The Wall

People Who Died -- June, 2022

If you think you want a break from this thing, this would be the month to take it.  While I am sure many people died, the notables, for the most part, took the month off, probably headed to the Hamptons and just didn’t expire.  Sure, there are people to write about but no real A-listers and very few true characters which is who I shoot for in this rag.  To those of you determined to waste some of your downtime, here we go. 

When People start talking gateway drugs, I always find it somewhat odd.  What really leads one to heroin or actually fentanyl?  The truth is, that most heroin addicts probably started with Gerber baby food so perhaps that is the demon of the world.  Then again, so too have Nobel Laureates, so who is to say?  Parents wondering, though, why their kids won’t eat vegetables until they hit, like 37, should think back to when they forced fed their toddlers everything from pureed peas to prunes, driving spoons full of it into their mouths by acting like it was a plane, cluster bombing the baby’s lips with a concoction of mixed vegetables that no human would wish to consume.  These kids thought they were doomed until they were old enough to sample the McDonald’s French fry, slathered with salt and ketchup which, by the way, should never be put on a hot dog.  It was when the first French fry from Mickie-D’s hit their lips that they felt they had found the culinary promised land and would refuse to eat anything that bore any resemblance to the Gerber products of their recent youth ever again. 

Well, I am not sure if it is with sadness or joy then that I announce, that Ann Turner Cook, the woman who, as a child, was the model for the infant on the millions and millions of Gerber baby food jars, died at 95.  Actually, we can’t hold any residual hatred we may have toward Gerber against her so her passing is to be noted.  In addition, the Times thought so much of her that Margalit Fox authored her obit which, for me, is the gold standard.   Anyway, Ms. Cook was secretive of her status for many years.   In 1928, Gerber, sought a child’s portrait to advertise its new line of baby food products.  Ms. Cook was neighbor to Dorothy Hope Smith, a well-known commercial illustrator.  Ms. Smith had done a charcoal drawing of Ms. Cook when she was about four months old.  She submitted it to Gerber explaining that it was “unfinished” and if they liked it, she would work on it to make it a complete work.  Notwithstanding that she was competing with all sorts of portraits done in oil and the like, Gerber liked the unfinished sketch so much it wanted no changes.  The company trademarked the image and it has become one of the most recognizable corporate logos of all time.  Gerber refused to identify the model or even the gender because it was so universal.  Because of that, rumors swirled as to who the child was with Humphrey Bogart being the most talked about.  Of course, that was nonsense because the kid didn’t have a cigarette hanging out of its mouth.   Actually, Bogart’s illustrated likeness (done by his mother, also a commercial artist) adorned advertisements for Mellin’s infant foods.  Anyway, someone sued Gerber saying it was she who was the model.  The case went to trial and Ms. Smith testified that it was Ms. Cook who was the model thereby outing our hero who, by that time, was teaching in Florida in total anonymity.  She had always known she was the model but did not come out as such believing that her students would make a mockery of it thereby changing the dynamic of her position as teacher.  Gerber, probably fearing that she might sue them as well, quietly provided her with a single payment of $5,000 which she used for the down-payment on a house.  Only in the late 1970’s, when Gerber was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the logo, did Ms. Cook come forward and take public credit for being the face that launched a million jars of strained peas and the like.  Turns out her students were more intrigued than mean.  After her retirement she self-published a series of crime novels and even made an appearance on the television show “To Tell the Truth.”   As the mother of four, she was often asked if she fed her own kids the products which her face adorned and the answer was, “not exclusively.  Wonder if her kids did drugs?

Sticking with the odd, Paul Vance passed on to the great hereinafter at 92.  He wrote the song “Itsy Bitsy teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” which many of you know but only wish you didn’t.  Today you could probably get arrested for writing that one and certainly all the people in the video link would probably be hauled away as pedophiles or at the very least be cancelled by our culture.  Oh, how times have changed.  Anyway, back to Mr. Vance who wrote the song about his two-year-old daughter who was embarrassed by the rather skimpy bathing suit her aunt had made for her.  The kid apparently had more sense than her parents who had her wear the rather skimpy suit but Vance got a hit out of it.   Lest you think it was nothing, it spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and for a week was number one.  It has been covered multiple times by the likes of Kermit the Frog and Devo.  He also co-wrote “Leader of the Laundromat” which was a spoof on “Leader of the Pack.”  During has career, he wrote songs for Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka and Tommy James and the Shondells but it will always be his ode to pedophilia that he will be noted for. 

