Archive for the ‘History’ Category

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Obit watch: May 13, 2023.

Saturday, May 13th, 2023

Hodding Carter III, journalist and aide to Jimmy Carter.

The son of the journalist Hodding Carter Jr., who won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials calling for racial moderation in the old segregated South, Hodding Carter III succeeded his father as editor and publisher of The Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, and as a voice of conscience in a state torn by violence and social change during the struggles of the civil rights era.
But after 5,000 editorials and years of journalistic trench warfare, Mr. Carter took his fight into politics.

…

In the 1976 presidential campaign, Mr. Carter helped engineer a narrow victory in Mississippi for Jimmy Carter, who was no relation, and was rewarded with an appointment as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. As chief spokesman for the State Department, he delivered nuanced statements on foreign policy with candor and wit, and developed a good if sometimes acerbic rapport with the diplomatic press corps.
He became the national face of the Carter administration during the Iranian hostage crisis, which broke on Nov. 4, 1979, when militants took over the United States Embassy in Tehran and seized 52 Americans. Their captivity lasted 444 days — virtually the remainder of President Carter’s single term in office, a tenure ended by a frustrated electorate that chose Ronald Reagan for president in 1980.

…

Colleagues in government and the news media gave Mr. Carter high marks for fielding tough questions on what was known, and not known, of the fate of the Americans. Aside from one episode in which he threw a rubber chicken at a persistent questioner, he coolly conveyed at press briefings the sensitivity of the diplomatic crisis.

I was alive and around during that time, but I do not recall the rubber chicken thing…

Posted in History, Media, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obligatory royals post.

Monday, May 8th, 2023

As my mother likes to say, “I stopped caring about the British royal family in 1776.”

However, this Substack piece mildly amused me. My favorite part:

Perhaps the most scandalous coronation took place at the newly completed St Paul’s Cathedral in February 1308. The young queen, Isabella, was the 12-year-old daughter of France’s King Philippe Le Bel, and had inherited her father’s good looks, with thick blonde hair and large blue, unblinking eyes. Her husband, Edward II, was a somewhat boneheaded man of 24 years whose idea of entertainment was watching court fools fall off tables.
It was a fairy tale coronation for the young girl, apart from a plaster wall collapsing, bringing down the high altar and killing a member of the audience, and the fact that her husband was gay and spent the afternoon fondling his lover Piers Gaveston, while ignoring her. Isabella’s two uncles, who had made the trip from France, were furious at the behaviour of their new English in-law, though perhaps not surprised.

Other than that, how was the coronation, Queen Isabella?

(Those with a historical bent may recall that Edward II ended up dying in prison: the unproven legend is that he was murdered by having a red-hot poker shoved up his neither regions.)

Posted in History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 28, 2023.

Friday, April 28th, 2023

As promised, NYT obit for Jerry Springer.

In 2008, some students objected when Mr. Springer was invited to give the commencement address at Northwestern.
“To the students who invited me — thank you,” he said. “I am honored. To the students who object to my presence — well, you’ve got a point. I, too, would’ve chosen someone else.”

Massad Ayoob has posted an obit for Bart Skelton on his blog. This is the only source I’ve found that I can link.

Carolyn Bryant Donham.

She was working in her husband’s general store on Aug. 24, 1955. She was white, married, and 21 years old. Her husband was a trucker who was working that day.

A group of black teenagers came to the store. Mrs. Bryant (at the time) claimed that one of the teenagers, a 14-year old boy, “made a sexually suggestive remark to her, grabbed her roughly by the waist and let loose a wolf whistle.”

That boy was Emmett Till.

He was killed four days later. Mr. Bryant and his half-brother were charged with the murder, but were acquitted.

The murder of Emmett Till was a watershed in United States race relations. Coverage of the killing and its aftermath, including a widely disseminated photograph of Till’s brutalized body at his open-casket funeral, inspired anguish and outrage, helped propel the modern civil rights movement and ultimately contributed to the demise of Jim Crow.

Posted in Guns, History, Law, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 26, 2023.

Wednesday, April 26th, 2023

NYT obit for Ken Potts, U.S.S. Arizona survivor. I think this one is a little better than the NYPost one I linked a few days ago.

I feel like I’m not giving Mr. Potts as much attention as I should, but since I posted the longer obit the other day, I also feel like this is mostly supplemental.

I am seeing reports that Bart Skelton, gun writer and son of Skeeter Skelton, has passed away. I don’t have anything I can link to at this time, but I’ll update if I do find something.

Alton H. Maddox Jr. has passed.

Mr. Maddox, along with C. Vernon Mason and the Rev. Al Sharpton, were the pivotal figures in the Tawana Brawley kidnapping and rape hoax.

Ms. Brawley was a few weeks shy of her 16th birthday when, in late November 1987, she cast herself as a victim of rank depravity: She, an African American teenager, had been abducted, she said, and held for four days near her home in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., a Dutchess County town about 60 miles north of New York City. She said she was sexually assaulted by a half-dozen white men.
Indeed, she was found in appalling condition. She lay dazed in a trash bag with some of her hair chopped off, feces smeared on her and “KKK” and a racial epithet written in charcoal on her body. Her assailants, Ms. Brawley said, included law enforcement officials.

