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Norts spews.

Wednesday, May 17th, 2023

I’m tagging this under “firings”, even though it isn’t a firing in the normal sense of the word.

There were elections yesterday in various parts of the country.

Voters in Tempe, Arizona had three propositions to vote on. All three were related to a plan to build a brand-new arena (and a related large “entertainment complex”) for the Arizona Coyotes NHL team, which is a complete disaster.

In order for the arena to be built, all three propositions had to pass by a simple majority vote.

All three failed by a pretty large margin.

The Arizona Coyotes submitted their proposal to Tempe in late 2021, which involved building nearly 2,000 apartments, an NHL arena and an entertainment district on 46 acres of land west of Tempe Town Lake. It became one of the biggest and most controversial developments in the city’s history.

The estimated cost of this plan was $2.1 billion. It isn’t clear to me how much of this would have been funded with public money, though Field of Schemes cites “$500 million in tax breaks“.

Right now, the team is playing in a 5,000 seat college arena.

“We are very disappointed Tempe voters did not approve Propositions 301, 302, and 303. As Tempe Mayor Corey Woods said, it was the best sports deal in Arizona history,” said Coyotes President Xavier Gutierrez. “What is next for the franchise will be evaluated by our owners and the National Hockey League over the coming weeks.”

There are persistent rumors that the team is going to move out of Arizona completely: one potential location I’ve seen is, believe it or not, Houston.

(I think I went to a Houston Aeros game in the Summit back in the day, possibly as a Boy Scout thing. Never went to see the other Houston Aeros, though, or the Ice Bats.)

More from the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.

Edited to add: coverage from Reason, which wasn’t up when I posted earlier.

Posted in Firings, Politics, Sports | 2 Comments »

Firing watch.

Tuesday, May 16th, 2023

Doc Rivers, who as far as I can tell is neither a doctor or a river (discuss) out as coach of the Philadelphia 76ers.

He went 154-82 in three regular seasons with the organization but, like predecessor Brett Brown, failed to get the team past the playoffs’ second round.

…

Rivers has been one of the NBA’s most recognizable and successful coaches for more than two decades, being honored as one of the top 15 coaches in league history during its 75th anniversary celebration. He won a championship with the Boston Celtics in 2008, before guiding a once-embarrassing Los Angeles Clippers franchise to six playoff appearances in seven seasons. The former All-Star point guard began his coaching career with the Orlando Magic in 1999-2000, where he was named coach of the year in his first season and took that team to three playoff berths in five seasons.
Yet Rivers has also become known for playoff failures, particularly in close-out games. He is now 17-33 in such situations, and 6-10 in Game 7s, after the Sixers surrendered their 3-2 series lead to Boston.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Sun’s Up!

Sunday, May 14th, 2023

Monty Williams out as head coach of the Phoenix Suns.

In four seasons, Williams posted a 194-115 record in the regular season, 27-19 mark in the playoffs, but had disappointing playoff exits last year and this year.

They lost to the Nuggets in six games this year. They made the finals in 2021, and lost in seven games to Dallas in the semi-finals last year.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

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

Brief loser update.

Wednesday, May 10th, 2023

We are into the baseball season, but not as far in as I would like to be. I sometimes try to post a loser update around the All-Star break.

But I did decide I wanted to throw up a link to this:

“Why the worst MLB teams of 2023 are historically bad“.

There are a lot of stats in the article for you baseball people, but summarizing:

Simply put, it is a real thing and it is very, very unusual in a historical context. We can argue about if it will continue, but for now, this is the reality of the big league competitive landscape: There are some teams playing very badly. There are an usual number of teams playing very badly. And there are an unusually large number of teams playing so badly.

Oakland is currently 8-30, for a winning percentage of .211. That works out to 127 losses this season if trends continue. The 1962 Mets lost 120 games, and the 2003 Tigers lost 119.

Posted in Loser, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 8, 2023.

Monday, May 8th, 2023

Vida Blue.

After losing on opening day to the Washington Senators in 1971, Blue, a lefty, reeled off eight wins in a row. In his first dozen games, he threw five complete-game shutouts. By the summer, he was leading baseball in not just shutouts but also wins, strikeouts, complete games and earned-run average.

