Whipped Cream Difficulties

Burt Bacharach. THR.

Noted:

Mr. Bacharach met Ms. Warwick at a recording session for the Drifters that included “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay,” two songs he wrote with the lyricist Bob Hilliard. Hearing Ms. Warwick, a backup singer, Mr. Bacharach realized he had found the rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases.

Albert Okura. You may not have heard of him, but the obit is interesting. He built a chicken empire (Juan Pollo), opened an “unofficial” McDonald’s museum, and worked on historic preservation along the old Route 66.

In addition to the McDonald’s museum, which is packed with memorabilia, he founded and supported a veterans museum near his corporate headquarters; distributed chicken dinners free to social gatherings and civic groups; and subsidized local Veterans Day parades and Christmas toy drives.

…

The Roy of Amboy’s famous Googie-style “Roy’s” gas station sign, erected in 1959, was Roy Crowl, who opened the service station in 1938 and with his first wife, Velma, owned the town. It was home to about 200 people in the 1940s when Mr. Crowl teamed up with Herman Burris, known as Buster, who married Roy’s daughter Betty. Together they added a motel and cafe.
Mr. Burris sold the town in 1998. The two investors who had previously arranged to rent it out for photo shoots and movie locations bought it outright, but lost it in a foreclosure by Mr. Burris’s widow. She sold it and several hundred acres of adjacent desert to Mr. Okura, who promised to reopen Roy’s and restore the town.
“The more I looked into Amboy, the more I realized there’s no other place like this,” Mr. Okura told The New York Times in 2007.
The gas station reopened in 2008, and its balky sign was lit again in 2019.

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