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Obit watch: March 2, 2020.

Monday, March 2nd, 2020

I was going to make this a special true crime edition, but I got overtaken by events.

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.

It was a time when successful, lavishly paid corporate executives were more admired than resented. Mr. Welch received a record severance payment of $417 million when he retired in 2001. Fortune magazine named him the “Manager of the Century,” and in 2000 The Financial Times named G.E. “the World’s Most Respected Company” for the third straight year.
Mr. Welch’s stardom extended beyond the business world. In a 2000 auction for the rights to his autobiography, Time Warner’s book unit won with a bid of $7.1 million, a record at the time. “Jack: Straight from the Gut,” written with John A. Byrne, was published the next year and eventually sold 10 million copies worldwide.

…

He attacked bureaucracy and made sweeping payroll cuts, creating a more entrepreneurial, if more Darwinian, corporate culture. He led the globalization of G.E.’s business, both expanding sales and manufacturing overseas. And he made G.E. far more dependent on finance, as banking and investment grew as a share of the American economy.
Mr. Welch distilled his management concepts into one-sentence nuggets. “Control your destiny, or someone else will.” “Be candid with everyone.” “Bureaucrats must be ridiculed and removed.” “If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by.”
His goal at G.E., Mr. Welch wrote in his autobiography, was to create “a company filled with self-confident entrepreneurs who would face reality every day.”

…

Mr. Welch was also attacked when he was leading G.E., especially for slashing the G.E. work force, which earned him the nickname “Neutron Jack.” But most of the second thoughts about him and his management legacy have arisen in recent years. The superstar chief executive, laser-focused on enriching shareholders, is often criticized today as a symbol of corporate greed and economic inequity.
The widely diversified corporation that Mr. Welch built is also out of favor, an idea underlined by G.E.’s precipitous decline in the last few years.
The New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart wrote in 2017, “Hardly anyone considers Mr. Welch a management role model anymore, and the conglomerate model he championed at G.E. — that with strict discipline, you could successfully manage any business as long as your market share was first or second — has been thoroughly discredited, at least in the United States.”

Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s.

Linda Wolfe, writer. She started out writing short fiction, and was clipping true crime stories to use in novel plots…

A turning point of sorts came in 1975, when twin doctors, both gynecologists, were found dead in their trash-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It turned out that Ms. Wolfe had been the patient of one of them, years before — only briefly, but that was enough to propel her to investigate the case and turn to a life of writing about crime.
“This will sound callous,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1994, but she felt lucky that she had had “the ‘good fortune’ of knowing somebody involved in the kind of story I had been clipping.”
Both doctors had been barbiturate addicts and had died not of an overdose but of the drug’s typically severe withdrawal syndrome. Ms. Wolfe, by then working at New York magazine (she worked there for 25 years as a contributing editor, writer and restaurant reviewer), wrote a journalistic account of the case, “The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists.” Her article inspired the David Cronenberg movie “Dead Ringers” (1988), which starred Jeremy Irons.

She became a prominent true crime writer.

She would go on to write several books and magazine articles that delved behind some of the nation’s most sensational headlines. Her articles included “The Professor and the Prostitute” (1983), about a Tufts University professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved, and “From a Nice Family” (1981), about a teenager in Dallas who killed his mother and his father, who was the president of Arco Oil and Gas.
One of her best-known books was “Wasted: The Preppie Murder” (1989), so called because the perpetrator, Robert E. Chambers Jr., had bounced around various elite schools and lived on the Upper East Side. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the 1986 strangulation death of Jennifer Levin in Central Park after they had had sex behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was released in 2003 after serving 15 years in prison and subsequently went back to prison on drug charges.

I read parts of The Professor and the Prostitute quite a while back: it shows up pretty frequently at Half-Price Books. I might have to grab a copy next time I’m there.

Finally, Dr. Charles Friedgood. I’d never heard of him either, but this is one of those interesting true crime stories (for multiple reasons). Dr. Friedgood was convicted of killing his wife in 1975.

