Off Topic RIP June

RIP
Beach looks lovely too...
and I know it’s April but it was just put in today


Michael Parsons obituary
Structural engineer who had a big hand in the creation of the Severn, Forth and Humber road bridges
Tony Burton

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Wed 2 Jun 2021 12.13 BST
Last modified on Wed 2 Jun 2021 12.24 BST

Michael Parsons, who has died aged 92, played a key role in the design of Britain’s three major suspension bridges, over the Forth, Severn and Humber estuaries – and was closely involved in the design of the first two suspension bridges over the Bosphorus in Turkey.

Working for the consultants Freeman Fox and Partners throughout his career, he was the originator of the streamlined box girder concept first adopted for the suspended deck of the Severn Bridge and taken up on most suspension bridges thereafter.

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Michael Parsons. Among his colleagues, he was known for his collegiate approach and for his caution and rigour in design
The Forth Road Bridge, which opened in 1964 and on which Mike’s role was to carry out the detailed design of the superstructure, followed traditional US suspension bridge practice in using a substantial lattice structure, or truss, to stiffen the suspended deck. Early in his career, Mike was charged with calculating the loads in the individual truss members – a painstaking task with a slide rule in the days before suitable computer programmes had been developed. Alongside this he ran a test programme to determine the compression strengths of the deck truss members, as these were all-welded square tubes that were expected to behave differently from the riveted ones on American bridges.

For the Severn Bridge Mike was asked by his boss, Gilbert Roberts, to design a deck truss of reduced depth by integrating it with the steel plating supporting the roadway. He succeeded in demonstrating that the depth could be nearly halved, and a model was taken to the National Physical Laboratory in London for wind tunnel testing. During set up, however, the model broke free of its fixings and destroyed itself in the subsequent impact.

That setback led Mike to propose an alternative deck structure for wind tunnel testing – a box section. The consequent testing proved successful, leading to the adoption of a streamlined plated box section for the Severn suspended deck, which resulted in a considerable weight saving. There was also a dramatic reduction in wind loading on the deck from the side – to one-fifth of that for the Forth deck – which benefited the tower design.

Born in Bristol, Mike was the second of four children of Norris Parsons, a plumber and later a hospital maintenance engineer, and his wife, Kathleen (nee Holder), who ran an umbrella shop. From Cotham grammar school he went to BristolUniversity and gained a first in engineering.

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Innovations led by Michael Parsons allowed for reductions in weight and wind loading on the Severn suspension bridge, which was opened in 1966.Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images
Mike’s fascination with suspension bridges was inspired by Brunel’s suspension bridge in Clifton, and was developed at university by a research project testing a model bridge. This moved him to apply for a job at Freeman Fox, which had a distinguished track record in the design of long-span bridges. His familiarity with bridge deck vibration modes stood him in good stead at interview and his application was accepted.

Mike met Joan Wickett, a civil servant, during his first two years with Freeman Fox and they married in 1951. By then he had been called up for national service and was posted to Germany shortly afterwards. After his two years were up, he resumed his career with the firm.

Learning from the spectacular collapse in 1940 of the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge in the US, which had been shaken to pieces by a 40 mph wind, Mike began to apply aircraft wing flutter theory to suspension bridge decks to understand how the structural properties of the deck could be adjusted to prevent any repeat of that disaster. The Tacoma failure had demonstrated that it was essential to provide sufficient torsional stiffness in suspension bridge decks, and this principle guided all subsequent Freeman Fox designs.

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Michael Parsons, right, with his colleague Brian Smith at the top of the Severn Bridge during its construction
In 1961 Mike was appointed deputy resident engineer on the Severn Bridge site, initially supervising the construction of foundations on the English side and subsequently the erection of the superstructure, until its completion in 1966. During the opening of the bridge by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh noticed that a few of the hangers were vibrating in the wind – something that the site staff, Mike included, had missed. As a result, Mike designed and fitted damping devices similar to those used on overhead electricity cables. The streamlined box girder adopted for the Severn Bridge was a breakthrough because of its inherent high torsional stiffness, and earned Freeman Fox the MacRobert award, which Mike shared with four colleagues, in 1969. I joined Freeman Fox that year, and although I did not work directly with Mike, I became aware of his reputation for thoroughness.

On his return to the London office, his next assignment was the detailed design of the Bosphorus Bridge, which was an evolution of the Severn design, although with an increased main span of 1,074 metres compared with 988 metres. A three-metre depth was again chosen for the box girder, but its width was increased to carry six traffic lanes.

The design of the Humber Bridge, on which Mike was appointed project engineer for the superstructure in 1973, broke new ground because of the dramatically increased main span of 1,410 metres. However, the deck was the same width as at the Severn Bridge (for four lanes), so Mike increased the depth of the box from 3 metres to 4.5 metres to provide adequate torsional stiffness. At its opening in 1981 its main span was the longest in the world, and it held that record for 17 years.

