Get These Pirates Out of My Locker

(Props to Greg)

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I’m a Big Griever

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Daydream Bereaver

(Kudos to Monty and Pete)

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He's on last train to Deadsville…

(Tip o’ the cap to Terrence)

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(His Coffin is your) Stepping Stone

(Additional accolades for Terrence)

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That was then, death is now

(More merit for Terrence)
Davy Jones, Marcia Brady’s prom date, has died at the age of 66 of a heart attack experienced under exertion, according to the strange woman with him who called 911, making this the first of the 1195 obituaries I’ve written that was for a guy who died in the saddle. Jones, Peter Tork, Mickey Dolenz and Mike Nesmith were compiled by record executives as The Monkees, the American answer to the Beatles, in their surreal head trip of a sitcom. Despite their suspect lineage, the Monkees attracted a constellation of talent, with Jimi Hendrix opening for them on their first concert tour, songs written by Neil Diamond and Carole King, and Jack Nicholson, penning and producing the group’s sole cinematic appearance: Head, named so that the tagline for the sequel could be: “From the people who gave you Head.” While The Monkees won the Emmy in 1967 for best comedy series, how much musical talent the band itself actually had is debatable. On the rare occasions the group was actually allowed to play their own instruments, they had to play the ones assigned by their handlers, which was how Dolenz ended up as the drummer despite never having held a drumstick outside of Thanksgiving. Fronting the Pre-Fab 4 was Jones, whose dreamy good looks and British accent quickly made him the most popular member. Jones other major contribution was being the progenitor of the urban legend that Charles Manson had auditioned for the band, a fallacy that still managed to find its way into some of Jones obituaries. Jones also forced a young English musician named David Jones to find a new stage name to avoid confusion. Which was just as well, because can you really imagine a bloke named David Jones singing about Ziggy Stardust and Spiders from Mars? Peter, Mike and Mickey didn’t attend the funeral to avoid making a spectacle of the event, but they would have been ideally suited to serve as pallbearers, as they clearly were not too busy singing to put anybody down.

Does a Bearanstain Shit the Bed in the Woods? Yes.

Jan Berenstain, one-half of the couple who created the Berenstain Bears, died from a stroke at the age of 88. She met her husband Stan on their first day of art school, they married 5 years later. They developed a domestic comic called “It’s All in the Family” that was syndicated into several women’s magazines for almost 30 years. Their first book, The Big Honey Hunt, was published in 1962, and with the help of the head of Random House’s Beginner Books (some hack named Theodore Giesel), they developed the story of a simple family of bears into an internationally published series. The stories showed how the Bear family (whose members bore the imaginative names of Papa, Mama, Brother and Sister) approached the day to day problems they encountered in the also inventively-named Bear Country. It was like the Waltons, if they were bears and John Boy ate most of his siblings. Critics would deride the series for not tackling weightier issues or being more reflective of the times, but their simple approach would lead to the publishing of over 300 titles, two TV shows, and a variety of other outlets. More recent entries did address bullying, on-line stalking and, in a book where Papa Bear takes a dislike to Asian-looking Pandas, racism.

The Dead End Kid

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You can 86 the Met!
(Kudos to Phil)
Gary Carter, who on his 34th birthday on April 8, 1988 ended a game against the Phillies by getting picked off second base by Steve Jeltz pulling the hidden ball trick in one of my happiest baseball memories, has died of brain cancer at the age of 57. The original camera whore, Carter had an ego bigger than le Stade Olympique and a reputation for only playing hard when his games were nationally televised. He emerged as a slugging star with the Expos in the early 1980s, but major league baseball’s Siberia was too small a stage and he was traded to the New York Mets, where his obnoxious hot-dogging home run trots and swagger fit right in. Carter helped lead New York to the 1986 World Series, and in the 10th inning of Game 6 when the Mets were down 2 runs and down to their last out against Boston, Carter started the eventual game winning rally, so Red Sox fans got to relive that hell during every tribute. His bat as tired as his act, he left New York after the 1989 season, bouncing from San Francisco (where he made the last out of Terry Mulholland’s no-hitter, the first ever at Veterans Stadium) to Los Angeles before wrapping things up in 1992 in Montreal. After his election to Cooperstown, the Hall of Fame stuck him with an Expos cap on his plaque, despite his stated preference to go in as a Met, a team that still hasn’t bothered to even retire his number.

