obit Archives - Page 15 of 25 - Ramblin' with Roger

My parents and Star Trek

Back in 1986, I suggested that Mom and I see Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

In light of Leonard Nimoy’s death on February 27, a not-unexpected event which nevertheless saddened me greatly, a couple of family recollections.

When I was a teenager in Binghamton, NY, my father was a big fan of Star Trek, airing on NBC-TV in 1966-1969. He watched it every week, barring some meeting conflict. I’d wander into the living room, watch a scene or two, and walk away, bemused.

Dad seemed particularly fond of this part-human, part-Vulcan character named Mr. Spock, played by Nimoy, who, I gathered, had nothing to do with the famous pediatrician of the era, Dr. Benjamin Spock.

There WAS a show Dad and I tended to watch together, and it was the spy show Mission: Impossible, which ALSO started in 1966, on CBS-TV. Among the stars was Martin Landau as Rollin Hand as a master of magic and makeup.

When Landau decided to leave M:I in 1969, he was replaced by Leonard Nimoy, who played a very similar character named Paris. Apparently, Nimoy was up for the Rollin Hand part but opted to do the space opera instead.

It wasn’t until the original Star Trek was shown in reruns that I finally “got” it. I was primed to see the first Star Trek movie in 1979, which I found a little slow, but then I watched the second and third movies, in which (can this be a spoiler?), Spock apparently dies, and then survives.

My parents and baby sister Marcia moved to Charlotte, NC in 1974. One of the traditions I had with my mother, when I would visit her down there was for us to go watch a movie at the local cinema. We saw the original Rocky and Dreamgirls, for two, the latter with my sisters.

For some reason, back in 1986, I suggested that Mom and I see Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which, as it turned out, Nimoy directed and co-wrote. This was not my best idea because Mom had not seen either II or III. She DID seem to enjoy the story but was a bit confused by the back story, which I tried to explain as quickly as possible.

The only non-Star Trek movie I recall seeing Leonard Nimoy in was the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I did watch the original Three Men and a Baby (1987), which he directed. Of course, I remember hearing his distinctive speech in several voiceover gigs.

I’ve found a LOT of nifty Nimoy stories this weekend. I liked Live Long and Prosper: The Jewish Story Behind Spock that also shows up in his New York Times obit. Read also Mark Evanier and Jaquandor tell stories about Leonard Nimoy, and Chuck Miller shows some nifty videos.

This quote I found on Daily Kos is true: “We lost the man who played the first ‘cool’ science nerd… Maybe that’s why his death is having a bigger impact on many of us than we would have thought, until now.” As his last tweet read: “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP.”

News guys: Brian Williams, Jon Stewart, Bob Simon

Brian Williams on the moon with Neil Armstrong.

It was a Wednesday night. I was at our Dad’s group at church, and the pastor was reading this excerpt of the book Jesus for President, about, in retrospect, the obvious buildup to the Iraq war, featuring folks such as Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush.

It reminded me of something CBS News correspondent Bob Simon had said in January 2003 on the Sunday Morning program. The exact words I don’t recall, but it was, in effect: The United States and its allies are now occupying Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, allowing the inspectors to look for those “weapons of mass destruction” we were supposedly so sure existed.

There was no reason to go to war; the status quo is the way we should pursue things. Of course, the US ignored his counsel, and we’re still dealing with the effects to this day (e.g., ISIL).

Bob Simon knew something of the region. “At the beginning of the Persian Gulf war in January 1991, he was captured with colleagues by Iraqi forces. The team spent 40 days in a prison of Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein. He was interrogated, beaten with canes and truncheons, and starved by his Iraqi captors. He would later recount his story in the book Forty Days.”

I got home that evening and discovered that Bob Simon was dead from a car crash. He was described as a “reporter’s reporter”, winner of 27 Emmys and four Peabody Awards, covering a wide range of topics from Vietnam to making instruments out of rubbish to how elephants communicate.

This news upset me far more than I would have anticipated.

Maybe Bob Simon was the kind of old school journalist/war reporter that Brian Williams, the suspended NBC News anchor, had hoped to be. Watch how his accounts of his time in Iraq had changed since 2003, which is a recurring pattern for him.

As bad as his six-month suspension, and loss of $5 million in salary, must be, what is worse is the public humiliation. He’s a Twitter hashtag, #BrianWilliamsMisremembers. Brian Williams on the moon with Neil Armstrong. Someone took the iconic picture of John Kennedy, Jr. saluting his father’s casket, and superimposed Brian Williams’ head, which, I admit, made me LOL.

The defense of Brian Williams seems to take two forms. One is that other news networks lie all the time. A quote attributed to Chris Rock read: “Fox News lies unapologetically for 20 straight years = #1 cable news network. Brian Williams embellishes one story = worldwide controversy.”

The other is that Cheney/Bush et al. lied about the reasons for going into the Iraq war, and Williams is the only one punished?

Frankly, I’m convinced that possible apology tour will not work, that his predilection for fibbing, which former anchor Tom Brokaw told him about, will do him in, even though he may well have begun to believe his own narrative, putting himself in the story, rather than a deliberate lie.

In the same news cycle, Jon Stewart announced he’d be leaving The Daily Show, Comedy Central’s faux news broadcast, which many critics think is far more substantial than the “regular” news.

As many are, I was saddened by the news; as a friend of mine said, Stewart had a way of expressing his own thoughts, but in a more coherent way. Here are some of his best bits.

Lots of speculation about who will replace Stewart. Some suggest Jon Oliver, former Daily Show contributor, who’s got a gig on HBO. Tina Fey or Amy Poehler both hosted the Weekend Update segment on Saturday night Live, are other names being bandied about.

Why not Brian Williams on The Daily Show? After all, he had wanted to be the Tonight Show host. Comedy Central might be a step down, but if Williams did some of the real news Stewart did, it just might raise Williams’ credibility to Jon Stewart level, which is quite high. Whereas he’ll be tainted for NBC, CBS, and ABC for a long time.
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I’ve only recently read the columns of David Carr, “who wrote about media as it intersects with business, culture, and government in his Media Equation column for The New York Times.” He died at his office last week. He was only 58.

Cousin Robert Yates (1946-2015)

Robert Yates became very active in coaching youth athletics.

That quiz that I do at the end of the year asks if I had any significant deaths in the past 12 months. I’ve dealt with three in the first frickin’ five weeks of 2015.

Robert Yates was my late mother’s first cousin. Mom’s mother was Gert; Gert’s brother was Ernie Yates, who married Charlotte Berman. They had four children: Raymond, born November 17, 1937, which I only know because it’s 10 years to the day after my mom; Frances, who was born January 1940; Donald, who was born in 1943; and Robert, the baby of the family, born in 1946.

They lived in Binghamton, with Ernie working as a truck driver, even though he was a college-educated man because that was what was available to him. But when Ernie died suddenly in 1954, the family moved to St. Albans, an enclave in Queens, New York City, in this house that looked like a mansion to me, it was so big compared with our modest dwelling.

Our family went down to NYC at least twice a year, and Charlotte and her brood came up to Binghamton. Since Robert was only seven years older than I, I felt more a natural kinship with him than his older siblings.

My father arranged the flowers for Robert’s wedding to a woman named Audrey, and possibly other Yates weddings. Robert and Audrey had a son, Aaron, who you can see below on my sister Leslie’s lap, as Robert looks on. Unfortunately, Aaron was murdered on the streets of New York City when he was 18, the details of which I’ve never been privy to.

I do know that Robert became very active in coaching youth athletics and generally being involved in the community. His nephews and nieces in particular really looked up to him. As one niece said, “He was a second, or even only, father to a lot of kids who are now better men because of his influence.”

After I moved to Albany, I’d only get a chance to visit them on special occasions, such as Aunt Charlotte’s 80th and 88th birthday parties. I last saw Robert, and his brother Donald, at Thanksgiving 2013, swapping memories.

Robert had been on dialysis for several weeks, so his passing on February 5 was not unexpected. And “he is now free from the pain and suffering that he had been living with for some time.” Still…

[Sigh.]

Looking for the reset button

Had a really good time during the Christmas/ New Year period, which I will write about soon. Temporarily forgot about the backlog at work- more on that down the road.

Already sad about the death of Mario Cuomo, which I wrote about, I did get a bit irritable about some of the commentary from the political left that his actions didn’t always match his rhetoric. As this article suggests, Cuomo knew that politics is the art of the possible. Or as Cuomo put it: “We campaign in poetry but we govern in prose.”

Then, when I got back home, I hear of the death of fellow choir Jimmy Rocco, who I knew and liked; wrote about THAT.

I’m sitting in church Sunday listening to the joys and concerns, when someone noted the sudden death of Sonny Hausgaard on January 3. Did I hear that name right? Yes. Sonny was a member of the board of the Friends of the Albany Public Library, over which I preside. His wife was a friend of one of our church members. This is the first time I looked in the newspaper obits and saw TWO people I knew personally.

Also, I was musing over the death of Edward Brooke on January 3, “the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote and the first Republican senator to call for the resignation of President Nixon over the Watergate scandal,” who died Saturday at the age of 95. “Upon his arrival in Washington, Brooke automatically achieved a number of social firsts, according to his memoirs, integrating both the Senate swimming pool and the Senate barbershop.”

More significant, for black people across the United States, he became “their” unofficial senator when he took office in January 1967. When their own representatives were unresponsive, often because of the vestiges of racism, they well might contact the junior senator from Massachusetts.

