Ron Masak, actor.
He had a pretty extensive movie and TV career. Beyond being the guy who let Jessica Fletcher get away with all those murders, he was in “Laserblast”, “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, and “Ice Station Zebra”. TV credits include late period “Columbo”, “McMillan & Wife”, “Mission: Impossible”, multiple appearances on “Police Story”, “Quincy M.E.”…
…and “Mannix”. (“The Sound of Murder“, season 5, episode 17. He played “Barry Gates” in an unaccredited appearance.)
Charley Trippi, football player.
Although he was a football star at a time when many players appeared on both offense and defense, Trippi was especially renowned for doing just about everything but kicking field goals and extra points and snapping the ball.
In his nine years with the Cardinals, he ran for 3,506 yards, threw for 2,547 yards and amassed 1,321 yards in pass receptions — the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame to have exceeded 1,000 yards in each category. He played at left halfback and quarterback, punted and returned punts and kickoffs, and finished out his career at defensive back.
Trippi took Georgia to an unbeaten 1946 season when he was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy behind Army’s Glenn Davis. He received the Maxwell Award, which also honors college football’s leading player.
He was a member of both the College Football Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame. Mr. Trippi was 100 when he passed, and at the time was the oldest living member of both.
Roger Welsch, tractor guy.
Okay, that’s a little misleading. He was also a regular on CBS “Sunday Morning”, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska, founder of the Liars Hall of Fame:
and a honorary member of the Pawnee, Omaha, and Oglala tribes. And a tractor guy.
His practical interest in tractors, especially antiques, became a fixation in his writing and speaking, and for years he maintained a popular website full of geeky farm-implement arcana. In 1988, The New York Times wrote that Mr. Welsch “is to tractor restoration, and the Allis-Chalmers in particular, what Thoreau was to the lakeside cabin.”
He wrote more than 40 books about love, tractors, dogs and women, including “Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor” (2002) and “Busted Tractors and Rusty Knuckles: Norwegian Torque Wrench Techniques and Other Fine Points of Tractor Restoration” (1997) — a book as funny as its title is droll.
Sergeant Major Dean Walton, of the British Army.
Sgt. Walton was a member of the Red Devils parachute demonstration team, and died during a training jump.
General James A. McDivitt (USAF – ret.), Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 astronaut.
When he joined the Air Force in 1951 as an aviation cadet after attending junior college, Mr. McDivitt had “never been in an airplane, never been off the ground,” as he recalled in an interview for NASA’s Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.
He went on to fly 145 fighter missions during the Korean War, became an Air Force test pilot, then was selected by NASA in September 1962 as one of nine astronauts for the Gemini program, the bridge between the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the Apollo missions leading to the moon landings.
Mr. McDivitt was in command of the Gemini 4 capsule, which orbited the earth for nearly 98 hours over four days in June 1965, a record for a two-person spaceflight.
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Mike Schank, from “American Movie”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Two really weird crime stories from the past few days.
1. Four bicyclists went missing in Oklahoma last week.
Later in the week, police pulled human remains out of a river.
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“We believe the men planned to commit some kind of criminal act when they left the resident on West 6th Street,” Prentice told reporters.
“That belief is based on information supplied by a witness who reports they were invited to go with the men to ‘hit a lick’ big enough for all of them,” he said, using slang for obtaining money illegally.
It is a shame that Big Don Westlake is dead, as this sounds like something out of a Parker novel.
2. The Mad Midnight Bomber What Bombed at Midnight was a cosplayer. And a sex offender.
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The victim, identified in court documents as NK, suffered serious injuries. He and his girlfriend, identified as SB, were members of the “Dagorhir” gaming community along with McCoy.
The game is described as “a live-action roleplaying (LARP) battle game” involving medieval costumes and mock combat with prop weapons.
McCoy approached SB over Discord and confessed his romantic feelings for her. She turned him down, reminding him she was dating NK. So McCoy built a homemade bomb, gift-wrapped it and dropped it off at NK’s doorstep, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland.
