In 2024, we've experienced the loss of several luminaries in the world of entertainment. These beloved figures—actors, comedians, musicians, singers, and coaches—have touched our lives with their talent, passion, and dedication. They've left an indelible mark on our hearts and shaped the world of entertainment in ways that will continue to inspire and influence generations to come.
Among the incredible actors who bid farewell this year, we mourn the loss of a true chameleon who effortlessly.
RAPPER APACHE (original name Anthony Teaks) died of protracted illness on Friday. The rapper known for 1992 hit "Gangsta Bitch," had huge fan following across the world.
"Without Apache there would have been no Queen Latifah, no Naughty By Nature, no Chill Rob G., no anything" Shakim Compere, co-founder of Flavor Unit Records was quoted by boombox.com
"Apache was the string that tied all of Flavor Unit together. Without Apache none of this would be," he added.
The singer rose to same as he shared work with Queen Latifah and 45 King's Flavor Unit.
Apache's debut album Apache Ain't Shit was released in 1991 and peaked at 66 no. on the Billboard 200.
Nancy Kerrigan's brother, Mark Kerrigan, has had a turbulent history with his parents, and was once sued by them for $105,000 in 2008, according to the Boston Herold.
Even though Kerrigan was sued by his parents, the case was ultimately dismissed.
An unemployed plumber, Mark Kerrigan, 45, was charged with assaulting his 70-year-old father, who died over the weekend after a disturbance at the family's Massachusetts home.
Robert Kerrigan pleaded not guilty and was ordered held on $10,000 cash bail after his arraignment Monday in Woburn District Court.
A police report said officers responding to a 911 call at 1:30 a.m. Sunday found Daniel Kerrigan lying on the floor unconscious. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. An autopsy was planned.
The report said Mark Kerrigan was found on a couch in the basement of the home in the middle-class Boston suburb of Stoneham and was "belligerent and combative" when questioned. Officers used pepper spray to subdue him and eventually arrested him.
Defense attorney Denise Moore said her client, an Army veteran who had served overseas, was on medication for post-traumatic stress syndrome and was seeing a psychiatrist.
Earl Wild[1][2] died he was 94. Wild was an American pianist widely recognized as a leading virtuoso of his generation. Harold C. Schonberg called him a "super-virtuoso in the Horowitz class".[3] He was known as well for his transcriptions of classical music and jazz. He was also a composer.
(November 26, 1915 – January 23, 2010)
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Wild was a musically precocious child and studied under Selmar Janson, Simon Barere and Egon Petri, among others. As a teenager, he started making transcriptions of romantic music and composition.
He was the first pianist to perform a recital on U.S. television, in 1939, as staff pianist for NBC. In 1997 he was also the first pianist to stream a performance over the Internet.[citation needed] In 1942, Arturo Toscanini invited him for a performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which was a resounding success and made him a household name. During World War II, Wild served in the United States Navy as a musician. A few years after the war he moved to the newly formed American Broadcasting Company (ABC) as a staff pianist, conductor and composer until 1968. He performed three times for the Peabody Mason Concert series in Boston, in 1952[4], 1968[5], and 1971.[6] Wild is renowned for his virtuoso recitals and master classes held around the world, from Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo to Argentina, England and throughout the United States.
Earl Wild created virtuoso solo piano transcriptions of 12 songs by Rachmaninoff, and works on themes by Gershwin. His Grand Fantasy on Airs from Porgy and Bess, the first extended piano paraphrase on an American opera, was recorded in 1976 and had its concert premiere in Pasadena on December 17, 1977. He also wrote Seven Virtuoso Études on Popular Songs, based on Gershwin songs such as "The Man I Love", "Fascinating Rhythm" and "I Got Rhythm".[7] He also wrote a number of original works. These included a large-scale Easter oratorio, Revelations (1962), the choral work The Turquoise Horse (1976), and the Doo-Dah Variations, on a theme by Stephen Foster (1992), for piano and orchestra. His Sonata 2000 had its first performance by Bradley Bolen in 2003.[8]
Wild, who was openly gay,[9] lived in Palm Springs, California[10] with his partner, Michael Rolland Davis.
Wild recorded extensively for Ivory Classics, an American classical music record label.