…

Their insults were nonstop, their allegations outlandish. The Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia and the Irish Republican Army were somehow all involved, they said. They accused the state’s attorney general, Robert Abrams, who led a seven-month grand jury inquiry into the Brawley matter, of having masturbated over a photo of her.
Mr. Maddox, who was given to referring to whites as “crackers,” went on later to call New York “the Mississippi of the ’90s” and New York’s governor at the time, Mario M. Cuomo, “the George Wallace of the ’90s.”

…

But in October 1988, the grand jury concluded in a 170-page report that Ms. Brawley had not come anywhere near the truth, dismissing her account as fiction. There was no evidence of sexual assault, it said; she had smeared herself with feces, written the racial slurs herself and faked being in a daze. Her motive was not made clear, but a boyfriend said later that she had wanted to avoid the wrath of her stepfather for having stayed out late.
For Mr. Maddox, the consequences were severe. In May 1990, after he refused to respond to charges of misconduct in the Brawley case, appellate judges in Brooklyn suspended his law license. He never bothered to seriously try getting it back. “The white man thought that after 13 years I’d be so much on my knees,” he said in 2003. “They don’t know me.”
There was also a price to pay in dollars. Steven Pagones, a Dutchess County prosecutor accused by the Brawley team of having assaulted her, won a defamation suit against Messrs. Sharpton, Maddox and Mason. Mr. Maddox was held personally liable for $97,000, a penalty that he paid with help from benefactors.
None of the three apologized for their roles in the hoax. Mr. Sharpton became a national figure with a television program. Mr. Mason, who was disbarred in 1995, became an ordained minister. And Mr. Maddox, who had moved to New York from Georgia in 1973, wrote columns for The Amsterdam News, offered radio commentary and for a while led a group called the United African Movement.

Posted in Guns, Heroism, History, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 24, 2023.

Monday, April 24th, 2023

I got a little behind while I was on vacation, so there’s a lot of catch-up here.

Ken Potts (USN – ret.) has passed away at the age of 102.

Mr. Potts was one of the two remaining survivors of the USS Arizona.

He was working as a crane operator shuttling supplies to the Arizona the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Pearl Harbor attack happened, according to a 2021 article by the Utah National Guard.
In a 2020 oral history interview with the American Veterans Center, Potts said a loudspeaker ordered sailors back to their ships so he got on a boat.
“When I got back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was afire,” He said in the interview. “The oil had leaked out and caught on fire and was burning.”
Dozens of ships either sank, capsized, or were damaged in the bombing of the Hawaii naval base, which catapulted the U.S. into World War II.
Sailors were tossed or forced to jump into the oily muck below, and Potts and his fellow sailors pulled some to safety in their boat.

This is the oral history referenced above:

USSArizona.org.

Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries.

Bud Shuster (R – Pennsylvania).

During his 28 years in Congress, including three terms as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Mr. Shuster managed to divert a disproportionately large share of federal highway trust funds into pedestrian crossings, access roads, interchanges, buses, road widening and the Bud Shuster Highway, which links State College, Altoona and the Pennsylvania Turnpike in southern Pennsylvania.
By 1991, he had perfected the earmarking of federal funds to his district so successfully that when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, was asked which state had reaped the biggest slice of the highway trust-fund pie, he replied, “The state of Altoona.”

Richard Riordan, former mayor of Los Angeles.

Posted in California Über Alles, Heroism, History, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 19, 2023.

Wednesday, April 19th, 2023

Tiger McKee, noted firearms trainer. American Handgunner.

I never had the pleasure of taking a course from Mr. McKee, but I did read his AH columns and The Book of Two Guns: The Martial Art of the 1911 Pistol and AR Carbine. (Amazon says I bought that in 2008. Wow.) And I think I knew that he was doing custom Smith and Wessons, but those were probably out of my price range.

This is a bad loss. And 61 seems a lot closer these days.

(Hattip to pigpen51 on this.)

Carol Locatell, actress. Other credits include “M*A*S*H”, “The Pretender”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”…

…and “Mannix” (“Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6.)

Almost a month ago, I posted an obit Lawrence sent me for Gloria Dea. Yesterday, the paper of record ran their own obit.

One of Ms. Dea’s last movie credits was in Ed Wood’s notoriously bad “Plan 9 From Outer Space” in 1957. She later sold insurance and then cars before settling back in Las Vegas.

IMDB. She’s credited as “Girl”.

Freddie Scappaticci.

During the Troubles (that is, the conflict in Northern Ireland), the British Army had a deep cover mole known as “Stakeknife”.

Stakeknife had penetrated the heart of the I.R.A.’s internal security unit, known as the Nutting Squad, a macabre sobriquet evoking the unit’s standard operating procedure — the execution of accused informers with two bullets to the “nut,” or head. Bodies were usually then dumped.

Mr. Scappaticci led that unit.

He was accused of overseeing the torture and killing of more than 30 suspected informers. If, at the same time, he was the British mole called Stakeknife, then he was a paid British agent killing fellow British agents.

There are a lot of people who believe he was Stakeknife. He consistently denied it.

Mr. Scappaticci may well have taken some of his secrets to his grave, shielding government intelligence and military handlers from one of the central moral conundrums of the case: Did the British state collude in the killings in order to protect Stakeknife’s identity?
British officials have described Stakeknife as the “golden egg” and “the jewel in the crown” of their infiltration of the I.R.A. They have said that intelligence he delivered alerted them to myriad I.R.A. operations, saving hundreds of lives.

…

In 2003, several British newspapers identified Stakeknife as Mr. Scappaticci. He denied the accusations publicly but then dropped out of sight. Several news reports said the British authorities had spirited him away, first to the Italian town of Cassino and then to a witness protection program in Britain.

There is an inquiry going on into Stakeknife. It’s been going on since 2016.

Mr. Boutcher, the head of the Stakeknife inquiry, promised on April 11 that investigators would publish an interim report on their findings this year. But families of victims greeted the news with skepticism.

Wikipedia entry. Why am I reminded of Whitey Bulger?

Posted in 1911, 1970s, Books, Guns, History, Law, Magic, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Smith and Wesson, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 10, 2023.

Monday, April 10th, 2023

NYT obit for Craig Breedlove.

Michael Lerner, actor. 186 credits in IMDB (counting the three upcoming), including “Mayor Ebert” in “Godzilla”, “Today’s F.B.I.”, four “Rockford Files”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Banacek”.

Francesca Cappucci. She worked for KABC-TV in LA.

Out of the blue, Quentin Tarantino named the glamorous Italian movie star wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton after her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Jacques Haitkin, cinematographer. Other credits include “Fist of the North Star”, “Team Knight Rider”, and “The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything”.

Hobie Landrith.

The Mets and the Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros), founded as 1962 National League expansion teams, began stocking their rosters in an October 1961 draft. They alternated in selecting players whom the eight N.L. teams viewed as too young, too old or too ordinary to keep.
Houston chose Eddie Bressoud, a shortstop with the San Francisco Giants, as the first pick of the draft. The Mets chose Landrith, also a Giant, as their first selection.
When reporters asked Mets Manager Casey Stengel why Landrith, 31 years old, was anointed as the first Met, he replied: “You gotta have a catcher or you’d have a lot of passed balls.”

(Side note: as best as I can tell, Eddie Bressoud is still alive at 90. He was traded to the Red Sox before he played a game with Houston, and then went from the Red Sox to the Mets.)

Landrith had a career batting average of .233 with 34 home runs and 203 runs driven in.
“I was in the major leagues more because I was a good defensive catcher, and the fact that I was good at handling pitchers,” he once told the baseball history website This Great Game. “I always thought I was a fairly decent hitter, but I realized that I wasn’t in the big leagues for my bat.”

Posted in Cars, History, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 8, 2023.

Saturday, April 8th, 2023

Today is a busy day. As it turns out, though, I have a few minutes to try and sneak some obits in.

Benjamin B. Ferencz has died at 103. The significance: he was the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials.

Fulfilling an Allied pledge to bring war criminals to justice, 13 trials were held in Nuremberg, where Nazi rallies had celebrated Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s. In the first and most important trial, held in 1945 and 1946, the International Military Tribunal convicted 24 of the Third Reich’s senior leaders, including Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor, who committed suicide on the eve of his execution, and the military commander Wilhelm Keitel, who was hanged. The chief prosecutor was Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson of the United States Supreme Court.
A dozen subsequent trials at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg put German judges, doctors, industrialists, diplomats and less senior military leaders in the dock in cases supervised by Justice Jackson’s successor, Gen. Telford Taylor. Mr. Ferencz was assigned to prosecute the notorious Einsatzgruppen case, which for its staggering volume of victims has been called the biggest murder trial in history.
It was the case against 22 Nazis, including six generals, who organized, directed and often joined roaming SS extermination squads — 3,000 killers, aided by the local police and other authorities, who rounded up and slaughtered a million specifically targeted people, or groups, in Nazi-occupied lands: the intelligentsia of every nation, political and cultural leaders, members of the nobility, clergy, teachers, Jews, Gypsies and other “undesirables.” Most were shot, others gassed in mobile vans.
They were crimes that beggar the imagination — 33,771 men, women and children shot or buried alive in the ravine near Kyiv called Babi Yar; the two-day liquidation of 25,000 Latvian Jews from Riga’s ghetto, forced to lie down in pits and shot; the spectacle of a barbarian in Lithuania who killed Jews with a crowbar while crowds cheered and an accordion played marches and anthems.
Unfolding in 1947 and 1948, the Einsatzgruppen trial was Mr. Ferencz’s first court case. But the evidence — mostly detailed records of killings kept by the Nazis themselves — was overwhelming and irrefutable.
“In this case, the defendants are not charged with sitting in an office hundreds of miles away from the slaughter,” the court said in a unanimous judgment. “These men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing and taking an active part in the bloody harvest.”
All the defendants were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Fourteen were sentenced to death and two to life in prison. Only four executions were ultimately carried out, however, which was typical of the Nuremberg trials: convictions, heavy sentences and later commutations. Analysts said leniency arose because the new realities of the Cold War with the Soviet Union meant that the Western powers needed Germany politically.

…

After earning his law degree in 1943, he enlisted in the wartime Army and became a private in an antiaircraft artillery unit. He joined the Normandy invasion in 1944 and fought across France and Germany. In 1945, his legal training and war-crimes expertise were recognized by the Army, and he was assigned to General Patton’s Third Army headquarters and then to investigate newly liberated concentration camps for evidence of war crimes.
What he witnessed was seared into memory. At Buchenwald, he said, “I saw crematoria still going. The bodies starved, lying dying, on the ground. I’ve seen the horrors of war more than can be adequately described.”
At Mauthausen, he found incriminating ledgers kept by the Nazi commandant on the number and manner of prisoners killed each day, on starvation rations and on horrific conditions in the lice-infested barracks. Sergeant Ferencz mustered out of the Army in Germany late in 1945.

I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere, or I would have been on it like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation. But Lawrence sent over an obit from Road and Track for Craig Breedlove, land speed record setter.

In a three-year span from 1963 through 1965, Breedlove’s successive conquering of the 400-, 500-, and 600-mph barriers made him a household name. Blessed with the looks of a movie star, his LSR exploits caught the attention of Hollywood and New York where television appearances and cover features in sports and lifestyle magazines and routine newspaper coverage brought him the same kind of fame that elevated fellow racers Dan Gurney, A.J. Foyt, and Mario Andretti to national acclaim.

…

Along with Walt and Art Arfons, Gary Gabelich, and other domestic land-speed heroes and record-setters, Breedlove took pride in defending America’s ownership of all major LSR speed titles. Breedlove’s 600.601-mph blast stood until 1970 when Gabelich’s Blue Flame moved the new standard out to 622.407 mph. As the 1970s beckoned, the country’s fascination with land-speed daredevils started to wane, but that didn’t stop England’s Richard Noble from chasing history at Bonneville in 1983.

Harry Lorayne, memory expert.

Fleet of mind and fleet of mouth, Mr. Lorayne was a sought-after guest on television shows and a particular favorite of Johnny Carson’s, appearing on “The Tonight Show” some two dozen times.
Mr. Lorayne had begun his professional life as a sleight-of-hand artist and well into old age was considered one of the foremost card magicians in the country. As both magician and mnemonist, he was a direct, gleeful scion of the 19th-century midway pitchman and the 20th-century borscht belt tummler.
By the 1960s, Mr. Lorayne was best known for holding audiences rapt with feats of memory that bordered on the elephantine. Such feats were born, he explained in interviews and in his many books, of a system of learned associations — call them surrealist visual puns — that seemed equal parts Ivan Pavlov and Salvador Dalí.
Mr. Lorayne demonstrated his act on the night of July 23, 1958, when, in his first big break, he appeared on the TV game show “I’ve Got a Secret.”
While the host, Garry Moore, was introducing members of the show’s panel, Mr. Lorayne was at work in the studio audience, soliciting the names of its members.He was then called onstage. Mr. Moore asked the audience members who had given Mr. Lorayne their names to stand. Hundreds did.
“That’s Mr. Saar,” Mr. Lorayne began, pointing to a man in the balcony. (The transcriptions here are phonetic.)
“Mr. Stinson,” he continued in his rapid-fire New Yorkese, gathering speed. “Miss Graf. Mrs. Graf. Miss Finkelstein. If I can see correctly, I believe that’s the Harpin family: Mr. and Mrs. Harpin; there was Dorothy Harpin and Esther Harpin. Mrs. Pollock. And way in the corner — it’s a little dark there — but I believe that’s Mrs. Stern.”
And so it went, through scores of names, each impeccably recalled.

…

Absent the time constraints of television, Mr. Lorayne often said, he could handily memorize the names of 500, or even a thousand, people in a single outing. Over the years, he said, he had met and recalled the names of more than 20 million people.
To naysayers who contended that he routinely seeded his audiences with friends, Mr. Lorayne’s reply was unimpeachable: “Who’s got 500 friends?”

…

At the height of his renown, Mr. Lorayne traveled the country demonstrating his prowess on theater stages, at trade shows and in corporate training seminars.
During the 1960s, he ran a memory-training school in New York. In later years, he starred in TV infomercials for his home memory-improvement system. His scores of books were translated into many languages.

Maybe this is a silly thought, but I like to think of Mr. Lorayne pulling up a chair and joining the conversation at the table with Ricky Jay, Harry Houdini, and all the other greats.

Ethan Boyes, cyclist. He was 44.

According to USA Cycling, Mr. Boyes was the reigning masters track world champion in the men’s 40-44 age group for the time trial and sprint events, and he held several records in his age group, including from a flying start race (when cyclists start already in motion as opposed to from a standstill) in Aguascalientes, Mexico, in 2018, at a high-altitude track.

He was struck by a car and killed while riding in San Francisco. (I apologize for using the NYT obit, but the SF papers are virtually unlinkable without a subscription.)

For the record: Bill Butler and Nora Forster.

The Hello Deli. At least in current form.

“Dave always joked that whenever they were out of ideas, they’d come to the deli,” he said.

Posted in Cycling, History, Magic, Nazis, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 25, 2023.

Saturday, March 25th, 2023

Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel and the “Moore” in “Moore’s Law”.

In 1965, in what became known as Moore’s Law, he predicted that the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip would double at regular intervals for the foreseeable future, thus increasing the data-processing power of computers exponentially.
He added two corollaries later: The evolving technology would make computers more and more expensive to build, yet consumers would be charged less and less for them because so many would be sold. Moore’s Law held up for decades.

…

In interviews, Mr. Moore was characteristically humble about his achievements, particularly the technical advances that Moore’s Law made possible.
“What I could see was that semiconductor devices were the way electronics were going to become cheap. That was the message I was trying to get across,” he told the journalist Michael Malone in 2000. “It turned out to be an amazingly precise prediction — a lot more precise than I ever imagined it would be.”
Not only was Mr. Moore predicting that electronics would become much cheaper over time, as the industry shifted from away from discrete transistors and tubes to silicon microchips, but over the years his prediction proved so reliable that technology firms based their product strategy on the assumption that Moore’s Law would hold.

