PASSINGS:

Chris Schenkel, 82, Versatile and Ubiquitous Sportscaster, Dies (RICHARD SANDOMIR, 9/12/05, NY Times)

Chris Schenkel, whose versatility and genial style made him one of the most important sports broadcasters from the 1950's to the 1970's, died yesterday at Lutheran Hospital in Fort Wayne, Ind. He was 82.

Mr. Schenkel had emphysema for many years and recently had complications from ulcer surgery, his wife, Fran, said by telephone.

Like many of his well-known contemporaries, Mr. Schenkel glided easily through many sports, including football, basketball, boxing, golf, horse racing, the Olympics and bowling, which he called for 36 years.

Mr. Schenkel came to prominence in 1952 as the television voice of the football Giants; his baritone became the vocal accompaniment to the team's loss to the Baltimore Colts in the 1958 National Football League championship game, a seminal broadcast in the league's history.

His time was one in which play-by-play announcers were usually less talkative than they are now and rarely critical, and they traveled with the players. [...]

Mr. Schenkel, popular locally and nationally through calling the Giants, the Triple Crown horse races and the Masters golf tournament on CBS, had his profile enlarged after he was hired by ABC Sports in 1965.

"It was Chris Schenkel who put ABC Sports on the map," said Dennis Lewin, a former ABC executive. "It was Chris who gave us credibility."

Along with Curt Gowdy on NBC, Mr. Schenkel embodied the role of the big-game announcer, as ABC's primary Olympic anchorman and its top college football, National Basketball Association and bowling announcer. [...]

Despite his varied career, Mr. Schenkel knew that he might be best remembered for calling the Professional Bowlers Association Tour, which he remained with until ABC stopped carrying it in 1997.

Guitarist Clarence Gatemouth Brown Dies at 81 (BEN RATLIFF, 9/12/05, NY Times)

Clarence Gatemouth Brown, an eminent guitarist and singer who spent his career fighting purism by synthesizing old blues, country, jazz, Cajun and R & B styles, died on Saturday. He was 81.

His death was confirmed by Rick Cady, his booking agent, who said Mr. Brown had suffered from lung cancer and heart disease.

Mr. Brown died at his grand-niece's apartment in Orange, Tex., his hometown. He had left his own home in Slidell, La., on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans, to escape Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Cady said that his house was destroyed by the storm, and Colin Walters, his biographer, said there had been a plan to resettle him in Austin, Tex.

"American music, Texas-style" was how Mr. Brown characterized his music, even making that phrase the name of one of his albums; he refused to call it blues and was scornful of musicians who let themselves be too easily understood by settling into a single sound. He disdained deep delta blues, calling it "negative." He wore a western shirt and a cowboy hat onstage, covered jazz numbers like Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train" and Lou Donaldson's "Alligator Boogaloo," and sometimes played the fiddle, mandolin and harmonica in performance as well as the guitar.

Bush kept his head and the danger's passed (Mark Steyn, 13/09/2005, Daily Telegraph)

I'll leave it to future generations of historians to settle the precise moment at which Hurricane Katrina finally completed its transformation into a Kansas-type twister, and swept up the massed ranks of the world's press to deposit them on the wilder shores of the Land of Oz. But for a couple of weeks now they've been there frolicking and gambolling as happy Media Munchkins, singing and dancing "Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead".

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the storm is exhausted, meteorologically and politically. Power has been restored to the whole of Mississippi (much quicker than in Euro-style big-government Quebec during the 1998 ice storm, incidentally), the Big Easy is being pumped free of water far ahead of anybody's expectations, and, as the New York Times put it: "Death Toll In New Orleans May Be Lower Than First Feared".

No truth in the rumour that early editions read "Than First Hoped".

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 12, 2005 5:25 PM