I did not know he was in “Twin Peaks” or “Shooter”. Or the bad “Hawaii 5-0”. And he was in the legendary “Zyzzyx Rd”. I did remember he was in the short-lived but stylishly violent “Robbery Homicide Division”.
Steve Mackey, of Pulp.
Thing I did not know:
Ted Donaldson. Other credits include an episode of “The Silent Service” in 1958 (his last one in IMDB) and “The Red Stallion”.
Ricou Browning has passed away at 93.
For those of you going, “Who?”, he was perhaps most famous as the guy in the rubber suit in “Creature From the Black Lagoon” and the two sequels (“Revenge of the Creature” and “The Creature Walks Among Us”). He had quite an interesting career beyond those:
The Florida native also served as a stuntman on Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), doubled for Jerry Lewis in Don’t Give Up the Ship (1959) and “played all the bad guys in [TV’s] Sea Hunt,” he said in a 2013 interview.
Plus, Browning directed the harpoon-filled fight in Thunderball (1965), another underwater scene in Never Say Never Again (1983) and the hilarious Jaws-inspired candy bar-in-the-pool sequence in Caddyshack (1980).
He was also intimately involved with “Flipper” and “Gentle Ben”. He directed two movies, “Salty” and “Mr. No Legs“, the latter of which sent me down a rabbit hole based on the description (from an obit Lawrence sent me): “centered on a man with shotguns built into his wheelchair”.
I don’t think that begins to cover how crazy “Mr. No Legs” sounds. Richard Jaeckel! Lloyd Bochner! John Agar! Rance Howard!
Imagine you’re hanging out by the pool in your wheelchair with a friend, and a group of thugs emerges from the bushes, knocks out your friend and rushes your chair. What do you do?
Double amputee Ted Vollrath found himself in exactly this situation and he didn’t hesitate. He knocked down the closest attacker with two quick punches, grabbed a ninja star from his spokes and zipped it across the pool, right into the jugular of another assailant who was reaching for a gun. Vollrath then finished off the remaining thugs with an array of punches and body attacks, eventually dragging two of them into the pool and subduing them.
Mr. Vollrath plays the titular character. In real life, he was a Korean war vet who lost both legs due to injuries sustained in combat. He went on to become “the first person to earn a black belt in karate while training out of a wheelchair”, and did a lot of work promoting accessibility to martial arts training for the disabled before his death in 2001.
Lawrence also sent over an obit for Gordon Pinsent, noted Canadian actor.
Walter Mirisch, producer. He was 101. Some of his credits: “In the Heat of the Night”, “The Magnificent Seven”, “The Apartment”.
Linda Kasabian. I am having a hard time deciding if she qualifies for the “Burning In Hell” watch.
On the one hand:
Mr. Manson harbored hateful ideas about Black people and sought to set off a race war, leading him to send Ms. Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles Watson out on a murderous mission. In the early hours of Aug. 9, 1969, Ms. Kasabian waited at the car while the others killed five people, including the actress Sharon Tate, the wife of the director Roman Polanski, in Ms. Tate’s Los Angeles home.
The next night, this time with Mr. Manson along, a group went to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Mr. Manson tied the couple up and left with Ms. Kasabian; several of his followers then stabbed the LaBiancas to death.
On the other hand, she rolled on the Family:
Once “Susan bolted,” the prosecution gave Ms. Kasabian conditional immunity — it would be revoked if she did not testify fully and truthfully — and she became the centerpiece of the trial of Mr. Manson and the three women. (She was later important in the case against Mr. Watson, who was tried separately.)
That trial was a wild affair that lasted months. Ms. Kasabian testified for 17 days, withstanding badgering by the defense lawyers and sometimes by Mr. Manson himself.
“Though the defense had been given a 20-page summary of all my interviews with her, as well as copies of all her letters to me,” Mr. Bugliosi, who died in 2015, wrote in “Helter Skelter,” “not once had she been impeached with a prior inconsistent statement. I was very proud of her.”
In a 2009 interview on “Larry King Live,” where he appeared alongside Ms. Kasabian (her image obscured to protect her privacy), Mr. Bugliosi left no doubt that she had put Mr. Manson behind bars.
“If there ever was a star witness for the prosecution, it was Linda Kasabian,” he said. “Without her testimony, Larry, it would have been extremely difficult for me to convict Manson and his co-defendants.
