Whipped Cream Difficulties

Valery Polyakov, cosmonaut.

He was also a physician, specializing in space medicine. He volunteered for a mission to see how the human body would hold up in micro gravity on a proposed Mars trip.

Dr. Polyakov took off for the Russian Mir space station on Jan. 8, 1994, and returned to Earth 437 days, 17 hours and 38 minutes later, on March 22, 1995. He had orbited Earth 7,075 times and traveled nearly 187 million miles, according to the New Mexico Museum of Space History.

That’s still a record.

He worked out while in space and returned looking “big and strong” — “like he could wrestle a bear” — Wired quoted the American astronaut Norman Thagard as saying.
Rather than be carried out of his capsule on his return, Dr. Polyakov walked on his own strength, sat down, stole a cigarette from a friend and began sipping brandy, according to “The Story of Manned Space Stations: An Introduction,” by Philip Baker.

Rev. John W. O’Malley, prominent Catholic historian.

He was prolific, publishing 14 books and editing eight more. He wrote in a breezy, precise fashion that managed to convey deep thoughts in simple terms, and many of his books sold as well among lay audiences as they did among academics. Several were translated into multiple languages.
“This approach is a form of correction to myself,” he said in a 2020 interview with Brill, his Dutch publisher. “I have to be humble enough to acknowledge that if the 10-year-old does not understand, it means that, deep down, I did not understand.”
Father O’Malley wore his learning lightly. Friends called him puckish. His personal page on the website for Georgetown’s Jesuit community lists the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini among his favorite artists, but also the outré filmmaker John Waters. (Father O’Malley was especially partial to Mr. Waters’s movie “Hairspray.”)
He was perhaps best known as a historian of the Jesuit order, which was founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540 to provide, according to conventional wisdom, the Vatican with a militant defense against the Reformation and to expand its influence through the founding of educational institutions.
Starting with “The First Jesuits” (1993), Father O’Malley showed that neither of those qualities were present at the order’s creation. By wading through thousands of letters written by Loyola and others, he concluded that the Jesuits were in fact designed as a pastoral project, intent on saving souls in the face of the dramatic social upheavals rocking Europe in the late medieval era, and only gradually took on their later reputation.

Arnold Tucker, Army quarterback.

At a time when college rules restricted substitutions, Tucker played not only quarterback but also safety, punt returner and kickoff returner. The one blemish on his team’s records was a 0-0 tie in a game against unbeaten Notre Dame in 1946 at Yankee Stadium.
That same year he earned first-team All-America honors and came in fifth in Heisman Trophy balloting — behind Blanchard and Davis, of course. (Davis won the trophy that year; Blanchard got his the year before.)
But before graduating in 1947, Tucker won the Sullivan Award as America’s outstanding amateur athlete. He was drafted by the Chicago Bears but never played professional football. For several years in the mid-1950s he was an assistant coach at West Point to Vince Lombardi, who went on to glory with the Green Bay Packers.

Blanchard and Davis were Felix “Doc” Blanchard and Glenn Davis, “Heisman Trophy-winning running backs remembered in football lore as Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside”. They somewhat overshadowed Mr. Tucker, who actually died on January 10, 2019.

There was a paid death notice published online and buried in the pages of The Miami Herald that January. And at the end of the year The Associated Press listed Tucker (just his name and age) among the many “notable sports deaths in 2019.” But his death was otherwise not widely reported in the mainstream press, which had, almost 80 years ago, chronicled his (and Blanchard and Davis’s) gridiron exploits and later, when their time came, gave both Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside substantial obituaries, Blanchard’s in 2009 and Davis’s in 2005.
Reached by phone on Tuesday, Tucker’s daughter, Patricia Nugent, confirmed his death. And when asked why it hadn’t gotten much publicity, she said that she had never reached out to the national news media. The Times discovered he had died in seeking to update an obituary about him that was prepared in advance in 2010.

Maury Wills.

Wills set a modern major league record when he stole 104 bases in 1962, eclipsing the record of 96 set by Ty Cobb in 1915 and transforming baseball from the power game that had prevailed since Babe Ruth’s heyday. He set the stage for Lou Brock of the St. Louis Cardinals, who stole 118 bases in 1974, and Rickey Henderson of the Oakland A’s, who set the current record with 130 steals in 1982.

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In his rookie season with the Dodgers, the team won the World Series, defeating the Chicago White Sox, who had their own outstanding base-stealer in Luis Aparicio. Wills stole 50 bases in 1960, his first full season, and went on to win the National League’s base-stealing title every year through 1965.
He was named the league’s most valuable player in 1962. He played on Dodger World Series championship teams again in 1963 and 1965 and a pennant-winner in 1966, teams powered by the pitching of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.

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He stole 586 bases (putting him 20th on the all-time major league career list) and had a career batting average of .281, with 2,134 hits — only 20 of them home runs. He was a five-time All-Star and winner of the Gold Glove award for fielding in 1961 and 1962. He remained on the Hall of Fame ballot for 15 seasons but was never inducted.