Obit watch: Bruce Reynolds, the man who planned the Great Train Robbery.
In the early morning of Aug. 8, 1963, a gang of 15 men stopped a Glasgow-to-London mail train about 45 miles short of its destination by tampering with a signal. The train, which usually carried large quantities of money in the second car behind the locomotive, was loaded even more heavily than normal because of a just-completed bank holiday in Scotland, and the thieves escaped with about 120 bags of cash, mostly in small bills, totaling about £2.6 million, or about $7 million at the time — the equivalent of about $60.5 million today.
I remember the murder of Jonathan Levin: it was a big deal at the time, mostly because his father was the chairman of Time Warner. Instead of going into business, Levin chose to teach high school:
The killing of Mr. Levin (pronounced luh-VIN) on May 30, 1997, sent his students and colleagues into waves of grief. His body was discovered, bound with duct tape, in his apartment on the Upper West Side. The police said he had been tortured with a knife for his bank card number and shot in the back of his head. At his funeral, some of his students propped a cardboard sign atop his plain wooden coffin with the words: “We are his kids.”
The Department of Education created the…
…Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications in the same South Bronx building where he had taught, declaring it “a living tribute” to the English teacher’s “spirit, values, commitment and impassioned belief” that every child has a right to a quality education.
Sadly, things haven’t worked out:
But in the past few years, a quality education at Levin High School became harder to come by. Money for a college scholarship in Mr. Levin’s name dried up. A ball field that a Mets official helped pay for fell into disrepair. Computers sat untouched, applications to the school fell and the graduation rate sank to 31 percent, the fifth-lowest in the city.
Now, just a decade after it opened, New York has deemed Levin High School a failure, and is preparing to close it down.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 1st, 2013 at 7:54 am and is filed under Clippings, Law, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.