearean classic.
Other Broadway roles included Eddie, the young main character’s recently widowed and debt-ridden father, in Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” (1991), with Irene Worth; Spalding Gray’s campaign manager in “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2000), a role he reprised as a replacement in the 2012 revival; Leo Herman, a.k.a. Chuckles the Chipmunk, the detestable host of a children’s television show, in “A Thousand Clowns” (2001); and Juror No. 1, the reasonable foreman, in “Twelve Angry Men” (2004).

…

He appeared in almost 30 films, including “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985), as a married hot-tub salesman; “Crocodile Dundee” (1986); and “Shattered Glass” (2003). His most recent, “The Pleasure of Your Presence,” a romantic comedy about a wedding in the Hamptons, has been completed but not yet scheduled for release.
Over the decades he appeared on dozens of prime-time series — among them “Miami Vice,” “Roseanne,” “Frasier” and three shows in the “Law & Order” franchise — and he remained active into 2020. He appeared in 30 episodes of the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle” as Union Bob, a rules-obsessed symphony orchestra piccolo player. His most recent roles were on the drama series “You,” as a mysterious bookstore owner and stroke victim; “Succession” (2018-19); and “Billions,” in an episode scheduled to air in May.

Posted in Guns, Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 26, 2020.

Thursday, March 26th, 2020

Lawrence sent me this the other day, but I forgot to note it in yesterday’s roundup.

Stuart Gordon, director and writer. THR.

He was probably most famous for “Re-Animator” (which, as you know, Bob, was based on an H.P. Lovecraft story). He also directed “From Beyond”, and some less well known works (“Space Truckers”, “Robot Jox”).

Posted in Lovecraft, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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