Obit watch: June 19, 2024.

Willie Mays. SF Chronicle (archived). ESPN.

The Awful Announcing blog has a link to a video tribute to Mr. Mays narrated by Jon Miller.

Neil Goldschmidt, former mayor of Portland and governor of Oregon. He seemed to have a promising political career (he was also transportation secretary under Jimmy Carter) but left office in 1990. There were a lot of rumors about his extramarital activities at the time.

In 2004, it came out that he’d been raping a teenage girl.

The statute of limitations on any criminal charges that might have been brought against Mr. Goldschmidt, including statutory rape, had expired decades earlier. The woman he abused later gave a series of interviews to Margie Boulé, a columnist for The Oregonian, describing her relationship with the mayor.
The woman said the abuse first began when she was 13, on her mother’s birthday. It virtually destroyed her, she said. She attempted suicide at age 15 and later become addicted to alcohol and cocaine. She died in 2011.

George R. Nethercutt Jr., former House member. He’s most famous for having defeated Thomas S. Foley, who was Speaker of the House at the time.

Paul Pressler. He was sort of a “power behind the throne” in the Southern Baptist Convention:

Judge Pressler was instrumental in building an internal grass-roots movement that in recent decades moved the denomination toward adopting theological and social positions that were strikingly more conservative than those held in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. They include opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, forbidding women to serve as head pastors and interpreting the Bible literally.

He was also involved in a messy sex scandal, which led to the Southern Baptist Convention distancing themselves from him.

Angela Bofill, R&B singer of the 1970s and 1980s.

She released her last studio album, “Love in Slow Motion,” in 1996. Her music career ended when she had strokes in 2006 and 2007 that left her partly paralyzed and speech-impaired.

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