(Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.)
Beware the Ides of March.
March 15th, 2022Obit watch: March 15, 2022.
March 15th, 2022Scott Hall, professional wrestler. THR.
Very good at being very evil in the ring, Hall won the WWE Intercontinental title four times and WCW Tag Team championships seven times (as “The Outsiders” with Nash), and in 1994 at WrestleMania X at Madison Square Garden, he competed in an iconic ladder match against Shawn Michaels. However, he never won the world title.
During his 26 years as a wrestler, he also feuded with the likes of Sting, Lex Luger, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Ric Flair and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.
After his retirement in 2010, Hall was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, first in 2014 as bad guy Razor Ramon (resplendent with gold chains, slicked-back hair and toothpick in mouth in an homage to Al Pacino’s Scarface character) and then in 2020 as a member of the villainous stable the New World Order (nWo).
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Hail Columbia!
March 15th, 2022Frank Martin out as basketball coach at the University of South Carolina.
The team was 18-13 this season.
Happy Pi Day!
March 14th, 2022This is the third year I haven’t been able to celebrate as I’d like to. Perhaps next year.
But in the meantime, please enjoy the day responsibly.
Obit watch: March 14, 2022.
March 14th, 2022Tova Borgnine, Ernest Borgnine’s fifth wife and cosmetics magnate.
Lawrence sent over a nice obit for Anne Beaumanoir. She spent a long time as
Before that, she was part of the Algerian resistance.
Practicing as a neurophysiologist in the southern French city of Marseille in the 1950s, she became a porteur de valise, a suitcase carrier, as well as a chauffeur for the Algerian resistance members inside France as part of what became known as the Jeanson network, which was also supported by intellectuals including the writer/philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Convicted in Marseille for 10 years in 1959, she was released into house arrest the following year because she was pregnant, escaped and found her way across the Mediterranean — first to Tunisia and later to Algeria. After France conceded independence to Algeria in 1962, she worked for the ministry of health under that country’s first independence president Ahmed Ben Bella and was granted Algerian citizenship. (Dr. Beaumanoir remains revered in Algeria for her supportive role, as a Frenchwoman, in the fight for independence.)
Before that, she was part of the French resistance.
In early 1944, Dr. Beaumanoir helped save two French teenagers of Polish origin whose father, Ruben Lisoprawski, ran a bakery in Paris. Like most of his family, he had been taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland and never seen again. But his children Daniel Lisoprawski, 14, and Simone, 16, survived in part because Dr. Beaumanoir learned that the Gestapo was planning a raid on a Paris apartment where the teens were being hidden by a Frenchwoman.
Dr. Beaumanoir went to the apartment to warn them and take the teens to a resistance safe house. That house was also soon raided by German soldiers, but a resistance leader managed to flee with the children over the rooftops of Paris to another safe place.
Eventually, Dr. Beaumanoir spirited them to her parents’ restaurant and home in Dinan, Brittany, where they remained hidden, moving among friendly locations during German house-to-house searches, until the end of the war in 1945. Afterward, the Beaumanoir family brought them up as if their own children.
In 1996, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, named Dr. Beaumanoir as well as her parents among the Righteous Among the Nations, a designation for non-Jews who rescued Jews, for their role in helping the Lisoprawski family.
Firings watch.
March 13th, 2022Been a busy weekend, both for me and for sports firings.
Will Wade out as men’s baskeball coach at LSU. Five seasons, 108-54 overall. But: the NCAA has informed LSU that they are investigating a total of 11 violations, including eight “level 1” violations.
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Wade was suspended at the tail end of the 2018-19 season after Yahoo Sports detailed a wiretapped conversation between him and now-convicted middleman Christian Dawkins. The conversation recorded by the FBI included Wade openly speaking about a “strong-ass offer” he made in the recruitment of former LSU guard and Baton Rouge native Javonte Smart in 2017.
This specific allegation is outlined in the NOA as the first of the seven charges against the men’s basketball team, and was determined to be a Level I violation. In the charge, the Complex Case Unit wrote in this instance Wade “violated the principles of ethical conduct and/or offered impermissible recruiting inducements in the form of cash payments and job offers in order to secure” an unnamed recruit, who is believed to be Smart.
Nino Giarratano out as baseball coach at the University of San Francisco. This is tied to a lawsuit by three former players accusing him of “persistent psychological abuse and repeated inappropriate sexual conduct”.
Tom Crean out as basketball coach of the Georgia Bulldogs. This one seems to have actually been a performance thing: he was 47-75 over four seasons, and they finished 6-26 this year.
Obit watch: March 12, 2022.
March 12th, 2022Dr. Donald Pinkel, big damn hero, has passed away at 95.
About 23 years ago, I was watching some sort of special on PBS. I don’t remember the title, but as I recall, they were talking about developments during the 20th century. One of the things they spent a lot of time on was the story of childhood leukemia.
There were drugs that could push leukemia into temporary remission. Emphasis on the “temporary”. It always came back.
Dr. Pinkel combined multiple chemotherapy drugs to drive the disease into remission. Then, when the patients were healthy enough, he and his team bombarded their skulls with radiation and injected drugs directly into their spinal columns, attacking places where Dr. Pinkel suspected the cancer was hiding during remission.
This would go one for months, even years. Children would lose their hair, their appetites. Some died. But by 1968 Dr. Pinkel’s regimen, which he called Total Therapy, was achieving remarkable results: Out of 31 patients in one study, 20 were in complete remission after three and a half years.
A decade later, after continued refinements to the protocol, the five-year survival rate was up to 80 percent. Today, still using Dr. Pinkel’s framework, it is 94 percent.
I realize we’re talking 60 years of scientific advancement here. But to me, this is still an amazing story. Turning things around from “everybody dies” to (almost) “everybody lives”. And going from zero to 80% in sixteen years?
Beyond that, Dr. Pinkel also helped build St. Jude.
One day in 1961 Dr. Pinkel got a call asking if he would be interested in a job as the head of St. Jude. During a period of emotional and professional distress, Mr. Thomas, the hospital’s founder, had prayed to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, for help. When he recovered, he decided to build a hospital to help children in similarly dire straits.
Dr. Pinkel was tired of the cold, wet Buffalo winters, but he wasn’t sure about the offer: Memphis was a segregated Southern city, and many in the medical community said Mr. Thomas’s status as a television comedian made it hard to take the idea seriously.
Still, he met with several members of the hospital board and came away impressed. They, like him, believed in focusing their efforts on childhood cancer, and they agreed that the hospital should be need-blind, and that both its staff and its patient population should be completely desegregated.
Dr. Pinkel drove to Memphis in his Volkswagen Beetle, arriving to find a hole in the ground where the hospital would one day be. He made himself an integral part of the planning process, insisting, among other things, that the hospital have integrated bathrooms.
He also insisted on as much common space as possible, including a single cafeteria for all —- doctors, scientists and administrators — to encourage creative cross-pollination. He also opened the cafeteria to patients and their families, to give staff members a visual reminder of their collective mission.
“It was a civil rights culture,” Jackie Dulle, one of his first executive assistants, said in a phone interview. “He wanted everyone to be equal.”
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Dr. Pinkel and his team found early success with his Total Therapy approach but kept the results unpublished until the late 1960s, to ensure that the data was solid. Still, when he did publicize his findings, he was met with skepticism, even derision; other doctors said he was cruel to give patients and their families hope in the face of what everyone knew was an incurable disease.
But after he invited a few of his most prominent critics to visit the hospital, they changed their tune; one of them, Alvin Mauer of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, took over as the president of St. Jude when Dr. Pinkel left.
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Random Sherlock Holmes crankery.
March 11th, 2022I do buy books that are not gun books. As a matter of fact, I’m quite fond of Sherlock Holmes. I don’t expect an invitation to join the Baker Street Irregulars, but I have both annotated versions of Holmes, and I enjoy reading about Holmes, Doyle, and related subjects.
I picked up two Holmes related books recently. One purchase was prompted by a Doyle-related book I recently finished, while the other was a word-of-mouth purchase. Since this is kind of long, I will put a jump here. For those who are not interested in bibliophilia or Holmes, another post should be coming along eventually.
Obit watch: March 11, 2022.
