From Terrible Towel to Funeral Shroud

(An epitaphany shared with Phil)
On the other end of the linguistic spectrum was Myron Cope, whose creative combination of English and Pittsburghese made him a local legend in his 35 years in the Steelers’ broadcast booth before his death at the age of 79. Among his turns of phrase: "Double Yoi," "Okle-dokle," "Dumbkopf!", and "How do?" He found his way into the booth after establishing a career in print, starting at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and landing on the original full-time staff of Sports Illustrated. His profile of Howard Cosell was selected one of the magazine’s 50 all-time classic articles, and only he and George Plimpton have held the title of special contributor at that magazine. Cope’s lasting contribution was the Terrible Towel, a tradition started before a 1975 playoff game against Baltimore when he encouraged fans to bring yellow dish towels to the game. The stands were full and the Steelers won 28-10. Official team-sanctioned towels were in hands by Super Bowl X. The towels became a fixture, and when the Steelers won Super Bowl XL, coach Bill Cowher held a Terrible Towel in one hand and the Vince Lombardi Trophy in the other.

The Buckley Stops Here

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I am satisfied to discontinue perambulation and contemplate my own former sentience
(Props for Mark)

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Firing Flatline
William F. Buckley, the pompous pontificator who turned exploitation of the proletariat into an intellectual exercise, has seen his metabolic processes terminate at 82. Buckley, who never conceived a syllable with which he was not enamored, preached the wisdom of the market mentality, yet refused to accept it in his own business, and National Review, the conservative journal he founded, edited and published was a perennial currency hemorrhager, and subsisted on donations and Buckley’s lecturing remunerations. Hard to believe now, but Buckley’s conservative commentary in print and on the long running PBS staple Firing line, espoused a distinct and well considered point of view, compared to the pill-popping small minded right-wing nutjobs contaminating the airwaves. While few read his magazine, Buckley was very much in love with his writing, producing 50 books, and another 4.5 million words in his 5,600 newspaper columns. He donated 7 tons of his collected papers to Yale, apparently rather than hitting the recycling yard. While Buckley preached conservatism, he did it with more style and panache than Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. His endorsement of General Eisenhower in 1952: We prefer Ike. He posited to NYC politician Mark Green: “You’ve been on the show close to 100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you learned anything yet?”

Creature in the Black Hole

He starred the last classic Universal monster movie, but unless you were related to him, you probably wouldn’t recognize him. Ben Chapman, the man behind the mask in Creature From the Black Lagoon, has died at the age of 79. The 6-foot-5 ex-Marine had earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts for his service in the Korean War and his size made him a perfect fit to play the Gill Man, the creature abducted from his happy home in the Amazon who develops a thing for Julie Adams. Like most stars, he felt sequels were beneath him, and he didn’t appear in Revenge of the Creature and the Creature Walks Among Us, or the Gill-Man’s appearance as Uncle Gilbert on The Munsters. His only other credited appearance was in Jungle Moon Man, as Marro. Despite the seeming anonymity, Chapman was a fixture on the horror festival circuit.

Cold Hard Cash

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Wiley Post-humous
Steve Fossett, who had more dollars than sense, has had his death wish granted, as he was declared dead 5 months after disappearing in the Nevada desert at the age of 63. One his last flight, he had been scouting locations to set a new land speed record. Previous attempts had always been attempted horizontally, Fossett, ever the adventurer, chose to break it vertically. While other moguls attempted great things with their wealth, either by curing disease, like Bill Gates, protecting the environment, like Ted Turner, or building a cool hollowed out volcano lair, like Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the billionaire soybean trader with an apparently tiny bit of manhood treated the The Guinness Book of World Records as his personal bucket list. He couldn’t even be bothered to hold a clinic explaining the climax of Trading Places. He swam the English Channel, raced in the Iditarod, drove in the Le Mans 24-hour sports car race and skied from Aspen to Vail. He set more than 100 aviation and sailing records, including being the first to fly around the world solo in a hot air balloon, which he achieved after a dozen abortive and near disastrous attempts, including a crash into shark-infested waters and a violation of Chinese air space, with rescues at taxpayer expense. He was the first to fly solo around the world without refueling and set the nonstop distance flight record at 25,766 miles and 76 hours, 42 minutes and 55 seconds. He set an altitude record in a glider and set a record for circumnavigating the globe in a catamaran. On his last flight he failed to file a flight plan, which made rescue efforts difficult and even more expensive, and if he survived the crash, probably sealed his fate. At least his final act, feeding coyotes and vultures, allowed him to do some good in this world.

We’re Going to Need a Bigger Hearse

(An epitaphany shared with Don)

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So Long, Old Chum
(Props to Craig)

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French Disconnection
(Additional Accolades for Craig)

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2008: The Year We Make Compost
Roy Scheider, whose unique approach to good cop-bad cop with Martin Short cracked notorious criminal mastermind Jim Belushi, has jumped the shark, succumbing to a staph infection at the age of 75. Best remembered as cinema’s greatest shark hunter in Jaws I and II, Scheider scored a Best Supporting Actor nomination as Cloudy Russo, Popeye Doyle’s partner in The French Connection and a Best Actor nomination as Joe Gideon, the chain-smoking, pill-popping, womanizing, workaholic, alcoholic, choreographer and director in All That Jazz. He was also the inept secret agent in Marathon Man that lets a 70-year-old Laurence Olivier get the drop on him, thus setting up the world’s most famous dental exam for Dustin Hoffman. He was the aging star Billy Young, and theoretically teammate of Billy Chapel, depending on your opinion of the impermeability of the 5th wall, in Tiger Town, showed that it was possible to make a sci-fi movie that made 2001: A Space Odyssey look linear in 2010: The Year We Make Contact. On the small screen, Scheider played Nathan Bridger, Commander of the submarine SeaQuest DSV, until he bitched about how much the show sucked and got himself out of his contract and Russian crime lord Fyodor Chevchenko on Third Watch. Despite the successes, Scheider had no problem with paycheck roles, playing the president in the Dolph Lundgren opus The Peacemaker and jumping into the sequels Dracula II and Dracula III, despite not having appeared in Dracula 2000.

