Drew Bannister was fired yesterday as head coach of the St. Louis Blues.
This isn’t SportsHirings.com, but it is interesting: the Blues have already replaced Bannister…with Jim Montgomery, who you may recall was fired last week.
Can’t get no antidote for Blues…
November 25th, 2024Obit watch: November 25, 2024.
November 25th, 2024Two members of the Civil Air Patrol were killed in a crash in Colorado over the weekend. Susan Wolber was the pilot and Jay Rhoten was serving as an aerial photographer. They were on a routine training mission when the plane crashed near Storm Mountain in Larimer County, Colorado. A third member of the crew, co-pilot Randall Settergren, survived the crash but was seriously injured.
I’m putting this up to give FotB RoadRich a chance to comment if he wishes. From private discussions with him, I know he was a friend of the pilot, but I’m going to leave it up to him how much more he wants to say.
Barbara Taylor Bradford, author. Her books were huge.
Beginning with the runaway success of her 1979 debut novel, “A Woman of Substance,” Ms. Bradford’s 40 works of fiction sold more than 90 million copies in 40 languages and were all best sellers on both sides of the Atlantic, according to publishers’ reports.
Ten of her books were adapted for television films and mini-series, and the author, a self-described workaholic whose life mirrored the rags-to-riches stories of many of her heroines, achieved global celebrity and amassed a $300 million fortune.
Charles Dumont has passed away at 95. He was a French songwriter, and you might recognize his name: he wrote (with Michel Vaucaire) “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”.
At 44, Piaf was racked by pain after a car accident and expressed little apparent interest in returning to the stage — certainly not with a song by Mr. Dumont, whom she had previously dismissed as “a mechanical songwriter of no great talent,” he recalled in a 2010 interview with The Independent.
That day, Piaf’s secretary had already informed them that the meeting was canceled when the singer piped up in a weary voice from her bedroom and agreed to see them. It took an hour for the frail figure to emerge, Mr. Dumont said, and when she did, she told them. “I’ll hear only one song — just one.” Mr. Dumont raced to the piano and began belting out “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” which he and Mr. Vaucaire had written with Piaf in mind.
“When I finished,” he said in 2010, “she asked, rather rudely, ‘Did you really write that song? You?’ Then she made me play it over and over again, maybe five or six times. She said that it was magnificent, wonderful. That it was made for her. That it was her. That it would be her resurrection.”
Noted:
Chuck Woolery. NYT (archived).
After the Kentucky native performed “Delta Dawn” on The Merv Griffin Show, Griffin offered him a chance to audition as the host of a new game show he had just developed called Shopper’s Bazaar. Woolery beat out former 77 Sunset Strip star Edd “Kookie” Byrnes for the job, and the renamed Wheel of Fortune premiered on NBC on Jan. 6, 1975.
With the show pulling in a 44 share in 1981, Woolery requested a raise from $65,000 a year to about $500,000, what other top game show hosts were making at the time, he recalled in 2007. Griffin offered him $400,000 and NBC said it would pony up the rest, but that somehow infuriated Griffin, who threatened to take Wheel of Fortune to CBS, according to Woolery.
Not wanting to lose the game show, NBC withdrew the offer, and Griffin proceeded to fire Woolery and hire Pat Sajak. Also let go: original letter-turner Susan Stafford, who was replaced by Vanna White.
This is an obit about Alice, and about the restaurant…
November 23rd, 2024Alice Brock, restaurant owner.
Most people would know her best as the “Alice” of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”.
Also among the dead: Peter Sinfield, King Crimson guy.
Mr. Sinfield, who once referred to himself as the band’s “pet hippie,” linked up with Mr. Fripp in 1968 after living an itinerant life in Spain and Morocco. He was the lyricist on the first four King Crimson albums, starting with “In the Court of the Crimson King” in 1969, which is widely regarded as the first album in the genre that came to be known as prog rock.
But his role was varied. He also helped produce King Crimson’s albums and worked as a roadie, lighting operator and sound engineer and, as art director, oversaw the band’s album covers. He even came up with the name of the band, plucked from his lyrics for the song “The Court of the Crimson King.”
Spencer Lawton Jr. He was a DA for 28 years.
