Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug. 17, 2025

Birthdays: Davy Crocket, Mae West, Marcus Garvey, Sam Goldwyn- born Schmuel Gelbfisz, Harry Hopkins, Monte Wooley, Boog Powell, Belinda Carlisle, Guillermo Vilas, V.S. Naipul, Jim Courier, Donnie Wahlberg, Belinda Carlisle, Maureen O’Hara, Sean Penn is 65, Martha Coolidge is 80, Robert DeNiro is 82

 

 

1838- Lorenzo da Ponte died in New York City at age 89. In Vienna he was a librettist for Salieri and Mozart. He wrote La Nozzi de Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutti and Don Giovanni. Failed business ventures and bankruptcy made him move to America in 1805. He once said, "He who believes in his dreams is mad; and he who does not believe in them--what is he?"

 

 

1876- Richard Wagner’s 4 hour opera Gotterdammerung- the Twilight of the Gods, premiered.

 

1908- D.W. Griffith signed a contract to begin directing movies for Biograph Pictures. He was paid $50 dollars a week plus royalties. 

 

1908- The premiere of the first fully animated film, Emile Cohl's "Fantasmagorie".

 

 

1941- EL GRUPO- Walt Disney and his artists arrive in Rio on a ten-week goodwill tour of South America, underwritten by a $70,000 U.S. government grant.  President Franklin Roosevelt was worried that some South American countries might be sympathetic to the Nazis, forcing the U.S. to worry about her backdoor. So FDR sent Nelson Rockefeller to give the Latin American countries whatever they wanted to keep them out of the world war. One of the things they wanted was Donald Duck. Back in LA the federal mediator Stanley White had worked out with Roy Disney that if they got Walt out of town, they could finally settle the Disney animator's strike. The name comes from hotel footmen in Buenos Aires paging the artists as “ El Grupo Disney! Your bus is here.”  The films Three Caballeros and Saludos Amigos result.

 

1954- Walt Disney’s True Life Adventure, “The Vanishing Prairie”, directed by James Algar, opened in theaters.

 

1960- Georg Pal’s The Time Machine opened in NY.

 

1962- The Beatles replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. One of the reasons they decided on Ringo was that he came with his own car.

 

1979- Monty Python’s The Life of Brian premiered. Directed by Terry Jones. Just before principal photography was due to begin, a key sponsor got cold feet about the dodgy religious connotations and withdrew their funding. At the last-minute Beatle George Harrison stepped in and donated $3 million of the $4 million dollar budget. He said he just wanted to see it. “ It is the world’s most expensive theatre ticket.”

 

1984- The Walt Disney Company executive board informed its chairman Ron Miller that they wanted his resignation. Disney had fallen to 14th in film box office by then. Miller had been Walt’s son-in-law and he was he was once a tight end for the LA Rams. Within two years of Roy Disney Jr. and Michael Eisner taking power Disney was number one. 

 

1985- The Hormel Meat Packing Strike, severely threatening the world’s supply of SPAM.

 

1986- Pixar short Luxo Jr, premiered at Siggraph ’86 Dallas. 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 16, 2025

Birthdays: Fess Parker, Karl Stockhausen, George Meany, Charles Bukowski, Menachem Begin, Otto Mesmer the creator of Felix the Cat, Myron Grim Natwick the creator of Betty Boop, Hal Foster the creator of Prince Valiant, Kathie Lee Gifford, Edie Gorme, Bill Evans, Leslie Ann Warren, Angela Bassett is 67, Julie Numar is 92, Robert Culp, James Cameron is 70, Bruce Beresford, Steve Carrell is 64, Madonna, aka Louise Ciccone of Bay City Michigan, is 67

 

1858- Queen Victoria sent the first transcontinental wire message to President James Buchanan via Cyrus Field's incredible UNDERWATER TRANSCONTINENTAL CABLE, stretching from London to New York.  After great fanfare about progress and a new era in communications it broke down, as well as the next several tries to fix it. Just hours after the first message a fisherman pulled it up in his net, thought it was the tail of a sea serpent and cut off a chunk to take home and brag to his friends. Other attempts were ruined when technicians tried to correct the faintness of the signal by boosting the voltage beyond the safety range of the insulation-Zapp! The final, working version of the cable was laid down by Cyrus Field in 1866. 

  Transcontinental communications didn't really become commonplace until wireless broadcasting. But the who-ha over this scientific marvel did inspire author Jules Verne to write "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”

 

1877- BIRTHDAY OF THE WORD-"HELLO". In a letter dated today Thomas Edison wrote to the first president of AT&T about how people should initiate conversation on the new telephone machine. A genteel Victorian would think it impolite to speak until spoken to. Alexander Graham Bell, an old navy man, always thought the right way to start a phone conversation was to say "AHOY!"  Edison explained that the results of sonic tests proved the old English fox hunting call "Halloo!" was most audible over great distances. In most languages around the world the word hello is the same.  

 

1896- THE YUKON GOLD RUSH. Four miners find gold in Bonanza Creek in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory. When a boatload of gold was brought down to Seattle and San Francisco, it caused a stampede of prospectors north. Prospectors included poet Robert Service, Wyatt Earp, and Donald Trump’s immigrant grandfather, Friedrich Trump.

 

1930- Ub Iwerk's "Fiddlesticks" the first Flip the Frog cartoon, done in a simple two-color process called Harriscolor. Iwerks was the first designer and animator of Mickey Mouse, who had left Walt Disney to open his own studio.

 

1938- In Three Forks Mississippi, Blues legend Robert Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband.

 

1942- Happy Birthday Mighty Mouse. Terrytoon's short: "The Mouse of Tomorrow".

 

1954- First issue of Sports Illustrated.

 

1965- The AFL, American Football League offered it’s first expansion franchise to a new team called the Miami Dolphins. The AFL merged with the NFL in the 80s.

 

1969- “ Hey Man, we’re gonna serve breakfast in bed for 500,000” So was hippy Wavy Gravy’s announcement at dawn on the second day of the Woodstock Rock Concert. Toasted oats in hot water was ladled out en-masse in paper cups. Wavy declared this was the day Americans first learned about Granola. 

 

1974- The Ramones play their first gig at the NY club CBGBs. Hey-Ho, Lets Go!

 

1977- E-DAY in Memphis. Elvis Presley, donuts and Pizza Hut box in hand, died of a heart attack while sitting on the toilet. He was reading a book-the Historic Search for the Face of Jesus. He was 42.

 

1985- On her birthday, Madonna married Sean Penn. They divorced shortly after.

 

1987- The Harmonic Convergence- Another one of these celestial events that the mainstream media trumpeted as the end of everything. All nine planets of our solar system were in perfect alignment and the subsequent gravitational forces were supposed to knock the Earth into the Sun or something or other that would send us to Hell in a Handbasket. Lots of New Age types flocked to occult sites like Mt. Shasta and Stonehenge to meditate on the End of All Things. So, what happened? Nothing. 

 

1991- The original Shamu the Whale died of respiratory failure at age 16.

 

2005- Top Pixar story-artist Joe Ranft was killed in an auto accident. He was 45.

 

2019- Animator Richard Williams died of cancer at age 86.

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 15, 2025


Birthdays: Napoleon Bonaparte, Leon Theremin- inventor of that weird electronic musical instrument that is in all those 1950s flying saucer movies, Samuel Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia 1685, Lawrence of Arabia, Ethel Barrymore, Huntz Hall, Bill Baird, Edna Ferber, Sir Robert Bolt, Rose-Marie, Linda Ellerbee, Gene Upshaw, Oscar Peterson, Shimon Peres, Mike “Mannix” Connors, Nicholas Roeg, Animator Dick Lundy, Julia Child, Anthony Andrews, Ben Afleck is 52, Debra Messing is 56, Jennifer Lawrence is 34. 

 

 

1843- Tivoli Gardens opened in Copenhagen. One of the oldest amusement parks in the world. King Christian said. “When people are amused, they don’t worry about politics.” Hans Christian Andersen was a frequent visitor. One hundred years later, Walt Disney visited to get inspiration for his Disneyland.

 

 

1885- Sir Richard Burton completed his translation from medieval Persian of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. There had been earlier attempts like a French edition in 1809, but Burton’s edition introduced the west to Aladdin and his magic lamp, Sinbad the Sailor and Scheherazade.

 

1911- Proctor & Gamble introduced Crisco shortening.

1935- Humorist writer Will Rogers and his pilot Wiley Post were killed when their small plane crashed in Barrow, Alaska. 

 

1936- Disney animator Ward Kimball married painter Betty Lawyer-Kimball.

 

1939 - In 1st night game at Comiskey Park, Sox beat Browns 5-2.

 

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1965- The Beatles played their largest U.S. concert yet, at New York's Shea Stadium.

 

1968- The pirate radio station Radio Free London began transmitting.

 

1969- WOODSTOCK-Three Days of Peace and Music- The rock concert of the 20^th Century opened. The promoters, one of whom was heir to the Polident Denture Cream fortune, were hoping to host 50,000 people and launch a recording studio in the quiet New York farming town. What they got was 500,000 young fans and the social phenomenon that defined an age. 

 

1973- Westworld with Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin opened. 

 

1979- Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic “Apocalypse Now” opened. Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, young Harrison Ford and even younger Lawrence Fishburne. Future Pixar director Ronnie Del Carmen (Inside Out) got his first job as a student painting scenery.

 

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 14, 2025

Birthdays: Gary Larson, Erwin "Magic" Johnson, Lina Wertmuller, David Crosby, Alice Ghostly, Buddy Greco, Nehemiah Persoff, The 20's Parisian nightclub singer Bricktop, Dick Lundy, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, C.S. Watson, James Horner, Rene Goscinny, Wim Wenders, Emmanuele Beart, Halle Berry is 59, Mila Kunis is 42, Steve Martin is 80

 

1873 - "Field & Stream" magazine began publishing.

 

 

1908- The first international beauty pageant held in Kent, England.

                                

 

1928 - Ben Hecht & Charles McArthur's play" The Front Page," premiered in NYC. They later went on to become top comedy writers in Hollywood after Sound pictures created a need for snappy dialogue. They came out to Hollywood after a mutual friend, writer Herman Mankiewicz sent Ben a telegram, “Hecht, some quick! Fortunes to be made and your competition are idiots!"

 

1935- President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the National Social Security Act. Still considered the most successful US Federal social program ever.

 

 

1939 - 1st night game at Comiskey Park -White Sox 5, Browns 2.

 

1939 - Donald Duck Day at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Donald has been flown in from Hollywood to attend the premiere of his latest cartoon Donald's Penguin, playing at the National Biscuit Theatre in the Food Pavilion. Donald then handed out gifts to five hundred lucky children and was presented with an honorary degree of Doctor of International Friendship from Prof. Frank Monaghan of Yale University during a ceremony held in Carnival land. 

 

1942- Pluto cartoon T-Bone for Two, released. Directed by Clyde Geronimi.

 

1956- The Marilyn Monroe movie "Bus Stop" premiered.

 

1962 - French & Italian workers break through at Mount Blanc to create an auto 

Tunnel through the Alps.

 

1962 - NASA test pilot Joseph Walker takes the X-15 supersonic plane to 60,000 ft.

 

1964 –California angels pitcher Bo Belinsky is suspended after attacking sportswriter Braven Dyer.

 

1965 - Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe" hits #1.

 

1965- Jane Fonda married director Roger Vadim, who put the beautiful young blonde in naughty movies like Barbarella. His previous wife Bridgette Bardot was a beautiful young blonde that he put in naughty movies….hmm.

 

1994 – The world’s most wanted terrorist "Carlos the Jackal" was arrested in Khartoum Sudan when he entered a clinic to have a varicose vein removed from his testicle.

2009- Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo opened in North America.

 

2126- Get your catchers mitts out! Comet Swift-Tuttle will pass very close by the Earth.

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Tom Sito's animation almanac for Aug 13, 2025

B-Dayz: Annie Oakley, Alfred Hitchcock, Erwin Schroedinger, Don Ho, Buddy Rogers, Bert Lahr, Ben Hogan, Richard Baseheart, Saul Steinberg, Regis Toomey, Johann Christoph Denner (1655)- inventor of the clarinet. Danny Bonaduce, John Logie Baird one of the inventors of television, Fidel Castro, Hockey great Bobby Clarke, Daniel Schorr, Bombay movie star Viyayanthimala

 

 

1934- First Little Abner comic strip by Al Capp. Dogpatch, Mammy Yokum, Daisy Mae, Kickapoo Joy Juice, Fearless Fozdick and the Schmoo are born. Al Capp was a hard drinking old curmudgeon of a cartoonist who lost one leg when as a child he fell off an ice truck and it was severed by a streetcar. 

 

 

1941- James Stuart Blackton certainly had an interesting career. The English born artist became a top newspaper cartoonist, a vaudevillian drag act as Mademoiselle Stuart, the first American animator, founder of the Vitagraph Company, the movie fanzine Motion Picture World. He even successfully faked a newsreel of the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 by using toy boats, sparklers and cigar smoke. He made fortunes but lost everything in the Stock Market Crash. On this day, a poor freelance artist for low budget Republic Pictures, Blackton died after was struck and killed by an auto on Pico Blvd.

 

1942-  Disney's Bambi opened in theaters. Based on a novel by Felix Salten. Friends sold the movie rights to MGM so Salten, an Austrian Jew, could escape the Nazis and get to Switzerland. MGM passed on the rights to Walt Disney. Today the film looks quaint but in its time artists felt it was as realistic as artists could attain. Joe Grant told me designer Rico LeBrun had a hunter friend bring in a real deer he shot in the Sierras. LeBrun set up drawing and anatomy sessions to study the dead animal. But LeBrun was so inspired by the opportunity he refused to dispose of the carcass even after several days it began to smell badly and attract flies. Finally, the other animators waited until LeBrun had left for lunch and tossed the rancid thing.

 

 

1946- MGM cartoon Northwest Hounded Police. One of the best examples of the 'Tex Avery Take" - used since in films like The Mask, Roger Rabbit and Casper.

 

1955- Shooting wrapped on Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. He was remaking the film he had done as a silent movie in 1925. One wag said: DeMille has done God one better, because he has now parted the Red Sea twice.". 

 

1967- The World’s Fair at Montreal Canada, Expo-67 Held the opening reception of its World Exhibition of Animation Cinema. Famous animators from around the world gathered in a special reception. Opening night featured a screening of Disney’s Dumbo, and animator Bill Tytla was saluted. Attendees included Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, June Foray, Art Babbitt, Walter Lantz, Dusan Vukotic’, Bruno Bozzetto, Dave Fleischer and more.

 

1967- Bonnie & Clyde with Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway opened in theaters. “They're Young. They're in Love. And They Kill People”

 

 

1991- Jack Ryan died. The toymaker was the inventor of Hot Wheels toy cars, and helped launch the doll Barbie.

 

2016- At the Rio Olympics, American swimmer Michael Phelps won his 22 gold medal, His final total was 28, the most Olympic gold medals of anyone in history. The second most wins was Leonidas of Rhodes in 164BC. But in Leonidas time they didn’t get medals. They received a laurel wreath and several large pots of premium olive oil.

 

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 12, 2025

Birthdays: King George IV, Cecil B. DeMille, The alien Alf- 1757, Cantinflas, Buck Owens, Edith Hamilton, Diamond Jim Brady, screenwriter William Goldman, Mtsislav Rostropovitch, Xenia Sharpe (educator who invented the children’s reader Dick & Jane) Kathy Lee Bates-the author of the song America the Beautiful, Klara Schickelgruber- Hitlers mom, Dominique Swain, Pete Samprass, Sam Fuller, John Casale, George Hamilton is 86, Casey Affleck is 50.

 

The Golden 12th. In England this is the beginning of grouse hunting season.

 

1833- The City of Chicago was founded. Chicago is an Indian word meaning “wild onions”.  The site of Chicago had been mentioned by explorers like LaSalle since 1688, and a man of African-European descent named Jean Baptiste Pont du Sable homesteaded on the site in the 1780s. He has been called the Founder of Chicago.

