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Obit watch: July 9, 2019.

Tuesday, July 9th, 2019

Ross Perot. (Edited to add: Lawrence. Dallas Morning News.)

He was no quitter: an Eagle Scout, a Navy officer out of Annapolis, a top I.B.M. salesman, the founder of wildly successful data processing enterprises, a crusader for education and against drugs, a billionaire philanthropist. In 1969, he became a kind of folk hero with a quixotic attempt to fly medicine and food to American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. In 1979 he staged a commando raid that freed two of his employees, and thousands of criminals and political prisoners, from captivity in revolutionary Iran.
And in 1992 he became one of the most unlikely candidates ever to run for president. He had never held public office, and he seemed all wrong, like a cartoon character sprung to life: an elfin 5 feet 6 inches and 144 pounds, with a 1950s crew cut; a squeaky, nasal country-boy twang; and ears that stuck out like Alfred E. Neuman’s on a Mad magazine cover. Stiff-necked, cantankerous, impetuous, often sentimental, he was given to homespun epigrams: “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.”

…

He joined the Boy Scouts at 12 and in little more than a year was an Eagle Scout, an extraordinary achievement that became part of his striver’s legend.

…

His folk-patriot reputation stemmed from two adventures. In 1969, after months of speaking on the plight of 1,400 American prisoners of war in North Vietnam, he chartered two jetliners, filled them with 30 tons of food, medicines and gifts and flew to Southeast Asia. Hanoi rejected the mission, but it was hardly a failure. The spotlight on prisoners’ hardships embarrassed Hanoi and led to better treatment for some.
In 1979, as an Islamic revolution swept Iran, Mr. Perot mounted a commando raid on a prison in Tehran to free two employees being held for ransom. A riot was orchestrated at the gates, and in the chaos of an ensuing breakout 11,800 inmates escaped, including both employees. The episode was chronicled in Ken Follett’s best-selling book “On Wings of Eagles” and in a 1986 mini-series on NBC.

You know, I need to read that book. (Also The Pillars of the Earth.)

Also among the dead: Jack Renner, co-founder of Telarc and a good Cleveland boy.

In 1978 the company made what Mr. Renner said was the first commercially released digital recording of symphonic music in the United States, featuring Frederick Fennell and the Cleveland Symphonic Winds.
“It created a lot of stir among audiophiles,” he said. “It had a bass drum that blew up speakers. Everybody accused us of hyping the bass drum. We didn’t.”

Back in the day, I had a fair number of Telarc CDs (including some of their P.D.Q. Bach).

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 26, 2019.

Wednesday, June 26th, 2019

Steve Dunleavy, noted tabloid journalist.

Mr. Dunleavy exposed Elvis Presley’s addiction to prescription drugs in Star and in a best-selling book that rankled Presley fans; scored exclusive interviews with the mother of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, and Albert DeSalvo, the confessed Boston Strangler; and championed police officers, smokers and gun owners, among others.
During his run on “A Current Affair,” from 1986 to 1995, he wrestled a bear in one segment and, in another, was bitten by a witness in a rape case when he confronted her with nude photographs of her.

That book, by the way, was: Elvis: What Happened?.

His columns in Star typically echoed the company’s conservative line, so much so that they earned him the “American of the Year” award from the right-wing John Birch Society — even though he was not a United States citizen and never became one.

…

Pete Hamill, who worked for both The Post and The News, was impressed by his drive. “I always thought he was writing his columns like he was double-parked,” Mr. Hamill said.

Rod Dreher has a tribute up as well, in which he quotes Hamill (after Dunleavy’s foot was run over by a snowplow):

“I hope it wasn’t his writing foot.”

NY Post.

By way of Lawrence: Herbert Meyer.

It was Meyer who, in a famous memo to Reagan in November 1983 when things were very tense with our intermediate-range missile deployments in Europe, wrote: “if present trends continue, we are going to win the Cold War.” Over eight vivid and tightly argued pages, Herb laid out the reasons that subsequently came to pass over the next decade.

Also by way of Lawrence: Desmond Amofah, YouTuber (under the handle “Etika”). He was 29.

