I did not know he was in “Twin Peaks” or “Shooter”. Or the bad “Hawaii 5-0”. And he was in the legendary “Zyzzyx Rd”. I did remember he was in the short-lived but stylishly violent “Robbery Homicide Division”.
Steve Mackey, of Pulp.
Thing I did not know:
Ted Donaldson. Other credits include an episode of “The Silent Service” in 1958 (his last one in IMDB) and “The Red Stallion”.
Wayne Shorter, saxaphone player and composer.
His career reached across more than half a century, largely inextricable from jazz’s complex evolution during that span. He emerged in the 1960s as a tenor saxophonist and in-house composer for pace-setting editions of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis Quintet, two of the most celebrated small groups in jazz history.
He then helped pioneer fusion, with Davis and as a leader of Weather Report, which amassed a legion of fans. He also forged a bond with popular music in marquee collaborations with the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, the guitarist Carlos Santana and the band Steely Dan, whose 1977 song “Aja” reaches a dynamic climax with his hide-and-seek tenor solo.
…
Mr. Shorter often said he was drawn to music because it has “velocity and mystery.” A lifelong fan of comic books and science fiction, he kept a shelf crowded with action figures and wore T-shirts emblazoned with the Superman “S” logo. In his later years, he cut the figure of a sage with a twinkle in his eye, issuing cryptic or elliptical statements that inevitably came back to a sense of play.
“Don’t throw away your childish dreams,” he said in 2012. “You have to be strong enough to protect them.”
Throughout his career he refused to hew too closely to any tradition except that of fearless expedition. “The word ‘jazz,’ to me,” he liked to say, “only means ‘I dare you.’”
…
In total, Mr. Shorter won 12 Grammy Awards, the last bestowed this year for best improvised jazz solo, for “Endangered Species,” a track, written with Ms. Spalding, from the album “Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival,” where he performed in a quartet with her, Terri Lyne Carrington and Leo Genovese.
He also received a lifetime achievement honor from the Recording Academy in 2015. He was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and a 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. He received the Polar Music Prize, an international honor recognizing both pop and classical music, in 2017. And he was among the recipients of the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors, in a class that also included the composer Philip Glass.
Greta Andersen, long-distance swimmer. She was 95.
…
Christopher Fowler, author. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
FotB RoadRich sent over a nice obit for David Rathbun. He spent 26 years with Cirrus Aircraft, and did a lot of work on the SR20, SR22, SR22T, and the SF50 Vision Jet.
Richard Anobile. I had not heard of him previously, but his story is relevant to my interests.
This was in the days before VCRs, DVDs, and widespread availability of older movies for easy viewing. Most famously, he got involved with Groucho Marx.
“The Marx Bros. Scrapbook,” published two years later, was a more ambitious project, and it brought Mr. Anobile into closer contact with Groucho, then in his 80s, through an introduction by his agent.
In addition to excerpts from his many hours of interviews with Mr. Marx, the book included photographs and illustrations, as well as playbills, reviews, advertisements, family scrapbook entries and pages from film scripts. Mr. Anobile also interviewed the other two surviving Marx brothers, Gummo (who left the group long before they started making movies) and Zeppo, as well as friends like the comedian Jack Benny.
I’m going to note here that used paperback copies of this are available on Amazon for reasonable prices.
Getting back to Groucho and Mr. Anobile, there was a problem:
But Mr. Marx regretted the publication of his raw opinions of people like his brother Chico (“All he could do was shoot the piano keys”); Noël Coward and Truman Capote (whom he tarred with gay slurs); George M. Cohan (“a no-good Irish son of a bitch”); S.J. Perelman, who contributed to the scripts of two Marx Brothers films (“I hated the son of a bitch and he had a head as big as my desk”); and Marilyn Monroe, who had a small role in “Love Happy” (1949), the brothers’ last film.