I was also saddened, far more than I expected, by the passing of Stuart Scott, the ESPN anchor who brought a “hip hop attitude” – ESPN’s words, not mine – to sport commentary. He was only 49 when he died on January 4. Watching a bunch of grown black men, usually, former athletes such as Cris Carter and Keyshawn Johnson, holding back tears, saying that Stuart let them know they had a role model so that they could be themselves, was surprisingly affecting. I had not realized that this was Scott’s THIRD bout with cancer, going back to 2007.

Instead of dealing with stuff I should have been addressing – paying bills, ABC Wednesday stuff, Black History Month organizing at church, Olin reunion, library lobby day, etc. – I was e-mailing the Friends to make sure they knew of Sonny’s death, planning to take off Wednesday morning (today) for Jimmy’s funeral, and in general, feeling more than a little discombobulated.

I may just throw the first week of 2015 on the 2014 bonfire and start anew. Perhaps I need to look at those good news sites Arthur was talking about, but suddenly I haven’t got the time. Hmm, feel like I’m crankier lately in this blog; this Alberta clipper cold snap (blame Canada!) we’re currently experiencing does NOT help.
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Bess Myerson died back on December 14, though it wasn’t revealed until recently. I knew her best as a panelist on the game show I’ve Got A Secret, but she came into prominence as the first Miss America who was Jewish. She wouldn’t change her name to something less “ethnic”; I always admired that. She had later difficulties in NYC government and in her personal life, unfortunately.

Mario Cuomo; Ed Hermann

I voted for Mario M. Cuomo, the son of Italian immigrants who became three-term governor of New York, more often than any political candidate. As the New York Times article announcing his New Year’s Day death at the age of 82 noted: “He commanded the attention of the country with a compelling public presence [and] a forceful defense of liberalism.”

He was the Democratic party’s official nominee for lieutenant governor in 1974 but lost in a primary to Mary Anne Krupsak. I happened to have been living in New York City when he ran for mayor in 1977, and he lost again, this time to Ed Koch, who I did not much like.

Cuomo was elected lieutenant governor in 1978, and when Hugh Carey chose not to run for governor in 1982, Cuomo found himself in another primary with Ed Koch.

The mayor seemed to be destined to win until he said disparaging things about upstate New York. Cuomo won the gubernatorial primary and the general election.

Mario Cuomo became a national figure when he made the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. “They asked only for a chance to work and to make the world better for their children, and they — they asked to be protected in those moments when they would not be able to protect themselves. This nation and this nation’s government did that for them.” Links to his 1984 and 1992 convention speeches can be found HERE.

I most appreciated his unpopular position against the death penalty, “which he blocked as governor in New York for 12 years, as a ‘stain on our conscience… The death penalty is wrong because it lowers us all,’ he wrote in The Daily News. ‘It is a surrender to the worst that is in us. (It) has never elevated a society, never brought back a life, never inspired anything but hate.'”

He was reelected governor in 1986 and 1990, then got the nickname “Hamlet on the Hudson” when he considered running for President in 1992. He opted against doing so, which was fine by me; Presidential politics were rough, even then.

I was sad, however, that he decided to decline a possible appointment to the US Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton. His contemplative style would have been great on the bench.

Moreover, a successful run for a fourth term as governor seemed less than promising to me, and sure enough, he was defeated in the general election in November 1994 by obscure state legislator George Pataki. Interesting that Cuomo died 20 years almost to the day that he ended his term as governor.

He was the father of five, including the current governor, Andrew, who was inaugurated earlier on New Years Day; and Chris, a reporter with CNN. He had been married to his wife Matilda (née Raffa) since 1954.
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Edward Hermann did the patrician man better than almost anyone. He was best known as the well-to-do father and grandfather on Gilmore Girls. He played Franklin Roosevelt several times, and I think I saw them all, including in the 1982 movie Annie. I also saw him in the movies The Paper Chase, The Great Gatsby, Reds, Nixon, and others.

Besides being the voiceover guy for programs on the History Channel, he was on several TV shows I watched, including Beacon Hill, The Practice, Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Wife, and especially the haughty priest in flashbacks on St. Elsewhere, and the arrogant surgeon in an episode of MASH.

Ed Hermann died on December 31, 2014, at the age of 71 from brain cancer.
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I found this list from 2009 of the top 100 rated TV shows in the US. There are lots of final episodes of series, Super Bowl football games, the miniseries Roots, the first broadcast of Gone With the Wind, special episodes (how shot JR on Dallas, Beatles on Ed Sullivan). And sprinkled on the list are thirteen regular-season episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies, which was the #1 show on American TV in 1962-63, and 1963-64. I watched it, but, hey, I was 10 or so. (Only a handful of shows since 2009 have entered the list, mostly Super Bowls.)

Noting the passing of Donna Douglas, who played goddess of the cee-ment pond, Elly May Clampett, on the program, at the age of 81 or 82.