Monday was the 90th anniversary of the strange death of Hubert Chevis, also known as “…the mysterious affair of Lieutenant Chevis and the Manchurian partridge“.
So that this isn’t a total waste of your time: here’s an old episode of a BBC Radio 4 podcast, “Punt PI”, covering the Chevis case, which I am listening to as I write this. (It is about 30 minutes long.)
This is a rather short article, but it includes photos of Mr. and Mrs. Chevis, and of the “J. Hartigan” telegram.
George Stranahan, colorful figure.
His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.
So he did:
The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”
He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.
He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.
He also did some ranching:
In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.
Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.
Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”
For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.
Brigitte Gerney passed away a few days ago. She was 85.
You probably never heard of her, but this is a great story. On May 30, 1985, she was pinned under a collapsed crane in New York City.
Mrs. Gerney was walking home to United Nations Plaza from her dentist’s office on East 69th Street, past the foundation for a 42-story apartment building on Third Avenue between 64th and 63rd Streets, when the 35-ton base of the crane tipped over onto the sidewalk, trapping her at the edge of the excavation.
“It was like an earthquake,” she testified a year later. “The pavement cracked up under me. I remember my bag flying out of my hands. I heard the noise of all the bones cracking in my legs. I’m sure I screamed, ‘Help me, help me, get me out!’ But I was alone.”
She continued: “I said, ‘Can’t you cut my legs off and take me out? I have two children. I have to live.’ But they said they couldn’t do that, that I would bleed to death.”
“I never believed I would get out,” she said. “I thought I was dying.”
She was asked if she wanted a priest, she added, “and I said yes.”
Three cranes were dispatched to help stabilize the toppled one while rescue workers extricated Mrs. Gerney, who remained conscious the entire time.
She was pinned for six hours.
James Essig of the 19th Precinct, among the first on the scene, was awarded a medal for valor. Paul Ragonese of the Emergency Service Unit was elevated to detective, retired from the bomb squad in 1988 and now handles security for the Durst Organization.
“What kept me alive is that he held my hand,” Mrs. Gerney said of Detective Ragonese.
He said at the time, “She is the most courageous man or woman I ever met.”
It took 13 operations (including skin grafts and microsurgery) but the doctors were able to save her legs, and she was able to walk again.
The accident and its aftermath were front-page news for more than a year. The contracting company and the construction foreman were convicted of assault and endangerment. The foreman was fined $5,000 and placed on five years’ probation. The crane operator, who was unlicensed and who had been ordered by the foreman to take over after the regular operator had left for the day, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault. He was spared a prison sentence after Mrs. Gerney urged compassion.
In 1988, she was awarded $10 million in damages, to be paid in monthly installments.
…
Mrs. Gerney’s first son drowned when he was a toddler. She was seriously injured in 1982 when the cable car she was riding at a Swiss ski resort disengaged and plunged to the ground. She survived lung cancer in 1980. Her husband died of colon cancer in 1983. After the crane accident, a doctor who had treated her, and whom she planned to marry, was shot dead by a retired fireman who had been awaiting a decision on his medical disability claim.
“Her reaction to this horrible litany of misfortune?” her son said. “She would say: ‘On the one hand, only in a place like New York does a crane fall on you when you are walking home from the dentist. On the other hand, only in New York would they shut down half the city, have these crazy, brave people crawl under a teetering crane to save you, and then have the best doctors in the world somehow rebuild your smashed legs.’”
Wow. Maybe I will be able to get it together to do Bloomsday greeting cards before the 100th anniversary of Ulysses next year.
In the meantime, please to enjoy: by way of Hacker News, vintage recordings of James Joyce actually reading from his works.
You know who was a Marine?
If you’re one of my readers who was a Marine, the answer is probably “Yes”. I figure the list of famous Marines is drilled into folks at boot camp.
But for everyone else: Don Adams.
I kid you not. Before he was “Maxwell Smart”, he served in the Marines during WWII. He fought (and was wounded) in the battle of Guadalcanal. He also came down with “blackwater fever”, and was medically evacuated to New Zealand, where he was hospitalized for over a year. After that, he served as a drill instructor until 1945.
As a side note, I went down a rabbit hole about “blackwater fever” a few months ago when I was reading White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris (affiliate link). It also comes up in “The Bridge on the River Kwai“, which I did finally watch Saturday.
Blackwater fever is a complication of malaria. From what I’ve picked up, red blood cells burst and release hemoglobin, which enters the kidneys and can cause them to fail. I’ve seen suggestions that quinine either caused it, or was a contributing factor: now that we have other anti-malarial drugs, the incidence of blackwater fever has decreased.
