The Wall

People Who Died -- May, 2026

This is a great time of the year. We have relative warmth, longer days, and generally my baseball team is still in the hunt. Not so this year as I am pretty much about to give up on any run for my Mets. Instead, I will watch each game in isolation. That said, the Knicks are energizing the town even though I believe the basketball and Hockey seasons (post-seasons actually, because the regular seasons don’t mean much) are a tad long and drawn out. That said, it has been a great ride so far and perhaps unlike other fans, I have been grateful for it, even if it ends here. If they take it all that will be great, but the climb from here will be much steeper. This is a great team, however, with players all New Yorkers can be proud of, regardless of the ultimate outcome. Last month I attributed the vocals on “Gimmie Some Lovin’” to Dave Mason. Pat Rocco correctly pointed out that it was Steve Winwood’s vocals that are on the recording. Duly noted. On to this month where I will undoubtedly take some liberties with the truth, but hey, that’s what makes good stories. Happy to be corrected.

He won the Americas Cup, one of sailing’s most prestigious honors. He managed the Atlanta Braves. He owned the Atlanta Braves. He started CNN and the 24-hour news cycle which many would argue has gotten us where we are today politically, for better or worse. He was the fifth largest private landowner in the United State, and his Ted’s Montana Grille, makes a pretty good plate of bison short ribs. We lost a true maverick who did what he believed in and, although he made billions, did it for the right reasons and not for the bottom line. It just turned out when he was right, the bottom line ballooned. Say what you will about him but Ted Turner, who died this month at 87, was one of a kind and although I didn’t always share his belief system, and have little but disdain for his baseball team of choice, I worship his sense of doing what he believed in and doing it as hard as he could. Turner’s father owned a billboard company and committed suicide when Turner was in his 20’s. He was a tough taskmaster, and his committing suicide went against everything he had taught his son. Ted stepped into the business and dealt with its debt and built it into a juggernaut, eventually buying a small UHF television station and starting the Turner empire. He was a risk-taker in everything that he did. If he believed he could get an advantage by taking a risk, he calculatedly took it and lived with the consequences. He once rammed his wife’s boat in a race (she later became his ex-wife) thinking he could get an advantage. He ran in all the best circles but was a regular guy. When he won the Americas cup race, rather than attend all the after-race festivities, he ran off with his sailing companions and got drunk in the streets of Newport. Time magazine wrote that during the elimination rounds of the Americas Cup, “he flirted with every girl in sight, crawled pubs with his crew, got tossed out of chic clubs and restaurants for boozy behavior and turned Newport’s blue bloods, absolutely purple.” My kind of guy. When his Atlanta Braves were not doing well, he put the manager on hiatus and began managing the team himself. He lost his first game and Major League Baseball, citing a clause in the agreement that forbade managers from having an ownership interest in the team, banished him from the dugout. When he started CNN, he lived in the building where it broadcast and was often walking around the set at odd hours in his bathrobe. Perhaps because he was sent to boarding school at a young age, he had a love of family and except for one, I believe, had good relationships with his ex-wives.

He attended Brown University but was bounced out when he was caught in bed with a woman in his dorm room. Today that might (or should) get him a Phi Beta Kappa key. When his father ended his life, all his associates advised Turner to sell the company, but he went against their advice, which became something he often did. He flung the company further into debt by purchasing an ailing Atlanta Television station. With little programming, Turner decided to buy the Atlanta Braves, which he picked up for $500,000 down, with an $8 million note payable over ten years. He used the Braves games to provide programming at a fraction of the cost putting on sitcoms would have required. He also purchased the Atlanta Hawks; the team Grady O’Malley once played for. Turner was a cable maverick and through that vehicle, Braves games were broadcast across the country making them the first America’s team. Turner, during this period, was known for philandering, drinking, verbal outbursts, and physical altercations. Thus, when he would leave for months to pursue his sailing exploits, those who worked around him were undoubtedly relieved. He kept the pressure to succeed on them, however. He bought more stations and started Turner classic films. His colorization of many film classics riled purists.

Yes, three paragraphs. Turner once said that by the time he got home from work, the evening news shows were over, and he wanted to provide people with news whenever they wanted. He started CNN, the cable news network. Most people mocked him for it, calling the network the chicken news network. However, when the Persian Gulf War occurred, CNN made it the first televised war. I can recall Bernard Shaw, Wolf Blitzer (he must be 100 by now but still on the air), and Peter Arnett broadcasting the war. President George Bush once said that he learned more from watching CNN than he did from his CIA briefings. I was no President, but I used to have to wait forever while my top-secret credentials were checked for briefings where all I learned was what I have seen on CNN two weeks before. SCI clearance is overblown. I bemoan what cable news has done to this Country, but Turner started out with only the best of intentions. Turner was also an avid hunter and environmentalist. He began purchasing land in the West and at his death owned huge ranches in several states. He curated large herds of bison and opened restaurants that served what he culled from the herds. I love Ted’s Montana Grilles. Oh, and did I mention he married Jane Fonda? They were not on the same page politically as you might imagine, and both were dug in and outspoken firebrands. I can’t imagine what their evenings were like. Ted taught Jane to do the tomahawk chop. He was wildly philanthropic, donating billions of dollars to the United Nations and environmental causes. When the Olympics were getting overly politicized, he started the Goodwill Games. He essentially did it all. Incredible businessman, sailor, environmentalist, lover of sports and women, visionary, and philanthropist. They simply don’t make them like Ted Turner anymore and that makes me sad. Although in many ways he was the anti-Jimmy Stewart, what a wonderful life.

I fully admit that my Mets suck. They have sucked for many years, with the occasional gem mixed in. On the field, they are not a team I can depend upon. Thankfully, their announcers, whether on television or the radio, are as good as it gets. World class. The Yankees, on the other hand, are a perennial playoff team, much to my chagrin. Their announcers, however, are a different story. Given what this blog is about, I will leave it at that and not get into specifics. That said, perhaps because they are the Yankees, or perhaps because of personal zaniness, a guy like John Sterling, who died this month at 89, deserves some ink here. Truth be told, he wasn’t my type, but hey, I have put him second behind Ted Turner, so I am giving him respect. I was put off by his home run calls and especially his game ending Yankees win death scream. Perhaps were he calling that for my team I would think differently but I am more of the Vince Scully school and prefer “put it in the books.” I will give him his due, however. Yankees fans loved his interesting, if not peculiar, home run calls. I did like the “it is high… It is far… it is gone part of his home run call but could have done without what followed. Things like “Giancarlo, non si puo de stopparo,” or “Bernie goes boom... Bern baby Bern,” or “it’s and A-bomb from A-Rod.” Okay, I’m breaking out in hives. Sterling was self-deprecating and made fun of himself. He took baseball seriously but was light-hearted. Sterling, born John Sloss, attended a few colleges, never earning a degree, but went into broadcasting when he was 19. He has a great voice and for a time was a rock n’ roll DJ. He did a lot of talk shows. He broadcast Nets games, and Islander hockey games. He broadcast for the Baltimore bullets (bad name in today’s times so they became the Washington Wizards). He went to Atlanta and was the voice of the Braves and the Hawks. But it was 1989 when he came to the Yankees where he broadcast with several sidekicks until Suzyn Waldman took the seat next to him, and they became the radio voices of the Yankees. Sterling has been the longest running Yankees announcer, and they have had some long-running announcers, such as Mel Allen, Red barber and Phil Rizzuto. Sterling broadcast Yankees games for more than 35 years – 5,420 regular season games, with 5,060 of them consecutively called from 1989 to 2019, making him almost the Cal Ripken of broadcasters. I think he is. The Toronto Bluejays broadcaster Tom Cheek (now deceased himself), broadcast 4,806 consecutive games which includes 61 playoff games. Thus, if you are looking at consecutive games, Cheek wins. If you look at consecutive regular season games, Sterling wins. Because it is not his fault he didn’t get to do post season games, I give it to Sterling. He was twice nominated for the Ford Frick award by the Baseball Hall of Fame; he has not been elected. Even given how I think about him, he should be. “That’s baseball Suzyn.”

As a Mets fan, there are a lot of teams to dislike because so many of them have beaten up on us over the years. The one team that has probably done more damage than others is the Atlanta Braves. With their manager, Bobby Cox, who died this month at 84, they dashed Mets fans’ dreams more than once. I mean one of their better hitters, Chipper Jones, named his daughter Shea after the stadium where he had so much good fortune. Cox started in the Los Angeles Dodgers minor league system and played his only two years in the bigs with the Yankees. He became the Yankees first base coach under Billy Martin and then went on to skipper the Braves where he managed from 1978 to 1981. He then managed the Toronto Blue Jays before returning to be the general manager in Atlanta. He then moved over to manager in 1990 and stayed in that position until his retirement in 2010. As a manager, he earned 2,504 wins, placing him fourth overall behind Connie Mack, John McGraw and Tony LaRussa. His team won 100 or more games in six seasons, a record equaled by only John McGraw. From 1991 to 2005, he managed his team to 14 straight division championships aided by the strike shortened 1994 season where the Expos had a six-game lead when the season was cancelled. He was named Manager of the year four times and was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in 2013. In addition to all his wins, Cox holds the record for having been ejected from 162 games. He is also the only manager to have been ejected from a World Series game, something he did twice. “That’s baseball Suzyn.”

They say that death comes in threes (whoever they are), and for the Atlanta Braves, this month has proven the adage because aside from losing their one-time owner and one-time manager, and one time manager (yes, I said it twice because, as noted above, Turner managed for a game), one of their true sluggers, Bob Horner, died at 68. One of only eleven players to hit four home runs in a game (which he did on July 6, 1986), Horner also went yard on his first major league at-bat. That year, he was named the National League Rookie of the Year. He played college ball for the Arizona State Sun Devils and skipped the minor leagues, going straight to the big club in Atlanta after being the first pick in the amateur draft. Horner became a free agent in 1987, which was when the owners were colluding. Not getting a decent offer, he was one of the few major league players to leave the U.S. at the peak of his prowess when he went to play in Japan. He was ultimately awarded over $7 million in damages when the case against the owners was made. Horner came back to the Majors when he signed with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1988 where he injured his shoulder and announced his retirement at the end of that year. Heck, if someone gave me $7 million, I would announce my retirement right now. My shoulder (along with everything else) hurts too. In is ten major league years, he batted 277 and hit 218 homers. Perhaps not Hall-of-Fame numbers but quite an impressive career.

Jazz giant, and master of the saxophone, Sonny Rollins, died this month at 95. He was one of the most influential jazz musicians of the genre. Born in Harlem, he started playing music at a young age. Still in his teens, he was playing the saxophone professionally, adopting the style of the first great jazz sax player, Coleman Hawkins. Although bebop was the era where he came of age, Rollins was far more than a bebop player. He did avant garde, jazz-rock fusion, and even straight rock. He appears on The Rolling Stone’s Tattoo You. You hear him on “I’m Just Waiting on a Friend.” His New York Times obituary referred to his playing as “suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring.” That is something I could never write. Rollins himself said “the music I play is too big to put into any one style. Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.” Rollins always sought to be better and was never fully satisfied like many a tortured genius. After getting a foothold in jazz, Rollins stepped back from playing for two years because he thought he needed to get better. Back then, he lived in lower Manhattan and would often take his sax on the walkway of the Williamsburg bridge where he practiced so as not to offend the neighbors. He said once, “I could have probably spent the rest of my life going up on the bridge. I realized no, I have to get back to the real world.” In 1950, he spent ten months in Riker’s Island for robbery and he, like many a Jazz musician, became addicted to heroin, which he ultimately beat using a then experimental methadone. Throughout his career, he played with the greats and constantly reinvented himself. Predictability was not his mainstay. Great jazz was. In his over seven-decade career, he put out over 60 albums. Several of his songs have become jazz standards. His record Saxophone Colossus was selected to be preserved in the National Registry of the Library of Congress, and he was a Kennedy Center Honoree. He was also given a Lifetime Grammy Award. Perhaps more than anything, his music will live on.

While I am on the subject of the saxophone, Dick Parry, not a household name, died at 83. Although perhaps not on Mr. Rollins’ level, Mr. Parry, an English session musician, played on records by Rory Gallagher, John Entwistle, side projects by John Lord and Ian Pace of Deep Purple, and as a lifelong friend of David Gilmour, played on several Pink Floyd albums and occasionally live with the band. Thus, it is Mr. Parry you hear on Pink Floyd’s “Money,” and “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” He is featured on Floyd’s albums Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Division Bell. “His feel and tone make his saxophone playing unmistakable,” said Mr. Gilmour. High praise.

I have probably written this a million times. A movie producer brings money to the table and perhaps a vision but is not involved in the day-to-day evolution of the film. That is more the director’s job. In music, that is not the case. The producer is not the bank. He or she is the artistic director of the record. Some producers have more input than others, but they are generally sitting in the control room orchestrating the sound, and oftentimes even picking the material that winds up on the record. Jack Douglas, a Bronx-born producer, famed for his work with Aerosmith and John Lennon, died this month at 80. Starting out as a musician, he traveled to England on a freight ship and upon arrival in England was detained for not having a work permit. He was released and made his way back home where he worked on Robert Kennedy’s Senate campaign writing jingles. He eventually attended the Institute of Audio Research and got a job as a janitor at the Record Plant. I already like the guy. He moved up to engineer and worked on records by Miles Davis, the James Gang, Cheap Trick, Montrose, Mountain, and others. One of the “others,” was John Lennon. Douglas was the engineer on Imagine and the two formed a bond. Douglas was sent to check out the band Aerosmith who had put out their first album but wasn’t getting traction. He produced Toys in the Attic, which put the band on the map, and several other albums including some by the Joe Perry Project as well. He produced Patty Smith’s first album, Radio Ethiopia, and he worked with the New York Dolls and Blue Oyster Cult. No record of him working with EVH, however. Eddie was a West coast guy. Douglas produced a lot of songs for the Who’s ill-fated Lifehouse project but many of the tunes wound up on Who’s Next. But it was his collaboration with Lennon that probably yielded his best work, he having produced the Double Fantasy album. He was working with Lennon on his next endeavor, Milk and Honey, the day Lennon was killed. The two generally travelled home together but on December 8, Lennon left the studio while Douglas kept working on the Tune “Walking On Thin Ice.” Thirty minutes later Lennon was dead. For me, that was the day the music died. This month, it was the day Mr. Douglas died.

Clarence Carter, the soul singer who brought us such tunes as “Back Door Santa,” died this month at 90. He was a shoo in for this rag because he sang the tune “Patches,” which is what I know him for. A song about a young, poor kid who is saddled with the pressure of being the family’s financial savior. It won the Grammy in 1971 for Best Rhythm and Blues tune. The New York Times described Carter as a crooner who “sang unabashedly about adultery and lust.” With songs such as “Making Love (At the Dark End of the Street),” and “Back Door Santa,” they are not wrong. But with “Patches, he went in another direction. When Carter, first heard the tune, he thought he could put his own spin on it. Initially, he has been quoted as saying “that it would be degrading for a Black man to sing a song so redolent of subjugation,” but was convinced to do so by the record’s producer. Carter was the son of a sharecropper who was blind from a young age. He graduated from Alabama State College (now University) with a degree in music. He teamed up with another blind musician, Calvin Scott, to form Clarence and Calvin, and later the C&C Boys. Carter did a lot of speaking on his records and in a New York Times interview said, “long before what they had what they call rap, Me and Isaac Hayes and Barry White were doing the same thing.” Maybe he was on to something because his records were sampled by many hip-hop artists including Run DMC, and the 2 Live Crew, known themselves for rather salacious lyrics. “My son it’s all left up to you.”

I’m not much of a NASCAR guy but I did know the name Kyle Bush, who took life’s checkered flag this month at 41. He broke into the sport as a brash and nearly unbeatable driver. He was more the bad-guy of racing, adopting the nickname Rowdy from the “Days of Thunder” movie. He once intentionally rammed another driver in a race while they were driving under a caution flag, and he would routinely curse out car owners and crew chiefs. In 22 years of racing, he racked up and amazing 234 wins. He raced on three circuits, (the Cup Series, the O’Reilly’s Auto Parts Series and the Craftsman Truck Series ), which was where he rammed his competitor, Ron Hornaday, Jr. In his later years, he calmed down a lot and lost much of his edge. His onetime teammate Denny Hamlinn wrote, “we have lost our Kobe Bryant,” according to the New York Times. Bush started driving go-carts when he was six and had his greatest professional success when he drove for Joe Gibbs, the old Washington Redskins coach. Only a week before he died, Bush was asked why winning never got old to him. He answered, in a prescient way, “because you never known when the last one is.” Bush had been feeling bad for weeks and tried to push through it. He died of pneumonia and sepsis. The lesson there is to get proper medical attention when you feel lousy.

Going more mainstream. Robert Blakey, the architect of the RICO law, which has been used to dismantle La Cosa Nostra in this Country, as well as being used against drug gangs, civil litigants and others, died at 90. Blakey toggled back and forth from academia to government. After graduating from Notre Dame Law school, he went to work for the Department of Justice. He was prosecuting an organized crime figure in Pennsylvania and encountered the defendant in the men’s room of the courthouse. The gangster complimented him on his skills but also noted that he would lose the case because the law was against him. Later in his career, Blakey took care of that. In 1989 he went to work for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. It was there that he worked under Senator McClellen to draft the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act. He also had a hand in drafting the wiretap statute and when passed, they became formidable law enforcement tools that are the weapons of prosecutors around the Country to this day. Prosecutors love the RICO statute, and defense attorneys say it is too vague and permits juries to speculate on guilt after the prosecutors get to bring in evidence of every bad act against defendants. Steven Gillers, the NYU Law Professor has called it the “white collar equivalent of capital punishment,” because you can get three times the amount of damages incurred if you are found to have violated the law. As a young associate, I spent many an evening dissecting footnote 14 in Sedima v. Imrex which discussed the RICO law in the civil realm. I used the statute as a prosecutor but certainly understood the criticism of it because it gave me a big advantage. Blakey made a career out of it, teaching it, advocating for its use, and acting as a consultant to many states who enacted analogs to the federal statute. Blakey also served as Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The Committee published a controversial report that, while agreeing with the Warren Commission Report that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, found that there was a second gunman who fired shots at the President’s limousine on November 22, 1973. The report also intimated that organized crime may have had a hand in the planning of the assassination. Five of the 12 members of the Committee dissented from the part of the report alleging a conspiracy in the President’s death. Blakey was not one of them. The FBI later put out its own report finding that Oswald acted alone. Blakey was critical of the Bureau’s findings. Blakey, as noted, taught law for many years at a number of institutions, Notre Dame foremost among them. He attributed his long life to “ice cream, a good book and a Notre Dame victory. He probably stayed away from gelato.

Claudine Longet, a singer best known for killing her lover, Spider Sabich, died this month at 84, 50 years after Mr. Sabich bought the farm. Ms. Longet, born in France, was a Vegas showgirl, a singer, and a bit of an actress whose claim to fame before offing Sabich, was marrying Andy Williams. They divorced after a few years and she moved in with Spider Sabich, a skier and Aspen resident who competed for the United States in the 1968 Winter Olympics. He was said to be the model for Robert Redford’s character in the film “Downhill Racer.” Ms. Longet was signed by Herb Alpert to his A&M label and put out some five albums. She also appeared in television shows like “Hogan’s Heroes,” and starred opposite Peter Sellers in the Blake Edwards directed movie “The Party.” If that was it, you wouldn’t be reading about her here. What puts her on my map is the March 21, 1976, shooting of Mr. Sabich for which Ms. Longet was charged with his murder. She claimed it to have been an accidental discharge as Mr. Sabich was showing her the weapon, but the forensic evidence showed that Mr. Sabich was in the bathroom and the gun was fired some 4-6 feet from him. Some of the state’s evidence was suppressed due to poor police work. The jury found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter and in what could only happen to a good-looking white woman in Aspen, she was sentenced to 30 days in prison, most of which she served on weekends. Again, we are talking Aspen, so she had her meals sent into her from various local restaurants. Her ex-husband, Mr. Williams, was a witness for the defense. Afterwards, she married her defense attorney and continued to live in Aspen. In its first year, SNL did a skit about the Claudine Longet Invitational where skiers would ski down a hill and try to avoid gunfire. The show had to issue an apology, apparently. The Rolling Stones wrote a song “Claudine,” with the refrain “Claudine’s back in jail again.” Longet was sued by the Sabich family for $1.3 million and the terms of the settlement forbade her from ever talking about Mr. Sabich or the trial. She apparently lived happily ever after.

Every so often there is a toy that takes the consuming world by storm. A toy that you are a bad parent if you can’t get hold of. A toy that makes people do things they are embarrassed by. In 1996, that toy was Tickle Me Elmo and its main creator, Greg Hyman, died this month at 76. Hyman was an electrical tinkerer since he was a kid. When he was 11, he gave inventing lessons to other kids for things involving electricity. He dropped out of Cornell engineering school so that he could go back to inventing. During the oil crisis, he invented a gadget to stop people from siphoning gas from cars. They should think about reissuing it. Hyman eventually got into the toy business and from the late 70’s into the 90’s, along with Larry Greenberg, he licensed over 40 toys. Greenberg died in 1992 and another inventor, Ron Dubrin, approached Hyman to make a toy that giggled when it was rubbed. Together they fashioned a monkey that giggled. They brought the toy to Tyco, a company which, at the time, had the rights to produce plastic Sesame Street characters. Hasbro had the license to develop plush toys, and Tyco knew that the license was up for renewal. When it was, they won the bid. They then took Hyman’s idea for the giggling ape and had him retool it for the Elmo character and Tickle Me Elmo was born. It was an instant hit. Even bigger than Tyco envisioned. The company ordered an initial run of 400,000 Elmos which sold out on Black Friday, leaving the entire Christmas season bereft of Tickle Me Elmos. It created a furry fury. Tyco scrambled to make more, Walmart workers were trampled when news broke out they were available at their stores. Elmo mania gripped the Country. To have gotten one was the ultimate parental status symbol. Failing to have a Tickle Me Elmo under the tree was the ultimate parental failure. Lines formed, people fought over them, all decorum went out the window to get one down your chimney. It was Cabbage Patch kids all over again. And once Christmas passed, so too did the frenzy. People learned that Tickle Me Elmo was not the be-all-end-all of life. Hard to believe. We haven’t had a toy craze since Elmo but there will be another. This also inured to Mr. Hyman’s benefit who was quoted as saying that money was no longer one of his problems. “Oh boy, that tickles.”

That wraps up May. Get out of the house and live life for those people who cannot.