…

As his wealth grew, Mr. Moore also became a major figure in philanthropy. In 2001, he and his wife created the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with a donation of 175 million Intel shares. In 2001, they donated $600 million to the California Institute of Technology, the largest single gift to an institution of higher learning at the time. The foundation’s assets currently exceed $8 billion and it has given away more than $5 billion since its founding.

I believe he was the last surviving member of “the traitorous eight”, the men who defected from William Shockley and founded the hugely influential Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.

In the 1960s, when Mr. Moore began in electronics, a single silicon transistor sold for $150. Later, $10 would buy more than 100 million transistors. Mr. Moore once wrote that if cars advanced as quickly as computers, “they would get 100,000 miles to the gallon and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls-Royce than park it. (Cars would also be a half an inch long.)”

…

In 2014, Forbes estimated Mr. Moore’s net worth at $7 billion. Yet he remained unprepossessing throughout his life, preferring tattered shirts and khakis to tailored suits. He shopped at Costco and kept a collection of fly lures and fishing reels on his office desk.

Greg Wittine.

His death was not widely noted; it had been decades since Mr. Wittine’s name appeared in the news, and interviews with local and national Scouting representatives indicated that he had largely fallen out of the organization’s institutional memory. But for a brief period, in the spring of 1978, Mr. Wittine enjoyed the status of a national hero.

Mr. Wittine was a Boy Scout. He also had cerebral palsy. He busted his hind end to earn Eagle Scout rank:

Over nearly a decade, he earned merit badges in subjects like fire safety and wildlife. To get his hiking badge, he crawled down a wooded trail for a mile until his knees were too bruised and bloody for him to go on, at which point he wheeled himself another nine miles.

By 1978, he had all the required badges. But the Boy Scouts wouldn’t let him advance to Eagle because he was 23 at the time, and the Scouts required that you be under 18.

His scoutmaster, Richard Golden, wrote letters to local newspapers, and in late March of that year journalists began relating Mr. Wittine’s story. The two men were soon on “Good Morning America,” Mr. Wittine pointing at his word board and Mr. Golden spelling out the letters.
The public “bombarded” the Boy Scouts of America with letters and phone calls, The Times reported. In a spontaneous outburst of shared sentiment, former scouts throughout the nation rooted around in their attics, found their Eagle medals and mailed them to Mr. Wittine.
“Allow me to share my medal with you,” a Florida man wrote in a handwritten letter. “It is old and tarnished, awarded fifteen years ago, but the cherished memories are as fresh and exciting as if it were yesterday.”
Adding to the pressure on the Boy Scouts of America, Mr. Golden issued a warning: He and Mr. Wittine would appear at a national Scouting conference soon to be held in Phoenix, even though they had not yet been invited. “We may go anyway, not only to argue Greg’s case but that of Scouting’s approach to all handicapped persons,” Mr. Golden told The Associated Press.
Days after that interview, on May 5, the Boy Scouts issued a news release. The first sentence read, “The Boy Scouts of America has changed its regulations, and the way is now clear for 23-year-old Scout Gregory Wittine of Roosevelt, N.Y., to become an Eagle Scout.”
It was a major change in policy, dropping “all age restrictions” for “severely handicapped” scouts while still requiring that they earn the same badges as other Eagle Scouts. And it brought Mr. Wittine a flood of more attention.

…

The Boy Scouts of America does not track how many Eagle Scouts have been able to earn their rank after age 18 because of a disability, but in an interview, Mike Matzinger, a national leader of the organization with knowledge about scouts who have disabilities, estimated the number to be in the tens of thousands.
Ben Burns has been the scoutmaster of a troop of disabled scouts in Dallas since 2010. In an interview, he said that the possibility of becoming an Eagle Scout gave his troop members a sense of mission, and that six of them — all over the age of 18, including his son Tim — had attained the rank.
Tim has Down syndrome and struggles to talk. But at his Eagle Scout ceremony in 2021, he gave a speech.
“That’s been the biggest moment in his life, because he was the center of attention, and it was all about him,” Mr. Burns said. “I’m not sure what he’d be doing with his life if he didn’t have Boy Scouts.”
Mr. Burns said that the approach Mr. Wittine conceived — working extremely hard to obtain badges that might seem out of reach, but getting ample time to do so — struck him as ideal. His scouts, who have a wide range of disabilities, pitch their own tents, use hand saws and learn how to climb back into sailboats after they capsize.
“When our boys earn it, they earn it,” he said.

Posted in Geek, History, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 20, 2023.

Monday, March 20th, 2023

Simone Segouin. She was 97.

She was a French resistance fighter as a teenager.

Given false papers saying she was Nicole Minet, of Dunkirk, Ms. Segouin ferried messages and weapons among members of the local partisan network on a bicycle she had stolen from a German. Lt. Boursier said he taught her how to use submachine guns, rifles and handguns. According to President Macron’s office, she also helped the partisans sabotage German troop trains.

She was also the subject of a “Life” profile by Jack Belden:

His article, headlined “The Girl Partisan of Chartres” in the Sept. 4, 1944, issue of Life, made “Nicole” an international symbol of the French resistance. Its sub-headline — “Pretty 17-year-old Nicole tells Life’s war reporter the story of how she killed a Boche,” French slang for a German — offered a whiff of the sensational.

…

“The article gave her a larger-than-life profile,” Robert Gildea, the author of “Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of French Resistance,” wrote in an email. “Most women resisters operated in the shadow and were modest about their resistance activities.”

New York Public Library digital archive.

Lawrence sent over two interesting obits:

Gloria Dea, the first magician to perform on the Vegas Strip.

On May 14, 1941, at only 19 years old, Dea performed in the Roundup Room at the El Rancho Vegas. That made her the first magician to ever perform on Highway 91, which wouldn’t be renamed Las Vegas Boulevard for 18 more years. (At the time, only the El Rancho Vegas and Last Frontier lined the road. The Flamingo was still under construction.)
Dea performed two shows that night. The crowds went wild for her billiard-ball trick and a floating-card trick, both taught to her by her father.
“It felt good,” Dea told the R-J at her birthday bash in August. “Anytime someone likes something that you do, you feel good don’t you? Oh, yeah. I was received wonderfully. It was a great room. You had the audience seated, then floor-to-ceiling glass in the back, and on the other side of that was the swimming pool.”
“Then you were onstage, facing that. It was fancy. It was a fun place.”

Byrd Odum Holland, makeup artist and actor.

Lawrence pointed out “The Creeping Terror”. We have “Five Minutes to Live“: I bought it on a cheap gas station DVD that I couldn’t pass up because it also had “Land of the Free” (Shatner!) We haven’t watched “Five Minutes” yet, but I am trying to sell the Saturday Movie Group on it because it sounds interesting. Johnny Cash plays a psychotic killer in one of only two “theatrical film roles” he played in his career (as opposed to appearances on TV and in documentaries).

Mr. Holland’s other acting credits include “Swamp Girl” and “The Black Klansman” (1966).

NYT obit for Jim Gordon, which, while late, is better than some of the other obits I’ve seen.

Posted in History, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 11, 2023.

Saturday, March 11th, 2023

Traute Lafrenz (who also went by Traute Lafrenz Page) has passed away at 103.

She was the last surviving member of the White Rose.

The White Rose was short-lived and never counted more than a few dozen members, most of whom were young and idealistic. Ms. Lafrenz (who later in life went by the name Traute Lafrenz Page) carried political leaflets and helped the group gain access to ink, paper and envelopes to produce and disseminate its anti-Hitler tracts, and to urge Germans to turn against the Nazis.
But the response to its activities, peaceful as they were, seemed to betoken the profound intolerance displayed by the Third Reich to any hint of opposition among Germans, even as it pursued the extermination of European Jewry and what it called “total war” against its adversaries.

…

While Ms. Lafrenz was a medical student in Hamburg, she met Alexander Schmorell, a central player in the White Rose, who introduced her to the leaders of the group, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, when she moved to Munich to continue her medical studies in the early 1940s.
Other leading players included Christoph Probst, Willi Graf and the group’s older mentor, Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy who was committed to liberal democracy.

…

The White Rose’s leaflets began appearing in the summer of 1942, but the project faltered in February 1943 with the arrest of Sophie and Hans Scholl, who were distributing fliers in a university building in Munich when Jakob Schmid, a janitor, spotted them and tipped off the Gestapo. Four days after their arrest, on Feb. 18, 1943, they were executed. Ms. Lafrenz attended her friends’ funeral, even though it was conducted under Gestapo surveillance.
Other members of the White Rose followed the grisly trail to execution; they were among an estimated 5,000 people beheaded under a revival of the use of the guillotine ordered by Hitler. The beheadings continued until January 1945.

Ms. Lafrenz was arrested in March of 1943. She was set to be tried at Bayreuth in April of 1945, but the US Army liberated the prison (and the prisoners) before the trial started.

“Traute Lafrenz was not at the center of the White Rose,” Mr. Waage wrote. “She did not physically write any of the leaflets — but she did just about everything else. She helped lay the foundation for the revitalization of cultural heritage as a weapon against brutality; she helped make the distribution of the leaflets as practical as possible and helped to spread them.”
In the postwar era, Ms. Lafrenz remained stubbornly reticent about her activities. “I was a contemporary witness,” she told Bild Zeitung in 2018. “Given the fates of the others, I am not allowed to complain.” Her daughter Renee told the newspaper that she had not learned of her mother’s wartime struggle until 1970.
Indeed, it was only on Ms. Lafrenz’s 100th birthday, on May 3, 2019, that she was awarded Germany’s Order of Merit, a high civilian honor. The citation said she “belonged to the few who, in the face of the crimes of national socialism, had the courage to listen to the voice of her conscience and rebel against the dictatorship and the genocide of the Jews. She is a heroine of freedom and humanity.”

Suzy McKee Charnas, noted SF writer. I believe Lawrence mentioned this to me a while back, but I could not find a link I was willing to use. The NYT obit says she passed away January 2nd, but “her death was not widely reported at the time”.

Ms. Charnas, whose books were well regarded but who, by her account, did not make a living from her writing, was best known for her science fiction. But she also wrote vampire fiction, young adult fantasy novels with women as central characters, and a memoir about taking care of her father in his later years after a long period of estrangement.

The obit gives a lot of space to her “The Holdfast Chronicles” series.

In an epic that began with “Walk to the End of the World” (1974) and concluded 25 years later with “The Conqueror’s Child,” Ms. Charnas conceived a dystopic world in which an escaped female slave, Alldera, leads the rebellious Free Fems to brutally conquer and enslave their former male masters. The men had faulted women for the near-destruction of humanity, called the Wasting.

