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Obit watch: September 25, 2025.

Thursday, September 25th, 2025

Sara Jane Moore. She was 95, which surprised me: I had been under the impression she was much younger.

You remember Ms. Moore, don’t you?

In San Francisco, about 3,000 people were gathered near Union Square for a glimpse of the president [Gerald Ford – DB] as he left the St. Francis Hotel. Ms. Moore, 45, who had been questioned by Secret Service agents the day before but then released, was standing across the street, 40 to 50 feet away from the commander in chief. She drew a chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver and fired at the president. The shot missed, and she raised the gun for a second shot.
Oliver W. Sipple, a former Marine, deflected the gun just as she fired. The bullet narrowly missed the president, ricocheted off a wall and grazed a bystander. Pandemonium erupted as Mr. Ford, unhurt, was hustled into a limousine by Secret Service agents and sped away. Mr. Sipple and two police officers seized Ms. Moore.

The attempt took place on September 22, 1975. Ms. Moore died on September 24th, 2025, so almost exactly 50 years later.

In February 1979, Ms. Moore and another female inmate escaped from a minimal-security federal prison camp in West Virginia by scaling a 12-foot fence, but they were recaptured hours later. During her imprisonment, she converted from Christianity to Judaism in 1986, explaining to Ms. Spieler that she wanted kosher food for better-quality prison meals. She was paroled from a federal prison in Dublin, Calif., on Dec. 31, 2007, a year after Mr. Ford died at 93.
Ms. Moore moved under an assumed name to an unidentified town on the East Coast and only rarely gave interviews. But she did speak to Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show in 2009.
“It was a time people don’t remember,” Ms. Moore told Mr. Lauer, citing the Vietnam War, a politically divided nation, her own radical beliefs and her attempt to kill the president. “We were saying the country needed to change. The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that this might trigger that new revolution in this country.”

Some things never change.

This is for Mike the Musicologist:

Joining John Wilkes Booth and other notorious figures from history, Ms. Moore was a character in Stephen Sondheim and John Wideman’s dark musical “Assassins,” which debuted Off Broadway in 1990. In the show, she was portrayed as a hapless revolutionary — “a true flibbertigibbet,” as the critic David Richards wrote in The New York Times, “as likely to pull a banana from her capacious handbag as she is a pistol.”

…

Accounts of her life are fragmentary and contradictory, partly because she deliberately obscured her identity and background. She told people falsely that she was the daughter of a rich coal and timber family, had graduate degrees in business administration and was an aspiring actress. Officials said she had been hospitalized repeatedly for aberrant behavior. At some point she took her mother’s maiden name as her surname.

Just in case you were wondering, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme is still alive. She’s only 76.

Henry Jaglom, indie director. I’d heard of him, but have never seen one of his movies.

He acknowledged that his movies tended to be either loved or hated. Many critics found his work rambling and navel-gazing. As the British newspaper The Guardian noted in 1991, his films have been described as “cinema as personal therapy,” “psychobabble” and “diaries as art.”
“It’s fortunate I’m so arrogant,” Mr. Jaglom told The Guardian. “I don’t mind bad reviews. I used to send the worst ones to people as Christmas presents.”

Posted in History, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 24, 2025.

Wednesday, September 24th, 2025

Claudia Cardinale. NYT (archived). IMDB.

The only Claudia Cardinale movie I’ve seen is “Lost Command” (though both “8 1/2” and “Fitzcarraldo” are on our list: “Son of the Pink Panther” is not). She was on a lot of lists of “the most beautiful women in the world”.

Bernie Parent, goalie.

Parent was beloved in Philadelphia — a French Canadian known for his upbeat personality, broad smile, thick mustache and the white fiberglass mask he wore to protect his face. A bumper sticker seen on fenders around Philadelphia paid tribute to his goaltending skills: “Only the Lord saves more than Bernie Parent.”

…

Parent was unprepared for life after hockey. He fell into a depression. He drank too much and got help through Alcoholics Anonymous to become sober. He coached another Flyers goalie, Pelle Lindbergh, who won the Vezina Trophy in 1985. (Later that year, Lindbergh, 26, died of injuries from a car accident.)
“When death defeats greatness, we all mourn,” Parent said at a memorial service for Lindbergh at the Spectrum, the Flyers’ home arena at the time. “And when death defeats youth, we mourn even more.”
Parent worked for many years as a team ambassador for the Flyers, as a spokesman for an insurance company and as a motivational speaker. He also helped other recovering alcoholics.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: September 17, 2025.

Wednesday, September 17th, 2025

For the historical record, Robert Redford: THR. NYT. LAT. Park Record. IMDB.

NYT obit for Pat Crowley (archived). (Previously.)

John Penton, one of the pioneers of off-road motorcycle riding.

Traveling home from Mexico in late 1958, he rode nonstop from California to Ohio, prompting one of his brothers to challenge him to try to break the transcontinental motorcycle record, riding from New York to Los Angeles.
At 5:59 a.m. on June 8, 1959, Mr. Penton set out from New York City on a 35-horsepower BMW R69S, outfitted with an oversize gas tank and a fender rack to hold rain gear and candy bars. To officially record his progress, he carried Western Union letterhead that he got stamped at tollbooths along the route.
In St. Louis, a cycling group, including two police officers, was expecting him and provided an escort through the city, offering him two ham sandwiches and two cups of milk, according to the podcast We Went Fast.
Mr. Penton intended to stop only to refuel. But by the time he reached Flagstaff, Ariz., he was exhausted and seeing double. So he set two alarm clocks and slept for an hour, then hit the road again.
On June 10, he arrived at the Western Union office in downtown Los Angeles at 8:10 a.m., having traveled 3,051 miles. His official time — 52 hours, 11 minutes, 1 second — broke the previous record by over 25 hours. Mr. Penton’s record stood for nine years.

…

In the late 1940s, Mr. Penton began to realize that smaller, more agile off-road motorcycles could outperform heavier, unwieldy roadster models like Harleys, Triumphs and Indians. By the 1960s, he was determined to design a bike that would not have to be modified for off-road use.
In 1967, while in Europe competing in a six-day team endurance event that is considered the Olympics of off-road racing, he paid $6,000 to the Austrian company KTM, a manufacturer of bicycles and mopeds, to build a prototype for a design he called the Penton.
The first Pentons were delivered in 1968; the 125cc model weighed 185 pounds, about half the weight of some bikes that Mr. Penton had ridden. The Penton came with innovations like a folding gearshift lever to prevent the bike from being caught on rocks and in muddy ruts, and an air-filter system that enhanced water resistance to keep the engine running smoothly.
“Our claim to fame,” Jack Penton said, “was that it was ready to perform at the highest level just as you bought it” — no modifications needed.
In 1978, Mr. Penton sold his distributorship to KTM, which rebranded the motorcycle with its company name. By then, more than 25,000 Penton motorcycles had been sold in the United States, according to the American Motorcyclist Association.

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

Obit watch: September 16, 2025.

Tuesday, September 16th, 2025

In keeping with the policy of this blog, I’m going to wait until tomorrow to post the Robert Redford obits. By then, any corrections and additions should be in place and the final versions should be up.

Patricia Crowley, actress. Other credits include “Today’s F.B.I.”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “The Rockford Files”, “Columbo”, and the good “Hawaii Five-O”.

Patrick McGovern. His obit is relevant to my interests:

Bespectacled, bearded and more professorial in appearance than the Indiana Jones character that Harrison Ford played onscreen, Dr. McGovern used modern scientific methods, including multiple forms of spectrometry, to identify biomarkers in the residue in primitive drinking vessels.
“When analyzing something, I work from a minuscule amount of chemical, botanical and archaeological data,” he told National Geographic magazine in 2016. “I look for principal ingredients: Does it have a grain? A fruit? An herb?”
One of his discoveries, found in shards of pottery dating back 9,000 years to a Neolithic village in China, was believed to be the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world — a mix of fermented rice, honey and hawthorn fruit, a red berry.
Another was the world’s oldest grape wine, dating to 6,000-5,800 B.C. in Georgia’s South Caucasus region.
And from 157 bronze vessels left behind in the tomb of King Midas in Turkey, Dr. McGovern identified a beverage made of barley beer, grape wine and honey mead. Given the proximity of the drinkware to the king’s body, the concoction was probably passed around during his funerary feast, as at an Irish wake.

…

Dr. McGovern was sometimes asked which came first: bread or beer?
“You need food to exist,” he said. “But if you want to have a good time,” he added, “if you want social lubrication, if you want to up your sexual relations and so produce more children, then alcoholic beverages help.”

Posted in History, Mixology, Movies, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: September 9, 2025.

Tuesday, September 9th, 2025

Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor and a good Cleveland boy.

A German of Hungarian extraction, Mr. Dohnanyi (pronounced DOKH-nahn-yee) served as Cleveland’s music director from 1984 to 2002, during which time the orchestra was widely described as one of the foremost in the world. At his death, he was the ensemble’s music director laureate.

…

Mr. Dohnanyi was esteemed for his meticulous, unfussy interpretations; fealty to composers’ intent; and broad historical compass. He was associated in particular with the music of Germanic composers — his Brahms was especially admired — and he was also an ardent champion of 20th-century repertoire, a notoriously hard sell for contemporary American audiences.

…

Founded in 1918, the Cleveland Orchestra is the youngest of the so-called Big Five — the cohort of high-wattage American ensembles that also includes the Boston and Chicago symphonies, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Dohnanyi was only the sixth music director to serve in Cleveland, succeeding Lorin Maazel, who had in turn succeeded Szell, whose masterful, iron-fisted quarter-century tenure was considered chiefly responsible for the orchestra’s impeccable sheen, precision and transparency.
Mr. Dohnanyi was widely credited with having restored that sheen, which many reviewers described as having coarsened during the Maazel years. He was also lauded for his tightly disciplined yet strikingly democratic control of the orchestra’s musicians, among the most skilled in the world: “this Rolls-Royce of orchestras,” he called the ensemble.
Under his stewardship, the Cleveland Orchestra attracted younger audience members, recorded prolifically and commissioned new works from the German composer Matthias Pintscher, the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg and the American Philip Glass, among many others.

Rick Davies, of Supertramp.

Mark Volman, of the Turtles.

Tom Shipley, of Brewer & Shipley.

Ruth Paine, historical footnote. She rented her home in suburban Dallas to Marina Oswald and her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Dr. David Baltimore, Nobel prize winning biologist.

Dr. Baltimore was only 37 when he made his Nobel-winning discovery, upending what was called the central dogma, which stated that information in cells flowed in only one direction — from DNA to RNA to the synthesis of proteins. Dr. Baltimore showed that information can also flow in the reverse direction, from RNA to DNA. The key was finding a viral enzyme, called a transcriptase, that reversed the process.
The discovery led to an understanding of retroviruses and viruses, including H.I.V., that use this enzyme. Today, gene therapies with disabled retroviruses are used to insert good genes into patients’ DNA to correct genetic diseases.

…

…a decade after his Nobel, Dr. Baltimore found himself ensnared in a scandal and the subject of attacks that tested his resolve and resilience.
It began when a postdoctoral fellow, Margot O’Toole, accused a researcher, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, of misreporting data in a paper that was published in the journal Cell. Dr. Baltimore was an author of that paper, although the work was not done in his lab.
The case escalated, with investigations by the National Institutes of Health and the Secret Service, which conducted a forensic study of Dr. Imanishi-Kari’s notebooks. There were also contentious hearings led by the Michigan Democrat John Dingell Jr., who was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. As a Nobel laureate, Dr. Baltimore became fodder for the case; he held his ground, standing up to Mr. Dingell in hearings and insisting that there had been no fraud…
Dr. Baltimore and Dr. Imanishi-Kari were finally vindicated in 1996, when an appeals panel found the accusations of fraud unfounded. But, Dr. Baltimore said, the case had taken its toll.
“I will never be able to forget it,” he said in an interview at the time. He said he had kept all the front-page New York Times articles about the accusations in his basement, unread, hoping someday to have the stomach to look at them.

Jacques Charrier. I want to make an argument that he was the luckiest man in the world. He was a huge movie star in France in the late 1950s.

