Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: June 25, 2020.

Thursday, June 25th, 2020

Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev’s son.

Mr. Khrushchev had been a rocket scientist before he moved to Rhode Island in 1991, shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to lecture on the Cold War at Brown University in Providence. He remained a senior fellow there.
He and his wife became naturalized United States citizens in 1999 and held dual citizenships. Mr. Khrushchev said in 2001 that his becoming an American citizen would not have displeased his father, who, in 1956, in the depths of the Cold War, famously declared to Western officials, “We will bury you!”
By the time his son became an American citizen, the Cold War was long over.
“I’m not a defector,” Sergei Khrushchev told The Providence Journal in 2001. “I’m not a traitor. I did not commit any treason. I work here and I like this country.

Michael Hawley, noted computer guy.

Mr. Hawley began his career as a video game programmer at Lucasfilm, the company created by the “Star Wars” director George Lucas. He spent his last 15 years curating the Entertainment Gathering, or EG, a conference dedicated to new ideas.
In between, he worked at NeXT, the influential computer company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in the mid-1980s, and spent nine years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, a seminal effort to push science and technology into art and other disciplines. He was known as a scholar whose ideas, skills and friendships spanned an unusually wide range of fields, from mountain climbing to watchmaking.
Mr. Hawley lived with both Mr. Jobs and the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, published the world’s largest book, won first prize in an international competition of amateur pianists, played alongside the cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the wedding of the celebrity scientist Bill Nye, joined one of the first scientific expeditions to Mount Everest, and wrote commencement speeches for both Mr. Jobs and the Google co-founder Larry Page.

…

As the director of special projects at M.I.T., Mr. Hawley published “Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Himalayan Kingdom” in 2003, drawing on his experiences and photographs spanning four visits to Bhutan over a decade and a half. Measuring five by seven feet and weighing more than 130 pounds, it was certified by Guinness World Records at the time as the world’s largest book.

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

Obit watch: June 22, 2020.

Monday, June 22nd, 2020

Joel Schumacher, director. Variety. THR.

Batman & Robin, however, was a critical disaster, and Schumacher admitted years later that he had made a mistake by listening to studio marketing executives, who wanted to target the film to kids.
“I want to apologize to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that,” he said in a 2017 interview with Vice.
“A lot of it was my choice. No one is responsible for my mistakes but me. I think one curveball we got was at the eleventh hour; Val Kilmer quit due to a role he got in The Island of Dr. Moreau. There had been talks about it, but none of us were involved, not with Warner Bros. and certainly not with me. I talked to Val, and all he kept saying was, ‘But man, it’s Marlon Brando.’ It’s not like he was on a hook and chain here, so Val went. So it was [then Warners co-CEO] Bob Daly’s idea to acquire George Clooney. He was an obvious choice because he was a rising star on ER. I had a talk with him and he was like, ‘All right, if you do it, I’ll do it.’

Wait, wait: Kilmer skipped out on Batman because he wanted to do “The Island of Dr. Moreau“? I haven’t laughed this hard since the hogs ate my kid brother.

Jim Kiick, Miami Dolphins running back in the early 1970s.

Running behind a fearsome offensive line, Kiick, fullback Larry Csonka and halfback Mercury Morris propelled the Dolphins to three Super Bowls and back-to-back titles in the 1972 and 1973 seasons.
Kiick scored six touchdowns during those playoff runs, including one in Super Bowl VII, a 14-7 win over the Washington Redskins, that helped the team complete the N.F.L.’s only perfect season. Kiick scored another touchdown and Csonka added two more in Super Bowl VIII, a 24-7 victory over the Minnesota Vikings.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I had not heard of him, either, but he wrote The Shadow of the Wind, which is “…the second-most-successful Spanish novel after Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece “Don Quixote,” according to Planeta.”

