Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Dale “The Hawk” Velzy, the pioneering master shaper of surfboards who helped popularize the Hawaiian sport of surfing along the California coast, has died. He was 77. Velzy, a longtime smoker, died of lung cancer Thursday at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo.

“I can’t tell you strongly enough how he was the original surfer-cowboy-hot-rodder in Southern California,” said Allan Seymour, who had known Velzy since the eighth grade and now produces a vintage surfboard and memorabilia auction. “When we grew up, you couldn’t get a higher compliment than, ‘You’re a Dale Velzy guy.’ ”

A pioneering surfer off Manhattan and Hermosa beaches, Velzy was the first to put a brand on his boards, establishing him as surfing’s first commercial shaper or builder.

His most famous board, the Pig, hit the waves in 1955 and is now a collectible — what Velzy called “wall hangers,” priced at more than $3,000 each. Another Velzy specialty board was the Bump.

In 1960, when he ran five shops and two factories and sold up to 200 boards a week in the made-by-hand industry, Velzy was considered the world’s largest surfboard manufacturer.

Born in Hermosa Beach on Sept. 24, 1927, Velzy started hopping on older surfers’ boards as a tyke, and by age 8 had acquired his own surfboard, carved by his father, a lifeguard and dory builder. With the woodworking tools of his cabinetmaker grandfather, Velzy and his dad started shaping boards.

NY Times
Oscar Brown Jr., a singer, songwriter, playwright and actor known for his distinctive blend of show-business savvy and social consciousness, died on Sunday in a Chicago hospital. He was 78 and lived in Chicago. The cause was complications of a blood infection, his family said.

Mr. Brown was most often described as a jazz singer, and he initially achieved fame by putting lyrics to well-known jazz instrumentals like Miles Davis’s “All Blues” and Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue,” but efforts to categorize him usually failed. As a performer, he acted his songs more than he sang them; as a songwriter, he drew as much from gospel, the blues and folk music as he did from jazz. He preferred to call himself an entertainer, although even that broad term did not go far enough: he saw his art as a way to celebrate African-American life and attack racism, and it was not always easy to tell where the entertainer ended and the activist began.

His song “Brown Baby,” recorded by Mahalia Jackson and others, was both a lullaby for his infant son and an anthem of racial pride. Other songs, like “Signifying Monkey” and “The Snake,” took their story lines from black folklore. The album “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” for which Mr. Brown wrote lyrics to the drummer Max Roach’s music, was one of the first jazz works to address the civil rights movement.

His commitment to art as a tool for change was most evident in the numerous stage shows he wrote and directed in his native Chicago, which addressed social issues and often had poor black teenagers in their casts. The most famous of these shows, “Opportunity, Please Knock,” was created in 1967 with members of the Blackstone Rangers, a street gang. His most recent production was a 2002 revival of “Great Nitty Gritty,” a show about gang violence that he had first staged 20 years earlier with young residents of the Cabrini Green housing project.

Oscar Brown Jr. was born in Chicago on Oct. 10, 1926. His performing career began early: he acted in radio dramas as a teenager and was the host of a local radio program called “Negro Newsfront” while still in his 20’s. But he did not become actively involved in music until after he had worked briefly for his father’s real estate business, run unsuccessfully for public office twice, and served a two-year Army hitch.

We discovered this floating in our ODDpool. Twas dropped into waters upstream by RioGrandeMud yesterday.

“Fair spring evening, in the Garden of stone

Walked my fair daughter and I all alone.

We walked and I played, that grace so amazing

Two tenors, a base and chanter ablazing.

The grass wet and dark green, the sky give to night.

Steping amoung those who dared and gave fight.

Graves fresh and long gone, all generations.

A small prayer for peace, is my veneration.”

We are ODDly slow this morning - leftovers from a long march we took yesterday no doubt. You will find Dale Velzy in our list today - the Endless Summer man arrives just after the so-called start of the summer season. Apparently Dale was not the best of businessmen, but his creations were legendary. We also have Chicagoan Oscar Brown, Jr who was well respected around his home town for his music and stage work and well-known in Broadway circles too.

You might check the International Surfing Museum site for a bit of history. And Wikipedia has this to say about surfing in general.

We ODDfellows have had our hearts broken twice in the last 24 hours. First dear Paris plans to marry herself. Or did we read that wrong? Paris squared? Paris by the dozen? A Paris Push-me Pull-you? (Sorry Dr. Doolittle). And the other heart break? Equally harsh. Seems the Royalty of British music has decreed that the Spice Girls music does not fit with the seriousness of the Live 8 political message about poverty. Music from Sir Paul, U2, Sting, Outkast, Destiny’s Child, Linkin Park and others apparently is fit for poverty. The girls we read were “gutted” by the decision as they had hoped to make a bit of a comeback. Sigh.

Girl Power isn’t what it used to be.

LA Times
In the style of a war correspondent, Marine Corps Reserve Maj. Ricardo A. Crocker sent regular dispatches to his colleagues at the Santa Monica Police Department, e-mails and photographs of life on the battlefield in Iraq.

“Two Marines killed, several wounded,” he wrote Aug. 21. “I was hesitant to write about this, however, it’s the reality of this place. Everyone in the battalion is getting through this.”

