Jim Caple, sportswriter.
I sort of remember the name: I was probably reading him back in the good old “Page 2” days. My feelings about lyrical happy horsepucky baseball writers are well known, but it seems like he wasn’t one of those guys:
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Archive for the ‘Media’ Category
Obit watch: October 3, 2023.
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023Obit watch: October 2, 2023.
Monday, October 2nd, 2023Lucy Morgan, Florida journalist. She wasn’t someone I had heard of before, but the obit (which I encourage you to read) makes her sound fascinating.
She specialized in uncovering political corruption. In 1973, she went to jail because she refused to reveal her source for grand jury proceedings.
She shared a Pulitzer (with Jack Reed) for exposing the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office.
She also exposed the sheriff of Gulf County, who got sent to prison for extorting oral sex from female inmates.
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Russ Francis, former tight end for the Patriots and 49ers, was killed in a plane crash on Sunday. Also killed was Richard McSpadden, a vice-president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA).
It appears they were taking off from Lake Placid Airport and there was some sort of problem. Reports say they tried to make it back to the airport but couldn’t.
Mr. Francis, in additional to a successful NFL career (first round NFL draft pick, three time Pro Bowl player) was also an avid pilot. He’d recently bought an interest in Lake Placid Airways, a local charter and scenic flight service.
Mr. McSpadden, in addition to being an AOPA VP, was a former commander and flight leader for the Thunderbirds.
Tim Wakefield, former Boston Red Sox pitcher (and a past winner of the Roberto Clemente Award). Cancer got him at 57.
Chris Snow, of the Calgary Flames. He was diagnosed with ALS in 2019, and passed away after a “catastrophic brain injury”.
Obit watch: September 20, 2023.
Wednesday, September 20th, 2023I didn’t find out about this until late last night, so I’m a bit behind. Apologies.
Two pilots, Nick Macy and Chris Rushing, were killed in an accident at the Reno Air Races on Sunday.
According to the reports I’ve read, both pilots had been competing in what’s called the “Gold Race” in the T-6 Class. The race had completed, and the pilots were in the post-race recovery period when they collided in mid-air.
Preliminary analysis from the Air Safety Institute. Reno Gazette Journal coverage. As the linked articles note, the remainder of the races was cancelled after the crash: this was the last year for the Reno Air Races in their current form.
Buddy Teevens, football coach at Dartmouth. He was badly injured in a bicycle accident in March, and died of complications from his injuries.
JoAnne Epps, acting president of Temple University. She was attending a memorial service when she collapsed. Ms. Epps was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
James Hoge, noted journalist.
Few editors at major American newspapers have been as young as Mr. Hoge was when he rose to the top at The Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid aimed at a working-class readership. He became the city editor at age 29, editor in chief at 33 and publisher at 44.
He shook up the staff, strove for sprightlier writing and, like other newspaper editors in the 1970s, introduced new sections on business, food and fashion. “I am always agitating,” he said.
The payoff was six Pulitzer Prizes on his watch: two each for feature photography and criticism and one each for spot news reporting (concerning violence by young radicals in Chicago) and local news reporting (on new evidence in the 1966 murder, still unsolved, of Valerie Percy, a daughter of Charles H. Percy of Illinois, then making his first United States Senate race).
He was also behind the Mirage Tavern investigation, and went on to become publisher of the New York Daily News and the journal Foreign Affairs.
Roger Whittaker, British musician.
Burning in Hell watch: Billy Chemirmir. I’d never heard of him, but he was convicted twice of capital murder, and was suspected of 20 more murders. His MO seems to have been smothering old folks.
You could also classify this as part of the “fool around and find out” watch:
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot told WFAA that Chemirmir was killed after apparently making inappropriate comments sexual in nature towards his cellmate’s children. According to Creuzot, the cellmate allegedly beat Chemirmir, dragged him out of his cell and killed him while other inmates watched. No one intervened and Chemirmir may have been stabbed with a pen, Creuzot said.
“Even though they are on lockdown, apparently [the cellmate] somehow opened the door and dragged [Chemirmir] into the hallway and there were other prisoners who saw it and not one intervened and no one called for help,” Creuzot told WFAA. “He was basically there for 15 to 20 minutes before anybody with authority could figure out what happened. When they got there, they tried to revive him, but he died.”
Obit watch: August 18, 2023.
Friday, August 18th, 2023I haven’t done any obits for the past few days, for reasons I don’t want to go into here.
But a few people have sent me some, and it would be rude not to acknowledge them.
