Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch: February 24, 2025.

Monday, February 24th, 2025

Joy Reid’s show on MSNBC.

MSNBC’s president suggested Sunday that blindsided staffers of liberal host Joy Reid’s canceled show can apply for other jobs within the progressive network as she confirmed the group of employees would be canned, according to a report.

Just gonna slide in here before Lawrence does…

Lynne Marie Stewart. Other credits include the animated 1995 “The Tick”, “The Running Man”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Son of the Beach”.

Roberta Flack.

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Tom Fitzmorris, who was the food guy in New Orleans for many years.

Mr. Fitzmorris had a corny sense of humor, which often involved jokes about the phrase “soup du jour.” (A customer asks what the soup du jour is; the waitress says, “I don’t know. They change it on me every day.”) He also liked to play elaborate April Fool’s pranks. He once made up a new restaurant that he said was opening near Commander’s Palace and described the fictitious competitor with such detailed admiration that Ella Brennan, then an owner of Commander’s Palace, dispatched her daughter, Ti Martin, to investigate.
Ti Martin, now one of the restaurant’s proprietors, remembered him as a particularly harsh critic, not out of meanness but because he wanted things done in a way he perceived as proper. When she ran out of iced tea at a restaurant she had just opened, he went on about it on his show for what she said seemed like an hour.
“But he was right,” she said. “Who runs out of iced tea?”

Posted in Food, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 3, 2025.

Monday, February 3rd, 2025

Fay Vincent, former MLB commissioner. ESPN.

“List of people banned from Major League Baseball“.

Merle Louise Simon, who worked extensively with Stephen Sondheim.

Ms. Simon — who worked for most of her career under the name Merle Louise — began her run in Sondheim shows with “Gypsy,” in 1959, and continued with “Company” (1970), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1979) and “Into the Woods” (1987), Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine’s interpretation of fairy tales. (Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy,” and the music and lyrics for the other shows.)
“Steve had a real history with Merle,” Mr. Lapine, who directed Ms. Simon in three roles, including the Giant in “Into the Woods,” said in an email. Mr. Sondheim, he added, “loved the energy she brought to the rehearsal room and the stage. Merle was usually the smallest person in the room but always the most ebullient and with the most glorious voice.”

…

She played Susan, a Southern belle going through a divorce, in “Company,” a series of vignettes that revolve around a bachelor learning about love, marriage and divorce from his married friends. She was then cast as the Beggar Woman, the crazed, long-lost wife of the title character in “Sweeney Todd,” a barber who slits the throats of unsuspecting clients.

Hey! New York Times! Spoilers!

Suzanne Massie.

An American-born author of books about Russian culture who spoke the language, Ms. Massie held a romantic view of what she called the Russian “soul,” and she formed a bond with a president who liked to understand and communicate complex issues through anecdotes about average people.

…

She became “Reagan’s window on the Soviet Union,” the historian James Mann wrote in “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan” (2009), a study of his role in ending the Cold War. “She described the country and the Russian people to the president in terms that he understood and found useful.”
It was Ms. Massie who taught Mr. Reagan the Russian proverb “Doveryai no proveryai” (“Trust but verify”), which he uttered to Mr. Gorbachev when they met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 — and repeated so often that Mr. Gorbachev grumbled about it.

…

Although Ms. Massie corresponded with Mr. Reagan and met with him before and after trips she made to Moscow — including a private lunch on the Oval Office patio with the president and the first lady, Nancy Reagan — memoirs by Reagan officials involved in U.S.-Soviet relations portray her as a minor figure.
But Mr. Mann wrote that she “played a more significant role” than is generally known. She served as an unofficial emissary, carrying messages between Mr. Reagan and Moscow, and she humanized Russians for Mr. Reagan at a time when he was revising his view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and reaching out to Mr. Gorbachev to ease nuclear tensions.

She was married to Robert K. Massie.

The couple’s first child, Robert, had hemophilia. Caring for him, which the Massies described in a searing memoir, “Journey” (1975), turned out to be an unlikely portal into Russian culture and, ultimately, the Oval Office.
The Massies learned that Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, the last of the Romanovs, had a son with hemophilia. Mr. Massie went on to write a best-selling history, “Nicholas and Alexandra” (1967), with Ms. Massie serving as editor and researcher. Seeking some respite from raising a disabled child, she took Russian lessons.

After their divorce, she married Seymour Papert.

James Carlos Blake, one of those authors I have heard of but have not read. The NYT compares him to Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.

Rebellious, nomadic and prone to divorce (he was married four times), Mr. Blake was nearly as colorful a character as the ones who populated his fiction. Before turning to writing full time in his late 30s, he had been a paratrooper, snake catcher, mechanic, swimming-pool maintenance man, jail officer and teacher.

…

“Violence is the most elemental truth of life,” he told GQ magazine in 2012. “It’s the central shaper of history, the ultimate determiner of whether A or B is going to get his way. When push comes to shove — as so much has a way of doing — all moral considerations go out the window and it all becomes a matter of who’s going to be the last man standing.”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Sports, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 31, 2025.

Friday, January 31st, 2025

Dick Button, figure skating guy. I’ve never been a big skating fan, but I remember Mr. Button from when I was young and actually watched some of the Olympics.

An Emmy winner, Button taught generations of TV audiences the nuances of triple toe loops, lutzes and axels and how judges assess a skater’s performance. But many fans might not have known that he was a two-time Olympic gold medalist himself, advancing modern figure skating in the late 1940s and early ’50s with his dazzling leaps and spins, including the first triple jump in competition.

Marianne Faithfull. THR.

Iris Cummings Critchell. She was 104.

She competed as a swimmer in the 1936 Summer Olympics, and was the last surviving member of the American team.

While Iris didn’t win a medal at the 1936 Olympics, she went on to capture three national 200-meter breaststroke titles. But after the 1940 Olympics in wartime Tokyo were canceled, she put competitive swimming aside in favor of another passion that would hold her interest for the rest of her life: flying.

She flew with the Woman’s Air Force Service Pilots, ferrying planes across the country for shipping overseas.

After the war, Ms. Critchell received a bachelor’s degree with a concentration in science and mathematics from the University of Southern California, where she went on to teach aviation — an uncommon accomplishment for a woman at the time.

…

In 1962, she and Mr. [Howard] Critchell [her husband – DB], who was working as a commercial pilot for Western Airlines, began teaching in the Bates Foundation Aeronautics Program at Harvey Mudd College, where their students included the future astronauts George Nelson and Stanley G. Love. Ms. Critchell ran the program on her own after Mr. Critchell retired from teaching in 1979. When the program was shut down in 1990, she remained affiliated with the college, lecturing and working as a librarian there.

…

In addition to her work at Harvey Mudd College, Ms. Critchell created aviation outreach programs for public high schools, developed manuals for the Federal Aviation Administration and worked as a pilot examiner there for more than 20 years. She was a longtime member of the Ninety-Nines, a nonprofit organization supporting female pilots.
She also competed in women’s transcontinental air races, known informally as the Powder Puff Derby, a term coined by Will Rogers. In 1957, she finished first in a race to Philadelphia from San Mateo, Calif., sharing an $800 prize with her co-pilot, Alice Roberts.

Posted in History, Music, Nazis, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 27, 2025.

Monday, January 27th, 2025

Jan Shepard, actress.

Other credits include a lot of TV westerns, “Highway Patrol”, “The F.B.I.”, “G.E. True“, “TV Reader’s Digest” (????)…

…and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit“, season 1, episode 20. She was “Rose”.)

Arthur Blessitt. He was a preacher in LA in the late 1960s, and ran “a Christian coffeehouse adjacent to a strip club”.

