Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Obit watch: January 4, 2019.

Friday, January 4th, 2019

Herb Kelleher, legendary co-founder of Southwest Airlines. NYT. Dallas Morning News.

As much as I complain about Southwest (“your cattle car in the sky”), I have to admit: they aren’t any worse than any other airline (“United Breaks Guitars”) and are frequently cheaper.

And:

By paying his employees well, avoiding layoffs and instilling a spirit of fun in the company’s culture, Mr. Kelleher also set a tone for Southwest that translated into customer loyalty.
“You have to treat your employees like customers,” he told Fortune magazine in 2001. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”
What sounded like a business cliché translated into tremendous cost savings for Southwest. Its employee productivity levels were far higher than those of the competition, and even as salaries rose, the company managed to keep fares low and profits high. The company was a perennial choice for Fortune’s “Most Admired Companies” list.

…

A hard drinker with an ever-present Kool cigarette in his mouth, he liked to dress like Elvis Presley or other characters at company meetings and maintain a level of fun in the workplace.

There’s another story I (kind of) remember about Southwest testing a new route near Thanksgiving. When passengers got off the plane, they were offered either a frozen turkey…or a bottle of Wild Turkey.

They don’t make them like that any more.

Posted in Leadership, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 3, 2019.

Thursday, January 3rd, 2019

For the historical records:

Daryl Dragon, the “Captain” in “Captain and Tennille”.

Bob “Super Dave Osborne” Einstein.

Gene Okerlund, wrestling guy.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 29, 2018.

Saturday, December 29th, 2018

For the record: NYT obit for Richard Overton.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 28, 2018.

Friday, December 28th, 2018

Richard Overton, local veteran and WWII hero, has passed. He was 112.

Well into his triple digits, Overton enjoyed cigars, a habit he picked up as a teenager, and occasionally a little whiskey would accidentally spill into his coffee. He reportedly drove until he was 107.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 26, 2018.

Wednesday, December 26th, 2018

Sister Wendy Beckett, nun, art historian and critic, and BBC television personality.

By 1997, as she marked 50 years as a nun, the Oxford-educated Sister Wendy had made three television series, the most successful BBC arts programs since “Civilisation,” the art historian Kenneth Clark’s landmark 1969 documentaries. She had also written 15 books on art and religion, and was a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, featured in articles and mobbed by fans.
…
For all her success, she remained a nun with commitments to prayer, solitude (when possible) and vows of poverty. She assigned all her earnings to a Carmelite order that had sheltered her for decades, and she attended Mass daily, even when traveling.

Technically, not an obit, but: the NYT summary of obits for 2018. (Even though we have close to a week left in the year.)

Spoiler: the five most read obits this year, according to the paper of record, were those for: Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, Tyrone Gayle (“a 30-year-old press secretary to Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, and a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign”), John McCain, and…Zombie Boy.

Posted in Art, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 23, 2018.

Sunday, December 23rd, 2018

Audrey Geisel, the second (and surviving) wife of Dr. Seuss.

Timothy C. May, noted cypherpunk. I never met Tim May, but I was on the cypherpunks list, and an avid reader of sci.crypt, back during the peak of the movement. It’s a little strange to see someone who is perhaps most famous as a provocateur on mailing lists get an obit in the NYT, but…

Posted in Books, Geek, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 21, 2018.

Friday, December 21st, 2018

Donald Moffat, noted actor.

Mr. Moffat was rarely accorded top billing. But when he played Falstaff, Shakespeare’s bravest coward, wisest fool and most ignoble knight, in Joseph Papp’s 1987 production of “Henry IV, Part 1” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, he was the indisputable star. Mainly a comic figure, Falstaff, a sidekick to Prince Hal, the future King Henry V, embodies a depth more common to major Shakespeare characters.

…

On television, Mr. Moffat appeared as Dr. Marcus Polk in the ABC soap opera “One Life to Live” (1968-69), as Rem the android in the CBS science-fiction series “Logan’s Run” (1977-78) and as the Rev. Lars Lundstrom in “The New Land,” the 1974 ABC drama series about Swedish immigrants. He was also seen in episodes of “Mannix,” “Ironside,” “Gunsmoke” and “The Defenders.”

…

“All the Dead Were Strangers“. He also did shots on the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Mission: Impossible”, and “The Six Million Dollar Man”, among many other TV credits. (Seasonally appropriate: he was “Dr. Chandler” in the horribly misguided adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” for the 1985 “Twilight Zone”.)

Among Mr. Moffat’s better-known film roles were as Garry, the station commander, in John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), about an extraterrestrial monster that terrorizes researchers in Antarctica; as Lyndon B. Johnson in Philip Kaufman’s “The Right Stuff” (1983), about America’s first astronauts; and as an arrogant corporate lawyer in Costa-Gavras’s “Music Box” (1989), about a Hungarian immigrant accused of having been a fascist war criminal.

And “President Bennett” in “Clear and Present Danger”.

For the record, since I’m a little behind: Penny Marshall.

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

Obit watch: December 15, 2018.

Saturday, December 15th, 2018

Nancy Wilson, noted chanteuse.

Sondra Locke, Academy Award nominated actress and Clint Eastwood’s lover for a period of time (followed by an extended court battle). Apparently, she passed away in early November but it was not widely reported until this week.

Other people I know seem to have a strong negative reaction to her, but I thought she was fine in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” (which we watched recently) and “Sudden Impact” (which I need to rewatch). I also remember her being…okay…in “The Gauntlet” for what that was: a fun B-movie action thriller.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 13, 2018.

Thursday, December 13th, 2018

Melvin Dummar, historical footnote, passed away last Sunday at the age of 74.

I’m not sure how many of my readers remember Mr. Dummar and his saga. To summarize: one night in 1967, Mr. Dummar picked up a drifter by the side of the road and gave him a ride. The drifter told him that his name was Howard Hughes. Mr. Dummar forgot about the incident until nine years later, when Mr. Hughes died…

…and a will turned up at the Morman Church headquarters that left 1/16th of the Hughes estate to the church…

…and 1/16th of the estate to Mr. Dummar. (This was about $156 million in 1976 dollars.)

Of course there were legal cases.

But after his fingerprints were found on the envelope, he testified that a stranger had given it to him at his gas station and that he had taken it to the church headquarters.
A jury decided that the will was forged, and while no one was ever officially charged, Mr. Dummar was found guilty in the court of public opinion.

…

By the time the Hughes inheritance was settled by a probate court jury in Texas in 1981, more than 600 people had made claims to the fortune, and 40 wills, all supposedly written by Mr. Hughes, had been produced and rejected. Mr. Hughes’s money was divided among descendants on both his mother’s and his father’s side.

Jonathan Demme made what is supposedly a pretty good movie (haven’t seen it yet) out of this story, “Melvin and Howard“.

Thing I didn’t know: there’s a revisionist movement, apparently led by a retired FBI agent, that claims Mr. Dummar’s story was true, and he was cheated out of his rightful inheritance by a vast conspiracy “replete with acts of obstruction of justice, witness intimidation and possible jury tampering.” Yeah. Gonna take some convincing to get me to buy that.

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

Obit watch: December 12, 2018.

Wednesday, December 12th, 2018

Helen Klaben Kahn passed away on December 2nd. She was 79.

I know, I know, but I’m a sucker for a good survival story.

Ms. Klaben (at the time) was a young woman and had been kicking around Alaska for a few months. She wanted to visit Asia, so she hopped on board a single engine aircraft piloted by Ralph Flores. (She was planning to make her was to San Francisco, and to Asia from there.) On February 4, 1963, they took off from Whitehorse heading for Fort Saint John.

Unfortunately, the weather was bad, and Mr. Flores was not an instrument rated pilot. They ended up crashing into the side of a mountain near the border between the Yukon and British Columbia. But: they survived the crash.

Ms. Klaben and Mr. Flores crashed in terrain that was waist-deep in snow, with temperatures as numbing as 48 degrees below zero. Without wilderness survival training, Mr. Flores adapted nonetheless. He wrapped Ms. Klaben’s injured foot in her sweaters, covered the openings of the cabin with tarpaulins and tried, without success, to fix their radio to send out a distress signal and build rabbit traps.
What little food Ms. Klaben and Mr. Flores had brought on board — a few cans of sardines, tuna fish, fruit salad and a box of Saltine crackers — was rationed and gone within 10 days. They drank water, some of it filtered through shreds of one of her dresses and boiled in an empty oil can. They ate bits of toothpaste that they squeezed from a half-filled tube — and virtually nothing else, they said.

They survived for 49 days before finally being rescued.

When she returned to New York City less than a week after being rescued, the toes of her frostbitten right foot were amputated. She soon began writing her book (with Beth Day), and shortly after its publication told her story on an episode of the game show “To Tell the Truth.”

…

The appetite for adventure that she nourished as a child did not leave after the crash. Mrs. Kahn, as she became known, had no fear of flying and no nightmares and traveled widely with her family to Europe, Asia and the Caribbean.
“We’d travel with her from one European city to the next, meeting kids from other countries,” her son, Dr. Kahn, said in a telephone interview. “She was a global citizen, whether we were in fancy places or campsites.”
She also taught survival skills to the Girl Scouts, schools and other groups.

Posted in Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 3, 2018.

Monday, December 3rd, 2018

Ken Berry, noted television actor. (“Mama’s Family”, “Mayberry R.F.D.”, “Dr. Kildare”, and he did a bunch of work on “Fantasy Island”, among his other credits.)

Yeah, I was going to put up the “F Troop” opening credits, but you know what? The paper of record beat me to it.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 1, 2018.

Saturday, December 1st, 2018

George Herbert Walker Bush. NYT. HouChron. WP. LAT. Lawrence. McThag.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 30, 2018.

Friday, November 30th, 2018

Lady Trumpington (Jean Alys Campbell-Harris).

She was a member of the House of Lords from 1980 to 2017, and held various other governmental positions.

But she gets her obit linked here because she was one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers.

This month, she was among a group of Bletchley Park veterans awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, for their contributions to the liberation of France.
“Oh, I had such fun in Paris after the war,” she said after receiving the medal in a ceremony at her home. “While this award recognized my time at Bletchley, I still find it difficult to discuss my time there, as we were taught to never talk about it.”

…

During her husband’s tenure at the Leys School in Cambridge, Lady Trumpington kept up her society habits. “I smoked and drank and did everything naughty,” she said.
Once, when presenting awards to Leys athletes, she jumped fully clothed into the school’s swimming pool, followed by the students. “My husband was furious,” she said.

Posted in Geek, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 28, 2018.

Wednesday, November 28th, 2018

For the historical record: Stephen Hillenburg, creator of “SpongeBob SquarePants”.

Jeeez. 57 is way too young. Also, ALS stinks.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 27, 2018.

Tuesday, November 27th, 2018

For the historical record, because I really have nothing to say about the man: Bernardo Bertolucci.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »