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Obit watch: February 9, 2020.

Sunday, February 9th, 2020

Let’s get down to it.

Paul Farnes. He was 101, and the last surviving RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

…for three months, through the end of October, the R.A.F. battled the Luftwaffe for supremacy in the skies over Britain. Flying a Hurricane fighter for the 501 Squadron, Mr. Farnes, a sergeant pilot, proved supremely adept at attacking German aircraft.
In August alone he shot down three Junkers Ju Stuka bombers, a Dornier 17 light bomber and a Messerschmitt 109E fighter.At the end of September, as Mr. Farnes maneuvered his malfunctioning Hurricane back to the R.A.F.’s Kenley base, he spotted a German bomber flying directly at him at about 1,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘Good God,’ so I whipped out and had to reposition myself and managed to get ’round behind him,” he said in an interview with the website History of War in 2017. “I gave him a couple of bursts, and he crashed at Gatwick just on the point between the airport and the racecourse.”

…

Aerial warfare against the Germans meant breaking away from the squadron, finding something to shoot at, firing away, then breaking away to safety. But by Mr. Farnes’s account it was also enjoyable, because he was able to combine his love of flying with the mission to protect Britain.
“The C.O. would quite often pick the next members of the squadron that had to be at ‘readiness,’ and the two or three who weren’t picked would be pretty fed up,” he told History of War. “If you weren’t picked, you’d think, ‘Why can’t I go?’ I’m sure one or two must have felt, ‘Well, thank God I’m not going!’ But a lot of us were quite happy to go.”

Robert Conrad. THR. Variety.

I was a little young for “Wild Wild West” in first run; if it was syndicated in Houston when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. It could have been on the station we were never able to pick up (the same one OG “Star Trek” was on). And “Hawaiian Eye” was before my time. But if you’re my age or a little on either side of it, this was like candy for us:

He also appeared multiple times on “Mission: Impossible” and other series, either as the lead of some less than successful ones (“High Mountain Rangers”) or doing guest shots. He did do a “Mannix”. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4.) And I didn’t know this, but he played G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.

Orson Bean. Variety. THR. Interesting guy: I remember him from “Being John Malkovich” and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some of those old game shows on Buzzr. In the 1960s, he founded a progressive school in New York City.

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)
When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

In the 1980s, he settled down again and resumed acting. He was 91 years old when he died: he was hit by a car while walking, fell, and was run over by a second car (according to Variety).

After the jump, more obits.

(more…)

Posted in 1970s, Books, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Nixon, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: February 6, 2020.

Thursday, February 6th, 2020

I wish I had something wise or profound or witty to say about Kirk Douglas beyond, “Man, what a career. Heck, what a life.”

The one thing I can say is: we’ve been lucky enough to watch a few Kirk Douglas movies recently during Saturday movie night, and I look forward to watching more. “Ace In the Hole” is a very under-rated but excellent movie about the power of the mass media to create circuses: in some way, I think it’s actually almost a prequel to “Network” (one of my top ten films). As for “Spartacus“, yes, it is a long movie, but I can’t think of anything I’d cut out of it. “Paths of Glory” is shorter, and is another Douglas movie that I think is under-rated. (I also think it may be Kubrick’s most overlooked film).

We haven’t watched “Lonely Are the Brave” yet, but it is on the list, and I may move the priority on that one up…

NYT. LAT. Variety. THR.

Man, what a career. What a life.

Also among the dead: Gene Reynolds, co-creator of “M*A*S*H” and creator of “Lou Grant.”

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

Obit watch: January 31, 2020.

Friday, January 31st, 2020

Fred Silverman, famous TV executive at CBS, ABC, and NBC.

At 25, Mr. Silverman was made head of daytime programming for CBS, and in 1970, in his early 30s, he landed the network’s top programming job, putting him in charge of the prime-time schedule.

He was responsible for the success of “All in the Family”:

“I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing,” Mr. Silverman recalled in an oral history recorded in 2001 for the Television Academy Foundation. “Compared to the crap that we were canceling, this was really setting new boundaries.”
He credited Robert Wood, president of CBS at the time, with putting the show on the air in January 1971. But it was Mr. Silverman who rescued it from its original, deadly Tuesday night time slot, stacking it on Saturday nights with another savvy series, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
“These were the first building blocks,” Mr. Silverman said, leading to other successes like the spinoffs “Maude,” from “All in the Family,” and “Rhoda,” from “Mary Tyler Moore.”

He went on to ABC:

By the time he left in 1978 to become NBC’s president and chief executive, ABC was No. 1 in the Nielsen rankings, on the strength of shows like “Laverne & Shirley” (a spinoff of “Happy Days”), not to mention the landmark mini-series “Roots” (1977).

At NBC. he was responsible for airing hits such as “Supertrain”, “Hello, Larry”, and “Pink Lady”. He also gave us the Jean Doumanian era of SNL.

Okay, that wasn’t 100% fair. He was also responsible for David Letterman’s daytime show, “Hill Street Blues”, and “Shōgun”.

After NBC, he went on to become an independent producer, whose credits included “Matlock”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “In the Heat of the Night”, and “Diagnosis: Murder”.

I actually managed to find a video of the legendary “A Limo for a Lame-O” sketch. I can’t embed it, but you can find it here. I can embed this:

Remember when Al Franken was funny?

John Andretti, member of the Andretti racing family. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

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

Obit watch: January 30, 2020.

Thursday, January 30th, 2020

Marj Dusay.

She knocked around episodic television a lot:

The Kansas native stepped in for the late Carolyn Jones as Myrna Clegg on CBS’ Capitol in 1983 and went on to play Pamela Capwell Conrad on NBC’s Santa Barbara, Vivian Alamain on NBC’s Days of Our Lives, the evil Vanessa Bennett on ABC’s All My Children and Alexandra Spaulding on CBS’ The Guiding Light.

She also played Blair’s mother on “The Facts of Life”, and Mrs. MacArthur in “MacArthur”. She also did guest shots on things like “Quincy, M.E.”, “Petrocelli”, “Cannon”, “Streets of San Francisco”, the good “Hawaii 5-0″…

…but she was perhaps most famous for playing “Kara”, the woman who steals Spock’s brain, in the “Spock’s Brain” episode of “Star Trek”…

…and yes, she appeared on “Mannix” twice. (“A Gathering of Ghosts”, season 4, episode 19, and “Mask for a Charade”, season 7, episode 21.)

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

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

Obit watch: January 24, 2020.

Friday, January 24th, 2020

Carol Serling, Rod Serling’s wife.

She was the associate publisher and consulting editor of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, a monthly magazine, in the 1980s. She was a consultant to “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983), a segmented film adaptation whose four directors included Steven Spielberg. In one segment she had a cameo role as an airline passenger in a remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the 1963 episode in which a terrified fellow passenger believes he has spied a gremlin cavorting on the wing outside his window.

…

Ms. Serling cemented Rod Serling’s place in the academy by donating many of his television scripts and movie screenplays to Ithaca College in upstate New York, where he had taught courses in creative writing and film and television criticism. The gifts helped the college establish its Rod Serling Archives. She also helped create scholarships and an award at the college, where she was a trustee for 18 years.

Jo Shishido, Japanese actor.

After plastic surgery to fatten the cheeks of the handsome young actor, Shishido became known for playing prominent heavies in action films.

He was in a whole bunch of Japanese films, including Seijun Suzuki’s “Branded to Kill” and something called “A Colt Is My Passport“. (I can’t lie: I love that title.)

He also played “Captain Joe” in a Japanese TV series called “Star Wolf“. And if that rings a faint (or even not-so-faint) bell for you, I’m so, so sorry: “Star Wolf” was later cut together and dubbed into two movies: “Fugitive Alien” and “Fugitive Alien II“, which, in turn, became MST3K episodes.

(I thought about embedding the forklift song here, but it was Ken, not Captain Joe, that they tried to kill with a forklift.)

