Dietrich Mateschitz, Red Bull guy. He didn’t invent it, but he adapted and “Westernized” an existing Thai energy drink.
Archive for the ‘TV’ Category
Obit watch: October 25, 2022.
Tuesday, October 25th, 2022Obit watch: October 21, 2022.
Friday, October 21st, 2022Ron Masak, actor.
He had a pretty extensive movie and TV career. Beyond being the guy who let Jessica Fletcher get away with all those murders, he was in “Laserblast”, “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, and “Ice Station Zebra”. TV credits include late period “Columbo”, “McMillan & Wife”, “Mission: Impossible”, multiple appearances on “Police Story”, “Quincy M.E.”…
…and “Mannix”. (“The Sound of Murder“, season 5, episode 17. He played “Barry Gates” in an unaccredited appearance.)
Obit watch: October 20, 2022.
Thursday, October 20th, 2022Charley Trippi, football player.
Although he was a football star at a time when many players appeared on both offense and defense, Trippi was especially renowned for doing just about everything but kicking field goals and extra points and snapping the ball.
In his nine years with the Cardinals, he ran for 3,506 yards, threw for 2,547 yards and amassed 1,321 yards in pass receptions — the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame to have exceeded 1,000 yards in each category. He played at left halfback and quarterback, punted and returned punts and kickoffs, and finished out his career at defensive back.
Trippi took Georgia to an unbeaten 1946 season when he was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy behind Army’s Glenn Davis. He received the Maxwell Award, which also honors college football’s leading player.
He was a member of both the College Football Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame. Mr. Trippi was 100 when he passed, and at the time was the oldest living member of both.
Roger Welsch, tractor guy.
Okay, that’s a little misleading. He was also a regular on CBS “Sunday Morning”, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska, founder of the Liars Hall of Fame:
and a honorary member of the Pawnee, Omaha, and Oglala tribes. And a tractor guy.
His practical interest in tractors, especially antiques, became a fixation in his writing and speaking, and for years he maintained a popular website full of geeky farm-implement arcana. In 1988, The New York Times wrote that Mr. Welsch “is to tractor restoration, and the Allis-Chalmers in particular, what Thoreau was to the lakeside cabin.”
He wrote more than 40 books about love, tractors, dogs and women, including “Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor” (2002) and “Busted Tractors and Rusty Knuckles: Norwegian Torque Wrench Techniques and Other Fine Points of Tractor Restoration” (1997) — a book as funny as its title is droll.
Obit watch: October 14, 2022.
Friday, October 14th, 2022He wasn’t someone whose work I have a lot of familiarity with, though I’ve heard good things about “Cracker”. Other credits included some “Blackadder”s, “The Pope Must Diet”, Falstaff in “Henry V”, and “Frasier”.
Dr. Vincent DiMaio, forensic pathologist. He was the chief medical examiner of Bexar County (which covers San Antonio) from 1981 to 2006. In that capacity, he testified for the prosecution against Genene Jones, who was convicted of killing a 15-month-old baby, and may have killed up to 60 other children.
Dr. DiMaio, who had been a medical examiner in Dallas from 1972 to 1981, was later called on to look into allegations that President Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a look-alike whom Soviet officials had trained to assume his identify. Michael Eddowes, a British lawyer and restaurateur, had made the allegations in a 1975 book, “Khrushchev Killed Kennedy,” which he published himself.
After the author persuaded Oswald’s wife, Marina, to have his body exhumed in 1981, Dr. DiMaio was recruited to help examine the remains. But his team quickly debunked the theory, confirming through forensic dentistry that the physical characteristics of the man buried as Oswald matched those on Oswald’s passport and his Marine Corps records.
As a private consultant, he also worked with the authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh and came to the belief that Vincent van Gogh’s death was murder, not suicide. He also testified for the defense in the George Zimmerman trial.
He also wrote four books: Morgue: A Life in Death (with Ron Franscell) was nominated for a “Best Fact Crime” Edgar award. (The NYT says it won, but the Edgar Awards database says The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale was that year’s winner.)
Bernard McGuirk, Don Imus’s producer.
Obit watch: October 12, 2022.
Wednesday, October 12th, 2022Angela Lansbury. THR. Appreciation. Variety.
Everybody has something to say about this, and I don’t have anything profound to add.
