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PASSINGS: Bob Greenberg, Jack Michon, Bernhard Perlin, Robert Jay Brandt, Richard H. Fogel

Music industry executive Bob Greenberg, left, with brother Jerry at their restaurant in Las Vegas in 2005. They were partners in the music business as well, with Jerry on the East Coast and Bob on the West Coast for various record labels. Bob Greenberg died Friday.
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
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Bob Greenberg

Music industry executive

Bob Greenberg, 75, a longtime music industry executive who held key positions at several record labels including Atlantic, Warner Bros., MGM/UA and Mirage, died Friday in West Hills, a day after suffering a stroke, his brother Jerry said.

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Born May 8, 1934, in New Haven, Conn., Bob Greenberg got his start in the business in the 1960s doing promotional work for Eastern Allied Associated Record Distributors. He moved on to oversee promotions for Warner Bros. in the Northeast, then arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1970s to run the company’s West Coast promotions.

When Jerry Greenberg became president of Atlantic Records in 1974, he hired Bob, who originally served as West Coast general manager before rising to vice president of West Coast operations.

Bob’s wide-ranging duties included working with artists as well as distributors, talent scouts, publicists and others throughout the company.

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“He was on the West Coast and I was on the East Coast. Artists loved him. He really developed a great musical ear,” Jerry Greenberg said this week.

“We had a wonderful relationship. We would talk every day about the business and our family.”

In 1980 the Greenbergs founded the Mirage Music label. Besides overseeing West Coast operations, Bob also later worked with Jerry at MGM/UA.

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Bob Greenberg later became president of Hitmakers magazine, a music industry publication.

In 2005 the brothers opened the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Las Vegas.

Jack Michon

Editor shared an Emmy for ‘Taxi’

Jack Michon, 75, an Emmy-winning editor of the sitcom “Taxi” who also produced features and documentaries, died Aug. 29 at a care center in Torrance. He had encephalitis and died of heart failure, said Noelle Michon, one of his three daughters.

Born in 1934 in Hackensack, N.J., Michon spent four years in the Navy and started his career at NBC News, where his brother Chris was a producer.

During the Vietnam War, Michon edited news footage from the front lines for the “Huntley-Brinkley Report” and “NBC Nightly News.” In the late 1970s, he produced the “28 Tonight” newsmagazine series for KCET.

In 1980 and 1981, he edited more than a dozen episodes of “Taxi” and shared an Emmy Award for editing. He also produced the 1985 made-for-TV movies “Bridge Across Time” and “Sins of the Father” and served as an assistant editor on the 1979 feature film “North Dallas Forty.”

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As a human rights activist, the “gregarious and outspoken” Michon was “very involved in the Green Party,” his daughter said. “If there was a cause, he protested it.”

Bernhard Perlin

Community volunteer in L.A.

Bernhard “Ben” Perlin, 94, a longtime community volunteer who served on Los Angeles’ Affordable Housing Commission and other city panels, died Aug. 29 of natural causes while in hospice care in West Hills.

Perlin, who had lived in Canoga Park for 37 years, also served on the city’s housing and Van Nuys Airport advisory committees and the Council on Aging.

Born in 1914 and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Perlin left grade school to get a job and help support his family. He studied science books on his own while working at the General Neon Tube Corp.

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His knowledge about gases helped him land a research position with the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, his family said, and he rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the Navy.

Robert Jay Brandt, who was married to actress Janet Leigh for 42 years and helped raise her daughters Kelly Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis, died Sept. 5 at his Beverly Hills home after battling Alzheimer’s disease. He was 82.

Richard H. “Dick” Fogel, a longtime newspaper editor who in 1978 co-founded the regional Bay City News Service in San Francisco, died Sept. 9 at a Thousand Oaks hospice after a brief illness. He was 86.

-- times staff and wire reports news.obits@latimes.com

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