Mr. Lawton served as district attorney for Chatham County, Ga., from 1981 to 2009, a tenure in which he combined a tough-on-crime message with a pioneering program to provide help to victims and witnesses.
After recognizing that the criminal justice system, which pits the government against the defendant, often left victims and witnesses as an afterthought, he created an office to give them counseling and resources as they navigated a labyrinth that they usually had not chosen to enter.His Victim-Witness Assistance Program swiftly became a model in other jurisdictions, first around Georgia and eventually nationwide.
He may be better known as the lead prosecutor in the murder case against James Arthur Williams for the killing of Danny Hansford, or the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil murder case.
Mr. Berendt, who spent several years in the 1980s living in Savannah and peppered his gossipy story with denizens of the city’s quirky demimonde, clearly believed Mr. Williams, and he went to great lengths to depict Mr. Lawton as dimwitted and opportunistic, yet also “eloquent and venomous.”
He strongly implied that Mr. Lawton chose a charge of first-degree murder, instead of manslaughter, at the behest of Lee Adler, who had an ongoing feud with Mr. Williams, a neighbor, according to the book, and who was one of Mr. Lawton’s major campaign donors.
Mr. Lawton declined to speak with Mr. Berendt during the trials, saying it would be unprofessional.
Nor did he speak out after the book appeared, though he let friends and colleagues know he was frustrated — especially after its success sent a flood of tourists to Savannah and led to a film version that leaned into Mr. Berendt’s depiction of Mr. Lawton as a bumbling hack (though it did use a pseudonym for him, Finley Largent).
…
Mr. Lawton built his campaign on promises to resolve an enormous backlog of cases the Ryans had accumulated and to fix an antiquated local criminal-justice system that he claimed was failing the public. He won handily, and over the next 28 years won acclaim for making the system more responsive and humane.
It was, he always insisted, his real legacy, regardless of what millions of readers and tourists might think. In an obituary prepared by his family, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” or Mr. Lawton’s role in it, does not get a single mention.
I haven’t read Midnight and I don’t plan to. My understanding is that Berendt is a hack, and a lot of Midnight is fabricated. That bothers me, and I owe you guys a longer more thoughtful essay on the subject of fabrication in true crime books, and why Midnight bothers me when In Cold Blood doesn’t. I think the best answer I have right now is that In Cold Blood seems less egregious to me than Midnight.
Obit watch: November 21, 2024.
November 21st, 2024A lot of obits from the NYT today for people of questionable notability, but I have a reason for posting each of these.
Diane Coleman, disability rights activist and opponent of assisted suicide/”right to die” laws.
Gifted with a dark sense of humor, in 1996 she founded a group called Not Dead Yet, a reference to a memorable scene in the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in which a man tries to pass off an infirm — but very much alive — relative to a man collecting dead bodies.
“To put it bluntly, she was blunt,” Jim Weisman, a disability rights lawyer, said in an interview.
Vic Flick, British session musician.
The Bond films produced signature catchphrases (“shaken, not stirred,” “Bond, James Bond”) that have been endlessly recited and parodied since “Dr. No,” the first in the series, was released in Britain in 1962. But it was the sound of Mr. Flick’s guitar in the opening credits that helped make the spy thrillers instantly recognizable.
During the title credits of “Dr. No,” when moviegoers were introduced to or reacquainted with the works of the author Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books, Mr. Flick’s thrumming guitar sounded out through a brass-and-string orchestra.
Bill Moyes, one of the pioneers of hang gliding.
…
…
He nearly killed himself several times.
In 1972, at a show in Jamestown, N.D., he fell 300 feet after the towing rope snapped. He sustained multiple fractures and was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he spent several weeks recuperating.
…
Reg Murphy, newspaper guy. Beyond my well-known affection for crusty old newspaper people, Mr. Murphy was the centerpiece of a bizarre crime story I’d never heard of before.
Mr. Murphy was the editorial page editor of The Atlanta Constitution on Feb. 19, 1974, when a man later identified as William A.H. Williams, a drywall subcontractor, called Mr. Murphy’s office to ask his advice about how best to donate 300,000 gallons of heating oil to a worthy cause.
He called again the next day at dusk and arranged to meet Mr. Murphy at his home; the two of them would then drive to Mr. Williams’s lawyer’s office to sign some papers.
“I really had no choice but to go with him,” Mr. Murphy wrote in a lengthy account in The New York Times shortly after the incident, “for newspapermen have to lead open lives and be available to anonymous or strange people.”
So strange was Mr. Williams that he immediately displayed a .38-caliber gun in his left hand and announced, “Mr. Murphy, you’ve been kidnapped.” He identified himself as a colonel in the American Revolutionary Army and ranted against the “lying, leftist, liberal news media” and “Jews in the government.”
…
That’s $700,000 in 1974 money. According to my preferred inflation calculator, that’s $4,482,044.62 in 2024 money.
After 49 hours of captivity, Mr. Murphy was released in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn. Mr. Williams, whom Mr. Murphy identified from photos of suspects, was arrested six hours later.
He was convicted on federal extortion charges and sentenced to 40 years in prison, of which he served nine. His wife received a three-year suspended sentence for failing to report his crimes. The ransom was recovered.
In 2019, Mr. Williams, stricken with Stage 4 melanoma, called the newspaper to apologize. He said he had been high on amphetamines when the kidnapping took place.
…
In 1975, Mr. Murphy left Atlanta to become editor and publisher of The San Francisco Examiner, owned by Randolph Hearst, whose daughter was on trial at the time for participating in a bank robbery linked to the radical group that had abducted her. After she was convicted, Mr. Hearst appeared in The Examiner’s office and dropped the key to a new Porsche on his desk in appreciation of the newspaper’s coverage.
“It takes integrity of a different kind for a father to come in and say, ‘You did a good job covering the trial of my daughter,’” Mr. Murphy said in an interview published this year in The Mercerian, the magazine of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., his alma mater.
UnBearable.
November 20th, 2024Jim Montgomery out as head coach of the Boston Bruins hockey team.
They were 120-41-23 in “three seasons”. 20 games into the current season, they’re 8-9-3.
The Bruins have been one of the NHL’s most notable disappointments this season. They’re 31st in team offense (2.40 goals per game) and 28th in defense (3.45 goals against per game).
Previously dependable aspects of the team have malfunctioned, in particular the goaltending. The team traded former Vezina winner Linus Ullmark to the Ottawa Senators for goalie Joonas Korpisalo. The Ullmark deal broke up the best goalie tandem in the NHL with 26-year-old Jeremy Swayman, who missed training camp during a bitter negotiation before signing an eight-year contract that will pay him $66 million.
(Apologies for the ESPN link, but I flat out cannot get around the various Boston media paywalls/”disable your ad blocker” prompts.)
Obit watch: November 19, 2024.
November 19th, 2024Lawrence, the Guardian, and the New York Times have all noted that two drummers for the Bee Gees have died in the past few days.
Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died on Nov. 14, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Mr. Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Mr. Bryon.
Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died on Nov. 18 at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Mr. Petersen died from a fall, they said.
Mr. Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, played on the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Mr. Webster said.
…
…
Arthur Frommer, travel book guy.
…
Thomas E. Kurtz, one of the great men of history. He co-created the BASIC computer language.
More firings!
November 19th, 2024According to “sources”, the NY Jets have fired general manager Joe Douglas. ESPN.
Under Douglas, the Jets have a 30-64 record, no winning seasons and no playoff appearances.
The Charlotte 49ers have fired football coach Biff Poggi.
…
The good news is, former coach Biff is going to have more time to drink white wine spritzers at the club with Muffy, Buffy, and Brock.
Firings watch.
November 18th, 2024There’s been a lot going on. I’m sorry to be linking so much to ESPN, but I’m having trouble finding local coverage for some of these.
Tom Herman out at Florida Atlantic. 6-16 in two seasons, and 0-6 in the AAC this season.
Don Brown out at the University of Massachusetts. 6-28 over “two plus seasons”, and they’re 2-8 so far.
Phil Longo out as offensive coordinator of the Wisconsin Badgers. I have not heard anything about mushrooms or the snake.
Stan Drayton out at Temple. 9-25 in “two plus” seasons, 4-18 in the AAC, and 0-15 on the road. But they actually won (in overtime) Saturday.
Noted: “Temple’s firing of Stan Drayton should open the door to dropping the football program“.
Obit watch: November 18, 2024.
November 18th, 2024Bela Karolyi, gymnastics coach.
You may remember him from such hits as Nadia Comaneci:
Mary Lou Retton:
And Dr. Larry Nassar:
…
…
In fact, a reckoning was already underway. That August, accounts emerged that Dr. Nassar had regularly molested young female athletes at the Karolyis’ ranch and at Michigan State University, where he was a faculty member and sports doctor. Gymnasts began discussing publicly how, while training with the Karolyis, they had practiced with fractured bones, suffered ridicule of their developing bodies, faced food restrictions and felt discouraged from complaining about hunger or pain.
Many former gymnasts said they had dreaded going to the Karolyis’ ranch. One testified that she once purposefully hit her head against a bathtub to avoid the abuse.
…
Obit watch: November 15, 2024.
November 15th, 2024Theodore B. Olson, noted lawyer. I sort of vaguely remember him from the Reagan administration:
Later on, he became involved in the effort to overturn California’s gay marriage ban, and opposed the first Trump administration’s efforts to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
…
Mr. Olson worked on the White House’s behalf during the initial stages of the Iran-contra affair, Congress’s investigation into the illegal arms sales to Iran to support right-wing rebels in Nicaragua. He was also accused of committing perjury during a congressional investigation into the White House’s withholding of environmental records.
That investigation, which lasted five years and personally cost Mr. Olson $1.5 million, ended without charges. It made him a darling among conservative commentators, but left many Democrats convinced that he was dangerously partisan.
…
His third wife, the conservative commentator Barbara (Bracher) Olson, was aboard American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles from Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked it, crashing it into the Pentagon and killing everyone aboard.
She had planned to leave the day before, but had stayed an extra day to be with Mr. Olson on the morning of his birthday. As the plane veered back toward Northern Virginia, where they lived, she called him from a bathroom, and Mr. Olson was able to record some of the call. His telephone is now in the collection of the National Museum of American History.
Gerry Faust, former coach at Notre Dame.
John Robinson, former coach at the Universty of Southern California and of the Rams.
…Attending Our Lady of Perpetual Help School, he met a fellow fifth-grader, John Madden, the future Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster, and they became lifelong friends.
“Just two doofuses from Daly City,” Robinson told The Los Angeles Times in 2021.
Timothy West, noted British actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Nicholas and Alexandra”, “Crime and Punishment” (the 1979 TV miniseries)…
…and what was, according to the obit, a disastrous production of “Macbeth” with Peter O’Toole.
Mr. O’Toole, who had not appeared on the London stage for 15 years, had insisted on complete artistic control over the production, Mr. West wrote in a memoir — “a sure recipe for dissent if not disaster” — and refused to make any suggested changes.
The first night was a critical failure (“Not so much downright bad as heroically ludicrous,” The Daily Mail wrote), and ignited a public war of words (“West Disowns MacBeth,” one headline blared). But the play drew so many curious theatergoers that it became a box office hit.
He was also married to Prunella “Sybil Fawlty” Scales, who I did not know (until I read the obit) has Alzheimer’s. Damn.
Obit watch: November 11, 2024.
November 11th, 2024Playing catch-up here:
Tony Todd, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy” of the 2000s except it sucked), “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Cop Rock”, “Jake and the Fatman”, and multiple spinoffs of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
This is a little old, but as I recall, it came up while Mike the Musicologist and I were wandering around: Jonathan Haze, actor. Other credits include OG “Dragnet”, “Highway Patrol”, “The Fast and the Furious” (1954), and “The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent”.
Finally, Baltazar Ushca has passed away at 80. He is believed to have been the last of the Andean ice harvesters.
…
Armistice Day.
November 11th, 2024I apologize. I have been more than a little distracted, with recovery from the previous eye surgery and planning for the next eye surgery (which is tomorrow). So I haven’t really had a chance to write anything special for Armistice Day.
In lieu of something from me, I’m going to point you to this recent article/book review from American Handgunner: “Fearless: The Adam Brown Story“.
I had not heard of Adam Brown before reading this, but cheese louise, what a guy.
…
Since there’s not a link in the article, if you want to read Fearless: The Undaunted Courage and Ultimate Sacrifice of Navy SEAL Team SIX Operator Adam Brown, you can find it at the above affiliate link.