Archive for the ‘Nixon’ Category

Obit watch: February 8, 2024.

Thursday, February 8th, 2024

Mojo Nixon. NYT (archived). THR.

“Before ‘Elvis is Everywhere’ there were just a lot of dudes at the Mojo show,” Nixon said. “It’s a sausage fest, and the women that are there are there in protest. ‘Yes, I’ll go and drive your drunk ass home if you go and watch this Jodie Foster movie with me.’ But after ‘Elvis Is Everywhere’ actual women came on their own, not coerced by their drunk husbands.”

Nixon summed up his career thus: “Mojo Nixon wanted to be Richard Pryor. He’s like Richard Pryor’s stupid cousin if he was white and played in a rockabilly band. I’d say things that simultaneously shocked people and spoke the truth.

Here’s a live version of one of my favorite Mojo songs, from 1989:

I’ve written a couple of times about the NYT‘s “Overlooked No More” obits. Here’s another interesting one: Henry Heard, tap dancer.

Of course, there’s more to the story than that.

He learned to dance at age 6 and was performing in clubs by the time he was 14. On Jan. 7, 1939, the car he was riding in with his group, the Three Dots, was struck by a train at an unguarded crossing in Memphis. Everyone in the car was killed except Henry, who suffered devastating injuries that necessitated the amputation of his right arm and right leg.
After multiple surgeries, he thought his life as a dancer was over and was tempted to give up. But he resolved not to. “I’d seen the blind and the crippled standing on street corners with their tin cups and pencils,” he told The Columbus Star in 1958, “and decided that I wanted to do more with my life than be the object of public curiosity and pity.”

He learned how to dance again, on one leg.

His innovative dancing was on display in “Boarding House Blues,” which starred Moms Mabley as the owner of a cash-strapped boardinghouse. To raise money, the tenants hold a show, and Heard is the opening act. He starts by using his crutch as he dances a Charleston step accompanied by Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra. He then slides his crutch offstage at the end of a turn and keeps on dancing, sculpting accents in the air with his free arm and punctuating a drum break with backward steps.

Wherever he traveled, Heard entertained patients at hospitals, including veterans hospitals, refuting the prevalent attitude that people with disabilities were charity cases to be pitied. He appeared at community events held by the N.A.A.C.P. as well as at Democratic Party fund-raisers, and he founded a long-running annual Christmas benefit for children at the Illinois School and Rehabilitation Center in Chicago, often using his own money for gifts and dinner and dressing as Santa.
Heard was one of a number of African American tap dancers, like Peg-Leg Bates, Big Time Crip and Jesse James, whose artistry made percussive use of a mobility aid.

On the TV variety show “You Asked for It,” Heard peppered three rapid-fire numbers with pyrotechnics: in the first, he interspersed double-time steps with triplets and trenches; in the second, he finger-snapped his way through a joyous rumba. For his finale, he tapped up and down stairs à la Bill Robinson.

He also did a lot of work with disability organizations, while at the same time being highly critical of them:

“They’re all very polite and want me to volunteer my services,” he told The Defender in 1971. “But no one is interested in hiring me to work full time with the people who need help. In fact, there just aren’t any substantial programs moving in that direction, and the handicapped, as a result, continue to struggle for the few ‘charity’ jobs they can get.”

TMQ Watch: February 6, 2024.

Tuesday, February 6th, 2024

The Tuesday Morning Quarterback Non-Quarterback Non-Running Back NFL MVP is Creed Humphrey, center for Kansas City.

In other news, welcome to the penultimate TMQ, and the penultimate TMQ Watch. Also, welcome to the most boring week in sports.

After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…

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Obit watch: September 4, 2023.

Monday, September 4th, 2023

Somebody out there is listening to me.

NYT obit for Marilyn Lovell (archived).

On Christmas Day 1968, while Mr. Lovell was on the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned spaceflight to orbit the moon, Ms. Lovell answered her door to find a representative from Neiman Marcus carrying a large box with moon-themed décor. In it was a mink coat and a note The New York Times would later describe as “the most romantic card in the universe”: “To Marilyn from the Man in the Moon.” Ms. Lovell did her household chores that day in pajamas and her new mink.
On that mission, Mr. Lovell named a triangle-shaped mountain on the lunar surface Mount Marilyn. It would later serve as a landmark for astronauts, and in 2017, after campaigning by Mr. Lovell, the name was officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union.

When Ms. Lovell’s 12-year-old daughter, Susan, became hysterical on seeing a priest at their door, Ms. Lovell found a way to soothe her. “Do you really think the best astronaut either one of us knows is going to forget something as simple as how to turn his spaceship around and fly it home?” she asked her daughter, according to Mr. Lovell’s memoir.
Reporters with notebooks, microphones and television cameras filled up the Lovell family lawn and driveway. She fielded a call from President Richard M. Nixon: “I just wanted you to know, Marilyn, that your president and the entire nation are watching your husband’s progress with concern,” he said. “Everything is being done to bring Jim home.”

When parachutes were seen on TV billowing out from the spaceship, guiding it safely to the ocean surface, a couple of famous astronauts in Ms. Lovell’s living room, Mr. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, opened champagne. President Nixon called with a new message: “I wanted to know if you’d care to accompany me to Hawaii to pick up your husband.”
She replied, “Mr. President, I’d love to.”

NYT obit for Douglas Lenat (archived).

Running across dozens of computers, Eurisko could discover possibilities that Dr. Lenat — and other humans — had not. But it needed help from human judgment. Machines could not be truly intelligent, he realized, unless they too had common sense.
The project was called Cyc. He set out to define the fundamental but largely unspoken laws that outline how the world works, including everything from “you can’t be in two places at the same time” to “when drinking a cup of coffee, you hold the open end up.” He knew it could take decades — perhaps centuries — to complete the project. But he was determined to try.
In recent years, the Cyc project — and the rule-based approach to A.I. research it represented — has fallen out of favor among leading A.I. researchers. Rather than defining intelligence rule by rule, line of code by line of code, the giants of the tech industry are now focused on systems that learn skills by analyzing massive amounts of digital data. This is how they build popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Many leading researchers now believe that this kind of sweeping data analysis will eventually reproduce common sense and reasoning. But as today’s computers struggle with even simple tasks and play fast and loose with the truth, others believe that the industry can learn from Dr. Lenat and his never-ending struggle to build common sense by hand.

My favorite Dr. Lenat story is partially in the article: the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron story.

In brief: Game Designers Workshop used to (still may) run a contest where you had a trillion “credits” to design the best possible fleet, according to the rulebook. The contestants were pitted against each other until one fleet won. Dr. Lenet fed the rules into Eurisko and iterated until it came up with what seemed to him to be an optimal strategy. He entered the 1981 tournament with his Eurisko designed fleet…and won.

The next year, GDW changed the rules. Dr. Lenet fed the revised rules into Eurisko, entered the tournament again…and won.

What the NYT obit doesn’t say: The third year, GDW told Dr. Lenet that if he entered the tournament with one of his weird computer designed fleets, they’d just cancel it completely. According to the Traveller wiki, he agreed to accept “the title ‘Grand Admiral’ as consolation.

Steve Harwell, former lead singer of Smashmouth. THR. Pitchfork.

Not much to say about this, really. 56 is awfully young, but all the stories go out of the way to mention his issues. And I was never a big fan of the band, with the possible exception of “Walkin’ on the Sun”.

Gayle Hunnicutt. Other credits include “Mister Roberts” (the TV series), “Get Smart”, and “Marlowe” (the 1969 movie with James Garner). (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Obit watch: July 20, 2023.

Thursday, July 20th, 2023

Kevin 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.

After his release, Mr. Mitnick became a polarizing but regular presence in the cybersecurity community. He portrayed himself as a misunderstood “genius” and pioneer, and some supporters said he was a victim of overzealous prosecution and overhyped media coverage. Fans staged protests across more than a dozen cities when he was sentenced and adorned their cars with yellow “Free Kevin” bumper stickers after his arrest.

It was not clear if Mr. Mitnick made significant financial gains from cybercrime, though he had the opportunity to do so. “My motivation was a quest for knowledge, the intellectual challenge, the thrill and the escape from reality,” he told a Senate committee hearing several months after he was freed from incarceration.

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.”

In another book, “The Accidental Victim: JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Real Target in Dallas” (2013), he wrote that Mr. Connally, who was riding in the car with President John F. Kennedy when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, had been Oswald’s intended target. Oswald, he wrote, may have blamed Mr. Connally for failing, as Navy secretary, to reconsider his dishonorable discharge from the Marines.

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.

Following the 1961 season, he was selected by Houston in the MLB expansion draft but was traded to the Red Sox before even playing for the Colt 45s.

Nick Benedict, actor. Other credits include the original “Mission: Impossible”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, and the good “Hawaii 5-0”.

Historical note, suitable for use in schools.

Friday, June 17th, 2022

I am still on the road, reuniting with one of my tribes and having more fun than I am legally allowed to have.

But I didn’t want to let today’s anniversary pass, even if I don’t have time to do a full detailed post.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break in.

Alfred Baldwin, on “spotter” duty at the Howard Johnson’s hotel across the street, was distracted watching the film Attack of the Puppet People on TV and failed to observe the arrival of the police car in front of the Watergate building.

Lawrence, we should add that to the list.

As a shiftless and lazy blogger who is on the road, I’m going to point to this Reason essay by Glenn Garvin, which I rather liked. Garvin’s one of the better crop of their current writers.

Obit watch: June 13, 2022.

Monday, June 13th, 2022

Philip Baker Hall. THR.

Other credits include “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Quincy M.E.”, “The Man with Bogart’s Face”, “Ghostbusters II”, “The John Larroquette Show”, and “Cradle Will Rock”.

NYT obit for Julee Cruise, which makes explicit something that the other obits only implied:

Her husband, Edward Grinnan, said the cause was suicide. He said she had struggled with depression as well as lupus.

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

Obit watch: May 11, 2022.

Wednesday, May 11th, 2022

Alfred Baldwin, unindicted co-conspirator.

Mr. Baldwin was the lookout for the Watergate burglars.

During the first break-in, in late May, the burglars installed two listening devices, Mr. Baldwin said in his interview. He was stationed across the street at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, from which he eavesdropped on the phone taps. He had logged about 200 calls by the time Mr. McCord realized that the bugging devices weren’t working properly and decided to stage a second incursion on June 17 to adjust them.
It was not clear at what point Mr. Baldwin saw that the police had arrived on the scene. A 2012 account in Washingtonian magazine said that at the time he was “glued to the TV watching a horror movie, ‘Attack of the Puppet People,’ on Channel 20 — oblivious to the situation developing across the street.”
But that account was wrong, Mr. Baldwin said. He said he had turned on the television to cover up the sound of his walkie-talkie, which he was using to communicate with the burglars.

In short order, uniformed police swarmed the scene, and the jig was up. E. Howard Hunt, one of the conspirators who had slipped out of the Watergate, rushed over to Mr. Baldwin’s motel room, told him to pack up the surveillance equipment, take it to Mr. McCord’s house and then disappear.
“Does that mean I’m out of a job?” Mr. Baldwin said he asked Mr. Hunt. But by then Mr. Hunt was out the door.

Mr. Baldwin rolled on the burglars and avoided charges. According to the NYT, he actually passed away in 2020, but his death only became known recently.

Obit watch: March 31, 2021.

Wednesday, March 31st, 2021

Most people don’t have a favorite Watergate conspirator.

G. Gordon Liddy was mine. WP in archive format so you can actually read it.

As a leader of a White House “plumbers” unit set up to plug information leaks, and then as a strategist for the president’s re-election campaign, Mr. Liddy helped devise plots to discredit Nixon “enemies” and to disrupt the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Most were far-fetched — bizarre kidnappings, acts of sabotage, traps using prostitutes, even an assassination — and were never carried out.
But Mr. Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent, engineered two break-ins at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. On May 28, 1972, as Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt stood by, six Cuban expatriates and James W. McCord Jr., a Nixon campaign security official, went in, planted bugs, photographed documents and got away cleanly.
A few weeks later, on June 17, four Cubans and Mr. McCord, wearing surgical gloves and carrying walkie-talkies, returned to the scene and were caught by the police. Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt, running the operation from a Watergate hotel room, fled but were soon arrested and indicted on charges of burglary, wiretapping and conspiracy.

Unlike the other Watergate defendants, Mr. Liddy refused to testify about his activities for the White House or the Committee to Re-elect the President, and drew the longest term among those who went to prison. He was sentenced by Judge John J. Sirica to 6 to 20 years, but served only 52 months. President Jimmy Carter commuted his term in 1977.

Disbarred from law practice and in debt for $300,000, mostly for legal fees, Mr. Liddy began a new career as a writer. His first book, “Out of Control,” (1979) was a spy thriller. He later wrote another novel, “The Monkey Handlers” (1990), and a nonfiction book, “When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country” (2002). He also co-wrote a guide to fighting terrorism, “Fight Back! Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style” (2006), and produced many articles on politics, taxes, health and other matters.
In 1980, he broke his silence on Watergate with his autobiography, “Will.” The reviews were mixed, but it became a best seller. After years of revelations by other Watergate conspirators, there was little new in it about the scandal, but critics said his account of prison life was graphic. A television movie based on the book was aired in 1982 by NBC.

In the 1980s, Mr. Liddy dabbled in acting, appearing on “Miami Vice” and in other television and film roles.

His IMDB page. In addition to “Miami Vice”, he also did a guest shot on “Airwolf”.

On the old Nashville Network cable channel, he co-starred as a crime boss in the short-lived series “18 Wheels of Justice,” a program that he boasted had “no redeeming social value.”

But he was better known later as a syndicated talk-radio host with a right-wing agenda. “The G. Gordon Liddy Show,” begun in 1992, was carried on hundreds of stations by Viacom and later Radio America, with satellite hookups and internet streaming. It ran until his retirement in 2012. He lived in Fort Washington, Md.
Mr. Liddy, who promoted nutritional supplements and exercised, was still trim in his 70s. He made parachute jumps, took motorcycle trips, collected guns, played a piano and sang lieder. His website showed him craggy-faced with head held high, an American flag and the Capitol dome in the background.

Obit watch: February 7 , 2021.

Sunday, February 7th, 2021

Leon Spinks, former heavyweight champion of the world.

Leon had fought professionally only seven times, with six victories and a draw, before facing Ali at the Las Vegas Hilton on Feb. 15, 1978, in a bout arranged by Bob Arum, one of boxing’s leading promoters.
Ali held the World Boxing Association and World Boxing Council titles. But at 36, though an overwhelming betting favorite, he was past his prime. He weighed in at 224 pounds to Spinks’s 197.
Spinks was a hard-charging brawler, but when he pressured Ali in the ring, the champion resorted to his rope-a-dope strategy, which was aimed at letting an opponent exhaust himself with punches that seldom did damage while Ali rested on the ropes.
The Spinks corner had a strategy of its own, aimed at weakening Ali.
“Jab, jab, jab, that was the plan,” Spinks’s trainer, George Benton, said in the dressing room afterward. “Hit him on the left shoulder all night with that jab.”Ali rallied in the 15th round, but Spinks warded him off and won a split decision.

He lost the WBA title to Ali in September of 1978: the WBC stripped him of the title because he wouldn’t fight Ken Norton.

Spinks’s last fight came in December 1995, when he lost a unanimous decision to Fred Houpe in an eight-round bout. Spinks was 42; Houpe was 45 and had not fought since November 1978.
Spinks retired with 26 victories (14 by knockouts), 17 losses and three draws.

George P. Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state and Nixon cabinet official.

He carried a weighty résumé into the Reagan White House, with stints as secretary of labor, budget director and secretary of the Treasury under President Richard M. Nixon. He had emerged from the wars of Watergate with his reputation unscathed, having shown a respect for the rule of law all too rare in that era. At the helm of the Treasury, he had drawn Nixon’s wrath for resisting the president’s demands to use the Internal Revenue Service as a weapon against the president’s political enemies.

Today’s dose of chicken soup for the you-know-what (because I’m pretty sure the actual term is trademarked, and I’ll hear about it from those people just like if I don’t refer to today’s game as the Superb Owl): Frank Shankwitz, former Arizona Highway Patrol motorcycle officer.

In 1980, he was introduced to a 7-year-old boy named Chris Greicius. Chris had terminal leukemia, and he desperately wanted to be a motorcycle officer when he grew up. He idolized Ponch and Jon from “CHiPs”.

The department had decided to make Chris’s wish come true, if just for a few days. A police helicopter ferried him to police headquarters from the hospital where he was being treated. Mr. Shankwitz was to greet him out front, next to his motorcycle.
“Figuring he’d be brought out in a wheelchair, I was surprised when the door opened and a pair of sneakers emerged,” Mr. Shankwitz wrote in his memoir, “Wish Man” (2018). “Out stepped Chris, an excited 7-year-old boy who seemed so full of life it was hard to believe he was sick.”
Mr. Shankwitz showed Chris his motorcycle, and after he and the other officers gave him a badge, the head of the department made him an honorary officer. Chris was feeling well enough to go home that night, and the next day the officers brought him a custom-made uniform.
To become a motorcycle officer, though, Chris had to pass a driving test — which he did, in his front yard, on his small battery-powered motorcycle. Mr. Shankwitz promised to bring him a special badge worn by motorcycle cops; he also called NBC, the network that aired “CHiPs,” and asked for the show’s stars, Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox, to autograph a photo.
The next day Chris was back in the hospital, and by the time Mr. Shankwitz arrived with the badge and the picture, he had fallen into a light coma. Chris had hung his uniform by the bed, and as Mr. Shankwitz pinned the badge on his shirt, the boy woke up.
“Am I an official motorcycle cop now?” Chris asked.
“You sure are,” Mr. Shankwitz replied.
Chris died later that day. Mr. Shankwitz and a colleague attended his funeral, in Southern Illinois, borrowing a pair of Illinois Highway Patrol motorcycles to accompany the hearse.

Mr. Shankwitz and five other people founded the Make-a-Wish Foundation in 1980, a few months after Chris’s funeral. It grew rapidly: Within a few years it had become a national organization, with state chapters opening almost monthly.

Obit watch: February 3, 2021.

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021

Eugenio Martinez has passed away at the age of 98.

His death, at his daughter’s home near Orlando, was announced by Brigade 2506, a veterans group of Mr. Martinez’s fellow anti-Communist Cuban exiles. Their abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to overthrow the government headed by Fidel Castro was covertly supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Martinez was the last surviving Watergate burglar.

In January 1973 four of the five burglars — members of the so-called plumbers, an informal White House team assigned to plug information leaks — pleaded guilty so as to avoid revealing details of the bungled operation. They were convicted of conspiracy, theft and wiretapping.
The others, also Cuban-born, were Bernard L. Barker, a former Miami real estate agent and C.I.A. operative, who died in 2009; Virgilio González, a Miami locksmith, who died in 2014; and Frank A. Sturgis, a soldier of fortune, who died in 1993. (In 1971, the four had taken part in the break-in at the Los Angeles office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who disclosed the Pentagon papers to the press.)

E. Howard Hunt, who allegedly recruited them, served 31 months in prison.

They were led by James W. McCord Jr., a security coordinator for the Nixon campaign whose confession to the judge just before his sentencing precipitated the revelations of White House crimes and cover-ups that culminated in Nixon’s resignation in 1974. For aiding prosecutors in pursuing senior presidential aides in the scandal, Mr. McCord had his one-to-five-year sentence cut to less than four months.

In 1983, after his requests for clemency had been rejected by Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, Mr. Martinez — who, it turned out, had still been on retainer to the C.I.A. at the time of the Watergate break-in — was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.
The pardon, which was granted because Mr. Martinez had been regarded as the least culpable of the defendants, restored his right to vote. Despite the ordeal, he prided himself on one Watergate keepsake — a golden lucky clover inscribed, in Spanish, with the words “Good luck, Richard Nixon.”

Historical note, suitable for use in schools.

Monday, December 21st, 2020

50 years ago today, on December 21, 1970, the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, met with one of the greatest singers of all time, Elvis Presley, at the White House.

The story goes that Elvis requested the meeting with Nixon, as he wanted the president to appoint him a “federal agent at large” in what was then known as the “Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs”. (BNDD merged into the DEA in 1973.) Elvis believed he could be a force for good and fight drug use among the young people.

Smithsonian magazine has a slightly different version of the story (written by the great Peter Carlson):

The story began in Memphis a few days earlier, when Elvis’ father, Vernon, and wife, Priscilla, complained that he’d spent too much on Christmas presents—more than $100,000 for 32 handguns and ten Mercedes-Benzes. Peeved, Elvis drove to the airport and caught the next available flight, which happened to be bound for Washington. He checked into a hotel, then got bored and decided to fly to Los Angeles.

Elvis was traveling with some guns and his collection of police badges, and he decided that what he really wanted was a badge from the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs back in Washington. “The narc badge represented some kind of ultimate power to him,” Priscilla Presley would write in her memoir, Elvis and Me. “With the federal narcotics badge, he [believed he] could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.”