Wild died aged 94 of congestive heart disease at home in Palm Springs, California.[11]
To see more of who died in 2010click here
James Mitchell died he was 90. Mitchell was an American actor and dancer. Although he is best-known to television audiences as Palmer Cortlandt on the soap opera All My Children (1979 – 2009), theatre and dance historians remember him as one of Agnes de Mille's leading dancers. Mitchell's skill at combining dance and acting was considered something of a novelty; in 1959, the critic Olga Maynard singled him out as "an important example of the new dancer-actor-singer in American ballet", pointing to his interpretive abilities and "masculine" technique.[1]
(February 29, 1920 – January 22, 2010)
Mitchell was born in Sacramento, California. His parents emigrated from England to Northern California, where they operated a fruit farm in Turlock. In 1923, Mitchell's mother, Edith, left his father and returned to England with Mitchell's brother and sister; she and Mitchell had no further contact. Unable to run a farm while single-handedly raising his remaining son, Mitchell's father fostered him out for several years to vaudevillians Gene and Katherine King. After Mitchell's mother died, however, his father remarried and brought both of his sons, but not his daughter, back to Turlock. At age seventeen, Mitchell left Turlock for Los Angeles, where he remained close to the Kings.[2]
While studying drama at Los Angeles City College, Mitchell was introduced to modern dance at the school of the famed teacher and choreographer, Lester Horton. After receiving his associate's degree, he joined Horton's company, where he remained for nearly four years. While working with Horton, Mitchell became a close friend of dancer Bella Lewitzky; in the 1970s, he became President of the Board of Directors of her Dance Foundation, and afterwards remained a “major longtime […] supporter” of hers.[3] In 1944, Horton took Mitchell to New York with him to form a new dance company, but the venture abruptly collapsed.
As it happened, the failure of Horton's company was a significant turning point in Mitchell's career: while struggling to find either acting or dancing roles in New York, he successfully auditioned for Agnes de Mille, who was choreographing her first musical since Oklahoma!. Mitchell, who did not study ballet until he was in his mid-twenties[4], was at a loss when faced with de Mille's ballet combination. Much later, describing his approach to the audition, Mitchell said, "Well, I really hadn't too much familiarity with that but I threw myself across the floor and about the third or fourth pass, Agnes cried 'Stop' and summoned me over and said 'Where on earth did you get your dance training?'".[5] De Mille nevertheless offered Mitchell the dual position of principal dancer and assistant choreographer. Given the option between touring with Helen Hayes and dancing for de Mille, Mitchell chose de Mille.[6]Bloomer Girl (1944) began an important artistic partnership with de Mille that lasted from 1944 to 1969 and spanned theater, film, television, and concert dance. De Mille's biographer, Carol Easton, describes him as the “quintessential male de Mille dancer” and de Mille's “closest confidant” in her artistic life.[7] In one of her autobiographical volumes, de Mille herself said of Mitchell that he had "probably the strongest arms in the business, and the adagio style developed by him and his partners has become since a valued addition to ballet vocabulary."[8] When, nearly thirty years later, an interviewer asked Mitchell to respond to de Mille's comments, Mitchell offered a more modest assessment of his career: "I was primarily an actor [...] and I think what Agnes was referring to was my acting and regard for the woman I was partnering. Because in the end I really was a partner. When I look at today's dancers, or I look at the great dance movies, such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers--I couldn't do any of that! I know I was a dancer, but I didn't have the technique. At most I was an actor-dancer."[9]
Mitchell's work with de Mille:
Bloomer Girl (Broadway, 1944): principal male dancer; assistant choreographer
Brigadoon (Broadway, 1947): Harry Beaton; assistant choreographer
Paint Your Wagon (Broadway, 1951): Pete Billings; assistant choreographer
American Theatre Laboratory (1967-69): instructor and company member
Mitchell worked consistently on stage in both musicals and straight dramas until the late 1970s, including numerous regional theatre roles across the country. His other significant credits include Broadway appearances in Carousel, First Impressions, and The Deputy; off-Broadway appearances in Winkelberg, The Threepenny Opera, Livin' the Life, and The Father; L'Histoire du Soldat at New York City Opera; and national tours of The Rainmaker (with future All My Children co-star Frances Heflin), The King and I, Funny Girl, and The Threepenny Opera.
