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Obit watch: July 12, 2023.

Wednesday, July 12th, 2023

Kenneth Eberhart. He was one of my uncles on my mother’s side of the family, and passed away over the weekend. I’ve been waiting until I had something I could link to.

Milan Kundera. THR.

…he was twice expelled from the party he had supported from age 18, when the Communists seized power in 1948.
His first expulsion, for what he called a trivial remark, was imposed in 1950 and inspired the central plot of “The Joke.” He was nevertheless allowed to continue his studies; he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1952 and was then appointed to the faculty there as an instructor in world literature, counting among his students the film director Milos Forman.
Mr. Kundera was reinstated to the party in 1956 but kicked out again, in 1970, for advocating reform. This time it was forever, effectively erasing him as a person. He was driven from his job and, as he said, “No one had the right to offer me another.”

Jimmy Weldon, voice actor and ventriloquist. He also did some TV work.

Posted in Books, Obits | 2 Comments »

Travel notes: Glendale, AZ.

Thursday, June 29th, 2023

So where was I last week?

Glendale, Arizona, for the annual Smith and Wesson Collectors Association Symposium.

This ordinarily would have been a flying situation, but when Mike the Musicologist heard where the Symposium was, he offered to drive. He’s not a S&WCA member, but he is a gun guy, and I bought him a guest pass so he could look around. Plus he wanted to see Taliesin West, which he has been hosed out of seeing in the past. Plus driving allowed us to take guns more easily than flying.

MtM did see Taliesin West (finally) but they don’t offer guided tours during the summer. Which is odd to me, because I took a guided tour when the S&WCA Convention (it wasn’t a symposium back then) was in Tuscon in the summer of 2010. (I had a rental car and drove from Tuscon to Scottsdale on one of the off days.) MtM did get to take the audio tour, and had a good time as far as I can tell.

I can’t talk a lot about what goes on at the Symposium, since it is a private meeting. I don’t feel like I’m giving too much away by saying Smith and Wesson actually sent a factory rep (for the second year in a row!) to talk with us and hang out at the convention. The gentleman in question even sat at our table during the Saturday night banquet that closed the show, and both MtM and I were able to chat him up about some…things, which I will keep secret but expect to be announced soon.

(Full disclosure: I own some stock in Smith and Wesson Brands, the holding company for the gun business, and American Outdoor Brands, the holding company for the non-gun business.)

The Symposiums are always like old home week to me. I get to meet up with friends that I only see once a year, though some of those folks were missing this year for various reasons. I get to talk shop with my people. And I get to relax for a few days, or in this case an entire week.

The question people always ask me: “Did you buy any guns?” The short answer: no, just paper and trinkets. The long answer: I came very close to purchasing one, and even had a handshake deal with the seller. But we mutually called the deal off for reasons that I don’t think I need to go into here. MtM and I traveled about 2,700 miles round trip…and I did end up buying a gun, not at the Symposium, but about five miles from my house. (Photos to come after part 2 of Day of the .45.)

It was a two-day drive both ways. We decided to take a scenic route going out to Arizona and went down to Del Rio and along the Rio Grande, paralleling the river and stopping overnight in Marathon at the Gage Hotel (and eating at the 12 Gage Restaurant). We did drive through Marfa (and past the Prada Store, but we missed the world’s smallest Buc-ees by just a few days). We also drove through Alpine and past Sul Ross State University, which gave me both an excuse and a captive audience to talk about Jack O’Connor (who, as you know, Bob, taught English at Sul Ross for a while). The second day we drove through Hatch, New Mexico, and up into the national forests before reaching Glendale late in the afternoon.

For the curious: we were stopped by the Border Patrol three times, twice out and once back, though the third time they just waved us through the checkpoint. The longest exchange we had: “Are you both US citizens?” “Yes.” “Anybody else in the car?” “No.” “Okay, go ahead.”

I don’t think we had a bad meal on the trip, though we did eat catered hotel food two nights. (There’s a “cocktail party”, which is really more like a buffet dinner, on Thursday night of the Symposium, and a sit-down banquet to close things out on Saturday night. The hotel food was somewhat better than decent.) Mike and I ate at The Wild Thaiger on Tuesday night after we got in, and I thought that was very good (I had the Mi Dang and we split an order of Dragon Eggz). Wednesday night we took a couple of my friends to the Barrio Cafe, which was another solid choice that everyone loved. Friday night we took a larger group to Giuseppe’s on 28th, which was also universally beloved by everyone who went.

