Obit watch: February 6, 2023.

Charles Kimbrough.

Ignoring “Murphy Brown” for the moment, he was also in the original Broadway casts of both “Company” and “Sunday in the Park With George”, among other theater credits.

Interesting side note: in 2002, he married Beth Howland, who was also in the original Broadway cast of “Company”.

Pervez Musharraf, former ruler of Pakistan.

Harry Whittington, most famous as the man Dick Cheney shot.

As a lawyer and investor, Mr. Whittington was a fierce proponent of property rights. He repeatedly questioned the city of Austin’s use of eminent domain to acquire private property — some of it his own — for public purposes.

In 1979, Gov. Bill Clements appointed Mr. Whittington to the Texas Corrections Board (now the Board of Criminal Justice), where he was the only Republican on a nine-member panel that had tended to rubber-stamp everything prison managers wanted.
“It was time for somebody to question,” Mr. Whittington said in an interview with The Austin American-Statesman. “There was no other way I knew how to do it.”
He uncovered secrets that stunned him: drug-running by prison officials, no-bid contracts, families paying off guards to protect their loved ones. At meetings, he asked hard questions.
His tenacity led to the creation of a separate unit for developmentally disabled prisoners and an end to wardens’ using prisoners to punish other inmates.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Shlomo Perel, Holocaust survivor with an interesting story.

So this man poses as an Aryan in order to appease the insane, fanatical Nazi Herrenrasse machine, becomes a Nazi translator, is conscripted into the Hitler Youth, and then joins the German military. That’s a fraught path to take.

Fred Terna, also a Holocaust survivor. He became famous for abstract art inspired by his experience.

Mr. Terna’s art became his Holocaust testimony. In acrylic works like “In the Likeness of Fire” and “An Echo of Cinders,” he painted in reds, yellows, oranges and blues to illustrate the flames that incinerated Jews in crematories. In some paintings, he used sand pebbles to represent ashes.
“I know how the fire of a crematorium chimney casts flickering light on a barrack wall,” he wrote in 1984 for the Berman Archive at Stanford University, which documents American Jewish communities. “How does one paint the near certainty of violent personal annihilation? How does one paint, and then make a viewer want to stop, to look at a canvas, to react to it?”

I know that some people would like for me to include photos. Pretty much all of the time, the obits I link to include photos. I’ve always generally assumed that, if you were that interested in the obit, you’d click through to the link, and including photos here would make these entries longer (and possibly infringe on intellectual property rights). I am trying to make more of an effort to link to archived articles, so people don’t have to navigate paywalls.

What do you guys think? Am I wrong about this?

3 Responses to “Obit watch: February 6, 2023.”

  1. pigpen51 says:

    I remember both Charles Kimbrough and his wife Beth Howland. Both were memorable actors, and looking them up on IMDB, it seems that they both had substantial careers both on and off Broadway. Almost like their first love was the stage, and they worked on television to earn a living in order to pursue their first love.
    That is certainly not a bad thing. A lot of people work normal jobs in order to fly fish the great waters of the world, or to climb mountains, or to shoot guns in the many competitions around the country. It is always good to have a passion to pursue. That is how you remain young.
    When Dick Cheney shot Mr. Whittington, the left was apoplectic, but when hunting I believe doves like they were, I seem to remember at the time people saying that it is possible to happen by accident, due to the manner that they hunt the birds. I don’t think that is any excuse of course, I just remember the time it happened, and the two sides arguing about it.
    Here in Michigan, they tried to have a dove hunt in the very southern part of the state, and it was a success but the liberals halted it after only one year, I believe.

  2. T Migratorious says:

    I very much appreciate the “avoiding paywalls” approach and I can look up the pics if I want to see them. Don’t change a thing.

    I too have been a big fan of obituaries for many years and will read them in almost any source. My favorite line from a local paper obit was “She was a beauty operator and a Baptist.” Sums it up, I guess.

    The NYT, alas, is still the best but its present day writers can’t hold a candle to the late Robert McG. Thomas, Jr. I even own a book of his classics:

    https://www.amazon.com/52-McGs-Obituaries-Legendary-Reporter/dp/1416598278

  3. RoadRich says:

    I only complain self-mockingly about the NYP omitting a photo of a cat. I like the clean format.