Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: March 25, 2020.

Wednesday, March 25th, 2020

Terrence McNally, noted playwright.

Mr. McNally’s Tony Awards attest to his versatility. Two were for books for musicals, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “Ragtime” (1998), and two were for plays, and vastly different ones: “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1995), about gay men who share a vacation house, and “Master Class” (1996), in which the opera diva Maria Callas reflects on her career.
And those prize winners were only a small part of his oeuvre. With some three dozen plays to his credit, as well as the books for 10 musicals, the librettos for four operas and a handful of screenplays for film and television, Mr. McNally was a remarkably prolific and consistent dramatist.

Hattip on this to Lawrence, who also pointed out that Mr. McNally did a guest shot on “The Greatest American Hero”. He actually did guest shots on a small hand full of TV shows, including “Salvage I” (that sounds like a “blink and you’d miss it” appearance), “CHiPs”, and “The Young and the Restless”.

Speaking of hattips, great and good FOTB Borepatch sent over an obit for Albert Uderzo, co-creator (with the late René Goscinny) of Asterix and Obelix.

Edited to add: NYT obit.

A followup from “The Drive” that I’ve been meaning to post for a couple of days: Kenny Rogers, dirt racer.

Rogers paired up with Sprint Car Hall of Famer C.K. Spurlock and campaigned his own team for several years before the two formed Gambler Chassis Company. Taking its name from Rogers’ famous song The Gambler, this project was anything but a gimmick. The company would go on to win races with stars like Steve Kinser, Sammy Swindell, and Doug Wolfgang behind the wheel. Simply put, Gambler cars were consistently some of the fastest in the United States, taking victories at primetime events like the Knoxville Nationals.

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

Obit watch: March 24, 2020.

Tuesday, March 24th, 2020

Lawrence sent over an obit for prolific British actor David Collings, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation from another site.

Eric Weissberg, multi-instrumentalist musician, but perhaps most famous as a banjo guy. Specifically, “Dueling Banjos”.

As a session player he appeared on Judy Collins’s “Fifth Album,” contributing guitar to her 1965 version of “Pack Up Your Sorrows.” He played banjo on John Denver’s 1971 Top 10 pop hit, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” His fretwork was heard on albums like Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” (1974), Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) and the Talking Heads’ “Little Creatures” (1985). He collaborated with jazz musicians like Bob James and Herbie Mann as well.
“Dueling Banjos” did not, as the song’s title suggests, involve two banjoists pitting their skills against each other. Instead it showcased Mr. Weissberg’s three-finger Earl Scruggs-style banjo in a sprightly call-and-response — more of a dance than a fight — with the flat-picked acoustic guitar of his collaborator, Steve Mandell.

…

When it appeared on the soundtrack for “Deliverance,” a movie based on the James Dickey novel of the same name, it was mistakenly copyrighted to Mr. Weissberg.
A lawsuit was settled in Mr. Smith’s favor. Mr. Weissberg always maintained that Warner Bros. had credited him as the song’s composer without his knowledge or consent.

Eli Miller. No, you probably never heard of him. He was one of the last of New York City’s door to door seltzer delivery men, who worked “from 1960 until he retired in 2017.”

When Mr. Miller started his business, hundreds of seltzer men plied the streets; when he retired, there were only a handful. Through all of the intervening decades, he appeared at his customers’ homes bearing a wooden box of pewter-topped bottles filled with authentic seltzer.
“It’s not the stuff you buy in the plastic bottles in the store, which has about five pounds of pressure,” Mr. Miller said in a video that accompanied an article about him in The New York Times in 2013.
What Mr. Miller brought customers, he said, was triple-filtered New York City water, without salt, sugar or other additives, pressurized to about 60 to 80 pounds per square inch — perfect for enjoying plain or spritzing into an egg cream.

…

Mr. Miller was inducted into the Brooklyn Jewish Hall of Fame in 2017. His fellow inductees that year included the television personality Judge Judy Sheindlin and Ira Glasser, a former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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

Obit watch: March 21, 2020.

Saturday, March 21st, 2020

Kenny Rogers. Borepatch.

He was an avid photographer as well. He published two volumes of his work: “Kenny Rogers’ America” (1986), an assortment of photos of national landmarks and other places of interest, and “Your Friends and Mine” (1987), a collection of portraits of fellow celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson.

…

Mr. Rogers was also a successful entrepreneur. His best-known enterprise was Kenny Rogers Roasters, a chain of chicken restaurants he opened with John Y. Brown Jr., the former governor of Kentucky and chief executive of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Opened in 1991, the chain — which was, among other things, the subject of a memorable episode of “Seinfeld” — closed in the United States 20 years later but has continued to prosper overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Boris Yaro, LAT photographer. He famously took multiple photos of Robert Kennedy immediately after the shooting.

There’s another story about Mr. Yaro’s photography: that one involves a suicidal man and Muhammad Ali, but you’ll have to read the obit for that one.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 20, 2020.

Friday, March 20th, 2020

Molly Brodak. She was a poet, and wrote a book about her childhood, Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir.

“Bandit,” her first published nonfiction work, was an unsparing account of her dysfunctional childhood with her father, Joseph Brodak, a tool and die worker who began robbing banks in the summer of 1994 to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, Molly was barely a teenager.
Mr. Brodak robbed 11 banks in and around Detroit that summer. He would hand a teller a note demanding cash and gesture that he had a gun in his jacket pocket (he didn’t). He wore a floppy hat and a fake mustache that earned him the sobriquet “the Super Mario Brothers Bandit,” after the similarly attired video game character. He was caught, spent seven years in prison and was released in 2001, then served another prison sentence for robbing more banks in 2009.

She was only 39 years old. The NYT quotes her husband as stating she died by 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.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Roy Hudd, prominent British actor. He played “Archie Shuttleworth” on “Coronation Street”, and, according to Lawrence, did a fair amount of horror.

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

Obit watch: March 19, 2020.

Thursday, March 19th, 2020

Alfred M. Worden, Apollo 15 astronaut. NASA tribute page.

Apollo 15 was NASA’s first moon mission devoted mainly to science. The flight of Apollo 11 in July 1969 had fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s call for America to reach the moon by the end of the 1960s. But the three lunar landings that preceded Apollo 15 had yielded relatively modest insight into the moon’s origin and composition.
Major Worden, of the Air Force, spent three days in orbit operating a pair of cameras in his space capsule Endeavour.
Those photos provided the sharpest images ever taken of the moon, an achievement that led to the mapping of its rugged terrain. Major Worden also operated an extensive package of instruments to enhance knowledge of space and the moon itself.
En route home, he released a “sub-satellite” — carried by Endeavour and weighing about 78 pounds — that was designed to orbit the moon for at least a year and radio back data on its gravitational field and other technical information. It was the first time such a space vehicle had been deployed.
He also undertook the first walk in deep space, spending 38 minutes tethered to Endeavour while more than 196,000 miles from Earth as he retrieved canisters of film attached to the skin of the craft.
The other Apollo 15 crewmen — Col. David R. Scott and Lt. Col. James B. Irwin, also Air Force officers — became the seventh and eighth men to land on the moon, having descended in their Lunar Module, Falcon, from the space capsule piloted by Major Worden. They spent 18½ hours exploring its surface and covered about 17½ miles in their rover — both NASA records — and returned to the capsule for the flight home with some 170 pounds of rock and soil samples.

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 18, 2020.

Wednesday, March 18th, 2020

Stuart Whitman, another one of those knock-around TV and movie actors. THR.

He was “Marshal Jim Crown” on “Cimarron Strip”, played a child molester in a British movie called “The Mark”, was “Sergeant Walters” on “Highway Patrol”, and did guest shots on a whole lot of 70’s TV. (No “Mannix”, though.)

Lyle Waggoner. Things I didn’t know: he tried out for “Batman”. He was the first “Playgirl” centerfold. He did guest shots on “Lost in Space” (the original) and “Supertrain”. And he was in “Catalina Caper“.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 17, 2020.

