Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Stevenson J. Palfi, a New Orleans musical documentarian best known for “Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together,” a 1982 look at three generations of Big Easy piano greats, has died. He was 53.

Palfi died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Dec. 14 at home, his family told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. Palfi, who left a suicide note and a will, had been severely depressed after Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters destroyed years of files, photographs and other possessions at his home in the Mid-City area.

“His death was a tragedy for everybody,” Jan Ramsey, editor and publisher of OffBeat Magazine, a New Orleans music publication, told The Times on Wednesday. “Stevenson was a valuable asset to the music community here in terms of preserving the culture.”

“Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together” focused on New Orleans keyboard luminaries Isidore “Tuts” Washington, Henry Roeland “Professor Longhair” Byrd and Allen Toussaint. Toussaint’s songwriting hits include “Working in the Coal Mine,” “Mother-in-Law” and “Southern Nights.”

The documentary, which was frequently shown on PBS and is still in distribution, provided insight into the way the three players influenced one another’s styles and showed the only time they ever rehearsed together for a joint concert.

Byrd died two days before the scheduled performance, and his jazz funeral, along with the Washington-Toussaint tribute concert, became part of the documentary.

“Piano Players Rarely Play Together,” Times-Picayune movie writer David Baron said, was “a last-chance document of one key thread in the Big Easy’s inimitable R&B tradition.”

Ramsey said, “In terms of a preservation piece, it’s remarkable, because there is very little [previous] footage of Professor Longhair or Tuts Washington, and when you get all three of them together in a studio, it’s unprecedented.”

Once described by his city’s newspaper as “the Big Easy’s big encyclopedia of music,” Palfi also documented other Crescent City musicians, such as singer Ernie K-Doe and Preservation Hall banjoist Manny Sayles.

Palfi co-produced “Played in the USA,” a 13-part series of video and film documentaries about American music for the Learning Channel. The 1991 series included “Papa John Creach: Setting the Record Straight,” Palfi’s documentary on the onetime fiddler with Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship.

As a filmmaker, Palfi once described himself as a slow, meticulous worker. At the time of his death, he was nearing completion on “Songwriter, Unknown,” a feature-length documentary on Toussaint. Funding for the project had been aided by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993.

“My friend Stevenson Palfi’s life’s work was immortalizing others, and, in so doing, he has immortalized himself,” Toussaint told the Times-Picayune this week. “His work will outlast all of us.”

Palfi’s love of music began while he was growing up in Chicago, where his earliest memories included listening constantly to Harry Belafonte calypso records and recordings of speeches by 1950s Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson.

“I listened to Stevenson because my parents named me after him,” he told The Times in 1991. “I’m not sure his speeches were especially musical, though there was a cadence to them.”

LA Times
George Gerbner, an educator and pioneer researcher into the influence of television violence on viewers’ perceptions of the world, has died. He was 86.

Gerbner, the former dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, died Saturday at his home in Philadelphia of unspecified causes.

Always interested in storytelling, the Hungarian-born Gerbner became concerned as television and motion pictures supplanted family members and friends in relaying tales both true and fictional.

By 2000, after more than three decades of study, Gerbner told National Public Radio that he had ceased to view television as a medium.

“I call it a cultural environment into which our children are born, and which tells all the stories,” he said. “You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”

He said average homes had a television set turned on at least seven hours a day, and that youngsters were learning to read by watching television commercials, developing a consumer mentality.

During his 25-year tenure as dean in the Penn communications school, which was funded by TV Guide magnate Walter Annenberg, Gerbner received numerous grants to study the portrayal of violence on television and in films and also to analyze how TV and films showcase particular professions and demographic groups.

In 1968, he founded and headed the Cultural Indicators Project to measure trends in television content and examine how television shapes Americans’ concept of society.

The project’s database has collected information on more than 3,000 television programs and 35,000 characters.

In the early 1990s, after leaving Penn, Gerbner founded a second organization, the Cultural Environment Movement, to work for greater diversity in media ownership, employment and representation.

Over 30 years of analysis, Gerbner said the level of violence shown on television remained relatively steady — six to eight incidents per hour, and in children’s programming up to 20 to 35 incidents per hour.

“The most general and prevalent association with television viewing,” he testified to a congressional subcommittee on communications in 1981, “is a heightened sense of living in a ‘mean world’ of violence and danger. Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures…. They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities. That is the deeper problem of violence-laden television.”

Through his research, Gerbner concluded that heavy television viewers (more than four hours daily) came to consider the world as rightly belonging to “the power and money elite” depicted on the small screen — the young, wealthy white males idealized in programming as heroic doctors and other professionals.

He warned that women, minorities and the elderly, from what they saw repeatedly on television, would come to accept inferior status and restricted opportunities as inevitable or even deserved.

NY Times
Richard L. Grimsdale, an electrical engineer who colleagues said built the first transistorized computer, died Dec. 6 at his home in Brighton, England. He was 76.

The cause was a heart infection, according to his wife, Shirley Roberts Grimsdale.

The transistor, which was invented in 1948 by researchers at Bell Laboratories was in its infancy when Mr. Grimsdale, who had received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Manchester University, began experimenting with the tiny switches, which were then built by hand.

He worked at the university, where he would later earn a Ph.D., as a research student and had heard about early tube-based computers. He did not have direct experience with the first machines until he was sent to Cambridge to take a summer school course in programming an early machine known as the EDSAC 1.

He returned to Manchester and was asked to write test programs by a professor. Frequently, he recalled in a memoir, he found errors, both in his programs and in the underlying logic of the early computers he was experimenting with.

He obtained samples of transistors in 1953 and began experimenting. These were difficult devices because of their spotty quality, and his wife said that he would occasionally complain about the value of systems that were made “during teatime.”

He was able to acquire a magnetic drum for storing data that had been made by Ferranti, an early computer maker. He ran the first program on his experimental computer in November 1953. The machine comprised 92 transistors. He noted that the transistor machine was “comparatively small,” and that he was able to build it on a post office rack, in contrast to the tube-based Mark I machine, which occupied a large room.

Later two engineers from Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical collaborated with Mr. Grimsdale on what is thought to have been the first commercial transistor computer, known as the MV950. A later version, the 1010, was one of the first machines to be used for what was to become data processing.

“You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.” ~~ George Gerbner.

Mr. Gerbner spent 25 years patiently explaining to us that television and motion pictures supplanted family members and friends in relaying tales both true and fictional. Try talking to a teenager and see if you agree with Mr. Gerbner. And no the V-Chip isn’t much of a help.

Television ratings are supposed to work with the V-Chip, but… And if you needed help with all this v-chip stuff, the Feds explain it all. And since we’re rating things - here is the other rating system that rules your life: the film rating system.

Leaving one small screen for another we delve into our other ODDguest today - Mr. Richard Grimsdale. Mr. Grimsdale is said to have spent his life tinkering with this and that. One of the ‘thats’ led him to create - according to his collegues - the first transistorized computer. What hath he wrought?!?

Ah, but never mind us - we’re off to have a cup of tea and tinker with more sex and violence. Cheerio!

LA Times
Eugene C. Robertson, 90, a geologist who helped build the Alaska Highway, died of heart disease Dec. 22 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md.

He was born in Tucumcari, N.M., and graduated from the University of Illinois in 1936. He was employed as a mining engineer with the Anaconda Copper Co. in Butte, Mont., until 1942, when he joined the Army Corps of Engineers.

He served as an officer with the 340th Regiment, one of 11,000 soldiers and 7,500 civilians assigned to help build the 1,520-mile Alaska-Canada Military Highway, or the “Alcan,” from Edmonton, Alberta, to Fairbanks, Alaska.

It was heavy, dirty work. Twenty-ton bulldozers, brought in to clear the way, sank when surface vegetation was removed and the exposed permafrost melted into black sludge. Where engineers had to, they laid down tree after tree to create a platform for the road itself. Begun in March 1942, the road was officially opened in November. It was improved the next year but wasn’t paved until 1960.

After nearly a year in the Far North, Robertson’s unit was stationed in the South Pacific for the rest of the war. He received a Bronze Star for his military service. His photographs of the Alaskan effort were shown on a recent PBS “American Experience” documentary, his family said.

After the war, Robertson earned a PhD in geology from Harvard University and went to the Washington, D.C., area to work at the Theoretical Geophysics Laboratory of the U.S. Geological Survey. He contributed numerous articles to scientific journals and edited a volume of scientific papers, “The Nature of the Solid Earth.” He also wrote “The Interior of the Earth” and “Geology of the Skagway B-3 and B-4 Quadrangles: Southeastern Alaska.”

LA Times
Michael Vale, the durable character actor who starred in more than 100 Dunkin’ Donuts commercials as the early-rising Fred the Baker and joked that he got paid in doughnuts, has died. He was 83.

Vale died Saturday at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City of complications from diabetes, said his son, Tracy Vale of Los Angeles.

The Brooklyn-born character actor was a veteran of a dozen Broadway shows, a handful of movies and about 1,000 commercials when he joined some 300 other actors for a Dunkin’ Donuts casting call in 1982.

About 40 of the contenders, including the short, folksy Vale, were called back to try their lines as the self-sacrificing Fred, who would rise each morning at 4 to help boost Dunkin’ Donuts into the world’s largest coffee and doughnut chain.

“The first time he said ‘Time to make the doughnuts,’ we were hysterical,” Ron Berger, partner and creative director of the company’s advertising agency Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer Euro RSCG, told the Boston Herald in 1997. “We knew the importance of the role. It was such that you want someone that people are going to like and definitely relate to. Michael was it.”

Vale became the personification of the burgeoning doughnut chain.

The phrase “time to make doughnuts,” which he uttered so memorably and so often for 15 years, was used as the title for a 2001 autobiography by Dunkin’ Donuts founder William Rosenberg.

Police officers, known for a love of doughnuts and coffee, were special fans — even pulling Vale over as he drove down the highway, just to get an autograph.

Vale’s long run as doughnut spokesman put him into advertising annals along with other durable fictional pitchmen such as Madge the manicurist for Palmolive dish detergent and the Maytag repair man.

He became such a marketing icon that when the company wanted a new advertising campaign, it first surveyed customers to determine the reaction to Fred’s possible departure. Customers said Fred could leave — if he were treated like an honored friend and employee.

So Dunkin’ Donuts devised an official “retirement” celebration for him, including a Boston parade and free doughnuts for an estimated 6 million customers on Sept. 22, 1997.

To condition his fans for his impending departure, Vale made a special series of commercials in which “Fred” discussed retirement with politician Bob Dole and athletes Mary Lou Retton, Sugar Ray Leonard and Larry Bird.

Like the celebrity he was, Vale made the rounds of morning talk shows and other news media, reflecting on his life as the early-rising baker.

Asked by Entertainment Weekly if he had ever actually made doughnuts, Vale quipped: “I’m on record as having made one. I didn’t add the sprinkles or frosting — I was too exhausted.”

He didn’t get up at 4 a.m. either, he confessed. It was more like 8 or 9.