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Obit watch: March 13, 2023.

Monday, March 13th, 2023

Kenzaburo Oe, noted Japanese writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Though he often said he wrote with only a Japanese audience in mind, Mr. Oe attracted an international readership in the 1960s with three works in particular: “Hiroshima Notes,” a collection of essays on the long-term consequences of the atomic bomb attacks; and the novels “A Personal Matter” and “The Silent Cry,” which had their genesis in a crisis for him and his wife, the birth of a son with a deformed cranium.

Pat McCormick, Olympic diver.

At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, McCormick won the women’s 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform competitions, the only ones being held for women at the time. In 1956 in Melbourne, Australia, eight months after the birth of her first child — and with her husband, Glenn McCormick, as the team’s coach — she won them both again.
Her feat was unequaled until another American, Greg Louganis, captured the 3-meter and 10-meter titles at the 1988 Seoul Olympics four years after doing it in Los Angeles.

Bud Grant, former coach of the Minnesota Vikings. He was 95.

He had a regular-season record of 158-96-5, for a .621 winning percentage, the second-most victories for a Vikings coach. His Vikings won 11 division titles and made it to four Super Bowls, but they never won; they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970, the Miami Dolphins in 1974, the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1975 and the Oakland Raiders in 1977.
His teams were led by the celebrated defensive line known as the Purple People Eaters, headed by Alan Page and Carl Eller, and by an offense that included quarterback Fran Tarkenton and running back Chuck Foreman. He was named N.F.L. coach of the year in 1969 and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1994. He won 10 or more games seven times between the 1969 and 1976 seasons.

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 11, 2023.

Saturday, March 11th, 2023

Traute Lafrenz (who also went by Traute Lafrenz Page) has passed away at 103.

She was the last surviving member of the White Rose.

The White Rose was short-lived and never counted more than a few dozen members, most of whom were young and idealistic. Ms. Lafrenz (who later in life went by the name Traute Lafrenz Page) carried political leaflets and helped the group gain access to ink, paper and envelopes to produce and disseminate its anti-Hitler tracts, and to urge Germans to turn against the Nazis.
But the response to its activities, peaceful as they were, seemed to betoken the profound intolerance displayed by the Third Reich to any hint of opposition among Germans, even as it pursued the extermination of European Jewry and what it called “total war” against its adversaries.

…

While Ms. Lafrenz was a medical student in Hamburg, she met Alexander Schmorell, a central player in the White Rose, who introduced her to the leaders of the group, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, when she moved to Munich to continue her medical studies in the early 1940s.
Other leading players included Christoph Probst, Willi Graf and the group’s older mentor, Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy who was committed to liberal democracy.

…

The White Rose’s leaflets began appearing in the summer of 1942, but the project faltered in February 1943 with the arrest of Sophie and Hans Scholl, who were distributing fliers in a university building in Munich when Jakob Schmid, a janitor, spotted them and tipped off the Gestapo. Four days after their arrest, on Feb. 18, 1943, they were executed. Ms. Lafrenz attended her friends’ funeral, even though it was conducted under Gestapo surveillance.
Other members of the White Rose followed the grisly trail to execution; they were among an estimated 5,000 people beheaded under a revival of the use of the guillotine ordered by Hitler. The beheadings continued until January 1945.

Ms. Lafrenz was arrested in March of 1943. She was set to be tried at Bayreuth in April of 1945, but the US Army liberated the prison (and the prisoners) before the trial started.

“Traute Lafrenz was not at the center of the White Rose,” Mr. Waage wrote. “She did not physically write any of the leaflets — but she did just about everything else. She helped lay the foundation for the revitalization of cultural heritage as a weapon against brutality; she helped make the distribution of the leaflets as practical as possible and helped to spread them.”
In the postwar era, Ms. Lafrenz remained stubbornly reticent about her activities. “I was a contemporary witness,” she told Bild Zeitung in 2018. “Given the fates of the others, I am not allowed to complain.” Her daughter Renee told the newspaper that she had not learned of her mother’s wartime struggle until 1970.
Indeed, it was only on Ms. Lafrenz’s 100th birthday, on May 3, 2019, that she was awarded Germany’s Order of Merit, a high civilian honor. The citation said she “belonged to the few who, in the face of the crimes of national socialism, had the courage to listen to the voice of her conscience and rebel against the dictatorship and the genocide of the Jews. She is a heroine of freedom and humanity.”

