Obit watch: May 1, 2023.

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author. (When Bad Things Happen to Good People and other books).

Detective Troy Patterson of the NYPD.

One night in 1990, three punks tried to hold Officer Patterson up. The robbery went bad, and Officer Patterson was shot in the head. He’d been in a vegetative state for the past 33 years.

Patterson was promoted to detective in 2016.
The three suspects — Vincent Robbins, Tracey Clark and Darien Crawford — were later arrested in the unprovoked shooting.
Robbins, now 53, was convicted of assault and attempted-robbery charges and sentenced to a prison term of five to 15 years. He was released in 2000, state records show.
Clark, the alleged gunman in the shooting, also went to trial in the case. The outcome of the case is not immediately available, nor are any details of the charges against Crawford.

Tim Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. You may recall that his brother, Robbie, passed in January.

Mike Shannon, former player and later broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals.

John Stobart, artist.

A product of Britain’s Royal Academy of Art, Mr. Stobart moved to the United States in 1970, when conceptual art, Op Art and minimalism were riding high in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.
Affable, unassuming and unfailingly candid, Mr. Stobart would have none of it. “I’ve never bought it, and the general public has never bought it either,” he said of abstract art in an interview with The Boston Globe in 1986. “That’s a lot of baloney, that stuff.”
Instead, he conjured the past as a master of richly detailed historical works brimming with schooners, brigs and sloops, their sails flapping under moody clouds, with shore lights twinkling in the distance.
Working out of studios in the Boston area, Martha’s Vineyard and several other locations, Mr. Stobart, who lived in Medfield, Mass., employed the same taste for exhaustive historical detail as Patrick O’Brian, the prolific Anglo-Irish author known for his bracing tales of naval heroics.
He left no detail to chance, traveling to the locations he painted, consulting old daguerreotypes of harbors and ships and going out to sea on various watercraft to learn the most arcane points about their engineering and behavior on the water.

By the mid-1980s, he had written the first of his three books, “The Rediscovery of America’s Maritime Heritage,” and thanks in part to a lucrative operation selling first-edition prints, was making up to $2.5 million a year. In recent years, his originals were selling for $15,000 to $400,000 through the Rehs Galleries in New York.

The obit reproduces some of Mr. Stobart’s paintings. I’m probably a sucker for representational art, but I like what I see there, and would be happy to have an original Stobart on my wall.

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