Archive for the ‘Nazis’ Category

« Older Entries

Obit watch: January 31, 2025.

Friday, January 31st, 2025

Dick Button, figure skating guy. I’ve never been a big skating fan, but I remember Mr. Button from when I was young and actually watched some of the Olympics.

An Emmy winner, Button taught generations of TV audiences the nuances of triple toe loops, lutzes and axels and how judges assess a skater’s performance. But many fans might not have known that he was a two-time Olympic gold medalist himself, advancing modern figure skating in the late 1940s and early ’50s with his dazzling leaps and spins, including the first triple jump in competition.

Marianne Faithfull. THR.

Iris Cummings Critchell. She was 104.

She competed as a swimmer in the 1936 Summer Olympics, and was the last surviving member of the American team.

While Iris didn’t win a medal at the 1936 Olympics, she went on to capture three national 200-meter breaststroke titles. But after the 1940 Olympics in wartime Tokyo were canceled, she put competitive swimming aside in favor of another passion that would hold her interest for the rest of her life: flying.

She flew with the Woman’s Air Force Service Pilots, ferrying planes across the country for shipping overseas.

After the war, Ms. Critchell received a bachelor’s degree with a concentration in science and mathematics from the University of Southern California, where she went on to teach aviation — an uncommon accomplishment for a woman at the time.

…

In 1962, she and Mr. [Howard] Critchell [her husband – DB], who was working as a commercial pilot for Western Airlines, began teaching in the Bates Foundation Aeronautics Program at Harvey Mudd College, where their students included the future astronauts George Nelson and Stanley G. Love. Ms. Critchell ran the program on her own after Mr. Critchell retired from teaching in 1979. When the program was shut down in 1990, she remained affiliated with the college, lecturing and working as a librarian there.

…

In addition to her work at Harvey Mudd College, Ms. Critchell created aviation outreach programs for public high schools, developed manuals for the Federal Aviation Administration and worked as a pilot examiner there for more than 20 years. She was a longtime member of the Ninety-Nines, a nonprofit organization supporting female pilots.
She also competed in women’s transcontinental air races, known informally as the Powder Puff Derby, a term coined by Will Rogers. In 1957, she finished first in a race to Philadelphia from San Mateo, Calif., sharing an $800 prize with her co-pilot, Alice Roberts.

Posted in History, Music, Nazis, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | No Comments »

Trip report: Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Wednesday, June 19th, 2024

“Back to Tulsa AGAIN? You were just there in November.”

True that. But the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association tries to rotate the symposiums around the country: “West Coast” one year (that was last year’s Glendale symposium), “East Coast” one year (Concord in 2022 and again next year), and “Central” (Tulsa this year).

I’m glad to say that this year’s hotel (which we were also at in 2021) was very very happy to see us. Last year’s hotel…wasn’t, and I’ll just leave it at that. The Renaissance Tulsa Hotel & Convention Center, on the other hand, could not have been more accomodating. (They did have “No Firearms or Weapons” stickers on the doors, but I never heard anything about anybody being hassled by the hotel staff.) I was privy to a conversation between one of my friends (who is a S&WCA officer) and one of the hotel managers, and the manager was very excited about having us back. We tip well, we don’t throw loud obnoxious parties, we have our own security, and we don’t trash the place.

There are two popular questions people ask me. Well, maybe one “popular” question and one not-so-popular.

“Did I buy any guns?” Answer: yes, but we’re still going through the transfer process. Once that’s complete, I plan to do a post. Here’s a hint:

“Did I buy any books?” asked nobody, ever. Answer: Yes! My book buddy from the Association came down from Canada and brought a stack of books. He thought I might be interested in “some” of them and planned to put the others on his sales table. I bought the whole lot, which came out to ten books by my count. This includes two new-to-me Samworths, one duplicate Samworth that’s in better shape than my copy, three Jack O’Connor books that I didn’t have, and some miscellaneous books from other publishers. I will be annoying my loyal reader with posts on those books as time permits.

Additionally, I happened to be working the registration table with another gentleman who, it turned out, was also a gun book person. He had somehow wound up with a spare copy of a recent gun book and gifted his spare to me.

I also picked up a fair amount of old paper, some of which my book buddy threw in as part of my purchase and some of which I bought from other dealers. I may scan and post some of this, especially when I do the gun post.

(And as a side note: the night before I left, I got two huge and heavy packages from an auction lot I’d placed a lowball bid on, and won. The lot was for old “gun and ammo” books. So I’ll be sharing interesting bits from that lot as well.)

Since Sunday was an off day, I drove up to Oklahoma City specifically to see the 45th Infantry Division Museum, which is now known as the Oklahoma National Guard Museum (and which is moving to a new facility). You may recognize the 45th Infantry Division Museum from such hits as:

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

I thought it was a very nice museum. They had me when I discovered there was an entire room devoted to Bill Mauldin.

Here. Have a random photo of some bazookas.

I’m very glad I went, especially now. As I noted above, the museum is moving to a new location. And I got into a conversation with the curator, who told me that they are planning to deaccession some things, as the new museum will be placing more emphasis on “telling stories”. I think that’s kind of a shame. Where else are you going to see this?

Except maybe in “The Green Berets“.

I encourage you to go now, if you’re in the area and have the opportunity. I would actually like to spend more time at the museum, but I wanted to get back in time for dinner and to take a couple of photos in Muskogee:

The first Girl Scout cookie sale took place in Muskogee in 1917. I could not find a reference to price at the time, but in 1922, the Girl Scouts recommended selling home-baked cookies for “25 to 30 cents per dozen”. $6 in 2024 money works out to 32 cents in 1922 money, and 24 cents in 1917 money, according to the inflation calculator I like to use.

I took a group of my friends to Siegi’s Sausage Factory and, as far as I could tell, everyone loved it. Another large group of my friends took me to the White River Fish Market and Restaurant, which I liked, but which was in a really gritty part of Tulsa.

We also went to an Abuelo’s one night, because it was very near the hotel. I went by myself one night to a place Mike the Musicologist calls “The Laugh-In Restaurant”: Sake 2 Me Sushi. It is all-you-can-eat, but I wasn’t wild about the sushi.

And Sunday night’s celebratory dinner was at The Chalkboard, because I haven’t been in forever and wanted some Beef Wellington.

Everything went smoothly. No complaints here, except that eight hours in a car does get a little tiring.

Usual thanks to the usual suspects. You know who you are. (It appears that word has gotten around within S&WCA circles that I have a blog.)

Posted in Books, Food, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Nazis, O'Connor, Smith and Wesson, Travel | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 5, 2024.

Friday, January 5th, 2024

Glynis Johns. IMDB.

Wow:

A year later [1963 – DB], she starred in her own short-lived CBS sitcom, Glynis, in which she played a mystery writer and amateur sleuth, and later, she was Lady Penelope Peasoup opposite Rudy Vallee as Lord Marmaduke Ffogg on the last season of ABC’s Batman.

Yes, she did do a guest spot on “Murder She Wrote“.

Wow^2: she was “Sister Anne” in “Nukie“.

Stephen Sondheim wrote “Send in the Clowns”, in “A Little Night Music”, with shorter phrasing to accommodate her. Although her voice, alternately described as smoky or silvery or wistful, was lovely, she was unable to sustain notes for long.

Be that as it may, I find her performance of that song incredibly haunting.

Maj. Mike Sadler has passed away at 103.

Mr. Sadler was one of the first recruits and the last surviving member of the S.A.S. from the year of its founding, 1941. Like a navigator at sea, he used stars, sun and instruments to cross expanses of the Libyan Desert, a wasteland almost the size of India, whose shifting, windblown dunes can be as changing and featureless as an ocean.
Compared with the commandos he guided on truck and jeep convoys — volunteer daredevils who crept onto Nazi airfields; attached time bombs to Messerschmitt fighters, Stuka dive bombers, fuel dumps and pilot quarters; then sped away as explosions roared behind — Mr. Sadler was no hero in the usual sense. Comrades said he might not have fired a single shot at the enemy in North Africa.
But he got his men to the targets — and out again. Without him, they said, the commandos could not have crossed hundreds of miles of desert, found enemy bases on the Mediterranean Coast, destroyed more than 325 aircraft, blown up ammunition and supply dumps, killed hundreds of German and Italian soldiers and pilots, or found their way back to hidden bases.

…

Mr. Sadler was intrigued by desert navigation. “What amazed me,” he told Mr. Rayment, “was that even with the vast, featureless expanses of the desert, a good navigator could pinpoint his exact location by using a theodolite, an air almanac and air navigational tables, and having a good knowledge of the stars.”
He spent weeks studying navigation techniques, including use of a theodolite — a telescopic device, with two perpendicular axes, used mainly by surveyors, for measuring angles in the horizontal and vertical planes. It was not unlike the sextant used by mariners to fix positions at sea.

…

In one of the epic stories of the North Africa campaign, Mr. Sadler and two sergeants escaped from the Germans and, with only a goatskin carrying brackish water, crossed 110 miles of desert on foot in five days. Hostile Bedouins stoned them, bloodying their heads, and stole their warm clothing, leaving them to shiver through freezing nights.
Starving except for a few dates, they were exposed to windblown sands that scraped them like sandpaper, a relentless sun that burned and blistered their faces, and swarms of flies that enveloped and tormented them. On the hot sands, their feet were masses of blisters after a few days. When they finally reached Free French lines, they looked like half-dead castaways in rags.
“We had long hair and beards and were looking very bedraggled,” Mr. Sadler recalled. “Our feet were in tatters — I don’t think we looked very much like soldiers.”

…

After his North Africa adventures as a desert navigator, Mr. Sadler returned to England and in 1944 parachuted into France after the Allied invasion of Normandy. He participated in sabotage operations against German occupation forces and won the Military Cross for bravery in action behind enemy lines.

Anthony Dias Blue, noted wine guy.

Mr. Blue was no populist. But he believed that good wine needn’t be expensive or difficult to appreciate; all that people needed, he said, was a guide, like him, to show them what was worth buying.

Posted in Heroism, History, Mixology, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 15, 2023.

Friday, September 15th, 2023

Éva Fahidi, Holocaust survivor.

Ms. Fahidi, part of a Hungarian Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism, was rounded up in 1944 along with the rest of her family and taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination complex in occupied Poland. She was 18.
She was apparently saved from the gas chamber by being of an age and fitness level to qualify for a forced-labor camp. Her other family members were sent to their deaths. Josef Mengele, the Nazi death camp doctor, presided over the selection process.

…

After the war ended in 1945, Ms. Fahidi (who was also known as Éva Fahidi-Pusztai from an early marriage) kept her experiences largely to herself for more than a half-century. Then, in 2003, on the anniversary of that day on the ramp when she last saw her family members, she visited the Birkenau site and was disappointed to find it more like a tourist attraction than like anything she remembered.
She committed herself to telling her story and to helping younger generations understand what had gone on at the camp and in the Holocaust in general. Over the next 20 years she spoke to countless schoolchildren and worked with young volunteers who collected Holocaust remembrances from survivors. She appeared at anniversary observances marking the liberation of Auschwitz and other occasions and spoke to legislative bodies. And she bore witness, including attending the 2015 war crimes trial in Germany of Oskar Gröning, who at 93 was accused of having been one of the guards working that ramp at Auschwitz and was one of the last complicit Germans to face trial.

Lauch Faircloth, former Senator from North Carolina.

But it was as a member and later as chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on the District of Columbia that Mr. Faircloth made national headlines on a collision course with Mr. Barry, a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who had been a popular elected official in Washington, in various capacities, since the establishment of limited home rule in the capital in 1973.

…

The mayor admitted that the city government was “unworkable” and asked Congress to take over some city functions. Instead, with Mr. Faircloth as point man, a new Republican congressional majority put some city operations into receivership and created a financial control board to take over day-to-day spending and financial planning, with the power to overrule the mayor.
Over the next two years, Mr. Faircloth granted the city some concessions: more money than requested for public schools and repairs to decaying buildings. But Mr. Barry and the control board battled constantly over policy and budgetary issues.
A settlement was reached in 1997, when the Clinton administration and Senator Faircloth agreed to rescue the city but stripped Mr. Barry of power over most city agencies, handing it to the control board. The mayor, who retained authority over parks and recreation, libraries and tourism, called the arrangement “a rape of democracy.”

