I have a bingo on my buzzword bingo card.
As a smart man says:
for some reason the economics of building a skyscraper in the middle of a city and then piping in water and light are less favorable than using flat lands in Iowa which gets rain and sun
— ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs (@MorlockP) April 28, 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.
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 NYT currently has a three paragraph blrub up, with “A complete obituary will follow.” I’ll either update or do a separate post once that goes up.
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“My passion is politics,” he told Men’s Health magazine in 2015, “and I’ve always been able to separate how I make a living from my passions.”
That was not strictly true: the two did collide in 1974, when the political and the prurient came together in an incident that derailed Springer’s dream of becoming a major politician. Then a Cincinnati councilman, he was found guilty of soliciting prostitutes (astonishingly, he had paid them with checks) and forced to resign, his long-term hopes of being a governor or U.S. senator shattered.
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April Stevens, of “Deep Purple” fame.
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.
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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.”
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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.
Ron Faber. The THR obit concentrates on his stage career, but he did do a few movies and TV shows, including “The Exorcist”, “Law and Order”, and “Romeo Is Bleeding”.
Ginnie Newhart, Bob’s wife.
Ginnie and Bob were set up on a blind date by comedian Buddy Hackett (Ginnie was baby-sitting Hackett’s kids at the time).
“Buddy came back one day and said in his own inimitable way, ‘I met this young guy and his name is Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comic and he’s Catholic and you’re Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other,’ ” she recalled in a 2013 interview.
They played pool at Buddy and his wife’s home the first time they met.
“It was just silly,” she said in 2005. “I was 20, 21, 21, and I think Bob was 32. And every time somebody would sink a ball in the pocket or whatever you’re supposed to do, [we’d] run around the table with our cue stick singing ‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’
They were married for 60 years.
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:
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.
I thought I’d throw up a post real quick, since I’ve been in Waco at the TGCA show the past few days and radio silent.
I thought this was rather neat, and it gave me a chance to tweak the Saturday Movie Group. If you can’t read the tag, this is an original Winchester Model of 1873 “One of One Thousand”. Like you might have seen in “Winchester ’73”. You don’t see many of these in the wild, for a good reason: Winchester didn’t make a whole bunch of them.
(This is a really neat book on the subject. I was lucky to get my copy before prices went out of control, and I absolutely would not recommend paying that price.)
Mauser Model of 1918 Tankgewehr anti-tank single shot rifle chambered in 13X92SR. The photos are with the bolt in and out.
Ammo pouch that comes with the gun, along with about 22 rounds of ammo.
This is what one of the rounds looks like. I should have included something for scale, but I didn’t have anything handy and didn’t want to impose on the seller.
If you’re interested, this is going to be in an upcoming Poulin Auction: the pre-sale estimate is $12,000 to $18,000.
And it is classified by BATFE as a “curio and relic”, so it is exempt from registration (and the tax stamp) as a “destructive device”.
I’ve been holding off on book posting until I get other stuff done, but I did want to post this for two reasons:
Vintage catalog from holster maker S.D. Myres Saddle Company, Inc. Judging by the postmark and price list inside, I believe this dates from around 1966.
The first reason for posting this is for great and good FotB (and El Paso native) RoadRich. Apple Maps seems to show 5018 Alameda as being a Family Dollar store, but I can’t tell what (if anything) is at 5030 Alameda. One of these days, I’d like to go back to El Paso and spend a few days there…
The second reason for posting this is: this was actually a kind and generous gift from my good friend David Carroll, purveyor of fine firearms to a grateful nation. If you are so inclined, why not wander over to his website, or check out his auctions on GunBroker?
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.
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.
IMDB. She’s credited as “Girl”.
During the Troubles (that is, the conflict in Northern Ireland), the British Army had a deep cover mole known as “Stakeknife”.
Mr. Scappaticci led that unit.
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.
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There is an inquiry going on into Stakeknife. It’s been going on since 2016.
Wikipedia entry. Why am I reminded of Whitey Bulger?
The past few days on the obit front have been fairly quiet, but I do want to catch up on a couple:
Billy Waugh, legendary Special Forces and CIA operative. He was 93.
Mr. Waugh, a well-known, colorful and blunt-spoken figure in the intelligence community, was a Special Forces veteran by the time he first arrived in Laos in 1961, in the early days of the Vietnam War, as part of a United States military advisory mission called White Star.
Over parts of a decade in Southeast Asia, he helped train counterinsurgency forces in South Vietnam and Laos. He participated in parachute drops to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which required jumping from aircraft at altitudes of 20,000 feet or more, he said, free-falling in the nighttime to the lowest possible height before popping the chute, to avoid enemy detection.
