Rest in Peace

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Rest in Peace

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Dec 21, 2014 12:24 am

I suppose this thread could be a catch-all, but this death should be noted:
Mandy Rice-Davies, Figure in Profumo Scandal, Dies at 70

By ALAN COWELLDEC. 19, 2014

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Mandy Rice-Davies leaving court after testifying on her relationship with Lord Astor in 1963. Credit Associated Press

LONDON — Mandy Rice-Davies, a former nightclub dancer and model who achieved notoriety in 1963 in one of Britain‘s most spectacular Cold War sex scandals, died on Thursday. She was 70.

Her publicist said in a statement confirming the death that Ms. Rice-Davies had endured a “short battle with cancer.” The statement did not say where she died.

In later years Ms. Rice-Davies became a businesswoman and a writer and was known by her married name, Marilyn Foreman. But Britons more widely remember her for making headlines in what was called the Profumo affair — revelations that a government minister, John Profumo, had shared a mistress, Christine Keeler, with a Soviet defense attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov.

The scandal raised questions about national security and rocked the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan.

Ms. Rice-Davies shared lodgings with Ms. Keeler but never met Mr. Profumo, who died in 2006.

In March 1963, Mr. Profumo went before Parliament to deny any “impropriety whatever” with Ms. Keeler. But he resigned three months later as details of the relationship emerged, forcing him to admit that he had lied to Parliament.

Details of the scandal were revealed in court hearings at the trial of Stephen Ward, an osteopath, who had introduced Mr. Profumo and Ms. Keeler at a party at the Berkshire country home of the aristocrat Lord Astor. Mr. Ward took a drug overdose just before he was found guilty on two counts of living off immoral earnings and died a few days later.

His story was the basis of a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, titled simply “Stephen Ward,” that opened in London late last year and closed after only a few months. At the time, Ms. Rice-Davies appeared in publicity photographs with Mr. Lloyd Webber and Charlotte Blackledge, who played her in the show. (The Profumo affair was also the basis of a 1989 film, “Scandal,” in which Bridget Fonda played Ms. Rice-Davies and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer played Ms. Keeler.)

In court hearings in 1963, the public learned of what seemed to be lurid activities involving aristocrats, government officials, diplomats, spies and call girls.

As the hearings unfolded, Ms. Rice-Davies gained renown for a pithy response to being told that Lord Astor had denied he had slept with her.

“Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” she said, according to one account. (Others quoted her as saying, “He would, wouldn’t he?” or, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”)

The remark was seen as a sign of a new lack of deference in 1960s Britain, as the country struggled for greater prosperity and the class system that had shielded the upper crust from scrutiny came under assault from newly assertive ordinary people.

“It was an age of deference,” Ms. Rice-Davies said in a BBC interview this year. “People still doffed their caps.”

Ms. Rice-Davies stuck to her account of the relationship with Lord Astor despite subsequent denials by his family. She also insisted that her role had not been that of a prostitute, and that Mr. Ward had not been a pimp.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story

“The only reason I still want to talk about it is that I have to fight the misconception that I was a prostitute,” she said at one point, according to the news agency The Press Association. “I don’t want that to be passed on to my grandchildren. There is still a stigma.”

She also said that the era’s renown for unbridled licentiousness was exaggerated. “In those days, there were good girls and there were bad girls,” she told The Associated Press last year. “Good girls didn’t have any sex at all, and bad girls had a bit.”

Born in Llanelli, Wales, on Oct. 21, 1944, Ms. Rice-Davies spent part of her early years in the English Midlands and dropped out of high school to work in a department store in Birmingham. At 16 she left home against her parents’ wishes and wound up working in London as a nightclub dancer.

“My biggest fear was living a drab, boring life,” she wrote in an article this year in the newspaper The Mail on Sunday. “Well, I certainly didn’t end up doing that.”

As a dancer at Murray’s Cabaret Club, she added, “I met a showgirl called Christine Keeler. It was dislike at first sight.”