As a film performer, Mitchell had only moderate success. In the early 1940s, he did both chorus dancing and extra work in a number of minor musicals and westerns. On the strength of his award-winning performance in Brigadoon, Mitchell was scouted by producer Michael Curtiz and signed to a contract at Warner Brothers. Curtiz initially intended to put Mitchell in a picture with Doris Day that never materialized.[10] After several months, Mitchell eventually made two films for Warner Brothers, including Raoul Walsh's Colorado Territory, before following Curtiz to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. At MGM, he played supporting roles in six films between 1949-55, most notably Anthony Mann's Border Incident, Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown, and Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon — an experience he loathed so much that he refused to see the film[11] — but he did not work for the studio again after appearing in the infamously over-budgeted flop The Prodigal (1955). Mitchell's film career ended abruptly after he starred in Hal R. Makelim's Western The Peacemaker (1956), the only time he was ever billed above the title. After that, it took over two decades before he made his next and what proved to be his final appearance on the big screen, The Turning Point (1977). He also co-starred with Thelma "Tad" Tadlock in the famous sponsored filmA Touch of Magic presented by General Motors at the 1961 Motorama.
On television, Mitchell was considerably more active, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In addition to working regularly as a dancer, Mitchell played dramatic roles in a number of TV movies and prime-time series, as well as in the anthologies that were once so popular, such as Play of the Week, Gruen Guild Playhouse, and Armstrong Circle Theatre. In 1964, he took his first contract role on a soap opera in The Edge of Night, as the corrupt Capt. Lloyd Griffin; this was followed by the entire run of Where the Heart Is (1969-73), in which he played the male lead, Julian Hathaway. During the late 1970s, he was a guest star on Lou Grant and Charlie's Angels.
Besides performing, Mitchell occasionally worked as a director and choreographer, particularly in the late 1960s and 1970s. He staged musicals at the Paper Mill Playhouse, the Mark Taper Forum, and The Muny, among other theatres. In 1956, he and Katherine Litz co-staged The Enchanted for American Ballet Theatre. After Mack & Mabel flopped in 1974, Mitchell's performing career nearly ended altogether. He earned a BA from Empire State College and an MFA from Goddard College in order to teach full-time at the college level, and taught movement for actors at Juilliard, Yale University, and Drake University. In 1979, after several years of only occasional work, Mitchell was hired to play the villainous businessman Palmer Cortlandt on the soap opera All My Children. Initially hired for only one year, Mitchell remained on contract through 2009. His final appearance as a contract player was September 19, 2008, although his retirement was not made official until September 30, 2009.[12] He made a guest appearance on January 5, 2010, as part of the show's fortieth anniversary.
A character based on Mitchell appears in Anderson Ferrell's biographical dance play, Dance/Speak: The Life of Agnes De Mille, which debuted at New York Theatre Ballet in 2009.
Mitchell's longtime partner was the Oscar award-winning costume designer Albert Wolsky.[13]
James Mitchell died on January 22, 2010, in Los Angeles, a matter of weeks before what would have been his 90th birthday. His death came after suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease complicated by pneumonia.[14]
To see more of who died in 2010click here
Pernell Elvin Roberts died he was 81. Roberts was an American television actor and singer. He was best known for his roles as Ben Cartwright's eldest son, Adam Cartwright, on the westernseriesBonanza (a role he played from 1959 to 1965), and as chief surgeon, Dr. John MacIntyre, the title character on Trapper John, M.D. (1979-1986).
He was known for his activism, which included participation in the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965, and pressuring NBC to refrain from hiring whites to portray minority characters.
(May 18, 1928 – January 24, 2010)
During his high school years, Roberts sang in local USO shows. He attended, but did not graduate from, Georgia Tech then served for two years in the United States Marine Corps. He attended the University of Maryland but was not a stellar student. He began his acting career in off-Broadway and Broadway theatre in New York City. The young actor won a prestigious Drama Desk award in 1955 for his performance in an off-Broadway rendition of Macbeth. He then worked with the Arena Stage Company in Washington, D.C.
In 1958, Roberts guest-starred as Captain Jacques Chavez on the NBC adventure series Northwest Passage based on the life of Major Robert Rogers in the French and Indian War. He appeared with fellow guest star Fay Spain in the 1958 episode "Pick up the Gun" of Tombstone Territory. In 1959, he co-starred in the film Ride Lonesome.
He came to prominence playing Ben Cartwright's urbane eldest son, Adam, in the Western television series Bonanza. Despite the show’s success, he left after the sixth season in 1965 due to disagreements with the writers and a desire to return to legitimate theatre. Among other complaints, Roberts argued that a 34-year-old, educated, Eastern-born man would not be calling his father "Pa".
The writers tacitly agreed not to exceed three "Pa" references per episode. According to producer David Dortort in the February 2006 "Bonanza Gold" issue, Roberts also wanted to stop wearing his toupee. Since, in real life, there were fewer than thirteen years of age between Roberts and Lorne Greene, a bald Adam would not have translated well on screen.[citation needed]Bonanza continued without Roberts for another eight seasons.
While performing in the series, Roberts recorded Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies, a folk music album which Allmusic calls "...the softer, lyrical side of folk music — pleasant and not challenging, but quite rewarding in its unassuming way."[1] . The album has been released on RCA Victor LPM / LSP 2662 (1963), and was arranged by Dick Rosmini. The album presently is available on compact disc only as part of the fourth disc of the Bonanza 4-CD boxed set on Bear Family.[2]
On the Bonanza box set albums, Roberts also sings "Early One Morning", "In the Pines", "The New Born King", "The Bold Soldier", "Mary Ann", "They Call the Wind Mariah", "Sylvie", "Lily of the West", "The Water is Wide", "Rake and a Ramblin Boy", "A Quiet Girl", "Shady Grove", "Alberta", and "Empty Pocket Blues". Roberts was the only trained/accomplished singer of the original Ponderosa clan. (However David Canary, who joined the cast in 1967, graduated as a voice major.) Blocker narrated intros and Landon held his own, while Lorne Greene's deep baritone voice scored big in songs such as "Ringo" (1964).
Roberts married three times. His first marriage was in 1951 to Vera Mowry, a professor at Washington State University, with whom he had his only child (Jonathan Christopher Roberts); they later divorced.[4] He married Judith Anna LeBreque on October 15, 1962[5]; they divorced in 1971. His last marriage was to Kara Knack, whom he married in 1972; they divorced in 1996. Jonathan Roberts died in a motorcycle accident in 1989 at age 38.
Roberts died of cancer at his home in Malibu, California on January 24, 2010, aged 81.[6]
To see more of who died in 2010click here
Jean Merilyn Simmons, OBE died she was 80. Simmons was an English actress who appeared predominantly in motion pictures, beginning with British-made films during and after World War II, followed mainly by Hollywood films from 1950.[1]
Simmons appeared alongside many leading British and American male film stars during a long and successful career.
(31 January 1929 – 22 January 2010)
Born in Lower Holloway, London, England, to Charles Simmons and his wife Winifred (Loveland) Simmons, Jean Simmons began acting at the age of 14. During World War II, the Simmons family was evacuated to Winscombe in Somerset.[2] Her father, a physical education teacher (who had represented Great Britain in the 1912 Summer Olympics),[3] taught briefly at Sidcot School, and sometime during this period Simmons followed her older sister on to the village stage and sang songs like "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow Wow". Returning to London and just enrolled at the Aida Foster School of Dance, she was spotted by the director Val Guest, who cast her in the Margaret Lockwood vehicle Give us the Moon.[4] Prior to moving to Hollywood, she played the young Estella in David Lean's version of Great Expectations (1946) and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948). It was the experience of working on Great Expectations that caused her to pursue an acting career more seriously:
"I thought acting was just a lark, meeting all those exciting movie stars, and getting £5 a day which was lovely because we needed the money. But I figured I'd just go off and get married and have children like my mother. It was working with David Lean that convinced me to go on."[5]
Playing Ophelia in Olivier's Hamlet made her a star, though she was already well-known for her work in other British films, including her first starring role in the film adaptation of Uncle Silas and Black Narcissus (both 1947). Olivier offered her the chance to work and study at the Bristol Old Vic, advising her to play anything they threw at her to get experience; she was under contract to the Rank Organisation. In 1950 Rank sold her contract to Howard Hughes, who then owned the RKO studio in Hollywood.
In 1950, she married the English actor Stewart Granger, with whom she appeared in several films, successfully making the transition to an American career. She made four films for Hughes, including Angel Face, directed by Otto Preminger. In 1953, she starred alongside Spencer Tracy in The Actress, a film that was one of her personal favourites. Among the many films she appeared in during this period were The Robe (1953), The Egyptian (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Big Country (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960), (directed by her second husband, Richard Brooks), Spartacus (1960), and The Happy Ending (1969), again directed by Brooks and for which she received her second Oscar nomination.
By the 1970s, Simmons turned her focus to stage and television acting. She toured the United States in Stephen Sondheim's well-reviewed musical A Little Night Music, then took the show to London, and thus originated the role of Desirée Armfeldt on the West End.[6] Doing the show for three years, she said she never tired of Sondheim's music; "No matter how tired or off you felt, the music would just pick you up." For her appearance in the mini-seriesThe Thorn Birds, she won an Emmy Award. In 1985 and 1986, she appeared in North & South. In 1988, she starred in The Dawning with Anthony Hopkins and Hugh Grant, and in 1989, she again starred in a miniseries, this time a version of Great Expectations, in which she played the role of Miss Havisham, Estella's adoptive mother. Simmons made a late career appearance in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Drumhead" as a witch-hunt-inspiring investigator named Admiral Norah Satie.
Jean Simmons was married twice: in 1950 to Stewart Granger, divorcing in 1960, and in 1960 to director Richard Brooks, divorcing in 1977. Both men were significantly older than Simmons but she has denied she was looking for a father figure. Her father had died when she was just sixteen but she said: "They were really nothing like my father at all. My father was a gentle, soft-spoken man. My husbands were much noisier and much more opinionated ... it's really nothing to do with age ... it's to do with what's there – the twinkle and sense of humour."[7] And in a 1984 interview, given in Copenhagen at the time she was shooting the film Yellow Pages, she elaborated slightly on her marriages. "It may be simplistic, but you could sum up my two marriages by saying that, when I wanted to be a wife, Jimmy (Stewart Granger) would say: 'I just want you to be pretty.' And when I wanted to cook, Richard would say: 'Forget the cooking. You've been trained to act – so act!' Most people thought I was helpless – a clinger and a butterfly – during my first marriage. It was Richard Brooks who saw what was wrong and tried to make me stand on my own two feet. I'd whine: 'I'm afraid.' And he'd say: 'Never be afraid to fail. Every time you get up in the morning, you are ahead." She had two daughters, Tracy Granger (born 1956) and Kate Brooks, one by each marriage – their names bear witness to Simmons' friendship with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Simmons moved to the East Coast in the late 1970s, briefly renting a home in the Litchfield County town of New Milford, Connecticut, and later to Santa Monica, California, where she lived until her death from lung cancer on the evening of Friday, January 22, 2010.[8]
To see more of who died in 2010click here
On August 16, 2005, Bragan came out of retirement to manage the independent Central LeagueFort Worth Cats for one game, making him — at 87 years, nine months, and 16 days old — the oldest manager in professional baseball annals (besting by one week Connie Mack, the manager and part owner of the Philadelphia Athletics). Always known as an innovator with a sense of humor — and an umpire-baiter — Bragan was ejected in the third inning of his "comeback", thus also becoming the oldest person in any capacity to be ejected from a professional baseball game. Bragan enjoyed the rest of the Cats' 11-10 victory from a more comfortable vantage point.
Bragan died on January 21, 2010, at his home in Fort Worth, Texas.[1][2]
During his major league career, Bragan never skippered a game past his 49th birthday. He managed the Pittsburgh Pirates (1956-57), Cleveland Indians (1958)[3], and Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves (1963-66)[4], each time getting fired in the mid-season of his final campaign (in Cleveland, he lasted a total of only 67 games of his maiden season before his dismissal). His career record in the major leagues was below .500: 443-478 (.481).
But Bragan was highly respected as a minor league pilot, winning championships in 1948-49 at Fort Worth of the AA Texas League during a successful five-year run, and with the 1953 Hollywood Stars of the Open-Classification Pacific Coast League. A photograph of Bragan lying at the feet of an umpire who had ejected him, still arguing, was published in LIFE Magazine at the time. Bragan also was a major league coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Colt .45s.