And he served with the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, a clandestine unit that ran reconnaissance and rescue missions in South and North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
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In June 1965, Mr. Waugh, then a master sergeant, was nearly killed when his team was overwhelmed by North Vietnamese forces in Binh Dinh Province, along the South Vietnam coast. He was shot in the knee, foot, ankle and forehead in a rice paddy. Thinking he was dead, North Vietnamese forces stripped him naked.
“I drifted in and out of consciousness, my body perforated with gunshot wounds, leeches feasting on every open wound with one thought jabbing at my semi-lucid brain,” he wrote in his 2005 autobiography, “Hunting the Jackal.” “Damn, my military career is finished. I’ll never see combat again.”
He was saved by two soldiers, one of them his commander, Capt. Paris Davis. Despite his own gunshot wounds, to an arm and a leg, Captain Davis helped Mr. Waugh crawl to a helicopter.
Those actions by Captain Davis earned him the Medal of Honor, which was belatedly presented to him by President Biden this year. Mr. Waugh received the Silver Star.
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He retired from the Army in 1972, with the rank of sergeant major, and worked for two years for the United States Postal Service, sorting mail, which bored him.
Then a call came in 1977 to return to action in a murky assignment — training Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libyan commandos in infantry tactics — and he jumped at the chance. It wasn’t a C.I.A. job, but one organized by a former agency officer, Edwin Wilson, who would later serve nearly 22 years in prison for selling explosives to Libya before his sentence was overturned.
After the Libyan mission, Mr. Waugh became an independent contractor for the C.I.A. In Sudan in 1991 and ’92, he watched and photographed bin Laden, who, long before he masterminded the 9/11 attacks, was already on the agency’s radar as the founder of Al Qaeda. Mr. Waugh sometimes jogged past bin Laden’s compound.
“At the time,” he wrote, “bin Laden was not considered an especially high-level assignment, and Khartoum was so completely saturated with miscreants and no-good bastards that my hunting wasn’t limited to this one tall Saudi exile.”
Still, as he told the MacDill Air Force Base website in 2011, he came within 30 meters of bin Laden. “I could have killed him with a rock,” he said.
He also tracked down and monitored Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, taking photographs of him at his apartment in Sudan before French intelligence agents captured him in 1994.
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After 9/11, Mr. Waugh, who was then 71, lobbied to be sent to Afghanistan.
“Billy got a folding chair and set it up opposite the entrance to my office and told my office manager, ‘I’m going to sit here until Cofer talks to me,’” said Mr. Black, who was director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the time.
Eventually, they talked. Mr. Waugh was still quite fit, and the next day, Mr. Black agreed to send him to Afghanistan, reasoning that his experience in unconventional warfare might help a young commander there.
During two months on Team Romeo, a combined Special Forces and C.I.A. unit whose mission was to root out Taliban soldiers and Al Qaeda terrorists, Mr. Waugh acted as a liaison between the soldiers and the C.I.A. operatives, advised Afghan troops and patrolled defenses.
“I was cold, filthy and stinky,” he wrote about his final days with the team, “but I was one of roughly 150 men who can say they conducted combat on the ground in Afghanistan during the initial — and pivotal — phase of Operation Enduring Freedom.”
Edward Koren, “New Yorker” cartoonist.
Well, I did end up getting a gun for National Buy a Gun Day.
Sort of. I actually got the night of the 14th, not on the 15th, but that still counts as far as I’m concerned.
It was one of the guns I had on layaway at my local gun shop: for various and uninteresting reasons, I ended up paying off the layaway a few weeks early, and was able to bring it home that night.
Photos to come: I may do a teaser photo, but a full write-up will have to wait until after part 2 of “Day of the .45”.
Good news: I’m taking time off this week for my birthday.
Bad news: Wednesday I’m participating in a mass casualty exercise at the airport. Friday I’m leaving for the Texas Gun Collector’s Association show in Waco, and plan to be there through Sunday afternoon.
So I may have some time on Thursday, but I’ll have to see what else comes up on the schedule. I do have at least one other thing I’d like to do that day…
Technically, National Buy a Gun Day is tomorrow, not today. Even better, tomorrow is a Saturday, so your gun shopping should be unobstructed.
However, I anticipate it being a busy weekend: Mike the Musicologist and I are planning to go to Kerrville tomorrow for the gun show, followed by Lawrence’s and my annual birthday dinner. So I’m posting today instead, because I don’t think I’ll have time otherwise.
Do I have my eye on anything in particular? Not really this year: I’m still waiting for my special order gun to show up, and I actually have two guns on layaway at my local gun shop, so I’m not much in the market right now. But gun shows are targets of opportunity, and you never know what might show up…
And some random gun crankery for you from The Firearm Blog:
Henry Repeating Arms, who is pretty famous for making modern lever-action rifles, is branching out. Now they’ve gotten into the revolver market. Doesn’t turn my crank, but if you own a Henry lever gun, you might like one of these as a companion side piece.
And Hi-Point’s introduced a new carbine…in .30 Super Carry. This seems weird, and not just because it is Hi-Point. .30 Super Carry, as I understand it, was designed more as a pistol cartridge, I’d be interested in seeing what it does out of a carbine, but not really interested enough to buy one.
(This is not me sneering at Hi-Point. I don’t find their guns attractive, but they are reasonably priced and work. The guys at Tex-Guns always used to say they’d sold “hundreds” of Hi-Points, and only had one or two come back needing work.)
And, yes, I know I owe everyone another gun/gun book post or two. I’m trying to work on it, but the weather and scheduling has not been cooperative. Soon…
Edited to add: If you aren’t busy on Sunday, though, and live in Austin, there’s a free “Stop the Bleed” course being offered. Details at the link.
Anne Perry, noted mystery writer.
Ms. Perry’s books, including the Thomas Pitt and William Monk series of historical mysteries, have sold more than 26 million copies, according to her website. In 1998, when The Times of London named its 100 Masters of Crime of the past century, there she was on the list alongside Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Heroes,” set in the trenches of World War I, won the 2000 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best short story. In 2013 and 2020, she was a guest of honor at Bouchercon, the international convention of mystery writers and fans.
I hate talking about this, but there’s a huge elephant in the room that I can’t ignore. As a teenager, she was known as Juliet Hulme. Her family moved to New Zealand, where she met Pauline Parker. The two girls became very close friends and “invented an elaborate medieval-like fantasy world and worshiped celebrities, especially the opera singer Mario Lanza, as saints.”
Juliet’s parents decided to divorce and leave New Zealand. The two girls didn’t want to be split up:
In Victoria Park, in Christchurch, the girls — Pauline was 16, Juliet was 15 — struck Honorah Parker in the head repeatedly with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. The trial was a sensation, much of it focusing on Juliet and Pauline’s absorption with each other and their fantasies about becoming famous novelists.
Both young women were convicted of murder, and after five years behind bars (in separate prisons) they were given new identities and instructed never to meet again. If they violated that order, they were warned, they would return to prison and serve life sentences.
The was dramatized in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”, which I strongly recommend if you can see it. (I checked Amazon: home video copies of this seem very hard to come by.)
Once her murder conviction was revealed, Ms. Perry did not shy away from acknowledging her guilt. She excused herself only by saying that she had been afraid that if she did not go along with the murder plan, her distraught friend might kill herself.
Ms. Perry’s regret did not extend to self-condemnation, however.
“In a sense it’s not a matter — at the end — of judging,” she said in the documentary. “I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?”
“It’s in the end, Who am I? Am I somebody that can be trusted? Am I someone that is compassionate, gentle, patient, strong?” She mentioned other traits: bravery, honesty, caring. “If you’re that kind of person — if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed.”
She concluded, “It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”
Someone sent me Virginia Norwood’s obit the other day, but I don’t remember who, and I can’t find it now. USGS.
Ms. Norwood pioneered the scanning technology used on the Landsat satellites.
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Ms. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.
Ms. Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.
The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.
A senior engineer from Hughes took the device out on a truck and drove around California to test it and convince the doubters that it would work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of the images, of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, on the wall of her house for the rest of her life.
Her tech was so good, it pretty much completely replaced the main Landsat system. (That system was actually shut down two weeks after the first Landsat launch because of problems.)
Alicia Shepard, former NPR ombudsman (ombudsperson?).
In June 2009, she wrote on her blog that she had received a “slew of emails” that took issue with NPR News’s use of the phrases “enhanced interrogation tactics” and “harsh interrogation techniques” instead of “torture” to describe what terrorism suspects held by the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq war had been forced to endure.
“Some say that by not using the word ‘torture,’ NPR is serving as right-wing apologists for waterboarding and other methods of extracting information,” Ms. Shepard wrote. President Bush refused to call waterboarding torture, but in April 2009 President Barack Obama did.
Ms. Shepard suggested that rather than labeling enhanced measures as torture, reporters should simply describe the tactics — saying, for example, that “the U.S. military poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds” or forced detainees “into cramped confines crawling with insects.”
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