DEATHS ; Notable Passings; The Thread to Pay Last Respects

[docneg]

For what is worth...

Beverly Fisher became famous at 17 as Beverly Aadland when she was Errol Flynn's last girlfriend.... she was the one who was there when he had his final heart attack at 50.

She was 67 years old when she died .... she always said she never stopped loving Flynn.

Am I dreaming here, or does she look like YOU, HadleyH?!

 

[skyvue]

Robert B Parker, the American crime novelist, who has died aged 77, helped revive and modernise the hard-boiled private eye genre through his Spenser series of novels.

On the same day, Erich "Love Story" Segal and Kate McGarrigle passed.

I liked Parker best in the early days, when he was channeling (or trying to, at least) Raymond Chandler, as opposed to his clipped, spare style, though I read any number of those books, too.

 

[HadleyH]

Am I dreaming here, or does she look like YOU, HadleyH?!

i really don't know! but thank you docneg!

 

[The Good]

Vice President Joe Biden's mother passed away today... very sad, as she had almost lived an entire year of her son's position, just shy of a day, I believe.

 

[Widebrim]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/crusher_killed_vnPIe00iPE1Vcq7vR6OcoI

Man, what a guy!

 

[docneg]

Man, what a guy!

All hail Joe!
He was apologetic while bending a quarter in his hands at the age of 100+ years that he could no longer do a dime!

Jeez...
:eusa_clap

 

[lolly_loisides]

Jean Simmons 1929 - 2010.

Here's an amusing excerpt from the Washington Post obit.

In her sixth decade of work, Ms. Simmons said that she continued to receive fan mail but that younger writers often confused her with Gene Simmons, the flamboyant singer with the rock band KISS.

One day a letter arrived from a 10-year-old.

"It was the usual fan letter, saying things like, 'I think you're wonderful,' " she said. "Then I got to the P.S.: 'I love it when you spit blood!' That's when I realized the letter wasn't for me."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...1/22/AR2010012205323.html?sid=ST2010012300148

 

[Foofoogal]

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001739/

yes, RIP Jean Simmons.

 

[Prairie Dog]

James Mitchell (February 29, 1920 – January 22, 2010) actor and dancer, best-known to television audiences as AMC's Palmer Cortland. The cowboy that I am will always remember him as "dream Curly" in Oklahoma!

Over the years I've seen my fare share of productions of Oklahoma! at the local high school. Some good, some mediocre, but none of them hold a candle to the 1955 film starring Shirley Jones.

Here's the very young and beautiful Miss Jones singing Rodger's & Hammerstein's "Out Of My Dream" and her "dream-self," dancing with the "dream-Curly," Mr. James Mitchell.
RIP Mr. Mitchell :eusa_clap

Watch this. It's real purdy.

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[Carlisle Blues]

Jean Simmons RIP

 

[Hondo]

'Bonanza' actor Pernell Roberts

This really hits home, I remember with my family,
Sunday Night TV was filled with Wonderful World of Disney and Bonanza!
Parnell Roberts has said year later, he regretted leaving Bonanza.
You could even visit the Cartwright ranch in South Lake Tahoe NV until it was sold recently, a true death of TV or what Tv used to be.
RIP

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/entertainment&id=7238521

 

[Wally_Hood]

When I was very young we lived in South Shore Lake Tahoe; I could hike across the dirt road into the pines and come out into the meadows where the opening of the Bonanza show was filmed.

 

[Foofoogal]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/25/entertainment/main6141209.shtml

Adam of Bonanza. Pernell Roberts. RIP cutie pie.

 

[Story]

Mrs. Lurz enlisted in the Army Nursing Corps in January 1943, and served in station hospitals in North Africa, Italy, and France. In Italy, Mrs. Lurz cared for soldiers wounded in the Battle of Monte Cassino.

In 2007, she told an Inquirer reporter: "The Germans were holed up in a monastery on top of a hill. The soldiers were sent up, and they were shot down. We got the patients. They were all beat up."

After the liberation of Rome in June 1944, Mrs. Lurz and other Army officers had an audience with the pope. Mrs. Lurz had a second audience with a pope in the 1980s when she was a private nurse and accompanied a patient to Rome.

http://www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/81082442.html

 

[Feraud]

Howard Zinn, Historian.

Howard Zinn, Groundbreaking Populist Historian, Dies at 87

AP/Michael DwyerHoward Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose book A People’s History of the United States taught millions of teenagers how to infuriate their parents during dinner, died yesterday of a heart attack in in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. Zinn was born in NYC in 1922; the son of Jewish immigrants, he was educated in public schools and worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After serving as a bombardier in WWII, Zinn attended NYU on the GI Bill while working in warehouses, then earned doctoral degrees in history from Columbia, going on to be a political science professor at Boston University. In the '70s, university president John Silber accused Zinn of arson (later retracting the charge) and cited him as a prime example of teachers "who poison the well of academe."

At age 17, at the urging of some young Communists in his neighborhood, Zinn attended a political rally in Times Square. He would later tell the Associated Press how the violent police crackdown radicalized him:

Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people. I couldn’t believe that. And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant.
"A People’s History" was published in 1980; the initial run of 5,000 copies sold out through word-of-mouth and the book became a best-seller, reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Zinn called his book "a response to traditional works" and told the AP, "There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete. My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times." Many establishment historians were unimpressed, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once sneered: "I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian."

But the hugely influential book fast become a pop culture signifier, and became even more popular after Matt Damon name-checked it in Good Will Hunting: "If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book will knock you on your ass." Ben Affleck, who co-wrote the screenplay and was friends with Zinn since childhood, said yesterday, "He taught me how valuable—how necessary—dissent was to democracy and to America itself. He taught that history was made by the everyman, not the elites."

One of Zinn’s last public writings was a brief essay on President Obama, published in The Nation this week: "I've been searching hard for a highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama's rhetoric; I don't see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies... I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president—which means, in our time, a dangerous president—unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction."

 

[Kid Mac]

J.D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger, 1919 - 2010

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/s/j_d_salinger/index.html

 

[dhermann1]

"The Catcher in the Rye" was one of the books that helped foment "the 60's", tho it was written way back in 1946. He also wrote "Franny and Zooey", which I read so many years ago that I don't remember anything about it, other than I loved it.
Great writer, strange man.

 

[Undertow]

Holy Smokes!! Howard Zinn died yesterday?! Was this reported by any major news outlet?

And Salinger today...my my.

 

[KilroyCD]

Zelda Rubinstein, Poltergeist Actress

Zelda Rubinstein, the US actress best known for her role as the diminutive psychic in 1982 film Poltergeist, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 76.

The 4ft 3in (1.29m) actress died in hospital on Wednesday after recently suffering a heart attack, her agent told the Los Angeles Times.

Eccentric medium Tangina Barrons was her first major role and one she reprised in two Poltergeist sequels.

More recently, Rubinstein appeared in Southland Tales and TV's Picket Fences.

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/movie-talk-poltergeist-actor-dies.html

 

[K.D. Lightner]

RIP, JD.

I loved his books, Franny & Zooey, also the book of short stories, Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters. And, of course, Catcher in the Rye.

I always wondered what he might have written had he not become a hermit. Although, maybe nothing.

karol