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For anyone who is not a long-time reader, I periodically do run downs of celebrity deaths, with comments on the ones that I find personally meaningful. I make no effort to be comprehensive; these are just people who I found interesting for some reason. My last celebrity death watch entry was right at the beginning of November, so this is a bit overdue.

Celebrity Death Watch - November 2025: Beverly Burns was the first woman to captain a Boeing 747. Martha Layne Collins was the governor of Kentucky from 1983-1987. Lieutenant General Kenneth Minion directed the Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency during the Clinton administration. Duane Roberts invented the frozen burrito. Donna Jean Godchaux sang with Grateful Dead. Diane Ladd was an actress, most famous for playing Flo in the movie, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Elizabeth Franz won a Tony award for playing Linda Loman in the 1999 revival of Death of a Salesman. Paul Ignatius was the Secretary of the Navy from 1967 to 1969 and later became president of the Washington Post. Louis Schweitzer was the CEO of Renault form 1992 to 2005 and the chairman of AstraZeneca from 2004-2012. Bill Ivey was a folklorist and chaired the National Endowment for the Arts from 1998 to 2001. Jeanette Winter wrote children’s books about famous women. Fern Michaels wrote romance novels and thrillers. Alec Wong was a disability rights activist. H. Rap Brown was a civil rights activist, including serving as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960’s, despite which he advocated for violence and was convicted of murdering two police officers. Dave Morehead pitched a no-hitter for the Red Sox in 1964, the last BoSox no-hitter until 2001. Viola Fletcher was the last survivor of the Tulsa race massacre. Fuzzy Moeller was a golf champion.


Archie Fisher was a Scottish folksinger and songwriter, who produced a number of recordings with other Celtic performers and hosted a radio show. One of my favorite songs of his was “The Witch of the Westmorland,” which was also recorded by Stan Rogers.

Dick Cheney was the Vice President under George W. Bush. He had earlier served as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush.

James Watson shared a Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. Though they were credited with discovering the double helix nature of DNA, the most important thing he discovered was Rosalind Franklin’s notes.

Jimmy Cliff was a reggae singer-songwriter. His movie, The Harder They Come was a cult classic and played at a movie theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts for ages. It was also the first English language movie in history to be subtitled in the U.S. The soundtrack is phenomenal.

Leslie Fish was a filk musician. Her song “Banned from Argo,” was well-enough known that even I know it.

Tom Stoppard was a playwright and screenwriter. I have not actually seen any of his plays, but I have seen a couple of the movies he wrote the screenplays for, e.g. Shakespeare in Love and Brazil.


Celebrity Death Watch - December 2025 (so far): Steve Cropper played guitar with Booker T. & the M.G.’s and write the song “In the Midnight Hour.” D.L. Coburn won the Pulitzer prize for his play The Gin Game. Peg Kehret wrote children’s books. Ian Douglas-Hamilton was a conservationist who specialized in elephants. Joanna Trollope was a novelist. May Britt was an actress but is more famous for having been married to Sammy Davis Jr. from 1960 to 1968. Paul Wiggin was a Hall of Fame football player for the Cleveland Browns. Peter Greene was an actor best known for portraying villains, e.g. Dorian Turell in The Mask. Robert J. Samuelson was a conservative economist who wrote for The Washington Post. Anthony Geary played Luke on the soap opera General Hospital. Carl Carlton sang “Everlasting Love.” Norman Podhoretz edited Commentary and became a prominent neocon. Ruth Bourne was a World War II codebreaker. Peter Arnett was a war correspondent, primarily for Associated Press. Jim Hunt was the longest serving governor in the history of North Carolina. Robert Mnuchin was an investment banker and art dealer, best known for his association with Willem de Kooning. Lou Cannon was the senior White House correspondent for the Washington Post during the Reagan administration and went on to write 5 books about Reagan. Mick Abrahams was the original guitarist for Jethro Tull.

Frank Gehry was one of the most famous architects of the modern era. Some of the buildings he was noted for include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Biomuseo in Panama, the Luis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, and the Stata Center at MIT. I consider the latter the ugliest building in Massachusetts. At least the more monstrous of his buildings do generally serve as good landmarks. He did design some buildings that are more conventional and I’m fine with his renovations to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for example.

Sophie Kinsella wrote chick lit. I enjoyed the Shopaholic series, but I thought her other books, e.g. The Undomestic Goddess were weaker. She was on my ghoul pool list (since she had announced she had glioblastoma) and scored me 10 points.

You can’t possibly need me to tell you about Rob Reiner. I watched All in the Family back in the day, but I think his work as a film director was even more significant. This Is Spinal Tap pretty much birthed the mockumentary genre. In case you were living under a rock, he and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were stabbed to death by their son, who had suffered with mental health issues and drug abuse for many years. We really don’t know how to deal with the people who don’t respond to the standard treatments. The Reiner case reminds me a lot of what happened with Creigh Deeds, who was stabbed by his son (but, fortunately, survived) during his gubernatorial campaign in 2009. That case led to some improvements in mental health care here, but there is a long ways to go.

Very belatedly, Sue Bender, who wrote the book Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish apparently died in early August, but her obituary was just published in the New York Times a few days ago. This was one of the books that influenced the voluntary simplicity movement and I thought it was worth a read back in the day.

Non-Celebrity Death Watch: George Leitmann was a professor of mechanical engineering at Berkeley while I was a grad student there. I studied Optimal Control and Game Theory with him.

A couple of obits from the company I spent my career at were Bill Sinclair (died in June 2024) and Linda Vandergriff (died in June 2025). More significantly, Jack Kinsey died in April 2025. He was the person who brought me to the East Coast to support the office of the Undersecretary of the Air Force.

Finally, two members of the Washington D.C. branch of the Travelers’ Century Club have died over the past few months. Both Terry Wharton and Bill Ashley were both in their 80’s, so it wasn’t a huge surprise. But I will miss them and their travel stories.