2020 Notables - Passages

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Driver John Andretti, Age 54.

John Andrew Andretti was an American race car driver. He was the older brother of racer Adam Andretti, nephew of Indianapolis 500 winner Mario Andretti, and first cousin to IndyCar champion Michael and Jeff Andretti. He was also the first cousin once-removed to IndyCar driver Marco Andretti.

https://www.wthr.com/article/indycar...-cancer-battle

[gozagswoohoo]

Never even seen this thread...sad...

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...-was-82-982205

Fred Silverman, whose talent for picking shows like All in the Family, The Waltons, Charlie’s Angels, Roots and Hill Street Blues earned him the nickname "The Man With the Golden Gut" as the only executive to program for CBS, ABC and NBC, has died. He was 82.

One of the most influential executives in television history, Silverman died Thursday at his home in Pacific Palisades, a publicist announced.

Silverman gave David Letterman his first TV show; orchestrated such popular spinoffs as The Jeffersons, Rhoda, Laverne & Shirley, The Bionic Woman and The Facts of Life; brought "Jiggle TV" series like Charlie’s Angels and Three’s Company to the airwaves (and suggested Suzanne Somers play Chrissy on the latter); and presided over Real People, one of the first hit shows to bring a news mentality to entertainment.

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https://apnews.com/74fd23c000ad16c2f...&utm_medium=AP

NEW YORK (AP) — Mary Higgins Clark, the tireless and long-reigning “Queen of Suspense” whose tales of women beating the odds made her one of the world’s most popular writers, died Friday at age 92.

A widow with five children in her late 30s, she became a perennial best-seller over the second half of her life, writing or co-writing “A Stranger Is Watching,” “Daddy’s Little Girl” and more than 50 other favorites. Sales topped 100 million copies and honors came from all over, whether a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France or a “Grand Master” statuette back home from the Mystery Writers of America. Many of her books, including “A Stranger is Watching” and “Lucky Day,” were adapted for movies and television. She also collaborated on several novels with her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark.

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Jack Burns, a Comic Force on Camera and Off, Is Dead at 86.

He paired with George Carlin, was the pompous half of a memorable comedy team with Avery Schreiber and had a second career as a producer and writer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/a...urns-dead.html

Mr. Burns was a popular comic presence for nearly 40 years, beginning with a brief but successful stint as a partner of George Carlin (and at one point showing up for a brief but less successful run on “The Andy Griffith Show”). After his long and fruitful partnership with Avery Schreiber ended, he went on to produce “The Muppet Show,” writing about two dozen episodes.

He also wrote for variety shows like “Hee Haw” and comedy specials starring Flip Wilson and Paul Lynde. And he lent his brash, booming voice to animated series like “Animaniacs” and “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home” as well as to an ad campaign promoting the use of safety belts. He was the voice of a crash-test dummy.

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Bernard J. Ebbers, who spent 12 years in prison after presiding over a notorious $11 billion accounting fraud as chief executive of the telephone company WorldCom, died on Sunday. He was 78.

His death was announced by his lawyer, Graham P. Carner, in a statement that said his health had sharply deteriorated in recent months.

Mr. Ebbers, who was sentenced to 25 years in 2005, was released from a federal prison in Texas in December, having been granted compassionate release by a federal judge to spend his final months at home in Mississippi. His family said in the statement that he died “surrounded by his loving family, and not chained to a hospital bed without anyone he knew in the room.”

In what was once considered a great entrepreneurial success story, the former executive from a modest upbringing turned a small phone company in Mississippi into a telecommunications juggernaut. At its peak, the company employed 80,000 people.

[sittingon50]

M*A*S*H co creator Gene Reynolds:


https://centurylink.net/news/read/ar.../entertainment

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Willie Wood, who was overlooked in the N.F.L. draft but forged a Hall of Fame career as one of pro football’s greatest defensive backs, playing on five Green Bay Packers championship teams of the 1960s, died on Monday in Washington. He was 83.

His death, at an assisted living facility, was announced by the Packers.

