Mike Budenholzer out as coach of the Milwaukee Bucks.
They lost to Miami in this year’s playoffs. I get the impression that they consistently did well in the regular season, and were a consistent disappointment in the playoffs. But as you know, Bob, I don’t follow basketball closely, so I could be wrong about this.
Rob Murphy out as assistant GM of the Detroit Pistons for being a sexual harasser.
Barbara Bryne. She was in the original Broadway productions of “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods”. Other credits include “Amadeus”, “Love, Sidney”, and “Best of the West”.
Eileen Saki. Other credits include “Meteor”, “History of the World: Part 1”, and “Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story”.
Another obit for Bart Skelton, this one from American Handgunner.
• All the world loves you if you have a song to sing, or a story to write: Unless that narrative is a warrant, then expect you will piss some people off, and they will hate you.
I ordered a copy of Down on the Border: A Western Lawman’s Journal (affiliate link) and am about four chapters into it. I’ll let you know when I’ve finished it.
Brad Bohannon out as baseball coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide.
The reason why is a bit shocking:
What’s specifically going on is that there’s an investigation into “suspicious wagering activity” on Tide games. Three states where betting is legal (Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) have stopped all betting on Alabama.
ESPN first reported Monday evening that the Ohio Casino Control Commission had suspended betting on Alabama baseball games at the state’s legal sports books after U.S. Integrity, a Las Vegas-based independent monitor, detected suspicious bets on last Friday’s Alabama-LSU game in Baton Rouge.
U.S. Integrity, which monitors gambling data to detect abnormalities and misuse of insider information, sent a warning to all of its clients after Friday’s game. Ronnie Johns, the chairman of the Louisiana Gaming Control Board, told NOLA.com that one of the bets was a parlay involving the Alabama-LSU game, and another was a “large” straight-up bet on the game. Both wagered LSU would win.
Alabama lost to LSU, 8-6.
— Pee Wee Herman Melville (@PeeMelville) September 12, 2022
I have poked my fair share of fun at the song, and will probably continue to do so. But there is something affecting about those lyrics. I think maybe it’s the idea of calm acceptance in the face of certain death.
Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author. (When Bad Things Happen to Good People and other books).
Detective Troy Patterson of the NYPD.
One night in 1990, three punks tried to hold Officer Patterson up. The robbery went bad, and Officer Patterson was shot in the head. He’d been in a vegetative state for the past 33 years.
Patterson was promoted to detective in 2016.
The three suspects — Vincent Robbins, Tracey Clark and Darien Crawford — were later arrested in the unprovoked shooting.
Robbins, now 53, was convicted of assault and attempted-robbery charges and sentenced to a prison term of five to 15 years. He was released in 2000, state records show.
Clark, the alleged gunman in the shooting, also went to trial in the case. The outcome of the case is not immediately available, nor are any details of the charges against Crawford.
Tim Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. You may recall that his brother, Robbie, passed in January.
Mike Shannon, former player and later broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals.
John Stobart, artist.
A product of Britain’s Royal Academy of Art, Mr. Stobart moved to the United States in 1970, when conceptual art, Op Art and minimalism were riding high in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.
Affable, unassuming and unfailingly candid, Mr. Stobart would have none of it. “I’ve never bought it, and the general public has never bought it either,” he said of abstract art in an interview with The Boston Globe in 1986. “That’s a lot of baloney, that stuff.”
Instead, he conjured the past as a master of richly detailed historical works brimming with schooners, brigs and sloops, their sails flapping under moody clouds, with shore lights twinkling in the distance.
Working out of studios in the Boston area, Martha’s Vineyard and several other locations, Mr. Stobart, who lived in Medfield, Mass., employed the same taste for exhaustive historical detail as Patrick O’Brian, the prolific Anglo-Irish author known for his bracing tales of naval heroics.
He left no detail to chance, traveling to the locations he painted, consulting old daguerreotypes of harbors and ships and going out to sea on various watercraft to learn the most arcane points about their engineering and behavior on the water.
…
The obit reproduces some of Mr. Stobart’s paintings. I’m probably a sucker for representational art, but I like what I see there, and would be happy to have an original Stobart on my wall.
I have a bingo on my buzzword bingo card.
As a smart man says:
for some reason the economics of building a skyscraper in the middle of a city and then piping in water and light are less favorable than using flat lands in Iowa which gets rain and sun
— ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs (@MorlockP) April 28, 2023
As promised, NYT obit for Jerry Springer.
