Miguel de la Madrid, Mexico's president during the '80s, was either a terrible president or an unlucky one. Truthfully, he was probably a little of both. He was elected in 1982 and presided over one of the most difficult six-year terms in the history of Mexico. Like someone else we all know, he inherited a country in economic crisis. He gambled and borrowed against oil revenues, and promptly defaulted on its foreign debt. Inflation soared, as well as unemployment.

Then there was the earthquake, an 8.1 disaster that killed 10,000 people. Like another leader we know, he did a heckuva job. He couldn't be found for a couple of days, and he played down the damage and refused international aid. Mexicans took matters into their own hands, forming citizens' groups and searching for survivors themselves.

So much for a Harvard education.

Miguel did one thing right, even if it was unpopular and didn't bear fruit for many years. After the economic crisis, he imposed austerity measures that actually sent the Mexican economy on the path to a free-market economy.

Subsequent leaders are now well known for learning from Mr. de la Madrid's mistakes.

You know who didn't make any mistakes? Allezblancs, DDT, Denise, DGH, Direcorbie, Mark and Morris the Cat. They each get 8 points. (With this hit, DDT broke the century mark, with 105 points.)

— Amelia

A Bill Schenley classic.

* * *

Leila Denmark, the pediatrician who died on April 1st at the age of 138 or 146 or some other ungodly number, not only outlived her fame but most of her patients, too. Her husband, John Denmark, died at 91, and Leila outlived him by twenty-two years. It was almost ninety years ago that she was credited with co-developing the vaccine to prevent whooping cough, for which she was awarded the Fisher Prize. Yeah, that's kinda what I was thinking — not exactly a Cy Young Award, or even an Oscar. According to Wikipedia (everyone's favorite source), she was one of the first doctors to warn against using drugs while pregnant, and against smoking cigarettes near children. This tells me that for 152 years, or however old she was, she was absolutely no fun.

She authored or inspired several books, among them Every Child Should Have a Chance and Dr. Denmark Said It!: Advice for Mothers from America's Most Experienced Pediatrician. Show of hands: Which one of you is so fucked up that you actually bought any of these books?

I had her on my first few deadpool lists when Charlene (I think) and then Kathi added her to their lists. I pulled out of the Leila Denmark sweepstakes and Charlene followed suit. Only Kathi hung in there for the geriatric-pediatric solo. She gets a whooping five-point bonus to add on to her single point for the hit. Total: 6.

— Bill Schenley

johnnyb and dannyb got this hit with little ol' me. (Does that scan?) Anyway, johnnyb volunteered for the writing and stayed up late to do it. Wonderful job telling it like it is. Six points each for the three of us.

* * *

As a child, Gil Noble was always the sign that it was time for me to go to bed.

I'd spend Saturday nights playing too many video games and God knows what else. Not an exciting existence, but what 11-year-old's is? Around 5 or 6 a.m. on Sundays (I can't remember the exact time) Noble's show Like It Is, with its theme song of loud African drumming, would pop up on the TV and cue me to hit the pillow before I got in trouble.

Like It Is was WABC-TV's Sunday morning civil-affairs program, centered around issues important to the black community. Noble was its host for nearly forty years.

Did being broadcast at such an early hour on a Sunday ever bother Gil? Hell no. Telling it like it is knows no time slot. If you were important to the African-American community or African diaspora in the second half of the 20th century, chances are you were on the Like It Is set at least once.

From Bill Cosby to Robert Mugabe, Noble talked one-on-one to both the famous and infamous, at home and abroad.

Not bad for a guy whose show could only be seen on one broadcast TV station.

Noble was an anchor and general assignment reporter for WABC-TV's news department when he started appearing every so often on the original version of Like It Is at the end of the 1960s. He quit reporting and became the show's full-time host in 1975.

From there, he racked up hundreds of interviews with noteworthy people and a slew of awards for his work.

Noble kept his vision of Like It Is going until the summer of 2011, when he suffered a severe stroke. He died almost a year later, an icon to the African-American community and anyone living within the New York City DMA.

And all this went on while I was trying to sleep.

— johnnyb

Bingu wa Mutharika was his name-o.

The man was a nutcase and, as president of Malawi, he led his country to ruin. His behavior was so bizarre that his sanity was questioned. For example, he left his $100 million, 300-room mansion because he believed it was haunted and that invisible rats were crawling over him in the night. No exorcists were successful.

Completely incapable of accepting any criticism, Bingu got rid of it. He shut down the free press and anyone else who dared speak out against him. He deported the British High Commissioner for doing exactly that. Despite many degrees in economics and time spent at the World Bank, he fucked the economy up but good. When the folks took to the streets, he sent spies and police and soldiers to shut them down. He fired his entire cabinet and took all their portfolios for himself. I bet he raised his voice quite a lot.

In April, he had a fatal heart attack and, even dead, he got his people to pretend he was still alive. Not sure how, but that's what he did. It took Britain, America and the African Union to make everyone see that the Malawi constitution must be upheld, and so the vice president — a woman — was confirmed as the new leader. She started an inquiry into the circumstances of Bingu's death. God knows where that will go. His family is appalled at the thought that he could obstruct justice in any way.

Bingu was married to the minister of tourism. This made me laugh out loud.

DDT gets the solo and a total of 13 points. What a cool hit.

— Amelia

Mike Wallace got his professional start as a broad-spectrum broadcaster. He did everything — quiz shows, commercials, announcing, all the non-specialized stuff everybody did on TV in the 1950s.

The Mike Wallace of the tough questions and the unamused stare was already well on his way by 1957, when Wallace played himself in a bit part in A Face in the Crowd, the classic Andy Griffith film about a folksy TV personality with a very dark side. Wallace was already a veteran of the tough interview, even then hosting a show called Night Beat on the tiny DuMont network. Wallace himself would say that he had a face made for radio, but he wound up doing just fine on TV.

I guess there's two things Mike Wallace will be remembered for, especially by boomers: 60 Minutes, of course, and the documentary series Biography, which Wallace hosted and narrated. Biography was produced by David Wolper, who'd just bought an entire library of film clips for peanuts and was searching for something profitable to do with them. Probably the best thing Wolper did was hire Mike Wallace to front the show. Wallace's narration gave the show weight. It ran for decades, well into the 1990s.

60 Minutes came a few years after Biography. News in those days was a loss leader. CBS in particular, and under chairman Bill Paley, was a good corporate citizen that financed its news division as a public service. News was payback, the price of doing business in America on the people's airwaves. News didn't make money; in fact, it lost scads of it. And so it was with 60 Minutes, the latest in a string of news magazines, with Ed Murrow's producer Don Hewitt in charge. Hewitt was old school, and so was 60 Minutes. With Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner in front, the show did well enough and quickly built a solid reputation as serious investigative journalism with a healthy dash of entertainment-oriented interviews and profiles. But it was, you know, news, and so not too many people watched it.

But then, about forty years ago, there was this new thing from the Federal Communications Commission called the prime-time access rule. It took the earliest hour of what was then considered prime time from the networks and gave it back to local stations to do with as they would. Eventually the FCC decided that Sundays from 7 to 8 p.m. Eastern time could be an exception to the rule, as long as the network programmed it with family-friendly programming or with news.

So that's where 60 Minutes went, and that's where it blossomed. It was on Sunday night opposite Walt Disney, and it was pretty much what you watched if you weren't six years old and they weren't playing football anywhere. By 1979 60 Minutes was making assloads of money for CBS. In many ways, the success of 60 Minutes is the worst thing that ever happened to broadcast news because, from then on, all network and local news was expected to make money. Before that, all it had to do was make sense. This sudden and unexpected prosperity was not Mike Wallace's fault. He was just doing what he'd always done.

CBS programmers didn't see 60 Minutes as news, but as a police procedural — good guys chasing bad guys. That's how the programmers accounted for its success. They had to categorize 60 Minutes as something, and the easiest thing to do was trivialize it. The musicians' union would also complain regularly that 60 Minutes didn't use music. That was mainly because Don Hewitt didn't think music belonged in news, but it was in part because he didn't have the budget to pay somebody to compose a theme song for a show that likely wouldn't last very long.

I'd see Wallace from time to time walking through the radio newsroom, even though Wallace didn't do radio after about 1986. I guess the word I'd use to describe him is "courtly." He had great presence. There was also the time he called me at the desk. There was a story in the next day's New York Times about how William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in South Vietnam, was about to drop his libel case against CBS and Wallace himself. The phone rang and there was just that voice. No need for introductions here. "Is there a story?" was all he said, smooth and courteous as anybody could be. I read it to him. He thanked me, said nothing further, and hung up. We all found out later how relieved he was, because Wallace knew the Westmoreland story was good and true, no matter how much it had stung a proud general.

I think that was the main thing about Mike Wallace. He believed the truth would out, always, even though you sometimes had to clench your teeth really hard until that happened.

Buford, Dannyb, Exuma, King Daevid, Mo, Morris the Cat, Sad Last Dave and Walking Dead Dude each get two points for this hit, one of the very last of the old guard in TV news.

— Brad

I never watched Dark Shadows because my mother had control of the TV during dinner prep. (She was a Match Game fan.) This means I missed the entire Dark Shadows phenomenon. While all the other twelve-year-olds were swooning over their DS lunchboxes or writing bad fanfiction (on notebook paper, since the Internet wasn't available yet), I was blissfully unaware of Barnabas Collins and his fangs.

Bad ratings brought Jonathan Frid to the set of Dark Shadows. Dan Curtis, the executive producer, sought to gain viewers by dumping conventional soap storylines and adding a lovelorn vampire. Barnabas Collins' 13-week run was to end with a stake through his heart. Ratings jumped as schoolgirls and college coeds joined the stay-at-home moms in falling for Barnabas. Frid received more than 6,000 fan letters a week (snail mail with real stamps!), mostly variations on the theme "I wish you'd bite my neck."

Frid was ambivalent about his four-year stint as Collins. It was steady work, but it wasn't what he had imagined for himself while he was studying at the Yale School of Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He did reprise the role in the TV-movie House of Dark Shadows, and he made a cameo appearance in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows feature film, but he avoided the 1991 revamp of the show. When asked, he deprecated his performance. "I'd get this long-lost look on my face," he told the Hamilton Spectator in 2000. "'Where is my love? Where is my love?,' it seemed to say. Actually, it was me thinking, 'Where the hell is the teleprompter? And what's my next line?'"

He also directed regional theater, starred in a Broadway revival of Arsenic and Old Lace, and performed many "readers' theater" evenings, but no one swooned or bought lunchboxes for those efforts.

John Herbert Frid died from complications of a fall at the age of 87.

— Wendy

Jazz Vulture, King Daevid, Mark, RH Draney and Where's my damn list? get 5 points each.

Thanks to DDT for volunteering this one. A lovely job, indeed.

The hit is lovely as well, and Fireball gets the solo for a total of 7 points.

* * *

Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller was Denmark's second richest man. He died at the age of 98 and, up until the last, he must have retained a steely grip on life, as his death came as somewhat of a surprise to those who knew him. He spent much of his career in charge of Mærsk, a huge international business conglomerate with offices in 130 countries. Mc-Kinney Møller's father founded the firm as a shipping line in 1914. It eventually became and continues to be the world's largest maritime transporter of goods.

Mc-Kinney Møller wasn't content to rest on his laurels when he inherited the firm in 1965. He started launching initiatives in a variety of other ventures. He made a fortune from drilling for gas and oil. He dabbled in airlines, data technology, manufacturing, retail, and salvage operations. Such was his Midas touch that Mc-Kinney Møller amassed a fortune so large that only one man in Denmark, the heir to the Lego fortune, was richer. Møller became the first non-American to sit on the board of IBM, was voted "Executive of the Century" in 2000, and was one of only three non-royals ever to have been bestowed with the Danish Order of the Elephant.

A conservative by nature, Mc-Kinney Møller made massive donations to the centre-right parties forming the government in Denmark. We can only speculate whether this largesse contributed in any way to the decision of that same government to grant him the monopoly to Denmark's oil and gas reserves under very favourable terms. Mc-Kinney Møller's philanthropy was on a large scale, but was perhaps not based on a motivation to help the neediest in society. Largely ignoring the Third World and the deprived in his own country, he paid for the construction of the Copenhagen Opera House, a school for Danes living in Germany, and the restoration of several crumbling Danish monuments.

Mc-Kinney Møller was reported to have been most unsettled by the Mærsk Dubai incident, when the captain of one of his vessels was arrested for the murder of two stowaways found on board, having ordered them at knifepoint to jump overboard. His fleet of ships also came in for some criticism from the world's press when it emerged that they emitted as much sulphur into the atmosphere each year as 500 million cars.

Mc-Kinney Møller was married to his childhood sweetheart for 65 years, and his personal life appears to have been devoid of any scandal. A model of Scandinavian efficiency, Mc-Kinney Møller was intently focused on his business interests, and he generally eschewed publicity. He had firmly held views on the way his company should be run and was said to be rather forthright in expressing these views to his subordinates. Although he had retired from the day-to-day running of the business some years ago, he remained in the background, heavily influencing the most important decisions right up until his death. When news of his death was announced, share prices in Mærsk rose significantly, possibly giving some indication that his continuing influence during his later years may not have been universally welcomed. Mc-Kinney Møller was survived by his three daughters. Queen Margrethe of Denmark attended his funeral.

— DDT

David Peat was a Scotsman who made award-winning documentaries over a career of more than forty years, mostly for the BBC. While he was traveling the world making those films, Peat roamed the streets of wherever he was, shooting stills with his trusty old Leica. Over the years, Peat shot thousands of rolls of film and had accumulated a roughly equal number of contact sheets — remember those? — but never did anything with them until he was diagnosed with cancer three years ago. Peat knew his myeloma was going to kill him, so he began plowing through all those contact sheets, not wanting their images to disappear along with him. He called them "my eye on the world." Peat came up with an exhibit called "Through the Looking Glass — Forty Years of Street Photography." It opened in Aberfeldy, in central Scotland, in July of last year. Many of the photos can be found online.

Drunkasaskunk snaps up 16 points for the hit: 11 for age and 5 for the solo.

— Brad

Matt Hubbard sends along this wonderful update. He felt that, having done the Soul Train guy, it was his duty to send off the AB guy.

* * *

I am of the wrong age and temperament to appreciate most of the career of Dick Clark. I was a little too young to see American Bandstand as a pioneering show legitimizing rock 'n' roll. When I was a kid, it was big on the bubble-gum end of pop music, and when I got older it wasn't nearly as watchable as Soul Train. I've never been a big fan of New Year's Eve, the sweepstakes business is a horrible series of scams, the bloopers and practical jokes have never amused me much.

But I'll give him this: He was an interesting host of Pyramid, however much money they made it worth ($10,000, $25,000, $100,000, whatever.)

Bill Cullen was the first host of Pyramid, and I always found him a likeable guy. The thing that set Dick Clark apart was his love for the post-mortem. There was almost no other game show that had the time for the host to come over and show up a contestant who'd just screwed the pooch on national TV. Clark always made it look like he was being helpful and the contestants were pretty much forced to take the advice in good humor ... but remember that they'd just lost a truckload of money, and this rich guy was quietly and gently putting the needle in.

"How about a baked potato, the Cleveland football team, a derby restaurant in Los Angeles..."

"Oh, things that are brown! Thanks, Dick, for making me feel even worse about blowing a real chance for serious cash."

And so let me finish this obit with a fitting tribute:

Charles Colson — his friends and fellow hatchet-men at the White House always called him Chuck — served as special counsel to President Nixon during Nixon's first term. Well, Colson might as well have put his own neck in a noose, because almost all of those evil shits wound up doing time for one outrage or another.

Colson never did say that he would run over his own grandmother to get Nixon re-elected in 1972, but it sure sounded enough like him that people believed he had. He was indicted in 1974 on charges related to the coverup of the break-in at the Watergate, and that was around the time he said he had become an evangelical Christian. There was a great deal of doubt about this at the time but, as the years and then the decades passed, Colson gave no sign that he hadn't been anything but sincere about it. Having seen the inside of prison life during the six months he spent in jail for his part in the Watergate scandal, Colson devoted the rest of his life to prison reform and providing services to ex-prisoners and their families.

Dannyb gets an honest ten points for the hit: five for age and five for the solo.

— Brad

Amos Vogel was a very famous film critic, historian, and academic. Scorsese said upon his death that if you're looking for the origins of film culture in America, look no further than Amos Vogel. He founded Cinema 16, which provided filmmakers from around the world — Roman Polanski, John Cassavetes, Luis Buñuel, Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, Alain Resnais and Stan Brakhage, for example — a place for their work to be screened for American audiences at a time when there weren't a whole lot of venues to do that. Experimental filmmakers found a home and a distribution center with Vogel. He wanted to see these films and he wanted others to see them as well.

He was also a dad. And in the summer of 1967 (or maybe it was 1968, can't remember), I found myself at Buck's Rock Camp with one of his sons. Now you have to know that Buck's Rock was one of those camps that attracted the liberal types so revered today. Even blacklisted liberal children. One of Jack Gilford's sons was there, too. I'm sure there were other famous kids. It was that kind of summer camp. In fact it was so artsy, this camp, that you didn't have to do anything you didn't want to do, and you could plan your day the way you wanted to, usually around theater or art. I played in a string quartet and I made a silver ring. That's all I remember about my activities.

But I do remember this: One night, Amos Vogel came to the camp to visit his son and to screen a film for us.

Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.

Did anyone complain? Did parents storm the office demanding answers as to why their precious children should be subjected to such an inappropriate summer film? Nah. No one cared. It was fascinating. Or, at least at 13 and 14, we probably pretended it was fascinating.

I see now that it was just what he had been doing his whole life. The only way to get these films seen would be to physically bring them to the people. And he thought of us teenagers as people.

Imagine that.

johnnyb has been carrying Vogel for a number of years. He gets the solo and two points for a total of 7. Well done.

— Amelia

Bill Schenley didn't do nothing wrong.

* * *

As a kid, Moose Skowron was one of my favorite New York Yankees. I'd see him in the lobby or the coffee shop of the Cleveland Sheraton Hotel when the Yankees played the Indians, and he was always friendly and approachable. And, once, he and Tony Kubek had to restrain my 6'6", 285 lb. father from jumping on Roger Maris. After the chaos from that incident had ended, both Moose and Kubek grabbed a handful of Sheraton Hotel postcards and got Yankee autographs for me. Broke my heart when the Yankees traded him to the Dodgers for Stan Williams. His teammates, including Mickey Mantle, said he was the go-to guy. Even before Mantle, Moose Skowron was the guy they wanted at bat when the game was on the line — especially a money game. Bill Skowron had a .293 post-season average with eight homers and 29 RBIs in just 39 World Series games.

He will be remembered as being one of the key members of the Yankee dynasties in the '50s and early '60s, and there are many, many Moose stories that I love ... Cracking Casey across the ankles with his bat — in anger — because Stengel pinch-hit for him in the first inning of a baseball game; his grand slam in the 7th game of the 1958 World Series (the only World Series I ever saw live); going to Arthur Murray Dance Studios to learn how to play first base; winning the 1963 World Series as a Dodger in four straight games against the Yankees and being broken-hearted because he was no longer a Yankee. But the one story that sticks with me before all of the others: sneaking out of Vero Beach spring training camp and flying back to his home in New Jersey because he had heard a rumor about his wife Virginia. Moose, along with a private investigator, sneaked into his house in the middle of the afternoon and caught his 29-year-old wife in what the newspapers at the time referred to as a "compromising position" with a much younger man. For years I've been fascinated by the lovely ex-Mrs. Skowron's excuse: "We didn't do nothing wrong. Not having my dress on was my only mistake."

So one more Bomber from the Mantle Dynasty Era has died, and Hulka, Monarc and Morris the Cat have all hit one out of the park. They didn't do nothing wrong and they each get five points for the hit and an extra point for the trio. Total: 6.

— Bill Schenley