A couple for the historical record:
Former Texas congressman Sam Johnson.
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Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category
Obit watch: May 28, 2020.
Thursday, May 28th, 2020Obit watch: May 22, 2020.
Friday, May 22nd, 2020Legendary Army Ranger, trainer, and gun guy Chuck Taylor passed away a few weeks ago. I wasn’t aware of this until Bayou Renaissance Man posted a nice tribute to Mr. Taylor on his blog, which I encourage you to go read.
Theodore “Ted” Keith passed away last September. I was not aware of this until it was posted on one of the forums for Smith and Wesson collectors.
Ted Keith was the son, and last surviving child of, the legendary gun guy Elmer Keith, about whom I have written in the past and certainly will in the future.
Ted Keith was a special guest at the 2012 S&WCA meeting in Boise. I didn’t get as much of a chance to talk to him as I would have liked (his time was pretty booked), but I have one outstanding memory of him: I was standing in the Boise Cabela’s with a bunch of other S&WCA folks looking at the Elmer Keith Museum (which, at the time, was located in the Boise Cabela’s). Ted was going around introducing himself to everyone there: he walked up to me, stuck out his hand, and said “Hi, I’m Ted Keith.”
The man was a class act.
Obit watch: May 20, 2020.
Wednesday, May 20th, 2020Annie Glenn. The phrase “love story for the ages” is over-used, in my opinion. But it fits here. She and John Glenn were childhood playmates, and were married for 73 years.
“I could never get through a whole sentence,” she told The New York Times in 1980. “Sometimes I would open my mouth and nothing would come out.”
But in 1973, in her 50s, she decided to address her stuttering by participating in a fluency-shaping program developed by Dr. Ronald Webster at Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Virginia.
“I cannot make telephone calls, so John called and enrolled me,” she told The Boston Globe in 1975. “The first requirement was to do a taped interview. That established the fact that I’m an 85 percent stutterer, which is in the ‘most severe’ range.”
She immersed herself in Dr. Webster’s intensive, three-week program. By the end of it, she said, she could do things that had been beyond her before, like go to a mall and comfortably ask a store clerk where to find something.
“Those three weeks, we weren’t allowed at all to see our family, or to call, or anything,” she said.
“When I called John” at the program’s end, she added, “he cried.”
She became a champion for people with speech disorders and an adjunct professor in the speech pathology department at Ohio State University’s department of speech and hearing science. In 1987, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association created an award in her honor, known as the Annie, presented annually to someone who demonstrates, as the organization puts it, her “invincible spirit in building awareness on behalf of those with communication disorders.”
“Annie Glenn remains a hero to many of us who in various periods of our lives couldn’t get a word, a thought, or a sentiment past our lips,” David M. Shribman, executive editor emeritus of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote in February in The Boston Globe on the occasion of Mrs. Glenn’s 100th birthday.
“She fought her condition, to be sure,” Mr. Shribman, a stutterer himself, wrote, “but she also fought for broad public understanding of stuttering, for the idea that stutterers weren’t merely shy, weren’t unintelligent, weren’t social pariahs.”
I don’t want to give away the end of the obit: I encourage you to go read it.
Obit watch: May 19, 2020.
Tuesday, May 19th, 2020Everybody and his brother sent me this, so: Ken “Eddie Haskell” Osmond.
I’ve never been a fan of “Leave It to Beaver”, but much respect to the late Mr. Osmond for honorable service with the LAPD:
“I’m not complaining, because Eddie’s been too good to me, but I found work hard to come by,” he said. “In 1968, I bought my first house, in ’69 I got married, and we were going to start a family and I needed a job, so I went out and signed up for the L.A.P.D.”
As an officer on motorcycle patrol, he grew a mustache to disguise himself. In 1980, he was shot three times in a chase with a suspected car thief but escaped serious injury: One bullet was stopped by his belt buckle, the others by his bulletproof vest. He was put on disability and retired from the force in 1988.
Michel Piccoli, prominent French actor.
Obit watch: May 18, 2020.
Monday, May 18th, 2020Phyllis George, former Miss America and former co-host of “The NFL Today”.
Hired as a co-host of CBS Sports’s weekly pregame football show — which featured the high-profile hosts Brent Musburger and Irv Cross and the gambling commentator Jimmy Snyder, or Jimmy the Greek, as he was known — Ms. George immediately became the most prominent woman in sportscasting.
But with her beauty-queen background and her modest television résumé, she was criticized for lacking the traditional sportscaster credentials. She was not a former sportswriter, like Mr. Musburger, and she was obviously not a retired football player, like Mr. Cross.
She responded to her critics by saying that she knew enough about sports, especially football, to get by.
“I’m from Texas,” she told People magazine in 1976, “and down there you follow the Texas Longhorns and the Dallas Cowboys or you don’t belong.”
Excuse me?
She was married twice: to John Y. Brown Jr., former Governor of Kentucky, and Robert Evans.
Captain Jenn Casey, Royal Canadian Air Force. She was a public affairs officer with the Snowbirds demonstration team: the plane she was in crashed during a demo in Kamloops yesterday. The pilot, Captain Richard MacDougall, ejected but suffered serious injuries.
Obit watch: May 16, 2020.
Saturday, May 16th, 2020Obit watch: May 14, 2020.
Thursday, May 14th, 2020Joel Kupperman has passed away at 83.
The name probably doesn’t ring any bells with you unless you are really old:
More specifically…
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“All of us on the program experienced to some degree ‘child star letdown,’ but we remembered the actual experience fondly,” Richard L. Williams, the show’s other math whiz, now a retired diplomat, said in a phone interview. “It was a high for us. But Joel said it destroyed his childhood. When he was 6, I was 11. The program put stress on the smallest kids. They got the most attention and were the least equipped to deal with it.”
He added: “Once the show went on television they kept Joel, because he was so well known, but the general age got lower and lower. I’m guessing that experience was pretty sour for him. No real competition and no real comradeship.”
After he left the show, Mr. Kupperman went to the University of Chicago: a professor there suggested that he leave the country.
Professor Kupperman earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Cambridge in England and joined the philosophy department of the University of Connecticut in 1960, remaining there until his retirement in 2010. His scholarly focus was on ethics and aesthetics, and he was an early champion of Asian philosophy at a time when Eastern traditions were considered more akin to religion or mysticism than philosophy.
He drew from a variety of traditions, many of them ancient, which made his work cosmopolitan and original, said David Wong, a professor of philosophy at Duke University.
“The tone of much of Joel’s work is that of a gentle and wise interlocutor who refrains from lecturing to us on what the good life is,” Professor Wong added, “but rather assists us in our individual and collective endeavors to live a good life by articulation of much good advice and well-taken cautions.”
He was extremely reluctant to discuss his time as a Quiz Kid: his family says he’d walk away if anyone brought it up.
He met Karen Ordahl in Cambridge, Mass., after she had earned a master’s degree in history at Harvard University, and they married in 1964, settling down together in Storrs, Conn., near the University of Connecticut campus.
“When we were dating that first summer, if a store clerk heard his name, they would invariably say, ‘I hated you when I was a kid,’” Ms. Kupperman said. “He was really determined to reinvent himself, and by college he was already thinking of himself as a philosopher. He wanted to retreat into the life of the mind, and in many ways he succeeded. He really lived in his head.”
And yet when his wife decided to pursue her Ph.D. in history at the University of Cambridge, Professor Kupperman took a sabbatical for a year followed by another year without pay so that she could do so. In England he cared for Michael and Charlie, then 7 and 4, while she worked toward her doctorate — not typical male behavior for the times, Ms. Kupperman said.
Ms. Kupperman survives him, as do a son and a daughter. His son, Michael Kupperman, is an artist who wrote a graphic novel memoir of his father called All The Answers (affiliate link).
Obit watch: May 11, 2020.
Monday, May 11th, 2020Jerry Stiller, of the comedy team Stiller and Meara, movies, theater, and a couple of obscure TV shows.
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Mr. Stiller remained active throughout his 80s. He was typically manic in a series of commercials for Capital One Bank, seen on television and heard on radio in 2012.
That same year, he played a group-therapy patient in the independent film “Excuse Me for Living.” In 2014, he provided the voice for the title character in an unorthodox animated television special, “How Murray Saved Christmas.”
“How Murray Saved Christmas” from “Great But Forgotten“.
There’s a great story at the end of the NYT obit that I won’t spoil here.
Obit watch: May 9, 2020.
Saturday, May 9th, 2020Richard Penniman, better known as “Little Richard”.
Little Richard did not invent rock ’n’ roll. Other musicians had already been mining a similar vein by the time he recorded his first hit, “Tutti Frutti” — a raucous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up but its meaning hard to miss — in a New Orleans recording studio in September 1955. Chuck Berry and Fats Domino had reached the pop Top 10, Bo Diddley had topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, and Elvis Presley had been making records for a year.
But Little Richard, delving deeply into the wellsprings of gospel music and the blues, pounding the piano furiously and screaming as if for his very life, raised the energy level several notches and created something not quite like any music that had been heard before — something new, thrilling and more than a little dangerous. As the rock historian Richie Unterberger put it, “He was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock ’n’ roll.”
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He was at the height of his fame when he left the United States in late September 1957 to begin a tour in Australia. As he told the story, he was exhausted, under intense pressure from the Internal Revenue Service and furious at the low royalty rate he was receiving from Specialty. Without anyone to advise him, he had signed a contract that gave him half a cent for every record he sold. “Tutti Frutti” had sold half a million copies but had netted him only $25,000.
One night in early October, before 40,000 fans at an outdoor arena in Sydney, he had an epiphany.
“That night Russia sent off that very first Sputnik,” he told Mr. White, referring to the first satellite sent into space. “It looked as though the big ball of fire came directly over the stadium about two or three hundred feet above our heads. It shook my mind. It really shook my mind. I got up from the piano and said, ‘This is it. I am through. I am leaving show business to go back to God.’”
He had one last Top 10 hit: “Good Golly Miss Molly,” recorded in 1956 but not released until early 1958. By then, he had left rock ’n’ roll behind.
He became a traveling evangelist. He entered Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Ala., a Seventh-day Adventist school, to study for the ministry. He cut his hair, got married and began recording gospel music.
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By his own account, alcohol and cocaine began to sap his soul (“I lost my reasoning,” he would later say), and in 1977, he once again turned from rock ’n’ roll to God. He became a Bible salesman, began recording religious songs again and, for the second time, disappeared from the spotlight.
He did not stay away forever. The publication of his biography in 1984 signaled his return to the public eye, and he began performing again.
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The NYT obit for Roy Horn wasn’t up when I was writing last night, but it is now.
We are all mourning the loss of #RoyHorn of #SiegfriedandRoy. S&R invented, created, pioneered the very idea that a magic show could be a full evening in Vegas. If not for S&R there would be no P&T in Vegas. He was so full of life, wild, and unpredictable. We will miss him. pic.twitter.com/sHW5NAyBMu
— Penn Jillette (@pennjillette) May 9, 2020
Obit watch: May 8, 2020.
Friday, May 8th, 2020Hattip to my brother: Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy (he was the one who got bit by the tiger) has passed away at 75.
According to reports, he died of COVID-19 related complications.
Obit watch: May 7, 2020.
Thursday, May 7th, 2020Florian Schneider, co-founder of Kraftwerk.
Gil Schwartz, former spokesman for CBS. He also wrote columns for Esquire and Fortune magazines, and a bunch of books, under the pseudonym “Stanley Bing”.
Obit watch: May 4, 2020.
Monday, May 4th, 2020Maj Sjöwall, co-author (with Per Wahlöö) of the Martin Beck series of Swedish police procedurals.
With their first novel, “Roseanna” (1965), about the strangling death of a young tourist, Ms. Sjowall and Per Wahloo, her writing and domestic partner, introduced Martin Beck, an indefatigable, taciturn homicide detective in Stockholm.
“He is not a heroic person,” Ms. Sjowall (pronounced SHO-vall) told the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2015. “He is like James Stewart in some American films, just a nice guy trying to do his job.”
In terse, fast-moving prose, the couple wrote nine more Beck books, including “The Laughing Policeman,” which won the Edgar Award in 1971 for best mystery novel and was made into a film in 1973 starring Walter Matthau, with its setting moved from Stockholm to San Francisco. Several Swedish movies and a TV series, “Beck,” have been made based on the novels.
Shula won an NFL-record 347 games, including including playoff games. He coached the Dolphins to the league’s only undefeated season (17-0) in 1972, culminating in a 14-7 victory over the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII.
The Dolphins repeated as champions the next season, beating the Minnesota Vikings 24-7 in Super Bowl VIII, the third straight title game Miami had played in; the Dolphins lost 24-3 to the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl VI.
In all, Shula guided the Dolphins to five Super Bowls, including losses to the Redskins (27-17 in Super Bowl XVII) and San Francisco 49ers (38-16 in Super Bowl XIX).
Obit watch: May 3, 2020.
Sunday, May 3rd, 2020Sam Lloyd, “Ted Buckland” on “Scrubs”.
Obit watch: April 30, 2020.
Thursday, April 30th, 2020Irrfan Khan, of “Life of Pi”, “Slumdog Millionaire”, and various other Hollywood and Bollywood films.
Rishi Kapoor, also a Bollywood actor, but without as much Hollywood crossover.
Obit watch: April 27, 2020.
Monday, April 27th, 2020Harold Reid, leader of the Statler Brothers.
The Statlers imbued contemporary country and folk material with traditional gospel harmonies, helping to usher Southern gospel music into the cultural mainstream while paving the way for the arrival of crossover-minded blockbuster country vocal groups like the Oak Ridge Boys and Alabama.
“We took gospel harmonies and put them over in country music,” Mr. Reid was quoted as saying in the Encyclopedia of Gospel Music.
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One of my favorite Statler Brothers songs:
Steve Dalkowski, minor league pitcher. This is actually one of those sad stories: he was famous for spending nine seasons in the minor leagues, mostly with the Baltimore Orioles’ teams. He apparently had an amazing fastball, but was also erratic as a pitcher. (“He walked batters almost as often as he struck them out..”) Supposedly, he inspired “Nuke LaLoosh”, the pitcher in “Bull Durham”.
He also had problems with alcohol. At the time of his death, he’d been in a nursing home with “alcohol-induced dementia” for 26 years.
Gene Dynarski. He was “Izzy Mandelbaum Jr.” on “Seinfeld”, appeared on two episodes of a minor SF series, and had guest shots on a lot of other TV, including multiple stints on “Banacek”…
…and, yes, “Mannix”. (“Fly, Little One”, season 3, episode 21. He’s credited as “Killer”.)
Bruce Allpress, New Zealand actor who was in “The Two Towers” and a few other things.
(Hat tip on the last two to Lawrence.)