Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: April 4, 2020.

Saturday, April 4th, 2020

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

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

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

Admiral Feightner was 100 when he passed.

Ira Einhorn is burning in hell.

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

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

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

Obit watch: April 3, 2020.

Friday, April 3rd, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Frankland was 108 when he died.

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

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

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 2, 2020.

Thursday, April 2nd, 2020

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

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

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

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

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 30, 2020.

Monday, March 30th, 2020

Krzysztof Penderecki, noted contemporary classical composer.

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

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

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

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

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

Obit watch: March 27, 2020.

Friday, March 27th, 2020

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

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

Fred “Curly” Neal, legendary Harlem Globetrotter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obit watch: March 26, 2020.

Thursday, March 26th, 2020

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

Stuart Gordon, director and writer. THR.

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

Posted in Lovecraft, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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

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