The Dead Thread

Squid dead at the hands of GROG. Bastard won't try derailing any more of GROG's threads!!!!!

What a way to go!!! Will there be a burial at sea?

May I suggest another more tasteful way to dispose of Squids remains?

Calamari

Saddam Hussein

Any minute now....

On 2006-12-29 19:22, pappythesailor wrote:
Saddam Hussein

Any minute now....

Arrr!

Ya beat me to the punch!

Last Updated: Saturday, 30 December 2006, 05:03 GMT

Saddam Hussein executed in Iraq

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been executed by hanging at an unspecified location in Baghdad for crimes against humanity.
Iraqi TV said the execution took place just before 0600 local time (0300GMT).

But...was it really him?

Didn't he have a twin?

"The inventor of instant noodles, Momofuku Ando, has died in Japan, aged 96, of a heart attack. Mr Ando was born in Taiwan in 1910 and moved to Japan in 1933, founding Nissin Food Products Co after World War II to provide cheap food for the masses.

His most famous product, Cup Noodle, was released in 1971. Its taste and ease of preparation - adding hot water to dried noodles in a waterproof polystyrene container - have made it popular around the world.

Mr Ando said the inspiration for his product came when he saw people lining up to buy bowls of hot ramen noodle soup at a black market stall during the food shortages after World War II.

He developed his first instant noodles, Chicken Ramen, in 1958. The product came out as Japan recovered from the ravages of World War II and began a long period of economic expansion. It was the masterstroke of providing a waterproof polystyrene container for the noodles that made his Cup Noodle an instant success in 1971. Nissin has led the global instant noodle industry since then, selling 85.7 billion servings every year, according to Agence France Presse. His firm also developed a version of Cup Noodle for Japanese astronauts to eat on the space shuttle Discovery in 2005.

In 1999, Mr Ando opened a museum in Osaka devoted to instant noodles. He retired as Nissin's chairman in 2005. Japanese newspapers and business people have been paying tribute to Mr Ando.

"He was a self-made man who developed an epoch-making instant noodle product and spread it to all corners of the world," Akio Nomura, chairman of the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told Kyodo news agency.

Mr Ando remained active until just days before his death, giving a New Year's speech to Nissin employees and having a lunch of Chicken Ramen with company executives."

JAY McSHANN.....another KC treasure gone.

Pianist, singer and bandleader Jay McShann died Thursday Dec.7, one month before his 91st birthday. Fittingly, he passed away in Kansas City, Missouri, his adopted hometown and one of the most significant incubators of modern jazz.

Entire article---
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/mcsh-d12.shtml

Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying

Co written by drummmer Fred Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers, gone @ 66. 12/14/06

Iwao Takamoto: The guy that was the animator for scooby doo died yesterday -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwao_Takamoto

Another piece of my childhood gone.

Sleep well Lily.

Yvonne De Carlo, 'Munsters' star, dead
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/10/obit.decarlo.ap/index.html

Alice Coltrane.
Pianist and wife of the late saxophone legend John Coltrane.
August 27, 1937 - January 12, 2007

http://www.alicecoltrane.org

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Music/01/15/alice.coltrane.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest

Science Fiction author Robert Anton Wilson
January 18, 1932 - January 11, 2007

http://hostgator.rawilson.com/main.shtml

Author of 35 books including the Illuminatus! trilogy

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/070113/entertainment/obit_wilson_1

-Dennis Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas
November 29, 1940 - January 19, 2007

http://www.dennydoherty.com

-Imagineer and Disney legend Don Edgren
Sept 11, 1923 - December 28, 2006

http://legends.disney.go.com/legends/detail?key=Don+Edgren

Was involved with the building of Disneyland in 1954 and the creation of Pirates of the Caribbean and the Space Mountain rides.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/01/21/america/NA-GEN-US-Obit-Edgren.php

Oh No!! Lily gone....thank goodness these memories are caputred in film. (sigh) :(

Brent Liles
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Brent Liles (born September 7, 1963 died January 18, 2007) was the bassist for Social Distortion from 1981-1984 and later was the bassist for Agent Orange. He left Social Distortion on New Year's Eve 1984, the same day as friend and Social Distortion drummer Derek O'Brien. The two would once again be bandmates in the early 1990's with Agent Orange. Liles also briefly played guitar for the band Easter.

Also appeared in the 1983 documentary Another State of Mind.

Brent Liles passed away January 18, 2007. He was struck by a truck as he rode his bicycle across a street in Placentia, California.

LAS VEGAS – Liz Renay, a stripper and cult movie actress whose real life included roles as a gangster's moll, prison inmate, author, artist and Hollywood Boulevard streaker, died from cardiopulmonary arrest and gastric bleeding, the Clark County coroner's office said. She was 80.

"Hollywood Boulevard Streaker" is nice resume padding.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/012807dnobitrenay.53b69e.html

Danny Finegood
March 23, 1954 - January 22, 2007

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/27/BAG8ANQ5U31.DTL

Hey Ben, Brent Liles was a good friend who hung around down in Newport in the early 80's and even played bass in Civil Disobediance when I was too "under the weather" to play. R.I.P.

"The best-selling American novelist, playwright and screenwriter Sidney Sheldon has died aged 89."

No new deaths to report...just that I feel dead tonight. :)

"Billy Henderson, one of the founders of US soul group The Spinners, has died at 67 after complications from diabetes."

AND

"US keyboardist Joe Hunter, a veteran session musician who helped craft the distinctive Motown sound, has died in Detroit, Michigan, at the age of 79. As one of the Funk Brothers, Hunter performed with such legendary Motown acts as Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and Martha and the Vandellas."

Frankie Laine, the singer with the booming voice who hit it big with such songs as "That Lucky Old Sun," "Mule Train," "Cool Water," "I Believe," "Granada" and "Moonlight Gambler," died today at Mercy Hospital in San Diego. He was 93.

Laine entered the hospital over the weekend for hip replacement surgery but suffered complications from the operation, said his friend A.C. Lyles, the longtime producer at Paramount Pictures.

In all, Laine sold well over 100 million records and was hugely popular not only in the United States but in Britain and Australia.

Even after his popularity crested after the rise of rock 'n' roll, Laine was heard for many years singing the theme to the TV series "Rawhide," which featured a young Clint Eastwood and ran until 1966.

Most of those who remember Laine for his biggest hits would hardly know that his body of work included "Baby That Ain't Right," "Rosetta" and many other songs that were more in the style of what Laine considered his roots -- jazz and blues.

"Years before Elvis Presley, Laine brought a potent blend of blues, jazz and country to popular music," jazz critic Don Heckman said. "Rarely acknowledged in Laine's work, he sang with the easy, loose phrasing and imaginative articulation of jazz performers."

Laine started out in jazz but was sidetracked by arranger Mitch Miller, who fashioned Laine into the popular artist that he is best remembered for being.

"When I told him I'd probably lose all my jazz fans [with these songs], I was right. I did," Laine told David Kilby of Australian Broadcasting Corp. "But he said I would pick up a lot of other kind of listeners, and I did, so he was right, too."

Miller produced most of Laine's hits in the 1940s and 1950s, including "Mule Train" and "That Lucky Old Sun." He said he loved Laine's voice because it sounded like "the blue-collar man, the guy who didn't know where his next paycheck was coming from."

Laine at first refused to do "Mule Train."

"You can't expect me to do a cowboy song," he told Miller. "I won't do it!"

But Miller persuaded him to record it and it was one of Laine's biggest hits.

Though Laine was big of voice, he said he didn't like being referred to as a "belter.""I was just trying to emphasize the rhythmic aspects of the songs I sang, using my voice the way a jazz soloist uses his instrument," he said in "That Lucky Old Son," his 1993 autobiography (written with Joseph F. Laredo). "'Crooning' may have the more commercial style, but it wasn't for me."

Francesco Paolo LoVecchio was born March 30, 1913, the eldest of eight children of Sicilian immigrants who settled in the Little Italy neighborhood in Chicago. His father was a barber whose customers included Al Capone; his maternal grandfather was the victim of a mob hit. Laine said he came from a "big and poor, but happy" family.

As a kid, Laine sang in the all-boy choir at church, but first became excited about music when he listened to one of his mother's records on a windup Victrola: Bessie Smith singing "Bleeding Hearted Blues," with "Midnight Blues" on the flip side.

"The first time I laid the needle down on that record I felt cold chills and an indescribable excitement," Laine would say later.

This record was his first exposure to jazz and the blues, which would draw him into music.

At 18, with the Depression underway and his father out of work, Laine hit the road as a dance marathoner. Altogether he participated in 14 marathons, coming in first on three occasions. He and his partner, Ruthie Smith, made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for dancing 145 days straight (although he disputed Guinness, saying he and Smith danced for 146 days).

Laine said the life of a marathoner wasn't as grim as was portrayed in the 1969 film, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

As bizarre as the whole business sounds today, it was a decent method of keeping body and soul together during the Depression," he said. "I gained experience, insights into human nature, and I learned how to handle big crowds."

Besides, he said, some of the attention he got then "helped light a spark of hope that maybe I had a shot at bigger and better things."

But Laine would not hit it big until his mid-30s. In between, he would live the tough life of an undiscovered musician in the shank of the Depression. He traveled from city to city, often without enough money for a hotel or a decent meal.

Times like this, which he described in his autobiography, were not unusual: "Armed with $40 and a letter of introduction from Hoyt [Kline]"-a friend of Louis Armstrong's-"I headed off for my second shot at New York. With my club experience and those new songs, I figured I'd be singing in about a week. It took me three days to get in to see the radio executive, and 15 minutes for him to show me the door."

Before long he had used up "my pathetic little bankroll" going from club to club for auditions. He would sneak into hotels and sleep on the floor — at least until he got thrown out. Then he began sleeping on a Central Park bench, using his last 4 cents to buy four Baby Ruth candy bars, which he rationed to himself until he ran out of food and money.

Then he got a break-an audition at WINS radio station, where he got a $5-a-week job singing on a live half-hour show.

It was the program director at WINS who changed his name from Frank LoVecchio to Frankie Lane. (Laine added the "i" to avoid confusion with another singer with the same last name.)

Years more of moving around, working other jobs and testing his talent brought him eventually to Los Angeles, where he hung out at clubs like Slapsy Maxie's and Billy Berg's. It was at Billy Berg's that he met Duke Ellington, Art Tatum and many other legends. And it was there that he would occasionally get to sing for free before eventually being hired.

Even this did not provide an unbroken ladder to success, but eventually Laine did get a chance to record a few songs for Mercury Records. He decided he wanted to do an old song he'd heard years ago, "That's My Desire," but he couldn't remember it well enough to sing it the way it was written, so he improvised.

"Desire" was the song that proved the breakthrough for Laine, although it took almost a year. First it hit the so-called "Harlem" pop charts — which recorded sales to black record buyers.

"That didn't surprise me," Laine said. "In my leaner days I failed many an audition because, I was told, I sounded 'too black.' I'm certain the confusion was the direct result of the music that influenced me while I was developing my style. I guess I became the first of the so-called blue-eyed soul singers."

During 1947, "Desire" got more and more airplay, even in Europe. By fall, Laine got his first royalty payment for the song: $36,000. He was 34.

After rock 'n' roll hit big, Laine was considered old hat. He remained popular in Europe and Australia, and he caught a second wind recording the theme songs for "Rawhide"; Mel Brooks' movie "Blazing Saddles," and many commercials, including one for Campbell Soup's Manhandlers soups ("How do ya handle a hungry man? Manhandlers!").

He also kept performing, traveling widely with his wife, actress Nan Grey. After her death in 1993, he stayed closer to his home in San Diego, where the couple had lived since 1968. He remarried in 1999 to Marcia Ann Kline.

In "Off the Record," a book of interviews of popular music icons, Laine told author Joe Smith, the former chief executive of Warner Bros., Elektra and Capitol Records, that if he could change anything about his success, it would be to "make it happen maybe 10 years sooner."

"Ten years is a good stretch of scuffling," Laine said. "But I scuffled for 17 years before it happened, and 17 is a bit much."