Towards the end of his career, in 1984, Mike was put in charge of a team tasked by the UK government with examining bids for the construction of a link from the UK to France either above or below the Channel. There were ten bids to evaluate, including one for a carbon fibre suspension bridge with spans about three times those over the Humber. Mike went about his assessments in his characteristically quiet, confident manner, and drew around him a diverse team of advisers. His report in 1985 recommended the acceptance of one of the bids that proposed a tunnel – and led eventually to the go-ahead for Eurotunnel to start the work.

He retired in 1988, and in 2012 gave an oral history interview for the British Library on his life and career. Among his colleagues, Mike was known for his collegiate approach and for his caution and rigour in design. Spending hours on equations that are now solved by computers in milliseconds, he found that the process of checking and cross-checking actually helped him to get a feel for what the bridge would feel and act like in real life. “I felt the structure was almost a part of me,” he said.

He is survived by Joan and their two sons, Paul and Philip.

Michael Francis Parsons, structural engineer, born 16 October 1928; died 20 April 2021

 

Tributes have been paid to Hull’s larger-than-life entertainer Roy “Wendy” Gibson, who died yesterday.

Flamboyant showman Roy was well known for his appearances at local pubs and clubs in the past but even more so for entertaining the troops aboard MV Norland when the North Sea passenger ferry was requisitioned to transport 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, to the Falklands.

The performer was playing at the Oak Vaults, in Scott Street, Hull, only last Sunday, just three days before his sad passing, aged 67.

The pub acknowledged the news on Facebook, saying: “It is with great sadness we report the passing of Hull's own Liberace, Roy Wendy Gibson. Roy was so well loved and royally entertained us at OV just last Sunday. RIP my friend.”

Pub owner Paul Bartle said it had been Roy’s first pub performance for about 15 years.

 

Roy 'Wendy' Gibson.
Very sad news...
RIP

 

RIP Kirkland.
Lived in Hornsea. Saw him a few times out and about

 

That’s really sad, I had the opportunity to speak to him a couple of times whilst he was in Hornsea, he wasn’t well, due to his accident,but always happy to chat.
He defeated Roberto Duran in New York, which he took at short notice and hardly any preparation. Incredible boxer, but just wanted to party instead of train.
RIP Kirkland.

 

RIP
One of the truly terrifying scenes in film history


Ned Beatty obituary
American stage and screen actor best known for his film roles in Deliverance, Network, Superman and Hear My Song
Ryan Gilbey

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Mon 14 Jun 2021 15.21 BST
Last modified on Mon 14 Jun 2021 19.14 BST

American cinema of the 1970s provided an embarrassment of riches for character actors specialising in the eccentric, flawed, vulnerable or monstrous. Each of those qualities was well within the range of Ned Beatty, the self-described “macho-fat-actor-man”, who has died aged 83.

Beatty starred in many of the key films of that decade. He made his screen debut in John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), where he is one of four friends who go canoeing in the Georgia wilderness, only to find that the locals are even more hostile than the landscape. Beatty’s formerly carefree character is raped by a woodsman, who compounds the ordeal by forcing him to squeal like a pig.

He always defended that disturbing scene: “I’m really proud of it. I think it scared the hell out of people.” For that reason, he did not take kindly to being squealed at in the street by strangers. Anyone doing so could expect to receive a curt reply from him, such as: “When was the last time you got kicked by an old man?”

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Ned Beatty, left, and Gene Hackman in Superman, 1978. Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar
In Robert Altman’s three-hour, multi-character drama Nashville (1975), Beatty is a lawyer and wheeler-dealer unable to connect emotionally with his children, who are deaf. In All the President’s Men, he is Martin Dardis, the Dade County chief investigator who receives a tip-off about the link between the Watergate burglars and the campaign to re-elect Richard Nixon. Network (also 1976) gave Beatty his showiest role, as the boss of a powerful conglomerate who holds forth on the topic of corporate supremacy: “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T…”

Most of the three-minute speech is delivered from the bottom right-hand corner of the frame, where Beatty is picked out by a theatrical spotlight in the darkened conference room. Part fire-and-brimstone preacher, part circus ringmaster, he rages and gesticulates wildly before making a sudden handbrake turn into the realm of the conciliatory.

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Ned Beatty in Hear My Song, 1991. Photograph: Channel Four Films/Allstar
The character is a former salesman, a line of work that Beatty knew well: it was his father’s job and, briefly, his own, back when he earned a living selling baby furniture. At the audition for Network, he daringly adopted high-pressure sales tactics, telling the director Sidney Lumetand the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky that he had another, more lucrative offer waiting for him. “I’m going to walk out of here and I’m going to make a call to my agent,” he informed them. “I’m going to say, ‘Hold on just a little while. I’ll let you know if I want to do that’ and when I come back through the door, I’ve got to know.” He was, he later admitted, “lying like a snake”.

