Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: November 2, 2018.

Friday, November 2nd, 2018

Bernard Bragg, actor.

He graduated from the New York School for the Deaf in 1947 and enrolled at what was then Gallaudet College, studying theater there and acting in school plays. Though he enjoyed performing, there was no obvious career path in show business for a deaf person; instead he took a teaching job at the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley, occasionally performing skits and directing small shows at conventions and clubs for the deaf. Then, in 1956, he made a life-changing trip to see Marceau perform in San Francisco.
Marceau’s ability to hold the crowd’s attention without words so struck Mr. Bragg that he sought Marceau out after the show and, with a note, introduced himself and asked where he could study mime. Marceau asked him to return the next day with a sample of his work, which he did: He performed two original sketches, one in which he played Noah and all the animals on the ark, the other in which he depicted all the instruments of an orchestra. Marceau invited him to study with him in France.
He spent the summer of 1956 doing just that, and when he returned to the United States he began performing in nightclubs, schools and universities in the San Francisco area. His routines were generally a mix of set pieces and improvisation.

He went on to become one of the founders of the National Theater of the Deaf.

Paul “Dr. Z” Zimmerman, SI writer. I really didn’t follow his work for the magazine, but I do have a copy of A Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football somewhere. (I’ve heard good things about it.)

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Whitey.

Wednesday, October 31st, 2018

If you go back to yesterday’s post, it looks like both the Boston outlets and the NYT did updates (and corrections) in place instead of posting new links. Which saves me some effort…

The big piece of news since the story broke seems to be:

One of the workers said that the inmates were thought to be “affiliated with the mob.” A law enforcement official who oversees organized crime cases said he was told by a federal law enforcement official that a mob figure was believed to be responsible for the killing.

The Patriarca family, maybe? Kind of makes sense…

Howie Carr. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I thought The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century was a terrific book.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 30, 2018.

Tuesday, October 30th, 2018

Wow.

My brother and Mike the Musicologist sent this to me literally within seconds of each other, which goes to show you how well they know me:

James “Whitey” Bulger is dead. He was apparently stabbed to death in a Federal prison in West Virginia.

Details are kind of sketchy right now. Here’s the Boston Herald coverage: apparently he had just been moved to the WV facility from one in Florida.

This is still a developing story, and I’m not finding much coverage outside of the Boston papers: it may be best to wait and post an update tomorrow.

Also among the dead: Victor Marchetti, former CIA agent and author who challenged the agency’s prior approval rule.

Ntozake Shange, noted playwright.

Edited to add: preliminary NYT coverage of Whitey Bulger, which wasn’t up when I posted earlier.

…was found beaten to death on Tuesday in a West Virginia prison. He was 89.
Two Federal Bureau of Prisons employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information was not yet public, said Mr. Bulger had been beaten unrecognizable by inmates. No other details were immediately available.

Interesting. The anonymous sources are saying he was beaten to death, not stabbed. But…

He was found unresponsive at 8:20 Tuesday morning, according to a statement from the federal Bureau of Prisons. The bureau said that lifesaving measures had been initiated and that he was pronounced dead by the Preston County Medical Examiner. The statement did not indicate a cause of death.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 26, 2018.

Friday, October 26th, 2018

James Karen, prolific actor.

I’ve never lived in an area served by Pathmark, but the man appeared on almost everything: “Quincy, M.E.”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Magnum, P.I.”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “The Rockford Files”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”…

…except he never did a spot on “Mannix”.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 24, 2018.

Wednesday, October 24th, 2018

Joachim Ronneberg, certified Norwegian badass.

Mr. Ronneberg led the commando raid that blew up the Nazi heavy water plant at Telemark. He was also the last survivor of that raid.

He received Norway’s highest decoration for military gallantry, the War Cross With Sword, from King Haakon VII; the Distinguished Service Order from Britain; the Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre from France; and the American Medal of Freedom With Silver Palm. (The latter was established by President Harry S. Truman to honor civilians who aided the war effort; it was replaced in 1963 by the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

Posted in Explosives, History, Nazis, Obits | Comments Closed

Story time.

Tuesday, October 16th, 2018

The last two Sears stores in Austin are closing.

My father did all of his own home and car maintenance, and he swore by (and sometimes at) his Craftsman tools. We didn’t get the Snap-On trucks much in our neck of the woods, and hey! Lifetime warranty!

He also swore by Sears DieHard batteries. True story: once upon a time he was running around the house, frantically searching for the warranty for the DieHard in one of our cars. I asked him several times where the owner’s manual for that car was, since it wasn’t in the glove box. He ignored me the first few times, and finally snapped: “Why do you keep asking me about the owner’s manual?!”

“Because,” I said, with the quiet confidence of a Christian holding four aces, “you’re exactly the kind of person who would stick the warranty paperwork inside the owner’s manual for safekeeping.” Whereupon he went to his briefcase, pulled out the owner’s manual for the car, flipped through it, found the warranty paperwork for the DieHard battery, and proceeded to rush off to the Sears store before it closed.

(He apologized later.)

(Side note: I remember DieHards being warrantied for five or even six years. Now, it seems like you can’t find any car battery that has more than a two year warranty. What’s up with that?)

(Another Dad story: once upon a time, we were on one of our driving vacations. The starter on the car (a Chevy Suburban from the mid-70s: you know, 350 V-8 and plenty of room to work) went out in some small town in Arkansas. Dad, being the type of person who brought tools with him on vacation, dropped the starter out of the car in the middle of a Sears Auto Center parking lot: the manager of the Sears AutoCenter took us over to the local automotive starter rebuild shop, who rebuilt the starter while we waited, then drove us back to the store, where Dad reinstalled the rebuilt starter, and we were on our way. I’m pretty sure he sent a nice letter to corporate about that manager.)

I was loyal to Sears for a long time because of those experiences. The first crack came when I went to one of those local Sears stores to get my personal DieHard replaced under warranty…and they refused, claiming that DieHard was “too small” for my car and thus my warranty was void. Even though I pointed out to them that the DieHard in question had been installed by the other local Sears, and their beef was with that Sears, not me, they still gouged me $60+tax that I could barely afford for a new battery. Yes, this infuriated me.

There were other things. Lawrence has his own story of being screwed over by NTB, back when they were owned by Sears: he’s been boycotting the chain for 20+ years now. As time went on, Sears just seemed to become sadder and sadder, and the only times I went into one were when I was cutting through to get to my parking space. Then I pretty much stopped going to malls, period.

I know Chapter 11 is a reorganization, not a liquidation. But the way things are going, it seems like this is the final turning out of the lights.

Goodbye, Sears. You managed to micturate through all of the goodwill I had for you when I was younger. And for what?

Posted in Economics, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 16, 2018.

Tuesday, October 16th, 2018

For the historical record, and by popular demand: Paul G. Allen.

Posted in Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 15, 2018.

Monday, October 15th, 2018

Catching up:

William Coors is dead at 102.

A grandson of the stowaway from Germany who founded the Adolph Coors Company in the foothills of the Rockies in 1873, Mr. Coors was chairman from 1959 to 2000 and vice chairman until 2002, building a regional brewery into the nation’s third-largest, behind only Anheuser-Busch and Miller.

…

Along with his younger brother, Joseph, a Coors executive who supported Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency, William Coors, although not as overtly political, championed bootstrap success and free enterprise, and was widely admired by conservatives.
But he alienated unionists, blacks, Hispanics, women and gays with views and policies that critics called racist, sexist and homophobic, and members of those groups joined informal boycotts of Coors beer in increasing numbers in the 1970s.

Jim Taylor, one of the great Green Bay Packers:

…the rugged Taylor is remembered as perhaps the last great fullback in professional football, a player tasked as much with carrying the football as blocking before the modern game divvied those responsibilities. He played nine seasons with the Packers from 1958-66 and departed Green Bay as the franchise’s all-time leading rusher.

NYT.

Cindy Lobel, food historian. I actually wasn’t familiar with her work, but I generally admire people who write about food and food history: I’m adding her book to my list. Plus: 48 is too damn young to die.

Betty Grissom, Gus Grissom’s widow. Thing I didn’t know: she ticked off a lot of people by suing North American Rockwell (the primary contractor for the Apollo program).

Her action brought Ms. Grissom considerable grief, with strangers accusing her of being unpatriotic and the close-knit space community shunning her.
The experience embittered the family, said Mark Grissom, who was 13 when his father died.
“We got the dark side of NASA,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “People who were my friends were no longer my friends. A lot of people turned their back on us, and Mom got a lot of hate mail. They were like, ‘How dare you sue NASA?’ We were no longer part of the NASA family.”

…

She told an interviewer that her husband’s sacrifice had helped pave the way for future missions in which other astronauts made it to the moon.
Still, she said, “I’m pretty sure he got to the moon before they did.”
“Of course he didn’t make it,” she added, “but in spirit I think he was already there.”

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

Obit watch: October 9, 2018.

Tuesday, October 9th, 2018

Scott Wilson.

He played Richard Hickock (opposite Robert Blake’s Perry Smith) in the 1967 adaptation of “In Cold Blood”. He was also in “In the Heat of the Night”.

Mr. Wilson appeared in several dozen more films, including “The Great Gatsby” (1974), “The Right Stuff” (1983), “Dead Man Walking” (1995), “The Last Samurai” (2003) and “Monster” (2003).
He played a cruel dog-owner in three movies based on Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s “Shiloh” novels, and Saint Albert Chmielowski in “Our God’s Brother” (1997), a film adaptation, by the Polish director Krzysztof Zanussiof, of a play written by Pope John Paul II.
Mr. Wilson also had recurring parts on the CBS police procedural “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and Netflix’s science fiction drama “The OA.”

Oddly, it doesn’t seem that he ever did a guest shot on “Mannix”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 5, 2018.

Friday, October 5th, 2018

Juan Romero.

Mr. Romero was a teenage busboy working in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in June 1968 when [Robert F.] Kennedy, moments after giving a victory speech in the California Democratic primary, came walking through and was shot in the head by an assassin.
Mr. Romero rushed to Kennedy and held him as he lay on the floor mortally wounded. Mr. Romero later said he had struggled to keep the senator’s head from hitting the floor.

Dave Anderson, sportswriter for the NYT.

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2018.

Sunday, September 23rd, 2018

Over the weekend, I was rewatching parts of “Project Grizzly” and I got to wondering what Troy Hurtubise was up to. I’d kind of lost track of him after the whole “Angel Light” thing.

Sadly, and completely unknown to me until yesterday, Mr. Hurtubise passed away in June, as the result of an automobile accident.

This is a damn shame. I’m extremely skeptical of “Angel Light” and “R-Light” (for obvious reasons), but Trojan armor seems like a logical extension of both the Ursus suits and the protective gear worn by bomb squad technicians. Firepaste doesn’t strike me as being too out there, either. I remember reading a book a while back about a famous magician who helped the Allies develop deception tactics during WWII. In his spare time, this guy also invented something that sounds very similar to Firepaste: the intent was that aircrews who anticipated a crash could apply the substance to exposed flesh and ideally get a little more time to flee a burning aircraft.

We extend our belated condolences to his people, and will pour out a 40 of something Canadian in his memory.

Anne Russ Federman, the last of the three daughters of Joel Russ, founder of Russ & Daughters (formerly Russ’s Cut Rate Appetizers).

Waxing rhapsodic in The New York Times Magazine in 2003, the editor and publisher Jason Epstein wrote that Russ & Daughters was “New York’s most hallowed shrine to the miracle of caviar, smoked salmon, ethereal herring and silken chopped liver.”

I’ve been reading Mark Federman’s book about Russ & Daughters, and I love the story behind the store. I also, as it happens, love me some smoked salmon, and I could go for a little herring, too. Next time I’m in New York City…

Posted in Books, Food, Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 18, 2018.

Tuesday, September 18th, 2018

Alan Abel, hoaxer, is dead at the age of 94.

Or is he? The NYT certainly thinks he is, and who would know better than the paper of record.

Among his many pranks: the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, Yetta Bronstein (“the phantom Jewish grandmother from the Bronx who ran for president in 1964”), Omar’s School for Beggars…

There were also the Topless String Quartet, with which, Mr. Abel said, an unsuspecting Frank Sinatra wanted to book a recording session; the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which, he said, the failed presidential candidate and former Klan grand wizard David Duke briefly accepted an invitation to conduct; Females for Felons, a group of Junior Leaguers who selflessly donated sex to the incarcerated; the mass “fainting” of audience members during a live broadcast of “The Phil Donahue Show”; his “discovery” (he posed as a former White House employee) of the missing 18½ minutes from the Watergate tapes; Euthanasia Cruises (“For people who wanted to expire in luxury,” Mr. Abel’s website recounted); Citizens Against Breastfeeding, which argued that exposure to the “naughty nipple” in infancy caused a plethora of problems later on; and a great many others.

Perhaps his most famous hoax was getting the NYT to publish his obituary while he was still alive.

Mr. Abel’s putative 1980 death, orchestrated with his characteristic military precision and involving a dozen accomplices, had been confirmed to The Times by several rigorously rehearsed confederates. One masqueraded as the grieving widow. Another posed as an undertaker, answering fact-checking calls from the newspaper on a dedicated phone line that Mr. Abel had installed, complete with its own directory-information business listing.
After the obituary was published, Mr. Abel, symbolically rising from the grave, held a gleeful news conference, and a much-abashed Times ran a retraction.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 16, 2018.

Sunday, September 16th, 2018

Some from the past day or two:

David Yallop, author and journalist. He was perhaps most famous for In God’s Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I which argued that the Pope “had been poisoned by a cabal connected to a secret Masonic lodge that had infiltrated the church and the Vatican Bank.”

Peter Donat, character actor. He was Mulder’s father on “The X-Files”, but he also did a lot of theater: “Over the years he played Cyrano de Bergerac, Prospero, Shylock, King Lear and Hadrian VII.”

Also:

He worked regularly in television, guest-starring on series like “The F.B.I.,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Mannix,” McMillan & Wife,” “Hill Street Blues” and “Murder, She Wrote,” on which he played three different roles over several seasons. On “Dallas,” he portrayed a doctor who treated the notorious Texas oilman J. R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) after he had been shot in a famous cliffhanger episode in 1980.

Walter Mischel, of “marshmallow test” fame.

In a series of experiments at Stanford University beginning in the 1960s, he led a research team that presented preschool-age children with treats — pretzels, cookies, a marshmallow — and instructed them to wait before indulging themselves. Some of the children received strategies from the researchers, like covering their eyes or reimagining the treat as something else; others were left to their own devices.
The studies found that in all conditions, some youngsters were far better than others at deploying the strategies — or devising their own — and that this ability seemed to persist at later ages. And context mattered: Children given reason to distrust the researchers tended to grab the treats earlier.

…

In the late 1980s, decades after the first experiments were done, Dr. Mischel and two co-authors followed up with about 100 parents whose children had participated in the original studies. They found a striking, if preliminary, correlation: The preschoolers who could put off eating the treat tended to have higher SAT scores, and were better adjusted emotionally on some measures, than those who had given in quickly to temptation.
The paper was cautious in its conclusions, and acknowledged numerous flaws, including a small sample size. No matter. It was widely reported, and a staple of popular psychology writing was born: If Junior can hold off eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes in preschool, then he or she is headed for the dean’s list.

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

Obit watch: September 11, 2018.

Tuesday, September 11th, 2018

Bill Daily, noted second banana. He was Major Healey on “I Dream of Jeannie” and Howard Borden on “The Bob Newhart Show”.

(Hattips: Borepatch and Lawrence.)

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 7, 2018.

Friday, September 7th, 2018

Pour out a 40 of Coors for the man.

Burt Reynolds: NYT. LAT. THR. WP.

Also among the dead: Richard DeVos, co-founder of Amway.

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

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