Literotica Cemetary

[JennyOHill2]

Ron Stewart, Star of Maple Leafs Champs, Dies at 79

Associated Press

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-afs0awx8-Ns/T21WCC5eanI/AAAAAAAANgY/Mvu4sPpMy3Q/s320/RonStewart.jpg
Ron Stewart

“He was one of the best defensive forwards in the N.H.L.,” said Emile Francis, who coached Stewart for the Rangers and later, as their general manager, turned the coaching over to him. “He was an excellent penalty-killer, one of the best in hockey.”

But for all his achievements, Stewart, who died on March 17 at 79, was shadowed by a moment away from the rinks: a “tragic, senseless, bizarre” incident, in the words of the Nassau County district attorney, William Cahn, that led to the death of a Rangers teammate, the Hall of Fame goalie Terry Sawchuk.

On the evening of April 29, 1970, after the Rangers’ regular season had ended, Stewart and Sawchuk were preparing to close up a house they rented in East Atlantic Beach on Long Island. Before they did, they went to a bar, where they got into an argument. Shouting soon turned to shoving.

After they returned to the house, the dispute resumed, and they pushed each other on the lawn, witnesses said. Sawchuk fell and injured his gallbladder and liver. He underwent surgery three times, but died of a blood clot on May 31 at a Manhattan hospital. He was 40.

Precisely how the fight started and how Sawchuk incurred his injuries remains murky, but a Nassau County grand jury found the death to be accidental, absolving Stewart of blame.

Sawchuk, who was notably a star with the Detroit Red Wings, was one of hockey’s greatest goalies in his prime despite a life plagued by emotional and drinking problems. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame the year after his death.

Stewart retained his ties to the Maple Leafs. He had planned to attend a 50th-anniversary reunion of their 1962 champions but could not because of failing health.

He died of cancer in Kelowna, British Columbia, his wife, Linda, said. The Leafs paid tribute to him on with a video scoreboard presentation at their game with the Rangers.

Ronald George Stewart was born on July 11, 1932, in Calgary, Alberta. He made his N.H.L. debut with the Maple Leafs in 1952 and played 13 consecutive seasons for them. He played in four All-Star Games and with the Leafs’ three consecutive Stanley Cup champions, from 1962 to 1964.

After stints with the Boston Bruins and the St. Louis Blues, he played for the Rangers, the Vancouver Canucks, the Rangers again and the Islanders before retiring as a player in 1973.

Francis hired Stewart to succeed him as the Rangers’ coach for the 1975-76 season. He had a 15-20-4 record when John Ferguson replaced Francis as general manager in January 1976 and then took over the coaching as well. Stewart coached the Los Angeles Kings in 1977-78, taking them to the playoffs.

Recalling the Stewart-Sawchuk fight in an interview on Wednesday, Francis said that when he visited Sawchuk in the hospital, “He said: ‘It wasn’t Ron Stewart’s fault, don’t blame him. I was the aggressor in the whole thing.’ ”

By Sawchuk’s account, Francis said, the arguing began when Sawchuk told Stewart that he owed him $8 on a phone bill. But Dr. Denis F. Nicholson, a physician for a number of Rangers families, said at the time that Sawchuk had told him that he punched Stewart at the bar because he “had been bugging him all year” and that he jumped Stewart at the house “and I fell on his knee.”

Francis said Stewart never spoke to him about the incident.

In addition to Linda Stewart, his second wife, Stewart is survived by his sons, Terry, Jeff and Robert, from his marriage to his first wife, Barbara, which ended in divorce, and three grandchildren.

Stewart visited Sawchuk at least twice while he was hospitalized. He was an honorary pallbearer at Sawchuk’s funeral in Pontiac, Mich., which Francis and several other Rangers players also attended.

“I told him, ‘You’re coming with us,’ ” Francis recalled. “ ‘You’ve got nothing to hide from.’ ”

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

Wrestler Chief Jay Strongbow is dead
April 5, 2012

He died on Tuesday April 4, 2012

A family member confirmed his death, but declined to say where he died or provide a cause. His age was variously listed as 79 or 83.

Joseph Luke Scarpa was born in Philadelphia. He is survived by his wife, Mary; a son, Mark, who wrestled as Mark Young; and a grandson.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/s...estling-fame-as-chief-jay-strongbow-dies.html

Wrestler Chief Jay Strongbow was a Pittsfield favorite

04/06/2012

May 2, 1973, was a warm night in Pittsfield, according to the Farmer's Almanac for that year. It got up to 82 degrees during the day. But if it was warm outside the Pittsfield Boys' Club that night, it was positively steaming inside.

In the feature match of the night, Chief Jay Strongbow squared off against "Classy" Freddie Blassie in a World Wide Wrestling Federation bout that was part of a five-match card.

("Classy" Freddie Blassie was anything but classy. He bit a man's ear off. He was the most hated of the bad guys, when I was a little child.)

According to newspaper accounts, he leapt out of the ring. When Strongbow followed, Blassie picked up the press table, scattering reporters hither and yon, and hurled it at him. Blassie fled back into the ring, and Strongbow, in hot pursuit, picked up the press table and followed the Classy One back into the squared circle and began to pummel him with the table, much to the delight of the crowd.

It was all too much for the referee, who stopped the fight and declared both wrestlers disqualified. The crowd howled in anger.

On Nov. 29, 1973, Strongbow and another wrestling icon, Andre the Giant, wrestled before a crowd of about 1,700, against then tag-team champions Mr. Fuji and Tanaka. The match ended in a double disqualification, when all four wrestlers entered the ring to fight.

Strongbow, in fact, was one of pro wrestling's great tag-team fighters. He won the belt four separate times, with three different partners: Sonny King, Billy White Wolf and his "brother" Jules Strongbow.

Strongbow was not the Chief's real name. He was born Joe Scarpa, in Philadelphia. In 1947, at the age of 20, he began wrestling under his real name.

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/ci_20337879/wrestler-chief-jay-strongbow-was-pittsfield-favorite

 

[JennyOHill2]

Former Cosmos, Lazio star Giorgio Chinaglia dies

ROME (AP) - Former New York Cosmos star Giorgio Chinaglia has died of complications from a heart attack, his son said. The Italian soccer great was 65.

Chinaglia died at his home in Naples, Fla., his son, Anthony, said through family friend Charlie Stillatano, who was Chinaglia's co-host on a Sirius XM radio show.

Chinaglia was the all-time leading scorer in the North American Soccer League after starring with the Italian club Lazio.

Lazio also announced the death. Chinaglia lived in the U.S. since facing accusations in Rome of involvement in an organized crime group that allegedly tried to buy Lazio in 2006.

Chinaglia helped Lazio win its first Italian title in 1974 and later became the club's president.

In 1976, he joined the Cosmos and played alongside Pele and Franz Beckenbauer. He played for Italy at the 1974 World Cup.

With the Cosmos, he was the power scorer in a lineup that featured the finesse of Pele and the calculating play of Beckenbauer.

"I am a finisher. That means when I finish with the ball, it is in the back of the net," he once said in 1978.

In 2000, Chinaglia was inducted into the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame and chosen the greatest player in Lazio's history during the club's centenary celebrations.

"Both myself and the entire city of Rome express profound condolences," Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno said in a statement. "For Lazio fans Chinaglia was more than a symbol. He was a banner player that carried along an entire generation of fans and the emblem of the first title in 1974. And that's how we remember him.

"We know that for years he was no longer a resident in Italy, but we're available for the family for any type of initiative they want to organize to remember him," Alemanno added.

Chinaglia was born in Tuscany, but his family soon moved to Wales, where he began his soccer career with Swansea.

Chinaglia returned to Italy with the small Tuscan club Massese in 1966 and eventually joined Lazio in 1969, going on to score 98 goals in 209 matches for the Roman team. Italian fans nicknamed him Long John for his Welsh past.

In New York, Chinaglia became the leading scorer in the history of the North American Soccer League, with 262 goals in his eight seasons for the Cosmos.

He was Lazio president from 1983 to 1985.

More recently, Chinaglia had been hosting "The Football Show" since 2006.
"Giorgio was one of soccer's legendary figures and we're honored and grateful to have had him as a part of the SiriusXM family," the satellite radio company said in a statement. "All those who love the sport and listened to him share his stories and incredible knowledge of the game are better for the experience. He will be missed."

 

[JennyOHill2]

Warren Stevens, Busy Character Actor, Dies at 92

Warren Stevens, a lanky, square-jawed actor with swept-back hair and a husky voice whose face became familiar through his more than 100 roles on television and in movies over six decades, died at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 92.

The cause was chronic lung disease, his publicist, Dale Olson, said.

Mr. Stevens, who first made his mark on the Broadway stage in the 1940s, became a versatile and ubiquitous presence on television in the ’50s. He played three different characters on episodes of “Have Gun, Will Travel” between 1957 and 1963; three different characters on “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” between 1965 and 1967; four characters on “Bonanza” between 1965 and 1970; and four on “Ironside” between 1967 and 1975.

While Mr. Stevens would make appearances on dozens of other television series, perhaps his best-known role was in the classic 1956 science fiction movie “Forbidden Planet.” He played the ill-fated Doc Ostrow, who perishes at the hand of a mysterious force on the planet Altair IV, 16 light years from Earth, after his spaceship arrives to search for a long-lost colony.

In 1952, he had a supporting role as a reporter in the movie “Deadline, U.S.A.,” in which Humphrey Bogart played the managing editor of a big-city newspaper seeking to dissuade its owners from selling it simply to free up their capital. Mr. Stevens was among the cast members who gave “conspicuously flavorsome and good” performances, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.