His belongings were found on Manhattan Bridge on Monday. He had uploaded an eight-minute YouTube video in which he talked about suicide.
Etika was popular for playing and discussing Nintendo games on YouTube and the streaming platform Twitch.

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

Not quite an obit, but:

The head of the Massachusetts motor vehicle division has resigned after her agency failed to terminate the commercial driving license of a man whose collision with a group of motorcyclists on a rural New Hampshire road left seven bikers dead.

Posted in Books, Elvis, Media, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 15, 2019.

Saturday, June 15th, 2019

Franco Zeffirelli.

A whirlwind of energy, Mr. Zeffirelli found time not only to direct operas, films and plays past the age of 80, but also to carry out an intense social life and even pursue a controversial political career. He had a long, tumultuous love affair with Luchino Visconti, the legendary director of film, theater and opera. He was a friend and confidant of Callas, Anna Magnani, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Coco Chanel and Leonard Bernstein.

Twice elected to the Italian Parliament, Mr. Zeffirelli was an ultraconservative senator, particularly on the issue of abortion. In a 1996 New Yorker article, he declared that he would “impose the death penalty on women who had abortions.” He said his extreme views on the subject were colored by the fact that he himself was born out of wedlock despite pressure brought to bear on his mother to terminate her pregnancy.

Did everybody born after…1964? see “Romeo and Juliet” in high school? Or was that a limited local phenomenon?

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

The vault, the vault, the vault is on fire…

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019

I haven’t had a chance to go through all of this yet, but it looks link worthy:

“The Day the Music Burned“, about the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

The scope of this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands of pages of depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.

…

Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.

This is the kind of telling detail I look for:

There were at least a dozen fire engines ringing the vault, and as Aronson looked around he noticed one truck whose parking lights seemed to be melting.

(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitters.)

Posted in Bookmarks, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 11, 2019.

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019

Bill Wittliff, Texas writer. Among his credits: the screenplay for “Lonesome Dove”.

Bushwick Bill, Houston area rapper with the Geto Boys. NYT. This is an odd one: there were reports on Sunday that his family was denying Bushwick Bill had passed, which may have been correct at the time, but I guess his status changed at some point during the day…

Bushwick Bill had an early brush with death in 1991. High on PCP and grain alcohol, he said, he got into an altercation with his girlfriend and was shot in the right eye, a trauma he described in harrowing detail on “Ever so Clear,” from his 1992 solo debut album “Little Big Man.”
He said in interviews that he had been pronounced dead, toe-tagged and taken to the morgue. “I was actually on the cold slab,” he said in 2014. (He told differing stories about the shooting; in some accounts his mother had shot him.)
The incident was immortalized on the album cover of “We Can’t Be Stopped,” which features a photo of Bushwick Bill taken in the hospital. Flanked by Willie D and Scarface, he is shown on a stretcher, his eye blood-red, the day before he had surgery to remove it. He later said that he had been so medicated, he didn’t know the photo was being taken, and that he didn’t see the album cover until after its release.

You’ve probably seen that cover. If not, it’s in the HouChron Warning! slide show Warning!.

Noted:

In the 1990s, he announced that he was renaming himself Dr. Wolfgang von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother-Funk Stay High Dollar Billstir.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 7, 2019.

Friday, June 7th, 2019

Malcolm John (Mac) Rebennack Jr.

You know him better as Dr. John.

Mr. Rebennack belonged to the pantheon of New Orleans keyboard wizards that includes Professor Longhair, James Booker, Huey (Piano) Smith and Fats Domino. What distinguished him from his peers was the showmanship of his public persona.
Onstage as Dr. John, he adorned himself with snakeskin, beads and colorful feathers, and his shows blended Mardi Gras bonhomie with voodoo mystery.
He recorded more than 30 albums, including jazz projects (“Bluesiana Triangle,” 1990, with the drummer Art Blakey and the saxophonist David Newman), solo piano records (“Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack,” 1981) and his version of Afropop (“Locked Down,” 2012). His 1989 album of standards, “In a Sentimental Mood,” earned him the first of six Grammy Awards, for his duet with Rickie Lee Jones on “Makin’ Whoopee!”

