Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: January 31, 2025.

Friday, January 31st, 2025

Dick Button, figure skating guy. I’ve never been a big skating fan, but I remember Mr. Button from when I was young and actually watched some of the Olympics.

An Emmy winner, Button taught generations of TV audiences the nuances of triple toe loops, lutzes and axels and how judges assess a skater’s performance. But many fans might not have known that he was a two-time Olympic gold medalist himself, advancing modern figure skating in the late 1940s and early ’50s with his dazzling leaps and spins, including the first triple jump in competition.

Marianne Faithfull. THR.

Iris Cummings Critchell. She was 104.

She competed as a swimmer in the 1936 Summer Olympics, and was the last surviving member of the American team.

While Iris didn’t win a medal at the 1936 Olympics, she went on to capture three national 200-meter breaststroke titles. But after the 1940 Olympics in wartime Tokyo were canceled, she put competitive swimming aside in favor of another passion that would hold her interest for the rest of her life: flying.

She flew with the Woman’s Air Force Service Pilots, ferrying planes across the country for shipping overseas.

After the war, Ms. Critchell received a bachelor’s degree with a concentration in science and mathematics from the University of Southern California, where she went on to teach aviation — an uncommon accomplishment for a woman at the time.

…

In 1962, she and Mr. [Howard] Critchell [her husband – DB], who was working as a commercial pilot for Western Airlines, began teaching in the Bates Foundation Aeronautics Program at Harvey Mudd College, where their students included the future astronauts George Nelson and Stanley G. Love. Ms. Critchell ran the program on her own after Mr. Critchell retired from teaching in 1979. When the program was shut down in 1990, she remained affiliated with the college, lecturing and working as a librarian there.

…

In addition to her work at Harvey Mudd College, Ms. Critchell created aviation outreach programs for public high schools, developed manuals for the Federal Aviation Administration and worked as a pilot examiner there for more than 20 years. She was a longtime member of the Ninety-Nines, a nonprofit organization supporting female pilots.
She also competed in women’s transcontinental air races, known informally as the Powder Puff Derby, a term coined by Will Rogers. In 1957, she finished first in a race to Philadelphia from San Mateo, Calif., sharing an $800 prize with her co-pilot, Alice Roberts.

Posted in History, Music, Nazis, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 28, 2025.

Tuesday, January 28th, 2025

The California Historical Society.

The society, a private nonprofit organization established in 1871 and designated the state’s official historical society in 1979, is one of California’s oldest historical organizations. But unusually among state historical societies, its leadership said, it received no regular state funding, which left if vulnerable to the vagaries of private donations.

…

The society’s treasures include the Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing, which features books, pamphlets, product labels, trade catalogs and other items produced in the American West between 1802 and 2001. The society also holds the archives of many organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the California Flower Market, Inc., founded by Japanese American flower merchants in 1912.

…

In 2016, it was tapped by the city of San Francisco as its lead partner for a potential restoration of the Old United States Mint in downtown San Francisco, one of the few structures to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire. But restoration of the building, which had been largely unused for decades, was deemed prohibitively expensive.

I think that would have been a very cool thing to tour. But I understand the cost.

In early 2020, the group announced a new strategic plan that involved selling its 20,000-square-foot building near Union Square and using the proceeds to support traveling shows and partnerships with smaller organizations around the state. But that effort was thwarted by the pandemic and downturn in San Francisco’s real estate market, as well as the unexpected death in 2022 of Alicia L. Goehring, the executive director and chief executive who helped formulate the plan.

It might have been smarter to build a dedicated historical museum in some place like the state capital. But that’s just my opinion.

In 2022, Gonzalez said, the group requested a one-time grant of $12 million to support a partnership with the University of California, Riverside, which would have involved collaborating with Native American tribes to bring historical projects to underserved parts of the state.
The request was rejected. “The legislature gave us the same answer we heard from philanthropic organizations: This sounds like something a university should be doing,” Gonzalez said.