A visit to a book warehouse in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s, inspired Mr. Ruiz Zafón to write “The Shadow of the Wind,” but he set the action in his birthplace, Barcelona. Written as a story within a story, the novel crisscrosses the tumultuous decades before, during and after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
It starts in 1945, when a boy named Daniel Sempere is taken by his father to a mysterious place known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where Daniel selects a book called “The Shadow of the Wind.” Fascinated by its obscure author, Julián Carax, Daniel enlists the help of friends to investigate the writer’s past, which also brings up the disturbing story of a character who has been burning all the copies of the book he can find.

That sounds like something that’s in my wheelhouse.

Posted in Boats, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 21, 2020.

Sunday, June 21st, 2020

Michael Drosnin, “Bible Code” guy.

“The Bible Code” opens with a stunning moment: The author, having discovered a biblical passage suggesting that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel would be assassinated, hops on a plane in 1994 to deliver a letter of warning. The message doesn’t alter the course of events — Mr. Rabin was shot and killed a year later — but, as Mr. Drosnin writes, it was “dramatic confirmation” of the Bible code.
That may sound like an Indiana Jones plot, but “The Bible Code” had its roots in science. In the early 1990s, the Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips and his colleagues performed an experiment in which they laid out the 304,805 letters of the Torah like a giant crossword puzzle and then performed a “skip-code” computer search. They discovered uncanny combinations. “Kennedy” appeared near the word “Dallas.” Hitler’s name, written upside down, appeared 20 rows from “Nazi,” written backward. And so on.
The findings were published in 1994 in the journal Statistical Science. Mr. Drosnin based his book on that research, adding discoveries of his own.
Many critics found the book unscientific, arbitrary and curiously weighted toward people and events relevant to an American living in the 20th century. Skeptics demonstrated that “Moby-Dick,” or a phone book for that matter, would reveal intriguing word groupings if one went looking for them. Mr. Rips himself denounced Mr. Drosnin’s interpretation of his work.

…

Mr. Drosnin offered more revelations in “The Bible Code II” (2002), another best seller, in which he claimed the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center had been predicted and warned that the world might have only three years left to avoid Armageddon. Then came “The Bible Code III” (2010), but by that time the novelty had worn off; it did not make the best-seller list.
Still, Mr. Drosnin had a high batting average as an author. Of his four books, three were best sellers, including the first, “Citizen Hughes” (1985), a portrait of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes as revealed through stolen office memos.

Posted in Books, History, Obits, Stupid | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 20, 2020.

Saturday, June 20th, 2020

Ian Holm.

A character actor who eventually played leading roles, Mr. Holm had a kind of magical malleability, with a range that went from the sweet-tempered to the psychotic. In the theater he ran the gamut of Shakespeare, from the high-spirited Prince Hal to the tormented King Lear, and he left his imprint on two roles in Mr. Pinter’s “The Homecoming”: the sleek, entrepreneurial Lenny and his autocratic father, Max.
In films, Mr. Holm incarnated characters of diverse geographic origin and nature, including a tough New York cop in “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1996), a big-city negligence lawyer in Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997) and a bohemian genius manqué in the title role in Stanley Tucci’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” (2000).
Exploring the world of fantasy, he was a malfunctioning robot in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979) and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in “The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001) and “The Return of the King” (2003), from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and Mr. Jackson’s subsequent “Hobbit” films.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 18, 2020.

Thursday, June 18th, 2020

Vera Lynn, singer and rallying point for the troops in WWII.

Long after the war ended, the melodies lingered on: “We’ll Meet Again,” “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”
In those wartime years, she became known as the “Forces’ Sweetheart,” and to the end of her life the veterans were her “boys,” still misty-eyed when she sang, “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.”

…

At 22, in 1939, she won The Daily Express newspaper’s “Forces’ Sweetheart” poll in a landslide. In 1940, she began her own BBC radio show, “Sincerely Yours,” which was beamed to troops around the world on Sunday nights right after the news.
“Winston Churchill was my opening act,” Ms. Lynn once said.
She read letters from the girlfriends, wives and mothers the troops left behind. She sang her sentimental songs, “We’ll Meet Again” being the most popular. In the blitz that sent the Luftwaffe on nightly raids over London in 1940, she sometimes slept in the theater until the all-clear sounded, then drove home through the rubble left by the bombings.
“The shows didn’t stop if a raid started,” she said. “We just used to carry on.”
Often, it seemed, Luftwaffe bombers droned over London just as Ms. Lynn sang “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” which became the theme song of the blitz.