…

As many albums as he made, however, Mr. Rebennack said he had earned more money cutting jingles. His clients included Popeyes chicken, Scott tissue and Oreo cookies. He also reached younger generations with his theme songs for the sitcom “Blossom” and the cartoon show “Curious George,” and through his Muppet musician doppelgänger, Dr. Teeth, leader of the Electric Mayhem.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 3, 2019.

Monday, June 3rd, 2019

Leah Chase, New Orleans restaurateur.

I haven’t managed to eat at Dooky Chase yet, though I have heard of it (probably by way of Calvin Trillin). As much as I prefer to link to local obits, I like the way the NYT puts it:

Mrs. Chase possessed a mix of intellectual curiosity, deep religious conviction and a will always to lift others up, which would make her a central cultural figure in both the politics of New Orleans and the national struggle for civil rights. “She is of a generation of African-American women who set their faces against the wind without looking back,” said Jessica B. Harris, who is an author and expert on food of the African diaspora and who said Mrs. Chase treated her like another daughter. “It’s a work ethic, yes, but it’s also seeing how you want things to be and then being relentless about getting there.”

…

Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”

…

Mrs. Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

I love this, too:

During that period, Mrs. Chase started catering the openings of fledgling artists so they could offer hospitality to people who had come to admire – and, perhaps, buy – their creations. She helped them pay their bills, and she hung their works in the restaurant.
This love of art, born when she studied art in high school, led to service on the boards of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase also sat on the boards of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

…

Mrs. Chase regularly provided food for nonprofit organizations’ fundraisers and refused to submit bills, said Morial, the widow of one New Orleans mayor and the mother of another.
“She provided food for the Amistad Research Center and would not take money. That was her contribution,” said Morial, an Amistad board member. “We’d tell her this was a fundraiser. She said, ‘I know, and you need all the money you can raise.’”

My feelings about baseball are well known, but I thought this was an interesting obituary: Marc Okkonen.

Mr. Okkonen, a commercial artist and baseball aficionado with an appreciation for vintage apparel, spotted flaws in the purported uniforms of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs and wondered why they were not precise replicas of the originals from 1939, when the movie takes place. Given how thoroughly documented baseball’s history is, he thought, accurate details would not have been too difficult to uncover.
But, to Mr. Okkonen’s surprise, he could find no single volume containing images of historic uniforms, so he set out to fill that void. He spent the next five years poring through books, microfilms and archives, including those at the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame, to find images of every home and road uniform worn by all major league teams, starting in 1900.

And then he wrote that book: Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide. This is the kind of obsessive historical study that I find admirable, in the same way that (for example) some people document the minute details of Smith and Wesson history…

(Eight days and a wake-up in country, and then I’m off to the S&WCA symposium.)

Roky Erickson, noted psychedelic musician with the 13th Floor Elevators. I wish I had more to say about this, but I pretty much missed the psychedelic era. Also, the treatment of Roky Erickson (and Daniel Johnston) locally seemed, to me, to be kind of “let’s point and laugh at the weirdo”. Not everyone was that way: I’m sure there were some people who were motivated by compassion and love of the music, but I felt like that was an undercurrent running through the scene. Perhaps some of my musician readers will have more to say on the subject.

(Edited to add 6/4: NYT obit for Mr. Erickson.)

Last and least: infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas, whose life was adapted into “American Gangster”.

Richard M. Roberts, who led the prosecution of Mr. Lucas in New Jersey, had befriended him in recent years but was under no illusions about what he did long ago. “In truth,” Mr. Roberts told The New York Times in 2007, “Frank Lucas has probably destroyed more black lives than the K.K.K. could ever dream of.”

Posted in Books, Clothing, Cops, Food, Law, Movies, Music, NYPD, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 31, 2019.

Friday, May 31st, 2019

Leon Redbone has died. He was 127.

Well, that’s what the press release said. Most sources I see say he was 69, though Wikipedia footnotes that as “disputed”.

The “Variety” obit (hattip: Lawrence) is pretty good. If it seems like I’m giving Mr. Redbone short shrift, well, I don’t have a lot to say: I never really caught that particular gene. I’ve been told he was on “Prairie Home Companion” a lot, but since that show basically makes me want to stab myself in the thigh repeatedly with a spork…

Also among the dead: Thad Cochran, congressman for 45 years.