Among his more than 40 films, Mr. Stevens also had roles in “The Barefoot Contessa,” “Gunpoint,” “Madigan,” “Red Skies of Montana” and “Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell.”

His more than 60 television roles over the years included appearances (and sometimes recurring roles) on “Return to Peyton Place,” “The Twilight Zone,” “M*A*S*H,” “Rawhide,” “The Man From U.N.C.L.E” and “Gunsmoke.”

In recent years, he appeared with Lou Diamond Phillips, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Majors in the 2004 western “The Trail to Hope Rose” on the Hallmark Channel and in a 2006 episode of “ER.”

Warren Albert Stevens was born on Nov. 2, 1919, in Clarks Summit, Pa. By his early 20s, he was acting in summer stock in Virginia.

After serving as a pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he came to New York and joined the Actors Studio. He soon had roles on Broadway in “Galileo,” “Sundown Beach” and “The Smile of the World,” and in radio soap operas including “The Aldrich Family.”

His break came in 1949 in the Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley’s “Detective Story,” a gritty account of the inner workings of a New York City police precinct that starred Ralph Bellamy. Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times that “as a decent young man horrified to find himself a common criminal, Warren Stevens gives a fine, reticent performance.” That performance led to a film contract with 20th Century Fox.

Mr. Stevens is survived by his wife of 43 years, the former Barbara Fletcher, and their two sons, Adam and Mathew; and a son, Laurence, from a previous marriage, to Susan Huntington.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Mike Wallace, `60 Minutes' star interviewer, dies

NEW YORK (AP) - CBS newsman Mike Wallace, the dogged, merciless reporter and interviewer who took on politicians, celebrities and other public figures in a 60-year career highlighted by the on-air confrontations that helped make "60 Minutes" the most successful primetime television news program ever, has died. He was 93.

Until he was slowed by heart surgery as he neared his 90th birthday in 2008, Wallace continued making news, doing "60 Minutes" interviews with such subjects as Jack Kevorkian and Roger Clemens. He had promised to still do occasional reports when he announced his retirement as a regular correspondent in March 2006.

Wallace said then that he had long vowed to retire "when my toes turn up" and "they're just beginning to curl a trifle. ... It's become apparent to me that my eyes and ears, among other appurtenances, aren't quite what they used to be."

Among his later contributions, after bowing out as a regular, was a May 2007 profile of GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, and an interview with Kevorkian, the assisted suicide doctor released from prison in June 2007 who died June 3, 2011, at age 83.

In December 2007, Wallace landed the first interview with Clemens after the star pitcher was implicated in the Mitchell report on performance enhancing drugs in baseball. The interview, in which Clemens maintained his innocence, was broadcast in early January 2008.

Wallace was the first man hired when late CBS news producer Don Hewitt put together the staff of "60 Minutes" at its inception in 1968. The show wasn't a hit at first, but it worked its way up to the top 10 in the 1977-78 season and remained there, season after season, with Wallace as one of its mainstays. Among other things, it proved there could be big profits in TV journalism.

The top 10 streak was broken in 2001, in part due to the onset of huge-drawing rated reality shows. But "60 Minutes" remained in the top 25 in recent years, ranking 15th in viewers in the 2010-11 season.

The show pioneered the use of "ambush interviews," with reporter and camera crew corralling alleged wrongdoers in parking lots, hallways, wherever a comment - or at least a stricken expression - might be harvested from someone dodging the reporters' phone calls.

Such tactics were phased out over time - Wallace said they provided drama but not much good information.

And his style never was all about surprise, anyway. Wallace was a master of the skeptical follow-up question, coaxing his prey with a "forgive me, but ..." or a simple, "come on." He was known as one who did his homework, spending hours preparing for interviews, and alongside the exposes, "60 Minutes" featured insightful talks with celebrities and world leaders.

He was equally tough on public and private behavior. In 1973, with the Watergate scandal growing, he sat with top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and read a long list of alleged crimes, from money laundering to obstructing justice. "All of this, Wallace noted, "by the law and order administration of Richard Nixon."

The surly Ehrlichman could only respond: "Is there a question in there somewhere?"

In the early 1990s, Wallace reduced Barbra Streisand to tears as he scolded her for being "totally self-absorbed" when she was young and mocked her decades of psychoanalysis. "What is it she is trying to find out that takes 20 years?" Wallace said he wondered.

"I'm a slow learner," Streisand told him.

His late colleague Harry Reasoner once said, "There is one thing that Mike can do better than anybody else: With an angelic smile, he can ask a question that would get anyone else smashed in the face."

Wallace said he didn't think he had an unfair advantage over his interview subjects: "The person I'm interviewing has not been subpoenaed. He's in charge of himself, and he lives with his subject matter every day. All I'm armed with is research."

Wallace himself became a dramatic character in several projects, from the stage version of "Frost/Nixon," when he was played by Stephen Rowe, to the 1999 film "The Insider," based in part on a 1995 "60 Minutes" story about tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, who accused Brown & Williamson of intentionally adding nicotine to cigarettes. Christopher Plummer starred as Wallace and Russell Crowe as Wigand. Wallace was unhappy with the film, in which he was portrayed as caving to pressure to kill a story about Wigand.

Operating on a tip, The New York Times reported that "60 Minutes" planned to excise Wigand's interview from its tobacco expose. CBS said Wigand had signed a nondisclosure agreement with his former company, and the network feared that by airing what he had to say, "60 Minutes" could be sued along with him.

The day the Times story appeared, Wallace downplayed the gutted story as "a momentary setback." He soon sharpened his tone. Leading into the revised report when it aired, he made no bones that "we cannot broadcast what critical information about tobacco, addiction and public health (Wigand) might be able to offer." Then, in a "personal note," he told viewers that he and his "60 Minutes" colleagues were "dismayed that the management at CBS had seen fit to give in to perceived threats of legal action."

The full report eventually was broadcast.

Wallace maintained a hectic pace after CBS waived its long-standing rule requiring broadcasters to retire at 65. In early 1999, at age 80, he added another line to his resume by appearing on the network's spinoff, "60 Minutes II." (A similar concession was granted Wallace's longtime colleague, Don Hewitt, who in 2004, at age 81, relinquished his reins as executive producer; he died in 2009.)

Wallace amassed 21 Emmy awards during his career, as well as five DuPont-Columbia journalism and five Peabody awards.

In all, his television career spanned six decades, much of it spent at CBS. In 1949, he appeared as Myron Wallace in a show called "Majority Rules." In the early 1950s, he was an announcer and game show host for programs such as "What's in a Word?" He also found time to act in a 1954 Broadway play, "Reclining Figure," directed by Abe Burrows.

In the mid-1950s came his smoke-wreathed "Night Beat," a series of one-on-one interviews with everyone from an elderly Frank Lloyd Wright to a young Henry Kissinger that began on local TV in New York and then appeared on the ABC network. It was the show that first brought Wallace fame as a hard-boiled interviewer, a "Mike Malice" who rarely gave his subjects any slack.

Wrote Coronet magazine in 1957: "Wallace's interrogation had the intensity of a third degree, often the candor of a psychoanalytic session. Nothing like it had ever been known on TV. ... To Wallace, no guest is sacred, and he frankly dotes on controversy."
Sample "Night Beat" exchange, with colorful restaurateur Toots Shor. Wallace: "Toots, why do people call you a slob?" Shor: "Me? Jiminy crickets, they 'musta' been talking about Jackie Gleason."

In those days, Wallace said, "interviews by and large were virtual minuets. ... Nobody dogged, nobody pushed." He said that was why "Night Beat""got attention that hadn't been given to interview broadcasts before."

It was also around then that Wallace did a bit as a TV newsman in the 1957 Hollywood drama "A Face in the Crowd," which starred Andy Griffith as a small-town Southerner who becomes a political phenomenon through his folksy television appearances. Two years later, Wallace helped create "The Hate That Hate Produced," a highly charged program about the Nation of Islam that helped make a national celebrity out of Malcolm X and was later criticized as biased and inflammatory.

After holding a variety of other news and entertainment jobs, including serving as advertising pitchman for a cigarette brand, Wallace became a full-time newsman for CBS in 1963.

He said it was the death of his 19-year-old son, Peter, in an accident in 1962 that made him decide to stick to serious journalism from then on. (Another son, Chris, followed his father and became a broadcast journalist, most recently as a Fox News Channel anchor.)

Wallace had a short stint reporting from Vietnam, and took a sock in the jaw while covering the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. But he didn't fit the stereotype of the Eastern liberal journalist. He was a close friend of the Reagans and was once offered the job of Richard Nixon's press secretary. He called his politics moderate.

One "Night Beat" interview resulted in a libel suit, filed by a police official angry over remarks about him by mobster Mickey Cohen. Wallace said ABC settled the lawsuit for $44,000, and called it the only time money had been paid to a plaintiff in a suit in which he was involved.

The most publicized lawsuit against him was by retired Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who sought $120 million for a 1982 "CBS Reports" documentary, "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception." Westmoreland dropped the libel suit in February 1985 after a long trial. Lawyers for each side later said legal costs of the suit totaled $12 million, of which $9 million was paid by CBS.

Wallace once said the case brought on depression that put him in the hospital for more than a week. "Imagine sitting day after day in the courtroom hearing yourself called every vile name imaginable," he said.

In 1996, he appeared before the Senate's Special Committee on Aging to urge more federal funds for depression research, saying that he had felt "lower, lower, lower than a snake's belly" but had recovered through psychiatry and antidepressant drugs. He later disclosed that he once tried to commit suicide during that dark period. Wallace, columnist Art Buchwald and author William Styron were friends who commiserated often enough about depression to call themselves "The Blues Brothers," according to a 2011 memoir by Styron's daughter, Alexandra.

Wallace called his 1984 book, written with Gary Paul Gates, "Close Encounters." He described it as "one mostly lucky man's encounters with growing up professionally."
In 2005, he brought out his memoir, "Between You and Me."

Among those interviewing him about the book was son Chris, for "Fox News Sunday." His son asked: Does he understand why people feel a disaffection from the mainstream media?

"They think they're wide-eyed commies. Liberals," the elder Wallace replied, a notion he dismissed as "damned foolishness."

Wallace was born Myron Wallace on May 9, 1918, in Brookline, Mass. He began his news career in Chicago in the 1940s, first as radio news writer for the Chicago Sun and then as reporter for WMAQ. He started at CBS in 1951.

He was married four times. In 1986, he wed Mary Yates Wallace, the widow of his close friend and colleague, Ted Yates, who had died in 1967. Besides his wife, Wallace is survived by his son, Chris, a stepdaughter, Pauline Dora, and stepson Eames Yates.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Former Hab Emile Bouchard dies

http://images.tsn.ca/images/stories/2012/4/14/94175830-430x296.jpg

MONTREAL -- Emile "Butch" Bouchard, a longtime Montreal Canadiens captain and four-time Stanley Cup winner, has died Saturday. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his son, Pierre, and his friend and sports analyst Ron Fournier.

Fournier said Bouchard was surrounded by his family when he died.

Bouchard scored 49 goals in 785 games during his 15-year NHL career. The defenseman captained the Canadiens for eight years before retiring after the 1955-56 season.

The Canadiens won the Stanley Cup four times while he was with the team, twice while he was captain. Bouchard was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1966.

"He was one of the great captains in the history of the Canadiens," said Rejean Houle, the team's alumni president, who played with the Canadiens in the 1970s and '80s.

"It was a period where the team really became a dynasty."

Pierre Bouchard, a member of the Canadiens himself from 1970-78, said his father remained active until the end of his life.

"He was getting old, but he was in good shape," he said.

Born in Montreal on Sept. 4, 1919, Emile Bouchard wasn't planning on a career in hockey after originally wanting to work in banking or as a beekeeper. He played many sports growing up, including baseball and boxing; it was only around age 16 that he began to take hockey seriously.

After borrowing $35 from his brother to buy equipment, Bouchard began playing for the Verdun Maple Leafs of Quebec's old Provincial Senior League.

The rugged 6-foot-2, 205-pound Bouchard quickly got noticed and the Canadiens offered him his first professional contract to play with their minor league club in Providence. He played 12 games for the team in 1940-41.

Bouchard grabbed the big club's attention at training camp the following year when he made the 50-mile trip by bicycle from his home in Montreal to the training site in St-Hyacinthe, Quebec.

He earned a spot on the blue line and played the next 15 seasons with the Canadiens, establishing a reputation as one of the best hitters of the era.

"He was one of the leaders in the 1940s for a team that wasn't going anywhere, and then later, things went very well, with the arrival of Maurice (Richard) and all the others after that," Pierre Bouchard said. "Those were great years for the Canadiens' organization.

Despite his success, Emile Bouchard had to wait 43 years to have his No. 3 jersey retired. After a grassroots campaign started by his family, he was honored alongside fellow great Elmer Lach before the team's centennial game on Dec. 4, 2009.

"It gave him a great boost in the last seven, eight years of his life," Pierre Bouchard said. "It allowed him to be better known to the younger generation."

 

[Weird Harold]

LOS ANGELES | Wed Apr 18, 2012 4:11pm EDT

(Reuters) - "American Bandstand" host Dick Clark, whose long-running television dance show helped rock 'n' roll win acceptance in mainstream America, has died at age 82, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

Clark, one of America's best-known TV personalities, parlayed his "Bandstand" fame into a career as a producer and host of dozens of other shows, including ABC's annual New Year's Eve broadcast from Times Square. His youthful good looks -- which he maintained into his 70s -- won him the nickname of "America's oldest teenager." He suffered a stroke in 2004.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Legendary TV host Dick Clark dies

LOS ANGELES --
Dick Clark, the ever-youthful television host and tireless entrepreneur who helped bring rock 'n' roll into the mainstream on "American Bandstand," and later produced and hosted a vast range of programming from game shows to the year-end countdown from Times Square on "New Year's Rockin' Eve," has died. He was 82.

Spokesman Paul Shefrin said Clark had a heart attack Wednesday morning at Saint John's hospital in Santa Monica, a day after he was admitted for an outpatient procedure.

Clark had continued performing even after he suffered a stroke in 2004 that affected his ability to speak and walk.

Long dubbed "the world's oldest teenager" because of his boyish appearance, Clark bridged the rebellious new music scene and traditional show business, and equally comfortable whether chatting about music with Sam Cooke or bantering with Ed McMahon about TV bloopers. He thrived as the founder of Dick Clark Productions, supplying movies, game and music shows, beauty contests and more to TV. Among his credits: "The $25,000 Pyramid," ''TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes" and the American Music Awards.

For a time in the 1980s, he had shows on all three networks and was listed among the Forbes 400 of wealthiest Americans. Clark also was part of radio as partner in the United Stations Radio Network, which provided programs — including Clark's — to thousands of stations.

"There's hardly any segment of the population that doesn't see what I do," Clark told The Associated Press in a 1985 interview. "It can be embarrassing. People come up to me and say, 'I love your show,' and I have no idea which one they're talking about."

The original "American Bandstand" was one of network TV's longest-running series as part of ABC's daytime lineup from 1957 to 1987. It later aired for a year in syndication and briefly on the USA Network. Over the years, it introduced stars ranging from Buddy Holly to Madonna. The show's status as an American cultural institution was solidified when Clark donated Bandstand's original podium and backdrop to the Smithsonian Institution.

Clark joined "Bandstand" in 1956 after Bob Horn, who'd been the host since its 1952 debut, was fired. Under Clark's guidance, it went from a local Philadelphia show to a national phenomenon.

"I played records, the kids danced, and America watched," was how Clark once described the series' simplicity. In his 1958 hit "Sweet Little Sixteen," Chuck Berry sang that "they'll be rocking on Bandstand, Philadelphia, P-A."

As a host, he had the smooth delivery of a seasoned radio announcer. As a producer, he had an ear for a hit record. He also knew how to make wary adults welcome this odd new breed of music in their homes.

Clark defended pop artists and artistic freedom, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said in an online biography of the 1993 inductee. He helped give black artists their due by playing original R&B recordings instead of cover versions by white performers, and he condemned censorship.

His stroke in December 2004 forced him to miss his annual appearance on "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve." He returned the following year and, although his speech at times was difficult to understand, many praised his bravery, including other stroke victims.

Still speaking with difficulty, he continued taking part in his New Year's shows, though in a diminished role. Ryan Seacrest became the main host.

"I'm just thankful I'm still able to enjoy this once-a-year treat," he told The Associated Press by e-mail in December 2008 as another New Year's Eve approached.

He was honored at the Emmy Awards in 2006, telling the crowd: "I have accomplished my childhood dream, to be in show business. Everybody should be so lucky to have their dreams come true. I've been truly blessed."

He was born Richard Wagstaff Clark in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1929. His father, Richard Augustus Clark, was a sales manager who worked in radio.

Clark idolized his athletic older brother, Bradley, who was killed in World War II. In his 1976 autobiography, "Rock, Roll & Remember," Clark recalled how radio helped ease his loneliness and turned him into a fan of Steve Allen, Arthur Godfrey and other popular hosts.

Clark began his career in the mailroom of a Utica, N.Y., radio station in 1945. By age 26, he was a broadcasting veteran, with nine years' experience on radio and TV stations in Syracuse and Utica, N.Y., and Philadelphia. He held a bachelor's degree from Syracuse University. While in Philadelphia, Clark befriended McMahon, who later credited Clark for introducing him to his future "Tonight Show" boss, Johnny Carson.

In the 1960s, "American Bandstand" moved from black-and-white to color, from weekday broadcasts to once-a-week Saturday shows and from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Although its influence started to ebb, it still featured some of the biggest stars of each decade, whether Janis Joplin, the Jackson 5, Talking Heads or Prince. But Clark never did book two of rock's iconic groups, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Elvis Presley also never performed, although Clark managed an on-air telephone interview while Presley was in the Army.

When Michael Jackson died in June 2009, Clark recalled working with him since he was a child, adding, "of all the thousands of entertainers I have worked with, Michael was THE most outstanding. Many have tried and will try to copy him, but his talent will never be matched."

Clark kept more than records spinning with his Dick Clark Productions. Its credits included the Academy of Country Music and Golden Globe awards; TV movies including the Emmy-winning "The Woman Who Willed a Miracle" (1984), the "$25,000 Pyramid" game show and the 1985 film "Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins." Clark himself made a cameo on "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and a dramatic appearance as a witness on the original "Perry Mason." He was an involuntary part of Michael Moore's Academy Award-winning "Bowling for Columbine," in which Clark is seen brushing off Moore as the filmmaker confronts him about working conditions at a restaurant owned by Clark.

In 1974, at ABC's request, Clark created the American Music Awards after the network lost the broadcast rights to the Grammy Awards.

He was also an author, with "Dick Clark's American Bandstand" and such self-help books as "Dick Clark's Program for Success in Your Business and Personal Life" and "Looking Great, Staying Young." His unchanging looks inspired a joke in "Peggy Sue Gets Married," the 1986 comedy starring Kathleen Turner as an unhappy wife and mother transported back to 1960. Watching Clark on a black and white TV set, she shakes her head in amazement, "Look at that man, he never ages."

