Grim Reader, Oct. 14, 2011: Al Davis, Bert Jansch and Diane Cilento

by Michael Schaffer

OCTOBER 14, 2011 TAGS: OBITS, NEWSPAPER ADD A COMMENT

GREETINGS, OBIT READERS! This week in death featured Oakland Raiders honcho Al Davis, pop pianist Roger Williams, and folk guitarist Bert Jansch. Plus, a pioneering woman in radar, an arms dealer whose obit reads like a spy novel, and a gay-rights legal strategist who was only lukewarm about gay marriage. Let’s turn to the obit pages:

“JUST WIN, BABY!” Al Davis’ obits are full of macho language befitting the NFL owner’s self-image: “A symbol of renegade toughness,” says the San Francisco Chronicle. “A rebel with a cause...who bucked league authority time and again” says the Associated Press. “The tough-minded owner of the Oakland Raiders who transformed a failing team into a three-time Super Bowl champion,” says the Los Angeles Times. The obits generally agree on Davis’ legacy: He cultivated a bad-boy image for his teams (everyone quotes his motto of “Just Win, Baby!” and his statement that he’d rather be feared than respected), he quarreled with league management (he resisted merging his upstart American Football League into the NFL, and later fought to move his team to another city without permission), and he packed his Raiders squads with unpopular outcasts, winning intense loyalty in blue-collar Oakland. Grantland, meanwhile, moves from the business-and-branding talk to some gridiron specifics, noting that Davis was a champion of the “vertical pass,” helping move football away from the ground game and usher in today’s speedier version of the game. The obit has x-and-o diagrams and everything! WHEN THE DEARLY DEPARTED WRITE THEIR OWN EPITAPHS: The Chronicle quotes Davis’ reaction to last year’s death of equally polarizing Yankee boss George Steinbrenner: "I judge sports figures based on individual achievement, team achievement and contributions to the game. George was right up there with me at No. 1: bright, aggressive and, most of all, not afraid." NOT MENTIONED AS MUCH: The obits mention, but don’t spend much time on, the fact that Davis’ feared squads have been distinctly mediocre for the past decade and a half. Also, in an age where sports concussions are big news, Grim Reader couldn’t help but be struck by the matter-of-fact reporting on the then-unusual violence associated with Davis’ Raiders.

WHO THE HELL IS KEN DAHLBERG? The Obitosphere finds plenty of ways to remember Ken Dahlberg: WWII ace, hearing-aid innovator, venture capitalist, Watergate figure. The Wall Street Journal leads with the business: He made a fortune marketing the Miracle Ear, then used chunks of it to bankroll the Buffalo Wild Wings chain, which now has 800 restaurants. The Washington Post and the New York Times go high with Watergate: Dahlberg was the donor who endorsed a check that wound up in one of the burglars’ accounts -- “the first real connective glue between Watergate, its funding and the Nixon campaign,” Bob Woodward tells the Post, in a quote picked up by all the other obits. Dahlberg was cleared of wrongdoing, but was turned off from politics, the Journal says, especially after the movie version of All the President’s Men depicted him as a cringing, nervous interview subject. The Post does the best job with his WWII status as a “triple ace,” who was shot down over Germany (he says he learned about business from POW camp bartering). The Times leads with, and everyone else mentions, Dahlberg’s sole appearance on Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, in which the president asks an aide: “Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?”

PIANIST TO THE PRESIDENTS: Roger Williams was the “pianist to the presidents,” says Reuters, noting that the “Autumn Leaves” pianist was friends with Ronald Reagan when the two young men worked at a Des Moines radio station. Williams ultimately played before nine U.S. chief executives. He was not, however, pianist to the critics. Though the Los Angeles Times notes that he “was the rare instrumental pop artist to strike a lasting commercial chord,” it also quotes reviewers calling his work “trite and oversimplified.” “Some critics labeled him America’s greatest exponent of ‘elevator’ music,” says the Telegraph.

SECOND-RICHEST COLOMBIAN: Lots of coverage of Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a Colombian tycoon, who “had holdings in nearly every major Colombian industry, from beer and soft drinks to aviation, automobiles, banks, cinema and telecommunications,” says the Associated Press. Forbes, though, says most of his wealth came from a 15 percent stake in the global beverage firm SABMiller, which purchased his Colombian brewery. Santo Domingo, who’d recently been overtaken by a banker as the richest Colombian, was number 108 on Forbes’ global list. The New York Times reports he lived in the famous apartment building at 740 Park Ave.

