Headline of the day.
May 20th, 2022Obit watch: May 20, 2022.
May 20th, 2022Elspeth Barker, novelist.
She wrote one book: “O Caledonia”.
The book recounts the short, unhappy life of a girl named Janet, who, like Ms. Barker, grew up half-feral in a neo-Gothic castle in rural Scotland, avoiding people and befriending jackdaws. Both faced constant harassment from local boys, and both sought refuge in foreign languages and books.
Though the novel opens with Janet newly dead, murdered on a staircase, it is full of life, energized by Ms. Barker’s thistle-sharp eye for natural detail: She writes of mist that “floats in steaming filaments off the glens” and of Janet shaking “wet honeysuckle over her face.”
“O Caledonia,” her only novel, was a hit among readers and critics. It sold widely in Europe and won a number of minor British literary awards, including the Scottish Book Prize, and was shortlisted for a major one, the Whitbread Book Award (now the Costa Book Award).
To be honest, I probably would have let this get past me, if it wasn’t for this line from the obit:
On a totally unrelated note, I don’t have a good place to put this, so I’m sticking it here.
Horridge, who spent 25 years as the Houston Oilers’ mascot they called Roughneck, died at the age of 86, according to KPRC2’s Randy McIlvoy.
Horridge always wore a Columbia blue shirt over his shoulder pads with a shiny chrome hardhat emblazoned with the Oilers’ oil derrick logo and he carried a 48-inch rig wrench, which he used to implore the Astrodome crowd to make some noise.
Before the Oilers’ 1979 AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh, Horridge told The Washington Post that he used to carry a plastic wrench with him at games, but he switched to a real one that weighed 44 pounds after some Steelers fans tried to rough him up in Pittsburgh after the AFC title game the previous season.
Longtime Houston Oilers mascot Art Horridge has passed away at the age of 86. I think all of us who went to games and covered the Oilers remember Art and his passion for the #Oilers @BudsOilers . Thanks to his family for sending these pics to us @KPRC2 pic.twitter.com/78bgxcNZxm
— Randy McIlvoy (@KPRC2RandyMc) May 19, 2022
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Obit watch: May 19, 2022.
May 19th, 2022Vangelis (Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou).
Yeah, yeah, yeah, “Chariots of Fire”, “Blade Runner”…
…in the late ’60s, he found success as a member of the Greek rock band Forminx and then with the progressive group Aphrodite’s Child, which had hits with the single “Rain and Tears” in 1968 and the influential album 666 in 1972.
He enjoyed a partnership with Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, and they released four albums as Jon & Vangelis from 1980 through 1991. (He had been asked to join Anderson’s prog rock band in the wake of keyboardist Rick Wakeman’s departure but declined.)
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How about a musical interlude?
Ray Scott, pioneer of bass fishing as sport.
The idea for a bass fishing tour came to Mr. Scott, then an insurance salesman, when rain cut short a fishing outing with a friend in Jackson, Miss., in 1967. Stuck in his hotel room watching sports on television, he had an epiphany: Why not start the equivalent of the PGA Tour for bass fishing?
He held his first tournament at Beaver Lake, in Arkansas, where 106 anglers paid $100 each to compete over three days for $5,000 in prizes. A second tournament followed that year; in 1968 he formed a membership organization, the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, or BASS.
In 1971, Mr. Scott started what has become known as the Super Bowl of bass fishing: the Bassmaster Classic, his organization’s annual championship tournament, which he paired with a merchandising expo for manufacturers of bass fishing boats and gear.
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Mr. Scott was the showman of BASS, the umbrella company for tournaments, magazines and television shows. Easily recognized in his cowboy hat and fringed jackets, Mr. Scott memorably served as the M.C. for tournament weigh-ins, entertaining thousands of fans with his exuberant patter as anglers pulled flopping fish out of holding tanks.
“Now, ain’t that a truly wonderful fish?” he asked one tournament crowd. “How many of you want to see more fish like that? C’mon, let’s hear it for that fish!”
NYT obits for Rosmarie Trapp and Sgt. Maj. John L. Canley.
John Aylward, actor. Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “The X-Files”, and “3rd Rock from the Sun”. He also did some theater:
He appeared in stage roles at the Kennedy Center with Kentucky Cycle, and at Lincoln Center with the play City of Conversation. A classically trained actor, Aylward performed everything from Shakespearean roles to farce with plays by Alan Ayckborne, and dramas by David Mamet, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
His standout roles included playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Richard III, Scrooge in Inspecting Carol and Shelley Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross, a role he played twice.