Clark's clean-cut image survived a music industry scandal. In 1960, during a congressional investigation of "payola" or bribery in the record and radio industry, Clark was called on to testify.

He was cleared of any suspicions but was required by ABC to divest himself of record-company interests to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. The demand cost him $8 million, Clark once estimated. His holdings included partial ownership of Swan Records, which later released the first U.S. version of the Beatles' smash "She Loves You."

He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 1994 and served as spokesman for the American Association of Diabetes Educators.

Clark, twice divorced, had a son, Richard Augustus II, with first wife Barbara Mallery and two children, Duane and Cindy, with second wife Loretta Martin. He married Kari Wigton in 1977.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Levon Helm, key member of The Band, dies at 71

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ALBANY, N.Y. — With songs like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," ''The Weight" and "Up on Cripple Creek," The Band fused rock, blues, folk and gospel to create a sound that seemed as authentically American as a Mathew Brady photograph or a Mark Twain short story.

In truth, the group had only one American — Levon Helm.

Helm, the drummer and singer who brought an urgent beat and a genuine Arkansas twang to some of The Band's best-known songs and helped turn a bunch of musicians known mostly as Bob Dylan's backup group into one of rock's most legendary acts, has died. He was 71.

Helm, who was found to have throat cancer in 1998, died Thursday afternoon of complications from cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, said Lucy Sabini of Vanguard Records. On Tuesday, a message on his website said he was in the final stages of cancer.

Helm and his bandmates — Canadians Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel — were musical virtuosos who returned to the roots of American music in the late 1960s as other rockers veered into psychedelia, heavy metal and jams. The group's 1968 debut, "Music From Big Pink," and its follow-up, "The Band," remain landmark albums of the era, and songs such as "The Weight," ''Dixie Down" and "Cripple Creek" have become rock standards.

Early on, The Band backed Dylan on his sensational and controversial electric tours of 1965-66 and collaborated with him on the legendary "Basement Tapes," which produced "I Shall Be Released," ''Tears of Rage" and many other favorites.

Dylan said on his website Thursday: "He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about."

Hudson said on his website that he was "terribly sad."

"Thank you for 50 years of friendship and music," he posted. "No more sorrows, no more troubles, no more pain. He went peacefully to that beautiful marvelous wonderful place. ... Levon, I'm proud of you."

The son of an Arkansas cotton farmer, Helm was just out of high school when he joined rocker Ronnie Hawkins for a tour of Canada in 1957 as the drummer for the Hawks. That band eventually recruited a group of Canadian musicians who, along with Helm, spent grueling years touring rough bars in Canada and the South.

They would split from Hawkins, hook up with Dylan and eventually call themselves The Band — because, as they explained many times, that's what everyone called them anyway.

In some ways, The Band was the closest this country ever came to the camaraderie and achievement of the Beatles. Each of the five members brought special talents that through years of touring, recording and living together blended into a unique sound.

The tall, lanky Robertson was an expert blues-rock guitarist and the group's best lyricist, his songs inspired in part by Dylan and by the stories Helm would tell him of the South. The baby-faced Danko was a fluid bassist, an accomplished singer and occasional writer. The bearish Hudson was a virtuoso and eccentric who could seemingly master any instrument, especially keyboards, while the sad-eyed Manuel's haunting falsetto on "Whispering Pines," ''Tears of Rage" and others led Helm to call him the group's lead singer.

But for many Band admirers, that honor belonged to the short, feisty Helm, whose authoritative twang once was likened to a town crier calling a meeting to order. He not only sang "Dixie Down," he inhabited it, becoming the Confederate Virgil Caine, "hungry, just barely alive," his brother killed by the Yankees, the South itself in ruins. It was the kind of heartbreaking, complicated story and performance that had even Northerners rooting for the proud and desperate Virgil.

"The Weight" and many other songs were true collaborations: Helm's voice was at the bottom, Danko's in the middle and Manuel on top. Helm — the group's musical leader on stage — played drums loose-limbed and funky, shoulders hunched and head to the side when he sang.

But the group, especially Manuel, struggled with drugs and alcohol. While Danko and Manuel shared songwriting credits in the early years, Robertson was essentially the lone writer for the last few albums. By the middle of the decade, Robertson, especially, was burned out and wanted to get off the road.

They bid farewell to live shows with a bang with the famous "Last Waltz" concert in 1976. Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Dylan were among the stars who played the show in San Francisco, filmed by Martin Scorsese for a movie of the same name, released in 1978.

"The Last Waltz" is regarded by many as the greatest of concert films, but it also helped lead to a bitter split between Robertson and Helm, once the best of friends.

Robertson became close to Scorsese during the production, and Helm believed the movie was structured to make Robertson the leader and advance his own movie career. They rarely spoke after, despite efforts by Hawkins and others to intervene.

While Helm would accuse Robertson of being on a star trip, Helm, ironically, was the more successful actor, with acclaimed roles in "Coal Miner's Daughter," ''The Right Stuff" and other films. And no one who watched "The Last Waltz" could forget Helm's performance of "Dixie Down," shot mostly in closeup, his face squeezed with emotion.

In his memoir, "This Wheel's on Fire," Helm said some hard feelings about Robertson also included his getting songwriting credits on Band songs that other members considered group efforts. Robertson would deny the allegations. On his Facebook page this week, he revealed that he had been devastated to learn of Helm's illness and visited him in the hospital.

"I sat with Levon for a good while, and thought of the incredible and beautiful times we had together," Robertson wrote.

Without Robertson, The Band reunited in the 1980s but never approached its early success. Manuel hanged himself in a Winter Park, Fla., hotel room in 1986. Danko died in his home near Woodstock in 1999, shortly before his 57th birthday.

Highlights from the '90s did include playing at a Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden in 1992 and a collaboration among Helm, Danko and Keith Richards on the rocker "Deuce and a Quarter."

While Helm's illness reduced his voice to something close to a whisper, it did not end his musical career. Beset by debt, in 2004 he began a series of free-wheeling late night shows in his barn in Woodstock that were patterned after medicine shows from his youth. Any night of the bi-weekly Midnight Rambles could feature Gillian Welch, Elvis Costello or his daughter Amy on vocals and violin.

He recorded "Dirt Farmer" in 2007, which was followed by "Electric Dirt" in 2009. Both albums won Grammys. He won another this year for "Ramble at the Ryman."

Original members of The Band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Ace Rosner

[He died in November, but is being buried in Arlington today. Story from WaPo]


The first time I met Ace Rosner he said to me, “I’ve had the best life and the most interesting life of anyone in the world.”

I doubt that anyone will ever make me think otherwise.


Adolph "Ace" Rosner Jr. gives a recipe on living a good life: healthy living and helping others. He died Sunday at the age of 94.

But now that most interesting of lives is over. The man I called my favorite one-armed, race-car-driving ex-CIA officer died Sunday at the age of 94.

Adolph Charles “Ace” Rosner Jr. was born in 1917 in Birmingham, Ala., the seventh of eight children. His father was a serial entrepreneur, and the family lived all over the country.

For a while after high school, Ace was a photo stringer in Baltimore for the New York Times. Then he joined the Army. As an officer in the 3rd Division, 30th Infantry, 1st Battalion, Ace participated in four invasions: Morocco, Sicily, Salerno and Anzio.

It was at Anzio in 1944 that a German mortar shell tore his right arm to ribbons. “When I was in Europe, shot up and injured, I decided that anything that I want that I can afford, I’m going to have,” said Ace, who received four Purple Hearts and three Bronze Stars for valor.

Cars became an obsession, not surprising for someone who learned to drive at age 8, sitting on his father’s lap in the family’s Packard Twin Six. Over the years, Ace owned more than 200, up to 44 at any one time: Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Jaguars, Austin-Healeys, Lincolns. . . . Last year he let me drive his brand-new $200,000 Mercedes SLS AMG Gullwing.

Ace kept his collection in the parking garage of the Woodley Road NW apartment building he moved to in 1961. He was working for the CIA then, a job that took him to London and Vienna during the height of the Cold War.

Ace never said exactly what he did in the CIA. His niece Susan Parker remembers Ace showing her a letter of commendation from the agency. It was totally devoid of details as to how he’d earned it. He would know what they were talking about, and that was good enough.

Whatever it was, it afforded Ace the opportunity to hobnob. While in Europe, he befriended the Greek royal family, endearing himself to the queen because of his ability to procure American peanut butter. He shared his love of cars with the king. Once, Ace was driving his black Ford Thunderbird to visit the monarch at the palace when he noticed that pedestrians stopped to cheer and wave as he sped past. He waved back, curious about the accolades.

When he parked his car at the palace, he saw why. The king had an identical T-Bird. Ace had been mistaken for royalty.

While living in Austria, Ace bought a 1949 Ferrari Barchetta and raced against the likes of Wolfgang von Trips. In Washington, he was a founding member of the Lavender Hill Mob, a group of rabid sports car enthusiasts who helped build the Marlboro race track in Maryland. He invested in a racing-themed bar in Georgetown called the Pit Stop that featured bucket seats as bar stools.

Ace’s cars were not the pampered sort you find at the show at Pebble Beach, Calif. He drove them, filling them with wrappers from his beloved McDonald’s. Sometimes he would just go down to the parking garage to wash them or move a battery charger from vehicle to vehicle. Wherever he was — in the garage, at a car show, driving celebrities in the Cherry Blossom Parade — Ace was always natty, with a driving cap perched atop his head and a scarf knotted around his neck.

His love of cars was infectious, and he had a cadre of younger friends from the local car club scene. Jaime Steve met Ace after moving into his building in 1993. At the time, Jaime owned one car. Today, Jaime owns 19, including a vintage Jeep painted to resemble the kind Ace drove at Anzio.

