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He also played “Jerry Singleton” on three episodes of “St. Elsewhere”, and voiced “J.D. Salinger” on four episodes of “Bojack Horseman”. IMDB.
Unfortunately, I can’t find the bit from “The In-Laws” I really want to use, so how about this one?
And, of course…
Glenda Jackson. NYT (archived).
Other credits include “T.Bag’s Christmas Ding Dong”, “The Patricia Neal Story” (she played Patricia Neal), and “The Nelson Affair”.
Robert Gottlieb, noted editor.
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His memoir offered a highlight reel of snarky critiques of authors — the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (“a snob”), Ms. Tuchman (“her sense of entitlement was sometimes hard to deal with”), William Gaddis (“unrelentingly disgruntled”), Roald Dahl (“erratic and churlish”).
“He wasn’t just an editor, he was the editor,” Mr. le Carré told The Times. “I never had an editor to touch him, in any country — nobody who could compare with him.” He noted that Mr. Gottlieb, using No. 2 pencils to mark up manuscripts, often signaled changes with hieroglyphics in the margins: a wavy line for language too florid, ellipses or question marks advising a writer to “think harder and try again.”
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Mr. Gottlieb joined Knopf in 1968 as vice president and editor in chief. He edited Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker” (1974), cutting 400,000 words from a million-word manuscript with the author fuming at his elbow. Despite the brutal cuts, their collaboration endured for five decades and became the subject of a 2022 documentary, “Turn Every Page,” directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, Mr. Gottlieb’s daughter.
“I have never encountered a publisher or editor with a greater understanding of what a writer was trying to do — and how to help him do it,” Mr. Caro said in a statement on Mr. Gottlieb’s death.
Flashing his range, Mr. Gottlieb also edited “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life” (1981), by Henry Beard, ghosting for the Muppets starlet, and Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” (1988), which prompted the outraged Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa urging Muslims to kill the author.
LeAnn Mueller, co-owner of the highly regarded Austin barbecue restaurant la Barbecue and member of the prominent Mueller barbecue family. She was 51.
I have not seen any updates on the criminal case against the la Barbecue owners. The only obit I’ve found that even mentions it is from the Austin Chronicle.
Jim Turner, former kicker for the Jets.
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The most memorable game of Turner’s career was the Jets’s face-off against the Baltimore Colts on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 1969.
The Colts belonged to the older and better established National Football League, while the Jets were part of its upstart competitor, the American Football League. The Super Bowl, held for the first time in 1967, then pitted the best team from each league against the other.
The Colts, led by quarterback Johnny Unitas and coach Don Shula, had beaten the powerhouse Green Bay Packers, winners of the previous two Super Bowls, en route to qualifying for the 1969 championship.
While Unitas and Shula epitomized the stoic masculinity that many fans associated with football, Namath, the Jets’ quarterback, nicknamed Broadway Joe, was a figure of loudmouth swagger, and none of his public comments had ever seemed less creditable than his guarantee that the Jets would become the first A.F.L. team to win the Super Bowl by beating the Colts.
Namath played well — completing 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards, earning him the Most Valuable Player Award — but it was Turner, a decidedly Off Off Broadway figure, who was the decisive player. He provided the Jets with their margin of victory and alone scored more points than the Colts did.
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Homer Jones, wide receiver for the New York Football Giants.
Jones was a member of the Giants from 1964-1969, where he was named to the Pro Bowl in 1967 and 1968.
“Homer Jones had a unique combination of speed and power and was a threat to score whenever he touched the ball,” said John Mara, the Giants president and chief executive officer.
“He was one of the first players (if not the first) to spike the ball in the end zone after scoring a touchdown and he quickly became a fan favorite. I remember him as an easygoing, friendly individual who was well liked by his teammates and coaches.”
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Not quite an obit, but Nautilus reran a nice article about Cormac McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute by one of his co-workers.