 

1851- Mr. Issac Singer received a patent on his new sewing machine. Elias Howe, who had invented the sewing machine first, immediately sued him. But Singers improved design was so much superior to Howes that he quickly recouped al the penalties paid and eventually bought out Howe. The Singer Sewing Machine Company is still around today. Winaretta Singer, heiress to the resulting fortune, became the Princess de Polignac, one of the great patrons of the arts in turn of the century Paris.

 

1869- San Francisco lunatic Joshua Norton, who called himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States, today published an Imperial Edict outlawing the Democratic and Republican Parties. Hmmm… he may be on to something!

 

1877- THE BIRTH OF RECORDED SOUND. Thomas Edison announced his sound recording invention and demonstrated it by recording "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a tin cylinder. Edison never quite understood the possibilities of a music industry and was convinced that the recorded sound was going to be a used primarily for people to listen to the voices of deceased family, sort of like a voice from the grave. That idea was so popular that it translated to the Logo of the RCA Company with the familiar image of the dog listening to "His master's voice". The original image of that dog listening to his master's voice, had the dog sitting on a coffin. 

A few years later Georgian Emile Berliner invented the flat record disc. Edison thought the disc was clumsy and too fragile. In the future he declared, everyone would use recording cylinders. Flat vinyl records were the global standard for the next 100 years.

 

1898- Annexation Day in Hawaii. The U.S. formally took over the Kingdom of Hawaii. The government of Queen Liliokalani had been overthrown by a group of Yankee sugar plantation owners led by Sanford Dole and handed control over to U.S. gunboats in the harbor.

 

1898- According to H.G. Well’s book The War of the Worlds, this day the first Martian cylinders were launched at our planet.

 

1915 - "Of Human Bondage," by William Somerset Maugham, published.

 

1927- William Wellman’s movie WINGS opened with Clara Bow, Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the first silent film to win best picture at the Academy Awards before the advent of sound. Director Wild Bill Wellman was himself a former fighter pilot and flew many of the stunt shots. He bolted cameras to the nose of planes and had the actor’s film themselves while flying. 

The second silent film to ever win best picture was The Artist, in the year 2012.

 

1932 Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first published. Before anyone ever heard of gene therapy, Huxley had written a scholarly paper on the moral dangers inherent in controlled genetic engineering. Writer H.L. Mencken urged Huxley to put his ideas in a fiction form to reach a wider audience. The title comes from Shakespeare's the Tempest " Oh Brave New World, that hath such people in it!'

 

 

1951- Bob McKimson’s Warner Bros short Hillbilly Hare. The short includes the long routine animated in part by Emery Hawkins and Chuck McKimson when Bugs Bunny takes over calling a square dance and uses it to torture the two twin-brother hunters after him. At the time many Warner artists enjoyed a fashion for country dances and hayrides. One artist who disliked square dancing was NY storyman Ted Pierce. So, when he got to write this short, he put all his satiric bite into the lyrics. “Hit him low and hit him high, Stick your finger in his eye.”

 

1958- A Great Day in Harlem- Photographer Art Kane, working for Esquire Magazine, arranged a group photo of 57 of the most important figure in Jazz music and the Harlem Renaissance all standing together on one stoop in Harlem, NY. Count Basie, Thelonius Monk, Maryann McPartland, Sonny Rollins, Gene Krupa and more.

 

1968- The album Cheap Thrills released from Big Brother and the Holding Company and their lead singer Janis Joplin. Robert Crumb drew the famous cover.

 

1981- IBM introduced its first PC- personal computer and PC-DOS I. Unlike Apple, IBM shared the basic hardware design, so a myriad of cheaper competitor PC’s from Commodore and Dell soon flooded the market.

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1983- The Nelvana animated feature Rock & Rule opened in theaters. 

 

1999- In Yorkshire England, Tish, the world’s oldest goldfish, died at age 43.

 

 

2008- TV entertainer and producer Merv Griffin died at age 82. The creator of shows like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and Merv Griffin Show, his last post on his website was " I was planning to go on vacation, but this is not the destination I intended."

 

tom sito's animation almanac for Aug 11, 2025

Birthdays: Antonio Salieri is 275, Frederick Ludwig Jahn 1778- founder of the Gymnastics Movement, Alex Haley, Jack Haley, Hulk Hogan, Dick Browne the creator of Hagar the Horrible, Steve Wozniak the co-founder of Apple Computers, Raymond Leppard, Lloyd Nolan, Mike Douglas, Patti Duke Astin, Viola Davis, Chris Hemsworth is 40, Rob Minkoff

1596- Hamnet Shakespeare, the 11 year old son of William Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway, died of plague. 

1866 - World's 1st roller skating rink opens (Newport RI)

1874 - Harry S. Parmelee patented the sprinkler head.

1896 - Harvey Hubbell patents electric light bulb socket with a pull chain.

1908- The Hearst syndicate press published a story today that Annie Oakley was destitute and was arrested in Chicago trying to buy cocaine from a black man! The story was a phony. The woman arrested was a burlesque dancer who had previously only impersonated her. The real Annie Oakley, one of the first big media stars, spent the next 6 years suing 55 newspapers. She won all but one lawsuit.

1909-The first S.O.S.-'Save Our Ship' Morse signal sent by the liner S.S. Arapahoe off Cape Hatteras North Carolina.

1932- The original Rin Tin Tin died. The German shepherd dog was the first animal movie star. Legend was he was rescued from a WWI battlefield by a doughboy named Lee Duncan who called him "Rinty". Later in Hollywood people joked he was more spoiled than any human star. Before sound he was the main moneymaker of struggling little Warner Bros studio. Jack Warner called him “Our little rent check.” When the Academy Award was created in 1927 there was a semi-serious discussion whether to give the very first Best Actor Oscar to Rin Tin Tin. In 1967 Warners admitted they had bred 16 duplicate dogs in case anything happened to him.

1934- The Mickey Mouse cartoon The Orphan’s Benefit. The first cartoon where Donald Duck lost his temper and did his fighting stance, and they started calling Dippy Dog by his new name- The Goof, or Goofy.

1942- Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr is awarded a patent for her radio-guided torpedo. It was ignored in her time, but many years later the principles became the basis of Spread Spectrum Technology, revolutionizing wireless communications.

1946- Playwright Moss Hart married Miss America Kittie Carlisle. 

1956- Abstract artist Jackson Pollack died when he drunkenly crashed his car into a tree near East Hampton Long Island. He was 44.

1957- The Toyota Car Company of Japan introduces itself to the United States with a car called the Toyopet. It's first year’s sales were so bad; they almost gave up on the U.S.

1957- Friz Freleng’s Sylvester & Tweety short “Birds Anonymous” came out.

1960- Chad declared its independence.

1962- Actor Sir Lawrence Olivier founded the National Theatre in London.

60th Anniv.1965- THE WATTS RIOTS- 6 days of urban warfare began when an angry crowd attacked some LAPD apprehending a black motorist named Marquette Frye. 34 deaths, 1000 injured. Similar riots erupted in a number of U.S. cities that year including Detroit, Newark and Washington D.C. 

1972- San Antonio Texas holds its first annual Cheech & Chong Day.

1973- American Graffiti opened nationwide. Despite good previews Universal exec Ned Tanen hated the film and threatened to shelve it or cut his losses by sending it direct to TV. Francis Ford Coppola, coming off his Godfather success, offered to buy the rights to the movie and take it elsewhere. Tanen backed down. American Graffiti cost $777,000 to make. And it earned $140 million. Making George Lucas a serious Hollywood director. Ned Tanen’s name was used as the bad guy bully Biff Tanen in Back to The Future.

1995- The Walt Disney short Runaway Brain, featuring Mickey Mouse, premiered. Directed by Chris Bailey and written by Tim Hauser.

2001- First day shooting on the film Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou.

2014- Comedian/Actor Robin Williams committed suicide in his San Francisco home.  He had been battling depression and could feel something was wrong with his body. It was later discovered he had Diffuse Lewy Body Dementia, a form of early onset Alzheimer’s. Then incurable. He was 63.