Marnie Schulenburg, actress. (“One Life to Live”, “As the World Turns”) She was only 37, and died from cancer.
Obit watch: May 18, 2022.
May 18th, 2022June Preston has passed away at 93.
Interesting career. She was a child actress: among her credits, “Anne of Green Gables”, “Heaven Can Wait”, “It Happened One Night” (uncredited) and “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break” (uncredited).
She also had considerable musical talent.
A year after playing Ann Rutherford‘s daughter in Happy Land (1943), her final feature, Preston was discovered at age 16 by maestro Gustav Stern, a German conductor and vocal coach in Seattle.
She graduated from West Seattle High School in 1947 and began touring two years later. In 1952 at age 24, she debuted with a Metropolitan Opera company on a South American tour in the leading role of Mimi in La Boheme opposite Met standout Jan Peerce.
During the next decade, Preston performed in the world’s most prestigious opera houses and with symphony orchestras in the U.S., Europe and Central and South America. A soprano with a five-octave range, she was nicknamed the “Golden Voice,” and entertainment columnist Walter Winchell was an admirer.
She retired after her marriage in 1963.
Ricky Gardiner, guitarist. He worked with David Bowie (“Visconti co-produced Bowie’s “Low” album and brought Gardiner to play lead guitar on the first half of the iconic album.“) and with Iggy Pop on “Lust for Life“.
Rosmarie Trapp, of the Trapp Family.
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You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#89 in a series)
May 17th, 2022This is one of the oddest hyena watches I’ve ever done. One reason is that I’ve never seen someone accused of “illegal registration of a helicopter”. (As we will see, there’s slightly more to the story than that.)
The city of Anaheim sold land to the Los Angeles Angels for a new stadium. There’s already been one issue with the land sale violating California affordable housing law.
Now, the state attorney general has asked a court to put the deal on hold. Why?
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Okay, so we’ve got obstruction of justice and witness tampering, as well as bribery. I’m guessing the false statements probably involve lying to the Feds. As for the fraud:
Where does the helicopter come in?
The evidence, according to the affidavit, also showed Sidhu pursued an Arizona address to register his helicopter, despite the fact that he lived in Anaheim and based the helicopter out of Chino.
Had he registered the helicopter in California, he would have owed $15,888 in sales tax. Had he registered the helicopter in Arizona, he would have owed a $1,025 vehicle tax.
I’d tend to call that “tax fraud” myself, though I also have trouble throwing stones at someone who tries to lower their tax bill (especially in California).
It should be noted that:
- Mayor Sidhu has not actually been charged with any crimes yet, though the release of the FBI affidavit makes me think this is coming soon.
- Nobody from the Angels has actually been accused of a crime yet.
The other odd aspect of this story is that I got tipped off to it by Field of Schemes. Neil deMause is a little more to the left than I’d like, but we find common ground in being opposed to giving tax dollars to sports franchises. This is the first actual political corruption story I’ve ever picked up from him, so take a bow, Mr. deMause.
Edited to add 5/18: Well, we have an actual indictment. But not against Mayor Sidhu: against Todd Ament, the former head of the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce.
According to federal officials, Ament – with the assistance of an unnamed political consultant who federal officials describe as a partner at a national public relations firm – devised a scheme to launder proceeds intended for the Chamber through the PR firm into Ament’s bank account, authorities say.
Federal officials say Ament and the PR consultant defrauded a cannabis company that believed it was paying $225,000 for a task force that would craft favorable legislation regarding cannabis.
The way I’m reading this, the charges against Mr. Ament aren’t directly related to Mayor Sidhu or the land deal: but the Feds had Mr. Ament nailed on those charges, and used them as leverage to flip Mr. Ament, who is strongly believed (based on poor document redaction) to be “Cooperating Witness #2” in the Sidhu affidavit.
Obit watch: May 17, 2022.
May 17th, 2022Maggie Peterson, also known as Maggie Mancuso.
She doesn’t have that many credits in IMDB, but they are interesting. She appeared several times on “The Andy Griffith Show” (and in “Mayberry R.F.D.” as well as “Return to Mayberry”) and did guest shots on “Green Acres”, “The Odd Couple”, and several appearances on “The Bill Dana Show”.