In 2008, some students objected when Mr. Springer was invited to give the commencement address at Northwestern.
“To the students who invited me — thank you,” he said. “I am honored. To the students who object to my presence — well, you’ve got a point. I, too, would’ve chosen someone else.”
Massad Ayoob has posted an obit for Bart Skelton on his blog. This is the only source I’ve found that I can link.
She was working in her husband’s general store on Aug. 24, 1955. She was white, married, and 21 years old. Her husband was a trucker who was working that day.
A group of black teenagers came to the store. Mrs. Bryant (at the time) claimed that one of the teenagers, a 14-year old boy, “made a sexually suggestive remark to her, grabbed her roughly by the waist and let loose a wolf whistle.”
That boy was Emmett Till.
He was killed four days later. Mr. Bryant and his half-brother were charged with the murder, but were acquitted.
The NYT currently has a three paragraph blrub up, with “A complete obituary will follow.” I’ll either update or do a separate post once that goes up.
…
“My passion is politics,” he told Men’s Health magazine in 2015, “and I’ve always been able to separate how I make a living from my passions.”
That was not strictly true: the two did collide in 1974, when the political and the prurient came together in an incident that derailed Springer’s dream of becoming a major politician. Then a Cincinnati councilman, he was found guilty of soliciting prostitutes (astonishingly, he had paid them with checks) and forced to resign, his long-term hopes of being a governor or U.S. senator shattered.
…
April Stevens, of “Deep Purple” fame.
NYT obit for Ken Potts, U.S.S. Arizona survivor. I think this one is a little better than the NYPost one I linked a few days ago.
I feel like I’m not giving Mr. Potts as much attention as I should, but since I posted the longer obit the other day, I also feel like this is mostly supplemental.
I am seeing reports that Bart Skelton, gun writer and son of Skeeter Skelton, has passed away. I don’t have anything I can link to at this time, but I’ll update if I do find something.
Alton H. Maddox Jr. has passed.
Mr. Maddox, along with C. Vernon Mason and the Rev. Al Sharpton, were the pivotal figures in the Tawana Brawley kidnapping and rape hoax.
Ms. Brawley was a few weeks shy of her 16th birthday when, in late November 1987, she cast herself as a victim of rank depravity: She, an African American teenager, had been abducted, she said, and held for four days near her home in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., a Dutchess County town about 60 miles north of New York City. She said she was sexually assaulted by a half-dozen white men.
Indeed, she was found in appalling condition. She lay dazed in a trash bag with some of her hair chopped off, feces smeared on her and “KKK” and a racial epithet written in charcoal on her body. Her assailants, Ms. Brawley said, included law enforcement officials.
…
Their insults were nonstop, their allegations outlandish. The Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia and the Irish Republican Army were somehow all involved, they said. They accused the state’s attorney general, Robert Abrams, who led a seven-month grand jury inquiry into the Brawley matter, of having masturbated over a photo of her.
Mr. Maddox, who was given to referring to whites as “crackers,” went on later to call New York “the Mississippi of the ’90s” and New York’s governor at the time, Mario M. Cuomo, “the George Wallace of the ’90s.”
…
But in October 1988, the grand jury concluded in a 170-page report that Ms. Brawley had not come anywhere near the truth, dismissing her account as fiction. There was no evidence of sexual assault, it said; she had smeared herself with feces, written the racial slurs herself and faked being in a daze. Her motive was not made clear, but a boyfriend said later that she had wanted to avoid the wrath of her stepfather for having stayed out late.
For Mr. Maddox, the consequences were severe. In May 1990, after he refused to respond to charges of misconduct in the Brawley case, appellate judges in Brooklyn suspended his law license. He never bothered to seriously try getting it back. “The white man thought that after 13 years I’d be so much on my knees,” he said in 2003. “They don’t know me.”
There was also a price to pay in dollars. Steven Pagones, a Dutchess County prosecutor accused by the Brawley team of having assaulted her, won a defamation suit against Messrs. Sharpton, Maddox and Mason. Mr. Maddox was held personally liable for $97,000, a penalty that he paid with help from benefactors.
