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Joseph James Zimmermann Jr., the man who enabled the world to avoid calls from parents and the repo man with the invention of the answering machine, died at the age of 92.

Tail End

Bonnie Jo Halpin, the first Playboy bunny who manned the door at the first Playboy club ever opened, has gone tits up at the age of 65. As the door bunny, Halpin put her breast foot forward in a strapless, one-piece bathing suit cut high on the leg that included the famous bunny ears, cottontail, and white cuffs and collar with a black bow tie. “She was a very special lady, one of my favorite five or six thousand women, bra none,” according to Bunny boss Hugh Hefner. Hoping to see the world, she left the Playboy organization in 1963, but her booby prize was to forever be remembered for her adoorable debut.

That's the way the Cooke crumbles

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Death Notice from America

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Restinpeace Theater
(Props to Greg)
Alistair Cooke, who spent more than 60 years as a double agent for the United States and England, died at midnight last night in his home in New York. He came to the United States in 1932 to enter the theatrical program at Yale University, but seeing the richness of American culture spurred him to become a journalist so he could report back to England all that they were missing. To the Brits he was an American, having become a U.S. citizen in 1941 and spending nearly 60 years bragging about England's upstart offspring. In 1946 he began a series of radio broadcasts for BBC Radio entitled Letters From America. Originally intended to be a 13-week series of essays, it became the longest-running radio program in history at 58 years, totaling 2,869 programs and gave the UK a glimpse of America's triumphs and tragedies, before Cooke signed off last month due to health problems. To Americans, he was the consummate Brit, bringing a refined elegance to American television, most notably as the host of Masterpiece Theater from 1971 to 1992, which followed another culture program Omnibus, which aired in the 1950s.

Face the Music

Art James, a host and announcer for television game shows, died on Sunday at the age of 74. Ironically known by many as the host of the fake game show Truth or Date from the Kevin James film Mallrats, James’ was the friend of many a stay-at-home mom and sick kid with a long list of day-time quiz shows including Say When!, Fractured Phrases, Face the Music, Who, What or Where Game, Blank Check, Matches N’ Mates, Temptation and the Magnificent Marble Game. He also served as the announcer and understudy for Hugh Downs on the original Concentration and last appeared in Family Feud Challenge in 1992.

Departacus

(Props to Tom for the header)
Peter Ustinov kept his Appointment with Death, passing away from heart failure at the age of 82. Equally comfortable with comedy or drama, Ustinov won Oscars for his work as Lentulus Batiatus in Spartacus and as Emperor Nero in Quo Vadis?, was nominated for two others and played the truck driver whose lorry was hijacked by an escaping Miss Piggy in The Great Muppet Caper during a career spanning 60 years. Perhaps best known as Hercule Poirot in several films based on Agatha Christie novels, Ustinov was a gifted dialectician, being fluent in French, German, English, Italian, Russian and Spanish and passable in Turkish and Greek, among others. A gifted and witty story-teller, even in his later years while often confined to a wheelchair, Ustinov continued to raise money as a Goodwill Amabassador UNICEF, an organization he had devoted more than 30 years of his life to help.

Mrs. Paul Bearer’s

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Tar tar

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Frozen Entrée

(props to Monty for the second alternate epitaph)

You’ve never heard of him, but you’ve probably had him over for dinner. The founder of Mrs. Paul's died over the weekend at the age of 87, ending a long-running feud with the Gorton's fisherman after she dallied with Arthur Treacher. Edward J. Piszek, the man behind the crabcake, was a walking version of the American dream. The son of an immigrant saloonkeeper, in the 1940s he gambled $450 on a scheme to freeze seafood for later meals, then used the millions he made off an increasingly lazy country to fund a wide range of philanthropic goals. Never forgetting his Polish roots, he bought and established a memorial in Philadelphia to Thaddeus Kosciuszko, an overlooked hero of the American Revolution, founded the Copernicus Society, and on a visit to Poland, he was appalled by the severity of the spread of tuberculosis and donated millions of dollars worth of medical supplies and equipment. During the 1970s, he visited Poland and Ireland with his friend Cardinal John Krol, and met Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, who would become Pope Paul II in 1978. During the Pope’s 1979 visit to Philadelphia, he stopped his procession and entered the crowd to embrace Piszek. Piszek was equally proud of his adopted country, and during the American Bicentennial, commissioned a duplicate of the Liberty Bell from the foundry in Whitechapel, England that had produced the original. The Liberty Park Commission declined his donation, as did the city of Philadelphia, but in 1987, during the Bicentennial Anniversary of the Constitution, former Supreme Court Justice Warren Berger sounded the bell.