…

In 1944, Ms. Lynn toured Burma (now Myanmar) for three months, earning the enduring affection of the so-called Forgotten Army, which battled the Japanese Army in jungle combat there. She started her journey with chiffon ball gowns, and when they fell apart, she finished in shorts that wound up as an exhibit in the Imperial War Museum in London.

…

Ms. Lynn’s popularity endured well into the 21st century. In August 2009, she became the oldest living artist to reach the British Top 20 album chart when her collection “We’ll Meet Again” was reissued to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany. A month later, the album reached No. 1.

…

Though the decades passed and she drifted out of the entertainment mainstream, she remained the Forces’ Sweetheart, evoking nostalgia with her old hits, appearing at reunions of veterans’ organizations, rallying support for soldiers’ widows and charities that helped Britain’s wartime generation. (Oddly enough, one of her greatest hits, “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” was written by Americans: Walter Kent, who admitted he had never seen the cliffs, and Nat Burton.)

She was 103.

From the legal beat: Ronald Tackmann, artist. And by “artist” I mean in both the visual sense and the escape sense.

At the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on Sept. 30, 2009, Mr. Tackmann, a neophyte artist and professional prisoner, put on a light-gray three-piece suit and covered his orange inmates’ slippers with black socks to try to pass as his own lawyer. (At the time, inmates were allowed to change into court clothes before facing a judge.) Briefly uncuffed and unchained and momentarily out of the view of guards, he fled down a back staircase, sauntered outside and vanished into the streets.
It wasn’t his first escape attempt. Twice before he had tried to hijack Correction Department vans that were transporting him and other convicts to court or to prisons upstate, using fake guns he had fashioned out of bars of soap and remnants of eyeglasses and aluminum cans.

…

His escape attempts made him an obvious security risk, and he was confined in solitary for about 20 years. There, improvising where he had to, art became his life.He substituted food coloring for paint, used his own hair to create brushes, and molded papier mâche out of white bread and toilet paper. Among his Dalí-like drawings, he depicted a child gleefully clinging to a supermarket-ride rocket, a jet outracing an eagle, and a skeletal inmate serving a 210-year sentence. A carving of a buffalo, made out of prison soap, shows an intricate touch.

There’s a picture of that buffalo carving in the obit, and I have to give the man credit: it’s well done. I wanted to post this obit so I could work this in:

During his last robbery spree, in Manhattan a little more than a decade ago, he netted $100 or so from a Dunkin’ Donuts on the Upper East Side; a similar amount, along with a cup of pistachio ice cream, from a Sedutto’s store; and a beating at a World of Nuts & Ice Cream outlet.

Delbert Africa, one of the MOVE members. He wasn’t present at the 1985 MOVE headquarters bombing: he was serving time in prison after being convicted of third-degree murder (along with eight other MOVE members) for killing police officer James Ramp in 1978.

Posted in Art, History, Law, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 16, 2020.

Tuesday, June 16th, 2020

Sushant Singh Rajput. He was a major Bollywood star:

Mr. Rajput started his acting career on television, where he was best known for his role as a car mechanic, Manav Deshmukh, in “Pavitra Rishta,” a soap opera that debuted in 2009.
After leaving the show in 2011, he made his Bollywood debut in 2013 as a gifted but troubled cricket player in “Kai Po Che,” a film based on a novel by Chetan Bhagat. For his performance he was nominated for a Filmfare Award, a coveted honor in the Hindi-language film industry of India. The critic Taran Adarsh said Mr. Rajput was “blessed with wonderful screen presence.”

He was 34 years old. The family did not specify a cause of death, but the paper of record reports that the Mumbai police were investigating it as a suicide.

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 surprisingly good page of additional resources. Suicide.org has a list of numbers and organizations in India.

Edén “Commander Zero” Pastora.

Mr. Pastora, in a life of danger and adventure that stretched from the jungles of the Miskito Coast to the halls of Congress in Washington, was instrumental in toppling the military dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last of the line in a repressive family dynasty that had ruled their Central American country for nearly a half century.
But deprived of a major role in the revolutionary government he had helped to install, and increasingly disillusioned by its Marxist-Leninist tendencies, Mr. Pastora went into exile and for years challenged the regime, led by Daniel Ortega, first with an international campaign of political pressures and later with hit-and-run guerrilla attacks inside Nicaragua.
Along the way he courted sympathizers and bankrollers in the United States, Europe and Latin America; took money and air support secretly from the Central Intelligence Agency; attacked cities in Nicaragua; was denounced by Managua as a traitor and tried in absentia; was seriously wounded by an assassin’s bomb that killed eight people; and once ran for the presidency of Nicaragua. He lost — and two years later, in 2008, announced that he had reconciled with the Ortega government.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 13, 2020.

Saturday, June 13th, 2020

William Sessions, former FBI director.

…in a tenure crowded with troubles and stumbling responses, Mr. Sessions presided for less than six years over an agency that mounted much-criticized deadly sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas; tried to enlist American librarians to catch Soviet spies; and was forced to concede that agents in the past had overzealously spied on Americans protesting government policies in Central America.

…

The first of the sieges under his watch occurred in 1992, when for 11 days the F.B.I.’s hostage rescue team surrounded a fugitive white separatist and others holed up in an isolated cabin on Ruby Ridge, near the Canadian border. After a United States marshal and the fugitive’s wife and son were killed by gunfire, a public furor arose questioning that use of deadly force. Mr. Sessions was not directly involved in the episode or accused of any wrongdoing, but the F.B.I.’s reputation was tarnished.
His agency again faced heavy criticism in 1993 over another violent standoff. This one began when four agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and six members of a cult called the Branch Davidians were killed in a gun battle at their compound near Waco, Texas. After a 51-day F.B.I. siege, President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno, fearing mass suicide, authorized a tear-gas assault on April 19. The compound caught fire. At least 75 people died, including many children.
By then, F.B.I. morale was abysmal and Mr. Sessions, a Republican stranded in a Democratic limbo, was under pressure to resign. His critics said he had failed to redefine the F.B.I.’s crime-fighting and domestic counterintelligence missions after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 during the administration of President George Bush. Some associates called him disengaged, a director who relished the trappings of high office but not the grind of bureau business.
But most damaging to Mr. Sessions was an internal Justice Department report — issued late in the Bush administration but pursued by the Clinton administration — accusing him of ethical violations, including using F.B.I. planes to visit relatives and friends around the country, often taking his wife; using agents to run personal errands; and having a $10,000 fence built around his Washington home at federal expense.

Posted in FBI, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 11, 2020.

Thursday, June 11th, 2020

Following up to yesterday’s obit watch, “Live PD” is now cancelled.

According to the Deadline article thoughtfully sent to us by Mike the Musicologist, there were discussions about bringing the show back in some form:

But A&E and the show’s production company pulled the plug yesterday.

Airing Friday and Saturday nights from 9 PM-12 AM, Live P.D. was ad-supported cable’s #1 show on Fridays and Saturdays in 2019 and has helped A&E become a leading cable network. The series had risen to the top spots in all cable during the pandemic when live sports were suspended, drawing a total of about 3 million viewers per weekend.

Bonnie Pointer, co-founder of the Pointer Sisters.

She left the group in the late 1970s and signed with Motown; she also married Jeffrey Bowen, a producer there. Her two albums for that label were heavy with disco remakes of 1960s Motown singles, like the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” with Ms. Pointer recording most of the vocal parts herself. The most successful in this formula was “Heaven Must Have Sent You,” which went to No. 11 in 1979.

Mary Pat Gleason, working actress. 174 credits on IMDB.

Pierre Nkurunziza, president of Burundi. He was 55, and apparently died of a heart attack.

Posted in Cops, Law, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 10, 2020.

Wednesday, June 10th, 2020

Not one, not two, but three different people all sent me the news that “COPS” has apparently been cancelled. (It was on infinite hyenas “indefinite hiatus”.)

They know me rather well, don’t they?

Edited to add: Heh. From Twitter:

In the meantime, “Live PD” is also on infinite hyenas. And there’s an interesting development that I missed until the “COPS” story broke.

Back in March of 2019, a man named Javier Ambler was involved in a chase with the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department.

Williamson County sheriff’s deputies attempted to pull Ambler over March 28, 2019, after he failed to dim the headlights of his SUV to oncoming traffic. Twenty-eight minutes later, the 40-year-old black father of two sons lay dying on a North Austin street after deputies held him down and used Tasers on him four times while a crew from A&E’s show “Live PD” filmed.
The former postal worker repeatedly pleaded for mercy, telling deputies he had congestive heart failure and couldn’t breathe. He cried, “Save me,” before deputies deployed a final shock.

Mr. Ambler died in custody. There is body cam video from an Austin PD officer that has been released to the Statesman and to one of the local TV stations. There’s also bodycam video from the WillCo officers, but that hasn’t been released.

A Williamson County internal affairs investigation found deputies did nothing wrong. But Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore, whose office is tasked with investigating Ambler’s death with Austin police detectives, told the Statesman that she plans to take the case to a grand jury.
Moore accused [WillCo Sheriff Robert] Chody of stonewalling and refusing to provide evidence.

There’s also video from the “Live PD” cameras. At least, there was:

A&E confirmed Tuesday that “video of the tragic death of Javier Ambler was captured by body cams worn on the officers involved as well by the producers of Live PD who were riding with certain officers involved.”
It said that the incident did not occur while the show was airing live and that the video was not broadcast later.
A&E’s statement said that Austin investigators had not asked for the video or to interview show producers. “As is the case with all footage taken by Live PD producers, we no longer retained the unaired footage after learning that the investigation had concluded,” the network said in a statement.

As you may recall, Bob, the WillCo county commissioners were already in a micturition contest with the sheriff over whether “Live PD” should even be there in the first place, as well as who could have access to the raw “Live PD” footage. Now the whole thing’s blown up even more, to the point where three out of four county commissioners want the sheriff to resign:

Chody on Tuesday called the allegations of stonewalling “misleading” and said commissioners’ calls for his resignation were misinformed and politically motivated.
“The Williamson County Sheriff’s Department remains ready and willing to participate in the investigation being conducted by the Travis County DA’s office,” Chody said in a statement. “However the Travis County DA’s office has not contacted us for any reason related to this investigation. Any attempt to say we have slowed or impeded the investigation is absolutely false.”
In a response, Moore said the investigation was conducted by the Austin police special investigations unit “with our oversight.”
“I stand by my representations regarding the lack of cooperation,” she said.
As more than a dozen protesters gathered outside the Commissioners Court’s regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday, Williamson County commissioners had strong words for Chody.
“I, like you, am outraged over the circumstance of his death, shocked at Sheriff Chody’s failure to cooperate with the investigation into Mr. Ambler’s death and heartbroken for his family and loved ones who almost 15 months later still have no answers,” said Williamson County Commissioner Cynthia Long. “Sheriff Chody must resign immediately.”
Commissioner Terri Cook also said Chody should resign.
“I have no confidence that he has the temperament, operational intelligence, administrative ability nor the people skills to handle the job,” Cook said.

Posted in Obits, Politics, TV, WillCo | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: June 8, 2020.

Monday, June 8th, 2020

Kurt Thomas, gymnast.

He competed in the 1976 Olympics, but didn’t win any medals. He won a gold medal at the world championships in 1978: he was the first American to do so.

Thomas followed up his breakthrough at the 1978 championships by winning five world championship individual medals in 1979, including gold in the floor exercise once more and in the horizontal bar, at Fort Worth, and he finished sixth in the all-around standings, based on his totals in the six individual events and his individual triumphs.

He was a favorite to medal in the 1980 Olympics, but we all know what happened there.

