Well poopy, I guess it’s over… :(

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    Nobuyuki
    Participant
    NEW YORK (AP) – The lovable legend of Yogi Berra, that ain’t ever gonna be over.

    The Hall of Fame catcher renowned as much for his dizzying malapropisms as his unmatched 10 World Series championships with the New York Yankees, died Tuesday. He was 90.

    Berra, who filled baseball’s record book as well as “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations,” died of natural causes at his home in New Jersey, according to Dave Kaplan, the director of the Yogi Berra Museum.

    Berra played in more World Series games than any other major leaguer, and was a three-time American League Most Valuable Player.

    For many, though, he was even better known for all those amusing “Yogi-isms.”

    “It ain’t over `til it’s over” is among eight of them included in Bartlett’s.

    “When I’m sittin’ down to dinner with the family, stuff just pops out. And they’ll say, `Dad, you just said another one.’ And I don’t even know what the heck I said,” Berra insisted.

    Short, squat and with a homely mug, Berra was a Yankees great who helped the team reach 14 World Series during his 18 seasons in the Bronx.

    “While we mourn the loss of our father, grandfather and great-grandfather, we know he is at peace with Mom,” Berra’s family said in a statement released by the museum. “We celebrate his remarkable life, and are thankful he meant so much to so many. He will truly be missed.”

    Berra served on a gunboat supporting the D-Day invasion in 1944 and played for the Yankees from 1946-63. His teammates included fellow Hall of Famers Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.

    “No! Say it ain’t so. He was a good man, my former manager and friend! RIP Yogi,” former Yankees star Dave Winfield tweeted.

    Lawrence Peter Berra, the son of Italian immigrants, got his nickname while growing up in St. Louis. Among his amateur baseball teammates was Jack McGuire, another future big leaguer.

    “Some of us went to a movie with a yogi in it and afterwards Jack began calling me Yogi. It stuck,” Berra told the Saturday Evening Post.

    He was a fan favorite, especially with children, and the cartoon character Yogi Bear was named after him.

    Until recent years, he remained a fixture at Yankee Stadium and in the clubhouse, where the likes of Derek Jeter, Joe Torre and others in pinstripes looked up to the diminutive old-timer.

    In 1956, Berra caught the only perfect game in World Series history and after the last out leaped into pitcher Don Larsen’s arms. The famous moment is still often replayed on baseball broadcasts.

    After his playing days, Berra coached or managed the Yankees, New York Mets and Houston Astros. He led both the Yankees and Mets to pennants.

    In 1985, his firing as manager by the Yankees 16 games into the season sparked a feud with George Steinbrenner. Berra vowed never to return to Yankee Stadium as long as Steinbrenner owned the team.

    But in 1999, Berra finally relented, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch of the Yankees’ season-opener.

    “We are deeply saddened by the loss of a Yankees legend and American hero, Yogi Berra,” the Yankees posted on Twitter.

    Berra, who played in 15 straight All-Star Games, never earned more than $65,000 a season. He died on the same date, Sept. 22, as his big league debut 69 years earlier.

    Growing up, he was anything but a natural.

    Chunky and slow, Berra was rejected by his hometown St. Louis Cardinals after a tryout in 1943. But a Yankees scout recognized his potential and signed him.

    He reached the majors late in the 1946 season and homered in his first at-bat. The next year, he continued to hit well, but his throwing was so erratic he was shifted to the outfield, then benched.

    His breakthrough season came in 1948, when he hit .315 with 14 homers and 98 RBIs while improving his fielding. In 1949, he compiled a .989 fielding percentage and did not make an error in the All-Star Game or World Series.

    “I don’t care who the hitter is,” Yankees Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel told the New York Journal-American, “(Berra) knows just how he should be pitched to.”

    Berra was the AL MVP in 1951, 1954 and 1955. He holds World Series records for most hits (71) and games (75).

    He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972.

    “You never think of that when you’re a kid,” Berra said. “But egads, you gotta be somethin’ to get in.”

    Among his boyhood friends was Joe Garagiola, who went on to a career as a major league player and broadcaster. In rejecting Berra at the 1943 tryout, the Cardinals signed Garagiola, another catcher, instead.

    Berra was born in St. Louis on May 12, 1925, the son of Pietro, a laborer in a brickyard, and Pauline Berra. He grew up in “The Hill,” or Italian district, with three older brothers and a younger sister.

    Berra was forced to drop out of school in the eighth grade and go to work to help support his family. He took jobs in a coal yard, as a truck driver and in a shoe factory.

    He continued to play amateur baseball, which brought him to the attention of major league scouts.

    In 1943, his first professional season with the Yankees’ farm team in Norfolk, Virginia, was interrupted by World War II.

    Berra married his wife, Carmen, in 1949. The couple met in their native St. Louis. Carmen died in 2014. Yogi is survived by their three sons.

    Dale Berra, a major league infielder, who briefly played for his father on the Yankees in 1985; Tim, who played one season for the NFL’s Baltimore Colts, and Lawrence Jr.

    Berra published three books: his autobiography in 1961, “It Ain’t Over …” in 1989 and “The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said” in 1998. The last made The New York Times’ best seller list.

    In 1996, Berra was awarded an honorary doctorate from the state university in Montclair, N.J., where he and his family lived. The university also named its baseball stadium for Berra. The adjoining Yogi Berra Museum opened in 1998.

    The museum houses Berra memorabilia, including what he said was his most prized possession, the mitt he used to catch Larsen’s perfect game.

    He tickled TV viewers in recent years by bringing his malapropisms to a commercial with the AFLAC duck. (”They give you cash, which is just as good as money.”)

    His wife once asked Berra where he wanted to be buried, in St. Louis, New York or Montclair.

    “I don’t know,” he said. “Why don’t you surprise me?”


    In the early 1950s, when Jack Larson was offered a role in a new Superman TV series, he was loath to accept. Playing the hapless sidekick of a caped superhero on a kids’ show had no appeal for an actor with dreams of Broadway stardom.

    But his agent prevailed, largely by arguing that the show would probably never be broadcast.

    “No one may ever know you’ve done it. So just take the money and run,” Larson, recalling the agent’s words, told the Indianapolis Star decades later.

    He took the money but, to his chagrin, “The Adventures of Superman” became a tremendous hit after its 1952 debut. The show indelibly fixed Larson in the public’s mind as Jimmy Olsen, the effervescent, cub reporter in a bow tie who works alongside Clark Kent and Lois Lane at the fictional Daily Planet newspaper.

    Larson, who turned to writing plays when he realized that he could not escape the character remembered for lines like “Golly, Mr. Kent” and “Jeepers,” died Sunday at his home in Brentwood. He was 87.

    His death was confirmed by writer-director Alan Howard, a longtime friend. The cause was not immediately known, but Howard said Larson had not been ill and “died peacefully with his beloved dog Charlie” nearby.

    Larson was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, 1928, and grew up in Montebello. His father drove a milk truck and his mother worked for Western Union; they divorced when their son was a child.

    He was interested in journalism as a career but was not a stellar student, often ditching class to go bowling. Encouraged by teachers to read Shakespeare, he began writing and directing plays at Pasadena City College. Discovered there by talent scouts from Warner Bros., he was cast in the 1948 film “Fighter Squadron,” directed by Raoul Walsh.

    A few years later, he was offered the role of Olsen, the energetic cub reporter and magnet for evil-doers who truss him up, kidnap him and lock him in vaults until Kent as the Man of Steel comes to his rescue.

    “The Adventures of Superman,” which originally aired from 1952 to 1957, cast Larson into the pop culture pantheon. The bow tie he wore as Jimmy Olsen later went to the Smithsonian, preserved along with Archie Bunker’s armchair, the Fonz’s leather jacket and a pair of Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

    At the time, however, being Jimmy Olsen felt like a trap.

    “I was really bitter for years, about being typed, and it absolutely wrecked my acting career,” Larson told the New York Daily News in 1996. “I quit acting and wrote because I just couldn’t get a job. They didn’t want Jimmy Olsen walking through their films.”

    He wasn’t the only cast member who was typecast. Noel Neill as Lane quit acting after the show ended. Opportunities for George Reeves, who had appeared in dozens of films, including “Gone With the Wind,” also dried up after “The Adventures of Superman”; his 1959 death from a gunshot to the head was ruled a suicide.

    For years, Larson refused to give interviews about playing Olsen in the hope that the public’s memory of his portrayal would fade. One of his first major credits as a playwright was “The Candied House,” a play that retold the Hansel and Gretel story in verse. It opened in 1966 at the Bing Center Theater in Los Angeles and earned critics’ praise.

    Margaret Harford, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called it “an enchanting discovery for young and old” created by “a young writer with a poet’s gift and an actor’s theatrical eye.”

    His proudest achievement was as librettist for the opera “Lord Byron,” about the flamboyant English poet. Composed by Virgil Thomson and directed by Oscar-winning actor John Houseman, it opened at the Juilliard Theater in New York in 1972.

    It received mixed reviews. One of the harshest notices came from Martin Bernheimer of the Los Angeles Times, who pronounced it “a colossal exercise in operatic ineptitude and pretension.”

    In the 1980s Larson teamed up with his life partner, writer-director James Bridges, to produce a number of Bridges’ films, including “Mike’s Murder,” starring Debra Winger, in 1984; “Perfect,” with John Travolta, in 1985; and “Bright Lights, Big City,” starring Michael J. Fox, in 1988.

    Larson lived with Bridges in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home known as the George Sturges House. After Bridges died of cancer in 1993, he donated $500,000 from the Bridges/Larson Foundation to upgrade a theater at UCLA and name it after his longtime companion.

    Larson had no immediate survivors.

    After years of trying to ignore the role that made him famous, he came to terms with his legacy and returned to acting.

    In 1991, he appeared in an episode of “Superboy,” a syndicated show focusing on Clark Kent as a college student, although he did not play Olsen. He finally returned to the part several years later, portraying an older Olsen in an episode of “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.” And in the 2006 film “Superman Returns,” he was cast as a bartender in a scene with actor Brandon Routh as Kent.

    “I know that, though I go on writing, and if I should win the Pulitzer Prize, and indeed the Nobel Prize, when they write my obituary it will say, ‘Jack Larson, best remembered as Jimmy Olsen on the popular 1950s Superman series,’ ” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “I’m pleased with it, I’m proud of it, and I would certainly do it again in hindsight.

    “It’s nice not to be forgotten.”

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      I’m glad you put that in about Yogi and Joe Gargiola being pals back in St. Louis. I was going to mention it if You didn’t.

      Joe was also on The Today Show back in the ’60s and did The Game of the Week

      with Vin Scully.

      Yogi was one of those players that you loved even if you weren’t a fan of their team.

      IIRC wasn’t Jack Larson also in the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie along with one of the two actresses who played Lois Lane?

      AFAIG: George Reeves death like Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane still remains a bit of a mystery to hard core fans.

      Back to Larson,he’s considered the best Jimmy Olsen of all time.

      Nobuyuki
      Participant

      mitsuki lover wrote:

      I’m glad you put that in about Yogi and Joe Gargiola being pals back in St. Louis. I was going to mention it if You didn’t.

      Praise the original writer I copy/pasted from. ;)

      Quote:

      IIRC wasn’t Jack Larson also in the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie along with one of the two actresses who played Lois Lane?


      That was Kirk Alyn, the Superman from the ’40s serials.

      hmmm….I thought I read somewhere it was Larson. Faulty memory then.

      I think some of the Yogisms might have actually been said by others, such as Casey Stengel.

      And for the record Jackie Robinson was most definitely SAFE! on that one play.

      Nobuyuki
      Participant

      Nobuyuki wrote:

      mitsuki lover wrote:

      I’m glad you put that in about Yogi and Joe Gargiola being pals back in St. Louis. I was going to mention it if You didn’t.

      Praise the original writer I copy/pasted from. ;)


      Poopy, again:

      Joe Garagiola’s nine-­year baseball career was a modest one. His 57 years in broadcasting that followed

      made him one of the most popular figures in the sports world and beyond.

      The man Arizona Diamondbacks President Derrick Hall called “one of the biggest personalities this game has ever

      seen” died Wednesday. He was 90.

      The Diamondbacks announced Garagiola’s death before their exhibition game against San Francisco, and there were

      murmurs of shock and sadness at the ballpark. He had been in ill health in recent years.

      Growing up in the Hill neighborhood of St. Louis not far from future Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, Garagiola went on to

      hit .257 during nine years in the majors. His highlight came early, getting a four­-hit game in the 1946 World Series

      and helping the hometown Cardinals win the championship as a 20-­year-­old rookie.

      “Not only was I not the best catcher in the major leagues, I wasn’t even the best catcher on my street,” Garagiola once

      remarked.

      But it was after he stopped playing that his fortunes took off. He thrived as a glib baseball broadcaster and fixture on

      the “Today” show, leading to a nearly 30­year association with NBC.

      Garagiola won baseball’s Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in broadcasting in 1991. He kept working well into his

      80s, serving as a part-­time analyst for Diamondbacks telecasts until he announced his retirement in February 2013.

      “He had a genuine impact on the craft. He was among the first to bring a humorous, story­telling style to the booth,”

      NBC announcer Bob Costas said.

      Garagiola’s son, Joe Jr., is a former general manager of the Diamondbacks and a current executive with Major

      League Baseball.

      “We are deeply saddened by the loss of this amazing man,” his family said in a statement, “who was not just beloved

      to those of us in his family, but to generations of baseball fans who he impacted during his eight decades in the

      game.

      Read that in yesterday’s paper. Very sad for the world of baseball.
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