By Elaine Donnelly
Extending sexual misconduct to combat units
Annette Funicello, the most popular Mouseketeer on "The Mickey Mouse Club," who matured to a successful career in records and '60s beach party movies but struggled with illness in middle age and after, died Monday, The Walt Disney Co. said. She was 70.
For the attic rummagers among us, nostalgic fans of the golden age of conservatism, there may be no better Christmas gift than "Freedom Is A Hammer: Conservative Folk Revolutionaries of the Sixties," a new anthology CD issued with a handsome booklet by the Omni Recording Corp.
Former Disney Mouseketeer Annette Funicello has suffered smoke inhalation from a fire that badly damaged her Los Angeles home, but her former husband says she wasn't seriously injured.
Long before he played a skinhead in "The Believer," a drug-addicted junior high school teacher in "Half Nelson" or a misfit who's in love with a blow-up doll in "Lars and the Real Girl," Ryan Gosling had a far simpler, more wholesome role. He was a member of "The Mickey Mouse Club."
"I have been blessed to have a mentor like Walt Disney," she said 40 years later. "Those years were the happiest of my life. I felt that back then. I feel the same today."
Asked about the revisionist biographies that have portrayed Disney in a negative light, she said, "I don't know what went on in the conference rooms. I know what I saw. And he was wonderful."
