Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: December 27, 2019.

Friday, December 27th, 2019

Jerry Herman, composer and lyricist.

In a half-century of work, he scored a dozen Broadway musicals and five Off Broadway revues, composed many of the nation’s most popular songs and was showered with awards, including Tonys for “Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage aux Folles.”
He also made stage history as the first composer-lyricist to have three musicals run more than 1,500 consecutive performances on Broadway — “Hello, Dolly!” with 2,844, “Mame” with 1,508 and “La Cage” with 1,761 — and remains one of only two to achieve that feat. (Stephen Schwartz, with “Pippin,” “The Magic Show” and “Wicked,” is the second.) And “La Cage” (1983) was the only Broadway musical to win the Tony for best revival twice, for 2004 and 2010 productions.

Posted in Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 26, 2019.

Thursday, December 26th, 2019

Death doesn’t take a holiday, but I do.

Now that I’m back…

Chuck Peddle. He was a key designer of the 6502 processor for MOS Technology.

“Chuck Peddle is one of the great unsung heroes of the personal computer age,” said Doug Fairbairn, a director at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “Virtually all of the early, successful, mass-market personal computers were built around the 6502, not chips from Intel or anyone else.”

One key reason for this is that the 6502 sold for $25 in 1975. The Motorola 6800 sold for $300.

Edward Aschoff, college football reporter for ESPN. The ESPN tribute makes it sound like he was a genuinely fun and well thought of guy. He was only 34 years old, and died after a short illness:

Mr. Aschoff had contracted pneumonia about a month ago, according to his social media posts. “I had a virus for two weeks. Fever and cough and the doctors think it turned into this multifocal pneumonia recently,” he tweeted on Dec. 5, noting that he rarely gets sick and had been taking antibiotics.

Posted in Geek, Media, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 23, 2019.

Monday, December 23rd, 2019

In keeping with the official policy of this blog: Claudine Auger. Apparently, she was a very successful actress in Europe, and less so elsewhere. But: she was the Bond girl in “Thunderball”.

Johanna Lindsey, who I have actually heard of, but never read any of her books. She actually passed away October 27th, but her death was only recently announced.

Her books sold at least 60 million copies, according to her publisher, Simon & Schuster, and she ranked among the leading romance writers of her era, most notably Jude Deveraux, Judith McNaught, Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers.
“Since I was old enough to appreciate a good novel, I’ve been a romantic,” Ms. Lindsey was quoted as saying in the book “Love’s Leading Ladies” (1982), by Kathryn Falk. “I enjoy happy-ending love stories more than any other type of reading. Romance is what comes out of me.”
Ms. Lindsey set her passionate tales in many locales, including the Caribbean; the Barbary Coast; England as early as the year 873; Norway, when the Vikings ruled; 19th-century Texas, Wyoming and Montana; and the planet Kystran, in a series of science-fiction bodice-rippers.

…

Liz Perl, the marketing director of Simon & Schuster, said that Ms. Lindsey had been a shy, private person who only occasionally toured to promote her books.
“On several occasions, her mother would accompany her, which was really sweet,” Ms. Perl said by phone. “Her mother was quite outgoing, so Johanna would sign the books, and her mom would stand next to her and tell fans anecdotes about Johanna when she was young.”
She added, “When she turned her books in, she wouldn’t celebrate by buying a car or going to Paris, but by buying a video game and playing it for 12 hours before starting her next book.”

I have a feeling that I would have enjoyed hanging out with her.

Gen. Ahmed Gaïd Salah, who the paper of record describes as “Algeria’s de facto ruler”.

General Gaïd Salah’s unexpected death at 79 — his official age, though he was most likely older — less than two weeks after the army’s favored candidate was elected president, creates a power vacuum in the vast North African nation, a major oil and gas producer.
A survivor from the generation that led Algeria to independence from France in the early 1960s, General Gaïd Salah was the man who increasingly blocked the demands of the popular protest movement that has rocked the country’s politics since last February.
As chief of staff, General Gaïd Salah orchestrated a hardening crackdown on the movement, imposed a presidential election that the protesters rejected, and demanded, in regular if stiff televised speeches to other army officers, that the demonstrators back off.
The movement has rejected the newly elected president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, as a mere figurehead, put in place to carry out the general’s wishes.

I try to leave geopolitics to Lawrence, so all I’ll say is: it should be interesting to watch this play out.

Elizabeth Spencer, another author I’d heard of but have not read. She was apparently most famous for “The Light in the Piazza”.

Baba Ram Dass, counterculture guy.

He started a foundation to combat blindness in India and Nepal, supported reforestation in Latin America, and developed health education programs for American Indians in South Dakota.

…

By the 1980s, Ram Dass had a change of mind and image. He shaved off the beard but left a neatly trimmed mustache. He tried to drop his Indian name — he no longer wanted to be a cult figure — but his publisher vetoed the idea. Ram Dass said that he had never intended to be a guru and that Harvard had been right to throw him out.
He continued to turn out books and recordings, however. He started or helped start foundations to promote his charities, to help prisoners and to spread his message of spiritual equanimity. He made sure his books and tapes were reasonably priced.
The old orthodoxies slipped away. He said he realized that his 400 LSD trips had not been nearly as enlightening as his drugless spiritual epiphanies — although, he said, he continued to take one or two drug trips a year for old time’s sake. He said other religions, including the Judaism that he had rejected as a young man, were as valid as the Eastern ones.

Posted in Books, History, Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 21, 2019.

Saturday, December 21st, 2019

Junior Johnson, legendary NASCAR racer. NYT. ESPN. News and Observer. NASCAR.

“The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” by Tom Wolfe.

In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.
Detroit has discovered these pockets of courage almost like a natural resource, in the form of Junior Johnson and about twenty other drivers. There is something exquisitely ironic about it. Detroit is now engaged in the highly sophisticated business of offering the illusion of Speed for Everyman—making their cars go 175 miles an hour on racetracks—by discovering and putting behind the wheel a breed of mountain men who are living vestiges of a degree of physical courage that became extinct in most other sections of the country by 1900. Of course, very few stock-car drivers have ever had anything to do with the whiskey business. A great many always lead quiet lives off the track. But it is the same strong people among whom the whiskey business developed who produced the kind of men who could drive the stock cars. There are a few exceptions, Freddie Lorenzen, from Elmhurst, Illinois, being the most notable. But, by and large, it is the rural Southern code of honor and courage that has produced these, the most daring men in sports.

Randy Suess. He and Ward Christensen built the first computer bulletin board system in 1978.

Posted in Cars, Geek, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obits and firings: December 19, 2019.

Thursday, December 19th, 2019

Obit: legendary college football coach Hayden Fry.

Firing: Tom Coughlin out as “executive vice president of football operations” for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Yes, I know this is a lazy post, but I just don’t have much to say about either event.

Posted in Firings, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 16, 2019.

Monday, December 16th, 2019

Anna Karina, French New Wave star. She was in a whole bunch of Jean-Luc Godard’s stuff, including “Band of Outsiders”, “Made in U.S.A.”, and (of course) “Alphaville“.

Gershon Kingsley, Moog guy. You perhaps knew him best as the composer of “Pop Corn”. And I was going to embed the Muppet version here, but the paper of record has saved me the effort.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 14, 2019.

Saturday, December 14th, 2019

As promised, the Danny Aiello roundup: NYT. THR. Variety. Tributes.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch.

Friday, December 13th, 2019

RoadRich has tipped me off to the death of the great Danny Aiello, but I think I want to wait until tomorrow to post obits, just so things have a chance to shake out.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 12, 2019.

Thursday, December 12th, 2019

Philip McKeon, who you may remember as Alice’s son Tommy on “Alice”. I had no idea he lived in Wimberly (which is a short drive from where I live), or that he was doing a radio show. (Hattip: RoadRich.)

Leonard Goldberg, noted television producer. He collaborated with Aaron Spelling on “Fantasy Island” and “Charlie’s Angels”, and went on to produce “Blue Bloods”.

I don’t watch much TV, especially network TV, but I have a feeling I should start watching “Blue Bloods”.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Tatsuo Umemiya, Japanese actor. I’m not familiar with his work, but he was highly prolific in Japan: 203 credits as an actor between 1959 and 2013.

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

Obit watch: December 9, 2019.

Monday, December 9th, 2019

René Auberjonois, versatile actor. He’s getting a lot of attention for his roles in Altman’s “MASH”, “Benson”, and some minor SF TV show, but he did a lot of movies and TV: “Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, “Mrs. Columbo” (but oddly not “Columbo”)…the list goes on.

Caroll Spinney is also getting a lot of coverage, but noted here for the record.

Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve.

Ron Leibman, another one of those highly versatile actors in movies, television, and theater.

Finally, Winston Lawson. he was the Secret Service agent who did the advance work for Kennedy’s Texas trip, rode in the motorcade, and helped load the president onto the stretcher at Parkland.

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

Obit watch: December 4, 2019.

Wednesday, December 4th, 2019

Interesting pair of obits from the NYT:

Wayne Merry has passed away at the age of 88. Mr. Merry, Warren Harding, and George Whitmore were rock climbers:

On Nov. 12, 1958, they became the first climbers to reach the top of El Capitan after ascending the Nose, notable for a daunting overhang called the Great Roof. The climb took 45 days, spread out over about a year and a half; in each leg of the climb they would secure fixed ropes to the highest point they had reached so that they could later resume the climb with relative ease.

…

They subsisted on cheese, raisins, canned fruit and sardines. They carried water in an old paint-thinner can, and drank wine. “We trained on red wine, if anything,” Merry told The Yukon News in 2015.
They relied on improvised implements, including pitons that they fashioned from the legs of old wood stoves and tools from a hardware store that they repurposed for climbing.
“I wouldn’t hang a picture from them today, but back then we hung our lives on them,” Merry told Yukon North of Ordinary magazine in 2016.

Brad Gobright passed away last week at 31.

Mr. Gobright, a native of California, was hailed as one of the world’s best free solo climbers, a technique that uses no ropes. He set a speed record in 2017 — 2 hours 19 minutes 44 seconds — at the popular climbing route called the Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. It has since been surpassed.

Mr. Gobright died in a fall while rappelling with a climbing partner in Mexico.

In non-rock climbing related news, this is a nice tribute to Tim George. Dr. George was a pediatric neurosurgeon at Dell Children’s Hospital:

In 2006, Bill Dollahite’s son Scott was badly hurt playing football for Cedar Park High School in Waco. Doctors told him Scott was paralyzed. The family decided to move him closer to home.
“We took about a three-hour ride in the worst weather in the world … following an ambulance,” Dollahite said. In the middle of the night, the ambulance pulled into what was Brackenridge Hospital, “and here comes Dr. George.”
George was still new to Austin; Dollahite is not sure if he even had an office. Dell Children’s was under construction.
“Dr. George looked at him and goes, ‘You know, let’s not give up everything just yet. Let me take a look at this, because everything looks too perfect,’” Dollahite said. “Long story short, Scott went into Brackenridge quadriplegic. A couple of days later, he walked out. No ill effects after that. By the miracles that Dr. George did, he gave him his life back.”

Dr. George went on to take up racing as a hobby. He was competing in an endurance race at Sebring in Florida last month (as part of a team with Scott Dollahite) when he suddenly became ill, pulled into pit row, and collapsed.

I never watched “Will and Grace”, but Shelley Morrison had a long career before that show: “Laredo”, “The Flying Nun”, “240-Robert”…

NYT obit for D.C. Fontana.

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

Obit watch: December 3, 2019.

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019

Robert K. Massie, author, historian, and Pulitzer Prize winner.

Mr. Massie said his literary odyssey was set in motion by research he did at the New York Public Library during lunch breaks from his job as a young journalist. It was purely personal research at first: He wanted to know more about the bleeding disease of hemophilia and how he and his wife at the time, Suzanne Massie, who became a noted Russian scholar, could help their hemophiliac son, Bob.
During his research he became fascinated with perhaps the most famous childhood case of hemophilia, that of Alexei, a son of Nicholas and Alexandra. It was to help Alexei that Alexandra had summoned Grigory Rasputin, the notorious faith-healing monk who gained influence over the imperial court. Public disdain of Rasputin contributed to the Russian people’s turn against the monarchy, helping to pave the way for the revolution of 1917.
Mr. Massie wound up writing an article on hemophilia for The Saturday Evening Post, where he had taken a job in 1962. He wrote an accompanying article about Alexei and his parents, but The Post did not print it. Still, he found himself unable to abandon the family drama of the Romanovs, as the Russian dynasty was known, and he eventually quit his job to pursue the subject full time.
A decade later, “Nicholas and Alexandra” was published to acclaim. Though nearly 1,000 pages long, it sold more than 4.5 million copies and is regarded as one of the most popular historical studies ever published.

When I was a little kid, we had a Reader’s Digest Condensed book that had Nicholas and Alexandra in it. I remember being both fascinated by it and incapable of understanding it, because I was a little kid, and Russian history was just a little above my level. Not too long ago (back when I was at St. Ed’s) I read – and loved – the actual, non-condensed book.

Lawrence tipped me off to this, but I don’t have an obit to link: Dorothy Catherine Fontana, aka D.C. Fontana. She did a lot of writing for television, including “The Waltons”, “Land of the Lost”, something called “Captain Simian & The Space Monkeys”, “Babylon 5”, “Dallas”, “Logan’s Run”, “Lancer”…

…and she was also heavily involved with a minor series called “Star Trek”, as well as some of the sequels: “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Star Trek: The Animated Series”, and various spin-off products.

Edited to add: THR obit. (Hattip: RoadRich.)

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

Obit watch: November 28, 2019.

Thursday, November 28th, 2019

Godfrey Gao, actor. He was in “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones” and did some other work in Chinese films. (He was also the voice of Ken in the Mandarin version of “Toy Story 3”.)

Mr. Gao was 35 years old. He died of an apparent heart attack while filming a Chinese reality TV series, “Chase Me”, in which “participants scale tall buildings, skid down obstacle courses and hang from tightropes”.

The death of Mr. Gao, who was born in Taiwan and raised in Canada, set off a wave of anger on the Chinese internet, with millions of people criticizing the entertainment industry as focused on ratings at the expense of safety.
By Wednesday evening, the death of Mr. Gao was one of the most widely discussed topics on Weibo, a popular microblogging site, and hashtags about it had garnered hundreds of millions of views.

William Ruckelshaus, “Saturday Night Massacre” figure.

And on a night of high drama, as the nation held its breath and constitutional government appeared to hang in the balance, Nixon ordered his top three Justice Department officials, one after another, to fire the Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, rather than comply with his subpoena for nine incriminating Oval Office tape recordings.
Mr. Cox’s complete independence had been guaranteed by Nixon and the attorney general during the prosecutor’s Senate confirmation hearings the previous May. He could be removed only for “cause” — some gross malfeasance in office. But none was even alleged. Nixon’s order to summarily dismiss Mr. Cox thus raised a most profound question: Was the president above the law?
Mr. Richardson and Mr. Ruckelshaus refused to fire Mr. Cox and resigned even as orders for their own dismissals were being issued by the White House. But Robert H. Bork, the United States solicitor general and the acting attorney general after the dismissal of his two superiors, carried out the presidential order, not only firing Mr. Cox but also abolishing the office of the special Watergate prosecutor.

Clive James, British critic.

He once dismissed a tedious public affairs program as “the mental equivalent of navel fluff.” He described William Shatner’s acting technique in “Star Trek” as “picked up from someone who once worked with somebody who knew Lee Strasberg’s sister.”

Jonathan Miller, theater and opera director, “Beyond The Fringe” member, television host, and medical doctor.

I’m generally unfamiliar with his theater and opera work. But I remember when “The Body in Question” aired on US television: I was pretty impressed with the episodes I managed to catch, and would love to watch the whole series again. (It looks like it may be on YouTube, though not in great quality. I can’t find a DVD of it, or of “States of Mind”, which I would also love to see.)

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

Obit watch: November 24, 2019.

Sunday, November 24th, 2019

Gahan Wilson, one of the greatest cartoonists ever.

Michael J. Pollard, character actor. Among his roles: “C.W. Moss” in “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Jahn” in the “Miri” episode of “Star Trek: Original Recipe”, “Fauss” in “Little Fauss and Big Halsy”, and a lot of assorted 60s and 70s TV.

At the Actors Studio he did a scene with Marilyn Monroe, at her request. According to Ms. Ephron, when Ms. Monroe had called him up to do the scene, she said: “Hello, this is Marilyn. The girl from class.”

NYT obit for Fred Cox. (Previously.)

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

Obit watch: November 22, 2019.

Friday, November 22nd, 2019

Fred Cox, former kicker for the Minnesota Vikings.

More significant (at least to me): Mr. Cox and another guy, John Mattox, invented the NERF football.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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