Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Frank Gorshin, a prolific actor and impressionist whose career was long identified with a questionable character, the Riddler on television’s original “Batman,” but later highlighted by his Broadway impersonation of a more amiable one, George Burns, died on Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. He was 72. The cause was cancer complicated by emphysema and pneumonia, said Fred Wostbrock, his agent.

In 1966 Mr. Gorshin was a hard-working but hardly famous character actor and nightclub regular when he was chosen to play a bodysuited misanthrope with a taste for bad puns and mayhem. The role was Batman’s nemesis, the Riddler, and from the first episode of the series, “Hi Diddle Riddle,” Mr. Gorshin - mugging, cackling and constantly torturing poor Robin - frequently stole the show from his fellow villains and Adam West, who played the Caped Crusader.

The series was an instant hit for ABC, combining elements of 1960’s culture (hippies and go-go discos) with a winking comic-book style (”Bam!” and “Ka-Pow!”) that perfectly suited Mr. Gorshin’s expressive acting style. In about a dozen episodes and a 1966 feature film, the Riddler terrorized Gotham with an endless supply of bombs, booby traps and brainteasers, an acting gig that would turn Mr. Gorshin into a marquee name and earn him an Emmy nomination.

As memorable as the role was, it was just one of hundreds that Mr. Gorshin played over the years in an endless variety of films, plays and television shows. His attitude about acting was all business. “I just want to work - no matter what it is,” he said in a 2002 interview with The New York Times. “You got a job for me?”

See also Mr. Gorshin’s filmography

Frank Gorshin memorabilia at eBay.com
More movies with Frank Gorshin

“You should have let me in on this. We could have planned it, prepared it, pre-sold the movie rights!”
~~ the Riddler

Fare Well Frank Gorshin. You were much more than the Riddler of course with a successful career in film, but we do so recall fondly sitting around a warm TV watching your trickery.

Holy Seeing Double Batman! John Astin (aka ‘Gomez Addams’) played the Riddler for a short stint. Boos all around apparently however.

By the way, humans have long enjoyed the riddle. In that vein we thoughtfully provide for your benefit this link to a riddles site.

Holy Useless Trivia Batman! The Batmobile is a modified 1955 Lincoln Futura. We needed to get that in before too much else happened.

Holy Web Site Batman! We liked these Batman sites best:

Batman (1966),

Batman Tribute Site,

and be sure to visit Batman and Robin sayings to bone up on conversation aids.

Don’t bother with the Adam West site - the site suffers a lack of content and someone needs a basic lesson in web site useability.

Ok, ODDthought: do you suppose the creators of Back to the Future watched too much 1960s TV? Hmmm…the answer to this riddle lies right up there in today’s blog title.

AND Happy Birthday Pete Towsend and Happy Anniversary Tommy
!

“Say Goodnight, Gracie”

NY Times
Jose M. Lopez, an Army veteran who was awarded the Medal of Honor for killing more than 100 German soldiers in a single engagement in World War II, died here on Monday at the home of a daughter. He was 94. His death, which followed hospitalization for treatment of cancer, was announced by his family.

The action for which Mr. Lopez received Medal of Honor took place in the opening days of the Battle of the Bulge. On Dec. 17, 1944, Mr. Lopez was a sergeant serving with the Second Infantry Division in Belgium when a superior force of German infantry and armor advanced on his company’s position.

His Medal of Honor citation, issued in 1945, says that Mr. Lopez jumped into a shallow hole with his heavy machine gun and killed 10 German soldiers. In the face of enemy tank fire, the document says, he held his position and shot 25 more German infantrymen trying to get around his flank. He later took another position and continued firing to slow down enemy forces while members of his unit retreated.

The San Antonio Express-News reported that although his medal citation and most biographies list his birthplace as Mission, Tex., Mr. Lopez was actually born in Santiago Huitlan, Mexico. To join the merchant marine, the newspaper reported, he bought a false birth certificate in 1935.

The Express-News also reported that Mr. Lopez was a boxer in his youth, using the name Kid Mendoza. He held a variety of other jobs, the newspaper reported on its Web site, including picking cotton, before enlisting in the Army in 1942.

NY Times
Paul K. Keene, a pioneer of organic farming in the United States whose products were among the first commercially available organic foods in the country, died on April 23 at a nursing home in Mechanicsburg, Pa. He was 94. Mr. Keene’s family announced the death.

For more than half a century, Mr. Keene ran Walnut Acres Farm, near Penns Creek in central Pennsylvania, which produced and packaged an array of foods including peanut butter, granola and free-range chicken. Walnut Acres products were grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers and were stocked by health food stores around the country and sold worldwide through the company’s mail-order catalog.

