Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Vincent Schiavelli, the droopy-eyed character actor who appeared in scores of movies, including “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Ghost,” died Monday at his home in Sicily. He was 57.

He died of lung cancer, said Salvatore Glorioso, mayor of Polizzi Generosa, the Sicilian village where Schiavelli lived.

Schiavelli, whose gloomy look made him perfect for creepy or eccentric roles, appeared in about 150 film and television productions, according to the Internet Movie Database.

In “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” he played the science teacher Mr. Vargas, who was married to the character portrayed by Lana Clarkson.

Schiavelli also appeared as Salieri’s valet in “Amadeus,” as “Cuckoo’s Nest” patient Frederickson, the subway ghost in “Ghost,” the organ grinder in “Batman Returns” and as Chester in “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” He was selected in 1997 by Vanity Fair as one of America’s best character actors.

Schiavelli, who was born and raised in New York, studied acting at New York University’s School of the Arts.

He also wrote three cookbooks and many articles about food for magazines and newspapers, possibly inheriting his love for cooking from his grandfather, who had been a cook for an Italian baron before moving to the United States.

His books include “Many Beautiful Things,” which was published in 2002 and is a compilation of recipes and anecdotes about his visits to Polizzi Generosa, the small hilltop town that was his grandparents’ birthplace.

Schiavelli also had worked in Italy, including directing a theater piece in Sicily in 2001 based on nine fables.

LA Times
George Bernau, a lawyer who turned his “what-if” musings into popular novels, beginning with the 1988 “Promises to Keep,” an imagined post-Dallas life for President Kennedy, has died. He was 60.

Bernau died Dec. 12 in Washington state of complications from a stroke suffered in October, his family said. He had moved to Washington from Santa Barbara in 1998 to be near his daughter, Erin.

The fledgling author made publishing history in 1987 when his derivative JFK manuscript was purchased by Warner Books for $750,000, a record advance for a first novel at that time.

“It really shakes out memories of growing up and having Kennedy die,” Bob Miller, Bernau’s editor at Warner Books told The Times about the manuscript then. ” … It gives you a deja vu of growing up in the ’60s …. It’s a collective fantasy to have Kennedy come back to life.”

The story about President John Trelawny Cassidy surviving being shot in a Dallas motorcade — and getting a second chance to keep the promises he made as a candidate — stemmed from two of Bernau’s personal experiences.

The first occurred in 1977 when he was severely injured in an automobile accident. As the 6-foot-6, thirtysomething lawyer lay in the emergency room wondering if the doctor who predicted he would die was right, he reevaluated his life. Given a second chance to keep his promises to himself, he abandoned law in 1981 and began to write.

The second key evening came in 1983, after Bernau had completed a novel called “High Wire Act,” which he was too embarrassed to publish. He was in Palm Desert, talking politics with a friend and wondering how their lives and the world might have been different had Kennedy survived the Nov. 22, 1963, fatal shooting.

Bernau closeted himself in his Solano Beach, Calif., home and for five years wrote in longhand in spiral notebooks. By 1988, the 25th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, he had published a 641-page success. The book, which received positive reviews and sold well, was soon optioned for a television miniseries.

Unlike Kennedy, Bernau’s President Cassidy survives three bullets. He opts not to seek reelection but puts his brother on the ticket as vice president to a Lyndon B. Johnson stand-in called Ransome Gardner.

After the brother dies in a helicopter tour of Southeast Asia, the former president challenges Gardner in the 1968 primaries, forcing him to withdraw. Also involved is the revelation of a failed plot to assassinate Fidel Castro and its consequence of putting a second gunman in Dallas.

“This is a story of conspiracy and corruption, of assassination, of regicide. For a generation of Americans, it is the story of their age,” wrote former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado in reviewing the book for The Times. “One believes, uncynically that Bernau was compelled to write this book. John Kennedy (with, it must be said, all his faults) was the Last American Hero.”

Bernau’s second book, “Candle in the Wind” published in 1990, dealt with another popular iconic figure, Marilyn Monroe.

That novel explored “what if” she had survived her 1962 drug overdose. Bernau’s movie star Marilyn Lane is spirited to a hospital, disappears, and her doctor and housekeeper are murdered. A Hollywood detective pursues the case to Baja California, shadowed by a hired assassin and both CIA and White House agents.