As the scandal ebbed, she wrote, “I was offered a job singing at a club in Germany, and I accepted with alacrity even though the only place I’d ever sung before was in the church choir.”

Ms. Rice-Davies performed in cabarets in Germany and Spain and later spent time in Israel, where, with her first husband, Rafael Shaul, an Israeli, she founded a string of nightclubs and restaurants in her name.

After a divorce and a brief second marriage, she returned to Britain in 1980, embarking on a career as an actor and writer. In 1988 she married Ken Foreman, a British businessman, who survives her. They had homes in Britain, Florida and the Caribbean. “My life has been one long descent into respectability,” she was widely reported as saying.

Besides her husband, she is survived by a daughter, Dana.

“Mandy was enormously well read and intelligent,” Mr. Lloyd Webber said in a statement on Friday. “I will always remember discussing with her over dinner subjects as varied as Thomas Cromwell’s dissolution of the monasteries and the influence of the artist Stanley Spencer on Lucian Freud. With a different throw of the dice, Mandy might have been head of the Royal Academy, or even running the country.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/world/europe/mandy-rice-davies-profumo-affair-figure-obituary.html?_r=0

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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby justdrew » Sun Dec 21, 2014 1:21 am

By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby MinM » Sun Dec 21, 2014 1:58 am

@johnsimkin · Dec 19 · Sad to announce the death of my friend, Mandy Rice Davies. http://spartacus-educational.com/SPYdavies.htm
Image

...Christine Keeler introduced Rice-Davies to Stephen Ward and Lord Astor. The two men helped pay the rent for the two women to live in a flat at Comeragh Road. Soon afterwards, Rice-Davies met Keeler's old boyfriend, Peter Rachman. Rice-Davies became his mistress: "I was comfortable with him, he was easy to talk to, a good listener as well as a good talker." Anthony Summers points out in Honeytrap: "On and off, for nearly two years, he was to be her lover and the fount of all good things - and money seemed a very good thing to the sixteen-year-old from Solihull."

During this period Rice-Davies also met Maria Novotny, who ran sex parties in London. So many senior politicians attended that she began referring to herself as the "government's Chief Whip". As well as British politicians such as John Profumo and Ernest Marples, foreign leaders such as Willy Brandt and Ayub Khan, attended these parties.

On 21st January 1961, Colin Coote invited Stephen Ward to have lunch with Eugene Ivanov, an naval attaché at the Soviet embassy. The following month Ward and Christine Keeler moved to 17 Wimpole Mews in Marylebone. According to Keeler's autobiography, The Truth at Last (2001), Roger Hollis and Anthony Blunt were regular visitors to the flat.

On 8th July 1961 Christine Keeler met John Profumo, the Minister of War, at a party at Cliveden. Profumo kept in contact with Keeler and they eventually began an affair. At the same time Keeler was sleeping with Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet spy. According to Keeler: "Their (Ward and Hollis) plan was simple. I was to find out, through pillow talk, from Jack Profumo when nuclear warheads were being moved to Germany."

In December 1961 Mariella Novotny held a party that became known as the "Feast of Peacocks". According to Christine Keeler, there was "a lavish dinner in which this man wearing only... a black mask with slits for eyes and laces up the back... and a tiny apron - one like the waitresses wore in 1950s tearooms - asked to be whipped if people were not happy with his services."

In her autobiography, Mandy (1980) Rice-Davies described what happened when she arrived at Novotny's party in Bayswater: "The door was opened by Stephen (Ward) - naked except for his socks... All the men were naked, the women naked except for wisps of clothing like suspender belts and stockings. I recognised our host and hostess, Mariella Novotny and her husband Horace Dibbins, and unfortunately I recognised too a fair number of other faces as belonging to people so famous you could not fail to recognise them: a Harley Street gynaecologist, several politicians, including a Cabinet minister of the day, now dead, who, Stephen told us with great glee, had served dinner of roast peacock wearing nothing but a mask and a bow tie instead of a fig leaf."