Mr. Keene’s company was sold in 2000 and is no longer in business. A line of foods bearing the Walnut Acres Organic label is now manufactured by the Hain Celestial Group, a natural-foods conglomerate. When Mr. Keene started Walnut Acres in the mid-1940’s, the agricultural gospel called for using chemical fertilizers and insecticides, with their promise of cheaper, more efficient farming. Natural farming was viewed as eccentric, if not downright un-American
Fear Not to Sow Because of the Birds: Essays on Country Living and Natural Farming from Walnut Acres

NY Times
Elisabeth Fraser, a versatile character actress with a 40-year career on stage, screen and, most enduringly, television, died on May 5 at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Los Angeles. She was 85 and lived in Los Angeles. The cause was congestive heart failure, said her daughter Meg Mc Donald Seltzer.

One of her longer-lasting roles was that of Sgt. Joan Hogan, the long-suffering sidekick of the wisecracking Master Sgt. Ernest G. Bilko on the “Phil Silvers Show” in the 1950’s. Ms. Fraser was accidentally discovered by Alfred Lunt and Robert E. Sherman, running into them when she hastily exited from the wrong stage at an open casting call.

She had her Broadway debut in 1940 in Robert Sherwood’s “There Shall Be No Night,” and she also won a Hollywood studio contract. She appeared in six Broadway shows and had supporting roles in more than 30 movies.

Later film and television audiences may remember her as a perky blonde playing brassy dames. She appeared in episodes of shows including “Maude,” “Mannix,” “Perry Mason,” “Ben Casey,” “Dragnet,” “Four Star Playhouse” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

Our eminent gathering today brings us the WWII Medal of Honor winner Jose Lopez, the Walnut Acres founder and organic farmer Paul Keene and 40 year veteran character actress Elisabeth Fraser. What interesting company we keep, eh what?

Perhaps you have noticed that we occasionally try (emphasis on try) and find a common thread with our guests. Today would require weaving war with farming and acting. Quite the thread that. But let’s see what goes: Jose Lopez fought in WWII which occurred in the 1940s. Paul Keene began Walnut Acres in the mid-1940s and Elisabeth Fraser had her Broadway debut in the 1940s.

Ok, maybe that was too easy. Roll the Bones
, and seek a different path. Acting, organics and war. Battles, thespians and counter-culture. Is this too much of a stretch? Jose Lopez was the Medal of Honor winner because in battle he acted counter to the way most people would act when facing superior enemy numbers. Paul Keene found a path counter to the prevailing agriculture thinking of his time. And Elisabeth Fraser got her start via a way counter to most actors/actresses - she physically ran into those who discovered her rather than appearing before them on stage.

Shall we continue our reaching and stretching exercises? Au contraire it doth appear the bounds they have been overstepped; thus we think not. Ciao!

LA Times
June MacCloy, a statuesque actress whose glamorous looks typified the Golden Age of Hollywood and whose mannish voice set her apart, has died. She was 95. MacCloy died May 5 of natural causes in a nursing home in Sonoma, Calif., a town she long called home, said Peter Mintun, a family friend.

“She didn’t even volunteer to tell people she’d been in the movies. She was of the old frame of mind that movie people were looked down upon by certain people in society,” Mintun, a New York pianist and singer who befriended the actress a decade ago, told The Times.

By age 21, MacCloy had left New York and a role in a vaudeville production designed by a young Vincente Minnelli for a film career that ran for 10 years. Paramount Pictures signed her to appear in film shorts in 1930 and immediately lent her to United Artists, for which she made her first feature, “Reaching for the Moon,” with Douglas Fairbanks Sr.

Her singing in that film of Irving Berlin’s “When the Folks High Up Do the Mean Low Down,” following renditions by a young Bing Crosby — who had last billing — caused The Times to write, “With a little encouragement, she would have stolen the picture.”
Reaching for the Moon
Go West, Framed Mini Movie Print
His majesty the American: The cinema of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr

May 5th, 2003 - June MacCloy leaves the stage for the final time. June belonged to the Golden Age of Hollywood appearing in films with a western (Denver, CO) born actor you might have heard of named Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. as well as the Marx Brothers.

It was with the Marx Brothers that Ms. MacCloy gave her last on screen performance in the movie ‘Go West’. This movie brought us the classic Groucho pickup line (as used on Ms. MacCloy’s character Lulubelle): “Let’s go somewhere where we can be alone. Ah, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this couch.”

‘There were three men come from the West

Their fortunes for to try,

And these three made a solemn vow:

“John Barleycorn
must die.”‘

Mind your manners and sit up straight.