Multiple people emailed me about this while I was tied up with something else. I usually don’t like to cover breaking obits, but sometimes the story is just too big.
Obit watch: January 26, 2020.
January 26th, 2020Obit watch: January 24, 2020.
January 24th, 2020Carol Serling, Rod Serling’s wife.
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Jo Shishido, Japanese actor.
He was in a whole bunch of Japanese films, including Seijun Suzuki’s “Branded to Kill” and something called “A Colt Is My Passport“. (I can’t lie: I love that title.)
He also played “Captain Joe” in a Japanese TV series called “Star Wolf“. And if that rings a faint (or even not-so-faint) bell for you, I’m so, so sorry: “Star Wolf” was later cut together and dubbed into two movies: “Fugitive Alien” and “Fugitive Alien II“, which, in turn, became MST3K episodes.
(I thought about embedding the forklift song here, but it was Ken, not Captain Joe, that they tried to kill with a forklift.)
Sonny Grosso, legendary NYPD detective. One night, Mr. Grosso and his partner, Eddie Egan…
…out for drinks at the Copacabana nightclub, spotted known drug dealers adulating an unidentified man, whom they later discovered owned a greasy spoon luncheonette in Brooklyn.
They followed him on a hunch, and the trail led to a French smuggler who was shipping 100 pounds of heroin — some of it stolen from a police vault — to the United States. Mr. Grosso determined the magnitude of the cache by weighing the Frenchman’s 1960 Buick Invicta when it arrived by ship and again when it was about to be transported back to France.
At the time, this was a record seizure. And speaking of bells ringing, yes, this was the “French Connection” case. Mr. Grosso’s character was “Buddy Russo” (played by Roy Scheider). (Eddie Egan was, of course, renamed “Popeye Doyle” and played by Gene Hackman, just in case you haven’t seen the movie.)
A product of East Harlem and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Grosso rose to the rank of detective first grade in the New York Police Department faster than any predecessor. He followed his 22 years on the force with a second career as a television producer and consultant for television shows about law enforcement, including “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Night Heat,” and for the movie “The Godfather,” in which he played a detective named Phil.
Until he died, Mr. Grosso carried his off-duty .38-caliber Colt revolver, the very same gun that was taped to the tank of a toilet and fired (using blanks) by Al Pacino in a mob hit in “The Godfather.”
…
Yes, he happened to be a regular at Rao’s, the tiny cliquish eatery on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem that has occasionally had unsavory associations. But it also happens to be a neighborhood hangout, just around the corner from where he was born.
Even there, drama intruded one night before Christmas in 2003, when a patron who objected to the singing of one of Mr. Grosso’s dinner guests was shot dead by another customer.
…
Recalling the crime-ridden city of decades earlier, Mr. Grosso explained how the police, and his partner in particular, had responded to the drug dealing that stoked homicides to record highs.
“It was a war then, and you had to act differently,” he said. “The junk epidemic was bursting out of Harlem.
“That’s why Eddie acted crazier than the people we were chasing. He had one philosophy: ‘It’s our job to put the bad guys in jail; don’t worry about the prosecutors and the judges.’ He was a madman, but he made sure I got home every night.”
“Those days,” Mr. Grosso said a little nostalgically, “we were just allowed to be cops.”
Obit watch: January 23, 2020.
January 23rd, 2020Wow. It got busy up in here all of the sudden.
Jim Lehrer. I feel like I should have more to say about this, but I was only an occasional “NewsHour” watcher. And I think the papers for the next day or so are going to be filled with eulogies that are probably better than I could write.
John Karlen, working actor. He was Willie Loomis on “Dark Shadows” and Lacey’s husband on “Cagney and Lacey”, among his 117 credits…
…which do include “Mannix”. (“Quartet for Blunt Instrument”, season 8, episode 19. He was “Hood #1”.)
Jack Kehoe, who never did “Mannix”, but was the “Erie Kid” in “The Sting”, the book keeper in “The Untouchables” (the DePalma one) and had roles in “Serpico”, “Melvin and Howard”, and a bunch of other films.
Jack Van Impe, televangelist.
Mr. Van Impe promoted a view of the end of the world known in evangelical circles as dispensational premillennialism, which teaches that Christians will be raptured, or taken up to heaven, before a period of tribulation, a final battle called Armageddon and the return and rule of Jesus on earth.
His sermons had titles like “The Coming War with Russia, According to the Bible. Where? When? Why?” (In that sermon he warned of a coming world dictator and a Russian invasion of Israel.) In his final broadcast, on Jan. 10, he discussed relations between the United States and Iran and predicted “the bloodiest war in the world,” saying it would result mostly in the deaths of “Muslim terrorists.”
Obit watch: January 22, 2020.
January 22nd, 2020I’m slightly behind the curve on the Terry Jones obits because my office is like Australia at the moment. (Everything’s on fire.)
This is actually a good thing, as Borepatch has a much better obit up than I could have written.
I rather liked this:
There were camps and alliances within the Pythons. Mr. Jones generally wrote with Mr. Palin. He was said not to get along with Mr. Cleese, although he shrugged off such claims.
“I only threw a chair at John once,” he told Vice in 2008. In a different interview his recollection was “John Cleese only threw a chair at me once.”
And now for something completely different: Egil Krogh, one of Nixon’s “Plumbers”.
In November 1973, Mr. Krogh, known as Bud, pleaded guilty to “conspiracy against rights of citizens” for his role in the September 1971 break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding in Beverly Hills, Calif.
The Plumbers, a group of White House operatives, were tasked with plugging leaks of confidential material, which had bedeviled the Nixon administration. Mr. Ellsberg, a military analyst, had been responsible for the biggest leak of all: passing the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret government history of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times earlier that year.
The Plumbers were hoping to get information about Mr. Ellsberg’s mental state that would discredit him, but they found nothing of importance related to him.
…
He was the first member of the president’s staff to receive a prison sentence; he was given two to six years but was released after four and a half months.
Mr. Krogh was disbarred in 1975 but was readmitted to the bar in 1980. Thereafter he concentrated on issues and clients related to energy.
Historical side note: Mr. Krogh was also an advisor to Nixon on drug policy…and, in that capacity, he arranged the legendary December 21, 1970 meeting between the president and Elvis Presley.
Obit watch: January 20, 2020.
January 20th, 2020Edith Kunhardt Davis, author (mostly of children’s books). I hadn’t heard of her before the NYT published her obit, but this is a kind of sad story that’s worth noting here.
Her mother was Dorothy Kunhardt, who also wrote children’s books, most famously Pat the Bunny.
Some of her books were Pat spinoffs, but she wrote originals too.
Dorothy Kunhardt revered Abraham Lincoln, a passion she inherited from her father, Frederick Hill Meserve. Their house in Morristown was filled with Lincoln and Civil War memorabilia. Over the decades, Philip Kunhardt amassed one of America’s greatest private Lincoln collections, with about 73,000 items, including a snippet of Lincoln’s hair.
Five generations of the family have been absorbed by Lincoln, and many of its members, including Dorothy Kunhardt, wrote books about him. On a trip to Springfield, Ill., she bought lamps from the parlor where Lincoln was married and used them to light her own house. Little wonder that Edith eventually wrote her own account, a children’s book titled “Honest Abe” (1993).
The sad part is that Ms. Davis was an alcoholic until 1973, when she got sober and began writing in earnest. She had a son, Edward, while she was drinking:
And long after she had become sober, she was confronted with the possibility that her excessive drinking while she was pregnant had led to the death of her son when he was 27.
His death, from heart disease, in 1990 became the subject of Ms. Davis’s 1995 memoir, “I’ll Love You Forever, Anyway.” An account of her grief made all the more anguishing by her guilt, it stood in stark contrast to the cheerful children’s tales for which she was known.
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Oh, those Texans…
January 20th, 2020Even though Houston teams will always break your heart, I thought the Texans did pretty well this year: they went to the playoffs, they beat the worthless Buffalo Bills, and while they lost in the divisional round, it was to Kansas City (who seems unstoppable).
But that wasn’t well enough for some people. Lawrence tipped me off that Chris Olsen (senior vice president of football administration) and John Pagano, outside linebackers coach, were shown the door.
In addition, defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel got replaced by defensive line coach Anthony Weaver.
Obit watch: January 18, 2020.
January 18th, 2020Marion Chesney, writer. She was best known for the mysteries she wrote as “M.C. Beaton”.
For the historical record: Christopher Tolkien.
Roger Scruton, English conservative intellectual. I’m not very familiar with his work, but Rod Dreher has written extensively about him.
… it caused me to think long and hard about Europe and its destiny, about Communism and about the human soul, which seems to live on in secret, even when its very existence has been denied as it was denied by Communism. In the Czech lands, I sensed the presence all around me of a dark, impersonal force, a controlling and all-observing eye whose goal was to plant suspicion and fear in the heart of every human relationship.
You could trace this force to no specific person, to no office or authority. It was just there, an invisible wall between all who sought to escape.
I had no name for this dark force, other than ‘It’ – a kind of negation of humanity. From behind the first stirrings of friendship or love, It lay in wait to reduce the flame to ashes. Always, when I stepped on the plane home, I felt I was escaping the grip of this alien force, and returning to a place where fear, suspicion and denunciation had no power over ordinary human decency.
Fallout II, Mets 0.
January 16th, 2020Don’t have a lot of time for this right now (I’m stealing five minutes from work), but: Carlos Beltran out as Mets manager.
This seems to be being spun as a resignation, or a mutual decision, rather than an out and out firing.
Obit watch: January 16, 2020.
January 16th, 2020Gladys Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain’s mom.
Anthony Bourdain became a hard-living chef, and in the late 1990s he wrote an article chronicling the seamier secrets of life in the restaurant business. He was struggling to publish it in 1999 when Ms. Bourdain mentioned to him that she knew a Times reporter, Esther Fein, who was married to David Remnick, the newly minted editor of The New Yorker magazine.
“She came over, and she said, ‘You know, your husband’s got this new job,’” Ms. Fein (who left The Times in 1999) said on Monday. “‘I hate to sound like a pushy mom, but I’m telling you this with my editor’s hat on, not my mother’s hat on. It’s really good, and it’s really interesting, but nobody will look at it, nobody will call him back or give it a second look. Could you put it in your husband’s hands?’”
Ms. Fein persuaded Mr. Remnick to read the article, and The New Yorker published it under the title “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” Mr. Bourdain later said that he had a book deal in a matter of days after that.
Matty Maher, of McSorley’s Old Ale House.
Mr. Maher, who could trace his career at McSorley’s to a bit of end-of-the-rainbow serendipity in Ireland, began by tending bar at the saloon in 1964 as an Irish immigrant.
He graduated to manager as the beer hall, surrounded by neighborhood blight near the Bowery, tottered at the brink of bankruptcy; survived the loss of a gender discrimination case in 1970 that forced McSorley’s to delete the last two words of its durable slogan vowing “Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies”; and endured a Health Department ordinance that, while it banned smoking, had the unintended consequence, Mr. Maher said, of encouraging customers to drink more.
Gary Starkweather, inventor of the laser printer.
And finally, Nelson Bryant, outdoor writer for the NYT for nearly 40 years.
I know: who knew the paper of record had an outdoor writer? But they did from 1967 to 2005.
Goofus and Gallant.
January 15th, 2020Goofus tells his players to high stick opponents.
Gerald Gallant gets fired by the Las Vegas Golden Knights.
Fallout.
January 15th, 2020The MLB cheating scandal claims another head: Alex Cora out as Red Sox manager.
Cora was a former Astros bench coach, and was implicated in setting up the Astros cheating scheme: MLB has not announced any discipline for him yet, but there are allegations that he also set up a cheating scheme with the 2018 Red Sox.
There’s an interesting piece at ESPN about how other teams are reacting to Rob Manfred’s disciplinary actions:
Multiple ownership-level sources told ESPN that dissatisfaction with the penalties had emerged following a conference call with Manfred, in which he explained how the Astros would be disciplined, then told teams to keep their thoughts to themselves.
“The impression,” one person familiar with the call told ESPN, “was that the penalty for complaining would be more than Houston got.”
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Firings watch.
January 13th, 2020I just got back from the doctor and don’t feel much like extended blogging, but I wanted to get this up:
Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch fired.
This is in the wake of MLB’s findings on the 2017 Astros cheating scandal (they were using video cameras to steal signs: both men have also been suspended by the commissioner for a year.
More from ESPN:
In addition, the Astros lost their first and second round draft picks in 2020 and 2021, and have been fined FIVE! MILLION! DOLLARS!
Obit watch: January 11, 2020.
January 11th, 2020Seriously, yesterday afternoon and last night were incredibly hectic. Let’s start at the top and work our way down.
Neil Peart, drummer for Rush.
Okay, that was a cheat. How about this?
Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman.
Georges Duboeuf, wine guy.
Mr. Duboeuf was already a successful Beaujolais merchant in the 1970s when he set out to mass-market the local tradition of making primeur, a quick, joyous wine born of the year’s new grapes.
Many wine regions enjoyed a similar harvest ritual, a festive local practice among friends and colleagues. Beaujolais was an especially enjoyable wine to drink young. It was fresh and easy in a way that, say, young Bordeaux, with tannins that could be unpleasantly astringent, was not.
A thriving local market existed for the young wine. It expanded to the Paris bistros in the 1950s, when distributors began to compete in a race to see who could deliver the first bottles to the capital.
Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the mid-November day that it became legal to ship the new wine, cartons were loaded onto trucks, and off they went as eager revelers waited. The official release date shifted from year to year, but the authorities eventually settled on the third Thursday of November.
Mr. Duboeuf took this annual race and, through energetic and endless promotion, turned it into much more. He enlisted countless French chefs, restaurants and celebrities to the cause.
A crucial ingredient in the promotion was a dollop of suspense. As the clock struck 12:01, Mr. Duboeuf made sure that cases and cases of the wine were loaded onto trucks, ships and eventually jets for shipment around the world, all duly recorded by cameras. The fact that much of the wine had been shipped in advance was irrelevant to the fun.
“Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé” became an exultant international catchphrase. Television commercials would show the wine being delivered to, by Beaujolais standards, the remotest corners of the earth.
Alasdair Gray, Scottish novelist.
By way of Lawrence, Ken Fuson. Not a particularly famous guy, but this is one of those funny and touching self-written obits.
Harry Hains, actor. (“American Horror Story”, “The OA”.)
Also by way of Lawrence (as was the Harry Haines obit): Shozo Uehara.
Quick flaming hyenas update.
January 11th, 2020Michael Shayne Wolfe, the mayor of Hempstead, Texas, has been officially indicted on one count of “theft of service by a public servant”.
(Previously.)
A quick weather report.
January 10th, 2020They are talking like we’re going to get near apocalyptic rain later on today.
That’s a good thing. Maybe it will wash all this damn dust out of the air.