Archive for July, 2023

« Older Entries

Obit watch: July 31, 2023.

Monday, July 31st, 2023

As I write this, I am seeing reports from two sources that Paul Reubens, aka “Pee-Wee Herman”, has passed at 70. Here’s THR‘s very short preliminary story: expect an obit watch tomorrow.

Inga Swenson, actress.

…the Nebraska native — no, she was not born in Germany — was cast in 1963 as the spinster Lizzy in 110 in the Shade, based on N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker. She received a Tony nomination for best actress in a musical for that performance, then landed another for her turn as Sherlock Holmes foe Irene Adler in the Hal Prince-directed Baker Street a year later.

Other credits include “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rookies”, “Earth II”, and “Vega$”.

Magnus White, cyclist.

White was a rising multidisciplinary star, winning a junior national championship in cyclocross in 2021 and earning a place on the U.S. national team. He competed with the team in Europe ahead of last year’s cyclocross world championships, and he was picked to represent the U.S. again at this year’s cyclocross worlds in the Netherlands.

He was 17, and died after being struck by a car on a training ride.

Devyn Reiley and Zach Colliemoreno were killed over the weekend in a plane crash at Oshkosh’s AirVenture 2023. Ms. Reiley was 30, Mr. Colliemoreno was 20. She was co-founder of the Texas Warbird Museum, and the daughter of former NFL player Bruce Collie.

Two other people, Mark Peterson and Thomas Volz, were killed in a second accident at AirVenture: their passing is also noted in the AVWeb article above.

Posted in 1970s, Cycling, Movies, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 28, 2023.

Friday, July 28th, 2023

Randy Meisner, formerly of the Eagles. (The NYT obit is still labeled as “A full obituary will appear shortly.”) THR.

Edited to add 7/29: full NYT obit (archived).

He left the band around the time “Hotel California” was released. Mr. Meisner also played with Poco, and later played “with the likes of Joe Walsh, Dan Fogelberg, Richard Marx, Bob Welch and James Taylor.”

“I was always kind of shy,” he said in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, noting that his bandmates had wanted him to stand center stage to sing “Take It to the Limit,” but that he preferred to be “out of the spotlight.” Then, one night in Knoxville, he said, he caught the flu. “We did two or three encores, and Glenn wanted another one,” he said, referring to his bandmate, the singer-songwriter who died in 2016.
“I told them I couldn’t do it, and we got into a spat,” Mr. Meisner told the magazine. “That was the end.”

Bo Goldman, screenwriter.

Goldman was one of the handful of screenwriters — Paddy Chayefsky, Francis Ford Coppola, Horton Foote, William Goldman, Billy Wilder and Joel and Ethan Coen among them — to win Academy Awards for both original and adapted screenplay.

IMDB.

Jerome Coopersmith, theater and television writer.

Coopersmith wrote 30 regular installments and two feature-length episodes of CBS’ Hawaii Five-O from 1968-76. Among those was the notable 1975 eighth-season installment Retire in Sunny Hawaii … Forever, which featured Helen Hayes in an Emmy-nominated guest-starring stint as the aunt of her real-life son, James MacArthur.

“Retire In Sunny Hawaii…Forever” from “The Hawaii Five-O Home Page”. My memory is that this was a pretty solid episode, and I’m glad Mike Quigley agrees.

The dramatist adapted stories from Arthur Conan Doyle to write the book for 1965’s Baker Street, which was directed by Hal Prince and featured lyrics and music from Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. Starring Fritz Weaver as Sherlock Holmes and Peter Sallis as Dr. Watson, it ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway.

IMDB.

Lelia Goldoni, actress. Other credits include “Theatre of Death”, “The Lloyd Bridges Show”, and “Johnny Staccato”.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 27, 2023.

Thursday, July 27th, 2023

Sinéad O’Connor. NYT (archive). THR. Tributes. Pitchfork. Tributes.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Noted.

Thursday, July 27th, 2023

Scott Cobb will be paroled in August after 34 years in prison.

NYPD officer Edward Byrne was unavailable for comment.

Posted in Cops, Law, NYPD | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 26, 2023.

Wednesday, July 26th, 2023

Johnny Lujack, one of Notre Dame’s greats. He was 98.

Lujack was an outstanding passer and a fine runner at quarterback, as well as a brilliant defensive halfback, a place-kicker and occasionally a punter. He was a two-time all-American and played in only one losing football game at Notre Dame. He also played baseball and basketball and ran track.
He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1960 and had been the oldest living winner of the Heisman, the prize awarded annually to college football’s leading player.
“He’s probably the greatest all-around athlete I’ve ever seen in college football,” Frank Tripucka, the backup to Lujack at Notre Dame and a longtime pro quarterback, told Steve Delsohn for the oral history “Talking Irish” (1998.) “He was six foot and maybe 180, but he was just a very tough guy from western Pennsylvania.”

…

Lujack took over as Notre Dame’s quarterback in November 1943 when Angelo Bertelli left for military service. He took the Irish to a 9-1 record and their first No. 1 national ranking.
He left Notre Dame for the Navy during World War II and served aboard a vessel chasing German submarines in the English Channel. He returned in 1946, when the Irish fielded an overpowering team composed largely of war veterans.
When Notre Dame played Army in November 1946 in a matchup of unbeaten teams, Lujack was hobbled by a sprained ankle, but he played nevertheless, on both offense and defense. He threw three interceptions, but in the third quarter, playing at defensive halfback, he saved the day for Notre Dame.
Coming across the field, he pulled down Army fullback Doc Blanchard, the 1945 Heisman winner, on the Irish 36-yard line, making a low tackle as Blanchard raced down the left sideline.
“I was the last guy between him and a touchdown,” Lujack told The New York Times in 1981. “I read afterward where I was the only guy ever to have made a one-on-one tackle on him. If I’d known that during the game, I’d probably have missed the tackle.”

…

Lujack took Notre Dame to a 9-0 record and a third national championship in 1947, his Heisman Trophy year, when he passed for nine touchdowns and 777 yards and ran for 139, averaging more than 11 yards per carry. The Associated Press named him America’s male athlete of the year.
In January 1948, the Bears signed Lujack to a four-year contract and a bonus, for a total of about $80,000. (A little more than $1 million in today’s money).
Lujack led the N.F.L. in pass completions (162), yards passing (2,658) and touchdown passes (23) in 1949, when he threw for six touchdowns and passed for a league-record 468 yards in a game against the Chicago Cardinals. He was a two-time Pro Bowl player and was named a first-team all-N.F.L. player in 1950. He retired after four pro seasons to become a backfield coach at Notre Dame.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

What time is it, kids?

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

Not Howdy Doody time.

I promised I wasn’t going to do any more gun books until “Day of the .45, part 2.” went up. Now that I have posted it, I have a large stack to go through, including more than one Samworth, so I’m going to start trying to knock some of those off.

First, some ground rules:

I’m going be posting some newer books, ones that are readily available on Amazon or from the usual suspects. For those, I will be posting Amazon affiliate links, and I will be posting commentary if I’ve read the book, but I won’t be posting cover photos or a lot of bibliographic detail. The Amazon links should give you enough information to order the book, or to find it from some other vendor, if you’re really interested, and photos of readily available contemporary books will just make these posts longer.

One of my side projects that I won’t be documenting in a lot of detail here: I’ve decided that I want to try to accumulate a complete set of Gun Digest. I’ve found that GD frequently has interesting articles on either gun or gun book history, and I think it would be useful to have them around for reference. I probably won’t be documenting those here, though I may mention them in passing.

My self-imposed limits for this project are: I’m buying them used, in very good to excellent condition, and I’m trying not to pay more than $10 for each one. So far, I have the 1998 edition (which has a very good article on the Winchester Model 52) and the 2005 edition (nice article on the guns of Roy Chapman Andrews). The 2010 edition (with the profile of E.C. Crossman) is on the way, as is another Samworth book by Crossman.

With those ground rules set:

(more…)

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 25, 2023.

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

Pamela Blair, actress. Other credits include John Huston’s film of “Annie”, “The Cosby Mysteries”, and “Law and Order”.

Reeves Callaway. He made cars go fast.

Mr. Callaway and his company were well known in the world of high-performance automobiles custom-made for deep-pocketed clients. He began by modifying cars out of his garage, then established his company in Old Lyme, Conn., with the goal of challenging European manufacturers like Porsche and Ferrari, which were then making the world’s fastest vehicles.

…

“They came to us,” he told the Truck Show Podcast in 2021, “and they said, ‘Look, could you, within one year’s time, develop an Alfa twin-turbo system for us that we could use to compete against the Maserati?’”
He did, making about three dozen modified vehicles, but then Alfa Romeo lost interest in the project. Yet somehow one of those modified Alfas found its way to General Motors’ Black Lake testing ground in Michigan, and soon GM was asking if Mr. Callaway could do the same thing to its Chevrolet Corvette.
“This was a huge opportunity, to become associated with Corvette,” he said. “So we saluted and said, ‘Yes, sir; immediately, sir; may I have another, sir?’”

…

In late 1988, he and his engineers tweaked the Corvette some more, taking aim at 250 miles per hour with a version of the car that they called the Sledgehammer.
“We basically decided that 250 m.p.h. was a reachable goal,” Mr. Callaway told the McClatchy News Service. “But if it was to have any meaning, the car had to be docile at low speeds as well. It had to retain all the things that make a car usable on the street, such as air-conditioning.”
To prove the point, his team drove the car from Connecticut to a seven-and-a-half-mile oval track in Ohio. (It got 16 miles per gallon, they said.) At the track, it hit 210 m.p.h. on its first run, 223 on its second. After more tweaking, it reached 254.76 on its third attempt, a record for a car made for normal driving. Mr. Callaway’s company, in its announcement of his death, said the record stood for more than 20 years.

The Santa Barbara News-Press.

Ampersand Publishing LLC, the entity that owns the paper, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, or liquidation, on Friday, with estimated assets of up to $50,000 and liabilities between $1,000,001 and $10 million, according to court records. The bankruptcy was approved by the LLC on May 1, with Wendy McCaw, who has owned the paper since 2000, as the authorized agent.

…

The News-Press has published for more than 150 years, but it has undergone years of turbulence since McCaw bought it from The New York Times Co. In 2006, six editors and a columnist resigned in protest of interference from McCaw in the editorial process. The was followed by an exodus of dozens of additional staffers, as well as a vote by remaining newsroom employees to unionize with the Teamsters.

Ron Sexton, comedian and regular on ‘The Bob & Tom Show’.

Posted in Cars, Media, Obits, Radio, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Bagatelle (#91)

Monday, July 24th, 2023

I did not know there was a Yogi Berra stamp.

I guess these were issued in 2021, which would explain why I can’t find first day covers on the USPS web site. But my local post office still had sheets of them.

Also, postage is 66 cents now. Good thing the Yogi stamps are forever stamps. After all, as someone once said, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Posted in Bagatelle, Stamps | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 24, 2023.

Monday, July 24th, 2023

Richard Barancik has passed away at 98.

The Monuments Men and Women were composed of about 350 people — among them museum directors, curators, scholars, historians and artists — whose missions included steering Allied bombers away from cultural targets in Europe; overseeing repairs when damages occurred; and tracking down millions of objects plundered by the Nazis and returning them to the institutions, and the countries, they came from.

Mr. Barancik was the last surviving member of this group.

Mr. Barancik (pronounced ba-RAN-sick) was one of four members of what was formally called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015 in Washington for their “heroic role in the preservation, protection, restitution of monuments, works of art and artifacts of cultural importance.”
On the day of the ceremony, Mr. Barancik told The Los Angeles Times: “The Americans cared about the cultural traditions of Europe. We did everything we could to salvage what the Nazis had done. It’s the best we could do.”

Mike Reynolds.

At first, the murder of Mr. Reynolds’s daughter, Kimber, seemed like just one more statistic. An 18-year-old college student home in Fresno on summer break, she was attacked one night in June 1992 by two men on motorcycles who tried to grab her purse.
When she resisted, one of the men, Joseph Michael Davis, shot her in the head, in front of dozens of witnesses. She was rushed to a hospital and died 26 hours later.

One of the murderers was killed in a shootout with police.

His accomplice, Douglas Walker, was arrested and reached a plea deal for a nine-year sentence with parole after four and a half, despite having a previous felony conviction. Mr. Reynolds decided that there should be a law to keep people like him locked up.

His efforts stalled out at first. Then Polly Klass was murdered.

Almost overnight, public outrage over Polly’s murder turned into support for Mr. Reynolds’s campaign. Calls came in to his Fresno headquarters in such volume that they overloaded the city’s 1-800 system. Within weeks, he had the signatures he needed.
The bill also found a new life in the Legislature, as state and national politicians, facing election in the fall of 1994, raced to appear tough on crime. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and her Republican opponent that year, Representative Michael Huffington, both endorsed the bill.
This time it sailed through both chambers of the Legislature, and Governor Wilson signed it into law in March. That fall, the accompanying ballot initiative passed with overwhelming support. In the years that followed, two dozen states, inspired by California, enacted their own three-strikes laws.

Tiny violin watch:

The law had, and continues to have, its detractors. Critics claimed it would overcrowd the prisons, drive up the cost of incarceration and clog the courts, as criminals facing life in prison would be less likely to reach a plea agreement.
It was also derided as unfair: Even a felony as minor as stealing a slice of pizza could result in a 25-year sentence, a situation that befell one man, Jerry Dewayne Williams. Though a judge later reduced Mr. Williams’s sentence, critics used his case as an example of the law’s unfairness.

More about Jerry DeWayne Williams.

An initiative to soften the three-strikes law failed in 2004, but a nearly identical initiative in 2012 succeeded. Both proposals mitigated the sentencing rules if the third felony was a nonviolent one. Mr. Reynolds strongly opposed them.

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

Day of the .45, part 2. (Random gun crankery)

Saturday, July 22nd, 2023

Finally. The position of the sun, the condition of the back porch, and all the other things going on in my life lined up, and I can bring you the senses shattering part two of “Day of the .45”.

The same day I picked up my CMP 1911, I also took a second gun off layaway. It was also chambered in .45 ACP, and also has a military background. It had been sitting in layaway purgatory for a few months, and I didn’t take out before then because holidays.

But once the holidays passed, I was free to buy things, and had the last tranche of funds available to take it home. After the jump, more history. And some pictures…

(more…)

Posted in 1911, Guns, Holsters, Smith and Wesson | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 21, 2023.

Friday, July 21st, 2023

Jim Scoutten, noted shooting sports commentator. Thanks to Pigpen51 for tipping me off on this one, but it took me some time to find something I could link.

Tony Bennett. THR. Well covered pretty much everywhere, so not a lot to say.

Carlin Glynn, actress. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Three Days of the Condor”, “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, and “Resurrection” (an interesting sounding movie I had not heard of until recently: parts of it were filmed in the area around Cattleman’s Steakhouse in Fabens).

Josephine Chaplin. IMDB.

Dick Biondi, noted Chicago DJ. I never listened to Chicago radio, but the name does ring a bell with me.

Posted in Guns, Movies, Music, Obits, Radio | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 20, 2023.

Thursday, July 20th, 2023

Kevin Mitnick, noted computer cracker/social engineer/security consultant. WP (archived). The NYT has one of their preliminary obits up, with a promise of a longer obit later. I’ll add that here when it is published.

Edited to add: NYT obit (archived) here.

After his release, Mr. Mitnick became a polarizing but regular presence in the cybersecurity community. He portrayed himself as a misunderstood “genius” and pioneer, and some supporters said he was a victim of overzealous prosecution and overhyped media coverage. Fans staged protests across more than a dozen cities when he was sentenced and adorned their cars with yellow “Free Kevin” bumper stickers after his arrest.

…

It was not clear if Mr. Mitnick made significant financial gains from cybercrime, though he had the opportunity to do so. “My motivation was a quest for knowledge, the intellectual challenge, the thrill and the escape from reality,” he told a Senate committee hearing several months after he was freed from incarceration.

James Reston Jr., historian, and author who was involved in the Frost/Nixon interviews.

Mr. Reston drafted a 96-page brief — an “interrogation strategy memo,” he called it — to gird Mr. Frost for nearly 29 hours of interviews that would be condensed into four 90-minute television programs.
“The resulting Frost-Nixon interviews — one in particular — indeed proved historic,” Mr. Reston wrote. “On May 4, 1977, 45 million Americans watched Frost elicit a sorrowful admission from Nixon about his part in the scandal: ‘I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me the rest of my life.’”
“In the broadcast,” Mr. Reston continued, “the interviewer’s victory seemed quick, and Nixon’s admission seemed to come seamlessly. In reality, it was painfully extracted from a slow, grinding process over two days.”

…

In another book, “The Accidental Victim: JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Real Target in Dallas” (2013), he wrote that Mr. Connally, who was riding in the car with President John F. Kennedy when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, had been Oswald’s intended target. Oswald, he wrote, may have blamed Mr. Connally for failing, as Navy secretary, to reconsider his dishonorable discharge from the Marines.

Ed Bressoud, baseball player. He played for both the New York Giants and the New York Mets. The only other person to do this was Willie Mays.

Following the 1961 season, he was selected by Houston in the MLB expansion draft but was traded to the Red Sox before even playing for the Colt 45s.

Nick Benedict, actor. Other credits include the original “Mission: Impossible”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, and the good “Hawaii 5-0”.

Posted in Books, Geek, Nixon, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

« Older Entries