MERLIN OLSEN, FOOTBALL STAR, COMMENTATOR AND ACTOR
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: March 11, 2010
Merlin Olsen, the Hall of Fame tackle who anchored the Los Angeles Rams’ Fearsome Foursome, the line that glamorized defensive play in the National Football League, died early Thursday at a hospital in Duarte, Calif. He was 69.
|
|||
 |
 |
||
Associated Press
Merlin Olsen while playing for the Los Angeles Rams in 1965.
His death was announced by his brother Orrin, who said he had been treated for mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer involving a membrane that covers and protects most of the body’s internal organs. Until his hospitalization he had lived in Park City, Utah.
Olsen was considered one of the greatest tackles in N.F.L. history, but he also forged careers in broadcasting and acting. He was a longtime color commentator for NBC’s pro football and Rose Bowl telecasts, working with Dick Enberg, and he acted on television, most prominently in NBC’s “Little House on the Prairie” and in his own series, “Father Murphy.”
In the early 1950s, the Rams boasted a high-powered offense, led by quarterbacks Norm Van Brocklin and Bob Waterfield and receivers Tom Fears and Crazy Legs Hirsch. The Rams of the mid-1960s were renowned for defensive linemen who earned a collective nickname a decade before the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Steel Curtain.
The Rams had only one winning season from 1963 to 1966, the span in which all four Fearsome players were teammates, but those linemen were celebrated for their strength, flair, know-how and agility.
Olsen, 6 feet 5 inches and 270 pounds or so, played left tackle, jamming up the middle, stopping draw plays and screen passes and often pressuring the quarterback. Deacon Jones, another eventual Hall of Famer, extremely quick and adept at the head slap, lined up at left end. Jones joined with Lamar Lundy, the right end, in rolling up the sacks while Roosevelt Grier, the former Giants star, was a formidable presence at right tackle.
“Merlin had superhuman strength,” Jones told The Los Angeles Times in 1985. “If I was beating my man inside, he’d hold him up and free me to make the tackle. If he had to make an adjustment to sacrifice his life and limb, he would make it. A lot of the plays I made were because he or the others would make the sacrifice.”
Olsen felt that the Fearsome Foursome could have excelled in any era.
“What made the Foursome unique, I think, is that we could have fit in extremely comfortably in the modern game,” he told The Orange County Register in 1997. He estimated that the line’s average weight was 275 pounds and said that “there was not a weight lifter in the group.”
“Imagine how big we’d be today,” he added.
“We could all run,” Olsen said. “The other thing we had going for us was a rare chemistry. There was also a very special kind of unselfishness.”
Joining the Rams in 1962 from Utah State University, where he won the Outland Trophy as college football’s best interior lineman, Olsen spent his entire 15-year career with Los Angeles.
Olsen was voted to the Pro Bowl every year except for his final season, he was an all-N.F.L. selection six times, and he was chosen by the Maxwell Club of Philadelphia as the N.F.L.’s most valuable player in 1974. He was voted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1982. He was named, along with Jones, to the 75th anniversary all-N.F.L. team in 1994 in a vote by the news media and league personnel.
Olsen may have exuded a fearsome presence in his own right, but he was hardly a brute. He was named one of the nation’s top scholar athletes by the National Football Foundation in his senior year at Utah State and he received a master’s degree in economics while playing for the Rams.
Merlin Jay Olsen, a native of Logan, Utah, was born on Sept. 15, 1940. He was so awkward while pursuing sports in the ninth grade that a coach discouraged him from athletic aspirations.
“I was either stubborn or foolish, but I was unwilling to give up on my dreams,” The South Bend Tribune quoted him as telling a College Football Hall of Fame luncheon in 2007.
Olsen played a major role in reviving the football program at Utah State, leading the Aggies to appearances in the Sun Bowl and the Gotham Bowl. He was one of the Rams’ two first-round draft picks in 1962, going third over all after they drafted quarterback Roman Gabriel.
Olsen was the N.F.L.’s rookie of the year on a team that won only one game. The Rams began a turnaround in 1966, when George Allen became the head coach, but Olsen never reached the Super Bowl.
In February 1977, shortly after retiring, Olsen signed a contract with NBC. In addition to working alongside Enberg in the broadcast booth, he appeared for several seasons with Michael Landon in “Little House on the Prairie” as the very large and bearded lumberman Jonathan Garvey.
From 1981 to 1983 he had the title role in NBC’s “Father Murphy,” in which he played an 1870s frontiersman who disguises himself as a priest to shelter orphans. In the short-lived “Fathers and Sons” he played a baseball coach, and in “Aaron’s Way,” a 1988 series, he was the head of an Amish family that leaves its traditional lifestyle behind and moves to California.
“I was raised in a very strict Mormon home and in a Mormon community,” The Post-Standard of Syracuse quoted him as saying when he took the role of the Amish patriarch Aaron Miller. “There are certain things I can lean back on and remember in a family situation that helped me to work as an actor.”
Olsen also had roles in television movies, made numerous guest appearances in a variety of TV series and was a familiar figure in commercials as a spokesman for FTD florists.
Utah State brought an ailing Olsen back to the campus for a halftime ceremony of a basketball game in December 2009, when the university announced it would dedicate the football field at its Romney Stadium as Merlin Olsen Field in 2010. The St. Louis Rams — the Los Angeles Rams’ successor franchise — honored Olsen at a home game that month, although he was unable to attend because of his illness.
Olsen was one of three brothers who played in the N.F.L. Phil Olsen was a teammate, playing defensive tackle for the Rams from 1971 to 1974 and later playing for the Denver Broncos. Orrin Olsen played center for the Kansas City Chiefs.
In addition to Phil and Orrin, Olsen is survived by his wife, Susan; their children Nathan, Jill and Kelly; his brother Clark; his sisters Colleen, Lorraine, Gwen, Winona and Ramona; and several grandchildren.
Olsen overpowered many an offensive lineman, but he had something of a mild-mannered outlook.
“I’m sure that I take out many of my personal aggressions on the field, but I don’t play football for that reason,” he remarked in the N.F.L.’s “The First 50 Years: The Story of the National Football League.”
“My roughness and aggressiveness at certain times are prompted by my desire to be a better football player. I don’t enjoy contact.”
**************************************************************************************************
JOHNNY ALF, A ‘FATHER OF BOSSA NOVA’
Johnny Alf in 2001. In the 1950s, other musicians would sneak into clubs to listen to him play and study his technique.
The cause was prostate cancer, said his manager, Nelson Valencia.
Though he was not widely known outside Brazil and enjoyed mass popularity only intermittently in his homeland, Mr. Alf, born Alfredo José da Silva, is highly regarded among Brazilian musicians and musicologists. The writer Ruy Castro, the author of several authoritative books on Brazilian popular music, has called him “the true father of the bossa nova.”
Mr. Alf was a contemporary of Antônio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto and others who would make the bossa nova a worldwide phenomenon, but he began his career earlier and spent the mid-1950s playing on what was known as Bottle Alley, a street in Copacabana full of bars and nightclubs. His younger admirers would sneak into those clubs to listen to him play and study his technique and improvisational style.
“From him I learned all of the modern harmonies that Brazilian music began to use in the bossa nova, samba-jazz and instrumental songs,” the pianist and arranger João Donato said Friday. The guitarist and composer Carlos Lyra added: “He opened the doors for us with his way of playing piano, with its jazz influence. When my generation arrived, he had already planted the seeds.”
Alfredo José da Silva was born in the Vila Isabel neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, a hotbed of samba, on May 19, 1929. His father was a corporal in the Brazilian Army, his mother a housekeeper. He began studying the piano at age 9, focusing on the classical repertory. But his love of American movies pushed him toward jazz and away from the classics, a shift on which he later reflected in an amusing composition called “Seu Chopin, Desculpe” (“Pardon Me, Chopin”).
Mr. Alf started playing professionally at 14, when he was given his Americanized stage name. He helped found a Frank Sinatra fan club in Rio and also admired George Gershwin and Cole Porter. But his biggest influence, as both pianist and singer, was probably Nat King Cole, whose smooth vocal delivery, gentle touch and sophisticated chords meshed with Mr. Alf’s quiet, even timid, personality.
“I always played in my own style,” Mr. Alf said in an interview last year with the Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo. “I had the idea of joining Brazilian music with jazz. I try to bring everything together to achieve an agreeable result.”
At its best, Mr. Alf’s music had a light and airy feeling that expressed the optimism and joie de vivre that Brazilians think of as among their defining national traits. It was reflected not just in the title of his best-known song, “Eu e a Brisa” (“Me and the Breeze”) but also in hits like “Ilusão à Toa” (“Carefree Illusion”) and “Céu e Mar” (“Sky and Sea”), as well as “O Tempo e o Vento” (“Time and the Wind”) and “Rapaz de Bem” (“Well-Intentioned Guy”), a two-sided success released as a 78 r.p.m. single in 1955 and now widely regarded as the first glimmering of bossa nova on record.
But Mr. Alf eventually tired of the glitz of Rio and moved to São Paulo in the mid-1960s to take a job teaching in a conservatory. After that, while continuing to perform regularly, he recorded only sporadically. In 1990 he recorded “Olhos Negros” (“Black Eyes”), a widely praised CD dominated by duets with a second generation of admirers, including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque and Gal Costa.
According to Brazilian press reports, Mr. Alf left no immediate survivors.
“At least I’m not completely forgotten,” he said last year. “My music was always considered difficult. The record labels sensed the value of my music, but it never had the commercial appeal that they would have liked.”
****************************************************************************************
COREY HAIM, ACTOR
|
|||
|
 |
||
Twentieth Century Fox, via Photofest
Corey Haim in the 1986 movie “Lucas.”
|
|||
|
 |
||
Justin Lubin/Lions Gate Entertainment, via AP
Corey Haim in 2009’s “Crank: High Voltage.”
His death was confirmed by Sgt. Michael Kammert of the Los Angeles Police Department. The assistant chief coroner of Los Angeles County, Ed Winter, told The Associated Press that Mr. Haim’s mother had called paramedics. “As he got out of bed, he felt a little weak and went down to the floor on his knees,” Mr. Winter said. No other details were provided. The police said they were investigating.
Mr. Haim started acting as a child and shot to fame as the gawky adolescent star of coming-of-age comedies like “Lucas,” a 1986 film in which he played the lovelorn title character, and “License to Drive,” a 1988 feature about a young man’s dreams of piloting the family Cadillac.
He was also among the stars of “The Lost Boys,” a 1987 vampire thriller directed by Joel Schumacher. The film was the first in which he appeared opposite Corey Feldman, another gangly teenage actor, whose films include “Stand by Me” and “The Goonies.” With a common first name, Mr. Haim and Mr. Feldman came to be known as the two Coreys and worked together in several more films, including “Dream a Little Dream” in 1989
In recent years Mr. Haim underwent rehabilitation for addictions to prescription pills and cocaine and outgrew his once scrawny form and image. In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, he said he had ballooned to more than 300 pounds and been offered a spot on the VH1 weight-loss reality show “Celebrity Fit Club.”
He was candid about his frequent attempts to overcome his drug problems, telling the ABC News program “Nightline” in 2007 that his habits had ruined his career “to the point where I wasn’t functional enough to work for anybody, even myself.”
After a long estrangement, Mr. Haim reunited with Mr. Feldman in 2007 for an A&E reality series called “The Two Coreys” during which Mr. Haim lived with Mr. Feldman and his wife for three months. The show was renewed for a second season but not a third after Mr. Feldman said he would not work with Mr. Haim until he had gotten “the help he truly needs.”
Mr. Haim was born on Dec. 23, 1971, and grew up in Toronto. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
************************************************************************************************
NAN MARTIN, ACTRESS FROM ‘DREW CAREY SHOW’
Nan Martin in the HBO movie “Mrs. Harris,” from 2006.
The cause was complications of emphysema, said her son Casey Dolan.
Ms. Martin gained wide exposure in the late 1990s in the recurring role of the mean-spirited boss, Mrs. Louder, in the sitcom “The Drew Carey Show.”
She made her Broadway debut in 1950 in a short-lived play, “A Story for a Sunday Evening.” She went on to appear in numerous television films and television series, including “The Twilight Zone” and “The Untouchables,” and became a regular in Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park productions in the early 1960s.
She earned a Tony nomination for her performance as the wife, Sarah, in Archibald MacLeish’s verse drama “J.B.” (1958), directed by Elia Kazan. In “Under the Yum-Yum Tree” (1960), she played Irene Wilson, the divorcée who briefly attracts the roving eye of Gig Young.
In 1976 she returned to Broadway as Mrs. Buchanan in Tennessee Williams’s “Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” a reconceived version of his play “Summer and Smoke.” In his review for The New York Times, Clive Barnes wrote that she “glitters like a bejeweled snake as the awful mother.”
Nan Clow Martin was born in Decatur, Ill., on July 15, 1927, and grew up in Santa Monica, Calif. After acting in a student production at the University of California, Los Angeles, which she attended part time, and modeling for the fashion designer Adrian, she moved to New York.
Besides “The Drew Carey Show,” her many television credits include “NYPD Blue” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” and she appeared in the films “Toys in the Attic,” “For Love of Ivy” and “Shallow Hal,” among others.
Mothers were something of a specialty for Ms. Martin on television and in film, most memorably her role as Mrs. Ben Patimkin, who douses Richard Benjamin with cold contempt in “Goodbye, Columbus” (1969). She also played Freddy Krueger’s mother in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (1987).
Later in her career, Ms. Martin acted with the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif. Her performance as Miss Helen in Athol Fugard’s three-character “Road to Mecca” in 1989 led to an engagement in the same role opposite the playwright at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Ms. Martin’s first marriage, to the screen composer Robert Emmett Dolan, ended in divorce. In addition to her son Casey, of Los Angeles, she is survived by her husband, Harry Gesner; another son, Zen Gesner of Malibu; and three grandsons.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 11, 2010
An obituary on Tuesday about the actress Nan Martin misspelled the given name of a surviving son in some editions. He is Zen Gesner, not Zan.
***********************************************************************************************
MARY JOSEPHINE RAY, CERTIFIED THE OLDEST LIVING AMERICAN
Granddaughter says oldest American was spry until the end
Associated Press
March 8, 2010, 11:20AM
WESTMORELAND, New Hampshire — A woman certified as the oldest person living in the United States has died.
Mary Josephine Ray, who was born in Canada, died Sunday at a Westmoreland nursing home at 114 years and 294 days old.
Katherine Ray said Monday that her grandmother remained spry until about two weeks before her death.
“She just enjoyed life. She never thought of dying at all,” Katherine Ray said. “She was planning for her birthday party.”
Even with her recent decline, Ray managed an interview with a reporter last week, her granddaughter said.
The Gerontology Research Group says that until her death, Ray was the oldest person in the United States and the second-oldest in the world.
The oldest living American is Neva Morris, of Ames, Iowa, at 114 years, 216 days.
The oldest person in the world is Japan’s Kama Chinen. She is 114 years, 301 days.
Ray was born May 17, 1895, in Bloomfield, Prince Edward Island, Canada. She moved to the United States at age 3.
She lived for 60 years in Anson, Maine. She lived in Florida, Massachusetts and elsewhere in New Hampshire before she moved to Westmoreland in 2002 to be near her children.
Ray’s husband, Walter, died in 1967. She is survived by two sons, eight grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and five great-great grandchildren.
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 