Barry Newman, actor.
Other credits include “City on Fire” (the 1979 TV movie), “Murder, She Wrote”, “Get Smart”, and “Quincy, M.E.” (which is worth calling out: he was actually the star in the weird final episode of the series, “The Cutting Edge”, which was an unsuccessful backdoor pilot).
Michael Norell, actor.
His acting credits in IMDB are limited, though his credits as a writer are more substantial. He did one episode of “Police Story”…
…and 110 episodes of “Emergency”. He was “Captain Stanley”. JEMS.
Cynthia Weil, songwriter. (“You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’”)
Redd Holt, drummer.
Mr. Holt scored his biggest hit as the drummer with the pianist Ramsey Lewis’s trio, whose original lineup also included Eldee Young on bass.
In 1965 — nearly 10 years after the band’s first record — they came out with “The ‘In’ Crowd,” a live album whose title track was a cover of a recently popular song by the R&B singer Dobie Gray.
The Lewis Trio version superseded Mr. Gray’s, reaching the top of the Billboard R&B chart and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their “‘In’ Crowd” won the 1965 Grammy Award for best instrumental jazz performance by a small group or soloist.
John Beasley, actor. Other credits include “The Sum of All Fears”, “The Pretender”, and “To Sir, with Love II”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Claudia Rosett, journalist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Highlights of her journalism career include exposing the Oil-for-Food corruption scandal at the United Nations; covering the Russian invasion of Chechnya; and monitoring Beijing’s abrogation of its one-country, two-systems promise on Hong Kong. Her short book, What to Do About the UN, argues that the international organization founded in 1945 as a vehicle to avert war and promote human freedom and dignity has instead become fraught with bigotry, fraud, abuse, and corruption.
One of her most memorable pieces of reporting took place on June 4, 1989, when she was present in Tiananmen Square as Chinese tanks rolled over unarmed, peaceful student protestors. In an article published in the Wall Street Journal the next day, she wrote, “With this slaughter, China’s communist government has uncloaked itself before the world.” Thirty-four years later, these words still ring true.
NYT obit for Brian Shul (archived).
C. Donald Bateman, big damn hero, passed away on Sunday. He was 91.
Most people outside of a small specialized circle have probably never heard of him, but:
…Bateman is credited by industry experts as having saved more lives than anyone in aviation history.
Back in the day, there was a huge problem with airplanes flying into the ground. The industry refers to this as “controlled flight into terrain” (CFIT). Two high profile examples of this were Southern Airways Flight 932 (the Marshall University crash) and TWA Flight 514 (the Mount Weather crash).
Don Bateman developed the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) which warns pilots when they’re getting too close to the ground.
Those early systems used a radar altimeter to track how high the plane was above the ground. It helped a lot, but it wasn’t perfect: the GPWS had a “blind spot” looking forward, and could also be fooled if the plane was configured for landing.
So Don Bateman went on to develop the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) which ties into GPS and a terrain database. EGPWS gives even more warning.
There’s a great story about the early development of EGPWS: Mr. Bateman found out that, after the Soviet Union had fallen apart, there was a huge terrain database that the Soviets had built up available for sale on the black market. So he went to his superiors at Honeywell and convinced them to buy the database, and the early EGPWS were built on that.
Today, what the FAA calls “terrain awareness and warning systems” (TAWS) are required on “all U.S. registered turbine-powered airplanes with six or more passenger seats (exclusive of pilot and copilot seating)”.
Bateman assembled a small team to work exclusively on flight safety systems — over the years, typically fewer than 10 people.
Bob Champion, who came to manage the team for Bateman, said “he looked for innovators who could drive his ideas. He liked people who disagreed and argued so we’d have a good debate about how to solve a problem.”
He said Bateman called it a “team of mavericks.”
Bateman’s team devised critical safety additions, including:
- The Runway Awareness and Advisory System, which alerts pilots taxiing on the ground when they are approaching a runway. It also tells pilots coming in to land if they are not aligned with the runway.
- The glide slope alert system, which warns pilots if their approach is excessively low or high.
- The Runway Overrun Awareness and Alerting System, which tells pilots if they’re coming in too long or too hard and in danger of overshooting.
- The Roll Recovery System, which detects an excessive bank angle and tells the pilot whether to roll left or roll right to prevent the plane rolling over.
For this year’s Memorial Day post, I’m going to lead off with a photo. Which is, frankly, not all that great because of the limitations of the situation, but it does serve to illustrate a story.
This is a photo I took when my brother, my nephew, and I went to see the Battleship Texas in dry dock.
If you click to embiggen, you’ll see a green dot. Here’s a cropped version, which might make it easier to see:
The green dot is from a laser pointer belonging to one of the tour guides. It shows where the Texas was patched.
Patched, you say?
I think “Route 66” was patient zero for a certain type of show: the mysterious drifter (or drifters: I can think of some shows with a pair, but I can’t think of any with more than two) come to a town, meddle in the affairs of other people solve someone’s problems, and then move on to the next town. (See: “The Fugitive”, “The Incredible Hulk”, “The Master”, etc. I think TV Tropes refers to this as “Walking the Earth“.)
Amazon Prime has four seasons of the show available. I feel like I want to watch it, and I have tried to watch it. But I just can’t get through the first episode.
Other credits include, yes, “The Master”, “SST: Death Flight”, “Movin’ On” (I don’t think that counts as a “Walking the Earth” show, in spite of the TV Tropes entry, but I believe “BJ and the Bear” would), and “McMillan and Wife”.
People of a certain age may remember him from the “Daniel Boone” TV show, or as a singer with the Ames Brothers, or for theater work (including “Chief Bromden” in the 1963 Broadway “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”).
People of my age remember him from a single clip from the Johnny Carson show, which I haven’t seen anyone actually reproduce anywhere, so here it is:
Gary Kent, knock-around guy. He was a stunt man (and stunt coordinator), acted some, and even directed a bit. Acting credits include “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant”, “The New Adam-12”, and “Sex Terrorists on Wheels”.
Marlene Clark. Other credits include “The Rookies”, “McCloud”, and “Mod Squad”.
I’m not badmouthing the dead, but I do think there’s something worth pointing out here:
“After suffering a stroke in 2009 because of my poorly controlled hypertension I struggled to get back up on my feet,” she penned. “This is when I first learned that my kidneys didn’t work that well anymore. They had already lost thirty-five percent of their function.”
Turner eventually “developed a fatal dislike” of her prescription pills and even “convinced” herself that they made her feel “worse.”
So without consulting with her doctors, she “replaced” her “conventional medication” with “homeopathic” remedies.
“Indeed, I started feeling better after a while,” the 12-time Grammy winner noted. However, she was in for a rude awakening when she went for her “next routine check-up.”
“Rarely in my life had I been so wrong. I had not known that uncontrolled hypertension would worsen my renal disease and that I would kill my kidneys by giving up on controlling my blood pressure,” she confessed.
Homeopathic “remedies”.
“Are the “dangers of mass popular delusion” not “so menacing”?“
Nicholas Gray, founder of Gray’s Papaya.
For the record: NYT obit for Rolf Harris.
Tina Turner tomorrow, after the dust has had a chance to settle.
Brian Shul, SR-71 pilot and author, passed away over the weekend.
I’ve had this obit on hold for a few days because I couldn’t find a good source to link to. FotB RoadRich forwarded the Flying obit, so much credit to him.
Bill Lee, musician.
He also wrote film scores for the first four feature films directed by Spike Lee, his son.
Newby was a member of John Lennon’s first band The Quarrymen, and news of his death was announced by The Cavern Club Liverpool — a music venue where The Beatles performed before finding global stardom.
“It’s with great sadness to hear about the passing of Chas Newby,” the venue wrote in a Facebook post. “Chas stepped in for The Beatles for a few dates when Stuart Sutcliffe stayed in Hamburg and latterly he played for The Quarrymen.”
Gerald Castillo, actor. Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects”, the 1990 “Dragnet”, and the 1990-1991 “The New Adam-12”.
Kenneth Anger, the Hollywood Babylon guy. He also did some “experimental” films. (Edited to add: NYT obit archived.)
I’ve heard more than once that HB is notoriously inaccurate. I know, I know, but: Wikipedia.
And here’s a direct link to the “You Must Remember This” episodes (which I have not listened to yet, not being a regular listener of YMRT).
Lawrence emailed an obit for C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel for George Bush and long-time advisor to other presidents. NYT (archived).
Rick Wolff. Interesting guy. He was a radio host on WFAN. Before that, he was the “psychological coach” for the Cleveland Indians: one of the first sports psychologists hired by a major league team.
Even though sports psychology was rare in baseball, Mr. Wolff said on his show last year, Cleveland’s players “took the mental side of the game seriously” and within a few years were a “powerhouse in the American League.”
The idea caught on, he added, and “these days it’s the rare, rare sports team or professional or college organization that doesn’t have at least one sports psychologist on their staff.”
…
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Rick Hoyt, marathon runner with his father Dick Hoyt. I wrote about the Hoyts when Dick Hoyt passed away in 2021, so I’ll point you back to that obit and to the Rick Reilly essay.
The pair competed nearly every year in the Boston Marathon from 1980 through 2014. In 2013, Dick and Rick Hoyt were honored with a bronze statue near the race’s starting line.
They completed more than 1,100 races together, including marathons, triathlons and duathlons, a combination of biking and running.
Ray Stevenson, actor. IMDB.
“Kill the Irishman” is an interesting movie that I have a sentimental fondness for (because Cleveland) and he was good as Danny Greene. But the movie could have been a lot better than it actually was.
Rolf Harris, “Australian-born, UK-resident presenter, actor and convicted sex offender” (stealing Lawrence‘s blurb). IMDB.
Helmut Berger, actor noted for his work with Luchino Visconti. IMDB. (He was also in “Victory at Entebbe” and “The Godfather Part III”.)