Sonny Grosso, legendary NYPD detective. One night, Mr. Grosso and his partner, Eddie Egan…

…out for drinks at the Copacabana nightclub, spotted known drug dealers adulating an unidentified man, whom they later discovered owned a greasy spoon luncheonette in Brooklyn.
They followed him on a hunch, and the trail led to a French smuggler who was shipping 100 pounds of heroin — some of it stolen from a police vault — to the United States. Mr. Grosso determined the magnitude of the cache by weighing the Frenchman’s 1960 Buick Invicta when it arrived by ship and again when it was about to be transported back to France.

At the time, this was a record seizure. And speaking of bells ringing, yes, this was the “French Connection” case. Mr. Grosso’s character was “Buddy Russo” (played by Roy Scheider). (Eddie Egan was, of course, renamed “Popeye Doyle” and played by Gene Hackman, just in case you haven’t seen the movie.)

A product of East Harlem and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Grosso rose to the rank of detective first grade in the New York Police Department faster than any predecessor. He followed his 22 years on the force with a second career as a television producer and consultant for television shows about law enforcement, including “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Night Heat,” and for the movie “The Godfather,” in which he played a detective named Phil.
Until he died, Mr. Grosso carried his off-duty .38-caliber Colt revolver, the very same gun that was taped to the tank of a toilet and fired (using blanks) by Al Pacino in a mob hit in “The Godfather.”

…

Yes, he happened to be a regular at Rao’s, the tiny cliquish eatery on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem that has occasionally had unsavory associations. But it also happens to be a neighborhood hangout, just around the corner from where he was born.
Even there, drama intruded one night before Christmas in 2003, when a patron who objected to the singing of one of Mr. Grosso’s dinner guests was shot dead by another customer.

…

Recalling the crime-ridden city of decades earlier, Mr. Grosso explained how the police, and his partner in particular, had responded to the drug dealing that stoked homicides to record highs.
“It was a war then, and you had to act differently,” he said. “The junk epidemic was bursting out of Harlem.
“That’s why Eddie acted crazier than the people we were chasing. He had one philosophy: ‘It’s our job to put the bad guys in jail; don’t worry about the prosecutors and the judges.’ He was a madman, but he made sure I got home every night.”
“Those days,” Mr. Grosso said a little nostalgically, “we were just allowed to be cops.”

(Eddie Egan died of cancer in 1995.)

Posted in Cops, Law, Movies, NYPD, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 23, 2020.

Thursday, January 23rd, 2020

Wow. It got busy up in here all of the sudden.

Jim Lehrer. I feel like I should have more to say about this, but I was only an occasional “NewsHour” watcher. And I think the papers for the next day or so are going to be filled with eulogies that are probably better than I could write.

John Karlen, working actor. He was Willie Loomis on “Dark Shadows” and Lacey’s husband on “Cagney and Lacey”, among his 117 credits…

…which do include “Mannix”. (“Quartet for Blunt Instrument”, season 8, episode 19. He was “Hood #1”.)

Jack Kehoe, who never did “Mannix”, but was the “Erie Kid” in “The Sting”, the book keeper in “The Untouchables” (the DePalma one) and had roles in “Serpico”, “Melvin and Howard”, and a bunch of other films.

Jack Van Impe, televangelist.

Mr. Van Impe promoted a view of the end of the world known in evangelical circles as dispensational premillennialism, which teaches that Christians will be raptured, or taken up to heaven, before a period of tribulation, a final battle called Armageddon and the return and rule of Jesus on earth.
His sermons had titles like “The Coming War with Russia, According to the Bible. Where? When? Why?” (In that sermon he warned of a coming world dictator and a Russian invasion of Israel.) In his final broadcast, on Jan. 10, he discussed relations between the United States and Iran and predicted “the bloodiest war in the world,” saying it would result mostly in the deaths of “Muslim terrorists.”

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Media, Movies, Obits, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 22, 2020.

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020

I’m slightly behind the curve on the Terry Jones obits because my office is like Australia at the moment. (Everything’s on fire.)