The entrance to SFI also serves as a mail room. When I first entered the building there was behind the front desk a permanent massif of book boxes. It was clear that the boxes were constantly cleared and just as quickly replenished. In this way the boxes achieved a dynamical equilibrium. In the study of complex systems this is called self-organized criticality and was made famous as an explanation for the constant gradient of sand piles and the faces of sand dunes.
The agent of this critical state was Cormac, who busied himself digging—like Kobo Abe’s entomologist in Women in the Dunes—to ensure balance at SFI and the growth of his library.
Astrud Gilberto, of “The Girl From Ipanema” fame.
Jim Hines. He set a world record by running the 100 meter dash in 9.95 seconds at the 1968 Olympics: that record stood for 15 years.
Roger Craig, noted split-fingered fastball pitcher.
Bobby Bolin, former pitcher for the Giants (also the Brewers and the Red Sox).
Bolin made his MLB debut in 1961 and was on the 1962 pennant-winning Giants, appearing in two games in the World Series against the Yankees, a series San Francisco would lose in seven games.
The sidearmer went a career-best 14-6 in 1965.
The following season he set career-highs with 10 complete games and four shutouts despite a pedestrian 11-10 record.
Mike the Musicologist sent over an obit for Kaija Saariaho, composer. He says some of her late works are appealing: I am unfamiliar with them myself.
George Riddle, actor. Other credits include “Arthur” and “The Trial of Standing Bear”.
Burning in Hell watch: Robert Hanssen, notorious spy.
People of a certain age may remember him from the “Daniel Boone” TV show, or as a singer with the Ames Brothers, or for theater work (including “Chief Bromden” in the 1963 Broadway “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”).
People of my age remember him from a single clip from the Johnny Carson show, which I haven’t seen anyone actually reproduce anywhere, so here it is:
Gary Kent, knock-around guy. He was a stunt man (and stunt coordinator), acted some, and even directed a bit. Acting credits include “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant”, “The New Adam-12”, and “Sex Terrorists on Wheels”.
Marlene Clark. Other credits include “The Rookies”, “McCloud”, and “Mod Squad”.
Barbara Bryne. She was in the original Broadway productions of “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods”. Other credits include “Amadeus”, “Love, Sidney”, and “Best of the West”.
Eileen Saki. Other credits include “Meteor”, “History of the World: Part 1”, and “Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story”.
Another obit for Bart Skelton, this one from American Handgunner.
• All the world loves you if you have a song to sing, or a story to write: Unless that narrative is a warrant, then expect you will piss some people off, and they will hate you.
I ordered a copy of Down on the Border: A Western Lawman’s Journal (affiliate link) and am about four chapters into it. I’ll let you know when I’ve finished it.
Ron Faber. The THR obit concentrates on his stage career, but he did do a few movies and TV shows, including “The Exorcist”, “Law and Order”, and “Romeo Is Bleeding”.
Ginnie Newhart, Bob’s wife.
Ginnie and Bob were set up on a blind date by comedian Buddy Hackett (Ginnie was baby-sitting Hackett’s kids at the time).
“Buddy came back one day and said in his own inimitable way, ‘I met this young guy and his name is Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comic and he’s Catholic and you’re Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other,’ ” she recalled in a 2013 interview.
They played pool at Buddy and his wife’s home the first time they met.
“It was just silly,” she said in 2005. “I was 20, 21, 21, and I think Bob was 32. And every time somebody would sink a ball in the pocket or whatever you’re supposed to do, [we’d] run around the table with our cue stick singing ‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’
They were married for 60 years.
Tiger 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?
This is one I’ve been holding for a couple of days because I am lazy and shiftless: James Bowman. countertenor.
When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.
“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”
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“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”
He was invited to audition.
“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”
Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.
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Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”
His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.
“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”
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Al Jaffee has passed at 102. THR. Tribute from Mad.
For those who don’t know, he was one of the great old-time “Mad Magazine” guys, perhaps most famous as the creator of the “fold-in” and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”.
Myriam Ullens. Noted here because this is an odd story.
She was a single mom and successful pastry chef when she went looking for investors to expand her business. One of the people she went to seek investment from was the billionaire Baron Guy Ullens de Schooten Whettnal (who apparently prefers “Ullens” as the short form).