…

The other books in the Holdfast series are “Motherlines” (1978) and “The Furies” (1994). “The Conqueror’s Child” won the 1999 James Tiptree Jr. Award (now called the Otherwise), a literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that explore gender.
She also won two other science fiction and fantasy awards: a Nebula for a novella, “Unicorn Tapestry,” which is a chapter in her 1980 novel, “The Vampire Tapestry,” and the basis for her play, “Vampire Dreams”; and a Hugo, for “Boobs,” a short story.
“Suzy, to me, was a lot like David Bowie,” said Jane Lindskold, a science fiction and fantasy writer who knew Ms. Charnas from a writers’ group in Albuquerque. “She followed her own muse. She could have just written only vampire books, but she did what she wanted to do.”

…

Science fiction was not the only genre she explored. In “The Vampire Tapestry,” she created Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire posing as an anthropology professor.Writing in The Washington Post, the fantasy writer Elizabeth A. Lynn praised the novel, saying it “works on many levels — as pure adventure, as social description, as psychological drama and as a passionate exploration of the web that links instinct, morality and culture. It is a serious, startling and revolutionary work.”
The director Guillermo del Toro, who is known for his science fiction and horror films, was an admirer of “The Vampire Tapestry.” He called it “flawless” on Twitter in 2015 and, after Ms. Charnas’s death, said, “It may be her masterpiece.”

The paper of record has a habit of running retrospective obits under the heading “Overlooked No More” for people who didn’t get an obit at the time. To the best of my knowledge, they still have not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.

However, this one struck home for me: Dilys Winn, mystery bookstore founder and writer.

When she opened Murder Ink — believed to be the nation’s first bookstore devoted entirely to the genre — she didn’t even have a window sign. But inside the store, compact though it was, one could find every type of mystery: British cozies, unsettling gothics, suspense thrillers, novels about hard-boiled detectives, police procedurals and even unpublished manuscripts — 1,500 titles in all.

…

Winn enjoyed hosting events so much that she sold the bookstore in 1975 and began holding Sunday afternoon mystery talks (admission $5) at the Steinway Concert Hall on the Upper West Side featuring mystery writers, editors and other guest speakers. She organized a 16-day mystery reader’s tour of the United Kingdom, with sites of interest that included the Tower of London, Jack the Ripper’s London neighborhood and the London docks. Excursions to Scotland and Wales provided more opportunities to commune with mystery writers, crime reporters and, supposedly, ghosts.
All the while, Winn was feverishly working on her opus: “Murder Ink.” Published by Workman Press in 1977, it included offbeat essays by established figures and Winn herself (under various nom de plumes), along with character studies, photographs, quizzes and even a guide to “terrible edibles” one might avoid — or seek, depending on the motive. In 1978, the Mystery Writers of America conferred an Edgar Allan Poe award on Winn, and the next year she published a sequel, “Murderess Ink: The Better Half of Mystery.”

I bought my mother a copy of Murder Ink as a present one year, so of course I read it. I loved it. I still think that’s a pretty swell book, and I want to say that’s one of the key books in influencing my lifelong love of mysteries.

“Spot”, or Glen Lockett, noted record producer for SST Records.

As the in-house producer for SST from 1979 to 1985, Mr. Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream — the college-radio mainstream, at least.
He produced or engineered more than 100 albums for SST, including classics like Black Flag’s “Damaged” (1981), Descendents’ “Milo Goes to College” (1982), Meat Puppets’ first album (1982), Minutemen’s “What Makes a Man Start Fires?” (1982) and Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” (1984).

I never got into any of SST’s stuff (I tried listening to Hüsker Dü) but I’ve always liked the SST poster I saw once at a record store in Houston. “Home taping is killing the music industry. Keep up the good work.”

Rick Scheckman. He was David Letterman’s film coordinator.

Scheckman joined Late Night With David Letterman in March 1982, a month after the show debuted on NBC. The writers called on Scheckman so often, he was given a full-time job as film coordinator.
“If 20 minutes before tape time, the writers suddenly came up with a bit that required film of a monkey washing a cat, Shecky knew where to find it,” writer Mark Evanier wrote on his blog.
When Letterman moved to CBS in 1993, Scheckman came along and remained with the Late Show through its 2015 conclusion. For those 33-plus years, his stuff was referred to as “Shecky Footage,” Letterman archivist Don Giller pointed out in a tribute post on YouTube.
As did many Letterman behind-the-scenes staffers, Scheckman often wound up in front of the camera, playing, for example, Elvis Presley; a naked man in the shower with a copy machine; a fan of Star Wars and Pokémon; and himself, getting shot by Bruce Willis (“Yippee ki yay, Shecky!!”), as seen in another tribute video.

Tributes from Mark Evanier and Leonard Maltin.

Otis Taylor, of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Over an 11-year career that began in 1965, when Kansas City was one of the top teams in the American Football League, Taylor was one of quarterback Len Dawson’s key offensive targets. (Dawson died last year at 87.) Tall and acrobatic with soft hands, he was the prototype for the big receivers who would come to dominate the position.
In 1966, his breakout season, Taylor caught 58 passes for 1,297 yards, an average of 22.4 yards a catch. Five years later, after the A.F.L.’s merger with the N.F.L was finalized, Taylor led the league with 1,110 receiving yards, and United Press International named him the N.F.L.’s player of the year.

…

When the Chiefs faced the Vikings in Super Bowl IV on Jan. 11, 1970, it was their second appearance in the championship game. They had lost to the Green Bay Packers, 35-10, in the first Super Bowl.
The Vikings were 13 ½-point favorites, but the Chiefs handled them easily. Kansas City was leading, 16-7, late in the third quarter when Dawson tossed a short pass to Taylor. He shook off a tackle from Earsell Mackbee, a cornerback; faked Karl Kassulke, a safety; and ran in for a 46-yard touchdown. Their 23-7 victory would be the Chiefs’ only Super Bowl win until 2020; they won the championship again last month.
“That’s it, boys!” Chiefs coach Hank Stram said gleefully from the sideline. “Otis!”

…

In his rookie season, when he started four of Kansas City’s 14 games, he caught 26 passes for 446 yards. He emerged as a star the next season, and over his career he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times and was a first-team All-Pro twice.
He caught a total of 410 passes in his career for 7,306 yards, with 57 touchdowns. He ranks third in Chiefs history in receiving yards, after Tony Gonzalez and Travis Kelce.

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Music, Nazis, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 9, 2023.

Thursday, March 9th, 2023

Great and good FotB Borepatch sent over an obit from Military.com for Jack Holder, who died February 24 at the age of 101.

Mr. Holder was a WWII veteran and a survivor of Pearl Harbor.

The young sailor survived that day by diving into a ditch between airplane hangars to avoid getting strafed by a Japanese pilot.
He went on to fly as a flight engineer on a PBY at Midway, scouting for Japanese forces with squadron VP-23. He later flew missions over Guadalcanal, retrained on the new B-24 and completed his WWII service flying missions over the English Channel. All in all, the young man had himself quite an eventful war.

He wrote a memoir, Fear, Adrenaline, and Excitement which you can get from Amazon.

On the occasion of an honor flight that celebrated his 100th birthday in December 2021, Holder announced that the secret to his long life was “good heart exercise and two scotch and sodas every night.”
There was a party after the 2019 “Midway” screening at the STK Restaurant at the W Hotel, the kind of hip, contemporary joint that makes a lot of folks over the age of 50 uncomfortable. Holder was right at home and was one of the very last people to leave as the night wound down.
The Jack Holder I met was slyly funny, incredibly enthusiastic about meeting new people and very excited about the chance to talk to younger women. The bonus for him was that almost every single woman he met qualified as a younger woman.

The Notorious B.I.G. “B.I.G.” in this case is Bert I. Gordon, who passed away yesterday at 100. THR.

For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Gordon was a monster movie impresario.

Six months after the release of the popular “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” directed by Jack Arnold, American International Pictures distributed Mr. Gordon’s “The Amazing Colossal Man” (1957). Caught in a nuclear accident, the title character grows to 60 feet and is shot by the police in Las Vegas. Variety said the film’s technical aspects were “well handled,” and other reviews were generally positive.

I’ve actually never seen that, but I have the impression that it is pretty good.

In “Beginning of the End” (1957), a scientist (Peter Graves) uses radiation to make giant fruits and vegetables to end world hunger, but a plague of giant grasshoppers that has eaten the food invades Chicago and starts feasting on people. Lured into Lake Michigan with an electronic mating call, the grasshoppers drown. Mr. Gordon did the special effects in his garage, filming 200 grasshoppers jumping and crawling on photos of the city. Reviewers called the special effects absurdly obvious and the screenplay ludicrous.

Elements of the beach-party genre were combined with Mr. Gordon’s usual themes in “Village of the Giants” (1965). A substance called “goo,” produced with a boy’s chemistry set, causes gigantism in a gang of rocking teenagers, who become 30-foot delinquents running amok in a California town. More chemistry-set magic produces an antidote, and all returns to normal. The Los Angeles Times’s reviewer liked the special effects and the “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”

We watched the MST3K version of this one fairly recently. It is not anywhere near as good as the NYT makes it sound.

Orson Welles, often desperate for money to finance his own films, starred in Mr. Gordon’s “Necromancy,” about a sinister man who wields mystical powers over a small town with rituals seeking to bring back the dead.
Ms. Lupino appeared in “The Food of the Gods,” one of three Gordon films loosely based on H.G. Wells tales, which portrayed people on an island fighting overgrown rats, wasps and chickens that have lapped up radioactive stuff that looks like pancake batter oozing from the ground. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “stunningly ridiculous.”

His autobiography on Amazon.

All this was fodder for the hosts of the comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000, which brought the Gordon canon to a new audience. “I watched it one time, and I didn’t like them making fun of [his work],” he said. “I take my films very seriously.”

Left out of most discussions I’ve seen: “Tormented”, which we also watched the MST3K version of. I don’t think it is as bad as “Village of the Giants”…

(Yeah, I might be a little unfair in referencing the MST3K versions. But for the ones I’ve seen, I’ll steal a line from Gene Siskel about another movie: “If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie still would have sucked.”)

Chaim Topol, or just “Topal”, of “Fiddler on the Roof” fame. THR.

Other credits include both “The Winds of War” and “War and Rememberance”, “SeaQuest 2032”, “For Your Eyes Only”, and he played Dr. Zarkov in the 1980 “Flash Gordon”.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Planes, Theatre | Comments Closed

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