He also starred in the 1985 film, “Gymkata“, a fact the NYT curiously omits from their coverage.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 5, 2020.

Friday, June 5th, 2020

Bruce Jay Friedman, noted writer.

Like his contemporaries Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin and Thomas Pynchon, he wrote what came to be called black humor, largely because of an anthology by that name that he edited in 1965. His first two novels, “Stern” (1962) and the best-selling “A Mother’s Kisses” (1964) — tales of New York Jews exploring an America outside the five boroughs — and his first play, the 1967 Off Broadway hit “Scuba Duba,” a sendup of race relations that is set in motion when a Jewish man fears his wife is having an affair with a black spear fisherman, made him widely celebrated. The New York Times Magazine in 1968 declared Mr. Friedman “The Hottest Writer of the Year.”

He also wrote the screenplays for “Splash” and “Stir Crazy”, and the works that were turned into “The Lonely Guy” and “The Heartbreak Kid”.

For the historical record: Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father.

Hutton Gibson belonged to a splinter group of Catholics who reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, known as Vatican II. These traditionalists seek to preserve centuries-old orthodoxy, especially the Tridentine Mass, the Latin Mass established in the 16th century. They operate their own chapels, schools and clerical orders apart from the Vatican and in opposition to it.
But even among these outsiders, Mr. Gibson, who had early in life attended a seminary before dropping out, was extreme in his views. He denied the legitimacy of John Paul II as pope, once calling him a “Koran Kisser,” and said Vatican II had been “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews.” He called Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a traditionalist leader until his death in 1991, a “compromiser.” Mr. Gibson earned the nickname “Pope Gibson” for his outspoken, dogmatic opinions on faith.
After he was expelled from a conservative group in Australia, where he had moved with his family from New York State in 1968, Mr. Gibson formed his own, Alliance for Catholic Tradition. Beginning in 1977, he disseminated his ultra-Orthodox views in a newsletter, “The War Is Now!,” and through self-published books, including “Is the Pope Catholic?” (1978) and “The Enemy is Here!” (1994). The Wisconsin Historical Society library and archives holds Mr. Gibson’s published works among its extensive collection of religious publications.

…

In 2003, as Mel Gibson was directing “The Passion of the Christ,” his film about the crucifixion, Hutton Gibson gave an interview to The New York Times laced with comments about conspiracy theories. The planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, had been remote-controlled, he claimed (without saying by whom). The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was wildly inflated, he went on.
“Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,” Mr. Gibson said. “It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?”
In a radio interview a week before the February 2004 release of “The Passion,” Mr. Gibson went further, saying of the Holocaust, “It’s all — maybe not all fiction — but most of it is.” The comments added to an already simmering controversy that the film was anti-Semitic; the chairmen of two major studios told The Times that they wouldn’t work with Mel Gibson in the future.

Posted in Books, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 3, 2020.

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

Wes Unseld, NBA center.

Over 13 seasons with the Baltimore, Capital and Washington Bullets (now the Washington Wizards), Unseld’s teams went to the N.B.A. finals four times and won the league’s title in 1978 over the Seattle SuperSonics. Unseld was named the series’ M.V.P.

There are only two players who have been named MVP and rookie of the year in the same season. The other one is Wilt Chamberlain.

Pat Dye, Auburn football coach.

Elsa Dorfman, photographer. She specialized in taking portraits with the giant 20×24 Polaroid camera, about which I have written previously.

By way of Hacker News (and I don’t think the WSJ link is going to work for many people): Irene Triplett. Ms. Triplett was 90 years old, and was the last person still receiving a Civil War pension.

According to the WallyJ, which I can read but can’t link here, her father (Moses Triplett) started out fighting for the Confederacy, then defected to the Union side in 1863. He married a woman named Elda Hall in 1924, had Irene Triplett in 1930 (he was 83, his wife was 34), and died in 1938 at 92.

Her pension was apparently $73.13 a month, though she received other benefits as a ward of the state. In addition, “…a pair of Civil War buffs visited and sent her money to spend on Dr. Pepper and chewing tobacco, a habit she picked up in the first grade.”

Posted in Art, History, Obits, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 1, 2020.

Monday, June 1st, 2020

Yesterday was a big day, but I wanted to give the news time to shake out.

Christo.

For “Valley Curtain” he strung orange nylon fabric along steel cables over a narrow pass in Rifle, Colo.; a large semicircular opening allowed cars on the state highway below to pass through.
Fierce winds ripped the curtain to shreds two days later, a setback that Christo shrugged off. “I as an artist have done what I set out to do,” he said. “That the curtain no longer exists only makes it more interesting.”
Then came “Running Fence,” a series of white nylon fabric panels that snaked their way over ranchland in Sonoma and Marin counties in Northern California and crossed Highway 101 on their way to the ocean in Bodega Bay.
For “Valley Curtain,” Christo and his lawyer devised the system that made all of his subsequent works possible. For each project a corporation was created, with Jeanne-Claude as director and Christo as a salaried employee. Financing came from the sale of drawings and small models to collectors and museums; Christo never accepted grants or public money. When the art work was taken down, the corporation dissolved itself, having earned zero profit.

…

Even more difficult, politically, was Christo’s plan to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin. The first drawing was made in 1971. For decades thereafter he encountered nothing but resistance from West German officials. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, momentum shifted his way, and in 1995 the work was completed.
In between the Pont Neuf and Reichstag Projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude simultaneously placed 1,760 yellow umbrellas in the Tejon Pass, just north of Los Angeles, and 1,340 blue umbrellas on a hillside near Ibaraki, Japan.
“The Umbrellas, Japan-U.S.A.” came to grief when one of the 485-pound umbrellas in California came unmoored in high winds and killed a woman and injured several other people. The two artists ordered the umbrellas in both countries to be taken down immediately. As a Japanese crane operator prepared to remove one of the umbrellas, his crane made contact with a power line, electrocuting him.

Herb Stempel, of quiz show scandal fame, has passed at 93. I’ve written about the quiz show scandal previously, so I won’t recap the whole story here.

On the day before each show, he was given the questions and answers and coached on lip-biting, brow-mopping, stammering, sighing and other theatrical gestures. “Remembering the questions was quite easy,” he told investigators, “but the actual stage directions were the most difficult thing, because everything had to be done exactly.”

Mr. Stempel apparently passed on April 7th, but his death was not confirmed until yesterday. It’s mildly interesting that he passed almost exactly a year after Charles Van Doren.

Posted in Art, Christo, History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 31, 2020.

Sunday, May 31st, 2020

Marge Redmond. She was perhaps most famous as “Sister Jacqueline” on “The Flying Nun”, but she did a fair amount of other TV: “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rockford Files”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Matlock”, and more. She was also in “The Fortune Cookie”, “Manhattan Murder Mystery”, and “Family Plot”.

She was married to Jack Weston, and they were both good Cleveland people. Apparently, she died in February, but her death was only recently reported.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 29, 2020.

Friday, May 29th, 2020

Richard Herd, working actor. He appeared on a minor SF TV show and was a regular on a minor sitcom, but he had a lot of other credits. (Including, interestingly enough, “Capt. Dennis Sheridan” on “T.J. Hooker”. One of the less reputable broadcast networks was running a marathon of that last weekend. Man, it is hard to watch these days.)

Anthony James, another working actor. He was in “Unforgiven” and “In the Heat of the Night” (the movie), also appeared on a minor SF TV show, and had a lot of other credits (“Quincy, M.E.”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Gunsmoke”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “Police Story”, and so on).

By way of Lawrence, Cindy Lou Butler Stevens.

“Cindy Lou who?”

No, Cindy Lou Butler Stevens. She was one of the female leads in the awful “Boggy Creek II: and the Legend Continues…“, and also appeared in “The Town that Dreaded Sundown” and “Grayeagle”.

All three of those were directed by Charles B. Pierce (who also directed “The Legend of Boggy Creek”, the first film in the trilogy). Per Lawrence, Ms. Stevens was married to Mr. Pierce at the time.

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

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