“Like, if you want to get high, you don’t have to drop acid. Just pray and you go all the way to Heaven,” he wrote in “Life’s Greatest Trip” (1970), one of his many religious tracts. “You don’t have to pop pills to get loaded. Just drop a little Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.”

One day, he heard God telling him to carry a cross on foot from Los Angeles…to New York City. So he did. But that was just the start.

It took him six months to walk across the country. When he was done, he returned to Los Angeles, only to receive — in his telling — orders from Jesus to take his journey global.
“Go!” Jesus told him, he recounted on his website. “I want you to go all the way.”

…

Mr. Blessitt kept meticulous notes abroad, detailing how long his boot soles lasted (about 500 miles) and how often he was arrested (24 times). He visited every continent, including Antarctica, as well as war zones, disaster zones and many other places where he was liable to get shot at, beaten or arrested.
He climbed Mount Fuji in Japan, confronted angry baboons in Kenya and was nearly blown up by a terrorist bomb in Northern Ireland — all while carrying his cross. He is listed in Guinness World Records for the “longest ongoing pilgrimage.”
It took him nearly 40 years, but in 2008 he completed his quest to visit every country when he was permitted to enter the last, North Korea. His “trek” there was largely symbolic: Authorities let him carry his cross from the front door of his hotel to the street and back.

…

His decades-long campaign made him a minor celebrity. Profiles invariably zeroed in on his combination of dogged perseverance and an aw-shucks approach to his task.
“You’d be amazed,” he told People magazine in 1978, “how much attention a man carrying a big wooden cross gets.”

Posted in Elvis, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 22, 2025.

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025

Jules Feiffer, artist. He was perhaps most famous as a cartoonist for the “Village Voice”, but he also did some movie and theater work.

In the mid-1950s, Norton Juster, a neighbor of Mr. Feiffer’s in Brooklyn, invited him to illustrate a children’s book he was writing, “The Phantom Tollbooth.” An ingenious kaleidoscope of wordplay arguably akin in style to Lewis Carroll, the book, published in 1961, was an instant hit.

…

Around 1980, the movie producer Robert Evans recruited Mr. Feiffer to write the screenplay for Robert Altman’s “Popeye.” Mr. Feiffer patterned his script after the Segar newspaper strip, not the animated adaptations made by the Fleischer brothers in the 1930s and ’40s. When E.C. Segar’s daughter saw the movie, Mr. Feiffer told The Comics Journal in 1988, she called to tell him that he had captured the essence of her father’s creation — at which, Mr. Feiffer added, he cried. Though it met a mixed critical reaction, the film, starring Robin Williams as Popeye and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, was a hit.

…

In May 1997, Mr. Feiffer ended his affiliation with The Village Voice over a salary dispute. “It’s not that I’ve slipped,” he said at the time. “It’s that I’m too expensive.” (In April 2008, he returned for a one-shot, full-page take on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.)
Later in life he derived great pleasure from writing and drawing children’s books, some in collaboration with his daughter Kate, among them “The Man in the Ceiling” (1993), “Bark, George” (1999), “By the Side of the Road” (2002), “The Daddy Mountain” (2004) and “A Room With a Zoo” (2005). A 2010 reunion project with Mr. Juster, “The Odious Ogre,” was warmly reviewed.

Garth Hudson, of the Band.

During its peak, the Band was famously a collaborative operation informed by the songwriting and barbed guitar playing of Robbie Robertson and the soulful singing and musicianship of Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. But critics and his fellow band members agreed that Mr. Hudson played an essential role in raising the group to another level entirely.
Mr. Robertson, quoted in Barney Hoskyns’s 1993 book, “The Band: Across the Great Divide,” called him “far and away the most advanced musician in rock ’n’ roll.” “He could just as easily have played with John Coltrane or the New York Symphony Orchestra as with us,” Mr. Robertson said.

Posted in Media, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 11, 2025.

Saturday, January 11th, 2025

Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave.

At their peak in the 1960s, Sam & Dave churned out rhythm-and-blues hits with a regularity rivaled by few other performers. When “Soul Man” topped the R&B charts and crossed over to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1967 (it also won a Grammy), its success helped open doors for other Black acts to connect with white audiences.
Sam & Dave’s live shows were so kinetic — they were known as the Sultans of Sweat and Double Dynamite — that even as charismatic a performer as Otis Redding was hesitant to be on the bill with them, for fear of being upstaged. Mr. Moore once spoke of his need to “liquefy” the audience before he considered a show a success.
“The strength of Sam & Dave,” he said, “was that we would do anything to please the audience.”

…

Working with the producers and songwriters Isaac Hayes and David Porter, the house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s and the crisp horns of the Mar-Keys, Sam & Dave were soon enjoying the benefits of stardom, including their own tour bus and plane, plus an entourage of women and hangers-on. They also both became addicted to heroin.

…

While still in high school, Sam was shot in the leg by the jealous husband of a married woman he was seeing. He later served 18 months in prison for procuring prostitutes. But music lifted him. He sang in a Miami Baptist church, then with an a cappella group called the Majestics and a gospel group called the Mellonaires, before teaming up with Mr. [Dave] Prater.

(Dave Prater died in a car accident in 1988.)

Burning in Hell watch: James Arthur Ray. People who have been reading this blog for a long time may remember that name, as I covered his actions and the resulting criminal case early on.

Mr. Ray was a “self-help guru” who killed three people in a sweat lodge in Sedona, Arizona.

Mr. Ray packed about 50 people into a temporary structure made of a round wood frame covered in tarps, measuring about 25 feet in diameter and only five feet at the center. He poured gallons of water over fire-heated rocks, filling the lodge with hot steam.
Though he told participants they could leave at any time, many said later that they felt pressured by him to stay. Eventually the conditions inside grew unbearable, and the crowd flooded out; many people collapsed on the ground.
Someone called 911; one first responder later said that the scene looked like the site of a mass suicide. Twenty-one people were taken to the hospital.
Three of them died — James Shore and Kirby Brown were declared dead on arrival, while Liz Neumann died nine days later. Mr. Ray was arrested shortly afterward on manslaughter charges.

Mr. Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years in prison.

“I am responsible,” he said about the sweat-lodge disaster.
At the end of the film, he added: “It had to happen, because it was the only way I could explore and learn and grow through the things that I’ve done. Am I drinking the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but the Kool-Aid works for me.”

Am I reading that right? Three people had to die in great agony so James Arthur Ray could “explore and learn and grow”?

Hell is too good for him.

(Obligatory note that it was Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.)

(James Arthur Ray’s website.)

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its “self-help” section: “For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.”

–Roger Ebert

Posted in Law, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 10, 2024.

Friday, January 10th, 2025

Anita Bryant.

In 1990, Ms. Bryant married Charlie Hobson Dry, an Oklahoma native and former NASA test crewman. He spent the next decade trying to revive her career, opening the Anita Bryant Music Mansion in Branson, Mo., and Pigeon Forge, Tenn., but financial problems plagued both ventures. The couple moved back to Oklahoma, where they operated Anita Bryant Ministries International.

The NYT obit wants to attribute her career decline to her anti-gay views. But was that really the case? Or did her career go into eclipse because American musical tastes changed? I honestly don’t know.

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

Obit watch: January 8, 2025.

Wednesday, January 8th, 2025

Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front party in France (now the National Rally).

An arm-waving reactionary with the swagger of a circus pitchman making outrageous claims, Mr. Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, making it to a runoff in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising specters of a new fascism as he excoriated Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants — anyone he deemed to be not “pure” French.
Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of his party, the National Front, in 2011 and rose to prominence on a tide of populist anger at the political mainstream. She was defeated in France’s presidential elections three times — in 2012, placing third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, with 33.9 percent, losing to the centrist Emmanuel Macron; and in 2022, with 41.5 percent, defeated again by Mr. Macron.
But that year’s elections also sent a record number of representatives from the party, renamed National Rally, to the lower house of Parliament — 89 in all — testimony to the success of Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and moderate its message in some regards.
By then it had became the leading opposition party, no longer an outcast widely viewed as a threat to the republic, and in 2023 the National Rally backed Mr. Macron’s bill restricting immigration, an embarrassment for the French president.

Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

Merry Christmas!

Wednesday, December 25th, 2024

I do like this version of the song, and (as far as I know) I’ve never used Maddy Prior before.

Don’t think I’ve used Dan Fogelberg, either.

Since it is Christmas, I’m going to put this here as a present for FotB RoadRich:

The great and good Pat Cadigan posts her favorite Christmas story every year (Merry Christmas, Pat!) so I think I’m going to start posting my favorite Christmas joke. This version comes by way of Bayou Renaissance Man and his weekly roundup of memes (click to embiggen):

Special Christmas best wishes to Borepatch. And to pigpen51 and Joe D: in the interest of preserving their OPSEC, I won’t reveal where the later two gentlemen are located, but I believe the temperature in their necks of the woods is somewhere around seven.

Posted in Cars, Christmas, Music | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 23, 2024.

Monday, December 23rd, 2024

I hope all of my readers are having a Festive Festivus.

Rickey Henderson, for the historical record, as I think this was well covered over the weekend. NYT. ESPN. Baseball Reference.

Michael Brewer, of Brewer & Shipley (“One Toke Over the Line”).

Miguel Angel Aguilar, fitness influencer.

Aguilar was hospitalized in a critical condition on Sept. 13 after he got caught up in an attempted robbery in Los Angeles, KTLA reported.
According to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Aguilar and his wife, celebrity hair stylist Priscilla Valles, were confronted by four armed men in the driveway of their Bel-Air home on Sept. 13.
The armed intruders ultimately struck Aguilar multiple times, including once in the face, before fleeing, TMZ reports. LAPD officers were called at around 4:30 p.m. that day.

He had been hospitalized since, and passed away on Saturday.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 25, 2024.

Monday, November 25th, 2024

Two members of the Civil Air Patrol were killed in a crash in Colorado over the weekend. Susan Wolber was the pilot and Jay Rhoten was serving as an aerial photographer. They were on a routine training mission when the plane crashed near Storm Mountain in Larimer County, Colorado. A third member of the crew, co-pilot Randall Settergren, survived the crash but was seriously injured.

I’m putting this up to give FotB RoadRich a chance to comment if he wishes. From private discussions with him, I know he was a friend of the pilot, but I’m going to leave it up to him how much more he wants to say.

Barbara Taylor Bradford, author. Her books were huge.

Beginning with the runaway success of her 1979 debut novel, “A Woman of Substance,” Ms. Bradford’s 40 works of fiction sold more than 90 million copies in 40 languages and were all best sellers on both sides of the Atlantic, according to publishers’ reports.
Ten of her books were adapted for television films and mini-series, and the author, a self-described workaholic whose life mirrored the rags-to-riches stories of many of her heroines, achieved global celebrity and amassed a $300 million fortune.

Charles Dumont has passed away at 95. He was a French songwriter, and you might recognize his name: he wrote (with Michel Vaucaire) “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”.

At 44, Piaf was racked by pain after a car accident and expressed little apparent interest in returning to the stage — certainly not with a song by Mr. Dumont, whom she had previously dismissed as “a mechanical songwriter of no great talent,” he recalled in a 2010 interview with The Independent.
That day, Piaf’s secretary had already informed them that the meeting was canceled when the singer piped up in a weary voice from her bedroom and agreed to see them. It took an hour for the frail figure to emerge, Mr. Dumont said, and when she did, she told them. “I’ll hear only one song — just one.” Mr. Dumont raced to the piano and began belting out “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” which he and Mr. Vaucaire had written with Piaf in mind.
“When I finished,” he said in 2010, “she asked, rather rudely, ‘Did you really write that song? You?’ Then she made me play it over and over again, maybe five or six times. She said that it was magnificent, wonderful. That it was made for her. That it was her. That it would be her resurrection.”

Noted:

Piaf dedicated her recording of the song to the Foreign Legion. At the time of the recording, France was engaged in a military conflict, the Algerian War (1954–1962), and the 1st REP (1st Foreign Parachute Regiment)—which backed the failed 1961 putsch against president Charles de Gaulle and the civilian leadership of Algeria—adopted the song when their resistance was broken. The leadership of the Regiment was arrested and tried but the non-commissioned officers, corporals and Legionnaires were assigned to other Foreign Legion formations. They left the barracks singing the song, which has now become part of the Foreign Legion heritage and is sung when they are on parade.

Chuck Woolery. NYT (archived).

After the Kentucky native performed “Delta Dawn” on The Merv Griffin Show, Griffin offered him a chance to audition as the host of a new game show he had just developed called Shopper’s Bazaar. Woolery beat out former 77 Sunset Strip star Edd “Kookie” Byrnes for the job, and the renamed Wheel of Fortune premiered on NBC on Jan. 6, 1975.
With the show pulling in a 44 share in 1981, Woolery requested a raise from $65,000 a year to about $500,000, what other top game show hosts were making at the time, he recalled in 2007. Griffin offered him $400,000 and NBC said it would pony up the rest, but that somehow infuriated Griffin, who threatened to take Wheel of Fortune to CBS, according to Woolery.
Not wanting to lose the game show, NBC withdrew the offer, and Griffin proceeded to fire Woolery and hire Pat Sajak. Also let go: original letter-turner Susan Stafford, who was replaced by Vanna White.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Music, Obits, Planes, TV | 6 Comments »

This is an obit about Alice, and about the restaurant…

Saturday, November 23rd, 2024

Alice Brock, restaurant owner.

Most people would know her best as the “Alice” of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”.

She closed the Back Room in 1967 and sold the church in 1971; Mr. Guthrie bought it in 1991 to house his archives and a community action center. By then she had moved to Provincetown, where she tried to put her fame behind her in favor of the tight-knit community she found on the Cape, which she considered her “chosen family.”

Also among the dead: Peter Sinfield, King Crimson guy.

Mr. Sinfield, who once referred to himself as the band’s “pet hippie,” linked up with Mr. Fripp in 1968 after living an itinerant life in Spain and Morocco. He was the lyricist on the first four King Crimson albums, starting with “In the Court of the Crimson King” in 1969, which is widely regarded as the first album in the genre that came to be known as prog rock.
But his role was varied. He also helped produce King Crimson’s albums and worked as a roadie, lighting operator and sound engineer and, as art director, oversaw the band’s album covers. He even came up with the name of the band, plucked from his lyrics for the song “The Court of the Crimson King.”

Spencer Lawton Jr. He was a DA for 28 years.

Mr. Lawton served as district attorney for Chatham County, Ga., from 1981 to 2009, a tenure in which he combined a tough-on-crime message with a pioneering program to provide help to victims and witnesses.
After recognizing that the criminal justice system, which pits the government against the defendant, often left victims and witnesses as an afterthought, he created an office to give them counseling and resources as they navigated a labyrinth that they usually had not chosen to enter.His Victim-Witness Assistance Program swiftly became a model in other jurisdictions, first around Georgia and eventually nationwide.

He may be better known as the lead prosecutor in the murder case against James Arthur Williams for the killing of Danny Hansford, or the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil murder case.

Mr. Berendt, who spent several years in the 1980s living in Savannah and peppered his gossipy story with denizens of the city’s quirky demimonde, clearly believed Mr. Williams, and he went to great lengths to depict Mr. Lawton as dimwitted and opportunistic, yet also “eloquent and venomous.”
He strongly implied that Mr. Lawton chose a charge of first-degree murder, instead of manslaughter, at the behest of Lee Adler, who had an ongoing feud with Mr. Williams, a neighbor, according to the book, and who was one of Mr. Lawton’s major campaign donors.
Mr. Lawton declined to speak with Mr. Berendt during the trials, saying it would be unprofessional.
Nor did he speak out after the book appeared, though he let friends and colleagues know he was frustrated — especially after its success sent a flood of tourists to Savannah and led to a film version that leaned into Mr. Berendt’s depiction of Mr. Lawton as a bumbling hack (though it did use a pseudonym for him, Finley Largent).

…

Mr. Lawton built his campaign on promises to resolve an enormous backlog of cases the Ryans had accumulated and to fix an antiquated local criminal-justice system that he claimed was failing the public. He won handily, and over the next 28 years won acclaim for making the system more responsive and humane.
It was, he always insisted, his real legacy, regardless of what millions of readers and tourists might think. In an obituary prepared by his family, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” or Mr. Lawton’s role in it, does not get a single mention.

I haven’t read Midnight and I don’t plan to. My understanding is that Berendt is a hack, and a lot of Midnight is fabricated. That bothers me, and I owe you guys a longer more thoughtful essay on the subject of fabrication in true crime books, and why Midnight bothers me when In Cold Blood doesn’t. I think the best answer I have right now is that In Cold Blood seems less egregious to me than Midnight.

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

Obit watch: November 21, 2024.

Thursday, November 21st, 2024

A lot of obits from the NYT today for people of questionable notability, but I have a reason for posting each of these.

Diane Coleman, disability rights activist and opponent of assisted suicide/”right to die” laws.

Gifted with a dark sense of humor, in 1996 she founded a group called Not Dead Yet, a reference to a memorable scene in the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in which a man tries to pass off an infirm — but very much alive — relative to a man collecting dead bodies.
“To put it bluntly, she was blunt,” Jim Weisman, a disability rights lawyer, said in an interview.

Vic Flick, British session musician.

The Bond films produced signature catchphrases (“shaken, not stirred,” “Bond, James Bond”) that have been endlessly recited and parodied since “Dr. No,” the first in the series, was released in Britain in 1962. But it was the sound of Mr. Flick’s guitar in the opening credits that helped make the spy thrillers instantly recognizable.
During the title credits of “Dr. No,” when moviegoers were introduced to or reacquainted with the works of the author Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books, Mr. Flick’s thrumming guitar sounded out through a brass-and-string orchestra.

Bill Moyes, one of the pioneers of hang gliding.

One winter day in 1968, Mr. Moyes became a man with wings. He took a ski lift to the top of Mount Crackenback, in the Australian Alps, harnessed himself to a device that looked like a giant kite and skied off a cliff.

…

Mr. Moyes flew at 1,000 feet for almost two miles, setting the world record for the longest unassisted flight, according to newspaper accounts. The triumph marked the beginnings of hang gliding, a sport Mr. Moyes popularized by flying into the Grand Canyon, soaring off Mount Kilimanjaro and being towed behind an airplane at 8,600 feet.

…

He nearly killed himself several times.
In 1972, at a show in Jamestown, N.D., he fell 300 feet after the towing rope snapped. He sustained multiple fractures and was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he spent several weeks recuperating.

…

On another occasion, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to launch from a speeding motorcycle that he was also driving. He did not break any bones. He also did not try that again.

Reg Murphy, newspaper guy. Beyond my well-known affection for crusty old newspaper people, Mr. Murphy was the centerpiece of a bizarre crime story I’d never heard of before.

Mr. Murphy was the editorial page editor of The Atlanta Constitution on Feb. 19, 1974, when a man later identified as William A.H. Williams, a drywall subcontractor, called Mr. Murphy’s office to ask his advice about how best to donate 300,000 gallons of heating oil to a worthy cause.
He called again the next day at dusk and arranged to meet Mr. Murphy at his home; the two of them would then drive to Mr. Williams’s lawyer’s office to sign some papers.
“I really had no choice but to go with him,” Mr. Murphy wrote in a lengthy account in The New York Times shortly after the incident, “for newspapermen have to lead open lives and be available to anonymous or strange people.”
So strange was Mr. Williams that he immediately displayed a .38-caliber gun in his left hand and announced, “Mr. Murphy, you’ve been kidnapped.” He identified himself as a colonel in the American Revolutionary Army and ranted against the “lying, leftist, liberal news media” and “Jews in the government.”

…

Mr. Murphy was held in a motel room, wedged tightly between a wall and a bed, and ordered to record an audiotape demanding $700,000 in ransom. The money was delivered in marked bills in two suitcases dropped off on a rural road.

That’s $700,000 in 1974 money. According to my preferred inflation calculator, that’s $4,482,044.62 in 2024 money.

After 49 hours of captivity, Mr. Murphy was released in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn. Mr. Williams, whom Mr. Murphy identified from photos of suspects, was arrested six hours later.
He was convicted on federal extortion charges and sentenced to 40 years in prison, of which he served nine. His wife received a three-year suspended sentence for failing to report his crimes. The ransom was recovered.
In 2019, Mr. Williams, stricken with Stage 4 melanoma, called the newspaper to apologize. He said he had been high on amphetamines when the kidnapping took place.

…

In 1975, Mr. Murphy left Atlanta to become editor and publisher of The San Francisco Examiner, owned by Randolph Hearst, whose daughter was on trial at the time for participating in a bank robbery linked to the radical group that had abducted her. After she was convicted, Mr. Hearst appeared in The Examiner’s office and dropped the key to a new Porsche on his desk in appreciation of the newspaper’s coverage.
“It takes integrity of a different kind for a father to come in and say, ‘You did a good job covering the trial of my daughter,’” Mr. Murphy said in an interview published this year in The Mercerian, the magazine of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., his alma mater.

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Obit watch: November 19, 2024.

Tuesday, November 19th, 2024

Lawrence, the Guardian, and the New York Times have all noted that two drummers for the Bee Gees have died in the past few days.

Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died on Nov. 14, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Mr. Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Mr. Bryon.
Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died on Nov. 18 at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Mr. Petersen died from a fall, they said.
Mr. Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, played on the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Mr. Webster said.

…

Mr. Petersen played on a string of hit ballads from 1967 to 1970, including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” He was also a child actor, known for his role in the 1956 film “Smiley,” which was the origin of his nickname, among a few other movies in the late ’50s.

…

Mr. Bryon, born in Cardiff, Wales, was a part of the Bee Gees for many of its greatest hits in the 1970s, including “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep is Your Love,” “You Should Be Dancing,” “More Than a Woman” and the rest of the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack. He started playing drums when he was 14.

Arthur Frommer, travel book guy.

Mr. Frommer built an empire of guidebooks, package tours, hotels and other services on the bedrock of his first book, published in 1957, which sold millions of copies in annually updated editions until 2007. (It was “Europe From $95 a Day” by then.)

…

“This is a book,” he wrote, “for American tourists who a) own no oil wells in Texas, b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan, c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation.”

Thomas E. Kurtz, one of the great men of history. He co-created the BASIC computer language.

At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall on the Dartmouth campus, the time-sharing system and BASIC were put to a test. A professor and a student programmer typed a simple command, “RUN,” into neighboring Teletype terminals and watched as both received the same answer simultaneously. It worked.

Posted in Books, Geek, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch; November 4, 2024.

Monday, November 4th, 2024

Quincy Jones. NYT.

Alan Rachins, actor. I watched enough “L.A. Law” that I remember him. THR.

Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “Showgirls”, and the “Fear on Trial” TV movie, which some of us had to watch in high school.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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