Archive for December 20th, 2024

Obit watch: December 20, 2024. (Supplemental)

Friday, December 20th, 2024

Turn out the lights, Party City is over.

Barry Litwin, the company’s chief executive officer, told corporate employees on Friday that Party City is “winding down” operations immediately and that today will be their last day of employment.

…

The development team was recalled from its yearly trip with vendors and told to go home immediately two weeks ago, according to a former corporate office employee who spoke to CNN.
The team was informed that the company believed the trip posed a safety risk since Party City stopped paying its suppliers.
All Party City corporate employees were sent home on Dec. 10 and security locked the front entrance of company headquarters in Woodcliff Lake, NJ.

…

Party City, which is known for selling balloons and other party supplies, first filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January last year, with $150 million in debtor-in-possession financing to support its operations and reported $1 billion to $10 billion of estimated assets and liabilities.
In September, the retailer reached a plan to exit bankruptcy, which saw a cancellation of about $1 billion in company debt and turned all its equity value over to the retailer’s lenders.

So what the heck happened with that plan? It isn’t clear from the article. Though “The company had considered filing for bankruptcy a second time earlier this month…”

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Obit watch: December 20, 2024.

Friday, December 20th, 2024

Joanne Pierce Misko, historical footnote. And I say that in the kindest possible way.

She spent 10 years as a nun with the Sisters of Mercy, but she decided she wanted to marry and have kids. She was looking for something to do other than teaching.

One day an F.B.I. agent came to her school in Olean to talk about jobs in the bureau. She had already been thinking about leaving her order, and the idea of a career in the F.B.I. intrigued her.

She signed on as a researcher in 1970. Research or clerical work were the only options available to women at that time. But when Hoover died in 1972, L. Patrick Gray III allowed women to sign up as agents.

With her supervisor’s encouragement, Mrs. Misko applied, and within a few months she was being sworn in with 44 others at the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. She and another woman, Susan Roley Malone, a former Marine, then traveled with the others to the new F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Va., for 14 weeks of training.

They were the first two female FBI agents.

“I can remember very vividly the first case I had,” she told the Buffalo TV station WGRZ in 2022. “We went out to get the guy, and he found out that we were looking for him and he called back into the office; he was incensed that a woman was being sent out to get him, you know, that he wasn’t worthy of a guy. He had to have a woman go after him.”
Often, she found her gender could be an advantage, as suspects often let their guard down around her.
“Most people back then didn’t even realize the F.B.I. had female agents,” Mrs. Misko said on the Madame Policy podcast in 2022. “Many times a subject would simply open the door when I knocked, not expecting me to say, ‘F.B.I.’”

“Celebrating Women Special Agents: Joanne Pierce Misko” on the FBI website. One thing not mentioned there, but in the NYT obit:

She retired in 1994 and went to work for a bank. That same year, she filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, saying she had been held back from promotion because of her gender. She settled the suit in 1996 for an undisclosed sum.

By the way, she did marry a fellow FBI agent, but the NYT does not mention children.

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Flaming hyena update.

Friday, December 20th, 2024

A while back, I wrote about Burnet County Judge James Oakley, who had just been indicted on both felony and misdemeanor charges.

A jury found him not guilty of one charge, and a judge threw out the other charges. However, a panel of judges from the Third Court of District Appeals recently ruled that judge “erred” in his decision.

Judge Oakley was also reprimanded by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct earlier this month.

One of the things he’s accused of is removing the lock to Justice of the Peace Lisa Whitehead’s courtroom door. Whitehead ended up filing a formal complaint over safety concerns after she said she could not find a “workable solution” with Oakley.
Oakley also faces allegations of sexual harassment from Whitehead that stem from 2023 and for creating a “hostile work environment.”

Judge Oakley resigned on Wednesday. For what it may be worth, the text of his reprimand is included in the linked KXAN article.

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