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Obit watch: September 11, 2025.

Thursday, September 11th, 2025

I feel like everyone is aware of Charlie Kirk. For the historical record, here’s an archived version of the NYT obit.

I don’t mean to give the man short shrift, but I also really have nothing of significance to add.

Polly Holliday. She had a considerable body of work in theater in addition to her TV and movie work. THR. NYPost.

Other credits include “Gremlins”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, and “All the President’s Men”.

I got to wondering about this yesterday, and then a short time later someone else asked me the same question: is anybody from “Alice” still alive?

Linda Lavin, Vic Tayback, Beth Howland, and Philip McKeon are all dead. But Diane Ladd, who replaced Polly Holiday for (roughly) the season after she left, is still alive. (She was also “Flo” in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”.) Celia Weston, who replaced Diane Ladd, is also still alive.

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

Obit watch: August 30, 2025.

Saturday, August 30th, 2025

It never fails. As soon as I say I can’t find an obit, the paper of record publishes one.

NYT obit for Randall “Duke” Cunningham.

I feel very conflicted about this. On the one hand, I have a lot of respect for people who served honorably in the military. Especially fighter pilots, and especially fighter aces.

On the other hand, Mr. Cunningham’s crimes were sleazy and stupid.

He pleaded guilty in federal court in 2005 to tax evasion and conspiracy to commit bribery. Among the favors he accepted from defense contractors were a Rolls-Royce, free rent on a live-aboard yacht, the Duke-Stir, moored on the Potomac River, and a sweetheart sale of his San Diego County home for nearly $1 million above market value.

On the gripping hand, it seems like this was a pattern for him. Wikipedia cites sources that say he was nearly court-martialed for breaking into his CO’s office. And it seems like the whole “Colonel Toon”/”Colonel Tomb” story was fabricated by Cunningham.

Floyd Levine, actor. Other credits include “Manimal”, “The Master”, “Mrs. Columbo” and “Columbo: Murder in Malibu”, “Braddock: Missing in Action III”, and “Angel III: The Final Chapter”.

Frank Price, movie executive. He was in charge at Columbia twice, and also at different times ran Universal’s television and movie divisions.

During Mr. Price’s five years there, Columbia released hits like the comedies “Stir Crazy” (1980), starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor; “Tootsie” (1982), with Dustin Hoffman as an out-of-work actor who finds success only by impersonating a woman; and “Ghostbusters” (1984), with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd. Another major film under his watch was “Gandhi” (1982), with Ben Kingsley as the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi; it won eight Oscars, including for best picture and best actor.
But Mr. Price was said to have refused to make “E.T. the Extraterrestrial,” Steven Spielberg’s science fiction story about a fragile alien lost on Earth, because of studio research saying that it would appeal only to children. The decision proved to be one of the biggest blunders in Hollywood history: “E.T.” went on to break box-office records.

…

“It’s hard for someone like Price to confront the fact that ‘Tootsie’ doesn’t make up for six bad films,” Mr. [Fay] Vincent told Kim Masters and Nancy Griffin for their 1996 book, “Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood.”

I don’t know. I personally think that one big hit can make up for six bad films: if you keep costs under control, which is something Hollywood seems to be bad at. Then again, as William Goldman used to say about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 27th, 2025.

Wednesday, August 27th, 2025

Playing catch-up after returning from my trip:

Ens. Donald McPherson (US Navy – ret.) He was 103. National WWII Museum.

I love the NYT opening:

On April 6, 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa in the final months of World War II, a 22-year-old Navy ensign, Donald McPherson, was piloting a Hellcat fighter with “Death N’ Destruction” painted on the side.
As his squadron, the VF-83, joined an aerial assault on the island of Kikaijima, between Okinawa and mainland Japan, Mr. McPherson spotted Japanese dive-bombers rushing toward him from below. He lowered the nose of his Hellcat and fired, notching his first hit before positioning himself behind a second enemy plane.
“By using full throttle, my Hellcat responded well, and I squeezed the trigger, and it exploded,” he said, referring to the enemy plane, in an interview for Fagen Fighters WWII Museum in Granite Falls, Minn. “Then I turned and did a lot of violent maneuvering to try to get out of there without getting shot down.”

