Obit watch: May 15, 2023.

May 15th, 2023

Doyle Brunson, legendary poker player and a good Texas boy.

The first person to win $1 million in tournament play, Mr. Brunson — nicknamed Texas Dolly — became a star to a new generation when poker became a fixture on television in the 1990s, his cowboy hat and no-nonsense drawl a gentlemanly foil to brash, talkative younger players.

…

Mr. Brunson, whose career in poker began in illegal games in the back rooms of Texas bars, won the World Series of Poker main event, the sport’s most coveted prize, in 1976 and 1977. His total tournament winnings exceeded $6 million.

…

Mr. Brunson was among the three dozen players invited in 1970 to the inaugural World Series of Poker, a name that belied its modest beginnings. The tournament was the brainchild of the casino owner Benny Binion and Jimmy Snyder, then a public relations agent better known as Jimmy the Greek.
The World Series expanded its roster of poker contests to include several variants of the game, but Texas hold ’em remained the most publicized and lucrative event. Mr. Snyder called Mr. Brunson “Texas Doy-lee,” which reporters mistook for Dolly, and the nickname Texas Dolly stuck, though it seemed incongruous for someone who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed well over 250 pounds.
After moving to Las Vegas in 1973 for steadier gambling opportunities, Mr. Brunson won the tournament’s main event in 1976 and 1977, widely viewed as the world championship, earning $560,000 in a winner-take-all format. His 10 World Series bracelets are tied for second behind Phil Hellmuth’s 16.

Bill Oesterle, co-founder of Angie’s List (now just “Angi”). He was 57, and died of complications from ALS.

Semi-obit: Vice Media. They’ve officially filed for bankruptcy, but it is a Chapter 11, they have a $20 million operating loan, and the plan for their lenders (“including Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management”) to buy the company is still on.

“Archer“.

The long-running animated comedy will conclude with its upcoming 14th season.

Posted in Media, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Sun’s Up!

May 14th, 2023

Monty Williams out as head coach of the Phoenix Suns.

In four seasons, Williams posted a 194-115 record in the regular season, 27-19 mark in the playoffs, but had disappointing playoff exits last year and this year.

They lost to the Nuggets in six games this year. They made the finals in 2021, and lost in seven games to Dallas in the semi-finals last year.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 13, 2023.

May 13th, 2023

Hodding Carter III, journalist and aide to Jimmy Carter.

The son of the journalist Hodding Carter Jr., who won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials calling for racial moderation in the old segregated South, Hodding Carter III succeeded his father as editor and publisher of The Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, and as a voice of conscience in a state torn by violence and social change during the struggles of the civil rights era.
But after 5,000 editorials and years of journalistic trench warfare, Mr. Carter took his fight into politics.

…

In the 1976 presidential campaign, Mr. Carter helped engineer a narrow victory in Mississippi for Jimmy Carter, who was no relation, and was rewarded with an appointment as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. As chief spokesman for the State Department, he delivered nuanced statements on foreign policy with candor and wit, and developed a good if sometimes acerbic rapport with the diplomatic press corps.
He became the national face of the Carter administration during the Iranian hostage crisis, which broke on Nov. 4, 1979, when militants took over the United States Embassy in Tehran and seized 52 Americans. Their captivity lasted 444 days — virtually the remainder of President Carter’s single term in office, a tenure ended by a frustrated electorate that chose Ronald Reagan for president in 1980.

…

Colleagues in government and the news media gave Mr. Carter high marks for fielding tough questions on what was known, and not known, of the fate of the Americans. Aside from one episode in which he threw a rubber chicken at a persistent questioner, he coolly conveyed at press briefings the sensitivity of the diplomatic crisis.

I was alive and around during that time, but I do not recall the rubber chicken thing…

Posted in History, Media, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 11, 2023.

May 11th, 2023

Sam Gross, “New Yorker” and “National Lampoon” cartoonist.

