[rtpoe]

JACK MCAULIFFE (1945-2025)

Born in Caracas where his father worked as a translator for the FBI, the family eventually settled in northern Virginia. Jack studied electronics, and when he joined the Navy, he was shipped off to Scotland to work on repairing submarine antennas. In his free time, he motorcycled around the area, stopping at local pubs and breweries.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, what in the world am I gonna do when I get back to the United States and they don’t have beer like this?’” he said in an oral history with Theresa McCulla, who chronicled the history of craft brewing as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. He found an answer while reading The Big Book of Brewing by Dave Line, a British home-brew pioneer who inspired him to start making his own beers.

Settling in Northern California, he got two friends to help him scrounge, scavenge, and build his own equipment (commercially available gear was either for the hobbyist or large commercial brewers). The New Albion Brewing Company opened up in 1976, quickly gaining national media attention. Even with their small output, it was still too much for what was essentially a one-person operation. After failing to get backing to expand the brewery, McAuliffe closed its doors in 1982, and left the brewing business.

But not before Ken Grossman had paid two visits to see how things were being done. “After looking at Jack’s operation, we realized you can’t survive off a barrel and a half of beer” a day, Grossman said. “You can’t eat off that, let alone cover your costs.” When Grossman launched Sierra Nevada in 1980, its production capacity was seven times the size of New Albion’s.

As the microbrewery industry exploded, people would not forget who started it. In 2012, the Boston Beer Co. paid tribute to Mr. McAuliffe with the release of a New Albion pale ale. One of the company’s co-founders, Jim Koch, had acquired the rights to the New Albion name, and worked with Mr. McAuliffe to put out the beer using New Albion’s original recipe. He then donated the New Albion trademark, along with proceeds from the run — some $350,000, according to McCulla’s oral history — to Mr. McAuliffe, who used some of the money to build a small cabin in Arkansas.

Mr. McAuliffe gave the rights to New Albion’s name to his daughter, DeLuca, who was born out of a teenage relationship he had with one of his high school classmates, Linda Pellini. Mr. McAuliffe did not know he had a daughter until the two reconnected late in life. In 2013, she formed the Brewer’s Daughter to partner with third-party breweries to reproduce New Albion beers. A few years ago, DeLuca partnered with BrewDog, a brewery based in Scotland, to produce a limited run of New Albion pale ales at BrewDog’s outpost in Columbus, Ohio. The company had known about Mr. McAuliffe’s ties to Scotland, where his passion for beer took root.

“That,” DeLuca said, “was a full-circle moment.”

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/food/online/brewing-revolution/revolution

McAuliffe with his homemade barrel washer, circa 1979:

[solvegas]

Today, Robert Redford died at 89 years of age. First time I saw him in a movie was back in 1969 when he starred along with Paul Newman in the Western movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was the Sundance Kid. The next movie that I remember seeing them both starring again was in 1973 called The Sting. He became a Hollywood icon, and he got Oscars for acting and directing movies.

[rtpoe]

BERNIE PARENT (1945-2025)

Born in Montreal, he didn't take up hockey until he was 11. He idolized Canadien's goalie Jacques Plante, and decided to become a goalie. He helped the minor league Niagara Falls Flyers win the Memorial Cup in 1965.

Parent signed with the Boston Bruins and turned pro that fall. However, he was left unprotected in the 1967 NHL Expansion Draft and was selected by Philadelphia. He was among the NHL’s best young goalies in his early years, but he never had a winning record while playing for the offensively challenged Flyers. With management desperate for more offense, Parent was sent to the Toronto Maple Leafs as part of a three-way trade midway through the 1970-71 season.

There, he was delighted to team with Jacques Plante, who said of him "He's probably got more natural ability than any goaltender in this league."

Parent would try to land a spot with a couple of World Hockey Association teams, but they all folded. Rather than go back to Toronto, he agreed to a trade back to the Philadelphia Flyers.

Back in the city he loved playing for, he launched into one of the greatest two-season runs in NHL history.

In the 73-74 season, he played in 73 of the Flyers' 78 games, winning 47 - a record that would last for decades. Taking the team to the playoffs, he'd lead them to the team's first Stanley Cup title. The next season, he repeated that performance, once again helping the Flyers win the championship. Both times he's win the NHL's award for "best goalie" and MVP of the playoffs. "When Parent is out there, we know we can win games we have no business winning," said coach Fred Shero.

A freak eye injury in 1979 brought an early end to his career. But he still stayed close to the team, serving as a "team ambassador" and working with their youth program. Always a fan favorite, he always appreciated his role. “He was so good with people, said teammate Joe Watson. "A lot of athletes don’t get it or don’t give fans the time of day. Bernie gave everyone the time of day.”

"The Flyers, starting with [chairman Ed] Snider, have done a great job as far as keeping us alive in front of the public as the years go by," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in December 2010. "It's been 30-some years. Three different generations came along, and yet 10-year-old kids ask: 'Can I have your autograph?' When you look at this, you say it's got to come from their parents, and the tradition goes on. It's just a beautiful thing."

[solvegas]

Born on April 3, 1934, she died on October 1, 2025 at age 91. I remember seeing her at the National Geographic TV show and magazine back in the 1960's and 1970's, when she was interacting with other primates such as gorillas, monkeys, chimpanzees, orangutans and she was young then. It was a radical thing to do in those days, but she got along fine with those species. She helped protect them and helped protect gorillas in Zaire, aka Congo, and was able to get the United Nations to protect them also. 

[rtpoe]

(beat me to it)

JANE GOODALL (1934-2025):

Always interested in animals, she kept a veritable zoo while growing up in the south of England - cats, dogs, birds, the lot. At age 4, she hid in a chicken coop to see exactly where eggs came from.

Unable to afford college, she took secretarial jobs until she had earned enough to travel to East Africa to visit a high school friend whose family had a farm near Nairobi. To stay there, she found work as a typist for a British construction firm. A chance meeting with anthropologist Louis Leakey turned into a private tour of the museum where he worked. He hired her as his secretary, then invited her along on his next dig at Olduvai Gorge, where she proved her mettle amid the wild animals.

Shortly after the team returned to Nairobi, he invited Goodall to lead a new chimp research project. He saw her inexperience as an asset that gave her a “mind uncluttered and unbiased by theory.” He asked her to go into the forests of what was then Tanganyika (later Tanzania) and observe chimpanzees. Leakey would help her get research grants, and encouraged her to get her doctorate. She enrolled in the University of Cambridge and received a PhD in ethology, or animal behavior, working on her dissertation whenever she could pry herself away from research at the Gombe camp.

There, she made some critical observations. She watched a chimpanzee feast on a freshly killed baby bush pig, contradicting the widely held assumption that chimps were strict vegetarians. Days later, she saw the same chimp insert a long blade of grass in a termite mound, then withdraw the stalk. The grass was covered with termites, and the chimp devoured them. That simple task — a seemingly throwaway gesture — proved a revelation. Her research, published in the journal Nature in 1964, sent shock waves through the worlds of animal behavior and anthropology. Dr. Goodall had seen an ape create and use a tool — behavior that was thought at the time to be an essentially human trait.

The discovery marked the start of a career that would span more than half a century and distinguish Dr. Goodall as the first scientist to engage in such a methodical, long-term study of wild chimps. Her research at the Gombe Stream Reserve showed that tenacious field observation could be more revealing than laboratory experiments, the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould later said, calling her work with chimps “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”

Chimps were not the unfeeling, unintelligent creatures that people had long assumed. Dr. Goodall’s work showed that they were individuals, with emotions and loyalties and disagreements. They kissed. They took care of each other. They went to war. They passed down lessons, one generation to the next. “She has made the most important contributions of any primatologist in history,” said Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford professor who studies baboons using Dr. Goodall’s model of long-term field observation. “She’s simply the patron saint of the field.”

Her career took a turn in 1986, when she attended a conference in Chicago. Learning how the population of chimpanzees had plummeted in the previous decades, she felt an imperative to leave behind her life as a solitary field researcher and became a traveling crusader for conservation. The Jane Goodall Institute, based in Washington, became a vehicle for her sprawling conservation efforts, addressing the well-being not just of apes but also of people.

In 2002, Dr. Goodall was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Two years later, she was knighted in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. In 2025, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor.