Also, I love Hellcats. Ens. McPherson shot down three kamikazes attacking the USS Ingraham in a subsequent engagement, making him an ace.

Although he never flew a plane again, Mr. McPherson was reintroduced to the F6F Hellcat when Fagen Fighters museum — which restores, displays and flies World War II-era planes — refurbished a similar one in 2021, soliciting his approval to paint it navy blue, the color of his plane, and adding the “Death N’ Destruction” motto. He reacquainted himself with the aircraft in person that year when it was flown to a ceremony at an airport in Beatrice, Neb.
At a 2022 event at the Fagen Fighters museum, Mr. McPherson said, “You people just can’t believe what all this has meant to me. That beautiful airplane.”
With a smile, he asked Evan Fagen, the museum’s chief pilot, “Can I take it home with me?”

The National WWII Museum and other reports I’ve seen refer to him as the last surviving WWII ace. The NYT obit seems to hedge that a bit by referring to him as “one of the last surviving American combat pilots from World War II recognized by the American Fighter Aces Association as combat aces”.

He received three Distinguished Flying Crosses and four Air Medals, and was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2015.

Humpy Wheeler, NASCAR guy. I probably would have let this go past if it wasn’t for this:

…he transformed race day into a carnival. With his taste for Hollywood-level stunts, he might just as easily have been called the Cecil B. DeMille of motorsports. The clowns, trapeze artists, elephants and tigers he brought in to perform in the speedway’s infield in 1980 were only a start.
He once collaborated with the 82nd Airborne Division, garrisoned in Fort Bragg, N.C., to restage the U.S.-led 1983 invasion of the Caribbean nation of Grenada, complete with wood fortifications, troops and helicopters.
“The mortars were blanks,” the sportswriter Tommy Tomlinson recalled in a recent post on Substack, “but the dynamite that blew up two houses placed on the infield was very real.”

David Ketchum, actor. IMDB.

Theodore Friedman, lawyer. I think this is an interesting story. He was a personal injury specialist, and known as a zealous advocate for his clients.

Maybe a little too zealous, as he was disbarred in 1994.

Mr. Friedman’s disbarment exposed an underside to his turn-it-to-11 style of lawyering. Accused of 23 counts of professional misconduct — including intentional dishonesty, filing a false affidavit and soliciting false testimony from a witness — he lost his law license after a special referee affirmed 14 of the charges. He was disbarred by the Appellate Division of the First Department, a state court that oversees civil and criminal appeals in Manhattan and the Bronx.
His disbarment was seen by some in the legal community as unfair, by others as a comeuppance for sleaze, and by still others as a cautionary tale about the limits of overzealous advocacy.

He reapplied for his license several times, and was ultimately reinstated to the bar in 2010.

Ron Turcotte, jockey. He was most famous as the jockey who Secretariat to the Triple Crown.

Secretariat, a big coppery chestnut nicknamed Big Red who, like Riva Ridge, was owned by Penny Chenery of Meadow Stable and trained by Lucien Laurin, made up for that disappointment in spectacular fashion. He powered to victory in the Derby and the Preakness, setting track records that still stand. He then demolished the competition in the Belmont Stakes to become the first Triple Crown winner since Citation in 1948.
Secretariat’s Belmont remains one of the most celebrated performances in racing history. Under Turcotte’s supremely confident handling, he cruised by the competition on the backstretch, “moving like a tremendous machine” in the famous race call by Chic Anderson, then drew off to win by an astounding 31 lengths. He broke the track record set by Gallant Man in 1957 by just under three seconds — the equivalent of 13 lengths — and set a new world record for the mile-and-a-half distance on the dirt, one that still stands and has never been approached.

Posted in Heroism, History, Horses, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 18, 2025.

Monday, August 18th, 2025

Terence Stamp. THR. Tributes.

Other credits include “Big Eyes”, “The Limey”, “Bowfinger”, and “The Hit”.

Dan Tana, who ran one of those famous LA hangouts for the stars (until he sold it in 2009). NYT (archived).

Dobrivoje Tanasijević was born on May 26, 1935, in Cibutkovica, a small town outside Belgrade, where he grew up. His father, Radojko, was a restaurateur. His mother, Lenka (Miloseviv) Tanasijevic, resourcefully kept the family afloat during World War II, when Radojko was arrested. He was considered an ally of the old ruling classes by the Yugoslav Communists, and he wound up becoming an accountant at one of the restaurants he had owned.
In the early 1950s, Dan, still a teenager, was on the farm team of Red Star Belgrade, a professional soccer club. The team traveled to Belgium, where he got into a fight with the chaperone. He and a couple of friends promptly defected.

…

Regulars during the 1970s described a particularly rowdy era: the musician Nils Lofgren serenading strangers with an accordion while high on acid; a fight between an agent and a producer over a third man’s wife that left enduring blood stains on the restaurant’s carpeted floor.
“Our best clients are the regulars who come at least once or twice a week,” Mr. Susser told The New York Times in 2005. “Even a studio chief might not get a booth at the last minute if they haven’t been in for a while.”

…

The restaurant’s hipness depended somehow on its orthodoxy. The interior and the menu remained locked in midcentury America’s imagination of an Italian restaurant — including after a fire in 1980, when customers pleaded with Mr. Tana to exactly replicate the old saloon, and after Mr. Tana sold it to a friend in 2009.

…

The average experience of a night at Tana’s went something like this:
You walked under a green awning into a space so dark your eyes took a second to adjust. The décor was repeatedly described as “bordello red”: red Naugahyde booths, red-and-white checked tablecloths, red Christmas-tree lights on the ceiling and, everywhere, mounds of marinara sauce.
Your table, lit by candlelight, would generally occupy a dark, recessed corner. Your waiter would not be the Los Angeles archetype — a beautiful but incompetent aspiring young actor — but instead, dressed in black bow tie, a professional, courteous gentleman from the former Yugoslavia.
Mr. Tana himself, though frequently attending to his international soccer interests in London or Belgrade, where he had homes, might also stop by your table to greet you. He had an athlete’s build — six feet tall, broad shouldered — but also the sophistication of a confident speaker of Russian, German, French, Italian, English and Serbo-Croatian.
“His manners are old world: He is one of the few men who can carry off kissing a woman’s hand,” Los Angeles magazine reported in 1997. “He does it swiftly, smoothly and without hesitation, the same way he lights your cigarette.”

Ronnie Rondell, stuntman. He has a pretty massive body of credits, but would be known to many people as “the guy on fire on the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here'”. He also did stunt work on “The Night Stalker”, “To Live and Die in L.A.”, and one of the movies based on a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

On May 23, 1969, Mr. Rondell married Mary Smith in Palm Springs, Calif. The couple had two sons, R.A. Rondell and Reid Rondell. Both children became involved in the stunt industry.
In 1985, Reid Rondell, 22, was killed when his helicopter crashed during the filming of the CBS television series “Airwolf.” A producer, Donald Bellisario, informed Mr. Rondell of the death, according to a news report at the time. “He was obviously broken up by it, but he told me, ‘You know, it goes with the territory,’” Mr. Bellisario said.

Tristan Rogers, actor. Other credits include “Cover Up“, “Mancuso, FBI”, “Delgo“, and “Fast Track”.

Jules Witcover, political columnist and reporter.

From the days of manual typewriters to the age of laptop computers, Mr. Witcover interpreted America’s political scene as an analyst and eyewitness to history. He swapped tales with presidents; covered presidential campaigns, beginning in 1960; recorded the rise and fall of Richard M. Nixon; and was steps away when a gunman killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968.
Mr. Witcover’s column, “Politics Today,” written five days a week for years with Jack Germond, appeared in The Washington Star from 1977 to 1981, when The Star folded. It then ran in The Baltimore Sun and up to 140 other papers from 1981 to 2005, when it was terminated in a cutback, and was later syndicated three times a week by Tribune Media Services. Mr. Germond died in 2013, but Mr. Witcover continued writing it until he retired in 2022.

…

He was featured in “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse’s 1973 book about pack campaign journalism, the old road show of poker games, pounding typewriters and all-night boozing. He fit right in, but he was one of the heavyweights.
“Witcover was deadly serious about his craft,” Mr. Crouse wrote. “He had given a great deal of thought to his own role as a political journalist, and was extraordinarily sensitive to the role that the whole press corps played, to its problems and failings.”

Posted in Food, Media, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 4, 2025.

Monday, August 4th, 2025

Loni Anderson. NYT.

“WKRP” was a great show, and she was a big part of what made it great. (“And, as we know, Jennifer was the smartest person in the room.” Yes, Jennifer was smart, and I’d even agree deceptively smart. But “smartest person in the room”? Hello, Bailey Quarters. Hello, Venus Flytrap. That’s another one of the things that made “WKRP” great: multiple smart people.)

Edited to add: I probably should have put in an IMDB link. Especially since Lawrence asked:

Who is killing the cast of “3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain”?

Rahaman Ali. Long time readers know I don’t like covering people just because of their relationship with other famous people. But Mr. Ali has an interesting story.

He was Muhammad Ali’s brother.

Rahaman Ali was a promising amateur boxer who won his first professional fight in an undercard bout the same evening that his brother beat Liston to become the world heavyweight champion. Rahaman went on to earn a middling record of 10 wins, three losses and one draw. He retired after a technical knockout in 1972.
Several figures from the brothers’ youth later said in interviews that Rahaman Ali had been a clever, coachable fighter who just lacked Muhammad’s charisma. When a group of Louisville businessmen got together to sponsor Muhammad, then known as Cassius Clay, they left Rahaman, then Rudy Clay, out of the deal. (The two brothers changed their names and joined the Nation of Islam around the same time in the early 1960s.)

He gave up his career to become part of Muhammad’s entourage, serving as “chauffeur, sparring partner, gofer, chef and cornerman”. Also human wristwatch, because Muhammad wouldn’t wear one: he’d just ask Rahaman for the time.

In 1990, speaking to The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Rahaman Ali expressed regret for not having focused on his own boxing career.
After his own bouts, “Muhammad never said, ‘Good fight, good fight, Rahaman,’” Rahaman said. “I feel he could have come back and congratulated me.”

…

Mr. Eig wrote that though Muhammad Ali had once promised always to provide for his brother, Rahaman had begun to live in poverty after a falling-out with Lonnie, Muhammad’s fourth and final wife.
He was sometimes described showing up to Ali Center events attended by his brother yet hardly speaking to him, instead wandering around to introduce himself as “Muhammad Ali’s brother.” Mr. Eig described one such occasion in 2015. Rahaman was not among the list of eminences who got a private audience with Muhammad. Afterward, he walked from table to table, collecting small decorative photographs of Muhammad and putting them into a shopping bag.

Flaco Jiménez, Tex-Mex accordion player. This isn’t my style of music, but even I’d heard of Flaco Jiménez. He was just that big a deal.

David Rendall, operatic tenor. I find this noteworthy because he had a series of…issues? Accidents?

In April 2005, Mr. Rendall was singing Radamès in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen when part of the stage collapsed, destroying the set. He was “knocked down at least 15 feet and tried to crawl to safety to avoid being crushed,” he later told The Telegraph of London. “I thought I was going to die,” a fate that awaits Radamès in the opera but is not normally faced by tenors singing the role.
Mr. Rendall had knee and hip replacements and surgery to his shoulder after the accident. Directors stopped calling, and he had to put his home up for sale. “I can’t do what some directors want onstage,” he told the British newspaper The Telegraph. He received some compensation from the theater but sued anyway.

Before that he nearly killed his singing partner.

Mr. Rendall was singing Canio in “I Pagliacci” in Milwaukee in November 1998 — his ringing performance of the great Act I aria “Vesti la giubba” is particularly noteworthy — when he nearly stabbed to death the baritone Kimm Julian.
The last scene includes, in the libretto, just such a stabbing, when Canio kills Silvio, the lover of his unfaithful wife.
“I’d been given my props when we started rehearsing, and these included a knife for the stabbing scene,” Mr. Rendall later told The New York Times. “At the crucial moment, just as I’d done 12 times before, I pushed the button to make the blade retract. But when I looked down, I saw to my amazement that the blade was still out.”
Mr. Julian, blood-soaked, collapsed. The blade had gone three inches into his chest and narrowly missed killing him.

The remaining performances of the show sold out. Mr. Julian made a full recovery. Mr. Rendall was questioned by the police, but ultimately released.

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 22, 2025.

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025

Sgt. Jake Larson (United States Army – ret.). He was 102.

In January 1942, he was stationed in Northern Ireland as part of the Army V Corps, also known as the Victory Corps. It played critical roles in the D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge.
As an operations sergeant, Mr. Larson assembled the planning books for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy. He ran onto Omaha Beach while German machine gunners sprayed the beach with gunfire.
He told The New York Times in 2019 that he remembered jumping off his landing craft into frigid water up to his neck amid explosions. He hid behind a pile of sand and asked a soldier if he had any dry matches to light a cigarette, as his were all wet.
“I looked again and there was no head under the helmet,” Mr. Larson said. “I thank that guy today. In that instant I had the ability to get up and run.”
He said that he weighed 120 pounds at the time.
“I don’t think the Germans were capable of shooting a toothpick, so I made it to shore,” he said. His unit, though, suffered significant losses.

During the pandemic, his grand daughter set up a TikTok account for him.

Mr. Larson had 1.2 million followers on TikTok on his channel, “Story Time with Papa Jake.” He amassed more than 11 million likes on the page.

…

The first video was posted in June 2020, and about 225 more followed as he quickly gained hundreds of thousands of followers.
Initially, he recounted in detail the preparations for D-Day, the operation itself, and the aftermath. But soon he added a recurring feature in which he opened letters and packages from his followers, and shared their contents in videos.

…

Mr. Larson was the last surviving member of his company.
“I am the last man,” he told The Times, while wearing a pin on his hat with the shield and motto of his military regiment, “To the last man.”

The Luckiest Man in the World: Stories from the life of Papa Jake on Amazon.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner. NYT (archived). IMDB. This is being well covered everywhere, and I have nothing to add. Except maybe: be careful swimming.

Jimmy Hunt, actor. Interesting story: he retired from acting at 14, and died at 85. IMDB.

Edwin Feulner, Heritage Foundation guy.

Tom Troupe, actor. Other credits include “Planet of the Apes” (the TV series), “The F.B.I.”, “Kelly’s Heroes”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. He was “Ben Holland”.)

Eileen Fulton, actress. Other credits include “Nero Wolfe” (the 1959 series), “Naked City”, and “Our Private World”.

Posted in 1970s, Heroism, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Bagatelle (#138)

Saturday, July 19th, 2025

“Justified” is full of timeless wisdom about how one should lead their life.

One of the best examples of this is Raylan’s Rule:

Raylan Givens: Any problem, that’s someone else’s fault. You ever hear of the saying, “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole”?

Another good example of this:

Art Mullen: I got a call this morning from AUSA David Vasquez. Wants to talk to you about you shooting Boyd Crowder.
Raylan Givens: What’s there to talk about? He pulled first. There was a witness.
Art Mullen: But you see, ten days ago you shot a man in Miami. Put it like this: you were in the first grade; bit a kid every week? They’d start to think of you as a biter.

“They’d start to think of you as a biter.” What brings this to mind?

A summer associate at white-shoe firm Sidley Austin began biting colleagues and roaring at them on her first day — and by the time she was canned, her body count had reached double digits, insiders told the legal news site Above the Law.
The bites were not “in an aggressive, ‘we’re beefing’ way” – but rather, “a faux-quirky manic pixie dream girl crossed with the Donner party vibe,” the outlet reported.
“Though I’ve seen pics of the results post-Biglaw Biter, and ‘nibble’ is probably too tame a word,” the article’s author noted.

…

A jaw-dropping account of the chomping spree posted to X said the girl sank her teeth into 10 colleagues, including other summer interns, associate lawyers and even an HR rep at the firm’s Seventh Avenue offices.

…

The firm declined to comment. But an insider told The Post the intern bit only five employees and that exaggerations were now flooding the internet.

Posted in Bagatelle, Law, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 17, 2025.

Thursday, July 17th, 2025

Connie Francis. NYT.