Rice-Davies claims: "In early 1962 I received an offer to make a television commercial in the States. The producer had come to England to find a girl with a British accent, typically British-looking." At that time, Michael Lambton, one of Christine Keeler's boyfriends, was working in Philadelphia. Rice-Davies suggested that the two women should go to the United States together. Peter Rachman agreed to pay for trip.

On 11th July, 1962, Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler, arrived in New York City. They stayed at a hotel on Fire Island. According to Rice-Davies she fell asleep on the beach and was badly sunburnt. She telephoned the studio and told them: "I've had this accident - first-degree sunburn. It will take about a month if I am lucky to get my skin back in order." The women returned to London on 18th July. It later emerged that their movements in America were being monitored by the FBI.

On her return to London, Rice-Davies met Earl Felton, a screen-writer. Felton introduced her to Robert Mitchum and for a short time she worked as his personal assistant. According to Christine Keeler, Felton was a CIA agent...

http://spartacus-educational.com/SPYdavies.htm

http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/14719

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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 22, 2014 8:47 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby lucky » Wed Dec 24, 2014 11:16 am

I have to say the death of JC hit me harder than Mandy R-C as he was a talented muscian who brought joy to 1000's she......er..had an affair
There's holes in the sky where rain gets in
the holes are small
that's why rain is thin.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Oct 21, 2016 1:36 pm

Phil Chess, Whose Record Label Elevated Unknown Blues Musicians, Dies at 95

By DOUGLAS MARTIN OCT. 19, 2016

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From left, Phil Chess, Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Bo Diddley. Chess Records, the independent label Mr. Chess co-founded, was known for recruiting black singers who had migrated from the South. Credit Michael Ochs Archives

Phil Chess, who with his brother founded Chess Records, a storied Chicago label that captured great blues musicians like Muddy Waters in their prime and helped power the musical fusillade of rock ’n’ roll with vibrant recordings by the likes of Chuck Berry, died on Tuesday at his home in Tucson, Ariz. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Pam Chess.

Chess Records was one of the most prominent of the independent labels — Atlantic in New York and Sun in Memphis were among the others — that became successful in the 1950s by finding little-known performers, recording them and persuading radio stations (not infrequently with the help of cash payments) to play their records.

Their goal was profit, but their lasting influence was suggested by the first ballot of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which consisted almost entirely of artists who had recorded for independent labels.

Chess Records was best known for recruiting black musicians who had taken their heartbreak, hopes and not a few harmonicas from the South to Chicago and who, with electric guitars and a big backbeat, gave birth to what came to be known as Chicago blues. In addition to Muddy Waters, its roster included, at various times, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and many other Chicago blues stars.

“Chess not only became the true repository of American blues music, but it also presented black music for the edification of white audiences throughout the world,” the Hall of Fame said in 1987 when it inducted Phil’s brother and partner, Leonard Chess.

Curiously, Phil Chess was neither inducted nor mentioned in the citation. Nor was he depicted in a 2008 movie about the company, “Cadillac Records.” (In another movie about the label, “Who Do You Love,” released in 2010, Phil, played by Jon Abrahams, and Leonard, played by Alessandro Nivola, were portrayed as equals.)

But Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, who worked with both men at Chess and went on to run the Rolling Stones’ record company, said both brothers did a lot of everything, including supervising recording sessions and hawking records to disc jockeys.

“It was a fully symbiotic, synergistic relationship,” he said in a 2008 interview with The Chicago Tribune.

Leonard’s greater visibility reflected the more public role he played. In addition, he worked primarily with the blues performers, for which the label was best known. Phil mostly shepherded the company’s jazz and doo-wop recordings.

Both brothers, however, were honored in 2013 by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences with a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement.

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Chucky Berry’s “Blue Feeling,” released by Chess Records.

The legacy of the tough-talking, cigar-chomping brothers can be seen not just in the records they made but also in the many songs recorded first by Chess artists and later by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and others.

The influence of Chess Records was evident in how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who had been playmates as children, got together musically as teenagers in the spring of 1961. On a train from Dartford, the London suburb where they both grew up, Mr. Richards noticed that Mr. Jagger was carrying two Chess albums then unavailable in England, one by Muddy Waters and the other by Chuck Berry.