His 45-year tenure was the longest of any currently serving member of Congress. His 39 years in the Senate was the 10th-longest stretch in history, and he was that body’s third longest-serving incumbent, behind only Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

And finally, Claus von Bülow, who was not a murderer. Really. Two out of three courts said so.

Seriously, this was one of the great true crime circuses of the 1980s. Mr. von Bülow was charged with attempting to murder his wife by giving her an overdose of insulin. She went into hypoglycemic comas twice (in December of 1979 and December of 1980). She recovered the first time, but her second coma was irreversible.

Mr. von Bülow was convicted in his first trial, but that conviction was overturned on appeal. (His legal team included Alan Dershowitz, Eliot “Client #9” Spitzer, and Jim “Mad Money” Cramer.) He was tried a second time and acquitted.

I’m glossing over a lot of stuff here (because I don’t have time), including the testimony in the second trial from Truman Capote and Johnny Carson’s wife. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary, though you have to read both the Sunny and Claus articles. (There’s a great story in one of them about Norman Mailer and his wife attending a dinner party with Claus and Dershowitz. You have to read it: I won’t spoil the punchline.)

Sunny von Bülow never recovered from her second coma, and remained in a vegetative state until she died in 2008.

Posted in Law, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 13, 2019.

Monday, May 13th, 2019

Doris Day.

I can’t find a good clip, but I rather liked Ms. Day in the 1956 version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. (I liked Jimmy Stewart in that movie, too, but I think the 1934 version moves faster and has a more satisfying climax. Don’t get me wrong: both are good Hitchcock films.)

Peggy Lipton, of “Mod Squad” and “Twin Peaks” fame. I wish I had more to say about her, but I was just a little too young for “The Mod Squad” and pretty much missed “Twin Peaks” the first time around.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

There’s no sun up in the sky…

Wednesday, May 1st, 2019

They keep predicting apocalyptic rain for the Austin area. And they keep pushing back the start time of said rain. Now it’s a 40% chance of rain starting at 6 PM Austin time.

So, here. Enjoy two clips that happened to pop up while I was looking at YouTube. Both of these are from “Stormy Weather”, the movie. The resolution on this first one isn’t great, but you should really go buy the DVD or blu-ray from Amazon. (I recommend the blu-ray, but that’s just my opinion.) There’s just something I find haunting and wonderful in Horne’s rendition here.

This is at a much better resolution, and just pure darn fun.

You can see what Gregory Hines was talking about, can’t you?

Posted in Movies, Music | Comments Closed

Hoplobibilophilia.

Tuesday, April 30th, 2019

My birthday was a week ago last Saturday (April 20th).

You know what this means, right?

Right. I’ve been buying books.

I ordered some things off of my Amazon wish list, since there were several items available used in the right combination of price and condition. Right now, I’m reading Tuchman’s Practicing History: Selected Essays: since that’s a collection of shorter work, I’m also planning to start Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War and alternate the two for variety.

(And, yes, I kind of want to see the Netflix series based on Five Came Back. Between that and “The Highwaymen”, I’m really tempted to get a Netflix trial, even though I refuse to pay for television.)

(Other things that were in the Amazon batch: The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics, which won an Edgar a few years back. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, for your obligatory Catholic content (CathCon?). More seriously, I like a lot of O’Connor, I know Rod Dreher is a big Walker Percy fan and I’d like to understand why, and I’m kind of interested in Merton. (Though, going back to Mr. Dreher again, I’m not sure now that I want to read Merton.) And The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy.)

Mike the Musicologist came up Friday night and we spent the weekend running around. We had a very good joint birthday dinner (Lawrence‘s is a few days before mine) at Lonesome Dove.

After dinner, we went back to Lawrence‘s and watched the 1943 “Stormy Weather“. “Stormy Weather” sort of presents itself as a loose “biography” of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (renamed “Bill Williamson” for the film). In truth, the biographical elements are an extremely thin skeleton…upon which is hung a whole bunch of fantastic musical performances by Robinson, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, the Nicholas Brothers, and others.