And she was “Rose Ellen Wilkerson”, the long-suffering and slightly dim girlfriend of Don Knotts’s character in “The Love God?”, which both Lawrence and I have written about.
The print edition of “People”, though this does not seem to be official yet. Noted:
Katsumoto Saotome, Japanese writer. His major project was six volumes of stories from survivors of the Tokyo firebombing.
Mr. Saotome traced his efforts to document the Tokyo firebombing to his attendance at a lecture given by a well-known history professor in 1970. He recalled asking the professor why the attack air was never mentioned in the same textbooks that described the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The professor told him that there was little documented evidence about the experiences of those who had lived through the firebombing.
Mr. Saotome decided he would seek out fellow survivors and ask them to share their stories of that terrible night. “I was not a popular writer,” he recalled, “so I had a lot of spare time.”
He also established, using private funds, a memorial museum.
He reserved some of his most potent anger for the Japanese government, which he said should have taken more responsibility for starting the war and compensated survivors of the firebombing. A group of them sued the government in 2007, but Japan’s Supreme Court rejected their claim.
Mr. Saotome said he never forgave his government for awarding Curtis LeMay, the United States Air Force general who had been the architect of the Tokyo air raid, its highest decoration for a foreigner, for helping to establish Japan’s modern air force after the war.
Jürgen Blin, boxer. He was best known for fighting Ali in 1971 (after Ali’s loss to Joe Frazier). Mr. Blin was knocked out in the seventh round.
Obit watch: May 14, 2022.
May 14th, 2022Sergeant Major John Canley (USMC – ret.)
Sergeant Major Canley received the Medal of Honor for actions during the Battle of Hue City. His citation:
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Sergeant Major Canley originally received the Navy Cross, but that was upgraded in 2018 to the Medal of Honor.
Robert C. McFarlane, former national security advisor for Ronald Reagan.
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And its fallout left Mr. McFarlane so ridden with guilt that he attempted suicide in his home in February 1987. While his wife, Jonda, a high school English teacher, was upstairs grading papers, he took an overdose of Valium and got into bed alongside her. When he couldn’t be roused in the morning, he was taken to a hospital and revived. He subsequently underwent many weeks of psychiatric therapy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
It was a stunning act in official Washington. Many considered it an unconcealed howl of pain by someone from whom they would have least expected it — one of the capital’s most self-contained of public and powerful men.
Killing himself, Mr. McFarlane believed at the time, was “the honorable thing to do,” he said in an interview for this obituary in January 2016 at his home in the Watergate complex in Washington.
“I so let down the country,” he said.
He earlier had tried to explain his actions by citing the ancient Japanese tradition of the honorable suicide. But he came to realize, he said in the interview, that those ways had no resonance in modern American culture and that most people could not understand such behavior.
Henry Scott Stokes, journalist and biographer of Yukio Mishima.
Val Broeksmit. No, you haven’t heard of him, but this is one of the oddest obits I’ve read recently.
Mr. Broeksmit was an “itinerant musician”. His stepfather worked for Deutsche Bank, but committed suicide. After his stepfather’s death, Mr. Broeksmit somehow obtained his passwords and supposedly used them to download a bunch of “whistleblower” documents revealing misconduct by Deutsche Bank.
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He also somehow got involved in the Sony hack. Mr. Broeksmit was 46.
Obit watch: May 13, 2022.
May 13th, 2022Fred Ward. Damn.
Credits include the titular character in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins”, “Sgt. Hoke Moseley” in “Miami Blues”, “Quincy M.E.”, “Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann”, “Tremors”, “The Right Stuff”, and “Det. Harry Philip Lovecraft” in “Cast A Deadly Spell”.
Bruce MacVittie. Other credits include “Waterfront”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Spenser: For Hire” and “The Equalizer”.
Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, head of state of the U.A.E. As always, don’t look to me for geo-political takes, as I know nothing.
I have not found a good obit yet, but Randy Weaver apparently passed away. Here’s Reason‘s take.
That sniper was Lon Horiuchi. Lon Horiuchi murdered Vicki Weaver.
The RRTF report to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) of June 1994 stated unequivocally in conclusion (in its executive summary) that the rules that allowed the second shot to have been made did not satisfy constitutional standards for legal use of deadly force. The 1996 report of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information, Arlen Specter [R-PA], chair, concurred, with Senator Dianne Feinstein [D-CA] dissenting. The RRTF report said that the lack of a request by the marshals to the Weavers to surrender was “inexcusable.” Harris and the two Weavers were not believed to be an imminent threat (since they were reported as running for cover without returning fire).