A lot of those old-time African hunters came down with blackwater fever at one time or another: the folk remedy (which seems to have worked for many of them) was…massive consumption of champagne. I would think that would overload the kidneys and make things worse, but enough of those guys seem to have survived (the mortality rate is claimed to be 90%) that maybe there was something to it…?
Father O’Callahan was a good Boston boy. Shortly after he graduated from high school in 1922, he signed up with the Jesuits.
He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1934. Along the way, he picked up a BA and a MA from St. Andrew’s College, “specializing in mathematics and physics”. He was a professor of math, physics, and philosophy at Boston College for 10 years (1927-1937), then he went over to Weston Jesuit School of Theology for a year. From 1938 to 1940 he served as the director of the math department at the College of the Holy Cross.
He enlisted in the United States Navy Reserve Chaplain Corps in August of 1940 as a lieutenant junior grade. But I gather he was pretty good at his job: by July of 1945 he had reached the rank of commander. He participated in Operation Torch and Operation Leader.
On March 2, 1945, Commander O’Callahan reported to the aircraft carrier USS Franklin.
On March 19, 1945, the Franklin was hit by two bombs from a Japanese aircraft. The bombs started a massive fire on the carrier deck.
There is a short documentary, “The Saga of the Franklin“, that you can find on the Internet Archive.
Commander O’Callahan was offered the Navy Cross, but refused it. There is speculation that his refusal had to do with “his heroic actions on USS Franklin highlighted perceived lapses in leadership by the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Leslie E. Gehres, which reflected poorly on the Navy”. Wikipedia claims there was a controversy at the time, Harry Truman stepped in…
…and Commander O’Callahan was awarded the Medal of Honor on January 23, 1946. (Another officer, Lieutenant junior grade Donald Arthur Gary, also received the Medal of Honor for his actions: “Lieutenant Gary discovered 300 men trapped in a blackened mess compartment and, finding an exit, returned repeatedly to lead groups to safety. Gary later organized and led firefighting parties to battle the inferno on the hangar deck and entered number three fireroom to raise steam in one boiler, braving extreme hazards in so doing.“)
Father O’Callahan retired from the Navy in 1948 and headed the math department at The College of the Holy Cross. He also wrote a book, I Was Chaplain on the Franklin (affiliate link).
He died in 1964 at the age of 58, and is buried in the Jesuit cemetery at The College of the Holy Cross. The destroyer USS O’Callahan was named after him.
One of Father O’Callahan’s students at Holy Cross before the war was John V. Power, who also received the Medal of Honor (posthumously).
(Previously. Previously.)
…
The Germans enlisted her to take commemorative photographs of them and, in some cases, their newly acquired mistresses. (“It better be good, or else you’ll be kaput,” she recalled a Gestapo commander warning her before, trembling, she asked him to smile.) They thus spared her from the firing squad because of their vanity and their obsession with bureaucratic record-keeping — two weaknesses that she would ultimately wield against them.
At one point the Germans witlessly gave her film to develop that contained pictures they had taken of the three trenches into which they, their Lithuanian collaborators and the local Polish police had machine-gunned Lenin’s remaining Jews, including her parents, sisters and younger brother.
She kept a copy of the photos as evidence of the atrocity, then later joined a band of Russian guerrilla Resistance fighters. As one of the only known Jewish partisan photographers, Mrs. Schulman, thanks to her own graphic record-keeping, debunked the common narrative that most Eastern European Jews had gone quietly to their deaths.
“I want people to know that there was resistance,” she was quoted as saying by the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. “Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter. I was a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof.”
In the wholesome era of “Our Miss Brooks” and “Father Knows Best” on television, Ms. Warren, who died at 91 on Tuesday in Orange County, Calif., developed a scandalous comedy routine that was full of barely veiled innuendo about sex, outrageous references to breasts and more, much of it delivered in a husky shout.
With that new risqué routine, she began packing larger clubs all over the country. The release in 1960 of her second comedy album, the brazenly titled “Knockers Up!,” only increased her fame.
It was a booming time for live comedy and comedy records — “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” Mr. Newhart’s Grammy-winning breakthrough, was released the same year — and Ms. Warren emerged as a star in an out-of-the-mainstream sort of way.
…
If it hasn’t already been written, somebody could get a good book out of the history of comedy records roughly mid-century (I’m guessing 1950-1975, maybe slightly later). Especially if they went into the history of “blue” or “party” records: not just Ms. Warren, but Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Rudy Ray Moore, and lots of other now mostly forgotten folks.
Lawrence sent over two: Shane Briant, British actor. (“Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell”, “Cassandra”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”)
…
…
This is the last entry in the series.
I feel we’ve reached the point where we are, more or less, out of jail: restrictions are being relaxed, I am fully vaccinated, and I’m seeing many businesses doing away with mask requirements.
I originally started this as a diversion while we were all on home confinement. If you were locked in, what did you have that was better to do than watch weird old videos that popped up in my YouTube recommendations? Now, it seems like this…feature? recurring trope?…has gone beyond what originally motivated it. This seems like a good time to wrap it up.
Mostly. I’m holding a couple of things in reserve for days in the future. And if we’re hit by a new variant and have to lock ourselves in again, I reserve the right to restart this.
I have something special I want to post, as the final entry, and also as a tribute.
Gardner Dozois passed away three years ago today. To the best of my knowledge, the NYT still has not published an obituary for him.
The penultimate entry seems like a good time for some randomness.
Let’s start with a final entry from the AT&T Archives: “Telezonia”.
Lawrence, this is for you:
The weird starts about two minutes in.
Bonus #1: As long as we’re talking about “psychedelic”: “Narcotics: Pit of Despair”.
Bonus #2: Couldn’t get away without one more bit of random gun crankery. This is part of an episode of “Wild West Tech” (an old History Channel show) talking about holsters.
I’m moving Travel Thursday to Tuesday this week, for reasons. I have something else coming up for Thursday.
Today: “New Horizons: Argentina” from our friends at Pan Am. We’ve done South America in general previously, but we haven’t focused specifically on Argentina.
This apparently dates to 1965, so I can’t really make any “Evita” jokes here, alas.
Bonus #1: But I can put up something relevant to Lawrence’s interests, and maybe Andrew’s as well: “MOUTH-WATERING STEAK at an Argentine Steakhouse in Mar del Plata, Argentina”.
Bonus #2: We’ve been to South America. Why not Central America on our way back?
Also by way of Pan Am, circa 1968: “Fiesta! A Central American Holiday”.
Military History Monday!
This is also the last entry in MilHisMon. Sort of. It’s complicated.
Somewhere in my collection of books on leadership, I have a thin little pamphlet that I picked up at the National Museum of the Pacific War: “Arleigh Burke on Leadership”.
Who was Arleigh Burke, other than being a guy who has a whole class of destroyers named after him?
“Saluting Admiral Arleigh Burke”, circa about 1961 (around the time he retired, after three terms as Chief of Naval Operations).
Bonus #1: This might be the last chance I get to do one of these. Plus: CanCon!
“Canadair CF-104 Starfighter”.
Bonus #2: And as long as I’m taking last chances…”Secrets of the F-14 Tomcat: Inflight Refueling” from Ward Carroll.
As a side note, which I learned from Mr. Carroll this past weekend, did not know previously, and don’t really have a good place to stick it: one of Donald Trump’s final pardons was granted to Randall “Duke” Cunningham.
Bonus #3: A documentary about “Operation Blowdown”.
“Operation Blowdown”? Yes: back in 1963, the Australian military decided to simulate a nuclear blast in a rain forest, just to see what conditions would be like afterwards. Because, you know, why the heck not?
A device containing was detonated to partially simulate a ten kiloton air burst in the Iron Range jungle. The explosives were sourced from obsolete artillery shells and placed in a tower 42 metres (138 ft) above ground level and 21 metres (69 ft) above the rainforest canopy. After the explosion, troops were moved through the area (which was now covered in up to a metre of leaf litter), to test their ability to transit across the debris. In addition, obsolete vehicles and equipment left near the centre of the explosion were destroyed.
Science Sunday!
For the final Science Sunday, I thought I’d go back to one of my favorite topics – computing history and computer science – and cover two companies whose machines I find fascinating.
“Cray Research at Chippewa Falls – A Story of the Supercomputer”.
I apologize for the quality on this one: it is from 1976, but I think it is worthwhile because…Seymour Cray introduces the Cray-1.
Bonus: During this week’s episode of one of the podcasts I listen to, one of the hosts made a reference to the Connection Machine. The other two hosts had never heard of the Connection Machine, so they were part of that day’s lucky 10,000.
For those of you who fall into the same boat, this is a fairly recent (so higher quality) talk by a guy named Dan Bentley about the Connection Machine and the concept of “Data Parallel Algorithms”.