Wait, wait: the California legislature rejected a proposal to spend taxpayer money?

This actually makes me kind of sad. I like state historical societies, and I hate to see one fall apart like this.

But: their collections and archives are being transferred to Stanford University. I guess the school is now the de facto historical society, and that may not be such a bad thing overall.

Posted in California Über Alles, History, Museums, Obits | 1 Comment »

Tomorrow is promised to nobody, so keep your eyes open.

Monday, January 27th, 2025

An errant weight thrown by a competitor struck and killed a spectator at a youth track and field meet in Colorado, according to officials at the university where the competition was held.
The hammer — a heavy ball on a chain — in the hammer throw event cleared certified barriers before striking the man Sunday morning at the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus, according to a university statement.

(Previously on WCD.)

Posted in Obits, Sports | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 27, 2025.

Monday, January 27th, 2025

Jan Shepard, actress.

Other credits include a lot of TV westerns, “Highway Patrol”, “The F.B.I.”, “G.E. True“, “TV Reader’s Digest” (????)…

…and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit“, season 1, episode 20. She was “Rose”.)

Arthur Blessitt. He was a preacher in LA in the late 1960s, and ran “a Christian coffeehouse adjacent to a strip club”.

“Like, if you want to get high, you don’t have to drop acid. Just pray and you go all the way to Heaven,” he wrote in “Life’s Greatest Trip” (1970), one of his many religious tracts. “You don’t have to pop pills to get loaded. Just drop a little Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.”

One day, he heard God telling him to carry a cross on foot from Los Angeles…to New York City. So he did. But that was just the start.

It took him six months to walk across the country. When he was done, he returned to Los Angeles, only to receive — in his telling — orders from Jesus to take his journey global.
“Go!” Jesus told him, he recounted on his website. “I want you to go all the way.”

…

Mr. Blessitt kept meticulous notes abroad, detailing how long his boot soles lasted (about 500 miles) and how often he was arrested (24 times). He visited every continent, including Antarctica, as well as war zones, disaster zones and many other places where he was liable to get shot at, beaten or arrested.
He climbed Mount Fuji in Japan, confronted angry baboons in Kenya and was nearly blown up by a terrorist bomb in Northern Ireland — all while carrying his cross. He is listed in Guinness World Records for the “longest ongoing pilgrimage.”
It took him nearly 40 years, but in 2008 he completed his quest to visit every country when he was permitted to enter the last, North Korea. His “trek” there was largely symbolic: Authorities let him carry his cross from the front door of his hotel to the street and back.

…

His decades-long campaign made him a minor celebrity. Profiles invariably zeroed in on his combination of dogged perseverance and an aw-shucks approach to his task.
“You’d be amazed,” he told People magazine in 1978, “how much attention a man carrying a big wooden cross gets.”

Posted in Elvis, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Religion, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 24, 2025.

Friday, January 24th, 2025

Aaron De Groft. I don’t think many people will recognize the name, but his story allows me to indulge one of this blog’s interests: art crime.

Mr. De Groft was the director of the Orlando Museum of Art.

In February 2022, the Orlando Museum of Art opened a blockbuster exhibition of 25 paintings that Mr. [Jean-Michel] Basquiat was said to have created in 1982, when he was 22 and living in Venice, Calif.
Mr. De Groft said that Mr. Basquiat had sold the artworks, most of them painted and drawn on slabs of cardboard, for $5,000 in cash, and that they had languished for decades in a Los Angeles storage unit. In 2012, Mr. De Groft said, the storage unit was foreclosed for lack of payment and the contents auctioned off. A little-known dealer purchased the artworks for about $15,000.

Mr. Basquiat is a big deal in the art world, and this was a major coup for the musuem.

At the time of the exhibition, they were said to be worth nearly $100 million. Some museum staff members raised concerns about their authenticity but were rebuffed by the museum’s board chairwoman and threatened by Mr. De Groft with termination if they publicly aired their skepticism.

Hmmmm. Hmmmm hmmmm hmmm. Hmmm.

Days after the exhibit opened, The New York Times published an article raising questions about the paintings. The article noted doubts expressed by several curators, and reported that one of the paintings was made on a piece of cardboard shipping material containing a printed FedEx typeface not used by that company until 1994 — six years after Mr. Basquiat’s death and 12 years after Mr. De Groft and the painting’s owners said the painting was made.
The F.B.I. raided the museum four months later, confiscating all 25 works. An affidavit revealed that the bureau had been investigating the artworks and their owners for a decade.

Hmmm!

Mr. De Groft was fired. The museum sued him.

After the Basquiat exhibit was shut down, a Los Angeles auctioneer admitted to the F.B.I. that he had helped create the faux Basquiats in 2012, some in as little as five minutes.
Mr. De Groft countersued the museum for wrongful termination, calling their claims a “public relations stunt intended to save face.” He still insisted that the Basquiats were genuine.
He said the artworks’ owners had commissioned a forensic investigation by a handwriting expert, who identified the signatures on many of the paintings as being Mr. Basquiat’s. He also cited an analysis by a Basquiat expert — since disavowed — and statements by a member of the Basquiat estate’s now-defunct authentication committee, who found the paintings to be genuine.

The status of the lawsuits is unclear. The Wikipedia section in Basquiat’s entry on “Forgeries” is interesting.

Jack De Mave, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “The Fugitive” (the original), “Adam-12”, and an uncredited role in “1776”.

Posted in Art, Law, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 22, 2025.

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025

Jules Feiffer, artist. He was perhaps most famous as a cartoonist for the “Village Voice”, but he also did some movie and theater work.

In the mid-1950s, Norton Juster, a neighbor of Mr. Feiffer’s in Brooklyn, invited him to illustrate a children’s book he was writing, “The Phantom Tollbooth.” An ingenious kaleidoscope of wordplay arguably akin in style to Lewis Carroll, the book, published in 1961, was an instant hit.

…

Around 1980, the movie producer Robert Evans recruited Mr. Feiffer to write the screenplay for Robert Altman’s “Popeye.” Mr. Feiffer patterned his script after the Segar newspaper strip, not the animated adaptations made by the Fleischer brothers in the 1930s and ’40s. When E.C. Segar’s daughter saw the movie, Mr. Feiffer told The Comics Journal in 1988, she called to tell him that he had captured the essence of her father’s creation — at which, Mr. Feiffer added, he cried. Though it met a mixed critical reaction, the film, starring Robin Williams as Popeye and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, was a hit.

…

In May 1997, Mr. Feiffer ended his affiliation with The Village Voice over a salary dispute. “It’s not that I’ve slipped,” he said at the time. “It’s that I’m too expensive.” (In April 2008, he returned for a one-shot, full-page take on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.)
Later in life he derived great pleasure from writing and drawing children’s books, some in collaboration with his daughter Kate, among them “The Man in the Ceiling” (1993), “Bark, George” (1999), “By the Side of the Road” (2002), “The Daddy Mountain” (2004) and “A Room With a Zoo” (2005). A 2010 reunion project with Mr. Juster, “The Odious Ogre,” was warmly reviewed.

Garth Hudson, of the Band.

During its peak, the Band was famously a collaborative operation informed by the songwriting and barbed guitar playing of Robbie Robertson and the soulful singing and musicianship of Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. But critics and his fellow band members agreed that Mr. Hudson played an essential role in raising the group to another level entirely.
Mr. Robertson, quoted in Barney Hoskyns’s 1993 book, “The Band: Across the Great Divide,” called him “far and away the most advanced musician in rock ’n’ roll.” “He could just as easily have played with John Coltrane or the New York Symphony Orchestra as with us,” Mr. Robertson said.

Posted in Media, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 18, 2025.

Saturday, January 18th, 2025

Jean Jennings, automotive writer. I remember her from back in the day when I was reading Car and Driver (she went by Jean Lindamood at the time).

Mrs. Jennings was hired at Car and Driver by David E. Davis Jr., a renowned figure in automotive journalism. In 1986, he took her with him after Rupert Murdoch offered to support a new type of car magazine, Automobile, which was aimed at more discerning readers and featured writers like P.J. O’Rourke, David Halberstam and Jim Harrison. Mrs. Jennings proved more than capable of keeping up with them.
“She and David were the only ones writing anything other than fanboy notes,” Kathleen Hamilton, a childhood friend who later worked for her at Automobile, said in an interview. “It was enthusiast writing, and she brought adventure to the car-world reader.”

I sort of halfway read “Automobile”, by which I mean I mostly thumbed through it on the newsstands but never bought an issue. I think I had checked out of the car magazine scene by the time she became Mrs. Jennings.

She was 70, which seems awfully young to me these days. Alzheimer’s got her.

Posted in Cars, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 17, 2025.

Friday, January 17th, 2025

As promised, David Lynch. NYT. This is the same THR obit link from yesterday, but I think they’ve substantially updated it since I originally posted.

David Lynch PSA for the New York City Department of Sanitation. (Hattip: NYPost.)

Roger Ebert’s one-star review of “Blue Velvet”.

Joan Plowright, actress. IMDB. I feel bad that I don’t have more to say about here, but I just don’t.

Nathalie Dupree, cookbook author and personality. She’s actually someone I’d heard of, but didn’t really have a lot of context for. The obit makes it sound like she would have been a fun person to know, more so in her Diet Coke days.

Ms. Dupree had a particular blend of Southern hospitality and risqué charm. Over the course of her career she was called “the Julia Child of the South,” “the queen of Southern cooking” and “the anti-Martha Stewart.”
She shocked the host Katie Couric by ending an elegant entertaining segment on the “Today” show, in which she prepared an entire pork crown roast, by presenting a supermarket chocolate cake. She filmed episodes of her television show with a red AIDS ribbon pinned to her apron, a bold move in the 1980s, when conservative suburban women made up much of her audience.
“She is one of the few people in my life who seems more like a fictional character than a flesh-and-blood person,” the novelist Pat Conroy wrote in “The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life” (2009), after taking one of Ms. Dupree’s classes. “You never know where Nathalie is going with a train of thought; you simply know that the train will not be on time, will carry many passengers and will eventually collide with a food truck stalled somewhere down the line on damaged tracks.”

…

Her early television shows, orchestrated solely by Ms. Graubart, were sponsored by a Southern flour company. Ms. Dupree wanted the kitchen segments to run with no edits. With a smear of flour on her face, she might leave ingredients half prepared or forget to add them altogether. She wiped her hands on her apron a lot and once searched around for her diamond ring that had fallen off as she cooked.
“Whatever happens to me is going to happen to you,” she’d tell audiences after a mistake.
“She was a hot mess, and that’s what people loved her for,” Ms. Graubart, who coauthored “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” in 2012 with Ms. Dupree, said in a phone interview.

Posted in Food, Movies, Obits, Theatre | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 16, 2025.

Thursday, January 16th, 2025

This is breaking news, but: David Lynch. I wouldn’t ordinarily post anything this early, but I happened to be writing this obit watch when the news broke. Expect more tomorrow.

Bob Uecker. ESPN. IMDB. Baseball Reference.

Uecker proved himself undistinguished during his six seasons as a major leaguer in the 1960s. He eked out a career batting average of just .197, hit 14 home runs and drove in 74 runs. A career reserve player, he never started more than 62 games in a season for the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves, the St. Louis Cardinals or the Philadelphia Phillies.

“Anybody with ability can play in the big leagues,” he once said. “But to be able to trick people year in and year out the way I did, I think that was a much greater feat.”

The sight of Uecker perched at such a distance became so much a part of his image that, in 2014, a statue of him was installed in the faraway reaches of the upper deck of Miller Park in Milwaukee.

“I can’t think of a better place to put it,” he said. “It’s great for the fans and even better for the pigeons.”

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

Obit watch: January 13, 2025.

Monday, January 13th, 2025

Leslie Charleson, actress.

Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “Emergency!”, “Search”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Chance at the Roses”, season 3, episode 16.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 11, 2025.

Saturday, January 11th, 2025

Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave.

At their peak in the 1960s, Sam & Dave churned out rhythm-and-blues hits with a regularity rivaled by few other performers. When “Soul Man” topped the R&B charts and crossed over to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1967 (it also won a Grammy), its success helped open doors for other Black acts to connect with white audiences.
Sam & Dave’s live shows were so kinetic — they were known as the Sultans of Sweat and Double Dynamite — that even as charismatic a performer as Otis Redding was hesitant to be on the bill with them, for fear of being upstaged. Mr. Moore once spoke of his need to “liquefy” the audience before he considered a show a success.
“The strength of Sam & Dave,” he said, “was that we would do anything to please the audience.”

…

Working with the producers and songwriters Isaac Hayes and David Porter, the house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s and the crisp horns of the Mar-Keys, Sam & Dave were soon enjoying the benefits of stardom, including their own tour bus and plane, plus an entourage of women and hangers-on. They also both became addicted to heroin.

…

While still in high school, Sam was shot in the leg by the jealous husband of a married woman he was seeing. He later served 18 months in prison for procuring prostitutes. But music lifted him. He sang in a Miami Baptist church, then with an a cappella group called the Majestics and a gospel group called the Mellonaires, before teaming up with Mr. [Dave] Prater.

(Dave Prater died in a car accident in 1988.)

Burning in Hell watch: James Arthur Ray. People who have been reading this blog for a long time may remember that name, as I covered his actions and the resulting criminal case early on.

Mr. Ray was a “self-help guru” who killed three people in a sweat lodge in Sedona, Arizona.

Mr. Ray packed about 50 people into a temporary structure made of a round wood frame covered in tarps, measuring about 25 feet in diameter and only five feet at the center. He poured gallons of water over fire-heated rocks, filling the lodge with hot steam.
Though he told participants they could leave at any time, many said later that they felt pressured by him to stay. Eventually the conditions inside grew unbearable, and the crowd flooded out; many people collapsed on the ground.
Someone called 911; one first responder later said that the scene looked like the site of a mass suicide. Twenty-one people were taken to the hospital.
Three of them died — James Shore and Kirby Brown were declared dead on arrival, while Liz Neumann died nine days later. Mr. Ray was arrested shortly afterward on manslaughter charges.

Mr. Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years in prison.

“I am responsible,” he said about the sweat-lodge disaster.
At the end of the film, he added: “It had to happen, because it was the only way I could explore and learn and grow through the things that I’ve done. Am I drinking the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but the Kool-Aid works for me.”

Am I reading that right? Three people had to die in great agony so James Arthur Ray could “explore and learn and grow”?

Hell is too good for him.

(Obligatory note that it was Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.)

(James Arthur Ray’s website.)

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its “self-help” section: “For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.”

–Roger Ebert

Posted in Law, Music, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 10, 2024.

Friday, January 10th, 2025

Anita Bryant.

In 1990, Ms. Bryant married Charlie Hobson Dry, an Oklahoma native and former NASA test crewman. He spent the next decade trying to revive her career, opening the Anita Bryant Music Mansion in Branson, Mo., and Pigeon Forge, Tenn., but financial problems plagued both ventures. The couple moved back to Oklahoma, where they operated Anita Bryant Ministries International.

The NYT obit wants to attribute her career decline to her anti-gay views. But was that really the case? Or did her career go into eclipse because American musical tastes changed? I honestly don’t know.

Posted in 1970s, History, Music, Obits, TV | No Comments »

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