None of the three apologized for their roles in the hoax. Mr. Sharpton became a national figure with a television program. Mr. Mason, who was disbarred in 1995, became an ordained minister. And Mr. Maddox, who had moved to New York from Georgia in 1973, wrote columns for The Amsterdam News, offered radio commentary and for a while led a group called the United African Movement.
Ron Faber. The THR obit concentrates on his stage career, but he did do a few movies and TV shows, including “The Exorcist”, “Law and Order”, and “Romeo Is Bleeding”.
Ginnie Newhart, Bob’s wife.
Ginnie and Bob were set up on a blind date by comedian Buddy Hackett (Ginnie was baby-sitting Hackett’s kids at the time).
“Buddy came back one day and said in his own inimitable way, ‘I met this young guy and his name is Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comic and he’s Catholic and you’re Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other,’ ” she recalled in a 2013 interview.
They played pool at Buddy and his wife’s home the first time they met.
“It was just silly,” she said in 2005. “I was 20, 21, 21, and I think Bob was 32. And every time somebody would sink a ball in the pocket or whatever you’re supposed to do, [we’d] run around the table with our cue stick singing ‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’
They were married for 60 years.
I got a little behind while I was on vacation, so there’s a lot of catch-up here.
Ken Potts (USN – ret.) has passed away at the age of 102.
Mr. Potts was one of the two remaining survivors of the USS Arizona.
He was working as a crane operator shuttling supplies to the Arizona the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Pearl Harbor attack happened, according to a 2021 article by the Utah National Guard.
In a 2020 oral history interview with the American Veterans Center, Potts said a loudspeaker ordered sailors back to their ships so he got on a boat.
“When I got back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was afire,” He said in the interview. “The oil had leaked out and caught on fire and was burning.”
Dozens of ships either sank, capsized, or were damaged in the bombing of the Hawaii naval base, which catapulted the U.S. into World War II.
Sailors were tossed or forced to jump into the oily muck below, and Potts and his fellow sailors pulled some to safety in their boat.
This is the oral history referenced above:
Bud Shuster (R – Pennsylvania).
During his 28 years in Congress, including three terms as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Mr. Shuster managed to divert a disproportionately large share of federal highway trust funds into pedestrian crossings, access roads, interchanges, buses, road widening and the Bud Shuster Highway, which links State College, Altoona and the Pennsylvania Turnpike in southern Pennsylvania.
By 1991, he had perfected the earmarking of federal funds to his district so successfully that when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, was asked which state had reaped the biggest slice of the highway trust-fund pie, he replied, “The state of Altoona.”
Richard Riordan, former mayor of Los Angeles.
I thought I’d throw up a post real quick, since I’ve been in Waco at the TGCA show the past few days and radio silent.
I thought this was rather neat, and it gave me a chance to tweak the Saturday Movie Group. If you can’t read the tag, this is an original Winchester Model of 1873 “One of One Thousand”. Like you might have seen in “Winchester ’73”. You don’t see many of these in the wild, for a good reason: Winchester didn’t make a whole bunch of them.
(This is a really neat book on the subject. I was lucky to get my copy before prices went out of control, and I absolutely would not recommend paying that price.)
Mauser Model of 1918 Tankgewehr anti-tank single shot rifle chambered in 13X92SR. The photos are with the bolt in and out.
Ammo pouch that comes with the gun, along with about 22 rounds of ammo.
This is what one of the rounds looks like. I should have included something for scale, but I didn’t have anything handy and didn’t want to impose on the seller.
If you’re interested, this is going to be in an upcoming Poulin Auction: the pre-sale estimate is $12,000 to $18,000.
And it is classified by BATFE as a “curio and relic”, so it is exempt from registration (and the tax stamp) as a “destructive device”.
I’ve been holding off on book posting until I get other stuff done, but I did want to post this for two reasons:
Vintage catalog from holster maker S.D. Myres Saddle Company, Inc. Judging by the postmark and price list inside, I believe this dates from around 1966.
The first reason for posting this is for great and good FotB (and El Paso native) RoadRich. Apple Maps seems to show 5018 Alameda as being a Family Dollar store, but I can’t tell what (if anything) is at 5030 Alameda. One of these days, I’d like to go back to El Paso and spend a few days there…
The second reason for posting this is: this was actually a kind and generous gift from my good friend David Carroll, purveyor of fine firearms to a grateful nation. If you are so inclined, why not wander over to his website, or check out his auctions on GunBroker?