Breaking this one out for reasons.
Dr. Ralph R. Brown, my uncle (on my dad’s side of the family).
Not much more that I want to say about this right now.
Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category
Obit watch part 2.
Thursday, September 6th, 2018Obit watch: September 6, 2018.
Thursday, September 6th, 2018George Austin, blogger and regular commenter, died earlier this week. Borepatch and ASM826 have nice tributes up.
Adding to what they said: I didn’t know Mr. Austin (I wish I had) but he was a frequent commenter here: as a matter of fact, he was the originator of Gavrilo Princip Day. We extend our condolences to his people.
Kenny Shopsin, restaurant owner. I never met him, either, but I was familiar with him by way of Calvin Trillin’s writings. I even have a copy of his cookbook, though of course I waited for it to show up used.
I suspect Mr. Shopsin and my stepdad would have gotten along famously, while there’s a 50/50 chance that Mr. Shopsin and I would have rubbed each other the wrong way. Such is the way of the world.
Obit watch: August 26, 2018.
Sunday, August 26th, 2018Obit watch: August 23, 2018.
Thursday, August 23rd, 2018Ed Brandon, long time weatherman for Channel 13 in Houston.
Obit watch: August 22, 2018.
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2018I wasn’t originally going to post this one, but there’s a story here that’s too good to pass up.
Don Cherry, noted singer and noted amateur golfer. He actually passed away April 4th, but his death was not widely reported until recently.
He was also the voice of Mr. Clean at one point.
Because of his dual pursuits, he nearly sabotaged himself on the eve of his inaugural Masters, in 1953.
The owner of a local nightclub hired him to sing each night of the tournament. When Clifford Roberts, a founder of the Masters and chairman of Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, where the tournament is held, learned of the sideshow, he called Mr. Cherry in for a talk.
“We never had anyone play in the Masters and sing at a local nightclub at the same time,” Mr. Roberts said, as Mr. Cherry recalled in his memoir.
“My reply, without being disrespectful and with a little Texas naïveté, was ‘Mr. Roberts, I have looked at the people playing in this tournament and can’t see anyone else who can sing.’ ”
Obit watch: August 21, 2018.
Tuesday, August 21st, 2018David Rothenberg died on July 15th at the age of 42. His death was not widely reported until late last week.
He worked as a visual artist under the name “Dave Dave” in Las Vegas:
Mr. Rothenberg became a close friend of Michael Jackson, who encouraged him to pursue a career in art. Through brightly colored 1960s-style Pop Art paintings and drawings, he sought to promote positivity, he wrote on his website, particularly through a series called “Lifted.”
“There is a lot that happens in people’s lives, but that doesn’t define them as a human being, it makes them stronger,” Mr. Rothenberg told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2016.
Here’s the rest of the story:
He was 6 in 1983 when his father gave him a sleeping pill in a motel room in Buena Park, Calif., near Disneyland, and then doused his bed with kerosene and set it on fire. The attack left burns on more than 90 percent of David’s body. His father, who was said to be in a bitter custody fight with his wife, Marie, then fled.
“He was working at a restaurant in New York, and he had saved $10,000 for this trip to California,” Mr. Rothenberg told The Review-Journal. “On the trip, he was planning to kill me.”
I swear that I’ve written about his father, Charles, previously, but I can’t find that blog entry now. Charles Rothenberg spent seven years in prison for attempted murder before being paroled. He went on to commit other crimes: I recall them being mostly financial. He’s currently serving a 25 to life sentence in California under the three strikes law.
For the historical record: Kofi Annan.
Obit watch: August 16, 2018.
Thursday, August 16th, 2018The cause was advanced pancreatic cancer, her publicist, Gwendolyn Quinn, said.
Also among the dead: Morgana King, who was somewhat famous as a jazz singer. She was better known, however, as Mama Corleone in the “Godfather” movies.
Herbert Sperling died in early July at a federal prison hospital near Boston. He’d been in prison since 1973.
He also had a reputation for violence.
In 1977, he was indicted on charges of hiring three fellow inmates at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta to murder Mr. [Vincent C.] Papa, whom he suspected of turning police informant. Mr. Sperling was acquitted in the conspiracy, but two other defendants were convicted of fatally stabbing Mr. Papa in the back and chest at least eight times in a prison courtyard.
Mr. Papa had been convicted of choreographing the audacious theft by rogue police officers of tens of millions of dollars worth of drugs from the New York Police Department’s evidence room in Lower Manhattan in the early 1970s and replacing it with bags of flour and cornstarch. The crimes kick-started a consequential corruption investigation of the police.
Much of the heroin had been seized in 1962 in the Bronx from the car in which it had been shipped from the French port city Marseille. The successful investigation in the case inspired the Oscar-winning 1971 movie “The French Connection.”
Mr. Sperling was also suspected in the death of Louis J. Mileto, whom police identified as a courier for the Sperling heroin ring. Mr. Mileto’s frozen, headless and limbless torso was found in 1972 in the trunk of a gutted car in the Hudson Valley. He was identified by his teeth, which were found in his stomach. Investigators said he had swallowed them during a vicious beating.
There’s your telling detail, right there.
Obit watch: August 13, 2018.
Monday, August 13th, 2018V.S. Naipaul, noted author.
Dr. Richard Jarecki. He was most famous for hacking roulette:
He and his wife honed his technique at dozens of casinos, including in Monte Carlo; Divonne-les-Bains, France; Baden-Baden, Germany; San Remo, on the Italian Riviera; and, briefly, Las Vegas. He became a regular in San Remo, where he had lucrative runs over several years.
By 1969 he had become “a menace to every casino in Europe,” Robert Lardera, the San Remo casino’s managing director, told The Morning Herald.
“I don’t know how he does it exactly, but if he never returned to my casino I would be a very happy man,” Mr. Lardera said.
According to the NYT, his technique basically amounted to painstaking long term observation of thousands of spins, looking for roulette wheels with biases, and then exploiting those biases.
Obit watch: August 7, 2018.
Tuesday, August 7th, 2018Joël Robuchon, noted French chef.
Lawrence and I often joke about French cooking: “High prices. Small portions.” And I’ve never eaten at a Robuchon restaurant. But he sounds like someone who had the right ideas.
…
…
Paul Laxalt, former Senator.
Tom Heckert, former general manager of the Cleveland Browns. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Amy Meselson. She was 46 years old, and had a reputation for defending immigrants to the United States. Her obit opens with a great story about her zealous advocacy for Amadou Ly, a Senegalese immigrant who was part of a winning robotics team at his high school.
…
…
Ms. Meselson earned her middle name by surviving a life-threatening respiratory disease. Besides dealing with depression, she had recently been given a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and extreme anxiety — all aggravated when she traveled to Greece two years ago to volunteer at a camp for Syrian refugees, Sarah Meselson said at a memorial service.
At the service, she said she wanted to recount her daughter’s maladies for two reasons.
“One,” she said, “is to emphasize what everyone already knows — that it is not always possible to comprehend the level of suffering that others may be experiencing, especially when they appear to be successful and to excel to the extent that Amy did.
“The other,” she added, “is to applaud my daughter for all that she accomplished despite her mental illness.”
In that vein, this is hard as hell to read, but worth it. (Hattip: Popehat on the Twitter.)
Obit watch: August 6, 2018.
Monday, August 6th, 2018Edited to add: NYT obit now up.
Obit watch: August 1, 2018.
Wednesday, August 1st, 2018Captain Lawrence E. Dickson passed away on December 23, 1944.
On Dec. 23, 1944, Captain Dickson got into a P-51 Mustang fighter plane at Ramitelli Air Base in Italy for a reconnaissance mission. Later, as he piloted the plane during the return flight, it experienced engine failure, the agency said.
Ms. Andrews said she learned from a wingman who flew alongside her father that two other planes flew alongside Captain Dickson’s plane as it descended until it disappeared.
Some witnesses told officials that they saw the plane crash and roll over, the canopy jettisoned.
Officials from D.P.A.A. said Captain Dickson was not seen ejecting from the plane.
(Note: as far as I am aware, the P-51 in 1944 did not have ejection seats.)
Captain Dickson was one of the Tuskegee Airmen. The crash site was not found until 2012, remains were not recovered from the site until 2017, and DNA analysis was not completed until last Friday.
Obit watch: July 30, 2018.
Monday, July 30th, 2018Yesterday was a bad day for wrestling.
Nikolai Volkoff (an alias for Josip Nikolai Peruzovic) passed away on Sunday. He was 70.
Peruzovic, who was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005, was best known in the world of professional wrestling for his over-the-top Soviet/Russian character during his time in the World Wide Wrestling Federation (later the WWF) in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. In reality, Peruzovic was born in what was then Yugoslavia and now stands as part of Croatia.
Peruzovic’s most famous run came as part of the then-WWF’s explosion in popularity in the mid-1980s, as he teamed with the Iron Sheik to form one of the most successful heel teams in the history of pro wrestling while being managed by the legendary “Classy” Freddie Blassie. He famously sang the Soviet Union’s national anthem while the Iron Sheik taunted and stoked the anger of crowds around the world by playing upon real-life conflicts.
Volkoff and the Iron Sheik won the tag team championship in 1985.
Brian Christopher Lawler, son of Jerry Lawler, who wrestled as “Brian Christopher” also died on Sunday. Apparently, he was in jail on a DWI charge and committed suicide in his cell.
Ron Dellums, former Congressman.
Two obits that I thought made an interesting juxtaposition:
Mary Ellis, who died at 101.
…
…
Oksana Shachko, who the paper of record describes as “a Ukrainian artist and a founder of Femen, a women’s rights group famous for its topless political protests”.
Together with the Pussy Riot punk group in Russia, Femen became part of a post-Soviet protest phenomenon that sometimes drew a violent reaction. In 2011, Femen said that Ms. Shachko and other activists had been abducted in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, after campaigning in front of the K.G.B. headquarters there. Several members were beaten up in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, in 2013 ahead of a visit by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Ms. Shachko and several other activists from the university town of Khmelnytsky, Ukraine, founded Femen in 2008. After a few conventional protests, they decided to demonstrate topless, often with political slogans written on their bodies.
…
In 2013, members of Femen ran topless in front of Mr. Putin as he visited Germany, drawing a grin and two thumbs up from him before guards wrestled the activists to the ground.
Ms. Shachko, along with several other Femen members, moved to Paris that same year and was granted political asylum by the French authorities. She maintained that the group’s members had been pursued by Russian special services and that the agents had planted a grenade in Femen’s office in Kiev, along with a photograph of Mr. Putin.
Ms. Shachko was 31. According to the NYT obituary, her death is being investigated as a suicide.
Obit watch: July 28, 2018.
Saturday, July 28th, 2018Bill Loud, patriarch of the Loud family, is dead at 97.
I’m not sure how many people remember the Loud family. They were the stars of what may have been the first television “reality” show: “An American Family”, which ran on PBS in 1973.
“An American Family” shocked Americans families. Aired with the imprimatur of public broadcasting, it was portrayed as sociological exploration, not exploitation, and although many people found it irresistible, it was also hard to watch.
It showed Mr. Loud’s wife, Pat, bluntly discussing his adultery with her brother and sister-in-law. It showed her telling her husband to move out. It captured the Louds’ oldest son, Lance, living an openly gay life in New York — startling images for many people at the time.
The Louds separated during the filming of the series, ended up divorcing…and thirty years later, moved back in together and cohabited until Mr. Loud’s death.
