Obit watch: May 22, 2025.

May 22nd, 2025

Jim Irsay. NYT. ESPN.

A lover of rock and roll, Irsay spent millions of dollars collecting rare and significant guitars like Les Paul’s 1954 Gibson Black Beauty, Prince’s Yellow Cloud and David Gilmour’s famed Black Strat. Irsay also owned the manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and the original manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous, the text that spawned the rehabilitation group. Irsay’s twin passions of music and rare collections culminated in the Jim Irsay Collection, an exhibit of Irsay’s rare items that has traveled the country, and The Jim Irsay Band, a collection of musicians who’ve traveled and played together since 2021, sometimes in conjunction with a display of The Jim Irsay Collection and sometimes in its own concert. For the past two seasons, Irsay and his band have opened the season by playing a free Colts Kickoff Concert at Lucas Oil Stadium, along with a display of the Jim Irsay Collection for Colts fans to enjoy.

George Coulam, also known as “King George”. He founded the Texas Renaissance Festival.

In 2024, the HBO docuseries “Ren Faire” focused on the festival’s succession and Coulam’s eventual retirement, highlighting the tension between his desire to find a romantic partner and his need to choose a successor. It also highlighted Coulam’s strict leadership style.
There have been ongoing legal disputes and potential sales of the festival, with a recent judge’s order in early May mandating the sale of Coulam’s properties, including the festival.

Michael McStay, British actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “The Persuaders!”, and “The Sweeney”.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

The greatest spectacle in auto racing.

May 21st, 2025

Team Penske has fired president Tim Cindric, “IndyCar managing director”, Ron Ruzewski, and “IndyCar general manager” Kyle Moyer.

This is fallout from a cheating scandal:

The trouble for Team Penske began before the fast 12 shootout on Sunday, when rival team owner Chip Ganassi was among a chorus of competitors who accused it of cheating. They noticed unapproved changes had been made to the rear attenuator, a safety device designed to absorb and reduce the force of impacts, and the assumption was the modifications would have given the two Team Penske cars an aerodynamic advantage in their four-lap qualifying runs.
Further investigation showed Newgarden’s winning car from last year that is displayed in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum has the same illegal modification, as did the car Team Penske brought to the White House last month. Rivals claim to have photos indicating the modification has been in place for some time.

This is the second Team Penske scandal in a year:

…the team was caught in a push-to-pass manipulation in which Newgarden was found to have access to an additional boost of horsepower when he should not have while winning the season-opener. He was stripped of his win and Penske suspended Cindric for two races, including the Indy 500.

By the way, the greatest spectacle in racing is not the Indy 500. At least, not this year.

The Wienie 500 will also mark the first “meat-up” of all six Wienermobiles in over a decade and the first competitive race for the fleet, each sporting an all-new look. Each Wienermobile will represent a different regional dog, including the Chi Dog (Midwest), New York Dog (East), Slaw Dog (Southeast), Sonoran Dog (Southwest), Chili Dog (South) and Seattle Dog (Northwest). From custom Hotdogger racing suits to a trophy presentation in the ‘Wiener’s Circle’, complete with a condiment spray and hot dog for the wiener’s enjoyment, every moment of the race is designed to spark smiles, serving up a delightful racing event only Oscar Mayer can.

This will be streaming live on Friday, but, sadly, while I’m at work. I’m hoping that someone will try to drift a Wienermobile, and highlights show up…somewhere.

Posted in Cars, Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 21, 2025.

May 21st, 2025

George Wendt. NYT.

Other credits that don’t involve him appearing as Norm include “Larry the Cable Guy’s Christmas Spectacular”, “Columbo: Strange Bedfellows”, and the 1986 “Twilight Zone” revival.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D – Virginia).

Vlastimil Hort, chess grandmaster. There’s a great story about Mr. Hort. Actually, there’s probably more than one, but this may be the one he’s most famous for.

In 1977, he was playing Boris Spassky in Reykjavik.

The match was a best-of-12 quarterfinal, whose winner would be one step closer to the top title in chess. After 12 games, they were tied, prompting a two-game playoff.
Then Mr. Spassky fell seriously ill. He was taken to the hospital, and his appendix was removed. According to the rules, he was entitled to three postponements of three days each. He took them all, but was still too unwell to play.
Mr. Spassky would have to forfeit, meaning Mr. Hort would advance to the semifinals.
Then Mr. Hort did something unexpected. To give Mr. Spassky a chance to continue to compete, Mr. Hort requested a three-day timeout, which was granted. It was a choice seen for decades as one of the greatest acts of sportsmanship in the history of the game, and it ended up costing Mr. Hort the match.
By the end of the timeout, Mr. Spassky could resume play, and after Games 13 and 14 were drawn, another two-game playoff was needed. In Game 15, Mr. Hort reached a winning position, but he froze. His time expired before he had made the required number of moves, thus forfeiting the game. After the next game ended in a tie, Mr. Spassky was declared the winner of the match.
Mr. Hort lost his chance to play for the world championship and never qualified again.

…

He was a popular player among his peers, with a sharp wit and a penchant for telling amusing anecdotes; he often called himself a “chess entertainer.”

Posted in Chess, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 19, 2025.

May 19th, 2025

Jeff Blank, massively influential Austin chef.

Opened in 1984 on a then-two-lane stretch of RM 620 near Lakeway, Hudson’s on the Bend was one of the first restaurants in Central Texas to explore and celebrate regional Texas cuisine. The pastoral restaurant, built in a 1948 limestone ranch house perched on a hill dotted by cedar trees and juniper bushes, helped change the way people thought of fine dining in Texas.

…

Hudson’s on the Bend may have been the boldest of the new regional cuisine practitioners, serving an exotic menu that over time featured venison, antelope, wild boar, partridge, pheasant, guinea fowl, quail and alligator, along with seafood and more traditional proteins.

We ate a couple of birthday dinners there, and it was a swell joint: expensive, but worth the money.

Blank, who bought out Rausch in 1992, operated the restaurant from 1984 until 2016, when he sold it to a group that would be the first of several to make failed attempts at filling the shoes of the singular personality.

We never tried any of the attempts to reboot Hudson’s, though. Right now, that space is being converted into a Wahoo’s Fish Tacos.

Lawrence pointed out to me the obit for Ed Smylie, the man who put duct tape to the highest and best use ever: saving the crew of Apollo 13.

“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary. “That’s where we were. We had duct tape, and we had to tape it in a way that we could hook the environmental control system hose to the command module canister.”

…

The adapter worked. The astronauts were able to breathe safely in the lunar module for two days as they awaited the appropriate trajectory to fly the hobbled command module home.

The Museum of Ice Cream in the Domain in Austin. I guess they just couldn’t come to terms on a new lease, and will be closing when the current one expires. We talked about having some corporate events there, but never actually did. And it seems kind of expensive: $30 will buy me more Amy’s Ice Cream than I can, or should, eat.

Biderman’s Deli off of Far West. This was their last standing location. I went there a few times with Mom: I think she liked their Reuben, and I know I liked their bagels and lox.

Posted in Food, History, Obits | Comments Closed

It’s Baltimore, gentlemen.

May 17th, 2025

Brandon Hyde out as manager of the Baltimore Orioles.

15-28 so far this season.

ESPN:

With an underperforming offense, one of baseball’s worst pitching staffs and middling defense, the Orioles have regressed in every facet of the game this season. Hyde, 51, entered the season with questions about his long-term future after Baltimore was swept out of a wild-card series against Kansas City last year. In 2023, following a season in which they won an AL-best 101 games, the Orioles were swept by the Texas Rangers in the division series.

Posted in Firings, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 16, 2025.

May 16th, 2025

Charles Strouse, noted Broadway composer. THR.

