The great Dabney Coleman, who was also a good Texas boy.
IMDB. I’m riding shotgun on the way to dinner right now, so I’ll just note: he was, among all his other credits, a “Mannix” three-timer.
I always liked him.
Archive for the ‘Mannix’ Category
Obit watch: May 17, 2024.
Friday, May 17th, 2024Obit watch: April 23, 2024.
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024Playing catch-up from the past few days:
Terry Anderson, journalist who was kidnapped and held for six years by Shia Hezbollah militants of the Islamic Jihad Organization in Lebanon.
While he had not been tortured during his captivity, he said, he was beaten and chained. He spent a year or so, on and off, in solitary confinement, he said.
“There is nothing to hold on to, no way to anchor my mind,” he said after the ordeal. “I try praying, every day, sometimes for hours. But there’s nothing there, just a blankness. I’m talking to myself, not God.”
He found some consolation in the Bible, though, and added: “The only real defense was to remember that no one could take away my self-respect and dignity — only I could do that.”
Roman Gabriel, quarterback for the Rams and Eagles.
He was voted the N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player when he led the league in touchdown passes, with 24, in a 14-game season with the 1969 Rams.
He was also named the comeback player of the year by pro football writers in 1973, his first season with the Eagles. Coming off knee problems and a sore arm, he led the N.F.L. in touchdown passes (23), completions (270) and passing yardage (3,219) that season.
He played in four Pro Bowl games, three with the Rams in the late 1960s and another with the Eagles in 1973. But he reached the postseason only twice, and his Rams were eliminated in the first round both times.
Terry Carter, actor. This is buried a bit in the article, but he was McCloud’s partner and played “Colonel Tigh” on the original “Battlestar Galactica”.
Other credits include “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Search”…
…and “Mannix” (“Medal For a Hero”, season 3, episode 14).
And in a wayfaring six-decade career, he was a merchant seaman, a jazz pianist, a law student, a television news anchor, a familiar character on network sitcoms, an Emmy-winning documentarian, a good will ambassador to China, a longtime expatriate in Europe — and a reported dead man; in 2015, rumors that he had been killed were mistaken. It was not him but a much younger Terry Carter who had died in a hit-and-run accident in Los Angeles by a pickup truck driven by the rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight.
Slightly misquoting Mark Twain, Mr. Carter posted on social media: “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Frederick Celani, serial con man. He conned people into thinking he was going to build a package delivery hub in Springfield (Illinois), conned inmates into giving him money to have their convictions overturned (he wasn’t a lawyer), and ran various real estate cons.
Fred Neulander. You may recall that name, as his trial was a brief sensation back in the 1990s.
The rabbi and his wife, Carol Neulander, 52, were well-known in the community through both the shul and Classic Cakes, the popular bakery Carol co-founded, CNN reported.
The mother of 3 had just returned from the bakery when she bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe in the couple’s Cherry Hill home on the evening of Nov. 1, 1994, the outlet said.
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Neulander was indicted for the murder in 1999, but the case did not come together until the following year, when private investigator Len Jenoff told police that the rabbi paid him and another man, Paul Daniels, $30,000 to kill his wife.
At trial in 2001, prosecutors argued that the rabbi wanted to get rid of Carol to continue his two-year affair with Philadelphia radio host Elaine Soncini.
Soncini, who was Catholic, had even supposedly converted to Judaism to be with the rabbi, whom she met when he performed funeral rites for her late husband.
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When the first trial ended in a hung jury, the 2002 retrial was moved from Camden County to Monmouth County to downplay the local scrutiny.
Following the retrial, Neulander was convicted of Carol’s murder. He narrowly avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison.
Soncini testified against Neulander at both trials, as did two of his three children.
Obit watch: April 17, 2024.
Wednesday, April 17th, 2024Man, it has been a rough few days for baseball.
Signed by the Yankees in 1949, he never made it out of their minor league system, though he picked up a lifetime of baseball knowledge from Manager Casey Stengel at spring training camps. He played the outfield for four American League teams over eight seasons with only modest success.
But Herzog found his niche as a manager with what came to be called Whiteyball, molding teams with speed, defense and pitching to take advantage of ballparks with fast artificial turf and spacious outfields, first at Royals Stadium in Kansas City and then at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.
Herzog managed the Kansas City Royals to three consecutive American League division championships in the 1970s, then took the Cardinals to the 1982 World Series title with a team he had built while general manager as well. And he managed the Cardinals to pennants in 1985 and 1987.
He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 2009.
He was 92, and the second oldest member of the Hall of Fame (behind Willie Mays). Baseball Reference.
Carl Erskine, pitcher.
Erskine was the last survivor of the 13 Dodger players of his time who were profiled by Roger Kahn in his 1972 book, “The Boys of Summer,” telling of their exploits on the field and the lives they led when their baseball years had ended.
Although struggling with a sore pitching shoulder throughout his career, Erskine, an unimposing presence on the mound at 5 feet 10 inches and 165 pounds, employed a superb overhand curveball to help the Dodgers capture five pennants (the first in 1949 and the rest in the 1950s) and the 1955 World Series championship, the only one in their history before they moved to Los Angeles in 1958.
His 14 strikeouts in Game 3 of the 1953 World Series against the Yankees, a complete-game 3-2 victory, has been eclipsed only by the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax, who had 15 strikeouts against the Yankees in 1963, and the St. Louis Cardinals’ Bob Gibson, who struck out 17 Detroit Tigers in 1968.
In the 1952 World Series, also against the Yankees, Erskine pitched an 11-inning complete game, retiring the last 19 batters in the Dodgers’ 6-5 victory.
He pitched no-hitters against the Chicago Cubs in 1952 and the New York Giants in 1956, both at Ebbets Field. His best season was 1953, when he was 20-6 and led the National League in winning percentage at .769.
Ken Holtzman, the “winningest Jewish pitcher in Major League Baseball”. He played for the Cubs and the Oakland A’s.
Holtzman won 174 games, the most for a Jewish pitcher in Major League Baseball — nine more than the Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, who is considered one of the best pitchers ever and who had a shorter career.
In addition to his win total, Holtzman, who at 6 feet 2 inches and 175 pounds cut a lanky figure, had a career earned run average of 3.49 and was chosen for the 1972 and 1973 All-Star teams.
Holtzman, at 23, threw his first no-hitter on Aug. 19, 1969, a 3-0 victory over the Atlanta Braves — a performance distinguished by the fact that he didn’t strike out any Braves. It was the first time since 1923 that a no-hitter had been pitched without a strikeout.
“I didn’t have my good curve, and I must have thrown 90 percent fastballs,” Holtzman told The Atlanta Constitution afterward. “When I saw my curve wasn’t breaking early in the game, I thought it might be a long day.”
His second no-hitter came on June 3, 1971, against the Cincinnati Reds at their ballpark, Riverfront Stadium, where he struck out six and walked four.
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Bob Graham, former Florida governor and US Senator.
Ron Thompson, actor. He did a lot of theater work, and some movies and TV. Other credits include “Quincy, M.E.”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, “Baretta”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Death Has No Face”, season 8, episode 6.)
Obit watch: April 2, 2024.
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024LTC Lou Conter (USN – ret.) passed away on Monday. He was 102. Internet Archive link.
LTC Conter was the last known survivor of the USS Arizona.
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Mr. Conter, who held the rank of quartermaster, a position assisting in the Arizona’s navigation, was on his shift shortly after 8 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, when a Japanese armor-piercing bomb penetrated five steel decks and blew up more than one million pounds of gunpowder and thousands of rounds of ammunition stored in its hull as the ship was moored in the harbor, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
“The ship was consumed in a giant fireball,” he wrote in his memoir.
Mr. Conter, who was knocked forward but uninjured, tended to survivors, many of them blinded and badly burned. When the order to abandon ship came, he was knee deep in water. A lifeboat took him ashore, and in the days that followed he helped in recovering bodies and putting out fires. Only 93 of those who were aboard the ship at the time lived; 242 other crew members were ashore.
But wait, there’s more.
200 combat missions. And the DFC. But wait, there’s more.
But wait, there’s more.
The Lou Conter Story: From USS Arizona Survivor to Unsung American Hero on Amazon.
Barbara Baldavin, actress. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Airport 1975”, “McMillan and Wife” and “Columbo”…
…and “Mannix”. (“You Can Get Killed Out There”, season 1, episode 19. “To Save a Dead Man”, season 5, episode 14.)
Vontae Davis, former NFL cornerback. He was 35.
Obit watch: April 1, 2024.
Monday, April 1st, 2024Barbara Rush, actress. (Edited to add: NYT obit (archived).)
