Obit watch: December 20, 2022.

December 20th, 2022

I have spent the past few days running around with Mike the Musicologist, so I haven’t really had a chance to post obits. Not that I’m complaining, but I did get a little behind.

Marion Smith, cave explorer.

…he was roundly considered the Greatest of All Time. He explored 8,291 separate caves — far more than anyone on record, ever. He climbed up and down some two million feet of rope.
He was especially taken with vertical caving: He descended more than 3,000 underground pits deeper than 30 feet, often dangling freely in the abyss on a rope no thicker than a thumb.

…

Mr. Smith developed a reputation as the guy who seemed to be everywhere, every weekend, constantly announcing new finds, pushing into unknown spaces without a whiff of fear. In 2014 he was pinned under a boulder for nine hours. Three years later he was hit in the temple by a fist-size rock that fell from 40 feet. In both cases he went to the hospital, and in both cases he was back underground within days.

…

In 1998 Mr. Smith was part of a team of cavers who discovered a 4.5-acre, 350-foot-tall underground chamber in East Tennessee they named the Rumble Room. They kept it secret for four years while they explored and mapped it, and they revealed it to the public only when a nearby town threatened to use an adjacent cave as part of a new sewage system.
“I didn’t want to let the cat out,” Mr. Smith told The Tennessean newspaper in 2002. “I wanted to keep it in the bag longer.”

…

Caves were his life, but exploring them was not his only passion. He was perhaps the world’s leading expert on the history of mining for saltpeter, a primary ingredient in gunpowder, which in the 19th century was often harvested from caves.
In the 2010s he joined with Joseph Douglas, a historian at Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin, Tenn., in a project to document the thousands of signatures left by Confederate and Union soldiers in Mammoth Cave, in central Kentucky. Mr. Smith was particularly taken with researching the men themselves, and he ultimately wrote about 80 miniature biographies.
“He called it the history of the obscure, but it took a great level of patience and attention to fine detail,” Dr. Douglas said in a phone interview.

Dino Danelli, drummer for the Rascals.

Sonya Eddy, actress.

Tom Browning, pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds.

On September 16, 1988, Browning tossed a perfect game against the Dodgers in a 1-0 victory, striking out Tracy Woodson to ensure his place in history.
Browning was 123-90 in his 12-season career, with his first 11 seasons in Cincy and two starts at the end of his career with the Royals. Browning was inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame in 2006.

Terry Hall, of The Specials and Fun Boy Three.

Stephanie Bissonnette. She was in “Mean Girls the Musical” and died at 32.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Firings watch.

December 18th, 2022

Not exactly a firing, but relevant:

NFL officials have informed the owners of the league’s 32 franchises that teams have spent $800 million on fired coaches and front-office executives over the past five years, league sources told ESPN.
The message, delivered this past week at the owners meetings in Dallas, was sent by the league as a reminder that as some franchises mull significant changes at the end of the season, hundreds of millions of dollars have been squandered recently by teams that may need to act less hastily.
NFL officials went so far as to compose spreadsheets specific to each team about the employees they fired and the costs incurred by the team, according to sources. The league wanted each team to see the exact cost for instability and the employees that they paid for services no longer rendered.

…

The Giants are paying three different head coaches, and their respective coaching staffs, this year alone: Pat Shurmur, who was fired in 2020 just two years into a five-year deal; Joe Judge, who was fired this past January after also lasting only two years into a five-year contract; and first-year coach Brian Daboll, who had led New York to a 7-5-1 record entering Sunday night’s showdown with the Commanders.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 16, 2022.

December 16th, 2022

Today’s obit watch is dedicated to my beloved and indulgent sister-in-law.

Frances Hesselbein has passed away. She was 107.

Ms. Hesselbein served as the chief executive of the Girl Scouts from 1976 to 1990.