Laine is survived by his wife, Marcia, and two stepdaughters, Pam and Jan from his marriage to Grey and two grandchildren.

Services are pending.

My personal favorite--

Crazy diapered astronaut lady has got to be thrilled that Anna Nicole Smith has stolen her spotlight.

39 years old--sad.

Her whole public life was a train wreck, but pin-ups never seem to end well. She followed Monroe and Mansfield to the end.

Guess the son will get all that money in the end.....hmmmm.

On 2007-02-08 19:40, VampiressRN wrote:
Guess the son will get all that money in the end.....hmmmm.

the son died months ago from an accidental drug overdose....

Sorry..I didn't mean Anna's son....I meant the son of the rich old fella she married. That son also died, but the family was still persuing Anna for money. Just sad how all the people fighting over the money are gone. I think Anna was just a tragic lost soul...but she was smart enough and what most think (cruel) enough to live off someone elses greenbacks.

Freddie Baker, February 5th 2007

"Freddie Baker, who had lived and performed in Albuquerque since the mid-1960s, was born in Honolulu on Feb. 7, 1921. By the time he was 13 he was performing, playing rhythm ukulele in a band. Baker, who until last week was performing dinner shows at the Town House Restaurant, died Monday night at age 85 after a short illness, said his wife, Jane Ong-Baker."

Whenever Mrs. Cheeky and I visited Albuquerque we would drop in to see Freddie performing at the Town House Restaurant. He was a warm and wonderful human being and we have many very fond memories of him.

We'll miss him....

PETER ELLENSHAW - Artist who helped create visuals for Disney films such as "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" & "Mary Poppins"
1913-2007

http://legends.disney.go.com/legends/detail?key=Peter+Ellenshaw

http://www.ellenshaw.com

Robert Adler, a US inventor best known for the creation of the couch potato's dream device, the TV remote control, has died at the age of 93.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6370831.stm

On 2007-02-16 08:27, cheeky half wrote:
Whenever Mrs. Cheeky and I visited Albuquerque we would drop in to see Freddie performing at the Town House Restaurant. He was a warm and wonderful human being and we have many very fond memories of him.

We'll miss him....

Indeed. Very sad. I'd hoped to make a trip to ABQ this spring and see Freddie at the Townhouse one more time. Great picture of you guys. Somewhere I've got one of me at our annual Chinese New Year gathering dancing in a lei and "King Kukulele Crown" as Freddie played and laughed behind me. Can't believe it's been almost nine years... RIP Freddie. Aloha and Mahalo.

http://www.alibi.com/index.php?story=18014&scn=music

Mary Kaye, a Hawaiian guitarist and singer who headed the "Mary Kaye Trio" and kicked off Las Vegas' 24-hour lounge scene, died Saturday of respiratory and heart failure, her nephew told The Associated Press. She was 83.

Kaye, born Mary Kaaihue, was the daughter of Johnny "Ukulele" Kaaihue, and an accomplished guitarist.

"She was the first person to ever have a guitar named after her, which is a Fender Mary Kaye Stratocaster," said her nephew, John Kaye, the administrator of Mary Kaye Trio Enterprises.

Kaye and her trio, made up of older brother Norman Kaye and Frank Ross, began playing deep into the night at Las Vegas' Frontier casino-hotel in the 1950s before such performances were hip, John Kaye said.

"They started the 24-hour gaming and entertainment venues," he said. "Within a matter of 72 hours, everywhere in town built a lounge. It became a mainstay of the Las Vegas night scene."

Norman Kaye, 84, is the only surviving member of the trio, said John Kaye, his son. Ross died in California in 1995.

The group recorded 13 albums, 21 singles, made 22 appearances on television and played on four movie soundtracks, John Kaye said. The albums included "Night Life" (1966), "Our Hawaii" (1962), and "A Night in Las Vegas" (1952).

If you liked the "Old & in the Way" album [Garcia] maybe you would like http://www.desertsageband.com Thats my other group. You prob. already know about http://www.agentsofvoodoo.com Anyway, if there ever WAS a connection between Tiki & the Dead? I'm livin proof!....Aloha & FAR OUT!......Remy

Hey! We got Iggy And The Stooges Tics for the Wiltern in the Pit!