Sad Sack

John Sack, a battlefield correspondent who covered American wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan died Saturday. He melded the "new journalism" literary style with a determination to accurately tell the story. Perhaps his most famous story was the account of William H. Calley, Jr., the man responsible for the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians, at 33,000 words, the longest ever published by Esquire. Sack was indicted on federal charges for refusing to hand over his notes to prosecutors during Calley’s trial, but the charges were dropped.

Jan and Dead

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Shouldn’t have gone fast on Deadman’s CurveJan Berry, half of the Beach Boys knock-off group Jan & Dean, has died of complications of a car accident that occurred in 1966. Jan & Dean had a series of hits including "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena," "Surf City" and the prophetic "Deadman's Curve." Berry’s career came to a screeching halt when his speeding Corvette hit a parked truck, leaving him with severe brain damage, partial paralysis and an inability to speak. Eventually, he was able to recover enough to resume singing and writing songs. The crash occurred while Berry was filming the movie "Easy Come, Easy Go," which would also have been the screen debut of Mel Brooks, but the film was cancelled due to the accident.

For the Birds

Viscountess Dilhorne, who trained pigeons to carry secret communications from the rest of Europe in World War II, died this week at the age of 93. Secret agents and resistance fighters in Europe used them to communicate with London. The birds flew back to Mary Manningham-Buller, as she was known before her husband was titled, with coded messages strapped to their legs. Her knack for espionage was handed down to her daughter, Eliza Manningham-Buller, who has been director-general of the Security Service since 2002.

Hamas Dinger

Another speed bump on the road to peace in the Middle East, as Israel decided the key to its security was using a 67-year-old blind, deaf, quadriplegic cleric for target practice. Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic militant group Hamas, who found a spiritual basis for slaughtering hundreds of innocents, died of natural causes Monday morning when his wheelchair was hit by three missiles from an Israeli attack helicopter. Yassin’s funeral drew more than 200,000 pretty pissed off people, so this will surely work out exactly as planned.

Bowled Over

After 33 years, 100 million visitors, and several billion boos, Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium is no more. Once hailed as an architectural marvel, in recent years the Vet has become better known for leaks, smells you couldn’t quite place, a wild kingdom of rats and feral cats, collapsing concrete that left a cadet with a broken neck at the 1998 Army-Navy Game and the worst AstroTurf in baseball or football, which shredded both of Chicago Bears wide receiver Wendell Davis’ knees on the same play. In its day it hosted three World Series, two MLB All-Star Games, and two conference championship games, one of only five stadia in sports history to accomplish that feat. At 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning, Greg Luzinski depressed the detonation plunger, and 62 seconds later the era of multi-purpose, cookie-cutter stadia was all but over. Only St. Louis’ Busch Stadium, slated for replacement in 2006, remains. But Broad and Pattison wasn’t just a concrete bowl with mostly empty earth-toned seats and some truly awful baseball teams – it was the place many of us grew up and learned about baseball, how to elevate profanity to an art form and how to appreciate a slightly orange chili dog.

Dutch Treat

Princess Juliana, the modest and beloved queen of The Netherlands for 32 years, died early Saturday at the age of 94. During her reign from 1948 to 1980, when she abdicated in favor of her daughter, Queen Beatrix, Juliana eschewed the trappings of her royal domain, regularly dropping by subjects unannounced and asking if she could come in for tea, as though the state-funded largesse of the official palace wasn't enough. She fled with her family from the Nazi invasion in 1940, and returned to a devastated country at the end of the war. She oversaw the reconstruction of the country and gave freedom to former members of the Dutch Empire.

PowerBar Outage

Brian Maxwell, a former world class marathon runner who later founded the multimillion-dollar PowerBar empire died Friday of a heart attack, proving healthy eating and living are overrated and you should all get off my back. At one time the third-best marathoner in the world, he was on the 1980 Olympic team that stayed home during the boycott, but drowned his sorrows when he sold PowerBar to Nestle in 2000 for $375 million.

Indian Bummer

Gene Bearden, who almost single-handedly secured the only World Series title for the Cleveland Indians in the last 84 years, died at the age of 83. That he survived to reach the major leagues was something of a miracle, as his ship narrowly escaped the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, only to be cut in two by a torpedo. Bearden floated for several days in a lifeboat before being rescued. As a rookie in 1948, Bearden had put together a decent season, winning 13 games as of Sept. 10. Over the last 4 weeks of the season, he won 7 more, including the one-game playoff over the Boston Red Sox on one day’s rest that put Cleveland in the World Series. In the Series, he won Game 3, then saved Game 6 as the Indians took the title. Once the American League learned not to swing at his knuckleball the following season, the jig was up, and he won just 25 more games in his career.

Cardio Killed the Video Star

J.J. Jackson, a long-time Boston and LA radio and TV personality and one of the original MTV veejays in 1981, has died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 62. Since 1995, he had been host of Westwood One's "The Beatle Years."

Rockets’ Dead Stare

William H. Pickering, one of NASA’s brightest stars from an era when accomplishments outpaced explanations, who answered the Russian’s Sputnik with the Explorer series, died last week at the age of 93. Given the go-ahead by Congress when a US Navy satellite program was foundering, Pickering’s group launched their first satellite in just 83 days. Under his stewardship, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory also sent the Ranger and Surveyor probes to the moon, returning pictures and digging into the soil to show that the Apollo spacecraft could safely land on the lunar surface. The research he pioneered laid the groundwork for nearly everything NASA has accomplished, up to the current Mars probes, which he witnessed at Mission Control.

SI’onyara

Sidney James, the founding editor of Sports Illustrated who rescued the struggling magazine from a premature demise, died last Thursday at the age of 97. For its first 11 years, Sports Illustrated was its own jinx as it bled red ink while struggling to find an audience, but James kept the faith, and the mag is now celebrating its 50th year, with a circulation of 3.15 million.

Went Sour

(Props to Dead Milkman Head Craig Barker for the header)

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Cold Blooded


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Dead MilkmanDave Blood, bassist for the Dead Milkmen, the best Philadelphia-based musical act since the Hooters, committed suicide Wednesday, according to a post by his sister on the band's official message board. Blood's mother passed away in January, and his musical career ended due to severe tendonitis, perhaps leading to the depression. The Dead Milkmen formed in 1983 and quickly rose to prominence in the college radio circuit. Their style melded punk with pop culture satire, but rarely rose above mildly amusing. Their 1985 debut album, "Big Lizard in My Backyard" boasts the cult-classic single "Bitchin' Camaro," and they produced the 1988 MTV staple "Punk Rock Girl." They also got a boost from former Detroit Tiger utility infielder Jim Walewander, who frequently mentioned the band in all those interviews that utility infielders on dreadful baseball teams get.

From the Dead Milkmen tribute site:
Hey they're Funny.
They're Loud.
They're Fast.
They're Violent.
They're a football game.
They're a Hockey fight
They're an air raid warning...
They're my Band.
-Jim Walewander, Professional Baseball Player

Freezer Burn

John Henry Williams, money-grubbing scion of Hall of Famer Ted Williams, died Sunday at the age of 35, cutting short his dream of medical science finding a way to get the Hall of Famer to autograph things from the sweet hereafter. Having spent a generally wasted life leeching off his father's name in a series of bad business deals, after Ted's death in 2002, the chip off the old ice block produced an oil stained scrap of paper that assured the world that his father's wish was to have his head cut off, have his torso suspended upside down in a vat of coolant and become the butt of jokes around the world. Before Ted's death, the Boston Red Sox gave John Henry a try-out with a low-level minor league club, where he failed to get a hit and then crashed into a camera well and fractured a rib. Following Marge Schott's death last week, we can hope that a third reprehensible figure associated with baseball will get tapped by the Cosmic Closer soon. Steinbrenner, Selig, Rose - watch your backs.

Now He’ll Really Never Finish

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Be Cold
Robert Pastorelli, best known as Eldin Bernicky, the painter who became a permanent fixture at Murphy Brown's house, died, probably of a drug overdose, at the age of 49. Prior to his acting career, he had been a boxer and a drug addict, so really this is full coming full circle for him. Recently cast in the Get Shorty sequel Be Cool, he also had been the guide who takes Kevin Costner to the middle of nowhere only to get scalped for his trouble in Dances With Wolves, and was part of the American obsession with ruining British TV by replacing Robbie Coltrane in the U.S. version of Cracker.

Swimming to New Jersey

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Gray’s Autopsy
Depressed monologist Spalding Gray inherited the family business, apparently committing suicide at the age of 62. Gray had been depressed for a number of years following his mother's suicide, a serious eye ailment, a head-on car crash while on vacation in Ireland, and having appeared on The Mike O'Malley Show. Gray was best known for his wittily observant and painfully honest monologues such as Swimming to Cambodia, based in part in his experiences in the film The Killing Fields, Monster in a Box and It's a Slippery Slope. A battle with a macula pucker led to the book and film Gray's Anatomy. He worked with some impressive directors, including David Byrne, Jonathan Demme, and Steven Soderbergh, who directed Gray as an eccentric bachelor who kills himself in King of the Hill. Quite a stretch. Other screen appearances included Beaches, Beyond Rangoon, Kate & Leopold, and a recurring role in The Nanny, so, much like Vincent Antonelli's shoes, it's a miracle he lasted as long as he did.

Sounder Off

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Angels in the Winfield(Props to Monty for the alternate epitaph)
Paul Winfield, who found Kahn Noonian Singh and a killer earwig on Seti Alpha 5 in Star Trek II and then got blasted by aliens with prominent frontal lobes in Mars Attacks!, died of a heart attack on Sunday at the age of 62. Winfield's first big role was as Diahann Carroll's boyfriend in Julia, one of the first TV shows to star two black actors, an ironic role given that Winfield was gay and had a partner of more than 30 years who died 2 years ago. He was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar in 1972 for his role in Sounder, the third black to be nominated as Best Actor or Actress. He was also nominated for back-to-back Emmys for Roots in 1978 and his role as Dr. Martin Luther King (BU '55) in 1979 and finally won a Emmy for a guest role in Picket Fences in 1995. He also had a recurring role as substitute angel Sam on Pax staple Touched by an Angel.

Labors Completed

Former WWF wrestler Raymond Fernandez, aka, Hercules Hernandez, died, apparently of a heart attack, in his sleep Saturday at the age of 46. His death was first reported at the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame banquet Sunday night and confirmed by Wrasslin.com, as fake deaths are apparently routinely reported at wrestling get-togethers. According to Wrasslin.com, his career highlights include wrestling Ricky Steamboat at Wrestlemania II and his days as half of the tag team titan Jurassic Powers, a dominant force in the glory days of New Japan Pro Wrestling.
(Direct queries to why this one was included to noted aficionado of the squared circle Wrasslin' Scott Monty.)

Dee-ceased

Frances Dee, film star from the 1930s and 1940s, has died at the age of 94. Achieving stardom opposite Maurice Chevalier in the 1930 musical The Playboy of Paris, one of the first talkie muscials, Dee also appeared in such films as I Walked with a Zombie and Little Women.

Schott Down, Isn’t it a Pity?

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Schott in the DarkOnly that more people didn't benefit from the demise of this loathsome woman. Marge Schott, racist former part-owner of the Cincinnati Reds, has died at the age of 75. The ultimate Red-neck, Schott repeatedly praised Adolph Hitler, but ultimately conceded that he "went a little too far," while belittling minority players and employees. Schott professed love for two colors: white and Cincinnati Red, and would have had her team take the field in hoods rather than caps if league rules didn't preclude it. Schott earned many rebukes, and ultimately a suspension, from the commissioner's office for her bigoted commentary, which overshadowed her more universal offenses. A common sight on the field at Cinergy (nee Riverfront Stadium) was the chain-smoking bigot demanding that Reds players pet her Saint Bernards Schottzie 1 and 2, and laughing when they left good luck tokens on the Astroturf. As a Christmas bonus for employees, she once gave boxes of candy. When the boxes were opened, they revealed an expiration date that had passed more than two years prior. When umpire John McSherry died of a massive heart attack moments before the first pitch on Opening Day 1996 at Riverfront, Schott expressed disappointment that the game was cancelled. The former used car dealer even sullied that business, as she was sued for falsifying sales figures. Forced to sell the team in 1996 or be suspended again, Schott spent her later years trying to buy her way into heaven with a series of philanthropic donations.

Pazuzu’s Petals

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DispossessedMercedes McCambridge, who won an Oscar in 1949 for All the King’s Men, her screen debut, has died at the age of 87. Also known for battling Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar and for playing James Dean’s sister in Giant, earning another Oscar nomination, she is probably best remembered as the voice of Pazuzu, the demon possessing Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist.