Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

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Obit watch: June 4, 2021.

Friday, June 4th, 2021

F. Lee Bailey.

What a career:

Mr. Bailey flew warplanes, sailed yachts, dropped out of Harvard, wrote books, touted himself on television, was profiled in countless newspapers, ran a detective agency, married four times, carried a gun, took on seemingly hopeless cases and courted trouble, once going to jail for six weeks and finally being disbarred.

And props to him for honorable service in the military:

Francis Lee Bailey was born on June 10, 1933, in Waltham, Mass., the oldest of three children of an advertising salesman, whose name he was given, and a nursery-school teacher, Grace Bailey Mitchell. He graduated in 1950 from Kimball Union Academy, in Meriden, N.H., and enrolled in Harvard but dropped out after two years to join the Navy. He transferred to the Marines and became a fighter pilot and an officer representing servicemen in courts-martial, although he had no legal training.

The NYT obit hits all the high points of his legal career: Dr. Sam Sheppard, the Boston Strangler, Patty Hearst, Capt. Ernest L. Medina, O.J….

In 1977, Mr. Bailey, a master of turning simplicity into complexity, successfully defended a racehorse veterinarian, Mark J. Gerard, from two felony charges in a notorious racetrack fraud at Belmont Park. The defendant was accused of switching two look-alike horses — a top 3-year-old, Cinzano, for a long shot, Lebon, that the New York Times sports columnist Red Smith said “couldn’t beat a fat man from Gimbels to Macy’s.”
The switch produced 57-to-1 odds, and Mr. Gerard won $80,000. But the strands of the case proved too hard for prosecutors to untangle in Nassau County Court on Long Island, and Dr. Gerard, who had tended Secretariat and Kelso, got off with a misdemeanor and a few months in jail. “The record,” an appeals court said, “reveals a factual scenario that might have been authored jointly by an Alfred Hitchcock and a Damon Runyon.”

I have a vague memory of seeing F. Lee Bailey’s “Lie Detector” when I was younger. And this is a good story:

Bailey was featured in an RKO television special in which he conducted a mock trial, examining various expert witnesses on the subject of the “Paul is dead” rumor referring to Beatle Paul McCartney. One of the experts was Fred LaBour, whose article in The Michigan Daily had been instrumental in the spread of the urban legend. LaBour told Bailey during a pre-show meeting he had made up the whole thing. Bailey responded, “Well, we have an hour of television to do. You’re going to have to go along with this.” The program aired locally in New York City on November 30, 1969, and was never re-aired.

Lawrence also mentioned that he voiced himself in an episode of the animated “Spider-Man” series.

Posted in Horses, Law, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 2, 2021.

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021

Arlene Golonka. She did a fair amount of Broadway work, and a lot of TV. She was “Millie Swanson” on “Mayberry R.F.D.”, and did a lot of guest spots on other shows.

Noted:

Golonka played several characters on a 1965 comedy album, You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, which soared to No. 9 on the Billboard charts. When she couldn’t do the follow-up record, she recommended [Valerie] Harper for the job.

Also:

She portrayed another prostitute opposite Clint Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High (1968) and was the wife of a CIA agent (Peter Falk) in The In-Laws (1979).

Robert Hogan. Man, he was in every damn thing: as the headline notes, his career stretched from “Peyton Place” to “The Wire”, with stops along the way at the various “Law and Order” franchises, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Alice”, “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, the good “Hawaii Five-O” and many other series…

…yes, including “Mannix”. (“The Crime That Wasn’t”, season 4, episode 18)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 1, 2021.

Tuesday, June 1st, 2021

Buddy Van Horn. He has 109 credits in IMDB for stunt work: many of those were as Clint Eastwood’s stunt double or as a stunt coordinator on Eastwood movies.

He also directed three Eastwood movies: “Any Which Way You Can”, “Pink Cadillac”, and “The Dead Pool”.

Romy Walthall. She was in “Face/Off”, the 1989 “The House Of Usher”, and “The Howling IV: The Original Nightmare”, and a fair number of 1980s and 1990s TV series.

By way of Lawrence: Foster Friess, “successful investor, Republican donor and onetime Wyoming governor candidate”.

Thomas Sullivan. He was a Federal prosecutor in Chicago, and Diogenes would likely have been glad to meet him.

As federal prosecutor, Mr. Sullivan embarked on an audacious plan to root out bribery and case-fixing in the Cook County Circuit Court system. It included installing listening devices in judges’ chambers and creating fabricated cases that would be tried before judges who were under investigation. The sting came to be known as Operation Greylord.
“If we used real cases,” he said in an interview on his law firm’s website in 2014, and the prosecutor or judge “takes a bribe and a guy is released from a minor crime and then goes out and commits a really horrible crime, I’m going to get blamed for it. So you can’t use real cases; you have to use fake cases.”
As part of the sting, F.B.I. agents who were lawyers established legal practices to gain access to judges.

…

“He said, ‘See that box on the left?’” Mr. Webb recalled Mr. Sullivan telling him on his first day in office. “‘That is an undercover project investigating the circuit court of Cook County. The box on the right is about an investigation of John Cardinal Cody, who’s under investigation for stealing from the church. Because your wife is Catholic, she will probably want a divorce — so you will not only be unemployed, you will be divorced.’”

(John Cardinal Cody from Wikipedia.)

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Historical note, suitable for use in schools.

Monday, May 31st, 2021

You know who was a Marine?

If you’re one of my readers who was a Marine, the answer is probably “Yes”. I figure the list of famous Marines is drilled into folks at boot camp.

But for everyone else: Don Adams.

I kid you not. Before he was “Maxwell Smart”, he served in the Marines during WWII. He fought (and was wounded) in the battle of Guadalcanal. He also came down with “blackwater fever”, and was medically evacuated to New Zealand, where he was hospitalized for over a year. After that, he served as a drill instructor until 1945.

As a side note, I went down a rabbit hole about “blackwater fever” a few months ago when I was reading White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris (affiliate link). It also comes up in “The Bridge on the River Kwai“, which I did finally watch Saturday.

Blackwater fever is a complication of malaria. From what I’ve picked up, red blood cells burst and release hemoglobin, which enters the kidneys and can cause them to fail. I’ve seen suggestions that quinine either caused it, or was a contributing factor: now that we have other anti-malarial drugs, the incidence of blackwater fever has decreased.

A lot of those old-time African hunters came down with blackwater fever at one time or another: the folk remedy (which seems to have worked for many of them) was…massive consumption of champagne. I would think that would overload the kidneys and make things worse, but enough of those guys seem to have survived (the mortality rate is claimed to be 90%) that maybe there was something to it…?

Posted in Heroism, History, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 30, 2021.

Sunday, May 30th, 2021

Gavin MacLeod. THR. Variety.

As he told the story, one night he was driving, while drunk, on Mulholland Drive in the hills above Los Angeles when he impulsively decided to kill himself by driving off the road. But he stopped himself, jamming on the brakes at the last moment. Shaken, he recalled, he made his way to the nearby house of a friend, the actor Robert Blake, who persuaded him to see a psychiatrist.

…

After his divorce, Mr. MacLeod married Patti Kendig, a dancer, in 1974. They also divorced, in early 1982, but remarried in 1985, by which time they had both become born-again Christians. Mr. MacLeod documented their story, as well as his decades-long struggle with alcoholism, in a 1987 book, “Back on Course: The Remarkable Story of a Divorce That Ended in Remarriage.”

B.J. Thomas.

Mr. Thomas placed 15 singles in the pop Top 40 from 1966 to 1977. “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” a monument to heartache sung in a bruised, melodic baritone, reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts in 1975. “Hooked on a Feeling,” an exultant expression of newfound love from 1968, also reached the pop Top 10. (Augmented by an atavistic chant of “Ooga-chaka-ooga-ooga,” the song became a No. 1 pop hit as recorded by the Swedish rock band Blue Swede in 1974.)

Faye Schulman.

The Germans enlisted her to take commemorative photographs of them and, in some cases, their newly acquired mistresses. (“It better be good, or else you’ll be kaput,” she recalled a Gestapo commander warning her before, trembling, she asked him to smile.) They thus spared her from the firing squad because of their vanity and their obsession with bureaucratic record-keeping — two weaknesses that she would ultimately wield against them.
At one point the Germans witlessly gave her film to develop that contained pictures they had taken of the three trenches into which they, their Lithuanian collaborators and the local Polish police had machine-gunned Lenin’s remaining Jews, including her parents, sisters and younger brother.
She kept a copy of the photos as evidence of the atrocity, then later joined a band of Russian guerrilla Resistance fighters. As one of the only known Jewish partisan photographers, Mrs. Schulman, thanks to her own graphic record-keeping, debunked the common narrative that most Eastern European Jews had gone quietly to their deaths.
“I want people to know that there was resistance,” she was quoted as saying by the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. “Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter. I was a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof.”

Rusty Warren.

In the wholesome era of “Our Miss Brooks” and “Father Knows Best” on television, Ms. Warren, who died at 91 on Tuesday in Orange County, Calif., developed a scandalous comedy routine that was full of barely veiled innuendo about sex, outrageous references to breasts and more, much of it delivered in a husky shout.
With that new risqué routine, she began packing larger clubs all over the country. The release in 1960 of her second comedy album, the brazenly titled “Knockers Up!,” only increased her fame.
It was a booming time for live comedy and comedy records — “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” Mr. Newhart’s Grammy-winning breakthrough, was released the same year — and Ms. Warren emerged as a star in an out-of-the-mainstream sort of way.

…

She released more than a dozen albums, including “Rusty Warren Bounces Back” (1961), “Banned in Boston” (1963), “Bottoms Up” (1968) and “Sexplosion” (1977), selling hundreds of thousands of copies (“Knockers Up!” was a longtime resident of the Billboard 200 chart) even though for much of her career some retailers wouldn’t display them prominently and television producers wouldn’t give her the bookings that more mainstream comics got.

If it hasn’t already been written, somebody could get a good book out of the history of comedy records roughly mid-century (I’m guessing 1950-1975, maybe slightly later). Especially if they went into the history of “blue” or “party” records: not just Ms. Warren, but Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Rudy Ray Moore, and lots of other now mostly forgotten folks.

Lawrence sent over two: Shane Briant, British actor. (“Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell”, “Cassandra”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”)

Paul Robert Soles.

Best known today for portraying Hermey the Elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Peter Parker and his crime-fighting alter ego in the 1967 cartoon Spider-Man he worked extensively in every medium, his favourites being radio drama and live theatre.

…

Among his many memorable dramatic performances three stand out: the lead in the Canadian premiere in 1987 of ‘I’m Not Rappaport’; the first Jewish Canadian to play Shylock in the 2001 production of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ at the Stratford Festival and the Dora-nominated role in the 2005 two-hander ‘Trying’.

…

Beyond work and family he had three life-long passions: sports cars, music and flying. A racing nut he drove the winning foreign entry in the American International Rally (1959) speaking only German and passing himself off as a factory driver from Mercedes in a zero-mileage model W120. A bigtime jazz fan, particularly of the big-bands, he was a fixture at clubs on both sides of the border and he forged friendships with a number of performers. An aviation enthusiast and pilot he owned two RCAF primary trainers, first a Fleet 16-B Finch open cockpit biplane acquired to barnstorm across the continent as part of The Great Belvedere Air Dash of 1973 and later a DeHavilland DHC-1 Chipmunk. He was a performing member of the Great War Flying Museum (Brampton), an air show participant for 20 years and a perennial volunteer for the Canadian International Air Show.

Posted in 1970s, History, Music, Nazis, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 422

Thursday, May 27th, 2021

This is the last entry in the series.

I feel we’ve reached the point where we are, more or less, out of jail: restrictions are being relaxed, I am fully vaccinated, and I’m seeing many businesses doing away with mask requirements.

I originally started this as a diversion while we were all on home confinement. If you were locked in, what did you have that was better to do than watch weird old videos that popped up in my YouTube recommendations? Now, it seems like this…feature? recurring trope?…has gone beyond what originally motivated it. This seems like a good time to wrap it up.

Mostly. I’m holding a couple of things in reserve for days in the future. And if we’re hit by a new variant and have to lock ourselves in again, I reserve the right to restart this.

I have something special I want to post, as the final entry, and also as a tribute.

Gardner Dozois passed away three years ago today. To the best of my knowledge, the NYT still has not published an obituary for him.

(more…)

Posted in Guns, History, Safety, TV | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: May 19, 2021.

Wednesday, May 19th, 2021

Charles Grodin. THR. Variety.

Paul Mooney.

After discovering he had a knack for comedy and writing, Moody moved to Hollywood where he would flourish as a writer for such classic TV programs as Sanford and Son and Good Times. Mooney also wrote a number of routines Pryor performed for his iconic albums, including Live on the Sunset Strip and Is It Something I Said. Mooney was also the head writer on the short-lived, cult classic, The Richard Pryor Show. He also had a short stint as a writer on In Living Color.

He also did some acting work (he appeared on “Chappelle’s Show” and as Sam Cooke in “The Buddy Holly Story”) and did stand-up comedy.

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

Obit watch: May 17, 2021.

Monday, May 17th, 2021

Sometimes I want to put up an obit just because the writer clearly had fun writing it.

In Canada, it’s possible to find a man lounging on a chesterfield in his rented bachelor wearing only his gotchies while fortifying his Molson muscle with a jambuster washed down with slugs from a stubby.

That’s the lead from the obit for Katherine Barber, founding editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. She was 61.

Chuck Hicks. He has 197 credits in IMDB as an actor…and 110 as a stunt person. He worked a lot with Clint Eastwood, was in “Cool Hand Luke”, “Dick Tracy”, and played the robot boxer in the “Steel” episode of “The Twilight Zone”…

…and among all of his other movie and TV credits, he appeared seven times on “Mannix”.

Posted in 1970s, Books, History, Mannix, Obits, TV, Wordplay | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 14, 2021.

Friday, May 14th, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit from one of the Indianapolis TV stations for Edgar Harrell and James W. Smith, both of whom passed away this week. They were 96 years old.

Both men were survivors of the USS Indianapolis sinking.

Harrell was the last surviving Marine. The Facebook page’s tribute to Harrell said, “During his time aboard ship, he helped guard components of the atomic bomb. After the torpedoing, he was a hero amongst his shipmates.”
Smith had served the longest aboard the ship, beginning in December 1943. The Facebook page’s tribute to Smith said, “During weekly zoom calls, James would regale the group with tales of wartime as a young sailor… tales filled with mischief, adventure, fear, heroism, and brotherhood… and of course girls and a few stashed bottles of moonshine that got him into trouble.”

I’ve been meaning to note this one for a couple of days now: Colt Brennan. He was a star quarterback at the University of Hawaii.

In 2006, he set what was then an N.C.A.A. record for touchdown passes — 58 — in a single season, raising the possibility that he would be recruited by the N.F.L. after his junior year.
Instead, he stayed on for his final year. The Rainbow Warriors finished the season 12-0 and made their only football bowl series appearance, in the Sugar Bowl, against Georgia on Jan. 1, 2008. Mr. Brennan was a Heisman Trophy finalist that season.

He was drafted by Washington in 2008 as a backup, was cut two years later, went to the Raiders, and was cut again.

According to his family, he was in a car crash in 2010 and was never the same: “…broke his collarbone and ribs, caused head trauma, and resulted in blood clots that would plague him the rest of his life”. He descended into addiction. Recently, he had spent four months in a rehab center.