His only Oscar nomination came for Network, and he lost out to his All the President’s Men co-star Jason Robards. But he reached his widest audience as Otis, the dim-bulb sidekick to the arch-villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) in Superman the Movie (1978) and Superman II (1980). The haughty, imperious Hackman and the humble, scurrying Beatty made an endearing comic duo with shades of Mr Toad and Mole from The Wind in the Willows.

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Ned Beatty in Los Angeles in 2007. Photograph: Héctor Mata/AFP/Getty Images
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Ned was the son of Margaret (nee Fortney) and Charles Beatty. As a child, he performed in a local church choir, and planned to become a priest until he developed a taste for acting after being cast in a school play. He attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, without graduating, then spent his early career performing with regional theatre companies.

One of his earliest roles, at the age of 21, was in summer stock as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He returned to the part in London in 2003, when he had reached the character’s exact age, of 65. He won great acclaim for that production, as well as for the Broadway transfer (the New York Times commended his “passionate, scrupulously detailed acting”), which brought him a Drama Desk award.

For eight years, he was a resident player at the Arena Stage in Washington. It was there that he appeared in The Great White Hope, which gave him his Broadway debut when it transferred in 1968. Following Deliverance, film came to dominate Beatty’s career. “I’m not one of your actors who bemoans the fact that he has left the theatre,” he said. “For me, film is the more poetic medium, and theatre the more literal.”

John Huston directed him in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) and an electrifying adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood (1979). Beatty reteamed with Burt Reynolds, his friend and Deliverance co-star, for White Lightning (1973), WW and the Dixie Dancekings (1975), Gator (1976), Stroker Ace (1983), Switching Channels (1988) and Physical Evidence (1989).

The disaster movie spoof The Big Bus and the jaunty, would-be Hitchcockian thriller Silver Streak gave him a chance to be straightforwardly funny. Also in 1976, he was a dour hitman in Mikey and Nicky, Elaine May’s grimy tale of small-time hoods.

He featured in two widely maligned films by major directors, Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Steven Spielberg’s wartime comedy 1941 (1979). But he sparkled as an FBI agent opposite Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson in the underrated spy caper Hopscotch (1980); as a corrupt police captain in the smart, sultry thriller The Big Easy (1986); and as the Irish tenor Josef Locke in the whimsical British comedy-drama Hear My Song (1991).

He worked frequently in television, with occasional appearances as the father of Dan Conner (John Goodman) on the sitcom Roseanne between 1989 and 1994, as well as a recurring role in three series of Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-95). Recent films included Mike Nichols’s political comedy Charlie Wilson’s War, Paul Schrader’s brooding thriller The Walker (both 2007) and the British director Michael Winterbottom’s harrowing adaptation of Jim Thompson’s pulp novel The Killer Inside Me. Younger audiences would be hard-pressed to recognise Beatty’s face, though his voice would surely be familiar from Toy Story 3 (also 2010), where he is at first genial, then menacing, as Lotso, the pink, strawberry-scented teddy bear who rules the nursery with an iron fist.

Beatty was happy to stay under the radar. “Stars never want to throw the audience a curve ball, but my great joy is throwing curve balls,” he said in 1977. “I love it when audiences don’t recognise me from movie to movie, when they see Network and don’t realise I’m in it until the final credits. It means I’ve done my job well.”

He is survived by his fourth wife, Sandra Johnson, whom he married in 1999, and eight children. Three earlier marriages – to Walta Chandler, the mother of Douglas, Charles, Lennis and Wally, in 1959; Belinda Rowley, mother of John and Blossom, in 1971; and Dorothy Lindsay, mother of Thomas and Dorothy, in 1979 – ended in divorce.

Ned Thomas Beatty, actor, born 6 July 1937; died 13 June 2021

 

Edward De Bono lateral thinker RIP

 

RIP Ned Beatty... I've picked a more joyful scene obviously.

 

Dean Parrish obituary
US singer whose 1960s song I’m on My Way became a cherished anthem of northern soul
Richard Williams

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Fri 18 Jun 2021 17.08 BST
Last modified on Fri 18 Jun 2021 17.10 BST

Dean Parrish was the name temporarily adopted by Phil Anastasi in the 1960s when he became one of a host of good-looking Italian American boys keen to emulate the singing success of Bobby Darin (born Robert Cassotto), Johnny Maestro (John Mastrangelo), Frankie Valli (Francesco Castelluccio) and Bobby Rydell (Robert Ridarelli). Long after Anastasi, who has died aged 79, had set it aside, it was the name by which he ascended, quite unknowingly, to a hero’s status among the UK’s northern soul fans, who adopted his song I’m on My Way as one of their most cherished anthems.