“We all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude towards Linda,” he added, “because if Manson had gotten out, there’s no question he would have continued to kill. He would have killed as many people as he could have.”
And from the accounts I’ve seen, she lived out the rest of her life quietly and tried to atone for her actions.
She told Mr. King that since the trial she had been “trying to live a normal life, which is really hard to do.”
“I’ve been on a mission of healing and rehabilitation,” she said. “I went through a lot of drugs and alcohol and self-destruction and probably could have used some psychological counseling and help 40 years ago.”
Wow. It has been busy.
Barbara Bosson. Other credits include “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, one episode of a spinoff from a minor SF TV series of the 1960s, “Cop Rock”, “The Last Starfighter”, “Capricorn One”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. She was “Miss Riley”. We actually watched that episode a couple of weeks ago because it was the next one in sequence: the “Miss Riley” part was extremely small, and as I best as I can recall, had no lines.)
Lawrence sent over an obit for Lee Whitlock, British actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, the film of “The Sweeney”, “He Kills Coppers” (a TV movie based on the Shepherd’s Bush murders) and “The Bill”.
Red McCombs, prominent local car dealer and philanthropist. He was also a former owner of the San Antonio Spurs and the Minnesota Vikings.
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Zach Milligan, climber.
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Milligan, who grew up in Tucker, Ga., got hooked on climbing at the age of 18 when he was getting a haircut and noticed a photo of Half Dome on the wall, SFGate reported.
He later moved to Yosemite National Park, where he spent 20 years including 13 living in a cave while workin for a cleaning service.
He climbed the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome 20 times and the 1,640-foot tall Steck-Salathé route up Sentinel Rock at least 275 times, according to the outlet.
Eileen Sheridan. She was a major female cyclist in the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1945, her first year of competitive cycling, Mrs. Sheridan won the women’s national time-trial championship for 25 miles, and in the coming years she won at 50 and 100 miles as well. After going professional in 1951, she broke 21 women’s time-trial records, five of which she still holds.
She is best remembered for her epic ride in July 1954 from Land’s End, at England’s southwestern tip, to John O’Groats, at the northern edge of Scotland — an 870-mile trek that she completed in just 2 days, 11 hours and 7 minutes, almost 12 hours faster than the previous record.
She had spent six months training, but the trip was nevertheless grueling, with mountain ranges and rough stretches of road, not to mention cold nights even in the middle of the summer. She developed blisters on her palms so painful that she had to hold on to her handlebars by just her thumbs until her support crew could wrap the grips in sponge.
“We had a nurse,” she said in the documentary, “and she actually wept.”
When she arrived at John O’Groats, after getting just 15 minutes of sleep over the previous two days, she decided to push farther, to see if she could set a women’s record for the fastest 1,000 miles. She took an hour-and-48-minute break, enough to eat a quick dinner and rest. Then she remounted her bike and took off into the night.
She began to wobble toward the side. She had hallucinations of friends urging her on and strangers pointing her in the wrong direction; she even imagined a polar bear. But she stayed the course and made it to her final destination, the John O’Groats Hotel, the next morning, after riding for three days and one hour. She celebrated with a glass of cherry brandy, on the house.
Her 1,000-mile record stood for 48 years, until Lynne Taylor of Scotland finally broke it in 2002.
Roger C. Schank, AI theorist.
In the late 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Schank developed ideas for how to represent in symbols for a computer simple concepts — like people and places, objects and events, cause-and-effect relationships — that humans describe with words. His model was called “conceptual dependency theory.”
Dr. Schank later came up with ways to assemble this raw material of knowledge into the equivalent of human memories of past experience. He called these larger building blocks of knowledge “scripts” and regarded them as ingredients for learning from examples, or “case-based reasoning.”
“When I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, Roger Schank was required reading,” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, wrote on a memorial website. “He was regarded as one of the major researchers and theoreticians in artificial intelligence and cognitive science.”
FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Leiji Matsumoto, manga artist.
I am way out of my depth when talking about manga or anime, so I’m just going to leave that link.
William Greenberg Jr., NYC baker. He sounds really interesting:
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Lee Strasberg, the imperious director and acting teacher, loved Mr. Greenberg’s fudgy brownies; so, apparently, did the film director Mike Nichols, who was said to have coaxed his actors into their best work with the promise of one. The actress Glenn Close ordered themed cakes for wrap parties. A well-known decorator was said to have offered Mr. Greenberg’s schnecken (German for snail) — bite-size sticky buns — to his clients along with his bills, to soften the blow…
The writer Delia Ephron was partial to the chocolate cream tart — a cake, actually, layered with fudge and fresh whipped cream. Alexa Hampton, the interior designer, favored the candy cake, topped with shaved chocolate, crowned with rich chocolate squares and blanketed on the sides with vertical piping of whipped cream. Her father, Mark, was a schnecken man.