Mr. Brennan tried to enroll in a detox facility over the weekend but was turned away because it was full, his father said.

Instead, he met up with some people at a hotel and (according to his family) overdosed on fentanyl. He was 37.

NYT obit for Billie Hayes.

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

Obit watch: May 12, 2021.

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021

Norman Lloyd. THR.

I think many people of my age remember him as “Dr. Auschlander” on “St. Elsewhere”, but man, what a career before that.

His first love was the theater, and he was asked by Welles and John Houseman to join their legendary Mercury Theatre in the mid-1930s. He played Cinna the Poet in Welles’ anti-fascist adaptation of Julius Caesar, the 1937 Broadway production that landed Welles, then 22, on the cover of Time magazine.

He would have been in Welles’ “Heart of Darkness”, if RKO hadn’t pulled the plug on that. He had a wife and a baby and needed work, so he left Welles before his next project: an obscure film called “Citizen Kane”.

His work as the bad guy Fry in Saboteur (1942) launched a relationship with Hitchcock that would span nearly four decades and include a role in Spellbound (1945) and work as a producer and director on the classic TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and its follow-up, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
On Hitchcock Presents, Lloyd directed a 1960 installment, “The Man From the South,” an adaptation of a Roald Dahl short story in which a young gambler (Steve McQueen) makes a bet that his cigarette lighter can work 10 straight times. If it does, he wins a car from Peter Lorre’s character; if it doesn’t, Lorre will chop off McQueen’s finger with a hatchet.

Lawrence sent me this obit: Neil Connery, Sean’s brother. Neil did a little acting himself, including “O.K. Connery”, aka “Operation Kid Brother”, aka “Operation Double 007”, aka “episode 508 of MST3K“.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2021.

Monday, May 10th, 2021

Frank McRae, actor. He was in “License to Kill” and “Last Action Hero”, and did a few TV guest shots (“Quincy”, “Rockford Files”, etc.)

Pete du Pont, former Deleware governor and presidential candidate.

NYT obit for George Jung.

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 9, 2021.

Sunday, May 9th, 2021

Tawny Kitaen, 80s figure.

With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the music video for Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”

She once described working with Paula Abdul, who was a choreographer at the time, on the set of one video.
As Ms. Kitaen recalled, Ms. Abdul asked her what she could do, and Ms. Kitaen showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” And then, Ms. Kitaen said, she left.
“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”

…

She married David Coverdale, the frontman of Whitesnake, in 1989. The couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a pitcher with the Anaheim Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.

Tawny Finley, in a declaration to the Orange County Superior Court, claimed Finley used steroids among other drugs. She also claimed he bragged about being able to circumvent MLB’s testing policy. When told of his wife’s accusations, which also included heavy marijuana use and alcohol abuse, Finley replied: “I can’t believe she left out the cross-dressing.”

Ed Ward, music critic. He wrote for “Crawdaddy” and “Rolling Stone”:

Mr. Ward’s review of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” (1969) in Rolling Stone demonstrated his tough side: He called “Sun King” the album’s “biggest bomb” and its second side “a disaster.”
“They’ve been shucking us a lot lately and it’s a shame because they don’t have to,” he wrote. “Surely they have enough talent and intelligence to do better than this. Or do they?”

…

Mr. Ward was fired from Rolling Stone after a few months (he didn’t get along with Jann Wenner, the publisher), then became the West Coast correspondent for the rock magazine Creem, a post he held for most of the 1970s. He left in 1979 to write about the thriving music scene in Austin as a music critic at The American-Statesman.
“Ed brought a reputation to Austin as an unflinching critic — Rolling Stone had a lot of clout — and he was not diplomatic in his writing,” said his friend and fellow writer Joe Nick Patoski, who described Mr. Ward as cantankerous and difficult. “Early on, there was a reaction to some of the things he wrote and it started a ‘Dump Ed Ward’ movement that had bumper stickers and T shirts.”

