Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Jak Knight, Known for ‘Big Mouth’ Netflix Series, Dies at 28

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      Mr. Knight, who was a stand-up comedian, died on Thursday in Los Angeles, his family said.Jak Knight, a stand-up comedian, writer and actor known for his role on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 28.His family on Saturday confirmed his death in a statement that did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Knight had recently finished filming as an actor in the movie “First Time Female Director,” written and directed by Chelsea Peretti.Starting in March, Mr. Knight starred with Chris Redd, Sam Jay and Langston Kerman in the Peacock series “Bust Down,” which he also helped to create. He was also an executive producer on the HBO talk show “Pause with Sam Jay” and was nominated this year for a Writers Guild of America award for his work on the show.From 2017-21, he was a writer and producer for the hit animated sitcom “Big Mouth” and voiced the character Devon. Mr. Knight worked as a writer for the ABC comedy “Black-ish” from 2019-20. His 30-minute Netflix stand-up special aired in 2018 as part of “The Comedy Lineup” series.He was named a 2014 Comedy Central Comic to Watch, a 2015 New Face at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival and an L.A. Comic to Watch by TimeOut in 2018.He opened for various stand-up comedians, including Dave Chappelle, Joel McHale, Eric Andre, Moshe Kasher and Hannibal Buress.Details about his surviving relatives were not immediately available.As news of his death spread, tributes to Mr. Knight appeared on social media.The comedian James Adomian said on Twitter that whenever he was performing with Mr. Knight, he knew it would be a “wildly funny night.”“He was winning big, all of it well deserved, so witty and memorable every moment on stage and off,” he wrote. More

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      David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80

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      An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.David Dalton, who chronicled the rock scene as an early writer for Rolling Stone and brought firsthand knowledge to his biographies of rock stars from having lived the wild life alongside them, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Dalton showed a knack for being where cultural moments and evolutions were happening. Before he was 20 he was hanging out with Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s he photographed the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other rock groups that were part of the British Invasion. He was backstage at the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired, along with Jonathan Cott, to write a book to accompany a boxed-set release of the Beatles’ 1970 album, “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown and talked about Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.As his career advanced, he gravitated toward writing biographies and helping celebrities write their autobiographies. His books included “Janis” (1972), about Joplin, revised and updated in 1984 as “Piece of My Heart”; “James Dean: The Mutant King” (1975); and “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that he helped their subjects write included Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography” (1994), “Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back” (1999), Steven Tyler’s “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (2011) and Paul Anka’s “My Way” (2013). He collaborated with Tony Scherman on “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” (2009).Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a writer who collaborated with Mr. Dalton on the 1977 book “Rock 100,” said Mr. Dalton, early in his career, was among a group of writers who took a new approach to covering the music scene.From left, the actress Edie Sedgwick, the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Mr. Dalton, the artist Marisol and an unidentified man in 1965. Mr. Dalton was hanging out with Andy Warhol before he was 20.David McCabe“In those days of rock journalism, there was not a lot of separation between writers and artists,” he said in a phone interview. “The writers aspired to create the same kind of artistic illumination as those they wrote about.”“David got to be very friendly with many people,” Mr. Kaye added, “and I believe that helped enhance his writing style. He had a way of assuming the persona of the person he was writing about.”Mr. Dalton’s wife of 44, years, Coco Pekelis, a painter and performance artist, said Mr. Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He had read that Jann Wenner was starting a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967 and began sending in some of the pictures of bands that he had been taking.“He was taking photographs of groups like the Shangri-Las, and Jann wanted captions,” Ms. Pekelis said by email. “So David started writing. And wrote and wrote and wrote. I asked him the other day when he knew he was a writer, and he said, when his captions got longer and longer.”Mr. Dalton assessed his voluminous output in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, explaining how his work had changed over the decades.“When I wrote rock journalism I was younger,” he noted. “I was involved in the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since.”Janis Joplin was among the many people whose biographies Mr. Dalton wrote. He also helped celebrities like Meat Loaf and Marianne Faithfull write their autobiographies.John David Dalton was born on Jan. 15, 1942, in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legon, said that during German air raids, David and a cousin, who grew up to be the actress Joanna Pettet, would be put in baskets and sheltered under a staircase or taken into the Underground, the London subway system, for protection.David grew up in London and in British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended the King’s School in Canterbury, England. He then joined his parents in New York, where they had moved, and he and his sister became assistants to Warhol, Ms. Legon said, helping him edit an early film, “Sleep.” In 1966, Mr. Dalton helped Warhol design an issue of Aspen, the multimedia magazine that came in a box or folder with assorted trappings.“Coming from England at the beginning of the sixties,” Mr. Dalton wrote in “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,” “I encountered Pop Art with the same jolt of excitement and joy I’d experienced on first hearing the blues. I was fortunate enough to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs I saw America’s brash, bizarre and manic underworld of ads, supermarket products, comics and kitsch brought to garish, teeming, jumping-out-of-its-skin life.”In the middle and late 1960s and the early ’70s, Mr. Dalton spent time on the East Coast, on the West Coast and in England, rubbing elbows with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and more. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson, who, he said, once expressed admiration for Charles Manson.After Manson had been charged in some brutal 1969 murders, Mr. Dalton began looking into the case for Rolling Stone with another writer, David Felton.“Like most of my hippie peers,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, “I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every longhaired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie.”His thinking turned when someone in the district attorney’s office showed him photographs of victims of Manson’s followers and the messages written in blood at the crime scenes.“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Mr. Dalton is quoted as saying in “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017), by Joe Hagan. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”For Rolling Stone, Mr. Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and others. By the mid-1970s he had moved on and was focusing on books, though still applying his full-immersion approach. For “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” his 1997 book about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who died of an overdose in 1979, “I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me,” he wrote. David Nicholson, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, found it compelling.“There is a certain hypnotic quality to the story that is akin to watching someone standing in the path of an onrushing train,” he wrote. “The writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it is in your face.”Mr. Dalton once described his biography technique this way:“Essentially you distill your subject into a literary solution and get high on them, so to speak. Afterwards, one needs brain detergent and has to have one’s brain rewired.”Mr. Dalton lived in Andes, N.Y. His wife, son and sister are his only immediate survivors.Mr. Kaye said Mr. Dalton had been both present for a sea change and part of it.“It was a fascinating time,” he said, “and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons.” More