She made her stage debut at 4, singing “Anchors Aweigh” and accompanying herself on the accordion at Olympic Park in Irvington, N.J.
At 11, she was a regular on “Marie Moser’s Starlets,” a local television variety show. After she appeared on Ted Mack’s “Original Amateur Hour” and “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” Mr. Mack advised her to lose the accordion, and Mr. Godfrey advised her to change her last name to Francis.

…

“I often say, I’d like to be remembered not for the highs I’ve reached but for the depths from which I’ve risen,” she told Mr. James. “There were exhilarating highs and abysmal lows. But it was fighting to get out of those lows that I feel most proud of.”

Joanna Bacon, British actress. Other credits include “The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells”, “The Bill”, and “EastEnders”.

Bryan Braman, former NFL linebacker. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Braman was part of the first playoff team in Texans history after signing with Houston as an undrafted free agent out of West Texas A&M. He was a regular on Houston’s special teams, with his most memorable moment coming in a helmet-less tackle of a Tennessee Titans kick returner in the 2011 regular-season finale. Braman was also a 2012 Pro Bowl alternate with Houston, and he finished his career with four years with the Philadelphia Eagles.

This is just in, and should be considered breaking news: Felix Baumgartner, noted skydiver and daredevil.

In 1999, he set the world record for the highest parachute jump from a building when he took a leap from the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
That same year, he set a record for the lowest BASE jump ever, hurtling himself from the 85-foot arm of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro.
Then in 2003, Baumgartner became the first person to skydive across the English Channel with the help of a custom-designed carbon fiber wing, leaping from the craft at a height of more than six miles over Dover, England before landing safely in Cap Blanc-Nez in France.
His most famous jump was in 2012, when Baumgartner jumped 24 miles from a helium balloon, reaching a top speed of Mach 1.25 (843.6 mph) and becoming the first person to ever break the sound barrier without a vehicle.
He descended from the stratosphere in full free-fall for four minutes and 19 seconds before deploying his parachute.

This broke Joe Kittinger’s old record. (Col. Kittinger assisted with planning the jump.)

The 56-year-old Austrian extreme sports enthusiast reportedly fell ill while flying a motorized paraglider in the Italian coastal town of Porto Sant’Elpidio, crashing the craft into a hotel swimming pool.
He reportedly died instantly during the freak accident, according to media reports. A hotel employee was also injured after being struck by the glider and taken to the hospital with neck injuries.

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

Obit watch: June 27, 2025.

Friday, June 27th, 2025

Fred Espenak, astrophysicist. He was known as “Mr. Eclipse”.

During five decades of chasing eclipses, Mr. Espenak wrote several books about them, notably “Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses” (2006), ​​a two-volume, 742-page treatise written with the Belgian meteorologist Jean Meeus; operated four websites devoted to celestial statistics, including MrEclipse.com; and witnessed 52 solar eclipses, 31 of which were total.

…

In the early 1990s, Mr. Espenak began writing NASA’s eclipse bulletins with the Canadian meteorologist Jay Anderson. He also started a website for the space agency devoted to eclipse data. His goal: simplify and democratize complicated data so nonscientists sky gazers could geek out on the data, too.
All the while, he kept chasing eclipses — traveling to Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Aruba, Turkey, Zambia, Antarctica, Spain, Libya and beyond.

Lalo Schifrin. He was 93, and dang, what a career.

(Edited to add 6/28: NYT obit, which just went up today.)

The workaholic Schifrin received Oscar nominations for his scores for Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Fox (1968), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Sting II (1983) and for the song “People Alone” from The Competition (1980).
He scored Dirty Harry (1971) and the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), all starring Clint Eastwood — the filmmaker presented him with his Oscar — and served as the composer on all three of the Rush Hour films.

…

His résumé also included work on Coogan’s Bluff (1968) — that kicked off his long association with Eastwood and director Don Siegel — Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Charley Varrick (1973), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Telefon (1977), The Nude Bomb (1980), Black Moon Rising (1986), Money Talks (1997), Something to Believe In (1998), Tango (1998), Bringing Down the House (2003) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004).
An inspired Bruce Lee worked out to the show’s score in his gym in Hong Kong before signing Schifrin as the composer and orchestrator on Enter the Dragon (1973). As a bonus, Lee gave the musician his first martial arts lessons, for free.
Schifrin concocted a jazz waltz in 3/4 time for the theme to the Mike Connors series Mannix — also produced by Geller — and played the Moog synthesizer on the opening music for another 1960s’ CBS drama, Medical Center.
Schifrin also was responsible for the themes for T.H.E. Cat, Petrocelli, Starsky & Hutch, Bronk and Most Wanted. And his “Tar Sequence” music from Cool Hand Luke was adopted by ABC affiliates for their Eyewitness News broadcasts.

IMDB.

Bill Moyers.

But he resisted opening up about himself. He occasionally spoke about his Johnson years, but he never consented to be interviewed by Robert A. Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent more than 40 years on his five-volume Johnson biography.

Rick Hurst, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Return of the Killer Shrews”, “Supertrain”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.

Carolyn McCarthy, former Congresswoman from Long Island and prominent gun control advocate.

I bet you thought I wasn’t going to post this, didn’t you? Yes, I’ve used it before (though not in this version) but for my money, I think this is the greatest TV theme of all time. (Though I admit it does have some stiff competition.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Guns, Mannix, Music, Obits, Politics, TV | 5 Comments »

Obit watch: June 24, 2025.

Tuesday, June 24th, 2025

Bobby Sherman. NYT (archived). Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, and “Flying High”.

NYT obit for Blake Farenthold.

Aki Aleong, actor. He was “Colonel Quoc” in an episode of “Airwolf” and “General Quoc” in “Braddock: Missing in Action III”, so he must have gotten promoted a few times in four years. Other credits include “Mancuso, FBI”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “The Wackiest Ship in the Army”, and three episodes of “Babylon 5”.

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

Obit watch: June 22, 2025.

Sunday, June 22nd, 2025

Frederick W. Smith, founder and former CEO of FedEx. NYPost. Nothing in the paper of record yet.

Lynn Hamilton, actress. Other credits include “Hunter”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Lady Sings the Blues”, “The Marcus-Nelson Murders” (the pilot for “Kojak”)…

…and “Mannix”. (“Tooth of the Serpent“, season 3, episode 15. This is actually a pretty solid episode.)

Jack Betts, actor. Other credits include “The Assassination of Trotsky”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Dead Men Don’t Die”.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 11, 2025.

Wednesday, June 11th, 2025

Brian Wilson. THR.

Playing catch-up, since this fell into the awkward “while I was traveling” gap: Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone.

Harris Yulin, actor. Other credits include “S.W.A.T.” (the original), “Barnaby Jones”, “Kojack”, and “Little House on the Prairie”.

Chris Robinson, actor. Other credits include “Young Doctors In Love”, “Murder She Wrote”, and “The Streets of San Francisco”.

John L. Young. He was one of the early Cypherpunks, and founded Cryptome.

Cryptome, which Mr. Young and Ms. Natsios, the daughter of a C.I.A. officer, founded in 1996, offers up a grab-bag of leaked and obscure public-domain documents, presented in reverse chronological order and in a bare-bones, courier-fonted display, as if they had been written on a typewriter.
The 70,000 documents on the site range from the seemingly innocuous — a course catalog from the National Intelligence University — to the clearly top secret: Over the years, Mr. Young exposed the identities of hundreds of intelligence operatives in the United States, Britain and Japan.

Posted in Cryptography, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 31, 2025.

Saturday, May 31st, 2025

Loretta Swit.

NYT (share link).

She took voice lessons and dance lessons, but her parents were horrified by her choice of entertainment as an actual career. As Ms. Swit told The Toronto Star in 2010, after they saw her in a play at a small Greenwich Village theater, “My mother said to my father, ‘If you don’t stop her now, she may wind up doing this for the rest of her life.’”

I would like to think she ended up with piles and piles of sweet “M*A*S*H” residuals, especially given how long she was on the show. But there’s a quote in Larry Linville’s IMDB entry:

…after his agent, business manager, accountant, US government and ex-wives all got their cut, his royalties from M*A*S*H (1972) were enough to make his car insurance payment.

Then again, she only had one ex-husband.

I have a lot of problems with “M*A*S*H”, and those problems only increase the more MeTV reruns it. But it is interesting that Major Houlihan was actually permitted to have a character arc. This is a nice moment. (It used to be on YouTube, but I think they’re scrubbing anything from “M*A*S*H” that isn’t official.)

Other credits include “Freebie and the Bean”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Mission: Impossible”, “Supertrain”…

…and she was a “Mannix” two-timer. (“Only One Death to a Customer“, season 3, episode 20. She was “Dorothy Harker”. “Figures in a Landscape“, season 4, episode 4. She was “Jill Packard”.)

Posted in 1970s, Leadership, Mannix, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 29, 2025.

Thursday, May 29th, 2025

FotB Joe D pointed out in comments the death of Harrison Ruffin Tyler at the age of 96.

He was the grandson of president John Tyler. It is actually a kind of interesting story: he was born to Lyon Gardiner Tyler, John’s son. Lyon was 75 when he was born. John Tyler was 63 when Lyon was born.

He fathered more children than any other American president, including eight with his first wife, Letitia Christian, and seven with his second, Julia Gardiner, whom he married in 1844 — two years after Letitia died of a stroke.

Bruce Logan, who did a lot of movie special effects. Among his credits: he blew up the Death Star.

Mr. Logan — who was also a cinematographer and director — recalled that he could not film the Death Star’s detonation as if it were happening on Earth.
“When you shoot an explosion conventionally, with the camera straight and level, with forces of gravity and atmospherics acting on it, what you get is a mushroom cloud which doesn’t look like it’s exploding in outer space,” he wrote on Zacuto.com, a film equipment website, in 2015.
To achieve the needed effect, Mr. Logan manned a high-speed camera, which was surrounded by a sheet of plywood, with a hole cut out for the lens and a sheet of glass covering it. With the camera pointed upward, Joe Viskocil, a pyrotechnics specialist, set off a series of miniature bombs overhead, which created the illusion of the explosions occurring in zero gravity in outer space.
The bombs’ ingredients included black powder, gasoline, titanium chips and napalm — and the only protection the crew had was a grip holding a fire extinguisher.
“I do remember wiping some burning napalm off my arm,” Mr. Logan told the Manhattan Edit Workshop, a postproduction school, in 2019.

Ed Gale, actor. Other credits include “Chopper Chicks in Zombietown”, “Land of the Lost”, and “Phantasm II”.

Peter Kwong, actor. Other credits include “Theodore Rex”, “Homeboys in Outer Space”, and “Renegade”.

(Hattip on the last two to Lawrence.)

Posted in Explosives, History, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 27, 2025.

Tuesday, May 27th, 2025

Catching up from the three-day weekend:

Phil Robertson, noted beard guy and founder of Duck Commander. He was also on a TV show. NYT.

(I kid a little. I kind of liked what I saw of “Duck Dynasty”.)

Marcel Ophuls, French documentary film maker. He was pretty famous for “The Sorrow and the Pity”, but he first came to my attention when “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie” was released. I haven’t seen either one, though I feel obligated to. THR.

Charles B. Rangel, former Congressman from New York City.

Ronnie Dugger:

Inspired by Thomas Paine’s treatises on independence and human rights, Mr. Dugger was the founding editor, the publisher and an owner of The Texas Observer, a widely respected publication, based in Austin, that with few resources and a tiny staff took on powerful interests, exposed injustices with investigative reports and offered an urbane mix of political dissent, narrative storytelling and cultural criticism.

James McEachin. Other credits include…well, just about every damn thing. “The F.B.I”, “Play Misty for Me”, “The Bold Ones: The Senator”, “The Bold Ones: The Protectors”…and “Mannix” (“Pressure Point”, season 2, episode 3. He was “Benjy”, but went uncredited.)

Rick Derringer, musician.

Derringer was prolific, working with a range of major acts including Cyndi Lauper, Kiss, Steely Dan, Barbra Streisand, Bonnie Tyler and Ringo Starr. He produced Weird Al Yankovic‘s first six albums, winning a Grammy for “Eat It” (a parody of Michael Jackson’s Beat It) in 1984 for best comedy recording.

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

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