Obit watch: November 24, 2022.

November 24th, 2022

Frederick P. Brooks Jr., one of the great figures in computer science, has passed away. He was 91.

…he is best known for being one of the technical leaders of IBM’s 360 computer project in the 1960s. At a time when smaller rivals like Burroughs, Univac and NCR were making inroads, it was a hugely ambitious undertaking. Fortune magazine, in an article with the headline “IBM’s $5,000,000,000 Gamble,” described it as a “bet the company” venture.
Until the 360, each model of computer had its own bespoke hardware design. That required engineers to overhaul their software programs to run on every new machine that was introduced.
But IBM promised to eliminate that costly, repetitive labor with an approach championed by Dr. Brooks, a young engineering star at the company, and a few colleagues. In April 1964, IBM announced the 360 as a family of six compatible computers. Programs written for one 360 model could run on the others, without the need to rewrite software, as customers moved from smaller to larger computers.

…

But there was a problem. The software needed to deliver on the IBM promise of compatibility across machines and the capability to run multiple programs at once was not ready, as it proved to be a far more daunting challenge than anticipated. Operating system software is often described as the command and control system of a computer. The OS/360 was a forerunner of Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.
At the time IBM made the 360 announcement, Dr. Brooks was just 33 and headed for academia. He had agreed to return to North Carolina, where he grew up, and start a computer science department at Chapel Hill. But Thomas Watson Jr., the president of IBM, asked him to stay on for another year to tackle the company’s software troubles.
Dr. Brooks agreed, and eventually the OS/360 problems were sorted out. The 360 project turned out to be an enormous success, cementing the company’s dominance of the computer market into the 1980s.

He did go on to found the University of North Carolina computer science department and chaired it for 20 years. I would actually say that he’s best known for something else:

Dr. Brooks took the hard-earned lessons from grappling with the OS/360 software as grist for his book “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering.” First published in 1975, it soon became recognized as a quirky classic, selling briskly year after year and routinely cited as gospel by computer scientists.
The tone is witty and self-deprecating, with pithy quotes from Shakespeare and Sophocles and chapter titles like “Ten Pounds in a Five-Pound Sack” and “Hatching a Catastrophe.” There are practical tips along the way. For example: Organize engineers on big software projects into small groups, which Dr. Brooks called “surgical teams.”
The most well known of his principles was what he called Brooks’s law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Dr. Brooks himself acknowledged that he was “oversimplifying outrageously,” but he was exaggerating to make a point.
It is often smarter to rethink things, he suggested, than to add more people. And in software engineering, a profession with elements of artistry and creativity, workers are not interchangeable units of labor.

And this is a nice thing to see in an obit:

During his IBM years, Dr. Brooks became what his son described as “a convinced and committed Christian” after attending Bible study sessions hosted by his colleague and fellow computer designer Dr. Blaauw. “I came to see that the intellectual difficulties I was having as a scientist with Christianity were secondary,” Dr. Brooks recalled in the Computer History Museum interview. He taught Sunday school for over 50 years at a Methodist church in Chapel Hill and served as a leader and faculty adviser to Christian study and fellowship groups at the university.

…

The major prizes typically cited his work in computer design and software engineering. But during his years at North Carolina, Dr. Brooks also turned to computer graphics and virtual reality, seeing it as an emerging and important field. He led research efforts that experts say included techniques for fast and realistic presentation of images and applications for studying molecules in biology.
“The impact of his work in computer graphics was enormous,” said Patrick Hanrahan, a professor at Stanford University and a fellow Turing Award winner. “Fred Brooks was a thought leader way ahead of his time.”

I have read The Mythical Man-Month (a long time ago, when I was a young sysadmin) and enjoyed it. I wish I had met Dr. Brooks.

Posted in Books, History, Obits, Religion | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 23, 2022.

November 23rd, 2022

John Y. Brown Jr., former governor of Kentucky and fried chicken tycoon.

In 1964, Brown purchased Kentucky Fried Chicken from Harland Sanders for $2 million. He became president of KFC in January 1965 and sold it to Heublein Corp. in a $275 million stock swap in 1971. Brown received nearly $21 million in Heublein stock for his KFC shares.

(Diversion: this is an older piece from Damn Interesting about Harland Sanders that I rather enjoyed. It does discuss the Brown sale and the Heublein buyout.)