Along with Jimmy Radcliffe’s Long After Tonight Is All Over and Tobi Legend’s Time Will Pass You By, Parrish’s song was part of a sequence of three records played before eight o’clock in the morning by the disc jockey Russ Winstanley to wrap up the famous all-nighter sessions at Wigan’s Casino ballroom, one of the temples of northern soul, which ran from 1973 to 1981. Known as the “3 before 8”, they sent dancers on their way home with the cocktail of emotions that characterised a scene notable for a fervent loyalty to the obscure singers who had provided them with the soundtrack to their lives.

The three songs evoked a bittersweet mixture of euphoria, urgency, nostalgia, optimism and regret, underscored by the knowledge that nothing lasts for ever except the defiant memory of how it was to share the fleeting pleasures of youth, and the importance of – in a favourite northern soul slogan – keeping the faith. In bringing this heightened emotional landscape to the lives of ordinary working-class kids, as much as in the idiosyncracy of its gymnastic high-tempo dance moves, the northern soul movement was – and remains, 50 years after it began – highly distinctive.

A key requirement for the 1960s soul records spun by the disc jockeys at the Casino, the Blackpool Mecca and Golden Torch in Stoke-on-Trent was that they should be obscure to the point of unobtainability. One of the most famous, Frank Wilson’s Do I Love You, existed in fewer than half a dozen copies, one of which was auctioned in 2009 for £25,742.

I’m on My Way was never quite as obscure as that, but Parrish, like Radcliffe and Legend, satisfied the requirement of being completely unknown to the general audience. All three remained, like dozens of others feted by the members of this remarkable subculture, completely unaware for some time of the sudden surge in their popularity on the other side of the Atlantic, in the towns of England’s industrial north and midlands.





Dean Parrish performing I’m on My Way at a Northern Soul Survivor Weekend in 2018
Once tracked down, most of them were delighted by the news and some, including Parrish, took advantage of invitations to perform at fan gatherings, followed by a chance to record again and to restart careers that had long since moved off in other directions, often out of music altogether.

Philip Anastasi (sometimes rendered as Anastasia) was born and raised in the Bronx, New York City. He studied at the School of Industrial Design while singing in street-corner vocal groups. Soon he was frequenting the Peppermint Lounge, the home of the Twist, where he befriended the members of the Ronettes, a trio from Spanish Harlem employed as the club’s go-go girls, later to find fame under the guidance of the record producer Phil Spector.

It was apparently Veronica Bennett, lead singer of the Ronettes, who suggested that young Phil change his name in order to advance his singing career. In the mid-60s he released a clutch of singles, including the Drifters-styled Bricks, Broken Bottles and Sticks and I’m on My Way, composed by Eliot Greenberg and Doug Morris, who was later to become chairman of Sony Music. As Dean Parrish, he toured with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars and appeared alongside Sonny and Cher, the Four Tops and the Righteous Brothers in the Clay Cole Show, a long-running TV music series. Having failed to register a hit, in 1967 he reverted to his real name and began working as an actor and session guitarist.

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Dean Parrish performing in later years, when his visits to the UK were frequent. Photograph: Static Wax Records
After being rediscovered by Winstanley, I’m on My Way was reissued in 1975 by Jonathan King’s UK Records label and reached No 38 in the British pop chart, while an EP featuring the “3 before 8” was said to have sold more than 200,000 copies. In 2001 Parrish made his first trip to UK, appearing at a northern soul weekend in Prestatyn. New recordings followed, including a version of a Paul Weller song, Left, Right and Centre, with Lord Large, and a set of 60s-style tracks recorded in New York.

In 2006, credited as Philip Anastasia, he appeared in an episode from the sixth season of The Sopranos, playing a suave, silver-haired MC at a lavish wedding reception. While Johnny Sack, the father of the bride, is persuading his fellow mobster Tony Soprano to arrange the murder of a rival, played by Valli, Anastasia serenades the happy couplewith a rendering of Daddy’s Little Girl.

His visits to the UK as Dean Parrish were frequent and in 2018 he could be witnessed at the Northern Soul Survivor Weekend in Skegness. Still handsome and carefully turned out in a tuxedo and bow tie, he sang I’m on My Way to an audience that crowded at the front of the stage, waving and singing along with every word, greeting the end of the song with a fervent chant: “Deano! Deano! Deano!”

Dean Parrish (Philip Joseph Anastasi), singer, guitarist, actor, born 30 December 1942; died 8 June 2021

 

Tax evasion charge of all things ! Very strange.

 

He had a strange life I believe, it was always likely to end in unusual circumstances. RIP

 

That's a known known then.