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      L.Q. Jones, Who Played Heavies With a Light Touch, Dies at 94

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      His face was familiar, mostly in westerns, during a career that spanned five decades. He also directed the cult film “A Boy and His Dog.”L.Q. Jones, a hirsute, craggy-faced, swaggering Texan who guilelessly played the antihero in some 60 films and dozens of television series, died on Saturday at his home in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by his grandson Erté deGarces.A former stand-up comic, Mr. Jones also tried his hand as a bean, corn and dairy rancher in Nicaragua and once described himself as “but several hours away from three degrees — one in law, one in business, one in journalism” at the University of Texas.But he was lured to the Warner Bros. studios when a college roommate, Fess Parker, the actor who later played both Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, persuaded him to audition for a minor role in the 1955 film “Battle Cry,” directed by Raoul Walsh and adapted from Leon Uris’s novel.Mr. Parker sent him a copy of the book and a map with directions to the Warner lot. Mr. Jones was cast in two days.Billed as Justus E. McQueen (his birth name), he made his first appearance onscreen as the movie’s narrator introduced a group of all-American Army recruits being shipped by train to boot camp. The camera then panned to a character named L.Q. Jones.“Then, abruptly, the narrator’s voice drops to the scornful tone of a 10th-grade math teacher doling out detention,” Justin Humphreys wrote in “Names You Never Remember, With Faces You Never Forget” (2006).“‘There’s one in every group,’ he tells us, as we see L.Q. mischievously giving one of the other soldiers-to-be a hotfoot,” Mr. Humphrey added. “There could have been no more perfect beginning to L.Q. Jones’s career in the movies. The word that best sums up his overriding screen persona is hellion.”The actor pirated the character’s name for his own subsequent screen credits. From then on, Justus McQueen was L.Q. Jones.Mr. Jones joined the director Sam Peckinpah’s stable of actors, appearing in “Ride the High Country” (1962), “Major Dundee” (1965) and “The Wild Bunch” (1969), in which he and his fellow character actor Strother Martin play rival bounty hunters and, as the studio described their manic competition for the highest body count, “bring their depraved characters to life with a childish energy.”Mr. Jones was also frequently seen in the stampede of westerns that arrived on TV in the 1950s and ’60s, including “Cheyenne,” “Gunsmoke,” “Wagon Train” and “Rawhide.” His films included the 1968 westerns “Hang ’em High,” in which he slipped a noose around Clint Eastwood’s neck, and “Stay Away, Joe,” with Elvis Presley. Among his other screen credits were Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” (1995) and Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion” (2006), his last film.Don Johnson and friend in “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), which Mr. Jones directed. “I hope he goes on directing,” one reviewer wrote. But he didn’t.LQ/JAFMr. Jones directed, produced and helped write “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), a dark post-apocalyptic comedy starring Don Johnson and Jason Robards, based on the book of the same name by Harlan Ellison.“‘A Boy and His Dog,’ a fantasy about the world after a future holocaust, is, more or less, a beginner’s movie. It has some good ideas and some terrible ones,” Richard Eder wrote in his New York Times review.“This is the second film directed by L.Q. Jones, better known as an actor,” Mr. Eder continued. “It is not really a success, but I hope he goes on directing.”He didn’t. “A Boy and His Dog” acquired a cult following, but Mr. Jones returned to what he did best. He preferred the independence of choosing the villainous roles that appealed to him, and that measured his success, to the prospect of directing someone else’s script and wrangling larger-than-life egos.“Different parts call for different heavies,” Mr. Jones told William R. Horner for his book “Bad at the Bijou” (1982).“I have a certain presence,” he explained. “I play against that presence a lot of times, and that’s of a heavy that is not crazy or deranged — although we play those, of course — but rather someone who is a heavy because he enjoys being a heavy.”“It’s really hard to say what they’re looking for when they pick me,” Mr. Jones said. “A lot of times your heavy is not that well presented in the script. Most times he’s too one-sided. So we look for things to bring to being a heavy: a certain softness; a vulnerability that makes him human; a quiet moment when he’s a screamer most of the time; a look; the way he dresses; the way he walks into a room.”Mr. Jones was born Justus Ellis McQueen Jr. on Aug. 19, 1927, in Beaumont, Texas. His father was a railroad worker; his mother, Jessie Paralee (Stephens) McQueen, died in a car accident when he was a child. He learned to ride a horse when he was 8.After graduating from high school, he served in the Navy, attended Lamar Junior College and Lon Morris College in Texas, and briefly attended the University of Texas at Austin. His marriage to Sue Lewis ended in divorce. In addition to his grandson, his survivors include his sons, Randy McQueen and Steve Marshall, and his daughter, Mindy McQueen.Mr. Jones seemed to measure success less by his bank account (he once described himself as “independently poor”) than by professional gratification. But he had a sense of humor about it.“I’m around somewhere, probably just counting my money,” the message on his telephone answering machine said. “When I get through, if I’m not too tired, I’ll return your call.” More