In late 1973, Mr. Marx sought an injunction in New York State Supreme Court to stop the distribution of the book, although it had already been delivered to bookstores nationwide. He argued that it contained “defamatory, scandalous, obscene and inflammatory matter” and that Mr. Anobile had assured him that he was going to turn his raw language into respectable prose.
Whatever it was he had said — to paraphrase a song he had sung in “Horse Feathers” (1932) — he was against it.
To prove that Mr. Marx said what he had said, Mr. Anobile brought the tapes of their interviews into court. In a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 1974, he recalled cautioning Mr. Marx not to say anything during the interviews that he did not want to see published.
He added, “He signed a jacket of the book, ‘This is a wonderful book, Richard, thanks to you.’”
Mr. Marx — who staged one of his depositions in a Manhattan hotel suite wearing a shirt patterned with the titles of Marx Brothers films and bearing the slogan “Money talks” — never got the injunction or the $15 million in damages that he had demanded.
Mr. Anobile told the blog Brain Dead and Loving It in 2018 that the case was settled after Mr. Marx’s death in 1977.
Ricou Browning has passed away at 93.
For those of you going, “Who?”, he was perhaps most famous as the guy in the rubber suit in “Creature From the Black Lagoon” and the two sequels (“Revenge of the Creature” and “The Creature Walks Among Us”). He had quite an interesting career beyond those:
The Florida native also served as a stuntman on Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), doubled for Jerry Lewis in Don’t Give Up the Ship (1959) and “played all the bad guys in [TV’s] Sea Hunt,” he said in a 2013 interview.
Plus, Browning directed the harpoon-filled fight in Thunderball (1965), another underwater scene in Never Say Never Again (1983) and the hilarious Jaws-inspired candy bar-in-the-pool sequence in Caddyshack (1980).
He was also intimately involved with “Flipper” and “Gentle Ben”. He directed two movies, “Salty” and “Mr. No Legs“, the latter of which sent me down a rabbit hole based on the description (from an obit Lawrence sent me): “centered on a man with shotguns built into his wheelchair”.
I don’t think that begins to cover how crazy “Mr. No Legs” sounds. Richard Jaeckel! Lloyd Bochner! John Agar! Rance Howard!
Imagine you’re hanging out by the pool in your wheelchair with a friend, and a group of thugs emerges from the bushes, knocks out your friend and rushes your chair. What do you do?
Double amputee Ted Vollrath found himself in exactly this situation and he didn’t hesitate. He knocked down the closest attacker with two quick punches, grabbed a ninja star from his spokes and zipped it across the pool, right into the jugular of another assailant who was reaching for a gun. Vollrath then finished off the remaining thugs with an array of punches and body attacks, eventually dragging two of them into the pool and subduing them.
Mr. Vollrath plays the titular character. In real life, he was a Korean war vet who lost both legs due to injuries sustained in combat. He went on to become “the first person to earn a black belt in karate while training out of a wheelchair”, and did a lot of work promoting accessibility to martial arts training for the disabled before his death in 2001.
Lawrence also sent over an obit for Gordon Pinsent, noted Canadian actor.
Walter Mirisch, producer. He was 101. Some of his credits: “In the Heat of the Night”, “The Magnificent Seven”, “The Apartment”.
Linda Kasabian. I am having a hard time deciding if she qualifies for the “Burning In Hell” watch.
On the one hand:
Mr. Manson harbored hateful ideas about Black people and sought to set off a race war, leading him to send Ms. Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles Watson out on a murderous mission. In the early hours of Aug. 9, 1969, Ms. Kasabian waited at the car while the others killed five people, including the actress Sharon Tate, the wife of the director Roman Polanski, in Ms. Tate’s Los Angeles home.
The next night, this time with Mr. Manson along, a group went to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Mr. Manson tied the couple up and left with Ms. Kasabian; several of his followers then stabbed the LaBiancas to death.
On the other hand, she rolled on the Family:
Once “Susan bolted,” the prosecution gave Ms. Kasabian conditional immunity — it would be revoked if she did not testify fully and truthfully — and she became the centerpiece of the trial of Mr. Manson and the three women. (She was later important in the case against Mr. Watson, who was tried separately.)
That trial was a wild affair that lasted months. Ms. Kasabian testified for 17 days, withstanding badgering by the defense lawyers and sometimes by Mr. Manson himself.
“Though the defense had been given a 20-page summary of all my interviews with her, as well as copies of all her letters to me,” Mr. Bugliosi, who died in 2015, wrote in “Helter Skelter,” “not once had she been impeached with a prior inconsistent statement. I was very proud of her.”
In a 2009 interview on “Larry King Live,” where he appeared alongside Ms. Kasabian (her image obscured to protect her privacy), Mr. Bugliosi left no doubt that she had put Mr. Manson behind bars.
“If there ever was a star witness for the prosecution, it was Linda Kasabian,” he said. “Without her testimony, Larry, it would have been extremely difficult for me to convict Manson and his co-defendants.
“We all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude towards Linda,” he added, “because if Manson had gotten out, there’s no question he would have continued to kill. He would have killed as many people as he could have.”
And from the accounts I’ve seen, she lived out the rest of her life quietly and tried to atone for her actions.
She told Mr. King that since the trial she had been “trying to live a normal life, which is really hard to do.”
“I’ve been on a mission of healing and rehabilitation,” she said. “I went through a lot of drugs and alcohol and self-destruction and probably could have used some psychological counseling and help 40 years ago.”
Wow. It has been busy.
Barbara Bosson. Other credits include “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, one episode of a spinoff from a minor SF TV series of the 1960s, “Cop Rock”, “The Last Starfighter”, “Capricorn One”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. She was “Miss Riley”. We actually watched that episode a couple of weeks ago because it was the next one in sequence: the “Miss Riley” part was extremely small, and as I best as I can recall, had no lines.)
Lawrence sent over an obit for Lee Whitlock, British actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, the film of “The Sweeney”, “He Kills Coppers” (a TV movie based on the Shepherd’s Bush murders) and “The Bill”.
Red McCombs, prominent local car dealer and philanthropist. He was also a former owner of the San Antonio Spurs and the Minnesota Vikings.
…
Zach Milligan, climber.
…
Milligan, who grew up in Tucker, Ga., got hooked on climbing at the age of 18 when he was getting a haircut and noticed a photo of Half Dome on the wall, SFGate reported.
He later moved to Yosemite National Park, where he spent 20 years including 13 living in a cave while workin for a cleaning service.
He climbed the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome 20 times and the 1,640-foot tall Steck-Salathé route up Sentinel Rock at least 275 times, according to the outlet.
Eileen Sheridan. She was a major female cyclist in the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1945, her first year of competitive cycling, Mrs. Sheridan won the women’s national time-trial championship for 25 miles, and in the coming years she won at 50 and 100 miles as well. After going professional in 1951, she broke 21 women’s time-trial records, five of which she still holds.
She is best remembered for her epic ride in July 1954 from Land’s End, at England’s southwestern tip, to John O’Groats, at the northern edge of Scotland — an 870-mile trek that she completed in just 2 days, 11 hours and 7 minutes, almost 12 hours faster than the previous record.
She had spent six months training, but the trip was nevertheless grueling, with mountain ranges and rough stretches of road, not to mention cold nights even in the middle of the summer. She developed blisters on her palms so painful that she had to hold on to her handlebars by just her thumbs until her support crew could wrap the grips in sponge.
“We had a nurse,” she said in the documentary, “and she actually wept.”
When she arrived at John O’Groats, after getting just 15 minutes of sleep over the previous two days, she decided to push farther, to see if she could set a women’s record for the fastest 1,000 miles. She took an hour-and-48-minute break, enough to eat a quick dinner and rest. Then she remounted her bike and took off into the night.
She began to wobble toward the side. She had hallucinations of friends urging her on and strangers pointing her in the wrong direction; she even imagined a polar bear. But she stayed the course and made it to her final destination, the John O’Groats Hotel, the next morning, after riding for three days and one hour. She celebrated with a glass of cherry brandy, on the house.
Her 1,000-mile record stood for 48 years, until Lynne Taylor of Scotland finally broke it in 2002.
Roger C. Schank, AI theorist.
In the late 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Schank developed ideas for how to represent in symbols for a computer simple concepts — like people and places, objects and events, cause-and-effect relationships — that humans describe with words. His model was called “conceptual dependency theory.”
Dr. Schank later came up with ways to assemble this raw material of knowledge into the equivalent of human memories of past experience. He called these larger building blocks of knowledge “scripts” and regarded them as ingredients for learning from examples, or “case-based reasoning.”
“When I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, Roger Schank was required reading,” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, wrote on a memorial website. “He was regarded as one of the major researchers and theoreticians in artificial intelligence and cognitive science.”
FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Leiji Matsumoto, manga artist.
I am way out of my depth when talking about manga or anime, so I’m just going to leave that link.
William Greenberg Jr., NYC baker. He sounds really interesting:
…
Lee Strasberg, the imperious director and acting teacher, loved Mr. Greenberg’s fudgy brownies; so, apparently, did the film director Mike Nichols, who was said to have coaxed his actors into their best work with the promise of one. The actress Glenn Close ordered themed cakes for wrap parties. A well-known decorator was said to have offered Mr. Greenberg’s schnecken (German for snail) — bite-size sticky buns — to his clients along with his bills, to soften the blow…
The writer Delia Ephron was partial to the chocolate cream tart — a cake, actually, layered with fudge and fresh whipped cream. Alexa Hampton, the interior designer, favored the candy cake, topped with shaved chocolate, crowned with rich chocolate squares and blanketed on the sides with vertical piping of whipped cream. Her father, Mark, was a schnecken man.
Another regular, the celebrated violinist Itzhak Perlman — a poker buddy of Mr. Greenberg’s — once ordered a cake fashioned in the shape of Ebbets Field, the storied home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, for his wife’s 40th birthday (not an easy creation, given the stadium’s elaborate Romanesque arches).
…
Richard Belzer. THR. Tributes.
I hate reducing an actor to just one role, and I know he had other accomplishments as a comedian (who got dropped on his head by Hulk Hogan, and bought a house in France as a result) and an author. But man, what a role.
With Munch, Mr. Belzer found phenomenal success. In 2013, when the character was written out of “SVU” — as the “Law & Order” spinoff is often called — Mr. Belzer wrote in The Huffington Post that he had appeared as Munch in more than 500 hours of programming on 10 different shows.
The character’s run began in 1993, on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and included guest appearances on “Sesame Street” and “30 Rock.”
At his retirement, Mr. Belzer was often described as the actor with the longest run playing the same character on television, as well as the actor who had played the same character on the largest number of different shows.
Gerald Fried, composer. He did music for “Roots” and for a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
Stella Stevens, actress.
We’re trying to work our way through all of the Sam Peckinpah movies, but we don’t have “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” yet. And this weekend is “The Last of Sheila” because Raquel Welch.
Other credits include “Hec Ramsey”, “Banacek”, “Nickelodeon” (the Peter Bogdanovich movie), and “A Town Called Hell”.
archive.is seems to be working better today, so here’s the NYT obit.
Raquel Welch. Damn.
Her first starring role came with her second film after signing with 20th Century Fox, though it was hardly an actor’s dream. Her biggest line of dialogue in the prehistoric drama One Million Years B.C. (1966) was, “Me, Loana … You, Tumak.” Her experience on the set was even less inspiring.
“On the first day of shooting,” she recalled, “I went straight up to the director, Don Chaffey, and said quite seriously, ‘Listen, Don, I’ve been studying the script and I was thinking …’ He turned to me in amazement and said, ‘You were thinking? Don’t.’”
Duangphet Promthep. He was the captain of the Thai soccer team that got trapped in the flooded cave and had to be rescued by divers.
He was 17 (I’ve seen other sources say 18). He was found unconscious in his room and died in a hospital.
Stanley Wilson, former cornerback for the Lions. He was 40, and this is sad.
In August of last year, he was arrested “after he allegedly broke into a Hollywood Hills home, took a bath in an outdoor fountain and raided the property”. He was held in police custody until February 1st, when he was declared not competent to stand trial and was transferred to a psychiatric facility.
Hugh Hudson, director. IMDB.
Cody Longo, actor. Other credits include “CSI: Original Recipe”, “CSI: NY”, and “Piranha 3D”.
NYT obit for Solomon Perel (also known as “Shlomo”), whose death was previously noted in this space.
Other credits include “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar”, “Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story”, and “Captain America” (the 1990 one).
George R. Robertson. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, the 1990 “War of the Worlds” TV movie, and “The Mad Trapper”.
Paco Rabanne, fashion designer.
John Adams. This one was a legendary Cleveland baseball fan, noted for banging a drum at games since 1973.
Mr. Adams’s drumming was heard at more than 3,700 home games, first at Cleveland Municipal Stadium and then, starting in 1994, at Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field). Stationed deep in the bleachers, he steadily urged the team on by rhythmically banging his drum with two mallets.
“Football has its bands and its cheerleaders, and all of them help get into the spirit of the game,” Mr. Adams told The Akron Beacon Journal in 1983, explaining his long-running stadium gig. “Baseball has nothing, so I thought of the war drum thing for the Indians.”
His status as a superfan was acknowledged when the team gave away bobblehead figures of him with a drum and movable arms at a home game in 2006. Six years later, Great Lakes Brewing introduced Rally Drum Red Ale in his honor.
And last year, on the 49th anniversary of Mr. Adams’s first performance at a game, he was inducted into the Guardians’ Distinguished Hall of Fame as a nonuniformed contributor. That group also includes Bill Veeck and Richard E. Jacobs, two of the team’s former owners.
…
Wally Campo, actor.
Other credits include “Shock Corridor”, “Ski Troop Attack”, and “Hell Squad”.
Sylvia Syms, British actress.
Other credits include “Doctor Who”, “Dalziel and Pascoe”, “The Poseidon Adventure” (the TV movie), “Doctor Zhivago” (the TV series), and “EastEnders”.
A 1955 film, “La Donna Più Bella del Mondo” (“The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” — a term some in Hollywood came to use about Ms. Lollobrigida herself), released in the United States as “Beautiful but Dangerous,” brought Ms. Lollobrigida her first major acting award: the David di Donatello, Italy’s equivalent of the Oscar. She won the Donatello twice more, for “Venere Imperial” (1962), in a tie with Silvana Mangano, and for “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” in a tie with Monica Vitti.
Ms. Lollobrigida was always considered more a sex symbol than a serious actress — at least by the American press — but she was also nominated for a BAFTA award as best foreign actress in “Pane, Amore e Fantasia” (1953). She received Golden Globe nominations for “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell” in 1969 and for a recurring role on the prime-time television soap “Falcon Crest” in 1985.
Al Brown. Other credits include “12 Monkeys” (the Gilliam film, not the TV series), “Forensic Files”, “The F.B.I. Files”, and something called “Fartcopter”.
Charles White, 1979 Heisman Trophy winner with U.S.C.
White, who went on to play eight seasons in the N.F.L., was part of U.S.C.’s lineage of elite running backs, four of whom also won the Heisman: Marcus Allen, O.J. Simpson, Mike Garrett and Reggie Bush. White’s 6,245 rushing yards exceed the 4,810 gained by Allen, who ranks second on U.S.C.’s all-time list.
White was not especially big or fast; rather than elude defenders, he bulled his way through them. And he was a workhorse: In 1978, he rushed 374 times (65 more than anyone else in the N.C.A.A.’s top ranks) for 1,859 yards. The next year he ran for 2,050.
…
White was chosen by the Cleveland Browns in the first round of the N.F.L. draft in 1980, but in four seasons, he never rushed for more than 342 yards. After he was released by the Browns, he was signed by the Rams, who were then coached by Robinson, for the 1985 season.
His first two seasons with the Rams were uneventful, but he was spectacular in 1987, carrying the ball 324 times for a league-leading 1,374 yards and 11 touchdowns. However, the season was tainted by a 24-day players’ strike, during which games were played largely by nonunion replacements for three weeks. White was one of a group of players who crossed the union’s picket lines.
He started the 1988 season serving his four-game suspension and never regained his starting job. He gained only 323 yards that year, and Greg Bell led the Rams with 1,212 rushing yards.
He also struggled with substance abuse and dementia (possibly caused by CTE). He was 64 and died of esophageal cancer.
The management of this theater suggests that, for the greater entertainment of your friends who have not yet seen the picture, you will not divulge to anyone the secret of the ending of Witness for the Prosecution.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to give away the ending.
The Saturday Movie Group did watch Witness, though. I had never seen the movie until now, and one thing I did not realize until we got settled in:
Witness for the Prosecution is hilarious.
This is unusual, for a documentary about the treatment of cardiac patients in the late 1950s British court procedural. Make no mistake: it is a drama, with high stakes, but it also sparkles with wit and sharp writing. RoadRich compared it to a good episode of “M*A*S*H” and I kind of agree.
In particular, the interplay between Sir Wilfrid Robarts Q.C. (Charles Laughton) and Miss Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester) is a delight. The nurse and the barrister play off each other well. (Of course, the screenplay by Billy Wilder, Larry Marcus, and Harry Kurnitz helps with that. While Witness is based on a 1953 play written by Agatha Christie, the entire Robarts/Plimsoll relationship was added for the movie.)
(And a bit of triva I did not realize until I looked up Laughton: he was married to Elsa Lanchester, which may explain why they had such great on-screen chemistry. They met in 1927, when they were cast in the same play, married in 1929, and stayed together until Laughton’s death in 1962.)
Spoiler free clip of my favorite bit from the movie. While the full clip is 3:10, the part that had me in stitches is in the first 20 seconds.
I commend Witness for the Prosecution to your attention, especially if you wait for one of Kino Lorber’s periodic sales. I think I paid $9.99 for the blu-ray.
I find it difficult to write about music: I just don’t know enough. Perhaps one of my commenters will have something more to say about Mr. Beck.
Dorothy Tristan. Other credits include “Fear on Trial”, “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”, and “Rollercoaster”.
Carole Cook. Other credits include “The Gauntlet”, “Quincy M.E.”, and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”.
Ben Masters. Other credits include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “Petrocelli”, and “Noble House”.
Barrie Youngfellow. Other credits include “Carter Country”, “The Eddie Capra Mysteries”, and “WKRP in Cincinnati”.
Hubert G. Wells, noted animal trainer.
Quinn Redeker, actor.
He did a fair number of cop and PI shows, among other credits, including “The Rockford Files”, “Harry O”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Falling Star“, season 1, episode 15. He was “Jim Dancy”.)
Mike Hill, film editor. He won an Oscar for “Apollo 13”.
Diamond Lynnette Hardaway, of “Diamond and Silk”.
Timothy Vanderweert. He ran the “Leicaphilia” blog, which has been on the sidebar for a while now.
Adolfo Kaminsky. I swear I have written something about him before, but I can’t find it now.
He was a forger. Specifically, he forged documents to get people out of the hands of the Nazis.
The forged documents allowed Jewish children, their parents and others to escape deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and in many cases to flee Nazi-occupied territory for safe havens.
At one point, Mr. Kaminsky was asked to produce 900 birth and baptismal certificates and ration cards for 300 Jewish children in institutional homes who were about to be rounded up. The aim was to deceive the Germans until the children could be smuggled out to rural families or convents, or to Switzerland and Spain. He was given three days to finish the assignment.
He toiled for two straight days, forcing himself to stay awake by telling himself: “In one hour I can make 30 blank documents. If I sleep for an hour 30 people will die.”
…
Using the pseudonym Julien Keller, Mr. Kaminsky was a key operative in a Paris underground laboratory whose members — all working for no pay and risking a quick death if discovered — adopted aliases like Water Lily, Penguin and Otter, and often contrived documents from scratch.
Mr. Kaminsky learned to fashion various typefaces, a skill he had picked up in elementary school while editing a school newspaper, and was able to imitate those used by the authorities. He pressed paper so that it, too, resembled the kind used on official documents, and photoengraved his own rubber stamps, letterheads and watermarks.
Word of the cell spread to other resistance groups, and soon it was producing 500 documents a week, receiving orders from partisans in several European countries. Mr. Kaminsky estimated that the underground network he was part of helped save 10,000 people, most of them children.
Bernard Kalb, former foreign correspondent for CBS, NBC, and the NYT.
He reported for The Times from 1946 to 1962, for CBS during the next 18 years (during which he joined his brother, Marvin, on the diplomatic beat) and as NBC’s State Department correspondent from 1980 to 1985. Then, for nearly two years, he served in the Reagan administration’s State Department — a stint that ended contentiously.
As a CBS correspondent in 1972, Mr. Kalb accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on the trip to China that proved to be a major step in the normalization of relations between the two nations. He also made virtually every overseas trip with Henry A. Kissinger, Cyrus R. Vance, Edmund S. Muskie, Alexander M. Haig Jr. and George P. Shultz during their tenures as secretary of state.
…
Russell Banks, novelist.
Joyce Meskis, former owner of The Tattered Cover.
In addition to creating a bookstore famed for its vast selection and bibliophile-friendly atmosphere, Ms. Meskis often took a stand in matters related to censorship and the First Amendment. Sometimes those positions were not easy ones to embrace.
In 1991, for instance, when she was president of the American Booksellers Association, she testified against the proposed Pornography Victims Compensation Act, a bill introduced by Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, that would have allowed victims of sex crimes to sue distributors of pornography, including bookstores, if they could demonstrate that pornography influenced their attacker. Opponents of that bill (which died in committee) were sometimes labeled pro-pornography, but Ms. Meskis knew the real issue was that the law would make bookstores wary of selling anything controversial.
Similarly, the case she took to the Colorado Supreme Court some two decades ago pitted her against law enforcement officials, who were trying to build a case against a customer suspected of making methamphetamine. In 2000 the police found two books on drugmaking in a trailer home used as a meth lab; they also found an envelope with Ms. Meskis’s bookstore listed as the return address. Hoping to link the drugmaking to the recipient whose name was on the envelope, they sought Ms. Meskis’s sales records — and, though her stand read as pro-drug to some, she again saw the bigger picture.
“This is about access to private records of the book-buying public,” she told The New York Times in 2000. “If buyers thought that their records would be turned over to the government, it would have a chilling affect on what they buy and what they read.”
In 2002 the State Supreme Court ruled that both the First Amendment and the Colorado Constitution “protect an individual’s fundamental right to purchase books anonymously, free from governmental interference.”
Adam Rich. Other credits include “CHiPs”, “Silver Spoons”, and “Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star”.
Owen Roizman, cinematographer. “The French Connection”, “The Exorcist”, and “Network”? Wow.
Art McNally, NFL official credited as being “the father of instant replay”.
Earl Boen. Other credits (he has 291 as an actor: man worked) include video game spun offs from a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Battle Beyond the Stars”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, and “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”.