FOUNDING FOLKIE: Bert Jansch “helped define the British folk music revival of the 1960s and 1970s,” says the Washington Post. “Almost pathologically determined not to become a star,” as the Telegraph puts it, Jansch according to the Independent “was famously name-checked as an influence.” No kidding! Here’s the paper’s paragraph on his devotees: “A handful of names might include Anne Briggs, Bernard Butler, Billy Connolly (anchor man for the BBC Jansch documentary Acoustic Routes), Pete Doherty, Jerry Garcia, Johnny Marr, Beth Orton, Jimmy Page and Neil Young.” BIG PRAISE: Jansch was “as much of a great guitar player as Jimi Hendrix was,” Young once said. DIRTY DEEDS: The Independent calls his song “Needle of Death” an even more transgressive heroin ode than the more famous one by Lou Reed, simply because Jansch wrote his earlier.

GAY RIGHTS LEGAL WHIZ: While others rely on short wire-service copy, The New York Times runs a long obit for Paula Ettelbrick, “a leading legal figure in the lesbian and gay civil rights movement who focused on defining ‘family’ in the broadest possible way.” Ettelbrick’s work, the Associated Press notes, helped persuade New York to grant same-sex domestic partnership benefits. But though the wire service says she cheered the state’s recent legalization of gay marriage, the Times paints a more complicated picture, noting that Ettelbrick had been wary of the cause, which she believed could still lead to marginalization of those whose lives don’t fit into the two-person-unit lifestyle. “I do not want to be known as ‘Mrs. Attached-to-Somebody-Else,’ ” she wrote. “Nor do I want to give the state the power to regulate my primary relationship.” Only the Times notes that Ettelbrick had been raising two children with her ex-partner.

EVEN EARLIER GAY RIGHTS CAMPAIGNER: The Washington Post covers the death of Frank Kameny, whose firing from the federal government more than 50 years ago for being gay turned him into a kind of activist rare for his time: one who was loud and proud, toting a sign that said “Gay is Good” and waging an campaign for Congress that stressed, rather than shunned, his identity. ACCOMPLISHMENT: His sign is now in the Smithsonian.

WOMAN ON THE RADAR: In the years after World War II, Pauline Austin was one of the few women in the emerging field of weather radar, says the Boston Globe. Her research focused on the “bright band,” the line between rain and snow in a storm. For years, she would periodically join her husband -- a TV meteorologist -- on air to discuss radar, then a new technology.

PIONEERING OENOPHILE: The New York Times notes the death of Robert Finigan, an early writer of his own self-published wine guide and “one of the earliest wine authorities to attract a national audience.” Wine Spectator quotes from some of his tough assessments, such as the time he called several Bordeaux "barely drinkable swill." But when he panned the 1982 Bordeaux vintage -- which went on to be a runaway success -- his newsletter went into decline, eclipsed by the better-known self-published newsletter of Robert Parker.

THE EX-MRS. CONNERY: The Variety obit for actress Diane Cilento remembers her as a “beautiful blonde actress -- wide eyed, with a throaty voice” who got an Oscar nomination for a role in Tom Jones, and later went on to marry Sean Connery. Not mentioned there -- or in the New York Times, Associated Press, or Independent, among others, is a detail that makes the Washington Post and the Telegraph: She accused Connery of abusing her, writing in a memoir that he “bashed my face in with his fists”

INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY: You always know it’s an interesting life if an obit features anonymous quotes from “senior government officials.” So it is with the New York Times’ obit for Sarkis Soghanalian, an arms dealer whose run-ins with the law (for boo-boos like selling gear to Saddam Hussein) were almost as frequent as his unusually light punishments (because, as the anonymous official notes, he did things to help Uncle Sam, too). “He’s one of those characters who emerged out of the cold war and played a critical role in clandestine activities on behalf of the United States, while providing deniability,” explains Lowell Bergman, the investigative reporter who produced several TV segments on Soghanalian. His career, the obit declares, “might have provided material for a shelf of thrillers.”

HE PLAYED THE HEAVY: Like so many dead character actors, Charles Napier gets remembered for his typecasting as much as for his life. “With his blockish head, heavy jaw and formidable stare, he was called upon most often to play no-nonsense heavies,” says the Guardian. (The Washington Post notes that he “was also skillful at playing oafish and deliriously self-obsessed comic roles.”) FUN FACT: In the ’70s, he took two years off from acting to be a writer and photographer for a truckers’ magazine.

Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.