…

Over the next decade, Mr. Ward was a music and food critic (sometimes, while he was still at The American-Statesman, under the pseudonym Petaluma Pete) for the alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle; one of three authors of “Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll” (1986), in which he focused on the 1950s; and, in 1987, one of several founders of the South by Southwest music, film and technology festival in Austin.

…

He returned to Austin in 2013 and set to work on “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” which was published in 2016. A second volume, taking the music’s history up to 1977, was published in 2019. But his publisher declined to publish a third one because the second book’s sales had not been as good the first one’s.

Ernest Angley, televangelist. Or, as I liked to call him, “the man who took over Rex Humbard’s soup kitchen“.

These last two by way of Lawrence: George Jung, cocaine smuggler.

Japanese composer Shunsuke Kikuchi. Among his credits: “Dragon Ball”, “Dragon Ball Z”, and several “Gamera” films.

Posted in Books, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 403

Saturday, May 8th, 2021

There have been a couple of incidents recently involving old guys falling off boats into the water and dying.

I’m not making fun of them: mad props to these guys for being out there. But, as Lawrence put it: “Important safety tip: try not to fall off the boat.”

From the National Safety Council, circa 1972: “Find a Float”.

Bonus #1: in honor of the late Bobby Unser, “Hazards of Mountain Driving”.

Bonus #2: “Blasting Cap Danger” brought to you by the “Institute of Makers of Explosives” circa 1957.

I remember when I was young and reading “Boy’s Life”, every now and then they’d have a public service advertisement depicting various types of blasting caps and warning young Boy Scouts not to mess with them. My question was: why? Was there a real problem with people just leaving blasting caps lying around for kids to find?

Posted in 1970s, Boats, Cars, Explosives, History, Safety | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 7, 2021.

Friday, May 7th, 2021

This has been well covered locally (and on ESPN) but for the historical record: Jake Ehlinger, linebacker for UT, was found dead in his apartment yesterday. He was 20 years old.

This one is for Lawrence: Milva. I’d never heard of her, either, but she was apparently a very prominent Italian singer.

Her deep, powerful voice garnered attention. But her short brown hair and slight build were far from the thick manes and full hourglass figures then in demand.
To compensate, she padded her bras and thickened her legs with three pairs of stockings. An agent recommended that she dye her hair red, a color that became her trademark and earned her the nickname La Rossa, or the Redhead.

NYT obit for Johnny Crawford.

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

Obit watch: May 5, 2021.

Wednesday, May 5th, 2021

Playing catch up once again:

Bobby Unser.

Unser conquered a fear of heights to capture the Pikes Peak climb a record 13 times, racing against the clock on a gravel road twisting through more than 150 turns with no guardrails overlooking drops of up to 1,000 feet. The previous Pikes Peak record of nine victories had been held by his uncle Louis.

He also won the Indianapolis 500 three times. Yes, three:

Unser bested Mario Andretti by 5.3 seconds in the 1981 race, but the next day officials gave the victory to Andretti after penalizing Unser one lap for illegally passing several cars under a caution. Had they imposed the penalty during the race, Unser might have made up the lap and won anyway, since he had the fastest car that season. An appeals panel reinstated Unser as the winner more than four months later but fined his team part of the winning purse.

Jason Matthews. This is a guy I’d never heard of, but am now intrigued by. He was a former CIA officer who wrote three spy novels (affiliate link) that are highly praised for their realism.

“I wake up every morning and I think, ‘Thank heavens for Vladimir Putin,’ ” Mr. Matthews told The Associated Press in 2017. “He’s a great character, and his national goals are the stuff for spy novels: weaken NATO, dissolve the Atlantic alliance, break up the European Union.”

Johnny Crawford. He was one of the original Mouseketeers, and later played Mark McCain, son of Lucas McCain, on “The Rifleman”.

Billie Hayes. Yes, “Witchiepoo”, but also “Mammy Yokum” in “Li’l Abner” (she replaced Charlotte Rae on Broadway, and played the role in the 1959 film version and the 1971 TV movie version).

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

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