Mark Evanier's Blog, page 5

Guy H. Lillian III, R.I.P.

Just heard of the passing of Guy Lillian last night at the age of 76. No cause has been mentioned but he'd been dealing with severe gastric problems and Parkinson's Disease for some time. Lemme tell you a little about Guy…

Guy was a retired lawyer (mostly a public defender) and a prominent figure in science-fiction fandom in the southern states. Many years earlier, he was a prominent figure in comic book fandom, gaining notoriety for his appearances in comic book letter columns, especially in DC Comics and especially in the ones then edited by Julius Schwartz. Since I was often in those same letter columns, people somehow assumed we were friends but we didn't meet until one day in the early seventies at some comic book convention in New York. Here's a photo I took of Guy with Julius Schwartz that day…

Guy is the one on the right, of course, but in an e-mail that I think was our last communication some years ago, he mentioned the photo and joked how he now looked more like Julie.

In the mid-seventies, Guy parlayed his connections from those letter column appearances into a job at DC Comics, assembling (ironically) letter columns and doing miscellaneous editorial work. He was starting to move towards writing comics when he decided that that profession (and New York) were not for him. He moved, married, got his law degree and expended his fannish energy towards s-f. We kept vaguely in touch but not for many a year. I remember him as a very, very bright guy and it's always sad to lose someone like that.

The P.P.B., R.I.P.

The Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters group was a neat little club founded in 1966 with, as I understand it, two goals. One was to preserve the history of West Coast broadcasting — radio and television — and it was pretty successful at that. Materials it accumulated are now housed at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library and I believe at other institutions that will preserve them and make them available for research. The other goal was to honor those who had made significant contributions to radio and TV, especially (but not exclusively) in Southern California.

The P.P.B. was pretty successful for a long time in the latter goal, as well. Mostly, the honoring was done with monthly luncheons, each honoring one or more of those significant contributors. I was a member for a while — unfortunately, late in the organization's existence so I missed a lot of the biggies. But there were still some star-studded luncheons and this video will give you an idea of what they were like…

Get the idea? They were wonderful events with wonderful speeches and wonderful gatherings and really, really bad food. How…bad…was it? One time when I somehow wound up on the dais as a speaker — I think the honoree was June Foray — I was seated next to Gary Owens, who was often among those of us honoring/roasting the Guest of Honor. As soon as we were served our lunches, Gary reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of energy bars and began passing them quietly to those seated near him. He whispered, "I've learned to not eat the food at these and to come prepared."

Wise man, that Gary Owens.

The awful chow was probably a minor reason that the group was in decline over the last decade or two. Among the other reasons was that the membership was getting older and older, and young people were not joining up in sufficient numbers to balance the losses. Also, they were having trouble finding worthy honorees…or people who wanted to help run the organization. And then the Sportsmen's Lodge in Studio City — the place we met, the place that served the inedible entrees — closed down and no centrally-located, reasonably-priced replacement could be found. Also, there was this thing you may have heard of called COVID and…well, let's just say the group died a slow, inevitable death. It changed its name to the Hollywood Media Professionals and that didn't change anything.

The folks who'd been keeping it on life support have just announced they're going to stop doing that and I doubt anyone could blame them. It was a great institution in its time but that time is not this time. I'll miss everything about it except the meals.

Today's Video Link

From the 1986 Tony Awards telecast, here's a nice little medley of Broadway tunes performed by Ann Reinking, Juliet Prowse, Sandy Duncan, Bea Arthur, Nell Carter, Karen Morrow, Bernadette Peters, Rex Smith, Dorothy Loudon, Cleo Laine, Stephanie Powers, Hal Linden, Leslie Uggams and Helen Hayes…

Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan explains what's going on with the Russia/Ukraine War. You remember that one…the war Trump was going to settle in 24 hours?

A Brief Tirade

I seem to have accumulated some dangerous Internet Algorithms. Any time I'm browsing a site like Facebook or YouTube — any site which shows me short videos by random contributors — I'm deluged with "medical advice," mostly what to eat and what not eat. Once in a while, the advisors might (might!) be doctors of some sort but usually, it's just some dude or dame standing around in the aisles of a Costco. There are very few foods on this planet that one of them won't tell you, often with a note of urgency in their voice, will kill you dead within a week.

I've said this before on this blog and I'll probably say it again many times. Years ago, I came to the conclusion that what works for me, health-wise, was to find a really good physician and build up a relationship with that physician. I do not expect this person to be infallible but he — in my case, it's a he — will be accurate a lot more often than any non-doctor, especially one of those guys standing around in a Costco telling me how eating one of their rotisserie chickens is more lethal than chug-a-lugging a Cyanide Smoothie.

So I trust my doctor and I trust any specialists to whom he refers me. It has been my experience that good doctors know who the other good doctors are.

In addition to not trusting "medical experts" whose offices seem to be in a Trader Joe's, I do not trust generic medical advice like "Everyone needs to cut out seed oils" or "Everyone should be drinking almond milk." Due to my various food allergies, there are dozens of foods you can eat that I can't, almond milk among them. The current mania to ban food dyes may be correct but it doesn't feel like it's being driven by people committed to following actual science.

I, of course, trust absolutely nothing advocated by our current Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He may well turn out to be the worst thing Donald Trump has done to us.

Dave Ketchum, R.I.P.

I've always loved a certain kind of actor — the kind who turned up at one time or another in almost every show I was watching when I was kid. Guys like Peter Leeds, Tom Pedi, Ed Peck, Dabbs Greer, Lou Krugman, the pre-M*A*S*H Jamie Farr, Herb Vigran, Herbie Faye — there's a long, long list — rarely had regular parts of those TV shows but they always seemed to be guest-starring. Dave Ketchum, who just died at the age of 97, was a regular on a few shows like Camp Runamuck, Get Smart and I'm Dickens, He's Fenster…but most of the time he turned up in guest roles. Producers and directors knew he was reliable and always did his job well.

Dave's job was not just acting. He did stand-up comedy. He wrote for a lot of TV shows. He was in a lot of commercials. I never worked with him but we got to talking on Writers Guild picket lines and he seemed like a nice, funny guy. Here's a rundown on the career of that nice, funny guy.

Today's Video Link

Here's film of Los Angeles and Hollywood in the thirties. The audio and the colorization are fake but the memories are real…

FACT CHECK: Same Old, Same Old

Trump claims the EU gave the United States a $600 billion present he could spend however he wanted. Daniel Dale over at CNN says no, he didn't. Steve Benen agrees with Dr. Dale.

While meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Monday, Trump threw out some statistics and versions of history that Daniel Dale says are not true.

Trump has made some really stupid, untrue statements about mail-in voting. Daniel Dale lists some of them and explains why they're wrong. FactCheck.org has more.

Trump says that "The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future." And for this Politifact awards him their coveted "Pants on Fire" ranking.

Trump feels he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because he's ended seven wars. The Associated Press does not agree with his list.

The Associated Press also has yet another update in the long list of statements and actions that prove Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

And Trump's ongoing insistence that any statistics that don't reflect well on them must be vicious lies extends to stats about crime in Washington, D.C. FactCheck.org explains why, as usual, he's wrong.

Today's Video Link

My pal Gary Sassaman has another installment up of his series, "Tales From My Spinner Rack!" In it, Gary reminisces about comic books he collected avidly when he was a kid and as I was a kid at roughly the same time collecting the same comics, his pieces strike a fine chord with me.

This time out, Gary discusses "The 25-Cent War," a moment in 1971 when it was necessary for DC and Marvel to raise their cover prices. They'd been offering 32-page comics for fifteen cents and with this increase, through some matter of possibly-illegal collusion, they both went to 48-page comics for 25 cents…but in Marvel's case, not for long. After one month, Marvel switched back to the 32-page format offering it with a cover price of twenty cents — a chess move which practically destroyed DC.

As some of you know, while I loved the content of a lot of DC Comics from this period, I thought the management of the company was totally inept. Their 48-page format comics were part new, part reprints and the readers hated the mix. Marvel, meanwhile, was giving their wholesalers and retailers a better deal on the 20-cent comics and it was all downhill for DC for several years after that, even after they gave up and went to twenty cents too. Things weren't helped by DC's tendency to give up on new products if the first or second issues didn't sell, and by a lot of bad, cluttered covers and…well, there were other missteps.

This is all my opinion, not Gary's…but you can see what he had to say about it all when you enjoy the latest edition of "Tales From My Spinner Rack!" Enjoy…

Groucho

I meant to post this yesterday but life, as it often does, interfered with my plans. Yesterday was the anniversary of the passing of Groucho Marx — a day that meant Mixed Feelings for those of us who loved the man and what he represented on-screen. I had the honor of being in his presence three times — one, when he was still able to walk and talk pretty much as he always had; once, when he was so "out of it" that a planned TV appearance had to be canceled; and once, up at his home, when a party of sorts spiraled around him and he just sat there, unable to say or understand very much of our brief conversation.

You can perhaps understand how I went home from that third visit feeling that Groucho was already gone.

If I had met Steve Stoliar that day at Groucho's house, I would have felt badly for him. Steve was a devout Groucho fan who stumbled into the dream job of assisting Groucho in the comedian's last few years. His book, Raised Eyebrows, recounts that bittersweet experience becoming involved in Groucho's last days, struggling to remain non-partisan when others were starting to fight over the body and whatever it owned. I highly recommend Steve's book and while you can buy it on Amazon, it's better if you buy it from the author who will personalize it for you.

But I didn't meet Steve back then. I met him and we became good friends thirty-five years after Groucho passed and since then, we've logged a lot of hours talking about all things Marx as well as other topics. Occasionally, it's about being present for and perhaps participating in the last years of people we'd admired from afar in their younger days. It's a very strange position to find one's self in.

Groucho meant a lot to a lot of us as he may have to you. His was a unique comic voice…and attitude…and body language. He was funny in just about every way a person can be funny on a stage and the things he said, whether ad-libbed or written by great comedy writers, were eminently quotable. I'm glad I met him that first time…and a little less glad for the other two encounters.