Whipped Cream Difficulties

Yesterday was a busy day for the NYT: the obit writers were apparently playing catch-up. One of these I knew about, but was waiting for a reliable source on, while the others I had not heard about.

William E. Butterworth III, noted and bestselling author.

According to his website, there are more than 50 million copies of his books in print in more than 10 languages.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell with you, that’s because he wrote mostly under pseudonyms. His best known pen name was W.E.B. Griffin.

(Also: awesome photo, NYT.)

Ken Nordine, poet and “word jazz” guy.

Mr. Nordine became wealthy doing voice-overs for television and radio commercials. But he found his passion in using his dramatic baritone to riff surreally on colors, time, spiders, bullfighting, outer space and dozens of other subjects. His free-form poems could be cerebral or humorous, absurd or enigmatic, and were heard on the radio and captured on records, one of which earned a Grammy nomination.

I used to fall asleep with the radio on and wake up to it in the morning. As I recall, early on Sunday mornings, in that twilight zone when I was half-awake and half-asleep, our local public radio station aired re-runs of “Word Jazz”.

I had not heard of Ethel Ennis, but this is an interesting story: Playboy jazz poll winner for best female singer,

She recorded for major labels in the late 1950s and the ’60s; toured Europe with Benny Goodman; performed onstage alongside Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong; and appeared on television with Duke Ellington. She became a regular on Arthur Godfrey’s TV show and headlined the Newport Jazz Festival.

And then she mostly walked away from it all and became Baltimore’s unofficial “First Lady of Jazz”.

“They had it all planned out for me,” she told The Washington Post in 1979, referring to the music executives in charge of her career. “I’d ask, ‘When do I sing?’ and they’d say, ‘Shut up and have a drink. You should sit like this and look like that and play the game of bed partners.’ You really had to do things that go against your grain for gain. I wouldn’t.”
She added: “I want to do it my way. I have no regrets.”

Finally, David Horowitz, newscaster and consumer reporter. I remember watching the syndicated version of “Fight Back!” on one of the Houston TV stations (though I don’t recall which one) back when I was young…

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2019 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Books, Guns, Music, Obits, Radio, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.