In 1969, Brown purchased controlling interest in the Kentucky Colonels, a Louisville franchise in the American Basketball Association. After the ABA folded, Brown paid a reported $1 million for half interest in the Buffalo Braves of the National Basketball Association. He wanted to move the Braves to Louisville but was blocked in court. Brown and a partner then swapped the Braves for the Boston Celtics, in the first trade of professional sports teams.
The Braves later moved to San Diego, and Brown later sold his share of the Celtics.

As some people may recall, he was married to Phyllis George.

For Christmas one year in the not-to-distant past, Lawrence gave me a copy of The Bluegrass Conspiracy, about Drew Thornton and his drug ring. (Cocaine bear!) John Y. Brown is mentioned quite a bit in that book: while he was never convicted of any crime, he certainly had close and questionable ties to people who were.

Mickey Kuhn. He was a child actor: his most famous role was probably “Beau Wilkes” in “Gone With the Wind”. He was also the last surviving cast member from that movie.

His last acting credit was in 1957.

Wilko Johnson, guitarist with Dr. Feelgood and acted in “Game of Thrones”.

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

November 23rd, 2022

This is a weird one.

Sean Kugler out as offensive line coach/running game coordinator of the Arizona Cardinals..

Why fire Kugler? Well, they are 4-7…but apparently that’s not why.

Answer: there was some sort of unspecified “incident” while the Cardinals were in Mexico City for Monday Night Football. More from ESPN, although the article seems speculative.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 21, 2022.

November 21st, 2022

I don’t have a good link for this, but noted SF writer Greg Bear passed away over the weekend. Lawrence has written a very nice obituary for him, which I encourage you to go read.

Jason David Frank, “the original green ranger on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers”. He was 49.

Nicki Aycox, actress. She was 47. Other credits include “CSI: Original Recipe”, “Law & Order”, and “Cold Case”.

This doesn’t quite qualify as an obit, and I would suggest taking this with more than a grain of salt: Bruce Lee may have died from excessive water consumption. As opposed to a reaction from a prescription painkiller, being poisoned by gangsters, or heat stroke.

Posted in Books, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Yet another batch of hoplobibilophilia.

November 18th, 2022

As promised, two recently added vintage books…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Art, Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 18, 2022.

November 18th, 2022

Ned Rorem, Pulitzer Prize winning classical composer.

The prize was awarded for “Air Music,” a suite commissioned for the American bicentennial by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Though he wrote many other orchestral works as well — including his Symphony No. 3, which was given its premiere by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein in 1959 — Mr. Rorem’s enduring appeal rested more on his vocal pieces.
Robert Shaw, who was America’s foremost conductor of choral music, called him the greatest art-song composer of his time. And it was a remarkably long time.
Mr. Rorem was 74 when his masterwork “Evidence of Things Not Seen” was first performed, in 1998. An evening-long song cycle for four singers and piano, incorporating 36 poems by 24 authors, it was praised by the New York magazine critic Peter G. Davis as “one of the musically richest, most exquisitely fashioned, most voice-friendly collections of songs” by any American composer.
Mr. Rorem had no use for avant-garde theories or their proponents — modern masters like Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter included. In turn, some critics found him short of original ideas and dynamism, a miniaturist unable to sustain longer pieces. Reviewing “Miss Julie,” the Rorem opera based on Strindberg’s drama, when it was presented by New York City Opera in 1965, Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote, “His melodic ideas are utterly bland, lacking in profile or distinction.”

Marcus Sedgwick, author. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

For the record: NYT obit for Robert Clary.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 17, 2022.

November 17th, 2022

Robert Clary, who played “Corporal LeBeau” on “Hogan’s Heroes”. He was “the last surviving member of the show’s original principal cast”. (Kenneth Washington, who joined the show in the final season, is still alive.)

Other credits include “Days of Our Lives” and “The Bold and the Beautiful”.

Noted:

Born Robert Max Widerman in Paris on March 1, 1926, Clary was the youngest of 14 children in a strict Orthodox Jewish family. At age 12, he began singing and performing; one day when he was 16, he and his family were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
“My mother said the most remarkable thing,” Clary told The Hollywood Reporter’s Peter Flax in late 2015. “She said, ‘Behave.’ She probably knew me as a brat. She said, ‘Behave. Do what they tell you to do.’”
Clary’s parents were murdered in the gas chamber that day.
At Buchenwald, Clary sang with an accordionist every other Sunday to an audience of SS soldiers. “Singing, entertaining and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” he told Flax.
Clary was incarcerated for 31 months (he worked in a factory making 4,000 wooden shoe heels each day) and tattooed with the identification “A-5714” on his left forearm. He was the only one of his captured family to make it out alive.