Sir Michael Parkinson, British talk show host. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Darren Kent, actor. IMDB. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Les Misérables” (the TV series), and “C.O.O.L.I.O Time Travel Gangster”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Paul Brodeur, longtime New Yorker writer.
Mr. Brodeur also reported on the possible dangers of radiation from microwave ovens, computer terminals and electromagnetic power lines. But this reporting was not as widely accepted as his work on asbestos and CFCs.
In 1997, the National Academy of Sciences found little to no evidence of any risk from power-line radiation. Other studies have been far from conclusive. (Mr. Brodeur noted, however, that the World Health Organization classified microwave radiation from cellphones to be a possible carcinogen.)
James L. Buckley, former Senator from New York (and brother of William F. Buckley Jr.).
Obit watch: July 25, 2023.
Tuesday, July 25th, 2023Pamela Blair, actress. Other credits include John Huston’s film of “Annie”, “The Cosby Mysteries”, and “Law and Order”.
Reeves Callaway. He made cars go fast.
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“They came to us,” he told the Truck Show Podcast in 2021, “and they said, ‘Look, could you, within one year’s time, develop an Alfa twin-turbo system for us that we could use to compete against the Maserati?’”
He did, making about three dozen modified vehicles, but then Alfa Romeo lost interest in the project. Yet somehow one of those modified Alfas found its way to General Motors’ Black Lake testing ground in Michigan, and soon GM was asking if Mr. Callaway could do the same thing to its Chevrolet Corvette.
“This was a huge opportunity, to become associated with Corvette,” he said. “So we saluted and said, ‘Yes, sir; immediately, sir; may I have another, sir?’”
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In late 1988, he and his engineers tweaked the Corvette some more, taking aim at 250 miles per hour with a version of the car that they called the Sledgehammer.
“We basically decided that 250 m.p.h. was a reachable goal,” Mr. Callaway told the McClatchy News Service. “But if it was to have any meaning, the car had to be docile at low speeds as well. It had to retain all the things that make a car usable on the street, such as air-conditioning.”
To prove the point, his team drove the car from Connecticut to a seven-and-a-half-mile oval track in Ohio. (It got 16 miles per gallon, they said.) At the track, it hit 210 m.p.h. on its first run, 223 on its second. After more tweaking, it reached 254.76 on its third attempt, a record for a car made for normal driving. Mr. Callaway’s company, in its announcement of his death, said the record stood for more than 20 years.
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Ron Sexton, comedian and regular on ‘The Bob & Tom Show’.
Obit watch: July 18, 2023.
Tuesday, July 18th, 2023Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher and author.
Professor Frankfurt’s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will — people’s motivating wants and desires — at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources of life’s meaning. For Professor Frankfurt, volition, more than reason or morality, was the defining aspect of the human condition.
Despite the ambition and inventiveness of this project — the philosopher Michael Bratman praised it as “powerful and exciting philosophy” of great “depth and fecundity” — Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.
The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.
Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”
That paper was republished as a book in 2005, On Bullshit (affiliate link), which became a best-seller. He also wrote On Truth (affiliate link) which seems to have been less successful.
For the record, and because Lawrence sent over an obit: Jane Birkin.
Over the weekend, my mother asked me: “How do you go from being a promising young journalist to being a swami?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but here’s the obit for Sally Kempton.
Robert Lieberman, director. Other credits include quite a few genre TV series, “Christmas in Tahoe”, “All I Want for Christmas”, and “Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy”.
Obit watch: July 10, 2023.
Monday, July 10th, 2023The sports department of the New York Times.
The paper of record plans to shift sports coverage to The Athletic, which it purchased last year.
Evva Hanes, popularizer of Moravian cookies.
Mrs. Hanes, the youngest of seven, grew up watching her mother, Bertha Foltz, make and sell hundreds of the thin cookies to supplement what little money the family’s small dairy farm brought in. Other Moravian women sold cookies, too, adhering to a recipe with molasses and warm winter spices, like clove and ginger, that were popular around Christmas.
Mrs. Foltz began baking a crispy vanilla-scented version as a way to differentiate herself and extend the selling season. By age 8, Evva could bake them on her own. By 20, she had taken over her mother’s business and slowly begun to expand it, selling the original sugar crisps as well as the traditional ginger version but eventually other flavors, too, like lemon and black walnut.
I feel a little guilty about saying this, but now I kind of want to order a tin of Moravian cookies.
Roy Herron, Tennessee state legislator. He was injured in a jet ski accident on July 1st, and passed away on Sunday.
I’ve written previously about both the Dutch resistance and about the NYT‘s “Overlooked No More” obits. In that vein: Hannie Schaft.
