Whipped Cream Difficulties

I wonder sometimes if I lean too much on the NYT for obits. I do try to pull obits from a variety of places (as long as they are trustworthy sources) and the paper of record doesn’t cover everyone, or cover them in a timely fashion.

But the Times also tends to publish obits for interesting people that I just don’t see elsewhere.

Two examples:

Si Spiegel. He was a pioneer of artificial Christmas trees.

In 1954, he finally landed a permanent position with the American Brush Machinery Company, which was based in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He operated machines that manufactured brushes from wire and other materials for various industrial functions, including cleaning and scrubbing wood and metal finishing.

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After American Brush unsuccessfully branched out into the Christmas tree business, Mr. Spiegel, by then a senior machinist, was tasked with closing the artificial tree factory. Instead, he began studying natural conifers, tweaked the brush-making machines to emulate the real trees and patented new production techniques.
He left the renamed American Tree and Wreath Company in 1979 and founded Hudson Valley Tree Company two years later., which began mass-producing 800,000 trees a year on an assembly line that turned one out every four minutes.
By the late 1980s, his company was generating annual sales of $54 million and employed 800 workers in Newburgh, N.Y., and Evansville, Ind. He sold the Hudson Valley Tree Company in 1993, retired as a multimillionaire and turned his attention to cultural, educational and social justice philanthropy.

Yes, he was Jewish. I wouldn’t ordinarily say that, but it is a key part of his origin story: he applied for commercial piloting jobs after WWII, but was consistently rejected because he was Jewish.

Mr. Spiegel celebrated Jewish holidays with his children, but when they were young, a Christmas tree was a winter holiday staple — first a real one, then the best of his fake ones.
“They were pagan symbols,” he told The Times. “My kids liked them.”

The other reason he’s interesting: he flew 35 missions over Germany as a B-17 pilot. On his 33rd mission, his B-17 was shot down and crash-landed in Poland, which was occupied by the Russians at the time.

Uncertain what to do with putative allies, the Russians awaited orders from their superiors. But instead of staying put, Mr. Spiegel and his fellow officers surreptitiously removed an engine and a tire from their own plane to repair another hobbled B-17 that had crashed nearby. They bartered for fuel and, on March 17, the combined crews escaped to Foggia, Italy, where they were able to notify their families back home that they had survived. Mr. Spiegel led two more missions, then returned home to New York on Aug. 31, 1945, but he would go back to England and Poland for reunions of his crew from the 849th Bomb Squadron of the 490th Bomb Group.

Elleston Trevor, call your office, please. I don’t see any evidence that he ever wrote a book about his wartime experiences, but I wish he had: I am genuinely curious how they moved the B-17 engine.

Mr. Spiegel, who died at 99 on Jan. 21 at his home in Manhattan, was among the last surviving American B-17 pilots of World War II, his granddaughter Maya Ono said.

Walter Shawlee, who the Times describes as “the sovereign of slide rules”.

…Inspired by this encounter with his youth, he created a website dedicated to slide rules. Before long, nostalgic math whizzes of decades past came across the site. Emails poured into Mr. Shawlee’s inbox. He began spending eight hours a day researching, buying, fixing and reselling old slide rules.

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In the early 2000s, he was earning $125,000 a year fixing and reselling slide rules. The business paid for his two children to go to college, and it sent one of them to law school. His customer base took its most organized form in the Oughtred Society, a club named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican minister generally recognized to have invented the slide rule in the early 1620s.
Mr. Shawlee’s website developed a subculture of its own, with a network of slide rule-o-philes from Arizona to Venezuela to Malaysia digging on Mr. Shawlee’s behalf through the mildewed wares of old stationery stores and estate sales and school district warehouses in search of slide rules. In Singapore, a civil servant, Foo Sheow Ming, visited the back room of a bookstore and found 40 unopened crates of more than 12,000 slide rules in multiple varieties. On his website, Mr. Shawlee called the find “the absolute El Dorado of slide rules,” and Mr. Foo told The Journal that it was “the mother lode.”

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Mr. Shawlee’s inventory included remarkable artifacts of science history. He offered a slide rule made for machine gun operators, with calculations for wind, elevation and range. He offered a slide rule for measuring metabolic rates, with different settings for age, sex and height. And he used his website to explore recondite points of slide rule-iana, writing, for example, about slide rules made by the U.S. government for calculating nuclear bomb effects.

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He also sold slide-rule cuff links and slide-rule tie clips, which in some cases had been made by major slide-rule manufacturers as promotional items during what Mr. Shawlee called “the golden age of slide rules.” The tie clips proved so popular on the Slide Rule Universe that Mr. Shawlee worked with a small foundry to start manufacturing them himself.

Lawrence gave me a slide rule tie clip one year, which looks like it may have come from Mr. Shawlee’s website. I treasure it, and wear it on special occasions.

Slide Rule Universe. I was previously unfamiliar with this site, but wow! It looks like a relic of the old school Web, which I absolutely love.

In a phone interview, Ms. Shawlee said that thousands of the devices were still in the family’s home. She said she planned to continue selling them. As far as she knows, there is no prospect of another collector-expert-fixer-dealer-romantic like Mr. Shawlee emerging in “the slide-rule racket.”

For the historical record: NYT obit for David Kahn.

The U.S. government considered [The Codebreakers] so volatile that the National Security Agency, the country’s premier cryptology arm, pondered how to block its publication. It even considered breaking into Mr. Kahn’s home in Great Neck, N.Y.
Eventually the agency chose more overt means, demanding that the publisher, Macmillan, not release it. The company refused; instead, MacMillan and Mr. Kahn submitted the text to the Department of Defense for review. Mr. Kahn agreed to cut a few paragraphs about Britain’s code-breaking efforts during World War II, which were still classified, but otherwise he kept the book intact.

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In a curious twist, in 1993, the N.S.A. invited Mr. Kahn to be its scholar in residence. Despite the agency’s earlier efforts to sideline his work, by the 1990s it had come to respect him for advancing the field of cryptology. In 2020, he was even named to its hall of fame.

Seiji Ozawa, conductor.

Mr. Ozawa was the most prominent harbinger of a movement that has transformed the classical music world over the last half-century: a tremendous influx of East Asian musicians into the West, which has in turn helped spread the gospel of Western classical music to Korea, Japan and China.
For much of that time, a belief widespread even among knowledgeable critics held that although highly trained Asian musicians could develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they could never achieve a real understanding of its interpretive needs or a deep feeling for its emotional content. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa surmounted this prejudice by dint of his outsize personality, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer hard work.

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He found himself near the top of the American orchestral world in 1973, when he was named music director of the Boston Symphony. He scored many successes over the years, proving especially adept at big, complex works that many others found unwieldy.He toured widely and recorded extensively with the orchestra. But his 29-year tenure was, many thought, too long for anyone’s good: his own, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’.
Though relatively inexperienced in opera, he left in 2002 to become music director of the august Vienna State Opera, where he stayed until 2010. The rest of his life was mainly consumed with health issues and with dreams of a major comeback on the concert stage, which he was never able to achieve.