It is only about 5 PM in London, so I don’t think I’m too late.
Happy Guy Fawkes Day, everyone! Especially all my peeps in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland!
I wasn’t able to dig up anything really good this year, but any video that contains the words “most dangerous” gets my attention.
Jo-Carroll Dennison was born on Dec. 16, 1923, in a men’s state prison in Arizona.
She died on October 18 at the age of 97. She was the oldest living Miss America.
With World War II raging, she visited military bases on the home front, sang and danced for the troops and sold war bonds. According to Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, photos of her in Life magazine made her the G.I.s’ second most popular “pinup girl,” after Betty Grable.
And Hollywood came calling. Ms. Dennison landed small parts in numerous movies, notably in the war propaganda film “Winged Victory” (1944) and “The Jolson Story” (1946), about the entertainer Al Jolson. She appeared on television with Frank Sinatra and Ed Sullivan and in a few episodes of the series “Dick Tracy” in 1950.
While she never achieved stardom as an actress, she spent decades in the company of Hollywood royalty. Through her brief marriage to the comedian Phil Silvers, she became a regular at Gene Kelly’s Saturday night parties and song fests, where André Previn played the piano and she rubbed shoulders with Judy Garland and Gregory Peck. Writers like Ray Bradbury gave her guidance on what books to read; Leonard Bernstein took her to concerts and advised her on which recordings to buy.
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Perhaps the idea of what a suitable military handgun should be may change, and who knows, perhaps we may have a new .40-caliber cartridge to get the ‘sectional density’ considered necessary for stopping power and a powder charge that will permit the average man to learn quickly to do good shooting at practical pistol range. Such a cartridge with a recoil and muzzle blast not much greater than that of the .38 Special and less than that of the .38 Colt automatic cartridge would make the handgun far more effective, for after all a bullet that misses the intended mark is without value regardless of the energy it may have. The idea that a handgun is essentially a short-range arm is not at all new, even in military circles, but we seem to have attempted to increase the range beyond the practical limit with such cartridges as the .45 Automatic, with the result that the gun is decidedly difficult for the average man to shoot well.
—Pistol and Revolver Shooting, Walter F. Roper (1945).
(Well, we never got a “new .40-caliber cartridge” in a military arm – we went straight from .45 ACP to 9mm – but we did get the .40 S&W as a popular police caliber. I wonder what Roper would have thought of the cartridge: biographical information is hard to find, but I’m pretty sure he had passed on when the .40 S&W was introduced in 1990.)
(As a side note: I’m not as enthusiastic about this gun as other folks seem to be, but that’s because I already have a Hi-Power. If I was in the market, I’d think about it. Or if Springfield comes out with a .40 S&W or even a .357 SIG version of the SA-35, that might quicken my pulse a bit.)
50 years ago today, Chuck Hughes died during a NFL game between Detroit and Chicago.
He is the last NFL player so far to pass away during a game.
Halyna Hutchins, cinematographer. She was 42.
Information about this is still coming in, but the reports so far are that Ms. Hutchins was killed when Alec Baldwin discharged what is being described as a “prop firearm” on the set of a movie he was working on in New Mexico (“Rust”). The movie’s director, Joel Souza, was also injured: the last reports I saw were that he was in critical condition.
I don’t have a lot to say about this right now because I don’t think there’s enough information. I have no special fondness for Alec Baldwin (though I think he was good in “Hunt For Red October”) but I want to give him and everyone else involved the same benefit of the doubt I’d give anyone else in this situation.
Earl Old Person, chief of the Blackfeet Nation.
Beginning in 1954, when he was first elected to the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, the tribe’s governing body, Chief Old Person positioned himself as a go-between linking his isolated, impoverished Native American community with the rest of the country and beyond. At his retirement from the council, in 2016, he was the longest-serving elected tribal leader in the country.
He was a regular witness at congressional hearings and a frequent guest of heads of state around the world. He drank tea with the shah of Iran and spoke at the 1988 Republican National Convention. He urged his tribe to be more entrepreneurial, and he persuaded government officials and venture capitalists to provide seed money for Blackfeet-owned businesses.
“His message is plain,” the magazine Nation’s Business wrote in 1981. “‘We don’t want your help, we want your business.’”