…

Opposing hitters spoke mystically of how Blue’s fastballs would disappear or jump over their bats. Reporters speculated about why he carried two dimes in his pocket when he pitched, with some suggesting it was a charm to help him win 20 games. Across the country, attendance at his outings swelled to levels that stadiums had not seen in years. Fans of an opposing team, the Detroit Tigers, chanted outside the clubhouse, “We want Vida!”
The A’s appeared in the playoffs for the first time since 1931, ultimately losing to the Baltimore Orioles in the American League Championship. Blue pulled off the feat of winning, in his first full season, both the Cy Young and the Most Valuable Player Awards (beating out his teammate Sal Bando to become the M.V.P.).

…

After the ’71 season, Blue said he should make $115,000. Finley countered with $50,000 and made the dispute public. Blue held a news conference and declared that he would retire from sports to become a vice president for public relations at a steel company.
Ultimately, Blue and Finley settled on $63,150.

…

Blue went on to cement a reputation as a standout regular season pitcher, recording 20 or more wins in three of his first five seasons. He was a contributor to the A’s subsequent success in the playoffs.

…

In 1983, as a pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, Blue and several of his teammates were questioned as part of a federal cocaine inquiry. He pleaded guilty to possession of the drug, leading to 81 days in prison and a yearlong suspension from baseball.

Newton N. Minow. Some of you may recall that name: he was a former chairman of the FCC who, in 1961, gave a famous speech:

“Stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you, and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off,” Mr. Minow said. “I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”
The audience sat aghast as he went on:
“You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom.”
He added, “If you think I exaggerate, try it.”

…

But the networks — still recovering from the payola and quiz show scandals of the 1950s — contended that they were only giving the public what it wanted, and an NBC special about Mr. Minow’s hearings appeared to bear them out. The program attracted only a small audience and was swamped by ratings for the western “Maverick” on ABC and the talking-horse sitcom “Mister Ed” on CBS.

…

Mr. Minow also pushed legislation that opened the era of satellite communications. It fostered the creation, by a consortium of interests, of the Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat), and later the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat); both allowed the United States to dominate satellite communications in the 1960s and ’70s, and it ultimately led to greater program diversity.

Bill Saluga. You may not recognize the name, but those of a certain age will recognize his most famous character: Raymond J. Johnson Jr.

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

Firings watch.

Friday, May 5th, 2023

Mike Budenholzer out as coach of the Milwaukee Bucks.

Milwaukee went 271-120 (.693) during the regular season with Budenholzer at the helm, the best record in the league across that span. The Bucks finished with the best record in the NBA during three separate seasons (2018-19, 2019-20 and 2022-23), but never made it to the Finals in any of those years. They dropped two playoff series against the Heat — this season and in the Orlando bubble in 2020, both in five games — when they were overwhelming favorites.

They lost to Miami in this year’s playoffs. I get the impression that they consistently did well in the regular season, and were a consistent disappointment in the playoffs. But as you know, Bob, I don’t follow basketball closely, so I could be wrong about this.

Rob Murphy out as assistant GM of the Detroit Pistons for being a sexual harasser.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Roll Wide! Tar Eagle!

Thursday, May 4th, 2023

Brad Bohannon out as baseball coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide.

The reason why is a bit shocking:

“Alabama director of athletics Greg Byrne announced he has initiated the termination process for head baseball coach Brad Bohannon for, among other things, violating the standards, duties, and responsibilities expected of University employees,” the university said in a statement Thursday morning. “Bohannon has been relieved of all duties and Jason Jackson will serve as the interim head coach. There will be no further comment at this time pending an ongoing review.”

What’s specifically going on is that there’s an investigation into “suspicious wagering activity” on Tide games. Three states where betting is legal (Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) have stopped all betting on Alabama.

ESPN first reported Monday evening that the Ohio Casino Control Commission had suspended betting on Alabama baseball games at the state’s legal sports books after U.S. Integrity, a Las Vegas-based independent monitor, detected suspicious bets on last Friday’s Alabama-LSU game in Baton Rouge.
U.S. Integrity, which monitors gambling data to detect abnormalities and misuse of insider information, sent a warning to all of its clients after Friday’s game. Ronnie Johns, the chairman of the Louisiana Gaming Control Board, told NOLA.com that one of the bets was a parlay involving the Alabama-LSU game, and another was a “large” straight-up bet on the game. Both wagered LSU would win.

Alabama lost to LSU, 8-6.

Alabama sophomore pitcher Luke Holman was scheduled to start Friday’s game, but according to UA’s game recap, reliever Hagan Banks was told “an hour before” first pitch that he would be starting in Holman’s place. Holman was scratched after experiencing back tightness before the game, The Advocate in Baton Rouge reported Friday evening.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 10, 2023.

Monday, April 10th, 2023

NYT obit for Craig Breedlove.

Michael Lerner, actor. 186 credits in IMDB (counting the three upcoming), including “Mayor Ebert” in “Godzilla”, “Today’s F.B.I.”, four “Rockford Files”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Banacek”.

Francesca Cappucci. She worked for KABC-TV in LA.

Out of the blue, Quentin Tarantino named the glamorous Italian movie star wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton after her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Jacques Haitkin, cinematographer. Other credits include “Fist of the North Star”, “Team Knight Rider”, and “The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything”.

Hobie Landrith.

The Mets and the Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros), founded as 1962 National League expansion teams, began stocking their rosters in an October 1961 draft. They alternated in selecting players whom the eight N.L. teams viewed as too young, too old or too ordinary to keep.
Houston chose Eddie Bressoud, a shortstop with the San Francisco Giants, as the first pick of the draft. The Mets chose Landrith, also a Giant, as their first selection.
When reporters asked Mets Manager Casey Stengel why Landrith, 31 years old, was anointed as the first Met, he replied: “You gotta have a catcher or you’d have a lot of passed balls.”

(Side note: as best as I can tell, Eddie Bressoud is still alive at 90. He was traded to the Red Sox before he played a game with Houston, and then went from the Red Sox to the Mets.)

Landrith had a career batting average of .233 with 34 home runs and 203 runs driven in.
“I was in the major leagues more because I was a good defensive catcher, and the fact that I was good at handling pitchers,” he once told the baseball history website This Great Game. “I always thought I was a fairly decent hitter, but I realized that I wasn’t in the big leagues for my bat.”

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

Your loser update: April 5, 2023.

Wednesday, April 5th, 2023

MLB teams that still have a chance to go 0-162:

None.

Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Washington are all 1-4 right now.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: April 4, 2023.

Tuesday, April 4th, 2023

It has been a few days. Where are we in the season?

MLB teams that still have a chance to go 0-162:

Philadelphia

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: March 31, 2023.

Friday, March 31st, 2023

MLB teams that still have a chance to go 0-162:

Boston
Cleveland
Detroit
Kansas City
Houston
LA Angels
Miami
Philadelphia
Washington
Cincinnati
Milwaukee
St. Louis
Arizona
San Diego
San Francisco

In other news, the Astros lost to the White Sox yesterday. As we all know, this means they won’t be able to sell beer at Minute Maid Park this year…

…because they lost the opener.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 22, 2023.

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023

John Jenrette Jr., former Democratic congressman from South Carolina.

Mr. Jenrette was, famously, caught up in the ABSCAM scandal.

A former social acquaintance, John Stowe, got in contact with Mr. Jenrette in 1979, saying that he had found a wealthy investor, sometimes referred to as a sheikh — an invention of the F.B.I. — who was willing to finance the revival of an empty munitions factory, bringing 400 jobs to Mr. Jenrette’s district. To sweeten the deal, Mr. Stowe said, he needed legislation that would let the sheikh emigrate to the United States.
Mr. Jenrette was captured on videotape, during one of his visits to a townhouse in the Georgetown section of Washington in December 1979, discussing a payment he would accept with people said to be lieutenants of the phony sheikh.
To an offer of $100,000, with $50,000 up front, Mr. Jenrette said, ”I have larceny in my blood — I’d take it in a goddamn minute.”
Five envelopes, each containing $10,000, were laid out on a desk.
Despite the urgings of Anthony Amoroso, an F.B.I. agent posing as one of the sheikh’s executives, Mr. Jenrette didn’t take the money. Instead, two days later, Mr. Stowe picked it up. Mr. Jenrette, fearful of appearing to have accepted a direct payoff to help the sheikh, agreed to receive $10,000 from Mr. Stowe as a loan, and received a promissory note for it.
The jury delivered a quick verdict, convicting Mr. Jenrette and Mr. Stowe of one count of conspiracy and two counts of violating the federal anti-bribery statute by promising to introduce legislation to let a fictitious Arab businessman into the United States.