“Bigger Than Life” is available from Criterion, and I kind of want to see it: unfortunately, none of the B&N stores I’ve gone to has had it in stock during the last few sales. (I know, I can order it online, but I just hate paying shipping.) Also, that may be a hard sell to the Saturday Movie Group.
Other credits include “Fantasy Island”, “Murder She Wrote”, “Death Car on the Freeway”, and quite a few cop shows…
…including “Mannix”. (“A Copy of Murder”, season 2, episode 6. “Design For Dying”, season 8, episode 22.)
Obit watch: February 26, 2024.
Monday, February 26th, 2024I was running pretty much flat out from mid-Friday afternoon until late Sunday night, so this is the first chance I’ve had to post anything. But: the NYT finally ran an obit for Chuck Mawhinney. (Previously.)
After graduating from high school in 1967, Chuck wanted to become a Navy pilot. But a Marine Corps recruiter won him over by promising that he could delay his enlistment by four months, until the end of deer season.
The Marines had not had dedicated snipers since World War II, but by 1967 the corps had changed its mind. Mr. Mawhinney was among the first to complete the new Scout Sniper School at Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps installation in Southern California. He graduated at the top of his class.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Golden Richards, former Dallas Cowboy receiver.
José DeLeón, pitcher.
Jackie Loughery, actress (and Jack Webb’s third wife). Other credits include OG “Perry Mason”, “Surfside 6”, and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”.
Charles Dierkop, actor.
Other credits include “Matt Houston”, “Bearcats!” and…two episodes of “Mannix” (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6. “Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6).
Eddie Driscoll, actor. IMDB.
Chris Gauthier, actor. Fair number of genre credits, including “Supernatural”, “Watchmen”, and the “Earthsea” mini series.
Kenneth Mitchell, actor. Other credits include “NCIS”, “CSI: Cyber”, and “Detroit 1-8-7”.
Pop culture programming note.
Wednesday, February 21st, 2024Tomorrow morning’s episode of “Perry Mason” (assuming METv sticks to their schedule) is “The Case of Constant Doyle”.
This is an interesting episode. This is not the same as saying it is a good episode, or one I recommend you watch. If you have not seen it previously, it might be worth your time.
During the filming of the sixth season, Raymond Burr was hospitalized for a period of time. I haven’t read any of the biographies, so I’m not sure exactly why. But his issue was serious enough that he was unable to film several episodes of “Perry Mason”.
There’s a four episode block (plus at least one more episode later in sequence) where they have “guest” lawyers, played by some of the best actors in Hollywood. Michael Rennie, Hugh O’Brian, Walter Pidgeon, and Mike Connors all did stints.
This is the first episode in that four episode block, and the guest lawyer is…Bette Davis, as the titular “Constant Doyle”.
The setup for this episode is that Constant and her husband Joe were both lawyers, and friends of Perry Mason. As the episode opens, it is established that Joe Doyle passed away a few months earlier, leaving Constant a widow. She gets involved in the case of “Cal Leonard”, a 17-year-old juvenile delinquent (played by Michael Parks) and friend of Joe’s. Constant ends up having to defend him from murder charges, even though criminal law is not her area of practice. But of course, Paul and Della are willing to help out. Perry even appears briefly (by telephone from his sickbed: they shot some scenes before Burr’s hospitalization and inserted them).
If I don’t exactly sound enthusiastic about this episode, as I have with others, well…
Bette Davis is always worth watching. But the way she plays Constant Doyle in this episode is very much as a cougar. This was 1963, and the networks still had standards and practices, so there’s nothing explicit here. But the character very clearly comes across as desiring not just a client-lawyer relationship (and the big fee she’d get from defending a teenage deliquent), but something more: perhaps something to fill the void left by the death of her husband.
The long lingering looks, the touching…your mileage may vary, but for me, this is a really uncomfortable episode to watch.
This episode will be on at 0800 CST (0900 EST) Thursday morning, so if you want to watch Ms. Davis, consider yourself notified.
You could also wait until the evening and watch “All About Eve” again.
Obit watch: October 27, 2023.
Friday, October 27th, 2023Lawrence sent over an obit for Stephen Kandel, screenwriter.
He has 103 credits as a writer in IMDB. Man wrote for everything. “Harry O”. “The Magician”. “Bearcats!”. “Banacek”. “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”. “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”. The good “Hawaii Five-0”. Two episodes of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, and two episodes of the animated spinoff…
…and eleven episodes of “Mannix”, which is more than I want to list here.
Obit watch: August 25, 2023.
Friday, August 25th, 2023Bray Wyatt, pro wrestler. He was 36.
Karol Bobko, astronaut. He was the first pilot of the Challenger. He flew two more shuttle missions (on Atlantis and Discovery).
Hersha Parady, actress. Other credits include “The Waltons”, “Bearcats!”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Cry Silence”, season 6, episode 2, credited as “Receptionist”.)
Obit watch: April 19, 2023.
Wednesday, April 19th, 2023Tiger McKee, noted firearms trainer. American Handgunner.
I never had the pleasure of taking a course from Mr. McKee, but I did read his AH columns and The Book of Two Guns: The Martial Art of the 1911 Pistol and AR Carbine. (Amazon says I bought that in 2008. Wow.) And I think I knew that he was doing custom Smith and Wessons, but those were probably out of my price range.
This is a bad loss. And 61 seems a lot closer these days.
Carol Locatell, actress. Other credits include “M*A*S*H”, “The Pretender”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”…
…and “Mannix” (“Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6.)
Almost a month ago, I posted an obit Lawrence sent me for Gloria Dea. Yesterday, the paper of record ran their own obit.
IMDB. She’s credited as “Girl”.
During the Troubles (that is, the conflict in Northern Ireland), the British Army had a deep cover mole known as “Stakeknife”.
Mr. Scappaticci led that unit.
There are a lot of people who believe he was Stakeknife. He consistently denied it.
Mr. Scappaticci may well have taken some of his secrets to his grave, shielding government intelligence and military handlers from one of the central moral conundrums of the case: Did the British state collude in the killings in order to protect Stakeknife’s identity?
British officials have described Stakeknife as the “golden egg” and “the jewel in the crown” of their infiltration of the I.R.A. They have said that intelligence he delivered alerted them to myriad I.R.A. operations, saving hundreds of lives.
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There is an inquiry going on into Stakeknife. It’s been going on since 2016.
Wikipedia entry. Why am I reminded of Whitey Bulger?
Notes on popular culture.
Thursday, April 6th, 2023These tweets are a few days old, but I think they are still relevant.
Here are some links for background:
“Inside Amazon Studios: Big Swings Hampered by Confusion and Frustration“.
“Hollywood Focus Groups Choose Fake Show Over Woke Show“.
$50 million an episode is just too much to process so I plugged it into an inflation calculator to think of it in 1990s TV terms, back when a typical genre show budget was like $1.5 million/episode
CITADEL is the equivalent of a 1990s genre show costing $25 MILLION PER EPISODE
— David Hines (@hradzka) April 4, 2023
This is for Lawrence:
I read a quote once "half of the cocaine in Atlanta flowed through the Sid & Marty Kroft offices"
…re how your entertainment dollar is spent
— ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs (@MorlockP) April 4, 2023
I had Amazon on the other day so I could watch a couple of episodes of “Judy Justice”, and caught a trailer for “Citadel”. I watched the whole thing. “Citadel” looks like an expensive, beautifully produced show about “hot spies”, with excellent production design…
…and after watching the trailer, I have zero interest in watching even one second of the show.
The “Fake Show” article cites a story (not attributed to Amazon in the original article, but tied to Amazon by other sources) about an A-B test of two shows.
The A show was a proposed real show about a lesbian POC law enforcement officer who breaks up with her girlfriend, moves to a southern town, and “is shocked by the racism, sexism and abuse of power of her new colleagues as well as their poor relations with the communities they serve. With few friends, she doesn’t know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys anymore and has to watch her back on and off duty while she tries to initiate change both in her department and in her community.”
The B show:
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I have two thoughts on this:
1. I would watch the crap out of “Vegas Detectives”.
2. I’ve written before about the “Mannix” episode “Death in a Minor Key” (season 2, episode 18) which has the same theme of detective goes to a Southern town and confronts racism.
Without spoiling that episode (much) it goes in a different direction than you’d expect from the initial setup. If the producers of “Mannix” knew in 1969 that the “Southern racist” plot was already cliched, and did interesting things with it instead, why didn’t the producers of “Show A” figure that out for thenselves?
Obit watch: February 21, 2023.
Tuesday, February 21st, 2023Wow. It has been busy.
Barbara Bosson. Other credits include “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, one episode of a spinoff from a minor SF TV series of the 1960s, “Cop Rock”, “The Last Starfighter”, “Capricorn One”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. She was “Miss Riley”. We actually watched that episode a couple of weeks ago because it was the next one in sequence: the “Miss Riley” part was extremely small, and as I best as I can recall, had no lines.)
