Archive for November, 2024

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The logjam breaks…

Friday, November 29th, 2024

I’ve been in kind of a dry spell for vintage gun books. But that broke this week: I have four on the way from Callahan and Company (and I ordered them before Thanksgiving, so I can get away with this), and will be blogging those when they arrive.

In the meantime, though, I’m not working on Black Friday. I did swing by Half-Price Books and picked up two more Gun Digests I didn’t have: 1969, with an article by James E. Serven about “Captain Samuel H. Walker”, and 2022, with an article by Terry Wieland about “The Colt Walker”. I’ll tie this back at the end.

Let us get started…

(more…)

Posted in 1911, Books, Cops, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Kindleing, Law, Texas Rangers | 1 Comment »

da Bears.

Friday, November 29th, 2024

I’m trying to get out of the house to do some shopping, but stuff keeps coming up.

The Chicago Bears fired Matt Eberflus this morning. Tribune. ESPN.

This was not entirely unexpected. The Bears have lost six straight games, and are 4-8 this season. The big reason for pulling the trigger seems to be yesterday’s Lions game. It wasn’t just that they lost to Detroit, it was that the Bears completely botched the end of the game.

Instead of calling his final timeout, Eberflus watched as rookie quarterback Caleb Williams threw a long pass out of the reach of Rome Odunze as time expired.

(I don’t know why ESPN keeps referring to this as “Sunday’s game”. It was Thursday, right? My internal clock isn’t that messed up, is it?)

I didn’t see the game (we were busy eating Thanksgiving dinner out with our people) but from what I hear and read, Eberflus completely botched things. For crying out loud, the game ended with an unused timeout by da Bears!

“Bears fire Matt Eberflus shortly after making him meet with media” from Awful Announcing. Yes, he had a press conference this morning, in which he said “I’m confident I’ll be working to San Francisco and coaching that game.”…and then they fired him about two hours later.

The likeliest explanation, however, is merely that this is an organization where dysfunction has often been the default setting, and much like Eberflus on Thursday, the Bears were caught flat-footed. So while Eberflus’ firing may have been justified, there’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that Chicago’s problems extend well beyond whoever’s not calling timeouts from its sideline.

Eberflus was 14-32 in “three years”.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Relevant to my interests…

Friday, November 29th, 2024

…and possibly other people’s as well.

I follow the Jack Carr podcast, but I don’t listen to every episode. I generally only listen to the ones where he has a guest I’m interested in, such as Clint Smith or Steven Pressfield.

In this case, I’m recommending an episode, not because of the guest, but because of the subject matter:

“Inside The Biggest US Navy Security Breach: The Rise of Fat Leonard” with Dr. Matthew Levitt Craig Whitlock.

Kind of thing you could listen to in the car driving back home, if you’re interested in the Fat Leonard saga (which both Lawrence and I have covered).

Edited to add: Well, this is embarrassing, but I don’t think it is my fault. Even though the episode title is “Fat Leonard” etc., the feed appears to be carrying a repeat of the previous episode which was about Hezbollah. I’m guessing this will be fixed in a day or two.

Edited to add 2: Looks like they fixed the feed now.

I wonder how many people were being paid with US taxpayer dollars to review scripts for NCIS, which bear almost no resemblance to the actual NCIS.

Posted in Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 28, 2024.

Thursday, November 28th, 2024

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Yes, I know it’s weird to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving in an obit watch, but it is a weird Thanksgiving. I’m actually rooting for Detroit to win this year. (And the odds look good: they’re playing da Bears.)

Rev. Robert W. Dixon Sr. (United States Army – ret.) passed away on November 15th. He was 103 years old, and was the last surviving “Buffalo Soldier”.

Created after the Civil War, the Army’s all-Black cavalry and infantry regiments were nicknamed “Buffalo Soldiers” by Native Americans who encountered them in the nation’s Western expansion in the post-Civil War 19th century. The name may have been a reference to the soldiers’ curly black hair or to the fierceness that buffalo show in fighting. In either case, the soldiers embraced the name.
The troops could serve only west of the Mississippi River because most white Southerners would not tolerate armed Black soldiers in their communities. They fought in the Indian Wars and protected settlers moving West. During the Spanish-American War, the experienced horsemen of the 10th Cavalry led the way for Col. Theodore Roosevelt’s novice Roughriders in fighting in Cuba.
In the 20th century, official racism by the Army diminished the role that Buffalo Soldier regiments played in major engagements during both world wars, although some troops saw action in World War II during the invasion of Italy and in the Pacific theater.

…

Mr. Dixon, who grew up in New York City, enlisted in the Army in 1941 and remained at West Point through the war.
His wife, whom he married in 1977, said she did not know where he learned to ride or what he did at West Point; he was a disciplined, modest man and a Baptist pastor, who never spoke of his wartime service, preferring to focus on the future.

…

The Buffalo Soldiers unit at West Point was disbanded in 1946, when the Army became fully mechanized. Two years later, President Harry S. Truman ordered the desegregation of the military. In 2005, Mark Mathews, who was then the oldest living Buffalo Soldier, died at 111 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

…

Mr. Dixon returned to West Point at 101 to visit a monument to Buffalo Soldiers erected in 2021 on the open grasslands where they had trained future officers; the area is now named Buffalo Soldier Field.
At a celebration of Mr. Dixon’s life this week, Aundrea Matthews, the granddaughter of a Buffalo Soldier who serves as president of the Buffalo Soldiers Association of West Point, recalled that Mr. Dixon declined the help offered by cadets during his visit.
“When the soldiers went to grab Rev. Dixon to bring him up, he shook them off,” she said. “At 101, he walked by himself, and he saluted the Buffalo Soldier monument.”

For the historical record, archived NYT obits for Jim Abrahams and Helen Gallagher, which were posted after I put up yesterday’s obit watch.

Edited to add: 11-1! Go Lions!

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 27, 2024.

Wednesday, November 27th, 2024

Jim Abrahams, of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker (ZAZ), the people who brought you “Airplane!”, “Police Squad!” (In color), and “Top Secret!”

I know I’ve mentioned this, but: I enthusiastically endorse Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! by ZAZ, and think it would make a great Christmas present for someone in your family.

Earl Holliman. He had an interesting lineup of other credits, including “Forbidden Planet”, “The F.B.I.”, and “The Sons of Katie Elder”.

Helen Gallagher, actress. Other credits include “The Cosby Mysteries”, “Law and Order”, and “Roseland”.

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

Knife the Mack.

Tuesday, November 26th, 2024

Mack Brown has been shived by the North Carolina Tar Heels.

He is going to coach the final game of the season, and might coach a bowl game (reply hazy, ask again later) but he won’t be back next year.

ESPN.

The team is 6-5 this season.

Brown has coached 192 games at UNC over 16 seasons. He has won more games (113) than any coach in school history, and during first tenure at the school, which ran from 1988 through 1997, UNC became a top-10 program. During his second tenure with the school, though, his teams have been defined by late-season collapses and porous defenses. The highs were an Orange Bowl appearance at the end of the pandemic-altered 2020 season and a Coastal Division championship, followed by a loss against Clemson in the ACC title game, in 2022.
But the lows were many. A preseason top-10 ranking gave way to a 6-7 finish in 2021. In 2022 and ‘23, the Tar Heels started strong and entered the top 15 of the national rankings, only to endure agonizing late-season losing streaks that called into question their ability to finish. Throughout it all, UNC recruited well but the success there didn’t often translate to the field. Defensively, UNC has been among the worst teams in the ACC throughout Brown’s second head coaching tenure — a stunning contrast to its performance on that side of the ball during his first stint at head coach. On offense, the Tar Heels have had two of the best quarterbacks in school history in recent years in Sam Howell and Drake Maye, but sustained success proved elusive.

In two stints at North Carolina, Brown has gone a combined 113-78-1.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

As God is my witness…

Tuesday, November 26th, 2024

A woman is delivering Thanksgiving turkeys to her neighbors living off the grid.
For the last three years, Esther Sanderlin has been loading frozen turkeys onto her plane to drop them off to Alaskans who live off the road system.

(Hattip: my beloved and indulgent aunt and uncle.)

Posted in Bagatelle, Birds | 1 Comment »

Can’t get no antidote for Blues…

Monday, November 25th, 2024

Drew Bannister was fired yesterday as head coach of the St. Louis Blues.

The Blues lost 13 of their first 22 games this season. Only two teams have scored fewer than their 2.36 goals a game, and they rank in the bottom third of the league on the power play and penalty kill while ravaged by injuries.

This isn’t SportsHirings.com, but it is interesting: the Blues have already replaced Bannister…with Jim Montgomery, who you may recall was fired last week.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 25, 2024.

Monday, November 25th, 2024

Two members of the Civil Air Patrol were killed in a crash in Colorado over the weekend. Susan Wolber was the pilot and Jay Rhoten was serving as an aerial photographer. They were on a routine training mission when the plane crashed near Storm Mountain in Larimer County, Colorado. A third member of the crew, co-pilot Randall Settergren, survived the crash but was seriously injured.

I’m putting this up to give FotB RoadRich a chance to comment if he wishes. From private discussions with him, I know he was a friend of the pilot, but I’m going to leave it up to him how much more he wants to say.

Barbara Taylor Bradford, author. Her books were huge.

Beginning with the runaway success of her 1979 debut novel, “A Woman of Substance,” Ms. Bradford’s 40 works of fiction sold more than 90 million copies in 40 languages and were all best sellers on both sides of the Atlantic, according to publishers’ reports.
Ten of her books were adapted for television films and mini-series, and the author, a self-described workaholic whose life mirrored the rags-to-riches stories of many of her heroines, achieved global celebrity and amassed a $300 million fortune.

Charles Dumont has passed away at 95. He was a French songwriter, and you might recognize his name: he wrote (with Michel Vaucaire) “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”.

At 44, Piaf was racked by pain after a car accident and expressed little apparent interest in returning to the stage — certainly not with a song by Mr. Dumont, whom she had previously dismissed as “a mechanical songwriter of no great talent,” he recalled in a 2010 interview with The Independent.
That day, Piaf’s secretary had already informed them that the meeting was canceled when the singer piped up in a weary voice from her bedroom and agreed to see them. It took an hour for the frail figure to emerge, Mr. Dumont said, and when she did, she told them. “I’ll hear only one song — just one.” Mr. Dumont raced to the piano and began belting out “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” which he and Mr. Vaucaire had written with Piaf in mind.
“When I finished,” he said in 2010, “she asked, rather rudely, ‘Did you really write that song? You?’ Then she made me play it over and over again, maybe five or six times. She said that it was magnificent, wonderful. That it was made for her. That it was her. That it would be her resurrection.”

Noted:

Piaf dedicated her recording of the song to the Foreign Legion. At the time of the recording, France was engaged in a military conflict, the Algerian War (1954–1962), and the 1st REP (1st Foreign Parachute Regiment)—which backed the failed 1961 putsch against president Charles de Gaulle and the civilian leadership of Algeria—adopted the song when their resistance was broken. The leadership of the Regiment was arrested and tried but the non-commissioned officers, corporals and Legionnaires were assigned to other Foreign Legion formations. They left the barracks singing the song, which has now become part of the Foreign Legion heritage and is sung when they are on parade.

Chuck Woolery. NYT (archived).

After the Kentucky native performed “Delta Dawn” on The Merv Griffin Show, Griffin offered him a chance to audition as the host of a new game show he had just developed called Shopper’s Bazaar. Woolery beat out former 77 Sunset Strip star Edd “Kookie” Byrnes for the job, and the renamed Wheel of Fortune premiered on NBC on Jan. 6, 1975.
With the show pulling in a 44 share in 1981, Woolery requested a raise from $65,000 a year to about $500,000, what other top game show hosts were making at the time, he recalled in 2007. Griffin offered him $400,000 and NBC said it would pony up the rest, but that somehow infuriated Griffin, who threatened to take Wheel of Fortune to CBS, according to Woolery.
Not wanting to lose the game show, NBC withdrew the offer, and Griffin proceeded to fire Woolery and hire Pat Sajak. Also let go: original letter-turner Susan Stafford, who was replaced by Vanna White.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Music, Obits, Planes, TV | 6 Comments »

This is an obit about Alice, and about the restaurant…

Saturday, November 23rd, 2024

Alice Brock, restaurant owner.

Most people would know her best as the “Alice” of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”.

She closed the Back Room in 1967 and sold the church in 1971; Mr. Guthrie bought it in 1991 to house his archives and a community action center. By then she had moved to Provincetown, where she tried to put her fame behind her in favor of the tight-knit community she found on the Cape, which she considered her “chosen family.”

Also among the dead: Peter Sinfield, King Crimson guy.

Mr. Sinfield, who once referred to himself as the band’s “pet hippie,” linked up with Mr. Fripp in 1968 after living an itinerant life in Spain and Morocco. He was the lyricist on the first four King Crimson albums, starting with “In the Court of the Crimson King” in 1969, which is widely regarded as the first album in the genre that came to be known as prog rock.
But his role was varied. He also helped produce King Crimson’s albums and worked as a roadie, lighting operator and sound engineer and, as art director, oversaw the band’s album covers. He even came up with the name of the band, plucked from his lyrics for the song “The Court of the Crimson King.”

Spencer Lawton Jr. He was a DA for 28 years.

Mr. Lawton served as district attorney for Chatham County, Ga., from 1981 to 2009, a tenure in which he combined a tough-on-crime message with a pioneering program to provide help to victims and witnesses.
After recognizing that the criminal justice system, which pits the government against the defendant, often left victims and witnesses as an afterthought, he created an office to give them counseling and resources as they navigated a labyrinth that they usually had not chosen to enter.His Victim-Witness Assistance Program swiftly became a model in other jurisdictions, first around Georgia and eventually nationwide.

He may be better known as the lead prosecutor in the murder case against James Arthur Williams for the killing of Danny Hansford, or the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil murder case.

Mr. Berendt, who spent several years in the 1980s living in Savannah and peppered his gossipy story with denizens of the city’s quirky demimonde, clearly believed Mr. Williams, and he went to great lengths to depict Mr. Lawton as dimwitted and opportunistic, yet also “eloquent and venomous.”
He strongly implied that Mr. Lawton chose a charge of first-degree murder, instead of manslaughter, at the behest of Lee Adler, who had an ongoing feud with Mr. Williams, a neighbor, according to the book, and who was one of Mr. Lawton’s major campaign donors.
Mr. Lawton declined to speak with Mr. Berendt during the trials, saying it would be unprofessional.
Nor did he speak out after the book appeared, though he let friends and colleagues know he was frustrated — especially after its success sent a flood of tourists to Savannah and led to a film version that leaned into Mr. Berendt’s depiction of Mr. Lawton as a bumbling hack (though it did use a pseudonym for him, Finley Largent).

…

Mr. Lawton built his campaign on promises to resolve an enormous backlog of cases the Ryans had accumulated and to fix an antiquated local criminal-justice system that he claimed was failing the public. He won handily, and over the next 28 years won acclaim for making the system more responsive and humane.
It was, he always insisted, his real legacy, regardless of what millions of readers and tourists might think. In an obituary prepared by his family, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” or Mr. Lawton’s role in it, does not get a single mention.

I haven’t read Midnight and I don’t plan to. My understanding is that Berendt is a hack, and a lot of Midnight is fabricated. That bothers me, and I owe you guys a longer more thoughtful essay on the subject of fabrication in true crime books, and why Midnight bothers me when In Cold Blood doesn’t. I think the best answer I have right now is that In Cold Blood seems less egregious to me than Midnight.

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

Obit watch: November 21, 2024.

Thursday, November 21st, 2024

A lot of obits from the NYT today for people of questionable notability, but I have a reason for posting each of these.

Diane Coleman, disability rights activist and opponent of assisted suicide/”right to die” laws.

Gifted with a dark sense of humor, in 1996 she founded a group called Not Dead Yet, a reference to a memorable scene in the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in which a man tries to pass off an infirm — but very much alive — relative to a man collecting dead bodies.
“To put it bluntly, she was blunt,” Jim Weisman, a disability rights lawyer, said in an interview.

Vic Flick, British session musician.

The Bond films produced signature catchphrases (“shaken, not stirred,” “Bond, James Bond”) that have been endlessly recited and parodied since “Dr. No,” the first in the series, was released in Britain in 1962. But it was the sound of Mr. Flick’s guitar in the opening credits that helped make the spy thrillers instantly recognizable.
During the title credits of “Dr. No,” when moviegoers were introduced to or reacquainted with the works of the author Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books, Mr. Flick’s thrumming guitar sounded out through a brass-and-string orchestra.

Bill Moyes, one of the pioneers of hang gliding.

One winter day in 1968, Mr. Moyes became a man with wings. He took a ski lift to the top of Mount Crackenback, in the Australian Alps, harnessed himself to a device that looked like a giant kite and skied off a cliff.

…

Mr. Moyes flew at 1,000 feet for almost two miles, setting the world record for the longest unassisted flight, according to newspaper accounts. The triumph marked the beginnings of hang gliding, a sport Mr. Moyes popularized by flying into the Grand Canyon, soaring off Mount Kilimanjaro and being towed behind an airplane at 8,600 feet.

…

He nearly killed himself several times.
In 1972, at a show in Jamestown, N.D., he fell 300 feet after the towing rope snapped. He sustained multiple fractures and was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he spent several weeks recuperating.

…

On another occasion, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to launch from a speeding motorcycle that he was also driving. He did not break any bones. He also did not try that again.

Reg Murphy, newspaper guy. Beyond my well-known affection for crusty old newspaper people, Mr. Murphy was the centerpiece of a bizarre crime story I’d never heard of before.

Mr. Murphy was the editorial page editor of The Atlanta Constitution on Feb. 19, 1974, when a man later identified as William A.H. Williams, a drywall subcontractor, called Mr. Murphy’s office to ask his advice about how best to donate 300,000 gallons of heating oil to a worthy cause.
He called again the next day at dusk and arranged to meet Mr. Murphy at his home; the two of them would then drive to Mr. Williams’s lawyer’s office to sign some papers.
“I really had no choice but to go with him,” Mr. Murphy wrote in a lengthy account in The New York Times shortly after the incident, “for newspapermen have to lead open lives and be available to anonymous or strange people.”
So strange was Mr. Williams that he immediately displayed a .38-caliber gun in his left hand and announced, “Mr. Murphy, you’ve been kidnapped.” He identified himself as a colonel in the American Revolutionary Army and ranted against the “lying, leftist, liberal news media” and “Jews in the government.”

…

Mr. Murphy was held in a motel room, wedged tightly between a wall and a bed, and ordered to record an audiotape demanding $700,000 in ransom. The money was delivered in marked bills in two suitcases dropped off on a rural road.

That’s $700,000 in 1974 money. According to my preferred inflation calculator, that’s $4,482,044.62 in 2024 money.

After 49 hours of captivity, Mr. Murphy was released in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn. Mr. Williams, whom Mr. Murphy identified from photos of suspects, was arrested six hours later.
He was convicted on federal extortion charges and sentenced to 40 years in prison, of which he served nine. His wife received a three-year suspended sentence for failing to report his crimes. The ransom was recovered.
In 2019, Mr. Williams, stricken with Stage 4 melanoma, called the newspaper to apologize. He said he had been high on amphetamines when the kidnapping took place.

…

In 1975, Mr. Murphy left Atlanta to become editor and publisher of The San Francisco Examiner, owned by Randolph Hearst, whose daughter was on trial at the time for participating in a bank robbery linked to the radical group that had abducted her. After she was convicted, Mr. Hearst appeared in The Examiner’s office and dropped the key to a new Porsche on his desk in appreciation of the newspaper’s coverage.
“It takes integrity of a different kind for a father to come in and say, ‘You did a good job covering the trial of my daughter,’” Mr. Murphy said in an interview published this year in The Mercerian, the magazine of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., his alma mater.

Posted in Law, Media, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

UnBearable.

Wednesday, November 20th, 2024

Jim Montgomery out as head coach of the Boston Bruins hockey team.

They were 120-41-23 in “three seasons”. 20 games into the current season, they’re 8-9-3.

The Bruins have been one of the NHL’s most notable disappointments this season. They’re 31st in team offense (2.40 goals per game) and 28th in defense (3.45 goals against per game).
Previously dependable aspects of the team have malfunctioned, in particular the goaltending. The team traded former Vezina winner Linus Ullmark to the Ottawa Senators for goalie Joonas Korpisalo. The Ullmark deal broke up the best goalie tandem in the NHL with 26-year-old Jeremy Swayman, who missed training camp during a bitter negotiation before signing an eight-year contract that will pay him $66 million.

(Apologies for the ESPN link, but I flat out cannot get around the various Boston media paywalls/”disable your ad blocker” prompts.)

Posted in Firings, Sports | 1 Comment »

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