“People just grow up thinking the forests and animals will last forever,” she told Canada’s Globe and Mail in 2001. “I’m just trying to change attitudes toward animals,” she added. “It’s very simple, really, I just want to change the world a little. Will I ever achieve it? No. But that’s what one works toward.”

This Gary Larson cartoon was given to the Jane Goodall Institute - not just the original, but all the rights to it. They've used it on fundraising merchandise and the like....

[rtpoe]

RONNIE RONDELL JR (1937-2025)

Ronald Reid Rondell was born into the movies. His father worked in Hollywood, and he accompanied his dad to movie sets — he liked to hang around the stunt performers — and got to be an extra in several "Ma and Pa Kettle" films.

While picking up a paycheck as an extra on a Western, he impressed actor Lennie Geer, who began schooling him in fights, falls and horseback riding. That led to him doubling for such actors as David Janssen on "Richard Diamond, Private Detective", Robert Horton on "Wagon Train", Doug McClure on "The Virginian" and Michael Cole on "Mod Squad".

His later career spanned the ’80s and ’90s with credits in Blazing Saddles , Lethal Weapon, Thelma & Louise, Speed, The Crow, as well as coordinating stunts for Star Trek: First Contact, Batman & Robin, Sphere, and Deep Blue Sea.

In 2003, he even returned from retirement to stage a car-chase sequence in The Matrix Reloaded, working alongside his son, R.A. Rondell, the film’s stunt coordinator.

His work was celebrated with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Taurus World Stunt Awards in 2004 and induction into the Hollywood Stuntman’s Hall of Fame.

His most famous work was a still photo.

For the cover of the Pink Floyd album "Wish You Were Here", art director Storm Thorgerson envisioned two businessmen shaking hands, one literally engulfed in flames, to evoke the metaphor of being “burned” by the deal. Photographer Aubrey “Po” Powell oversaw the shoot at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California. They had to shoot the scene fifteen times to get it to look right.

https://www.floydianslip.com/news/2018/01/the-story-behind-pink-floyds-wish-you-were-here-cover-photo/

“You never told anyone you were hurt,” he said in Kevin Conley’s 2008 book, The Full Burn: On the Set, at the Bar, Behind the Wheel, and Over the Edge With Hollywood Stuntmen. “Because they always had another guy that could fit the clothes.”

[rtpoe]

DOLORES "SISTER JEAN" SCHMIDT (1919-2025)

The oldest of three children, Dolores Bertha Schmidt was born in San Francisco on Aug. 21, 1919. Her father was a janitor and later a city administrator. She attended Catholic school. Her third-grade teacher, whom she adored, was a member of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. “Dear God,” she would pray at night, “help me understand what I should do, but please tell me that I should become a BVM sister.” In high school, she played on the girls’ basketball team.

In 1937, she joined the BVM, taking the name Sister Jean Dolores. She completed her bachelor’s degree in education in 1949. After teaching at elementary schools, Sister Jean received a master’s degree in education from Loyola University of Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount) in 1961. That year, she joined the faculty at Mundelin College.

Sister Jean joined Loyola Chicago in 1991 after Mundelein College became affiliated with the university. In 1994, Loyola’s president asked her to work with Loyola’s athletes on improving their grades to help them remain eligible to play.

Athletes met with her weekly. She helped some write essays. She counseled others on time management. The meetings frequently drifted beyond academics. She prayed with athletes after family members died. She listened to them when their hearts were broken after relationships ended. Sister Jean was “the one person we knew we could always count on,” Derek Molis, one of the first players she worked with, told the New York Times in 2018.

In 1996, she was named the basketball team's chaplain, where she added playing advice to her tutelage. “There’s been days throughout my last four years when I had a bad game, a down game,” Donte Ingram, a Loyola Chicago senior in 2018, told the Times. “We might have won. We might have lost. But at the end of the message, she always found a way to make me feel better.”

She was thrust into the national spotlight as the Ramblers staged an improbable run to the Final Four in 2018. After Loyola-Chicago’s buzzer-beating win over Miami in the first round, Sister Jean became an overnight ce|ebrity — with photos and videos of her hugging players after the win going viral

Her bobblehead became the biggest seller in bobblehead history. Lego made a statue of her. “Sometimes I wonder, Why me?” she wrote in her autobiography. “Why did I become so famous? Why was I blessed with this kind of platform so that I could spread God’s grace and be an inspiration to others? I don’t know the answer.”

Finally, she concluded: “Our God is a God of surprises. Some are unpleasant, but many are wonderful. Things will happen in life that we could never anticipate. God likes to keep us on our toes. He has blessed me with an amazing life full of love and purpose. I can’t wait to see what He has in store for me next.”

[MaxBigfoot]

It's been a very bad couple of days.
Moody Blues singer and bass player John Lodge died yesterday.
Thommy Price, who played drums with Scandal, Billy Idol, and Blue Öyster Cult; and was Joan Jett and the Blackhearts drummer for 30 years, plus was a respected session drummer, died yesterday.
And today, Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton died.   

[solvegas]

It's been a very bad couple of days.
Moody Blues singer and bass player John Lodge died yesterday.
Thommy Price, who played drums with Scandal, Billy Idol, and Blue Öyster Cult; and was Joan Jett and the Blackhearts drummer for 30 years, plus was a respected session drummer, died yesterday.
And today, Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton died.   

These is a sad period. 

[rtpoe]

MISS MAJOR GRIFFIN-GACY (1946-2025)

Miss Major, who was known to many of her friends and colleagues as “Mama,” grew up in Chicago and said she was unsure of her exact birth date, which was listed in official records as Oct. 25, 1946. As she told it, her mother named her Major on the advice of a psychic, who suggested she give the **09** “a name of importance.”

After graduating from high school at 16, Miss Major entered college in Milwaukee, only to be kicked out of school after a roommate found a suitcase of women’s clothing among Miss Major’s belongings, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

Miss Major performed in drag shows in Chicago and then New York, finding encouragement from a friend named Kitty, who dressed her, did her makeup and gave her a blond wig. “If it wasn’t for Kitty, I wouldn’t be here,” Miss Major told the Guardian. “She gave me me. I saw I was beautiful, and there was no turning back.”

In New York, Miss Major supported herself as a sex worker and show girl and socialized at the Stonewall Inn, one of the few gay bars that didn’t exclude trans people. She was there on June 28, 1969, when New York police raided the place, sparking a riot.

She moved to the West Coast in 1978. She worked with HIV/AIDS patients in San Diego and later the Bay Area, where she operated San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange van and started a drop-in center for transgender sex workers as part of an AIDS nonprofit. When the organization’s director tried to end the center because they believed it to be too radical, Miss Major mobilized staff in protest, leading the director to step down.

As awareness of trans issues increased in the past decade, Miss Major received growing recognition and was featured in a 2015 documentary, “Major!” While visiting Little Rock for a screening of the film, she found herself in love with the city and decided to stay. Beginning in 2019, she and her nonprofit, House of gg, acquired property in Little Rock to create what the organization described as “a space for our community to take a break, swim, enjoy good food, laugh, listen to music, watch movies, and recharge for the ongoing fight for our lives.”

Although she had two strokes and other medical problems late in life, Miss Major stayed active, trying to beat back conservatives’ anti-trans rhetoric and policy efforts. “They want us to live in the 1950s. No. Get off our backs and let us live,” she told the Guardian, with an expletive. “They try to push us back — well, that means we gotta put the gloves on and fight again. … People have to organize and get it together, and we also must vote.”
 
Miss Major at the 2024 NYC Pride March, where she served as a grand marshal. (Rob Kim/Getty Images)

[MaxBigfoot]

Ace Frehley, guitarist for KISS, passed away yesterday.   

[wolpertinger]

Klaus Doldinger (1936-2025)

Jazz Musician Klaus Doldinger was especially famous for his compositions of the title melodies for the films "The Boat" (Das Boot), "The never ending Story" (Die unendliche Geschichte) and the film music for the German-Austrian-Swiss Detective Series "Tatort" (Site of Crime).



Klaus Doldinger (12 May 1936 – 16 October 2025)

[rtpoe]

DREW STRUZAN (1947-2025)

Born in Oregon City OR, he loved drawing, using whatever materials he could get. He went to the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles to further his career. He worked his way through that school selling his artwork and accepting small commissions.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree, he landed a job as a staff artist for Pacific Eye & Ear, a design studio. After designing album covers for acts including The Beach Boys, the Bee Gees and Earth, Wind & Fire — for just $150 to $250 a piece — he moved into movie posters in 1975.