…

The case put a great strain on his marriage, which had already been roiled by his womanizing. His wife, Rita (Carpenter) Jenrette soon wrote, with a co-author, an article for The Washington Post with the headline “Diary of a Mad Congresswife,” in which she declared, “I hate my life as a congressional wife” and described Mr. Jenrette’s struggles with alcohol.
A few months later, she posed for Playboy and, in an accompanying article, said that she and her husband had once made love on the steps of the United States Capitol. When she was profiled in 2017 on “CBS Sunday Morning,” she amended that to say that they had simply shared a passionate kiss behind a Capitol column.
The Jenrettes divorced in 1981 after five years of marriage.

…

“Between our two salaries we were OK but not flush with money,” Ms. Jenrette, now known as Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, wrote from Italy. “This evoked his childhood to him, the poverty, the lack, the uncertainty brought to a child with elderly parents. He drank more, and the rest is history.”

Willis Reed, noted player for the New York Knickerbockers.

Reed won the N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award for the 1969-70 season and was named the M.V.P. of the championship series. He won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1965, was voted an All-Star seven times and won another N.B.A. title and finals M.V.P. with the Knicks in 1973. For his career, he averaged 18.7 points and 12.9 rebounds per game.
He was chosen by the N.B.A. for its 50th and 75th anniversary teams. In 1996, he was chosen by the N.B.A. as one of its 50 greatest players. His No. 19 uniform jersey — white with blue and orange trim — was the first to be retired by the Knicks, on Oct. 21, 1976. He was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1982.

Bobbi Kelly. This is probably going to be a “Who?” moment for most of you.

She was the woman on the cover of “Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More”.

The man, Nick Ercoline, was her boyfriend at the time. They married in 1971 and stayed married until her death.

It wasn’t until the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, in 1989, that Nick and Bobbi were publicly identified as the couple in the iconic photo that they now proudly display in their kitchen.

Posted in Law, Music, Obits, Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 21, 2023.

Tuesday, March 21st, 2023

The athletic program at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

All of it. All 19 sports will be abolished after the spring semester.

Obscure school, who cares, right? They were actually a Division 1 school, which kind of surprised me: the basketball team was 14-16 this season, and 7-9 in the Northeast Conference.

In its statement the school cited “increased operating expenses, flattening revenue streams, and plateauing enrollment in part due to a shrinking pool of high school graduates in the aftermath of the pandemic” as reasons for the need to restructure. Former chief operating officer Tim Cecere has also been appointed acting school president with the board granting Dr. Miguel Martinez-Saenz his request for a personal leave.

…

The men’s basketball program, which dates back to 1896, was the oldest college program in New York City and a charter member of the NCAA.

The school states they intend to honor all current athletic scholarships, but the athletic staff will be let go at the end of the semester.

More from ESPN, which claims 21 teams instead of 19:

The move comes as part of larger restructuring of the private Catholic school located in Brooklyn. Enrollment at the school is about 2,300 undergraduate students.

Just for the sake of comparison, my old school has an undergraduate enrollment of 2,800 to 3,500 (US News gives two different figures)…and the basketball programs are DII. As far as I know, St. Ed’s has never tried to compete in D1.

It seems to me that it might have made more sense to drop down to D2, rather than eliminating athletics totally. But St. Francis just moved to a new facility…that doesn’t have a gym or pool. The original plan was apparently that they were going to share those things with some other school. Perhaps that turned out to be impractical?

Posted in Firings, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 14, 2023.

Tuesday, March 14th, 2023

Dick Fosbury, Olympic high-jumper and inventor of the “Fosbury Flop”.

With a running start at a raised bar, he launched himself back first, seemed to hover for a moment parallel with the ground, and landed approximately on the back of his neck.
The technique has been compared to a corpse being pushed out of a window. Like Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling, Fosbury’s flopping struck many onlookers as residing somewhere between a physical feat and a joke. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the crowd oohed, aahed and laughed watching Fosbury compete.
But the last laugh was his:
The high-jump bar kept being raised, and Fosbury kept clearing it. He finally executed a Fosbury Flop at 7 feet 4¼ inches — earning him not just the gold medal, but an Olympic record at the time.

…

Within a few years, the Fosbury Flop was the standard method of elite high jumping. (The current Olympic record is held by Charles Austin, who Fosbury Flopped 7 feet 10 inches at the 1996 games in Atlanta.)
More broadly, the Flop set a standard for the kind of innovation that can transform a human endeavor. The Times has written about “the Dick Fosbury of ski jumping,” of racewalking, of golf, of angler fishing and of the game show “Jeopardy!” When Piaget introduced a line of watches advertised as a “daring departure,” the company made Fosbury its spokesman.

…

In later years he often said that at the start of his high-jump career, in high school, he was the worst jumper in his school, in the school’s conference and in all of Oregon. He was seemingly not even a gifted athlete, having failed to make his school’s football and basketball teams.

…

It was not just Fosbury’s form that made him an unconventional athlete. He wore mismatched running shoes. He had the arm muscles of a chess player. Before making an approach run, he rocked back and forth, clenching and unclenching his fists.

Joe Pepitone, noted Yankee.

In his second season, he displaced the Yankees’ longtime first baseman Bill Skowron, and with Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra aging and Roger Maris’s best years behind him, Pepitone seemed poised to become the focus of the next-generation lineup. From 1963 to 1965, he made three consecutive All-Star teams, belting 27 home runs in 1963, 28 in 1964, 18 in 1965 and a career-high 31 in 1966.

…

His Yankee teams finished no higher than fifth through 1969, after which he completed his big-league career in the National League, playing for the Houston Astros, the Chicago Cubs and briefly in 1973 for the Atlanta Braves.
He socked 27 homers again for the Yankees in 1969 and hit .307 in more than 40 at-bats for the Cubs in 1971, but after 1966 he never drove in more than 70 runs in a season. Overall, he hit 219 home runs, with a career average of .258.
For most of his career, Pepitone undermined his own gifts with his rambunctious and self-destructive behavior. He had money problems and marital problems. His night life began after night games; he drank with and without his teammates and was no stranger to drugs. He claimed at one point to have turned Mantle and Whitey Ford on to marijuana, and in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine in 2015, he recalled that when he was with the Cubs, fans in the bleachers would throw packets of joints and cocaine at him in the outfield, and he would hide them in the ivy that covered the stadium wall.

…

Pepitone played briefly in Japan in 1973 and wrote a whiny article for The New York Times about his treatment there; hardly anyone spoke English, he complained, “and at my apartment, I swear the door was 4 feet 5 inches high.”
He played some professional softball, was in the bar business for a time and in the early 1980s worked briefly for the Yankees as a hitting coach. In 1985, he was riding in a car with two other people when the police stopped them for running a red light and found drugs — cocaine, heroin and quaaludes — and a loaded handgun in the car.
Pepitone was convicted on misdemeanor counts of possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia and served about half of a six-month sentence.

And speaking of Japan, this one goes out to FotB RoadRich: Masatoshi Ito is dead at 98.

“Who?”

He brought 7-11 to Japan.

Perhaps his greatest contribution to modern Japan began in 1973, when a young executive persuaded him to bring 7-Eleven to the country. Starting with a single store in Tokyo, the deal he struck with the chain’s owners, the Dallas-based Southland company, launched a revolution in Japanese retailing that would transform everything from the way companies moved their products to the way people eat.
The company’s introduction of the ready-to-eat rice ball to store shelves in 1978 made that humble snack into a central part of the country’s fast food culture.
In the decades that followed, 7-Eleven and its imitators would open tens of thousands of convenience stores across Japan, providing a wide range of goods and services. The shops — open 24 hours a day, every day of the year — became so integral to daily life that the government declared them part of the national infrastructure.

7-11 in Japan was so successful, the parent company ended up buying out Southland, who had run 7-11 in the US into the ground.

The victory, however, was short-lived. In 1992, Mr. Ito announced he was stepping down as Ito-Yokado’s president after three executives at the company were accused of providing payoffs to corporate shakedown artists who had threatened to disrupt the company’s annual meeting, a common racket at the time.
Replaced by his protégé, Mr. Suzuki, Mr. Ito stayed out of the public view for several years before re-emerging in the late 1990s, when he was appointed Ito-Yokado’s honorary chairman. In 2005, the company became Seven & I, combining the convenience store’s name with the first initial of its predecessor. Mr. Ito remained honorary chairman until his death.

Jesus Alou, baseball player and one of the three Alou brothers (Felipe and Matty were the other two).

Jesus Alou played in the major leagues for 15 seasons and was a member of the Oakland A’s teams that won World Series championships in 1973 and 1974. He had limited power, hitting only 32 home runs in his career, but he was a solid batter with a career average of .280.

He was also famous for another reason:

When Jesus Alou was a rookie, he and his brothers were all in the Giants’ outfield on Sept. 15, 1963. They were the only three brothers in major league history to play together in a single game.

Patricia Schroeder, former Congress woman (D-Colorado).

Posted in Obits, Politics, Sports | 2 Comments »

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