Mr. Strouse had more than a dozen Broadway shows to his credit and composed some of the most enduring musical theater numbers of his era: “Put On a Happy Face” and “Kids (What’s the Matter With Kids Today?)” from “Bye Bye Birdie,” which opened in 1960 and featured lyrics by his frequent collaborator Lee Adams; “But Alive” from “Applause” (1970), a musical adaptation of the movie “All About Eve” starring Lauren Bacall, with lyrics by Mr. Adams; and “Tomorrow” and “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” from “Annie” (1977), with lyrics by Martin Charnin.

…

Some of Mr. Strouse’s numbers became so ubiquitous that they seemed revered and reviled by the public in equal measure. Each response in its own way was a badge of honor.
There was the time, for instance, that a stranger accosted Mr. Strouse at a party.
“If I have to hear my daughter sing ‘Tomorrow’ one more time,” he thundered, “I’m going to kill myself — and you!”

…

He wrote scores for films as well, including “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” (1968. For television, he composed the music for “Those Were the Days,” the opening theme of Norman Lear’s groundbreaking sitcom “All in the Family,” with lyrics by Mr. Adams. (It is Mr. Strouse’s piano playing that is heard on the soundtrack as Archie and Edith Bunker sing the song on camera.)

…

Not all of Mr. Strouse’s ventures were successful. “Bring Back Birdie,” a 1981 sequel, closed on Broadway after four performances. Two “Annie” sequels, “Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge” and “Annie Warbucks,” closed out of town before reaching Broadway. The 1991 musical “Nick & Nora,” with a book by Arthur Laurents, lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr. and a cast featuring Barry Bostwick and Joanna Gleason as Dashiell Hammett’s detectives Nick and Nora Charles, played just nine Broadway performances.

…

“When I was a 6-year-old girl, I only based my opinion on people from how they made me feel and how they treated me. When I first met Charles Strouse, I was 100 percent enamored with him,” Danielle Brisebois, who played Molly in the original production, said. “His warm smile and his soulful eyes … He was always encouraging, thoughtful and kind. I had no idea I was in the presence of a legend!”

…

“Everybody has flops,” he said. “When I teach, the students say, ‘How can you work three or four years on a show … and it flops? How do you recover from that?’ The only answer is, you’ve done your best, it didn’t work, what’s next?”

Posted in 1970s, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Your loser update: May 16, 2025.

May 16th, 2025

We’re about 25% of the way through the MLB season, so I thought it was time to do a loser update.

The question is: what teams are worth covering?

The Braves, which started out horribly, are now 22-22, for a .500 average. I don’t think they’re worth considering in the loser update any longer unless there’s a dramatic change.

There are some teams that are below .400 that might be worth consideration:

Baltimore is at 15-27, for a .357 winning percentage.

The Miami Marlins are at 16-26, .381.

Pittsburgh, the first team this season to fire their manager, is at 15-29, .341.

The Chicago White Sox are at 14-30, for a .318 winning percentage. This projects out to 110 losses, which is bad, but not historically bad, and at least better than last year.

And the Colorado Rockies…7-36, .163 winning percentage. This is bad. This is historically bad. This is a projected total of 135 losses. This is the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network publishing an article:

“Are Rockies worse than 2024 White Sox? Breaking down the numbers”.

The 2024 Sox lost 121 games, but didn’t quite nail down the “worst team in the modern era” mark. Could the Rockies accomplish what the Sox didn’t? Hope springs eternal.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 15, 2025.

May 15th, 2025

Joe Don Baker. Damn.

THR. He was in a lot of good stuff: “Charley Varrick”, “Golden Needles”, “The F.B.I.”, “Lancer”…

He was also in a lot of crap: “Leonard Part 6”, “Final Justice”, and, of course…

Joan O’Brien, actress. Other credits include “Bus Stop” (the series), “Rawhide”, “The Alamo” (the good one, with John Wayne), and “Perry Mason”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: May 14, 2025.

May 14th, 2025

Robert Benton, noted screenwriter and director. NYT (archived). IMDB.

Richard L. Garwin, physicist.

A polymathic physicist and geopolitical thinker, Dr. Garwin was only 23 when he built the world’s first fusion bomb. He later became a science adviser to many presidents, designed Pentagon weapons and satellite reconnaissance systems, argued for a Soviet-American balance of nuclear terror as the best bet for surviving the Cold War, and championed verifiable nuclear arms control agreements.
While his mentor, the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, called him “the only true genius I have ever met,” Dr. Garwin was not the father of the hydrogen bomb. The Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who developed theories for a bomb, may have greater claims to that sobriquet.
In 1951-52, however, Dr. Garwin, at the time an instructor at the University of Chicago and just a summer consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, designed the actual bomb, using the Teller-Ulam ideas. An experimental device code-named Ivy Mike, it was shipped to the Western Pacific and tested on an atoll in the Marshall Islands.

“The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin’s design,” Dr. Teller said in a 1981 statement that acknowledged the crucial role of the young prodigy. Still, that belated recognition got little notice, and Dr. Garwin long remained unknown publicly.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Physics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 12, 2025.

May 12th, 2025

Hattip to pigpen51 for letting us know about the death of Chet Lemon, center fielder for the Detroit Tigers. ESPN.

Lemon played seven seasons with the Chicago White Sox from 1975 to ’81 and nine with the Tigers from 1982 to ’90. He batted .273 with 215 homers, 884 RBIs, 973 runs and 1,875 hits in 1,988 games.
Lemon set a still-standing American League record for outfielders with 512 putouts during the 1977 season.
He led the American League with 44 doubles in 1979 and made the All-Star teams in 1978, 1979 and 1984.

Baseball Reference.

Johnny Rodriguez, musician. NYT (archived).

Terry Brunk, who used the professional name “Sabu” in his wrestling career. He mostly worked with Extreme Championship Wrestling, though he did spend one year with W.W.E.

Although widely remembered for his use of props and tables in the ring, Mr. Sabu was wary of professional wrestling’s spectacle. He would go on to criticize the larger-than-life stunts that would come to define later iterations of the W.W.E. and other wrestling promotion companies.
“In an Olympic match, you cannot stack a couple tables and then climb something and jump off. That’s a stunt,” Mr. Brunk told an interviewer with Covalent TV at Wrestlecade 2024. “I’m not a stuntman or an actor.”

Somewhat related: a NYT article about wrestlers who died young.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

I’ll take “Als” for $400, Alex.

May 12th, 2025

President Trump talking about re-opening Alcatraz prompted two stories in the NYPost that are moderately worth linking:

1) An interview with Charlie Hopkins, who is 93, and is allegedly the last surviving Alcatraz inmate.

2) A second interview, this time with Jolene Babyak. Ms. Babyak’s father worked in the federal prison system. Her family lived on Alcatraz twice, and she’s written several histories over the years.

Posted in Books, History, Law | Comments Closed

Out of the black…

May 12th, 2025

On Saturday, general manager of the Colorado Rockies Bill Schmidt came out in support of manager Bud Black.

“I think our guys are still playing hard, and that’s what I look at,” Schmidt told the Post. “Guys are working hard every day, they come with energy, for the most part. I don’t think we are [at that point of firing Black]. Guys still believe in what we are doing and where we are headed. We are all frustrated.”

Saturday night, the Rockies lost to the San Diego Padres…21-0.

Sunday, the Rockies fired Bud Black. Also out: bench coach Mike Redmond.

Black was in his ninth year as Rockies manager and had a career record with Colorado of 544-690. He is the winningest manager in franchise history.

I have been planning to do a loser update later this week. I’ve been waiting until we got to about the 25 percent mark in the season. However, I will say that right now, the Rockies are 7-33, for a .175 winning percentage. If my projections are correct, and this holds up for the rest of the season, I estimate that they will lose 133 games. Which would not just be “historically bad”, but would be the worst percentage in the modern era.

Posted in Firings, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 9, 2025.

May 9th, 2025

For the historical record: David H. Souter, former Supreme Court justice. WP (archived).

James Foley, director. The Saturday Movie Group has seen “Glengarry Glen Ross” and I thought it was pretty good. Other credits include “At Close Range” and “After Dark, My Sweet”.

“Rescue: HI-Surf”, the lifeguard series on one of the broadcast networks. I never saw an episode, just promos. But it looked a lot like a version of “Baywatch” that took itself way too seriously.

Also among the dead: “Lopez vs. Lopez” and “Night Court”. I greatly admire John Larroquette. But I also greatly admired Harry Anderson, and I just couldn’t see watching a “Night Court” without him.

“The Real Housewives New York City”. Between Pope Leo XIV and this being cancelled, I think it’s been a good week.

Posted in Law, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Walking the plank.

May 8th, 2025

The baseball season doesn’t really start until the ceremonial throwing out of the first manager.

Derek Shelton out as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

12-26 so far this season, for a .316 winning percentage. Not great, but better than the White Sox and Rockies.

306-440 in “five plus” seasons, according to ESPN.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 7, 2025.

May 7th, 2025

Dr. Philip Sunshine, one of the pioneers of neonatology and a big damn hero.

Before Dr. Sunshine and a handful of other physicians became interested in caring for preemies in the late 1950s and early ’60s, more than half of these unimaginably fragile patients died shortly after birth. Insurance companies wouldn’t pay to treat them.
Dr. Sunshine, a pediatric gastroenterologist, thought that many premature babies could be saved. At Stanford, he pushed for teams of doctors from multiple disciplines to treat them in special intensive care units. Along with his colleagues, he pioneered methods of feeding preemies with formula and aiding their breathing with ventilators.
“We were able to keep babies alive that would not have survived,” Dr. Sunshine said in 2000 in an oral history interview with the Pediatric History Center of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And now everybody just sort of takes this for granted.”

…

As chief of Stanford’s neonatology department from 1967 to 1989, Dr. Sunshine helped train hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of doctors who went on to work in neonatal intensive care units around the world. When he retired in 2022, at age 92, the survival rate for babies born at 28 weeks was over 90 percent.
“Phil is one of the ‘originals’ in neonatology, a neonatologist’s neonatologist, one of our history’s best,” David K. Stevenson, Dr. Sunshine’s successor as head of Stanford’s neonatal department, wrote in the Journal of Perinatology in 2011. “He stands comfortably among the great leaders in neonatology and is more than simply a pioneer. He is one of the creators of our discipline.”
Dr. Sunshine recognized that caring for preemies required both technical expertise and human connection. He urged hospitals to allow parents to visit neonatal intensive care units so they could hold their children, sensing that skin-to-skin contact between mothers and babies was beneficial.
He also gave nurses more autonomy and encouraged them to speak up when they thought doctors were wrong.
“Our nurses have always been very important caretakers,” Dr. Sunshine said in the oral history. “All through my career, I’ve worked with a nursing staff that often would recognize problems in the baby before the physicians would, and they still do that now. Well, we were learning neonatology together.”

Crew resource management: it isn’t just for airplanes.

For the historical record: NYT obits for Lulu Roman (previously):

“The next thing you know, I’m on a plane to Hollywood and riding a limo to the CBS studios,” Ms. Roman said in 2006. “The first person I saw was Carol Burnett, with my mouth wide open. She said, ‘Shut your mouth, child. You’re fixin’ to be one of us.’”

and Cora Sue Collins (previously).

As Miss Collins aged, her roles dwindled. Before her 17th birthday, she said, she was a victim of harassment when Harry Ruskin, a screenwriter at MGM whom she viewed as a father figure, offered her a big role if she would sleep with him. She turned him down, started to cry and left his office.

…

She reported Mr. Ruskin’s behavior to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where she was a contract player at the time. But, as she recalled, he said, “You’ll get used to it, sweetie.” Soon after, he threatened to keep her from ever working in movies again.
“Mr. Mayer, that’s my heartfelt desire,” she said she told him, adding, “It was the best decision of my life.”

Posted in Obits | 1 Comment »

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