This is actually a good thing, as Borepatch has a much better obit up than I could have written.

I rather liked this:

There were camps and alliances within the Pythons. Mr. Jones generally wrote with Mr. Palin. He was said not to get along with Mr. Cleese, although he shrugged off such claims.
“I only threw a chair at John once,” he told Vice in 2008. In a different interview his recollection was “John Cleese only threw a chair at me once.”

And now for something completely different: Egil Krogh, one of Nixon’s “Plumbers”.

In November 1973, Mr. Krogh, known as Bud, pleaded guilty to “conspiracy against rights of citizens” for his role in the September 1971 break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding in Beverly Hills, Calif.
The Plumbers, a group of White House operatives, were tasked with plugging leaks of confidential material, which had bedeviled the Nixon administration. Mr. Ellsberg, a military analyst, had been responsible for the biggest leak of all: passing the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret government history of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times earlier that year.
The Plumbers were hoping to get information about Mr. Ellsberg’s mental state that would discredit him, but they found nothing of importance related to him.

…

He was the first member of the president’s staff to receive a prison sentence; he was given two to six years but was released after four and a half months.
Mr. Krogh was disbarred in 1975 but was readmitted to the bar in 1980. Thereafter he concentrated on issues and clients related to energy.

Historical side note: Mr. Krogh was also an advisor to Nixon on drug policy…and, in that capacity, he arranged the legendary December 21, 1970 meeting between the president and Elvis Presley.

Mr. Krogh wrote a book about the moment, “The Day Elvis Met Nixon” (1994). In a 2007 speech at the Nixon library in California, hecalled it “the one completely fun day I had on the White House staff.”

Posted in 1970s, Elvis, Nixon, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 11, 2020.

Saturday, January 11th, 2020

Seriously, yesterday afternoon and last night were incredibly hectic. Let’s start at the top and work our way down.

Neil Peart, drummer for Rush.

Okay, that was a cheat. How about this?

Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman.

Qaboos’s decades as an absolute monarch who used oil wealth to pull his country from poverty made him a towering figure at home, with roads, a port, a university, a sports stadium and other facilities bearing his name. Internationally, as the longest-serving leader in the Arab world, he used Oman’s place in a turbulent region, next to one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, to become a discreet but essential diplomatic player.

Georges Duboeuf, wine guy.

Mr. Duboeuf was already a successful Beaujolais merchant in the 1970s when he set out to mass-market the local tradition of making primeur, a quick, joyous wine born of the year’s new grapes.
Many wine regions enjoyed a similar harvest ritual, a festive local practice among friends and colleagues. Beaujolais was an especially enjoyable wine to drink young. It was fresh and easy in a way that, say, young Bordeaux, with tannins that could be unpleasantly astringent, was not.
A thriving local market existed for the young wine. It expanded to the Paris bistros in the 1950s, when distributors began to compete in a race to see who could deliver the first bottles to the capital.
Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the mid-November day that it became legal to ship the new wine, cartons were loaded onto trucks, and off they went as eager revelers waited. The official release date shifted from year to year, but the authorities eventually settled on the third Thursday of November.
Mr. Duboeuf took this annual race and, through energetic and endless promotion, turned it into much more. He enlisted countless French chefs, restaurants and celebrities to the cause.
A crucial ingredient in the promotion was a dollop of suspense. As the clock struck 12:01, Mr. Duboeuf made sure that cases and cases of the wine were loaded onto trucks, ships and eventually jets for shipment around the world, all duly recorded by cameras. The fact that much of the wine had been shipped in advance was irrelevant to the fun.
“Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé” became an exultant international catchphrase. Television commercials would show the wine being delivered to, by Beaujolais standards, the remotest corners of the earth.

Alasdair Gray, Scottish novelist.

Mr. Gray’s first novel, “Lanark: A Life in Four Books” (1981), wasn’t published until he was 46, but it came to be hailed as a masterpiece. He wrote six more novels and six collections of short stories, influencing a generation of writers. In a wide-ranging career, he also created artwork, much of it seen in the streets of Glasgow.

