Personal Life and Death
During his early writing days, Block was friends with fellow comedy writers Bill Morrow, Jack Benny writer and Don Quinn, who wrote for Fibber McGee and Molly.
During Block's years in radio and television, newspaper columns had linked him romantically to several actresses and singers including Nanette Fabray, Dorothea Pinto and Joan Judson. Plans for marriage were reported between Block and Mitzi Green, and then later Kay Mallah, a showgirl. Green had been a childhood star and in 1941 was attempting to make comeback at age twenty-one. Block, along with Herb Baker, was writing a Broadway show for her. When Block and Green split, he began seeing Dorothea Pinto, a chorus girl. Pinto once made some news while she was working at the Diamond Horseshoe nightclub in New York and punched one of the club's investors. Pinto appeared as a showgirl in Follow the Girls, which Block wrote. Block once explained he preferred being a bachelor because "wives were too expensive."
On April 22, 1981 Block was seriously burned from a fire in his Chicago apartment. On June 16, 1981, Block died in Edgewater Hospital, Chicago, as a result of the injuries. He was survived by two sisters.
Read more about this topic: Hal Block
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or death:
“The personal touch between the people and the man to whom they temporarily delegated power of course conduces to a better understanding between them. Moreover, I ought not to omit to mention as a useful result of my journeying that I am to visit a great many expositions and fairs, and that the curiosity to see the President will certainly increase the box receipts and tend to rescue many commendable enterprises from financial disaster.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Our life without love is coke and ashes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You listen to artists fighting with each other, competing to the death like gladiators, in order to see who is going to get into a show, who is going to make it, who isn’t: who is going to get a full-page ad and who is going to get a half-page. Then I think, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go off somewhere and just do your work?””
—Howardena Pindell (b. 1943)