Yodeler Whitman of TV-pitched music
MIAMI - Country singer Slim Whitman, the high pitched yodeler who sold millions of records through ever-present TV ads in the 1980s and 1990s and whose music saved the world in the film comedy Mars Attacks, died Wednesday at a Florida hospital. He was 90.
Whitman died of heart failure at Orange Park Medical Center, his son-in-law Roy Beagle said.
Whitman’s tenor falsetto and ebony mustache and sideburns became global trademarks - and an inspiration for countless jokes - thanks to the TV commercials that pitched his records.
But he was a serious musical influence on early rock, and in the British Isles he was known as a pioneer of country music for popularizing the style there.Whitman also encouraged a teen Elvis Presley when he was the headliner on the bill and the young singer was making his professional debut.
Whitman recorded more than 65 albums and sold millions of records, including 4 million of All My Best that was marketed on TV.
His career spanned six decades, beginning in the late 1940s, but he achieved cult-figure status in the 1980s.
Born Ottis Dewey Whitman Jr. in Tampa on Jan. 23, 1923, he worked as a young man in a meatpacking plant, at a shipyard and as a postman.
He was able to get on radio in Tampa and signed with RCA Records in 1949 with the help of Col. Tom Parker, who later became Presley’s longtime manager. RCA gave the slender 6-foot-1 Whitman the show-business name Slim.
Wrote Rolling Stone’s McChrystal expose
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES - Michael Hastings, the war correspondent whose reporting from Afghanistan led to the resignation of a top U.S. army general, has died in a car accident in Los Angeles, according to his employer and family.
Hastings, who was 33, was described by many of his colleagues as an unfailingly bright and hard-charging reporter who wrote stories that mattered. Most recently, he wrote about politics for the news website BuzzFeed.
“Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians,” said Ben Smith, BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief.
Smith said he learned of the death from a family member.
Authorities said there was a car crash early Tuesday in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles that killed a man, but coroner’s officials could not confirm whether Hastings was the victim.
Hastings won a 2010 George Polk Award for magazine reporting for his Rolling Stone cover story “The Runaway General.”
His story was credited with ending Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s career after it revealed the military’s candid criticisms of President Barack Obama’s administration.
Hastings quoted McChrystal and his aides mocking Obama administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, over their war policies.
Hastings was also an author of books about the wars. The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan was published late last year and details shocking exploits of the military overseas.
Arkansas, Pages 14 on 06/20/2013