In honor of all famous pipe smokers.
Francis George Middlemass was an English actor, who even in his early career played older roles. He is best remembered for his television roles as Rocky Hardcastle in As Time Goes By, Algy Herries in To Serve Them All My Days and Dr. Alex Ferrenby in 20 episodes of Heartbeat. Middlemass was also active in the Royal Shakespeare Company and was the fourth and final actor to play Dan Archer in The Archers.
Hans Hellmut Kirst was a German novelist and the author of 46 books, many of which were translated into English. Kirst is best remembered as the creator of the "Gunner Asch" series which detailed the ongoing struggle of an honest individual to maintain his identity and humanity amidst the criminality and corruption of Nazi Germany.
Hans Hellmut Kirst was born in Osterode, East Prussia. Osterode is today in Poland.
Kirst joined the German Army in 1933 and served as an officer during World War II, ending the war as a First Lieutenant and Nationalsozialistischer Führungsoffizier. Kirst was a member of the Nazi Party, stating later that he had "confused National Socialism with Germany."
Kirst later indicated that after the war he did not immediately believe accounts of Nazi atrocities. "One did not really know one was in a club of murderers," he recalled.
Kirst's first novel was published in 1950, translated into English as The Lieutenant Must Be Mad. The book told of a young German officer who sabotaged a Nazi garrison.
Kirst won an international reputation with the series Null-acht, fünfzehn (Zero-Eight, Fifteen), a satire on army life centered on Gunner Asch, a private who manages to buck the system. Initially conceived as a trilogy — 08/15 in der Kaserne (1954), 08/15 im Krieg (1954), 08/15 bis zum Ende (1955) — the three-book narrative was expanded to five with the publication of 08/15 Heute in 1963 and 08/15 in der Partei in 1978. The series follows the career of Asch, a common man in an impossible situation, from the years before World War II, to the Eastern Front, and finally into the world of post-war Germany.
The Gunner Asch series was published in English as: The Revolt of Gunner Asch (1955), Forward, Gunner Asch! (1956), The Return of Gunner Asch (1957), What Became of Gunner Asch (1964) and Party Games (1980). ("Party Games", NOT part of the Gunner Asch series)
Other major novels by Kirst set during the Third Reich and World War II include Officer Factory, about the investigation into the death of a training officer in an officer school near the end of World War II, Last Stop, Camp 7, the story of 48 hours in an internment camp for former Nazis, The Wolves, a tale of crafty resistance in a German village, and The Nights of the Long Knives, about a fictitious 6-man squad of SS hit men. All of these novels featured humor and satire, with leading characters often shown positioning themselves as outspoken, ardent Nazis during the Third Reich era before effortlessly flipping to become equally ardent in their claims to have been anti-Nazi and 100% pro-democracy or pro-communist after the tide turned.
Kirst also wrote about the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in Aufstand der Soldaten (1965), which was translated into English as Soldiers' Revolt.
Kirst's non-World-War-II-themed novels included The Seventh Day (1957), a nuclear holocaust story that received worldwide acclaim and was dubbed "so convincing, that it doesn't seem like fiction at all". Using a wide array of viewpoint characters, most of them Germans, it describes – step by step and day by day – how in just a single week a chain of small incidents escalates into bigger incidents, small-scale fighting, all-out war, resort to nuclear arms and finally a worldwide nuclear exchange with Europe totally destroyed by the Seventh Day and "the Days of Humanity were numbered". Symbolic characters are a pair of star-crossed lovers, a West German boy and his East German girlfriend, who spend the entire book desperately searching for each other finally to find and run towards each other but before they can touch a nuclear explosion vaporizes both of them in a split second.
Die letzte Karte spielt der Tod (1955) is a fictional account of the life of Soviet spy Richard Sorge, published in the United States as The Last Card and in the United Kingdom as Death Plays the Last Card.
In 1965 Kirst was nominated for an Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America for his 1962 book Die Nacht der Generale, translated into English as The Night of the Generals. The book dealt with an investigation into a series of murders of prostitutes during and after World War II committed by one of three German generals. The book was made into a 1967 film of the same name, which starred Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole.
Kirst also wrote the Konstantin Keller series of detective novels set in Munich in the 1960s and published in English translations as Damned to Success (and also as A Time for Scandal), A Time for Truth and Everything has a Price.
In 1972 Kirst was a member of the jury at the 22nd Berlin International Film Festival. He was also a member of International PEN and The Authors Guild.
At the time of his death, the New York Times noted that "his novels, many of them replaying the events of the war, reflect his acceptance of his nation's guilt," but that some critics "charged him with trivializing the history of the Third Reich.
Kirst died in Bremen in February 1989 aged 74 years.
Maurice Edmond Sailland better known by his pen-name Curnonsky and dubbed the Prince of Gastronomy, was one of the most celebrated writers on gastronomy in France in the 20th century. He wrote or ghost-wrote many books in diverse genres and many newspaper columns. He is often considered the inventor of gastronomic motor-tourism as popularized by Michelin, though he himself could not drive. He was a student of Henri-Paul Pellaprat.
Maurice Edmond Sailland was born in Angers (Maine-et-Loire) on October 12, 1872 to Edmond-Georges Sailland and his wife Blanche-Alphonsine Mazeran. His mother died within of month of his birth, and his father abandoned him. He was raised by his grandmother in Angers and attended the Collège Saint-Maurille in town. At the age of 18, he moved to Paris to attend the Ecole Normale Supérieure to prepare for a career in journalism.
Curnonsky's professional activities were truly wide-ranging. He even created a number of advertising slogans for important companies. According to his biographer Arbellot, he coined the name Bibendum for the Michelin Man in 1907—because "Michelin tires drink [i.e. 'soak up' or 'eat up'] everything, even obstacles"—, and wrote Michelin's weekly column "Les Lundis de Michelin" in Le Journal starting on November 25, 1907. It was originally signed "Michelin" but starting on March 2, 1908, it was signed "Bibendum". Michelin had used the phrase "Nunc est bibendum" ("Cheers!" in Latin) on a poster in 1898, showing the Michelin Man swallowing a glass full of nails, but it is unclear when the word "Bibendum" became applied to this character.
In 1921, he began writing a series of regional travel guides with Marcel Rouff, published under the collective title of La France Gastronomique: Guide des merveilles culinaires et des bonnes auberges françaises (Gastronomic France: Guide to the culinary marvels and the good inns of France). This was the early days of automobile tourism, which served to highlight the regional foods of France. Curnonsky and Rouff played an important role in the increasing popularity of discovering regional dishes and restaurants. Between 1921 and 1928, Curnonsky and Rouff wrote 28 volumes, which totaled 3,000 pages and included more than 5,000 recipes. The historian Julia Csergo writes that Curnonsky and Rouff "invented the 'gastronomic guide' with the publication of their Gastronomic Tour of France."
He was named a knight of the Légion d'Honneur in 1928 and was made an officer in 1938.
In 1928, he co-founded the Académie des gastronomes, modelled on the Académie Française, and served as its first president, until 1949. In 1947, he started the magazine Cuisine et Vins de France along with Madeleine Decure. In 1950, he was a co-founder of the Confrérie de la Chaîne des Rôtisseurs His other associations included honorary member of the Club des Purs Cent, member of the Association des Gastronomes régionalistes, and member of the Académie de l'Humour.
Curnonsky died on July 22, 1956, at the age of 89.
Professor Jacques Cauvin was a French archaeologist who specialised in the prehistory of the Levant and Near East.
Cauvin started his work in France at Oullins Caves and Chazelles Caves (near Saint-André-de-Cruzières) in 1959 and 1960 and then Chandolas in 1965. He began to specialise in archaeology of the Middle East in 1958 when Maurice Dunand invited him to assist with excavations and studies of the stone tool industries at Byblos in Lebanon. He carried out seven seasons there until 1967, which included surveys extending to Lebanon's Mediterranean coast. Cauvin's extensive typological studies of this fully excavated site are still used as references for students of lithics today. Also at this time he began studies in Syria at Horan in 1962, in the Jezireh in 1969 and excavations at Taibe in 1965 and Tell Aswad in 1972. Because of his experience in this area, he was chosen to lead excavations at the major site of Mureybet, originally discovered and surveyed by Maurits van Loon. Mureybet was a large-scale rescue operation and had at the time the longest stratigraphic sequence seen since the excavation at Tell es-Sultan to the south. Excavations and multidisciplinary studies were conducted from 1971 to 1974. Flooding of the site prevented further work. Another season was carried out at the neighbouring and partly-contemporary site of Sheikh Hassan in 1976.