(MtM picked all the restaurants. His secret: he picks places that have been on “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives”.)

I heartily endorse all three of these restaurants, and The Old German Bakery and Restaurant in Fredericksburg.

We took advantage of one of the slower days to go visit some bookstores and some gun stores. The one bookstore we visited (Bookmans) I didn’t buy anything at, though I did think it was a good store. Tombstone Tactical was more of a modern firearms store. They had good prices on new guns, but I didn’t find anything I wanted. Legendary Guns, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of funky mixed gun shop I love. And I bought some books there.

We took I-10 coming back, and stopped for dinner at the Cattleman’s Steakhouse in Fabens (also heartily endorsed), staying overnight at the Hotel El Capitan before the final push back to Austin the following day.

Thanks to MtM for driving, and to everyone who attended the Symposium. Next year: back to Tulsa (which is not that far).

Posted in Beef, Books, Endorsements, Food, Guns, Smith and Wesson, Travel | Comments Closed

Happy Gavrilo Princip Day!

Wednesday, June 28th, 2023

It almost got past me again this year, but I made a spectacular last minute catch.

Please observe a moment of silence in honor of the late guffaw.

On a semi-related note, especially given past comments about Barbara Tuchman: I recently read The Zimmermann Telegram, and that’s a swell book that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Posted in Books, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 22, 2023.

Thursday, June 22nd, 2023

Still alive, just having more fun than humans should be allowed to have.

I did want to note the passing of Henry Petroski. I read To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Also: Teresa Taylor, of BH Surfers and “Slacker” notoriety.

Posted in Books, Geek, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 16, 2023.

Friday, June 16th, 2023

Daniel Ellsberg, notorious leaker.

The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 government pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress and misled the American people — plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy.
It led to illegal countermeasures by the White House to discredit Mr. Ellsberg, halt leaks of government information and attack perceived political enemies, forming a constellation of crimes known as the Watergate scandal that led to the disgrace and resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.
And it set up a First Amendment confrontation between the Nixon administration and The New York Times, whose publication of the papers was denounced by the government as an act of espionage that jeopardized national security. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the freedom of the press.
Mr. Ellsberg was charged with espionage, conspiracy and other crimes and tried in federal court in Los Angeles. But on the eve of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the case, citing government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, a break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist and an offer by President Nixon to appoint the judge himself as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Brett Hadley, actor. Other credits include “The Rockford Files”, “McMillan and Wife”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, and “The F.B.I.”.

Richard Severo, NYT reporter with an interesting backstory.

…while reporting for The Times’s science section, Mr. Severo ran afoul of his bosses when he decided to write a book drawn from his articles about a patient with neurofibromatosis — known as the “Elephant Man” disease — whose face was reconfigured after grueling surgery.
Accounts of what happened next vary, but The Times, through its publishing subsidiary Times Books, was said to have claimed first rights to the book because it was based on Mr. Severo’s work for the newspaper. Mr. Severo, however, through his agent, had already begun auctioning the rights to other publishers. Times Books eventually bid $37,500 (about $110,000 in today’s dollars), but Harper & Row, with an offer of $50,000 (about $145,000) won the rights.

The paper of record reassigned Mr. Severo to the metropolitan desk, which he considered to be a demotion and retaliatory behavior.

Four years of arbitration hearings ensued, during which Mr. Severo took an unpaid leave. Along the way an internal rebellion was mounted by a cadre of Pulitzer Prize winners when management demanded that Mr. Severo hand over his diaries and other personal papers. In the end, in September 1988, an arbitrator ruled in The Times’s favor.
Ending his leave, Mr. Severo returned and accepted the transfer to the metropolitan desk. He was later assigned to the obituaries desk, where he prepared many in-depth obituaries about luminaries in advance of their deaths.

According to the obit, current NYT policy is: reporters have to notify the paper in advance if they plan to write a book based on their work, and they are not allowed to accept a bid from another publisher until the NYT decides if they want to make a “competitive offer”.

Review of Lisa H: The True Story of an Extraordinary and Courageous Woman by the late and sorely missed David Shaw for the LAT. You can find used copies on Amazon cheap.

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

Obit watch: June 15, 2023.

Thursday, June 15th, 2023

Glenda Jackson. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “T.Bag’s Christmas Ding Dong”, “The Patricia Neal Story” (she played Patricia Neal), and “The Nelson Affair”.

Robert Gottlieb, noted editor.

Mr. Gottlieb edited novels by, among many others, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing and Chaim Potok; science fiction by Michael Crichton and Ray Bradbury; histories by Antonia Fraser and Barbara Tuchman; memoirs by former President Bill Clinton and Katharine Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post; and works by Jessica Mitford and Anthony Burgess.

…

Then, in 1987, in an abrupt career change from the relative anonymity and serenity of book publishing, Mr. Gottlieb was named the third editor in the 62-year history of The New Yorker, one of American journalism’s highest-profile jobs. He replaced William Shawn, the magazine’s legendary editor for 35 years, who had succeeded the founding editor, Harold Ross.

…

His memoir offered a highlight reel of snarky critiques of authors — the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (“a snob”), Ms. Tuchman (“her sense of entitlement was sometimes hard to deal with”), William Gaddis (“unrelentingly disgruntled”), Roald Dahl (“erratic and churlish”).
“He wasn’t just an editor, he was the editor,” Mr. le Carré told The Times. “I never had an editor to touch him, in any country — nobody who could compare with him.” He noted that Mr. Gottlieb, using No. 2 pencils to mark up manuscripts, often signaled changes with hieroglyphics in the margins: a wavy line for language too florid, ellipses or question marks advising a writer to “think harder and try again.”

…

Mr. Gottlieb joined Knopf in 1968 as vice president and editor in chief. He edited Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker” (1974), cutting 400,000 words from a million-word manuscript with the author fuming at his elbow. Despite the brutal cuts, their collaboration endured for five decades and became the subject of a 2022 documentary, “Turn Every Page,” directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, Mr. Gottlieb’s daughter.
“I have never encountered a publisher or editor with a greater understanding of what a writer was trying to do — and how to help him do it,” Mr. Caro said in a statement on Mr. Gottlieb’s death.
Flashing his range, Mr. Gottlieb also edited “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life” (1981), by Henry Beard, ghosting for the Muppets starlet, and Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” (1988), which prompted the outraged Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa urging Muslims to kill the author.

LeAnn Mueller, co-owner of the highly regarded Austin barbecue restaurant la Barbecue and member of the prominent Mueller barbecue family. She was 51.

I have not seen any updates on the criminal case against the la Barbecue owners. The only obit I’ve found that even mentions it is from the Austin Chronicle.

Jim Turner, former kicker for the Jets.

Turner played professional football for 16 years, with the Jets from 1964 to 1970 and the Broncos from 1971 to 1979. In the 1968-69 season, he kicked 34 field goals and scored 145 points, setting records that stood until 1983, when the New York Giants kicker Ali Haji-Sheikh broke the first and the Washington Redskins kicker Mark Moseley broke the second.

…

The most memorable game of Turner’s career was the Jets’s face-off against the Baltimore Colts on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 1969.
The Colts belonged to the older and better established National Football League, while the Jets were part of its upstart competitor, the American Football League. The Super Bowl, held for the first time in 1967, then pitted the best team from each league against the other.
The Colts, led by quarterback Johnny Unitas and coach Don Shula, had beaten the powerhouse Green Bay Packers, winners of the previous two Super Bowls, en route to qualifying for the 1969 championship.
While Unitas and Shula epitomized the stoic masculinity that many fans associated with football, Namath, the Jets’ quarterback, nicknamed Broadway Joe, was a figure of loudmouth swagger, and none of his public comments had ever seemed less creditable than his guarantee that the Jets would become the first A.F.L. team to win the Super Bowl by beating the Colts.
Namath played well — completing 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards, earning him the Most Valuable Player Award — but it was Turner, a decidedly Off Off Broadway figure, who was the decisive player. He provided the Jets with their margin of victory and alone scored more points than the Colts did.

…

Namath’s prediction came true, and the Jets won, 16-7.

Homer Jones, wide receiver for the New York Football Giants.

Jones was a member of the Giants from 1964-1969, where he was named to the Pro Bowl in 1967 and 1968.
“Homer Jones had a unique combination of speed and power and was a threat to score whenever he touched the ball,” said John Mara, the Giants president and chief executive officer.
“He was one of the first players (if not the first) to spike the ball in the end zone after scoring a touchdown and he quickly became a fan favorite. I remember him as an easygoing, friendly individual who was well liked by his teammates and coaches.”

…

Jones, who played six seasons with Big Blue, ranks sixth all-time among Giants receivers with 4,845 receiving yards and 35 touchdowns.

Not quite an obit, but Nautilus reran a nice article about Cormac McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute by one of his co-workers.

The entrance to SFI also serves as a mail room. When I first entered the building there was behind the front desk a permanent massif of book boxes. It was clear that the boxes were constantly cleared and just as quickly replenished. In this way the boxes achieved a dynamical equilibrium. In the study of complex systems this is called self-organized criticality and was made famous as an explanation for the constant gradient of sand piles and the faces of sand dunes.
The agent of this critical state was Cormac, who busied himself digging—like Kobo Abe’s entomologist in Women in the Dunes—to ensure balance at SFI and the growth of his library.

Posted in Beef, Books, Food, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 14, 2023.

Wednesday, June 14th, 2023

Cormac McCarthy. NYT (archived). “Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner” (archived). THR. Publisher’s Weekly.

Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.
“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

I can’t find it now, but I saw the same story recounted in a tweet somewhere: in that version, the McCarthy’s were so poor, they couldn’t afford toothpaste. And that explains why she became the second ex-Mrs. McCarthy.

Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.

Noted:

A correction was made on June 13, 2023: An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to El Paso, where Mr. McCarthy moved in 1976. It is in Texas, not New Mexico.

Layers and layers of editors.

This tableau inspired one of the funniest pieces of wildcat food criticism I’ve ever read. The essay, by Helen Craig, was titled “A Meat Processing Professional Reviews Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road.’” It ran in 2014 on a website called The Toast.
Craig pointed out that such a “living larder” is wasteful. Every day they’re alive, she wrote, “these people will be depreciating in calorific value.” Craig suggested, as any good butcher would, that “the ribs will be good fresh, and a pickling and brining process for the thighs and haunches should result in a product that is similar to ham.”

“The Toast” essay (archived).

“Unless you have an old rancid stockpot that you can just sort of throw every horrible thing into — rotten turnips, dead cats, whatever — and let it simmer for about a month — you’re at a real disadvantage,” he says.

So it sometimes goes in McCarthy’s universe. He goes to great lengths to get details right, then throws his readers a curveball. After all, it’s fiction. Asked about the fettuccine via his publicist (because how could I not?), McCarthy responded, in pure Bobby Western fashion: “No goddamn clams! Put a note at the bottom of the page!”

Jacques Rozier, who the NYT describes as the “last of the French New Wave Directors”.

John Romita Sr., Marvel comics artist.

In 1966, Romita began a five-year run working Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee on The Amazing Spider-Man. He took over for artist Steve Ditko, who had created the famed webslinger with Lee in 1961 before leaving in a spat with the comic book legend.
Romita’s run on Spider-Man saw the introduction of a number of the property’s most memorable characters, including Spidey love interest Mary Jane Watson and crime boss Kingpin; it was during Romita’s time as artist that Spider-Man overtook Fantastic Four to become Marvel’s top-seller, with the masked man becoming the face of the company.

Patrick Gasienica, Olympic ski jumper. He was 24, and died in a motorcycle accident.

Park Soo Ryun. She was the star of a Disney+ show, “Snowdrop”. I note this because she was 29, and her death kind of scares me:

Ryun slipped down a flight of stairs Sunday at a property on Jeju Island, South Korea’s largest island, where she was scheduled to perform, according to the Mirror.
The actress was reportedly taken to the hospital for emergency treatment and was pronounced brain dead by medics after attempts to revive her failed.

…

Fellow “Snowdrop” star Kim Mi-soo also died unexpectedly at age 29 last year.

Posted in Books, Food, Media, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

It never fails.

Tuesday, June 13th, 2023

You post the obit watch on your lunch hour. You’re thinking, “Oh, it looks like a slow day. No big news is going to break after lunch.”

Big news breaks after lunch.

Cormac McCarthy obits tomorrow. The NYT‘s current one is a kind of lengthy preliminary one (probably pulled from the files) with the standard “A full obituary will appear shortly.” tag.

Posted in Books, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 9, 2023.

Friday, June 9th, 2023

James G. Watt, former Secretary of the Interior and notorious Beach Boys hater.

As planning for the 1983 Independence Day celebration on the National Mall began, Mr. Watt said that pop-music groups retained in recent years had attracted “the wrong element” — presumably young people drinking and taking drugs. The Mall’s most prominent band had been the Beach Boys, popular since the 1960s.
Mr. Watt, a Pentecostal fundamentalist who did not smoke or drink alcohol, proposed the Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton, whose signature song was “Danke Schoen,” and military bands, saying they would better represent the patriotic, family-oriented themes he preferred.

…

After leaving the government, Mr. Watt was a lobbyist for builders seeking contracts from the Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1984 to 1986. In 1995, he was charged with 25 counts of perjury and obstructing justice by a federal grand jury investigating fraud and influence-peddling during his lobbying at HUD. But the prosecution’s case deteriorated, the felony charges were dropped and he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor and was sentenced to a $5,000 fine and 500 hours of community service.

Carroll Cooley, historical and legal footnote, has passed away at 87.

Mr. Cooley was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department. In that capacity, he was the person who took Ernesto Miranda’s original confession.

He wasn’t handcuffed because he was not yet under arrest, Detective Cooley said during a speaking engagement in 2016 quoted in an article in The Arizona Republic, and he wasn’t told that he needed a lawyer because there was no legal requirement to do so.

…

The Miranda case was by far the most significant of Detective Cooley’s law enforcement career. Mr. Miranda was convicted of rape and kidnapping by a Superior Court jury in June 1963; the conviction was upheld nearly two years later by the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that his confession was admissible despite his not having had a lawyer present.
In late 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review four cases, including Mr. Miranda’s, in which indigent men had confessed after being interrogated. The next year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Fifth Amendment required the police to advise suspects that they had the right to remain silent once they were in custody and to have an attorney present during interrogations. The rights, almost from the day of the decision, became known as the Miranda warning.
Mr. Miranda’s conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, but he was retried on rape and kidnapping charges and found guilty again in 1967. (The confession was not used in that trial.) He was paroled in 1972 and stabbed to death four years later in a barroom fight. After his death, it was reported that he had been trading on his legal celebrity by selling Miranda warning cards for $1.50 each.

…

In 1976, he defended his actions in the Miranda case to The Republic, saying that Mr. Miranda’s confession had been written voluntarily and that Mr. Miranda knew his rights.
“He was not un-knowledgeable about his rights,” he said. “He was an ex-convict and served a year in prison” — for auto theft — “and had been through the routine before.”

Noreen Nash, actress. Other credits include the original “Dragnet” TV series, “77 Sunset Strip”, and ‘Yancy Derringer”.

On the advice of her son, she decided to quit show biz in 1962 and went back to study, enrolling at UCLA and graduating in 1971 with a Bachelor’s Degree in history. In 1980, she published her first novel, ‘By Love Fulfilled’, set in the 16th century and following the life of a physician at the court of Catherine de Medici. This was followed by ‘Agnès Sorel, Mistress of Beauty’ in 2013 and an autobiographical work of recollections, ‘Titans of the Muses: When Henry Miller Met Jean Renoir’ in 2015.

Posted in Books, Cops, History, Law, Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 24, 2023.

Wednesday, May 24th, 2023

Brian Shul, SR-71 pilot and author, passed away over the weekend.

I’ve had this obit on hold for a few days because I couldn’t find a good source to link to. FotB RoadRich forwarded the Flying obit, so much credit to him.

Bill Lee, musician.

Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, including as well Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.

He also wrote film scores for the first four feature films directed by Spike Lee, his son.

Chas Newby.

Newby was a member of John Lennon’s first band The Quarrymen, and news of his death was announced by The Cavern Club Liverpool — a music venue where The Beatles performed before finding global stardom.
“It’s with great sadness to hear about the passing of Chas Newby,” the venue wrote in a Facebook post. “Chas stepped in for The Beatles for a few dates when Stuart Sutcliffe stayed in Hamburg and latterly he played for The Quarrymen.”