They fell in love and married. The two of them got out of the business world and into philanthropy, founding (among other ventures) the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
According to reports, Ms. Ullens and her husband were shot by her stepson while sitting in their car. Her husband was wounded in the leg.
For the record: NYT obit for Michael Lerner.
Elizabeth Hubbard, actress. She doesn’t have that many screen credits beyond the two soaps (“As the World Turns” and “The Doctors”) she was in, but she also did a fair amount of work on Broadway.
Great and good FotB Borepatch sent over an obit from Military.com for Jack Holder, who died February 24 at the age of 101.
Mr. Holder was a WWII veteran and a survivor of Pearl Harbor.
The young sailor survived that day by diving into a ditch between airplane hangars to avoid getting strafed by a Japanese pilot.
He went on to fly as a flight engineer on a PBY at Midway, scouting for Japanese forces with squadron VP-23. He later flew missions over Guadalcanal, retrained on the new B-24 and completed his WWII service flying missions over the English Channel. All in all, the young man had himself quite an eventful war.
He wrote a memoir, Fear, Adrenaline, and Excitement which you can get from Amazon.
On the occasion of an honor flight that celebrated his 100th birthday in December 2021, Holder announced that the secret to his long life was “good heart exercise and two scotch and sodas every night.”
There was a party after the 2019 “Midway” screening at the STK Restaurant at the W Hotel, the kind of hip, contemporary joint that makes a lot of folks over the age of 50 uncomfortable. Holder was right at home and was one of the very last people to leave as the night wound down.
The Jack Holder I met was slyly funny, incredibly enthusiastic about meeting new people and very excited about the chance to talk to younger women. The bonus for him was that almost every single woman he met qualified as a younger woman.
The Notorious B.I.G. “B.I.G.” in this case is Bert I. Gordon, who passed away yesterday at 100. THR.
For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Gordon was a monster movie impresario.
I’ve actually never seen that, but I have the impression that it is pretty good.
We watched the MST3K version of this one fairly recently. It is not anywhere near as good as the NYT makes it sound.
Orson Welles, often desperate for money to finance his own films, starred in Mr. Gordon’s “Necromancy,” about a sinister man who wields mystical powers over a small town with rituals seeking to bring back the dead.
Ms. Lupino appeared in “The Food of the Gods,” one of three Gordon films loosely based on H.G. Wells tales, which portrayed people on an island fighting overgrown rats, wasps and chickens that have lapped up radioactive stuff that looks like pancake batter oozing from the ground. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “stunningly ridiculous.”
Left out of most discussions I’ve seen: “Tormented”, which we also watched the MST3K version of. I don’t think it is as bad as “Village of the Giants”…
(Yeah, I might be a little unfair in referencing the MST3K versions. But for the ones I’ve seen, I’ll steal a line from Gene Siskel about another movie: “If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie still would have sucked.”)
Chaim Topol, or just “Topal”, of “Fiddler on the Roof” fame. THR.
Other credits include both “The Winds of War” and “War and Rememberance”, “SeaQuest 2032”, “For Your Eyes Only”, and he played Dr. Zarkov in the 1980 “Flash Gordon”.
Ignoring “Murphy Brown” for the moment, he was also in the original Broadway casts of both “Company” and “Sunday in the Park With George”, among other theater credits.
Interesting side note: in 2002, he married Beth Howland, who was also in the original Broadway cast of “Company”.
Pervez Musharraf, former ruler of Pakistan.
Harry Whittington, most famous as the man Dick Cheney shot.
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In 1979, Gov. Bill Clements appointed Mr. Whittington to the Texas Corrections Board (now the Board of Criminal Justice), where he was the only Republican on a nine-member panel that had tended to rubber-stamp everything prison managers wanted.
“It was time for somebody to question,” Mr. Whittington said in an interview with The Austin American-Statesman. “There was no other way I knew how to do it.”
He uncovered secrets that stunned him: drug-running by prison officials, no-bid contracts, families paying off guards to protect their loved ones. At meetings, he asked hard questions.
His tenacity led to the creation of a separate unit for developmentally disabled prisoners and an end to wardens’ using prisoners to punish other inmates.
Lawrence emailed an obit for Shlomo Perel, Holocaust survivor with an interesting story.
Fred Terna, also a Holocaust survivor. He became famous for abstract art inspired by his experience.
Mr. Terna’s art became his Holocaust testimony. In acrylic works like “In the Likeness of Fire” and “An Echo of Cinders,” he painted in reds, yellows, oranges and blues to illustrate the flames that incinerated Jews in crematories. In some paintings, he used sand pebbles to represent ashes.
“I know how the fire of a crematorium chimney casts flickering light on a barrack wall,” he wrote in 1984 for the Berman Archive at Stanford University, which documents American Jewish communities. “How does one paint the near certainty of violent personal annihilation? How does one paint, and then make a viewer want to stop, to look at a canvas, to react to it?”
I know that some people would like for me to include photos. Pretty much all of the time, the obits I link to include photos. I’ve always generally assumed that, if you were that interested in the obit, you’d click through to the link, and including photos here would make these entries longer (and possibly infringe on intellectual property rights). I am trying to make more of an effort to link to archived articles, so people don’t have to navigate paywalls.
What do you guys think? Am I wrong about this?
I have spent the past few days running around with Mike the Musicologist, so I haven’t really had a chance to post obits. Not that I’m complaining, but I did get a little behind.
Marion Smith, cave explorer.
…he was roundly considered the Greatest of All Time. He explored 8,291 separate caves — far more than anyone on record, ever. He climbed up and down some two million feet of rope.
He was especially taken with vertical caving: He descended more than 3,000 underground pits deeper than 30 feet, often dangling freely in the abyss on a rope no thicker than a thumb.
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In 1998 Mr. Smith was part of a team of cavers who discovered a 4.5-acre, 350-foot-tall underground chamber in East Tennessee they named the Rumble Room. They kept it secret for four years while they explored and mapped it, and they revealed it to the public only when a nearby town threatened to use an adjacent cave as part of a new sewage system.
“I didn’t want to let the cat out,” Mr. Smith told The Tennessean newspaper in 2002. “I wanted to keep it in the bag longer.”
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Caves were his life, but exploring them was not his only passion. He was perhaps the world’s leading expert on the history of mining for saltpeter, a primary ingredient in gunpowder, which in the 19th century was often harvested from caves.
In the 2010s he joined with Joseph Douglas, a historian at Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin, Tenn., in a project to document the thousands of signatures left by Confederate and Union soldiers in Mammoth Cave, in central Kentucky. Mr. Smith was particularly taken with researching the men themselves, and he ultimately wrote about 80 miniature biographies.
“He called it the history of the obscure, but it took a great level of patience and attention to fine detail,” Dr. Douglas said in a phone interview.
Dino Danelli, drummer for the Rascals.
Sonya Eddy, actress.
Tom Browning, pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds.
On September 16, 1988, Browning tossed a perfect game against the Dodgers in a 1-0 victory, striking out Tracy Woodson to ensure his place in history.
Browning was 123-90 in his 12-season career, with his first 11 seasons in Cincy and two starts at the end of his career with the Royals. Browning was inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame in 2006.
Terry Hall, of The Specials and Fun Boy Three.
Stephanie Bissonnette. She was in “Mean Girls the Musical” and died at 32.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Al Strobel, the one-armed man from “Twin Peaks”.
Representative Jim Kolbe (R-Arizona).
Sal Durante, historical footnote. He caught the ball from Roger Maris’s 61st home run.
Mills Lane. He was the ref in the Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield 1997 fight (that was the ear biting one) and later went on to have a syndicated court show.
“Stomp”. 29 years off-Broadway.
“KPOP”. the musical. 17 regular performances on Broadway and 44 previews.
I had forgotten about the associated drama: the NYT pretty much panned the show, the producers accused the NYT of racism, and the NYT basically responded with the bedbug letter.