Rock on!

Guitarist Al Viola
June 16, 1919 – February 21, 2007
http://www.alviola.com

Played mandolin on "The Godfather" soundtrack.
Worked with Frank Sinatra and can be heard on his recording of "My Way" and "New York, New York"

http://www.spaceagepop.com/viola.htm

Captain America--R.I.P.

One of America's most patriotic superheroes has died.

Marvel Entertainment killed off Captain America in an issue that hit newsstands Wednesday, the New York Daily News reported.

The superhero, who was created in 1941 as a patriotic hero during World War II, is shot down by a sniper in front of a courthouse.

His demise is a blow to one of the men who created him. "We really need him now," the superhero's creator, Joe Simon, 93, told the Daily News.

Over the years, an estimated 210 million copies of "Captain America" comic books have been sold in 75 countries.

And he could be back at some point. Marvel Entertainment said a resurrection isn't impossible. The company has said it's developing a Captain America movie.

Ernest Gallo
1909 - 2007
http://www.gallo.com/ErnestGallo

[ Edited by: KING BUSHWICH THE 33RD 2007-03-08 09:04 ]

Paul deLay (1952-2007). Portland bluesman and master harmonica player.
http://blog.oregonlive.com/aenow/2007/03/more_to_come.html

Fri Mar 9, 11:24 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Brad Delp, the lead singer of the 1970s and '80s rock band Boston was found dead at his home in southern New Hampshire on Friday,

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070310/people_nm/delp_dc

You think he would have lived in Boston.

R.I.P. Richard Jeni

Dammit! He was one of about five standup comics I really liked.

Richard Jeni, a standup comedian who played to sold-out crowds, was a regular on the "Tonight Show" and appeared in movies, died of a gunshot wound in an apparent suicide, police said Sunday.

Police found the 49-year-old comedian alive but gravely injured in a West Hollywood home when they responded to a call Saturday morning from Jeni's girlfriend, Los Angeles Police Officer Norma Eisenman said.

Eisenman said the caller told police: "My boyfriend shot himself in the face."

Jeni died at a nearby hospital.

Eisenman said suicide had not been officially confirmed and the investigation was continuing. An autopsy on Jeni would be done Monday, said Lt. Fred Corral from the investigation division of the coroner's office.

Jeni regularly toured the country with a standup act and had starred in several HBO comedy specials, most recently "A Big Steaming Pile of Me" during the 2005-06 season.

Another HBO special, "Platypus Man," won a Cable ACE award for best standup comedy special, and formed the basis for his UPN sitcom of the same name, which ran for one season.

Jeni's movie credits included "The Mask," in which he played Jim Carrey's best friend, "The Aristocrats," "National Lampoon's Dad's Week Off," and "An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn."

Larry "Bud" Melman [aka Calvert DeForest]

NEW YORK - The balding, bespectacled nebbish who gained cult status as the oddball Larry "Bud" Melman on David Letterman's late night television shows has died after a long illness. The Brooklyn-born Calvert DeForest, who was 85, died Monday at a hospital on Long Island, the Letterman show announced Wednesday. He made dozens of appearances on Letterman's shows from 1982 through 2002, handling a variety of twisted duties: dueting with Sonny Bono on "I Got You, Babe," doing a Mary Tyler Moore impression during a visit to Minneapolis, handing out hot towels to arrivals at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

"Everyone always wondered if Calvert was an actor playing a character, but in reality he was just himself — a genuine, modest and nice man," Letterman said in a statement. "To our staff and to our viewers, he was a beloved and valued part of our show, and we will miss him."

The gnomish DeForest was working as a file clerk at a drug rehabilitation center when show producers, who had seen him in a New York University student's film, came calling. His was the first face to greet viewers when Letterman's NBC show debuted on Feb. 1, 1982, offering a parody of the prologue to the Boris Karloff film "Frankenstein.""It was the greatest thing that had happened in my life," he once said of his first Letterman appearance.

DeForest, given the nom de tube of Melman, became a program regular. The collaboration continued when the talk show host launched "Late Show with David Letterman" on CBS in 1994.