The name of the group they soon formed, the Rolling Stones, came from a Waters song. When the Stones first visited the United States in 1964, they made a pilgrimage to Chess’s studio in Chicago and recorded several tracks there, including an instrumental titled “2120 South Michigan Avenue” — the company’s address.

The Chess saga began in Motal, a small town that was then in Poland and is now in Belarus. To try to lift his family from poverty, the brothers’ father, Yasef Czyz, emigrated to Chicago in the early 1920s. By 1928 he had saved enough to send for his wife, Cyrla; his daughter, Malka; and his sons, Lejzor and Fiszel, the youngest child, born on March 27, 1921. Czyz became Chess, and all the first names were Americanized, with Lejzor becoming Leonard and Fiszel becoming Philip.

Motal was inarguably a place to escape, with no running water or electricity and only one windup phonograph. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2008, Phil Chess said life in the shtetl was “blues all the time.”

Chicago wasn’t easy, either. After working as a carpenter, Yasef, now Joe, acquired a junkyard and planned to have his sons work there. But Phil left for Western Kentucky University on a football scholarship, and Leonard acquired a liquor store in a black neighborhood, near their Jewish one. Having returned from Kentucky after three semesters, Phil helped Leonard in the store until he was drafted in 1943.

While he was in basic training, Phil married Sheva Jonesi. She died this year. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two sons, Kevin and Terry; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Leonard Chess died in 1969.

Leonard bought a restaurant on the South Side of Chicago while Phil was in the Army and converted it into a nightclub, the Macomba Lounge. He wanted to record some of the acts, mainly jazz groups, that played there, and in 1947 he bought a share of Aristocrat Records, which a local married couple, Evelyn and Charles Aron, had recently started.

Aristocrat had begun recording some of the black blues singers who had moved to Chicago from the South. The company pressed 3,000 copies of Waters’s single “I Can’t Be Satisfied” — even though Leonard said he did not understand Waters’s music — and they sold out in a day. The recording is now widely regarded as an early masterpiece of Chicago blues.

After his discharge in 1946, Phil joined Leonard at the Macomba; he was soon managing it by himself as Leonard delved deeper into the record business. After the club burned down in 1950, Phil, too, devoted himself to recording full time. They acquired all of Aristocrat that year and renamed the company Chess.

The brothers operated on what Phil called “an unspoken understanding”: “Whatever we did, we did as partners.”

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Mr. Chess Credit Michael Ochs Archives

The first Chess release was the jazz saxophonist Gene Ammons’s recording of “My Foolish Heart.” Their second was Waters’s “Walkin’ Blues,” with “Rollin’ Stone” on the B-side.

During Chess’s first decade, a pantheon of musicians helped lay the foundation for rock ’n’ roll, among them Bo Diddley and, most notably, Chuck Berry, who was an unknown singer, songwriter and guitarist from St. Louis when Waters brought him to the brothers’ attention. Mr. Berry quickly made his mark with groundbreaking singles like “Maybellene” and “Roll Over Beethoven.” (Phil Chess said he considered Mr. Berry, not Elvis Presley, the real king of rock ’n’ roll.)

An association with Sam Phillips, who would go on to found the Sun label in Memphis, yielded a number of Chess releases, most notably “Rocket 88,” a 1951 recording by Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm (under the name Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats). Some music historians consider it the first rock ’n’ roll record.

The rosters of Chess and its subsidiary labels, Checker and Argo (later known as Cadet), also included doo-wop groups, jazz musicians like Ramsey Lewis and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, gospel singers like a young Aretha Franklin and comedians like Moms Mabley. When Elvis Presley hit, Chess signed its own white rockers, Dale Hawkins and Bobby Charles. Etta James was also part of Chess’s stable.