Ace could have that effect on you.

People would inevitably ask Ace how he could race with just one arm. He was good at steering with his knees, he explained, and at shifting through the steering wheel. Ace was also a great believer in the spinner knob — a little contraption that attaches to the wheel — and he bought them in bulk from Pep Boys. He gave me one, promising that it would enhance any driving experience.

Ace had a loyalty for Walter Reed Army Medical Center that dated back to the year he spent there after losing his arm. Once, when visiting a sister in Baltimore, he was attacked by a knife-wielding mugger, who stabbed Ace in his left hand. Rather than risking an unfamiliar emergency room, Ace wrapped his bleeding hand in towels and drove to Walter Reed in the District.

It was at Walter Reed — now in Bethesda — that Maj. A.C. Rosner passed away from congestive heart failure. He had no immediate survivors.

“I remember everything,” Ace used to tell me before launching into a story. I certainly won’t ever forget him.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Jonathan Frid, Ghoulish ‘Dark Shadows’ Star, Is Dead at 87

Jonathan Frid, a Shakespearean actor who found unexpected — and by his own account unwanted — celebrity as the vampire Barnabas Collins on the sanguinary soap opera “Dark Shadows,” died last Saturday, April 14, in Hamilton, Ontario. He was 87.
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He died from complications of a fall, said Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played several characters on the show. Mr. Frid, who lived in Ancaster, Ontario, leaves no immediate survivors.

Mr. Frid, along with several castmates, makes a cameo appearance in Tim Burton’s feature film “Dark Shadows,” to be released on May 11. Johnny Depp stars as Barnabas.

Though the befanged Mr. Frid was the acknowledged public face of “Dark Shadows” — his likeness was on comic books, board games, trading cards and many other artifacts — Barnabas did not make his first appearance until more than 200 episodes into the run. The character was conceived as a short-term addition to the cast, and early on the threat of the stake loomed large.

Broadcast on weekday afternoons on ABC, “Dark Shadows” began in 1966 as a conventional soap opera (with Gothic overtones), centering on the Collins family and their creaky manse in Maine.

The next year, with ratings slipping, the show’s executive producer, Dan Curtis, chose to inject an element of the supernatural. Enter Barnabas, a brooding, lovelorn, eternally 175-year-old representative of the undead. Today TV vampires are legion, but such a character was an unusual contrivance then.

The ratings shot up, and not only among the traditional soap-opera demographic of stay-at-home women. With its breathtakingly low-rent production values and equally breathtakingly purple dialogue, “Dark Shadows” induced a generation of high school and college students to cut class to revel in its unintended high camp. The producers shelved the stake.

Swirling cape, haunted eyes and fierce eyebrows notwithstanding, Barnabas, as portrayed by Mr. Frid, was no regulation-issue vampire. An 18th-century man — he had been entombed in the Collins family crypt — he struggled to comes to terms with the 20th-century world.

He was a vulnerable vampire, who pined for his lost love, Josette. (She had leaped to her death in 1795.) He was racked with guilt over his thirst for blood, and Mr. Frid played him as a man in the grip of a compulsion he devoutly wished to shake.

Mr. Frid starred in almost 600 episodes, from April 18, 1967, to April 2, 1971, when the show went off the air. (It remains perennially undead on DVD.)

Mr. Frid received nearly 6,000 fan letters a week. “I wish you’d bite ME on the neck,” read one, from a woman in Illinois.

Others contained snapshots of the letter-writers’ necks — and everything on down — laid bare.

All this, Mr. Frid said in 1968, was exquisitely ironic in that “the other vampires we’ve had on the show were much more voluptuous biters than I am.”

It was also an exquisitely unimagined career path for a stage actor trained at the Yale School of Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Mr. Frid, as he made plain in interviews, was as conflicted about his calling as Barnabas was about his own.

The son of a prosperous construction executive, John Herbert Frid was born in Hamilton on Dec. 2, 1924; he changed his given name to Jonathan early in his stage career.

After service in the Royal Canadian Navy in World War II, Mr. Frid received a bachelor’s degree from McMaster University in Hamilton; he later moved to London, where he studied at the Royal Academy and appeared in repertory theater. In 1957, he earned a master’s degree in directing from Yale.

Mr. Frid spent his early career acting in North American regional theater, appearing at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn. On Broadway, he played Richard Scroop, Archbishop of York, in “Henry IV, Part 2” in 1960.

Long after “Dark Shadows” ended, Barnabas remained an albatross. Mr. Frid reprised the role in the 1970 feature film “House of Dark Shadows”; the few other screen roles that came his way also tended toward the ghoulish. He starred opposite Shelley Winters in the 1973 TV movie “The Devil’s Daughter,” about Satanism; the next year he played a horror writer in “Seizure,” Oliver Stone’s first feature.

Returning to the stage, Mr. Frid played Jonathan Brewster — a role originated by Boris Karloff — in a 1986 Broadway revival of the macabre comedy “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

As critical as he was of “Dark Shadows,” Mr. Frid was equally critical of his performance in it.

“I’d get this long-lost look on my face,” he told The Hamilton Spectator in 2000. “ ‘Where is my love? Where is my love?,’ it seemed to say. Actually, it was me thinking: ‘Where the hell is the teleprompter? And what’s my next line?’ ”

 

[JennyOHill2]

Charles Colson dies at 80; Watergate felon and prison reformer

WASHINGTON — Watergate felon and prison reformer Charles W. Colson, who died at age 80 in northern Virginia, was two people.

He was Richard Nixon's "hatchet man," the president's "evil genius," who by his own admission was "ruthless in getting things done" in the Watergate years, when the things that he and others in the White House were getting done would become a national disgrace and send Colson to prison.

And he was a born-again Christian, the founder of the world's largest prison ministry, an "unfailingly kind but tremendously courageous" intellectual leader who became the "William F. Buckley" of the evangelical movement.

Colson died from complications resulting from a brain hemorrhage at Fairfax Inova Hospital, a spokesman for his ministry said. He had undergone surgery three weeks ago to remove a pool of clotted blood on his brain.

"He had this reputation as being this ruthless guy. Even Richard Nixon thought he was ruthless," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, who compared Colson to Buckley. "That is so different than the Chuck Colson I knew. He was the least ego-driven and one of the most friendly, kind people I've ever known."

The fact that Colson was "born again" into evangelical Christianity as he was about to be charged in the Watergate scandal caused much snickering in the press. But Colson's conversion proved genuine and lasting. After serving seven months, mostly at the Maxwell Correctional Facility in Alabama, he founded Prison Fellowship Ministries, which says it operates in 1,367 prisons in the U.S. and has more than 200,000 inmates participating in its programs.

Colson turned PFM into a respected conglomerate of organizations and programs dedicated to serving prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families and encouraging them to embrace Jesus Christ. And as his organization grew, so did his fame with evangelicals. His daily four-minute BreakPoint radio commentary was carried by 1,300 stations.

But, unlike the Pat Robertsons or Jerry Falwells of the evangelical movement, Colson never sought the limelight. "I haven't sought publicity in the Christian world," he told The Times in 1987. "I've stayed out of religious politics. Falwell is in the middle of it. Jim and Tammy Bakker, Pat Robertson .... I've stayed away. It hasn't been my calling."

And unlike some others in his world, he apparently never amassed great personal wealth from his work. He took an annual salary of $113,000 from his prison groups and donated all royalties from his 30 books, substantial speaking fees, and the $1 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion he was awarded in London in 1993 to his prison fellowship.

But whether Colson will be known more for his good works or his bad may depend on which audience is remembering.

For the survivors of the Watergate era, Colson was one of the central figures in the scandals generally grouped together under the rubric of Watergate. Appointed special counsel to the Republican president in 1969, he was the author of the infamous Nixon Enemies List. He was a central figure behind the 1971 burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrists' office, a vicious attempt to discredit the source of the "Pentagon Papers" Vietnam War documents.

John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel and later nemesis, said in an interview that Colson was "the catalyst" for the more famous break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington. Dean said Colson pressured the president's reelection committee to approve the "intelligence activities" of G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, leaders of the so-called White House plumbers.

Dean, who himself became Colson's target when Dean started to cooperate with Watergate prosecutors, said that Colson's ruthlessness may have been overstated.

"He was extremely aggressive in trying to get Nixon's policies and programs passed, as well as for his politics to succeed," Dean said. "He was very bright, very able, and fairly expedient. He didn't have strong moral qualms about what he was doing."

Dean said though Colson "tried to destroy me," the two "buried the hatchet" while they were both being held at Fort Holabird in Baltimore. "Chuck apologized for it and said he was sorry, that he put out a lot of false information and regretted doing it."

Dean said that the two were friendly for a number of years, until Colson despaired of converting him to his evangelical beliefs.

Less charitable to Colson is Ellsberg. Though Colson was charged in both with the Watergate and the Ellsberg burglaries, he was allowed to plead guilty only to obstruction of justice in the Ellsberg matter.

Ellsberg, who like Colson had been a young officer in the Marines, said in an interview that Colson was also behind a failed plot to have him beaten up during an anti-war demonstration at the Capitol by a dozen Cubans brought to Washington by Hunt and Liddy.

Ellsberg said that Colson always denied involvement in that plot, despite testimony from others to the contrary and, while he admitted doing many bad things during Watergate, he failed to adequately own up to the specifics of what he had done.

"In short, I think Colson had a lot he could have told. His 'born again' experience didn't entirely take when it came to coming clean," Ellsberg said.

Colson was born Oct. 16, 1931, outside Boston, the grandson of Swedish and English immigrants. He graduated from Brown University and, after serving from 1953 to 1955 in the Marines where he became its youngest ever company commander, went to work for Sen. Leveret Saltonstall (R-Mass.) while going to law school at George Washington University at night.

After starting his own, successful law firm in Washington in the 1960s, he was appointed special counsel to Nixon in 1969.

After he got out of prison in 1975 he published his first book, the memoir "Born Again," a bestseller that was made into a movie.

In his later years he lived in Naples, Fla., with his second wife, Patricia Ann Hughes, who survives him. They also maintained an apartment outside Washington. He is also survived by three children, from his first marriage to Nancy Billings, and five grandchildren.

Though always conservative, except when he was advocating for fewer prisons and for the release of nonviolent prisoners, he was not very active politically on the national stage after his White House years. But he told the New York Times two years ago that, though he had had high hopes for President Obama, he had become "totally disillusioned" with the president. "I think he has turned out to be an ideologue," he said.

Though Colson will have a split legacy, for evangelicals he will be remembered as a hero.

"If there were an evangelical Mt. Rushmore, Chuck would be on it," Land said.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Bill ‘Moose’ Skowron, baseball star of 1950s and ’60s, dies at 81

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Bill “Moose” Skowron, a six-time All Star first baseman who helped lead the New York Yankees to five World Series championships, died April 27 at a hospital in Arlington Heights, Ill. He was 81 and had congestive heart failure and complications from lung cancer. The Yankees reported his death on their Web site.

From 1954 until he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1963, Mr. Skowron was a major element in the Yankee dynasty, helping the team to the World Series seven times. He hit a grand slam home run in the seventh inning of the seventh game of the 1956 World Series, clinching the championship for the Yankees over the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Two years later, Mr. Skowron drove in the winning run in the 10th inning of the sixth game of the World Series against the Milwaukee Braves. In the seventh and decisive game, he hit a three-run homer in the eighth inning off pitcher Lew Burdette, sealing a 6-2 victory and another World Series title for the Yankees.

During his Yankee years, Mr. Skowron played with Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Roger Maris and Whitey Ford, stars who tended to overshadow the workmanlike quality of Mr. Skowron’s play.

Six feet tall and a hulking 200 pounds, Mr. Skowron was a right-handed hitter known for powerful opposite-field home runs.

“I don’t always swing at strikes,” he told Harvey Frommer in the book “A Yankee Century.” “I swing at the ball when it looks big.”

Mr. Skowron was not a naturally graceful man and was asked by his manager to take dancing lessons to improve his footwork at first base.

“I couldn’t catch a fly ball,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2006. “[Yankee manager] Casey Stengel said, ‘The only way you can play is to play first base, and the only way you can learn is by going to dancing school.’ I went to Arthur Murray Dance Studios in St. Petersburg, Florida, to learn how to shift my legs, because I was no gazelle.”

William Joseph Skowron, the son of a garbage collector, was born Dec. 18, 1930, in Chicago.

“Dad was a disciplinarian,” Mr. Skowron told Baseball Digest in 2003. “I got called for dinner once, but I was in the park with my friends and didn’t hear my mom. He kicked me in the behind when I came in and drove me right into the door knob. It took 20 stitches to close up my head, but I never missed dinner again.”

Mr. Skowron acquired his nickname, “Moose,” from childhood friends who thought he had a resemblance to the Italian dictator of the 1930s, Benito Mussolini.

Mr. Skowron attended Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., on a football scholarship. He didn’t play baseball regularly until he was at Purdue, but he soon became such a powerful hitter that he left college when the Yankees offered him a $25,000 bonus to pursue a career in baseball.

He made his major-league debut in 1954. After he was traded to the Dodgers in 1963, he later played for the Washington Senators, Chicago White Sox and California Angels until his retirement in 1967.

Mr. Skowron had a lifetime batting average of .282, with 211 home runs. In 39 World Series games, he hit a total of eight home runs. His best season was in 1960, when he batted .309, with 26 home runs and 91 runs batted in for the Yankees.

He once had a restaurant in Illinois named Call Me Moose and, after his playing career, worked in public relations with the White Sox and as a sales manager.

Mr. Skowron’s personal life drew unwanted headlines in 1963, when he made a surprise visit to his home in New Jersey and found his wife, the former Virginia Holmquist, in what news reports described as a “compromising position with a gentleman friend.”

They were divorced a year later.

Survivors include his second wife, Lorraine “Cookie” Rochnowski Skowron; two sons from his first marriage; a daughter from his second marriage; a brother; and four grandchildren.

Mr. Skowron met his second wife on a blind date.

“She told me over the phone, ‘Meet me at the bowling alley and if you like what you see, we’ll go out,’ ” he told Baseball Digest.

“Well, I did like what I saw and I guess she liked what she saw because we got married two years later . . . I found out later she thought I was Moose Vasko, the hockey guy.”

 

[JennyOHill2]

Soviet hockey great Valeri Vasilyev dies at 62

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) --

Valeri Vasilyev, a standout Soviet Union defenseman who won two Olympic gold medals, has died at 62.

His death was announced by his longtime club Dinamo Moscow. The statement last Thursday said he died of a serious illness but did not elaborate.

Vasilyev played on the Soviet teams that won Olympic gold medals in 1972 and 1976. He also played on the national team when it had two of its biggest losses — the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" match that put the United States into the gold-medal game at the Lake Placid Olympics and the 1972 Summit Series against Canadian NHL players.

In 13 years on the national team, he scored 43 goals in 285 games.



Personal note: I got to see the Russian team play a few times, and remember how exciting a player he was.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Men at Work musician Greg Ham found dead

SYDNEY, (AP) --

Greg Ham, a member of the Australian band Men at Work whose saxophone and flute punctuated its smash 1980s hits, was found dead in his Melbourne home.

Police said the death did not appear to be suspicious, though the cause was not immediately known. A friend who found Ham's body said he hadn't been the same since 2010, when a court ruled that his signature flute riff from the song "Down Under" had been stolen from a classic campfire song.

Victoria state police confirmed that the deceased was the 58-year-old resident of Ham's house but did not identify him by name, in keeping with local practice. Ham was 58 and neighbors said he was the lone occupant of the house.

Men at Work topped charts around the world in 1983 with the songs "Down Under" and "Who Can it Be Now?" and won a Grammy Award that year for Best New Artist.

Frontman Colin Hay issued a statement expressing deep love for Ham, whom he met in 1972 when they were seniors in high school. Hay recalled decades of shared experiences with Ham — from appearing on "Saturday Night Live," to flying through dust storms over the Grand Canyon, to getting lost in the rural Australian countryside.

"We played in a band and conquered the world together," Hay said. "I love him very much. He's a beautiful man. ... He's here forever."

Two concerned friends who had not heard from Ham in some time found his body after going to check on him, police said.

Local pharmacist David Nolte, who had known Ham for 30 years, told The Associated Press on Friday that he and another friend found his body. He said the musician's cats were outside the house and appeared unfed, and all calls had gone to Ham's voicemail for days.

After banging on the door and calling for Ham in vain, they entered his house and found his body. Nolte checked for a pulse; there was none. He declined to elaborate on the condition of Ham's body, citing privacy reasons and the pending police investigation.

"Even though he was famous, he was a very decent, kind, humble person," Nolte said. "I'd like to remember him being a really first-rate man."

Police Detective John Potter said there was "nothing to suggest to us that it's a suspicious investigation. However, we will wait and make that assessment once we know a cause of death."

"We'll get an indication fairly quickly, but certain tests do take weeks," he said.

Ham was perhaps best known for playing the flute riff for "Down Under," which remains an unofficial anthem for Australia. But the beloved tune came under intense scrutiny in recent years after the band was accused of stealing the catchy riff from the children's campfire song "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree."

The publisher of "Kookaburra" sued Men at Work, and in 2010 a judge ruled the band had copied the melody. The group was ordered to hand over a portion of its royalties, and lost its last appeal in October.

Ham later said the controversy had left him devastated, and he worried it would tarnish his legacy.

"It has destroyed so much of my song," he told Melbourne's The Age newspaper after the court ruling. "It will be the way the song is remembered, and I hate that. I'm terribly disappointed that that's the way I'm going to be remembered — for copying something."

Nolte said he did not want to speculate on Ham's mental state in his final days, but said his friend had been shattered by the court battle.

"That really did affect him ... he was sad," Nolte said. "He put on a brave face, but he wasn't the same Greg Ham."

Ham played the saxophone on "Who Can It Be Now?" — Hay noted that his rehearsal take was the one that made it on the record. He also played keyboards. More recently he worked as a guitar teacher.

Australian rock historian Glenn Baker, who was Australian editor of Billboard magazine when Men At Work was at its peak touring the world, recalled Ham as bursting with energy during the band's glory days.

"When they came back (from tour), it was generally Greg who I would interview because he'd tell the best stories and he was effervescent, energetic, good fun, good-humored and good-natured," Baker said. "He was having a great time."

 

[JennyOHill2]

Poker's 'Amarillo Slim' dies in Texas at age 83

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AMARILLO, Texas (AP) — A professional poker player and author who gained international fame as "Amarillo Slim" has died in Texas.

Thomas Austin "Amarillo Slim" Preston Jr. died in hospice care in Amarillo. Bunky Preston said that his father had colon cancer. He was 83.

The self-proclaimed "World's Greatest Gambler" was born in Johnson, Ark. His family later moved to Texas and settled in Amarillo.

Bunky Preston says his father picked up the Amarillo Slim nickname while playing pool. He was in the military and entertained U.S. troops by doing pool exhibitions.