Waking David Kelly

(Props to Monty)
David Kelly, professional old man, has died at the age of 82. A career character actor, Kelly’s career hit the big time as the man selected to impersonate a lottery winner who had inconveniently died before collecting in Waking Ned Devine, a role that included a naked motorcycle ride to maintain the ruse. After seeing he could play sexy, casting directors couldn’t wait to get him in bed again, leading to his only other major role as Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The Powers That Was

John Powers Severin, one of the founding cartoonists with Mad magazine in 1952, has died at the age of 90. Other work included an extensive career in the war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat for EC Comics, then Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos for Marvel, then he was the primary penciler in the Silver Age The Incredible Hulk (that probably means something to you if you live in your parents’ basement). He wrapped things up with a 45-year stint ripping himself off at Cracked, with even the publisher saying the magazine is “a bunch of crap, and John Severin.” For his contributions, he was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2003.

Houston, You Have… Had… a Problem

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No Longer Waiting to Exhale
(Monty)

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Always Was a Little Shorter Than She Planned
Whitney Houston, best remembered for her covers of songs by Dolly Parton and Francis Scott Key, has died of a drug overdose at the age of 48. The multi-platinum singer was one of America’s great soul/R&B singers, serving as a musical bridge from Tina Turner to Rihanna, before deciding that “Crack is whack.” And by “whack” she meant the greatest thing since sliced heroin. By the mid-1990s her drug abuse was nearly out of control, as shown by her decision to star in The Bodyguard opposite Kevin Costner, who advised her not to take acting lessons, because he hadn’t, and look how great he turned out. As her drug-addled foibles mounted, she was seen less in Billboard, more in National Enquirer. She even got fired by the Academy Awards, and those people thought Rob Lowe dancing with Snow White was a good idea. At the same time, her volatile marriage to Bobby Brown grew rockier, and the pair realized the best place to work things out was in the white-hot spotlight of a reality show “Being Bobby Brown.” They divorced in 2007, and in the settlement, he apparently got her voice, as her once powerful pipes seemed frayed in her concert appearances. She took a shot at a comeback in 2009 with her I Look to You album and world tour, but her inability to hit or hold a note had fans saying “I Look to Exit” about half way through her set despite dropping $150 a ticket. In the end, she couldn’t even score a role in a Tyler Perry movie.

How Low Can Zaslow Go? Six Feet, at Least

Anyone hoping to chronicle their 15 minutes of fame have one less option for co-author as a result of the car accident death of Wall Street Journal columnist and writer-for-hire Jeffrey Zaslow.  Zaslow wrote for the Orlando Sentinel and the Chicago Sun-Times (where at just 29 years old he replaced Ann Landers with a column called “All That Zazz”), he moved to the WSJ where he wrote the column “Moving On,” which focused on life transitions. Who said business journalism couldn’t be ironic? As an author, he co-wrote books by Captain Chesley Sullenberger, Gaby Giffords, and most notably Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, cornering the market on near death experiences. His book with Pausch, The Last Lecture, became an international best seller, with 5 million copies sold in the US alone. Zaslow also wrote books on his own, typically on inspirational stories like a group of life-long friends from Ames, Iowa and the hopes of mothers and their soon to be married daughters in The Magic Room. Zaslow was also an avid runner, for all that it helped him.

The Other Side of the Dirt

Jill Kinmont Boothe, originator of the SI cover jinx, has died at the age of 75. A sure bet to represent the United States at the 1956 Winter Olympics, Kinmont was the cover girl, skis on her shoulder with a snowy mountain backdrop, on the Jan. 31, 1955 issue of Sports Illustrated. Days later, she was paralyzed from the next down in a skiing accident. So maybe next time your team loses a game or your quarterback throws an interception after appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, maybe you should dial it down a little. Her struggle to recover in a country 40 years before the ADA when the only ramps were on roller derby track was documented in the 1975 movie “The Other Side of the Mountain,” and 1978’s Part II.

Rigor Morty

(Accolades to Monty)
Phil Bruns, Jerry Seinfeld’s first TV father has joined Jerry’s second TV father and sustained the Seinfeld curse, dying of natural causes at the age of 80. A classic ”Hey, it’s That Guy,” Bruns earned day rates on dozens of sitcoms and dramas from the 1960s to the 1990s, including MASH, Hill Street Blues, Kojak, Mr. Belvedere, Ed and Barney Miller. The one show where he appeared more than once as the same character was the 1970s soap-opera parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, where he played Hartman’s ill-informed, perpetually confused blue collar mechanic father. Looking at the last 15 months, Bruns joins Bill Erwin (The Old Man), Len Lesser (Uncle Leo), and Frances Bay (The Marble Rye) on the Seinfeld In Memoriam reel, while Daniel von Bergen (Mr. Kruger) took a shot at joining the list.

They Came To Get Him Barbara

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Night of the Dead Dead
Bill Hinzman, who survived 40 years as a zombie, couldn’t beat cancer, dying at the age of 75. Best remembered for being promoted from cameraman to the first zombie in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Hinzman made a living among the lifeless. In Legion of the Night he reanimated the dead, he was the experienced zombie with a refined palate in The Drunken Dead Guy, he inadvertently created the zombies by killing innocent men in River of Darkness, was one of the titular Crazies in the Romero original and played random zombies in Underground Entertainment: The Movie, It Came from Trafalgar and Shadow: Dead Riot. He was the braaaaiiiiinnnnns behind The Majorettes, a film about a cheerleader murderer and Flesheater, one of the greatest movies ever about farmer zombies.

No Longer Running For His Life

(Props to Mike Mulcahy)

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Brick on a Cold Tin Slab

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Anatomy of a Malignancy
Ben Gazzara, who got nearly jeté-d to death in Road House, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 81. The original Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway, Gazzara studied at the same Actors Studio as Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger and was a similarly intense Method actor. A frequent partner of John Cassavetes in his early independent movies like Husbands and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Gazzara viewed the major Hollywood roles he was offered with disdain, seeing them as beneath his idealistic approach. He made up for that later in life, appearing in 38 films during the 1990s alone, most of them direct to cable dreck like Too Tired to Die, The Zone, Vicious Circles and Ladykiller. Other roles included his Emmy-nominated stint in Run for Your Life, an anthology series about a man completing his bucket list after being given 18 months to live that ran for 3 seasons, a soldier on trial for killing his wife’s rapist in Anatomy of a Murder and a porn producer in The Big Lebowksi.

Dundee Muffled

Angelo Dundee, who coached 15 world champions in the squared circle, not counting Jim Braddock in Cinderella Man, has died at the age of 90. In his 60 years in the corner, Dundee was part cutman, part psychologist, part master strategist helping guide Muhammad Ali to the heavyweight title 3 different times, Sugar Ray Leonard to convince Roberto Duran he could take “no mas,” and George Foreman to become the oldest heavyweight champion of all time. Others in the stable were Carmen Basilio, Pinklon Thomas, Trevor Berbick, Ralph Dupas, Wilfredo Gomez, Jose Napoles, Willie Pastrano, Jimmy Ellis, Michael Nunn, Sugar Ramos and Luis Rodriguez. As is generally the case in boxing, not everything in his bag of tricks was entirely above boards. After Ali was knocked down in a 1963 bout with Henry Cooper, Dundee stretched a hole in Ali’s glove, buying time for Ali to recover. At the Rumble in the Jungle, Dundee noticed that the high humidity was causing the ring ropes to sag, so he used a razor blade to cut the ropes and then tightened them. Thus Ali was able to employ his “rope-a-dope” strategy, letting Foreman wear himself out while the ropes absorbed most of the energy from Foreman’s punches. For his efforts, legal and otherwise, Dundee was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1994.

The SOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUL Hearse!

(Kudos to Terry Walsh)

Or
Soulless Train
(Props to Monty)
Don Cornelius, who introduced blacks to white America, has opted out at the age of 75. Cornelius employed a silky baritone and Fletch-esque afro as the host of African-American Bandstand, aka Soul Train. The show helped build bridges between whites and blacks by giving wide exposure to musicians like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson. White stars like Elton John and David Bowie also appeared to reach black audiences with the bastardized versions of music that had been stolen without compensation from their forebears. During performances, singers were backed by black teens who were putting the latest urban dance moves on display, dispelling the idea that all black kids did was steal cars, spray graffiti and sell drugs on street corners. Soul Train launched locally in Chicago in 1970 (hardly the easiest time to mend racial divides), then went into national syndication in 1971, starting a 35-year run, the longest of any first-run syndicated program in history. In lieu of pallbearers, Cornelius’ casket will be passed hand over hand by two rows of gyrating teens.