In June 1944, Schaft and a fellow resistance fighter, Jan Bonekamp (with whom she was rumored to have had a romantic relationship), targeted a high-ranking police officer for assassination. As the officer was getting on his bicycle to go to work, Schaft shot him in the back, causing him to fall off the bike. Bonekamp finished the killing but was injured doing so. He died shortly after. Schaft managed to escape on her own bike, which was how she got around doing her resistance work.
Schaft was also involved in killing or wounding a baker who was known for betraying people, a hairdresser who worked for the Nazis’ intelligence agency, and another Nazi police officer.
Before confronting her targets, Schaft put on makeup — including lipstick and mascara — and styled her hair, Jackson said. In one of the few direct quotations that have been attributed to Schaft, she explained her reasoning to Truus Oversteegen: “I’ll die clean and beautiful.”
Obit watch: June 14, 2023.
Wednesday, June 14th, 2023Cormac McCarthy. NYT (archived). “Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner” (archived). THR. Publisher’s Weekly.
Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.
“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”
I can’t find it now, but I saw the same story recounted in a tweet somewhere: in that version, the McCarthy’s were so poor, they couldn’t afford toothpaste. And that explains why she became the second ex-Mrs. McCarthy.
Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.
Noted:
Layers and layers of editors.
This tableau inspired one of the funniest pieces of wildcat food criticism I’ve ever read. The essay, by Helen Craig, was titled “A Meat Processing Professional Reviews Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road.’” It ran in 2014 on a website called The Toast.
Craig pointed out that such a “living larder” is wasteful. Every day they’re alive, she wrote, “these people will be depreciating in calorific value.” Craig suggested, as any good butcher would, that “the ribs will be good fresh, and a pickling and brining process for the thighs and haunches should result in a product that is similar to ham.”
“The Toast” essay (archived).
Jacques Rozier, who the NYT describes as the “last of the French New Wave Directors”.
John Romita Sr., Marvel comics artist.
In 1966, Romita began a five-year run working Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee on The Amazing Spider-Man. He took over for artist Steve Ditko, who had created the famed webslinger with Lee in 1961 before leaving in a spat with the comic book legend.
Romita’s run on Spider-Man saw the introduction of a number of the property’s most memorable characters, including Spidey love interest Mary Jane Watson and crime boss Kingpin; it was during Romita’s time as artist that Spider-Man overtook Fantastic Four to become Marvel’s top-seller, with the masked man becoming the face of the company.
Patrick Gasienica, Olympic ski jumper. He was 24, and died in a motorcycle accident.
Park Soo Ryun. She was the star of a Disney+ show, “Snowdrop”. I note this because she was 29, and her death kind of scares me:
Ryun slipped down a flight of stairs Sunday at a property on Jeju Island, South Korea’s largest island, where she was scheduled to perform, according to the Mirror.
The actress was reportedly taken to the hospital for emergency treatment and was pronounced brain dead by medics after attempts to revive her failed.
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Fellow “Snowdrop” star Kim Mi-soo also died unexpectedly at age 29 last year.
Headline of the day.
Friday, May 19th, 2023In other news, “Violent Taco Rampage” is the name of my new Smiths cover band.
Obit watch: May 15, 2023.
Monday, May 15th, 2023Doyle Brunson, legendary poker player and a good Texas boy.
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Mr. Brunson was among the three dozen players invited in 1970 to the inaugural World Series of Poker, a name that belied its modest beginnings. The tournament was the brainchild of the casino owner Benny Binion and Jimmy Snyder, then a public relations agent better known as Jimmy the Greek.
The World Series expanded its roster of poker contests to include several variants of the game, but Texas hold ’em remained the most publicized and lucrative event. Mr. Snyder called Mr. Brunson “Texas Doy-lee,” which reporters mistook for Dolly, and the nickname Texas Dolly stuck, though it seemed incongruous for someone who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed well over 250 pounds.
After moving to Las Vegas in 1973 for steadier gambling opportunities, Mr. Brunson won the tournament’s main event in 1976 and 1977, widely viewed as the world championship, earning $560,000 in a winner-take-all format. His 10 World Series bracelets are tied for second behind Phil Hellmuth’s 16.
Bill Oesterle, co-founder of Angie’s List (now just “Angi”). He was 57, and died of complications from ALS.
Semi-obit: Vice Media. They’ve officially filed for bankruptcy, but it is a Chapter 11, they have a $20 million operating loan, and the plan for their lenders (“including Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management”) to buy the company is still on.
“Archer“.
The long-running animated comedy will conclude with its upcoming 14th season.
Obit watch: May 13, 2023.
Saturday, May 13th, 2023Hodding Carter III, journalist and aide to Jimmy Carter.
The son of the journalist Hodding Carter Jr., who won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials calling for racial moderation in the old segregated South, Hodding Carter III succeeded his father as editor and publisher of The Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, and as a voice of conscience in a state torn by violence and social change during the struggles of the civil rights era.
But after 5,000 editorials and years of journalistic trench warfare, Mr. Carter took his fight into politics.
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In the 1976 presidential campaign, Mr. Carter helped engineer a narrow victory in Mississippi for Jimmy Carter, who was no relation, and was rewarded with an appointment as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. As chief spokesman for the State Department, he delivered nuanced statements on foreign policy with candor and wit, and developed a good if sometimes acerbic rapport with the diplomatic press corps.
He became the national face of the Carter administration during the Iranian hostage crisis, which broke on Nov. 4, 1979, when militants took over the United States Embassy in Tehran and seized 52 Americans. Their captivity lasted 444 days — virtually the remainder of President Carter’s single term in office, a tenure ended by a frustrated electorate that chose Ronald Reagan for president in 1980.
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I was alive and around during that time, but I do not recall the rubber chicken thing…
Obit watch: April 13, 2023.
Thursday, April 13th, 2023Anne Perry, noted mystery writer.
Ms. Perry’s books, including the Thomas Pitt and William Monk series of historical mysteries, have sold more than 26 million copies, according to her website. In 1998, when The Times of London named its 100 Masters of Crime of the past century, there she was on the list alongside Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Heroes,” set in the trenches of World War I, won the 2000 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best short story. In 2013 and 2020, she was a guest of honor at Bouchercon, the international convention of mystery writers and fans.
I hate talking about this, but there’s a huge elephant in the room that I can’t ignore. As a teenager, she was known as Juliet Hulme. Her family moved to New Zealand, where she met Pauline Parker. The two girls became very close friends and “invented an elaborate medieval-like fantasy world and worshiped celebrities, especially the opera singer Mario Lanza, as saints.”
Juliet’s parents decided to divorce and leave New Zealand. The two girls didn’t want to be split up:
In Victoria Park, in Christchurch, the girls — Pauline was 16, Juliet was 15 — struck Honorah Parker in the head repeatedly with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. The trial was a sensation, much of it focusing on Juliet and Pauline’s absorption with each other and their fantasies about becoming famous novelists.
Both young women were convicted of murder, and after five years behind bars (in separate prisons) they were given new identities and instructed never to meet again. If they violated that order, they were warned, they would return to prison and serve life sentences.
The was dramatized in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”, which I strongly recommend if you can see it. (I checked Amazon: home video copies of this seem very hard to come by.)
Once her murder conviction was revealed, Ms. Perry did not shy away from acknowledging her guilt. She excused herself only by saying that she had been afraid that if she did not go along with the murder plan, her distraught friend might kill herself.
Ms. Perry’s regret did not extend to self-condemnation, however.
“In a sense it’s not a matter — at the end — of judging,” she said in the documentary. “I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?”
“It’s in the end, Who am I? Am I somebody that can be trusted? Am I someone that is compassionate, gentle, patient, strong?” She mentioned other traits: bravery, honesty, caring. “If you’re that kind of person — if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed.”
She concluded, “It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”
Someone sent me Virginia Norwood’s obit the other day, but I don’t remember who, and I can’t find it now. USGS.
Ms. Norwood pioneered the scanning technology used on the Landsat satellites.
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Ms. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.
Ms. Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.
The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.
A senior engineer from Hughes took the device out on a truck and drove around California to test it and convince the doubters that it would work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of the images, of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, on the wall of her house for the rest of her life.
Her tech was so good, it pretty much completely replaced the main Landsat system. (That system was actually shut down two weeks after the first Landsat launch because of problems.)
Alicia Shepard, former NPR ombudsman (ombudsperson?).
In June 2009, she wrote on her blog that she had received a “slew of emails” that took issue with NPR News’s use of the phrases “enhanced interrogation tactics” and “harsh interrogation techniques” instead of “torture” to describe what terrorism suspects held by the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq war had been forced to endure.
“Some say that by not using the word ‘torture,’ NPR is serving as right-wing apologists for waterboarding and other methods of extracting information,” Ms. Shepard wrote. President Bush refused to call waterboarding torture, but in April 2009 President Barack Obama did.
Ms. Shepard suggested that rather than labeling enhanced measures as torture, reporters should simply describe the tactics — saying, for example, that “the U.S. military poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds” or forced detainees “into cramped confines crawling with insects.”
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