…Mr. Charrier gained custody of their son, and the onetime movie idol began a slow slide into obscurity. He acted in over a dozen films through the 1960s and ’70s, including several directed by Claude Chabrol and one by Jean-Luc Godard (“Anticipation, ou l’Amour en l’An 2000,” 1967). But he quit the movie business after a 1975 film he produced (but did not act in) — “Il Pleut sur Santiago,” centered on the 1973 coup in Chile — bombed. (The film, which starred Jean-Louis Trintignant, was spoiled by its “didacticism,” Le Monde wrote.)

So why was he lucky? He married Brigitte Bardot. Then again, he may not have been that lucky: Ms. Bardot does not come across well in the obituary.

Their unhappiness was intensified by Ms. Bardot’s pregnancy — “nine nightmarish months,” she wrote in her 1996 memoir, “Initiales B.B.” She made it clear then and afterward that the birth of her only child, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, was deeply unwelcome. She would have preferred “giving birth to a dog,” she wrote.

…

Mr. Charrier had been discreetly out of the public eye for nearly three decades when Ms. Bardot published her memoirs, which included a section viciously attacking him as a bourgeois loser, a freeloader and an egotist. As for her son, she wrote, when he was presented to her at his birth, “I started to cry, begging that he be taken off of me.”

Posted in History, Movies, Music, Obits, Science | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 2, 2025.

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025

Graham Greene, actor. I’ve never seen “Dances With Wolves” but Lawrence has it and is threatening to bring it out for the next movie night. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “Wind River”, “Atlantic Rim”, and “Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion” (which I’d really like to see).

Joe Bugner, boxer.

In 1971, he won a controversial victory on points over his countryman Henry Cooper, a widely popular figure, gaining the British, the British Commonwealth and the European heavyweight titles. Cooper went into retirement afterward, and Bugner was left to deal with a less than adoring British public.

He’s perhaps more famous for fighting Ali twice and Frazier once.

On Feb. 14, 1973, in a 12-rounder against Ali in Las Vegas, Bugner sustained a cut over his left eye in the opening round. But he remained on his feet while losing a unanimous decision. There were no knockdowns. Bugner left with respect from the crowd and from Ali.
The New York Times reported that Ali, who had predicted a seventh-round knockout, said afterward of Bugner, a former sparring partner: “He’s a little better than I thought. I didn’t know his legs were so good. He’s three times better than when I sparred with him through the years.”
Less than five months later, on July 2, Bugner fought Frazier in a 12-round bout in London. It was Frazier’s first fight since losing his heavyweight title to George Foreman in January 1973. Charging ahead in the 10th round, Frazier knocked Bugner down for a nine count, but Bugner recovered and staggered Frazier before the bell, closing his left eye.
Frazier won on points, but The Times said that the decision “may have done more for his opponent’s reputation than for his.”

…

Bugner met Ali again on July 1, 1975, this time for a 15-round championship fight in the wilting morning heat of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Both fighters survived the conditions, but Ali won convincingly “with the ease of assaulting a statue,” Dave Anderson of The Times reported.
Bugner acknowledged that he had lacked energy in the heat and humidity. Afterward, he grew irritated with journalists’ probing questions and, according to The Telegraph, declared: “Get me Jesus Christ! I’ll fight him tomorrow!”
To which Hugh McIlvanney, a veteran British boxing reporter, replied, “Ah Joe, you’re only saying that ’cause you know he’s got bad hands.”

Gene Espy. He was the second person to “thru-hike” (make the whole trip in one continuous hike) the Appalachian Trail.

It took Mr. Espy 123 days to complete his journey, which started at Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia and took him through 14 states along the world’s longest continuous hiking-only footpath. Back then, the Appalachian Trail was mainly rugged wilderness, with few trail markers. He walked through parts of the trail where few others had ventured.
“I’d carry a map in my hat,” he was quoted as saying in 1993 by The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C. “Every so often, I would stop and take my hat off, pull out my map, look around and try to figure out where I was.”
He averaged about 16 miles a day, but sometimes walked more than 30 on his way to Mount Katahdin in Maine, the northern terminus of the trail, which he reached on Sept. 30, 1951.

…

He bought a used backpack from an Army surplus store, hiking shoes from L.L. Bean, a canvas tent and a rain poncho. He carried a Boy Scout knife, cooking utensils, a miner’s carbide lamp and two canteens, one for water and the other for gasoline to fuel his tiny stove. His meals included dehydrated mashed potatoes and boiled cornmeal with sugar, raisins and powdered milk.

