Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Paul B. Clayton, the architect who designed Johnie’s Broiler, the landmark coffee shop and drive-in in Downey, a popular center of Southern California car culture in the 1950s and ’60s, has died. He was 91.

Clayton died Monday of leukemia in Draper, Utah, according to his family.

Johnie’s Broiler, which started out as Harvey’s Broiler in 1958, is one of the last remaining examples of postwar Modern coffee shop/drive-in architecture, said Peter C. Moruzzi, a Los Angeles historic resources consultant who argued on behalf of listing it on the California Register of Historic Resources.

In 2002 the structure was declared eligible for the register, but it was not listed because the current owner objected. The building at 7447 Firestone Blvd. is now a car dealership. Much of its interior has been altered.

During the 1960s, Johnie’s was hugely popular, sometimes drawing up to 5,000 customers a weekend to Downey, which was a major center of California’s car culture. Teens especially gathered there to check out their cars and one another over hamburgers and sodas.

NY Times
Dan O’Herlihy, an Oscar-nominated character actor whose 50-year career extended from the Irish stage to television and Hollywood movies including “Fail-Safe” and “RoboCop,” died on Thursday at his home here, said Michael Druxman, his longtime publicist. He was 85.

Mr. O’Herlihy was nominated for a best actor Academy Award for his starring role in Louis Buñuel’s “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” (1954). (That year Marlon Brando won for “On the Waterfront.”)

Born in Wexford, Ireland, Mr. O’Herlihy earned a degree in architecture from the National University of Ireland before picking up minor roles at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. He was spotted there by the British director Carol Reed, who cast him in the 1946 thriller “Odd Man Out.”

Mr. O’Herlihy went on to appear in more than 70 plays in Dublin and in the United States, including “Measure for Measure” and “Macbeth.”

After moving to Hollywood, he played Macduff in Orson Welles’s 1948 film “Macbeth” and began a career that included roles as Brig. Gen. Warren A. Black in “Fail-Safe” (1964), President Franklin D. Roosevelt in “MacArthur” (1977) and the mysterious executive with a cyborg company in “RoboCop” (1987).

The Independant
Peter R. Ackroyd left an enduring legacy for English-speaking bible-readers for the enthusiasm and energy with which, shortly after taking up appointment in 1961 as Samuel Davidson Professor of Old Testament Studies at King’s College, London, he promoted and edited a series of major commentaries on the Bible. Most prominent were the Old Testament volumes of the New Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges published between 1961 and 1979 and the Cambridge History of the Bible (volume 1, 1970), but he published widely in the cause of religious education.

His Free Church upbringing left him with a strong conviction that the Bible provides a central pathway to spiritual insight which lies at the heart of Christianity. It opens the door to spiritual maturity and freedom, without which religion becomes moribund and dangerous. His Archbishop’s Lenten study book, Doors of Perception: a guide to reading the Psalms (1978), expressed this personal concern to use the hard-won insights of modern scholarship, as a means of enriching modern understanding and worship.

Born in 1917, in Harrow, Middlesex, into a family with a strong Dissenting tradition, Ackroyd went up to Downing College, Cambridge, in 1935 to read Modern Languages - an expertise which he was later to put to good use in his biblical research. Turning to theology he took the Bachelor of Divinity (London) in 1940 and proceeded back to Cambridge to undertake research, gaining his doctorate in 1945.

After a period as a pastoral minister (1943-48) he returned to academic life as a lecturer, first at Leeds University, and then at Cambridge from 1952. Here his disenchantment with what he felt to be an over-preoccupation with linguistic and lexicographical issues in the teaching and study of the Old Testament became widely known.

Ever an enthusiast for serious scholarship Ackroyd admired the strong, if sometime over-refined, literary and theological traditions of Germany that had been too long ignored in England. To help remedy this neglect he translated into English Otto Eissfeldt’s huge Einleitung in das Alte Testament, acknowledged at the time as the standard text on the subject, as The Old Testament: an introduction (1965). Not only was the translation excellently done, but the 1934 original was improved by updated bibliographies, errors corrected and the whole presented in a most clear and readable fashion. It proved to be an important turning point for a wider international engagement with scholarly biblical research with which the aged Eissfeldt was himself delighted.
Israel Under Babylon and Persia#(New Clarendon Bible, Old Testament)
Archaeology, politics and religion: The Persian period (The Inaugural lecture of the Walter G. Williams Lectureship in Old Testament)
Studies in the Religious Tradition of the Old Testament
Englishing the Psalms

We are into the President’s weekend, but no presidents grace our list today. Instead we have Mr O’Herlihy originally from Wexford, Ireland and a long time character actor. By the way Wexford is a marvelous area of Ireland. Go visit if you can and make sure you take in the views from Hook Head lighthouse.

Paul Clayton designed a much visited landmark in Southern California. Johnie’s Broiler was a central fixture in California’s so-called car culture period. ODD isn’t it that instead of becoming a landmark Johnie’s was converted to a car dealership.

The Reverend Professor Peter Ackroyd also gained our list today. Don’t confuse this Peter Ackroyd with the English author of the same name. The good Reverend spent his life steeped in all things biblical.

LA Times
Actor Brian Kelly, who starred as Porter Ricks in the popular 1960s’ NBC television series “Flipper,” has died. He was 73.

Kelly died Saturday of pneumonia in Voorhees, N.J., according to a family friend.

Kelly was born Feb. 14, 1931, in Detroit, the son of Harry F. Kelly, who later served as governor of Michigan and as a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court.

Brian Kelly began his acting career after serving in the Marines during the Korean War and attending University of Michigan Law School for a year.

After a number of guest appearances on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Rifleman” and other shows, he was cast as the father of two boys in “Flipper,” which also starred a dolphin as the title character. The series was filmed in Miami and in Nassau, the Bahamas.
Flipper memorabilia at eBay.com
Flipper: White Dolphin/Flipper’s Monster

LA Times
Country singer Jewel “Sammi” Smith, 61, whose recording of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” helped propel Kristofferson into the music business and helped earn her a Grammy as best female country vocalist for 1971, died Saturday.

Smith died at home in Oklahoma City after a long illness. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Smith was born in Orange, Calif., and grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona and Colorado. She began singing at 11 and had her own club act when she was 12. After an early marriage and four children, she divorced and moved to Nashville.

In 1967, she had her first hit, “So Long Charlie Brown.” Six years later, she moved to Dallas, where she joined the “Outlaw Movement” with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Her recording of Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” was a country staple in 1975.
Here Comes That Rainbow Again

NY Times
Dr. Paul E. Lacy, a pathologist who was known as the father of islet cell transplants, an experimental treatment for Type 1 diabetes, died Tuesday in Zanesville, Ohio. He was 81.

The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic lung disease, said his son Paul E. Lacy Jr.

Dr. Lacy was among the first scientists to observe how beta cells, which reside in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas, make insulin. He also developed and refined techniques for isolating islet cells, which make up about 2 percent of the pancreas, to prepare them for transplant.

In 1972, Dr. Lacy was credited with performing the first successful islet transplant in laboratory rats, curing the animals of their diabetic disorder. He then went on to do the same operation in dogs, in monkeys and ultimately, in the 1980’s, in people.

In 1989, Dr. Lacy and his colleague Dr. David Scharp performed a human islet transplant that enabled the patient to stop using insulin injections, said Dr. Scharp, who is now chief medical officer of Novocell Inc., a biotechnology company in Irvine, Calif., that is continuing to research islet cells.
Treating Diabetes With Transplanted Cells : A Scientific American article
Diabetic Low-Fat and No-Fat Meals in Minutes: More Than 250 Delicious, Easy, and Healthy Recipes & Menus for People With Diabetes, Their Families, and … riends (Juvenile Diabetes Foundation Library)
Pancreatic Islet Cell Transplantation: 1892-1992 One Century of Transplantation for Diabetes

NY Times
Martin J. Hillenbrand, a former State Department expert on European affairs who was ambassador to Hungary and Germany, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Athens, Ga. He was 89.

His death was announced by the University of Georgia, where he was Dean Rusk emeritus professor of international relations.

In 37 years in the Foreign Service, Mr. Hillenbrand filled high-level positions on the European fault lines of East-West confrontation. He was the assistant secretary of state for European affairs from 1969 until 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon sent him to Bonn as his ambassador to what was then West Germany.

Mr. Hillenbrand’s expertise in German affairs was called upon to help smooth relations with other Europeans and keep West Germany firmly aligned with Washington.

His experience predated the Berlin crisis of 1962, when he led the German desk at the State Department.

The Independant
Cyanobacteria are responsible for a large proportion of the two processes, photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation, that sustain life on Earth. Sixty years ago these organisms were regarded as an underclass of the smallest plants and classified as blue-green algae. Part of the large body of work that has since established their global importance had its foundation in the pioneering studies of G. E. Fogg.

Gordon Elliott Fogg, known as Tony by family and friends, was the son of a Methodist minister. His interests in plants began as a boy when he spent summers collecting herbarium specimens on his grandparents’ farm. He was educated at Dulwich College and in 1937 obtained a scholarship to Queen Mary College, London, to read Botany.
The Growth of Plants (Pelican S.)

Today looks like ‘That 70’s Show.’ In 1971, Paul Lacy published his article on successful transplantation of pancreas islet cells (a still experimental treatment for diabetes). Nixon was in The Whitehouse, and Martin Hillenbrand was his ambassador to the West Germany. Sammi Smith, a ‘Nashville Outlaw’ had her hit ‘Today I started loving you again.’ And, the TV series ‘Flipper,’ in which Brian Key, starred was well into reruns. It continues into syndication today. Check out the ODDly irreverent review of the 1995 movie remake ‘Flipper’ The link to Mr. Cranky

Here’s an ODD little fact, several dolphins played Flipper. The last surviving dolphin was Bebe, a female dolphin. She died in Miami (where else?) in 1997 at age 40 years. She was survived by eight of her calves. We doubt she ever saw the movie. Enjoy President’s Day weekend. Be careful.

LA Times
Samuel W. Alderson, a multifaceted inventor who created crash test dummies such as those used in automobile safety tests, has died. He was 90.

Alderson died Friday at his home in Marina del Rey of complications associated with myelofibrosis, said his son Jeremy.

The mechanically inclined Alderson, who grew up puttering in his father’s custom sheet-metal shop, built the first automobile test dummy at his Alderson Research Labs in 1960. But the idea caught on, he said, only when Ralph Nader’s consumer protection book “Unsafe at Any Speed” was published five years later.

Reacting to consumer outrage engendered by Nader’s book, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began buying Alderson’s dummies to test seat belts, air bags and other devices designed to minimize deaths and injuries in car crashes. Various dummies, including the Vince and Larry models popular in television advertising, were standardized over the years as Alderson and his colleagues improved the technology.

LA Times
Jack L. Chalker, who wrote more than 60 science-fiction and fantasy novels, died of kidney failure Friday at a hospital in Baltimore. He was 60.

Chalker won numerous awards during a career that began in his early teens with a literary magazine, Mirage, that he produced on a mimeograph machine and assembled with friends on the dining-room table of his family’s home.

The magazine earned Chalker, then 14, a nomination for the Hugo Award, the genre’s highest honor, given by the World Science Fiction Society. He was nominated for three more Hugos during his career.

“He was one of the greats in our field,” said Catherine Asaro, president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Inc. “He always had something provocative to say, his creativity in imagining different universes.”

Chalker’s 1977 novel “Midnight at the Well of Souls,” about a walking, talking plant with brains in its feet, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, said his wife, Eva C. Whitley.

Jack Chalker memorabilia at eBay.com
More Jack Chalker books at Amazon.com

NY Times
Otto Plaschkes, a British producer of films including the spy thriller “Hopscotch” (1980) and the dark comedy “Georgy Girl” (1966), died on Monday in London. He was 75.

The cause was heart failure, said Rob Gerlach, a friend.

Mr. Plaschkes gravitated to wry screenplays that explored identity and sized up society. “Georgy Girl,” jointly produced with Robert A. Goldston, made a heroine of the plump, gawky young woman played by Lynn Redgrave.

In the 1970’s, Mr. Plaschkes was head of European production for the American Film Theater, founded by Ely Landau to adapt plays for the screen. There he was executive producer of “The Homecoming” (1973), adapted from Harold Pinter’s play; “Butley” (1976), written and adapted by Simon Gray; “Galileo” (1975), based on Charles Laughton’s 1947 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play; and “In Celebration” (1975), which David Storey wrote and adapted.

“The Holcroft Covenant” (1985), one of his last films, was an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum best seller.

Mr. Plaschkes was born in Vienna on Sept. 13, 1929, and was among the Jewish children who escaped Nazi-occupied countries through the Kindertransport. He was later reunited with his parents and sister.

