M.B. Bites Dust

Not this reporter, but this reporter's former apartment manager, horror film star* Marilyn Burns. Also resident in the bldg.

until he died in 1985, Robert Courtin, who played the Window Washer in the film that was Burns' first starring role, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

In others who vaguely touched my existence & now no longer exist, my mother knew long-time KNBC (& other local stations) anchor Jess Marlow when he worked in San Jose, & persuaded him to get me an interview w/ some muckity-muck or another at Channel 4's news dep't. (In 197X. My mother's idea, not mine. Expected & got the standard "Come back after you have a few yrs. typing at a mid-market station under your belt" bit o' advice.) Nonetheless quite nice of Marlow, described by Variety in 1997 as

“one of the last of a vanishing breed of classy, insightful anchormen.”

On Monday, former KNBC colleague Tom Brokaw called Marlow “a first-rate journalist and a beloved figure in the newsroom.”

“He also had a wicked sense of humor,” Brokaw recalled in a statement. “After one of Evel Knievel’s many crashes, Jess said, ‘Evel rides fast and thinks slow.’”

Marlow, who got his start in communications as a railroad telegrapher, spoke in the flat, Midwestern tones of his native Illinois. An advocate of meat-and-potatoes hard news, he criticized the waves of car chases, titillating celebrity items and demographically inspired lifestyle features that surged through TV newsrooms.

But when departing KNBC news anchor Keith Morrison said the station’s newscasts were so grimy he felt like taking a shower afterward, Marlow struck a softer note.

“I told our general manager, ‘I never felt like taking a shower — a sponge bath, maybe.’”

All blow-dried cretins from here on.

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*Show Bidnis!! Movie star/apartment manager, renting to her friends. Can't remember if Robert wanted more acting work, but here's his IMDb trivia listing: Worked at a camera rental firm [Birns & Sawyer] in Los Angeles from 1979 to his death in 1985.