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Harry Morgan, 1915-2011

By on December 7, 2011 in Movies, Obituaries, Television

An American actor who was the son of Norwegian immigrants, Harry Morgan, has died at the age of 96, according to news reports. The man who portrayed Colonel Sherman Potter on the CBS television series M*A*S*H appeared in more than 100 movies, including as the judge in the film adaptation of the stage play Inherit the Wind with Frederic March and Spencer Tracy. For me he’ll be remembered foremost for playing policeman Joe Gannon to Jack Webb’s honorable Sgt. Joe Friday in the TV series Dragnet (1967). The series, based on real cases in the Los Angeles Police Department, was a counterpoint to the rising New Left. Dragnet was a clear, sternly dramatic repudiation of the cultural spread of the Hippies. Mr. Morgan’s Joe Gannon was an observer to the wrongs, caretaker to the victims, comrade to the hero, and a devoted investigator in pursuit of justice with regard to the Hippies’ most vile crimes and moral transgressions.

Though I watched it with my Korean War veteran dad, and found the writing intelligent and the plots often involving and sometimes poignant, I never looked forward to his show M*A*S*H, in which from 1975 to 1983 he played the commander of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit in Korea during the Korean War. It was always so joyless and depressing and there was a resignation and defeatism about it that reflected the Korean War’s unresolved status and foreshadowed late 20th century American appeasement of our enemies. His character in particular represented pragmatism; the medical unit’s leader embodied the American anti-intellectual.

But Col. Potter was apparently Mr. Morgan’s favorite part, according to an interview for the Archive of American Television, and like his character, the Detroit, Michigan-born actor had a horse named Sophie; he raised quarter horses on a ranch in Santa Rosa, California. After playing varsity football and serving as senior class president, he attended the University of Chicago, where he studied law and theater, and he made his Broadway debut in 1937 in the original production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy. He moved to California in 1942, where he eventually signed a motion picture contract with 20th Century Fox. His movies include The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) with Henry Fonda, High Noon (1952) with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) with Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford, Inherit the Wind (1960), in which he played the small-town Southern judge hearing arguments against Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in the fictionalized version of the Scopes monkey trial, and the grand epic How the West Was Won (1962) with Jimmy Stewart and Debbie Reynolds. In that picture, Harry Morgan portrayed Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. He also appeared in Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) with James Garner and Walter Brennan, The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) with Tim Conway and Don Knotts and the 1987 spoof of Dragnet featuring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. Harry Morgan lived in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles.

Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr., 1919-2011

By on October 28, 2011 in Business, Obituaries, Television

“If you can put a number on it, then you know something,” the late Arthur C. Nielsen Jr., who died earlier this month, reportedly said his father once told him. If you use or refer to metrics, analytics and box office statistics, you are cashing in on Mr. Nielsen’s work, because he was president and chairman of the A. C. Nielsen Company founded by his father. The Nielsen Company pioneered gathering, reporting and analyzing consumer data and it still dominates such information in the entertainment industry, especially television. Arthur Nielsen, whose life began and ended in Winnetka, Illinois, became president of his father’s modest television statistics firm in 1957 and he was named chairman in 1975. According to newspaper obituaries, he took the business from making under $4 million a year to $680 million in annual revenue. The World War 2 veteran, who served as a major in the Corps of Engineers, was assigned during the war to construct a building that would function as a place to operate a machine. The machine’s purpose? To generate highly complex tables that would calculate for accuracy the metrics of firing huge artillery guns. Nielsen was fascinated and became a passionate exponent and innovator of what the company called a “measurement science.” Among those innovations are of course the famous Nielsen ratings that continue to define, frame and shape television markets. Whether they know it or not, future practitioners and pioneers in entertainment industry statistics analysis, such as my former business partner, Box Office Mojo founder Brandon Gray, gained enormous value from Mr. Nielsen’s work. He leaves behind much more than the world’s leading market research business. Art Nielsen, as he was known to his colleagues, ran, fostered and kept re-creating a technology-based business that advanced our understanding of the arts and business. Gaining knowledge of what people choose to consume helps us learn why they consume it, which helps artists produce richer, more compelling work for people to consume. By taking measure of what people consume, Nielsen’s distinguished career improved both the art of business and the business of art.

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

By on October 5, 2011 in Business, News, Obituaries

One of America’s greatest businessmen died today. Apple founder and Chairman of the Board Steve Jobs was in his prime, and he went out on top of the world, exiting gracefully if prematurely due to pancreatic cancer amid a chorus of passionate expressions of love and admiration for his breathtaking achievements in business, technology, and the arts. I can’t add to the countless tributes, posts, and deeply felt bows to this American hero, and I’ve already posted about Apple here, so I’ll simply say that this longtime Apple consumer, who began using Apple’s products at a California newspaper where I was writing ad copy and designing ads before hustling my way into a writing assignment (a feature on the 50th anniversary of The Fountainhead), learned of my hero’s demise in an Apple Store in Century City, California. The location and setting, a rainy, autumn afternoon where steel towers meet the sky in an urban landscape predicated on the union of form and function, seems fitting. I had been taking a brief tutorial on Apple’s new business service, Joint Venture, from Gustavo, with another Apple associate, Chadwick, who later confirmed that Mr. Jobs was gone. I’d already been briefed on the forthcoming Apple iPhone 4S, and watched a clip from What’s Eating Gilbert Grape on AppleTV, and I was exiting the store, the busiest enterprise in the complex, when I noticed his image on a MacBook with his name and birth and death dates. When Chadwick told me, we shared a moment of sadness and I went off to be alone. With America in its darkest days, with capitalism being destroyed by our government, and with mobs of vacant hippies occupying Wall Street, Los Angeles and Boston, threatening to tear down business, the rich, and the productive, I thought: here was a man who took on the whole world and won, with honor, self-interest, and excellence and on the merits, in every sense. He brought us together, in newsrooms, stores and coffee shops, and on social media, and he knew the supremacy and simplicity of what it means to be left alone. Saying thank you isn’t enough for what he did. Steve Jobs deserves something deeper, like a prayer. Today, he died, and I am glad I was in a place he created when I heard the news. But I think I will always feel like those stores, and the neat rows of products made by the company he created, are an embodiment of something larger than life, something sacred, and something real, made by him. Steve Jobs.

Malcolm Wallop Dies

By on September 14, 2011 in Health Care, News, Obituaries, Politics

Associated Press reports from Cheyenne, Wyoming, that Western pioneer descendant and former Wyoming U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop has died at age 78. The anti-Communist Republican, who served in the Senate for 18 years, is the first elected official to propose space-based missile defense, which became part of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

But I remember Sen. Wallop, an advocate for property rights, as one of only two U.S. senators during the historic Clinton health care plan debate of 1993-1994 to proclaim – correctly – that health care is not a right. During this crucial national debate, which preceded America’s current system, ObamaCare, Sen. Wallop named the flawed premise of government-dictated medicine by standing on the Senate floor and declaring that health care is not a right (Texas Sen. Phil Gramm was the only other senator to say it). Despite Republican attempts to compromise and pass the Clinton health care plan, socialized medicine was defeated; the Clinton administration’s widely unpopular scheme never became a piece of legislation.

According to his official bio, Wallop was also the first non-lawyer in U.S. Senate history to serve on the Judiciary Committee and, as ranking Republican member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee from 1990 to 1994, Sen. Wallop was an outspoken advocate for development of domestic energy supplies of coal, oil and natural gas. Wallop pushed for an amendment to the 1980 Clean Water Act, barring federal usurpation of state control of water, authored the Sunset of the Carter Era Windfall Profits Tax, the first sunsetted tax in history, and he sponsored the 1977 Wallop Amendment to the Surface Mining Control Act, which directed the federal government to compensate, through purchase or exchange, owners of mineral rights whose right to mine had been denied by government regulation. In 1981, Congress enacted his legislation to cut inheritance and gift taxes. He later founded his own grass-roots organization, Frontiers of Freedom, whose agenda includes “preservation of property rights and reform of the Endangered Species Act, the privatization of Social Security, protection of civil liberties and the defeat of such big government initiatives as the antiterrorism bill and the national ID card legislation, and reform of the Food and Drug Administration.”

In 1996, Steve Forbes asked Wallop to be general chairman and executive director of his presidential bid, leading to changes which led to primary victories in both Delaware and Arizona. The Yale University graduate served in the U.S. Army as a First Lieutenant from 1955 to 1957 and was a member of the Wyoming Legislature from 1969 to 1976. His extensive business career includes management of the Wyoming ranch holdings he owned and the self-described rancher, businessman, real estate developer and investor jointly ventured oil and gas development projects in Nebraska, Montana and Wyoming. Mr. Wallop died Wednesday afternoon at his home near Big Horn, Wyoming.

Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield, 1922-2011

By on August 8, 2011 in News, Obituaries, Politics

Former Oregon Sen. Mark O. Hatfield, 89, died yesterday. The Portland Oregonian posted an excellent obituary about the World War 2 veteran’s long career. Read the article here. The piece by Jeff Mapes makes me realize me how influential the evangelical Christian Senator Hatfield, the son of two deeply religious Baptists, was in shaping conservative Republican politics. Hatfield was anti-war, deeply religious, and a serious advocate of environmentalism. In other words, he was an early trailblazer, pardon the Oregon pun, in fusing fundamentalist religion with a liberal, welfare-statist approach to government. Though he was considered a maverick, out-of-step liberal anomaly in Republican circles during most of his 30-year career in the United States Senate, and he had also served as Oregon’s governor, Mark Hatfield was a forerunner to today’s dogmatic Big Government advocates on the left and on the right. Mark Hatfield paved the way for faith-based liberals and Big Government conservatives. In a sad coincidence, according to the Oregonian obituary, Senator Hatfield’s grandson, a U.S. Marine who had served in Iraq also named Mark, died of an undisclosed cause in Connecticut at the age of 25 four weeks ago. I wrote about military suicides over two years ago, and I wonder if Sen. Hatfield’s grandson, like so many soldiers enlisted in America’s asinine wars of self-sacrifice, killed himself. While I disagreed with Sen. Hatfield on nearly every issue, when I met the late senator and his son Mark during a political campaign, I personally found both gentlemen to be as kind and cordial as the article suggests. He certainly made an impact on American government.