Bragan was a protégé of Branch Rickey, the Hall of Fame front office executive, who hired him as an unproven young manager at Fort Worth when both were with the Brooklyn Dodgers and then brought Bragan to Hollywood and the Pittsburgh organization, where Rickey was general manager from 1951-55. Bragan started the 1948 season with Brooklyn, but Rickey wanted to bring up Roy Campanella from the minors. Rickey offered Bragan the managerial job with the Fort Worth Cats and he took over in July of ’48, remaining with the Cats for five years.
Ironically, Bragan had clashed with Rickey in 1947 over the Dodgers' breaking of the baseball color line after the major-league debut of Jackie Robinson. Bragan — the Dodgers' second-string catcher at the time — was one of a group of white players, largely from the American South, who signed a petition against Robinson's presence. He even asked Rickey to trade him. But Bragan quickly relented. "After just one road trip, I saw the quality of Jackie the man and the player," Bragan told mlb.com in 2005. "I told Mr. Rickey I had changed my mind and I was honored to be a teammate of Jackie Robinson." When Bragan attended Branch Rickey's funeral in 1965, he stated that he decided to attend because, "Branch Rickey made me a better man." [source: Baseball by Ken Burns] As a manager, Bragan earned a reputation for fairness and "color-blindedness." When he was the skipper of the Dodgers' Spokane Indians PCL farm club in 1959, Bragan played an influential role in helping Maury Wills, a speedy shortstop whose baseball career had stalled until he learned to switch hit under Bragan. Said former Dodger general manager Buzzie Bavasi, "Bobby would call six times a day and tell me over again how Wills had learned to switch-hit and how he was a great team leader, off and on the field, and how I was absolutely nuts if I didn't bring him up right away."[5] Wills would fashion a 14-year MLB career and in 1962 set a new record for stolen bases in a season, with 104 thefts, breaking Ty Cobb's 47-year-old mark of 96.
Bragan began his seven-year (1940-44; 1947-48) major league playing career as a shortstop for the Philadelphia Phillies, but by 1943, his first season with Brooklyn, he had learned how to catch and was for the most part a backup receiver for the Dodgers for the remainder of his MLB playing days. A right-handed batter, Bragan hit .240 in 597 games, with 15 career home runs.
In 1969, Bragan, a Fort Worth resident, began a new career chapter when he became president of the Texas League.[6] He was so successful, in 1975 he was elected president of the minor leagues' governing body, the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues.
Upon completion of his three year term as president of the minor leagues, Bobby and his wife, Gwenn, returned home to Fort Worth, where they had lived since Branch Rickey's Brooklyn Dodgers assigned him to manage the Fort Worth Cats in 1948. Bragan joined the Texas Rangers' front office in 1979 and continued to make appearances and speaking engagements on behalf of the ballclub well into his '80s.
After Gwenn Bragan’s death in 1983, Bobby married Roberta Beckman. It was Roberta who suggested to Bobby that he establish a scholarship foundation to encourage youth to do well in school and go on to college. With the financial seed money provided by Roberta, the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation [1] (BBYF) was established in 1991.
Roberta Beckman Bragan died in 1993. Bobby, being accustomed to a companion, married Betty Bloxom in 1995. Betty survives at this writing.
As he passed the 90 year mark, Bobby continued an active schedule, as the Chairman of the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation and making numerous appearances for civic organizations and businesses, including his beloved Fort Worth Cats as well as in schools, where he enjoyed entertaining and motivating students.
Each year, the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation honors outstanding athletes and executives for the achievements on and off of the playing field at the annual Bobby Bragan Gala to raise funds for the scholarships. Honorees have included Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, Larry King, Tommy LaSorda, Bobby Valentine, Bud Selig, Willie Mays, Lou Brock and Brooks Robinson. Bragan came from a baseball family. Five of the six Bragan boys played baseball professionally. His late brother Jimmy was a minor league player and longtime coach and scout in major league baseball who himself was president of the AA Southern League during the 1980s. His brother Peter has owned and operated the Jacksonville Suns in the class AA Southern League for over 25 years and his late son, Bobby Bragan, Jr. operated the Elmira, NY ballclub in the New York-Penn League.
Robert Randall "Bobby" Bragan died at his Fort Worth home on January 21, 2010 at the age of 92 years, 2 months and 22 days.
RAPPER APACHE (original name Anthony Teaks) died of protracted illness on Friday. The rapper known for 1992 hit "Gangsta Bitch," had huge fan following across the world.