“Bernau … does a masterful job here in weaving fact, prevalent myths and artful fiction into a fast-paced thriller that races from Los Angeles to Baja, back to Los Angeles, and then to the East Coast — Washington and then a narrow wooden bridge over the chill waters of Triondak Bay near the Maryland coast,” wrote Don G. Campbell in reviewing the book for The Times.

The Librarian of Congress has added ‘Fast Times At Ridgemont High’ to the National Film Registry just in case you weren’t watching. Rocky Horror Picture Show and Baby Face were also entered along with Fast Times.

But it is Fast Times that gives us our intro today as Mr. Vargas - Vincent Schiavelli - has passed away apparently as another in the long line of lung cancer victims. What was not so well known about Mr. Schiavelli was that he authored several cook books. If you are a lover of Italian cooking then you owe yourself a visit to Mr. Schiavelli’s section in Cooking.

You might consider that the phrase ‘fast times’ is also appropriate to the writings of George Bernau, our second ODDguest today. Mr. Bernau came up with the idea of the ‘What If?’ novel - what if JFK had survived Dallas? And what if Marilyn had survived? This type of novel could be more than just tedious if done poorly, but according to many reviews Mr. Bernau’s writing is stellar.

LA Times
Patricia Anne Van Tighem, who was almost mauled to death by a grizzly 22 years ago but survived to write a harrowing memoir about the brutal assault and her struggle to cope with it, has died. She was 47.

The lasting psychological and physical effects of the attack she chronicled in “The Bear’s Embrace” led to Van Tighem’s suicide Dec. 14 in a hotel room in Kelowna, Canada, her family said.

“What we keep reflecting on is not why she died when she did but how she lasted this long,” said her brother, Kevin. “She’d had countless surgeries, chronic pain and major episodes of post-traumatic stress.”

In 1983, Van Tighem was hiking with her husband, Trevor Janz, in the Canadian Rockies near Montana when a grizzly protecting her cubs and an autumn meal pounced on Janz.

With staccato sentence fragments, Van Tighem recounted in her 2000 book the horror of watching the bear savage her husband: “Two more steps forward. I stop. A bear? From the side. Light brown. A hump. A dish-shaped face. A grizzly. Charging. And Trevor. Fast. He half turns away. The bear’s on him, its jaws closing around his thigh, bringing him down.”

When she climbed a tree to try to get away, the grizzly clambered after her. The bear swatted her down and began inflicting the damage from which Van Tighem would never recover.

“Crunch of my bones,” she wrote. “Slurps. Heavy animal breathing. Thick animal smell. No pain. So fast. Jaws around my head. Not aggressive. Just chewing, like a dog with a bone.”

Two hikers stumbled upon the couple and helped them to a hospital, where each spouse was desperate to find out how the other was doing.

“Trevor finally just … bellowed, ‘Trish, how are you?’ ” Van Tighem said in a 2003 documentary on Canadian television. “And apparently, I yelled back, ‘I’ve had better days.’ … The whole emergency staff had a good laugh at that one.”

Her facial injuries were extensive. The left side of her face was nearly destroyed, her cheekbone absent, her left eye blind, the eyelids gone. The back of her scalp was missing. “I feel sick to my stomach,” she wrote about looking in the hospital mirror. “What I see isn’t even me.”

Her husband’s injuries were not as disfiguring. The third-year medical student’s jaw and nose had been broken but his spirit was still intact.

“I was young and wild, and I thought … lightning never strikes anywhere in the same place twice. I’m virtually immortal now, and isn’t it great to be alive?” Janz, now a doctor, recalled in the documentary.

Surviving the bear attack was “the easy part,” Van Tighem said in the same interview. “The hard part is what came afterward.”

Van Tighem endured more than 30 surgeries, crippling pain, mental illness and unending emotional anguish.

She began writing her book as a form of therapy to help her deal with the trauma. To her “humble surprise,” her family said, it became a Canadian bestseller.

Every day, she wrote, the attack replayed in her mind. In a recurring nightmare, a bear performed surgery. She was haunted by the happiness she once knew.

The Times review in 2001 called it an important “reminder of what it means to be vulnerable in a world that has little patience for vulnerability.”

LA Times
Paul Williams, a Pacific Northwest climber who responded to the increasing popularity of mountain climbing in the 1950s by helping to establish a national network of mountain rescue volunteers, has died. He was 80.

Williams, a lawyer who also wrote a guide to organizing mountain rescue units, died from congestive heart failure at home Wednesday in Hansville, Wash., said his son Brian.

“He was a natural leader who knew the backcountry and the perils people would get into, and he knew how to survive them,” Brian Williams said.

After using his legal skills to help form Seattle Mountain Rescue and later lead it, Paul Williams turned to the national scene.

“He recognized they needed a parent organization so there was some uniformity to rescues across the country,” his son said.

In 1958, at a lodge at Mt. Hood, Ore., Williams drafted incorporation papers for what became the national Mountain Rescue Assn.; he also led that group. The largely volunteer organization oversees team training and seldom charges for its search-and-rescue operations, according to the group’s website.

Williams passed on his organizational knowledge in “Rescue Leadership,” a 1977 primer that rescue teams still use today, his son said.

“He’d answer any call, day or night,” Brian Williams said. “He’d just about walk out of court to participate in a rescue.”

Neighbors who had never planted an ice ax in rock-hard snow could tell that the father of eight belonged on an alpine ridge — he jogged in mountain climbing boots.

One of the most challenging missions Williams joined occurred in 1960, when four Seattle climbers fell near the summit of Alaska’s Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America. The most seriously injured were evacuated by helicopter from 17,200 feet, an unheard of feat at the time, according to Seattle Mountain Rescue. Teams from Oregon and Washington helped bring down the others, but a subsequent storm trapped more than 20 rescuers for 10 days.

In the early 1960s, Williams scaled Mt. McKinley, and he reached the summit of Mt. Rainier at least nine times. He had climbed extensively in Washington, Oregon and Canada, and had attempted peaks in Mexico and Argentina.

But during an expedition more than 20 years ago, Williams turned away from climbing.

“He looked up at this great mountain and realized he had a thin window of opportunity to climb it,” his son said. “He said, ‘At that moment, I made the decision between my family and my climbing career.’ “

Our ODDguests today both had ties to the Out of Doors: Patricia Anne Van Tighem and Paul Williams. Van Tighem survived, but in many ways did not survive, a grizzly attack in the Canadian Rockies. Williams was a climber in his youth who later helped establish a national network of mountain rescue volunteers.

Edward Abbey once said that “wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit”. And sometimes necessity can be quite dangerous. One might recall a quote from Bilbo at this point also: “Its a dangerous business going out your front door…”.

And yet, if you have hiked, or ridden, or otherwise got yourself out into the wild you know the feeling it brings. The feel on your skin, the smells, and the sense of wonder. And if you have had the opportunity to see bears wandering the wild with you, then you know first hand the respect they require, but also the awe they inspire. And, as in Van Tighem case, no one really expects while wandering out there to cross paths with a mother grizz and her cubs. The worst possible situation with no way out.

Read Van Tighem’s obit to get a feel for the book she wrote as an attempt to purge finally the mental trauma from the attack:

“Two more steps forward. I stop. A bear? From the side. Light brown. A hump. A dish-shaped face. A grizzly. Charging. And Trevor. Fast. He half turns away. The bear’s on him, its jaws closing around his thigh, bringing him down.”

The writing is exquisite, if that can be said about such a thing. Read her obit further and to feel her own attack. It is no wonder the book became a Canadian best seller. But it is also no wonder that she fought with the after effects for so long. We wish her peace.

Williams knew there were dangers out there and used his organizational skills to create a safety net for the rest of us. People out there are going to get into trouble, really you wouldn’t have the wild any less dangerous, you wouldn’t add padding or some insanity from OSHA now would you? No, rather you would have fellow Out Theres available if you get into trouble. You see these groups in the news now and again - they are tireless and devoted and mostly unsung.

So we say to gear yourself appropriately for your journeys Out There, read up not only on where you’re going, but what to expect and how to care for yourself and your companions. Take something with you who’s never been Out There and share the experience. Be prepared, but leave your fears at home, no need for those companions. Rather you might consider taking a wee dram of the Water of Life - we’ve always found that it makes for a good walk about partner.

When the dark wood fell before me
And all the paths were overgrown
When the priests of pride say there is no other way
I tilled the sorrows of stone

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me
Please remember me ~~ “Dante’s Prayer”, Loreena McKennitt