“‘I have never worked for Harvey Weinstein,’ Chaykin told the Toronto Star in 2007. ‘And now I think maybe I never will.‘” A Wolfe rests: Veteran Canadian character actor Maury Chaykin, 1949-2010. “‘He was one of our greatest actors,’ [Mark] McKinney said. ‘Maury’s an actor of unparalleled gifts. You cannot learn what he had in spades.’“
Category: Memoriam
West Virginia Granite (This Byrd has Flown.)
“Mr. Byrd…said he had no illusions that his oratory was going to change the outcome of the final vote. So why was he on the floor day after day? What was he accomplishing? ‘To me, that question misses the point, with all due respect to you for asking it,’ he said. ‘To me, the matter is there for a thousand years in the record. I stood for the Constitution. I stood for the institution. If it isn’t heard today, there’ll be some future member who will come through and will comb these tomes.‘”
Senator Robert Byrd, the longest-serving member of Congress in American history, 1917-2010. Known as a fierce defender of Senate prerogative and a legislator with a penchant for pork, Senator Byrd, we all know, held some indefensible positions in his day. But at least he got on the right side of history before his time came. Rest well, Senator.
Billy’s Last Ride.
The Guru, the Visionary, and the Matriarch.
“The opening of ‘Dog Day’ is about what Sonny lost, and the rest of the film is about how he lost it. This sequence is about the necessity of recognizing and appreciating the beauty of life itself. A better tribute to Dede Allen’s artistry is hard to imagine.” Groundbreaking film editor Dede Allen, 1923-2010.
“‘If the times aren’t ripe, you have to ripen the times,’ she liked to say. It was important, she said, to dress well. ‘I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves. Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down.'” Matriarch of the civil rights movement Dorothy Height, 1912-2010.
Granny Rests at Last.
“The problem with Granny D…is that she makes the rest of us look like such schlumps.” — Molly Ivins. R.I.P. campaign finance reform activist Doris “Granny D” Haddock, 1910-2010.
Farewell to the Disc-Man.
“‘I thought the name was a horror,’ he told The Press Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., in 2007. “Terrible.” (Before perfecting the Pluto Platter in 1955, Mr. Morrison had called earlier incarnations of his disc the Flyin’ Cake Pan, the Whirlo-Way and the Flyin-Saucer.)” And millions of dogs howled in lament: Walter Frederick Morrison, inventor of the Frisbee, 1920-2010. (By way of FmH and The Late Adopter.)
The Old School Dealmakers.
“[L]ong before Hollywood discovered the Texan, he cut a wide swath through the House, always playing the roguish ladies’ man and macho militarist…[His] frequent, much more sober-styled partner was Democratic Rep. John Murtha, the Pennsylvania powerhouse who chaired the defense subcommittee so important to CIA funding for the Afghan cause. And the fact that both have died now within days of each other punctuates the end of a major chapter for the House left behind.“
Charlie Wilson, 1933-2010, and John Murtha, 1932-2010.
The Activist, the Loner, and the Clairvoyant.
“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” — Howard Zinn, 1922-2010.
“It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.” — J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010. [The Onion mourns.]
“You’re not an actor if you’re just a person that fits into a cute costume. You’re a prop.” — Zelda Rubenstein, 1933-2010.
MLK 2010.
Last of the Kon-Tiki. | The Man Twice-Bombed.
“Twice he was captured and escaped, once by back-flipping over a snow bank and running off into the woods before his guards could use their weapons. A third time, surrounded by the Gestapo at a maternity hospital in Oslo where he had set up a transmitter in a chimney, he shot his way to freedom with a pistol.” Via a friend, Knut Haugland, WWII resistance fighter and last surviving member of the Kon-Tiki expedition, 1917-2010.
We may “play” Call of Duty nowadays, but this guy lived it. “He particularly objected to the word ‘heroes’ in the title. ‘I never use that word about myself or my friends,’ he told BBC4 Radio in 2003. “We just did a job.” Referring to the glider crashes and the killing of the survivors, he added: ‘Forty-one men were killed, and it could have been avoided. Because of the loss of life, you shouldn’t glorify the story.’“Update, and via several Twitterers: Also passing very recently, another unbelievable survivor of WWII: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 1916-2010. “On August 6, 1945, he was about to leave the city of Hiroshima, where he had been working, when the first bomb exploded, killing 140,000 people. Injured and reeling from the horrors around him, he fled to his home — Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west.“
Crazy. He’s like a real-life Pariah for the Atomic Age. “‘I think it is a miracle,’ he told The Times on the 60th anniversary of the bombings in 2005. ‘But having been granted this miracle it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world. For the past 60 years survivors have declared the horror of the atomic bomb, but I can see hardly any improvement in the situation.’“