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      Monty Norman, Who Wrote 007’s Memorable Theme, Dies at 94

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      He composed the instantly recognizable melody for the first James Bond film, “Dr. No.” It has accompanied the agent on his adventures ever since.Monty Norman, who in the early 1960s reached into his back catalog, pulled out a song about a sneeze and transformed it into one of the most recognizable bits of music in movie history, the “James Bond Theme,” died on Monday in Slough, near London. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his family on his website.Mr. Norman began his career as a singer, but by the late 1950s he was making a name for himself writing for the musical theater, contributing to “Expresso Bongo,” “Irma la Douce” and other stage shows. A 1961 show for which he wrote the music, “Belle, or the Ballad of Dr. Crippen,” had among its producers Albert Broccoli, who had a long list of film producing credits.As Mr. Norman told the story, Mr. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had acquired the film rights to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels at about the same time. Mr. Broccoli asked if he’d like to write the score for the first of the films, “Dr. No.” He wasn’t particularly familiar with the books, he said, and was lukewarm about the idea — until Mr. Saltzman threw in an incentive: a free trip to Jamaica, where the movie was being shot, for him and his family.“That was the clincher for me,” Mr. Norman told the BBC’s “The One Show” in 2012. “I don’t know whether the James Bond film is going to be a flop or anything, but at least we’d have a sun, sea and sand holiday.”He was struggling to come up with the theme, he said, until he remembered a song called “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” from an unproduced musical version of the V.S. Naipaul novel “A House for Mr. Biswas” on which he and a frequent collaborator, Julian More, had worked.“I went to my bottom drawer, found this number that I’d always liked, and played it to myself,” he said. The original (which opened with the line “I was born with this unlucky sneeze”) had an Asian inflection and relied heavily on a sitar, but Mr. Norman “split the notes,” as he put it, to provide a more staccato feel for what became the theme song’s famous guitar riff.“And the moment I did ‘dum diddy dum dum dum,’ I thought, ‘My God, that’s it,’” he said. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes.”“Dr. No” premiered on Oct. 5, 1962, in London. Another piece of music was vying for public attention then — that same day the Beatles released their first single, “Love Me Do” — but the Bond theme caught the public imagination too. Luke Jones, a music producer and host of the podcast “Where is MY Hit Single?,” said the theme, which regularly turned up in various ways in subsequent Bond movies, was just right for “Dr. No” and for the franchise.“The Bond theme encapsulates many key aspects of the 007 brand in a very short space of time,” Mr. Jones said by email. “That iconic guitar riff perfectly accompanies footage of Bond doing just about anything.”“It’s such a simple melody,” he added, “that children can and have been singing it to each other in the playground for decades. Then, finally, an outrageously jazzy swing-era brass section that offers all the glamour of a Las Vegas casino.”A version of the theme recorded by the John Barry Seven was released as a single and made the pop charts in England. But there was controversy ahead.Mr. Barry, then early in what would be a long career of creating music for the movies, had orchestrated Mr. Norman’s theme, but in later years he was sometimes credited with writing it, and he didn’t discourage that notion.Mr. Norman in 2001. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes,” Mr. Norman said of his 007 theme.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Press Association, via Associated PressMr. Norman sued The Sunday Times of London over a 1997 article that gave Mr. Barry credit and played down his own contributions. The article, he told a jury when the case went to trial in 2001, “rubbished my whole career.” The jury found in his favor and awarded him 30,000 pounds. Mr. Barry died in 2011.Monty Noserovitch was born on April 4, 1928, in London to Abraham and Ann (Berlyn) Noserovitch. His father was a cabinet maker, and his mother sewed girls’ dresses.When he was 16 his mother bought him a guitar, and he once studied the instrument with Bert Weedon, whose manual “Play in a Day” would influence a later generation of rock guitarists. According to a biography on Mr. Norman’s website, Mr. Weedon once gave him a backhanded compliment by telling him, “As a guitarist, you’ll make a great singer.”By the early 1950s, Mr. Norman was singing with the big bands of Stanley Black and others, as well as appearing on radio and onstage in variety shows. Later in the decade he started writing songs, and that led to his work in musical theater. He was one of the collaborators on “Expresso Bongo,” a satirical look at the music business, staged in 1958 in England with Paul Scofield leading the cast.He, Mr. More and David Heneker collaborated on an English-language version of a long-running French stage show, “Irma la Douce,” which made Broadway in 1960 under the direction of Peter Brook, who died this month. The show was nominated for seven Tony Awards, including best musical.Mr. Norman’s lone other Broadway venture was less successful. It was a musical parody he wrote with Mr. More called “The Moony Shapiro Songbook,” and the Broadway cast included Jeff Goldblum and Judy Kaye. It opened on May 3, 1981, and closed the same day.Mr. Norman’s marriage to the actress Diana Coupland ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Rina (Caesari) Norman, whom he married in 2000; a daughter from his first marriage, Shoshana Kitchen; two stepdaughters, Clea Griffin and Livia Griffiths; and seven grandchildren. More

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      in Music

      Adam Wade, Network Game Show Pioneer, Is Dead at 87

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      As a singer, he had three Top 10 hits in 1961. As an actor, he had a long career in film and on television. As an M.C., he broke a racial barrier.Adam Wade, a versatile, velvet-voiced crooner who scored three consecutive Billboard Top 10 hits in a single year, appeared in scores of films, plays and TV productions, and in 1975 became the first Black host of a network television game show, died on Thursday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 87.His wife, Jeree Wade, a singer, actress and producer, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.In May 1975, CBS announced that it would break a network television racial barrier by naming Mr. Wade the master of ceremonies of a weekly afternoon game show, “Musical Chairs.”Staged at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan and co-produced by the music impresario Don Kirshner, the program featured guest musical performances, with four contestants competing to complete the lyrics of songs and respond to questions about music. (Among the guest performers were groups like the Spinners and singers like Irene Cara.)The novelty of a Black M.C. was not universally embraced: A CBS affiliate in Alabama refused to carry the show, and hate mail poured in — including, Mr. Wade told Connecticut Public Radio in 2014, a letter from a man “saying he didn’t want his wife sitting at home watching the Black guy hand out the money and the smarts.”The show was canceled after less than five months. Still, Mr. Wade said, “It probably added 30 years to my career.”That career began while he was working as a laboratory technician for Dr. Jonas E. Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, and a songwriter friend invited him to New York to audition for a music publisher. He first recorded for Coed Records in 1958 and two years later moved to Manhattan, where he performed with the singer Freddy Cole, the brother of his idol Nat King Cole, and, rapidly ascending the show business ladder, opened for Tony Bennett and for the comedian Joe E. Lewis at the fashionable Copacabana nightclub.“Two years ago, he was Patrick Henry Wade, a $65-a-week aide on virus research experiments in the laboratory of Dr. Jonas E. Salk at the University of Pittsburgh,” The New York Times wrote in 1961. “Today he is Adam Wade, one of the country’s rising young singers in nightclubs and on records.”That same year, he recorded three songs that soared to the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 chart: “Take Good Care of Her” (which reached No. 7), “The Writing on the Wall” (No. 5) and “As if I Didn’t Know” (No. 10).Patrick Henry Wade was born on March 17, 1935, in Pittsburgh to Pauline Simpson and Henry Oliver Wade Jr. He was raised by his grandparents, Henry Wade, a janitor at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (now part of Carnegie Mellon University), and Helen Wade.He attended Virginia State University on a basketball scholarship, but, although he had dreamed of playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, dropped out after three years and went to work at Dr. Salk’s laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. Undecided about whether to accept the recording contract that Coed offered, Mr. Wade consulted Dr. Salk.“He told me he had this opportunity,” Dr. Salk told The Times at the time. “I told him he must search his own soul to find out what is in him that wants to come out.”He changed his first name — because his agent said there were too many Pats in show business — and had his first hit with the song “Ruby” early in 1960. His smooth vocal style was often compared to that of Johnny Mathis, but Mr. Wade said he was primarily influenced by an earlier boyhood idol, Nat King Cole.“So I guess that tells you how good my imitating skills were,” he said.He appeared on TV on soap operas including “The Guiding Light” and “Search for Tomorrow” and sitcoms including “The Jeffersons” and “Sanford & Son.” He was also seen in “Shaft” (1971), “Come Back Charleston Blue” (1972) and other films, and onstage in a 2008 touring company of “The Color Purple.”He and his wife ran Songbird, a company that produced African American historical revues, including the musical “Shades of Harlem,” which was staged Off Broadway at the Village Gate in 1983.The couple last performed at an anniversary party this year.In addition to Ms. Wade, whom he married in 1989, he is survived by their son, Jamel, a documentary filmmaker; three children, Sheldon Wade, Patrice Johnson Wade and Michael Wade, from his marriage to Kay Wade, which ended in 1973; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.For all his success in show business, Mr. Wade said he was particularly proud that 40 years after dropping out of college he earned a bachelor’s degree from Lehman College and a master’s in theater history and criticism from Brooklyn College, both constituents of the City University of New York. He taught speech and theater at Long Island University and at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.“I was the first one in my family to go to college,” he told Connecticut Public Radio. “I promised my grandmother back then that I would finish college someday. Many years later, I kept that promise.” More

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      in Television

      Hank Goldberg, Betting Maven and Sports Radio Star, Dies at 82

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      A New Jersey fan of sports and gambling who became one of the country’s top television handicappers: What are the odds?Hank Goldberg, a prickly, bombastic and witty sports talk radio and television personality in Miami who became nationally known for handicapping horse races and N.F.L. games on ESPN, died on Monday, his 82nd birthday, at his home in Las Vegas.The cause was complications of chronic kidney disease, which required dialysis treatments and caused the amputation of his right leg below the knee last year, said his sister and only immediate survivor, Liz Goldberg.For more than 50 years, sports and gambling were inseparable spheres to Mr. Goldberg. A habitué of racetracks and casino sports books, he ghostwrote for the celebrated oddsmaker Jimmy Snyder, known as Jimmy the Greek, in the 1970s. He was an analyst for Miami Dolphins football games on radio, hosted sports talk shows on two Miami radio stations, and reported and anchored sports for a local TV station.As a major sports figure in Miami, he counted the Dolphins’ former head coach Don Shula and former quarterback Bob Griese among the friends with whom he bet on horses at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach, Fla. He imbibed the privileges of celebrity, including being treated like a king at the famous Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant in Miami Beach.“I own this town,” he said while driving around Miami in archival video that was used by ESPN in a tribute to him after his death.Starting in the early 1990s, he found a broader audience as ESPN’s betting maven, dishing out his takes on favorites, underdogs and point spreads before Sunday’s N.F.L. games and the odds before Triple Crown and Breeders’ Cup horse races.ESPN reported that Mr. Goldberg had a .500 record or better in 15 of the 17 seasons that he handicapped N.F.L. games for the network.“It was the next step up from what ‘the Greek’ did,” said Mark Gross, a senior vice president of ESPN. Mr. Snyder declared which teams would win but was prohibited by the N.F.L. from discussing point spreads. Mr. Goldberg was restricted only from using team nicknames on the ESPN show “SportsCenter” but could talk about their cities.Mr. Goldberg’s outsize personality emerged most fully on radio, where he started in 1978, at WIOD-AM in Miami. His aggressive style led him to argue with callers and sometimes hang up in disgust.Joe Zagacki, one of Mr. Goldberg’s producers at WIOD, recalled in a phone interview a day when “Hank had an argument with a caller — he had one of his volcanic explosions — and I said, ‘My goodness, you just hammered that guy. You’re ‘Hammering Hank Goldberg.’”The nickname stuck. After he started at ESPN in 1993, Mr. Goldberg began banging a mallet on a studio desk to express his disagreement with a colleague or his disdain for a sports figure. He referred to himself as “Hammer.”He initially appeared on ESPN2, which was new at the time and was attempting to reach a younger audience with anchors who dressed in a casual, cool style. Not Mr. Goldberg, who was definitely not cool but brought a quirky, brassy personality to the network — although it was more congenial than his in-your-face radio demeanor.“Hank could fit into any genre; he could fit anywhere,” said Suzy Kolber, a longtime anchor and reporter at ESPN who worked with Mr. Goldberg on ESPN2 and in Florida. “Plug him into the horse-racing crowd or the ESPN2 bunch. He fit right in.”Henry Edward Goldberg was born on July 4, 1940, in Newark and grew up in South Orange, N.J. His mother, Sadie (Abben) Goldberg, was a homemaker; his father, Hy, was a sports columnist for The Newark Evening News. Hy Goldberg frequently took his wife and children to the Yankees’ spring training in Florida, where young Hank became friendly with Joe DiMaggio, who called him Henry, Ms. Goldberg said in an interview.At 17, Mr. Goldberg went to the racetrack for the first time and won $450 when he hit the daily double at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. When he brought his winnings home, he recalled, his father told him, “Oh, you’re in trouble now.” In an interview this year with The Las Vegas Review-Journal, he added, “He knew I’d never get over my love for the races.”After attending Duke University, he transferred to New York University and graduated in 1962. He started his career as an account executive for the advertising agency Benton & Bowles. He moved to Miami in 1966 and continued to work in advertising.He found work in the broadcast booth of the Orange Bowl in Miami as a spotter — helping the play-by-play announcer by identifying which player caught a pass or made a tackle — for network telecasts of the Dolphins. He developed a friendship with the NBC play-by-play announcer Curt Gowdy. and also developed relationships in the local sports world that led him to meet Mike Pearl, who wrote and produced Jimmy Snyder’s radio show and ghostwrote his syndicated column.Ms. Goldberg said that Mr. Pearl introduced her brother to Mr. Snyder and they got along well. When Mr. Pearl left for CBS Sports, where he would produce “The NFL Today,” Mr. Snyder asked Mr. Goldberg to take over the column.In 1978, he was hired as the host of a sports talk show and a commentator on Dolphins games at WIOD, replacing Larry King. In 1983, he added work as a sports reporter and anchor on the Miami TV station WTVJ. He also continued to work in advertising; from 1977 to 1992, he was an executive with the Beber Silverstein agency. Despite his success on WIOD, Mr. Goldberg was suspended several times over the years and fired in September 1992, following a dispute with the program director over the content of his show.“The biggest radio name in South Florida sports is a loudmouth who loves to drop names — often like dirt — and who upon announcing the Dolphins’ fantastic finish Monday Night didn’t know it was his own, too,” wrote Dave Hyde, a columnist for The Sun-Sentinel, a South Florida newspaper. Mr. Hyde suggested that all the station should have done was “wash out his mouth.”Mr. Goldberg was quickly hired by another local station, WQAM-AM, where he was again successful. But he left in 2007, believing he had been lowballed in contract negotiations.By then, he was well into his two-decade run at ESPN. It ended around 2014, but he returned for the “Daily Wager” show in 2019, a year after he moved to Las Vegas. He was also a prognosticator for CBS Sports HQ, a sports streaming service, and Sportsline, an online CBS sports network.Asked what motivated her brother, Ms. Goldberg gave a simple answer: “He loved the microphone.” More

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      in Theater

      Larry Storch, Comic Actor Best Known for ‘F Troop,’ Dies at 99

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      His well-honed comic timing, and the mimicry skills he had developed in nightclubs, served him well on one of the sillier sitcoms of the 1960s.Larry Storch, who played a memorable television oddball on the 1960s sitcom “F Troop” and for years carried a secret in his personal life that was odd in an entirely different way, died on Friday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 99.His stepdaughter, June Cross, confirmed the death.Mr. Storch had a long career as a nightclub comic and as a character actor on the stage and the big and small screens. But his other work was dwarfed by the impression he made during the two-season run of “F Troop” on ABC, from 1965 to 1967.The show was a slapstick comedy about an outpost called Fort Courage in Indian country just after the Civil War, and Mr. Storch played Cpl. Randolph Agarn, one of the bigger misfits in a unit full of them. Agarn and his business partner, Sgt. Morgan O’Rourke, played by Forrest Tucker, were constantly hatching moneymaking schemes, most of them involving the local Indian tribe, the Hekawis.O’Rourke was the brains of the partnership; Agarn provided the idiocy, and Mr. Storch’s well-honed comic timing served him deliciously in the role. So did the mimicry skills he had honed in nightclubs, where his act included all sorts of impersonations: In various “F Troop” episodes he played not only Agarn but also assorted Agarn relatives, who somehow found their way to the fort from far-off locales. “I had cousins who came from Moscow, Mexico, Montreal,” Mr. Storch recalled in a 2009 interview. “F Troop” wasn’t on long. But, like many sitcoms in that era of limited television choices, it burned itself into the minds of those who watched it, perhaps in part because it trafficked in the kinds of stereotypes — especially those hard-drinking, firewater-brewing Indians — that would soon disappear from television.Mr. Storch, in a 2007 interview with The Asbury Park Press, credited Mr. Tucker with securing him the role of Agarn.“I was supposed to be the sergeant,” Mr. Storch said, “but when they saw Forrest Tucker dressed in a cavalry suit — he looked like a polar bear — they said, ‘That’s going to be it.’ And Forrest Tucker said: ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to need a corporal around here, and I think he and I would have good chemistry.’” The “he” was Mr. Storch.When not clowning around on the stage or screen, Mr. Storch was party to an unusual secret at home. Before he and his wife, Norma Greve, were married in 1961, she had had a biracial daughter, Ms. Cross, with a Black performer named Jimmy Cross. Mother and child left Mr. Cross soon after June’s birth in 1954, but since the girl was dark-complexioned enough that she could not pass as white, she and her mother began encountering racism. When June was 4, Norma asked friends, a middle-class Black couple in Atlantic City, N.J., to raise her.Later, when the Storches were married and living in Hollywood, June would come to visit, and they would explain to friends that she was an abused child of former neighbors and that they had adopted her, but that she lived most of the year with Black friends.“In those days, people were encrusted in prejudice,” Mr. Storch explained to People magazine in a 1996 interview. “We saw no reason to rock the boat.”June Cross later became a television producer and then a professor at Columbia University. In 1996 she told her story in “Secret Daughter,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, which won an Emmy Award. The personal story of Mr. Storch and his wife has another wrinkle as well. In 1948, years before they were married, they had a daughter, whom they put up for adoption. After Ms. Cross’s documentary came out, the Storches and that daughter, Candace Herman, were reunited.After “F Troop,” Mr. Storch found steady work on other TV shows. He played a reporter who impersonates a priest in a 1969 episode of “The Flying Nun,” with Sally Field.ABC Photo Archives/Disney via Getty ImagesLawrence Samuel Storch was born on Jan. 8, 1923, in Manhattan. His father, Alfred, is described in several biographical listings as a real estate agent, though in a 1983 interview with The Washington Post Mr. Storch said he was a cabdriver. His mother, Sally (Kupperman) Storch, was a telephone operator who later had a jewelry store and ran a rooming house.Ms. Cross, in a telephone interview, said that as a child Mr. Storch would pick up voices and accents from the rooming house guests (Orson Welles, he always said, was one) that served him well later as a comedian.Mr. Storch left high school during the Depression when he found that he could make a few dollars doing impressions in the city’s clubs and acting as M.C. for vaudeville shows. He served in the Navy during World War II. By the time television came along, he was a well-established comic in the city and had used his mimicry skills to gain a foothold in radio.He first came to the attention of television audiences in 1951 as a guest host of “Cavalcade of Stars,” and in 1953 CBS picked him to host the summer replacement show that filled Jackie Gleason’s Saturday night slot. A string of television appearances followed, including a recurring role on “Car 54, Where Are You?” Mr. Storch was also the voice of the TV version of Koko the Clown in scores of cartoon shorts, and teamed with his friend Don Adams as one of the voices in the 1963 cartoon series “Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales.”Then came “F Troop,” which brought Mr. Storch an Emmy nomination in 1967. He worked steadily in television through the 1980s, doing guest spots on “The Flying Nun,” “The Love Boat,” “Love, American Style” and numerous other shows. In 1975 he reunited with Mr. Tucker in a live-action children’s show called “The Ghost Busters,” in which the two men played detectives who searched for spooks. (The show was unrelated to the later “Ghostbusters” movies.)One of Mr. Storch’s Navy friends was a fellow sailor named Bernard Schwartz, who became better known as Tony Curtis and gave Mr. Storch roles in several of his films, including “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962), “Sex and the Single Girl” (1964) and “The Great Race” (1965).Mr. Curtis and Mr. Storch teamed up again years later, in 2002, in a stage musical version of “Some Like It Hot,” the 1959 Billy Wilder movie that had starred Mr. Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. (The show drew upon the 1972 Broadway musical “Sugar” and added new material.) Mr. Curtis played not his original role, a musician on the run from gangsters who joins a band disguised as a woman, but the millionaire Osgood Fielding; Mr. Storch played the band manager, Bienstock.That show, which toured the country, never made Broadway, but Mr. Storch had a half-dozen Broadway appearances to his credit, beginning with “The Littlest Revue,” a 1956 show that also starred Joel Grey. In 1958 he appeared in the play “Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?,” and he had roles in revivals of “Porgy and Bess” (1983), “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1986), “Annie Get Your Gun” (2000) and “Sly Fox” (2004). His other films included Blake Edwards’s “S.O.B.” and the disaster movie “Airport 1975.” His vocal talents turned up in numerous cartoons as well as in McDonald’s commercials (“the most money I ever made,” he said in 2009).Mr. Storch’s wife died in 2003. His brother, Jay, an actor who used the name Jay Lawrence, died in 1987. In addition to Ms. Cross and Ms. Herman, he is survived by a stepson, Lary May, the author of several books on film and popular culture; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Mr. Storch at a birthday party for Jerry Lee Lewis at B.B. King Blues Club and Gril in Manhattan in 2017. He continued to make public appearances late in life.Derek Storm/Everett CollectionMr. Storch was still making public appearances late in life. In June 2014 he served as mayor for a day of Fort Lee., N.J., a town where he had once performed. That September he appeared at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles and was honored with a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars.In 2016 he was honored by Passaic, N.J., the city the fictitious Corporal Agarn called home. Mayor Alex Blanco said at the ceremony that Passaic had been mentioned all over the world because of “F Troop”; Mr. Storch said that he had never been there before, but that he had chosen Passaic for his character’s hometown because “it sounded tough.”In his later years Mr. Storch maintained an active Facebook page and posted videos on TikTok. He also put in appearances at Wild West City, a western-themed attraction in Stanhope, N.J. In July 2021, at 98, for what was billed as his final public appearance, he toured the site in a sporty red sedan, hamming it up for onlookers.Mr. Storch could sometimes be seen playing the saxophone, a lifelong hobby, in Central Park. Another signature activity, even late in life, was standing on his head. “It helps your breathing,” he explained in 2002 to a reporter for The Detroit News, while standing on his head. “The blood goes to your brain, whatever brain you have.” More

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      in Theater

      Kenward Elmslie, Poet and Librettist, Dies at 93

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      He collaborated on operas with Jack Beeson and Ned Rorem and published numerous poetry books. Late in life, he was victimized by theft.Kenward Elmslie, who wrote poetry, opera librettos and stage musicals, and who late in life made headlines when his chauffeur bilked him out of millions of dollars and several valuable artworks, including one by Andy Warhol, died on June 29 at his home in the West Village. He was 93.The poet Ron Padgett, a friend since the 1960s, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Elmslie had been dealing with dementia for many years.Mr. Elmslie, a grandson of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, became interested in musical theater while in high school, and in 1952 he met and became a lover of John Latouche, a lyricist who worked with Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and others and had numerous Broadway credits. Mr. Elmslie is said to have helped Mr. Latouche on some of his projects, generally uncredited.After Mr. Latouche’s death in 1956, Mr. Elmslie continued to live in the house they had shared in Vermont, alternating between there and Manhattan. And he began to have success himself as a lyricist and librettist.He provided the libretto for the Jack Beeson opera “The Sweet Bye and Bye,” which was first performed by the Juilliard Opera Theater in New York in 1957. In 1965 he worked with Mr. Beeson again, on “Lizzie Borden,” an embellished version of the famed ax-murder case, which premiered that year at City Center in New York. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.“The performers, the composer, the librettist, the designer and the director shared the bows at the end,” Howard Klein wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Many bravos were heard.”Ellen Faull and Richard Krause in a scene from the Jack Beeson opera “Lizzie Borden,” for which Mr. Elmslie wrote the libretto. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.NET Opera, via PhotofestMr. Elmslie’s other opera credits included the libretto for Ned Rorem’s “Miss Julie” (1965). He also dabbled in songwriting — his “Love-Wise,” written with Marvin Fisher, was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1959 — and in theater, even accumulating a Broadway credit as book writer and lyricist for “The Grass Harp,” a musical based on a Truman Capote novel that opened in 1971 but, unloved by critics, closed days later.W.C. Bamberger, in the introduction to “Routine Disruptions,” a 1998 collection of Mr. Elmslie’s poems and lyrics, wrote that it was during lulls in his opera and lyric-writing work that Mr. Elmslie began trying his hand at poetry. He was plugged into the New York art and literary scene and had befriended Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and other poets. His first collection, “Pavilions,” appeared in 1961, followed by more than a dozen others, including “Motor Disturbance” (1971) and “Tropicalism” (1975).In the 1970s, as editor of Z Press and its annual Z Magazine, Mr. Elmslie published many of the poets he admired. His own work defied categorization. There was plenty of wit, as in “Touche’s Salon,” which shamelessly dropped names to evoke a 1950s gathering at Mr. Latouche’s penthouse:Meet Jack Kerouac. Humpy and available.His novel On The Road is unreadable. And unsalable.John Cage is sober, Tennessee loaded.Better not ask how his last flop show did.But his more serious poetry could be ambitious, as well as dense. Mr. Ashbery once said that it was like the notes of “a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.”Mr. Elmslie came to combine his various hats — librettist, songwriter, poet — both in his books, some of which were collaborations with visual artists, and in his poetry readings, which might find him in costume delivering a song in addition to reading his verses. Susan Rosenbaum, reviewing his 2000 book, “Blast From the Past: Stories, Poems, Song Lyrics & Remembrances,” in Jacket magazine, noted that the printed page didn’t do justice to his wide-ranging interests.“For an artist as multitalented as Elmslie, the book is a limiting format: One wants to see and hear his musical works in performance, to visit the galleries where his visual collaborations are displayed,” she wrote. “But the very ability to elicit this desire — to reveal poetry’s affinities with song, theater and visual art — is a measure of the talent of this unique poet.”Kenward Gray Elmslie was born on April 27, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, William, met Constance Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer’s youngest daughter, when he was working as a tutor for another of the Pulitzer children. They married in 1913.Kenward grew up in Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C., and graduated from Harvard University in 1950 with an English degree. In New York in the 1950s and ’60s, he mixed easily with an artsy crowd. A 1965 article in The Times about a trendy party in the Bowery had him among the guests, with Warhol, the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, the pioneering electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, all gathered to hear a reading by William S. Burroughs.The year before that party, Warhol had given Mr. Elmslie one of his Heinz ketchup box sculptures, a classic example of Warholian Pop Art. More than four decades later, in 2009, the work was stolen, along with other valuable items and several million dollars. “Pulitzer kin hit in pop art scam,” the headline in The Daily News read.In 2010, James Biear, who had been Mr. Elmslie’s chauffeur and caretaker, was indicted in the thefts. News accounts at the time said he took advantage of Mr. Elmslie’s dementia, which was already in its early stages. In 2012 Mr. Biear was sentenced to 10 years in prison.In 1963 Mr. Elmslie began a long relationship with Joe Brainard, an artist and writer with whom he also collaborated on various projects. Mr. Brainard died in 1994. Mr. Elmslie is survived by a half sister, Alexandra Whitelock. More