Gerald Castillo, actor. Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects”, the 1990 “Dragnet”, and the 1990-1991 “The New Adam-12”.

Kenneth Anger, the Hollywood Babylon guy. He also did some “experimental” films. (Edited to add: NYT obit archived.)

I’ve heard more than once that HB is notoriously inaccurate. I know, I know, but: Wikipedia.

And here’s a direct link to the “You Must Remember This” episodes (which I have not listened to yet, not being a regular listener of YMRT).

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

Obit watch: May 20, 2023.

Saturday, May 20th, 2023

Jim Brown.

Playing for the Browns from 1957 to 1965 after earning all-American honors at Syracuse University in football and lacrosse, Brown helped take Cleveland to the 1964 National Football League championship.
In any game, he dragged defenders when he wasn’t running over them or flattening them with a stiff arm. He eluded them with his footwork when he wasn’t sweeping around ends and outrunning them. He never missed a game, piercing defensive lines in 118 consecutive regular-season games, though he played one year with a broken toe and another with a sprained wrist.
“All you can do is grab, hold, hang on and wait for help,” Sam Huff, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker for the Giants and the Washington team now known as the Commanders, once told Time magazine.
Brown was voted football’s greatest player of the 20th century by a six-member panel of experts assembled by The Associated Press in 1999. A panel of 85 experts selected by NFL Films in 2010 placed him No. 2 all time behind the wide receiver Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers.
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971, the Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1984 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995.

He retired in 1966…

He had appeared in the 1964 western “Rio Conchos” and was involved in the shooting of the World War II film “The Dirty Dozen” in England, with plans to attend the Browns’ training camp afterward. But wet weather delayed completion of the filming. When he notified Art Modell, the Browns’ owner, that he would be reporting late, Modell said he would fine him for every day he missed camp. Affronted by the threat, Brown called a news conference to announce that he was done with pro football.

…

Handsome with a magnificent physique — he was a chiseled 6 feet 2 inches and 230 pounds — Brown appeared in many movies and was sometimes cited as a Black Superman for his cinematic adventures.
“Although the range of emotion Brown displayed onscreen was no wider than a mail slot, he never embarrassed himself, never played to a demeaning stereotype of the comic patsy,” James Wolcott wrote in The New York Review of Books in his review of Dave Zirin’s 2018 biography, “Jim Brown: Last Man Standing.” He called Brown “a rugged chassis for a more self-assertive figure, the Black uberman.”
One of Brown’s best-remembered roles was in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), in which he played one of 12 convicts assembled by the Army for a near-suicide mission to kill high-ranking German officers at a French chateau in advance of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He next played a Marine captain in the Cold War thriller “Ice Station Zebra” (1968).

IMDB. He was also a prominent civil rights activist.

Brown led the N.F.L. in rushing in eight of his nine seasons. He also set N.F.L. records for career yardage (12,312), total touchdowns (126), touchdowns by running (106), and average yards rushing per game (104) and per carry (5.22). He ran for more than 1,000 yards seven times when teams played only 12 and then 14 games a season (they now play 17), and at a time when the rule book favored the passing game over running plays. He caught 20 touchdown passes, and he returned kickoffs.

Martin Amis, British novelist.

He is best known for his so-called London trilogy of novels — “Money: A Suicide Note” (1985), “London Fields” (1990) and “The Information” (1995) — which remain, along with his memoir, his most representative and admired work.

…

Mr. Amis’s misanthropic wit made his voice at times reminiscent of that of his father, Kingsley Amis. Kingsley, who died in 1995, was one of the British working- and middle-class novelists of the 1950s known as the Angry Young Men and became famous with the success of his comic masterpiece “Lucky Jim” (1954).
Father and son were close, but they disagreed about much. Kingsley Amis drifted to the right with the rise of Margaret Thatcher; he once publicly referred to his son’s left-leaning political opinions as “howling nonsense.”

…

Mr. Amis’s talent was undeniable: He was the most dazzling stylist in postwar British fiction. So were his swagger and Byronic good looks. He had well-chronicled involvements with some of the most watched young women of his era. He wore, according to media reports, velvet jackets, Cuban-heel boots, bespoke shirts. He stared balefully into paparazzi lenses.
His raucous lunches with friends and fellow writers like Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Clive James, James Fenton and Mr. Hitchens were written up in the press and made other writers feel that they were on the outside looking in. He seemed to be having more fun than other people. His detractors considered him less a bad boy than a spoiled brat.

…

In 2002, Mr. Amis published “Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million,” a study of the Stalin regime’s atrocities in the Soviet Union. The title alludes to Stalin’s nickname, Koba. The word “laughter” in the subtitle refers to Mr. Amis’s morally perplexed realization that, while Hitler and the Holocaust are off limits, many consider it appropriate to joke about Stalin and the Soviet Union.

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

Obit watch: May 18, 2023.

Thursday, May 18th, 2023

Superstar” Billy Graham, noted wrestler.

A bodybuilding friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Graham got into pro wrestling in the late 1960s with Stew Hart’s Stampede Wrestling in Calgary and wrestled until 1987 until injuries and health issues pushed him out of the ring.
Graham, who moved into a commentary role, wrestled for AWA, WWWF, NWA and WWF during his career.
He was dubbed “Superstar” during his time in the AWA.
Graham won the WWWF championship from Bruno Samartino in April 1977 and held the belt for nine and a half months — losing the title to Bob Backlund in February 1978.

Ralph Lee, founder of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade and puppeteer.

His menagerie ranged from hand puppets to fantastic figures that towered over the audience and were controlled by multiple puppeteers. One of his most famous puppets ate Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin and others — it was the “land shark” that turned up at unsuspecting women’s doors in a 1975 “Saturday Night Live” sketch and returned several times over the years.

Amy Silverstein, author. When she was 24, she was diagnosed with congestive hear failure and had a transplant. She published a book, Sick Girl, in 2007.

The first heart eventually failed, and she went through a second transplant in 2014. In 2017, she published My Glory Was I Had Such Friends.

She was 59, and died of cancer, which is believed to have been caused by the medications she was taking to prevent organ rejection.

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Obit watch: May 10, 2023.

Wednesday, May 10th, 2023

Joe Kapp, former quarterback for the Vikings.

Kapp tied a single-game National Football League record — one held by several quarterbacks — when he threw seven touchdown passes against the defending league champion, the Baltimore Colts, in September 1969.
He threw 19 touchdown passes during the 1969 regular season, leading the Vikings to the 1970 Super Bowl against the Kansas City Chiefs, the champions of the American Football League, which was in its last season before it merged with the N.F.L. The Vikings, anchored by the Purple People Eaters, a fearsome defensive line with Carl Eller and Jim Marshall at the ends and Alan Page and Gary Larsen at the tackles, were strong favorites, but the Chiefs defeated them, 23-7.

…

Kapp joined the Boston (later New England) Patriots in 1970. The Patriots finished with a 2-12 record, then drafted quarterback Jim Plunkett of Stanford, the Heisman Trophy winner.
Having already been involved in a contract dispute with the Patriots, Kapp refused to sign a standard players contract for the 1971 season and quit the team in July, then filed an antitrust suit against the N.F.L. A jury declined to award him damages, but the case represented an early challenge in the players’ ultimately successful struggle to win free agency rights.

…

Kapp turned to acting after his N.F.L. career ended. He appeared on the TV crime series “Ironside” and had supporting roles in the football-themed movies “The Longest Yard” (1974) and “Semi-Tough” (1977).

IMDB listing.

Denny Crum, former Louisville Cardinals basketball coach.

Nicknamed Cool Hand Luke because of his unflinching sideline demeanor, Crum retired in March 2001 after 30 seasons at Louisville with a record of 675-295 and championships in 1980 and 1986.
A former assistant under the renowned U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden, Crum often wore a red blazer and waved a rolled-up stat sheet like a bandleader’s baton as he directed Louisville to 23 N.C.A.A. tournaments and six Final Fours. He was voted college coach of the year three times.

Lawrence emailed an obit for British actor Terrence Hardiman. Other credits include “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles”, “Midsomer Murders”, and “McLibel!”.

Heather “Dooce” Armstrong, blogger and author.

She was one of the early and influential bloggers, who famously got fired when her employers discovered her blog. (This originated the briefly popular slang term “dooced” for someone who got fired for their online writing.) She evolved into a prominent “mommy blogger”, writing about parenthood, domestic life, and her struggles with mental health, especially post-partum depression.

I used to read her somewhat intermittently, back in the day. I thought she wrote well about mental health issues.

She became sort of a big name in the blogsphere. She had content and sponsorship deals. She even had a short lived deal with HGTV.

By [2009], ads visible to Dooce’s 8.5 million monthly readers made a reported $40,000 for the Armstrongs each month, making it her primary source of income; she began running sponsored content as well…
…Jon joked in 2011 that the traffic from the hate sites had been better for the family business than the birth of their second child two years earlier. By then the revenue from Dooce paid salaries not only to the Armstrongs but an assistant and two full-time babysitters.

She and Jon (her husband) divorced in 2012, and she stopped blogging for a time. When she came back, social media was bigger, and even though she had an Instagram feed, her reach had declined. She also went through an experimental treatment for clinical depression, and a couple of years ago announced she was a recovering alcoholic.

She was 47.

Pete Ashdown, her longtime partner, who found her body in the home, said the cause was suicide.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline. If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

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

Obit watch: May 4, 2023.

Thursday, May 4th, 2023

Barbara Bryne. She was in the original Broadway productions of “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods”. Other credits include “Amadeus”, “Love, Sidney”, and “Best of the West”.

Eileen Saki. Other credits include “Meteor”, “History of the World: Part 1”, and “Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story”.

Another obit for Bart Skelton, this one from American Handgunner.

• All the world loves you if you have a song to sing, or a story to write: Unless that narrative is a warrant, then expect you will piss some people off, and they will hate you.

I ordered a copy of Down on the Border: A Western Lawman’s Journal (affiliate link) and am about four chapters into it. I’ll let you know when I’ve finished it.

Posted in Books, Guns, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 1, 2023.

Monday, May 1st, 2023

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author. (When Bad Things Happen to Good People and other books).

Detective Troy Patterson of the NYPD.

One night in 1990, three punks tried to hold Officer Patterson up. The robbery went bad, and Officer Patterson was shot in the head. He’d been in a vegetative state for the past 33 years.

Patterson was promoted to detective in 2016.
The three suspects — Vincent Robbins, Tracey Clark and Darien Crawford — were later arrested in the unprovoked shooting.
Robbins, now 53, was convicted of assault and attempted-robbery charges and sentenced to a prison term of five to 15 years. He was released in 2000, state records show.
Clark, the alleged gunman in the shooting, also went to trial in the case. The outcome of the case is not immediately available, nor are any details of the charges against Crawford.

Tim Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. You may recall that his brother, Robbie, passed in January.

Mike Shannon, former player and later broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals.

John Stobart, artist.

A product of Britain’s Royal Academy of Art, Mr. Stobart moved to the United States in 1970, when conceptual art, Op Art and minimalism were riding high in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.
Affable, unassuming and unfailingly candid, Mr. Stobart would have none of it. “I’ve never bought it, and the general public has never bought it either,” he said of abstract art in an interview with The Boston Globe in 1986. “That’s a lot of baloney, that stuff.”
Instead, he conjured the past as a master of richly detailed historical works brimming with schooners, brigs and sloops, their sails flapping under moody clouds, with shore lights twinkling in the distance.
Working out of studios in the Boston area, Martha’s Vineyard and several other locations, Mr. Stobart, who lived in Medfield, Mass., employed the same taste for exhaustive historical detail as Patrick O’Brian, the prolific Anglo-Irish author known for his bracing tales of naval heroics.
He left no detail to chance, traveling to the locations he painted, consulting old daguerreotypes of harbors and ships and going out to sea on various watercraft to learn the most arcane points about their engineering and behavior on the water.

…

By the mid-1980s, he had written the first of his three books, “The Rediscovery of America’s Maritime Heritage,” and thanks in part to a lucrative operation selling first-edition prints, was making up to $2.5 million a year. In recent years, his originals were selling for $15,000 to $400,000 through the Rehs Galleries in New York.

The obit reproduces some of Mr. Stobart’s paintings. I’m probably a sucker for representational art, but I like what I see there, and would be happy to have an original Stobart on my wall.

Posted in Art, Boats, Books, Cops, Law, Music, NYPD, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

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