Celebrity Deaths

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SANTA FE, N.M. -- Former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith has died in Santa Fe after suffering a brain hemorrhage and lapsing into a coma on Sunday. He was 72.

Meredith's wife, Susan, confirmed the former football star's death. She says a private graveside ceremony is being planned and that family members are traveling to Santa Fe.

Meredith played for the Cowboys from 1960-1968, becoming the starting quarterback in 1965. While he never led the Cowboys to the Super Bowl, Meredith was one of the franchise's first stars.

Over his nine-year career, Meredith threw for 17,199 yards and 111 touchdowns. He retired unexpectedly before the 1969 season.



"Dandy Don" Meredith - 17

Known to millions of Monday Night Football fans for his famous line, "Turn out the lights, the party's over", Dandy Don led the team in passing from 1963-1968. Meredith led the Cowboys to the long defunct Playoff Bowl in 1965 against the Baltimore Colts, after finishing second in the NFL Eastern Division behind the Cleveland Browns. The game was not a pretty sight, losing 35-3, yet it was the beginning of what would turn out to be a common occurence -- the Cowboys in the NFL playoffs.
The following year Dallas began the season thoroughly whipping their first four opponents, averaging 45 points a game, and the league knew they were to be reckoned with. By the end of the year Dallas had upended Cleveland as Eastern Division Champions, and won the right to face the Green Bay Packers in the Cotton Bowl. The Dallas-Green Bay winner would earn the right to play the AFL representative in the first Super Bowl.

Dallas put up a tough fight, getting back into the game after falling behind 14-0. There was no intimidating the Cowboys this day. Vince Lombardi's Packers were in for the fight of their lives. The Cowboys were driving for the tying score when Dallas called the play that would haunt them for years. Dallas had the ball deep in Green Bay territory, down 34-27. Landry called a short out pass to tight end Pettis Norman, used primarily as a blocker and not receiver. Norman was wide open on the play, but because Meredith did not expect Norman in that position, Meredith threw the ball short. Norman, instead of catching the ball and jogging into the end zone, ran back for the ball and Green Bay tackled him at the two yard line. On the subsequent play, a pass into the end zone, rookie linebacker Dave Robinson hit Meredith, and the pass flew out of control from Dandy Don and into the arms of Packer safety Tom Brown.

Meredith played three more years, taking the Cowboys to their second NFL Championship game, also against the Packers, and two Divisional Championship games against the Browns before retiring
unexpectedly in 1969.

Meredith provided the leadership Dallas needed to begin their winning tradition. Meredith played with a broken nose, when he could barely breathe. He was sacked and pounded often, yet rarely missed a game, except when they would not let him play. In an era where cornerbacks were allowed to bump and run with receivers throughout the field, Meredith was as effective as anyone, especially in 1966 when he won the NFL Most Valuable Player Award.

"Dandy" Don Meredith remains an all time favorite quarterback, despite never winning an NFL Championship. Cowboy fans still love remembering Don Meredith leading the Cowboys. Time has illuminated the achievements his career, and "Dandy" Don is most often remembered as the courageous leader Dallas had when the tradition of Cowboys victory started. He was enshrined in the Ring of Honor in 1976

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David Nelson dies at 74



David Nelson dies at 74; last surviving member of the TV sitcom family David Nelson and his brother, Rick, joined their parents on 'The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet' on radio in 1949. The show moved to TV in 1952 and ran for 14 years. David Nelson later became a director.

David Nelson, the elder son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and the last surviving member of the family that became an American institution in the 1950s and '60s as the stars of the classic TV sitcom "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," died Tuesday. He was 74.

Nelson died at his Century City home of complications from colon cancer, said publicist Dale Olson.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituari...,1039470.story

"The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" began on radio in 1944, focusing on the home life of bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his vocalist wife, Harriet Hilliard.

In 1949, the popular show became a true family affair when 12-year-old David and 8-year-old Ricky replaced the child actors who had been portraying them on radio.

"The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" moved to television three years later, debuting on ABC in October 1952.

When the series ended in 1966 after 435 episodes, it had become the longest-running family situation comedy in TV history — as well as serving as the launch pad and showcase for teen idol Rick Nelson's singing career.

In the process of playing fictionalized versions of themselves on television each week for 14 years, David and Rick Nelson literally grew up in front of millions of Americans.

Indeed, after David and Rick were married in the early '60s, their wives — first David's wife, actress June Blair, and then Rick's wife, the former Kris Harmon — became their TV wives.

The blurring of what was real and what was not real caused confusion in some viewers' minds.

When David enrolled at USC and joined a fraternity after graduating from Hollywood High School in 1954, his TV character started college and joined a fraternity.

But unlike his TV character, who became a lawyer on the show, David did not go into law.

Instead, he launched his career as a director by taking the reins from his director-father for about a dozen episodes of the show in the early '60s. He spent the next several decades directing commercials and occasional TV series and movies.

"The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" has been criticized for presenting an idealized version of American family life that few could live up to.

That included the Nelsons, as David pointed out in a 1971 Esquire article headlined "The Happy, Happy, Happy Nelsons."

"We would keep up the front of this totally problemless, happy-go-lucky group," he said. "There might have been a tremendous battle in our home, but if someone from outside came in, it would be as if the director yelled, 'Roll 'em,' We'd fall right into our stage roles.

"It's an awfully big load to carry, to be everyone's fantasy family."

He was born Oct. 24, 1936, in New York City, when Ozzie and Harriet were in their big-band heyday.

