I am seeing unconfirmed reports that Gene Wolfe, one of the greatest SF authors ever to walk the face of the earth, has passed away.
I’ll try to link to reliable obits when I find them.
Edited to add:
"My definition of a great story has nothing to do with "a varied and interesting background." It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure." – Gene Wolfe
— Dean Bradley (@DeanBradleySFF) April 15, 2019
Charles Van Doren has passed away at the age of 93.
I wrote a little about this a while back, but to recap: Mr. Van Doren was from a cultured and educated family, had batchelor’s and master’s degrees, taught at Columbia University, and was “handsome, personable” with “an honest look about him”.
He was recruited by Albert Freedman to appear on the quiz show “Twenty-One” (he didn’t even own a TV at the time), and knocked off Herb Stempel, the reigning champion. (From some accounts I’ve seen, the producers basically felt Mr. Van Doren was “more appealing” to the audience than Mr. Stempel.)
Mr. Van Doren won $129,000 in 1956 money (the paper of record claims that’s equivalent to $1 million today).
In succeeding months, as rumors and skepticism over TV quiz shows grew, some contestants admitted that the programs had been fixed. The networks denied it, and Mr. Van Doren insisted that he had not taken part in any deceptions. Besides misleading the press and public, he continued to deceive his family and friends, and even lied to a Manhattan grand jury about his performances.
But on Nov. 2, 1959, he told congressional investigators that the shows had all been hoaxes, that he had been given questions and answers in advance, and that he had been coached to make the performances more dramatic.
Mr. Van Doren served a suspended sentence for second-degree perjury (for lying to the grand jury), went on to work for Encyclopaedia Britannica, and wrote a couple of books after he retired. (He also collaborated on some books with Mortimer Adler.)
The famous New Yorker article from 2008.
As far as I can tell, Herb Stempel is still alive at the age of 92.
Lt. Colonel Richard E. Cole (United States Air Force – Ret.)
He was 103.
Lieutenant (at the time) Cole was Jimmy Doolittle’s co-pilot on the Tokyo raid. He was the last survivor of Doolittle’s Raiders.
…
Doolittle, Lieutenant Cole and the other three crewmen of their plane bailed out in rain and fog soon after their bomber crossed the Chinese coast as darkness arrived. Lieutenant Cole landed in a pine tree atop a mountain and was unhurt except for a black eye. He made a hammock from his parachute and went to sleep. At dawn, he began walking, and late that day he made contact with Chinese guerrillas.
He was soon reunited with Doolittle, who had come down in a rice paddy, and their three fellow crewmen. The five joined up with other stranded airmen who had been rescued. The Chinese took them all on an arduous journey, much of it by riverboat, to an air strip, where they were picked up by a United States military transport plane and flown to Chungking, the headquarters for the Nationalist Chinese.
For the record:
Lt. Cole went on to fly transport planes over the Hump. He also served with the 1st Air Commando Group.
Lt. Cole’s page on doolittleraider.com which contains some great photos. Obit from MySanAntonio.com. I had no idea the gentleman lived in Comfort (about 90 minutes up the road from me). Cool story from the Express News in 2018.
Dick Cole’s War: Doolittle Raider, Hump Pilot, Air Commando sounds like a fascinating book.
Rest in peace, soldier.
Vonda N. McIntyre, noted SF writer, passed away on Monday, but I did not know about this until Lawrence mentioned it last night. The NYT obit is datelined Friday, but I’m thinking it must have been posted late in the day.
Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, for the historical record.
Ly Tong. He was a pilot with the South Vietnamese Air Force.
So, in 1992, he…
…hijacked a commercial airliner after takeoff from Bangkok, ordered the pilot to fly low over Ho Chi Minh City — known as Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, before the Communist victory — and dumped thousands of leaflets calling for a popular uprising.
He then strapped on a parachute and followed the leaflets down to certain capture. He was released six years later in an amnesty and returned to the United States, where he had become a citizen after the war.
That takes us to 1998. In 2000…
Later that year…
He spent another six years in a Thai prison for that. The paper of record states he was unarmed and nobody was hurt during either of his hijackings, which makes me wonder about the definition of “hijacking”. But I digress.
Kind of a brief one, but I didn’t get to use this trope last night, so what the heck:
The Baltimore Sun has a good summary of the “Healthy Holly” scandal that’s threatening to take down Mayor (and former state Senator) Catherine Pugh.
There’s also a “special section” that collects links to their other stories. My personal favorite so far:
How the rise of the self-publishing industry contributed to the problems for Baltimore’s mayor
I’m not kidding. That’s an actual headline from an actual article.
Come on. It’s Baltimore, gentlemen: if it wasn’t this, it would have been something else. Grifters gonna grift, and technology doesn’t change that.
If I was a book collector and had $100,000 to spend, what should I spend it on?
Let’s see. For that money, I could maybe get two copies of the UK first of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Or maybe just one.
Or I could be like this guy, who paid $100,000 for one book from “Healthy Holly LLC”.
Should I even mention that this guy does business with the city of Baltimore? And that “Healthy Holly LLC” is the mayor’s publishing company?
It doesn’t sound as interesting as Harry Potter, but it may be equally rare:
Bonus: the mayor has an “upscale second hand boutique” that’s been selling Groupons. (Groupons? Those are still a thing?) But when a reporter bought one and went to visit yesterday afternoon…
Getting back to the books, it’s a shame nobody can find them: Lawrence has a birthday coming up, and he’s a connoisseur of books published by political hacks to get money under the table.
Richard Erdman, noted character actor. He was on “Community”, which I never watched. But before that, he seems to have done guest shots on many TV shows of the 1970s and 1960s (except “Mannix”). Like everyone else in Hollywood, he was also in “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, and played Hoffman in “Stalag 17”.
Al Silverman passed away on Sunday. He worked in publishing, spending 16 years with Book of the Month Club and later becoming an editor with Viking Books.
Before that, he was a freelance sportswriter and later editor in chief of “Sport” magazine. While he was editing “Sport”, he met and wrote about Gayle Sayers, who was recovering from a knee injury. Ultimately, Mr. Silverman and Mr. Sayers collaborated on Mr. Sayers’s autobiography, I Am Third. And, in turn, a chapter from that book became the basis for “Brian’s Song”.
Another great story:
When the running back Paul Hornung was celebrated for leading the Green Bay Packers to the 1961 National Football League championship, Sport awarded him a 1962 Corvette. Mr. Hornung soon after sold the car and got into a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service in United States Tax Court after he failed to disclose the full market value of the car as part of his gross income for 1962.
“My father testified to Hornung’s defense that he should not pay income tax on the car,” Brian Silverman said. His father argued that the car was an unsolicited reward for Mr. Hornung’s talents and thus should be tax-exempt — “the same as a Nobel Prize, because football was Hornung’s art and he performed it to an award-winning degree.” Mr. Hornung lost the case.
Or is it hoplobibilophilia? What do you call it when you have a fondness for gun books?
Whatever it is, I have the fever. And the only cure is…more cowbell, er, buying more books. Now it’s your turn to suffer for my -phila.
Seriously, I’ve picked up a couple of books lately that I want to endorse and document Lawrence style. (Please do not confuse “Lawrence style” with “Gangnam style“.) Half-Price Books has been having another coupon sale, but the first two books here I actually ordered new from the publishers.
Great and good friend of the blog Karl Rehn (official trainer to WCD) has a new book out, co-written with John Daub.
Strategies and Standards for Defensive Handgun Training is available in paperback and Kindle form. Quoting Amazon’s summary:
I haven’t read (or ordered) this book yet. But as you know, Bob, I’ve known Karl for a while and taken classes from him, so I don’t have any qualms endorsing this. I plan to order my copy soon, and will report back once I’ve read it.
Besides, if you can’t pimp your friend’s products, whose products can you pimp?
I held back on these yesterday because I wanted to give them 24 hours to shake out.
Dan Jenkins, noted Texas author (Semi-Tough) and sports writer. NYT.
If you want to get a taste of his work, you could do worse than browse through the “SI 60“, especially “The Disciples Of St. Darrell On A Wild Weekend: A Texas football odyssey” and “The Sweet Life Of Swinging Joe: Joe Namath, celebrity and New York City“.
Jan-Michael Vincent, for the historical record.
Carmine “The Snake” Persico, noted Mafia boss.
…
The extent of Mr. Persico’s influence and authority in the Mafia was exposed at a watershed federal trial in 1986 in Manhattan. He and the reputed bosses of the Genovese and Lucchese crime families were convicted of being members of the Commission, the select body that resolved major disputes and set policies for the five New York crime families: the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese factions.
At the trial, Mr. Persico, a high school dropout, decided to represent himself, and he won the praises of lawyers and judges for his acumen in questioning witnesses, writing legal briefs and raising points of law.
His unorthodox trial tactics failed, however, and he was convicted, along with Anthony Corallo, the accused boss of the Lucchese family, and Anthony Salerno, a high-ranking member of the Genovese family. Each man was sentenced to 100 years in prison without the possibility of parole after being found guilty of conspiracy to commit murders, racketeering and leading a criminal enterprise, the Commission.
Dick Churchill passed away earlier this month at the age of 99.
…
Mr. Churchill helped dig the three main tunnels, which the prisoners called Tom, Dick and Harry. It was arduous, nerve-racking work, conducted with improvised tools and the constant risk of discovery or a cave-in.
“You didn’t have any air,” Mr. Churchill said, “and you had a little fat lump lamp which was Reich margarine, which spluttered, with a bit of pajama cord or something similar, which sucked up the oil and gave you a little bit of a light. And you hacked away at your sand, pushed it behind you where another fool took it further back.”
The tunnels were cleverly concealed, but Tom was discovered by the Germans in 1943 and Dick proved unusable. On a frigid night in March 1944, Mr. Churchill was one of 76 prisoners to make their way through the tunnel called Harry and out of Stalag III.
…
Mr. Churchill was the last surviving member of the escape party.
She was most famous as the author of The Love Boats (link goes to revised edition on Amazon, and yes, I will get a tiny kickback if you buy the book), about her time as a cruise ship hostess and cruise director. That book inspired three TV movies, and ultimately “The Love Boat” television series.
Mark Bramble, who wrote the book for the musical “Barnum” and co-wrote the book for “42nd Street”. Oddly, when I was in my late teens, I saw “Barnum” with Stacy Keach in the title role. But I don’t remember very much about the music or the book…
I’ve avoided writing about Brody Stevens because:
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.
Yesterday was a busy day for the NYT: the obit writers were apparently playing catch-up. One of these I knew about, but was waiting for a reliable source on, while the others I had not heard about.
William E. Butterworth III, noted and bestselling author.
If the name doesn’t ring a bell with you, that’s because he wrote mostly under pseudonyms. His best known pen name was W.E.B. Griffin.
(Also: awesome photo, NYT.)
Ken Nordine, poet and “word jazz” guy.
I used to fall asleep with the radio on and wake up to it in the morning. As I recall, early on Sunday mornings, in that twilight zone when I was half-awake and half-asleep, our local public radio station aired re-runs of “Word Jazz”.
I had not heard of Ethel Ennis, but this is an interesting story: Playboy jazz poll winner for best female singer,
And then she mostly walked away from it all and became Baltimore’s unofficial “First Lady of Jazz”.
“They had it all planned out for me,” she told The Washington Post in 1979, referring to the music executives in charge of her career. “I’d ask, ‘When do I sing?’ and they’d say, ‘Shut up and have a drink. You should sit like this and look like that and play the game of bed partners.’ You really had to do things that go against your grain for gain. I wouldn’t.”
She added: “I want to do it my way. I have no regrets.”
Finally, David Horowitz, newscaster and consumer reporter. I remember watching the syndicated version of “Fight Back!” on one of the Houston TV stations (though I don’t recall which one) back when I was young…