Lawrence sent over an obit for Lee Whitlock, British actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, the film of “The Sweeney”, “He Kills Coppers” (a TV movie based on the Shepherd’s Bush murders) and “The Bill”.
Red McCombs, prominent local car dealer and philanthropist. He was also a former owner of the San Antonio Spurs and the Minnesota Vikings.
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Zach Milligan, climber.
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Milligan, who grew up in Tucker, Ga., got hooked on climbing at the age of 18 when he was getting a haircut and noticed a photo of Half Dome on the wall, SFGate reported.
He later moved to Yosemite National Park, where he spent 20 years including 13 living in a cave while workin for a cleaning service.
He climbed the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome 20 times and the 1,640-foot tall Steck-Salathé route up Sentinel Rock at least 275 times, according to the outlet.
Eileen Sheridan. She was a major female cyclist in the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1945, her first year of competitive cycling, Mrs. Sheridan won the women’s national time-trial championship for 25 miles, and in the coming years she won at 50 and 100 miles as well. After going professional in 1951, she broke 21 women’s time-trial records, five of which she still holds.
She is best remembered for her epic ride in July 1954 from Land’s End, at England’s southwestern tip, to John O’Groats, at the northern edge of Scotland — an 870-mile trek that she completed in just 2 days, 11 hours and 7 minutes, almost 12 hours faster than the previous record.
She had spent six months training, but the trip was nevertheless grueling, with mountain ranges and rough stretches of road, not to mention cold nights even in the middle of the summer. She developed blisters on her palms so painful that she had to hold on to her handlebars by just her thumbs until her support crew could wrap the grips in sponge.
“We had a nurse,” she said in the documentary, “and she actually wept.”
When she arrived at John O’Groats, after getting just 15 minutes of sleep over the previous two days, she decided to push farther, to see if she could set a women’s record for the fastest 1,000 miles. She took an hour-and-48-minute break, enough to eat a quick dinner and rest. Then she remounted her bike and took off into the night.
She began to wobble toward the side. She had hallucinations of friends urging her on and strangers pointing her in the wrong direction; she even imagined a polar bear. But she stayed the course and made it to her final destination, the John O’Groats Hotel, the next morning, after riding for three days and one hour. She celebrated with a glass of cherry brandy, on the house.
Her 1,000-mile record stood for 48 years, until Lynne Taylor of Scotland finally broke it in 2002.
Roger C. Schank, AI theorist.
In the late 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Schank developed ideas for how to represent in symbols for a computer simple concepts — like people and places, objects and events, cause-and-effect relationships — that humans describe with words. His model was called “conceptual dependency theory.”
Dr. Schank later came up with ways to assemble this raw material of knowledge into the equivalent of human memories of past experience. He called these larger building blocks of knowledge “scripts” and regarded them as ingredients for learning from examples, or “case-based reasoning.”
“When I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, Roger Schank was required reading,” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, wrote on a memorial website. “He was regarded as one of the major researchers and theoreticians in artificial intelligence and cognitive science.”
FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Leiji Matsumoto, manga artist.
I am way out of my depth when talking about manga or anime, so I’m just going to leave that link.
William Greenberg Jr., NYC baker. He sounds really interesting:
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Lee Strasberg, the imperious director and acting teacher, loved Mr. Greenberg’s fudgy brownies; so, apparently, did the film director Mike Nichols, who was said to have coaxed his actors into their best work with the promise of one. The actress Glenn Close ordered themed cakes for wrap parties. A well-known decorator was said to have offered Mr. Greenberg’s schnecken (German for snail) — bite-size sticky buns — to his clients along with his bills, to soften the blow…
The writer Delia Ephron was partial to the chocolate cream tart — a cake, actually, layered with fudge and fresh whipped cream. Alexa Hampton, the interior designer, favored the candy cake, topped with shaved chocolate, crowned with rich chocolate squares and blanketed on the sides with vertical piping of whipped cream. Her father, Mark, was a schnecken man.
Another regular, the celebrated violinist Itzhak Perlman — a poker buddy of Mr. Greenberg’s — once ordered a cake fashioned in the shape of Ebbets Field, the storied home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, for his wife’s 40th birthday (not an easy creation, given the stadium’s elaborate Romanesque arches).
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