Multiple people emailed me about this while I was tied up with something else. I usually don’t like to cover breaking obits, but sometimes the story is just too big.
Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category
Obit watch: January 26, 2020.
Sunday, January 26th, 2020Obit watch: January 24, 2020.
Friday, January 24th, 2020Carol Serling, Rod Serling’s wife.
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Jo Shishido, Japanese actor.
He was in a whole bunch of Japanese films, including Seijun Suzuki’s “Branded to Kill” and something called “A Colt Is My Passport“. (I can’t lie: I love that title.)
He also played “Captain Joe” in a Japanese TV series called “Star Wolf“. And if that rings a faint (or even not-so-faint) bell for you, I’m so, so sorry: “Star Wolf” was later cut together and dubbed into two movies: “Fugitive Alien” and “Fugitive Alien II“, which, in turn, became MST3K episodes.
(I thought about embedding the forklift song here, but it was Ken, not Captain Joe, that they tried to kill with a forklift.)
Sonny Grosso, legendary NYPD detective. One night, Mr. Grosso and his partner, Eddie Egan…
…out for drinks at the Copacabana nightclub, spotted known drug dealers adulating an unidentified man, whom they later discovered owned a greasy spoon luncheonette in Brooklyn.
They followed him on a hunch, and the trail led to a French smuggler who was shipping 100 pounds of heroin — some of it stolen from a police vault — to the United States. Mr. Grosso determined the magnitude of the cache by weighing the Frenchman’s 1960 Buick Invicta when it arrived by ship and again when it was about to be transported back to France.
At the time, this was a record seizure. And speaking of bells ringing, yes, this was the “French Connection” case. Mr. Grosso’s character was “Buddy Russo” (played by Roy Scheider). (Eddie Egan was, of course, renamed “Popeye Doyle” and played by Gene Hackman, just in case you haven’t seen the movie.)
A product of East Harlem and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Grosso rose to the rank of detective first grade in the New York Police Department faster than any predecessor. He followed his 22 years on the force with a second career as a television producer and consultant for television shows about law enforcement, including “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Night Heat,” and for the movie “The Godfather,” in which he played a detective named Phil.
Until he died, Mr. Grosso carried his off-duty .38-caliber Colt revolver, the very same gun that was taped to the tank of a toilet and fired (using blanks) by Al Pacino in a mob hit in “The Godfather.”
…
Yes, he happened to be a regular at Rao’s, the tiny cliquish eatery on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem that has occasionally had unsavory associations. But it also happens to be a neighborhood hangout, just around the corner from where he was born.
Even there, drama intruded one night before Christmas in 2003, when a patron who objected to the singing of one of Mr. Grosso’s dinner guests was shot dead by another customer.
…
Recalling the crime-ridden city of decades earlier, Mr. Grosso explained how the police, and his partner in particular, had responded to the drug dealing that stoked homicides to record highs.
“It was a war then, and you had to act differently,” he said. “The junk epidemic was bursting out of Harlem.
“That’s why Eddie acted crazier than the people we were chasing. He had one philosophy: ‘It’s our job to put the bad guys in jail; don’t worry about the prosecutors and the judges.’ He was a madman, but he made sure I got home every night.”
“Those days,” Mr. Grosso said a little nostalgically, “we were just allowed to be cops.”
Obit watch: January 23, 2020.
Thursday, January 23rd, 2020Wow. It got busy up in here all of the sudden.
Jim Lehrer. I feel like I should have more to say about this, but I was only an occasional “NewsHour” watcher. And I think the papers for the next day or so are going to be filled with eulogies that are probably better than I could write.
John Karlen, working actor. He was Willie Loomis on “Dark Shadows” and Lacey’s husband on “Cagney and Lacey”, among his 117 credits…
…which do include “Mannix”. (“Quartet for Blunt Instrument”, season 8, episode 19. He was “Hood #1”.)
Jack Kehoe, who never did “Mannix”, but was the “Erie Kid” in “The Sting”, the book keeper in “The Untouchables” (the DePalma one) and had roles in “Serpico”, “Melvin and Howard”, and a bunch of other films.
Jack Van Impe, televangelist.
Mr. Van Impe promoted a view of the end of the world known in evangelical circles as dispensational premillennialism, which teaches that Christians will be raptured, or taken up to heaven, before a period of tribulation, a final battle called Armageddon and the return and rule of Jesus on earth.
His sermons had titles like “The Coming War with Russia, According to the Bible. Where? When? Why?” (In that sermon he warned of a coming world dictator and a Russian invasion of Israel.) In his final broadcast, on Jan. 10, he discussed relations between the United States and Iran and predicted “the bloodiest war in the world,” saying it would result mostly in the deaths of “Muslim terrorists.”