…

Did Clary have any reservations about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps?
“I had to explain that [Hogan’s Heroes] was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps,” he wrote in his inspirational 2001 memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.

…

He sang on several jazz albums that featured the work of songwriters like Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer. (Also a part of his discography: Hogan’s Heroes Sing the Best of WWII, recorded with his castmates Richard Dawson, Larry Hovis and Ivan Dixon.)

I can’t find the album anywhere, but the memoir is available from Amazon.

Edited to add: Thanks to Joe D. for his comment, which I greatly appreciate. Also, while I still can’t find the “Hogan’s Heroes” album, Mike the Musicologist pointed out that Robert Clary’s “Meet Robert Clary” (1955) and “Hooray for Love” (1956) are available on Apple Music and Amazon Music.

Posted in Books, Music, Nazis, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: November 14, 2022.

November 14th, 2022

Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Folsom (USMC – ret.) has passed away at 102.

In the vast undertaking to capture and hold Guadalcanal in the late summer and fall of 1942, Lieutenant Folsom was a 22-year-old aviator who had never flown at high altitude and had fired the wing guns of his Grumman F4F Wildcat only once, in a training exercise in California.
But he loved flying and, sent into the thick of air combat over Guadalcanal in the first major Allied land offensive since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he had two essential qualities for survival: guts and luck. His 40-pilot squadron battled Japanese Zeros that escorted the Imperial Navy’s cigar-shaped “Betty bombers,” the twin-engine Mitsubishi G4M attack planes that were his squadron’s prime targets.
During Lieutenant Folsom’s three months on the island, nearly half of his squadron’s pilots were killed or wounded. In dogfights, the faster, more maneuverable Zeros often riddled his plane with bullets. He was wounded twice by shrapnel and once by a bullet that gashed his leg. When he ran out of ammunition, he escaped by flying into clouds and circling back to his tiny airstrip, Henderson Field.

…

Flying at 20,000 feet with Wildcats on his wing, he spotted a group of Mitsubishi bombers far below, skimming the ocean surface for a torpedo attack on a flotilla of American ships in the channel between Guadalcanal and Savo Island.
“Over went our noses and down we went, vertically, in a screaming dive,” Mr. Folsom recalled. “The surface vessels were throwing up a tremendous barrage of ack-ack fire.” He leveled off just over the water, pulled in behind an enemy bomber and fired bursts from his six 50-caliber wing guns. The bomber’s tail gunner shot back. “The guns in that baby winked at me but never made a hit,” he said.
“Some of my slugs must have hit the pilot, for not 50 yards in front of me, and from about 10 feet off the surface, he skimmed in. There was a sudden lurch, followed by a cloud of spray and I was over him, headed for the next one. I followed the same tactics again, but this fellow didn’t fall such easy prey. As I came up astern, he began to skid from side to side.”
One of the bomber’s twin engines smoked, but it kept going. “Closing in again, I peppered him with the last of my ammo,” Mr. Folsom said. “This time I was rewarded by seeing him hit the water for keeps, right wing first. The plane catapulted into the sea.” He later learned that 24 Mitsubishi bombers and six Zeros had been shot down that day. The Americans had lost six planes and two pilots.

…

Lieutenant Folsom, who was awarded the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross, went on to a distinguished military career, commanding night fighter squadrons in battles over Okinawa and in the Korean War. He was a high-altitude test pilot, served in the Office of Naval Operations in Washington and for two years was the assistant Naval attaché at the American Embassy in Norway.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to all of this yet, but here’s an oral history interview from the Library of Congress.

Kevin O’Neill, comic artist. (“The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, “Marshal Law”.)

In a statement to The Times after Mr. O’Neill’s death, Mr. Moore said: “Nobody drew like Kevin O’Neill. When I was putting together my formative ideas for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the lead-out groove of the last century, I quickly realized that nobody save Kevin was qualified to present such a dizzying range of characters, periods, situations and styles with the vitality and ingenuity that the narrative — a ridiculous mash-up of all human fiction since classical antiquity — seemed to demand.
Their collaboration on this series, Mr. Moore said, began what was perhaps the longest, happiest and most productive partnership of both men’s careers.

John Aniston, actor. Other credits include “Airwolf”, “Mission: Impossible”, and a two-part episode of one of the spinoffs of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

David Davis, TV guy. (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, “Taxi”, “The Bob Newhart Show”)

Two years later, when Mr. Davis was working on “Rhoda,” which turned Mary’s wisecracking sidekick, played by Ms. Harper, into a leading lady, he cast Ms. [Julie] Kavner as her self-deprecating sister. (She and Mr. Davis had met before, when Ms. Kavner read for a part on an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” although another actress was cast.) A year later they were a couple.
“He gave me my career, my heart and my life,” Ms. Kavner said, noting that that was her first paying part. She went on to be the voice of Marge, the kindly matriarch with the blue bouffant, on “The Simpsons” and, among other movie roles, the star of “This Is My Life,” Nora Ephron’s 1992 film adaptation of a Meg Wolitzer novel about a stand-up comedian and her family.

…

Mr. Davis left television in 1979, after the first season of “Taxi” ended. He was 43. He wanted to spend more time with Ms. Kavner — “I got lucky and kept working,” she said, and they traveled to wherever a job took her — and was determined to make a life outside a studio lot.
“He left for the love of his life,” Mr. DeVito said, “but it was OK because we were already on our way.”

Posted in 1970s, History, Obits, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 12, 2022.

November 12th, 2022

Kevin Conroy, prominent voice actor most famous for doing Batman across multiple iterations.

Conroy voice starred in the acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series from 1992-96, and continued on with the role through nearly 60 different productions spanning 15 films and 400 episodes of television as well as video games. In recent years, he was a fixture on the comic convention circuit.

…

Mark Hamill, who played Conroy’s onscreen foil The Joker, mourned his collaborator in a statement.
“Kevin was perfection,” recalled Hamill. “He was one of my favorite people on the planet, and I loved him like a brother. He truly cared for the people around him – his decency shone through everything he did. Every time I saw him or spoke with him, my spirits were elevated.”

IMDB. He played “Ted Kennedy” in the “Kennedy” mini-series? I didn’t even know there was a “Kennedy” mini-series.

Gallagher. NYT (archived).

The Gallagher channel on the ‘Tube.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Veterans Day.

November 11th, 2022

I’ve been struggling with where I wanted to go after finishing my ongoing series, and I’ve also been struggling a little with time constraints. It just doesn’t feel like there’s enough time in the days for me to do everything I want to do.

So: “Chaplain Medal of Honor Recipients” from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

I’ve already covered five of these men (see the first link). It’s interesting to me that the other four men were all MoH recipients during the Civil War.

And for those who complain that Veterans Day is to honor all veterans, while Memorial Day is for those who died in service: all four men survived the war. Three died after 1900: the fourth died in 1899.

It’s also interesting to me how short the Medal of Honor citations are for the Civil War veterans, as opposed to the longer much more detailed ones for the veterans of the 20th Century wars. I feel sure there are historical reasons for that, but I haven’t done enough research on Medal of Honor history to know what those reasons are.

Posted in Heroism, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 11, 2022.

November 11th, 2022

Paul Morantz, lawyer.

He specialized in “taking on cults, abusive psychotherapists and self-proclaimed gurus”.

Mr. Morantz made his name taking down one such movement, Synanon. It had begun as a last-chance drug rehabilitation program in the late 1950s but had, by the early ’70s, become an insular, oppressive organization under its founder, Charles Dederich.

…

Synanon and Mr. Dederich were known for using violence against their enemies, even in minor run-ins. In 1977, a group of Synanon thugs pistol-whipped a truck driver who had cut off their vehicle on a highway. Mr. Dederich even kept an elite squad of enforcers that he called the Imperial Marines. Mr. Morantz would become one of their targets.
On Oct. 10, 1978, he met with police officers to discuss next steps against Synanon, then hurried back to his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood to catch the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees play game one of the World Series.
As he walked in the door, he reached his left hand into his mailbox. As he did, he noticed a dark, lumpy shape. He didn’t have time to pull back before the object, a four-and-a-half-foot diamondback rattlesnake, bit him on his wrist.

He survived the bite. Two Synanon members were charged with attempted murder. Mr. Dederich was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

The judge, calling the attack on Mr. Morantz an “aberration,” went easy on the two assailants, owing, he said, to the group’s history of helping addicts. Each was sentenced to a year in prison, while Mr. Dederich received five years’ probation.

Posted in Law, Obits, Reptiles, Snakes | 1 Comment »

Lazy firings watch.

November 9th, 2022

Jeff Scott out as head coach of the University of South Florida.

The team is currently 1-8, has lost seven games in a row, and got beat 54-28 by Temple last week.

Scott compiled a 4-26 record (1-19 AAC) in his two-plus seasons with the Bulls.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

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