Preston won the 1972 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas and was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1992.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys dead at 47

According to reports on entertainment website TMZ and RollingStone.com, rapper, instrumentalist, entrepreneur and director Adam Yauch, the gruffest of the Beastie Boys, has died at 47.

Yauch, also known as MCA, was diagnosed with cancer in his parotid salivary gland in 2009. At first, Yauch told fans that his illness was treatable. But the cancer worsened in recent years: the Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, but Yauch was too sick to participate in the ceremony.

If the name Adam Yauch isn’t immediately familiar, that’s at least somewhat by design. The Beastie Boys — Yauch, Adam Horowitz, and Michael Diamond — always resisted the temptation to promote a single star or frontman; instead, they projected a fraternal image, as indivisible as the Three Musketeers, or the Three Stooges. The three friends hung tight throughout the group’s multi-decade run, rarely working on side or solo projects. Together, they were able to accomplish something that a single emcee probably could not have – they brought hip-hop, a style once exclusively associated with urban America, to a mass suburban audience.

But there was far more to Yauch than clever couplets. The rapper was a dedicated Buddhist, a vegan, a charity concert organizer, and a consciousness-raiser. From 1996 through 2003, Yauch’s Milarepa Fund organized six massive Freedom concerts in cities all over the world, attracting top-drawer performers (U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, De La Soul, and many others) to sing for Tibetan independence.

Born in Brooklyn in 1964, Yauch formed the Beastie Boys in the late '70s with several teenage friends, including Michael "Mike D" Diamond. (Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz joined the group a few years later.) At first, the trio played scruffy hardcore punk. But by the mid-'80s, the Beasties had embraced hip-hop, and developed distinctive deliveries, none of which have ever been successfully emulated. Horovitz's was high, whiny, insinuating; Diamond was eager, playful, boyish. Yauch played the tough guy, and he delivered many of the group's famous boasts. In early Beastie Boys’ songs, Yauch was mythologized as the wildest of the bunch, the hardest partier and the truest ladies man: “Your girlfriend screams when MCA’s in the place,” the three memorably rhymed on “Time to Get Ill, “ He stumbles in the room with the Chivas in his hand/ Cold chillin’ on the spot at the microphone stand.” The group’s distinctive style betrayed the easy camaraderie between the three – they finished each others lines, riffed off of each others’ jokes, and gave the general impression of a gang of impish friends horsing around in the back of a speeding car.

On a 1985 tour with Madonna, the Boys’ onstage wildness, roughneck tactics, and liberal use of obscenities were sharply criticized by the censorious. But "Licensed to Ill," the group's 1986 debut, became a blockbuster hit, selling millions of copies and turning the three Beasties into unlikely stars. Driven by the hit single "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party!)," and the giddy “Girls,” "Licensed to Ill" became the first hip-hop album to top the Billboard charts.

The album defined the early Beasties approach: hedonistic, brash, funny, determined to annoy authority figures at all costs. The album wasn’t the first fusion of hard rhyming and overdriven rock guitar; Run-DMC had beaten the Beasties to the sound. But it did appeal to a wide audience of metalheads and classic rock fans who’d had no prior exposure to hip-hop. The Beasties — three white Jews working in a genre dominated by African-American artists — became one of rap’s great popularizing acts, reaching precincts that had previously ignored the genre.

The kaleidoscopic "Paul's Boutique,” released in 1989, did not sell as well as "Licensed to Ill" did. It was no less a landmark. The sample-heavy disc, rich with allusive storytelling, pop culture jokes, and witty references to New York City landmarks, demonstrated that the Beasties had far more to offer than their Three Stooges image suggested. On “Shadrach,” a single from the set, the Beastie Boys nodded directly to their Jewish heritage, drawing a connection between their partnership and that of the three young Hebrews (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) saved from the fire in the Biblical Book of Daniel.

More ambitious music was to come. Yauch had played bass in the original punk rock Beastie Boys, and he returned to the instrument on subsequent Beasties albums. On "Check Your Head," the group’s third set, the Beastie Boys left the frathouse behind for good, plunging into dense, experimental pop that drew from murky Gotham punk and no wave as well as alternative hip-hop. Under the pseudonym Nathanial Hörnblowér -- one he'd use for all his subsequent film projects -- Yauch directed the video for “So What’cha Want,” the biggest hit from the collection.

"Ill Communication,” the Beastie Boys’ 1994 full-length, ventured even further into avant-garde territory, incorporating sound collage and ambient music. Ironically, the album returned the Beastie Boys to the top of the charts, thanks to the video for lead single “Sabotage,” which spoofed ‘70s cop shows. (Yauch, along with the other Beasties, was always an enthusiastic video performer.) But beyond “Sabotage,” which reprised a familiar Beasties style, Yauch used “Ill Communication” to explore ideas he’d picked up on trips to Nepal and Tibet. “Shambhala” and “Bodisattva Vow” made Yauch’s Buddhism explicit. In the wake of the success of “Ill Communication,” Yauch, moved by the teachings of the Dalai Lama, set up the Milarepa Fund and dedicated it to the cause of Tibetan independence.

Yauch is survived by his wife, Dechen, and his daughter, Tenzin Losel Yauch.

 

[JennyOHill2]

'Goober Pyle' actor George Lindsey dies

Los Angeles (CNN) -- George Lindsey, the actor who portrayed the country-bumpkin mechanic Goober Pyle on "The Andy Griffith Show," died Sunday after a brief illness, his family said. He was 83.

Lindsey's character Goober Pyle joined the hit sitcom in 1964 as the cousin of Gomer Pyle, played by Jim Nabors. When the show ended four seasons later, Lindsey continued as Goober for three years on the sequel series "Mayberry R.F.D."

"George often told me his fondest memories of his life in show business were the years he spent working on 'The Andy Griffith Show' and 'Mayberry R.F.D.'" said Andy Griffith. "They were for me, too."

Co-star Ron Howard remembered Lindsey as "warm, intelligent and lovable," in a post on Twitter.

"He generated lots of laughs & raised a lot of money for Special Olympics," Howard tweeted.

The Fairfield, Alabama, native never escaped the stereotyping that the Goober Pyle role brought him. Lindsey embraced it for another 20 years as a regular on TV's "Hee Haw," by wearing the familiar hat and clothes of Goober, and carried the character on the road for decades of stand-up comedy shows.

Lindsey auditioned for the Gomer Pyle role when the show started in 1962, but he was edged out by Nabors, the family's obituary said. When he saw that first episode on TV featuring Nabors as Gomer, he kicked his television screen because he was upset for losing the part.

"Not only that, but now I didn't have a TV to watch 'Ben Casey' on," Lindsey wrote in his autobiography. He was finally added to the cast as Goober, eventually taking over the job of running Mayberry's gas station when Gomer joined the Marines with his own spinoff show, "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C."

Lindsey turned to acting after a stint in the U.S. Air Force and then as a high school teacher. He studied at the American Theater Wing in New York for two years while working as a comedian in nightclubs and coffeehouses. An agent from the William Morris Agency saw his work and signed him.

That representation led to stage roles, including the production of "All American" at Broadway's Winter Garden Theatre.

Lindsey moved to Los Angeles, where his work was mostly in westerns, such as "The Rifleman" and "Gunsmoke." He also acted in the "The Real McCoys," "The Twilight Zone" and several Disney productions. He was cast in three episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Hour."

An obituary released by the Nashville funeral home handling Lindsey's arrangements said the actor often joked about what he wanted written on his tombstone.
"One choice goes for the joke: 'I told you I was sick.' The other goes for the heart: 'I hope I made you laugh.' "

Lindsey is survived by his son George Lindsey Jr., daughter Camden Jo Lindsey Gardner, and two grandsons.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Vidal Sassoon Dead: Hairdresser Dies At Age 84

Vidal Sassoon is dead at age 84, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Sassoon, often referred to as the "founder of hairdressing," is credited with pioneering the bob haircut and launched a sprawling network of salons around the world. He was found dead in his Mulholland Drive home; authorities told the LA Times he died of an "unspecified illness."

Sassoon was reportedly fighting leukemia as of last year, after being diagnosed with blood cancer in 2009.

Sassoon grew up in England, where his mother, a single parent, placed Sassoon and his brother in a Jewish orphanage for seven years when she couldn't provide for the family, as Sassoon told the Telegraph in a 2011 interview:

"First of all what we truly have to look at is the situation. I was born in 1928 and by 1931 the Depression was beginning to mount. My father had left us, my brother, and myself. We were in Shepherd's Bush, but we were being evicted, we had nowhere to go."

Later, Sassoon fought in the Israeli army before beginning training as a hairdresser. He opened his first salon in London in 1954 and launched his own line of products in 1973 with the now-famous slogan, "If you don't look good, we don't look good."

Sassoon is most famous for the pixie cut he gave Mia Farrow for the famous film "Rosemary's Baby," which he says was necessary: "When I got to her there were bits that were about an inch and bits that were 10in. She didn't tell me what had happened. Her bone structure was beautiful. I told her that we had to go very short."

Sassoon is survived by his fourth wife Ronnie. He had four children; Catya, a mother of three, died in 2002 at age 33 of a drug-induced heart attack.

 

[Weird Harold]

Nicholas Katzenbach, Unsung Hero of America's Desegregation
By Andrew Cohen

May 9 2012, 5:00 PM ET 7

The Civil Rights era attorney general died Tuesday night at the age of 90

 

[ryan8558]

Legendary car designer, racer Shelby dies at 89

DALLAS (AP) — Carroll Shelby, the legendary car designer and champion auto racer who built the fabled Shelby Cobra sports car and injected testosterone into Ford's Mustang and Chrysler's Viper, has died. He was 89.

Shelby's company, Carroll Shelby International, said Friday that Shelby died a day earlier at a Dallas hospital.

