Great and good friend of the blog Joe D. let us know about the death of Al Evans.
Al was one of the old time Austin BBS people, and a personal friend of mine from back then. The Facebook post is a nice tribute to someone who was a good person, and whose passing leaves a hole in the world.
Taurean Blacque. Beyond “Hill Street Blues”, it seems like he had a pretty active theater career, and other credits including “The Bob Newhart Show”, “Taxi”, and “DeepStar Six”.
Nostalgia is a moron, but man, wasn’t that a heck of a show?
Shonka Dukureh passed on at 44. She was a musician, and also plays “Big Mama Thornton” in the current “Elvis” film.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Alan Grant, comic writer (“Batman”, “Judge Dredd”).
Werner Reich. He survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen (and the “35-mile death march in snow and ice” between the two). He also learned a card trick from another prisoner, Herbert Levin (aka “Nivelli the magician”) while he was in Auschwitz.
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Mr. Levin’s card trick stayed with Mr. Reich the rest of his life.
“We loved anything that could take us away from Auschwitz for even a moment, that could take our minds off our memories and the horror around us,” he said in the 2017 interview.In England, he immersed himself in magic. He bought a deck of cards, then some magic tricks and books, and still more tricks and books.
“There’s a very, very thin line between a hobby and insanity,” he joked during his TEDx Talk.
Mr. Reich never saw Mr. Levin after Auschwitz and did not know that he had also emigrated to the United States, resumed his magic career and lived in Rego Park, Queens.
Mr. Levin died in 1977, but Mr. Reich did not learn of the death until nearly 30 years later, when he read an article in The Linking Ring, the monthly magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, to which Mr. Reich belonged.