And while there are lines of taste that many cartoonists will not cross, Mr. Gross leaped over them, doused them with gasoline and lit them on fire, cackling as he did.
A stiff-legged dog lies on its back next to a blind man holding a sign that says, “I am blind, and my dog is dead.” A gigantic beanstalk grows out of a medieval peasant’s posterior, and another peasant says, “I told you they were magic beans and not to eat them.” Diners sit in front of a sign advertising frogs’ legs in a restaurant as a despondent legless amphibian rolls out of the kitchen. Some of his cartoons can’t be fully described in a family newspaper.

Jacklyn Zeman, actress. Other credits include “Sledge Hammer!”, “Young Doctors In Love”, and “The New Mike Hammer”.

Lisa Montell, actress. She did a lot of TV westerns, but her credits end in 1962. According to her IMDB biography, she went on to become “a spiritual exponent of the Bahá’í faith”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2023.

May 10th, 2023

Joe Kapp, former quarterback for the Vikings.

Kapp tied a single-game National Football League record — one held by several quarterbacks — when he threw seven touchdown passes against the defending league champion, the Baltimore Colts, in September 1969.
He threw 19 touchdown passes during the 1969 regular season, leading the Vikings to the 1970 Super Bowl against the Kansas City Chiefs, the champions of the American Football League, which was in its last season before it merged with the N.F.L. The Vikings, anchored by the Purple People Eaters, a fearsome defensive line with Carl Eller and Jim Marshall at the ends and Alan Page and Gary Larsen at the tackles, were strong favorites, but the Chiefs defeated them, 23-7.

…

Kapp joined the Boston (later New England) Patriots in 1970. The Patriots finished with a 2-12 record, then drafted quarterback Jim Plunkett of Stanford, the Heisman Trophy winner.
Having already been involved in a contract dispute with the Patriots, Kapp refused to sign a standard players contract for the 1971 season and quit the team in July, then filed an antitrust suit against the N.F.L. A jury declined to award him damages, but the case represented an early challenge in the players’ ultimately successful struggle to win free agency rights.

…

Kapp turned to acting after his N.F.L. career ended. He appeared on the TV crime series “Ironside” and had supporting roles in the football-themed movies “The Longest Yard” (1974) and “Semi-Tough” (1977).

IMDB listing.

Denny Crum, former Louisville Cardinals basketball coach.

Nicknamed Cool Hand Luke because of his unflinching sideline demeanor, Crum retired in March 2001 after 30 seasons at Louisville with a record of 675-295 and championships in 1980 and 1986.
A former assistant under the renowned U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden, Crum often wore a red blazer and waved a rolled-up stat sheet like a bandleader’s baton as he directed Louisville to 23 N.C.A.A. tournaments and six Final Fours. He was voted college coach of the year three times.

Lawrence emailed an obit for British actor Terrence Hardiman. Other credits include “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles”, “Midsomer Murders”, and “McLibel!”.

Heather “Dooce” Armstrong, blogger and author.

She was one of the early and influential bloggers, who famously got fired when her employers discovered her blog. (This originated the briefly popular slang term “dooced” for someone who got fired for their online writing.) She evolved into a prominent “mommy blogger”, writing about parenthood, domestic life, and her struggles with mental health, especially post-partum depression.

I used to read her somewhat intermittently, back in the day. I thought she wrote well about mental health issues.

She became sort of a big name in the blogsphere. She had content and sponsorship deals. She even had a short lived deal with HGTV.

By [2009], ads visible to Dooce’s 8.5 million monthly readers made a reported $40,000 for the Armstrongs each month, making it her primary source of income; she began running sponsored content as well…
…Jon joked in 2011 that the traffic from the hate sites had been better for the family business than the birth of their second child two years earlier. By then the revenue from Dooce paid salaries not only to the Armstrongs but an assistant and two full-time babysitters.

She and Jon (her husband) divorced in 2012, and she stopped blogging for a time. When she came back, social media was bigger, and even though she had an Instagram feed, her reach had declined. She also went through an experimental treatment for clinical depression, and a couple of years ago announced she was a recovering alcoholic.

She was 47.

Pete Ashdown, her longtime partner, who found her body in the home, said the cause was suicide.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline. If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

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

Brief loser update.

May 10th, 2023

We are into the baseball season, but not as far in as I would like to be. I sometimes try to post a loser update around the All-Star break.

But I did decide I wanted to throw up a link to this:

“Why the worst MLB teams of 2023 are historically bad“.

There are a lot of stats in the article for you baseball people, but summarizing:

Simply put, it is a real thing and it is very, very unusual in a historical context. We can argue about if it will continue, but for now, this is the reality of the big league competitive landscape: There are some teams playing very badly. There are an usual number of teams playing very badly. And there are an unusually large number of teams playing so badly.

Oakland is currently 8-30, for a winning percentage of .211. That works out to 127 losses this season if trends continue. The 1962 Mets lost 120 games, and the 2003 Tigers lost 119.

Posted in Loser, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 9, 2023.

May 9th, 2023

Bruce McCall, artist.

Borrowing from the advertising style seen in magazines like Life, Look and Collier’s in the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. McCall depicted a luminous fantasyland filled with airplanes, cars and luxury liners of his own creation. It was a world populated by carefree millionaires who expected caviar to be served in the stations of the fictional Fifth Avenue Subway and carwashes to spray their limousines with champagne.
“My work is so personal and so strange that I have to invent my own lexicon for it,” Mr. McCall said in a TED Talk in 2008. He called it “retrofuturism,” which he defined as “looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow.”

…

In 1970, Mr. McCall and his friend Brock Yates, the editor of Car and Driver, invented a series of mythical airplanes, among them the Humbley-Pudge Gallipoli Heavyish Bomber, for which they wrote pseudo-scholarly historical notes. Playboy bought the idea, assigned Mr. McCall to do the illustrations and ran the collaboration in January 1971 under the title “Major Howdy Bixby’s Album of Forgotten Warbirds.” It went on to win Playboy’s annual humor award.

In addition to “Playboy”, “National Lampoon”, and the “New Yorker”, he was briefly a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and also did work for “Car and Driver”. Lawrence sent over an obit from that august publication.

Posted in Art, Obits | 1 Comment »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#106 in a series)

May 9th, 2023

This story snuck up on me, which is why I haven’t covered it before today. It has nothing to do with the protagonist being a Republican: as I have said before, I am an equal opportunity observer of hyenas on fire.

Bryan Slaton (R-Royse City) resigned from the Texas House yesterday.

His resignation came one step ahead of his being expelled from the House, in what appears to be a massive bi-partisan consensus that he needed to go.

So what the heck happened? Former Rep. Slaton apparently plied one of his aides, a 19-year old woman, with rum and cokes until she was drunk. Then he had sex with her.

On Sunday, the Texas House Freedom Caucus, a group that includes some of the most socially conservative lawmakers in the chamber who are usually politically aligned with Slaton, also called for his resignation.
“The abhorrent behavior described in the report requires clear and strong action,” the caucus said in a statement. “He should resign. If he does not, we will vote to expel him Tuesday.”
Later that night, 36 members of the 62–member State Republican Executive Committee, party activists who help set the agenda for the party, also called for his resignation, calling his conduct “wrong and unacceptable.” They were joined by the party’s vice chair, Dana Myers, and secretary Vergel Cruz. Three more committee members who could not be reached Sunday night added their names to the call for resignation Monday morning.

More from KVUE, which does not appear to be a re-hashed Texas Tribune story (unlike Fox 7 and KXAN). Statesman coverage.

Posted in Law, Politics, Texas | 1 Comment »

Obligatory royals post.

May 8th, 2023

As my mother likes to say, “I stopped caring about the British royal family in 1776.”

However, this Substack piece mildly amused me. My favorite part:

Perhaps the most scandalous coronation took place at the newly completed St Paul’s Cathedral in February 1308. The young queen, Isabella, was the 12-year-old daughter of France’s King Philippe Le Bel, and had inherited her father’s good looks, with thick blonde hair and large blue, unblinking eyes. Her husband, Edward II, was a somewhat boneheaded man of 24 years whose idea of entertainment was watching court fools fall off tables.
It was a fairy tale coronation for the young girl, apart from a plaster wall collapsing, bringing down the high altar and killing a member of the audience, and the fact that her husband was gay and spent the afternoon fondling his lover Piers Gaveston, while ignoring her. Isabella’s two uncles, who had made the trip from France, were furious at the behaviour of their new English in-law, though perhaps not surprised.

Other than that, how was the coronation, Queen Isabella?

(Those with a historical bent may recall that Edward II ended up dying in prison: the unproven legend is that he was murdered by having a red-hot poker shoved up his neither regions.)

Posted in History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 8, 2023.

May 8th, 2023

Vida Blue.

After losing on opening day to the Washington Senators in 1971, Blue, a lefty, reeled off eight wins in a row. In his first dozen games, he threw five complete-game shutouts. By the summer, he was leading baseball in not just shutouts but also wins, strikeouts, complete games and earned-run average.

…

Opposing hitters spoke mystically of how Blue’s fastballs would disappear or jump over their bats. Reporters speculated about why he carried two dimes in his pocket when he pitched, with some suggesting it was a charm to help him win 20 games. Across the country, attendance at his outings swelled to levels that stadiums had not seen in years. Fans of an opposing team, the Detroit Tigers, chanted outside the clubhouse, “We want Vida!”
The A’s appeared in the playoffs for the first time since 1931, ultimately losing to the Baltimore Orioles in the American League Championship. Blue pulled off the feat of winning, in his first full season, both the Cy Young and the Most Valuable Player Awards (beating out his teammate Sal Bando to become the M.V.P.).

…

After the ’71 season, Blue said he should make $115,000. Finley countered with $50,000 and made the dispute public. Blue held a news conference and declared that he would retire from sports to become a vice president for public relations at a steel company.
Ultimately, Blue and Finley settled on $63,150.

…

Blue went on to cement a reputation as a standout regular season pitcher, recording 20 or more wins in three of his first five seasons. He was a contributor to the A’s subsequent success in the playoffs.

…

In 1983, as a pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, Blue and several of his teammates were questioned as part of a federal cocaine inquiry. He pleaded guilty to possession of the drug, leading to 81 days in prison and a yearlong suspension from baseball.

Newton N. Minow. Some of you may recall that name: he was a former chairman of the FCC who, in 1961, gave a famous speech:

“Stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you, and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off,” Mr. Minow said. “I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”
The audience sat aghast as he went on:
“You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom.”
He added, “If you think I exaggerate, try it.”

…

But the networks — still recovering from the payola and quiz show scandals of the 1950s — contended that they were only giving the public what it wanted, and an NBC special about Mr. Minow’s hearings appeared to bear them out. The program attracted only a small audience and was swamped by ratings for the western “Maverick” on ABC and the talking-horse sitcom “Mister Ed” on CBS.

…

Mr. Minow also pushed legislation that opened the era of satellite communications. It fostered the creation, by a consortium of interests, of the Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat), and later the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat); both allowed the United States to dominate satellite communications in the 1960s and ’70s, and it ultimately led to greater program diversity.

Bill Saluga. You may not recognize the name, but those of a certain age will recognize his most famous character: Raymond J. Johnson Jr.

Posted in Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#105 in a series)

May 5th, 2023

Kimberly M. Gardner, the head prosecutor (“Circuit Attorney”) in St. Louis, resigned yesterday.

In a letter addressed to Gov. Mike Parson, Gardner made no mention of the turmoil in her office nor the extensive staff departures in recent weeks. Instead, she said she was stepping down, effective June 1, to prevent the state Legislature from passing a bill that would strip her of most of her power and “permanently remove the right of every St. Louis voter to elect their Circuit Attorney.”

The Attorney General of Missouri was (and still is) suing to force her removal from office..

It sounds like she was…not good. There were large numbers of resignations among her staff: “…leaving her with half the number of attorneys as when she took office”. (She was elected in 2017, and re-elected in 2020.)

There were also other issues:

…about a year into office, she indicted sitting Gov. Eric Greitens for taking a partially nude photo of a woman in a Central West End basement without her consent. But charges were eventually dropped, an investigator she hired pleaded guilty in federal court to concealing documents in the case, and Gardner herself was reprimanded by the Missouri Supreme Court and forced to pay a $750 fee in an ethics case over her office’s mishandling of evidence.
She continued to face public scrutiny over her “exclusion list” of St. Louis police officers, whose work she didn’t trust, and also for her decision to charge a Central West End couple with brandishing guns at racial justice protesters.

…

Then in February, the scandals intensified when a car speeding through downtown streets crashed, pinning between two vehicles a teen visiting St. Louis for a volleyball tournament, and leading to the amputation of both of her legs. The car’s driver, Daniel Riley, had remained free after court delays, despite violating his bond dozens of times.

…

Then, last week, a St. Louis judge found there was evidence Gardner should be held in contempt of court for failing to show up for a pair of court dates in an assault case. Bailey’s lawsuit cleared its first legal hurdle. And state senators announced they would debate a bill stripping Gardner of most of her power.

…

…on Thursday, city officials, attorneys and former staffers said Gardner had to leave.
Prominent St. Louis defense attorney Scott Rosenblum called her leadership untenable.
“This was overdue,” he said. “The office was running amok.”
Former assistant prosecutor Natalia Ogurkiewicz, who quit last month, blasted Gardner for taking “the easy way out.” She wanted to see what Bailey would uncover in trial.
“She asked for this fight and then she backed down so that the information would not get out, and the people in the city, the countless lives that she has ruined with all of this, they all deserve to have these answers,” she said.

(Hattip on this to Mike the Musicologist, who has been feeding me links to this story.)

Edited to add: while I generally prefer local news sources when I can get them, I think this NYT story is a good basic primer on the Gardner situation.

Also, I’m putting this here as a sub-story, since I don’t think Andrew Gillum counts as a tax-fattened hyena any longer:

A federal jury acquitted Andrew Gillum, the Democrat who lost the 2018 Florida governor’s race to Ron DeSantis, of lying to the F.B.I. on Thursday. But jurors failed to reach a verdict on charges related to whether Mr. Gillum and a close associate diverted campaign funds when Mr. Gillum was running for governor.
After more than four days of deliberation, the 12-member jury said it had reached agreement only on the charge that Mr. Gillum made false statements when the F.B.I. interviewed him in 2017. Judge Allen C. Winsor of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee declared a mistrial on one conspiracy charge and 17 fraud charges against Mr. Gillum and Sharon Lettman-Hicks.

He can still be tried again on the charges where the jury did not reach a verdict.

Posted in Law, Politics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 5, 2023.

May 5th, 2023

Katie Cotton, former Apple PR head.

“She was formidable and tough and very protective of both Apple’s brand and Steve, particularly when he got sick,” Walt Mossberg, a former technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, said in a phone interview, referring to Mr. Jobs’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2004. He added: “She was one of the few people he trusted implicitly. He listened to her. She could pull him back from something he intended to do or say.”

…

Ms. Cotton also chose which reporters could speak to Mr. Jobs (even though he would occasionally speak, on his own, to journalists he knew well). In 1997 she invited a Newsweek reporter, Katie Hafner, to watch the first commercial in Apple’s new “Think Different” advertising campaign, along with Mr. Jobs.
A tribute to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels and the troublemakers,” a narrator intoned as the commercial opened with a still picture of Mr. Jobs holding an apple in his left hand and continued with clips of people who changed the world, among them Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, John Lennon, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Edison and Muhammad Ali.
“I looked over and Steve was crying,” Ms. Hafner, who wrote about Apple for Newsweek and later for The New York Times, said in a phone interview. “I looked at Katie and I couldn’t tell if she was moved or feeling triumphant — I don’t know — but I was filled with admiration for her, because she knew how to play this and to give me access.”
Richard Stengel, a former managing editor of Time magazine, said in an email that Mr. Jobs “would call me five or six times in a day to tell me I should do a story or not,” and that Ms. Cotton would “frequently call right after and gently apologize or pull back something he had said.” He added, “She was very loyal, but she saw him in an unvarnished way.”

She was 57.

Posted in Apple, Obits | Comments Closed

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