…

Mr. Espy’s former home in Macon became a mecca to fans seeking his advice.
“They brought their packs to our house and asked what they would need,” his wife, Eugenia (Bass) Espy, said in an interview. “He always said they were bringing too much and would say, ‘You don’t need this, you don’t need that.’ He tried to explain that you only should carry the essentials and keep the pack as light as you can.”

…

One day in 1965, Mr. Espy and his daughters were hiking on the trail in Georgia.
“We heard this crashing in the woods and this scruffy man came at us,” Ms. Gilsinger recalled. “He looked at us and said, ‘Gene Espy!’ And my father said, ‘Earl Shaffer!’ He was really depleted physically, and we took him into town, got him supplies and perked him up.”

(Earl Shaffer was the first person to thru-hike the trail. He passed away in 2002.)

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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 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

I’m still here.

Thursday, August 14th, 2025

There just hasn’t been much I’ve felt like blogging about. No obits that I’ve thought were sufficiently notable.

I still can’t upload images to the blog, so no gun book blogging and no random gun crankery. Bluehost support has been as useless as teats on a boar hog, and I’m planning to migrate the blog over to Siteground. The problem is, I want to be fully here when the migration gets done, and I’ve been wrapped up in so many things outside the blog that I haven’t been able to coordinate the migration yet. I expect to do that towards the end of the month.

(I will be leaving town for a few days the later part of next week.)

One thing I will mention in passing: I have rejoined the Richard the III Society. I’ve been an off-and-on member, but I had let my membership lapse. However, this came up when the Saturday Movie Group was watching “Richard III“: Lawrence was somewhat astounded when I told him I had been a member, so I decided I’d sign up again.

(I recommend “Richard III” for two reasons. One, Ian McKellen is great in it. Two, the whole movie is just absolutely bat guano insane, and I loved every minute of it.)

(And, as everyone knows, I am a sucker for lost causes and beautiful women. One of those explains my membership in the Richard the III Society.)

A very brief gun related note: Leupold no longer makes any pistol scopes, and says they don’t have any plans to introduce new ones in the future. As best as Mike the Musicologist and I can tell, Burris is your only option for a pistol scope at the moment.

Posted in Admin, Guns, History, Movies | 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

Obit watch: July 11, 2025.

Friday, July 11th, 2025

Rebekah Del Rio.

I don’t want to seem like I’m speaking ill of Ms. Del Rio: that sequence was one of the few good things in “Mulholland Drive”. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, much of the rest of the movie was pretentious crap.

Dave “Baby” Cortez. He did an instrumental, “The Happy Organ”, which was a hit in 1959. He also had a hit with “Rinky Dink” in 1962.

Then he became what the paper of record describes as “reclusive”, though it also states that he worked as a church organist, held down other jobs, and even recorded a new album in 2011. The way I read the obit, it seems like he was more “bitter about the music business” than genuinely reclusive.

Then again…

…one of the reasons I wanted to note this obit is that it is one of the NYT‘s odd ones. Mr. Cortez actually passed away in 2022, but his death was not publicly disclosed until recently.

His body lies in Plot 434 on Hart Island, the potter’s field off the coast of the Bronx, where some one million bodies are buried in unmarked graves.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | 4 Comments »

Anniversaries.

Tuesday, July 8th, 2025

I’ve been involved in some recent conversations about two things that are sort of connected.

Apparently, the word for the 250th anniversary of something is “Semiquincentennial”. Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, also says “Sestercentennial” is acceptable. Also: “Quarter Millennium”, and in the context of the upcoming anniversary, “America250”. “America250” sounds kind of silly and undignified to me. “America! 250! With purchase of an America of equal or greater value!”

I was feeling like nobody gives a diddly squat about the Semiquincentennial. I haven’t seen people talking about it, or announced plans for a big celebration, or any commemorative items. I’m old enough to (somewhat) remember the run-up to the Bicentennial. I may even have some Bicentennial quarters somewhere.

It turns out that there’s actually a federally chartered “non-partisan” planning committee, the “United States Semiquincentennial Commission“, which was spun up in 2016. It also turns out that President Trump has created “The White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday“, aka “Task Force 250”. I like “Task Force 250”. “Task Force 250, engage the guns on Mount Suribachi.”

(We watched “Sands of Iwo Jima” over the weekend. I like it, but I would not say it was one of John Wayne’s best films.)

And, of course, the NYT has to micturate all over the idea.

I wonder if we’re going to see any commemorative guns for the 250th anniversary. And I don’t mean guns like the various “Trump 2025” and “47” guns you see around. I mean some really classy commemoratives, of the kind gun makers used to issue in the old days. And speaking of the old days…

For some reason, Mike and I were talking about my Smith and Wesson Model 544, the “Texas Wagon Train Commemorative”, for the 150th anniversary of Texas independence. While we were talking, I got to wondering: did any other manufacturers issue Texas Sesquicentennial guns? Surely there was a commemorative Winchester, right? Winchester issued more commemoratives than Carter had little liver pills.

Oh, if only I had some reference work on Winchester commemorative guns. Oh, wait! I do!

Volume One of the Trolard books says that Winchester was going to produce a full-length rifle, a carbine, and a cased set with both the rifle and carbine as well as a Bowie knife. The first volume came out in 1985, so Mr. Trolard was writing ahead of actual release. (He does have photos of the guns, which I’m guessing were factory supplied.)

Then it gets weird, and frankly unclear to me. There’s a reference early on in the second volume to “the unfortunate event with the termination of the production for the Texas Sesquicentennial program”, but not much more detail than that. At least some Texas Sesquicentennial guns made it out of the factory, as you can find auctions for them online. U.S Repeating Arms Company (the parent company of Winchester at the time) shut down the Winchester commemoratives program in 1987. They contracted with Cherry’s Sporting Goods to “design, create and market” commemoratives in 1989. This is about the same time that USRA went bankrupt and was bought by Fabrique Nationale Herstal.

(Some of the Texas Sesquicentennial guns were re-purposed as Larry Bird commemoratives, per Trolard. Really, I’m not making this up. There were Larry Bird commemorative Winchesters sold through “Larry Bird’s Boston Connection” with serial numbers that started with “TSR”. “More commemoratives than Carter had little liver pills” indeed.)

And what about Colt? I’m not as up on Colts, and don’t have as many Colt references as I’d like. But it seems like Colt did a Texas Sesquicentennial commemorative Single Action Army. All the ones I have seen for sale so far have ivory grips. Here’s one example from GunBroker.

Mike the Musicologist also turned up a Colt 1860 Army Texas Sesquicentennial commemorative. The listing he found claims they are very rare: here’s one listed and sold by Collectors Firearms.

The Texas Sesquicentennial Colts are listed in the online Blue Book of Gun Values, but that’s weird, too: the site shows a “Colt 1985 Texas 150th Sesquicentennial SAA Premier Model” that looks like the SAA with ivory grips, and a “Colt 1985 Texas 150th Sesquicentennial SAA Standard Model” that looks like an 1860 Army, not a SAA.

There is also a “Texas Sam Houston 150th Sesquicentennial Deluxe U.S. Model 1847 Walker .44 Caliber Blackpowder Cap & Ball Revolver” listed on GunBroker right now, but that seems to be more of a Sam Houston commemorative than a Texas Sesquicentennial one. Also, it doesn’t look like it was produced by Colt, but made by the “United States Historical Society” using an Uberti Walker reproduction.

I kind of think it would be fun to have a collection of all the Texas Sesquicentennial guns, at least the official manufacturer produced ones. But I don’t think I want to scratch that itch right away…

…that Single Action Army with ivory grips does look pretty, though.

If any of my readers are Colt people, and can fill in some of the blanks on Colt commemoratives, or can point to a good reference work, please drop a comment here.

Posted in Coins, Colt, Guns, History, Movies, Smith and Wesson, Winchester, Wordplay | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 4th, 2025.

Friday, July 4th, 2025

Happy Independence Day, everyone. Today marks 249 years of not giving a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what the British royal family thinks.

It is going to be a busy three-day weekend, but I did want to quickly note the death of Michael Madsen. NYT (archived).

NYT obit for Jim Shooter.

Kenneth Colley. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “The Bill”, and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (credited as “Jesus”).

Posted in Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

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

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