Obit watch: January 20, 2020.
Monday, January 20th, 2020Edith Kunhardt Davis, author (mostly of children’s books). I hadn’t heard of her before the NYT published her obit, but this is a kind of sad story that’s worth noting here.
Her mother was Dorothy Kunhardt, who also wrote children’s books, most famously Pat the Bunny.
Some of her books were Pat spinoffs, but she wrote originals too.
Dorothy Kunhardt revered Abraham Lincoln, a passion she inherited from her father, Frederick Hill Meserve. Their house in Morristown was filled with Lincoln and Civil War memorabilia. Over the decades, Philip Kunhardt amassed one of America’s greatest private Lincoln collections, with about 73,000 items, including a snippet of Lincoln’s hair.
Five generations of the family have been absorbed by Lincoln, and many of its members, including Dorothy Kunhardt, wrote books about him. On a trip to Springfield, Ill., she bought lamps from the parlor where Lincoln was married and used them to light her own house. Little wonder that Edith eventually wrote her own account, a children’s book titled “Honest Abe” (1993).
The sad part is that Ms. Davis was an alcoholic until 1973, when she got sober and began writing in earnest. She had a son, Edward, while she was drinking:
And long after she had become sober, she was confronted with the possibility that her excessive drinking while she was pregnant had led to the death of her son when he was 27.
His death, from heart disease, in 1990 became the subject of Ms. Davis’s 1995 memoir, “I’ll Love You Forever, Anyway.” An account of her grief made all the more anguishing by her guilt, it stood in stark contrast to the cheerful children’s tales for which she was known.
…
Obit watch: January 18, 2020.
Saturday, January 18th, 2020Marion Chesney, writer. She was best known for the mysteries she wrote as “M.C. Beaton”.
For the historical record: Christopher Tolkien.
Roger Scruton, English conservative intellectual. I’m not very familiar with his work, but Rod Dreher has written extensively about him.
… it caused me to think long and hard about Europe and its destiny, about Communism and about the human soul, which seems to live on in secret, even when its very existence has been denied as it was denied by Communism. In the Czech lands, I sensed the presence all around me of a dark, impersonal force, a controlling and all-observing eye whose goal was to plant suspicion and fear in the heart of every human relationship.
You could trace this force to no specific person, to no office or authority. It was just there, an invisible wall between all who sought to escape.
I had no name for this dark force, other than ‘It’ – a kind of negation of humanity. From behind the first stirrings of friendship or love, It lay in wait to reduce the flame to ashes. Always, when I stepped on the plane home, I felt I was escaping the grip of this alien force, and returning to a place where fear, suspicion and denunciation had no power over ordinary human decency.
Obit watch: January 16, 2020.
Thursday, January 16th, 2020Gladys Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain’s mom.
Anthony Bourdain became a hard-living chef, and in the late 1990s he wrote an article chronicling the seamier secrets of life in the restaurant business. He was struggling to publish it in 1999 when Ms. Bourdain mentioned to him that she knew a Times reporter, Esther Fein, who was married to David Remnick, the newly minted editor of The New Yorker magazine.
“She came over, and she said, ‘You know, your husband’s got this new job,’” Ms. Fein (who left The Times in 1999) said on Monday. “‘I hate to sound like a pushy mom, but I’m telling you this with my editor’s hat on, not my mother’s hat on. It’s really good, and it’s really interesting, but nobody will look at it, nobody will call him back or give it a second look. Could you put it in your husband’s hands?’”
Ms. Fein persuaded Mr. Remnick to read the article, and The New Yorker published it under the title “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” Mr. Bourdain later said that he had a book deal in a matter of days after that.
Matty Maher, of McSorley’s Old Ale House.
Mr. Maher, who could trace his career at McSorley’s to a bit of end-of-the-rainbow serendipity in Ireland, began by tending bar at the saloon in 1964 as an Irish immigrant.
He graduated to manager as the beer hall, surrounded by neighborhood blight near the Bowery, tottered at the brink of bankruptcy; survived the loss of a gender discrimination case in 1970 that forced McSorley’s to delete the last two words of its durable slogan vowing “Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies”; and endured a Health Department ordinance that, while it banned smoking, had the unintended consequence, Mr. Maher said, of encouraging customers to drink more.
Gary Starkweather, inventor of the laser printer.
And finally, Nelson Bryant, outdoor writer for the NYT for nearly 40 years.