While he admitted that he had injected his wife, Sophie Friedgood, 48, with a painkiller, Dr. Friedgood insisted that he had not intended to kill her. She had suffered a stroke in 1959, when she was 33, and had become an invalid.
Dr. Friedgood was convicted of second-degree murder after prosecutors proved to a jury that he had deliberately given his wife an overdose at the family’s 18-room home in Great Neck, N.Y., where they had reared their six children.
Her cause of death was recorded as a stroke, but the police grew suspicious because Dr. Friedgood had signed the death certificate himself and rushed the body out of state for immediate burial in accordance with Jewish religious custom.
Five weeks later, he was arrested at Kennedy International Airport with more than $450,000 of his wife’s cash, negotiable bonds and jewelry. Prosecutors said he had intended to fly to Europe to join his paramour, a Danish nurse who had sometimes cared for Mrs. Friedgood and with whom he had fathered two children. He had begun his affair with the nurse in the late 1960s.

He was sentenced to 25 years to life. He was released on compassionate grounds in late 2007, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’d served 31 years and was 88 when he was released.

He lived another 11 years after being released. According to the NYT, he died in May of 2018 at the age of 99, but his death had not been reported until now.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 28, 2020.

Friday, February 28th, 2020

Freeman J. Dyson, noted physicist.

As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper — worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize — that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great achievements of modern science.
But it was as a writer and technological visionary that he gained public renown. He imagined exploring the solar system with spaceships propelled by nuclear explosions and establishing distant colonies nourished by genetically engineered plants.

…

Dr. Dyson called himself a scientific heretic and warned against the temptation of confusing mathematical abstractions with ultimate truth. Although his own early work on QED helped bring photons and electrons into a consistent framework, Dr. Dyson doubted that superstrings, or anything else, would lead to a Theory of Everything, unifying all of physics with a succinct formulation inscribable on a T-shirt. In a speech in 2000 when he accepted the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Dr. Dyson quoted Francis Bacon: “God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.”
Relishing the role of iconoclast, he confounded the scientific establishment by dismissing the consensus about the perils of man-made climate change as “tribal group-thinking.” He doubted the veracity of the climate models, and he exasperated experts with sanguine predictions they found rooted less in science than in wishfulness: Excess carbon in the air is good for plants, and global warming might forestall another ice age.
In a profile of Dr. Dyson in 2009 in The New York Times Magazine, his colleague Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate, observed, “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

He was also skeptical of the “nuclear winter” theory.

He considered himself an environmentalist. “I am a tree-hugger, in love with frogs and forests,” he wrote in 2015 in The Boston Globe. “More urgent and more real problems, such as the overfishing of the oceans and the destruction of wildlife habitat on land, are neglected, while the environmental activists waste their time and energy ranting about climate change.” That was, to say the least, a minority position.
He was religious but in an unorthodox way, believing good works to be more important than theology. “Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason,” he said in his Templeton Prize acceptance speech. “The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.”

…

Any advanced civilization, he observed in a paper published in 1960, would ultimately expand to the point where it needed all the energy its solar system could provide. The ultimate solution would be to build a shell around the sun — a Dyson sphere — to capture its output. Earthlings, he speculated in a thought experiment, might conceivably do this by dismantling Jupiter and reassembling the pieces.

He was also one of the folks behind Project Orion.

In the late 1970s Dr. Dyson turned full force to writing. Anyone with an interest in science and an appreciation for good prose is likely to have some Dysons on the shelf: “Disturbing the Universe,” “Weapons and Hope,” “Infinite in All Directions,” “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet.”
He also entered literature in a different way. He appeared in John McPhee’s book “The Curve of Binding Energy” (1974), a portrait of Ted Taylor, the nuclear scientist who led the Orion effort, and in Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship and the Canoe” (1978). In a memorable scene, Mr. Brower wrote of Dr. Dyson’s reunion with his son, George, who had turned his back on high technology to live in a treehouse in British Columbia and build a seafaring canoe. George Dyson later returned to civilization and became a historian of technology and an author. Dr. Dyson’s daughter Esther Dyson is a well-known Silicon Valley consultant.

Statement from the Institute for Advanced Study. This is a great line:

In 1956, Dyson began a three-year association with General Atomic, where he worked to design a nuclear reactor that would be inherently safe, or, as colleague Edward Teller put it, “not only idiot-proof, but PhD proof.”

I’m going to have to start using “PhD proof” more often in conversation.

This is eloquently stated, and seems like a good note to end on:

“No life is more entangled with the Institute and impossible to capture—architect of modern particle physics, free-range mathematician, advocate of space travel, astrobiology and disarmament, futurist, eternal graduate student, rebel to many preconceived ideas including his own, thoughtful essayist, all the time a wise observer of the human scene,” stated Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor. “His secret was simply saying “yes” to everything in life, till the very end. We are blessed and honored that Freeman, Imme, and their family made the Institute their home. It will be so forever.”

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Physics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 27, 2020.

Thursday, February 27th, 2020

Kind, generous, and thoughtful Friend of the Blog Borepatch forwarded a nice obit from the Guardian for the late Clive Cussler, which was much appreciated.

In the early 2000s, Cussler agreed to work with co-authors at the request of his US publisher Simon and Schuster, in order to publish more frequently; in 2017 alone, he published four novels. “I don’t give a damn,” he said in a 2015 interview, in reply to criticism of the move. “I never had a highfalutin view of what I write. It’s a job. I entertain my readers. I get up in the morning and I start typing … I want it to be easy to read. I’m not writing exotic literature. I like snappy dialogue and short descriptions and lots of action.”

There’s an interesting obit in the NYT for Dr. Stanley Dudrick, who passed away at 84. I’d never heard of him, but when people say you rank with…

…Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis, who pioneered antiseptic medical procedures; William T.G. Morton, who popularized anesthesia during surgery; and Sir Alexander Fleming, who is credited with the discovery of penicillin.

What did he do? Well, when he was a medical resident, three people who had gone through “technically sucessful” surgeries died in the hospital. He wanted to know why, and devoted his time to research…

…finding the answer to be deceptively simple. But more than that, he perfected a treatment — one that has been credited with saving the lives of millions of premature infants as well as those of adults with a wide range of ailments, including cancer, severe bowel, kidney and liver diseases, and burns.

The deceptively simple cause?

The cause of the three deaths that had so motivated him, he concluded, was severe malnutrition. The patients had been unable to eat or to absorb enough nutrients to sustain life.
Malnutrition had often gone unrecognized as a direct or contributing cause of death because death certificates typically cited an underlying disease, like cancer or liver failure.

Dr. Dudrick developed “total parenteral nutrition” (TPN)…

…which bypasses the intestinal tract when a patient cannot receive food or fluids by mouth and instead injects nutrients — liquid carbohydrates, electrolytes, fats, minerals, proteins and vitamins — directly into the circulatory system through a vein.

He never patented TPN.

The intravenous delivery of concentrated nutrients proved successful over time in stimulating and restoring normal bodily functions, including immune systems of patients with malignant growths.
The technique has not only increased the chances of survival after operations; it has also spared many patients surgery — often because a diagnosis of malnutrition had not been contemplated and nutrition was not considered a remedy.

One peer who is quoted in the article believes Dr. Dudrick is responsible for saving “tens of millions of people across the world.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#63 in a series)

Thursday, February 27th, 2020

Catherine Pugh got three years of prison time, and three years of probation. She also has to pay $669,000 in restitution.

Baltimore Sun, which is being really obnoxious.

I’m still unable to find any “Healthy Holly” books on Amazon. There’s one copy of “Exercising Is Fun” available, at a price of $19,560.41: I’m pretty sure that’s someone (or some bot) gaming Amazon’s system, and that’s not a legit offer.

(While I’ve been keeping an eye out, since I knew she was being sentenced today, hat tip to Lawrence, who emailed me the story while I was busy picking up barbecue for the office.)

Posted in Books, Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 26, 2020.

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020

My brother sent out an obit watch for Clive “Raise the Titanic!” Cussler. I have not been able to find an obit to link to yet, but his passing seems to be confirmed by a post from his wife on his Facebook page. When I find actual obits, I’ll either update here or post another obit watch tomorrow.

Edited to add: Of course. Literally five minutes after I hit “Publish”, the paper of record posts their obit.

He began writing fiction at home in the late 60s, but his first two books, “Pacific Vortex” and “The Mediterranean Caper,” were repeatedly rejected. Unable even to get an agent, he staged a hoax. Using the letterhead of a fictitious writers’ agency, he wrote to the agent Peter Lampack, posing as an old colleague about to retire and overloaded with work. He enclosed copies of his manuscripts, citing their potential.
It worked. “Where can I sign Clive Cussler?” Mr. Lampack wrote back. In 1973, “The Mediterranean Caper” was published, followed by “Iceberg” (1975) and “Raise the Titanic!” (1976).
Despite an improbable plot and negative reviews, “Raise the Titanic!” sold 150,000 copies, was a Times best seller for six months and became a 1980 film starring Richard Jordan and Jason Robards Jr.

I actually kind of enjoyed the book “Raise the Titanic!”, but I was young at the time. I also paid actual money to see the movie in a theater, and that was a piece of s–t.

His books sales have been staggering — more than 100 million copies, with vast numbers sold in paperback at airports. Translated into 40 or so languages, his books reached The New York Times’s best-seller lists more than 20 times, as he amassed a fortune estimated at $80 million.

Ahem. Ahem.

While searching for his obit, though, I stumbled across the THR one for Ben Cooper. He was in a fair number of Westerns: “Johnny Guitar”, “Support Your Local Gunfighter”, “The Fastest Guitar Alive”. He also did a lot of TV guest spots: “Gunsmoke”, “Bonanza”, “The Rifleman”, “Death Valley Days”, and had regular spots on “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo” and “The Fall Guy”…

…and yes, he was on “Mannix” twice. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4, the same one Robert Conrad was in. That’s the next one we’re watching, Lawrence. Also “To Cage a Seagull”, season 4, episode 10.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 18, 2020.

Tuesday, February 18th, 2020

Charles Portis, author (True Grit, Norwood, The Dog of the South).

A lot of people I know (especially in the SF community) praise Portis. He’s on my list, but so far I’ve only read parts of True Grit. I need to go back and read the whole thing: the use of voice in this novel is fascinating.

The narrative voice of “True Grit” is that of a self-assured old woman, Mattie Ross, as she recalls an adventure she had in Arkansas’s Indian Territory when she was 14, on a quest to track down her father’s killer with Cogburn’s help.
Mr. Portis wanted her to sound determined to “get the story right,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. The book has virtually no contractions, and the language is insistently old-fashioned.

I think more to the point that this is a book written from the point of view of a determined older woman, recounting a formative experience of her youth, and Portis manages to capture both the teen and the adult.

Mr. Portis shrank from the attention his more celebrated novels attracted. He steadfastly refused to be interviewed, although he made himself available to talk about his life for this obituary. When drawn into public gatherings, he dodged photographers. But he didn’t like to be called a recluse or compared to the likes of J.D. Salinger. He pointed out that his name was in the Little Rock phone book.

…

Mr. Portis’s reluctance to talk to the news media may have been traceable to his days as a reporter, when intruding on people’s lives was part of the job description. Mattie, his narrator in “True Grit,” may be voicing Mr. Portis’s own feelings when she speaks of the reporters who had sought her out to tell them her story of Rooster Cogburn.
“I do not fool around with newspapers,” Mattie says. “The paper editors are great ones for reaping where they have not sown. Another game they have is to send reporters out to talk to you and get your stories free. I know the young reporters are not paid well and I would not mind helping those boys out with their ‘scoops’ if they could ever get anything right.”

(Interestingly, this is another NYT obit where the subject outlived the obit writer.)

It may be kind of a cliche, but this section is quoted in the NYT obit. I’m also a sucker for John Wayne, and this is one of my favorite Wayne moments.

(“Fill your hand, you son-of-a-bitch!” Such a useful phrase.)

Kellye Nakahara Wallett. As Kellye Nakahara, she was perhaps best known as “Lt. Kellye Yamato” on M*A*S*H, a character who was mostly a bit player (though the character was featured in one episode near the end of the run). M*A*S*H Wiki entry.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 9, 2020.

Sunday, February 9th, 2020

Let’s get down to it.

Paul Farnes. He was 101, and the last surviving RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

…for three months, through the end of October, the R.A.F. battled the Luftwaffe for supremacy in the skies over Britain. Flying a Hurricane fighter for the 501 Squadron, Mr. Farnes, a sergeant pilot, proved supremely adept at attacking German aircraft.
In August alone he shot down three Junkers Ju Stuka bombers, a Dornier 17 light bomber and a Messerschmitt 109E fighter.At the end of September, as Mr. Farnes maneuvered his malfunctioning Hurricane back to the R.A.F.’s Kenley base, he spotted a German bomber flying directly at him at about 1,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘Good God,’ so I whipped out and had to reposition myself and managed to get ’round behind him,” he said in an interview with the website History of War in 2017. “I gave him a couple of bursts, and he crashed at Gatwick just on the point between the airport and the racecourse.”

…

Aerial warfare against the Germans meant breaking away from the squadron, finding something to shoot at, firing away, then breaking away to safety. But by Mr. Farnes’s account it was also enjoyable, because he was able to combine his love of flying with the mission to protect Britain.
“The C.O. would quite often pick the next members of the squadron that had to be at ‘readiness,’ and the two or three who weren’t picked would be pretty fed up,” he told History of War. “If you weren’t picked, you’d think, ‘Why can’t I go?’ I’m sure one or two must have felt, ‘Well, thank God I’m not going!’ But a lot of us were quite happy to go.”

Robert Conrad. THR. Variety.

I was a little young for “Wild Wild West” in first run; if it was syndicated in Houston when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. It could have been on the station we were never able to pick up (the same one OG “Star Trek” was on). And “Hawaiian Eye” was before my time. But if you’re my age or a little on either side of it, this was like candy for us:

He also appeared multiple times on “Mission: Impossible” and other series, either as the lead of some less than successful ones (“High Mountain Rangers”) or doing guest shots. He did do a “Mannix”. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4.) And I didn’t know this, but he played G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.

Orson Bean. Variety. THR. Interesting guy: I remember him from “Being John Malkovich” and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some of those old game shows on Buzzr. In the 1960s, he founded a progressive school in New York City.

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)
When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

In the 1980s, he settled down again and resumed acting. He was 91 years old when he died: he was hit by a car while walking, fell, and was run over by a second car (according to Variety).

After the jump, more obits.

(more…)

Posted in 1970s, Books, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Nixon, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: February 7, 2020.

Friday, February 7th, 2020

Roger Kahn, noted baseball writer.

Posted in Books, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 3, 2020.

Monday, February 3rd, 2020

A little bit of catch up:

Mary Higgins Clark, noted suspense author.

Peter Serkin. I swear I’ve heard this name somewhere before, but I can’t place where. He was a pianist, came from a prominent musical family, and was a child prodigy.

Yet, though he was proud of his heritage, Mr. Serkin found it a burden. Like many who came of age in the 1960s, he questioned the establishment, both in society at large and within classical music. He resisted a traditional career trajectory and at 21 stopped performing, going for months without even playing the piano.

…

Throughout his career, he presented recital programs that juxtaposed the old and the new: 12-tone scores and Mozart sonatas; thorny pieces by the mid-20th-century German composer Stefan Wolpe and polyphonic works from the Renaissance. Admirers of his playing appreciated how he drew out allusions to music’s past in contemporary scores, while conveying the radical elements of old music.
He played almost all the piano works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Wolpe. He also introduced dozens of pieces, including major works and concertos, written for him by composers like Toru Takemitsu, Charles Wuorinen and, especially, his childhood friend Peter Lieberson.

…

Though Mr. Serkin never completely shook off the early perception of him as “the counterculture’s reluctant envoy to the straight concert world,” as the Times critic Donal Henahan called him in an admiring 1973 profile, over time he reconciled to the ways, even the dress protocols, of that classical world and developed productive associations with artists like the Guarneri String Quartet, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (who had married Peter Lieberson) and the conductors Seiji Ozawa, Herbert Blomstedt, Robert Shaw and Pierre Boulez.

…

Mr. Serkin relished teaching, and held posts at institutions including the Mannes School of Music and the Juilliard School in New York, and, in recent years, Bard. He so enjoyed spending summers teaching at the Tanglewood Music Institute that he bought a home in the Berkshires and lived there for years.

Just in this morning: Bernard J. Ebbers, convicted WorldCom CEO.

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

This week in fraud.

Monday, January 27th, 2020

A couple of stories came to my attention over the weekend, and I thought they’d make an interesting diversion from the endless parade of obits.

1) Back in 1973, David Rosenhan (a social psychologist at Stanford) published what became one of the most famous papers in psychology. Summarizing:

Rosenhan himself and seven mentally healthy associates, called “pseudopatients”, attempted to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals by calling for an appointment and feigning auditory hallucinations…
All were admitted, to 12 psychiatric hospitals across the United States, including rundown and underfunded public hospitals in rural areas, urban university-run hospitals with excellent reputations, and one expensive private hospital. Though presented with identical symptoms, seven were diagnosed with schizophrenia at public hospitals, and one with manic-depressive psychosis, a more optimistic diagnosis with better clinical outcomes, at the private hospital. Their stays ranged from 7 to 52 days, and the average was 19 days. All were discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission”, which Rosenhan considered as evidence that mental illness is perceived as an irreversible condition creating a lifelong stigma rather than a curable illness.

(I would link to his paper, “On Being Sane In Insane Places” here, but I can’t find a trustworthy non-paywalled version. If someone else can, please leave a link in the comments and I’ll update.)

This caused a great deal of consternation in the profession, and led to the creation of the DSM and other changes.

Susannah Cahalan (the author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a book I haven’t read yet but plan to) got interested in Rosenham’s paper and the story behind it:

‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’ was the only significant scholarship he ever produced, and he lived off this famous paper throughout his career. It occurred to her that it would be fascinating to track down as many of the pseudo-patients as she could, and to explore the circumstances under which Rosenhan had come to undertake his study.

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness is her new book (it came out in November) about Rosenham and his experiment. I haven’t read it, so I can’t really spoil it, but the title probably gives away a lot:

With two and a half exceptions, even as skilful an investigative reporter as Cahalan was unable to locate the pseudo-patients. Rosenhan himself was easily identified as the first of them. His files included his admission as ‘David Lurie’ to Haverford State Hospital in Pennsylvania. (He was then teaching at Swarthmore College.) And internal clues in the files enabled her to track down Bill Underwood, who had been a Stanford graduate student at the time. Another pseudo-patient, Harry Lando, surfaced — once also a graduate student and now an academic — but he only half counts, for, as a usually overlooked footnote in Rosenhan’s paper recounts, one pseudo-patient had been dropped from the study, and this was he. As for the rest: nothing, nada, no trace.

…

In a larger sense, it scarcely matters, because Cahalan uncovered so much other evidence of Rosenhan’s malfeasance and lies. He claimed, for example, to have carefully coached his volunteers before sending them forth. Bill Underwood and Harry Lando emphatically denied this. Lando appears to have been dismissed from the study, not because he violated protocol, but because, as Rosenhan incredulously noted about his confinement, ‘HE LIKES IT!’ And then some of the things Lando reported about his experiences reappeared in the published paper attributed to a different pseudo-patient.
Most damning of all, though, are Rosenhan’s own medical records. When he was admitted to the hospital, it was not because he simply claimed to be hearing voices but was otherwise ‘normal’. On the contrary, he told his psychiatrist his auditory hallucinations included the interception of radio signals and listening in to other people’s thoughts. He had tried to keep these out by putting copper over his ears, and sought admission to the hospital because it was ‘better insulated there’. For months, he reported he had been unable to work or sleep, financial difficulties had mounted and he had contemplated suicide. His speech was retarded, he grimaced and twitched, and told several staff that the world would be better off without him. No wonder he was admitted.

In summary (this is the reviewer talking, not me):

…the evidence she provides makes an overwhelming case: Rosenhan pulled off one of the greatest scientific frauds of the past 75 years, and it was a fraud whose real-world consequences still resonate today.

2) Randy Constant was a farmer. He bought and sold orgainc grain, and raised fish commerically. In 2017, he was named to the list of “10 Sucessful Farmers to Watch” published by “Successful Farming”.

And about the same time he was named to that list, the FBI raided his home and businesses.

Records showed that in 2016 he sold 7 percent of all the corn labeled organic and 8 percent of all the soybeans carrying that designation. More than $19 million worth that year, $24 million the year before and so on every year before that back to 2010 at least.
It was impossible for him to have done that legitimately. He didn’t have access to enough organic crop acres to supply so many bushels.

…

With the FBI’s assistance, the USDA would go on to prove that Constant was a swindler on a grand scale: More than $140 million in fraudulent sales between 2010 and 2017 for grain that was likely worth half that.
The Star’s subsequent reporting found that, in fact, his scheme stretched back further than that, to 2007 or 2006.
Constant scammed grain buyers, meat producers and millions of American consumers for a decade or more. The organic beef and poultry countless Americans were eating during those years wasn’t organic after all.

And what did he do with the money?

Not only did he bankroll extravagant family vacations every summer — counting kids and grandkids, he’d treat a dozen to stays at luxury resorts like Hilton Head, South Carolina — Constant also admitted to using the grain sales money to pay for sex with prostitutes and wagering at casinos.
He took more than 20 trips to Las Vegas, often alone, during the seven-year period covered in his indictment. There he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal profits on gambling on the Vegas strip, hiring female escorts and providing financial support to three women with whom he had extramarital affairs.
He shared a bank account with one of them, and spent $110,000 on her car payments and other bills, a trip to Spain and surgery to enhance her breasts.
“During a roughly seven-month period in the course of the scheme,” Constant admitted in court records, “another account in my name and under my control incurred more than $250,000 in Las Vegas-related expenses.”

(As Lawrence said when I read him that quote, “The rest of it he just wasted.”)

The Kansas City Star piece is long, but I think it’s worth reading. It covers not just Constant and what may have motivated him, but also the flaws in the government’s system of certifying organic crops.

Constant pled guilty to one count of wire fraud and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He committed suicide before his sentence began.

Posted in Books, Food, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 20, 2020.

Monday, January 20th, 2020

Edith Kunhardt Davis, author (mostly of children’s books). I hadn’t heard of her before the NYT published her obit, but this is a kind of sad story that’s worth noting here.

Her mother was Dorothy Kunhardt, who also wrote children’s books, most famously Pat the Bunny.

In a later memoir, “My Mother, the Bunny and Me” (2016), Edith recalled her eccentric childhood between the Depression and World War II and the creative household in which she grew up, with her mother’s literary friends, like Carl Sandburg and Isak Dinesen, coming and going. Dorothy Kunhardt wrote 43 children’s books before she died in 1979.

Some of her books were Pat spinoffs, but she wrote originals too.

Dorothy Kunhardt revered Abraham Lincoln, a passion she inherited from her father, Frederick Hill Meserve. Their house in Morristown was filled with Lincoln and Civil War memorabilia. Over the decades, Philip Kunhardt amassed one of America’s greatest private Lincoln collections, with about 73,000 items, including a snippet of Lincoln’s hair.
Five generations of the family have been absorbed by Lincoln, and many of its members, including Dorothy Kunhardt, wrote books about him. On a trip to Springfield, Ill., she bought lamps from the parlor where Lincoln was married and used them to light her own house. Little wonder that Edith eventually wrote her own account, a children’s book titled “Honest Abe” (1993).

The sad part is that Ms. Davis was an alcoholic until 1973, when she got sober and began writing in earnest. She had a son, Edward, while she was drinking:

And long after she had become sober, she was confronted with the possibility that her excessive drinking while she was pregnant had led to the death of her son when he was 27.
His death, from heart disease, in 1990 became the subject of Ms. Davis’s 1995 memoir, “I’ll Love You Forever, Anyway.” An account of her grief made all the more anguishing by her guilt, it stood in stark contrast to the cheerful children’s tales for which she was known.

…

“An important component of my particular story was the guilt that I carried because I was an alcoholic parent who lived in an era when doctors did not restrict drinking during pregnancy,” she wrote. “My fears that I might possibly have caused Neddy’s heart illness — and his dyslexia — through drinking while pregnant haunted me and complicated the mourning process.”

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Obit watch: January 18, 2020.

Saturday, January 18th, 2020

Marion Chesney, writer. She was best known for the mysteries she wrote as “M.C. Beaton”.

For the historical record: Christopher Tolkien.

Roger Scruton, English conservative intellectual. I’m not very familiar with his work, but Rod Dreher has written extensively about him.

… it caused me to think long and hard about Europe and its destiny, about Communism and about the human soul, which seems to live on in secret, even when its very existence has been denied as it was denied by Communism. In the Czech lands, I sensed the presence all around me of a dark, impersonal force, a controlling and all-observing eye whose goal was to plant suspicion and fear in the heart of every human relationship.
You could trace this force to no specific person, to no office or authority. It was just there, an invisible wall between all who sought to escape.
I had no name for this dark force, other than ‘It’ – a kind of negation of humanity. From behind the first stirrings of friendship or love, It lay in wait to reduce the flame to ashes. Always, when I stepped on the plane home, I felt I was escaping the grip of this alien force, and returning to a place where fear, suspicion and denunciation had no power over ordinary human decency.

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