I’m flashing back to when Mike Evans died.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1757175/posts#36
Guy claiming to be Damon Evans posted here (I don’t know why anyone would pretend so I assume it was really him).
Actually I absent from FR at that time, you must have told me about it later.
I see Lancey Howard and I were having a back and forth about “The Jeffersons” on the thread, and he’s since passed, too. :-(
I actually checked in on Ben Powers IMDb message boards from time to time to see how he was doing or any news on him, since there were some of us who remained fans of his since he was still actively working. Someone mentioned Bern Nadette Stanis had lost touch with him and was wanting to contact him, I don’t know if she was able to.
Commenting a bit more about the late Mike Evans, who was co-creator of “Good Times”, he actually was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Los Angeles. The setting of the show in the Chicago projects had more to do with the other creator of the show, Eric Monte (who lived there himself for a time, and it was a deeply personal project for him). Monte had also done “Cooley High” and “What’s Happening !!”
I read he butted heads with show developer Norman Lear (who had all those shows in the hopper at the same time) and eventually sued him for not giving him the proper credit (Monte claimed he was the one who created George & Louise Jefferson’s characters and also pushed Lear to hire Redd Foxx for “Sanford” when Lear was set to do the American version of a junk dealer with a White cast).
An interesting long bio about Eric Monte (real name: Kenneth Williams) on IMDb. Unfortunately, the lawsuit likely gave him a bad rap and he also fell into substance abuse and poor health (though he’s still alive at 71).
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0599088/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm