The Erie Playhouse is one of the oldest community theaters in the country. Still going strong after 95 years. This summer, you can see The Music Man. Pump Boys and Dinettes. Rent. Hear that, Bill? In your own backyard. So why am I telling you this? Because long before she was a fag hag, Rue McClanahan made her professional debut on the stage in Erie, Pennsylvania, in Inherit the Wind. And, as the Erie Playhouse website makes very clear, it's 432 miles to Broadway, give or take a mile or so if it's Off-Broadway you're visiting. You think of Oklahoman Rue McClanahan as a TV star, but she spent a lot of years treading the boards. Norman Lear found her in an Off-Broadway play, Who's Happy Now, for which she won an Obie for a waitress called Faye Precious. He put her in All in the Family, which led to Maude, which led to Golden Girls and eternal fame. But those theater years are significant. I must have seen her in MacBird! (She was Lady MacBird.) She was in Jimmy Shine, the Murray Schisgal play with Dustin Hoffman. She played Caitlin Thomas in a play called Dylan that brought her fan mail from Tennessee Williams. She loved the theater and she understood completely how important it was to actors and audiences alike.

A few years ago, when my daughter was working at a downtown theater company in the box office, Rue McClanahan called to get tickets for an almost sold-out show. She didn't get anyone to call. She made the call herself. She was not at all concerned where she sat, insisted on paying full price and insisted on spelling her name out. And when she came to the performance, she was really surprised that people recognized her. All of which made a great impression on my daughter, who was born the year Golden Girls premiered. You have to remember where you come from, whether it's Oklahoma, Erie, or Off-Broadway.

Undertaker, who spelled her name right, and Worm Farmer, who didn't, are a pair of clever deadpoolers. Rue McClanahan was 76, so they each get 8 points for the hit and an extra three for the duet. Total: 11.

— Amelia

Charlene is making a habit of writing these wonderful updates:

* * *

When I was ten years old my father, who never met a gadget he didn't need to buy, brought home a little transistor radio for me. Every night after I went to bed I'd put it under my pillow and listen to voices from faraway exotic places like Bozeman, Boise, Casper and Minot, but it was the voice of E.G. Marshall and the creak of his crypt door that I loved the most. "Welcome," he'd intone over a muttering of strings and woodwinds, "come in," and the door would creak, and I'd be thoroughly, delightedly terrified.

Himan Brown invented that creaking door back in 1941 for Inner Sanctum Mysteries, and found it so effective that he reused it 33 years later for CBS Radio Mystery Theater, the show that I secretly stayed up to listen to all those years ago. Most of the programs Brown created were adaptations of print works, and sometimes they weren't that true to the original — he famously gave the taciturn Nero Wolfe a trademark kookaburra laugh — but he knew how to draw in listeners and keep them tuning in. And if the scripts weren't always that great, the acting usually was — and the sponsors almost always got their money's worth.

The crypt door has finally shut for the last time on Himan Brown at the age of 99. Pleasant dreams, hm?

— Charlene

Charlene is the appropriate recipient of the points for Himan Brown. She gets 2 for the hit and 5 for the solo. Total: 7. Oddly, she stays right where she was. Spooky.

In 1968, when the Philadelphia 76ers traded Wilt Chamberlain to the Los Angeles Lakers (now the World Champion Los Angeles Lakers), the former UCLA Bruins basketball coach, John Wooden, was invited to attend the press conference announcement. At this press conference, a member of the press asked Chamberlain, "Do you think that Bill van Breda Kolff [the Laker coach at the time] can handle you?" Chamberlain replied, "No one handles me. I am a person, not a thing. You handle things. You work with people. I think I can work with anyone." (For the record, there were a whole lot of people Wilt Chamberlain did not work well with. Somewhere near the top of that list was Bill van Breda Kolff.)

Coach Wooden had just published a coaching book, Practical Modern Basketball, and a section of this book was entitled "Handling Your Players." Wooden went home from the press conference and crossed out "Handling Your Players" and put "Working with Your Players." At every point in the book that alluded to handling basketball players, he made the change. He then contacted the publisher and insisted that the changes be made for any future editions.

 

"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." — John Wooden

 

The most money John Wooden made in one year as the UCLA basketball coach was $32,500. Jack Kent Cooke, who owned the Lakers, offered Wooden $350,000 per year to coach the Lakers. Wooden turned Cooke down because he considered himself more a teacher than a coach. Throughout his 27 years at UCLA, he taught many All-American basketball players, including Lew Alcindor (now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Bill Walton, Sidney Wicks, Walt Hazzard, Henry Bibby, Steve Patterson, Keith Wilkes, Lucius Allen, Jamaal Wilkes and Marques Johnson. John Wooden refused to allow any of his star players' uniform numbers to be retired.

 

"What about the fellows who wore that number before? Didn't they contribute to the team?" — John Wooden

 

"To lead the way Coach Wooden led takes a tremendous amount of faith," Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stated in an interview several years ago. "He was almost mystical in his approach, yet that approach only strengthened our confidence. Coach Wooden enjoyed winning, but he did not put winning above everything. He was more concerned that we became successful as human beings, that we earned our degrees, that we learned to make the right choices as adults and as parents.

"In essence," Abdul-Jabbar concluded, "he was preparing us for life."

Classy guy, that John Wooden, who swore he was once offered the job as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Dead Batteries, Deepstblu, Eternity Tours, Exuma, The Wiz and Tim J all shoot and score two points for stopping John Wooden's 99-year oxygen streak. Total: 2.

— Bill Schenley

A classy update from DDT, who lives where this sort of person can readily be found and made fun of. Thanks, DDT, for taking it out of my hands.

* * *

His Grace Angus Alan Douglas-Hamilton, 15th Duke of Hamilton and 12th Duke of Brandon, was Scotland's most senior aristocrat. As if being the Duke of two places at once weren't enough, he was far more ennobled than any nobleman really needs to be and was also a Lord, a Baron, an Earl and a Marquess. Not stopping there, his C.V. also included the roles of "Bearer of the Crown of Scotland," "Knight of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem," and "Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society." Impressed? Me neither.

The deceased Duke was, like most of the aristocracy, notable for who he was rather than famous for what he did. Nevertheless, he lived a not uninteresting life. When Angus was still a toddler, Hitler's deputy, Rudolph Hess, was arrested after he parachuted in to Britain in a bizarre attempt to meet up with young Angus' father. Like his father, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and then went on to fly in the Royal Air Force. His ancestors had blown most of the family fortune, thereby depriving him of the opportunity to do absolutely nothing. He kept himself busy by flying things around, racing cars and keeping his castle in a good enough condition for the British public to pay money to visit and look at his inherited collection of art and other trinkets. He also remained occupied by getting married three times, fathering four children, and getting convicted of driving under the influence of excessive amounts of alcohol on no fewer than five occasions.

His mental health was at times fragile, and on more than one occurrence he had to make use of his local psychiatric services to address personal intranquilities of an unspecified nature. Towards the end of his life, he found happiness with his third wife, gave up the demon drink, and became a passionate advocate of animal rights. Then he got a nasty form of dementia and rather quickly died, aged 71. Senior members of the Royal Family are expected to attend his funeral. His son Alexander, Marquess of Douglas and Clydesdale will now become Duke, Earl, Baron, Bearer, etc., etc., inheriting the vast plethora of unpaid pointlessness which his father never seemed to know quite what to do with.

— DDT

DDT knew what to do with dementia. Add it to the list! He gets 8 points for the hit and 5 for the solo. Total: 13. Now second place is his.