By way of Lawrence, Ken Fuson. Not a particularly famous guy, but this is one of those funny and touching self-written obits.

In his newspaper work, Ken won several national feature-writing awards, including the Ernie Pyle Award, ASNE Distinguished Writing Award, National Headliner Award, Missouri Award (twice) and Distinguished Writing Award in the Best of Gannett contest (five times, but who’s counting?). No, he didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize, but he’s dead now, so get off his back.

Harry Hains, actor. (“American Horror Story”, “The OA”.)

Also by way of Lawrence (as was the Harry Haines obit): Shozo Uehara.

Uehara is best remembered as the main writer for Ultraman and one of the original writers on Ultra Q, the series that preceded Ultraman. He was later contracted by Toei Productions and created his first Super Sentai series, Himitsu Sentai Goranger (known as Five Rangers in the West).

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

Obit watch: January 10, 2020.

Friday, January 10th, 2020

Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, noted for “77 Sunset Strip”. NYT.

Broadcast on ABC from 1958 to 1964, “77 Sunset Strip” starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Roger Smith as a pair of suave Los Angeles private eyes and Mr. Byrnes as the parking-lot attendant at the restaurant next door to their office.
As he ministered tenderly to the Thunderbird convertible driven by Mr. Zimbalist in the show, Kookie (né Gerald Lloyd Kookson III) ran his omnipresent pocket comb through his lush ducktailed pompadour, cracked his devil-may-care grin and spouted aphorisms that even at midcentury had all the gnomic obscurity of Zen koans:
“A dark seven” (a depressing week); “piling up the Z’s” (getting some sleep); “headache grapplers” (aspirin); “buzzed by germsville” (to become ill); and, most emblematically, “Baby, you’re the ginchiest!” — a phrase of the highest Kookian approbation.

His character evolved from parking attendant to junior partner in the detective agency, but he was pretty much typecast after that. Deadline suggests that he partially inspired the Rick Dalton character in “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood”. He did go on to play the dance host in “Grease” and did a fair number of guest shots on TV shows…

…yes, including “Mannix”. (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6.)

Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, Texas sculptor of giant objects.

Iggy wound up at the Lone Star, a Texas-themed honky-tonk, in the 1970s after Mr. Wade had shown it at an exhibition in western New York, near Niagara Falls. Impetuously picking up the phone one day at 2 a.m., he called Mort Cooperman, the club’s owner, and asked him if he would like to install the sculpture on the roof of the Lone Star building, at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street. Mr. Cooperman said yes, agreeing to pay Mr. Wade $1,000 a year for Iggy — the deal was originally for five years — and $1,000 a year for his bar tab.

…

The iguana was Mr. Wade’s opening act. There would be many more gigantic, kitschy installations: A sextet of 10-foot-tall dancing frogs and an alligator made of Altoid tins. A New Orleans Saints helmet made largely out of an old Volkswagen. A hog-shaped motorcycle made from salvaged Harley-Davidson parts. A colossal pair of simulated ostrich-skin boots. (They’d fit a cowboy with size 500 feet, he estimated.)

…

A few years after the boots were disassembled and moved to a mall in San Antonio on three flatbed trucks in 1980, Mr. Wade got a phone call from the mall’s manager. A homeless man had found his way into one of the boots and cooked his lunch there. The boot was on fire.
“It was the size of a small apartment, kind of a nice spot, and he was cooking lunch with cans of Sterno, and smoke was emerging from the top of the boots,” Mr. Wade said in “Too High, Too Wide and Too Long.”

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

Obit watch: January 9, 2020.

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

The great Buck Henry.

He was a co-writer of “The Graduate”, co-created “Get Smart” with Mel Brooks, did guest stints on “Saturday Night Live” in the early days (and was the first five-timer), created “Quark”, wrote the screnplays for “Catch-22” and “The Day of the Dolphin”, co-wrote the legendary disaster “Town and Country“…man, what a career.

(Edited to add: NYT obit wasn’t up previously. It is now.)