Another important site was discovered and surveyed by van Loon around this time at El Kowm where the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs agreed with the Syrian authorities to study a large 30-kilometre (19 mi) area without the constraints of urgency at Mureybet. In 1977 Cauvin prepared the groundwork for the permanent mission to El Kowm-Mureybet (Syria), which he retained leadership of until 1993, when he was replaced by Danielle Stordeur. In 1978, Cauvin was asked by the Turkish government to launch a new rescue campaign on the Euphrates at Cafer Hoyuk that ended in 1986 due to flooding of the area. His work on these various important sites and the materials collected have highlighted the steps in humanity's development through the late Natufian to the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB).
In 1966, with the support of the CNRS and other research fellows, he founded the Centre de Recherche d'Ecologie humaine et de Préhistoire (CREP) in a converted mill in southern Ardeche to study and stock collections of stone tools and work on the problems of the Neolithic. These collections include paleobotanical and archaeozoological specimens and everything related to the manufacturing (technology) and use (traceology) of stone objects and bones. This developed into the Maison de l'Orient Méditerranéen Ancien, equipped with a library, meeting rooms and accommodation on site. This has further developed and is now called the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée.
He remained a researcher at the CNRS throughout his career, successively as Research Fellow in 1957, "Chargé" in 1966, Master in 1977, Director in 1983 then Director Emeritus in 1995. He taught in Paris from 1978 to 1982 and Lyon from 1977 to 1982 in the form of courses or seminars directing Master's degree programs. Cauvin was regarded as an objective thinker, prolific author, charismatic team leader, and one of the great French experts on prehistory. He was married to Marie-Claire Cauvin, also a Director at CNRS, author and specialist in Near East Archaeology.
Étienne Mougeotte was a French journalist and media director. During his fifty-year career, he served as Vice-President of TF1 Group and was satellite director of TF1 from 1987 to 2007 alongside Patrick Le Lay. He directed the editorial staff at Le Figaro from 2008 to 2012 and was Director-General of Radio Classique from 2012 to 2018. From 2015 to 2020, he was President of Groupe Valmonde [fr], including the magazine Valeurs actuelles.
Mougeotte was born in La Rochefoucauld on 4 March 1940, during the Phoney War. His father worked as an inspector for SNCF and his mother was a housewife in Charente. His father died when he was 18, which compelled his mother to start working. He was a khâgne student at the Lycée Henri-IV, which prepared him to attend Sciences Po, where he became Vice-President of the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France. He was opposed to President Charles de Gaulle while maintaining an anti-Marxist stance. While a student, he spent his time playing basketball alongside Lionel Jospin. He finished his studies at the French Press Institute.
Mougeotte began his career with Paris-Normandie [fr] before joining France Inter as a reporter and correspondent in Beirut. During his time in Lebanon, he often interacted with Lebanese radio. He notably covered the Six-Day War for France Inter. He then worked as a newspaper editor for Europe 1 during May 68. In 1969, he joined the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF), presented the newscast Information Première [fr] with Philippe Gildas. From 1972 to 1973, he worked for RTL before returning to Europe 1 in 1974, where he became editor and news director until 1981.
In 1987, Mougeotte joined TF1, which had just been purchased by Bouygues. He quickly became Vice=President of TF1 Group and became antenna director of TF1 in 1989. In 1987, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, which he recovered from, but left lasting effects on his voice. He and Patrick Le Lay were credited with the group's success in the 1990s and 2000s. He was responsible for hiring multiple personalities who became prominent news anchors, such as Nikos Aliagas, Arthur, Christophe Dechavanne, and Jean-Luc Reichmann. Several successful programs also took off under Mougeotte's leadership, such as Ciel, mon mardi !, À prendre ou à laisser, Qui veut gagner des millions ?, and others. He received great renown for his journalistic and professional skills.
Mougeotte also served as President of La Chaîne Info, the non-stop news channel of the TF1 Group, from 1994 to 2007. In 2006, he became Vice-President of France 24.
Mougeotte left TF1 in 2007 to become a communications consultant. However, he remained an adviser to TF1 Group CEO Nonce Paolini [fr], who replaced Patrick Le Lay. In August 2007, he began working for Le Figaro Magazine and became editorial director of the Le Figaro group in November of that year, replacing Nicolas Beytout [fr]. On 2 December 2007, he joined the team of interviewers on Le Grand Jury. In 2012, he took part in the group with supported re-election for President Nicolas Sarkozy. In July 2012, he left his post as editorial director of Le Figaro and was replaced by Alexis Brézet [fr]. That month, he briefly worked as a consultant for TVous.
On 12 December 2012, Mougeotte was appointed general manager of Radio Classique, a position he held until 1 March 2018. In 2015, with Iskandar Safa and Charles Villeneuve, he purchased Groupe Valmonde from Laboratoires Pierre Fabre, which the right-wing weekly magazine Valeurs contemporaine was a part of.
In his youth, Mougeotte was firmly committed to the left and was briefly suspended from the ORTF for this reason. He broke from the left following the signing of the Programme commun in 1972 and became a supporter of President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. He was ousted from Europe 1 following the victory of François Mitterrand in 1981. During his time as Vice-President of TF1, the channel leaned to the right and supported Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. In 2012, Le HuffPost considered him a right-wing journalist, and François Hollande refused any interview with Le Figaro during the 2012 French presidential election, and would have demanded his departure from the newspaper.
Mougeotte in Paris at the age of 81 on 7 October 2021.
Dave Berg was an American cartoonist, most noted for his five decades of work in Mad of which The Lighter Side of... was the most famous.
Berg showed early artistic talents, attending Pratt Institute when he was 12 years old, and later studying at Cooper Union. He served a period of time in the Army Air Forces. In 1940, he joined Will Eisner's studio, where he wrote and drew for the Quality Comics line. Berg's work also appeared in Dell Comics and Fawcett Publications, typically on humorous back-up features. Beginning in the mid-1940s, he worked for several years with Stan Lee on comic books at Timely Comics (now known as Marvel Comics), ranging from Combat Kelly and The Ringo Kid to Tessie the Typist. He also freelanced for a half-dozen other companies, including EC Comics. Berg retains notoriety as a contributing “good girl artist” during the 50s and 60s for such publications as editor Abe Goodman's Humorama, rendering attractive women using pinup stylings generally in the form of one-panel humorous gags. Berg’s body of contributions during this period rank him alongside recognized contemporaries such as Bill Ward and Bill Wenzel. Beginning in 1983, he worked for a Jewish children's magazine, The Moshiach Times.
Berg began at Mad in 1957. For four years, he provided satirical looks at areas such as boating, babysitting, and baseball. In 1961, he started the magazine's "Lighter Side" feature, his most famous creation. Berg would take an omnibus topic (such as "Noise," "Spectators" or "Dog Owners") and deliver approximately 15 short multi-panel cartoons on the subject. Beginning in #218 (October 1980), he abandoned the thematic approach, and thereafter covered multiple topics in each article. Berg often included caricatures of his own family—headed by his cranky hypochondriac alter ego, Roger Kaputnik—as well as of the Mad editorial staff. Occasionally he drew fellow artists, including Don Martin in #110 (April 1967) and Al Jaffee in #119 (June 1968).
His artistic style made Berg one of the more realistic Mad artists, although his characters managed to sport garish early-1970s wardrobes well into the 1990s. The art chores for a 1993 article, "The First Day of School 30 Years Ago and Today", were split between Berg and Rick Tulka, since Berg's old-fashioned appeal made him an ideal choice to depict the gentle nostalgia of 1963. The artist's lightweight gags and sometimes moralistic tone were roughly satirized by the National Lampoon's 1971 Mad parody, which included a hard-hatted conservative and a longhaired hippie finding their only common ground by choking and beating Berg. However, "The Lighter Side" had a long run as the magazine's most popular feature. Mad editor Nick Meglin often sketched layouts of "Lighter Side" panels. Sixteen original collections by Berg were published as paperbacks between 1964 and 1987.
Berg held an honorary doctorate in theology. He produced regular religious-themed work for Moshiach Times and the B'nai Brith newsletter. His interaction with Mad's atheist publisher Bill Gaines was suitably irreverent: Berg would tell Gaines, "God bless you," and Gaines would reply, "Go to Hell."
Fellow Mad contributor Al Jaffee described Berg's unique personality in 2009: "Dave had a messianic complex of some sort. He was battling ... he had good and evil inside of him, clashing all the time. It was sad, in a sense, because he wanted to be taken very seriously, and you know, the staffers at Mad just didn't take anything seriously. Most of all, ourselves ... It came out in a lot of the things he did. He had a very moralistic personality ... He wrote a book called My Friend God. And of course, if you write a book like that, you just know that the Mad staff is going to make fun of you. We would ask him questions like, "Dave, when did you and God become such good friends? Did you go to college together, or what?"
In this faith connection, Berg was additionally hired to contribute content to The Magazine For Jewish Children, The Moshiach Times, by Rabbi Dr. Dovid Sholom Pape. According to Pape: "He was a wonderful writer and humorist, and he had a great Jewish heart. I asked him to prepare a series of cartoons that would, in a humorous way, illustrate basic ideas in Torah. To do this, he invented a fat character called Schlemiel who would always misunderstand things, and then there would be a couple of boys who would correct him." In 2002, Berg told an interviewer, "There was a psychiatrist who filed my Lighter Sides in categories. When a patient would tell him their troubles, he would pull out one of my sequences and say, 'See, it happens to everyone.'"
His characters occasionally made their way into other artists' works, such as Kaputnik finding himself a patient in a Mort Drucker spoof of St. Elsewhere, tagged "with apologies to Dave Berg."
Berg contributed to Mad for 46 years until his death, appearing in 368 issues. His final hand-drawn strip appeared in Mad issue #423. His last set of "Lighter Side" strips, which had been written but not penciled, were illustrated after Berg's death by 18 of Mad's other artists as a final tribute; this affectionate send-off included the magazine's final new contributions from Jack Davis and George Woodbridge. This tribute appeared in Mad issue #427.
Between 2008 and 2017, Berg's old Lighter Side gags were given rewritten word balloons with inappropriately "un-Berg-like" humor by longtime Mad writer Dick DeBartolo and other staffers, while the art was unchanged. The twelve installments of this irregular feature were called "The Darker Side of the Lighter Side."
Berg's other work included the comic strips Citizen Senior (1989–93), Roger Kaputnik (1992) and Astronuts (1994).
He died in his home in Marina del Rey, California, on May 17, 2002.
Siegfried Kracauer was a German writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. He has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He is notable for arguing that realism is the most important function of cinema.
Born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, Kracauer studied architecture from 1907 to 1913, eventually obtaining a doctorate in engineering in 1914 and working as an architect in Osnabrück, Munich, and Berlin until 1920.
Near the end of the First World War, he befriended the young Theodor W. Adorno, to whom he became an early philosophical mentor. In 1964, Adorno recalled the importance of Kracauer's influence:
[f]or years Siegfried Kracauer read the Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers. [...] If in my later reading of philosophical texts I was not so much impressed with their unity and systematic consistency as I was concerned with the play of forces at work under the surface of every closed doctrine and viewed the codified philosophies as force fields in each case, it was certainly Kracauer who impelled me to do so.
From 1922 to 1933 he worked as the leading film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung (a leading Frankfurt newspaper) as its correspondent in Berlin, where he worked alongside Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, among others. Between 1923 and 1925, he wrote an essay entitled Der Detektiv-Roman (The Detective Novel), in which he concerned himself with phenomena from everyday life in modern society.
Kracauer continued this trend over the next few years, building up theoretical methods of analyzing circuses, photography, films, advertising, tourism, city layout. In 1927, he published the work Ornament der Masse (published in English as The Mass Ornament) which emphasizes the tremendous value of studying the masses and popular culture. His essays in Ornament der Masse shows Karacauer's fascination with popular culture, particularly within the capitalist society of the United States.
In 1930, Kracauer published Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses), a critical look at the lifestyle and culture of the new class of white-collar employees. Spiritually homeless, and divorced from custom and tradition, these employees sought refuge in the new "distraction industries" of entertainment. Observers note that many of these lower-middle class employees were quick to adopt Nazism, three years later. In a contemporary review of Die Angestellten, Benjamin praised the concreteness of Kracauer's analysis, writing that "[t]he entire book is an attempt to grapple with a piece of everyday reality, constructed here and experienced now. Reality is pressed so closely that it is compelled to declare its colors and name names."
Kracauer became increasingly critical of capitalism (having read the works of Karl Marx) and eventually broke away from the Frankfurter Zeitung. About this same time (1930), he married Lili Ehrenreich. He was also very critical of Stalinism and the "terrorist totalitarianism" of the Soviet government.
With the rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1933, Kracauer migrated to Paris. In March 1941, thanks to the French ambassador Henri Hoppenot and his wife, Hélène Hoppenot, he emigrated to the United States, with other German refugees like John Rewald.
From 1941 to 1943 he worked in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, supported by Guggenheim and Rockefeller scholarships for his work in German film. Eventually, he published From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), which traces the birth of Nazism from the cinema of the Weimar Republic as well as helping lay the foundation of modern film criticism.
In 1960, he released Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which argued that realism is the most important function of cinema.
In the last years of his life Kracauer worked as a sociologist for different institutes, amongst them in New York as a director of research for applied social sciences at Columbia University. He died there, in 1966.
Ernst Simon Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher. Bloch was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as by apocalyptic and religious thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme. He established friendships with György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on an optimistic teleology of the history of mankind.
Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, the son of a Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married in 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, the couple had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the United States. He lived briefly in New Hampshire before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was there, in the reading room of Harvard's Widener Library, that Bloch wrote the lengthy three-volume work The Principle of Hope. He originally planned to publish it there under the title Dreams of a Better Life.
In 1948, Bloch was offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and he returned to East Germany to take up the position. In 1955 he was awarded the National Prize of the GDR. In addition, he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin (AdW). He had more or less become the political philosopher of the GDR. Among his many academic students from this period was his assistant Manfred Buhr, who earned his doctorate with him in 1957, and was later professor in Greifswald, then director of the Central Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences (ADC) in Berlin and who became a critic of Bloch.
However, the Hungarian uprising in 1956 led Bloch to revise his view of the SED (Socialist Unity Party) regime, whilst retaining his Marxist orientation. Because he advocated humanistic ideas of freedom, he was obliged to retire in 1957 for political reasons – not because of his age, 72 years. A number of scientists and students spoke publicly against this forced retirement, among them the renowned professor and colleague Emil Fuchs and his students as well as Fuchs's grandson Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski.
When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy. He died in Tübingen.
Geoffrey McIntyre Rowe known by his stage name Jethro, was a British stand-up comedian and singer from Cornwall.
Rowe was born in St Buryan, Cornwall, on 8 March 1948, the son of a farmer. After leaving school, he apprenticed as a carpenter and worked in the Levant tin mine. His father, Hugh, founded the St Buryan Male Voice Choir, and Jethro made his first stage appearances with the St Just District Operatic Society in St Just as a bass singer.
Rowe started touring pubs and clubs in Cornwall, singing traditional songs. One night, he ran out of voice and could not sing any more, so he told a joke instead. It was well received, and so he began developing his comedy act. His gags included misogyny, bodily functions, and jokes about genitalia, which always went down well in the working men's clubs and stag parties. This changed little when he started theatre tours, with fellow comedian Dawn French describing him as "gloriously un-PC".
From 1967 he also played rugby as a prop forward in over 100 matches for Penzance & Newlyn RFC, a team that later became the Cornish Pirates. It was here that Geoff Rowe acquired the name "Jethro", influenced by the character of Jethro Bodine in the American television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies.
After his popularity grew in Cornwall and Devon through the 1970s and 1980s, Rowe made his first national television performance in 1990 on the Des O'Connor Show, making several subsequent appearances. He also appeared five times on Jim Davidson's The Generation Game show, twice giving a demonstration of how to make a Cornish pasty, and on regional television, though much of his material was considered unsuitable for a television audience. He produced his first video, A Portion of Jethro, in 1993, followed by several others. He also claimed that, during the height of his popularity, he sold some 250,000 theatre seats a year. In 2001, he appeared in a Royal Variety Performance.
His best known routine was "This Train Don't Stop Camborne Wednesdays", partly because it was one of the few that could be performed in polite society, and therefore was aired more on the television. On the news of his death, Great Western Railway posted a tribute to him on the platform of Camborne station.
In February 2020, Rowe announced that he was retiring from public performances at the end of the year; the final shows were later postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jethro's standup act made use of his strong Cornish accent and rural style of dress, with a "no-holds barred, foul-mouthed and sexually explicit routine". He was sometimes criticised for incorporating racism, sexism, and homophobia into his act. Comedian Richard Herring noted that Jethro's success over a long career was admirable, but also stated, "Part of my admiration is that his stuff isn't as horrible as that of some of his contemporaries. Which is a bit of a negative positive."
Rowe spent his later years living in Lewdown, where he bred horses and owned a comedy club, which closed in 2012. In 1995, he walked from Land's End to Lewdown and raised £20,000 for the Bristol Cancer Open Scanner Appeal.
He said that "Jethro" and "Geoff Rowe" were two entirely different people, and described himself as "a total recluse" off the stage; embarrassed when people recognised him in the street.
He died in Plymouth on 14 December 2021, at the age of 73.
Siegfried Lowitz was a German actor.
Born in Berlin, he played the Hauptkommissar Erwin Köster in the German television drama Der Alte. Prior to his tenure as Hauptkommissar, he played a killer in the popular German police series Derrick.
He died at Munich in 1999.
Fritz Bachschmidt was a German actor .
Bachschmidt received private acting lessons, he worked as a theater actor in the Stadttheater Bern and in the Staatstheater in Hanover on stage.
Bachschmidt was on television, among other things. in the ARD series Lindenstraße from 1985 to 1988 as "Gottlieb Griese". He played other roles in the series Der Fahnder , Die Insel , AufAxis and the film Asche des Siegers as well as the ZDF series Our teacher Doctor Specht and The Black Forest Clinic . Bachschmidt was also seen in various fairy tale films such as The Travel Mate and The Galoshes of Luck .
Fritz Bachschmidt was married to his colleague Anke Wehner-Bachschmidt. Their daughter Christiane also works as an actress.
Bachschmidt died in 1992 at the age of 63
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Reginald Albert Saltmarsh, known by the stage name Reginald Marsh, was an English actor who is best remembered for supporting roles in many British sitcoms from the 1970s onwards.
Marsh was born in London in 1926 and he grew up on the Sussex coast at Worthing. After he left school he worked in a bank. After realising how serious he was about acting, his father introduced him to a retired actress, who introduced him to an agent who got his first acting role, at the age of 16, as a juvenile in Eden End by J.B. Priestley. He then worked in rep.
In 1958, he started working behind the scenes of Granada Television, but he soon went back to acting. From the 1960s he appeared in many films, including The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), Jigsaw (1962), Berserk! (1967), The Ragman's Daughter (1972), Young Winston (1972) and The Best Pair of Legs in the Business (1973), and on television, in such series as Dixon of Dock Green, Z-Cars and The Persuaders!. He also played bookie Dave Smith in Coronation Street on and off from 1962 to 1976.
Marsh played works general manager Arthur Sugden in the boardroom drama The Plane Makers (1963–64). He also appeared in The Champions (1968), Hine (1971), The Stone Tape (1972), Emmerdale Farm (1973), Crown Court (1973–74), QB VII (1974), Bless This House (1974), The Sweeney (1975), and The Duchess of Duke Street (1976). From 1975, Marsh played Jerry Leadbetter's boss in several episodes of The Good Life. He played a similar role in George and Mildred from 1976 to 1979, as Humphrey Pumphrey, Mildred's brother-in-law. From 1979 to 1987, Marsh played another similar role, Sir Dennis Hodge, Terry's boss, in Terry and June later reuniting with June Whitfield in the 1992 sitcom Terry and Julian, where he played Terry's boss George Wilson. From 1981 to 1985, Marsh played Reg Lamont in the soap opera Crossroads.
His play The Death is Announced ("A Murder Play") was produced in Leeds in 1964. He played Inspector Cullen. He described the play as a "comedy who-dun-it" and said that he wrote it "because he could never find a good 'copper' part for himself."
In the 1980s and 1990s, Marsh had many small roles on television, including appearing in Only When I Laugh, Home to Roost, Bergerac, Boon, Minder, Alleyn Mysteries and Terry and June. One of his last television roles was in an episode of Paul Merton in Galton & Simpson's... aired on 14 October 1997.
Reginald Marsh was married to actress Rosemary Murray, and they had four children. Marsh had two other children by his first marriage, actress Jenifer Coverdale. One of his sons had Down’s Syndrome, and during his retirement on the Isle of Wight Reginald Marsh actively supported MENCAP.[1] He died at his home on 9 February 2001 in Ryde aged 74.
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Sir Richard Stafford Cripps was a British Labour Party politician, barrister, and diplomat.
A wealthy lawyer by background, he first entered Parliament at a by-election in 1931, and was one of a handful of Labour frontbenchers to retain his seat at the general election that autumn. He became a leading spokesman for the left-wing and co-operation in a Popular Front with Communists before 1939, in which year he was expelled from the Labour Party.
During World War II, he served as Ambassador to the USSR (1940–42), during which time he grew wary of the Soviet Union but achieved great public popularity because on being invaded by Nazi Germany the USSR stated its co-operation with the Allies and restoring peace, causing Cripps to be seen in 1942 as a potential rival to Winston Churchill for the premiership. He became a member of the War Cabinet of the wartime coalition but failed in his efforts (the "Cripps Mission") to resolve the wartime crisis in India, where his proposals were too radical for Churchill and the Cabinet, and too conservative for Mahatma Gandhi and other Indian leaders. He later served as Minister of Aircraft Production, an important post but outside the inner War Cabinet.
Cripps rejoined the Labour Party in 1945, and after the war; served in the Attlee ministry, first as President of the Board of Trade and between 1947 and 1950 as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Labour party member and historian Kenneth O. Morgan claimed of his role in the latter position that he was "the real architect of the rapidly improving economic picture and growing affluence from 1952 onwards."
The economy improved after 1947, benefiting from American money given through grants from the Marshall Plan as well as loans. However, the pound had to be devalued in 1949. He kept the wartime rationing system in place to hold down consumption during an "age of austerity", promoted exports and maintained full employment with static wages. The public especially respected "his integrity, competence, and Christian principles."
Norman Chandler was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times from 1945 to 1960.
Norman Chandler was born in Los Angeles on September 14, 1899, one of eight children of Harry Chandler and Marian Otis Chandler. His grandfather, Harrison Gray Otis, had been publisher of, the Los Angeles Times from 1881 to 1917, and his father from 1917 to 1944.
As a youth he was raised in his parents' estate on Hillhurst near the Greek Theater. He delivered copies of the Los Angeles Times in a model‐T Ford.
Chandler attended Hollywood High School, then Stanford University, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Sigma Rho chapter). While at Stanford, he met an athletic coed from Long Beach, who he married, Dorothy Buffum. They raised their two children, Mia and Otis Chandler on their suburban ranch in Sierra Madre. After the children grew up, they moved to a grand Italianate house on Lorraine Ave in the Windsor Square neighborhood of Los Angeles. Through his later years, the silver‐haired, pipe-smoking, handsome Chandler was a frequent visitor to the California Club, the Bohemian Grove, and his beach house in the Dana Strand Club in Dana Point, CA.
After dropping out of Stanford his senior year, Chandler started working at the Los Angeles Times on a seven year training program under his father, Harry Chandler, who had been its publisher since 1917. Norman Chandler became general manager in 1936, president in 1941 and at his father’s death in 1944, the third publisher of the newspaper.
The Times prospered under Chandler, and gained regional, as well as national, prominence. In 1947 it became the largest-circulation newspaper in Los Angeles, and in 1961 the Sunday paper had a circulation of more than one million.
Seeking to create a community-like work environment, Chandler was one of the first newspaper employers to offer benefits to his employees, including health insurance and pension plans, and to foster community spirit. His wife, too, recognized the importance of community spirit, instigating great revitalization of the culture of Los Angeles. Always one to recognize his success as coming from the success of his employees, Chandler constantly sought to create a warm, caring environment in which the individual needs of the workers and their families were always a consideration. In this way, Chandler was able to bring out the best in his employees so that the paper as a whole benefited, together with the larger community of Los Angeles, and beyond into the wider society.
Time Magazine honored Chandler in 1957 by putting him on the cover.
“In the world today,” he said, “we are witnessing education and publishing rivaling the population explosion in dramatic growth. The necessities of life have always challenged man's ingenuity—now the distribution of knowledge has become the challenge of the age.”
Chandler retired as publisher in 1960, leaving the job to his thirty year old son Otis Chandler.
The parent company of the Los Angeles Times, started by Harrison Gray Otis, was the Times Mirror Company. Under Norman Chandler's leadership, Times Mirror grew with both acquisitions and internal growth, becoming the first family-owned newspaper company to go public.
After letting his son, Otis, take over as publisher of the Times, Norman Chandler remained as chairman of the board from 1961-1968. Over the objections of his conservative family, he succeeded in getting the corporation listed on the NYSE in 1964. He then used the public shares to continue his expansion and diversification of the company, acquiring New American Library book publishers in 1960; the book publisher World Publishing Company in 1962: C.V. Mosby Company (1967), which published medical college textbooks and reference books; Harry N. Abrams — a publisher of art and photography books (1966); legal publisher Matthew Bender; and air navigation publisher Jeppesen (1961).
The company also acquired more newspapers: Newsday, The Dallas Times Herald and The Orange Coast Pilot in Costa Mesa, Calif.
Chandler also brought Times-Mirror Company into broadcasting; Times Mirror was a founding owner of television station KTTV in Los Angeles, which opened in January 1949. It became that station's sole owner in 1951, after re-acquiring the minority shares it had sold to CBS in 1948. Times-Mirror also purchased a former motion picture studio, Nassour Studios, in Hollywood in 1950, which was then used to consolidate KTTV's operations. Later to be known as Metromedia Square (then the Fox Television Center), the studio was sold along with KTTV to Metromedia in 1963.
Chandler died on October 20, 1973.
