Richard Erdman, noted character actor. He was on “Community”, which I never watched. But before that, he seems to have done guest shots on many TV shows of the 1970s and 1960s (except “Mannix”). Like everyone else in Hollywood, he was also in “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, and played Hoffman in “Stalag 17”.
Al Silverman passed away on Sunday. He worked in publishing, spending 16 years with Book of the Month Club and later becoming an editor with Viking Books.
Before that, he was a freelance sportswriter and later editor in chief of “Sport” magazine. While he was editing “Sport”, he met and wrote about Gayle Sayers, who was recovering from a knee injury. Ultimately, Mr. Silverman and Mr. Sayers collaborated on Mr. Sayers’s autobiography, I Am Third. And, in turn, a chapter from that book became the basis for “Brian’s Song”.
Another great story:
When the running back Paul Hornung was celebrated for leading the Green Bay Packers to the 1961 National Football League championship, Sport awarded him a 1962 Corvette. Mr. Hornung soon after sold the car and got into a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service in United States Tax Court after he failed to disclose the full market value of the car as part of his gross income for 1962.
“My father testified to Hornung’s defense that he should not pay income tax on the car,” Brian Silverman said. His father argued that the car was an unsolicited reward for Mr. Hornung’s talents and thus should be tax-exempt — “the same as a Nobel Prize, because football was Hornung’s art and he performed it to an award-winning degree.” Mr. Hornung lost the case.