Jane Hathaway obit

Jane Hathaway, foundation director, condor advocate,
figured in Commerce Bank scandal

LOS ANGELES [October 18. 1998]

Jane Hathaway, the bank secretary at Beverly Hills’ Commerce Bank who first came to public attention by testifying against and helping convict her boss in the 1972 California Dream banking scandal, died in a Los Angeles nursing home Sunday of complications from cancer at the age of 71.

Hathaway helped convict her long-time boss Milburn Drysdale after his California Dream Landscapes Finance Company and related ventures were revealed as little more than a complicated Ponzi scheme based on fraudulent premises which Drysdale and associates helped devise. She later became an advocate for preserving the California condor also twice sought election as a Republican to the California Assembly.

She was originally a co-defendant with Drysdale, but her attorneys were able to obtain separate trials and won her acquittal. The testimony revealed in her trial helped lead to more charges against Drysdale who was eventually convicted of 27 charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Drysdale died at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1977.

After unsuccessful campaigns for the California legislature in 1976 and 1978, Hathaway went to work in 1980 as Executive Director for the Daisy Moses Foundation, which had been founded by J. D. Clampett, the oil mogul who was Drysdale’s primary victim. Clampett, who lost an estimated $30 million and control of Mammoth Pictures as a result of Drysdale’s crimes, had said he never believed Hathaway guilty at all and paid for her “dream team” defense. Hathaway left the Moses Foundation in 1988 to become director of Biddle Bird Watchers Society. Elly May Clampett, J. D. Clampett’s daughter and granddaughter of Daisy Moses, replaced her at the Moses Foundation.

She met the late P. Casper Biddle, the famed condor advocate and founder of Biddle Bird Watchers in the early 1960’s and became a devoted follower. She left the Biddle Bird Watchers after events following Biddle’s 1993 death led to the dissolution of the Biddle Society.

“If it weren’t for such devoted people as Professor Biddle and Jane Hathaway,” there wouldn’t be any condors left here,” said state senator Diane Kong, frequently described as the legislature’s leading condor advocate. ‘That woman was amazing. She should have been a professional lobbyist.”

“She was the nicest and most helpful person I met in California,” Clampett said from his retirement home in Tennessee. I would have never known what that man [Drysdale] was doing to me if it hadn’t been for her and she stopped things before I was wiped out.”

Services are pending. Golden West Funeral Home in Beverly Hills is handling the arrangements.

TV Obit -- Otis Campbell

I have accumulated a few fake obituarties of people associated with past television series. Some will show up here.

Otis Campbell, motivational speaker

RALEIGH, North Carolina [June 23, 1998]

Otis Campbell, the well known self-help guru from the 1970’s and 1980’s died at his home in Raleigh June 22. Campbell had been known to have emphysema and was believed to be in his mid-70’s.

Campbell, who captivated a generation of baby boomers disaffected with what he disdainfully called the “3C’s Society” referring to chemicals, change, and complaints with his “You can’t smell how great it is at the top until you’ve gotten rid of your own stink” lecture series, had recently retired. His publicist, Lisa Diesel, said that he died of complications of emphysema.

Admitting that he had been the “town drunk of Mayberry [North Carolina],” Campbell used illustrations from his own days of addictions and his subsequent recovery into a career as a successful ice cream distributor in his speeches. His lecture stops were noted for the distribution of his “Coming Clean” ice cream. The packaging contained inspirational messages.

Famed Metropolitan Opera singer Gomer Pyle, a friend of Campbell’s from his Mayberry days, often appeared with him on his speaking tours. He had seen Campbell as recently as Tuesday and told reporters today that Campbell’s passing was “regrettable.”

Pyle said that Campbell “could have done so much more for others if he had had more time,” but also noted that Campbell acknowledged that lack of time was one of his shortcomings, always noting that recovering addicts still bore the responsibility for the results of their bad habits and adapt to the limits they had already put on themselves.

“His message differed from some motivational speakers. He knew that he could not escape the consequences for any of the things he done earlier. He felt instead that it was more important to work for as wonderful future as one had the ability to make,” Pyle noted.

Campbell, a widower twice, is survived by a brother, nieces, nephews, and cousins. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.