He studied history at Cambridge and received an education diploma at Oxford, according to an obituary in The Guardian. He then became a production assistant at Ealing Studios, working on “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962). In the 1980’s he was chief executive of the British Film and Television Producers Association.

NY Times
Owen Allred, head of the Apostolic United Brethren, one of Utah’s largest polygamous denominations, died on Monday at his home in Bluffdale, a suburb of Salt Lake City. He was 91.

His death was announced by his son Carl.

Mr. Allred’s group, thought to have about 6,000 members, is based in Bluffdale. They live collectively and say they adhere to the original revelations of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Polygamy was renounced by the Mormons in 1890, when Wilford Woodruff, the president of the church, said he had received a revelation from God saying that the time for polygamy was past. From then on, the church excommunicated members who supported the practice, including Mr. Allred, who was excommunicated more than 60 years ago.

NY Times
Marcello Viotti, a prominent Swiss-born conductor with a flourishing European career, died yesterday in a hospital in Munich. He was 50.

His brother, Silvio Viotti, announced his death. A spokesman for the Bavarian Radio said Mr. Viotti had a stroke last week after a rehearsal for a concert performance of Jules Massenet’s “Manon” with the Munich Radio Orchestra, where he had been chief conductor from 1998 until last fall. He had emergency surgery for a blood clot in the jugular vein, but remained in a coma from which he never awoke.

A regular guest at opera houses around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, where he conducted “Aida” last fall, Mr. Viotti was music director of La Fenice in Venice, where he was to have conducted “Parsifal” in March. He had resigned his post as chief conductor of the Munich Radio Orchestra in protest over budget cuts that threatened to eliminate the orchestra altogether, but he was honoring his conducting engagements with the group for the remainder of his contract, which ran through 2006.

The Independant
Peter Esmond Bernard Sayers, musician and singer: born Bath, Somerset 6 November 1942; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Cambridge 11 February 2005.

Not for want of trying, no English performers have become stars in American country music, but Pete Sayers got closer than most. He was an engaging performer, able to sing serious songs and indulge in comedy banter, as well as being a multi-talented musician.

He made several albums, of which the best known are Watermelon Summer (1976) and Bogalusa Gumbo (1979), which was produced by the Nashville songwriter John D. Loudermilk.

Sayers was born in Bath in 1942. His father taught music and his mother was a fine pianist. The musical humorist Gerard Hoffnung, a friend of his father, gave the young Sayers a small violin.

When Sayers was seven, the family moved to Newmarket, where he became a chorister and an adept at playing hymns on a harmonica. He trained as a piano repairer but wanted to be a professional musician. Sayers formed the Bluegrass Cut-Ups, possibly the UK’s first bluegrass band, and often played with the US singer Johnny Duncan and his Blue Grass Boys. In 1966 he hosted a country-music series on Tyne-Tees Television.

When he went to Nashville later that year for a holiday, he found employment as a warm-up artist on the Grand Ole Opry radio show. Sayers worked for the Opry for three years and often performed on the show itself. He also hosted a US breakfast TV programme and worked on tour with Kitty Wells and the bluegrass duo Flatt and Scruggs.
Pete Sayers memorabilia at eBay.com

From crash test dummies to an English born country-western artist and then on to a movie producer, a polygymist, a conductor, and a science fiction writer. Quite the trip.

Why do you think that Pete Sayers never made it in the American Country-Western market? It’s not for lack of trains or prisons in his home country certainly. Thinking of trains leads one to Utah (the Golden Spike of course) and thus to Mr. Allred and his group. Polygamy is a divisive matter certainly - just look at the spread of books on the subject. Jumping out of Utah, but sticking to the soul of this discourse we see that Jack Chalker died. His Well of Souls books are solid examples of the Science Fiction novel.

You know thinking about trains also leads to conducting and thus to Marcello Viotti. Much too soon did this promising conductor depart. You might be ahead of us here on the next jump as we go from conducting symphonies to conducting tests; specifically crash tests. Samuel Alderson helped to improve the safety of our vehicles with his invention of the crash test dummy. Not only that but his invention gave name to a fairly eclectic music group .

Ever get the feeling that today’s blog has been a lot of hopping around? A bit like ‘Hopscotch’ now isn’t it? Stay safe.