The Crane Pool Forum

Benjamin Grimm wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 4:43 pm I'm not sure that I ever really watched Baretta, but I do remember "Don't go to bed with no price on your head. Don't do it!"

Those were part of the lyrics from the show's theme song, 'Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow'

Didn't he have a parrot? I wonder if the parrot is still alive?

I believe it was a Cockatoo (named Fred IIRC) but close enough. Not sure of Fred's where-abouts these days. Someone should scan Twitter to see if anyone claiming to be Fred weighs in on Blake's death.

Edgy MD wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 4:38 pm He also made for an interestingly weird guest on Johnny Carson from his Baretta days and well beyond, regaling Johnny's audience with his Hollywood tales delivered wholeheartedly with out-of-date Rat Pack-y swinger slang, ending each of story with an emphatic Mickey Spillane-ish New Jersey-inflected topper like "And that's the name of that tune!"

Yeah, during a story about his less than ideal childhood (he claimed sexual abuse from both parents) on a Carson appearance he blurted out that 'For a time I didn't know whether I was a boy or a girl'
in an era when few uttered that privately much less publicly. Sometimes it seemed tough to tell where Barreta left off and where Blake began (or vice versa) including those speech patterns. But, even
if it was hard to tell at times what was truth vs exaggeration, he did lead a wild early life: teenage runaway, car stealer, drug dealer, drug addict, etc. and wasn't shy about hiding it. Then adding in the
murder charge on the cusp of turning 70 and you realize that streak never really ended.

He reminded me of I guy I dated and done me wrong but RIP. I enjoyed his show

Jerry Samuels. The name might not ring a bell, but he wrote and recorded one of the weirdest top 40 hits of the 60. It was one of the few 45s I actually bought.

Yes, he was Napoleon XIV.

R.I.P.

Bud Grant, if not on the Mount Rushmore of football coaches then with a face carved from granite, 95.

He will, I assume, be buried in the snow wearing a short sleeve shirt.

RealityChuck wrote: ↑Sat Mar 11, 2023 11:13 am Jerry Samuels. The name might not ring a bell, but he wrote and recorded one of the weirdest top 40 hits of the 60. It was one of the few 45s I actually bought.

Yes, he was Napoleon XIV.

R.I.P.

My friend had that and the B side as I recall was the song played backwards

I thought it was Jerry Lewis

With Robert "Mickey" Blake's passing, it looks like the last surviving member of the Little Rascals company is Sidney "Woim" Kibrick, toady suckup to neighborhood bully Tommy "Butch" Bond.



Come collect your $$ if you had Our Gang outliving Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Pat Schroeder, high-profile Congresswoman from Colorado, 82.

https://apnews.com/article/pat-schroede ... 7bd364b6b9

Cried when she announced that she wasn't going to run for president, and the general reaction was, "She can't ever be president! She CRIED!"

Bobby Caldwell, who gave us “What You Won’t Do For Love,” 71.

https://pitchfork.com/news/r-and-b-sing ... ies-at-71/

Drummer Jim Gordon

https://variety.com/2023/music/news/jim ... 235555775/

Gordon was a major sessions drummer in LA in the 60s and 70s and was a member of Frank Zappa's Band, Traffic, Derek and the Dominoes, where he co-wrote "Layla."

He lived a troubled life, though and had schizophrenia. He murdered his mother, believing she was one of the voices in the head that tormented her. He was sentenced to life imprisonment (he was not allowed to make an insanity defense). He was one of the richest prisoners in America from royalties from "Layla."

A sad life. R.I.P.

Rita Coolidge has long made a strong argument (as other have) that the section that made Gordon a co-writer on Layla — the outro melody on piano — was hers, from a song she and Gordon had co-written.

I don't know why she didn't take the case to court — or maybe she did — but I guess a three-headed monster like Gordon, Clapton, and Robert Stigwood was just too much to face.

Lance Reddick, who evolved from bureaucratic cog to stick-it-to-the-brass guy as Lt. Daniels from "The Wire", 60.

So sad , The Wire , Bosch and so many more

It would seem that the cast of The Wire has produced a disproportionately large necrology.

Just learned today of the death a week ago of Richard Douglas 'Dick' Fosbury - 76
Talk about a guy who revolutionized if not a sport then at least an event within a sport.

Looking for a way to improve his high jumping results as an Oregon teenager, his experiments gradually morphed into a backwards version of the face-down 'straddle' which was then the
sport standard. Coaches and other track folks were dismissive but his rapidly improving results his over-backwards method of what came to be known as the 'Fosbury Flop' started to
change minds and eventually led to an NCAA championship (Oregon State - Go Ducks!) then a berth on the 1968 Olympic team where he'd win the gold medal at the Mexico City games
while also setting an American record [7' 4-1/4"]. By the next Olympics most jumpers were using his technique and after that virtually everyone.

Frayed Knot wrote: ↑Sun Mar 19, 2023 8:58 pm (Oregon State - Go Ducks!)

The University of Oregon teams are the ducks. (The Quack Attack)
The mascot for Oregon State is the beaver, (Bennie Beaver) like C.C.N.Y.

Anyhow, RIP

Later

Jerry Green, Detroit News football writer who covered Super Bowls I through LVI before deciding this year that if 56 was good enough for DiMaggio, it was good enough for him, 94.

https://www.si.com/nfl/2023/03/26/detro ... dies-at-94

Mark Russell, long a PBS staple as the guy at the piano poking fun at pols, 90.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituari ... nist-dead/

Joins Skip Stephenson and Fred Willard in the Real People afterlife.

G-Fafif wrote: ↑Thu Mar 30, 2023 7:12 pm Mark Russell, long a PBS staple as the guy at the piano poking fun at pols, 90.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituari ... nist-dead/

It's weird, for some reason I was thinking of him earlier today and I wondered if he was still around, only to find that he passed yesterday. I wonder how many of his PBS specials would hold up today (assuming I can even remember the news items they were based on).

One of the great film archivists, Rick Scheckman, 67, also known as Shecky if you’re a David Letterman aficionado. (A friend of the family as well.) Library of Congress offers a tribute:

https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2023 ... -congress/