His big break came in 1978 when he was hired to help create the poster for the re-release of Star Wars, painting the human characters in oil while fellow artist Charles White III handled the mechanical details. His “circus poster,” designed to evoke turn-of-the-century carnival art, became an instant classic. It was reportedly George Lucas’ favorite of the many Star Wars posters, and Lucasfilm hired him on for several projects.

From there, Struzan became Hollywood’s go-to “one-sheet wonder,” creating unforgettable posters for Blade Runner, The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Thing, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and many more.

“His posters made many of our movies into destinations … and the memory of those movies and the age we were when we saw them always comes flashing back just by glancing at his iconic photorealistic imagery.” - Stephen Spielberg

Struzan himself once explained his philosophy: “I felt that art was more than just telling the story....
I asked the directors what they’re doing and why they were doing it. I try to find the best in what they are doing, then I paint that way.”

Drew (l) receiving a tribute poster from fellow poster artist Kyle Lambert:

[rtpoe]

GRAMMA (1884?-2025)

Whalers visiting the Galápagos Islands devastated the native tortoise population. By the beginning of the 1900s, it was becoming clear that they were on the brink of extinction. In the 1920s and 1930s, conservationists such as the New York Aquarium’s first director, Charles Haskins Townsend, went to the Galápagos to save the species.

It was during a Townsend expedition in either 1928 or 1931 that Gramma was captured and brought back to the Bronx. Hoping to establish breeding populations, Townsend sent his specimens to zoos across the US. One of the tortoises sent to San Diego was Gramma.

It took a while, but the captive breeding progam worked - there are now around 30,000 of the giant tortoises around the world, with a third of them coming from the program.

Meanwhile, Gramma and her fellows at the San Diego Zoo became local ce|ebrities. Ch|ldren would write poems to them, and the more accommodating of the tortoises - like Gramma - would tolerate giving rides to them.

In captivity, the tortoises don’t have to worry about predators and eat a wider variety of foods. That’s because what they would eat in the wild — grass — can’t be bought at the grocery store. Lettuces, kale, collards, mustard greens, spinach, endive, dandelion greens and cabbage are all on the menu — which to a tortoise, is decadent, said Joe Flanagan, chief veterinarian at the Houston Zoo.

As is common for animals of her size and age, Gramma had developed an “ongoing bone conditions related to advanced age,” according to the San Diego Zoo. They became severe enough that her caretakers decided to euthanize her.

Gramma is remembered as a thread that has connected generations of employees, guests and conservationists, the zoo said. She went from appearing in black-and-white photos to being a social media maven.

“It was a privilege to care for such a remarkable tortoise,” the zoo wrote.

Gramma in 2024, having a nice meal:

[rtpoe]

PAUL EKMAN (1934-2025)

Before he even graduated from high school, Ekman enrolled at the University of Chicago where he studied psychology. He'd earn his BA at NYU in 1954, focusing on facial expressions and body movement. A grant from the National Institute of Mental Health allowed him to continue his work; the grant would be renewed for forty years.

He would soon note a strong correlation between emotions and specific expressions across all manner of societies, which ran counter to the prevailing theory that expressions for things like joy and anger were learned. With his colleague Wallace V. Friesen, he would categorize the many little movements that create a facial expression. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) — a comprehensive tool for measuring facial movement - was the result. The FACS was first published in 1978 and revised in 2002. It allows trained individuals to categorize facial movements based on the specific muscles involved in an expression.

Ekman would develop this work into a way to help detect when a person is lying. His work is frequently referred to in the TV series Lie to Me where he served as scientific advisor and in which the character Dr. Lightman is based on him. He also worked with Pixar's film director and animator Pete Docter as a scientific consultant for the latter's 2015 film Inside Out.

He did have some minor issues with that movie's portrayal of Sadness. “Sadness is seen as a drag, a sluggish character that Joy literally has to drag around through Riley’s mind…In the film, Sadness is frumpy and off-putting. More often in real life, one person’s sadness pulls other people in to comfort and help,” he explained.

After the release of Inside Out 2, Ekman noted he hoped a third movie in the series would include the emotion of compassion. As for Inside Out 2, he wrote, “All in all, it was a joy to watch and feel along” with the film.