Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obits and firings: September 21, 2019.

Saturday, September 21st, 2019

Andy Green out as manager of the San Diego Padres. 274-366 over basically four years, during which the team never finished above .500. And they lost at least 90 games in the first three seasons. (They’re 69-85 right now.) ESPN.

Obit: Barron Hilton, son of Conrad Hilton, grandfather of Paris, and last survivor of the original AFL team owners. Sadly, the team he owned was the worthless Los Angeles (at the time) Chargers, but that was hardly his fault.

Marko Feingold. He was Austria’s oldest survivor of the Holocaust, and died at 106.

(Hattip on the Feingold and Green stories to Lawrence. Hattip on the de Blasio obit to Mike the Musicologist.)

Posted in Firings, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 18, 2019.

Wednesday, September 18th, 2019

Betty Corwin. I hadn’t heard of her until I read the NYT obit, but it seems like she was one of nature’s noblewomen.

Ms. Corwin founded the New York Public Library Theater on Film and Tape Archive.

The still-growing archive — which at last count held 8,127 recordings, including artist interviews and theater-related films and television programs — has long been a rich resource for artists, students and researchers.
When Audra McDonald was preparing to perform in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” on Broadway this summer, she went to the library to watch the archive’s 1988 recording of the original Manhattan Theater Club production, starring Kathy Bates. The week that Mike Nichols died in 2014, he had an appointment to look at “Master Class,” a version of which he was planning to direct for HBO.

…

The collection includes every play in August Wilson’s 20th-century cycle, starting with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” in 1985; the 1978 New York Shakespeare Festival production of “The Taming of the Shrew,” starring Meryl Streep and Raul Julia; the original Broadway production of “Angels in America,” recorded in 1994; and the 1988 Lincoln Center Theater production of “Waiting for Godot,” starring Robin Williams and Steve Martin.

Sander Vanocur, noted TV journalist.

Mr. Vanocur, along with John Chancellor, Frank McGee and Edwin Newman, was one of NBC’s “four horsemen” — correspondents who prowled the floor of national conventions in the 1960s in search of news developments and tantalizing tidbits to report. (He was also the last surviving of those four.)

Cokie Roberts. NYT. NPR.

Posted in Media, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 17, 2019.

Tuesday, September 17th, 2019

Phyllis Newman, actress.

Ms. Newman won a Tony in 1962 as best featured actress in a musical for “Subways Are for Sleeping,” whose book and lyrics were written by her husband, Adolph Green, and his regular collaborator, Betty Comden. In the show, Ms. Newman played a long-term resident of the Brunswick Arms who, to stave off eviction, has shut herself in her room, a role that required Ms. Newman to spend the play in an unusual costume.
“Her line is that she is sick,” Howard Taubman wrote of the character in his review in The New York Times, “and to prove it she wears a towel wrapped around her excellently appointed torso. The only addition to her costume all evening is a pair of black gloves.”

Both my mother and the paper of record tell me that she was also a fixture on a lot of 70s game shows and talk shows, but I don’t remember that.

Cokie Roberts obit will probably be tomorrow, to give the dust time to settle.

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

Obit watch: September 16, 2019.

Monday, September 16th, 2019

Ric Ocasek, co-founder of The Cars and a good Cleveland boy.

Anne Rivers Siddons, novelist. She was one of those writers I’d heard of, and about, but I’ve never read any of her books.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 13, 2019.

Friday, September 13th, 2019

Eddie Money.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 12, 2019.

Thursday, September 12th, 2019

T. Boone Pickens. Oklahoma State football hardest hit.

Diet Eman has passed away at 99.

Ms. Eman, at 20, was living with her parents and bicycling to work at the Twentsche Bank in The Hague when, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands. Her sister’s fiancé was killed on the first of five days of fighting. (A brother died later in a Japanese prison camp.)
Some of her neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Ms. Eman — herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage and, for the most part, even lying to others — could find no justification for such evil.
She and her boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group (coincidentally called HEIN, an acronym translated as “Help each other in need”). They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal.

…

A plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Ms. Eman’s at the bank, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food and gas ration cards, forging identity papers and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews.
She said of the German occupiers, “It was beyond their comprehension that we would risk so much for the Jews.”
Ms. Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying babies and even toilet flushing risked raising the suspicions of neighbors, who knew only that a woman had been living there alone.