"We are all deeply saddened, and feel a tremendous sense of loss for Carroll's family, ourselves and the entire automotive industry," said Joe Conway, president of Carroll Shelby International, Inc. and board member. "There has been no one like Carroll Shelby and never will be. However, we promised Carroll we would carry on, and he put the team, the products and the vision in place to do just that."

Shelby was one of the nation's longest-living heart transplant recipients, having received a heart on June 7, 1990, from a 34-year-old man who died of an aneurism. Shelby also received a kidney transplant in 1996 from his son, Michael.

The 1992 inductee into the Automobile Hall of Fame had homes in Los Angeles and his native east Texas.

The one-time chicken farmer had more than a half-dozen successful careers during his long life. Among them: champion race car driver, racing team owner, automobile manufacturer, automotive consultant, safari tour operator, raconteur, chili entrepreneur and philanthropist.

"He's an icon in the medical world and an icon in the automotive world," his longtime friend, Dick Messer, executive director of Los Angeles' Petersen Automotive Museum, once said of Shelby.

"His legacy is the diversity of his life," Messer said. "He's incredibly innovative. His life has always been the reinvention of Carroll Shelby."

Shelby first made his name behind the wheel of a car, winning France's grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race with teammate Ray Salvadori in 1959. He already was suffering serious heart problems and ran the race "with nitroglycerin pills under his tongue," Messer once noted.

He had turned to the race-car circuit in the 1950s after his chicken ranch failed. He won dozens of races in various classes throughout the 1950s and was twice named Sports Illustrated's Driver of the Year.

Soon after his win at Le Mans, he gave up racing and turned his attention to designing high-powered "muscle cars" that eventually became the Shelby Cobra and the Mustang Shelby GT500.

The Cobra, which used Ford engines and a British sport car chassis, was the fastest production model ever made when it was displayed at the New York Auto Show in 1962.

A year later, Cobras were winning races over Corvettes, and in 1964 the Rip Chords had a Top 5 hit on the Billboard pop chart with "Hey, Little Cobra." ("Spring, little Cobra, getting ready to strike, spring, little Cobra, with all of your might. Hey, little Cobra, don't you know you're gonna shut `em down?")

In 2007, an 800-horsepower model of the Cobra made in 1966, once Shelby's personal car, sold for $5.5 million at auction, a record for an American car.

"It's a special car. It would do just over three seconds to 60 (mph), 40 years ago," Shelby told the crowd before the sale, held in Scottsdale, Ariz.

It was Lee Iacocca, then head of Ford Motor Co., who had assigned Shelby the task of designing a fastback model of Ford's Mustang that could compete against the Corvette for young male buyers.

Turning a vehicle he had once dismissed as "a secretary car" into a rumbling, high-performance model was "the hardest thing I've done in my life," Shelby recalled in a 2000 interview with The Associated Press.

That car and the Shelby Cobra made his name a household word in the 1960s.

When the energy crisis of the 1970s limited the market for gas-guzzling high-performance cars, Shelby weathered the downturn by heading to Africa, where he operated a safari company for a dozen years.

By the time he had returned to the United States, Iacocca was running Chrysler Motors and he hired him to design the supercharged Viper sports car.

In the meantime, Shelby had also inaugurated the World Chili Cookoff competition and he began marketing Carroll Shelby Original Texas Chili.

In recent years, Shelby worked as a technical adviser on the Ford GT project and designed the Shelby Series 1 two-seat muscle car, a 21st century clone of his 1965 Cobra.

"I just wanted to see if I could do it one more time after a heart transplant and a kidney transplant," he once told the AP.

In 1990 he had marketed the Can-Am Spec Racer, an affordable racing car for entry-level drivers.

He created the Carroll Shelby Children's Foundation in 1991 to provide assistance for children and young people needing acute coronary and kidney care. According to its website, the foundation has helped numerous children receive needed surgery, as well as provided money for research.

Carroll Hall Shelby was born Jan. 11, 1923, in Leesburg, Texas.

During World War II he was an Army Air Corps flight instructor who corresponded with his fiancee by dropping love letters stuck into his flying boots onto her farm.

After leaving the military in 1945, he started a dump truck business, then decided to raise chickens. The poultry business initially flourished, with Shelby earning a $5,000 profit on the first batch of broilers he delivered. He went broke, however, when his second flock died of disease.

A friend then invited him to become an amateur racer and his success led to his joining the Aston-Martin team and competing in races all over the world.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Booker T bassist Donald Dunn dies in Tokyo aged 70

Bass guitarist Donald "Duck" Dunn, who played with Booker T and the MGs, has died in Tokyo aged 70.

The MGs were the house band for Stax Records, and Dunn can be heard on songs such as Otis Redding's Respect and Sam and Dave's Hold On, I'm Comin'.

He was in Japan for a series of concerts, and had played two shows on Saturday night.

His friend and fellow musician Steve Cropper, who was on the same tour, said Dunn had died in his sleep.

"Today I lost my best friend," Cropper wrote on his Facebook page. "The World has lost the best guy and bass player to ever live".

Miho Harasawa, a spokeswoman for Tokyo Blue Note, the last venue Dunn played, confirmed he died alone early Sunday. She had no further details.

Born in Memphis on November 24, 1941, Dunn started playing bass at the age of 16.

"I tried the guitar but it had two strings too many," he wrote on his website.

"It was just too complicated, man! Plus, I grew up with Steve Cropper. There were so many good guitar players; another one wasn't needed. What was needed was a bass."

His distinctive grooves underpinned dozens of hit records for the legendary Stax label - including Soul Man and Try A Little Tenderness. The MGs scored their own hit with Green Onions in 1962.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, John Mayall, Roger Daltrey, Pete Townsend, and The Beatles all attended shows and, according to legend, The Beatles sent limousines to pick up the Stax crew each night after the shows.

In return, Booker T and the MGs covered the entire Beatles' Abbey Road album. Their version was called McLemore Avenue, which was the address of the Stax studio complex, and the cover mimicked the Fab Four's famous zebra crossing photo.

The band later provided backing for the John Lennon solo track Beef Jerky.

In his later career, Dunn worked with the likes of Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Stevie Nicks and Rod Stewart.

He played himself in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers, and its 2000 sequel.

The MGs were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and Dunn received a lifetime achievement Grammy award in 2007.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Maurice Sendak, Author Of 'Where The Wild Things Are', Dies

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Award-winning children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak has died at 83. He shot to fame in 1963 with his picture book 'Where The Wild Things Are'. He published several more books, including 'In The Night Kitchen', 'Outside Over There' and most recently, 'Bumble-Ardy'.

Family friend Lynn Ceprio confirmed his death. The New York Times reports his cause of death was complications from a stroke he'd recently suffered.

Sendak's signature book won the 1964 Caldecott Medal for children's literature and is beloved for its character Max, who shouts, "Let The Wild Rumpus Start!" Sendak won additional writing and illustration awards, according to publisher Harper-Collins.

But as Sendak was controversial. 'Wild Things' was novel: it put children in a scary place with roaring and claws and gnashing of teeth. In 2006, Sendak told NPR: "The idea of an American children's book where the child is not perfectly safe was something that was new. I didn't know it was new, I didn't set out to break any new ideas. I was just doing what was only in my head."

NPR featured 'Where The Wild Things Are' in 2004 on an All Things Considered segment dedicated to 'Kids Books With Lessons For Life'.

A feature film based on the best-selling book was produced in 2009, written and directed by Spike Jonze, and featuring Forest Whitaker and Catherine O'Hara.

 

[KingOrfeo]

https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRJS-Cj6lg_IwkeCeGRfco-VtK38mLGCVlREMCiN0MRySoMOm3xdA

Award-winning children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak has died at 83. He shot to fame in 1963 with his picture book 'Where The Wild Things Are'. He published several more books, including 'In The Night Kitchen', 'Outside Over There' and most recently, 'Bumble-Ardy'.

Family friend Lynn Ceprio confirmed his death. The New York Times reports his cause of death was complications from a stroke he'd recently suffered.

Sendak's signature book won the 1964 Caldecott Medal for children's literature and is beloved for its character Max, who shouts, "Let The Wild Rumpus Start!" Sendak won additional writing and illustration awards, according to publisher Harper-Collins.

But as Sendak was controversial. 'Wild Things' was novel: it put children in a scary place with roaring and claws and gnashing of teeth. In 2006, Sendak told NPR: "The idea of an American children's book where the child is not perfectly safe was something that was new. I didn't know it was new, I didn't set out to break any new ideas. I was just doing what was only in my head."

NPR featured 'Where The Wild Things Are' in 2004 on an All Things Considered segment dedicated to 'Kids Books With Lessons For Life'.

A feature film based on the best-selling book was produced in 2009, written and directed by Spike Jonze, and featuring Forest Whitaker and Catherine O'Hara.

Oh, please don't go! We'll eat you up! We love you so!

 

[JennyOHill2]

Kevin Hickey (1956-2012)

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Kevin Hickey, who served as a Chicago White Sox pre-game instructor for the club since 2004 and pitched for the team from 1981-83, passed away Wednesday morning at Rush University Medical Center. Hickey was 56.

A native of Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood who attended St. Rita High School and Kelly High School, Hickey pitched six seasons in the major leagues with the White Sox and Orioles. He is survived by his partner in life, Anna D'Agata; five daughters: Samantha, Elizabeth, Kristen, Jessica and Sarah; three grandchildren; his mother, Kathleen; brothers, Jim and Tom; and sisters, Karen and Kathy.

"Hick came to the park every single day ready to work and with a smile on his face," said White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski. "He will be sorely missed by us all."