Category: In Memoriam

Obituaries and memorials

Zelig backing up first base

Douglas Martin closes the book on Greg Goossen, C and 1B for the Mets and Seattle Pilots. A bright prospect who never starred, nonetheless Goossen’s name is attached to many incidents of baseball history in the 1960s, and he provided fodder for Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.

Bouton told of the time the two were on opposing International League teams and Goossen was catching. The batter bunted to the pitcher, and Goossen yelled, “First base! First base!” Instead the pitcher threw to second and everybody was safe.

As a disgusted Goossen stalked back to the plate, Bouton shouted from the dugout, “Goose, he had to consider the source.”

The rich have their own photographers

Via wood s lot comes news of the passing last week of Milton Rogovin, social documentary photographer based in Buffalo, N.Y. Claire O’Neill has assembled a slideshow of some of Rogovin’s images of “the forgotten ones,” and links to a 2003 interview with Scott Simon. Once blacklisted as the “top Communist in Buffalo,” Rogovin’s archives are now with the Library of Congress.

Strange liberators

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at Riverside Church, New York, 4 April 1967:

A few years ago there was a shining moment… a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

* * *

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

To be free

A slightly belated tribute to Billy Taylor, who passed away this week after a long long career, as reported by A Blog Supreme. Several years ago, I attended a series of “jazz appreciation 101” talks by Dr. Taylor, given in Kennedy Center rehearsal space. He was a welcoming, generous teacher. One of the things I remember is his observation that you can learn a lot about jazz harmony just by mastering Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”

It’s magic

Robbins Barstow, Wethersfield, Connecticut’s prototype of the vlogger, has passed away. His 1956 Disneyland Dream, a home movie documentary of the family trip to Disneyland (by way of a 3M Scotch Tape contest), with narration added in 1995 (and more than a few corny jokes), is available through the Internet Archive. Disneyland Dream is one of the few amateur works named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.

Mr. Barstow’s survivors include the original cast of Disneyland Dream: his wife, the former Margaret Vanderbeek, whom he married in 1942; his sons, David and Dan; and his daughter, now known as Cedar.

A journalist

Let us mark the passing of Daniel Schorr: hired into Edward Murrow’s news team in the 1950s, named on the Nixon “enemies” list, barred from Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, dubbed a “son of a bitch” by CIA Director Richard Helms. Quite a life of accomplishments.

In the recent past, many of Schorr’s radio commentaries came off as nothing more than a recap of the week’s events. Perhaps that was his point.