Obituaries in the news: Prankster pitcher Moe Drabowsky
Moe Drabowsky
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Moe Drabowsky, the prankster pitcher who delighted in putting pythons in teammates' shoes and wound up as a World Series star for the Baltimore Orioles when they won their first championship in 1966, is dead. He was 70.
Drabowsky died Saturday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Medical Center in Little Rock, spokeswoman Liz Caldwell said Sunday. He had been ill with multiple myeloma, the Orioles said.
Drabowsky worked for the Orioles' organization the last 13 seasons as their Florida pitching instructor, overseeing players in extended spring training and on rehab assignments.
More than anything, Drabowsky was known for being one of the most zany players in the majors — he loved to make crank calls from bullpen phones and once gave commissioner Bowie Kuhn a hotfoot. In a 1987 interview with The Associated Press, while working as a minor league pitching coach for the Chicago White Sox, he lamented that the game wasn't so playful anymore.
"Players seem to be more serious now," he said then. "I would tend to believe they don't have as much fun. You don't find the same kind of characters in the game today. Egos are a big factor. And the guys are making so much money."
The highlight of Drabowsky's 17-year career came in Game 1 of the 1966 World Series. He set a record for relievers by striking out 11 over 6 2-3 scoreless innings against the Los Angeles Dodgers, starting the underdog Orioles toward a sweep.
Drabowsky pitched from 1956-72 with the Chicago Cubs, Milwaukee Braves, Cincinnati, Kansas City Athletics, Baltimore, Kansas City Royals, St. Louis and the White Sox. He was 88-105 with 55 saves and a 3.71 ERA.
Drabowsky also was the answer to several trivia questions. He gave up Stan Musial's 3,000th career hit, was the losing pitcher in Early Wynn's 300th career victory and was the first Royals pitcher to win a game.
Yet Drabowsky developed more of a reputation for what he did off the field.
Slipping sneezing powder into the air conditioning system of the opponent's locker room was a pet trick. So was putting goldfish in the other team's water cooler. He was a master at hotfoots and claimed Kuhn as one of his victims, lighting the commissioner's shoe on fire during the Orioles' 1970 Series win over Cincinnati.
Oh, and the snakes: Because of Drabowsky, they'd show up in shaving kits, lockers and many other places. During a reunion dinner in Baltimore, in fact, one of them slithered out of Brooks Robinson's bread basket and frightened him.
Drabowsky made his share of crank calls from bullpen phones, too. He used the one at Anaheim Stadium to order takeout food from a Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong. His favorite gag ever, he said, came at old Municipal Stadium in Kansas City.
"I had pitched there for a few years so I was familiar with the phone system. I knew the extension of the Kansas City bullpen and you could dial it direct from the visitor's bullpen," Drabowsky once recalled.
"One game, Jim Nash of the Athletics is cruising against us in about the fifth inning. So I call their bullpen and shout 'Get Krausse up' and hang up.
"You should've seen them scramble, trying to get Lew Krausse warmed up in a hurry," Drabowsky said. "It really was funny."
Born Myron Walter Drabowsky in 1935 in Poland, he was a young boy when his family left the country and made it to the United States.
Drabowsky, by the way, once said he never intended to be a kooky character. When he broke into the majors, he actually was ostracized by some teammates for being too serious.
"I signed with the Cubs in 1956 for $75,000, which was a lot of money then," he remembered. "Some of the guys used to get on me pretty good, saying I was strange because I carried The Sporting News under one arm and the Wall Street Journal under the other."
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James Cameron
MILWAUKEE (AP) — James Cameron, who survived an attempted lynching by a white mob and went on to found America's Black Holocaust Museum, died Sunday. He was 92.
Cameron had suffered from lymphoma for about five years, said Marissa Weaver, chairwoman of the Milwaukee-based museum's board.
In 1930, in Marion, Ind., Cameron and two friends were arrested and accused of killing a white man during a robbery and raping the man's companion.
A mob broke them out of jail and hanged Cameron's two friends, then placed a rope around his neck.
"They began to chant for me like a football player, 'We want Cameron, we want Cameron," he recalled in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. "I could feel the blood in my body just freezing up."
The 16-year-old shoeshine boy was spared when a man in the crowd proclaimed his innocence.
Cameron was convicted of being an accessory before the fact to voluntary manslaughter and spent four years in prison, but was granted a pardon in 1993. He said he had been beaten into signing a false confession.
Cameron said he was inspired to create the museum by a 1979 trip to Israel and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial.
In 1988, he opened the museum in a small storefront room in downtown Milwaukee. Six years later, he took over an abandoned 12,000-square-foot gym the city sold him for $1. The museum explores the history of the struggles of blacks in America from slavery to modern day and was considered one of the first of its kind in the country.
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Ingo Preminger
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ingo Preminger, a literary agent, producer of the film "MASH" and brother of the late filmmaker Otto Preminger, has died. He was 95.
Preminger died Wednesday at his home in Pacific Palisades, said his son, Jim. A cause of death was not given.
Preminger began his career as an attorney in Vienna but fled Naziism with his family in 1938 and moved to New York, where he owned a paint supply business. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1947 and he began a new career in the entertainment business.
He opened his own talent agency in 1948 and later represented leading writers who were blacklisted during the McCarthy era, including Ring Lardner and Dalton Trumbo. He helped them skirt studio restrictions by getting other writers to agree to take credit for their work.
Lardner sent Preminger a copy of the book "MASH." Preminger took it to Richard Zanuck, head of production at 20th Century Fox, who agreed to turn it into a movie and brought on Preminger as producer.
The 1970 film, directed by Robert Altman, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a Golden Globe for best musical or comedy film and was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture.
Preminger also produced 1972's "The Salzburg Connection." He retired from the film business in the late 1970s.
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Bruce Shand
LONDON (AP) — Maj. Bruce Shand, the father of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, died at home Sunday, her spokesman said. He was 89.
Shand was surrounded by family when he died at home in Dorset, on England's south coast, said the spokesman for Clarence House, the residence Camilla shares with her husband Charles, the Prince of Wales. A cause of death was not disclosed.
Shand, a former cavalry officer, was credited with giving his daughter steadfast support when she was publicly vilified as the cause of the tensions that led to Charles' divorce from Princess Diana.
Charles and Camilla wed last year.
Shand was honored as a hero during World War II, even before he was wounded by a bullet to the face during the battle of El Alamein in Egypt in 1942. He was captured by Nazi forces at the battle and held in a German prisoner of war camp until 1945.
After the war, he found work as a partner in the London wine merchants Block, Grey and Block and pursued a passion for hunting in his free time.
