Conrad Dobler, NFL guard.
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ESPN:
On July 25, 1977, Dobler made the cover of Sports Illustrated with the title “Pro Football’s Dirtiest Player.”
Stories about the feisty offensive lineman included him punching Joe Greene, spitting on Bill Bergey and kicking Merlin Olsen in the head.
“I’ll do anything I can get away with to protect my quarterback,” Dobler told the magazine.
Austin Majors, actor. I used to watch re-runs of “NYPD Blue” in syndication, and I remember him playing “Theo Sipowicz”.
Hugh Hudson, director. IMDB.
Cody Longo, actor. Other credits include “CSI: Original Recipe”, “CSI: NY”, and “Piranha 3D”.
NYT obit for Solomon Perel (also known as “Shlomo”), whose death was previously noted in this space.
The list of Austin City Council members has been updated.
It will, I hope, stay that way for the next five minutes or so.
I’ve included staff information when and where it is available. Which led me to note: notorious gun-grabber Ed Scruggs is now the “Constituent Director & Policy Aide” for District 8 council member/mayor pro tem Paige Ellis.
I encourage folks to be polite and respectful in their communications with these folks. Next up: the Travis County Commissioners, then the Congressional reps. Maybe I can get those done this weekend? We’ll see.
(I’ve made some good progress on part 2 of “Day of the .45”, but I still need to take photos, do some proofreading, and triple-check my sources. I might get to the photos this weekend, but again, we’ll see.)
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
Noted:
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.
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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.
Ted Bell, author. He wrote spy thrillers featuring the “Alex Hawke” character, and wrote a couple of YA time-travel historical novels featuring “Nick McIver”.
He wasn’t someone I’ve read, but I do recall seeing his books in the supermarket racks: as I’ve noted before, that’s always a good sign of success for a writer.
Charlie Thomas, Drifter. But not one of the original Drifters:
Mr. Thomas became a Drifter by chance. He was singing with the Crowns, an R&B group, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1958 when they came to the attention of George Treadwell, the manager of the original Drifters, who were also on the bill.
After one of the Drifters got drunk and cursed out the owner of the Apollo and the promoter of the show, the music historian Marv Goldberg wrote, Mr. Treadwell, who owned the name, fired all its members and replaced them with members of the Crowns, including Mr. Thomas and Ben Nelson, who would later be known as Ben E. King, and rechristened them the Drifters.
This is not to say that he wasn’t talented or successful:
Mr. King had written “There Goes My Baby” for Mr. Thomas to sing. But Mr. Thomas froze at the studio microphone, according to Billy Vera’s liner notes for “Rockin’ and Driftin’: The Drifters Box” (1996), and Mr. King took over. The song rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959.
The hits continued for several years, as the Drifters became one of the most successful groups of the era. They followed “There Goes My Baby” with songs like “This Magic Moment,” “Up on the Roof,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “On Broadway” and “Saturday Night at the Movies.” “Save the Last Dance for Me” was their only song to reach No. 1.
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.
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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.
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?
Other credits include “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar”, “Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story”, and “Captain America” (the 1990 one).
George R. Robertson. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, the 1990 “War of the Worlds” TV movie, and “The Mad Trapper”.
Paco Rabanne, fashion designer.
John Adams. This one was a legendary Cleveland baseball fan, noted for banging a drum at games since 1973.
Mr. Adams’s drumming was heard at more than 3,700 home games, first at Cleveland Municipal Stadium and then, starting in 1994, at Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field). Stationed deep in the bleachers, he steadily urged the team on by rhythmically banging his drum with two mallets.
“Football has its bands and its cheerleaders, and all of them help get into the spirit of the game,” Mr. Adams told The Akron Beacon Journal in 1983, explaining his long-running stadium gig. “Baseball has nothing, so I thought of the war drum thing for the Indians.”
His status as a superfan was acknowledged when the team gave away bobblehead figures of him with a drum and movable arms at a home game in 2006. Six years later, Great Lakes Brewing introduced Rally Drum Red Ale in his honor.
And last year, on the 49th anniversary of Mr. Adams’s first performance at a game, he was inducted into the Guardians’ Distinguished Hall of Fame as a nonuniformed contributor. That group also includes Bill Veeck and Richard E. Jacobs, two of the team’s former owners.
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…in fact, it’s cold as hell.
New Hampshire’s Mount Washington felt more like Mars than planet Earth on Friday as wind chills dipped below an unfathomable minus 110 degrees, a new record for the coldest wind chill ever recorded in the US.
Known for having some of the world’s worst weather, Mount Washington saw air temperatures plummet to minus 46 degrees with wind speeds averaging over 100 miles per hour with gusts over 125 miles per hour as the artic air mass wreaked havoc Friday, according to the Mount Washington observatory.
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This goes out to FotB RoadRich:
Nimbus the cat, who lives in the observatory with staffers, was reportedly cozied up and unbothered by the deadly storm, despite being a bit grumpy from taking his flea medication.
“He is actually sleeping through most of this event,” Tarasiewciz said.
I apologize for the radio silence the past couple of days.
The power at our house went out shortly before 7 AM (CT) on Wednesday and is still not restored at the time of this writing.
I was thinking it’d be back on sometime on Wednesday. Then I was thinking sometime on Thursday.
I’ve gone into the office this morning to get work done and things charged. I managed to keep the cell phones charged up by tapping the battery on my laptop, but I ran that down to 2% before I got into the office. I have a UPS protecting the network equipment at the house (cable modem/router/issued work from home gear) but it feels like the same event that took out the power also took out Spectrum internet in our area, so I couldn’t get an Internet connection anyway. And by now, the UPS is fully discharged (though it will run for about five hours with all that crap connected to it).
To be clear about this, the issue is not an ERCOT/power grid problem, like it was a while back. This is just simply ice accumulation on power lines bringing them down, and ice accumulation on trees causing limbs to fall and take out power lines.
Edited to add: power restored at our house at about 1 PM CT today. So that’s about 54 hours without electricity, by my reckoning.
Chicken wings, of course!
Remember a few years back, we had a guy busted for stealing $1.2 million worth of fajita meat in Cameron County?
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The station reported that Liddell ordered more than 11,000 cases of chicken wings for the district with school funds, but took all the poultry for herself.
“The food was never brought to the school or provided to the students,” court records claimed.
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The auditor “discovered individual invoices signed by Liddell for massive quantities of chicken wings, an item that was never served to students because they contain bones,” prosecutors said.
The food service provider employees all knew Liddell by name “due to the massive amount of chicken wings she would purchase,” prosecutors said, according to WGN.
Lt. Col. Dr. Harold Brown (USAF – ret.)
Dr. Brown flew 30 missions during the war in Europe and later served in the Korean War. He spent 23 years in the military before retiring, earning a doctorate and becoming a college administrator.
He was one of the last surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group that included 355 pilots who served in segregated units operating from the war’s Mediterranean theater after beginning their training at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Fewer than 10 are still living, according to Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an organization dedicated to preserving their legacy.
After taking off from Italy at dawn on March 14, 1945, Dr. Brown, a second lieutenant at the time, was piloting a P-51 Mustang strafing a German freight train near Linz, Austria, when the locomotive exploded, hurling shrapnel into the engine of his single-propeller plane.
With only seconds before his plane lost power, he bailed out and parachuted to safety. But he landed not far from his target, where he was apprehended by two armed local constables and was soon surrounded by a furious mob of some two dozen Austrians whose town he and his comrades had just attacked.
“I was met by perhaps 35 of the most angry people I’ve ever met in my life,” Dr. Brown said on the PBS podcast “American Veteran.” “There’s no doubt murder’s on their mind.”
“It was clear that they finally decided to hang me,” he recalled in a memoir, “Keep Your Airspeed Up: The Story of a Tuskegee Airman” (2017), which he wrote with his wife. “They took me to a perfect hanging tree with a nice low branch and they had a rope. I can still visualize that tree today.
“I knew at that moment I was going to die.”
But he was rescued from the vigilantes by a third constable, who threatened to fire on the crowd to protect Dr. Brown as a prisoner of war.
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FotB RoadRich sent over a link: Boeing will be live streaming the handover ceremony at 1 PM Pacific (4 PM Eastern, 3 PM Central) this afternoon.
Bobby Hull as promised. ESPN. Chicago Tribune.
Cindy Williams. Other credits include “Cannon”, “The First Nudie Musical”, and the good “Hawaii Five-0”. And if you haven’t seen “The Conversation”, you really should.
Kevin O’Neal, actor. Other credits include “The Fugitive” (the original), “Perry Mason” (the good one), and “Lancer”.
Tom Verlaine, musician.
In 1972, inspired by the New York Dolls, they started a band called the Neon Boys. Mr. Verlaine bought an electric Fender Jazzmaster guitar for himself and picked out a $50 bass for Mr. Hell; their friend Billy Ficca joined them on drums.
In 1973 they added Richard Lloyd, a guitarist, and renamed themselves Television. They chose the name because they had a distaste for the medium and hoped to provide an alternative. Mr. Verlaine also enjoyed the resonance with his initials, T.V.
After seeing a performance by Television in 1974, David Bowie called the group “the most original band I’ve seen in New York.” However, Mr. Hell’s emotive, chaotic outlook on music clashed with Mr. Verlaine’s more controlled approach. Mr. Hell was replaced by Fred Smith in 1975 and later went on to form the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
Television signed with Elektra Records and in 1977 released its first album, “Marquee Moon,” which featured hypnotic guitar work that ranged from mournful to ecstatic.
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Television is one of those seminal ’70s bands…that I just never got into.
Lisa Loring. Other credits include “As the World Turns” and “Barnaby Jones”.
Barrett Strong, Motown singer and songwriter.
Annie Wersching, actress. She was only 45: cancer got her.
Hattip on the previous two to Lawrence, who also sent over this article that’s not quite an obit, but as he put it, “is the sort of thing you like to link to”. Which is true.
Breaking: Bobby Hull, hockey player. I’m going to go ahead and link to the NYT directly, since this is just a preliminary obit: if I end up doing an obit watch tomorrow, I’ll link to an archive version of the full obit.
(This is a guest post from FotB RoadRich, speaking in his capacity as a private citizen, and not representing any organization or group. -DB)
In this article that I found after following links from the Michigan helicopter one, it is revealed that the old man who shot up two California farms had mental problems. But of course the problem is the guns.
Set aside the fact he tried to kill his roommate with a pillow.
It’s not mental illness, it’s the guns.
Oh, and later threatened the same roommate with a knife.
It’s the guns.
And also made a thinly veiled threat to bring his vengeance to work.
Can’t be mental illness.
Must be something we can take away from people so they can’t defend themselves when one of these lunatics snaps. So that we look like we’re doing something.
I know, we will just fight back with some paper laws and voluntary-only social programs.
Because people with mental illness will naturally sign up for those on their own, they know they need help.
