I loved his show. May he rest in peace.
Vic
On 2/27/17, Travis Bower <tdbower@xxxxx> wrote:
Thanks Marty will be sharing this with some people I think might beYou are subscribed to Ourplace (
interested in this. As for me I use to catching his show as often as I
could infact I had a few of his episodes on the youtube sites. Sincerely
Travis Bower
From: ourplace-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ourplace-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Marty Rimpau
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2017 4:21 PM
To: our place list
Subject: [ourplace] joseph wapner, 97, folksy judge on 'the people's court'
Joseph Wapner, 97, folksy judge on 'The People's Court' . By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post . WASHINGTON - Joseph A. Wapner, a retired California judge
whose flinty-folksy style of resolving disputes on the show "The People's
Court" helped spawn a genre of courtroom-based reality television with
no-nonsense jurists and often clueless litigants, died Sunday at his home
in
Los Angeles. He was 97. A grandson, Gabriel Wapner, confirmed the death but
did not know the immediate cause. Judge Wapner had had several strokes in
recent years. "The People's Court," which the silver-haired Judge Wapner
hosted from 1981 to 1993, was a syndicated half-hour show that turned
private arbitration of small-claims cases into highly engrossing
entertainment. Within a few years of its debut, the program regularly
attracted 20 million viewers. One measure of its success was a Washington
Post survey in 1989 that showed 54 percent of Ame ricans could identify
Judge Wapner compared with 9 percent who could name the chief justice of
the
United States, William H. Rehnquist. For a viewing audience weaned on
courtroom dramas such as "Perry Mason," the Wapner program was a stark
departure. Instead of invented murder and mayhem, "The People's Court"
featured unscripted, real-life grievances between plaintiffs and defendants
who could be tangent-prone, inarticulate, or alarmingly naive. Disputes
centered on nonpayment for goods and services, unwise lending of money to
shady friends and family members, purchases in which the buyer did not
beware, and altercations between people and their neighbors' animals. The
parties, selected from the dockets of Los Angeles-area small-claims courts,
agreed to have their matters settled outside a normal court of law and to
sign a legally binding arbitration contract. Each litigant was paid about
$250 to appear on TV. The courtroom set, the only fictional component of
the
show, was presided over by a judge who had spent 18 years on the bench of
the Los Angeles Superior Court and brooked little tolerance for
unpreparedness and interruptions. When a litigant told him, "I'm not
through, your honor," Judge Wapner replied, "Well, now you are. "It's a
case
that requires proof, and you didn't even tip the scales," he told one woman
seeking redress for damaged furniture and stolen underwear during a move.
Although he could be gruff, Judge Wapner also displayed a sense of fairness
in Solomon-like conundrums. In a matter involving disputed ownership of a
dog between two boys, it was revealed that a third party had improperly
taken the dog from the first boy and sold it to the second. Judge Wapner
gave the dog back to the first boy and awarded $200 to the second for his
careful temporary guardianship. "He behaved like a judge who had been on
the
bench a little too long, and that's what made it work," said Robert
Thompson, a television and pop culture scholar at Syracuse Universi ty.
"It's hard to remember what a state of cultural virginity the American
audience was in, in regards to what we'd call regular people - nonactors
without scripts. "It turns out regular people are whiny, petty, annoying
folks, so Judge Wapner's crotchety grouch thing was just what we wanted -
to
shut them up now and then. Judge Wapner, who remained a TV presence, hosted
an Animal Planet show called "Judge Wapner's Animal Court" from 1998 to
2000. Joseph Albert Wapner, whose father was a lawyer, was born in Los
Angeles on Nov. 15, 1919. He initially wanted to be an actor until a
theater
director at Hollywood High School said he had no talent. After graduating
in
1941 from the University of Southern California, Judge Wapner saw Army
combat in the Pacific. While on Cebu, an island province in the
Philippines,
he was wounded by shrapnel from a grenade and risked his life to save a
wounded soldier from being raked with machine-gun fire. His decorations
included the Bronze Star and the P urple Heart. He received a law degree
from USC in 1948 and spent 10 years in private practice before receiving a
judicial appointment to the Los Angeles Municipal Court. He leaves his wife
of 70 years, Mildred "Mickey" Nebenzahl of Los Angeles; two sons, Fred
Wapner, a judge on the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, of Los Angeles
and David Miron-Wapner of Jerusalem; a sister; four grandchildren; and a
great-granddaughter. A daughter, Sarah Wapner, died in 2015.