In 1963, the Chess brothers purchased a Chicago radio station, WHFC, and renamed it WVON (the call letters stood for “voice of the Negro”). With a lineup of lively air personalities playing the rhythm-and-blues hits of the day, it quickly became one of the top-rated stations in the market. It was sold in 1969 and is now owned by the Midway Broadcasting Company and has a talk format.

Chess Records ceased to be a family affair that same year, when it was bought by General Recorded Tape for $6.5 million. The Chess catalog is now owned by the Universal Music Group.

Over the years, the Chess brothers were accused more than once of taking financial advantage of their artists, and there were lawsuits, usually settled confidentially. Some Chess artists said their compensation was more often like an allowance than like a salary.

But there were many instances of apparently genuine friendship: Chuck Berry sometimes stayed overnight at Phil’s house, sharing a room with his son, Terry, and musicians attended the Chess sons’ bar mitzvahs.

The Chess brothers may have been motivated more by financial considerations than by artistic ones. But virtually no one disputes that they helped document some of America’s most important vernacular music.

“That is the paradox of the Chess story,” the British newspaper The Guardian wrote in 2010. “The brothers were not musical visionaries; they were small-time ‘indie’ record men making a quick buck from the poorest, least respected people in America. But their recorded bread-and-butter discs of local street musicians and bar bands still sound as fresh today as they did 60 years ago. By failing to be timely, they succeeded in being timeless.”

The brothers never claimed to be musical geniuses. “If you put the scale on the wall and ask me which one was do re mi, I couldn’t tell you,” Phil was quoted as saying by Nadine Cohodas in “Spinning Blues Into Gold” (2000), a history of Chess Records. “Neither could Leonard.” Motioning to his ear, Ms. Cohodas wrote, he added: “This could tell you. That’s what told us.”

When The Chicago Sun-Times asked Phil Chess in 1997 why he had been so successful, he shrugged. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/arts/music/phil-chess-dead.html
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Fri Oct 21, 2016 1:46 pm

I think this is the perfect place to post this news.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/ ... -new-album

Legendary guitarist Chuck Berry is recording a new album, his first with new material in 20 years, in a St. Louis studio in celebration of his recent 75th birthday. Berry tells Billboard he hopes that an album will be completed and released before the end of the year, promising new versions of some of his biggest hits, as well as new tunes.

Asked why he has recorded so sporadically in recent years, Berry admits, "It's laziness, or after you've had so much success, you get slack on the ability and the initiative, you know? And it's not right! It's my profession -- it's what I should be doing."

The album is being recorded on Pro Tools digital software at Four Seasons Media Productions in St. Louis. "That's a big change," says Berry of the migration from magnetic tape to computer-based Pro Tools. "I've done 30 hours there already, and I'm going to finish the record there. It's great, really up to date, and brand-new."

Forty-six years ago, Berry queried Muddy Waters, following the latter's performance at the Palladium in Chicago, as to the possibility of recording his music for commercial release. Waters referred him to Leonard Chess of Chess Records, and only days later, Berry, with pianist Johnnie Johnson and drummer Eddie Hardy, were making history with "Roll Over Beethoven," "Maybellene," and "Wee Wee Hours." At 75, Berry's enthusiasm for recording is clearly re-energized. "I want this to be like no other record I've ever put out," he says.

As previously reported, Berry celebrated his birthday with an Oct. 18 concert in St. Louis, featuring Little Richard and the Duke Robillard Band.
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 21, 2016 3:16 pm

I knew the Chess brothers...I had been to their horse ranch in Woodstock Il. in the 1960's ...used to ride there....my neighbor took care of their horses...Chess at one time had the no. 1 Appaloosa horse in the country

Cadillac Records was a movie made about them..,mostly about his brother Leonard ...not too accurate though


Phil was in the Jerry Zaks' movie Who Do You Love
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Cordelia » Fri Oct 21, 2016 4:39 pm

seemslikeadream wrote:I knew the Chess brothers...I had been to their horse ranch in Woodstock Il. in the 1960's ...used to ride there....my neighbor took care of their horses...Chess at one time had the no. 1 Appaloosa horse in the country

Cadillac Records was a movie made about them..,mostly about his brother Leonard ...not too accurate though



Phil was in the Jerry Zaks' movie Who Do You Love


Oh well, disappointed but not, since it is Hollywood, surprised.
Great music & acting though........