Ms. Eman was captured at one point and briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp: she managed to convince the Germans she was an innocent housemaid who knew nothing. Her fiance was also captured and was killed at Dachau.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan hailed Ms. Eman in a letter for risking her safety “to adhere to a higher law of decency and morality.” In 1998, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, granted her the title of Righteous Among the Nations, given to non-Jews for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust; she was cited for her leadership in sheltering them. In 2015, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, during a stop in Grand Rapids on a promotional tour for Dutch businesses, lauded Ms. Eman as “one of our national heroes.” (She became a United States citizen in 2007.)

It has been a bad week for photographers.

Robert Frank, noted for “The Americans”.

“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
But recognition was by no means immediate. The pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.”

Neil Montanus. He worked in several different areas of photography, including underwater and microscopic. But he was perhaps most famous as one of Kodak’s leading “Colorama” photographers: he took 55 out of the 565 photos, which were displayed in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal between 1950 and 1990.

Every weekday, 650,000 commuters and visitors who jostled through the main concourse could gaze up at Kodak’s Coloramas, the giant photographs that measured 18 feet high and 60 feet wide, each backlit by a mile of cold cathode tubing, displaying idealized visions of postwar family life — not to mention the wonders of color film.

I kind of wish “On Taking Pictures” was still doing new shows, as I figure Jeffery Saddoris and Bill Wadman would have a lot to say about these two.

Finally: Daniel Johnston, singer/songwriter and Austin icon. Don’t have much to say: for me, he fell into the same category as Roky Erickson.

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

Obit watch: September 7, 2019.

Saturday, September 7th, 2019

Carol Lynley, actress.

The paper of record seems rather dismissive of her acting career post 1967 or thereabouts (“..she was never directly in the public eye again”) but she did a lot of guest shots on various 1970s TV: “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Kojack”, “Quincy M.E”, “Police Woman”, “Hawaii 5-0”, multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, and the list goes on…

…and she was Kolchak’s girlfriend in “The Night Stalker”…

…and, yes, she did do a “Mannix” (“Voice In the Dark”).

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

Obit watch: September 6, 2019.

Friday, September 6th, 2019

Sharing the same riff with other folks, but: Robert Mugabe is burning in Hell.

Unemployment exceeded 80 percent. At one point, inflation ran at an almost incomprehensible 230 million percent: When a bank note with a face value of 10 trillion dollars was introduced in early 2009, it was worth only about $8 on the black market. Zimbabwe’s money became so worthless that it was effectively replaced by outside currencies, including the South African rand, the United States dollar and China’s yuan.
Mr. Mugabe morphed into a caricature of dictatorship: vain and capricious, encircled by the flashy spending of his second wife and other family members, who lived in luxury at home and went on shopping sprees and long annual vacations in the Far East. (That wife, the former Grace Marufu, had been his secretary and mistress, and Mr. Mugabe, despite a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, fathered two children with her while still married to his first wife, Sally Hayfron.)

…

Starting around 2000, Mr. Mugabe’s lieutenants sent squads of young men to invade hundreds of white-owned farms and chase away their owners. The campaign took a huge toll.
Over two years, nearly all of the country’s white-owned land had been redistributed to about 300,000 black families, among them 50,000 aspiring black commercial farmers and many of Mr. Mugabe’s loyalists. By late 2002, only about 600 of the country’s 4,500 white farmers had kept parts of their land.
The violent agricultural revolution had come with a heavy price: The economy was collapsing as farmland fell into disuse and peasant farmers struggled to grow crops without fertilizer, irrigation, farm equipment, money or seeds. Food shortages, at first ascribed to drought, only worsened as farmers were forced to stop farming. When food aid arrived, people who had opposed Mr. Mugabe said government officials had denied them handouts to punish them.

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 2, 2019.

Monday, September 2nd, 2019

For the historical record: Valerie “Rhoda” Harper.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 30, 2019.

Friday, August 30th, 2019

James R. Leavelle.

He was the man standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald when Jack Ruby shot Oswald.

Ningali Lawford-Wolf, Australian Aboriginal actress. She was perhaps most famous as the mother in “Rabbit Proof Fence“.

Official NYT obit for Jessi Combs.