He researched how to build it, bought materials in cash from multiple stores to conceal his efforts, and ultimately built a package bomb that he placed inside a shipping box, which he drove to the victim’s house himself, according to prosecutors.
The bomber seems fairly clever. But not clever enough: they got DNA, they got location data from his cellphone, and they got video from a neighbor’s doorbell camera.
Executive vice president of football operations Jack Easterby out in Houston.
More from Pro Football Network by way of Lawrence.
Not much more to add to this, really: nobody seems unhappy with Easterby’s performance in the role. There’s a lot of “it was just time”.
The Texas are 1-3-1 and had a bye this past week.
He wasn’t someone whose work I have a lot of familiarity with, though I’ve heard good things about “Cracker”. Other credits included some “Blackadder”s, “The Pope Must Diet”, Falstaff in “Henry V”, and “Frasier”.
Dr. Vincent DiMaio, forensic pathologist. He was the chief medical examiner of Bexar County (which covers San Antonio) from 1981 to 2006. In that capacity, he testified for the prosecution against Genene Jones, who was convicted of killing a 15-month-old baby, and may have killed up to 60 other children.
Dr. DiMaio, who had been a medical examiner in Dallas from 1972 to 1981, was later called on to look into allegations that President Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a look-alike whom Soviet officials had trained to assume his identify. Michael Eddowes, a British lawyer and restaurateur, had made the allegations in a 1975 book, “Khrushchev Killed Kennedy,” which he published himself.
After the author persuaded Oswald’s wife, Marina, to have his body exhumed in 1981, Dr. DiMaio was recruited to help examine the remains. But his team quickly debunked the theory, confirming through forensic dentistry that the physical characteristics of the man buried as Oswald matched those on Oswald’s passport and his Marine Corps records.
As a private consultant, he also worked with the authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh and came to the belief that Vincent van Gogh’s death was murder, not suicide. He also testified for the defense in the George Zimmerman trial.
He also wrote four books: Morgue: A Life in Death (with Ron Franscell) was nominated for a “Best Fact Crime” Edgar award. (The NYT says it won, but the Edgar Awards database says The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale was that year’s winner.)
Bernard McGuirk, Don Imus’s producer.
Andy Detwiler, YouTuber.
He had a popular channel, “Harmless Farmer“. What distinguished him from other farming YouTubers was that Mr. Detwiler had lost both arms in a farming accident when he was two years old, and did everything with his feet and other body parts.
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Angela Lansbury. THR. Appreciation. Variety.
Everybody has something to say about this, and I don’t have anything profound to add.
Austin Stoker, actor. Other credits include “Riding with Death” (“Dimwitted, meaty guy foils criminals by turning invisible.”), “Airwolf”, “Lou Grant”, “Chopper One”, “McCloud”, and “Airport 1975”.
Lawrence sent over an obit from Publisher’s Weekly for Jill Pinkwater, author, illustrator, and spouse of Daniel Pinkwater.
Eileen Ryan. Credits include “Eight Legged Freaks”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Cannon”, and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”.
NYT obit for Nikki Finke, just for the record.
Matt Rhule deposed as head coach of the Carolina Panthers, in the first NFL coach firing this season.
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As with the offensive coordinator dilemma, Rhule never identified a long-term, efficient quarterback. The team signed journeyman Teddy Bridgewater to lead the offense in 2020, but he was traded to the Denver Broncos following a 5-11 debut season under Rhule.
The Panthers traded three draft picks to the New York Jets for former first-round pick Sam Darnold last offseason. Darnold faltered as the franchise QB in Carolina, as he did in New York, and the Panthers remained on the hook for his salary through this season after picking up his fifth-year option following the trade to acquire him.
This summer, the Panthers tried to upgrade the QB spot by trading for former first overall pick Baker Mayfield. Through five games, Mayfield has struggled mightily, completing just 54.9% of his passes for 962 yards, four touchdowns and four interceptions.