Obit watch: February 4, 2023.

Melinda Dillon.

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.

“Suddenly, I saw people clapping to the beat,” he recalled. “When the game was over, people stopped me outside the stadium. They told me I had the opposing pitcher so rattled that guys from the other team were looking all over for me.” The Indians beat the Texas Rangers that day, 11-5.

2 Responses to “Obit watch: February 4, 2023.”

  1. Pictures would be nice.

  2. pigpen51 says:

    As a Detroit Tigers fan, I remember quite well Mr. Adams and his drum beating. He was often singled out by the Detroit television announcers for his continual drumming. That he was inducted into the teams hall of fame is a fitting tribute as he was a constant for them, for many years.
    And Melinda Dillon is another one of those actresses that you often would see in some small production, a tv movie or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She always seemed to be the right actress for whatever role she took on, so I guess that made her a very good actress.
    As for the extremely cold temperatures, right here in Muskegon, MI, there was one winter, it had to be in the early 1980’s, we had wind chills of -70 below. I remember that because I worked in the steel foundry and had to drive my lift truck outside to get scrap to remelt, and if I got stuck I had to leave my truck, come inside to warm up, and then go back out and try and get unstuck, to avoid frostbite. You can’t stay outside in that cold for long, or you will certainly get frostbitten.