Ms. Combs was a lifelong racing fan whose love of cars and the sport led her into television, with a short run of appearances on “MythBusters,” the popular science program, and continuing hosting roles on “Xtreme 4×4,” a show about off-roading, and “Overhaulin’,” a show about revamping cars.

Ms. Combs was killed on Tuesday while attempting to set a land speed record.

Posted in Cars, History, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 26, 2019.

Monday, August 26th, 2019

Gerard O’Neill, investigative reporter for the Boston Globe.

Mr. O’Neill, who spent 35 years at The Globe, was one of three original reporters on the paper’s Spotlight Team, the full-time investigative strike force that was modeled after the Insight Team of The Sunday Times of London.
Two years after its founding in 1970, Spotlight — with the 29-year-old Mr. O’Neill on the team — won a Pulitzer Prize for its first major investigation, which uncovered rampant corruption in Somerville, a Boston suburb.
Later, as chief of the unit, Mr. O’Neill would help report, write and edit investigations that swept numerous awards, landed multiple Massachusetts officials in jail and led to reforms.

One of his (and the team’s) major accomplishments was breaking the story that Whitey Bulger was a FBI informant, and that the FBI had been letting him get away with major crimes (including murder) in return for informing.

Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Lehr would go on to write three books together, including two about Mr. Bulger: “Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal” (2000), which was made into a 2015 movie starring Johnny Depp as Bulger, and “Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss” (2013).

Black Mass, while dated, is one of the two books on Bulger that I recommend (the other being The Brothers Bulger). Black Mass also won the best fact crime Edgar Award in 2001.

I was less enthusiastic about Whitey, which kind of felt like a quickly written update and attempt to cash in on Bulger’s capture.

Posted in Law, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 23, 2019.

Friday, August 23rd, 2019

NYT obit for David H. Koch, for the historical record. (Edited to add: Reason.)

Russ Conway. No, you’ve probably never heard of him, but I think he’s noteworthy.

Mr. Conway was a reporter for the Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Massachusetts. He covered the Boston Bruins for the paper. And, while doing so, came up with evidence of serious – indeed, criminal – misconduct by the head of the NHL Players Union, Alan Eagleson.

Mr. Eagleson, he wrote, had, among many things, skimmed money from players’ disability payments; lent union funds to friends and associates at favorable rates; and billed the union for personal expenses, including a London apartment and Wimbledon tickets.
He also reported that Mr. Eagleson had promised that the N.H.L. players’ pension fund would profit from the Canada Cup — which was held five times between 1976 and 1991 between teams from Europe, the United States and Canada — but that little was left after subtracting questionable expenses.

His reporting was published as a series in the paper, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer. It was later expanded into a book, Game Misconduct: Alan Eagleson and the Corruption of Hockey.

Even better, his reporting led to investigations in the US and Canada, and a 1994 Federal indictment on 32 charges. Mr. Eagleson pled guilty to three counts of mail fraud in 1998, and was ordered to make restitution to the union. He was also convicted on fraud charges in Canada, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. (He served six months.) In addition, Mr. Eagleson was disbarred and forced out of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

What Mr. Conway uncovered about Mr. Eagleson occasionally disgusted him. He recalled one player, Ed Kea, who suffered a brain injury when he was checked into the boards during a game in 1983 while he was with a minor league affiliate of the St. Louis Blues.
“Al Eagleson didn’t even have the common decency to go visit the family,” Mr. Conway told Maclean’s. “He wouldn’t aid them in the insurance process. He was gone. Crush up the cigarette pack, throw it out. Next!”

Posted in Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 22, 2019.

Thursday, August 22nd, 2019

Jack Perkins, NBC News reporter and former host of “Biography” on A&E.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 20, 2019.

Tuesday, August 20th, 2019

NYT obit for Cedric Benson.

Statement from APD.

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 18, 2019.

Sunday, August 18th, 2019

Cedric Benson, former UT and NFL player, was reportedly killed in a motorcycle accident last night.

Benson, a running back who played for the Longhorns from 2001 to 2004, accumulated the second-most rushing yards in program history and topped 1,000 yards in each of his four seasons. He captured the Doak Walker Award as the nation’s top running back in his senior season in 2004. The next year, the Chicago Bears took him No. 4 overall in the NFL draft. Benson went on to play eight seasons in the league and last played in 2012 with the Green Bay Packers.

He was 36. Reports are that a passenger on his motorcycle was also killed.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

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