Jimmy Dean grew up poor. As a child, he killed and butchered hogs with his family in Texas, and they made sausage according to his mother's recipe. I guess he got pretty sick of that because, at 16, he ran off and joined the Merchant Marine, and after two years of that he joined the Air Force. He got together with three other Air Force guys and formed Jimmy Dean and the Texas Wildcats. They were all discharged in 1948, and about five minutes later they were on the radio in Washington, DC, with a show of their own called Town & Country Time. The show went to television in 1955:

Town & Country Time, Part 1

Town & Country Time, Part 2

CBS gave Jimmy a network daytime show in 1957. It ran from 7 in the morning 'til a quarter of eight, against NBC's Today, and of course it didn't draw flies. CBS moved the show around the morning schedule to no point and finally dropped it in 1959.

ABC gave Jimmy a prime-time slot in the 1960s. That's the show people remember, and they remember it primarily because of Jimmy's comedy bits with Rowlf the Dog, the first Muppet character to become a national favorite. The show lasted three seasons. Jimmy owed a lot of that success to Rowlf.

The ABC show ended in 1969, and Jimmy fell a chill. His singing career was fading. Jimmy had grown up poor, and he swore he'd never be poor again. He'd seen other stars piss away their money, winding up so broke that people would have to throw a benefit for them. No one's ever going to have to throw a benefit for me, said Jimmy, who knew two things in his life: singing and sausage. In that same year of 1969 Jimmy, with his brother Don, started Jimmy Dean Foods. Jimmy and Don made sausage according to the recipe the Dean boys had learned from their mother. Jimmy made the aw-shucks commercials, the product was good, and the company was making money within six months. In 1984 they sold the company to what later became the Sara Lee Corporation. Jimmy did commercials for another twenty years, until Sara Lee dumped him for being too old. Whoever came up with "Nobody Doesn't Like Sara Lee" never met Jimmy Dean, who from 2004 on never again ate anything with his name on it, ever.

Old and sick but still rich, Jimmy Dean died at the age of 81. His name will continue to be invoked in hundreds of thousands of homes across America every morning, as sleep-deprived couples scream at each other, "Whaddaya got for breakfast?" "I dunno." "We got any of those goddamn Jimmy Deans left?" "Yeah, the biscuits, I think. Hey, isn't that the guy who died?" "Who?"

Ray Arthur knows who. He gets five points for the hit and another five points for the solo. Total: 10.

— Brad

Doubletap, a new player, gets his first hit, and it's a lovely one. To celebrate, he wrote the update. Worked out for everyone. (You don't want me writing about NASCAR.)

* * *

Sometimes, winning is not enough. Being first or last matters, too. Raymond Parks had a lock on being the "first" and "last." If he had stayed in the game long enough, he likely would have owned a trifecta by adding many more wins to the mix.

Back in the late 1930s and early 1940s, popular auto racing in America mostly consisted of modified jalopies crashing and banging around dirt tracks across the land as well as the occasional beachfront racecourse.

Raymond Parks attended a seminal meeting in 1947 held at the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida. That meeting initiated the formation of NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing), a sanctioning organization overseeing events run at numerous racetracks throughout the country.

In 1948, a car fielded by Raymond Parks won the first NASCAR race ever held. Later that same season, one of his drivers won the first NASCAR championship for modified race cars. In the following year, 1949, a new division of NASCAR came into fruition with cars that appeared similar to those driven by common folk, customers of the automobile manufacturers. One of the drivers sponsored by Parks won the first championship in this new "stock car" division.

Several years later, Raymond Parks got out of racing because it couldn't provide a living wage for him and his crew. He operated his Atlanta-area businesses and was largely forgotten by the NASCAR community. In 1997, with the 50th anniversary of NASCAR's formation being celebrated, his name regained a bit of popularity.

During the last few years of his life, Parks was recognized at races and celebrated among the knowing as a formative influence during the early years of NASCAR. That recognition wasn't enough for him to be included among the first group of individuals inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2010. He will be considered for inclusion during the coming years.

Raymond Parks was born in Dawsonville, Georgia. To show how fleeting fame can be, at the time of this AObit, the Wikipedia entry for Dawsonville contains no mention of Raymond Parks. The most popular individual associated with the town (population 619 at the 2000 census) is stock car driver Bill "Awesome Bill from Dawsonville" Elliott. The Wiki entry includes mention that former professional wrestler Bill Goldberg once resided in Dawsonville. Recognition of Parks being a native son in Dawsonville is even overshadowed by the fact that it is home to the Kangaroo Conservation Center, the largest concentration of kangaroos in the world outside of Australia.

Bottom line: First or last matters little. Winning a lot might mean something. But marsupials may be more important than the accomplishments of man.

— Doubletap

Parks was 96, so Doubletap gets 2 points for the hit and 5 for the solo. Total: 7.

Irwin Barker was a Canadian comedy writer and comedian who died in Toronto at the age of 54 from a horrible form of cancer, leiomyosarcoma. Is it fair to have a cancer you can't spell? I can spell b-r-e-a-s-t. Barker's doctor gave him twelve months to live, but he said his lawyer could get it down to eight. Ha. Ha. Anyway, Barker wrote for the Canadian Television Network's This Hour Has 22 Minutes and The Rick Mercer Report. Barker was a standup comedian. He was active in raising money for cancer research and was the subject of a documentary about his disease. (I bet there's a blog, but I can't bear to look.) When I googled him, I kept coming up with things Christian, so I guess he's a Christian comic. And I can't even imagine what that means. I know it's not about a priest, a minister and rabbi going to heaven. Those are for Jewish comics. Anyway, poor soul, he used his illness as a subject for humor. Example: Cancer has my body, not my spirit and I'll continue to make jokes, not so much about cancer, but in spite of it.

So Irwin Barker is at the Pearly Gates ...

— Deceased Hose, with an assist from Amelia

Deceased Hose, who will never speak to me again, gets 14 points for the hit and 5 for the solo. Total: 19.

And in the beginning Chuck Berry created Rock 'n' Roll; then there was Rock — created in part by garage bands like The Yardbirds, Them ... and The Kinks. Bass player Pete Quaife, who has died at 66 was, along with Dave Davies and his older brother Ray Davies, one of the founders of The Kinks, one of Rock's most revered and influential bands. Quaife left The Kinks in 1969 and eventually became a graphic artist in Canada. In 1998 he was diagnosed with renal failure and was on dialysis for the rest of his life. While on dialysis, he penciled a series of cartoons that would eventually be published as The Lighter Side of Dialysis. Here's a selection:

Book Cover
Cartoon 1
Cartoon 2
Cartoon 3
Cartoon 4

Being a dedicated follower of the dying, I really got Pete ... That means 11 points for the hit and five more ... for not getting tired of waiting alone. Total: 16.

— Bill Schenley

Algirdas Brazauskas, who died on June 26 aged 77, was a former president and prime minister of Lithuania, and is seen as one of the key figures in the breakup of the Soviet Union. Rather than talk about this or his life, or even his death, I will concentrate on his funeral, which was rife with controversy. It seems that Vilnius Archbishop Cardinal Audrys Juozas Backis did not allow former President Brazauskas' coffin to be present in the Vilnius Cathedral during the funeral Mass, although that had been Brazauskas' dying wish. First they said there wouldn't be enough room for all the visiting dignitaries. But that wasn't true, it turned out. (Not even Biden had to go to this minor event.) Among the reasons cited for the slight were Brazauskas' excellent credentials as a Communist functionary; the fact that he never bothered to divorce his first wife along the path the Church lays out; and the fact that he never bothered to marry his second wife in any church at all. Deprived of his trip to the Cathedral, he was, nevertheless, buried as "the best Catholic." There was much sturm und drang about the absence of his coffin, and big discussions about the separation of church and state, and I could go on and on about this but, really, who gives a shit? Still, I'm tempted to do it so you won't be fucking tempted next year to pick someone like the fucking President of Lithuania from 1993 to 1998, like DDT did. I should take points away for extraordinarily boring picks. (You want proof? An admirer once said of him: "When Brazauskas goes to a village, he not only remembers the names of the farmers but also the names of his cows.") You deserved this update, DDT. And you don't deserve the points (13). But I have to give them to you, because the asshole even had a boring obit in the NY Times which I saw but didn't read. Which everyone saw but didn't read. Hopefully, no one will read this boring piece of shit either. Wait — his daughter will, or his niece, or someone very close to him with a gmail address, and she will send me an email complaining about the way I talked about him.

I hate you, DDT.

— Amelia

But wait! There's more!

Ok, so I made a mistake. I figured Jim Thornton was ignoring me when I asked him to write the Lithuanian prez. I didn't realize he had agreed and was just taking his time. So now we have TWO updates for the guy. Mine, which is boring. And his, which is anything but. (Although we both stole the cows anecdote from the Telegraph.) As Brad says, the most obscure hit of the year gets a double shot. How cool is that?

* * *

Take care what you ask Amelia. After fun with bad Beryl Bainbridge, I asked for more, so she gave me an old commie bird, dead six days before — she must have been struggling to shift him. Lymphatic cancer pushed him off the perch and now I've got to write about him.

December 20th 1989 was Algirdas Brazauskas' big day. As leader of the Lithuanian Communists he broke away from Moscow, and four months later the whole country declared independence. Gorbachev imposed an economic blockade, huffed and puffed for a year, and finally attempted a military coup. But plucky Lithuania struggled on until August 1991, when Gorbachev faced his own coup, Yeltsin clambered onto his tank, and the USSR broke up.

It all seems inevitable now but was hardly guaranteed — ask the students in Tiananmen Square. Sure, the Berlin Wall had fallen the previous month, and it was widely assumed that Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia might gain independence, but Lithuania and the Baltic States were much deeper within the Soviet sphere. Brazauskas could well have ended up in a Moscow dock. But he didn't, and after many twists and turns ended his last term as the democratically elected prime minister of independent Lithuania in 2006.

What else can I tell you? He'd led communist Lithuania since 1977, when Brezhnev was president. His enemies called him unprincipled, his friends said he was flexible and sensitive to changing moods. Whatever, he was a wily old career politician — "When Brazauskas goes to a village, he not only remembers the names of the farmers but also the names of his cows." He had two wives and, by some accounts, plenty of girlfriends, and in 2003 he joined the order of Vytautas the Great with the Golden Chain, Lithuania's highest honour. Don't ask.

— Jim Thornton

But wait! There's even more!

Well, guess what, DDT, you didn't deserve all those points, because good old Mo had him, too — along with an even more obscure Nepalese minister who died in March, but he's just telling me about it. Shoot me now.

So you and Mo each get 11 points. (In other words, DDT loses the five-point bonus for the solo, but gets three points back for the duet.)

A duet for this boring guy. Unreal.

— Amelia

Sourabh Narang could have made a movie about how hard it is to find out any details about his own life, such as the date of his birth or the name of his wife and kid. (Even the researchers at the New York Public Library gave up.) Perhaps, someday, somebody in Bollywood will make that film and, in the grand tradition of Indian cinema, the events onscreen will be interrupted at odd moments by a bizarre musical number.

It's Time for a Bizarre Musical Number

Narang (whose first name has been spelled at least three different ways in the Indian press, and that's just in the Roman alphabet) was a guy from TV who made just one major theatrical film, a 2004 horror flick called Vaastu Shastra, which may be one word or two, and which may mean "Architecture" or something like it. It's hard to say.

Vaastu Shastra comes off much like The Amityville Horror. There's the usual cast of characters you'll find in a movie about a haunted house: a young family with a knowing kid, an old lady who knows all about spooky stuff, and so on. There's a kissing scene, which is still a big hairy deal for a lot of people in India, who probably call it a mouth malfunction. Most of the film is in Hindi, and the actors' accents are so thick that the film's DVD distributor even had to subtitle the scenes in which the characters speak English. However, the film is really not bad at all, and there are one or two genuinely creepy scenes in it. For India, though, Vaastu Shastra was a phenomenon. It scared the crap out of its audience, which wasn't used to this sort of stuff. Think The Exorcist when it first played in American theaters almost forty years ago, and all the shocked attention that film drew, and you've just about got what happened in India with this one. For some reason, though, the film didn't draw the sixteen gazillion ticketbuyers a film in India needs to make real money, and so Vaastu Shastra was it for Sourabh Narang for five long years.

And Here's Another Bizarre Musical Number

Last November, Narang was supposed to have started shooting his new film, Return Gift, a non-horror film about an Indian diplomat on a mission to Pakistan. Narang put the project off, though, because he'd had the hiccups for months. He finally went to the doctor and was diagnosed with stomach cancer on his birthday last year, the day after shooting on Return Gift was to have begun.

Narang is survived by his widow Priyanka and their three-year-old son Agastya, as well as the devoted cult of fans of Vaastu Shastra. It doesn't look as if anybody's going to pick up Return Gift and run with it, though.

Howzabout a Little Bizarre Travelin' Music, Sammy?

CIB, who's been paying very close attention, is standing all alone in a dark, empty house with this one. He gets 20 points for the hit and another five for the solo. In addition, Narang was the year's youngest hit (by 106 days), so CIB also receives a 25-point bonus for that, too. Total: 50.

— Brad

Ok, here's the story. Bill wanted to do Robert Byrd very much. When Byrd died, Bill wrote to me immediately and said I'm doing Byrd. Makes sense. What you probably know by now is that Bill takes quite a long time to write his updates. First he thinks about it, then he does a little internet research, then he spends many hours researching just about everything else, you know, like why David Cone isn't doing Yankee announcing anymore, stuff like that. Then he spends an ungodly amount of time "writing it in his head." You know what this means. This means he hasn't gotten around to it. This means he's procrastinating. Bill is very good at procrastinating. This means several emails from me that say things like, c'mon Bill ... if I don't get it by tomorrow I'm writing it. And then another one with saltier language. Then another one with tears. It can be brutal. I wrote one of those threatening emails last night. He gave me some bullshit time I'd get it. And then Steinbrenner died. Right after Sheppard. Both of whom I knew he would want to do. So I said, you get two of those guys, not three. And he jumped at it. And you know that writing in his head thing? It's bullshit. I got nothing from him.

So I'm writing Robert Byrd about a month late. (How late is it? They're naming his replacement this week.) I'm not writing it in my head, doing internet research, or anything.

Byrd was a bad man, then a better man, then a much better man. He cried at Ted Kennedy's funeral and yelled at the assholes in the Executive Branch about the obscene war. He lived a very long time, but not as long as Bob Sheppard, who was a good man for as long as he lived. Sheppard was concerned about President Kennedy not wearing warm enough clothing at Yankee Stadium, for goodness' sake. We all know what Byrd was about, and if you're a Democrat, you sorta forgive him. If you're a Republican, you're appalled that Democrats forgive him. If you're like me and you don't really care, you write an update like this one. Sorry if you wanted something more sophisticated, witty, or intelligent. Talk to Bill about it.

Byrd was in his 90s (I'm not even looking up his age) so 18 poolers get 2 points, including one husband-and-wife team. They are, in alphabetical order, Alan (first hit for a new player), Another Lurker, Buford, Busgal, Dead People Server, DGH, Erik, Exuma, Eternity Tours, Hulka, Jazz Vulture (first hit of the year), JD, JTH (first hit for a new player), Kixco, Moldy Oldies, Undertaker, Wendy and Worm Farmer.

Hope it was worth the wait.

— Amelia