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1309MEQ4b30

(I don't remember Phil Chess even mentioned in the film.)
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 21, 2016 4:46 pm

yes you are correct I don't believe he was ...weird
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Oct 21, 2016 7:17 pm

I love Etta!

Jerry Lee Lewis turned 90!
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Cordelia » Fri Oct 21, 2016 8:30 pm

Iamwhomiam wrote:I love Etta!

Jerry Lee Lewis turned 90!


:thumbsup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LZsW-cFHck
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 21, 2016 8:47 pm

I was just listening to this last night :P


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeoqZ4AUenI
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Oct 30, 2016 11:33 am

John Zacherle, Host With a Ghoulish Perspective, Dies at 98

By WILLIAM GRIMES OCT. 28, 2016

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John Zacherle as the playfully spooky Zacherley in the 1950s. Credit Louis Nemeth


John Zacherle, one of the first of the late-night television horror-movie hosts, who played a crypt-dwelling undertaker with a booming graveyard laugh on stations in Philadelphia and New York in the late 1950s and early ’60s, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.

His death was announced by friends and a fan website.

Mr. Zacherle, billed as Zacherley in New York, was not the first horror host — that honor goes to Maila Nurmi, the Finnish-born actress who began camping it up as Vampira on KABC-TV in Los Angeles in 1954 — but he was the most famous, inspiring a host of imitators at local stations around the country.

As Roland in Philadelphia (pronounced ro-LAHND) and Zacherley in New York, he added grisly theatrics and absurdist humor to the entertainment on offer, which more often than not was less than Oscar quality. He became a cult figure, making star appearances at horror conventions across the Northeast.

Dressed in a long black frock coat decorated with a large medal from the government of Transylvania, Roland introduced, and interrupted, the evening’s film with comic bits involving characters who existed only as props in his crypt-cum-laboratory.

There was My Dear, his wife, recumbent in a coffin with a stake in her heart, and his son, Gasport, a series of moans within a potato bag suspended from the ceiling. A large blob of gelatin tied up in cheesecloth was Thelma, a high-strung amoeba who cheated at checkers and responded to the command “Heel!”

At intervals throughout the evening, Mr. Zacherle performed mini-skits with his stock company, treated viewers to recitations from his opera “Draculare” or taught conversational Transylvanian. (“The skull of my aunt is on the table.”)

Sometimes, through camera trickery, he seemed to jump right into the film, appearing as a Tyrolean fiddler, a body on a morgue slab or, in “The Mummy,” a mysterious figure in a fez behind a beaded curtain. At the end of the program, he would bid his audience farewell with the signoff “Good night, whatever you are.”

Image
John Zacherle in 2012. Credit Julie Glassberg for The New York Times


John Karsten Zacherle was born in Philadelphia in September 1918. His father, George, was a bank clerk, and his mother, Anna, was a homemaker. He did not grow up on horror films — his father did not approve. He claimed not to have seen the original “Frankenstein” or “Dracula” movies until he showed them on television. In a bit of foreshadowing, though, his father tended cemeteries after retiring from his bank job.

After graduating from Germantown High School, Mr. Zacherle enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an English degree in 1940. He enlisted in the Army at the start of World War II and served in England, Italy and North Africa with the Quartermaster Corps, rising to the rank of major.

Returning to Philadelphia after the war, he joined the Stagecrafters, a small theater troupe in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood. Before long he found work doing commercials for local drug companies.

“I guess my first horror gig was posing for before-and-after pictures for some new tranquilizer,” he told The Daily News in New York in 2000. “In the ‘before’ shot, I was chasing my wife with a carving knife. Then, after I took the pill, I was a kind and loving husband.”