…

He dismissed Mr. Barry’s criticism. “I’ve heard so many meaningless statements from Marion Barry that one more doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s airy persiflage.”

Lisa Lyon, bodybuilder and Robert Mapplethorpe photo subject.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Jean Boht, British actress, with the note that he wasn’t aware there was a British remake of “The Golden Girls”. I wasn’t either, but if we can remake British shows in the US, why can’t the Brits remake our stuff?

(I was aware that there was an attempt at a US “Fawlty Towers” remake. I wasn’t aware, until I went to look it up, that there were actually three attempts, including the Harvey Korman/Betty White one, and another with John Larroquette.)

IMDB.

Posted in History, Nazis, Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 10, 2023.

Monday, July 10th, 2023

The sports department of the New York Times.

The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 journalists and editors, is a major shift for The Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and its Sports of the Times column in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism. The section covered the major moments and personalities of the last century of American sports, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League.

The paper of record plans to shift sports coverage to The Athletic, which it purchased last year.

As a business, The Athletic has yet to turn a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year. But the number of paying subscribers has grown to more than three million as of March 2023, from just over one million when it was acquired.

Evva Hanes, popularizer of Moravian cookies.

Mrs. Hanes, the youngest of seven, grew up watching her mother, Bertha Foltz, make and sell hundreds of the thin cookies to supplement what little money the family’s small dairy farm brought in. Other Moravian women sold cookies, too, adhering to a recipe with molasses and warm winter spices, like clove and ginger, that were popular around Christmas.
Mrs. Foltz began baking a crispy vanilla-scented version as a way to differentiate herself and extend the selling season. By age 8, Evva could bake them on her own. By 20, she had taken over her mother’s business and slowly begun to expand it, selling the original sugar crisps as well as the traditional ginger version but eventually other flavors, too, like lemon and black walnut.

I feel a little guilty about saying this, but now I kind of want to order a tin of Moravian cookies.

Roy Herron, Tennessee state legislator. He was injured in a jet ski accident on July 1st, and passed away on Sunday.

I’ve written previously about both the Dutch resistance and about the NYT‘s “Overlooked No More” obits. In that vein: Hannie Schaft.

In June 1944, Schaft and a fellow resistance fighter, Jan Bonekamp (with whom she was rumored to have had a romantic relationship), targeted a high-ranking police officer for assassination. As the officer was getting on his bicycle to go to work, Schaft shot him in the back, causing him to fall off the bike. Bonekamp finished the killing but was injured doing so. He died shortly after. Schaft managed to escape on her own bike, which was how she got around doing her resistance work.
Schaft was also involved in killing or wounding a baker who was known for betraying people, a hairdresser who worked for the Nazis’ intelligence agency, and another Nazi police officer.
Before confronting her targets, Schaft put on makeup — including lipstick and mascara — and styled her hair, Jackson said. In one of the few direct quotations that have been attributed to Schaft, she explained her reasoning to Truus Oversteegen: “I’ll die clean and beautiful.”

Posted in Food, History, Media, Nazis, Obits, Sports | 3 Comments »

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 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: February 6, 2023.

Monday, February 6th, 2023

Charles Kimbrough.

Ignoring “Murphy Brown” for the moment, he was also in the original Broadway casts of both “Company” and “Sunday in the Park With George”, among other theater credits.

Interesting side note: in 2002, he married Beth Howland, who was also in the original Broadway cast of “Company”.

Pervez Musharraf, former ruler of Pakistan.

Harry Whittington, most famous as the man Dick Cheney shot.

As a lawyer and investor, Mr. Whittington was a fierce proponent of property rights. He repeatedly questioned the city of Austin’s use of eminent domain to acquire private property — some of it his own — for public purposes.

