In Passing
Santa Monica, Calif.
Robert E. Petersen, magazine publisher
Robert E. Petersen, the publishing magnate whose Hot Rod and Motor Trend magazines helped shape America’s car culture and who gave millions to a museum dedicated to his passion, has died. Petersen, 80, died Friday of complications from neuroendocrine cancer.
Petersen, the son of an auto mechanic, founded Hot Rod magazine in 1948 while trying to promote a car show at the Los Angeles Armory. The following year, he launched Motor Trend for automobile enthusiasts.
A dozen other specialty consumer magazines followed, including Guns & Ammo, Sport, Motorcyclist, Hunting, Mountain Biker, Photographic, Teen and Sassy.
By the time his publishing empire was sold in 1996, Petersen Publishing’s annual revenue was about $275 million.
Babylon, N.Y.
Calvert DeForest, Letterman sidekick
Calvert DeForest, the roly-poly character actor with the black-framed glasses and seemingly clueless delivery who developed a cult following as Larry “Bud” Melman on “Late Night with David Letterman” in the 1980s, has died. He was 85.
DeForest, who continued appearing with Letterman under his own name after the late-night comedian moved from NBC to CBS in the ‘90s, died after a long illness Monday at a hospital in Babylon, N.Y.
A struggling sometime-actor from Brooklyn, DeForest was working part time as a receptionist in a drug rehabilitation center when his role as a deranged studio mogul in a student film caught the attention of Letterman and head writer Merrill Markoe.
As Letterman’s “resident oddball,” as People magazine once called him, the unassuming DeForest became an unlikely TV celebrity.
He went on to appear in a string of commercials – pitching MCI, Frosted Cheerios, Pizza Hut. He also appeared in numerous films, TV movies and TV shows and even starred in his own video, “Couch Potato Workout.”
Ashland, Ore.
John Backus, computer pioneer
John Backus, known as the father of the Fortran computer-programming language that made computers more accessible, died March 17 in Ashland, Ore., according to the International Business Machine Corp., his longtime employer. He was 82.
In the 1950s, Backus headed a small team at IBM trying to find a way to make computers more useful for scientists and mathematicians. Before the development of Fortran, computers came with no software. To use the machines, computer programmers had to hand-code instructions.
Fortran, which stood for Formula Translator or Formula Translation, was finished in 1957. What had taken 1,000 machine instructions could be done in 47 statements, according to Backus in a 1979 interview printed in Think, IBM’s employee newsletter.
The breakthrough earned Backus a National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He also received the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering.
Beverly Hills, Calif.
Stuart Rosenberg, director
Stuart Rosenberg, a prolific director of episodic television who is best known for directing the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke,” has died. Rosenberg, 79, died Thursday of a heart attack.
Rosenberg began directing television episodes in the 1950s for such series as “The Defenders,” “The Untouchables,” “Naked City,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Bus Stop.”
But after completing his first feature film – “Cool Hand Luke” – he never went back to the small screen. A gritty, riveting tale about life on a chain gang, the film stars Paul Newman as a nonconformist who becomes a reluctant hero to his fellow inmates.
The film received four Academy Award nominations – although none for Rosenberg – with George Kennedy winning for best supporting actor. It also provided one of the most quoted lines of that film era, spoken by the camp’s warden, played by Strother Martin: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
Critics gave Rosenberg high marks for “Cool Hand Luke” and praised some of his later efforts, including “Voyage of the Damned” (1976), “Brubaker” (1980) and “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984). But other movies, such as “The Laughing Policeman” (1973) and “The Amityville Horror” (1979), pleased audiences more than reviewers.