In 1953 he began appearing as characters on “Action in the Afternoon,” a live western series shot in a vacant lot behind the studios of WCAU. “The idea was to get somebody in trouble on Monday, and either get him out of trouble, shoot him or hang him by Friday,” he told The Daily News in 1959.

One of his recurring characters was an undertaker named Grimy James, whose frock coat came in handy when the station bought a collection of 52 old horror films from Universal. The station manager, reviewing his new acquisition, decided that most of the films were so bad, he would have to build a show around them to add entertainment value.

Mr. Zacherle put on the frock coat and, in October 1957, went to work as the host of “The Shock Theater” (later simply “Shock Theater”), bringing with him an endless supply of sight gags and ad-lib patter.

A rabid fan base developed. When the station held an open house, expecting about 1,500 viewers to turn up, 13,000 stormed the studio to meet the Cool Ghoul, as Mr. Zacherle was known. In March 1958 he recorded a single, “Dinner With Drac” (a “Monster Mash” before the fact) — “For dessert there was bat-wing confetti, and the veins of a mummy named Betty” — that made the Top 10.

Image
Zacherley on the cover of the June 1960 issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Credit Warren Publishing


Its sequels, “Eighty-Two Tombstones,” “I Was a Teenage Caveman” and “Monsters Have Problems Too,” were less successful.

In late 1958, Mr. Zacherle moved to New York, “flapping in on leathery wings of fame,” as The Journal of Frankenstein, a monster magazine, put it. He took over “Shock Theater” at WABC, Channel 7, and added a “y” to his name to avoid confusion about how it should be pronounced. After the show tripled its ratings in the first year, it was renamed “Zacherley at Large.”

When WABC had run through its stock of horror films, Mr. Zacherle took his act to Channel 9 and then Channel 11, where he became the host of “Chiller Theater,” “The Mighty Hercules Cartoon Show” and, briefly, “The Three Stooges Show.”

In 1965, WNJU, a new UHF television station broadcasting from Symphony Hall in Newark, put him in charge of an afternoon dance party called “Disc-O-Teen.” The show simply grafted Mr. Zacherle’s “monster of ceremonies” persona onto a low-budget version of “American Bandstand.” Somehow, it managed to attract well-known groups like the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Young Rascals and the Doors during its three-year run.

“Jim Morrison looked at our weird set and mumbled, ‘This is the damnedest TV show I’ve ever seen,’” Mr. Zacherle told The New York Times in 2012.

He moved to the New York album-rock radio station WNEW-FM in 1967 as a morning D.J. and two years later began hosting a program at night. He later worked at another rock station, WPLJ, and in 1992 joined WXRK, known as K-Rock. That job ended four years later when the station changed its format from classic rock to alternative rock.

Mr. Zacherle, who leaves no immediate survivors, wrote introductions for the horror anthology “Zacherley’s Midnight Snacks” and a sequel, “Zacherley’s Vulture Stew.” He also provided the voice of a drug-dealing, brain-eating parasite in the 1988 horror comedy “Brain Damage,” and appeared as a weatherman in “Frankenhooker” (1990), dedicating his forecast to “all you mad scientists out there.”

“I can’t imagine how it all happened,” Mr. Zacherle told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2015. “I look back on it and say, ‘My God, I’m 96 years old, what the hell have I been doing all these years?’”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/arts/television/john-zacherle-dies.html

Here's a link to Zacherley's "Monsters have problems too," and other songs he recorded. (I omitted the bad NYT UT link as published above.)

John Zacherle's Midnight Snacks was my first late-night television viewing experience and always guaranteed laughs along with revulsion and being scared out of your wits. Only the covers of National Enquirer were scarier.

Bless you, John, you're officially a real-life, dead ghoul.

And thank you for giving me many fine and happy memories.

Your timing, right to the last, was impeccable.
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Re: Rest in Peace

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Nov 09, 2016 7:06 pm

Ralph Cicerone, Scientist Who Sounded Climate Change Alarm, Dies at 73

By SAM ROBERTS NOV. 7, 2016

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Ralph J. Cicerone had been president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s leading independent scientific body. Credit Mark Finkenstaedt/National Academy of Sciences, via Associated Press


Ralph J. Cicerone, who as a researcher and the president of the National Academy of Sciences issued an early warning about the grave potential risks of climate change, died on Saturday at his home in Short Hills, N.J. He was 73.

