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by The Grim ~V~eeper
Greetings,
everyone...and welcome to this edition of
Celebrity Cemetary, the Grim ~V~eeper's Obituary Page.
This dark little corner of HOTP is intended
to cover all the famous deaths through the year, in
support of the Death Poll 2001 game. No player points in
January, but I smell death in the air...heh heh heh...
Here's the latest from the SICKTICKER at www.stiffs.com ...
Mary Bono goes under the knife to have abdominal mass
removed... Billy Graham misses Presidential inauguration
due to minor brain surgery... Steve Irwin receives 12
stiches from being bit by crocodile...Chuck Norris is
quitting Walker, Texas Ranger... Ted Williams underwent
heart surgery, and is slowly recovering... Neil Sedaka
leaves hospital after a sucessfull angioplasty... Ronald
Reagan recuperating from hip replacement... Princess
Margaret admitted for possible stroke... Bill Clinton had
cancerous growth removed from back... Dudley Moore going
through diapers like newborn quints... Candlelight vigil
being held...Kurt Cobain is still dead...
Before we review the lastest bunch of stiffs, yours
ghouly would like to give a bony-thumbs up to www.celebritymorgue.com . This is the real
deal, Neal. It's got actual photos of dead celebs. And is
NOT for the squeamish. Everyone from Abe Lincoln to
Marilyn Monroe to Tupac Shakur is represented, sometimes
in grisly living color. Go ahead ... take a peek. I DARE
you {s evillaff}
January's death toll didn't have any huge names, but
there were some bizarre coinkydinks. For example, Arena
Football, the red-headed step-child of pro sports, made
the obituary news with this:
Jan 15:
Dennis Fitzgerald, a former defensive coordinator of
the Albany Firebirds, died of cancer at age 64. He was
the third former assistant in the Arena Football League
to die of the disease within a month. Former Arizona
Rattlers line coach Tinker Ratliff, 51, died of
cancer Jan 1, and former Iowa Barnstormers coach George
Asleson, 66, also died of cancer Dec 20.
What many people don't realize is that there is an even
more horrid football league, which contains athletes who
can only hope to make the big city lights of Arena
football. No, it's not the XFL; its simply known as
Arena2. Not to be outdone, this franchise checked in with
its own casualty:
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Jan
20: Lineman Breon Thomas of the
Jacksonville Tomcats of Arena2 passed on due to
complications from diabetes. He was 23.
Speaking
of odd sports, check out the simlarities with these two
from the world of bullfighting:
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Jan 15: Spain's bullfighting community mourned the
death of one of its most respected bullfighters. Julio
Robles, a matador who was left crippled by a bull
a decade ago, left us at age 49.
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Jan 23: Francisco "Curro" Rivera, one of Mexico's
most famous bullfighters, died of a heart attack while
practicing his craft. He was also 49. Rivera, who retired
eight years ago, had planned to return to the ring this
year.
The
odd parallels continue from the world of medicine:
Jan
11: Dr. Dorothy M. Horstmann, 89, an
epidemiologist, virologist, polio pioneer, and the first
woman appointed as a professor at the Yale
School of Medicine, passed away while battling
Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Horstmann died just as the World
Health Organization was on the verge of eradicating
polio, and four days after the death of Dr. Joseph L.
Melnick of Houston, another polio pioneer with whom she
worked and wrote scholarly papers.
Jan
7: Dr. Joseph L. Melnick, a founder of
modern virology, a pioneer in polio research and a leader
in environmental science. Dr. Melnick died in Houston,
where he worked for more than 40 years at the Baylor
College of Medicine. He was 86. Conincidentally, the
cause was Alzheimer's disease.
Jan 18:
Charles Merieux, a French scientist who combined
his medical knowledge with industrial savvy to develop
one of the world's leading vaccine laboratory. Ill for
more than a year, Merieux died in Lyon, the city of his
birth. He was 94. In his 60-year career, Merieux worked
with some of the leading scientists in the world,
including Jonas Salk. Under Merieux's leadership, his
family firm mass produced immunizations used broadly in
the 1950s to fight polio.
L.A.
radio had some "dead air" in January...
Jan
20: Deirdre O'Donoghue, 53, longtime host
of the syndicated radio program "Breakfast With the
Beatles," a two-hour Sunday morning program devoted
to the legendary British band. O'Donoghue was found dead
in her Santa Monica, CA home by police officers who
responded to a report that she had missed a broadcast and
had not returned phone calls.
Jan 25:
Dick Whittinghill fulfilled his last daily sign-off
on Jan 23: "Now if you'll excuse me . . . I'm
walking out the door." Whittinghill died at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles two days
later. He was 87 and had suffered from a variety of
problems associated with old age. Whittinghill was the
top-rated and highest-paid disc jockey in Southern CA for
years. He earned his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
and was immortalized in the Hollywood Wax Museum.
...and
finally, the Maple Leaf flies at half-staff with these
casualities from the Great White North, eh?
Jan 14: Jim
Coleman, the dean of Canadian sports writers whose
newspaper career began 70 years ago, died at 89 in
Vancouver, B.C. A member of the Order of Canada, Coleman
was inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.
That year, he was named Canadian racing's Man of the
year.
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Jan
17: Veteran Canadian stage, film and television
actor Al
Waxman died during heart surgery at a Toronto
hospital. He was 65. He played a police chief in the
series "Cagney and Lacey," and was involved in
more than a thousand British productions as either an
actor or director in TV, film, radio and theater.
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Jan
13: Michael Cuccione played Jason "Q.T."
McKnight on the MTV show "2gether," which poked
fun at the boy band craze. Jason, 16, died in Vancouver,
BC, from complications from Hodgkin's disease.
And
here's the rest of this month's corpses, piled up in the
usual categories:
ACTORS:
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Jan 5: Character actress Nancy
Parsons, 58, in LaCrosse, WI, after a long illness.
Parsons was most memorable as arch-villainous Beulah
Balbricker of the three "Porky's" high school
romps.
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Jan 11: From lung cancer, Michael
Williams, 65, a noted character and Shakespearean
actor who performed frequently opposite his Oscar-winning
wife, Dame Judi Dench. He performed great bit parts in
British movies, such as Brian in Educating Rita.
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Jan 26: Sandy Baron, a veteran comedian and actor who
often played appealingly schlocky characters in films and
television, including a recurring role on TV's
"Seinfeld," died of emphysema at a Van Nuys
nursing home. He was 64.
MUSIC:
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Jan 10: Bryan Gregory, famous for his
guitar playing on early records by the rock band known as
the Cramps died at age 46, at the Anaheim, CA, Memorial
Hospital. He had suffered a heart attack and never fully
recovered. (Gregory is that handsome, tow-headed lad
with the crater face)
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Jan
4: Les Brown, whose Band of Renown scored a No.
1 hit with "Sentimental Journey" during
Americas big band era of the 1930s and 40s,
died of lung cancer. He was 88.
Jan 5: If ever a case
could be made that a rock band was at the center of a
political revolution, it could be made for Plastic People
of the Universe. The seminal Czech group, formed by bass
player, singer and
composer Milan Hlavsa in the late 1960s,
became a rallying symbol for leading dissidents nearly a
decade later. Hlavsa died of lung cancer in Prague, he
was only 49.
SPORTS:
 Dec 28: A plane chartered
by the Oklahoma State University men's basketball team to
take players and support staff home after a Colorado game
emitted a shrill noise before crashing in a fireball on
the plains east of Denver, killing all 10 people aboard.
Those lost were: Oklahoma State players Nate
Fleming and Dan Lawson; sports
information employee Will Hancock; director of
basketball operations Pat Noyes; trainer Brian
Luinstra; student manager Jared
Weiberg; broadcast engineer Kendall
Durfey; broadcaster Bill Teegins; pilot Denver
Mills; and co-pilot Bjorn Falistrom.
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Jan 22: Tommie Agee, the center fielder
who made two of the greatest catches in World Series
history to help the New York Mets win their unexpected
title in 1969, died a heart attack in New York. He was
58.
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Jan 5: Affirmed, the last horse to win the Triple
Crown, was euthanized at Jonabell Farm in Lexington, KY,
after months of leg problems. He was 26. The death of
Affirmed leaves Seattle Slew as the only living Triple
Crown winner.
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Dec 26: Al McGuire, the charismatic New Yorker who
coached Marquette to the 1977 national championship and
later brought his streetwise lingo to the broadcast
booth, died of a blood disorder at 72.
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Jan 9: Lowell Perry, a star football
player at Michigan in the 1950s who became the first
black coach in the NFL after World War II, died at age 66
in Southfield, MI. Perry died of complications from
cancer at Providence Hospital. After college Perry played
for the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1956, a hip injury ended
his career. The next year he was hired as a receivers
coach for the Steelers. Then in 1966, CBS hired him as
one of the first black broadcasters for NFL games.
BUSINESS:
Jan 9: William R. Hewlett, the surviving
member of the duo who all but invented Silicon Valley in
a Palo Alto garage 62 years ago, died Friday. He was 87.
Hewlett died quietly in his sleep at his Palo Alto home,
according to a statement from Hewlett-Packard Co. His
stock in the company he founded made Hewlett one of
America's wealthiest individuals, ranked last year by
Forbes magazine at No. 26, with an estimated net worth of
$9 billion. Technology followers all over the valley
remarked that Hewlett's death signified the passing of
the original generation of high-tech entrepreneurs. He
received the National Medal of Science, America's highest
scientific honor, in 1985.
Jan
17: Ted Mann, 84, who built the largest
independent movie theater chain in the US and changed the
name, amid protests, of Hollywoods famed
Graumans Chinese Theatre to Manns Chinese
Theatre. Mann died at his Los Angeles home of
complications from a stroke.
MISCELLANEOUS:
Jan 18: In Kinshasa, Congo,
Laurent
Kabila was welcomed as a liberator when he led an
epic uprising that swept away his country's long-ruling
dictator. But when he began to resemble the man he
ousted, he faced a war that tore Congo apart. Kabila, who
was 59, died after being wounded in a palace shooting
-nearly 40 years to the day after the execution of his
hero, Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.
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Jan 17: Poet Gregory Corso, one of the circle
of Beat poets that included Allen Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac, died in Robbinsdale, MN, following a battle with
prostate cancer. He was 70.
Jan
5: Martin Konigsberg, the father of Woody Allen passed
away at age 100. Daily News quoted the film maker as
saying that a family doctor had told him his father
"could pass a draft physical tomorrow."
Konigsberg, who turned 100 on Dec. 25, was a former
restaurant waiter and jewelry engraver.
And
finally, the death that pleases me the most, the party
responsible for stranding me in NYC for six
hours....vengence is mine MOO HOO HOO HAA HAA!
TWA, the first airline
to fly coast-to-coast, entered bankruptcy protection for
the third time in a decade. As the company headed into
bankruptcy with about $100 million in debts, it leaves
approximately 21,000 employees and about 200 aircraft
(and a Dome in Minnesota)
So,
farewell until next month,
DG~V~
Celebrity
Death Poll 2001 player's picks
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