DemBones

There’s still one more left that I know of, sax player Joey Ambrose.

That ship’s already sailed, mate. The last veteran (officially) from WWI was a lady from the Women’s RAF who worked as a steward. She outlived the last combat veteran by about 9 months.

Now there’s someone who lived a full life. Beauty queen, journalist, TV presenter, entrepreneur, and a former First Lady of Kentucky. Although this old Peanuts cartoon will always be the first thing I think of whenever I hear her name mentioned.

1980s Bad Company, which was my intro to the band. I have fond memories of my brother picking me up from Sunday School with “Holy Water” blaring on the car stereo and other parents in the parking lot giving us sideways looks. I liked his singing though, even if he was always going to suffer compared to Paul Rodgers. RIP.

Straw has to be the betting favorite to go first from that lot, right? I’m half-surprised he’s not dead already.

I just did some research, because it seems like Lombardi-era Packers have been dying off at a remarkable rate recently. Sure enough, of the 41 players on the roster for the first Super Bowl champion team (1966-67), ten of them have died in just the last three years, including four already this year alone. That might not bode well for Paul Hornung in particular, given his heavy drinking into the 1970s and more recent battles with dementia. That said, 18 of them are still alive, so it’ll still be a while before we start shifting into “last survivor watch” mode. And one of the coaching staff is also still alive, defensive backs coach (and later Vikings HC) Jerry Burns.

Damaso Garcia, a two-time all-star second baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1980s, is dead at 63. He was given six months to live about 30 years ago after they found a brain tumor, so you could say he beat the odds. https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29038959/former-blue-jays-2b-damaso-garcia-dies-63 I don’t really remember seeing him play, though I’m sure I did, but his ‘84 Topps baseball card was one of the first I ever owned.

You’re probably thinking of the Club Cinq-Sept fire in 1970. 146 dead, including all six members of the band Les Storms, according to Wikipedia.

It’s a problem with several of those early vocal groups where the group name itself is more valuable for touring revenue than who’s actually singing the songs. The Drifters and the Ink Spots are the most extreme examples, but many others like the Platters and The Coasters have had the same legal issues with various touring groups of disputable legality using their names. It’s actually led some US states to pass laws in recent years that don’t allow groups to advertise themselves as being a particular band unless at least one original member of the group is performing with them. The Kingston Trio is another group where all the original members are gone, although there is an official (authorized) lineup including relatives of the original members that still performs. Bob Shane, the last original member, just died in January.

50’s one-hit wonder group The Penguins (“Earth Angel”) has no surviving original members as of last year. The Blue Moon Boys (Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and DJ Fontana), Elvis Presley’s original backing band, have all passed on - the last one died in 2018. Duke Fakir (age 84) is the last original member of The Four Tops I looked up Manfred Mann out of curiosity and found that all of their former members except Jack Bruce are actually still alive, and in fact they’re another band that would qualify for the “all members made it to age 70” list that was being tossed around last week.

Golden Earring, at least the core four members who’ve all been playing together for the last 50 years. Dunno about some of the ancillary members who came and went, but all of them who were notable enough to get Wikipedia articles are 70+ and still alive. The original members of Slade (the 1966-92 lineup) are all still alive. Jim Lea turned 70 last year, and he’s the youngest. The classic lineup of Genesis is almost there, if they can all hang on for the next 10 months. Banks, Hackett, and Gabriel have all turned 70, and Collins and Rutherford are both 69.

RIP. 49ers were my local team when I was a kid, and I'm old enough to have seen him when he was still an active player. That was a fast-moving case, too. He only announced it last year, and he was still able to walk as recently as last fall. Very different from Steve Gleason, who was diagnosed almost seven years ago now and is somehow still hanging in there.

At least 14 members of a Canadian junior hockey team from Saskatchewan are dead after their team bus was T-boned by a semi yesterday afternoon. https://www.tsn.ca/rcmp-say-14-people-killed-in-bus-crash-involving-humboldt-broncos-1.1049577 No official confirmations yet, but the names of some of the victims are starting to trickle out.

I'd add Bryan Singer (at least until a few months ago) and Paul Thomas Anderson to the "still relevant" group, and you could make a case for John Dahl who's at least built a successful career as a TV director on shows like Dexter and Justified, but yeah, it's been disappointing how that generation of directors has overall turned out to be less prolific and less successful than most of us hoped for back when they were turning out indie classics like The Usual Suspects and The Last Seduction. The quality of Kevin Smith's movies seemed to be inversely proportional to his budgets - i.e., the more money he was given to work with, the worse his movies got.

Hall of Famer Nate "Tiny" Archibald revealed today that he was diagnosed with amyloidosis in 2016.

Former Orioles catcher Frank Zupo might challenge that statement. BTW, he played his last game for Baltimore at age 21, so he's probably around 18-20 in that photo. The Orioles must've had a thing for unibrowed catchers back then, because they also signed Andy Etchebarren to his first pro contract the same year that Zupo's career ended.

An interesting quirk with that film - out of the actors who played the seven people trapped in the farmhouse, the three men are all dead (two of them died relatively young), and the four women are all still alive (the oldest, Marilyn Eastman, is 84, and the youngest is 60). On the subject of zombie movies, the cult favorite Zombies of Mora Tau (1957) is down to two living cast members, both quite old: Autumn Russell (b. 1930) and actor/stuntman Chuck Hicks (b. 1927).

A few more casts that are gone or nearly gone. No survivors: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) The Maltese Falcon (1941) Hell in the Pacific (1968) (this movie had a cast of two, Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune) One survivor: Anne of Green Gables (1934) - June Preston (b. 1928) Two survivors: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) - Julie Adams (b. 1926) and Ricou Browning, one of the two actors who played the Creature (b. 1930) Uncertain, but possibly one or less: Hamlet (1948 Laurence Olivier version) - Patricia Davidson (b. 1926) and possibly Tony Tarver (unknown) Our Town (1940) - Dix Davis (b. 1926) doesn't have a year of death listed in IMDB, but a Google search says that he died in 1989. Douglas Gardner is an unknown, but played one of the younger characters, so he could still be alive somewhere. Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) - the one confirmed living cast member is Robert Blake (yes, that Robert Blake), but there are three Mexican actors who played small roles that we have no information about, so this one will unfortunately probably never be verified. One other movie of interest, it turns out that The Black Hole (1979) actually had quite a small cast with only ten performers, five of whom are still alive. The youngest, Joseph Bottoms, is only 63 though, so it probably won't join the list anytime soon.

Don't know anything about Bob Hamlin's status, but he's also the only unknown for Alice in Wonderland, too, where the Mellomen played the cards that were painting the roses red. Kathryn Beaumont (Alice) is still alive and turning 80 this year, but she's the last confirmed survivor; Hamlin's a question mark, and everyone else is gone. On the topic of Disney movies, Fantasia is an interesting one. None of the six vocal performers from the original 1940 version are still alive (the last one was Julietta Novis, the 'Ave Maria' singer, who died in 1994). But the master tape of Deems Taylor's original voiceover narration has deterioriated so badly that they can't use it anymore, so the narration has been re-recorded by three other actors since then, most recently by Corey Burton in 2010 - and all three of those actors are still alive. So I don't know if you want to count that one or not. Disney's Swiss Family Robinson (1960) only has one surviving cast member: Tommy Kirk, who turns 77 this year. Outside Disney, I also looked up the three Topper movies, which I thought might be good candidates: Topper (1937), Topper Takes a Trip (1938), and Topper Returns (1941). Topper Returns yielded a hit - in fact, the last two cast members of that movie (Patsy Kelly and William H. O'Brien) both died way back in 1981. The other two movies each have one unknown gumming up the works, with everyone else confirmed deceased. In the original Topper the mystery actress is Donna Dax, who played a minor role. Her name also pops up in several other famous movies from the late 30's and 40's, most notably Citizen Kane, so she's someone who could end up haunting this thread if no one can find any information on her. Topper Takes a Trip has the more familiar problem of a total unknown named Jimmy Colman, who played a waiter in his only film role.

"The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun," by Julie Brown (1983). Mass school shootings aren't exactly a great topic for musical comedy these days, and she admitted that even she didn't feel comfortable performing it after Columbine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG3yGdQYwqg

Boston Celtics great Jo Jo White, MVP of the 1976 NBA finals and member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, is dead at 71. Cause of death was pneumonia, according to his daughter, though he had also been battling dementia for several years.

Got curious tonight, so I looked up the roster of the 1972 Soviet basketball team that controversially won the gold medal over the USA in Munich. I found out that only 4 of the 12 players on that team are still alive. Anatoli Polivoda (b. May 29, 1947, age 70) Modestas Paulauskas (b. Mar. 19, 1945, age 72) Ivan Edeshko (b. Mar. 25, 1945, age 72) Alzhan Zharmukhamedov (b. Oct. 2, 1944, age 73) Coincidentally, none of the four remaining players are native Russians either - they're Ukranian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Kazakh, respectively. Ivan Dvorny, who died in 2015, was the last surviving Russian member of the team.

Hiromi Tsuru, Japanese voice actress who played Bulma in the Dragon Ball franchise and also worked for the past 30 years on the long-running children's series Anpanman, has died from an aortic dissection at the age of 57. https://www.theepochtimes.com/dragon-ball-voice-actress-hiromi-tsuru-found-dead-in-car_2360289.html