Obit watch: December 13, 2022.

Stuart Margolin.

Personally, my favorite “Rockford Files” episodes are the ones where Angel plays a key role. And the man worked: 123 acting credits in IMDB. Including “18 Wheels of Justice”, “Lanigan’s Rabbi” (he played Rabbi Small in the pilot (!), but was replaced by Bruce Solomon in the other four episodes), “Cannon” and “Kelly’s Heroes”.

Mike Leach. My sister and her family were big Mike Leach fans (and felt he was unjustly driven out of Texas Tech). Now who’s going to tell us about owning a trash panda as a pet?

Angelo Badalamenti, composer for David Lynch.

Marijane Meaker, author. She wrote an influential early lesbian novel, “Spring Fire”, under the pseudonym of “Vin Packer”:

Ms. Meaker said she had wanted to call the book “Sorority Girl,” but her editor, Dick Carroll, had a different idea.
“James Michener had just published his book ‘Fires of Spring,’” she said in a 2012 interview with Windy City Times, the L.G.B.T.Q. publication in Chicago. “Dick hoped if we called mine ‘Spring Fire’ the public might confuse it with Michener and we’d sell more copies.”

“Vin Packer” later evolved into a hard-boiled writer. She also wrote young adult novels:

She used Mary James for quirky books aimed at younger children, like “Shoebag” (1990), about a cockroach that turns into a boy. Her books under her own name included “Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s” (2003), about her two-year relationship with the author Patricia Highsmith.

…

She retired Packer in 1966 and in 1972, as M.E. Kerr, tried the youth market with “Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!,” a story about a girl with a weight problem who longs for more attention from her mother, a good Samaritan type who works with drug addicts.

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