Tuesday, March 17th, 2020

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge:

Genesis led the influential British rock bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, dabbled as a dominatrix in New York, ran a soup kitchen in Kathmandu, hid out from Scotland Yard, organized a cultlike fan club that asked initiates to send in their bodily fluids, and undertook a long-running surgical project to merge identities with her wife, Jacqueline Mary Breyer, in a single nongendered being they called a “pandrogyne.”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 10, 2020.

Tuesday, March 10th, 2020

Max von Sydow. Variety. THR.

Man classed up everything he was in.

R.D. Call, movie and TV character actor. He was in “Born On the Fourth of July”, “Last Man Standing”, and “Waterworld”, as well as a fair amount of TV. Of particular note: he was in “L.A. Takedown”, the TV movie that later became “Heat”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 4, 2020.

Wednesday, March 4th, 2020

I’m dropping into the obscure here, but I have reasons.

Rafael Cancel Miranda. Mr. Miranda was one of the four men who shot up the US Capital on March 1, 1954.

Mr. Cancel Miranda, a hero to many who favor independence for Puerto Rico but a terrorist to many others, was 23 when he and three companions attacked the Capitol, spraying gunfire from the gallery into the House chamber and injuring five congressmen as 243 House members were debating a bill involving migrant workers from Mexico.
The four — the others were Lolita Lebrón, Irvin Flores Rodríguez and Andres Figueroa Cordero — were not satisfied with the agreement that had made Puerto Rico a United States commonwealth in 1952, believing that it was a sham and that the island essentially remained an occupied colony.
Ms. Lebrón waved a Puerto Rican flag briefly and shouted about independence as the attack unfolded and House members sought cover. The four were overpowered and arrested.
Although the scene was chaotic, Mr. Cancel Miranda, at least, was convinced that most of those injured “got hurt by my gun,” as he put it when he was freed in 1979.
“No congressman in particular was the target,” he said then. “It was just an effort to shoot up the place. If we aimed to kill, believe me, that would have happened.”

All four men served “lengthy prison sentences”, at least by NYT standards. Wikipedia says that Mr. Miranda was sentenced to 85 years.

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence of Mr. Figueroa Cordero, who had cancer and died in 1979. President Carter freed the other three in 1979, though they had never sought clemency, considering themselves political prisoners.

Mr. Miranda was the last surviving member of the quartet.

I’ve been going back and forth about this one, and came down on the side of inclusion. Not because this person was famous, but because this is another example of the kind of thing the paper of record does well: the obit for the person who was important to the community in some way, without necessarily being famous.

In this case, Matvey “Falafel” Natanzon, backgammon player.

His illness prematurely ended a roller-coaster career during which he went from sleeping under a bench in Washington Square Park, where he lived for nearly six months after college, to mastering backgammon, a board game that combines rolls of the dice with strategic checker moves.

…

In his short pants, sweatshirt and knitted wool hat, Mr. Natanzon could look like an amiable loser to his easy marks, as he baited them with his nonstop babble and swaggering hubris.
He would graduate to winning (and, on rarer occasions, losing) tens of thousands of dollars in as little as an hour; achieve celebrity status in a game that had migrated from black-tie casino tables to cheesy hotel ballrooms, where baseball caps worn backward were de rigeur; and be named the top player in an unofficial ranking by his peers, known as the Giants of Backgammon.
“Falafel is, without a doubt, backgammon’s No. 1 commentator and is probably its best-known celebrity,” Joe Russell, the chairman of the backgammon federation’s board, said when he awarded Mr. Natanzon the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. “He has been in the top 10 of the Giants list seven straight times, and has been voted No. 1 twice and No. 2 once.”

He was 51. A brain tumor got him.

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 2, 2020.

Monday, March 2nd, 2020

I was going to make this a special true crime edition, but I got overtaken by events.

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.

It was a time when successful, lavishly paid corporate executives were more admired than resented. Mr. Welch received a record severance payment of $417 million when he retired in 2001. Fortune magazine named him the “Manager of the Century,” and in 2000 The Financial Times named G.E. “the World’s Most Respected Company” for the third straight year.
Mr. Welch’s stardom extended beyond the business world. In a 2000 auction for the rights to his autobiography, Time Warner’s book unit won with a bid of $7.1 million, a record at the time. “Jack: Straight from the Gut,” written with John A. Byrne, was published the next year and eventually sold 10 million copies worldwide.

…

He attacked bureaucracy and made sweeping payroll cuts, creating a more entrepreneurial, if more Darwinian, corporate culture. He led the globalization of G.E.’s business, both expanding sales and manufacturing overseas. And he made G.E. far more dependent on finance, as banking and investment grew as a share of the American economy.
Mr. Welch distilled his management concepts into one-sentence nuggets. “Control your destiny, or someone else will.” “Be candid with everyone.” “Bureaucrats must be ridiculed and removed.” “If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by.”
His goal at G.E., Mr. Welch wrote in his autobiography, was to create “a company filled with self-confident entrepreneurs who would face reality every day.”

…

Mr. Welch was also attacked when he was leading G.E., especially for slashing the G.E. work force, which earned him the nickname “Neutron Jack.” But most of the second thoughts about him and his management legacy have arisen in recent years. The superstar chief executive, laser-focused on enriching shareholders, is often criticized today as a symbol of corporate greed and economic inequity.
The widely diversified corporation that Mr. Welch built is also out of favor, an idea underlined by G.E.’s precipitous decline in the last few years.
The New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart wrote in 2017, “Hardly anyone considers Mr. Welch a management role model anymore, and the conglomerate model he championed at G.E. — that with strict discipline, you could successfully manage any business as long as your market share was first or second — has been thoroughly discredited, at least in the United States.”

Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s.

Linda Wolfe, writer. She started out writing short fiction, and was clipping true crime stories to use in novel plots…

A turning point of sorts came in 1975, when twin doctors, both gynecologists, were found dead in their trash-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It turned out that Ms. Wolfe had been the patient of one of them, years before — only briefly, but that was enough to propel her to investigate the case and turn to a life of writing about crime.
“This will sound callous,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1994, but she felt lucky that she had had “the ‘good fortune’ of knowing somebody involved in the kind of story I had been clipping.”
Both doctors had been barbiturate addicts and had died not of an overdose but of the drug’s typically severe withdrawal syndrome. Ms. Wolfe, by then working at New York magazine (she worked there for 25 years as a contributing editor, writer and restaurant reviewer), wrote a journalistic account of the case, “The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists.” Her article inspired the David Cronenberg movie “Dead Ringers” (1988), which starred Jeremy Irons.

She became a prominent true crime writer.

She would go on to write several books and magazine articles that delved behind some of the nation’s most sensational headlines. Her articles included “The Professor and the Prostitute” (1983), about a Tufts University professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved, and “From a Nice Family” (1981), about a teenager in Dallas who killed his mother and his father, who was the president of Arco Oil and Gas.
One of her best-known books was “Wasted: The Preppie Murder” (1989), so called because the perpetrator, Robert E. Chambers Jr., had bounced around various elite schools and lived on the Upper East Side. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the 1986 strangulation death of Jennifer Levin in Central Park after they had had sex behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was released in 2003 after serving 15 years in prison and subsequently went back to prison on drug charges.

I read parts of The Professor and the Prostitute quite a while back: it shows up pretty frequently at Half-Price Books. I might have to grab a copy next time I’m there.

Finally, Dr. Charles Friedgood. I’d never heard of him either, but this is one of those interesting true crime stories (for multiple reasons). Dr. Friedgood was convicted of killing his wife in 1975.

While he admitted that he had injected his wife, Sophie Friedgood, 48, with a painkiller, Dr. Friedgood insisted that he had not intended to kill her. She had suffered a stroke in 1959, when she was 33, and had become an invalid.
Dr. Friedgood was convicted of second-degree murder after prosecutors proved to a jury that he had deliberately given his wife an overdose at the family’s 18-room home in Great Neck, N.Y., where they had reared their six children.
Her cause of death was recorded as a stroke, but the police grew suspicious because Dr. Friedgood had signed the death certificate himself and rushed the body out of state for immediate burial in accordance with Jewish religious custom.
Five weeks later, he was arrested at Kennedy International Airport with more than $450,000 of his wife’s cash, negotiable bonds and jewelry. Prosecutors said he had intended to fly to Europe to join his paramour, a Danish nurse who had sometimes cared for Mrs. Friedgood and with whom he had fathered two children. He had begun his affair with the nurse in the late 1960s.

He was sentenced to 25 years to life. He was released on compassionate grounds in late 2007, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’d served 31 years and was 88 when he was released.

He lived another 11 years after being released. According to the NYT, he died in May of 2018 at the age of 99, but his death had not been reported until now.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 28, 2020.

Friday, February 28th, 2020

Freeman J. Dyson, noted physicist.

As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper — worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize — that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great achievements of modern science.
But it was as a writer and technological visionary that he gained public renown. He imagined exploring the solar system with spaceships propelled by nuclear explosions and establishing distant colonies nourished by genetically engineered plants.

…

Dr. Dyson called himself a scientific heretic and warned against the temptation of confusing mathematical abstractions with ultimate truth. Although his own early work on QED helped bring photons and electrons into a consistent framework, Dr. Dyson doubted that superstrings, or anything else, would lead to a Theory of Everything, unifying all of physics with a succinct formulation inscribable on a T-shirt. In a speech in 2000 when he accepted the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Dr. Dyson quoted Francis Bacon: “God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.”
Relishing the role of iconoclast, he confounded the scientific establishment by dismissing the consensus about the perils of man-made climate change as “tribal group-thinking.” He doubted the veracity of the climate models, and he exasperated experts with sanguine predictions they found rooted less in science than in wishfulness: Excess carbon in the air is good for plants, and global warming might forestall another ice age.
In a profile of Dr. Dyson in 2009 in The New York Times Magazine, his colleague Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate, observed, “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

He was also skeptical of the “nuclear winter” theory.

He considered himself an environmentalist. “I am a tree-hugger, in love with frogs and forests,” he wrote in 2015 in The Boston Globe. “More urgent and more real problems, such as the overfishing of the oceans and the destruction of wildlife habitat on land, are neglected, while the environmental activists waste their time and energy ranting about climate change.” That was, to say the least, a minority position.
He was religious but in an unorthodox way, believing good works to be more important than theology. “Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason,” he said in his Templeton Prize acceptance speech. “The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.”

…

Any advanced civilization, he observed in a paper published in 1960, would ultimately expand to the point where it needed all the energy its solar system could provide. The ultimate solution would be to build a shell around the sun — a Dyson sphere — to capture its output. Earthlings, he speculated in a thought experiment, might conceivably do this by dismantling Jupiter and reassembling the pieces.

He was also one of the folks behind Project Orion.

In the late 1970s Dr. Dyson turned full force to writing. Anyone with an interest in science and an appreciation for good prose is likely to have some Dysons on the shelf: “Disturbing the Universe,” “Weapons and Hope,” “Infinite in All Directions,” “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet.”
He also entered literature in a different way. He appeared in John McPhee’s book “The Curve of Binding Energy” (1974), a portrait of Ted Taylor, the nuclear scientist who led the Orion effort, and in Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship and the Canoe” (1978). In a memorable scene, Mr. Brower wrote of Dr. Dyson’s reunion with his son, George, who had turned his back on high technology to live in a treehouse in British Columbia and build a seafaring canoe. George Dyson later returned to civilization and became a historian of technology and an author. Dr. Dyson’s daughter Esther Dyson is a well-known Silicon Valley consultant.

Statement from the Institute for Advanced Study. This is a great line:

In 1956, Dyson began a three-year association with General Atomic, where he worked to design a nuclear reactor that would be inherently safe, or, as colleague Edward Teller put it, “not only idiot-proof, but PhD proof.”

I’m going to have to start using “PhD proof” more often in conversation.

This is eloquently stated, and seems like a good note to end on:

“No life is more entangled with the Institute and impossible to capture—architect of modern particle physics, free-range mathematician, advocate of space travel, astrobiology and disarmament, futurist, eternal graduate student, rebel to many preconceived ideas including his own, thoughtful essayist, all the time a wise observer of the human scene,” stated Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor. “His secret was simply saying “yes” to everything in life, till the very end. We are blessed and honored that Freeman, Imme, and their family made the Institute their home. It will be so forever.”

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

Obit watch: February 27, 2020.

Thursday, February 27th, 2020

Kind, generous, and thoughtful Friend of the Blog Borepatch forwarded a nice obit from the Guardian for the late Clive Cussler, which was much appreciated.

In the early 2000s, Cussler agreed to work with co-authors at the request of his US publisher Simon and Schuster, in order to publish more frequently; in 2017 alone, he published four novels. “I don’t give a damn,” he said in a 2015 interview, in reply to criticism of the move. “I never had a highfalutin view of what I write. It’s a job. I entertain my readers. I get up in the morning and I start typing … I want it to be easy to read. I’m not writing exotic literature. I like snappy dialogue and short descriptions and lots of action.”

There’s an interesting obit in the NYT for Dr. Stanley Dudrick, who passed away at 84. I’d never heard of him, but when people say you rank with…

…Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis, who pioneered antiseptic medical procedures; William T.G. Morton, who popularized anesthesia during surgery; and Sir Alexander Fleming, who is credited with the discovery of penicillin.

What did he do? Well, when he was a medical resident, three people who had gone through “technically sucessful” surgeries died in the hospital. He wanted to know why, and devoted his time to research…

…finding the answer to be deceptively simple. But more than that, he perfected a treatment — one that has been credited with saving the lives of millions of premature infants as well as those of adults with a wide range of ailments, including cancer, severe bowel, kidney and liver diseases, and burns.

The deceptively simple cause?

The cause of the three deaths that had so motivated him, he concluded, was severe malnutrition. The patients had been unable to eat or to absorb enough nutrients to sustain life.
Malnutrition had often gone unrecognized as a direct or contributing cause of death because death certificates typically cited an underlying disease, like cancer or liver failure.

Dr. Dudrick developed “total parenteral nutrition” (TPN)…

…which bypasses the intestinal tract when a patient cannot receive food or fluids by mouth and instead injects nutrients — liquid carbohydrates, electrolytes, fats, minerals, proteins and vitamins — directly into the circulatory system through a vein.

He never patented TPN.

The intravenous delivery of concentrated nutrients proved successful over time in stimulating and restoring normal bodily functions, including immune systems of patients with malignant growths.
The technique has not only increased the chances of survival after operations; it has also spared many patients surgery — often because a diagnosis of malnutrition had not been contemplated and nutrition was not considered a remedy.

One peer who is quoted in the article believes Dr. Dudrick is responsible for saving “tens of millions of people across the world.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 26, 2020.

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020

My brother sent out an obit watch for Clive “Raise the Titanic!” Cussler. I have not been able to find an obit to link to yet, but his passing seems to be confirmed by a post from his wife on his Facebook page. When I find actual obits, I’ll either update here or post another obit watch tomorrow.

Edited to add: Of course. Literally five minutes after I hit “Publish”, the paper of record posts their obit.

He began writing fiction at home in the late 60s, but his first two books, “Pacific Vortex” and “The Mediterranean Caper,” were repeatedly rejected. Unable even to get an agent, he staged a hoax. Using the letterhead of a fictitious writers’ agency, he wrote to the agent Peter Lampack, posing as an old colleague about to retire and overloaded with work. He enclosed copies of his manuscripts, citing their potential.
It worked. “Where can I sign Clive Cussler?” Mr. Lampack wrote back. In 1973, “The Mediterranean Caper” was published, followed by “Iceberg” (1975) and “Raise the Titanic!” (1976).
Despite an improbable plot and negative reviews, “Raise the Titanic!” sold 150,000 copies, was a Times best seller for six months and became a 1980 film starring Richard Jordan and Jason Robards Jr.

I actually kind of enjoyed the book “Raise the Titanic!”, but I was young at the time. I also paid actual money to see the movie in a theater, and that was a piece of s–t.

His books sales have been staggering — more than 100 million copies, with vast numbers sold in paperback at airports. Translated into 40 or so languages, his books reached The New York Times’s best-seller lists more than 20 times, as he amassed a fortune estimated at $80 million.

Ahem. Ahem.

While searching for his obit, though, I stumbled across the THR one for Ben Cooper. He was in a fair number of Westerns: “Johnny Guitar”, “Support Your Local Gunfighter”, “The Fastest Guitar Alive”. He also did a lot of TV guest spots: “Gunsmoke”, “Bonanza”, “The Rifleman”, “Death Valley Days”, and had regular spots on “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo” and “The Fall Guy”…

…and yes, he was on “Mannix” twice. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4, the same one Robert Conrad was in. That’s the next one we’re watching, Lawrence. Also “To Cage a Seagull”, season 4, episode 10.)

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

Obit watch: February 25, 2020.

Tuesday, February 25th, 2020

Hosni Mubarak, deposed Egyptian leader. Hat tip to Lawrence on this, and I’m going to defer to him on any geopolitical angle: I just don’t know enough about Middle Eastern affairs.

John Franzese, Mafia guy.

Prosecutors portrayed him in his prime as one of the Mafia’s top “earners,” generating many millions of dollars in loot, and as one of its most fearsome killers. In 1967, prosecutors asserted that an informer had heard Mr. Franzese boast that he had been involved in 40 or 50 underworld executions.
At his last trial, in 2011, prosecutors said a turncoat had secretly recorded him graphically describing how hit men should dismember and dispose of bodies to evade arrest. “I killed a lot of guys,” he was quoted as saying in a pretrial hearing. “You’re not talking about four, five, six, ten.”

…

His first felony conviction — on federal charges of masterminding four nationwide bank robberies — came in March 1967. Nine months later, in December 1967, he was the subject of a state trial in Queens on charges of ordering the death of a suspected government informer, whose body, with 17 stab wounds and six bullet wounds and weighted with two concrete blocks, was discovered in Jamaica Bay. He was found not guilty.
After appeals lasting three years in the bank robbery case were denied, Mr. Franzese, in 1970, began serving an indeterminate term of up to 50 years. He was paroled in 1978, but, in a series of revolving-door parole violations, he spent about 20 of the next 30 years in federal penitentiaries.

He was convicted of extortion in 2011, sentenced to eight years, and was released in 2017. In the “who’d thunk it” department (hi, Borepatch!), Mr. Franzese was 103 when he died (apparently of natural causes, though his family declined to give details).

Diana Serra Cary, also known as “Baby Peggy”. I’d never heard of her, and I apologize for the long quotes, but I think this is a sad story (though maybe with a happy ending). She was a famous child star in silent films:

Her name was Peggy-Jean Montgomery, and she was a precocious 2½-year-old in 1921 when Century Studio cast her as Baby Peggy, opposite Brownie the Wonder Dog. America soon fell in love with the chubby-cheeked little girl as she fled burning buildings, held thugs at bay with a pistol and clung to the underside of a train.
A Century fire in 1926 and decaying celluloid have left only a few of her vintage films in museum archives, in the Library of Congress and on the internet, including “Playmates” (1921), “Miles of Smiles” (1923), “Helen’s Babies” (1924) and “Captain January” (1924). But silent film aficionados say she could evoke terror, joy, pity and sorrow with the best of them, and was a good mimic, too, satirizing adult stars of the day, including Rudolph Valentino and Pola Negri in “Peg o’ the Movies” (1923).
By age 5 she had made more than 150 pictures, mostly short comedies and melodramas, for Century, Universal and Principal Pictures, and was a multimillionaire. Home was a Beverly Hills mansion near Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. A $30,000 chauffeur-driven limousine took her to work every day.

…

“I had identity problems from the time I was growing up,” Ms. Cary recalled in a 1999 interview with silentsaregolden.com. “Baby Peggy was very powerful. She was very popular. Nobody knew who I was — I mean, me. So I had this terrific personality that the whole world knew, and then I had me to deal with. So I couldn’t get my head together, and I couldn’t be me as long as I was carrying her.”
In 1925, Baby Peggy’s career crumbled. A $1.5 million contract was canceled, and she was virtually blacklisted in Hollywood after her father, a cowboy stuntman and stand-in for the Western star Tom Mix, had a bitter falling out with a studio boss over her salary. She made one last picture, “April Fool,” in 1926, and then found no more work in Hollywood. She was washed up, a 7-year-old has-been.

,,,

For several years after her film career faded, Baby Peggy performed on a grueling vaudeville circuit to support her parents in the style to which they had become accustomed. They squandered much of her $2 million fortune on hotels, luxury cars and travel. The rest was lost or embezzled by a stepgrandfather who absconded, or it evaporated in the stock market crash of 1929. The home in Beverly Hills was sold, as were the cars, jewels and other luxuries.
As the Depression deepened, the family moved to a ranch in Wyoming. Dirt poor and struggling, they pawned everything of value. A friend lent the family $300, and against Peggy’s wishes they returned to Hollywood and put her back to work, now as a teenager in the talkies. From 1932 to 1938, she appeared in eight films as an anonymous extra or in small roles credited to Peggy Montgomery.

…

After graduating, she eloped in 1938 with her first boyfriend, Gordon Ayres, a movie extra. They were divorced in 1948. She was a switchboard operator and a bookstore clerk, and then managed a gift shop in Santa Barbara. She told no one of her past, and took the name Diana Serra. In 1954, she married Bob Cary, an artist, and took his surname. They had a son, Mark. Her husband died in 2001. Besides her son, she is survived by a granddaughter, Stephanie.
The Carys settled in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he painted and she became a freelance journalist, writing magazine articles. In 1970, they moved to La Jolla, part of San Diego, and she began a new career as a film historian. Her first book, “The Hollywood Posse” (1975), was a well-received account of stunt riders in film. Her second, “Hollywood’s Children” (1978), recounted the often troubling stories of child actors.
But it was the years of work on her memoir, “Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy? The Autobiography of Hollywood’s Pioneer Child Star” (1996), that proved therapeutic and redemptive. She re-examined her life in silent films, her parents’ conduct in frittering away her fortune, the studios’ harsh working conditions and the fates of child stars who, like her, were left impoverished, emotionally scarred and largely forgotten.
In “Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Child Star” (2003), she wrote about her old friend, who sued his mother and stepfather in 1938 for spending his more than $3 million in earnings on furs, diamonds, homes and expensive cars.

…

In recent years, Ms. Cary also appeared at silent film festivals, lectured, gave interviews and appeared in documentaries about her career, including Vera Iwerebor’s “Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room,” which was shown on Turner Classic Movies in 2012.

She was 101 years old, and is considered (at least by the paper of record) to have been the last surviving child star of that era. (“About a dozen other silent-era actors survive, but most were uncredited extras or ensemble players in series like the “Our Gang” pictures of the 1920s.”)

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

Obit watch: February 21, 2020.

Friday, February 21st, 2020

I can’t put this one any better than the paper of record did:

Sy Sperling, Founder of Hair Club for Men (and Also a Client), Dies at 78

Several people sent me obits for Lawrence Tesler:

Mr. Tesler worked at a number of Silicon Valley’s most important companies, including Apple under Steve Jobs. But it was as a young researcher for Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s that he did his most significant work: helping to develop today’s style of computer interaction based on a graphical desktop metaphor and a mouse.
Early in his Xerox career (he began there in 1973), Mr. Tesler and another researcher, Tim Mott, developed a program known as Gypsy, which did away with the restrictive modes that had made text editing complicated. For example, until Gypsy, most text-editing software had one mode for entering text and another for editing it.

…

The Gypsy program offered such innovations as the “cut and paste” analogy for moving blocks of text and the ability to select text by dragging the cursor through it while holding down a mouse button. It also shared with an earlier Xerox editor, Bravo, what became known as “what you see is what you get” printing (or WYSIWYG), a phrase Mr. Tesler used to describe a computer display that mirrored printed output.

…

It was Mr. Tesler who gave Mr. Jobs the celebrated demonstration of the Xerox Alto computer and the Smalltalk software system that would come to influence the design of Apple’s Lisa personal computer and then its Macintosh.

The NYT ran a nice obit for Kellye Nakahara Wallett. There’s also a very good tribute to her on Ken Levine’s blog.

Esther Scott, actress. (“Boys N the Hood”)

Ja’Net DuBois, “Willona Woods” on “Good Times” and co-writer and performer of the theme for “The Jeffersons”.

Bonnie MacLean, another one of the 1960s San Francisco psychedelic poster artists.

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

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