I know: who knew the paper of record had an outdoor writer? But they did from 1967 to 2005.
Obit watch: January 11, 2020.
Saturday, January 11th, 2020Seriously, yesterday afternoon and last night were incredibly hectic. Let’s start at the top and work our way down.
Neil Peart, drummer for Rush.
Okay, that was a cheat. How about this?
Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman.
Georges Duboeuf, wine guy.
Mr. Duboeuf was already a successful Beaujolais merchant in the 1970s when he set out to mass-market the local tradition of making primeur, a quick, joyous wine born of the year’s new grapes.
Many wine regions enjoyed a similar harvest ritual, a festive local practice among friends and colleagues. Beaujolais was an especially enjoyable wine to drink young. It was fresh and easy in a way that, say, young Bordeaux, with tannins that could be unpleasantly astringent, was not.
A thriving local market existed for the young wine. It expanded to the Paris bistros in the 1950s, when distributors began to compete in a race to see who could deliver the first bottles to the capital.
Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the mid-November day that it became legal to ship the new wine, cartons were loaded onto trucks, and off they went as eager revelers waited. The official release date shifted from year to year, but the authorities eventually settled on the third Thursday of November.
Mr. Duboeuf took this annual race and, through energetic and endless promotion, turned it into much more. He enlisted countless French chefs, restaurants and celebrities to the cause.
A crucial ingredient in the promotion was a dollop of suspense. As the clock struck 12:01, Mr. Duboeuf made sure that cases and cases of the wine were loaded onto trucks, ships and eventually jets for shipment around the world, all duly recorded by cameras. The fact that much of the wine had been shipped in advance was irrelevant to the fun.
“Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé” became an exultant international catchphrase. Television commercials would show the wine being delivered to, by Beaujolais standards, the remotest corners of the earth.
Alasdair Gray, Scottish novelist.
By way of Lawrence, Ken Fuson. Not a particularly famous guy, but this is one of those funny and touching self-written obits.
Harry Hains, actor. (“American Horror Story”, “The OA”.)
Also by way of Lawrence (as was the Harry Haines obit): Shozo Uehara.
Obit watch: January 10, 2020.
Friday, January 10th, 2020Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, noted for “77 Sunset Strip”. NYT.
Broadcast on ABC from 1958 to 1964, “77 Sunset Strip” starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Roger Smith as a pair of suave Los Angeles private eyes and Mr. Byrnes as the parking-lot attendant at the restaurant next door to their office.
As he ministered tenderly to the Thunderbird convertible driven by Mr. Zimbalist in the show, Kookie (né Gerald Lloyd Kookson III) ran his omnipresent pocket comb through his lush ducktailed pompadour, cracked his devil-may-care grin and spouted aphorisms that even at midcentury had all the gnomic obscurity of Zen koans:
“A dark seven” (a depressing week); “piling up the Z’s” (getting some sleep); “headache grapplers” (aspirin); “buzzed by germsville” (to become ill); and, most emblematically, “Baby, you’re the ginchiest!” — a phrase of the highest Kookian approbation.
His character evolved from parking attendant to junior partner in the detective agency, but he was pretty much typecast after that. Deadline suggests that he partially inspired the Rick Dalton character in “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood”. He did go on to play the dance host in “Grease” and did a fair number of guest shots on TV shows…
…yes, including “Mannix”. (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6.)
Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, Texas sculptor of giant objects.
…
…
A few years after the boots were disassembled and moved to a mall in San Antonio on three flatbed trucks in 1980, Mr. Wade got a phone call from the mall’s manager. A homeless man had found his way into one of the boots and cooked his lunch there. The boot was on fire.
“It was the size of a small apartment, kind of a nice spot, and he was cooking lunch with cans of Sterno, and smoke was emerging from the top of the boots,” Mr. Wade said in “Too High, Too Wide and Too Long.”
Obit watch: January 9, 2020.
Thursday, January 9th, 2020The great Buck Henry.
He was a co-writer of “The Graduate”, co-created “Get Smart” with Mel Brooks, did guest stints on “Saturday Night Live” in the early days (and was the first five-timer), created “Quark”, wrote the screnplays for “Catch-22” and “The Day of the Dolphin”, co-wrote the legendary disaster “Town and Country“…man, what a career.
(Edited to add: NYT obit wasn’t up previously. It is now.)
Mike Resnick, noted SF writer. Lawrence has an excellent obit up at his site, and pretty much says everything I was going to say. I won’t say we were personal friends (I don’t think he would have passed Lawrence’s “pick me out of a police lineup” test) but he was a good and erudite guy who got me into Theodore Roosevelt and “Duck, You Sucker!” (among other things). His passing leaves the world a smaller, colder place.
Edited to add: found this, by way of Dean Bradley’s Twitter, and thought it was a nice tribute to Mr. Resnick.
“Science Fiction is the literature of warning: this bad thing will happen IF…”
All the possibilities in the world are loaded into that statement. I think about that whenever I sit down to write a sci fi story. And I always think of Mike when I do it.
RIP Mr Resnick. 3/3
— Daniel J Davis (@DanielJWrites) January 9, 2020
Edited to add 2: Michael Swanwick on Mr. Resnick.
I had not heard of Adela Holzer before her obit showed up in the paper of record, but her story is too good to ignore. She was married to a “shipping magnate” and was an early investor in the musical “Hair”. (Depending on which account you believe, she put in $57,000 and made $2 million, or she put in $7,500 and made $115,000.) She went on to produce the notorious flop “Dude“.
Then it got worse. You may ask: how much worse can it get than having your show close on opening night? This much worse:
At that point, theater was the least of Ms. Holzer’s problems. She had declared bankruptcy seven weeks earlier. She had been arrested on fraud charges over the summer and was free on $50,000 bail, awaiting the first of the three criminal trials that would shape the rest of her life.
The indictment, which finally came in 1979, was for a classic Ponzi scheme: paying her earliest victims “profits,” which were really just funds from her next group of investors, and so on. One of those early investors was Jeffrey Picower, who was later implicated in the Bernie Madoff scandal, a much larger Ponzi scheme.
She served two years in prison. Ms. Holzer tried to make a comeback in the 1980s with a musical about Joseph McCarthy that never opened.
She served four years (of an eight year sentence) for that.
Things had changed in 2001, when she was arrested yet again, this time charged with 39 counts of fraud. At the time, she was using a different surname, Rosian — she was living with a man named Vladimir Rosian on the Upper West Side — and the stakes were much lower. She had been charging immigrants $2,000 to $2,700 each, falsely telling them that she had influence on immigration legislation and could help them gain permanent resident status.
This time she was sentenced to nine to 18 years. When she was released in June 2010, she was in her 80s.
Noted:
Obit watch: January 7, 2020.
Tuesday, January 7th, 2020Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation. She was 52.
The writer David Samuels, a friend since childhood, said the cause was metastatic breast cancer, a disease that resulted from the BRCA genetic mutation. Ms. Wurtzel had a double mastectomy in 2015. After her diagnosis, she became an advocate for BRCA testing — something she had not had — and wrote about her cancer experience in The New York Times.
“I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer,” she wrote. “I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so.”
Obit watch: January 4, 2020.
Saturday, January 4th, 2020Sam Wyche, former coach of the Bengals and Buccaneers. He was 61-66 (3-2 in playoffs) in Cincinnati and 23-41 in Tampa.
For the historical record: NYT obits for Jack Sheldon and Syd Mead.
Obit watch: January 2, 2020.
Thursday, January 2nd, 2020Don Larsen, pitcher for the Yankees and the only man ever to pitch a perfect game in a World Series. ESPN.
Jack “Only A Bill” Sheldon. Mark Evanier has a nice tribute up at his blog, with two funny stories about the late Mr. Sheldon (who, in addition to his “Schoolhouse Rock” work, did several appearances on the late 60’s/early 70s “Dragnet”).
Martin West. He did bit parts on a lot of stuff, including “Ironside”, “The Invaders”, and “Hill Street Blues”.
(Hattip on all three of these to Lawrence.)
For the historical record: David Stern. ESPN. Field of Schemes.
Obit watch: December 31, 2019.
Tuesday, December 31st, 2019Last one of the year.
Sonny Mehta, book guy.
Gen. Paul X. Kelley, former commandant of the United States Marines.
The Beirut bombing took place four months into his time as commandant.
Obit watch: December 30, 2019.
Monday, December 30th, 2019Neil Innes, musical humorist.
In the early 1960s he was one of the first members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, also known as simply the Bonzo Dog Band. He wrote the group’s biggest hit, “I’m the Urban Spaceman,” which climbed into the Top 10 on the British charts in 1968.
In the 1970s he wrote material for Monty Python, the groundbreaking six-member comedy troupe. Midway through that decade he and Eric Idle, a Python, came up with the Rutles, a deadpan parody of the Beatles; the group not only recorded albums but also made films, most notably the mock documentary “The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash” in 1978.
Sleepy LaBeef, noted rockabilly musician.
Lee Mendelson, producer of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.