Suzy McKee Charnas, noted SF writer. I believe Lawrence mentioned this to me a while back, but I could not find a link I was willing to use. The NYT obit says she passed away January 2nd, but “her death was not widely reported at the time”.

Ms. Charnas, whose books were well regarded but who, by her account, did not make a living from her writing, was best known for her science fiction. But she also wrote vampire fiction, young adult fantasy novels with women as central characters, and a memoir about taking care of her father in his later years after a long period of estrangement.

The obit gives a lot of space to her “The Holdfast Chronicles” series.

In an epic that began with “Walk to the End of the World” (1974) and concluded 25 years later with “The Conqueror’s Child,” Ms. Charnas conceived a dystopic world in which an escaped female slave, Alldera, leads the rebellious Free Fems to brutally conquer and enslave their former male masters. The men had faulted women for the near-destruction of humanity, called the Wasting.

…

The other books in the Holdfast series are “Motherlines” (1978) and “The Furies” (1994). “The Conqueror’s Child” won the 1999 James Tiptree Jr. Award (now called the Otherwise), a literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that explore gender.
She also won two other science fiction and fantasy awards: a Nebula for a novella, “Unicorn Tapestry,” which is a chapter in her 1980 novel, “The Vampire Tapestry,” and the basis for her play, “Vampire Dreams”; and a Hugo, for “Boobs,” a short story.
“Suzy, to me, was a lot like David Bowie,” said Jane Lindskold, a science fiction and fantasy writer who knew Ms. Charnas from a writers’ group in Albuquerque. “She followed her own muse. She could have just written only vampire books, but she did what she wanted to do.”

…

Science fiction was not the only genre she explored. In “The Vampire Tapestry,” she created Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire posing as an anthropology professor.Writing in The Washington Post, the fantasy writer Elizabeth A. Lynn praised the novel, saying it “works on many levels — as pure adventure, as social description, as psychological drama and as a passionate exploration of the web that links instinct, morality and culture. It is a serious, startling and revolutionary work.”
The director Guillermo del Toro, who is known for his science fiction and horror films, was an admirer of “The Vampire Tapestry.” He called it “flawless” on Twitter in 2015 and, after Ms. Charnas’s death, said, “It may be her masterpiece.”

The paper of record has a habit of running retrospective obits under the heading “Overlooked No More” for people who didn’t get an obit at the time. To the best of my knowledge, they still have not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.

However, this one struck home for me: Dilys Winn, mystery bookstore founder and writer.

When she opened Murder Ink — believed to be the nation’s first bookstore devoted entirely to the genre — she didn’t even have a window sign. But inside the store, compact though it was, one could find every type of mystery: British cozies, unsettling gothics, suspense thrillers, novels about hard-boiled detectives, police procedurals and even unpublished manuscripts — 1,500 titles in all.

…

Winn enjoyed hosting events so much that she sold the bookstore in 1975 and began holding Sunday afternoon mystery talks (admission $5) at the Steinway Concert Hall on the Upper West Side featuring mystery writers, editors and other guest speakers. She organized a 16-day mystery reader’s tour of the United Kingdom, with sites of interest that included the Tower of London, Jack the Ripper’s London neighborhood and the London docks. Excursions to Scotland and Wales provided more opportunities to commune with mystery writers, crime reporters and, supposedly, ghosts.
All the while, Winn was feverishly working on her opus: “Murder Ink.” Published by Workman Press in 1977, it included offbeat essays by established figures and Winn herself (under various nom de plumes), along with character studies, photographs, quizzes and even a guide to “terrible edibles” one might avoid — or seek, depending on the motive. In 1978, the Mystery Writers of America conferred an Edgar Allan Poe award on Winn, and the next year she published a sequel, “Murderess Ink: The Better Half of Mystery.”