His death was announced by the academy, which he headed from 2005 until last June. It did not provide the cause.

In 2001, while he was the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, Dr. Cicerone headed an academy panel, commissioned by President George W. Bush, which concluded unequivocally that “greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.”

The 11 leading scientists who composed the panel, including some who had been climate-change skeptics, were unanimous in reaffirming the mainstream scientific view on global warming just as Mr. Bush was preparing to join environmental talks with European leaders. They were outraged that he had recently rejected the global warming pact known as the Kyoto Protocol.

The panel’s conclusion was based in part on research reported in 1974 by Dr. Cicerone and two colleagues from the University of Michigan. They were among the first to warn that the atmosphere’s ozone layer, which protects the planet from potentially lethal ultraviolet radiation, was being dissipated by chlorine gases.

Their research was credited in the citation for the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, which F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario J. Molina shared with Paul J. Crutzen for their discovery, also in 1974, that supposedly inert fluorocarbons like Freon, a propellant in products like aerosol spray cans and refrigerants, could deplete the ozone layer to dangerous levels.

They found that a single chlorine atom could absorb more than 100,000 ozone molecules and linger in the stratosphere for up to a century.

“The clarity and startling nature of what Molina and Rowland came up with — the notion that something you could hold in your hand could affect the entire global environment, not just the room in which you were standing — was extraordinary,” Dr. Cicerone told The New York Times in 2012.

Such research led in 1987 to the Montreal Protocol, the global treaty banning chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals that had been used as aerosol propellants and coolants.

The academy, the nation’s leading independent scientific body, had been defending its positions on global climate change, stem-cell advances, genetic engineering and evolution when Dr. Cicerone took over. With a reputation for nonpartisan civility, he pursued the activist agenda that he had inherited even more aggressively, gaining the support of President Obama, who visited the academy twice, and working to rally public opinion behind scientific research.

Under Dr. Cicerone, the academy issued reports that advocated reducing greenhouse gas emissions while identifying strategies for adapting to a changing climate. It also renovated its historic headquarters on the National Mall in Washington and established a $500 million Gulf Research Program after the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.

Rush D. Holt, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called Dr. Cicerone “a champion of science who helped scientists understand their obligations to society and helped nonscientists understand the importance of science to their lives, especially with respect to human induced changes of Earth’s climate.”

Ralph John Cicerone was born on May 2, 1943, in New Castle, in rural western Pennsylvania, the grandson of Italian immigrants. His father, Salvatore, was an insurance salesman who left math problems for Ralph to solve on the evenings he was making house calls to clients. His mother was the former Louise Palus.

The first in his family to attend college, Dr. Cicerone was inspired by the space race with the Soviet Union to pursue an engineering career. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering in 1965 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where he was captain of the baseball team, a sport he later restored to Irvine) and earned a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He is survived by his wife, the former Carol Ogata; their daughter, Sara; two grandchildren; and two sisters, Sylvia Ferrare and Sally Golis.

Dr. Cicerone was an atmospheric chemist on the faculty of the University of Michigan from 1971 to 1978. After conducting research at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, he was named senior scientist and director of the atmospheric chemistry division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

He became a professor at Irvine in 1989. There he founded the earth system science department, served as dean of physical sciences and was chancellor from 1998 to 2005.

As president of the National Academy of Sciences, he lamented the partisanship in Congress over matters like climate change. “Does it take a crisis to get people to go along a new path,” he asked in 2007, “or can they respond to a series of rational, incremental gains in knowledge?”

By this year, though, he seemed more sanguine. “The general notion that humans are causing a global planetary problem is growing, especially among young people,” he said, “so I’m optimistic.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/science/ralph-cicerone-scientist-who-sounded-climate-change-alarm-dies-at-73.html
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