…

In 1979, Gov. Bill Clements appointed Mr. Whittington to the Texas Corrections Board (now the Board of Criminal Justice), where he was the only Republican on a nine-member panel that had tended to rubber-stamp everything prison managers wanted.
“It was time for somebody to question,” Mr. Whittington said in an interview with The Austin American-Statesman. “There was no other way I knew how to do it.”
He uncovered secrets that stunned him: drug-running by prison officials, no-bid contracts, families paying off guards to protect their loved ones. At meetings, he asked hard questions.
His tenacity led to the creation of a separate unit for developmentally disabled prisoners and an end to wardens’ using prisoners to punish other inmates.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Shlomo Perel, Holocaust survivor with an interesting story.

So this man poses as an Aryan in order to appease the insane, fanatical Nazi Herrenrasse machine, becomes a Nazi translator, is conscripted into the Hitler Youth, and then joins the German military. That’s a fraught path to take.

Fred Terna, also a Holocaust survivor. He became famous for abstract art inspired by his experience.

Mr. Terna’s art became his Holocaust testimony. In acrylic works like “In the Likeness of Fire” and “An Echo of Cinders,” he painted in reds, yellows, oranges and blues to illustrate the flames that incinerated Jews in crematories. In some paintings, he used sand pebbles to represent ashes.
“I know how the fire of a crematorium chimney casts flickering light on a barrack wall,” he wrote in 1984 for the Berman Archive at Stanford University, which documents American Jewish communities. “How does one paint the near certainty of violent personal annihilation? How does one paint, and then make a viewer want to stop, to look at a canvas, to react to it?”

I know that some people would like for me to include photos. Pretty much all of the time, the obits I link to include photos. I’ve always generally assumed that, if you were that interested in the obit, you’d click through to the link, and including photos here would make these entries longer (and possibly infringe on intellectual property rights). I am trying to make more of an effort to link to archived articles, so people don’t have to navigate paywalls.

What do you guys think? Am I wrong about this?

Posted in Art, History, Nazis, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: January 10, 2023.

Tuesday, January 10th, 2023

Quinn Redeker, actor.

He did a fair number of cop and PI shows, among other credits, including “The Rockford Files”, “Harry O”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Falling Star“, season 1, episode 15. He was “Jim Dancy”.)

Mike Hill, film editor. He won an Oscar for “Apollo 13”.

Diamond Lynnette Hardaway, of “Diamond and Silk”.

Timothy Vanderweert. He ran the “Leicaphilia” blog, which has been on the sidebar for a while now.

Adolfo Kaminsky. I swear I have written something about him before, but I can’t find it now.

He was a forger. Specifically, he forged documents to get people out of the hands of the Nazis.

The forged documents allowed Jewish children, their parents and others to escape deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and in many cases to flee Nazi-occupied territory for safe havens.
At one point, Mr. Kaminsky was asked to produce 900 birth and baptismal certificates and ration cards for 300 Jewish children in institutional homes who were about to be rounded up. The aim was to deceive the Germans until the children could be smuggled out to rural families or convents, or to Switzerland and Spain. He was given three days to finish the assignment.
He toiled for two straight days, forcing himself to stay awake by telling himself: “In one hour I can make 30 blank documents. If I sleep for an hour 30 people will die.”

…

Using the pseudonym Julien Keller, Mr. Kaminsky was a key operative in a Paris underground laboratory whose members — all working for no pay and risking a quick death if discovered — adopted aliases like Water Lily, Penguin and Otter, and often contrived documents from scratch.
Mr. Kaminsky learned to fashion various typefaces, a skill he had picked up in elementary school while editing a school newspaper, and was able to imitate those used by the authorities. He pressed paper so that it, too, resembled the kind used on official documents, and photoengraved his own rubber stamps, letterheads and watermarks.
Word of the cell spread to other resistance groups, and soon it was producing 500 documents a week, receiving orders from partisans in several European countries. Mr. Kaminsky estimated that the underground network he was part of helped save 10,000 people, most of them children.

Posted in 1970s, History, Mannix, Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits, Photography, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 17, 2022.

Thursday, November 17th, 2022

Robert Clary, who played “Corporal LeBeau” on “Hogan’s Heroes”. He was “the last surviving member of the show’s original principal cast”. (Kenneth Washington, who joined the show in the final season, is still alive.)

Other credits include “Days of Our Lives” and “The Bold and the Beautiful”.

Noted:

Born Robert Max Widerman in Paris on March 1, 1926, Clary was the youngest of 14 children in a strict Orthodox Jewish family. At age 12, he began singing and performing; one day when he was 16, he and his family were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
“My mother said the most remarkable thing,” Clary told The Hollywood Reporter’s Peter Flax in late 2015. “She said, ‘Behave.’ She probably knew me as a brat. She said, ‘Behave. Do what they tell you to do.’”
Clary’s parents were murdered in the gas chamber that day.
At Buchenwald, Clary sang with an accordionist every other Sunday to an audience of SS soldiers. “Singing, entertaining and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” he told Flax.
Clary was incarcerated for 31 months (he worked in a factory making 4,000 wooden shoe heels each day) and tattooed with the identification “A-5714” on his left forearm. He was the only one of his captured family to make it out alive.

…

Did Clary have any reservations about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps?
“I had to explain that [Hogan’s Heroes] was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps,” he wrote in his inspirational 2001 memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.

…

He sang on several jazz albums that featured the work of songwriters like Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer. (Also a part of his discography: Hogan’s Heroes Sing the Best of WWII, recorded with his castmates Richard Dawson, Larry Hovis and Ivan Dixon.)

I can’t find the album anywhere, but the memoir is available from Amazon.

Edited to add: Thanks to Joe D. for his comment, which I greatly appreciate. Also, while I still can’t find the “Hogan’s Heroes” album, Mike the Musicologist pointed out that Robert Clary’s “Meet Robert Clary” (1955) and “Hooray for Love” (1956) are available on Apple Music and Amazon Music.

Posted in Books, Music, Nazis, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 22, 2022.

Friday, July 22nd, 2022

Great and good friend of the blog Joe D. let us know about the death of Al Evans.

Al was one of the old time Austin BBS people, and a personal friend of mine from back then. The Facebook post is a nice tribute to someone who was a good person, and whose passing leaves a hole in the world.

Taurean Blacque. Beyond “Hill Street Blues”, it seems like he had a pretty active theater career, and other credits including “The Bob Newhart Show”, “Taxi”, and “DeepStar Six”.

In 1982, Blacque received a supporting actor Emmy nomination for his work as the toothpick-dependent Washington on Hill Street but lost out to co-star Michael Conrad. Amazingly, the other three nominees — Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — also came from the 1981-87 series, created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll.

Nostalgia is a moron, but man, wasn’t that a heck of a show?

Shonka Dukureh passed on at 44. She was a musician, and also plays “Big Mama Thornton” in the current “Elvis” film.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Alan Grant, comic writer (“Batman”, “Judge Dredd”).

Werner Reich. He survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen (and the “35-mile death march in snow and ice” between the two). He also learned a card trick from another prisoner, Herbert Levin (aka “Nivelli the magician”) while he was in Auschwitz.

Mr. Reich, who became an engineer after his immigration to the United States, never lost his love of magic, performing close-up tricks with cards and coins for small groups of other magicians, at temples and at his sons’ birthday parties.

…

Mr. Levin’s card trick stayed with Mr. Reich the rest of his life.
“We loved anything that could take us away from Auschwitz for even a moment, that could take our minds off our memories and the horror around us,” he said in the 2017 interview.In England, he immersed himself in magic. He bought a deck of cards, then some magic tricks and books, and still more tricks and books.
“There’s a very, very thin line between a hobby and insanity,” he joked during his TEDx Talk.
Mr. Reich never saw Mr. Levin after Auschwitz and did not know that he had also emigrated to the United States, resumed his magic career and lived in Rego Park, Queens.
Mr. Levin died in 1977, but Mr. Reich did not learn of the death until nearly 30 years later, when he read an article in The Linking Ring, the monthly magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, to which Mr. Reich belonged.

Posted in Magic, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 17, 2021.

Wednesday, November 17th, 2021

Still playing catch up on obits. Please to excuse the shortness here.

Terence Wilson, of UB40.

Graeme Edge, of the Moody Blues.

Clifford Rose, noted actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He also did some movie and TV work, including “Doctor Who”.

Geir Vegar Hoel, Norwegian actor. Lawrence and I knew him from “Dead Snow“, a fun little horror movie about Nazi zombies.

Posted in Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

« Older Entries