Obit watch: October 11, 2022.
Tuesday, October 11th, 2022Austin Stoker, actor. Other credits include “Riding with Death” (“Dimwitted, meaty guy foils criminals by turning invisible.”), “Airwolf”, “Lou Grant”, “Chopper One”, “McCloud”, and “Airport 1975”.
Lawrence sent over an obit from Publisher’s Weekly for Jill Pinkwater, author, illustrator, and spouse of Daniel Pinkwater.
Eileen Ryan. Credits include “Eight Legged Freaks”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Cannon”, and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”.
NYT obit for Nikki Finke, just for the record.
Pop culture programming note.
Thursday, October 6th, 2022I usually don’t do this, but I’m making an exception today. I know that there are some readers of this blog (including one prominent blogger) who are “Perry Mason” fans.
Tomorrow morning’s re-run on MeTV is “The Case of the Prudent Prosecutor“, which is my personal favorite from the run.
Why?
- The episode is set at a hunting and fishing club. “Perry Mason” is pretty good about guns in general (for reasons) and it is nice to see gun usage (not just hunting, but defensive carry) treated as perfectly normal and reasonable.
- The plot of the episode boils down to: a friend of Hamilton Burger is charged with murder, and Burger asks Perry to defend him. Which is a twist…
- …but it’s a good twist. This is one of the episodes that attempts to humanize Hamilton, and more or less succeeds. There’s a nice scene between Hamilton and Perry, where Hamilton explains why the accused is so important to him. It’s a good character moment: I wish the writers had been a little more consistent about Burger through the rest of the series.
If you happen to be in a position to watch this episode, and haven’t, I encourage you to do so.
Obit watch: October 4, 2022.
Tuesday, October 4th, 2022…
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Survivors include a younger sister, the country singer Crystal Gayle; her daughters Patsy Lynn Russell, Peggy Lynn, Clara (Cissie) Marie Lynn; and her son Ernest; as well as 17 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Betty Sue Lynn, and another son, Jack, died before her.
She also leaves legions of admirers, women as well as men, who draw strength and encouragement from her irrepressible, down-to-earth music and spirit.
“I’m proud I’ve got my own ideas, but I ain’t no better than nobody else,” she was quoted as saying in “Finding Her Voice” (1993), Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s comprehensive history of women in country music. “I’ve often wondered why I became so popular, and maybe that’s the reason. I think I reach people because I’m with ’em, not apart from ’em.”
Joan Hotchkis. A lot of theater work, and a fair number of TV credits. “The F.B.I.”, “My World and Welcome to It” (somebody needs to release that on home video), “Medical Center”, “Marcus Welby, M.D.”…
…and “Mannix”. (“To Draw the Lightning”, season 5, episode 22. “With Intent to Kill”, season 4, episode 17.)
Obit watch: October 3, 2022.
Monday, October 3rd, 2022Sacheen Littlefeather. Alt link. THR.
Ms. Littlefeather was most famous as Marlon Brando’s stand-in at the 1973 Academy Awards. She read part of his prepared speech refusing the award. (The speech was eight pages long, but “but telecast producer Howard Koch informed her she had no more than 60 seconds”.
Robert Brown. Other credits include an episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Primus”, “Run for Your Life”, “Perry Mason”…
…and “Mannix” (“The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress”, season 7, episode 1.)
Obit watch: September 28, 2022.
Wednesday, September 28th, 2022Robert Cormier, actor. He was 33: according to reports, he died from “injuries suffered in a fall”.
Venetia Stevenson. Other credits include “77 Sunset Strip”, “The Third Man” (the TV series), and “The Sergeant Was a Lady”.
Ray Edenton, noted Nashville studio musician.
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Obit watch: September 26, 2022.
Monday, September 26th, 2022Dale McRaven. He co-created “Mork & Mindy” (with Garry Marshall) and created “Perfect Strangers”.
Estrin had a successful career in TV, starting with credits on Charmed, Dawson’s Creek and Tru Calling, before rising through the ranks to serve as co-executive producer of Fox’s Prison Break.
Estrin was showrunner and executive producer of two ABC paranormal thrillers, The River and The Whispers, as well as co-creator and executive producer of ABC’s Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.
He was only 51.
