Trip report: Tulsa, Oklahoma.

June 19th, 2024

“Back to Tulsa AGAIN? You were just there in November.”

True that. But the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association tries to rotate the symposiums around the country: “West Coast” one year (that was last year’s Glendale symposium), “East Coast” one year (Concord in 2022 and again next year), and “Central” (Tulsa this year).

I’m glad to say that this year’s hotel (which we were also at in 2021) was very very happy to see us. Last year’s hotel…wasn’t, and I’ll just leave it at that. The Renaissance Tulsa Hotel & Convention Center, on the other hand, could not have been more accomodating. (They did have “No Firearms or Weapons” stickers on the doors, but I never heard anything about anybody being hassled by the hotel staff.) I was privy to a conversation between one of my friends (who is a S&WCA officer) and one of the hotel managers, and the manager was very excited about having us back. We tip well, we don’t throw loud obnoxious parties, we have our own security, and we don’t trash the place.

There are two popular questions people ask me. Well, maybe one “popular” question and one not-so-popular.

“Did I buy any guns?” Answer: yes, but we’re still going through the transfer process. Once that’s complete, I plan to do a post. Here’s a hint:

“Did I buy any books?” asked nobody, ever. Answer: Yes! My book buddy from the Association came down from Canada and brought a stack of books. He thought I might be interested in “some” of them and planned to put the others on his sales table. I bought the whole lot, which came out to ten books by my count. This includes two new-to-me Samworths, one duplicate Samworth that’s in better shape than my copy, three Jack O’Connor books that I didn’t have, and some miscellaneous books from other publishers. I will be annoying my loyal reader with posts on those books as time permits.

Additionally, I happened to be working the registration table with another gentleman who, it turned out, was also a gun book person. He had somehow wound up with a spare copy of a recent gun book and gifted his spare to me.

I also picked up a fair amount of old paper, some of which my book buddy threw in as part of my purchase and some of which I bought from other dealers. I may scan and post some of this, especially when I do the gun post.

(And as a side note: the night before I left, I got two huge and heavy packages from an auction lot I’d placed a lowball bid on, and won. The lot was for old “gun and ammo” books. So I’ll be sharing interesting bits from that lot as well.)

Since Sunday was an off day, I drove up to Oklahoma City specifically to see the 45th Infantry Division Museum, which is now known as the Oklahoma National Guard Museum (and which is moving to a new facility). You may recognize the 45th Infantry Division Museum from such hits as:

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

I thought it was a very nice museum. They had me when I discovered there was an entire room devoted to Bill Mauldin.

Here. Have a random photo of some bazookas.

I’m very glad I went, especially now. As I noted above, the museum is moving to a new location. And I got into a conversation with the curator, who told me that they are planning to deaccession some things, as the new museum will be placing more emphasis on “telling stories”. I think that’s kind of a shame. Where else are you going to see this?

Except maybe in “The Green Berets“.

I encourage you to go now, if you’re in the area and have the opportunity. I would actually like to spend more time at the museum, but I wanted to get back in time for dinner and to take a couple of photos in Muskogee:

The first Girl Scout cookie sale took place in Muskogee in 1917. I could not find a reference to price at the time, but in 1922, the Girl Scouts recommended selling home-baked cookies for “25 to 30 cents per dozen”. $6 in 2024 money works out to 32 cents in 1922 money, and 24 cents in 1917 money, according to the inflation calculator I like to use.

I took a group of my friends to Siegi’s Sausage Factory and, as far as I could tell, everyone loved it. Another large group of my friends took me to the White River Fish Market and Restaurant, which I liked, but which was in a really gritty part of Tulsa.

We also went to an Abuelo’s one night, because it was very near the hotel. I went by myself one night to a place Mike the Musicologist calls “The Laugh-In Restaurant”: Sake 2 Me Sushi. It is all-you-can-eat, but I wasn’t wild about the sushi.

And Sunday night’s celebratory dinner was at The Chalkboard, because I haven’t been in forever and wanted some Beef Wellington.

Everything went smoothly. No complaints here, except that eight hours in a car does get a little tiring.

Usual thanks to the usual suspects. You know who you are. (It appears that word has gotten around within S&WCA circles that I have a blog.)

Posted in Books, Food, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Nazis, O'Connor, Smith and Wesson, Travel | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 19, 2024.

June 19th, 2024

Willie Mays. SF Chronicle (archived). ESPN.

The Awful Announcing blog has a link to a video tribute to Mr. Mays narrated by Jon Miller.

Neil Goldschmidt, former mayor of Portland and governor of Oregon. He seemed to have a promising political career (he was also transportation secretary under Jimmy Carter) but left office in 1990. There were a lot of rumors about his extramarital activities at the time.

In 2004, it came out that he’d been raping a teenage girl.

The statute of limitations on any criminal charges that might have been brought against Mr. Goldschmidt, including statutory rape, had expired decades earlier. The woman he abused later gave a series of interviews to Margie Boulé, a columnist for The Oregonian, describing her relationship with the mayor.
The woman said the abuse first began when she was 13, on her mother’s birthday. It virtually destroyed her, she said. She attempted suicide at age 15 and later become addicted to alcohol and cocaine. She died in 2011.

George R. Nethercutt Jr., former House member. He’s most famous for having defeated Thomas S. Foley, who was Speaker of the House at the time.

Paul Pressler. He was sort of a “power behind the throne” in the Southern Baptist Convention:

Judge Pressler was instrumental in building an internal grass-roots movement that in recent decades moved the denomination toward adopting theological and social positions that were strikingly more conservative than those held in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. They include opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, forbidding women to serve as head pastors and interpreting the Bible literally.

He was also involved in a messy sex scandal, which led to the Southern Baptist Convention distancing themselves from him.

Angela Bofill, R&B singer of the 1970s and 1980s.

She released her last studio album, “Love in Slow Motion,” in 1996. Her music career ended when she had strokes in 2006 and 2007 that left her partly paralyzed and speech-impaired.

Posted in Music, Obits, Politics, Religion, Sports | Comments Closed

Don’t you lie to me like I’m Monty Williams.

June 19th, 2024

Monty Williams out as head coach of the Detroit Pistons after one season.

After starting the season 2-1, the Pistons went on a historic 28-game losing streak…
…The Pistons ultimately finished with a franchise-low 14-68 record, leaving Detroit with the worst record in the league for the second consecutive season.

More from ESPN.

The Pistons are 94-290 (.245) over the past five seasons, easily the worst in the league. Detroit was the third-youngest team in the league.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 18, 2024.

June 18th, 2024

Yesterday was an extended travel day. I got in around 5 PM last night, and had to unpack the car and take care of other business. So blogging opportunities were limited.

Oddly, I have to work today, and have meetings tonight. But tomorrow is a company holiday. I’m planning to post something of a trip report then.

In the meantime, a few obits.

Anouk Aimée, French actress. NYT (archived). IMDB.

Kevin Brophy, actor. Other credits include “Matt Houston”, “Trapper John, M.D.”, and a spinoff of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s.

Ben Vautier, French artist. I haven’t done an “Art, damn it! Art!” watch for a while, and he seems like a good candidate.

Forever looking to provoke, Mr. Vautier found a kindred spirit in 1962 when he met George Maciunas, who spearheaded the avant-garde Fluxus movement of the 1960s, which included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and other artists, and which drew from the iconoclastic Dada movement of the early 20th century.
Fluxus, as articulated in Mr. Maciunas’s 1963 manifesto, was intended as a revolution, a call to comrades to “promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality,” while purging the world of “dead art, imitation, artificial art.”
Mr. Vautier certainly did his part, as both a visual and performance artist, with works that straddled the line between conceptual art and punchline.
At the Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany in 1972, he famously strung a banner that read “Kunst Ist Überflüssig” (“Art Is Superfluous”) across the top of the august Fridericianum museum.
He strove to show that art could be found in daily life, and in ordinary objects, as with his series “Tas,” in which he piled dirt and garbage into lots and signed them as if they were masterpieces.
Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Vautier gave staged performances — he called them “gestes” (“gestures”) — that could seem like practical jokes on the audience. In one, “Audience Piece No. 8” (1965), guests were informed that the next piece was to be presented in a special area. Ushers then led them in groups through back exits and abandoned them.
In “Piano Concerto No. 2 for Paik,” an apparent concert from the same year, a pianist fled the stage before playing a note and the orchestra chased him in hot pursuit, trying to drag him back.
Mr. Vautier was often all too willing to shock. In one performance piece, he urinated in a jar, which he then exhibited as if it were high art. In another, he repeatedly slammed his head against a wall.

James Kent, NYC chef.

He opened his own restaurant, Crown Shy, in 2019 with a partner, Jeff Katz, the general manager of Del Posto, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan that closed in 2021. “At Crown Shy, the Only False Step Is the Name” read the headline of a “critic’s pick” review by Pete Wells, the restaurant critic of The New York Times. (The name refers to tall trees’ tendency not to allow their upper stories to grow entangled with the branches of their neighbors.)
Mr. Wells wrote that Mr. Kent’s dishes “regularly over-deliver.” He singled out for praise “an almost absurdly creamy purée of white bean hummus under a fiery red slick of melted ’nduja; a beef tartare with toasted walnuts and rye croutons; and oysters served with “cucumber jelly, diced cucumbers, grains of jalapeño and microleaves of purple shiso.”

…

Crown Shy garnered one star from the Michelin restaurant guide. Saga earned two.
It was fine dining worthy of the European tradition, but with American casualness and an embrace of pop culture.
Mr. Kent played Wu-Tang Clan and the Notorious B.I.G. at Crown Shy. He eschewed a formal dress code. With his chef coat he could often be seen wearing expensive sneakers.
His spray-painted murals earned him a reputation as “a chef that’s also a wildly talented graffiti artist,” as Bloomberg reported in 2016. He was commissioned to do artwork at NoMad Hotel and the restaurant tech company Salido.

…

In April, The Times reported that Mr. Kent and Saga Hospitality Group had leased 3,000 square feet on the ground floor of the former Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn for a bakery and a “casual all-day restaurant.”
That same month, the lifestyle magazine The Robb Report described yet more ambitious plans. Mr. Kent was opening a new 140-seat restaurant on Park Avenue inspired by the Grand Central Oyster Bar, where his grandmother Sue Mingus first went on a date with the jazz musician Charles Mingus, who became her husband and whose legacy she took charge of overseeing until her death in 2022.
At the same time, Mr. Kent was planning a fast-casual fried chicken sandwich restaurant on the level of Shake Shack, The Robb Report said. LRMR Ventures, a private investment firm of LeBron James and his friend and business partner Maverick Carter, was backing Saga Hospitality Group’s expansion.
Investors “believe Kent’s a rare, multidimensional talent who’s primed to become the next great American restaurateur,” The Robb Report wrote.

He was 45.

Posted in Art, Food, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 16, 2024.

June 16th, 2024

This is a nice tribute to Mike “Duke” Venturino from American Handgunner. Obit by the same author for GunMag.com.

Edward Stone, physicist. He was behind the two Voyager missions.

Dr. Stone was the program’s chief project scientist for 50 years, starting in 1972, when he was a 36-year-old physics professor at Caltech. He became the public face of the project with the double launch in 1977.

…

“We were on a mission of discovery,” Dr. Stone told The New York Times in 2002. “But we didn’t appreciate how much discovery there would be.”
In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to pass the heliopause frontier, where the fierce solar wind of subatomic particles yields to the force of other suns. Today, Voyager 1 is estimated to be 15 billion miles from Earth and traveling at a speed of 38,000 m.p.h., according to NASA. Voyager 2 crossed the border to interstellar space in 2018.

Posted in Guns, Obits, Physics, Science | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: June 14, 2024.

June 14th, 2024

Geneviève de Galard has passed away at the age of 99.

After studying English at the Sorbonne during and after the war, Ms. de Galard received her nursing diploma in 1950. And, after a retreat at a Benedictine convent, she was admitted to the French armed forces’ corps of flight nurses, charged with tending to the wounded who had been evacuated from battlegrounds by plane.
With the war in French Indochina raging since late 1946, she went there for the first time in 1953, attached to Hanoi’s Lanessan hospital.

She was flown into a French base as a nurse, but the plane that brought her and the airstrip were knocked out. She was trapped.

The base was Dien Bien Phu.

Ms. de Galard, who was 29, was put “in charge of emergency care of the most seriously wounded,” she wrote.
“I worked under the light of an electric lamp in the corridor, one knee on the ground, the other on the edge of the stretcher,” she continued. “In this underground of suffering, every day I attended to the wounded, giving shots, changing bandages and distributing medicine.”
The doctor in charge, Major Paul-Henri Grauwin, wrote in a memoir: “While the shells were falling, I watched her and was astonished by her calm. She went from wounded man to wounded man, thinking nothing of it. She had the gestures that were needed, the sweetness, the precision.”

…

On April 29, with the Viet Minh closing in, she was summoned to the underground bunker of the commanding officer, Gen. Christian de la Croix de Castries, who pinned on Ms. de Galard the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian decoration, as shells exploded outside.
“She will always be, for the combatants at Dien Bien Phu,” the citation read, “the purest incarnation of the heroic virtues of the French nurse.”

…

When the fight was over, on May 7, 1954, after more than 10,000 soldiers had been taken prisoner by the communist Viet Minh insurgents in one of the greatest military disasters in French history, Ms. de Galard continued to change the bandages of the wounded, refusing to leave their side. By then the legend of the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu,” as the American press later baptized her, had been born.

…

The Viet Minh freed her on May 21, 1954, and she left Dien Bien Phu on the 24th, unlike thousands of other French prisoners, many of whom died on death marches to prisoner of war camps. Later that year, France gave up North Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh’s communists, enabling the fateful partition of the country that led the U.S. into a war that it had vowed to stay out of.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 12, 2024.

June 12th, 2024

Still traveling, so these are going to be on the brief side.

Mike “Duke” Venturino, longtime gun writer. I had been reading his articles since Jesus was a lance corporal at least, so this hits a little hard.

I never met him, but he was a swell writer. I don’t have any more information other than the linked article, but I’ll post anything additional I find.

(Hattip to Pigpen51 on this.)

Tony Lo Bianco, actor. Other credits include “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “The Twilight Zone” (the 1985 revival), and “Police Story”.

Jerry West, NBA player, coach, and executive.

Posted in Guns, Movies, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Travel day.

June 11th, 2024

Posted in Admin, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 9, 2024.

June 9th, 2024

Major General William A. Anders (USAF – ret.), Apollo 8 astronaut.

In 1968, General Anders, who was a major at the time — along with Col. Frank Borman, who like him was in the Air Force, and Capt. James A. Lovell Jr. of the Navy — was part of the first group of spacemen to leave the bounds of Earth’s orbit. During their mission, they took photos and motion pictures of the lunar surface in preparation for the Apollo 11 flight, when men first stepped on the moon, and they were the first astronauts sent aloft by a giant Saturn V rocket.

…

On Christmas Eve, during their 10 orbits of the moon, the three astronauts, whose movements were telecast to millions around the world, took photos of Earth as it rose over the lunar horizon, appearing as a blue marble amid the blackness of the heavens. But only Major Anders, who oversaw their spacecraft’s electronic and communications systems, shot color film.
His photo shook the world. Known as “Earthrise,” it was reproduced in a 1969 postage stamp bearing the words “In the beginning God …” It was an inspiration for the first Earth Day, in 1970, and appeared on the cover of Life magazine’s 2003 book “100 Photographs That Changed the World.”

Betty Anne Rees, actress. Other credits include “Lou Grant”, “The F.B.I.”, “Bearcats!”…

…and “Mannix”. (“With Intent to Kill”, season 4, epsiode 17. She was “Cora Hayden”.)

Posted in 1970s, Geek, Mannix, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Gun Books ‘R Us.

June 7th, 2024

Seriously, I thought by now I’d have a clever intro for this. But I don’t. My Strategic Clever Reserves are exhausted. So why don’t we jump into this one? Warning: I think this is longer than usual…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Ruark | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 7, 2024.

June 7th, 2024

Alan Scarfe, actor.

Other credits include “Jake and the Fatman”, “Columbo”, two spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series, and “Iron Eagle II”.

Harry Roland. This is an odd obit, but an example of the kind of thing the NYT does well.

Within months of Sept. 11, Mr. Roland, a self-described former tour guide and security guard at the World Trade Center, haunted the streets surrounding the ruins. He was not a street preacher of the End Times to come, but something more unusual: an orator who insisted that passers-by reckon with a tragedy of the past.

…

Eventually, cleanup of the site was finished and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened. Mr. Roland set up shop a block away on Greenwich Street, where a long bronze plaque commemorates all 343 firefighters who died in the calamity. When Mr. Roland took breaks from speaking to passers-by, he burnished the plaque with a cloth.

…

Mr. Roland had always loved the Twin Towers, his daughter said; he would collect pictures of them and pose his children in front of them for photographs. She recalled him on Sept. 11 seeing the smoke and fire from his home at the time in New Jersey, getting on a boat to take him to ground zero in the hope of helping out, and encountering a horrific scene.

David Boaz, noted libertarian.

Asked in 1998 why he chose a career pushing often unpopular and derided ideas up a huge cultural and political hill, Boaz told me: “I think it’s satisfying and fun. I believe strongly in these values and at some level I believe it’s right to devote your life to fighting for these values, though particularly if you’re a libertarian you can’t say it’s morally obligatory to be fighting for these values—but it does feel right, and at some other level more than just being right, it is fun, it’s what I want to do.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 6, 2024.

June 6th, 2024

Robert Persichitti (US Navy – ret.) has passed away at the age of 102.

Persichitti, meanwhile, had served in Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Guam as a radioman second class on the command ship USS Eldorado during WWII.
He was among the US troops who witnessed the raising of the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945 — a moment that would go on to become one of the most famous photos captured during the war.
“I was on the deck,” Persichitti told Stars and Stripes in a 2019 interview when he returned to the region. “When I got on the island today, I just broke down.”

He was part of a group of veterans traveling to Normandy when he fell ill, was airlifted off the ship, and passed away in a hospital.

Bob Kelley. You might not know the name, but if you’re into cars, you know the book.

The Kelley Blue Book started in 1926 at the Kelley Kar Co., a Los Angeles dealership founded by Mr. Kelley’s father, Sidney, and an uncle, Leslie Kelley. As one of the biggest used-car dealerships in the region — and eventually the country — they had a constant need for new inventory, and the book originated as a simple list of prices that they were willing to pay for certain cars in certain conditions.
Mr. Kelley joined the company after the end of World War II, a prime time to get into the used-car business. The war had put an end to new-car production, and it would be several years before automakers could meet the demand.
He was initially in charge of both valuations on new inventory and compiling the book, and he brought a jeweler’s eye to the job. He studied all the factors that go into deciding a car’s road-worthiness and visual appeal — mileage, sound system, paint color — then developed a long list of data points that, combined, would produce a price.

…

The Kelleys closed their dealership in 1962 and sold the Kelley Blue Book to a fellow dealer in Los Angeles. By then Sidney and Leslie Kelley had largely left the business, but the new owners kept Bob Kelley and the rest of the team as employees.Mr. Kelley worried at first that without the dealership, confidence in the book would diminish. Instead its popularity continued to grow, largely because of Mr. Kelley’s reputation for evaluating cars.
As he deepened the data underlying his valuations, the Kelley Blue Book became increasingly valuable beyond used-car dealerships. Courts, insurance companies and banks all used it to evaluate what for most people constituted one of the biggest assets they would ever own.
He also expanded the scope of the book to encompass new cars as well as used, and to include motorcycles, boats, RVs and trucks as well as luxury vehicles and imports. Eventually, an updated edition of the book appeared every other month, selling a total of a million copies a year.

…

Other popular car-buying guides have come along, but the Kelley Blue Book remains the gold standard, and “blue book value” has entered the lexicon as a synonym for top-notch, objective assessment of a used item, whether it’s covered by Mr. Kelley’s book or not.

Tom Bower, actor. Other credits include “Hill Street Blues”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, and “The Rockford Files”.

Posted in 1970s, Cars, History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »