Stephen Greif, British actor.
Other credits include some “Doctor Who” related shows, some “Judge Dredd” related work, “EastEnders”, “Drop the Dead Donkey”, and “The Last Days of Pompeii”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Michael Reed, noted director of photography. Other credits include “The Groundstar Conspiracy”, “Rasputin: The Mad Monk”, and “God’s Outlaw“.
Diane McBain, actress.
Other credits include “Airwolf”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Barbary Coast”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Blind Mirror”, season 3, episode 17. She was “Stella Diamond”.)
Franco Harris, one of the great Steelers. Archive version, but the NYT keeps saying “This is a developing story. A full obituary will be published soon.”
The 6-foot-2 running back won four Super Bowls with the Steelers as they established themselves as the N.F.L.’s dominant team of the 1970s, and he was named to the Pro Bowl in each of his first nine seasons. But it was a single, heads-up play that more than anything defined his career.
On Dec. 23, 1972, the Steelers were trailing, 7-6, in a divisional round playoff game against the Oakland Raiders. With less than 30 seconds to play in the fourth quarter, the Steelers quarterback, Terry Bradshaw, lofted a desperation pass to John “Frenchy” Fuqua, only to see the ball deflect toward the ground. But Harris scooped the ball out of the air just inches from the turf and ran untouched for the game-winning touchdown, a miraculous finish that has been replayed thousands of times since.
Five decades later, Harris, who played college football at Penn State, remained one of the most beloved Steelers players, an instantly recognizable face in Pittsburgh. He rushed for 12,120 yards over 13 seasons, 12 of which were with Pittsburgh, and was a linchpin of the Steelers’ most successful era, winning Super Bowls in the 1974, 1975, 1978 and 1979 seasons.
I want to mention pigpen51’s obit for Les Lowery, leather and saddle maker. I was unfamiliar with him until pigpen posted, but he sounds like a really good guy: anybody who helps people walk is doing a mitzvah in my book. I spent some time trying to find more about Mr. Lowery online, but everything I did find was paywalled.
Mike Hodges, director. Other credits include “The Terminal Man”, “Morons From Outer Space”, and “A Prayer For the Dying”.
Frank “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, notorious New England mobster.
Personally, my favorite “Rockford Files” episodes are the ones where Angel plays a key role. And the man worked: 123 acting credits in IMDB. Including “18 Wheels of Justice”, “Lanigan’s Rabbi” (he played Rabbi Small in the pilot (!), but was replaced by Bruce Solomon in the other four episodes), “Cannon” and “Kelly’s Heroes”.
Mike Leach. My sister and her family were big Mike Leach fans (and felt he was unjustly driven out of Texas Tech). Now who’s going to tell us about owning a trash panda as a pet?
Went through the @KREM2 archive today to put together a mashup of all-time Mike Leach moments – most with @WSUCougarFB. (I could have found MANY more)
A one of a kind guy.
Here's to hoping we get to enjoy more time with him 🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/wryklkLoHh
— Travis Green (@ItsTravisGreen) December 13, 2022
No football coach has stronger opinions on weddings than Mike Leach
After we talked about the win, I got some advice straight from the source..
Coach Leach, big elopement guy 😂
Hi @TampaBayTre pic.twitter.com/C9pvrFsm0t
— Alyssa Lang (@AlyssaLang) October 2, 2022
Angelo Badalamenti, composer for David Lynch.
Marijane Meaker, author. She wrote an influential early lesbian novel, “Spring Fire”, under the pseudonym of “Vin Packer”:
Ms. Meaker said she had wanted to call the book “Sorority Girl,” but her editor, Dick Carroll, had a different idea.
“James Michener had just published his book ‘Fires of Spring,’” she said in a 2012 interview with Windy City Times, the L.G.B.T.Q. publication in Chicago. “Dick hoped if we called mine ‘Spring Fire’ the public might confuse it with Michener and we’d sell more copies.”
“Vin Packer” later evolved into a hard-boiled writer. She also wrote young adult novels:
…
I think Lawrence is slightly annoyed at me. But it isn’t my fault.
There were a plethora of obits yesterday. It seems like I was sending emails every five minutes, though I know that’s not actually true. So here are the ones that weren’t for Col. Kittinger, because I wanted to break his out.
Dominique Lapierre, author. He started out as a foreign correspondent, and wrote some well-received travel books. Then he teamed up with Larry Collins, and they wrote several massive bestsellers: Is Paris Burning? and Freedom at Midnight, among others.
Mr. Lapierre also wrote other books, some collaboratively, some alone. Most famously, he wrote The City of Joy:
In 1981 he and his second wife, also named Dominique, returned to India as humanitarians. They lived for two years in a slum in Kolkata, once known as Calcutta, in a four-by-six room without running water.
“We left the slum every few weeks to take a good long bubble bath,” he told Metro, a French magazine, in 1986.
Mr. Lapierre wrote frequent dispatches from Kolkata and used his extensive reporting to write “City of Joy,” a 1985 novel populated by loosely fictionalized characters based on people he had met along the way, including a priest and a rickshaw puller.
The book was another giant hit — more than eight million copies were sold — and it was adapted into a 1992 movie starring Patrick Swayze. It brought attention to the conditions of India’s very poor, with mixed results.
The Indian government committed billions to bring running water and other services to Kolkata’s slums, but the light the book cast on the city also attracted thousands of international tourists to see the poverty for themselves.
“On the streets of Calcutta these days, the book is often seen clutched in the hands of Western tourists,” wrote The Los Angeles Times in 1987. “If Paris has the Guide Michelin, Calcutta has ‘The City of Joy.’”
Mr. Lapierre promised to give half his royalties from the book to improve public health in the city’s slums. He created a nonprofit to direct his efforts, and over time spent more than $1 million of his own money on things like mobile health clinics.
Others gave as well: Within a year of the book’s publication he had received more than 40,000 letters from readers seeking to help. Some sent cash or checks; one sent a wedding ring taped to a piece of paper.
Grant Wahl, soccer journalist.
Gary Friedkin, actor. The NYPost says he was in “Blade Runner” and “Return of the Jedi” but those are not reflected in his IMDB credits. Lawrence says he remembers him from “Young Doctors In Love”, which I have never seen, and he was also in “Under the Rainbow”.
Helen Slayton-Hughes, actress. Other credits include “Mafia on the Bounty”, “The Greatest Event in Television History”, amd “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Al Strobel, the one-armed man from “Twin Peaks”.
Representative Jim Kolbe (R-Arizona).
Sal Durante, historical footnote. He caught the ball from Roger Maris’s 61st home run.
Mills Lane. He was the ref in the Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield 1997 fight (that was the ear biting one) and later went on to have a syndicated court show.
“Stomp”. 29 years off-Broadway.
“KPOP”. the musical. 17 regular performances on Broadway and 44 previews.
I had forgotten about the associated drama: the NYT pretty much panned the show, the producers accused the NYT of racism, and the NYT basically responded with the bedbug letter.
Other credits include the second movie based on a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, the 1995 “Village of the Damned”, and “The Love Boat”.
(Thank you to pigpen51 for tipping me off to this last night.)
Lawrence sent over an obit for Meg Wynn Owen, who passed away in June (but her death was only announced recently).
She appears to have been best known for “Upstairs Downstairs”. Other credits include “The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission”, “Gosford Park”, and “The Duellists”.
Other credits include “Invasion of the Bee Girls”, “The Incredible Hulk”, “Salvage 1”, and “Halloween II”.
In honor of Mr. Emmich, the Saturday Movie Group watched “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot”, which I had never seen before. I like it, but it is kind of an odd film: sort of a weird blend of a road movie and a heist movie, with lots and lots of landscape. (No surprise there: this was the first movie directed by Michael Cimino. Arguably, one of the problems with “Heaven’s Gate” was Cimino’s obsession with landscapes, at the expense of plot, length, and coming in under budget.)
Notes:
Back in the day (before GCA 1968) you could purchase 20mm surplus anti-tank guns and shells. Today, Anzio Ironworks will sell you a single-shot 20mm for a mere $9,800, and a mag-fed one for $11,900. Add $3,200 for a suppressor.
And as a fun historical note, suitable for use in schools: here’s an article from American Rifleman about the real life heist that may have inspired “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot”.
Bob McGrath, longtime “Sesame Street” guy.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb, underground comic artist.
Frederick Swann, organist.
Mr. Swann was well known in New York as organist and music director at Riverside Church in Manhattan, where he began playing in the 1950s.
In 1982 he reached a much wider audience when he moved to the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., home base of the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, the television evangelist. There he appeared each week on “Hour of Power,” one of the most widely watched religious programs in the country, with a viewership in the millions.
Before retiring in 2001, he also served for three years as organist at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, which has one of the largest pipe organs in the world. He also played thousands of recitals all over the United States and beyond.
…
“Fred was a genius at controlling and maximizing the potential of very large pipe organs,” the organist John Walker, who succeeded Mr. Swann as music director at Riverside, said in a phone interview. “Every organ is absolutely unique. They are custom-made works of art, and Fred was so uniquely skilled at uncovering the timbres in each instrument that he was regularly invited to give inaugural recitals” — that is, the first public performance on a new or rebuilt organ.
He filled that role in 2004 for the formidable organ at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, a 6,134-pipe instrument designed by Frank Gehry. His program that night included pieces by Bach, Mendelssohn and Josef Rheinberger.
“In all three,” Mark Swed wrote in a review in The Los Angeles Times, “the stirring deep pedal tones produced a sonic weight that seemed to anchor the entire building, while the upper diapason notes were clear and warm. The delicate echo effects in the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s sonata spoke magically, as if coming from the garden outdoors.”
…
Mr. Walker said that Mr. Swann held four centuries’ worth of music in his head and generally played from memory. He played recitals of all kinds, sometimes as the featured attraction and sometimes accompanying a vocalist, and released numerous albums. Mr. Walker said his playing for religious services was particularly poignant.
“In playing a hymn,” he said, “he would be able to express the meaning of an individual word in such a poignant way that I would just immediately tear up.”
Brad William Henke, former NFL player and actor.
Wait, wait: “Orange Is the New Black” was a comedy? By the way, he was also “Coover Bennett” in season 2 of “Justified” (working opposite Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale).
Frank Vallelonga Jr. Other credits include “The Sopranos” and “The Birthday Cake”.
Other credits include “CHiPs”, “Top Gun”, and “L.A. Takedown“.
Freddie Roman, one of the old time Borscht Belt comedians.
One of my grail guns (sort of: it’s complicated) is the H&K P7 pistol.
Yes, I know: “H&K: You suck and we hate you.” And I’ve heard the triggers on the P7 are…not great. (I’ve never actually shot one.) But it is such an interesting and cool design. And I could probably put together the money for one.
Stealing blatantly from Wikipedia:
You’d kind of think remembering to squeeze the lever would make it harder to learn the gun. Perhaps. As I’ve said, I’ve never fired one. But in my experience with other pistols, gripping them hard enough to where I would (probably) depress a (hypothetical) cocking lever has never been a problem. Indeed, I suspect that Karl (official firearms trainer to WCD) would tell anyone who asked that I have a death grip on my guns when shooting, that if you shoved a lump of carbon between me and the gun you’d get diamonds when I’m done, and that I’d shoot better if I relaxed.
(At least, I suspect he’d say that if he could. I also feel like Karl is probably much like a priest, in that confidentiality prevents him from discussing the flaws of his students. At least, not unless there’s a court order.)
My ideal would be the M13 variant, because 13 rounds of 9mm goodness. But I’d settle for a M8. Or the M10, which is the .40 S&W variant.
When I see them in shops or at fun shows, they seem to go for $2,000 and up. “Up” is doing a lot of work here: check GunBroker to see what I mean.
Noted:
Why is that significant? And what does this have to do with Christmas? (I’m really not expecting a P7 under the tree, thankyouverymuch, though I have been good this year. Mostly.)
The Internet Movie Firearms Database has a write-up on one of the more famous fictional users of the P7. He was originally intended to be carrying some sort of Walther, but I’m guessing the movie armorer suggested the P7M13 and everyone liked the look of it.
Because it’s just not Christmas until I see Hans Gruber fall from the Nakatomi Tower.
John Y. Brown Jr., former governor of Kentucky and fried chicken tycoon.
(Diversion: this is an older piece from Damn Interesting about Harland Sanders that I rather enjoyed. It does discuss the Brown sale and the Heublein buyout.)
In 1969, Brown purchased controlling interest in the Kentucky Colonels, a Louisville franchise in the American Basketball Association. After the ABA folded, Brown paid a reported $1 million for half interest in the Buffalo Braves of the National Basketball Association. He wanted to move the Braves to Louisville but was blocked in court. Brown and a partner then swapped the Braves for the Boston Celtics, in the first trade of professional sports teams.
The Braves later moved to San Diego, and Brown later sold his share of the Celtics.
As some people may recall, he was married to Phyllis George.
For Christmas one year in the not-to-distant past, Lawrence gave me a copy of The Bluegrass Conspiracy, about Drew Thornton and his drug ring. (Cocaine bear!) John Y. Brown is mentioned quite a bit in that book: while he was never convicted of any crime, he certainly had close and questionable ties to people who were.
Mickey Kuhn. He was a child actor: his most famous role was probably “Beau Wilkes” in “Gone With the Wind”. He was also the last surviving cast member from that movie.
His last acting credit was in 1957.
Wilko Johnson, guitarist with Dr. Feelgood and acted in “Game of Thrones”.
Other credits include “The Longest Day”, “Love on a Branch Line”, and “The Last Detective” TV series.
Susan Tolsky. “Pretty Maids All in a Row” is on my Amazon list: I need to pull the trigger on that and talk the Saturday Movie Group into it. Other credits include “Barney Miller”, “Quincy M.E.”, “Darkwing Duck”, and “Crazy Like a Fox”.
Jeff Cook, co-founder of Alabama.
Dan McCafferty, lead singer for Nazareth.
I wasn’t a big enough fan of either Alabama or Nazareth to be able to comment intelligently on either of these deaths. But my readers are welcome to comment if they’d like.
Lucianne Goldberg, literary agent who was behind the Lewinsky scandal.
It was Ms. Goldberg who advised Linda Tripp, a Pentagon aide, to record her conversations with her young co-worker Monica Lewinsky, who as a White House intern had an affair with President Bill Clinton.
Those recordings became crucial evidence in the special counsel investigation that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment for lying under oath in claiming that he had not had an affair with Ms. Lewinsky.
Rod Dreher put up a very nice tribute to her, and links to John Podhoretz’s equally nice tribute.
Robert Gordon, musician.
Mr. Gordon had been the frontman for the buzzy CBGB-era band Tuff Darts when he traded his punk attitude for a tin of Nu Nile pomade and released his first album, a collaboration with the fuzz-guitar pioneer Link Wray, in 1977. At the time, 1950s signifiers like ducktail haircuts and pink pegged slacks had scarcely been glimpsed for years outside the set of “Happy Days” or the Broadway production of “Grease.”
But, turning his back on both the pomp of ’70s stadium rock and the rock ’n’ roll arsonist ethos of punk, Mr. Gordon helped seed a rockabilly resurgence that would flower during the 1980s, with bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters hitting the charts and punk titans like the Clash and X also paying their respects.
Lawrence emailed an obit for Edward Dameron IV, SF and fantasy artist. He did illustrations for The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and designed the base for the 1988 Hugo Awards.
Ian Whittaker, set decorator. Among his credits: “Alien”, “Tommy”, and “Highlander”. He did also do some acting. IMDB.
General James A. McDivitt (USAF – ret.), Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 astronaut.
When he joined the Air Force in 1951 as an aviation cadet after attending junior college, Mr. McDivitt had “never been in an airplane, never been off the ground,” as he recalled in an interview for NASA’s Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.
He went on to fly 145 fighter missions during the Korean War, became an Air Force test pilot, then was selected by NASA in September 1962 as one of nine astronauts for the Gemini program, the bridge between the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the Apollo missions leading to the moon landings.
Mr. McDivitt was in command of the Gemini 4 capsule, which orbited the earth for nearly 98 hours over four days in June 1965, a record for a two-person spaceflight.
…
Mike Schank, from “American Movie”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)