Another regular, the celebrated violinist Itzhak Perlman — a poker buddy of Mr. Greenberg’s — once ordered a cake fashioned in the shape of Ebbets Field, the storied home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, for his wife’s 40th birthday (not an easy creation, given the stadium’s elaborate Romanesque arches).
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Richard Belzer. THR. Tributes.
I hate reducing an actor to just one role, and I know he had other accomplishments as a comedian (who got dropped on his head by Hulk Hogan, and bought a house in France as a result) and an author. But man, what a role.
With Munch, Mr. Belzer found phenomenal success. In 2013, when the character was written out of “SVU” — as the “Law & Order” spinoff is often called — Mr. Belzer wrote in The Huffington Post that he had appeared as Munch in more than 500 hours of programming on 10 different shows.
The character’s run began in 1993, on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and included guest appearances on “Sesame Street” and “30 Rock.”
At his retirement, Mr. Belzer was often described as the actor with the longest run playing the same character on television, as well as the actor who had played the same character on the largest number of different shows.
Gerald Fried, composer. He did music for “Roots” and for a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
Stella Stevens, actress.
We’re trying to work our way through all of the Sam Peckinpah movies, but we don’t have “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” yet. And this weekend is “The Last of Sheila” because Raquel Welch.
Other credits include “Hec Ramsey”, “Banacek”, “Nickelodeon” (the Peter Bogdanovich movie), and “A Town Called Hell”.
archive.is seems to be working better today, so here’s the NYT obit.
Raquel Welch. Damn.
Her first starring role came with her second film after signing with 20th Century Fox, though it was hardly an actor’s dream. Her biggest line of dialogue in the prehistoric drama One Million Years B.C. (1966) was, “Me, Loana … You, Tumak.” Her experience on the set was even less inspiring.
“On the first day of shooting,” she recalled, “I went straight up to the director, Don Chaffey, and said quite seriously, ‘Listen, Don, I’ve been studying the script and I was thinking …’ He turned to me in amazement and said, ‘You were thinking? Don’t.’”
Duangphet Promthep. He was the captain of the Thai soccer team that got trapped in the flooded cave and had to be rescued by divers.
He was 17 (I’ve seen other sources say 18). He was found unconscious in his room and died in a hospital.
Stanley Wilson, former cornerback for the Lions. He was 40, and this is sad.
In August of last year, he was arrested “after he allegedly broke into a Hollywood Hills home, took a bath in an outdoor fountain and raided the property”. He was held in police custody until February 1st, when he was declared not competent to stand trial and was transferred to a psychiatric facility.
Conrad Dobler, NFL guard.
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ESPN:
On July 25, 1977, Dobler made the cover of Sports Illustrated with the title “Pro Football’s Dirtiest Player.”
Stories about the feisty offensive lineman included him punching Joe Greene, spitting on Bill Bergey and kicking Merlin Olsen in the head.
“I’ll do anything I can get away with to protect my quarterback,” Dobler told the magazine.
Austin Majors, actor. I used to watch re-runs of “NYPD Blue” in syndication, and I remember him playing “Theo Sipowicz”.
Hugh Hudson, director. IMDB.
Cody Longo, actor. Other credits include “CSI: Original Recipe”, “CSI: NY”, and “Piranha 3D”.
NYT obit for Solomon Perel (also known as “Shlomo”), whose death was previously noted in this space.
Ignoring “Murphy Brown” for the moment, he was also in the original Broadway casts of both “Company” and “Sunday in the Park With George”, among other theater credits.
Interesting side note: in 2002, he married Beth Howland, who was also in the original Broadway cast of “Company”.
Pervez Musharraf, former ruler of Pakistan.
Harry Whittington, most famous as the man Dick Cheney shot.
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In 1979, Gov. Bill Clements appointed Mr. Whittington to the Texas Corrections Board (now the Board of Criminal Justice), where he was the only Republican on a nine-member panel that had tended to rubber-stamp everything prison managers wanted.
