Escape Claus

An obituary that probably went unnoticed for most of you was Frank Olivo, who worked a number of jobs in the Philadelphia area and died at 66 of diabetes-related complications. But you’ve all heard his story – in the last game of the 1968 season, with snow falling and the Eagles putting the finishing touches on a 2-12 season, Olivo, a 19-year-old kid in a dirty Santa Claus costume and a fake beard was asked to walk onto Franklin Field while Here Comes Santa Claus was played on the PA because the intended Santa was snowed in. Olivo faced a deluge from the stands – first boos, then snowballs. And forever more, Philadelphia would be renowned for having bad fans because they booed Santa. The ignored parts of that story – while the Atlanta Falcons have to pipe in crowd noise and the city has twice lost NHL teams to smaller Canadian cities, while the NFL had to finally rescind its blackout rule so that Chargers fans could occasionally see their team playing at home, while the Rays and Marlins have gone to World Series while playing in half-empty ballparks, while NHL teams are dictating what can be worn to games because fans can’t create enough of a home-ice advantage, more than 54,000 Eagles fans braved the snow and cold to watch an awful team going nowhere. And while Dodgers fans beat a Giants fan in the parking lot so severely he was left with permanent brain damage, while White Sox fans in separate incidents attacked an umpire and caused permanent eye damage to first base coach Tom Gamboa, while a Brewers fan tackled and punched Astros right fielder Bill Spiers, while New York Giants fans threw ice and sent a San Diego Chargers coach to the hospital, while a Chicago Cubs fan charged Randy Myers on the mound, while New York Rangers fans rocked an ambulance with concussed Pat Lafontaine inside and chanted “Buy a Porsche” at Flyers goalie Ron Hextall the season after goalie Pelle Lindbergh was killed while driving a Porsche, Philadelphia has bad fans because they booed a skinny kid with a bad fake beard in a grubby Santa Claus costume.

Sleeper, Cold

(Props to Greg)

Vern Gagne, a champion in the ring and Vince McMahon’s bitch outside it, has died at the age of 89. Gagne had been a standout at the University of Minnesota in wrestling and football and was drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1947, but opted for the more lucrative world of professional wrestling instead. He became one of the most well-known stars of wrestling’s Golden Age, hailed for his technical skill rather than histrionics. He was also one of its most well-paid, raking in more than $100,000 a year during the 1950s so that by 1960, he was able to break off and start the American Wrestling Association. Though he cut back on his wrestling to build the organization, he was its biggest star and soon one of its first champions. He was intermittently a champion 9 different times, and held the belt well into his 50s. Gagne was old school, and championed wrestlers with technical skill, while the (then-)WWF preferred steroid-gobbling, oiled-up personalities. Among them Hulk Hogan, who had been fired by the WWF, became a star with the AWA (though Gagne hated him as a showboat rather than a wrestler), and then headed back to the WWF. But not before Gagne offered the Iron Sheik a bribe to injure Hogan. When the WWF decided to nationalize what had been a “sport” of regional organizations, Gagne tried to match the effort, even securing a contract with ESPN. But ESPN treated the AWA like a second-class citizen, pre-empting their timeslots for live events and tractor pull previews. Like it now does with baseball. With a steady flow of its stars heading to the WWF, the AWA was bankrupt by 1991. All told, Gagne was a 16-time World Heavyweight Champion, holds the record for the longest combined reign as a world champion and is one of six men inducted into each of the WWE, WCW, Professional Wrestling and Wrestling Observer Newsletter halls of fame. His legacy endured for decades through the wrestlers Gagne trained, including Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Bob Backlund, and Ken Patera.

Deep in the Meadows

Jayne Meadows, MathNet’s Lady Esther Astor Astute, has died at the age of 95. She appeared on Broadway in the 1940s. She spent the 1950s and 1960s as part of the permanent game show welfare class of celebrities on such shows as To Tell the Truth and I’ve Got a Secret. She spent the 1970s and 1980s as an occasional guest star on a range of TV shows from The Nancy Walker Show to Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. In the 1990s, she was Billy Crystal’s mother in City Slickers. But mostly you know her because she had sex with Steve Allen. In their 46-year marriage, someone had to keep the multitalented Allen’s composing, writing, acting, hosting and Steve-O-Meter inventing straight, so Meadows put her acting career as the 6th female lead on hold. The two appeared together on all of Allen’s shows, and as a bickering couple in a brilliant and CSI-presaging episode of Homicide: Life on the Street where Allen fires a warning shot at Meadows and hits the body of a man committing suicide by jumping off the roof of their building. 

When a Man’s Life is Over

Or

Yet Michael Bolton lives

Percy Sledge, who we have to thank for that no-talent ass clown Michael Bolton, has died of liver cancer at the age of 74. His biggest hit, "When a Man Loves a Woman", was a No. 1 hit on both the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B singles charts and went gold in 1966. Lesser hits included It Tears Me Up, Take Time to Know Her, I'll Be Your Everything and Sunshine. Sledge was an inaugural Rhythm and Blues Foundation Pioneer Award honoree in 1989 and he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.

Flag Draper

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If I stay here with you girlThings just couldn't be the same'Cause Stan Freberg is Dead NowAnd Freberg is in a Grave

Stan Freberg, the satirical ad man who tried to boost sales for Pacific Air Lines following a 1964 plane crash that killed all 44 people on board with ads saying the pilots were just as afraid as the passengers and handing out survival kits with luck rabbit’s feet, has died at the age of 88. You may have noticed you’ve never heard of Pacific Air Lines. Despite that misstep, he was considered one of the finest ad men this side of Don Draper, Darrin Stephens and Roger Thornhill, winning 21 Clios, the top award in the industry, though his unorthodox style kept him out of the Advertising Hall of Fame, which apparently is a thing. One commercial for Chun King Chow Mein featured an announcer declaring, “Nine out of 10 doctors prefer Chun King,” followed by the camera panning to show nine Asian ‘doctors’ and one Caucasian. When not trying to give people a reason to stop going to the bathroom while watching TV and for reading around the articles in the newspaper, he made a number of hit comedy records, including “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America,” considered one of the best comedy albums ever recorded, and voiced hundreds of cartoon characters, including Cecil, from the Beany and Cecil show, one of the Goofy Gophers, a beaver in “Lady and the Tramp,” and Pete Puma. George Lucas had tabbed Freberg to voice C-3PO for Star Wars before Freberg suggested letting Anthony Daniels, the man in the costume, provide the voice himself. He also was the last comedian on commercial radio with his own program, having inherited Jack Benny’s slot on CBS Radio in 1957, before getting canceled after telling jokes about the hydrogen bomb and refusing tobacco advertisements.

Dead, Deader, Best

Or

Best in Peace 

Or

Just a Dead Old Boy

(Props to Patrick)

Or

Welcome Home Roscoe Coltrane

(Huzzah for Phil)

Or

He's Leaving - Rosco Coltrane from Georgia

(Additional accolades for Phil)

James Best, who used overturned metal tanks to escape The Killer Shrews, has died of complications from pneumonia at the age of 88. Best is best remembered as the inept, vaguely corrupt sheriff of Hazard County, forever chasing Bo and Luke (and briefly Coy and Vance) Duke for no apparent reason and toward no discernible end, with his barely sentient bloodhound Flash at his side and a kewkewkew in his heart. Best had hundreds of roles to his credit, including virtually every TV Western of the 1950s and ’60s, plus plenty of big screen oaters. He also has the rare distinction of having major roles in three episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Grave, The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank, and Jess-Belle. With such a long string of success to his credit, Best clearly was intended to teach acting, where he counted among his students Quentin Tarantino, and you can see Best’s fingerprints in Jimmie Dimmick, the dorky dressing, gourmet coffee drinking friend of Jules Winnfield, who refuses to take ownership of Marvin’s corpse in Pulp Fiction.

The Band with a Thud

Or

Maybe Barris *is* an assassin - Owens, Patton, DeLugg. That's why Langston wore a bag over his head...

(Props to the conspiracy-minded Phil)

Milton Delugg, who made a career out of oddness and mediocrity, yet worked with such music giants as Al Jolson, Nat King Cole and Pia Zadora, has died of heart failure at the age of 96. As musical director for a radio program, Delugg accompanied Jolson shortly before his death in 1950, then became bandleader for “Broadway Open House,” the first late-night program in TV history. There he co-wrote and performed “Orange Colored Sky,” which would become a hit for Nat King Cole. He also produced the Buddy Holly single Rave On. Stretching his wings, he wrote the music for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, arguably the worst entry in the worst cinematic subgenre, notable only for the presence of Pia Zadora and the first appearance by Mrs. Claus in a movie. He was the rebound bandleader for Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show between Skitch Henderson and Doc Severinsen. In the 1960s, he also scored the gig as the music director for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade that he would hold until 2013, bringing the best out of faded singers and wannabe Broadway hits as background score for the gas bags getting dragged around New York as well as the ones bantering inanely in the host’s booth. His varied experiences with performers of varied skills made him the ideal bandleader of the Band With a Thug and comic foil on Chuck Barris’ surreal splendor The Gong Show, where the polka he penned, Hoop Dee Doo, was used to celebrate each week’s champion.

Lach Less

Or

Punch Out

Elmer Lach, the José Carreras of the Punch Line, has died of a stroke at the age of 97. With Toe Blake on one side and Henri Richard on the other, Lach was the feisty anchor on one of the greatest lines in NHL history – so named for its offensive firepower – all of whom are in the Hall of Fame. In 14 years, all with the Canadiens, Lach somehow managed to only win 3 Stanley Cups, one of the least productive periods in team history. Lach’s OT goal in Game 5 gave the Canadiens the 1953 Stanley Cup, though his celebration with Richard left him with a broken nose. One of the more enjoyable of his many injuries. It has been said that a pictorial history of the NHL of the 1940s would have to include Lach’s X-rays – his sophomore season was ended when he shattered an elbow, broke a wrist and dislocated a shoulder, his nose was broken 7 times, he suffered a fractured skull, and his jaw was broken 3 times, the last time so badly it was held together for the rest of his life with a platinum wire. Of course being a hockey player, he usually skated through the pain – he didn’t mention one of the jaw fractures to his coach so he wasn’t pulled from the game, on another occasion, he stayed in a game despite two veins in his foot being severed by a skate blade until a teammate noticed the blood. Despite weighing just 165 pounds, he gave as good as he got, and was known for exploding under a player’s arms as he skated with the puck, hoisting him off his skates. Lach was a 5-time All-Star, won the league’s MVP in 1945, and earned 2 scoring titles, retiring as the league’s all-time leading scorer. He served as a mentor for Jean Béliveau, who replaced Lach in the lineup and would emerge as one of the greatest players in league history.