Scott Cobb will be paroled in August after 34 years in prison.
Noted.
July 27th, 2023Obit watch: July 26, 2023.
July 26th, 2023Johnny Lujack, one of Notre Dame’s greats. He was 98.
Lujack was an outstanding passer and a fine runner at quarterback, as well as a brilliant defensive halfback, a place-kicker and occasionally a punter. He was a two-time all-American and played in only one losing football game at Notre Dame. He also played baseball and basketball and ran track.
He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1960 and had been the oldest living winner of the Heisman, the prize awarded annually to college football’s leading player.
“He’s probably the greatest all-around athlete I’ve ever seen in college football,” Frank Tripucka, the backup to Lujack at Notre Dame and a longtime pro quarterback, told Steve Delsohn for the oral history “Talking Irish” (1998.) “He was six foot and maybe 180, but he was just a very tough guy from western Pennsylvania.”
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Lujack took over as Notre Dame’s quarterback in November 1943 when Angelo Bertelli left for military service. He took the Irish to a 9-1 record and their first No. 1 national ranking.
He left Notre Dame for the Navy during World War II and served aboard a vessel chasing German submarines in the English Channel. He returned in 1946, when the Irish fielded an overpowering team composed largely of war veterans.
When Notre Dame played Army in November 1946 in a matchup of unbeaten teams, Lujack was hobbled by a sprained ankle, but he played nevertheless, on both offense and defense. He threw three interceptions, but in the third quarter, playing at defensive halfback, he saved the day for Notre Dame.
Coming across the field, he pulled down Army fullback Doc Blanchard, the 1945 Heisman winner, on the Irish 36-yard line, making a low tackle as Blanchard raced down the left sideline.
“I was the last guy between him and a touchdown,” Lujack told The New York Times in 1981. “I read afterward where I was the only guy ever to have made a one-on-one tackle on him. If I’d known that during the game, I’d probably have missed the tackle.”
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Lujack took Notre Dame to a 9-0 record and a third national championship in 1947, his Heisman Trophy year, when he passed for nine touchdowns and 777 yards and ran for 139, averaging more than 11 yards per carry. The Associated Press named him America’s male athlete of the year.
In January 1948, the Bears signed Lujack to a four-year contract and a bonus, for a total of about $80,000. (A little more than $1 million in today’s money).
Lujack led the N.F.L. in pass completions (162), yards passing (2,658) and touchdown passes (23) in 1949, when he threw for six touchdowns and passed for a league-record 468 yards in a game against the Chicago Cardinals. He was a two-time Pro Bowl player and was named a first-team all-N.F.L. player in 1950. He retired after four pro seasons to become a backfield coach at Notre Dame.
What time is it, kids?
July 25th, 2023Not Howdy Doody time.
I promised I wasn’t going to do any more gun books until “Day of the .45, part 2.” went up. Now that I have posted it, I have a large stack to go through, including more than one Samworth, so I’m going to start trying to knock some of those off.
First, some ground rules:
I’m going be posting some newer books, ones that are readily available on Amazon or from the usual suspects. For those, I will be posting Amazon affiliate links, and I will be posting commentary if I’ve read the book, but I won’t be posting cover photos or a lot of bibliographic detail. The Amazon links should give you enough information to order the book, or to find it from some other vendor, if you’re really interested, and photos of readily available contemporary books will just make these posts longer.
One of my side projects that I won’t be documenting in a lot of detail here: I’ve decided that I want to try to accumulate a complete set of Gun Digest. I’ve found that GD frequently has interesting articles on either gun or gun book history, and I think it would be useful to have them around for reference. I probably won’t be documenting those here, though I may mention them in passing.
My self-imposed limits for this project are: I’m buying them used, in very good to excellent condition, and I’m trying not to pay more than $10 for each one. So far, I have the 1998 edition (which has a very good article on the Winchester Model 52) and the 2005 edition (nice article on the guns of Roy Chapman Andrews). The 2010 edition (with the profile of E.C. Crossman) is on the way, as is another Samworth book by Crossman.
With those ground rules set:
Obit watch: July 25, 2023.
July 25th, 2023Pamela Blair, actress. Other credits include John Huston’s film of “Annie”, “The Cosby Mysteries”, and “Law and Order”.
Reeves Callaway. He made cars go fast.
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“They came to us,” he told the Truck Show Podcast in 2021, “and they said, ‘Look, could you, within one year’s time, develop an Alfa twin-turbo system for us that we could use to compete against the Maserati?’”
He did, making about three dozen modified vehicles, but then Alfa Romeo lost interest in the project. Yet somehow one of those modified Alfas found its way to General Motors’ Black Lake testing ground in Michigan, and soon GM was asking if Mr. Callaway could do the same thing to its Chevrolet Corvette.
“This was a huge opportunity, to become associated with Corvette,” he said. “So we saluted and said, ‘Yes, sir; immediately, sir; may I have another, sir?’”
…
In late 1988, he and his engineers tweaked the Corvette some more, taking aim at 250 miles per hour with a version of the car that they called the Sledgehammer.
“We basically decided that 250 m.p.h. was a reachable goal,” Mr. Callaway told the McClatchy News Service. “But if it was to have any meaning, the car had to be docile at low speeds as well. It had to retain all the things that make a car usable on the street, such as air-conditioning.”
To prove the point, his team drove the car from Connecticut to a seven-and-a-half-mile oval track in Ohio. (It got 16 miles per gallon, they said.) At the track, it hit 210 m.p.h. on its first run, 223 on its second. After more tweaking, it reached 254.76 on its third attempt, a record for a car made for normal driving. Mr. Callaway’s company, in its announcement of his death, said the record stood for more than 20 years.
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Ron Sexton, comedian and regular on ‘The Bob & Tom Show’.
Bagatelle (#91)
July 24th, 2023I did not know there was a Yogi Berra stamp.
I guess these were issued in 2021, which would explain why I can’t find first day covers on the USPS web site. But my local post office still had sheets of them.
Also, postage is 66 cents now. Good thing the Yogi stamps are forever stamps. After all, as someone once said, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
Obit watch: July 24, 2023.
July 24th, 2023Richard Barancik has passed away at 98.
Mr. Barancik was the last surviving member of this group.
Mr. Barancik (pronounced ba-RAN-sick) was one of four members of what was formally called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015 in Washington for their “heroic role in the preservation, protection, restitution of monuments, works of art and artifacts of cultural importance.”
On the day of the ceremony, Mr. Barancik told The Los Angeles Times: “The Americans cared about the cultural traditions of Europe. We did everything we could to salvage what the Nazis had done. It’s the best we could do.”
At first, the murder of Mr. Reynolds’s daughter, Kimber, seemed like just one more statistic. An 18-year-old college student home in Fresno on summer break, she was attacked one night in June 1992 by two men on motorcycles who tried to grab her purse.
When she resisted, one of the men, Joseph Michael Davis, shot her in the head, in front of dozens of witnesses. She was rushed to a hospital and died 26 hours later.
One of the murderers was killed in a shootout with police.
His efforts stalled out at first. Then Polly Klass was murdered.
Almost overnight, public outrage over Polly’s murder turned into support for Mr. Reynolds’s campaign. Calls came in to his Fresno headquarters in such volume that they overloaded the city’s 1-800 system. Within weeks, he had the signatures he needed.
The bill also found a new life in the Legislature, as state and national politicians, facing election in the fall of 1994, raced to appear tough on crime. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and her Republican opponent that year, Representative Michael Huffington, both endorsed the bill.
This time it sailed through both chambers of the Legislature, and Governor Wilson signed it into law in March. That fall, the accompanying ballot initiative passed with overwhelming support. In the years that followed, two dozen states, inspired by California, enacted their own three-strikes laws.
Tiny violin watch:
The law had, and continues to have, its detractors. Critics claimed it would overcrowd the prisons, drive up the cost of incarceration and clog the courts, as criminals facing life in prison would be less likely to reach a plea agreement.
It was also derided as unfair: Even a felony as minor as stealing a slice of pizza could result in a 25-year sentence, a situation that befell one man, Jerry Dewayne Williams. Though a judge later reduced Mr. Williams’s sentence, critics used his case as an example of the law’s unfairness.
More about Jerry DeWayne Williams.
Day of the .45, part 2. (Random gun crankery)
July 22nd, 2023Finally. The position of the sun, the condition of the back porch, and all the other things going on in my life lined up, and I can bring you the senses shattering part two of “Day of the .45”.
The same day I picked up my CMP 1911, I also took a second gun off layaway. It was also chambered in .45 ACP, and also has a military background. It had been sitting in layaway purgatory for a few months, and I didn’t take out before then because holidays.
But once the holidays passed, I was free to buy things, and had the last tranche of funds available to take it home. After the jump, more history. And some pictures…
Obit watch: July 21, 2023.
July 21st, 2023Jim Scoutten, noted shooting sports commentator. Thanks to Pigpen51 for tipping me off on this one, but it took me some time to find something I could link.
Tony Bennett. THR. Well covered pretty much everywhere, so not a lot to say.
Carlin Glynn, actress. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Three Days of the Condor”, “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, and “Resurrection” (an interesting sounding movie I had not heard of until recently: parts of it were filmed in the area around Cattleman’s Steakhouse in Fabens).
Dick Biondi, noted Chicago DJ. I never listened to Chicago radio, but the name does ring a bell with me.
Obit watch: July 20, 2023.
July 20th, 2023Kevin Mitnick, noted computer cracker/social engineer/security consultant. WP (archived). The NYT has one of their preliminary obits up, with a promise of a longer obit later. I’ll add that here when it is published.
Edited to add: NYT obit (archived) here.
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James Reston Jr., historian, and author who was involved in the Frost/Nixon interviews.
Mr. Reston drafted a 96-page brief — an “interrogation strategy memo,” he called it — to gird Mr. Frost for nearly 29 hours of interviews that would be condensed into four 90-minute television programs.
“The resulting Frost-Nixon interviews — one in particular — indeed proved historic,” Mr. Reston wrote. “On May 4, 1977, 45 million Americans watched Frost elicit a sorrowful admission from Nixon about his part in the scandal: ‘I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me the rest of my life.’”
“In the broadcast,” Mr. Reston continued, “the interviewer’s victory seemed quick, and Nixon’s admission seemed to come seamlessly. In reality, it was painfully extracted from a slow, grinding process over two days.”
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Ed Bressoud, baseball player. He played for both the New York Giants and the New York Mets. The only other person to do this was Willie Mays.
Nick Benedict, actor. Other credits include the original “Mission: Impossible”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, and the good “Hawaii 5-0”.
There’s a strike, in case you haven’t heard…
July 19th, 2023…so why not watch something vintage?
Someone on Hacker News posted this, and I thought I’d bookmark it here for the benefit of my readers:
The UCLA Library Film and Television Archive collection of the U.S. Steel Hour.
You can watch “select episodes” online. Why would you want to? Well, those select episodes include:
- “Queen of the Orange Bowl”, a rom-com featuring Anne Francis (who is always worth watching) and…Johnny Carson.
- “The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon“, the original adaptation of Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon”, predating “Charly” but also starring Cliff Robertson.
- “Scene of the Crime”, a “grim and claustrophobic crime drama with a noir twist”…starring Betty White.
- “The Thief“, featuring James Dean.
- “The Rack“. “…a previously decorated Army officer faces court martial for actions taken while under duress of extreme torture in a Korean P.O.W. camp.” Teleplay by Rod Serling, later mode into a feature film with Paul Newman and Anne Francis.
It isn’t like I don’t already have enough stuff to watch: I should be able to survive the end of the entertainment industry with ease. But this seems like the kind of thing some folks might enjoy.
Obit watch: July 18, 2023.
July 18th, 2023Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher and author.
Professor Frankfurt’s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will — people’s motivating wants and desires — at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources of life’s meaning. For Professor Frankfurt, volition, more than reason or morality, was the defining aspect of the human condition.
Despite the ambition and inventiveness of this project — the philosopher Michael Bratman praised it as “powerful and exciting philosophy” of great “depth and fecundity” — Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.
The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.
Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”
That paper was republished as a book in 2005, On Bullshit (affiliate link), which became a best-seller. He also wrote On Truth (affiliate link) which seems to have been less successful.
For the record, and because Lawrence sent over an obit: Jane Birkin.
Over the weekend, my mother asked me: “How do you go from being a promising young journalist to being a swami?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but here’s the obit for Sally Kempton.
Robert Lieberman, director. Other credits include quite a few genre TV series, “Christmas in Tahoe”, “All I Want for Christmas”, and “Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy”.
Firings watch.
July 14th, 2023Jim Foster out as baseball coach at Northwestern.
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Northwestern had several coaches depart the program in February, and the team struggled to a 10-40 record. After the season, 16 players reportedly entered the transfer portal.
Radio station 670 The Score in Chicago reported that Foster discouraged players from seeking medical attention for injuries and that players hid their injuries from him. The station also reported that Northwestern coaches and other staff members attempted to meet with Gragg but were denied an opportunity.
This seems like fallout from a story I missed covering earlier this week: football coach Pat Fitzgerald got canned on Monday, for pretty much the same reason.
The firing of Fitzgerald, 48, comes after the school announced Friday that he’d be suspended without pay for two weeks this summer following the conclusion of a university-commissioned investigation into allegations made by a former Northwestern football player. The school said the investigation, which was initiated in January and conducted by an outside law firm, did not find “sufficient” evidence that the coaching staff knew about ongoing hazing — though there were “significant opportunities” to find out about it.
The school then reversed course Saturday night after The Daily Northwestern published a story detailing allegations from the former player, who described specific instances of hazing and sexual abuse. That led Schill to write an open letter to the university community in which he said that he “may have erred in weighing the appropriate sanction” for Fitzgerald and acknowledged focusing “too much on what the report concluded (Fitzgerald) didn’t know and not enough on what he should have known.”