In 1960, Gardner, who had recently appeared Off Broadway in the Jerry Herman musical review Nightcap, was cast in what would be her signature role: Luisa, or “The Girl,” in the Harvey Schmidt-Tom Jones musical The Fantasticks. Based loosely on Edmond Rostand’s 1894 play The Romancers, the musical told the allegorical story of two fathers who trick their children – The Girl, Luisa, and The Boy, Matt – into falling in love by pretending to oppose the union.
The production, at a tiny Off Broadway venue in Greenwich Village called the Sullivan Street Playhouse, became a huge success, spawning a hit song (“Try To Remember”), running 42 years and boosting the careers of Gardner and other cast members (including Kenneth Nelson, who went on to star in The Boys in the Band, and, most notably, Jerry Orbach, the Law & Order star who enjoyed a long career on stage, film and television).
She did a considerable amount of theater work, both on and off Broadway. She also did some TV, including three of the shows in the “Law and Order” franchise.
Jim Florio. former governor of New Jersey, “who then pushed through a record increase shortly after taking office, incurring public wrath that led to his defeat in his bid for a second term“.
Nancy Hiller, woodworker. (Alt link.)
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There was nothing fancy about her work. She resisted the label “artist,” though people tried to pin it on her. And she deliberately charged less than her peers, not to undercut them, but to make her work affordable to middle-class clients who appreciated good design and hard work.
“She didn’t want to do work that was only accessible to a few people,” Megan Fitzpatrick, a woodworker and editor, said in an interview. “She wanted work that was accessible to everybody.”
Just Jaeckin, director. His most famous film was probably the 1974 soft-core porn film “Emmanuelle”. Other credits include “The Story of O”, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, and “The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak”.
Obit watch: September 24, 2022.
Saturday, September 24th, 2022This is shaping up to be another one of those busy weekends: Mike the Musicologist is in town and we’re going to a fun show.
However, I have a few minutes, and I didn’t want to let Louise Fletcher get past me. THR.
Other credits include “Perry Mason” (the original, twice), “Maverick”, “The Untouchables”, and several appearances on one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.
Edited to add: slipping another one in. John Hartman, drummer for the Doobie Brothers. I apologize that I don’t have more time to go into detail: I might try to do a musical interlude on Monday.
Obit watch: September 23, 2022.
Friday, September 23rd, 2022Hilary Mantel, author of historical fiction.
She was someone I’d heard of, but never read. I didn’t know, until I read the obit, that those three books are a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, and now I kind of want to read them.
Maarten Schmidt, astronomer. He did a lot of work on quasi-stellar radio sources, or “quasars”.
In 1962, two scientists in Australia, Cyril Hazard and John Bolton, finally managed to pinpoint the precise position of one of these, called 3C 273. They shared the data with several researchers, including Dr. Schmidt, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.
Using the enormous 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in rural San Diego County, Dr. Schmidt was able to hone in on what appeared to be a faint blue star. He then plotted its light signature on a graph, showing where its constituent elements appeared in the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared.
What he found was, at first, puzzling. The signatures, or spectral lines, did not resemble those of any known elements. He stared at the graphs for weeks, pacing his living room floor, until he realized: The expected elements were all there, but they had shifted toward the red end of the spectrum — an indication that the object was moving away from Earth, and fast.
And once he knew the speed — 30,000 miles a second — Dr. Schmidt could calculate the object’s distance. His jaw dropped. At about 2.4 billion light years away, 3C 273 was one of the most distant objects in the universe from Earth. That distance meant that it was also unbelievably luminous: If it were placed at the position of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, it would outshine the sun.
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The question remained: If these objects weren’t stars, what were they? Theories proliferated. Some said they were the fading embers of a giant supernova. Dr. Schmidt and others believed instead that in a quasar, astronomers could see the birth of an entire galaxy, with a black hole at the center pulling together astral gases that, in their friction, generated enormous amounts of energy — an argument developed by Donald Lynden-Bell, a physicist at Cambridge University, in 1969.
If that was true, and if quasars really were several billion light years away, it meant that they were portraits of the universe in its relative infancy, just a few billion years old. In some cases their light originated long before Earth’s solar system was even formed, and offered clues to the evolution of the universe.
Sara Shane, actress. Other credits include the 1950s “Dragnet”, “The Outer Limits”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, and the “I Led 3 Lives” TV series.
The Times has published two obits over the past couple of days for people who weren’t all that famous, but were interesting for reasons.
John Train. He was a co-founder of “The Paris Review”. He was an author: among other things, he wrote three books about “remarkable names of real people”.
And he was also kind of a shadowy power broker:
Yet he was also an operator in high finance and world affairs who, by one researcher’s account, had ties to U.S. secret services. Mr. Train founded and ran a leading financial firm devoted to preserving the money of rich families, and he worked to support the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The multifariousness of his career defies definition, but one quality did underlie his many activities. Mr. Train exemplified the attitudes and values of the exalted class he was born into: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the postwar era. He was globe-bestriding but also self-effacing, erudite but also pragmatic, cosmopolitan but also nationalistic, solemn at one moment and droll the next.
Allan M. Siegal. This is one of those internal NYT obits, but Mr. Siegal was an old-line Times guy, so his obit is of some interest.
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“Readers will believe more of what we do know if we level with them about what we don’t” was one of Mr. Siegal’s favorite injunctions, articulated long before media outlets in the digital era began emphasizing transparency in news gathering and editing.
Another: “Being fair is better than being first.”
Mr. Siegal’s knowledge of grammar, history, geography, nomenclature, culture and cuisine was expansive. But on no subject was he more authoritative than The Times itself.
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In 2003, in the aftermath of a scandal in which the fabrications of a reporter, Jayson Blair, led to the fall of the newsroom’s top two managers, Mr. Siegal headed an internal committee that reviewed the paper’s ethical and organizational practices.
Among its recommendations was the creation of a new job: standards editor. Mr. Siegal was the first to be named to the position, adding the title to that of assistant managing editor, a post he held from 1987 until his retirement in 2006. At the time, his name had been listed among the paper’s top editors on the masthead, which appeared on the editorial page, more than twice as long as anyone else’s.
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Mr. Siegal was capable of withering criticism. His post-mortem critiques to subordinate editors and reporters — written in precise penmanship with a green felt-tip pen (known as “greenies” among the staff, they showed up well against black-and-white newsprint, he found) — could be as terse as “Ugh!” “How, please?” “Name names” and “Absurd!”
Once, having demanded that a headline combine several complex elements in a short word count, he found the result wanting: “As if written by pedants from Mars,” he declared.
But his rockets were also astute and instructive, guiding generations of editors and reporters in the finer points of style and tone. And perhaps because he was so demanding, his not-infrequent notes of praise were cherished all the more. “Nice, who?” was his trademark comment when he thought a headline or caption, by an anonymous editor, was especially artful. (The answer, the name of the editor, would appear — to the editor’s great pride — in the next day’s compilation of post-mortems, run off and stapled together by copy machine and distributed throughout the news department.)< Other critiques showed a biting sense of humor. “If this bumpkin spelling is the best we can do,” he once wrote of a subheadline that included a reference to “fois gras” (rather than foie gras), “we should stick to chopped liver.” When a headline allowed that the football coach Mike Ditka “should recover” from a heart attack, Mr. Siegal wrote: “Unless God returns our call, we shouldn’t predict in such cases.”
Obit watch: September 20, 2022.
Tuesday, September 20th, 2022Marva Hicks, actress.
Other credits include “Mad About You”, “Babylon 5”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.
This pushes the boundary of obits a bit, but: two decomposed bodies were found yesterday in the home of the former mayor of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. As far as I can tell, the bodies have not been identified yet, but the police also apparently do not suspect criminal activity.
The pilot who died on Sunday at the Reno Air Races has been identified as Aaron Hogue. He was flying a L-29 in the Jet Gold race.
Mr. Hogue was also one of the owners of Hogue Inc., which makes various firearms accessories (including grips) and knives. (I touched on them briefly in my NRAAM coverage.)
Obit watch: September 19, 2022.
Monday, September 19th, 2022Henry Silva, actor. THR. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Bearcats!”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, and “Quark”.
Lawrence emailed an obit for Cristobal Jodorowsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s and the star of “Santa Sangre”.
There was a fatal crash at the Reno Air Races on Sunday. The pilot’s name has not been released yet, as far as I can determine, but I will update when I have more information. Coverage from the Reno paper (by way of archive.is).