There are still many fans of electric football, which is challenging to say the least. It was extremely popular when I was a kid back in the 1960s. My brother, or maybe both of them, had the vibrating games. It would drive me crazy. You'd flip the switch, and the toy players would move, but usually the wrong way or else fall down. There were and are no steroids available to make the players perform better:
Norman Sas, a toy maker who transformed a vibrating sheet of metal into a thrilling and sometimes exasperating tabletop game called electric football, winning the devotion of boys from the late 1940s until simulated on-field action arrived on video screens in the 1980s, died on June 28 at his home in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 87.
His daughter Wendy Jones confirmed his death.
In the 1930s, an employee at a New York metal products company run by Mr. Sas’s father developed a device that propelled figures across a metal surface using vibrations created by a small motor. The company, Tudor Metal Products, first used the technology for car and horse racing games. But when Norman Sas bought the company with a partner shortly after World War II, he saw potential in applying the technology to football, which had become increasingly popular and was beginning to be televised in the New York region.
The Onion, that publication of reliability, has some milestones in the history of this game.
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Maria Hawkins Cole, 89, the long-suffering wife of singing great Nat "King" Cole, after a short battle with cancer.
Maria appears to have been a good person with a good heart. She had to have to have taken Nat back after he screwed around on her with 20-something Gunilla Hutton back in the early sixties. By that time he was very sick with cancer, and it was she, not Gunilla, who stayed at his side until he died.
The dirt:
The last years of Cole's life were complicated and painful. He had smoked obsessively for years. In Epstein's words: ''He smoked for exhilaration and he smoked to calm down; he smoked upon waking, and snuffed his last cigarette in the ashtray next to his bed as he turned off the light to go to sleep.'' In 1964, at the age of 44, he discovered he was dying of lung cancer and fell recklessly in love with a young Swedish dancer, Gunilla Hutton, who was touring with his stage show. He was soon hospitalized, and a byzantine melodrama unfolded. Maria blocked all incoming telephone calls and sat by his bed while they went from lethal words to lethal silences. Gunilla called Maria at home and asked her to give Nat the divorce he wanted. Maria went back to the hospital, dialed Gunilla's number for Nat (he was too weak to hold the phone), then listened as he told her that he was dying and must remain with his family.
Nat died about a month later.
Hutton is best remembered for her roles in Petticoat Junction and Hee Haw.
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Possible death, no confirmation as of yet: Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, of scandal.
If Mitt's campaign indeed goes on the rocks, it will be because the GOP has deliberately thrown the election--again.
After all, Obama does the Republicans' and neolibs' work anyway.
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Richard Zanuck, following his father's footsteps to become a famous film producer but without all of the personal baggage, has died at the age of 77.
Zanuck died of a heart attack at his Beverly Hills home.
He followed his father's lead and became an executive at 20th Century Fox until his father fired him, but it didn't stop Richard at all. He struck out on his own:
The production company the younger Zanuck founded with David Brown produced “The Sting” in 1973, as well as Steven Spielberg’s first feature film, “The Sugarland Express,” in 1974 and Spielberg’s first blockbuster, “Jaws,” in 1975. “The Sting” also won the best movie Oscar, although Zanuck and Brown were not listed as its producers. “Jaws” was nominated for best picture, as was the Zanuck-produced “The Verdict.”
Richard Zanuck was married three times and had four children.
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