Mike Resnick, noted SF writer. Lawrence has an excellent obit up at his site, and pretty much says everything I was going to say. I won’t say we were personal friends (I don’t think he would have passed Lawrence’s “pick me out of a police lineup” test) but he was a good and erudite guy who got me into Theodore Roosevelt and “Duck, You Sucker!” (among other things). His passing leaves the world a smaller, colder place.

Edited to add: found this, by way of Dean Bradley’s Twitter, and thought it was a nice tribute to Mr. Resnick.

Edited to add 2: Michael Swanwick on Mr. Resnick.

I had not heard of Adela Holzer before her obit showed up in the paper of record, but her story is too good to ignore. She was married to a “shipping magnate” and was an early investor in the musical “Hair”. (Depending on which account you believe, she put in $57,000 and made $2 million, or she put in $7,500 and made $115,000.) She went on to produce the notorious flop “Dude“.

In 1975, she was riding high. Then she wasn’t. By the next spring, she had produced three new Broadway flops: The Scott Joplin opera “Treemonisha” held on for almost two months, but both “Truckload” and “Me Jack, You Jill” closed in previews. She followed those with “Something Old, Something New,” starring Hans Conried and the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon; it closed on opening night, Oct. 1, 1977.

Then it got worse. You may ask: how much worse can it get than having your show close on opening night? This much worse:

At that point, theater was the least of Ms. Holzer’s problems. She had declared bankruptcy seven weeks earlier. She had been arrested on fraud charges over the summer and was free on $50,000 bail, awaiting the first of the three criminal trials that would shape the rest of her life.
The indictment, which finally came in 1979, was for a classic Ponzi scheme: paying her earliest victims “profits,” which were really just funds from her next group of investors, and so on. One of those early investors was Jeffrey Picower, who was later implicated in the Bernie Madoff scandal, a much larger Ponzi scheme.

She served two years in prison. Ms. Holzer tried to make a comeback in the 1980s with a musical about Joseph McCarthy that never opened.

She was soon arrested again, on grand larceny charges. It was revealed that she had told numerous associates that their investments — in oil and mineral deals — had been guaranteed by the banker David Rockefeller, to whom she claimed to be secretly married. That lie was bolstered by at least one fake marriage license and by a framed silver photo of him at her bedside. It was later reported that the photo had been clipped from a magazine.

She served four years (of an eight year sentence) for that.

Things had changed in 2001, when she was arrested yet again, this time charged with 39 counts of fraud. At the time, she was using a different surname, Rosian — she was living with a man named Vladimir Rosian on the Upper West Side — and the stakes were much lower. She had been charging immigrants $2,000 to $2,700 each, falsely telling them that she had influence on immigration legislation and could help them gain permanent resident status.
This time she was sentenced to nine to 18 years. When she was released in June 2010, she was in her 80s.

Noted:

Ms. Holzer’s resistance to truth telling apparently knew no boundaries. “If she told me the sun was shining, I’d go out to look — and I’d take an umbrella,” Michael Alpert, who had been her theatrical public relations representative, told Vanity Fair in 1991.

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

Obit watch: January 2, 2020.

Thursday, January 2nd, 2020

Don Larsen, pitcher for the Yankees and the only man ever to pitch a perfect game in a World Series. ESPN.

Jack “Only A Bill” Sheldon. Mark Evanier has a nice tribute up at his blog, with two funny stories about the late Mr. Sheldon (who, in addition to his “Schoolhouse Rock” work, did several appearances on the late 60’s/early 70s “Dragnet”).

Martin West. He did bit parts on a lot of stuff, including “Ironside”, “The Invaders”, and “Hill Street Blues”.

(Hattip on all three of these to Lawrence.)

For the historical record: David Stern. ESPN. Field of Schemes.

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 28, 2019.

Saturday, December 28th, 2019

Don Imus. Not much to say: I was never an Imus listener.

Sue Lyon. She did some TV and movies, but was most famous as the nymphet in Kubrick’s “Lolita”.

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

Obit watch: December 12, 2019.

Thursday, December 12th, 2019

Philip McKeon, who you may remember as Alice’s son Tommy on “Alice”. I had no idea he lived in Wimberly (which is a short drive from where I live), or that he was doing a radio show. (Hattip: RoadRich.)

Leonard Goldberg, noted television producer. He collaborated with Aaron Spelling on “Fantasy Island” and “Charlie’s Angels”, and went on to produce “Blue Bloods”.

I don’t watch much TV, especially network TV, but I have a feeling I should start watching “Blue Bloods”.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Tatsuo Umemiya, Japanese actor. I’m not familiar with his work, but he was highly prolific in Japan: 203 credits as an actor between 1959 and 2013.

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

Obit watch: December 9, 2019.

Monday, December 9th, 2019

René Auberjonois, versatile actor. He’s getting a lot of attention for his roles in Altman’s “MASH”, “Benson”, and some minor SF TV show, but he did a lot of movies and TV: “Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, “Mrs. Columbo” (but oddly not “Columbo”)…the list goes on.

Caroll Spinney is also getting a lot of coverage, but noted here for the record.

Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve.

Ron Leibman, another one of those highly versatile actors in movies, television, and theater.

Finally, Winston Lawson. he was the Secret Service agent who did the advance work for Kennedy’s Texas trip, rode in the motorcade, and helped load the president onto the stretcher at Parkland.

Posted in 1970s, History, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 4, 2019.

Wednesday, December 4th, 2019

Interesting pair of obits from the NYT:

Wayne Merry has passed away at the age of 88. Mr. Merry, Warren Harding, and George Whitmore were rock climbers:

On Nov. 12, 1958, they became the first climbers to reach the top of El Capitan after ascending the Nose, notable for a daunting overhang called the Great Roof. The climb took 45 days, spread out over about a year and a half; in each leg of the climb they would secure fixed ropes to the highest point they had reached so that they could later resume the climb with relative ease.

…

They subsisted on cheese, raisins, canned fruit and sardines. They carried water in an old paint-thinner can, and drank wine. “We trained on red wine, if anything,” Merry told The Yukon News in 2015.
They relied on improvised implements, including pitons that they fashioned from the legs of old wood stoves and tools from a hardware store that they repurposed for climbing.
“I wouldn’t hang a picture from them today, but back then we hung our lives on them,” Merry told Yukon North of Ordinary magazine in 2016.

Brad Gobright passed away last week at 31.

Mr. Gobright, a native of California, was hailed as one of the world’s best free solo climbers, a technique that uses no ropes. He set a speed record in 2017 — 2 hours 19 minutes 44 seconds — at the popular climbing route called the Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. It has since been surpassed.

Mr. Gobright died in a fall while rappelling with a climbing partner in Mexico.

In non-rock climbing related news, this is a nice tribute to Tim George. Dr. George was a pediatric neurosurgeon at Dell Children’s Hospital:

In 2006, Bill Dollahite’s son Scott was badly hurt playing football for Cedar Park High School in Waco. Doctors told him Scott was paralyzed. The family decided to move him closer to home.
“We took about a three-hour ride in the worst weather in the world … following an ambulance,” Dollahite said. In the middle of the night, the ambulance pulled into what was Brackenridge Hospital, “and here comes Dr. George.”
George was still new to Austin; Dollahite is not sure if he even had an office. Dell Children’s was under construction.
“Dr. George looked at him and goes, ‘You know, let’s not give up everything just yet. Let me take a look at this, because everything looks too perfect,’” Dollahite said. “Long story short, Scott went into Brackenridge quadriplegic. A couple of days later, he walked out. No ill effects after that. By the miracles that Dr. George did, he gave him his life back.”

Dr. George went on to take up racing as a hobby. He was competing in an endurance race at Sebring in Florida last month (as part of a team with Scott Dollahite) when he suddenly became ill, pulled into pit row, and collapsed.

I never watched “Will and Grace”, but Shelley Morrison had a long career before that show: “Laredo”, “The Flying Nun”, “240-Robert”…

NYT obit for D.C. Fontana.

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

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