“It was time for somebody to question,” Mr. Whittington said in an interview with The Austin American-Statesman. “There was no other way I knew how to do it.”
He uncovered secrets that stunned him: drug-running by prison officials, no-bid contracts, families paying off guards to protect their loved ones. At meetings, he asked hard questions.
His tenacity led to the creation of a separate unit for developmentally disabled prisoners and an end to wardens’ using prisoners to punish other inmates.
Lawrence emailed an obit for Shlomo Perel, Holocaust survivor with an interesting story.
Fred Terna, also a Holocaust survivor. He became famous for abstract art inspired by his experience.
Mr. Terna’s art became his Holocaust testimony. In acrylic works like “In the Likeness of Fire” and “An Echo of Cinders,” he painted in reds, yellows, oranges and blues to illustrate the flames that incinerated Jews in crematories. In some paintings, he used sand pebbles to represent ashes.
“I know how the fire of a crematorium chimney casts flickering light on a barrack wall,” he wrote in 1984 for the Berman Archive at Stanford University, which documents American Jewish communities. “How does one paint the near certainty of violent personal annihilation? How does one paint, and then make a viewer want to stop, to look at a canvas, to react to it?”
I know that some people would like for me to include photos. Pretty much all of the time, the obits I link to include photos. I’ve always generally assumed that, if you were that interested in the obit, you’d click through to the link, and including photos here would make these entries longer (and possibly infringe on intellectual property rights). I am trying to make more of an effort to link to archived articles, so people don’t have to navigate paywalls.
What do you guys think? Am I wrong about this?
Other credits include “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar”, “Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story”, and “Captain America” (the 1990 one).
George R. Robertson. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, the 1990 “War of the Worlds” TV movie, and “The Mad Trapper”.
Paco Rabanne, fashion designer.
John Adams. This one was a legendary Cleveland baseball fan, noted for banging a drum at games since 1973.
Mr. Adams’s drumming was heard at more than 3,700 home games, first at Cleveland Municipal Stadium and then, starting in 1994, at Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field). Stationed deep in the bleachers, he steadily urged the team on by rhythmically banging his drum with two mallets.
“Football has its bands and its cheerleaders, and all of them help get into the spirit of the game,” Mr. Adams told The Akron Beacon Journal in 1983, explaining his long-running stadium gig. “Baseball has nothing, so I thought of the war drum thing for the Indians.”
His status as a superfan was acknowledged when the team gave away bobblehead figures of him with a drum and movable arms at a home game in 2006. Six years later, Great Lakes Brewing introduced Rally Drum Red Ale in his honor.
And last year, on the 49th anniversary of Mr. Adams’s first performance at a game, he was inducted into the Guardians’ Distinguished Hall of Fame as a nonuniformed contributor. That group also includes Bill Veeck and Richard E. Jacobs, two of the team’s former owners.
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Lt. Col. Dr. Harold Brown (USAF – ret.)
Dr. Brown flew 30 missions during the war in Europe and later served in the Korean War. He spent 23 years in the military before retiring, earning a doctorate and becoming a college administrator.
He was one of the last surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group that included 355 pilots who served in segregated units operating from the war’s Mediterranean theater after beginning their training at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Fewer than 10 are still living, according to Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an organization dedicated to preserving their legacy.
After taking off from Italy at dawn on March 14, 1945, Dr. Brown, a second lieutenant at the time, was piloting a P-51 Mustang strafing a German freight train near Linz, Austria, when the locomotive exploded, hurling shrapnel into the engine of his single-propeller plane.
With only seconds before his plane lost power, he bailed out and parachuted to safety. But he landed not far from his target, where he was apprehended by two armed local constables and was soon surrounded by a furious mob of some two dozen Austrians whose town he and his comrades had just attacked.
“I was met by perhaps 35 of the most angry people I’ve ever met in my life,” Dr. Brown said on the PBS podcast “American Veteran.” “There’s no doubt murder’s on their mind.”
“It was clear that they finally decided to hang me,” he recalled in a memoir, “Keep Your Airspeed Up: The Story of a Tuskegee Airman” (2017), which he wrote with his wife. “They took me to a perfect hanging tree with a nice low branch and they had a rope. I can still visualize that tree today.
“I knew at that moment I was going to die.”
But he was rescued from the vigilantes by a third constable, who threatened to fire on the crowd to protect Dr. Brown as a prisoner of war.
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FotB RoadRich sent over a link: Boeing will be live streaming the handover ceremony at 1 PM Pacific (4 PM Eastern, 3 PM Central) this afternoon.
Bobby Hull as promised. ESPN. Chicago Tribune.
Cindy Williams. Other credits include “Cannon”, “The First Nudie Musical”, and the good “Hawaii Five-0”. And if you haven’t seen “The Conversation”, you really should.
Kevin O’Neal, actor. Other credits include “The Fugitive” (the original), “Perry Mason” (the good one), and “Lancer”.
Tom Verlaine, musician.
In 1972, inspired by the New York Dolls, they started a band called the Neon Boys. Mr. Verlaine bought an electric Fender Jazzmaster guitar for himself and picked out a $50 bass for Mr. Hell; their friend Billy Ficca joined them on drums.
In 1973 they added Richard Lloyd, a guitarist, and renamed themselves Television. They chose the name because they had a distaste for the medium and hoped to provide an alternative. Mr. Verlaine also enjoyed the resonance with his initials, T.V.
After seeing a performance by Television in 1974, David Bowie called the group “the most original band I’ve seen in New York.” However, Mr. Hell’s emotive, chaotic outlook on music clashed with Mr. Verlaine’s more controlled approach. Mr. Hell was replaced by Fred Smith in 1975 and later went on to form the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
Television signed with Elektra Records and in 1977 released its first album, “Marquee Moon,” which featured hypnotic guitar work that ranged from mournful to ecstatic.
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Television is one of those seminal ’70s bands…that I just never got into.
Lisa Loring. Other credits include “As the World Turns” and “Barnaby Jones”.
Barrett Strong, Motown singer and songwriter.
Annie Wersching, actress. She was only 45: cancer got her.
Hattip on the previous two to Lawrence, who also sent over this article that’s not quite an obit, but as he put it, “is the sort of thing you like to link to”. Which is true.
Breaking: Bobby Hull, hockey player. I’m going to go ahead and link to the NYT directly, since this is just a preliminary obit: if I end up doing an obit watch tomorrow, I’ll link to an archive version of the full obit.
Wally Campo, actor.
Other credits include “Shock Corridor”, “Ski Troop Attack”, and “Hell Squad”.
Sylvia Syms, British actress.
Other credits include “Doctor Who”, “Dalziel and Pascoe”, “The Poseidon Adventure” (the TV movie), “Doctor Zhivago” (the TV series), and “EastEnders”.
Paul La Farge, author. He wasn’t someone I’d heard of before, but he sounds interesting:
Mr. La Farge’s novels and short stories defied easy categorization, but they were all characterized by a sort of writer’s derring-do.
“With each novel he would set out, and then it would become clear to him that he had set what seemed like an impossible formal challenge for himself,” Ms. Stern, the artistic director of the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, said by email, “but he would keep on, wrestling forward and sideways and backwards, and eventually the story and its form would be inextricable in a way that was awe-inspiring and yet felt inevitable.”
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Mr. La Farge began “Haussmann: Or the Distinction” (2001) by presenting it as a translation of an unearthed French text from 1922. The novel goes on to tell a made-up tale about the real-life French official Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who oversaw the redesign of Paris in the 1800s.“The Facts of Winter” (2005) was another exercise in fiction-as-reality. Mr. La Farge presented it as his translation of a minor French poet, Paul Poissel, whom he had invented out of whole cloth.
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“Luminous Airplanes” (2011), about a San Francisco programmer who returns to upstate New York to sort through his dead grandfather’s possessions, is perhaps the most realistic of Mr. La Farge’s novels, but it had its own unexpected element: Readers were invited to go to a website where Mr. La Farge posted elaborations on and continuations of the story.
His most recent novel, “The Night Ocean” (2017), again takes a real historical figure — the writer H.P. Lovecraft — and weaves a story around him.
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Lance Kerwin. Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “The Fourth Wise Man”, and “Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy”.
Yoshio Yoda, actor.
He only has five acting credits in IMDB, but one of those was 163 episodes of “McHale’s Navy” as “Fuji Kobiaji”. He was also in two “McHale’s Navy” movies.
Betty Sturm, actress. “The World’s Greatest Sinner” is her only IMDB credit. (I have not seen “Sinner”, and I’m not aware of anyone ever screening it while I’ve lived in Austin. Apparently it is on Amazon Prime. I have seen “200 Motels”, and would have to think hard about repeating that experience. And I’m a Zappa fan.)