Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Dr. Clarence Dennis, who performed the first open-heart surgery that included the use of a heart-lung machine, which he helped develop, has died. He was 96.

Dennis died July 11 of dementia at Lyngblomsten Care Center in St. Paul, Minn., said his wife, Mary Dennis.

The idea of a machine that could keep blood flowing to prevent damage while a patient’s heart was stopped to make repairs “seemed very enchanting,” Clarence Dennis said last year.

In April 1951, the idea became reality when Dennis operated on a 6-year-old girl. She died within hours, but the heart-lung machine had done its job, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, another pioneering surgeon who observed the operation at the University of Minnesota, once recalled.

A second operation two weeks after the first also was unsuccessful, because of a staff member’s mistake during surgery.

Dennis soon left the University of Minnesota for Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York, where he was chairman of the surgery department from 1951 to 1972 and earned a reputation as a masterful surgeon and teacher.

“He was really a Renaissance person. The heart was at that time the Holy Grail — no one thought anyone could operate on it,” said Dr. Michael Zenilman, now chairman of the Downstate surgery department. “Dr. Dennis and others had the nerve and audacity to go into that area.”

Dennis had begun researching the concept of a heart-lung machine in the late 1930s at the University of Minnesota, which was the birthplace of heart surgery and a hub of academic surgery in the 1940s and ’50s, Zenilman said.

On June 30, 1955, Dennis became the second doctor in the country to perform successful open-heart surgery — meaning the patient lived — with the aid of a mechanical pump oxygenator, or heart-lung machine. He had built the device in a machine shop.

LA Times
Arvo Ojala, a legendary Hollywood quick-draw expert and gun coach who appeared as the anonymous bad guy who loses the gun duel with James Arness’ Marshal Matt Dillon in the opening of the long-running weekly TV series “Gunsmoke,” has died. He was 85.

Ojala died of natural causes July 1 at his home in Gresham, Ore., his family said.

With an ability to cock his pistol, fire and reportedly hit his target in one-sixth of a second, Ojala was the go-to guy for learning the art of the fast-draw during the heyday of TV westerns in the 1950s and ’60s.

Ojala, a stuntman and bit player who turned his skill with a six-gun into a lucrative business, manufactured his own patented, metal-lined fast-draw holsters that were used by countless sagebrush heroes and quick-draw competitors.

Among those who benefited from Ojala’s quick-draw tutelage were Hugh O’Brian (”The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp”), James Garner (”Maverick”), Ty Hardin (”Bronco”), Dale Robertson (”Tales of Wells Fargo”) and Wayde Preston (”Colt .45″).

Ojala also served as the gun coach on films such as “The War Wagon,” “Silverado,” “Three Amigos” and “Back to the Future Part III.” Among his latter-day students were Kevin Kline, Michael J. Fox, Kevin Costner, Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

But it was his quick-draw duel with Arness’ Dillon on a Dodge City street — a fleeting appearance for which Ojala initially received $100 but which earned him thousands more in residuals over the years — that he achieved a degree of small-screen immortality.

Despite Dillon’s scripted victory over the black-hatted gunslinger in the opening, Ojala earned high praise from the show’s star.

“There’s no one faster with a gun,” Arness, who received fast-draw pointers from Ojala, said in a 1959 Times story.

Arvo Ojala was a quick-draw expert and Hollywood gun instructor. If you wake up one morning lacking in direction, then perhaps try the Fast Draw Resource Center web site. You can watch a few clips, get tips, and generally dig around to decide if you’ve got the talent. If you hurry you can make the South Dakota State Championship in Mitchell SD this August 27/28. Don’t forget to pay your respects at the Corn Palace.

BTW - Arvo’s last name seems apt for someone in the fast draw business. “Ojala” is of Spanish origin and derives from Arabic with the meaning of “Oh, Allah” or “If God Wills”. Somewhere we read that this Spanish/Arabic blending was all due to the Moors. No Moorish guns, but certainly some serious looking swords.

Go read the obit for Dr. Dennis and note this part: perform successful open-heart surgery — meaning the patient lived. Isn’t it nice to know exactly how success is defined? Follow that piece with the bit about him building his heart-lung machine in a local machine shop and you get a feel for the, dare we say it?, bleeding edge-ness of his work.

NY Times
Geraldine Fitzgerald, a feisty, gravel-voiced Dublin redhead who drew instant acclaim in her first Hollywood films, including a 1939 Oscar nomination for “Wuthering Heights,” before carving out a long, varied career in films, television, cabaret and theater, died on Sunday afternoon at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 91.

She had Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade and was essentially incapacitated in recent years, leading to a respiratory infection that finally killed her, said her daughter, Susan Scheftel, a clinical psychologist in New York.

Ms. Fitzgerald appeared on the New York stage and as a highly coveted character actress in dozens of Hollywood films, including “Watch on the Rhine” in 1943, “Ten North Frederick” in 1958, “The Pawnbroker” in 1964, “Harry and Tonto” in 1974 and “Arthur” in 1981. But she may have been best known in New York for what many critics considered one of the definitive Mary Tyrones, opposite Robert Ryan, in a 1971 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

Witty and intelligent, she was also notoriously combative and blamed herself for sabotaging her early Hollywood success by battling with studio executives over roles. “My mother was just way too feisty to be in bondage to the Warner Brothers,” Ms. Scheftel said.

Born in 1913, the daughter of a Dublin solicitor, Geraldine Fitzgerald was drawn into the legendary Gate Theater by her aunt, Shelagh Richards, one of its stars. Ms. Fitzgerald performed there alongside James Mason and Orson Welles. She married Edward Lindsay-Hogg, an Irish aristocrat, and after a stint at art school in England she moved to New York in 1938 to further her husband’s songwriting ambitions.

Money grew tight, and she noted that her old friend Welles was directing something called the Mercury Theater. She called and he hired her for a role in “Heartbreak House.”

Norman Lloyd, a longtime friend and founding member of the Mercury Theater, described the effect she had. “She was a staggeringly beautiful girl with the most delightful speech, a slight Irish tinge, not a thick brogue, and this glorious red hair,” he said.

Hal Wallis, a major Hollywood producer, saw her in Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” and signed her to a Warner Brothers contract. She was told to play best friend to the dying Bette Davis in “Dark Victory” (1939), and her performance persuaded Samuel Goldwyn to cast her as the tragic Isabella Linton in “Wuthering Heights.”

In the 1940’s she mingled with Hollywood’s intellectual elite, counting among her friends Laurence Olivier, Charlie Chaplin, Davis, Welles and the screenwriter Charles Lederer.

NY Times
Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded the United States forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, overseeing the vast troop buildup and the height of the fighting, died last night in a retirement home in Charleston, S.C., his son, James Ripley Westmoreland, announced. The general was 91.

Westy, as he became known while a West Point cadet, was driving and combative - in World War II, leading a fast-moving artillery battalion; in Vietnam, directing “search and destroy” missions meant to decimate the enemy; in retirement, suing CBS for a television documentary that he said had defamed him.

The libel suit, which he brought to trial in 1984 but dropped early in 1985, revived long-standing controversy about him. Over the years, he was widely criticized, inside and outside the armed forces, for his prime role in the conduct of the Vietnam War. One of his deputies in Vietnam, Gen. Bruce Palmer Jr., who rose to be vice chief of staff of the Army, later called the war “the first clear failure” in American military history.

But in his memoirs, General Westmoreland blamed the outcome on the South Vietnamese Army and on President Johnson’s refusal to broaden the war into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. The general contended that in Vietnam the American forces’ record of “achievements was remarkable: the mammoth logistical buildup, various tactical expedients and innovations, the advisory effort, civic action programs.”

“But perhaps most impressive of all,” he wrote, was “the accomplishment for the first time in military history of a true air mobility on the battlefield.”

Over the years, other highly placed officers and officials praised the logistical effort but argued that under General Westmoreland’s command, war-of-attrition tactics failed, and that emphasis on military operations carried out by American forces damaged the South Vietnamese Army psychologically.

A military historian and former Army major, Andrew F. Krepinevich, argued that the general had suffered from self-delusion in Vietnam. In a 1986 book, “The Army and Vietnam” (Johns Hopkins), the major said, “In focusing on the attrition of enemy forces rather than on defeating the enemy through denial of his access to the population,” General Westmoreland’s command “missed whatever opportunity it had to deal the insurgents a crippling blow.”

In 1990, the author Jessica Mitford asked the general at a newspaper industry convention in Washington whether he had suffered from “massive self-delusion.” Chin jutting, he dismissed her question as nonsense.

Critics also said that the priority given to fighting major Communist units in the field impeded efforts to regain control of villages, and that the mobility gained by the lavish use of aircraft was misused. Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, seven years after General Westmoreland was replaced as commander and two years after the last American combat troops were withdrawn.

Something about the hurrier we go. Do you feel that way too? Too many things bombarding you from directions that don’t even exist on your internal compass. And they are all important and all demand your immediate attention, neh? From Hey Jude to Sandra’s wedding to Karl’s Kapers to explosive chemists to summer time reunions to pleasant rides on your horse or bicycle and my Gawd the Yankees are in first.

We’ve a distraction for you to try if you’re feeling a tad batty. Zorbing. No, this has nothing to do with Greeks. This is vastly more self-abusive. Try that word once more: Zorbing. Now the next time you find yourself in the Antipodes you’ll have something to do other than count sheep.

Now since we wandered off and looked up ‘batty’ we got stuck awhile with all the other turns of phrase meaning crazy. ‘Daft’ and ‘loony’ have always been favorites likely due to heavy Python-ese exposure. ‘Bananas’ has a similar place in our ODDhearts due chiefly to Marxism. And were we even slightly British there would be no end of us spewing ‘crackers’.

Yet Another ODD Public Service - we’d be remiss if we didn’t give you a war cry for your Zorbing episodes: try shouting ‘non compos mentis’ as bounce down the lovely New Zealand countryside. Gaga.

LA Times
Joe Harnell, a Grammy Award-winning pianist, arranger and conductor, died Thursday of heart failure at Sherman Oaks Hospital in Sherman Oaks, according to his publicist. He was 80.

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Harnell began studying piano when he was 6 and started his professional career as a jazz pianist at 14. He graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in music.

He enlisted in the Army Air Forces during World War II, touring with the Glenn Miller Air Force band. After his discharge at the end of the war, he studied composition with Aaron Copland and worked as a music director or accompanist for a number of leading singers. Harnell worked with Peggy Lee in concerts and on several of her albums in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

He conducted the orchestra on her albums “Anything Goes: Cole Porter” and “Peggy Lee and the George Shearing Quintet,” and played piano on Lee’s “Things Are Swingin’ ” album. He also worked with Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey and Frank Sinatra.

In the early 1960s, Harnell took advantage of the bossa nova music craze and arranged “Fly Me To the Moon Bossa Nova,” which became a hit. The song — based on the Bart Howard-penned “Fly Me To the Moon,” which would later be a hit for Tony Bennett — won Harnell a Grammy Award in 1962 for best performance by an orchestra for dancing.

From 1967 to 1973, Harnell served as music director for Mike Douglas on his afternoon television talk and variety show.

Harnell moved to California and found work scoring for films and television shows, including “Santa Barbara,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Bionic Woman,” “Alien Nation” and “V.” He received three Emmy nominations for best dramatic score.

He recorded numerous albums under his own name, including “Bossa Nova Now” for Columbia and “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Hud and Other Movie Themes” for Kapp.

LA Times
Tom Rogers, a retired advertising copywriter whose beret- and sunglasses-wearing hipster tuna became an icon of pop culture, died June 24 in Charlottesville, Va., where he lived with his son’s family. The 87-year-old Rogers drowned while swimming alone in the family’s backyard pool.

Charlie the Tuna was the likably obtuse deep-sea striver who never lived up to the taste standards of Starkist Tuna. (”Sorry, Charlie. Starkist wants tuna that tastes good, not tuna with good taste.”)

The character was based on an acquaintance of Rogers who was a habitue of the beat scene in 1950s New York City, said his son, Lance Rogers. A beat musician and part-time actor who called himself Henry Nemo, the man personified one of Rogers’ favorite aphorisms: “The straightest distance between two points is an angle.”

“Everybody knows somebody like that, an appealing character who’s totally confident but totally wrong,” Lance Rogers said.

Rogers had a hand in creating other memorable ad mascots of the 1960s and ’70s, the cookie-baking Keebler elves and the finicky feline in the 9 Lives cat food ads, Morris the Cat. He didn’t originate the characters, his son said, but he infused them with distinctive personalities based on a lifetime of observing human nature.

Thomas Russell Rogers was born in Minneapolis. During Prohibition, he occasionally hung out at speak-easies, where he earned a little money cleaning floors and scurrying around town making deliveries for bootleggers, who presumed the police wouldn’t suspect a kid.
Starkist Charlie’s Lunch Kit, 4.5 oz
Can/Tuna Colander - The Tuna Press & Strainer

We’re changing out our usual Egad! and Egads! today for a more comic book approach with Gadzooks! Tis something like Egad! (note the root of Gad), but with a bit more of a hook (apparently). ODD words and phrases for $100 Alex - The answer is “True Fact”. Go figure please, but we decidedly heard an attorney use this lovely turn of phrase and it has been hardwired in our ODDheads ever since. Upon consideration we’ve decided it must be valid since the government has for years upon years been delivering upon us “false facts”.

BTW it is a true fact that you should avoid visiting to the Jeopardy web site. Certainly in this case the Jeu Parti name says it all. This site is one of those flash oriented nasties that grabs your browser and refuses to let go. Go ahead and try the escape pod BACK button - Ha! “Open the pod bay doors, Hal“. “I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave.” Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.

Since we’re on a rant n’ roll - web masters who effectively disable the browser BACK button should be shot - line them up with those clowns who program stop lights to be so incredibly stupid. Do not disable a basic and well understood component just because you want to force users to sit and take in the glory of your creation. You simply add to the confusion and aggravation exactly as left turn arrow lights that refuse to change to green at 2am.

We’d rant some more, but our lips are tired from reading everything our monkeys have typed to this point.