Wood was found to have dementia in 2006 and had received financial assistance from a joint N.F.L.-players’ union fund aiding former players with that condition. He had also undergone several orthopedic operations. In March 2012, when his native Washington named a block of N Street, where he had once lived, as “Willie Wood Way,” he attended the ceremony in a wheelchair.

Playing for the Packers from 1960 to 1971, Wood did not have much speed and was only 5 feet 10 inches tall and 180 pounds at best. But he was an outstanding tackler, often hitting opponents around the ankles when he was not intercepting passes or batting them down. Roaming the secondary at free safety, he was quick to dissect plays and get to the ball. He was also a league-leading punt returner.

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Actor Kirk Douglas, age 103.

Nominated three times for best actor by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — for Champion (1949), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Lust for Life (1956) — Douglas was the recipient of an honorary Oscar in 1996. Arguably the top male star of the post-World War II era, he acted in more than 80 movies before retiring from films in 2004.

The father of two-time Oscar-winning actor-director-producer Michael Douglas, the Amsterdam, New York native first achieved stardom as a ruthless and cynical boxer in Champion. In The Bad and the Beautiful, he played a hated, ambitious movie producer for director Vincente Minnelli, then was particularly memorable, again for Minnelli, as the tormented genius Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, for which he won the New York Film Critics Award for best actor.

Perhaps most importantly, Douglas rebelled against the McCarthy Era establishment by producing and starring as a slave in Spartacus (1960), written by Dalton Trumbo, making the actor a hero to those blacklisted in Hollywood. The film became Universal’s biggest moneymaker, an achievement that stood for a decade.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...artacus-670526

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Author Roger Kahn, age 92.

OBIT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/o...NA11qDv6XCb2ok

“The Boys of Summer,” for which he revisited many of the old Dodgers years after their playing days, was the first and, by most estimates, the best of these — as influential a baseball book as has been written in the last 50 years.

“At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams,” the book begins. “During the early 1950s, the Jackie Robinson Brooklyn Dodgers were outspoken, opinionated, bigoted, tolerant, black, white, open, passionate: in short, a fascinating mix of vigorous men.”

Fiction by the likes of Ring Lardner, Bernard Malamud and Mark Harris had set characters redolent of America against the backdrop of the ballpark. Arnold Hano’s undersung “A Day in the Bleachers” (1955) described one game of the 1954 World Series from the point of view of the man in the stands.

But “The Boys of Summer” — along with “The Summer Game,” the first collection of Roger Angell’s revelatory New Yorker pieces about baseball, also published in 1972 — more or less created a new literary category: long-form narrative baseball reporting.

[sittingon50]

Great read. Thank you Mr. Kahn.

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Actor and comedian Orson Bean, age 91. Struck and killed by a car as he was walking on Venice Blvd. . .

AP: https://apnews.com/c74e551badceefd74...&utm_medium=AP

Bean’s style appealed to both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, and he appeared on “The Tonight Show” more than 200 times.

But his early career was hobbled for a time when he found himself on the Hollywood blacklist in the early years of the Cold War.

“Basically I was blacklisted because I had a cute communist girlfriend,” he explained in a 2001 interview. “I stopped working on TV for a year.”

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Story Link: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne..._medium=social

Robert Conrad, the athletic, two-fisted actor who starred as Secret Service agent James West and did his own spectacular stunts on the 1960s futuristic CBS Western The Wild Wild West, has died. He was 84.

The Chicago native also was known for starring as real-life World War II pilot Maj. Greg "Pappy" Boyington on NBC's 1976-78 period drama Baa Baa Black Sheep (later known in syndication as Black Sheep Squadron), one of the first series created by Stephen J. Cannell.

Conrad, though, always said that the performance he was most proud of was his turn as the French-Canadian trapper Pasquinel in James Michener's Centennial, the 16 1/2-hour, 12-episode miniseries about the evolution of the American West that aired on NBC in 1978-79.

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NYT OBIT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/b...koch-dead.html

In 1983, a wealthy American wandered into the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in England. He saw a scale model of a new theater that the company hoped to build, if only it had the money. The American said he would underwrite the project, but wanted to remain anonymous.

Three years later, Queen Elizabeth II presided at the opening of the new Swan Theater. The American, Frederick R. Koch, who had built the theater for $2.8 million, stood by her side. But she respected his wish for privacy: She thanked “our generous benefactor” — but did not name him.

His most substantial gift was to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, to which he donated an exceptional collection of musical and literary manuscripts. His core collection held more than 2,000 items, including scores by Debussy, Wagner and Verdi.

“These working scores are really important because they show how something evolved from its first appearance through subsequent productions,” Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, said in an interview.

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https://www.billboard.com/articles/n...lyle-mays-obit

Lyle Mays, a jazz keyboardist whose work, chiefly with the Pat Metheny Group, won nearly a dozen Grammy Awards, died Monday in Los Angeles, it was announced. He was 66.

He joined the guitarist group Metheny in the 1970s, where he was a performer, composer and arranger. The group’s endlessly innovative fusion style incorporated everything from rock and contemporary jazz to world music.

The group won numerous jazz performance Grammys, and some for best contemporary jazz album, including 2005’s award for The Way Up. But the group also scored an award in 1998 for best rock instrumental performance for “The Roots of Coincidence.”

Mays also was a sideman for albums by jazz, rock and pop artists, including Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones and the group Earth, Wind & Fire.

One of my favorite jazz albums, "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls," released in 1981, was a Mays - Metheny collaboration.

[sittingon50]

Former Major League All Star Tony Fernandez:


https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2020/...sses-away.html

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A. E. Hotchner, age 102

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/b...hner-dead.html

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Mickey Wright, age 85

Mary Kathryn "Mickey" Wright (February 14, 1935 – February 17, 2020) was an American LPGA Tour professional golfer. She became a member of the tour in 1955 and won 13 major championships and 82 LPGA Tour career events. She was a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.

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19 February

Pete Babando, age 94

Peter Joseph Babando (May 10, 1925 – February 19, 2020) was a Canadian ice hockey player who played in the National Hockey League for the Boston Bruins, Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Black Hawks, and New York Rangers. On April 23, 1950, in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, he scored the Cup-clinching goal as a member of the Red Wings, to eliminate the New York Rangers at 8:31 of the second overtime. As of 2019, it remains the only Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final to go multiple overtimes. At the time he was one of the few American-born players in the NHL.

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Bonnie MacLean, whose colorful posters for rock shows in San Francisco in the 1960s and early ’70s helped define the psychedelic scene and have since become collector’s items, died on Feb. 4 in Newtown, Pa. She was 80.

[Rangerzag]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...lackgirlmagic/


After 101 years, Katherine Johnson left this earth with a contribution that far exceeds her work at NASA: she has inspired young black girls to reach for the stars. The film “Hidden Figures” made famous her work calculating the trajectory the Mercury space capsule had to follow to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. While these calculations were first derived by an electronic computer, astronaut John Glenn refused to launch until the computer’s data were confirmed by manual calculation. And there was only one person he trusted fully to do that calculation: Johnson. Only when her work was complete did Glenn declare the mission a go.

[sittingon50]

RIP Ms. Johnson.

That was a terrific movie, Ranger.

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Ousted Egyptian leader Hosni Mubark, age 91.

[seacatfan]

David Roback, one of the founders of the band Mazzy Star, 61.

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Writer Clive Cussler, age 88

NYT OBIT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/b...bits&smtyp=cur

Mayan jungles, undersea kingdoms, ghost ships, evil forces out to destroy the world, beautiful women, heroes modeled on himself — Mr. Cussler’s vivid literary fantasies and his larger-than-life exploits swirled together for four decades, spinning off more than 85 books and locating almost as many shipwrecks.

A college dropout who once pumped gas and wrote advertising copy, Mr. Cussler resorted to a hoax to get his first book published. But his work — mostly action thrillers of the James Bond-Indiana Jones kind, plus nonfiction accounts of his marine quests and a few children’s books — made him a global celebrity.

His Arvada, CO, car museum displays roughly 70 of the 120 vintage cars he collected: https://www.cusslermuseum.com/