Obit watch: July 23, 2025.

Ozzy Osbourne roundup: THR. NYT. ASM826 by way of Borepatch.

In honor of Mr. Osbourne and ASM826’s obit, please feel free to share your favorite “inappropriate public urination” story in the comments below. You can remain monogamous if you’d like: I’m certainly not going to out anybody.

The quartet released its debut album, also called “Black Sabbath,” in 1970, and followed with seven more over the next eight years. The band’s music was largely reviled by critics and snubbed by radio stations, but its albums were consistently certified platinum, and songs like “Paranoid,” “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” became anthems for generations of disaffected youth.

…

Mr. Osbourne had long drunk to excess, but as Black Sabbath became successful he could afford a wider variety of intoxicants, and he enthusiastically pursued all of them. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I Am Ozzy” (2009), “Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list.” Throughout his career he frequently announced his sobriety, only to backslide into addiction.

Sarah Morlok Cotton. She was the last survivor of the Morlok quadruplets. And this is one of those sad stories from before my time. I think this is sort of before my mother’s time, even.

They were born in 1930.

Donations poured in almost immediately. The city of Lansing provided the family with a rent-free home. The Massachusetts Carriage Company sent a custom-made baby carriage with four seats. Businessmen opened bank accounts for each child.
“Lansing’s Morlok quadruplets,” The Associated Press wrote, “are the most famous group of babies on the American continent.”
The Morloks charged visitors 25 cents to visit their home and see the babies. Carl Morlok, who ran for constable of Lansing in 1931, used photos of his daughters on his campaign ads with the slogan, “We will appreciate your support.” He won in a landslide.

The Great Depression was ongoing, so their mom turned them into song and dance performers. All four girls were also abused by their father.

He banged the sisters’ heads together when they wouldn’t go to sleep. A germophobe, he forbade them from going to the library because he worried that there were germs on the books. Worst of all, Ms. Farley noted, he sexually abused all of the girls when they were teenagers.

When the girls were in their 20s, they began to show signs of mental illness.

Eventually, a doctor who had been treating the sisters in Michigan referred them to the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. Intrigued by the connections between the genetic and environmental causes of mental illness, a team of researchers there studied the quadruplets from 1955 to 1958. Each woman had her own psychiatrist, though only Sarah was able to engage in meaningful psychotherapy.

…

Only Sarah recovered enough to live on her own. Ms. Farley attributed that to two factors: She had endured less abuse from her father than her sisters had, and she had benefited from exceptionally good psychotherapy during the study in Maryland.
“She knew quite clearly that she got better at NIMH and her sisters didn’t,” Ms. Farley said in an interview. “And she always had survivor’s guilt about that.”

…

Sarah met George Cotton, an Air Force officer, at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C. They married in 1961, and for many years she worked as a legal secretary and typist.
Mr. Cotton died in 2023. In addition to their son David, Mrs. Cotton is survived by four grandsons. Another son, William, died in 1994. As for the other Morlok sisters, Wilma died in 2002, Helen in 2003 and Edna in 2015.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Music, Obits, Urine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Obit watch: July 23, 2025.”

  1. Pigpen51 says:
    July 23, 2025 at 8:37 pm

    I read the obit, and it mentioned the sisters performing at a boat show in Lowell. In fact, the thing was called The Lowell Showboat, and it was a sort of paddle wheeled floating stage, which held festivals there for many years.
    Later they moved it to the equally small town of Chesaning, but I think that now it is no longer in service.
    I never knew the story of the Morlok sisters, so this is a sad thing for me to see. The fact that a family would use their children as a meal ticket is nothing new, it seems, nor has it stopped. One only has to look at families like the Kardashians, Britney Spears, and a few others to realize that the human condition is often no greater than the animals. Sad.

  2. stainles says:
    July 24, 2025 at 9:03 am

    There’s a story in the NYPost that I won’t link to, or even go into details about. It is that disturbing, and if you look at the NYPost front page, you’ll know it when you see it.

    But “the human condition is often no greater than the animals” indeed. Actually, I don’t even think animals would do what’s in that story.