In the style of true friends, Santa Monica officers e-mailed encouraging messages, sent care packages to Crocker’s division and kept a spot for him in the station where he worked: A life-size cutout photograph of Crocker in his combat gear stands in the detective squad bureau.

“It was like he was still here,” Police Chief James T. Butts Jr. said Saturday. “We’d see his image every day. We’d read the e-mails.”

On Thursday morning, Crocker, 39, a nearly 10-year veteran of the Santa Monica Police Department, was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Iraq’s Al Anbar province — a vast desert region that stretches west from the cities of Fallouja and Ramadi to the Syrian border. It is now the epicenter of the nation’s insurgency.

To read more, please click on name.

“The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country and during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.”
Major General Jonathan A. Logan. (General Logan shared the podium with Abraham Lincoln at the Gettysburg Address, and is probably somewhere in this photo taken at the address.)

“The strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves,” led to the alternative name, “Decoration Day.”

In 1971,President Richard Nixon declared Memorial Day a federal holiday on the last Monday in May.

On the Friday before each Memorial Day, soldiers of the “Old Guard”
Third U.S. Infantry place over two hundred thousand flags on each of the graves of soldiers buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

A special thanks to the veterans of World War II.

It is estimated that 1,800
American veterans of WW II die each day.

Chicago Tribune
Legendary restaurateur Arnold “Arnie” Morton was a man of a million ideas, some practical, some whimsical and some that changed the face of Chicago’s dining and nightlife scene.

Morton, 83, perhaps best-known for Arnie’s, the swank nightspot that carried his first name, and Morton’s, the steakhouses that still bear his last, died Saturday, May 28, at Whitehall North care facility in Deerfield, family members said. He had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.

“He was an innovative son of a gun who had the warmest personality of anybody that you could meet,” said former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), a one-time regular at Morton’s restaurants in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

The notions that came into his head included the Playboy Club, which he launched in 1960 with Hugh Hefner and Victor Lownes, and Taste of Chicago, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in July…

Morton spared no expense with the restaurant and club, spending a small fortune to get everything just right.

“He took decor to a new level,” said fellow Chicago dining legend Rich Melman of the Lettuce Entertain You restaurants. “The place he opened up, it was magnificent.

“All these people now, they talk about these great architects who are doing restaurants–he was one of the first to do that stuff,” Melman said. “He built this place and it was hot. And Arnie was in his glory. It was fun to go there because Arnie ran the place.”

Ruth’s Chris Rides Hurricane of Success

It’s the Memorial Day weekend, and the air is choked grey with smoke from thousands and thousands of smoldering backyard barbeques, and the permeating stink of charred flesh. (We ODDFellows are certainly not beyond our own form of purple prose
.) How fitting that Arnie Morton, master restaurateur and originator of “Morton’s”
has passed on. We trust he is not in a certain place perpetually barbequing, but rather at a fine table, pondering the dessert
menu.

Time for the weekly recap:

LUDMILLA N. SHAPIRO (91). Nimble fingered collector of Soviet-era political porcelain (try saying that three times.) Cause of death not specified. SMERSH
?
EDDIE ALBERT (99): Noted actor, resident of Green Acres, and visitor to Hooterville
. No doubt missed by his pet pig “Arnold.”
Pneumonia and Alzheimer’s.
VIVIAN L. DISTIN (77): First wife of Johnny Cash and inspiration for “I walk the line.” (He didn’t–it was Johnny’s amphetamine
era.) Died following surgery for lung cancer.
KEIITI AKI (75): Seismologist. Killed by gravity (a fall caused brain hemorrhage.)
RUTH LAREDO (67): Pianist who gave commentary on what she played. We once slept with a woman that did the same thing. At first it was a tad erotic, but quickly became tedious.
Cancer.
ISMAIL MERCHANT (68): Producer of movies, including “Room with a View.” Complications of abdominal surgery.
THURL RAVENSCROFT (91): Voice actor, best known for Tony the Tiger is Deeeaaaad! Cause was prostate cancer. When you visit The Mouse
, you will hear his voice in Pirates of the Caribbean, Splash Mountain, and the Haunted Mansion (spooky, huh?).
FRANK SEARLE (84): Loch Ness monster hunter. Cause of death unspecified. Wet footprints found at site of death being followed by Scotland Yard
.
HOLLYWOOD DUN IT (22): Famous reining horse. ODD does not condone nor does it practice speciesism
: we have been known to eat anything
.
HOWARD MORRIS (85): Actor, director, and voice-over artist. Produced voices of Qantas Koala bear, Atom Ant, and Gerald McBoing-Boing. Heart disease.
STEPHEN ELLIOT (85): Actor who played Dudley Moore’s evil millionaire father in “Arthur.” Congestive heart failure.

It was not a good week for mathematicians who helped create linear programming.
GEORGE B. DANTZIG (90) died of diabetes and heart disease.
LEONARD KHACHIYAN (52) died of a heart attack.

ELLIS PAGE (81): Widely published educational psychologist who also produced a computer program to grade essays. Pneumonia.

Off to fire up the ODDcharcoal broiler. We find a 1:2 mixture of gasoline to diesel fuel works quite nicely. It does leave a slight after-taste of hydrocarbons and a bouquet best described as “bus stop.”