The later Justice task force criticized Horiuchi for firing through the door, when he did not know if anyone was on the other side of it. While there is a dispute as to who approved the rules of engagement which Horiuchi followed, the task force condemned the rules of engagement that allowed shots to be fired without a request for surrender.
Obit watch: May 12, 2022.
May 12th, 2022Gloria Parker has passed away at 100.
Ms. Parker played glasses.
At a young age, Gloria began studying violin (she said she played a child-sized instrument at the Brooklyn Academy of Music when she was 4 or 5). At 8, she began learning to play the glasses from her grandfather, who had brought the skill (and eight fragile Bohemian crystal glasses) from his native Czechoslovakia.
“When I was still a little girl,” Miss Parker told United Press International in 1984, “I had a musical vaudeville act playing both the glasses and marimba.”
She mastered how to conjure music from 28 glasses, each filled with water or white wine to produce particular sounds.
“One drop either way makes a difference,” she told The Daily News in 2012. “Height, circumference — it all makes a difference soundwise.”
She would rub her fingers over the rims of the glasses to produce a musical range of two octaves as she played pop, classical, jazz and calypso songs.
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She was also in “Broadway Danny Rose” as one of Rose’s clients.
Richard Wagner. He was one of the old CBS news guys who covered Vietnam and a lot of other stories.
Obit watch: May 11, 2022.
May 11th, 2022Alfred Baldwin, unindicted co-conspirator.
Mr. Baldwin was the lookout for the Watergate burglars.
During the first break-in, in late May, the burglars installed two listening devices, Mr. Baldwin said in his interview. He was stationed across the street at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, from which he eavesdropped on the phone taps. He had logged about 200 calls by the time Mr. McCord realized that the bugging devices weren’t working properly and decided to stage a second incursion on June 17 to adjust them.
It was not clear at what point Mr. Baldwin saw that the police had arrived on the scene. A 2012 account in Washingtonian magazine said that at the time he was “glued to the TV watching a horror movie, ‘Attack of the Puppet People,’ on Channel 20 — oblivious to the situation developing across the street.”
But that account was wrong, Mr. Baldwin said. He said he had turned on the television to cover up the sound of his walkie-talkie, which he was using to communicate with the burglars.
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In short order, uniformed police swarmed the scene, and the jig was up. E. Howard Hunt, one of the conspirators who had slipped out of the Watergate, rushed over to Mr. Baldwin’s motel room, told him to pack up the surveillance equipment, take it to Mr. McCord’s house and then disappear.
“Does that mean I’m out of a job?” Mr. Baldwin said he asked Mr. Hunt. But by then Mr. Hunt was out the door.
Mr. Baldwin rolled on the burglars and avoided charges. According to the NYT, he actually passed away in 2020, but his death only became known recently.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop making “Airplane!” references…
May 11th, 2022Bob Lanier has passed away at 73.
Lanier played 14 seasons with the Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks and averaged 20.1 points and 10.1 rebounds per game. He is third on the Pistons’ career list in both points and rebounds. Detroit drafted Lanier with the No. 1 overall pick in 1970 after he led St. Bonaventure to the Final Four.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Lanier was among the most talented centers in league history and added that his accomplishments went far beyond what he did on the court.
“For more than 30 years, Bob served as our global ambassador and as a special assistant to David Stern and then me, traveling the world to teach the game’s values and make a positive impact on young people everywhere,” Silver said in a statement. “It was a labor of love for Bob, who was one of the kindest and most genuine people I have ever been around.”
While this is sad and tragic, and I don’t want to minimize it, at least Kareem Abdul-Jabbar no longer has to drag him up and down the court for 48 minutes.
(Too soon?)
“I’ve got a serious situation here,” the Cessna Caravan passenger was reportedly heard telling air traffic control about 70 miles north of his final destination. “My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.”
“Roger. What’s your position?” a dispatcher responded, according to the outlet.
“I have no idea,” the passenger reportedly said. “I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.”
Spoiler:
Obit watch: May 10, 2022.
May 10th, 2022Lawrence sent over an obit for James R. Olson. He passed away on April 17th, but I haven’t seen anybody else cover this. (THR put up a story literally as I was writing this.) Which is odd, because he had a pretty interesting career before he retired in 1990.
He also did a lot of TV and movie work. He was another one of those actors who hit the NBC Mystery Movie trifecta: appearances on all three of the original series (“McCloud”, “Columbo”, “McMillan and Wife”). Other credits include “Moon Zero Two”, “The Andromeda Strain”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, “Lancer”, “Ironside”, “The Rookies”, “Police Story”, “The F.B.I.”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Game Plan“, season 8, episode 2. “Odds Against Donald Jordan“, season 2, episode 21.)
Jack Kehler. Other credits include “Karen Sisco”, “NYPD Blue”, “NCIS: Original Recipe”, “NCIS: Los Angeles”, and something called “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”.
Ms. Decter was in the forefront of an ideologically evolving generation of public intellectuals. Cutting their teeth on leftist politics in the 1930s and ’40s, they settled into anti-communist liberalism in the 1950s and early ’60s. Jolted by the turbulence of the student and women’s movements, they later broke from liberals to embrace a new form of conservatism — championing traditional social values, limited free-market economics and muscular American foreign policies — that reached its zenith in the early 21st century in the administration of President George W. Bush.
Ms. Decter wielded her influence as editor of Harper’s and other magazines, as an author and book editor, and as a political organizer and frequent speaker.
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Ms. Decter’s ideological shift in the late ’60s stemmed from a rising concern that she expressed in her 2001 memoir, “An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War.” Liberalism, she said, rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into “a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live.”
She and her husband, the writer and fellow former liberal Norman Podhoretz, worried about the effect the new thinking, particularly that of the counterculture, might have on their children and succeeding generations.
Also by way of Lawrence: Adreian Payne, basketball star at Michigan State.
No man is an Islander.
May 9th, 2022Well, that’s not true. Some men are Islanders.
Not, however, Barry Trotz, who got fired this morning as head coach.
Trotz’s record as Islanders coach was 152-102-34 in the regular season and 28-21 in the playoffs.
The Islanders (37-35-10) had a disastrous season in 2021-22, prompted by a poorly timed COVID-19 outbreak that derailed them following a season-opening 13-game road trip.
Obit watch: May 9, 2022.
May 9th, 2022This was another one of those weekends where I got behind the power curve and am playing catch-up. I expect that next weekend will be closer to what passes for normal around here.
A honey-toned singer with a warm, unhurried delivery, Mr. Gilley had 17 No. 1 country singles from 1974 to 1983, including “I Overlooked an Orchid” and “Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.”
He placed 34 singles in the country Top Ten during his two decades on the charts. But he was ultimately best known as the proprietor, with Sherwood Cryer, of Gilley’s, the honky-tonk in Pasadena, Texas, that became one of the most storied nightspots in country music.
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Interesting fact #1 which may not be generally known: Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart were cousins of Mr. Gilley.
Interesting fact #2 for the benefit of FotB RoadRich:
George Pérez, comics guy. (“Wonder Woman”, “Avengers”, “The New Teen Titans”)
For the record, NYT obits for Kevin Samuels and Ric Parnell.
Dennis Waterman, British actor. Credits other than “The Sweeney” include “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil”, “Tube Mice”, and “Stay Lucky”.
Kenneth Welsh. 242 credits in IMDB, which is pretty impressive (Clint Howard has 253). Other credits include one of the spinoffs of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, “Perfect Storms: Disasters That Changed the World”, “Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer”, “Due South”, and “The X-Files”.
Firings watch.
May 6th, 2022Las Vegas Raiders interim president Dan Ventrelle is out.
This is kind of interesting because of the circumstances. The Raiders put out a tweet:
— Las Vegas Raiders (@Raiders) May 6, 2022
And that’s all. No press conference, nothing else. Kinda makes you wonder…
Edited to add 5/7: Former interim president Ventrelle is saying that his firing was retaliatory.
…alleging he was fired in retaliation for bringing concerns by multiple employees about hostile workplace conditions within the organization to the NFL.
“I take that responsibility very seriously, which is why multiple written complaints from employees that Mark [Davis] created a hostile work environment and engaged in other potential misconduct caused me grave concern,” Ventrelle said in a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “When Mark was confronted about these issues he was dismissive and did not demonstrate the warranted level of concern.
“Soon thereafter, I was fired in retaliation for raising these concerns. I firmly stand by my decision to elevate these issues to protect the organization and its female employees.”
He also said he’s hired lawyers and “would not provide further comment at this time”.