Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: February 23, 2019.

Saturday, February 23rd, 2019

Yesterday was a busy day for the NYT: the obit writers were apparently playing catch-up. One of these I knew about, but was waiting for a reliable source on, while the others I had not heard about.

William E. Butterworth III, noted and bestselling author.

According to his website, there are more than 50 million copies of his books in print in more than 10 languages.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell with you, that’s because he wrote mostly under pseudonyms. His best known pen name was W.E.B. Griffin.

(Also: awesome photo, NYT.)

Ken Nordine, poet and “word jazz” guy.

Mr. Nordine became wealthy doing voice-overs for television and radio commercials. But he found his passion in using his dramatic baritone to riff surreally on colors, time, spiders, bullfighting, outer space and dozens of other subjects. His free-form poems could be cerebral or humorous, absurd or enigmatic, and were heard on the radio and captured on records, one of which earned a Grammy nomination.

I used to fall asleep with the radio on and wake up to it in the morning. As I recall, early on Sunday mornings, in that twilight zone when I was half-awake and half-asleep, our local public radio station aired re-runs of “Word Jazz”.

I had not heard of Ethel Ennis, but this is an interesting story: Playboy jazz poll winner for best female singer,

She recorded for major labels in the late 1950s and the ’60s; toured Europe with Benny Goodman; performed onstage alongside Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong; and appeared on television with Duke Ellington. She became a regular on Arthur Godfrey’s TV show and headlined the Newport Jazz Festival.

And then she mostly walked away from it all and became Baltimore’s unofficial “First Lady of Jazz”.

“They had it all planned out for me,” she told The Washington Post in 1979, referring to the music executives in charge of her career. “I’d ask, ‘When do I sing?’ and they’d say, ‘Shut up and have a drink. You should sit like this and look like that and play the game of bed partners.’ You really had to do things that go against your grain for gain. I wouldn’t.”
She added: “I want to do it my way. I have no regrets.”

Finally, David Horowitz, newscaster and consumer reporter. I remember watching the syndicated version of “Fight Back!” on one of the Houston TV stations (though I don’t recall which one) back when I was young…

Posted in Books, Guns, Music, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 22, 2019.

Friday, February 22nd, 2019

For the historical record: Peter Tork, of The Monkees.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 20, 2019.

Wednesday, February 20th, 2019

Don Newcombe, noted pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

An imposing right-hander, at 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds, with an overpowering fastball, Newcombe claimed a string of achievements: National League rookie of the year in 1949; four-time All-Star; the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1956, when he also won the first Cy Young Award as baseball’s top pitcher. Moreover, he was the first black pitcher to start a World Series game.

…

While Newcombe was proud of his accomplishments as a pitcher, he was gratified as well to have played a role in the civil rights struggle by helping to shatter modern baseball’s racial barrier after the arrival of the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson and catcher Roy Campanella.
He once said that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King came to his house in the weeks before his assassination in 1968 and told him, “I would never have made it as successfully as I have in civil rights if it were not for what you men did on the baseball field.”

Also among the dead: Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer.

Guy Webster, album cover photographer.

Mr. Webster’s work with the Rolling Stones — including the photo for the bucolic cover of the United States release of the anthology “Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)” (1966) — began with an unusual offer in 1965 from Andrew Loog Oldham, their producer and manager: Take photographs, but don’t expect to be paid because it’s an honor simply to work with the band.
“And I said, ‘Well, it’s an honor for you that I take these pictures,’ ” Mr. Webster said at the Annenberg event. “He paid me for one album cover. Three of them came out during the years using my photographs.”

For Exposure, call your office, please.

Posted in Music, Obits, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 19, 2019.

Tuesday, February 19th, 2019

George Mendonsa has passed away at the age of 95.

Mr. Mendonsa was the man in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square after the Japanese surrender.

At least, maybe he was. Eisenstaedt didn’t record the names of the sailor or nurse, and at least three women and 11 men have claimed they were one or the other.

But Mr. Mendonsa was adamant that he was the one. He sued Life in the 1980s when the magazine would not definitively acknowledge that he was the sailor, though nothing came of the lawsuit.

…

Mr. Mendonsa eventually received recognition from most parties after extensive testing. Among other efforts, in 2005, Richard Benson, a photographer and printmaker at Yale, scrutinized the photographs in the early 1980s and determined that Mr. Mendonsa’s specific features, like a cyst on his left arm and a dark patch on his right, matched those of the sailor in the photo.
Mr. Mendonsa’s face was painstakingly 3-D mapped, then reverse-aged, to show that it matched the sailor’s in Eisenstaedt’s picture. Four years later Norman Sauer, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University, analyzed the photo and said he could not find a single inconsistency between Mr. Mendonsa’s face and the sailor’s.

Greta Friedman, who may have been the nurse, passed away in 2016.

Posted in History, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 18, 2019.

Monday, February 18th, 2019

From the Department of Brief Round-Ups, a couple of obits that people mentioned to me over the weekend:

Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Patrick Caddell, prominent political pollster.

Betty Ballantine, wife of Ian Ballantine. The Ballantines basically pioneered paperbacks in this country:

With a $500 wedding dowry from Ms. Ballantine’s father, the couple established Penguin U.S.A. by importing British editions of Penguin paperbacks, starting with “The Invisible Man” by H. G. Wells and “My Man Jeeves” by P. G. Wodehouse.

…

They left Penguin in 1945 to start Bantam Books, a reprint house. Having purchased the paperback rights for 20 hardcovers, their first round of titles included Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi,” John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
They started Ballantine Books in 1952, publishing reprints as well as original works in paperback.

And:

While Ian Ballantine, who died in 1995, was the better known of the publishing duo, Betty Ballantine, who was British, quietly devoted herself to the editorial side. She nurtured authors, edited manuscripts and helped promote certain genres — Westerns, mysteries, romance novels and, perhaps most significantly, science fiction and fantasy.
Her love for that genre and knowledge of it helped put it on the map.
“She birthed the science fiction novel,” said Tad Wise, a nephew of Ms. Ballantine’s by marriage. With the help of Frederik Pohl, a science fiction writer, editor and agent, Mr. Wise said, “She sought out the pulp writers of science fiction who were writing for magazines and said she wanted them to write novels, and she would publish them.”
In doing so she helped a wave of science fiction and fantasy writers emerge. They included Joanna Russ, author of “The Female Man” (1975), a landmark novel of feminist science fiction, and Samuel R. Delany, whose “Dhalgren” (1975) was one of the best-selling science fiction novels of its time.
The Ballantines also published paperback fiction by Ray Bradbury, whose books include “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451”; Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey”; and J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 16, 2019.

Saturday, February 16th, 2019

The late great Bruno Ganz.

In the Wim Wenders drama “Wings of Desire” (1987), he played an angel whose job was to spend time on earth, make himself visible to the dying and to comfort them. But the character saw such beauty in human life that he wanted it for himself.

…

Most of Mr. Ganz’s more than 80 films and television movies were European productions, among them Mr. Wenders’s film noir hommage “The American Friend” (1977), with Dennis Hopper, in which he played a German with a terminal-illness diagnosis who agrees to be a hit man; Volker Schlöndorff’s “Circle of Deceit” (1981), as a war correspondent in Beirut; Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu” (1979), as the innocent Jonathan Harker; and Barbet Schroeder’s “Amnesia” (2017).
But he did appear in American films, including “The Boys From Brazil” (1978), the drama about Nazi war criminals starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier; Jonathan Demme’s all-star 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate”; and “The Reader” (2008), with Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 14, 2019.

Thursday, February 14th, 2019

Lyndon LaRouche, one of the 20th Century’s greatest cranks. LaRouche PAC.

Defining what Mr. LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and loathed Hitler, the composer Richard Wagner and other anti-Semites, though he himself made anti-Semitic statements.

…

He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — he saw rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

…

In Mr. LaRouche’s view, Mr. Johnson continued, “true Platonists believe that industrialization, technology and classical music should be used to bring wealth and enlightenment to the citizens of the world.”
He added: “The Aristotelians are trying to stop them by using not only sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll but also environmentalism and quantum theory. With their bag of brainwashing techniques, they hope to trick civilization into destroying itself, bringing on a new dark ages in which the world’s riches will be firmly in the hands of the oligarchs.”

…

After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Mr. LaRouche warned that the new president was in “grave and imminent danger” of being assassinated by the “British Empire,” a familiar target of Mr. LaRouche’s.

…

But Mr. LaRouche was heartened by the election of President Trump, though he perceived a British conspiratorial hand reaching into the United States to foment efforts to “politically paralyze” the president and bring about his impeachment.

He was rather oddly obsessed with the British royal family. From a recent editorial on the LaRouche PAC web site calling for his exoneration:

The frame-up and jailing of LaRouche, facilitated by years of lying media vilification of LaRouche and his movement, which continues to this day, was carried out by the same British-run political apparatus—in many cases, by the same individual hit-men, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller—that today is out to topple the President of the United States.

…

Because LaRouche’s proposed war on drugs against London’s Dope, Inc. banking apparatus was never implemented, a drug epidemic today is poisoning our nation and the world.

They don’t make them like that any more.

Posted in Law, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 13, 2019.

Wednesday, February 13th, 2019

Rick Schmidt, former owner of Kruez Market in Lockhart.

Kreuz Market first opened in 1900. Rick’s father, Edgar “Smitty” Schmidt, purchased it in 1948, and Rick and his brother Don Schmidt bought the legendary Lockhart barbecue restaurant from their father in 1984. Don retired from the family business in 1997, and in 1999, Austin-native Rick relocated Kreuz Market from its previous location on Main Street to Colorado Street, near Town Branch creek, following a public dispute with his sister, Nina Sells, who inherited the old brick building on Main Street.
Sells converted the original Kreuz Market location into Smitty’s Market, while Schmidt opened his massive, red-brick building about a mile up the road. The family feud made headlines in Austin and landed the family on an episode of the CBS newsmagazine “48 Hours.″

Posted in Beef, Food, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 11, 2019.

Monday, February 11th, 2019

Great and good friend of the blog Borepatch, who has probably forgotten more about popular music than I know, sent over a couple of obits that I missed.

Bonnie Guitar passed away in January at the age of 95.

Ms. Guitar was best known for her recording of “Dark Moon,” a Top 20 country single on the Dot label that crossed over to the pop Top 10 in 1957. The record, a haunting nocturne sung in a clear-toned alto, was, along with Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” — which reached the pop Top 40 the same year — one of the earliest records by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart.

…

But the achievement for which Ms. Guitar never really received her due, perhaps because she decided to remain in her native Washington instead of resettling in a major recording center like Los Angeles or Nashville, was her trailblazing work as a studio maven and entrepreneur. Over seven decades she did everything from engineer recordings to scout talent and run a record label.

And Sanger D. “Whitey” Shafer also died in January. He was perhaps most famous for writing “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” and “Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind”.

In 2004, Shafer earned a different kind of hit, as his own recording of “All My Ex’s” appeared on the soundtrack of the hit video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Few country songwriters of his generation can claim that, and it’s one of many reasons we’ll not see his like again.

Tribute from “Austin City Limits”. Obit from Saving Country Music. Obit from WFAA.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 8, 2019.

Friday, February 8th, 2019

Albert Finney.

Mr. Finney was nominated five times for an Oscar, four for best actor: as the title character in “Tom Jones,” Tony Richardson’s 1963 adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel; as Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express”; as an aging, embittered actor in Peter Yates’s 1983 version of “The Dresser”; and as an alcoholic British consul in a small town in Mexico in John Huston’s “Under the Volcano,” based on the Malcolm Lowry novel. His performance in “Erin Brockovich” earned him a supporting actor nomination.

Frank Robinson, who became the first black manager in MLB when he took over the Cleveland Indians:

Robinson made his debut as the majors’ first black manager with the Cleveland Indians on April 8, 1975, 28 years after Jackie Robinson (no relation) first took the field with the Dodgers. Rachel Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s widow, threw out the ceremonial first ball.
Frank Robinson, who was still an active player, punctuated the historic occasion by hitting a home run in his first at-bat, as the designated hitter, leading the Indians to a 5-3 victory over the Yankees.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 5, 2019.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2019

This one goes out to Borepatch and Weer’d Beard: Jacqueline Steiner, who co-wrote “M.T.A.”. That song (also known as “Charlie on the M.T.A.”) later became a huge hit for the Kingston Trio:

The song remains embedded in Boston’s collective unconscious and is something of an unofficial city anthem.

Thing I did not know: it was originally written for a guy running for mayor in 1949. He only got one percent of the vote, and was later blacklisted as a Communist.

Also among the dead: Albert J. “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, notorious corporate raider.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 4, 2019.

Monday, February 4th, 2019

By way of Lawrence, THR obit for Julie Adams.

Edited to add: NYT obit.

She was most famous for “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (which I still haven’t seen). But her list of credits is extensive, including “McQ” and “The Last Movie”.

And she did a whole bunch of TV work: Jimmy Stewart’s wife on “The Jimmy Stewart Show”, guest shots on “Perry Mason”, “Ironside”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Then the Drink Takes the Man”, “Little Girl Lost”). And she was the drunken wife of the dead scientist in the “Mr. R.I.N.G” episode of “Kolchak: The Night Stalker“.

(Oddly enough, she came up in passing Saturday night. The main topic of discussion was the annoying (to me, anyway) tendency of “Kolchak”‘s writers to kill off the more attractive women. The hot girl in the bathing suit in “Firefall”, the lab worker in “The Energy Eater”, the Air Force captain in “Legacy of Terror”, etc.)

As an administrative side note: I’ve been thinking about posting this for a while, but finally decided to make it explicit. If your IMDB credits include an entry for “Mannix”, you will automatically get an obit watch entry here. Please feel free to contact me with any omissions.

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

Obit watch: February 2, 2019.

Saturday, February 2nd, 2019

NYT obit for Dick Miller.

This one goes out to Mike the Musicologist: Sanford Sylvan, noted baritone. He did a lot of work with John Adams: among other roles, he was the first Chou En-lai in “Nixon in China” and Leon Klinghoffer in “The Death of Klinghoffer”.

His recordings, many with Mr. Breitman, include programs of Schubert, Fauré, Jorge Martin and Virgil Thomson, as well as a luminous, delicate 1991 release, “Beloved That Pilgrimage,” which includes Theodore Chanler’s “Eight Epitaphs,” Barber’s “Hermit Songs” and Copland’s “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.” Mr. Sylvan took part in the New York premiere of Mr. Adams’s opera “A Flowering Tree” in 2009, and also performed contemporary works by composers like Peter Maxwell Davies, Philip Glass, John Harbison and Charles Fussell.

Finally, Captain Rosemary Mariner, United States Navy (ret.). She was one of the first six women to go through naval flight training, the first to fly an attack jet, and the first woman to command a naval aviation squadron. She also had a leading role in removing the restrictions on women flying combat missions.

When she retired from the Navy in 1997, Captain Mariner “had become one of the nation’s leading advocates for equal opportunity in the military,” Deborah G. Douglas wrote in “American Women and Flight since 1940” (2005).
Captain Mariner logged 17 landings on aircraft carriers and more than 3,500 flight hours in 15 different aircraft.

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

Obit watch: January 31, 2019.

Thursday, January 31st, 2019

Lawrence sent me the “Variety” obit for character actor Dick Miller.

He was hella prolific. Among his credits: the pawn shop guy in “The Terminator”, the sleezy land developer in the original “Piranha”, “Gremlins”, “Chopping Mall”, “Twilight Zone: The Movie”…

…and a lot of TV guest shots, including “Police Squad!” (“In Color!”), “Dragnet 1967”, and, yes, “Mannix” (“Falling Star”, “The Cost of a Vacation”).

He also appeared in “W*A*L*T*E*R”, which is one of those curious side notes in television history.

Speaking of curious side notes, Meshulam Riklis passed away a few days ago at the age of 95. He was a prominent financier, but became somewhat famous in the 1980s for what happened after he married his second wife…

…Pia Zadora.

His devotion to Ms. Zadora included inviting Golden Globe Awards voters to private screenings of “Butterfly” (1982), a film he produced for her, and promoted her candidacy in a media campaign — all for someone considered a lightweight competing with the likes of Kathleen Turner, Howard E. Rollins Jr. and Elizabeth McGovern for best new star of the year in a motion picture.
When Ms. Zadora won the award — a shock in Hollywood and beyond — it was assumed that Mr. Riklis had somehow engineered her victory, although he and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which runs the Golden Globes, denied the accusation.

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

Obit watch: January 24, 2019.

Thursday, January 24th, 2019

Mary Boyd Higgins, trustee of the Wilhelm Reich estate and legacy.

When she was appointed trustee, in March 1959, Ms. Higgins had her work cut out for her.
She quickly discovered that most of Dr. Reich’s personal papers, which he had wanted sealed for 50 years before anyone could see them, had been stolen; she had to start litigation to retrieve them. He wanted his Maine property turned into a museum; she would need to become an expert in museum design. She also studied copyright law in seeking to have his books republished.

I wasn’t originally going to post this, but then it occurred to me that this obit gives me a flimsy excuse to embed this video:

Posted in Law, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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