Trapped in a World He Never Made

Steve Gerber, a fringe player in the Marvel Universe who created a cult sensation with a cranky duck who didn’t like to wear pants – no, the other one – has died of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 60. Gerber developed the Howard the Duck character, who had fallen to earth from his home planet, a planet where man evolved from ducks, in the late 1970s, first in guest appearances in Adventure into Fear, then getting his own comic. Howard takes up residence in Cleveland, doing battle with Phelch the Space Turnip and bedding Beverly, a human hottie. The comic was intended as a satire of the 1970s, with characters based on Anita Bryant and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. He ran for president on the All Night Party ticket, losing to Jimmy Carter. Howard was resurrected in the 1986 movie that, Greg’s protestations notwithstanding, sucked. Gerber also produced the comics Omega the Unknown, Man-Thing, Foolkiller, Sludge and the craptastic Conan-in-space knockoff Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon.

Woman Without a Future

Phyllis A. Whitney, prolific author has solved her last mystery, dying from being really, really old at the age of 104. Her 75 novels, all with plots seemingly derived from Our Gang shorts, spanned from 1941’s “A Place for Ann,” about young women doing odd service jobs; her last, 1997’s “Amethyst Dreams,” about a woman who stands to inherit a fortune before disappearing. Her novels, mostly mysteries for children, were notable for fast pacing, light reading and lots of cliffhangers, sort of an ancient female Dan Brown.

7 Pooligans skipped to the last page of this mystery, Michelle’s - Die Another Day - Just Before November 30 moves into 3rd, Mark’s Nonagenarians Gone Wild takes 4th, Kirsti’s Geri(atrics) and the Pacemakers is now in 7th, and Jon (with his first-ever hit), Shawn’s Team Oldest, Steve and Monty’s Great Hits of Brits & Lits dogpile into 17th. In historical news, with Whitney’s death, Kirsti’s 2004 and 2005 lists are the first to complete GHI bingo – with all 10 entries dying.

The Maltese Fallen
Fra Andrew Bertie, a descendant of Britain’s royal Stuart family who was grand master of the Knights of Malta, has died at the age of 78. Bertie was the 78th grand master of the Knights, a 900-year-old charitable order – kind of like what the Stonecutters became under Homer. Officially known as the Sovereign Military Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, the society has the status of an independent state and operates in 120 countries, providing medical and social services, particularly in war zones and impoverished areas.

An annual tradition in the GHI is to tally the listees Mark gave up on too soon – here’s his first – Bertie was one of his 2007 – Royal Oldsters.

Butz Out

Earl Butz, who brought a little intrigue and excitement to the Agriculture Department, has died at the age of 98. With food prices escalating in the 1970s, Butz encouraged farming “hedgerow to hedgerow,” plowing wetlands, and an overreliance on herbicide, pesticide and fertilizers, making environmental groups very happy. This relaxation in farming practices helped give rise to agribusinesses, which in turn gave rise to the fattening of America, while destroying family farms. On the lighter side, he mocked Pope Paul VI at the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome and his opposition to "population control" by quipping, in a mock Italian accent: "He no playa the game, he no maka the rules." All that was fine, but he went a little too far on a commercial flight from the Republican National Convention in 1976, discussing with Pat Boone – yes, that one – why the party of Lincoln couldn’t do more to attract blacks and announcing “the only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight p - - - - , loose shoes and a warm place to shit.” With the revelation that Butz was an ass, he was forced out of the Ford Administration. That kind of wit made him a fave on the dinner circuit, but he decided he didn’t eneed to pay taxes, and did time for tax evasion after failing to report more than $148,000 in speaker’s fees.

Morse Coded

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No Re-Morse
Barry Morse, the most tenacious, if not the most successful, cop in TV history, has died at the age of 89. In his 8-decade career, he logged more than 3,000 appearances, and was featured in so many shows on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that he was nicknamed “the CBC test pattern,” but he’s best remembered for the 37 episodes of The Fugitive as Lt. Philip Gerard, always one step behind Dr. Richard Kimble, in turn a step behind the one-armed killer of his wife. Although he portrayed Gerard as an intelligent, dedicated upholder of justice, Morse was known as the most hated man in America by those who saw him as dogging an innocent man. Morse also appeared on Space: 1999, a series that put the fiction in science fiction, depicting the stories of the inhabitants of a moon base after a nuclear explosion blows the moon out of its orbit, ignoring the fact that an explosion large enough to disrupt the moon’s orbit would actually destroy the moon. Morse played Victor Bergman, lead scientist on Moonbase Alpha and rational sounding board to Martin Landau’s Kirk-like Commander John Koenig. Further pushing credibility, in a closed base, Bergman somehow disappeared after the first season without explanation. Morse’s stage career is most notable for appearing in every play written by both William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. Morse also played Reagan-esque American president Johnny Cyclops on the BBC sitcom Whoops Apocalypse.