“She was incredibly focused on the Girl Scouts’ mission,” Marshall Goldsmith, a prominent leadership coach and a friend of Ms. Hesselbein’s, said in a phone interview. “She came up with a model called ‘Tradition With a Future.’ The Girl Scouts weren’t moving into the new world at all. She brought inclusivity and diversity, but she never put down or insulted the past.”
Helping girls reach their greatest potential remained the organization’s mission under Ms. Hesselbein (pronounced HESS-el-bine), but she also saw that the Girl Scouts needed a makeover. What had once thrived with a largely white, middle-class membership had faded with the social and political convulsions of the 1960s and the blossoming of feminism as more women went to work.

…

The overhaul worked. Membership rose to 2.3 million in 1990, according to Businessweek. Recruitment efforts increased minority membership to 15.5 percent. Ms. Hesselbein launched a project to help scouts learn about as many as 95 career opportunities, and started programs in telecommunications and marine biology that were designed to be done at home or at troop meetings.
“The era before Frances we call ‘the Betty Crocker Era,’ where the girls turned to conforming to what was appropriate for girls to do, and so they earned cooking badges,” Tamara Woodbury, the former chief executive of the Girl Scouts—Arizona Cactus-Pine Council, said in a phone interview. Ms. Woodbury, who met Ms. Hesselbein when she was a teenage Girl Scout, added, “She wanted the Girl Scouts to be a place where girls could push outside the boundaries and not conform to social norms.”

…

She married John Hesselbein in the late 1930s, and they opened a commercial photography studio in Johnstown that also made educational and promotional films. In 1950, when their son, John, was 8, Ms. Hesselbein was pressed by a neighbor to replace the departing leader of a local Girl Scout troop.
“I explained that I didn’t know anything about little girls,” she said in an oral history project at Indiana University in 2011. “I had a little boy.”
She agreed to fill in for six weeks, but stayed for eight years.
“It was the greatest leadership training I ever had,” she added. “You can’t work with a group of 30 little girls, 10 years old, and talk about the values and have them respond, and not live them.”

Posted in History, Leadership | 1 Comment »

Short gun crankery update.

December 15th, 2022

Theodore Roosevelt’s Smith and Wesson went for $910,625.

Which is on the low end of what I expected.

Posted in Guns, History, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 14, 2022.

December 14th, 2022

Curt Simmons, pitcher.

Simmons was the last survivor of the mostly young 1950 Phillies team known as the Whiz Kids, who captured the National League pennant on the final day of the season, only to be swept by the Yankees in the World Series.
While pitching for the Phillies, Simmons was a three-time All-Star. In his mid-30s, after coming back from elbow surgery, he pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals’ 1964 N.L. pennant winners and started twice in their seven-game World Series victory over the Yankees.
Relying on his fastball early on and later reinventing himself with a variety of pitches that kept batters off stride, Simmons had a career record of 193 victories and 183 losses.

Stephen “tWitch” Boss.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline. If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

For the record: NYT obits for Stuart Margolin and Mike Leach.

Posted in Obits, Sports, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: December 13, 2022.

December 13th, 2022

Stuart Margolin.

Personally, my favorite “Rockford Files” episodes are the ones where Angel plays a key role. And the man worked: 123 acting credits in IMDB. Including “18 Wheels of Justice”, “Lanigan’s Rabbi” (he played Rabbi Small in the pilot (!), but was replaced by Bruce Solomon in the other four episodes), “Cannon” and “Kelly’s Heroes”.

Mike Leach. My sister and her family were big Mike Leach fans (and felt he was unjustly driven out of Texas Tech). Now who’s going to tell us about owning a trash panda as a pet?

Angelo Badalamenti, composer for David Lynch.

Marijane Meaker, author. She wrote an influential early lesbian novel, “Spring Fire”, under the pseudonym of “Vin Packer”:

Ms. Meaker said she had wanted to call the book “Sorority Girl,” but her editor, Dick Carroll, had a different idea.
“James Michener had just published his book ‘Fires of Spring,’” she said in a 2012 interview with Windy City Times, the L.G.B.T.Q. publication in Chicago. “Dick hoped if we called mine ‘Spring Fire’ the public might confuse it with Michener and we’d sell more copies.”

“Vin Packer” later evolved into a hard-boiled writer. She also wrote young adult novels:

She used Mary James for quirky books aimed at younger children, like “Shoebag” (1990), about a cockroach that turns into a boy. Her books under her own name included “Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s” (2003), about her two-year relationship with the author Patricia Highsmith.

…

She retired Packer in 1966 and in 1972, as M.E. Kerr, tried the youth market with “Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!,” a story about a girl with a weight problem who longs for more attention from her mother, a good Samaritan type who works with drug addicts.

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

Obit watch: December 10, 2022 (supplemental).

December 10th, 2022

I think Lawrence is slightly annoyed at me. But it isn’t my fault.

There were a plethora of obits yesterday. It seems like I was sending emails every five minutes, though I know that’s not actually true. So here are the ones that weren’t for Col. Kittinger, because I wanted to break his out.

Dominique Lapierre, author. He started out as a foreign correspondent, and wrote some well-received travel books. Then he teamed up with Larry Collins, and they wrote several massive bestsellers: Is Paris Burning? and Freedom at Midnight, among others.

Mr. Lapierre also wrote other books, some collaboratively, some alone. Most famously, he wrote The City of Joy:

In 1981 he and his second wife, also named Dominique, returned to India as humanitarians. They lived for two years in a slum in Kolkata, once known as Calcutta, in a four-by-six room without running water.
“We left the slum every few weeks to take a good long bubble bath,” he told Metro, a French magazine, in 1986.
Mr. Lapierre wrote frequent dispatches from Kolkata and used his extensive reporting to write “City of Joy,” a 1985 novel populated by loosely fictionalized characters based on people he had met along the way, including a priest and a rickshaw puller.
The book was another giant hit — more than eight million copies were sold — and it was adapted into a 1992 movie starring Patrick Swayze. It brought attention to the conditions of India’s very poor, with mixed results.
The Indian government committed billions to bring running water and other services to Kolkata’s slums, but the light the book cast on the city also attracted thousands of international tourists to see the poverty for themselves.
“On the streets of Calcutta these days, the book is often seen clutched in the hands of Western tourists,” wrote The Los Angeles Times in 1987. “If Paris has the Guide Michelin, Calcutta has ‘The City of Joy.’”
Mr. Lapierre promised to give half his royalties from the book to improve public health in the city’s slums. He created a nonprofit to direct his efforts, and over time spent more than $1 million of his own money on things like mobile health clinics.
Others gave as well: Within a year of the book’s publication he had received more than 40,000 letters from readers seeking to help. Some sent cash or checks; one sent a wedding ring taped to a piece of paper.

Grant Wahl, soccer journalist.

Gary Friedkin, actor. The NYPost says he was in “Blade Runner” and “Return of the Jedi” but those are not reflected in his IMDB credits. Lawrence says he remembers him from “Young Doctors In Love”, which I have never seen, and he was also in “Under the Rainbow”.

Helen Slayton-Hughes, actress. Other credits include “Mafia on the Bounty”, “The Greatest Event in Television History”, amd “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot”.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 10, 2022.

December 10th, 2022

Colonel Joseph William Kittinger II (USAF – ret.) has passed away at the age of 94.

Col. Kittinger severed honorably in Vietnam:

He flew 483 fighter-plane missions in the Vietnam War before he was shot down and taken prisoner.

…

Mr. Kittinger flew three tours of duty in Vietnam, became a squadron commander and shot down a North Vietnamese jet. His fighter was downed in May 1972, and he spent 11 months in the prison camp known as the Hanoi Hilton.
He retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1978 and was a multiple winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

He was also the first man to fly a balloon solo across the Atlantic.

…in the 106,000-cubic-foot (3,000 m3) Balloon of Peace, from September 14 to September 18, 1984, launched from Caribou, Maine and organized by the Canadian promoter Gaetan Croteau. As an official FAI world aerospace record, the 5,703.03-kilometre (3,543.70 mi) flight is the longest gas balloon distance flight ever recorded in the AA-10 size category. For the second time in his life, he was also the subject of a story in National Geographic Magazine.

He is perhaps most famous for the act that got him his first National Geographic story.

On August 18, 1960, he jumped out of a balloon at an altitude of 102,800 feet.

He free fell for 13 seconds, protected against air temperatures as low as minus-94 degrees by specialized clothing and a pressure suit. And then his small, stabilizer parachute opened as planned to prevent a spin that could have killed him. He free fell for another 4 minutes and 36 seconds, descending to 17,500 feet before his regular parachute opened.

…

Taking part in experimental Air Force programs in the skies over New Mexico in the late 1950s and early ’60s to simulate conditions that future astronauts might face, Mr. Kittinger set records for the highest balloon flight, at 102,800 feet; the longest free fall, some 16 miles; and the fastest speed reached by a human under his own power, descending at up to 614 miles an hour.

Those records were broken by Felix Baumgartner in 2012. Col. Kittinger assisted Mr.Baumgartner in the jump.

Mr. Kittinger piloted the Excelsior I balloon to 76,400 feet in November 1959, then prepared to jump out of his gondola. What happened next almost cost him his life.
His left arm caught on the door as he emerged, and the delay in freeing himself caused the premature deployment of the small parachute designed to prevent him from going into a catastrophic spin. The parachute caught Mr. Kittinger around the neck and sent him spinning. He tumbled toward Earth at 120 revolutions per minute, but his main parachute opened at 10,000 feet, as designed, slowing him down and saving his life.
A little more than three weeks later, he was aloft again, climbing to 74,400 feet in Excelsior II before jumping out.
In August 1960, soaring to 102,800 feet in the Excelsior III balloon, Mr. Kittinger eclipsed by almost 1,300 feet the altitude record set by Major David Simons of the Air Force in 1957 in his Man High II balloon.
And then Mr. Kittinger jumped from a gondola once more. “I said, ‘Lord, take care of me now,’” he recalled. “That was the most fervent prayer I ever said in my life.”
The right glove of his pressure suit had failed during his ascent, leaving his hand swollen and in pain, but he was otherwise in fine shape when he touched down.

I’ve said this before, but I really liked Craig Ryan’s The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space (affiliate link) and the price on it seems much more reasonable than the last time I looked.

When Joe Kittinger was 13, he once scrambled atop a 40-foot-high tree to snare some coconuts, ignoring warnings to stay put. His father recalled that venture as symbolizing the derring-do that would be his son’s life.
As the elder Mr. Kittinger put it: “Everybody wants coconuts, but nobody has the guts to go up there and get them.”

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch (the lighter side): December 9, 2022.

December 9th, 2022

A couple of quick obits that I felt were just too un-serious to be included in the previous two obit watches.

“A Very Backstreet Holiday”, the Backstreet Boys holiday special. It was supposed to be on ABC Wednesday night (December 14th) but got canned because of rape accusations against Nick Carter.

“Monarch“. I confess: I was sort of vaguely interested in this. A trashy Fox soap opera about a country music dynasty? Sounds like the sort of thing I can sit down in front of and turn off my brain for a while. Plus: Susan Sarandon.

When the rubber met the road, though, I never watched an episode. I also kind of expected it to be cancelled after two episodes, like “Lone Star” or “Viva Laughlin“. (Also, the reviews spoiled the fact that Susan Sarandon dies in the first episode, though she apparently shows up in flashbacks later on.)

I guess if I want country music drama, I’ll have to stick with reading the transcripts of “Cocaine and Rhinestones” episodes, and waiting for a new batch to drop.

At some point in 1978, Jones, DeeDoodle and the Old Man began making lists of the people they wanted to kill.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

(Sort of an) obit watch: December 9, 2022.

December 9th, 2022

I wanted to break this out into a separate entry because it didn’t feel like it belonged with the previous one. Also, it’s another one of those “not quite an obit” things.

Philadelphia’s “Boy in the Box” has been identified.

The boy, then believed to be between 4 and 6 years old, had been beaten to death, an autopsy later revealed. But clues were scant, and copious efforts over decades to solve the crime proved futile. The unknown victim became known as “The Boy in the Box.” Others called him, more gently, “America’s Unknown Child.”
His name is now known: Joseph Augustus Zarelli. Born on Jan. 13, 1953, he was 4 when he died, Philadelphia police officials said Thursday, at a news conference where they described a breakthrough using DNA and genetic genealogy techniques that have revolutionized cold case work in recent years.

He was found in a cardboard box in February of 1957.

He was unclothed, and had been wrapped in a flannel blanket, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. His hair had recently been “cut in a way that suggested it was not the work of a skilled barber,” and his fingernails had been trimmed, according to the national system.

…

Capt. Jason Smith said officers did not yet know who killed the boy or the circumstances of how he had died, and that investigations would continue.
“We have our suspicions as to who may be responsible, but it would be irresponsible of me to share these suspicions as this remains an active and ongoing criminal investigation,” Captain Smith said.

I remember this case getting a lot of coverage from John Walsh on the old America’s Most Wanted. I’m glad they have a name for the child now.

Posted in Cops, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 9, 2022.

December 9th, 2022

Squadron Leader George Leonard “Johnny” Johnson, MBE, DFM (RAF – ret.) has passed away at the age of 101.

He was the last surviving participant in the May 17, 1943 “Dambusters” raid by 617 Squadron.

This is a great story:

The crew of Sergeant Johnson’s plane — flown by the lone American on the raid, Flight Lt. Joe McCarthy, a native of Long Island who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force — had an even tougher task
Its target, the Sorpe Dam, was an embankment lined with soil and rocks that was expected to absorb much of a bomb’s explosive power, in contrast to the two more vulnerable masonry dams.

…

Lieutenant McCarthy had to clear the steeple of a church, then dip to a level of 30 feet and fly parallel and extraordinarily close to the wall for his plane’s bomb to make a significant impact when it exploded underwater. He made repeated runs along the dam before Sergeant Johnson was satisfied that he could drop his bomb at the center point, where it could do the most damage.
“I found out very quickly how to be the most unpopular member of the crew,” Mr. Johnson recalled in a 2013 interview with the University of Huddersfield in England, explaining that his patience had increased the chances of his plane being spotted by the Germans.
At one point, he said, his rear gunner pleaded, “Will somebody just get that bomb out of here?”
“After nine dummy runs, we were satisfied we were on the right track,” Mr. Johnson wrote in his memoir. “I pushed the button and called, ‘Bomb gone!’ From the rear of the plane was heard ‘Thank Christ for that!’ The explosion threw up a fountain of water up to about 1,000 feet.”

Two Lancasters hit the Sorpe: the dam was damaged, but not breached.

The squadron leader, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who would be killed in action later in the war, received the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for valor. Sergeant Johnson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal.

…

His death, announced by his family on Facebook, came five years after Queen Elizabeth II conveyed the title Member of the Order of the British Empire on Mr. Johnson in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
The honor was bestowed after thousands had signed a petition asking that Mr. Johnson, a bomb-aimer during the war (the equivalent of an American bombardier), be accorded recognition in his final years as a collective tribute to the Dambusters.

…

For all the harrowing missions he took part in, Mr. Johnson said, he felt confident that he would survive.
“I didn’t feel afraid,” he told James Holland for his book “Dam Busters” (2012), in recalling his combat service between 1942 and 1944. “I was sure I was going to come back every time.”

Posted in History, Obits, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 8, 2022.

December 8th, 2022

Lawrence sent over an obit for Al Strobel, the one-armed man from “Twin Peaks”.

Representative Jim Kolbe (R-Arizona).

Sal Durante, historical footnote. He caught the ball from Roger Maris’s 61st home run.

Mills Lane. He was the ref in the Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield 1997 fight (that was the ear biting one) and later went on to have a syndicated court show.

“Stomp”. 29 years off-Broadway.

“KPOP”. the musical. 17 regular performances on Broadway and 44 previews.

Since it began previews in October, the new musical has often made less than $200,000 a week, ranking among the lowest-grossing in weekly industry tallies. Capacity has remained fairly healthy but alongside a low average weekly ticket price. The quick closing means KPOP will not be able to benefit from the traditional boost in ticket sales that comes around the holidays and for which many shows hold out for.

I had forgotten about the associated drama: the NYT pretty much panned the show, the producers accused the NYT of racism, and the NYT basically responded with the bedbug letter.

“Wonder Woman 3”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Politics, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

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