(I love this entry from Wikipedia about the Nicholas Brothers: “Gregory Hines declared that if their biography were ever filmed, their dance numbers would have to be computer generated because no one now could emulate them.“)

Unfortunately, our plans for Sunday fell through (they caught the kangaroo) but we were able to spend the afternoon talking about kitchen remodeling with some friends of ours. Yes, this is the exciting life of a 54-year-old.

I took Monday off (another perk of being a full-time Cisco employee: you get a free day off on or around your birthday) and went running errands with Mom. This involved stopping at both the Round Rock and central Half-Price Books locations. And HPB sent me a 15% off your total purchase coupon for my birthday. And it just so happened that they had a whole bunch of interesting gun books…

(more…)

Posted in Books, Food, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Movies, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 25, 2019.

Thursday, April 25th, 2019

Wow. Lots going on.

This is breaking news: Lawrence beat me to it (because I had to wait for my lunch hour to post).

Former Williamson County DA Jana Duty was found dead in a South Texas condo yesterday.

I have a WCDA tag for reasons: if you go back and look, or read Lawrence’s post, you’ll see that former DA Duty was controversial and apparently had some issues during her tenure. But this is still a sad and awful thing.

Mark Medoff, playwright. He was best known for “Children of a Lesser God”, which won multiple Tony awards and was the basis for the Oscar winning Marlee Matlin movie.

This one is for Mike the Musicologist: Heather Harper, soprano.

An unanticipated performance in 1962 brought Ms. Harper international attention when, on 10 days’ notice, she substituted for Galina Vishnevskaya in the premiere of Britten’s “War Requiem.” The work was written to dedicate the new Coventry Cathedral in England, the original 14th-century structure having been bombed into ruin during World War II.
As a gesture of reconciliation, Britten, a pacifist, had intended the soloists to be the tenor Peter Pears (an Englishman), the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (a German) and Ms. Vishnevskaya (a Russian). But the Soviet government refused to allow Ms. Vishnevskaya to travel to Coventry for the premiere. Ms. Harper, just turned 32, took her place and triumphed.

She did a lot of work with Britten (including Ellen in the 1969 BBC production of “Peter Grimes”) but she had a larger repertoire, including singing “Lohengrin” at Bayreuth.

Fay McKenzie, actress. Her story is interesting:

Ms. McKenzie made her screen debut in 1918, when she was 10 weeks old, cradled in Gloria Swanson’s arms in “Station Content,” a five-reel silent romance. Her last role was a cameo appearance with her son, Tom Waldman Jr., in “Kill a Better Mousetrap,” a comedy, based on a play by Scott K. Ratner, that was filmed last summer and has yet to be released.

She was also in five Blake Edwards movies and five Gene Autry movies. Ms. McKenzie was 101 when she passed.

Ken Kercheval. He did a lot of TV work (no “Mannix”, though) and was probably most famous as Cliff Barnes on “Dallas”. (He was also in “Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell“, which I’d kind of like to watch. Lawrence, however, does not seem to care much for movies involving demonic dogs.)

Finally, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg. Noted:

As the crown prince, he fled Luxembourg with the grand ducal family after Germany invaded the country in May 1940 and found refuge in France, Portugal, the United States and Canada before moving to Britain to join the Irish Guards, a regiment of the British Army, as a private in 1942.
He participated in the Allies’ invasion of Normandy in 1944 and fought in the Battle for Caen there. Three months later he took part in the liberation of Brussels.
Among other honors, he received a Silver Star from the United States, a War Medal from Britain and the French Croix de Guerre. He was promoted to colonel in the Irish Guards in 1984 and was made an honorary general of the British Army in 1995.

Posted in 1970s, Cops, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV, Wagner, WCDA | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 24, 2019.

Wednesday, April 24th, 2019

Henry W. Bloch, co-founder of H&R Block, has passed away at 96.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces and served as a B-17 navigator, flying 31 combat missions over Germany, three over Berlin, and winning the Air Medal and three oak leaf clusters.

I don’t get as much of an opportunity to use these tags as I would like, so I have to note the death of Verena Wagner Lafferentz, Richard Wagner’s last surviving grandchild.

Ms. Lafferentz was the daughter of Wagner’s son Siegfried and his wife, the English-born Winifred, who was a fanatical admirer and a rumored paramour of Hitler’s. She met him at the Bayreuth Festival in 1923.

…

In 1940, she, too, was romantically linked to Hitler, although he was said to have been uncomfortable with how the public would perceive their two-decade age gap. She was known to be both flirtatious and unusually frank in her conversations with him about everything from culture to current events.

…

In 1943, when she was 23, she was back in the public eye when she married Bodo Lafferentz, who had joined the Nazi Party a decade earlier, had worked for Volkswagen and had since 1939 been a high-ranking officer in the SS, assigned to the Race and Settlement office.
He oversaw a rocket research center at an outpost of the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where, according to the book “Bayreuth, the Outer Camp of Flossenbürg Concentration Camp” (2003), Wieland Wagner recruited inmates as laborers to build sets for the Bayreuth Festival.

Posted in Music, Nazis, Obits, Wagner | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 12, 2019.

Friday, April 12th, 2019

Earl Thomas Conley, musician.

Mr. Conley had 24 Top 10 country singles in the ’80s, several of which he wrote or co-wrote, including 18 that reached No. 1. Only two artists that decade topped the country charts more times than he did: the vocal group Alabama, which had 27 No. 1 singles, and the singer Ronnie Milsap, who had 23. All but one of Mr. Conley’s No. 1 hits were recorded for RCA, starting with “Somewhere Between Right and Wrong” in 1982.

…

“My stuff started with bluegrass music,” Mr. Conley once explained in an interview. “That’s what inspired me, the people that came out of those hills in West Virginia and Kentucky. And, of course, Hank Williams Sr. down in Alabama.
“I was born in ’41, and I was raised up on that early stuff,” he went on. “Coming out of those mountains, there’s a different soul and a different feeling and a whole different deal than what it would be like to come from the city.”

Forrest Gregg, legendary Green Bay Packer.

He was the best offensive lineman of his era. He was so good that he went to nine Pro Bowls, was a first-ballot Hall of Famer and was named to the NFL’s 75th anniversary team.

…

Drafted in the second round out of SMU in 1956, Gregg began a streak of a then-NFL record 188 consecutive games, interrupted only in ’57 when he missed the entire season in order to serve in the army. The NFL did not count those as missed games and Gregg became a mainstay on the Packers’ offensive line, playing mostly right tackle but filling in at guard when injuries dictated.

He also did some coaching: he was with the Browns, took the Bengals to the Super Bowl, had a controversial stint as head coach in Green Bay, and was the first coach at SMU after the scandal.

NYT. Packers.com.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 19, 2019.

Tuesday, March 19th, 2019

Reason has a nice obit up for Dick Dale.

“…We’re like Johnny Appleseed, crossing the country and sowing the seeds of survival.”

Johnny Thompson, aka “The Great Tomsoni”,

…a pompous caricature of a magician. His act, full of deadpan humor and often performed with his wife, Pamela Hayes, as his indifferent assistant, left spectators laughing so much that they might not have fully appreciated that they were also seeing expertly executed tricks.

He was more than a magician, though: he was a consultant and advisor to other magicians (including Penn and Teller, who he worked extensively with) and an expert magic historian.

“Johnny had a profound way of taking an idea and creating an illusion that worked,” he said by email. “When I called him and asked, ‘How do I make a guarded car vanish from inside of a dealership?,’ without missing a beat he said, ‘We don’t, we vanish it from a tent outside, just like the vanishing elephant illusion,’ ” a reference to a classic trick performed by Houdini and others.
Mr. Jillette said that this knowledge of history had also come into play in a less visible role that Mr. Thompson filled: that of informal mediator when one magician thought another might be stealing material.
“If two people felt they were doing material that was too close, Johnny knew the provenance of everything,” Mr. Jillette said. “He could adjudicate that.”

You should read all the way to the end of this obit: there’s a story involving Mr. Jillette that I won’t spoil for you here.

Posted in Magic, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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