Continuing with music, perhaps fittingly, Jim Seals is off on a Summer Breeze at 79.  With Dash (Darrel) Crofts and their smooth harmonies, they put together a string of hits which included the aforementioned “Summer Breeze,” “Diamond Girl” and “Get Closer.” While still very popular, they naively put out an album entitled “Unborn Child,” soon after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision (which is now being mourned by many for also having lost its life) which, in the lyric to the title track, cautioned women to “stop, turn around, go back, think it over.”   That led to their concerts being picketed and stalled their career.  Seals later said that had they realized what a lightning rod the album and song would be, they would have thought twice about releasing it.  Fifty years later the divide remains and, if anything, is more pronounced.  Lesser-known fact is that he had a brother, Dan Seals, who was a member of England Dan & John Ford Coley (“I’d Really Like to See You Tonight”), who predeceased him in 2009.   They are both “blowin’ like a jasmine in my mind.”  That was rather cheesy but I had no other way out.    

I hate it when people die at the end of the month because then I have to stick them in at the last minute when all I really want to do is proofread this thing an put it out.  This month, however, the last minute thing is exactly what happened when I found out that Arnold Skolnick  died (or at least just made the news reports about dying) at 85.  One thing is for sure -- he deserves to be here because I spent five minutes trying to rationalize to myself how to keep him out but lost the battle.  While the Gerber baby may be corporate America’s most loved logo, The Woodstock logo (remember the bird sitting on the neck of a guitar) was the symbol of a generation.  Mr. Skolnick designed it over a weekend and didn’t receive much more than Ms. Cook did for being on the jars of strained peas.  Nearly bubkis.  He wasn’t the first one chosen to create the logo.  That honor went to David Byrd who designed the posters for the Fillmore East.  Mr. Byrd designed a poster that included as its centerpiece a nude woman holding an urn.  While it may have worked aesthetically, the businesses in whose windows the promoters wanted to place these posters had a problem with a nude woman gracing their establishments.  Thus began a last-minute panic to get a new, more commerce-friendly logo.  Enter Mr. Skolnick who didn’t like rock n’ roll, the drug culture or the psychedelic art the promoters were looking for.  Nevertheless, he set about to design the poster.  First, he put the bird (which many people think was a dove but was really a type of catbird that he had been fascinated with sketching at the time) on a flute but thought that too jazz based.  Thus, he altered it to have the bird on the neck of the guitar.  Of the catbird, he made a mistake and failed to tell the printer that the beak should be black so it was left as red.  A writer friend of his wrote the words and they split the $12,000 fee.  Alas, he didn’t retain the copyright so any money from knockoffs, of which there were many, didn’t go to him.   He obviously had the wrong lawyer.  Oh, and as a second shout out to my older brother, he, like Mr. Skolnick, was a product of Pratt Institute.  My brother, however, is not nearly as artistic as Mr. Skolnick.  Peace out.      

George Weyerhaeuser, who was the CEO of the timber giant, died at 95.  It is not that he was CEO of such a large and successful company that gets him here because, let’s face it, his last name was Weyerhaeuser and you wouldn’t expect, say, a McKenna to be running the show at the lumberyard.  No, he makes it here because when he was eight he was kidnapped on his way home from school. Thankfully, he didn’t meet the same fate as the Lindbergh baby but he was cool under pressure. He was in the clutches of his captors for a week.  At one point he was shackled at the bottom of an underground pit and he was stuffed into the trunk of a car which drove across the State of Washington.  Of the car ride he said “I think I actually managed to sleep part of the way.”  He was released after his family paid the ransom that was demanded and found his way home with the help of some strangers.  He ultimately attended Yale and was the company CEO for some 25 years and won reluctant praise from environmentalists for the manner in which the company operated.  His kidnappers were apprehended, convicted and sent to prison.  One of them wrote Mr. Weyerhaeuser to apologize and when he got out of prison was given a job at the company driving a truck.  Mr. Weyerhaeuser said of him that while they were not close friends, “I kind of like him.  And I think vice versa.  He sends me a card once in a while.”  As to the whole kidnapping ordeal, Mr. Weyerhaeuser took it in stride stating to Sports Illustrated: “I don’t think it bothered me unduly.” And that a boy “is a pretty adaptable organism.  He can adjust himself to conditions in a way no adult could.”  I would have loved to have a beer with that guy.

As a lawyer I am always preoccupied with generating business.  Donald Lubin, a lawyer with the Sonnenschein law firm, had a good method.  He died at 88.  He was asked as a young lawyer to do some low-level work for McDonalds which was then a small hamburger chain.  A few years after that he got a call from a bookkeeper at the company seeking information about weddings in Las Vegas where a friend of hers was getting married.  He found out the information, relayed it to the woman and refused to charge for his services.  She was impressed and started to send him low level work for the company and arranged for him to prepare a will for her boss Ray Kroc.  He and Mr. Kroc got along well and formed a professional friendship.  Lubin joined the Board of McDonalds and remained for 27 years.  When the Kroc’s purchased the San Diego Padres, he negotiated the deal and became the team’s general counsel remaining at Sonnenschein through its merger with Dentons.  He was a major rainmaker at the firm.  The moral of Mr. Lubin’s story is to not discount people for who they are because an act of kindness can get you a lifetime of free Big Mac’s.         

 The wine world has taken it on the palate lately.  Last month we lost Jack Cakebread and this month we lost two wine pioneers.  Someone must have pissed off Bacchus.  I don’ know about you but for me there is nothing like opening the box and enjoying a good glass of wine.  This month, Sean Thackrey swirled his last glass at 79.  Thackrey, who had no real background in oenology, started buying grapes and making small batches which became widely popular.  He never owned a vineyard and with only a few people, made the wine in his backyard.  He believed that vintner’s preoccupation with where grapes were grown and the concept of terroir was, according to his New York Times obit, “viticultural racism.”  He believed in the winemaker over the vineyard.  To the small, home winemaker, he was the gold standard. 

Mr. Thackrey’s polar opposite, Josh Jensen, who believed firmly in the sanctity of the soil, thereby making him in Mr. Thackery’s words, a viticultural racist, sniffed his last pinot , also at 79.  After graduating Yale and spending two years at Oxford University, he got involved in grape growing.  After a few years in France, he found just the right place in California to grow the pinot noir grape, a grape not generally well-known in California in the early 70’s when he bought his vineyard.  His Calera Wine Company went on to bottle some of the best pinots in the world.  Now, truth-be-told, I’m a cabernet guy so this whole pinot craze, much like the Rose fad wholly enveloping the hip, goes right over my tongue. It might also have something to do with my feelings, or lack thereof, for France where the Burgundy region is the Mecca for the pinot grape.  That said, Mr. Jensen set in play a pinot trend in this Country that continues to this day.  Not, however, in my wine fridge.

Alright, on to sports.  Sadly, we lost the Goose, Tony Siragusa, at 55, which I can’t really say is old for a football player.  Siragusa was born in Kenilworth, New Jersey and in his best years played for the Baltimore Ravens, a team which sadly my older brother roots for.  As a defensive tackle, he helped the Ravens to their first Super Bowl championship.  Prior to playing for Baltimore, he spent seven years with the Indianapolis Colts.  The Goose’s playing weight was about 330 pounds and I wonder if he got there through his own form of gavage.  His size matched his personality.  He enjoyed a good practical joke once spiking a pot of cocoa his young teammates made with a laxative, relishing watching them run off the field at various times during the game.  Another time he barricaded the tight ends on his team in a meeting room causing Shannon Sharpe to steal the Goose’s truck and hold it hostage until he got an apology.  Perhaps Siragusa’s biggest play was when he knocked Oakland Raider’s quarterback, Rich Gannon, to the ground in the AFC Championship game, separating the quarterback’s left shoulder.  The Goose was later fined for the hit but afterwards was quoted as saying: “I saw his eyes roll back.  He got every ounce of my fat ass on him.”   That said, off the field he was gentle and generous.  Perhaps is crowning glory was a spot in the Sopranos.    

Marion Barber III, a running back for the Dallas Cowboys and the son of Jet’s running back Marion Barber, Jr., died at the age of 38.  In 2006 he led the NFC in touchdowns with 14 and the following year he was selected for the Pro-Bowl.  After his playing career his life spiraled downward with mental health issues which, unfortunately, is not all that uncommon amongst people who play such a violent sport. 

More upbeat (for death, that is), James Rado, one of the co-creators of the Broadway musical “Hair,” along with Gerome Ragni (died in 1991 ) and Galt MacDermot (died 2019) died at 90.   Rado and Ragni wrote the original manuscript on a borrowed typewriter and, seeing Joe Papp, who was then working on opening the Public Theater, on a train platform in New Haven Connecticut, gave it to him to read.  Papp liked it and committed, un-committed and re-committed to opening the Public Theater with the play which, by then, had been re-tooled with Mr. MacDermot adding new melodies to the Rado/Ragni lyrics.  The play eventually found its way to Broadway and was wildly successful.  The show got its name when Rado and Ragni were strolling through a museum and saw a painting by Jim Dine simply titled Hair.  The songs from the musical were wildly popular with the Fifth Dimension scoring a number one hit with “Aquarius;” the Cowsills version reaching number two.  Oliver hit number three with “Good Morning Starshine;” and Three Dog Night reached number four with “Easy to Be Hard” which frankly, I had to go to YouTube to recall.  Good song, though.  When it hit Broadway, the music was at first overshadowed by the nudity in the show but now it all seems rather tame.  “Here baby, there mamma, everywhere daddy, daddy hair.” 

Proving that, if nothing else, I am responsive to my readers, Mark Shields, a political commentator, died at 85.  For myself, I probably would not have made a place for him but it is a rather slow month and I was asked to include him. He is certainly no Eddie Van Halen but the whore that I am for readers, here he is.  Of him, his proponent wrote “He was a national treasure, and I enjoyed his point/counterpoint appearances with David Gergen on the old McNeil-Lehrer news hour (back when journalists still cared about journalism). I often disagreed with him, but he invariably offered trenchant and interesting commentary.”  I couldn’t have written that because I don’t know what trenchant means.  Shields, a marine, started as a political operative, moved to journalism and then to the little screen. For years he was on CNN’s “Capital Gang.”  He was also an author.  His longest stint on television was the News Hour.  Not much more to say here.  He didn’t tackle anyone or dislocate shoulders.

I love a heroic story of overcoming odds.  Hershel Williams, who died at 92, did just that --  A few times.  He was the last of 472 servicemen who received the Medal of Honor for service to this Country in WWII.  The Medal of Honor is our Country’s highest award for valor.  Mr. Williams earned his on Iwo Jima where he wielded a flamethrower and took out seven pillboxes which were bunkers made of reinforced concrete and when covered with sandbag were pretty much impregnable, even to the firepower of the U.S. Army.  Enter Mr. Williams wielding his flamethrower.  He returned to headquarters five times to get more flamethrowers and miraculously lived to talk about it which is what nearly 7,000 other American soldiers could not.  The battle for the tiny, yet strategic, island lasted 36 days before the American flag was raised over it in one of the most iconic photographs of the war.  Twenty-seven marines and Navy servicemen received the Medal of Honor for their heroism at Iwo Jima, fourteen of them receiving it posthumously.  Mr. Walker was the youngest of 11 children but lost six of his siblings to the Pandemic of 1918.  His family were farmers and when his father died when he was 11 he went to work helping his older siblings run the farm.  He was always impressed by the Marine Corps uniform and although he just made the height cutoff (5’6” ad 135 pounds) he joined and wielded one helluva flamethrower.  I don’t think, they make them like that anymore.  Hope I’m wrong.           

While I am at stealing other people’s words, John Farmer wrote a nice piece about his neighbor, a true war hero who is lot closer to home than Mr. Williams.   Bill Watkinson died at 100.   John writes better than me and while he gave me permission to “Wallify” Mr. Watkinson’s life, I rather commend it to you in its original form:  https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3520578-remembering-bill-watkinson-a-true-top-gun-maverick/.    

I’ll end with wishing the Country a happy birthday even though the family is in the middle of a multi-year spat.  Bad as it is, we had a civil war and we have not reached that point.  Enjoy the holiday weekend and the coming summer month.