Archive for the ‘History’ Category

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Obit watch: August 1, 2024.

Thursday, August 1st, 2024

Greenspoint Mall in Houston.

At one point, it was the largest mall in Houston until the Galleria mall surpassed it with multiple expansions in the late 1980s and early 2000s.

That was the mall for my family for a long time. We saw “Star Wars” at the theater there, and I spent a lot of time as a teen in that mall. But Willowbrook Mall opened up closer to our house, and that became the mall of choice (unless there was some compelling reason to go to Greenspoint).

After we all moved away, the mall and the area around it went into decline. Crime got so bad, the mall was nicknamed “Gunspoint Mall” by locals.

Part of the area’s expansive campus will be transformed into a new apartment complex called Summit at Renaissance Park, developed by the Zieben Group. It will replace a vacant Sears Auto Center.

I’m sorry. Did someone say “Sears Auto Center”?

(I thought about putting a language warning on this, but: it’s Ron White. If you need a language warning on Ron White, well, welcome to our universe, I hope you enjoy your stay here.)

(And both Lawrence and I would be firmly in the “fark Sears Auto Center” camp, if Sears Auto Center still existed.)

I haven’t watched all of this yet, but here’s a “Dead Malls” YouTube video on Greenspoint:

This one’s for Mike the Musicologist: Richard Crawford.

“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Mr. Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”
While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Mr. Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning the 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)
Whereas Mr. Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Mr. Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.
So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.

…

“Americanists set out, by turning our full attention to music in our own backyard, to prove the musicological worth of American studies,” he wrote in the journal American Music in 2005. The value was not in discovering an American Bach or expanding the classical canon, but instead shifting focus, as he once described it, “from Music with a capital M to music-making.” For Mr. Crawford, musical history was about process, not just product; performance, not just composition.
“They pointed not to beauty, not to excellence, not to the music that had survived, but to all the music whose existence in America could be documented,” he wrote of his generation of Americanists. “Only by reconstructing that totality could the life — the beating heart, we might say — of a forgotten or moribund tradition be glimpsed and a true image of historical ‘shape’ imagined.”
Thus, his magnum opus, the 2001 book “America’s Musical Life: A History,” presented not a parade of major composers and their masterworks but instead a rich musical tapestry, beginning with Native American songs and colonial psalms and continuing through African-American spirituals, Civil War anthems, Tin Pan Alley and Philip Glass. With clear, matter-of-fact prose, Mr. Crawford placed economic and artistic developments in popular, folk and classical music side by side.

Posted in History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 30, 2024.

Tuesday, July 30th, 2024

15 years ago today, I posted my first obit, for the late legendary Reverend Ike.

Just sayin’. “15 years looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired.” I cannot tell a lie: that still makes me laugh my spleen out of my body. (As you know, Bob, the spleen is the most amusing body part, though not the most humerus.)

Francine Pascal, author. She did some screenwriting for soaps, but is best known as the creator of the “Sweet Valley High” book series and the spinoffs of that.

Ms. Pascal wrote the first 12 books in the series, then worked with a team of writers to keep a steady, rapid publication pace, often a book a month. She would draft a detailed outline, then hand it to a writer to flesh out while relying on what Ms. Pascal called her “bible” — a compendium of descriptions of the personalities, settings and dense web of relationships that defined life in Sweet Valley.

Edna O’Brien, author.

Roland Dumas, French foreign minister under François Mitterrand. This is the most French obit I’ve read recently.

A longtime confidant of François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president, Mr. Dumas was one of the most high-profile officials in France for two decades. His career stretched from the French Resistance to the summit of power, taking in epoch-making treaties, secretive negotiations with world leaders, numerous extramarital affairs, expensive art — works by Picasso, Braque and Chagall hung in his sumptuous apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris — and a notorious pair of $2,700 made-to-measure Berluti shoes that featured in a 2001 corruption trial.
Mr. Dumas avoided jail, but his conviction, which was eventually overturned, ended his career. He had already been forced to resign from the presidency of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest appeals body. Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model who had given him the shoes while they were having an affair, was not so lucky: She published a memoir called “The Whore of the Republic” (“La Putain de la République,” 1998) and spent five months in prison.

…

Mr. Mitterrand said of him, “I have two lawyers: Badinter for the law,” referring to Robert Badinter, the upright jurist who abolished the death penalty in France, “and Dumas for everything that’s twisted.”

…

But like Mr. Mitterrand, Mr. Dumas was skeptical of many aspects of European integration. He failed to foresee the rapid collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, believed in the fixed European relationships and borders established after World War II and, for much of his life, harbored hostility for Germany and Germans.
He traced this sentiment to what he often said was the pivotal event of his life: the firing-squad shooting of his father, a member of the Resistance, by the Germans on March 26, 1944, when Mr. Dumas was 21 and himself in the French underground.

…

He served as foreign minister until 1993. Two years later, Mr. Mitterrand appointed him to the Constitutional Council, the summit of a French political career.
In the meantime he had become involved with Ms. Deviers-Joncour, whom the state oil company, Elf-Aquitaine, hoping to curry favor with Mr. Dumas, had hired as a “lobbyist,” showering her with favors to the tune of nearly $9 million, including a luxurious Left Bank apartment. She used the money to give Mr. Dumas valuable ancient artifacts, expensive meals and the custom Berluti shoes, among other things.
Mr. Dumas later suggested that he was unclear about the source of all this spending. That argument was eventually adopted by an appeals court, which threw out his six-month prison sentence in 2003, to the outrage of critics across the political spectrum, who saw France’s protective old-boy network in action.

Finally, William L. Calley Jr.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Second Lieutenant Calley, a 24-year-old platoon leader who had been in Vietnam just three months, led about 100 men of Charlie Company into My Lai 4, an inland hamlet about halfway up the east coast of South Vietnam. The Americans moved in under ambiguous orders, suggesting to some that anyone found in the hamlet, even women and children, might be Vietcong enemies.
While they met no resistance, the Americans swept in shooting. Over the next few hours, horrors unfolded. Witnesses said victims were rousted from huts, herded into an irrigation ditch or the village center and shot.
Villagers who refused to come out were killed in their huts by hand grenades or bursts of gunfire. Others were shot as they emerged from hiding places. Infants and children were bayoneted and shot, and an unknown number of females were raped and shot. A military photographer took pictures.
Although Lieutenant Calley’s immediate superiors knew generally what had happened, the atrocity was covered up in military reports, which called it a successful search-and-destroy mission. It took nearly a year and a half — and persistent efforts by a few soldiers and an independent investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his disclosures — for investigations to grind forward and the story to reach a stunned world.

…

On Sept. 6, 1969, he was charged with the mass murder of civilians at My Lai. He was one of 25 people charged in the case, including two generals accused of misconduct. But charges against the generals were dropped, as were those against 10 other officers and seven enlisted men accused of murder or suppression of evidence. Six men were court-martialed, but all except Lieutenant Calley were acquitted, among them Capt. Ernest Medina, the company commander.
Lieutenant Calley’s trial, in Fort Benning, Ga., opened in November 1970. He was accused of personally killing 102 civilians. Many soldiers refused to testify. But eight witnesses, in often shockingly graphic testimony, said the lieutenant had herded sobbing, cowering villagers into a ditch and the hamlet center and shot them in bunches, and had ordered his troops to kill as well.
The number of victims at My Lai was never fixed precisely; the Army did not count the bodies. The official American estimate was 347, but a Vietnamese memorial at the site lists 504 names, with ages ranging from 1 to 82.
Lieutenant Calley, in three days of testimony, expressed no remorse and insisted that he had only followed orders by Captain Medina to kill all the villagers, quoting him as saying that everyone in the village was “the enemy.” The captain denied saying that, insisting that he had meant his order to apply only to enemy soldiers.
In March 1971, Lieutenant Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of “not less than” 22 Vietnamese and sentenced to life in prison. Americans, long divided over Vietnam, were overwhelmingly outraged, calling him a scapegoat for a long chain of command that had gone unpunished. Many blamed the war itself, or said the lieutenant was only doing his duty.

…

Days after the sentencing, President Richard M. Nixon spared the lieutenant from prison, allowing him to remain in his bachelor apartment at Fort Benning pending appeals. In an ensuing roller-coaster of legal maneuvers, the fort’s commanding general reduced the life term to 20 years, and Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway cut it to 10 years, saying that Mr. Calley would be paroled after only one-third of that term.
In 1974, a federal judge in Georgia, J. Robert Elliott, overturned the conviction, saying Mr. Calley had been denied a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity. The Army appealed, and Mr. Calley was confined to barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for three months. He was then released on bail and never returned to custody.
In 1975, a federal appeals court in New Orleans reversed Judge Elliott and reinstated the conviction. And in 1976, the United States Supreme Court refused to review the case, letting the conviction stand and closing a bitter chapter of national history. By then, Mr. Calley had qualified for parole. His life term had been whittled down to slightly more than three years of house arrest and barracks confinement, which had ended in 1974.

WP (archived).

Posted in Admin, Books, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 24, 2024.

Wednesday, July 24th, 2024

John Mayall, massively influential British bluesman. NYT (archived).

Though he played piano, organ, guitar and harmonica and sang lead vocals in his own bands with a high, reedy tenor, Mr. Mayall earned his reputation as “the godfather of British blues” not for his own playing or singing but for recruiting and polishing the talents of one gifted young lead guitarist after another.
In his most fertile period, between 1965 and 1969, those budding stars included Eric Clapton, who left to form the band Cream and eventually became a hugely successful solo artist; Peter Green, who left to found Fleetwood Mac; and Mick Taylor, who was snatched from the Mayall band by the Rolling Stones.
A more complete list of the alumni of Mr. Mayall’s band of that era, known as the Bluesbreakers, reads like a Who’s Who of British pop royalty. The drummer Mick Fleetwood and the bassist John McVie were also founding members of Fleetwood Mac. The bassist Jack Bruce joined Mr. Clapton in Cream. The bassist Andy Fraser was an original member of Free. Aynsley Dunbar would go on to play drums for Frank Zappa, Journey and Jefferson Starship.

As you know, Bob, music – especially music of this period – is outside of my area of competence, so I am going to defer to valued commenter pigpen51 for additional comment on Mr. Mayall and his legacy.

Also outside of my area of competence (Hello, pigpen51! Really, I should give you posting privileges here.): Duke Fakir, of the Four Tops.

His family said in a statement that the cause was heart failure.

“Heart failure,” MacAdoo said in an almost sorrowful tone.
“Heart seizure,” Haere said automatically.
“What’s the difference?”
‘Everyone dies of heart failure.”

–Ross Thomas, Missionary Stew

Lewis H. Lapham, of “Harper’s Magazine” and “Lapham’s Quarterly”.

This might just be me, and I may very well be speaking ill of the dead. But when I see someone described as a “scholarly patrician”, I mentally translate that to: someone who thinks they are better and smarter than you are, therefore they know better than you how to run your life, and believe the government should enforce their point of view on you.

Finally, one I’ve been holding for a couple of days and want to get in: Robert L. Allen, “writer, activist and academic”. I knew of Mr. Allen because he wrote the book on “The Port Chicago Mutiny“, which was proceeded by the Port Chicago explosion.

There were a large number of black soldiers stationed at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, loading and unloading ammunition. Safety procedures may not have been what they should have been. On July 17, 1944, the E.A. Bryan exploded during the loading process. It was a massive explosion which destroyed everything within 1,000 feet, including another ship. 320 people died, many of them black sailors.

White officers were given leave to recover, but Black sailors were soon ordered to continue their dangerous work loading munitions at a nearby port. They did not know why the ships had exploded — a cause has never been determined — and 258 refused to keep working, leading an admiral to threaten to execute them by firing squad, Mr. Allen said.

…

Of the 258 men, 208 returned to work, but they were still court-martialed for disobeying orders. The 50 others, in a summary court-martial, were convicted of conspiracy to commit mutiny and sentenced to eight to 15 years of confinement.

Interestingly, Mr. Allen’s death apparently prompted the Navy to exonerate all the sailors last week.

“The secretary of the Navy called to offer condolences,” Ms. Carter said in an interview, referring to Carlos Del Toro. “And he said, ‘I’m going to do more than that — I’m going to exonerate these sailors.’”

I haven’t read Mr. Allen’s book, though I kind of want to. I know about the book and the incident from a long piece John Marr wrote in the late and very much missed “Murder Can Be Fun” zine (issue #11).

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

Sunday is my gun book day…

Sunday, July 21st, 2024

…and given the breaking news today, I suspect it’s going to be a manic Monday. (Also, I have to go to the eye doctor tomorrow.) So how about a little distraction?

(more…)

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, O'Connor | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 18, 2024.

Thursday, July 18th, 2024

Robert Pearson, hair stylist turned…barbecue chef.

He was pretty successful as a stylist, working with Vidal Sassoon and Paul Mitchell, as well as setting up a chain of salons in Bloomingdale’s.

By the end of the 1970s, Mr. Pearson was growing tired of the stylist’s life, in particular the long trips around the country to train stylists and speak at industry conventions. He did enjoy visits to one city, though: Lubbock, where he first encountered Texas-style barbecue.

He took up Texas-style barbecue seriously.

He purchased a $13,000 custom-made pit from Texas. He bought mesquite wood at $800 a cord, which he blended with local green oak (at just $110 a cord); after much experimentation, he found that a one-to-four ratio created the right balance of smoke from the mesquite and moisture from the oak to fuel the six- to 18-hour fires he needed to cook his meats.
Mr. Pearson was a purist: He insisted on wood, and only wood, as fuel. He cooked low and very, very slow. He eschewed rubs and sauces, letting flavor emerge from the meat and smoke. He specialized in brisket, the lodestar of Texas barbecue, but also offered half chickens, pork shoulder and the occasional exotic fare, like alligator, elk loin and rattlesnake.

His first location was in Connecticut, just off of I-95. Later on, he moved it to Queens.

After establishing himself in Queens, Mr. Pearson tried to open an outlet in Manhattan, which he supplied with food cooked in Queens. But he found that the cooked meat lost its zing during the drive across the East River, and in any case the space caught fire a few days after opening.
In the late 1990s, he stepped back from his restaurant, not long before it lost its lease under pressure from neighbors who, despite loving his food, were less enamored with its constant, thick smoke.

…

While many young pit masters looked to Mr. Pearson as a mentor, few chose to follow his near-religious devotion to an austere interpretation of Texas barbecue, and in particular his aversion to sauce.
Conceding to consumer tastes, he did offer a quartet of sauces as an accompaniment: mild, medium, “madness” and “mean,” which he said, with some disdain, was a further concession to “macho” diners who insisted that real barbecue had to be wet and spicy. Mean, made with a pile of Szechuan peppercorns, gave them what they wanted, and more.
“When I’m making that sauce at the store, I’ve got to make sure it’s very quiet, and nobody else is around,” he told Newsday. “It’s very volatile. Mean is not really meant for human consumption.”

Peter Buxtun, one of the people responsible for exposing the Tuskegee Study.

For the benefit of my younger readers:

Officially known as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, the research began in 1932 with the recruiting of about 400 poor, undereducated Black men in Macon County, Ala., whose seat is Tuskegee. All had been found to have syphilis.
The infected men were deceptively told that they had “bad blood,” not a sexually communicable disease that could lead to blindness, heart injury and death. The researchers wanted to use them as human guinea pigs, without their informed consent, to study the ravages of syphilis.
Even after penicillin was found in the 1940s to be an effective cure for syphilis, the men were not offered treatment. In one sample of 92 deceased men from the study, 30 percent were found to have died of syphilis complications.

…

But in the early 1970s, after Mr. Buxtun had left the health service for law school, he turned his files over to reporters for The Associated Press. An article by Jean Heller, an A.P. investigative reporter, ran on front pages around the country, including in The New York Times on July 26, 1972.
“All hell broke loose,” said Susan M. Reverby, the author of “Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy.”

…

Hearings called by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, at which Mr. Buxtun testified, led to the termination of the study. A class-action lawsuit on behalf of survivors and descendants was settled for $10 million. In 1997, President Bill Clinton invited surviving Tuskegee subjects to the White House, where he offered a formal apology and called the government’s actions over four decades “shameful” and “clearly racist.”

I like this quote:

Dr. Reverby, who got to know Mr. Buxtun, described him as a political libertarian and National Rifle Association member who was angry that the health agency where he worked, tracing people with sexually transmitted diseases, was denying treatment to the Alabama men.
“He thought it was outrageous and wrong,” she said, adding, “He was really a strong-willed, irascible guy.”

Posted in Beef, Food, History, Obits | Comments Closed

And speaking of holidays…

Friday, July 12th, 2024

…happy 45th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night!

For those of my readers who may be unfamiliar with what is (in my humble opinion) one of the three great events in sports history, here’s a “game story” from SABR.

Among those taking to the field was 21-year-old aspiring actor Michael Clarke Duncan; during the melee, Duncan slid into third base, had a silver belt buckle stolen, and went home with a bat from the dugout.

You know, I’m not sure I would consider a bat to be a good trade for a silver belt buckle. Also, how do you steal a belt buckle? Unless you’re Apollo Robbins…

Here’s a 25th anniversary documentary that I don’t think I’ve linked to before:

And a more recent 45th anniversary compilation:

Finally, Steve Dahl’s “Do You Think I’m Disco?”:

As someone with no musical talent at all, I will leave it to my loyal readers to judge the quality of this song.

Posted in History, Sports | 1 Comment »

Brief historical note, suitable for use in schools.

Thursday, July 11th, 2024

Today is the 220th anniversary of the Burr-Hamilton duel.

Here’s a fairly good article about the pistols.

Fun fact that I did not know until a few days ago, when I went looking for the video online: Michael Bay directed this commercial.

Posted in Guns, History, TV | Comments Closed

Buster Keaton, call your office, please.

Thursday, July 4th, 2024

Private Philip G. Shadrach (US Army) and Private George D. Wilson (US Army) were awarded the Medal of Honor on Wednesday.

The awards were posthumous, as the action they were involved in took place about 162 years ago.

Private Shadrach and Private Wilson were involved in the Great Locomotive Chase.

In the spring of 1862, a small group of Union Army saboteurs came up with a daring idea to cut off Confederate supply lines near Chattanooga by stealing a train, tearing up railroad tracks, burning bridges and cutting down telegraph wires — which would have denied means of travel and communication to enemy forces in the area.
Dressed in plain clothes, they launched their mission in April, sneaking behind enemy lines in Georgia, taking over a locomotive near Marietta and wreaking havoc for seven hours along miles of railway in an effort to help take the battle deep into Tennessee.But the stolen train, called “the General,” ran out of fuel 18 miles from Chattanooga, according to a U.S. Army account of the heist, which became known as the Great Locomotive Chase. The Union soldiers and civilians who took part in the mission fled, but all were captured after less than two weeks on the run.

…

In 1863, six survivors of the raid were the first American soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest decoration for valor in combat, which had been authorized by President Abraham Lincoln the year before.
In all, 19 of the men received the Medal of Honor in the years that followed. But two soldiers who were executed by Confederates soon after the mission were never recognized.

Private Shadrach and Private Wilson were those two soldiers.

Private Shadrach’s page at the Congressional Medal of Honor Society website. The citation is listed as “coming soon”.

Private Wilson’s page at the Congressional Medal of Honor Society website. Ditto on the citation.

Posted in Heroism, History | Comments Closed

Man, we are just jam-packed with holidays, aren’t we?

Monday, July 1st, 2024

Happy Bobby Bonilla Day, one and all!

Posted in History, Sports | Comments Closed

Now that I’m done with my obligations for the day…

Friday, June 28th, 2024

…I’m going to sit back with a large knock of bourbon and some ginger ale (real ginger ale, not diet: Drink Canada Dry, or die trying), and drink a toast to guffaw and Gavrilo Princip Day!

I suppose, technically, it would be more fitting to take a shot. But I have a bottle around the house that I wanted to finish up.

Posted in History | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: June 28, 2024.

Friday, June 28th, 2024

“Kinky” Friedman followup: NYT. THR.

How about a little music?

Edited to add: Reason tribute. Noted here for two reasons:

1. Jesse Walker mentions another of my favorite Kinky songs that I decided not to use, but it was a close decision: “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You”.

2. I had always associated Kinky with the “dropped acid and listened to Shiva’s Headband at the Armadillo World Headquarters” crowd, so this is an interesting quote:

He even sneered at the Armadillo World Headquarters, the town’s legendary music venue: “A lot of people think it’s a very warm place, but to me it’s an airplane hangar.”

This is pushing the definition of an “obit” just a bit, but Will Dabbs, MD, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite modern gun writers, has a nice tribute up to Donald Sutherland.

More specifically, it is a tribute to Donald Sutherland’s role as “Oddball” in “Kelly’s Heroes”.

I’ve seen “Kelly’s Heroes”, but when I was a child, on the late night movies. (Kids, ask your parents about late night movies on TV.) I think the Saturday Movie Conspiracy is going to be re-watching it in the fairly near future. And I had not heard the story about the grenades.

Posted in Guns, History, Movies, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

This is a knife…

Friday, June 28th, 2024

A while back, some jerk said:

You know, I wonder if you could forge a knife out of Battleship Texas steel…probably, if you could get enough of it from the Foundation.

We have our answer: yes, you can.

And the Battleship Texas Foundation is auctioning them off, along with other items made from salvaged battleship materials.

The auction opens tomorrow, though some things have already sold at the “Buy It Now” price. Yes, it is pricy stuff, but it is also for (what I think is) a good cause.

And even if you don’t buy anything from the auction, there’s a lot of artists participating that might be worth looking into.

Posted in History, Knives | Comments Closed

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