This week in the Obituaries....
BO STICKELY
(April 22, 1946 - December 1, 2020)
Action movie fans mourn the passing of Bo Stickely today, born in 1946 in Cornflower, Iowa. Stickely is best remembered for a string of martial arts films from the early 1970s, including Face Punch Master and its sequel, Kick Nuts Champion.
Stickely came to California to work the potato fields following the dragon fruit blight of 1969. While in the southern part of the state he took martial arts lessons with part-time stuntman Jay Femur. Femur recommended Stickely to his studio contacts based on his student's tough but handsome demeanor and iron-hard skull. Joel Woot of Woot Films saw in Stickely "a chance to make some of that karate money with a white dude." In Stickely's first film, 1971's Drunken Monk Punk, he played the world's greatest martial artist, a peace-loving man who will not fight unless he is so drunk he loses all coordination and manual dexterity. When his pet hamster is stolen, however, he goes on a sober rampage.
"I love making movies," he once told the Hollywood Reporter. "They just point me at someone, tell me what to say, and when to hit him. And I get paid!" He added, "I never took a single acting lesson, you believe that?" Fans did. He went on to star in a series of cheap but satisfying films, including Silent But Deadly, Bloody Spleen, and You Killed My Master III: Running Out of Masters.
In the 1980s, the end of the grindhouse era and an enormous beer gut brought Stickely's film career to a halt. Small parts in television also came to an end when he was guest-starring on an episode of Golden Girls and thought he was supposed to beat up Bea Arthur.
For years afterward he made a small living signing autographs at film conventions, before retiring to the Punch Drunk Home for Stuntmen and Others, where he died on December 1 from cancer of the islets of Langerhans.
HIBISCUS FLOWER
(February 7, 1935 - December 2, 2020)
Folk music pioneer Hibiscus Flower, née Henrietta Lipschitz, was born in Levittown, New York, twelve years before the town was founded. In her adult life she discovered the joys of the folk-music movement, changed her name, and tried to get in on the action.
"I love writing songs for the common working man," she told a Village Voice interviewer in 1962. "All the college kids say the common working man would love my songs if he ever heard them."
Flower was not a singer -- she confessed to having "a voice like a broken hairdryer" -- but between 1958 and 1966 she wrote 451 folk songs. Many of these were recorded by groups such as the O'Hara Experience, the Pantless Four, and Pickle 'n Sickle. One of her biggest hits, "The Ol' Red Rooster," was a #30 hit for Nearsighted Mickey Meara in 1963.
Following the "Electric Dylan" shock of 1965, Flower retreated to her Upstate New York home in Coxsackie with a sick headache, where she continued to write in seclusion. That is, until 1970, when a reporter from the New York Post visited her in her arbor, where she wrote all of her songs. Hanging in the arbor was a wind chime that emitted five notes -- A, C sharp, D, F sharp, and G -- which he realized were the only notes she ever used in any of her songs. "Every melody she ever wrote came from those chimes," the reporter concluded, and Flower's songwriting career effectively came to a close.
Still, her best-known songs, like "Pick Up Yo' Shovel, Eb," "Ain't Seen No Sunshine in Waukegan," and "The Ol' Combine," continued to be recorded by bands including Hilljack Shine and Wickëd Blüd. For the next fifty years Hibiscus Flower was able to live on her royalties while collecting dead butterflies, live cats, and resentments, until her passing on Wednesday from cardiac arrest -- or, as she wrote in "Broken Hearted Billie," "a heart that just done stopt."
HOWARD ZINKLE
(November 18, 1951 - November 30, 2020)
Pioneering food scientist Howard Zinkle, known to friends as Zinkmeister, passed away suddenly on December 3, 2020. Zinkle was best known for his work on established lines like Reddi-Wip, Cool Whip, Dream Whip, and Miracle Whip. But he also made great strides in the field of dehydrating and freeze-drying foods, and was known in some circles as the King of Waterless Comestibles.
"I was so crushed when NASA said that our freeze-dried ice cream would crumble in space and ruin the gears or whatever," Zinkle told The Smithsonian. "We worked really hard to suck the moisture out of ice cream. It's not easy. Not to mention the chocolate syrup."
Zinkle, who earned a Ph.D. in Food Science from the Grenada School of Eats, was employed as a Food Consultant for Heinz and Campbell's, among other food giants. His plan to make condensed condensed soups, which would fit a serving for eight in a two-ounce can, never came to fruition, and he often found himself tinkering in his own laboratory. Zinkle is distinguished by holding the third-most patents of any U.S. individual for inventions that don't work.
Zinkle was experimenting with a revolutionary new appliance, a self-cleaning microwave oven, when he was fatally injured in the explosion. In accordance with his instructions, Zinkle's freeze-dried remains will be interred in a shoebox this Friday in the Hallowed Halls and Greenish Grounds Memorial Plaza in Garden City, New York.