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In the 1980s, the Department of the Interior began to lease land to oil and gas prospectors in the Badger-Two Medicine region, adjacent to the Blackfeet reservation, in northwestern Montana. The land is sacred to the Blackfeet, but an 1896 treaty ceded it to the federal government.
Chief Old Person insisted that the tribe had given only the land rights, not the mineral rights, and he helped lead a 40-year campaign to render the region off limits to outside interests (leaving open the possibility that the tribe might one day get into the energy business itself). Last year a court ruling closed the last of the leases on the land.
“Chief Old Person was a fierce advocate for the Blackfeet Nation and all of Indian Country for his entire life,” Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, said in a statement after the chief’s death. “The world is a better place because he was in it.”
Edited to add: current reports are that Joel Souza is out of the hospital. I wish him a speedy recovery.
Peter Scolari has passed away at 66. Since this is breaking, I’ll plan to do a more complete post tomorrow.
Edited to add 2: “How can a prop gun used on a movie set be deadly?” I feel like most of my readers know all this already, but this is a decent explainer for anybody who does not. Also, somebody tweaked me for not referencing Jon-Erik Hexum (which I didn’t do because it isn’t clear if the Baldwin situation is anything like the Hexum one, or the Brandon Lee one), so here’s your reference.
Edited to add 3:
The 28-year-old son of martial arts icon and legendary screen star Bruce Lee was killed in a freak accident on the set of “The Crow” on March 30, 1993, when fellow actor Michael Massee was supposed to shoot him at close range with a harmless pistol.
But when Massee fired the .44 Magnum revolver, the gunpowder in the blank cartridge ignited a bullet fragment that became embedded in the barrel — propelling it into Lee’s body about 15 feet away at the Carolco Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina, the Sun reported.
(Admittedly, it is a couple of days old.)
check your kids halloween candy. my cousin found the assassination of archduke franz ferdinand in sarajevo by serbian nationalist gavrilo princip inside a snickers bar pic.twitter.com/3EgySLKapD
— everett byram (@rad_milk) October 18, 2021
…and Sotheby’s is going to be auctioning off part of Ricky Jay‘s collection starting October 27th.
Link to the auction. Sotheby’s video.
NYT article tied to the auction. It’s worth reading, if for no other reason than the story about Siegfried and Roy’s tiger at the beginning. (Alternative link.)
Not that Jay was a hoarder. With the help of assistants, he photographed and cataloged every item in a digital database. His books were arranged by category — magic, circus, eccentric characters — and his file drawers were labeled, which made it easier, say, to find that handbill for “Prof. William Fricke’s Original Imperial Flea Circus.”
Under “flea bills,” of course.
There’s a punchline at the end that I won’t spoil for you, because Mr. Jay would haunt me in the afterlife.
I don’t think I’ll be placing any bids, as I expect anything from the Ricky Jay Collection will be way out of my price range.
Colin Powell. Everybody is on this like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition, but for the historical record: NYT. WP. (Edited to add: Lawrence.)
Betty Lynn. Her most famous role was as “Thelma Lou”, Barney’s girlfriend on “The Andy Griffith Show”.
Loral I Delaney, well known dog trainer…and legendary trapshooter.
An animal lover who as a young girl kept as pets every creature from raccoons to skunks, Delaney at age 5 headlined her first dog act in 1943 at the Northwest Sportshow in Minneapolis.
When she returned to the same stage a year later, the Minneapolis Tribune gushed, “The tiny daughter of Fred Armstrong put her two beautiful black Labradors through a retrieving act that literally brought down the house.”
In the nearly six decades that followed, Delaney and her dogs would appear at sports shows from New York to Los Angeles. She often drove herself, pulling a trailer full of Labradors, setters, pointers and Chesapeake Bay retrievers.
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Trapshooting brought Delaney still wider acclaim. The first time she competed at the Minnesota State Trapshoot at age 19, she won the women’s title, breaking 197×200. At the same competition, she won the handicap in a shoot-off with five men.
A member of the National Trapshooting Hall of Fame, Delaney was named to every All-American Trapshooting team from 1966 to 1981, with the exception of one year. She won the Women’s World Flyer Championships four times. She shot on the U.S. Women’s Trapshooting Team before women’s trapshooting was included in the Olympics. And she and Chuck won the husband-wife U.S. trapshooting title four times.
Delaney also won seven Grand American World Trapshooting Championships, include five years consecutively, and was the only woman to win more than two in a row and more than four total.
Bennie Pete, leader of the New Orleans brass band, the Hot 8.
The Hot 8 began playing for tips on Bourbon Street and in Jackson Square, in the heart of the French Quarter. They performed outside a housing project in the Central City neighborhood, where people sat down with bags of crawfish and bottles of Abita beer to listen. Mr. Pete once found himself leading a jazz funeral for a dog.
“He was a popular dog for one of the popular musicians,” he told Esquire magazine in 2014, “and they threw a big second-line parade through the streets for him. They’d make a reason to party.”
By 2000, the Hot 8 had established itself as part of a vanguard of young brass bands that were upholding the jazz and funk traditions of New Orleans yet playing with a contemporary sound. The Hot 8’s repertoire included songs by the Specials and Marvin Gaye, and the band incorporated rap and hip-hop into its style. The musicians led second lines on Sundays for social aid and pleasure clubs; crowds formed at night to watch them play in bars in the Treme neighborhood.
Post Katrina, the Hot 8 led the effort to keep New Orleans’s musical heritage intact.
Two months later, the Hot 8 regrouped to lead the first jazz funeral in New Orleans after the storm. The band played with donated instruments, and members of the procession wore salvaged pieces of finery. The parade, which honored a celebrated chef, Austin Leslie, started at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen in the Seventh Ward before ambling to the former site of Chez Helene, where a sign greeted the marchers: “We won’t bow down. Save our soul.”
As despair weighed on the city, the Hot 8 began performing at evacuation shelters and emergency medical centers. They drove around in a van, stopping to jam for crowds until little second lines formed, before heading to another part of town. It wasn’t long before they became local heroes.
“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”
They were featured in Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” and got a record deal.
Released in 2012, “The Life & Times Of …” was nominated for a Grammy Award as best regional roots music album. The group released “Tombstone,” a sister album also based on the theme of remembrance, the next year. The Hot 8 was also featured on a 2015 compilation album, “New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City,” on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.
“Everything kind of worked,” Mr. Pete told Esquire. “Yeah, we are the Hot 8 who went through these things, but we’re still here, and this is who we are after the storm.”
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But even as music returned to New Orleans after the storm, the Hot 8 endured more misfortune. Their snare drummer, Dinerral Shavers, was shot dead in his car in December 2006. It was only the latest in a series of tragedies for the band.
In 1996, the trumpet player Jacob Johnson was shot in the head at his home. In 2004, the trombonist Joseph Williams was killed in an encounter with the police. And just after Katrina, the trumpeter Terrell Batiste lost his legs in a road accident.
Mr. Pete was 45 years old. He died from complications of COVID and sarcoidosis, according to his family.
Willie Garson, from “Sex and the City”.
In addition to the “Sex and the City” movies, Mr. Garson worked with the Farrelly brothers in some of their films, including “Kingpin” (1996), “There’s Something About Mary” (1998) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).
He also played Lee Harvey Oswald three times, in the film “Ruby” (1992) and on the TV shows “Quantum Leap” and “MADtv.”
Saadi Yacef. He was a major figure in the Algerian revolt.
Mr. Yacef became involved in opposition movements while still a teenager and in 1954 joined the Front de Libération Nationale, the F.L.N., the leading nationalist organization during the war for independence. The war lasted from 1954 to 1962, ending with the country’s liberation from France.
He became the organization’s military chief in Algiers in 1956, ordering bombings and other guerrilla attacks until his arrest by French paratroopers the next year in the part of the city known as the casbah. He was sentenced to death.
“While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he told The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”
Charles de Gaulle eventually freed him. And then he went on to act in Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers”.
With a script based on his book, he met with Mr. Pontecorvo, who was said to have been considering his own movie about the Algerian War, one that he hoped would star Paul Newman as a French paratrooper turned journalist. Mr. Yacef and his backers nixed that idea, and Mr. Pontecorvo found Mr. Yacef’s script propagandistic, but they continued to talk. Mr. Yacef arranged to bring Mr. Pontecorvo and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, to Algiers for an extended stay so they could study up on the revolution, see locations where the fighting had occurred and meet people who had fought.
The resulting movie, filmed in Algeria with Mr. Yacef as a producer, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and caused a sensation for its startling realism. Some scenes, especially of bombings, looked so authentic that the film in its initial showings was preceded by a disclaimer saying that no newsreel footage had been used.
I have “The Battle of Algiers” but haven’t watched it yet. It is a tough sell for the Saturday Night Movie Group, especially since I sort of forced them to watch another movie about the Algerian revolt (“Lost Command“, based on The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy).
Gilbert Seltzer has died at 106.
He was one of the last members of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. His death leaves only nine surviving members.
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was also known as the “Ghost Army”.
“We would move into the woods in the middle of the night, going through France, Belgium and Germany, and turn on the sound” — from blaring loudspeakers — “so it sounded like tanks were moving on the roads,” Mr. Seltzer told StoryCorps in 2019. “The natives would say to each other, ‘Did you see the tanks moving through town last night?’”
“They thought they were seeing them,” he added. “Imagination is unbelievable.”
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Mr. Seltzer, an architect, was a platoon leader and later a lieutenant and adjutant of the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, whose ranks included men who would go on to work in advertising, art, architecture and illustration, among them the future fashion designer Bill Blass, the photographer Art Kane and the painter Ellsworth Kelly.
The battalion handled the Ghost Army’s visual fakery; the 3132nd Signal Service Company was in charge of sound deception; the Signal Company, Special, devised realistic-sounding radio messages to throw off the Germans. The 406th Combat Engineer Company provided security.
In March 1945, in one of their most elaborate feats of trickery — during the critical Rhine River campaign, designed to finally crush Germany — the 23rd set up 10 miles south of the spot where two American Ninth Army divisions were to cross the river. To simulate a buildup of those divisions at their decoy location, the Ghost Army used inflated tanks, cannons, planes and trucks; sent out misleading radio messages about the American troops’ movements; and used loudspeakers to simulate the sound of soldiers building pontoon boats.
The Germans fell for the ruse, firing on the 23rd’s divisions, while Ninth Army troops crossed the Rhine with nominal resistance.
Nino Castelnuovo, Italian actor who was perhaps most famous for a French film: he played opposite Catherine Deneuve in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”.
Peter O’Toole may have been one of the unluckiest men in movies.
This came up last night, and I’m not sure why. For some reason, Lawrence and I got into a discussion of O’Toole. (Last night’s movie was “United 93”, which, while fitting, does not have Mr. O’Toole in it.)
I would have sworn he’d won an Oscar for “My Favorite Year”, but Lawrence correctly pointed out he didn’t. His only Oscar was a honorary one in 2002 (and, according to Wikipedia, his family had a king-size job persuading him to accept it, as he felt like he wasn’t done acting yet).
But why unlucky? He was nominated eight times, which is a record for nominations without a win. But worse yet, a lot of his nominations were for fantastic roles…that just happened to go up against someone else who had a career defining role that year.
See what I mean, Vern?
Side note for Dave: the TV series in which Cloris Leachman played a Pilgrim was “Thanks“. It lasted for six episodes in 1999.
(This is a guest post from FotB RoadRich, who is speaking in his capacity as a private citizen, and not as a representative of any Federal, state, or local governmental body, or as a representative of any corporation or non-profit organization. –DB)
Good afternoon,
Twenty years ago today (well, this evening) I went to a baseball game.
I was with friends who were also members of an athletic performance team I’m a member of. It so happens many of these friends were from families who had emigrated from Vietnam to a better place. I had been in their care since a few days prior, when after returning home from an outing with them, I discovered one of my previous cat family’s last members was near the end of his life. I called up one of my friends who rushed over and helped us both get to a vet where my little friend was confirmed to be gone, having passed away in my arms enroute. It became a very long night. A local friend offered a spot on his ranch for a burial and heading back into town I was told I was staying over at my friends’ shared apartment rather than head to an empty apartment.
The next day another of our friends visited and thought it would be good to get out of the apartment and do something, so after a quick dinner we went out to the Dell Diamond for a ball game. We were running late, so we were in line outside buying tickets when the National Anthem began to play.
Absolutely everything stopped. Tickets stopped being sold. Those in line paused and put their hands over their hearts, or removed their ball caps. I could actually see through the gates to the other side of the ball field and it looked full. But it was absolutely and completely silent. And I was moved.
The date was September TENTH, 2001. In twelve hours my small concerns would be submarined but in this moment I already felt how united we were.
Stipulated: he was a cranky old liberal whose politics drove me up a tree.
But: Lou Grant.
He made a point of largely avoiding comedy — out of fear, he said in a 2002 appearance at Vanderbilt University, and because “in those days you got discovered by doing the drama shows as a guest star.” But he agreed to audition for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” because, as he said in an Archive of American Television interview, Lou Grant “was the best character I’d ever been asked to do” in either television or film.
Lou was a hard-drinking, straight-shooting, short-tempered journalist who had tender emotions but did not plan to show them; a strong aura of professional and personal integrity; a fear that he had outlived his era; and “a great common core of honor,” as Mr. Asner told Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, the authors of “Love Is All Around: The Making of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’”
416 credits in IMDB as an actor. That’s impressive. And he did do more than a few cop shows, including both the good and bad “Hawaii 5-0”, but never a “Mannix”.
(Here’s an IMDB list of people with over 300 acting credits. Mr. Asner is listed at #92, but the list hasn’t been updated and his count is off. Also, many of the people ahead of him are either porn actors or voice actors: Mel Blanc comes in at #9 with 1,220 credits. Eric Roberts and James Hong are the first two non-porn, not primarily a voice actor, people I recognize: Roberts with 638 credits and Hong with 444 to date.)
(What about “Up”? No comment. I’ve never seen it.)
There are times when I just want to quote the entire NYT lead: not because I’m lazy (though I am) but because they encapsulate the obit so perfectly, anything I could say would be superfluous.
Seriously, just go read this one.
For the historical record, obits from the paper of record for:
(Technically, this popped up last night.)
It’s more like trying to pick up someone who doesn’t speak your language out of a crowd. At a f–king death metal concert at Madison Square Garden.
And it’s at triple capacity.
And only one door is open.
And the place is on fire.
I’m not a religious person, but the word that comes to mind is “biblical.” It’s like Hurricane Katrina meets Dien Bien Phu.
Bill Clotworthy. You almost certainly never heard of him, but you’ve seen his work.
Or, perhaps more accurately, you haven’t seen his work.
Mr. Clotworthy was a long time “standards and practices executive” – in other words, a network censor – for NBC. His nickname was “Doctor No”.
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In a 2002 interview, Clotworthy described one SNL sketch that never made it to air:
It revolved around “a bunch of guys in a fraternity house trying to light farts,” he recalled. “You didn’t see anything, but you heard the voiceover and then there was this big explosion, and Joe Piscopo was dressed as Smokey the Bear, and he came out and said that should be a lesson to everyone — don’t fart with fire.”
He said he was OK with it but was overruled by his boss.
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Those sound really cool. Amazon doesn’t list them, but there is a Kindle edition of Saturday Night Live: Equal Opportunity Offender: The Uncensored Censor.
Stretching the definition of an obit here, but: there was an unveiling ceremony for Dorothy Parker’s tombstone on Monday.
The story of Dorothy Parker’s ashes is almost as weird as the story of Evita’s body. After her death, her ashes sat in a crematory for six years, then in a filing cabinet in the former office of her (retired) lawyer. In 1988, her ashes were turned over to the NAACP (“In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and upon King’s death, to the NAACP.“)
The NACCP set up a memorial outside their headquarters in Baltimore. But when they moved in 2020, the organization returned the ashes to her family, who reburied them in Woodlawn Cemetery.
The New York Distilling Company in Williamsburg issued a commemorative gin to pay for the headstone.
Along with the gin, mourners left red roses near Parker’s grave, which lies next to those of her parents and grandparents.
The family plot is in a section of the 400-acre cemetery that includes the graves of writers such as Herman Melville and E.L. Doctorow — as well as a man dubbed “The Father of Mixology,’’ 19th century New York City bartender Jerry Thomas.
Brian Travers, founding member of UB40. Brain tumor got him at 62.
Marilyn Eastman, “Helen Cooper” in “Night of the Living Dead”.