March 11th, 2022Emilio Delgado. He was most famous as “Luis” on “Sesame Street” (for 44 years), but he also did some other work: three of the “Law and Order” shows, a regular role on “Lou Grant”, “Quincy, M.E.”, and the good “Hawaii 5-0”, among other credits.
Elsa Klensch, of “Style With Elsa Klensch”.
Odalis Perez, former pitcher for the Braves and Dodgers (also the Royals and Nationals). He was 44: according to his family, he apparently fell off a ladder at his home.
Bobbie Nelson, sister of Willie Nelson and pianist and singer in his band.
(Hattip on this to FotB RoadRich.)
I think I love soccer now.
March 9th, 2022Actually, no, I still can’t stand soccer.
But this is a fun story.
There was a massive fight at a soccer game between Queretaro and Atlas (who I gather are both teams in the Mexican Liga MX league) on Saturday. 26 people were injured.
Yesterday, punishments were handed down: Queretaro has to play at home with no spectators for one year, barras (supporter’s groups) are banned for three years, the owners were fined 1.5 million pesos ($70,450), and…
…the owners have to sell the team by the end of the year.
Queretaro’s ownership group (Gabriel Solares, Adolfo Ríos, Greg Taylor and Manuel Velarde) will also be banned from league-related activities for five years and the club will be returned to previous owners Grupo Caliente, which owns fellow Liga MX club Tijuana…
Grupo Caliente will be tasked with selling Queretaro by the end of this year, and if unable to do so, it will go under the ownership of Liga MX.
I’ve never heard of an owner being forced to sell a team before. I guess it may have happened in the past, but I’m not aware of it. MLB may have come close with Marge Schott, but they never actually pulled the trigger.
Edited to add: Mike the Musicologist cites Donald Sterling as a possible “forced to sell the team” owner. I’m going to give him the win on points for two reasons. First of all, I’m impressed that he remembered Donald Sterling: if there is a person who is even less of an NBA fan (or sports fan in general) than I am, it is MtM.
The thing is, it isn’t clear to me that he was actually forced to sell. There were suits and counter-suits, and his wife moved to sell the team – he claimed without his authorization – and it seems like the cases were dismissed before there was any vote or a forced sale by the NBA. All that seems clear is that Sterling’s wife managed to get the team sold off to Steve Ballmer before she was stripped of her ownership interest by league vote.
So even though it isn’t clear to me, my second reason for giving this to MtM on points is that the NBA seems to have come as close as any other sport ever has, and probably ever will (except Liga MX) to forcing an owner to sell a team. Certainly closer than baseball came with Schott.
Also:
Obit watch: March 9, 2022.
March 9th, 2022Conrad Janis, jazz musician and actor.
“Conrad Janis Is Glad to Live Three Lives,” the headline on a 1962 Newsday article read. At the time he was starring in the romantic comedy “Sunday in New York” on Broadway and, after the Friday and Saturday night performances, playing trombone with his group, the Tailgate 5, at Central Plaza in Manhattan. (On Sundays he’d trek to Brooklyn to play at the club Caton Corner.) When not onstage or on the bandstand, he could often be found at his father’s art gallery.
Sixteen years later he found himself on one of the most popular shows on television when he was cast on “Mork & Mindy,” which premiered in September 1978, as the father of Mindy (Pam Dawber), a Colorado woman who befriends an eccentric alien (Robin Williams). On Sundays during this period, he played in the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band at the Ginger Man, a club in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose owners included Carroll O’Connor of “All in the Family.”
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In the movies, he played alongside some famous names: Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in the notoriously bad “That Hagen Girl” (1947), Charlton Heston and other prominent stars in “Airport 1975” (1974), Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker” (1975), George Burns in “Oh God! Book II” (1980).
He was on television from the medium’s earliest days, playing numerous roles in the late 1940s and ’50s, many of them on shows like “Suspense,” “Actor’s Studio” and “The Philco Television Playhouse” that were broadcast live. Some of those roles took advantage of his familiarity with musical instruments.
Among other credits, he did a few cop shows: “Baretta”, “Banacek”, “Cannon”. And he was a regular (“Palindrome”) on “Quark”.
Brief historical note, suitable for use in schools.
March 9th, 2022Today is the 106th anniversary of Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico (also known as the Battle of Columbus).
KXAN has offered us a nice summary of the commemorative events going on in the area.
Short summary: Villa was bouncing around during the revolution, had just lost a battle, and his army was short on everything. He thought it would be a swell idea to do a cross-border raid, especially when he was told there were only about 30 soldiers in Columbus.
There were actually about 350 soldiers in Columbus. Villa sent “about 600” of his people (since he didn’t have enough supplies and ammo for everyone) and his troops had the initial advantage of surprise. However, the American forces rallied and drove off Villa’s forces.
In addition, many of the townspeople were armed with rifles and shotguns.
Armed citizens for the win!
I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve liked Jeff Guinn’s other books, so I’ll mention War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion (affiliate link), which comes out in trade paperback in May.
Obit watch: March 8, 2022.
March 8th, 2022Laurel Goodwin, actress.
She had a somewhat short career, possibly due to bad luck. Her first movie was “Girls! Girls! Girls!” with Elvis. She was in the first (rejected) pilot for a minor 1960s SF TV series, but was cut from the second one. In the meantime, she said she had turned down offers for two successful comedies.
Other credits include “Get Smart”, “The Beverly Hillbillies”, a 1978 TV mini-series based on Dashiell Hammett’s “The Dain Curse”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight”, season 3, episode 5.)
Do you like tossed salad?
March 7th, 2022I broke this obit out into a separate entry because…
…well, to be honest, I forgot I had it in the queue.
But it probably deserves a separate entry, as another one of those obits for a “colorful” newspaper man. He actually kind of sounds like he crossed the border from “colorful” to word that rhymes with “glassbowl”, but I guess some people loved him.
Mike Marley, former sports writer for the NY Post, “but mostly a boxing man unequalled for access, sarcasm, creativity and the ability to dine at the finest restaurants without picking up the check”. He later went on to work with Howard Cosell, and after that became a lawyer.
This is full of great stories, if you like hard-bitten hard-drinking newspaperman stories. There’s the Winter Olympics story. There’s the landlord story.
They don’t make ’em like that any more. And I haven’t made up my mind if this is a bad or a good thing.
Obit watch: March 7, 2022.
March 7th, 2022I was running flat out yesterday from 7 AM to 8:30 PM, so I got a little behind in obits. My apologies.
Mitchell Ryan. THR. Other credits (besides those in the headline) include guest shots on a lot of cop shows (“O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “Cannon”, “Barnaby Jones”), “High Plains Drifter”, “Magnum Force”, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”, and apparently he starred in a series called “Chase” that I’ve never heard of.
Tim Considine. THR. Other credits include “Soldier Who Gets Slapped” in “Patton”, “The Shaggy Dog”, and a guest shot on “Ironside”.
…he made a career as a sports and automobile photographer, writer and author. His books included “The Language of Sport” (1982) and “American Grand Prix Racing” (1997).
Mr. Considine even substituted a couple of times for William Safire, writing the “On Language” column for The New York Times Magazine. He explained how “the first Olympic Games, in 776 B.C., in which a line scratched in the dirt served as the starting point” for some events, led to the expression “start from scratch.”
“Great But Forgotten” did a nice tribute to “The Adventures of Spin and Marty” a while back. The idea of a children’s show where the main characters actually grow and change kind of interests me.
(Shallow rabbit hole about “The Shaggy Dog”, because it came up over the weekend. Lawrence was wondering, and according to Wikipedia (the source of all slightly accurate information), “The Shaggy D.A.” was actually a sequel. There was also a two-part TV movie in 1987, “The Return of the Shaggy Dog”, set at some point between the two movies and starring Gary Kroeger.)
Johnny Brown. Other credits include “The Lost Saucer”, “The Wiz”, “Get Christie Love!”, and he played a character called “Huggy Bear” in an episode of “The Rookies”. (I can’t tell if “Streets of San Francisco” [Edited: D’oh! “Starsky and Hutch”! I blame the fact that my parents wouldn’t let me watch any of these shows.] intended for this to be the same character, but they did use Antonio Fargas instead of Johnny Brown.)
Gary North, economist. I’d heard of him, but I never actually read any of his work.