Gladys Knight & the Pips Knight & the Pips embarked on their final tour in 1988 and disbanded upon its conclusion, as Gladys Knight decided she wanted to pursue a solo career, ending a 37-year tenure. Following the group's amicable disbandment in 1989, Edward Patten and William Guest formed their own production company in Detroit, titled Guest and Patten Productions, later renamed the Crew Entertainment Company. Patten was diagnosed with diabetes, which led to amputations on his legs and being confined to a wheelchair. He later died of complications from the disease on February 25, 2005 in Livonia, Michigan. William Guest continued to lead the
Battle of the Pips no hits. Radar was still a new and unreliable technology at that time, and weather conditions around the Aleutians were characteristically bad, with the very poor visibility normal for the area. No Japanese warships were actually within . Author Brian Garfield surmises, based on analysis by modern Aleutian fishing-boat captains, that the pips were rafts of sooty or short-tailed shearwaters, species of migratory petrel that pass through the Aleutians in July every year. Battle of the Pips The Battle of the Pips is the name given to an incident on 27 July 1943, part of the Aleutian campaign of World