I bought my mother a copy of Murder Ink as a present one year, so of course I read it. I loved it. I still think that’s a pretty swell book, and I want to say that’s one of the key books in influencing my lifelong love of mysteries.

“Spot”, or Glen Lockett, noted record producer for SST Records.

As the in-house producer for SST from 1979 to 1985, Mr. Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream — the college-radio mainstream, at least.
He produced or engineered more than 100 albums for SST, including classics like Black Flag’s “Damaged” (1981), Descendents’ “Milo Goes to College” (1982), Meat Puppets’ first album (1982), Minutemen’s “What Makes a Man Start Fires?” (1982) and Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” (1984).

I never got into any of SST’s stuff (I tried listening to Hüsker Dü) but I’ve always liked the SST poster I saw once at a record store in Houston. “Home taping is killing the music industry. Keep up the good work.”

Rick Scheckman. He was David Letterman’s film coordinator.

Scheckman joined Late Night With David Letterman in March 1982, a month after the show debuted on NBC. The writers called on Scheckman so often, he was given a full-time job as film coordinator.
“If 20 minutes before tape time, the writers suddenly came up with a bit that required film of a monkey washing a cat, Shecky knew where to find it,” writer Mark Evanier wrote on his blog.
When Letterman moved to CBS in 1993, Scheckman came along and remained with the Late Show through its 2015 conclusion. For those 33-plus years, his stuff was referred to as “Shecky Footage,” Letterman archivist Don Giller pointed out in a tribute post on YouTube.
As did many Letterman behind-the-scenes staffers, Scheckman often wound up in front of the camera, playing, for example, Elvis Presley; a naked man in the shower with a copy machine; a fan of Star Wars and Pokémon; and himself, getting shot by Bruce Willis (“Yippee ki yay, Shecky!!”), as seen in another tribute video.

Tributes from Mark Evanier and Leonard Maltin.

Otis Taylor, of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Over an 11-year career that began in 1965, when Kansas City was one of the top teams in the American Football League, Taylor was one of quarterback Len Dawson’s key offensive targets. (Dawson died last year at 87.) Tall and acrobatic with soft hands, he was the prototype for the big receivers who would come to dominate the position.
In 1966, his breakout season, Taylor caught 58 passes for 1,297 yards, an average of 22.4 yards a catch. Five years later, after the A.F.L.’s merger with the N.F.L was finalized, Taylor led the league with 1,110 receiving yards, and United Press International named him the N.F.L.’s player of the year.

…

When the Chiefs faced the Vikings in Super Bowl IV on Jan. 11, 1970, it was their second appearance in the championship game. They had lost to the Green Bay Packers, 35-10, in the first Super Bowl.
The Vikings were 13 ½-point favorites, but the Chiefs handled them easily. Kansas City was leading, 16-7, late in the third quarter when Dawson tossed a short pass to Taylor. He shook off a tackle from Earsell Mackbee, a cornerback; faked Karl Kassulke, a safety; and ran in for a 46-yard touchdown. Their 23-7 victory would be the Chiefs’ only Super Bowl win until 2020; they won the championship again last month.
“That’s it, boys!” Chiefs coach Hank Stram said gleefully from the sideline. “Otis!”

…

In his rookie season, when he started four of Kansas City’s 14 games, he caught 26 passes for 446 yards. He emerged as a star the next season, and over his career he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times and was a first-team All-Pro twice.
He caught a total of 410 passes in his career for 7,306 yards, with 57 touchdowns. He ranks third in Chiefs history in receiving yards, after Tony Gonzalez and Travis Kelce.

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Music, Nazis, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 6, 2023.

Monday, March 6th, 2023

Gary Rossington, founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

In 1976, Rossington survived a devastating car wreck in which he drove his Ford Torino into a tree. The crash inspired Lynyrd Skynyrd’s song “That Smell.” Only a year later, in 1977, he survived the tragic plane crash in Mississippi that killed lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines.
Rossington broke both arms and a leg and punctured his stomach and liver in the infamous plane crash.

Jerry Richardson, former NFL player and former owner of the Carolina Panthers.

Mr. Richardson was only the second former player to own a team (George Halas of the Chicago Bears was the other), and he made the most of his two seasons in the league. A wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, he caught a touchdown pass from quarterback Johnny Unitas in the 1959 N.F.L. title game and used his bonus of several thousand dollars to pay for the first Hardee’s hamburger restaurant in Spartanburg, S.C.
Mr. Richardson would open hundreds more restaurants in the next 30 years, making him one of the richest men in the Carolinas.

…

In 2017, he announced he was selling the Panthers soon after Sports Illustrated reported on accusations that he sexually harassed women working for the team and that he had used a racial slur in the presence of a Black scout. The league investigation into Mr. Richardson’s workplace behavior led to a $2.75 million fine. But by then, he had already reached an agreement to sell the team for a then-record $2.3 billion. Mr. Richardson never publicly addressed the allegations.

…

After his second season, he asked for a raise to $10,000. After the team offered $9,750, Richardson returned to Spartanburg, and with his former college teammate, Charles Bradshaw, bought the first Hardee’s hamburger restaurant there. Mr. Richardson was hands-on, cleaning parking lots, mopping floors and flipping burgers.
“He was very serious, very intent, and very quickly found himself to be interested in the running of the businesses,” said Hugh McColl, the former chief executive of Bank of America who, in the 1960s, lent Mr. Richardson $25,000 to open a Hardee’s in Charlotte, and who later helped him purchase the Panthers and build a new stadium.
Decades ago, Mr. McColl visited a Hardee’s with Mr. Richardson and watched him pick up trash outside the restaurant and hand it to the manager. “I’ve never seen it before or since,” he said of Mr. Richardson’s attention to detail.

Dave Wills, radio guy for the Tampa Bay Rays. He was 58.

Darin Jackson, a veteran member of the Sox broadcast team, always looked forward to catching up with Wills when the teams met.
“Man, he was as big as life. Dave was always a legend in the city of Chicago,” Jackson said. “And he was a good man for the game of baseball. If you had Dave as part of any organization, you’ve got yourself a true warrior going to war with you guys and for you guys.
“That’s what I remember most about Dave when he was doing his job. He was there to let the people know the truth. He was there to be honest about the organization. And he wasn’t afraid to go ahead and hold people to task. I loved that about him. He’s going to be missed.”

For the record: NYT obits for Ricou Browning and Gordon Pinsent.

Posted in Movies, Music, NFL, Obits, Radio, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 28, 2023.

Tuesday, February 28th, 2023

Bob Richards, aka the “Vaulting Vicar”, ordained minister…and legendary pole vaulter.

Although he broke Olympic records and Russian hearts, and although he became one of America’s most lionized and familiar celebrities — a motivational speaker and Wheaties pitchman who personified wholesome values and once ran for president of the United States on a third-party ticket — Richards, even at the peak of his athletic power, was not the greatest American pole-vaulter of all time.

…

Richards himself never vaulted more than 15 feet 6 inches. But from 1947 to 1957, he dominated national and international competitions by clearing 15 feet more than 125 times. Besides winning two gold medals in the Olympics in the 1950s, he took a bronze medal at the 1948 Olympics in London and gold at the Pan American Games in 1951 and 1955. He also won 17 A.A.U. championships in indoor and outdoor vaulting competitions, and United States decathlon championships in 1951, 1954 and 1955.

In case you were wondering…

Today’s top male vaulters, with refined techniques and springy fiberglass poles that bow almost to U shapes, routinely soar over crossbars set above 19 feet. The world record is held by Armand Duplantis, an American-born Swedish athlete known as Mondo, who on Feb. 25 vaulted 20 feet 4 ¾ inches. That mark (pending official ratification) surpassed his own previous five world records, all over 20 feet and all set since 2020.
Even Richards’s son Brandon, as a teenager using a fiberglass pole in 1985, vaulted 18 feet 2 inches, which was then a national record for a high schooler and stood for 14 years.

And the greatest American pole vaulter was probably Cornelius Warmerdam, who set world records in the 1940s (using bamboo poles) but never got to compete in the Olympics because of WWII.

Fred Miller, Baltimore Colt.

Miller, who was drafted out of LSU in the 7th round by the Colts in the 1962 NFL draft, made the Pro Bowl as a defensive tackle three straight seasons from 1967-69.

…

Miller was part of the Colts’ 1968 NFL title team which shutout four teams, including the Browns in a 34-0 win in the NFL championship game before losing to the Jets in Super Bowl III.
He was also in Baltimore’s 1970 championship squad that found redemption with a 16-13 win over the Cowboys in Super Bowl V, with Miller making five tackles against Dallas.
“What a bond we had as a team,” Miller told the Baltimore Sun in 2009. “We gave a damn about each other. No cliques. Our wives socialized. We babysat for each other. That didn’t happen on other clubs.”

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 21, 2023.

Tuesday, February 21st, 2023

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.

In 2022, Forbes listed him among the richest men in the world, with a $1.7 billion estimated net worth. McCombs was also a co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, now known as iHeartMedia, and also owned the NBA’s Denver Nuggets.

…

The McCombs family and the McCombs Foundation — the family’s primary philanthropy arm — have contributed more than $135 million to civic causes in Texas since 1981, according to McCombs Enterprises.

Zach Milligan, climber.

Milligan and his friend, Jason Torlano, made headlines in 2021 when they became the first people to ski down Yosemite National Park’s famed Half Dome.

…

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.

The European audience knows Matsumoto primarily through Space Pirate Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express 999. America owes its anime and manga fandom to the huge TV impact of Star Blazers, the US edit of Space Battleship Yamato. This resumé ignores an immense and almost unexplored hinterland of Matsumoto works, from I am a Man (Otoko Oidon) the gritty tale of a penniless student from the provinces scraping to get by in a cheap Tokyo boarding house, and his first SF manga, the spy-fi adventure Sexaroid, to girls’ manga Natasha and Miime the TabbyCat about one of his beloved cats, who also appears in Captain Harlock. There are his manga biographies of musicians, including David Bowie for RecoFan magazine, and many stories on the pain and pointlessness of the Pacific War. To see Matsumoto purely through the space opera lens is to miss so much of his range and depth.

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:

Mr. Greenberg, an affable redhead at 6 feet 4 inches tall who was raised in the Five Towns area of Long Island, opened his first bakery in Manhattan in 1946, in a narrow storefront on East 95th Street, near Second Avenue, with $3,000 — poker winnings from games he played in the Army. It turned out that Mr. Greenberg was as skilled with cards as he was with a piping gun.

…

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).

…

…they received a call to make a cake for President Bill Clinton’s 50th birthday, in August 1996. They conceived an American flag, made from layers of yellow poundcake. It was a colossus, requiring 432 eggs, 96 pounds of butter, 98 pounds of sugar and 100 pounds of flour, layered with 15 pounds of raspberry preserves and topped with 15 pounds of dark fudge glaze, and it would take two full days to prepare it. (The birthday event was a fund-raiser, and the Greenbergs donated their creation, which would have cost $4,000 at retail.)

Posted in 1970s, Cycling, Food, Mannix, Movies, NFL, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 15, 2023.

Wednesday, February 15th, 2023

Raquel Welch. Damn.

THR. Variety.

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 moved to England last year after securing a scholarship to a soccer academy that promoted its high-level program and international student population. “I promise I will focus and do my best,” he wrote on social media at the time, later posting photographs of his classes and the school grounds.

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.

The former NFL player collapsed and died during intake at the medical facility, law enforcement sources told the outlet.

Posted in Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: February 14, 2023.

Tuesday, February 14th, 2023

Conrad Dobler, NFL guard.

Over a 10-year NFL career, Dobler embraced his role as protector, joining forces with the likes of future Hall of Famer Dan Dierdorf to form one of the best offensive lines in history on the “Cardiac Cardinals.” In 1975, they surrendered just eight sacks — then a league record — with Dobler embracing the task of keeping QB Jim Hart upright, no matter the means.

…

A fifth-round pick out of Wyoming in 1972 — undersized at 6-foot-3 and 254 pounds — Dobler made three straight Pro Bowls from 1975-77 with St. Louis before spending the final two seasons of his career with the Saints and Bills.

ESPN:

On July 25, 1977, Dobler made the cover of Sports Illustrated with the title “Pro Football’s Dirtiest Player.”
Stories about the feisty offensive lineman included him punching Joe Greene, spitting on Bill Bergey and kicking Merlin Olsen in the head.
“I’ll do anything I can get away with to protect my quarterback,” Dobler told the magazine.

Austin Majors, actor. I used to watch re-runs of “NYPD Blue” in syndication, and I remember him playing “Theo Sipowicz”.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Quick lazy firings watch.

Thursday, January 19th, 2023

Josh Boyer out as defensive coordinator for the Miami Dolphins. Also out: safeties coach Steve Gregory, outside linebackers coach Ty McKenzie, and assistant linebackers coach Steve Ferentz.

Byron Leftwich out as offensive coordinator in Tampa Bay.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

Tuesday, January 17th, 2023

Offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi and quarterbacks coach Shane Day out at the worthless Los Angeles Chargers.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Quick firings watch.

Wednesday, January 11th, 2023

There haven’t been any additional head coach firings in the past couple of days, but there have been a few lower level firings:

Mike LaFleur out as offensive coordinator for the Jets.

Scott Turner out as offensive coordinator for the Washington Generals Redskins Commanders.

The Tennessee Titans fired offensive coordinator Todd Downing on Monday. Also out: ffensive line coach Keith Carter, secondary coach Anthony Midget and offensive skill assistant Erik Frazier.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 9, 2023.

Monday, January 9th, 2023

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.

…

After graduating from the City College of New York in 1942, Mr. Kalb spent two years in the Army, mostly working on a newspaper published out of a Quonset hut in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. His editor was Sgt. Dashiell Hammett, the author of the detective novels “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man.”

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”.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Law, Media, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 3 Comments »

Your Bloody Monday thread.

Monday, January 9th, 2023

The NFL regular season ended yesterday. You know what that means.

Yes, the firings will continue until morale improves. This is your Bloody Monday NFL firings thread, which I will try to keep updated today.

Starting with yesterday’s “Damn, you didn’t even wait to get him in the house” firing: Lovie Smith out as head coach of the Texans after one season. 3-13-1 as Texans coach. From the NYPost:

Smith had a successful nine-year run in Chicago, going 81-63 and taking the team to the Super Bowl in 2006 after a 13-3 season. Since, though, he has gone 11-35-1 in stints with the Buccaneers and now the Texans.

Smith replaced David Culley, who was also fired after one year in Houston, as head coach in February 2022.

This team was so inept, they couldn’t even get the first draft choice. What the heck happened? The Texans used to be at least competitive.

Joe Woods out as defensive coordinator in Cleveland. At least the Browns were competitive (7-10 this season).

More later, if there are any more firings today.

Edited to add: Kliff Kingsbury out as head coach of the Cardinals, and Steve Keim stepping down as GM. Keim’s resignation is apparently for health reasons.

Kingsbury was 28-37-1 overall, and the team was 4-13 this season. Interestingly, both Kingsbury and Keim had their contracts extended last March.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 3, 2023.

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023

Very quick roundups from the past few days:

Fred White, drummer for Earth, Wind and Fire.

Anita Pointer, of the Pointer Sisters.

Jeremiah Green, drummer for Modest Mouse.

Uche Nwaneri, former offensive lineman for the Jacksonville Jaguars. He was 38.

RoadRich sent over an obit for Ken Block, rally driver and YouTuber. He was 55, and died in a snowmobile accident.

Chris Ledesma, music editor for “The Simpsons”. He worked on every episode through May of 2022.

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

Merry Christmas!

Monday, December 26th, 2022

I know, it is December 26th, but as I always say: all people of goodwill know the Christmas season runs through January 6th.

Today’s Christmas present: Nathaniel Hackett out as head coach of the Denver Broncos, less than a year after being hired.

The Broncos are 4-11 this season (and in Hackett’s tenure) and lost 51-14 to the (5-10) Rams on Sunday. But they did beat the Texans in week 2, so they’re not quite the most pathetic team in the NFL this season.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 21, 2022.

Wednesday, December 21st, 2022

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.

Posted in Law, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports | 3 Comments »

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