In the 1970s much of the outside world had taken moral measure of Mr. Loud and found him wanting. But Grant Loud said his father was not created by television and should not be defined by it. He noted that the family moved to Santa Barbara in 1962 with very little money, and that his father had created a successful business from scratch.
“It provided a family of five kids with a very comfortable life, and took him — and us — around the world,” he said by email in 2013. “As a kid, I never thought much about it. As a middle-aged guy, I can only shake my head in awe and respect.”
The Loud’s had five children. Four survive him: Lance passed away in 2001.
Obit watch: July 24, 2018.
Tuesday, July 24th, 2018Tony Sparano, offensive line coach for the Vikings and former head coach of the Dolphins and Raiders. StarTribune.
This is kind of a half-obit, but I want to bring it up here so I can call out a couple of things. Tess Henry was an opiate addict. Beth Macy, a writer for the NYT, covered her struggle to get off opiates using “medication-assisted treatment”. Sadly, that struggle ended last December: someone beat her head in and threw her in a dumpster.
This jumped out at me:
…
So, on the one hand, we have the addict’s mother, who not only knows her better than just about anyone else, but who is also a nurse who has treated addicts. On the other hand, we have…a NYT reporter.
This, too:
The day of her funeral in January, Dan Polster, a federal judge in Cleveland, was presiding over a hearing in the continuing mass litigation case against opioid makers, distributors and retailers. “About 150 Americans are going to die today, just today, while we’re meeting,” Judge Polster said.
Last month, a lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs in that case called me to discuss a potential settlement. She wanted my ideas about how to treat the more than two million opioid-addicted Americans.
Settlement for what? We’ve decided we’re going to demonize the drug companies for making effective painkillers available, and make it harder for people with real, chronic, crippling pain to get the drugs those companies make – drugs that can improve their quality of life – because we’re so damn concerned with what other people put into their bodies.
I’m not exactly “pro-heroin”. But if Tess Henry had been able to spend $20 a day on a couple of shots – shots of known dosage and purity – would she have been able to work? Hold down a job? Take care of her child? Would she have been any different than the person who comes home at night and drinks some Scotch over ice?
Would Tess Henry be alive today, if we weren’t so insistent on the “demon opiates” line of thinking?
“the Drug Company That Addicted America”. I think we know where she’s coming from.
Obit watch: July 22, 2018.
Sunday, July 22nd, 2018Jonathan Gold, restaurant critic for the LA Times and Pulitzer Prize winner. NYT.
This hit me kind of hard, and I’m not exactly sure why. I don’t live in LA, I barely even consider California to be part of the United States these days, and the LAT website has become so obnoxious I rarely read it. At most, I was an intermittent follower of Gold’s.
I know obituaries generally concentrate on the positive about the subject – I’ve seen very few that say, “Christ, what an a–hole” – but the tributes to him make him sound like an incredibly kind and funny guy who loved food, and even more loved telling people about food.
…
…
He preferred to praise chefs rather than pan them. If Gold wrote about you, he generally liked your food. Earnest and slightly awkward in person, he would voice displeasure with a gentle rebuke instead of the gleeful excoriating that other critics tend to dabble in.
“He wasn’t looking down his nose at the world, he was looking out from the table and trying to put restaurants, meals and cuisines in context. Empathy, understanding, commensality: That’s what he brought to the game,” Meehan said. “Jonathan didn’t write restaurant reviews, he wrote about who we are and how we feed each other. He wasn’t just a better writer than the rest of us, he cared more, too.”
Also, he was only 57: pancreatic cancer got him so fast most people didn’t even know he was sick, according to the obits. I’ve linked to them before, but The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research still gets four stars from Charity Navigator.
Also among the dead: Shinobu Hashimoto, screenwriter perhaps most famous for his work with Akira Kurosawa (including “Rashomon”, “Ikiru”, and “Seven Samurai”.
Madeleine Kamman, noted French chef and author.
Last, least, and burning in Hell: Barry Mills, leader of the Aryan Brotherhood.