Rick was born in 1940, the year before the Nelsons moved permanently to Hollywood.

After Ozzie and Harriet launched their radio show in 1944, David and Rick would accompany their parents to their live broadcasts.

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Jack LaLanne, Founder of Modern Fitness Movement, Dies at 96
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: January 23, 2011

The cause was respiratory failure resulting from pneumonia, his family said.

A self-described emotional and physical wreck while growing up in the San Francisco area, Mr. LaLanne began turning his life around, as he often told it, after hearing a talk on proper diet when he was 15.

He started working out with weights when they were an oddity, and in 1936 he opened the prototype for the fitness spas to come — a gym, juice bar and health food store — in an old office building in Oakland.

“People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” he remembered. “The doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive.” But Mr. LaLanne persevered, and he found a national pulpit in the age of television.

“The Jack LaLanne Show” made its debut in 1951 as a local program in the San Francisco area, then went nationwide on daytime television in 1959. His short-sleeved jumpsuit showing off his impressive biceps, his props often limited to a broomstick, a chair and a rubber cord, Mr. LaLanne pranced through his exercise routines, most notably his fingertip push-ups.

He built an audience by first drawing in children who saw his white German shepherd, Happy, perform tricks.

“My show was so personal, I made it feel like you and I were the only ones there,” he told Knight-Ridder Newspapers in 1995. “And I’d say: ‘Boys and girls, come here. Uncle Jack wants to tell you something. You go get Mother or Daddy, Grandmother, Grandfather, whoever is in the house. You go get them, and you make sure they exercise with me.’ ”

His show continued into the mid-1980s.

“He was perfect for the intimacy of television,” Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, told The San Jose Mercury News in 2004. “This guy had some of the same stuff that Oprah has and Johnny Carson had — the ability to insinuate themselves in the domestic space of people’s lives.”

Long before Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda and the Atkins diet, Mr. LaLanne was a national celebrity, preaching regular exercise and proper diet. Expanding on his television popularity, he opened dozens of fitness studios under his name, later licensing them to Bally. He invented the forerunners of modern exercise machines like leg-extension and pulley devices. He marketed a Power Juicer to blend raw vegetables and fruits and a Glamour Stretcher cord, and he sold exercise videos and fitness books. He invited women to join his health clubs and told the elderly and the disabled that they could exercise despite their limitations.

At 60 he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman’s Wharf handcuffed, shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat. At 70, handcuffed and shackled again, he towed 70 boats, carrying a total of 70 people, a mile and a half through Long Beach Harbor.

He ate two meals a day and shunned snacks.

Breakfast, following his morning workout, usually included several hard-boiled egg whites, a cup of broth, oatmeal with soy milk and seasonal fruit. For dinner he took his wife, Elaine, to restaurants that knew what he wanted: a salad with raw vegetables and egg whites along with fish — often salmon — and a mixture of red and white wine. He sometimes allowed himself a roast turkey sandwich, but never a cup of coffee.

Mr. LaLanne said he performed his exercises until he experienced “muscle fatigue,” lifting weights until it was impossible for him to continue. It produced results and, as he put it, “the ego in me” made the effort worthwhile.

The son of French immigrants, Jack LaLanne was born in San Francisco on Sept. 26, 1914, and spent his early years on his parents’ sheep farm in Bakersfield, Calif. By the time he was 15, the family having moved to the Bay Area, he was pimply and nearsighted, craved junk food and had dropped out of high school. That is when his mother took him to a women’s club for a talk by Paul C. Bragg, a well-known speaker on health and nutrition.

That talk, Mr. LaLanne often said, turned his life around. He began experimenting with weights at the Berkeley Y.M.C.A., tossed aside cakes and cookies and studied Gray’s Anatomy to learn about the body’s muscles. He graduated from a chiropractic school, but instead of practicing that profession he became a pitchman for good health.

He opened his first health studio when he was 21, and a decade and a half later he turned to television. He was first sponsored by the creator of a longevity pill, a 90-year-old man, but it sold poorly and he obtained Yami Yogurt as his new sponsor. “It tasted terrible, so I mixed it with prune juice and fruits,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “Nobody thought about it until then. We made the guy a millionaire.”

Mr. LaLanne, 5-foot-6 and 150 pounds or so with a 30-inch waist, maintained that he disliked working out. He said he kept at it strictly to feel fit and stay healthy. He built two gyms and a pool at his home in Morro Bay, and began each day, into his 90s, with two hours of workouts: weight lifting followed by a swim against an artificial current or in place, tied to a belt.

“The Jack LaLanne Show” may have run its course in the mid-1980s, but it had a second life in reruns on ESPN Classic. “We have over 3,000 shows,” Mr. LaLanne said in 2004. “I own everything.”

In September 2007, “Jack LaLanne Live!” made its debut on the online VoiceAmerica Health and Wellness Radio Network. He appeared on it with his wife and his nephew Chris LaLanne, a personal trainer.

In addition to his wife, Elaine, Mr. LaLanne is survived by their son, Jon, of Hawaii; his daughter, Yvonne LaLanne, of Walnut Creek, Calif., from his previous marriage, and a stepson, Dan Doyle, of Los Angeles, from Elaine LaLanne’s previous marriage.

Mr. LaLanne promoted himself and his calling into his final years, often accompanied at events by his wife, a physical fitness convert but hardly a fanatic. He brimmed with optimism and restated a host of aphorisms for an active and fit life.

“I can’t die,” he most famously liked to say. “It would ruin my image.”