Cue cards were often DeForest's television kryptonite, and his character inevitably appeared in an ill-fitting black suit behind thick black-rimmed glasses.

The Melman character opened Letterman's first CBS show, too — but used his real name because of a dispute with NBC over "intellectual property." DeForest, positioned inside the network's familiar eye logo, announced, "This is CBS!"

DeForest often draw laughs by his bizarre juxtaposition as a "Late Show" correspondent at events such as the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway or the anniversary Woodstock concert that year.

His last appearance on "Late Show" came in 2002, celebrating his 81st birthday.

DeForest also appeared in an assortment of other television shows and films, including "Nothing Lasts Forever" with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd.

As per his request, there will be no funeral service for DeForest, who left no survivors. Donations can be made in his name to the Actors' Fund of America.

The Hollywood Christmas Parade will never return!

Hollywood Christmas Parade

Vonnegut.

So sad.

One of my favorite authors, while in my 20s, and an important voice in American literature.

Go read the Sirens of Titan or Cat's Cradle!

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies

By Dinitia Smith
New York Times News Service

April 11, 2007, 10:49 PM CDT

NEW YORK -- Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five,""Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and '70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. "Mark Twain," Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, "Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage," "finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died."

Not all Vonnegut's themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.

His novels -- 14 in all -- were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago "filled with bittersweet lies," a narrator says).

The defining moment of Vonnegut's life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. "The firebombing of Dresden," Vonnegut wrote, "was a work of art." It was, he added, "a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany."

His experience in Dresden was the basis of "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, "so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age."

To Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," summed up his philosophy: "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him "one of the most able of living American writers." Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a fourth-generation German-American and the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Vonnegut's brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.

During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Edith Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. "When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information," Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.

He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, "'All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.' "

"My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside," he wrote.

Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

In 1944, he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.

Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and U.S. warplanes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.

Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

"The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified," he wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death."

When the war ended, Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children: Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Vonnegut's sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts adopted their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

In Chicago, Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He also studied for a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on "The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales." It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel "Cat's Cradle" as his thesis.)

In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for General Electric Co. Three years later he sold his first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," to Collier's magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started an auto dealership.

His first novel was "Player Piano," published in 1952. A satire on corporate life -- the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses -- it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.

"Player Piano" was followed in 1959 by "The Sirens of Titan," a science fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961, he published "Mother Night," involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Vonnegut's other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like "Slaughterhouse-Five," in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, "Mother Night" was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.

In 1963, Vonnegut published "Cat's Cradle." Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes water to freeze at room temperature.

Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with "Slaughterhouse-Five." It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. "You know -- we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves," an English colonel says in the book. "We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God -- I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.'"

As Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.

In "Slaughterhouse-Five," Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

"Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round," Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, "was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

"Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."

One of many Zen-like words and phrases that run through Vonnegut's books, "so it goes" became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.

"Slaughterhouse-Five" reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

After the book was published, Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.

"The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem," he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, "Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity."

Forsaking novels, Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife, Jane, and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)

In 1979, Vonnegut married the photographer Jill Krementz. They have a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.

Vonnegut returned to novels with "Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday" (1973), calling it a "tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.

In 1997, Vonnegut published "Timequake," a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, "a stew" of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. "If I'd wasted my time creating characters," Vonnegut said in defense of his "recycling,""I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter."

Though it was a bestseller, it also met with mixed reviews. "Having a novelist's free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride," R.Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: "The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut's transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir."

Vonnegut said in the prologue to "Timequake" that it would be his last novel. And so it was.

His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, "A Man Without a Country." It, too, was a best seller. It concludes with a poem written by Vonnegut called "Requiem," which has these closing lines: When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, "It is done." People did not like it here.

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

[ Edited by: tikibars 2007-04-11 22:47 ]

On 2007-04-11 22:26, tikibars wrote:
Vonnegut.

So sad.

One of my favorite authors, while in my 20s, and an important voice in American literature.

Sad indeed. :(

And his novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" was made into a movie that because of the Valerie Perrine in-her-prime nude scenes...kept me up many a night. :wink: