Whipped Cream Difficulties

Jay J. Armes passed away on September 19th. He was 92.

I had been thinking about him recently, wondering if he was still around and enjoying a comfortable retirement, or if he was still working.

I’m not sure how many people remember him, but he was a pretty famous private investigator in El Paso.

Described as “armless but deadly” by People magazine, Mr. Armes appeared to live the life of a superhero. In the 1970s, the Ideal Toy Corporation even reproduced him as a plastic action figure, with hooks like those he began wearing in adolescence after an accident in which railroad dynamite exploded in his hands.

…

In May 1946, Julian and an older friend were horsing around one afternoon with a teenager who had a pair of railroad blasting caps. Julian was holding them when they blew up, shooting him into the air, mangling his hands and nearly killing him.
A few months later he was fitted with prosthetic hooks.

He tried acting for a bit, but went into PI work.

Mr. Armes (pronounced arms) catapulted to investigatory stardom in 1972 after Marlon Brando hired him to find his 13-year-old son, Christian, who had been abducted in Mexico. Working with Mexican federal agents, Mr. Armes said he found the boy in a cave with a gang of hippies.
He told other daring tales of triumph: flying on a glider into Cuba to recover $2 million for a client; helping another client escape from a Mexican prison by sending him a helicopter, which he said inspired the 1975 Charles Bronson movie “Breakout.”

He was a self-promoter. Perhaps a bit too much of one.

After Newsweek, People and other national publications chronicled his adventures, the Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright went to El Paso to write a profile of Mr. Armes. His article — headlined “Is Jay J. Armes For Real?” — is widely regarded as a classic of magazine writing.

The Cartwright article is linked from the obit, but Texas Monthly is kind of skirty about reading without a subscription. Here’s an archived version. Brutally summarizing (you should really read the whole thing), Mr. Cartwright found a lot of inconsistencies between what Mr. Armes claimed and what could be documented.

Mr. Armes’s son said in an interview last week that Mr. Cartwright’s article was a “hatchet job” and that it was retaliation for his father’s unsuccessful campaign for sheriff of El Paso County against a friend of the writer. Mr. Cartwright died in 2017.
In 2016, the public radio program “Snap Judgment” revisited the Texas Monthly article and the puzzle of Mr. Armes.
The private eye couldn’t tolerate even hearing Mr. Cartwright’s name.
“He’s got a wilted hand, and I guess he had an inferiority complex,” Mr. Armes told “Snap Judgment.” “He saw Jay Armes had accomplished all this. So, he had to write a cutthroat story. Don’t tell me about anything about this corrupt Gary Cartwright. Don’t even mention his name to me.”

…

He told interviewers that he appeared in more than three dozen movies and television shows. But he is credited as an actor with just one TV appearance on the Internet Movie Database — a 1973 episode of “Hawaii Five-O” in which he played an assassin.

“Hookman”, season 6, episode 1. He was a violent criminal who was out for revenge against the four cops that caused him to lose his hands…one of whom was Steve McGarret. I admit, I haven’t seen every episode of the good “Hawaii Five-O”, but I have seen this one, and I would agree it is one of the best of those I’ve seen. Mike Quigley seems to agree with me.

(It was remade for the bad “5-0” (season 3, episode 15), but without Mr. Armes.)

He had some notable successes and seemed to earn enough money to support his lifestyle. In 1991, he was credited by authorities with tracking down the body of Lynda Singshinsuk, a Northwestern University student who had gone missing. Mr. Armes also persuaded the suspect, Donald Weber, to confess to killing her.
“Without Mr. Armes’s assistance, there is a significant possibility that Mr. Weber would not be brought to justice,” a prosecutor told The Chicago Tribune.

I found two action figures on eBay. One is $61.19 and it doesn’t look complete. The other one is $149.99. I can’t tell how complete it is, but it does have the “briefcase” with the various “hands”.

In other news, Masamitsu Yoshioka has passed away. He was 106.

His death was announced on social media on Aug. 28 by the Japanese journalist and author Takashi Hayasaki, who spoke with Mr. Yoshioka last year. He provided no other details.

He was “the last known survivor among some 770 crew members who manned the Japanese airborne armada that attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941”.

He explained last year in an interview with Jason Morgan, an associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, for the English-language website Japan Forward, “I’m ashamed that I’m the only one who survived and lived such a long life.”
Asked in that interview if ever thought of visiting Pearl Harbor, he at first replied, “I wouldn’t know what to say.” He then added: “If I could go, I would like to, I would like to visit the graves of the men who died. I would like to pay them my deepest respect.”

This made me snort:

He participated in the attack on Wake Island on Dec. 11, 1941, and a raid in the Indian Ocean early in 1942. (As Professor Morgan put it, he “was involved in many additional campaigns for the liberation of Asia from white colonialism.”) But when Emperor Hirohito announced his nation’s surrender, Mr. Yoshioka was on an air base in Japan.

“…the liberation of Asia from white colonialism”.

The Rape of Nanjing.

“Now I think of the men who were on board those ships we torpedoed. I think of the people who died because of me,” Mr. Yoshioka said. “They were young men, just like we were. I am so sorry about it; I hope there will not be any more wars.”

Bob Yerkes, stuntman. IMDB.

His backyard was equipped with rigs for high falls, mats to practice flips and a springboard powered by compressed air that launched people end-over-end. He is said to have invented the airbag for stunt use.
“There will never be another backyard like Bob’s where you could train for free or even live for free if you needed a place to stay,” Williams wrote.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 3rd, 2024 at 7:33 pm and is filed under 1970s, History, Law, Movies, Obits, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.