Anyway, Elvis wrote a letter to Nixon (reproduced here, transcription here) asking for the position and a badge. There was some internal discussion at the White House, but presidential aide Egil “Bud” Krogh persuaded Nixon to agree to the meeting.

That personal gift Elvis mentions in his letter? It was a Colt .45. I have seen it asserted both that the Secret Service confiscated it before Elvis got in to see Nixon, and that Elvis got it past the guards and personally presented it to Nixon.

Nixon’s famous taping system had not yet been installed, so the conversation wasn’t recorded. But Krogh took notes: “Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit. The President then indicated that those who use drugs are also those in the vanguard of anti-American protest.”
“I’m on your side,” Elvis told Nixon, adding that he’d been studying the drug culture and Communist brainwashing.

Elvis asked for a BNDD badge, and Nixon basically said “Make it so.”

Before leaving, Elvis asked Nixon to say hello to Schilling and West, and the two men were escorted into the Oval Office. Nixon playfully punched Schilling on the shoulder and gave both men White House cuff links.
“Mr. President, they have wives, too,” Elvis said. So Nixon gave them each a White House brooch.
After Krogh took him to lunch at the White House mess, Elvis received his gift—the narc badge.

The meeting was kept secret at the time: Jack Anderson covered it a year later, but apparently nobody actually gave a tinker’s damn back then.

Today:

Of all the requests made each year to the National Archives for reproductions of photographs and documents, one item has been requested more than any other. That item, more requested than the Bill of Rights or even the Constitution of the United States, is the photograph of Elvis Presley and Richard M. Nixon shaking hands on the occasion of Presley’s visit to the White House.

You can download copies of the photos from the George Washington University National Security Archive (their site has been a major help in writing this). NARA has a site devoted to the meeting, but it is annoying as all get out. You can order a print here, as well as some other related merchandise.

“Bud” Krogh apparently wrote a book about the meeting (called, fittingly, The Day Elvis Met Nixon (affiliate link)) which I believe is out of print but readily available from Amazon.

Obit watch: February 9, 2020.

Sunday, February 9th, 2020

Let’s get down to it.

Paul Farnes. He was 101, and the last surviving RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

…for three months, through the end of October, the R.A.F. battled the Luftwaffe for supremacy in the skies over Britain. Flying a Hurricane fighter for the 501 Squadron, Mr. Farnes, a sergeant pilot, proved supremely adept at attacking German aircraft.
In August alone he shot down three Junkers Ju Stuka bombers, a Dornier 17 light bomber and a Messerschmitt 109E fighter.At the end of September, as Mr. Farnes maneuvered his malfunctioning Hurricane back to the R.A.F.’s Kenley base, he spotted a German bomber flying directly at him at about 1,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘Good God,’ so I whipped out and had to reposition myself and managed to get ’round behind him,” he said in an interview with the website History of War in 2017. “I gave him a couple of bursts, and he crashed at Gatwick just on the point between the airport and the racecourse.”

Aerial warfare against the Germans meant breaking away from the squadron, finding something to shoot at, firing away, then breaking away to safety. But by Mr. Farnes’s account it was also enjoyable, because he was able to combine his love of flying with the mission to protect Britain.
“The C.O. would quite often pick the next members of the squadron that had to be at ‘readiness,’ and the two or three who weren’t picked would be pretty fed up,” he told History of War. “If you weren’t picked, you’d think, ‘Why can’t I go?’ I’m sure one or two must have felt, ‘Well, thank God I’m not going!’ But a lot of us were quite happy to go.”

Robert Conrad. THR. Variety.

I was a little young for “Wild Wild West” in first run; if it was syndicated in Houston when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. It could have been on the station we were never able to pick up (the same one OG “Star Trek” was on). And “Hawaiian Eye” was before my time. But if you’re my age or a little on either side of it, this was like candy for us:

He also appeared multiple times on “Mission: Impossible” and other series, either as the lead of some less than successful ones (“High Mountain Rangers”) or doing guest shots. He did do a “Mannix”. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4.) And I didn’t know this, but he played G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.

Orson Bean. Variety. THR. Interesting guy: I remember him from “Being John Malkovich” and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some of those old game shows on Buzzr. In the 1960s, he founded a progressive school in New York City.

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)
When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

In the 1980s, he settled down again and resumed acting. He was 91 years old when he died: he was hit by a car while walking, fell, and was run over by a second car (according to Variety).

After the jump, more obits.

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