Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: March 17, 2025.

Monday, March 17th, 2025

Guns magazine and American Handgunner are reporting the passing of John Taffin last week. Podcast.

I was fortunate enough to meet him in 2012, shake his hand, and say “thank you”. And I’ve written about some of his books, too.

I’m hoping at some point this week (or by next Sunday) I can get a special gun crankery post up in memory of the late Mr. Taffin. He struck me as a swell guy, and he knew his Smith and Wessons.

Gene Winfield, custom car builder. He did a considerable amount of work in Hollywood.

The Reactor was then used on three more series: “Star Trek,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Batman,” on which Catwoman (Eartha Kitt) used it as the Catmobile.

(Also “Bewitched”.)

He also designed cars for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”, “Get Smart”, “Sleeper”, and “Blade Runner”. And he designed the famous shuttle craft from a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Posted in Books, Cars, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Obits, Smith and Wesson, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 15, 2025.

Saturday, March 15th, 2025

I lost pretty much the entire day yesterday to various things. I didn’t even get any pie.

One of the things that went by the wayside was obits, so here’s a quick and lazy roundup from the past few days. I have to rush off in a little bit to a wedding shower, and I’m not sure when I’m going to be back.

John Feinstein, sports writer and author. The only one of his books I’ve read is The Punch, which I wrote about a while back and thought was pretty good.

Chris Moore, artist. He illustrated quite a few SF books, and also did album covers for Fleetwood Mac and Rod Stewart.

Carl Lundstrom, who was one of the people behind the Pirate Bay website, died in a plane crash on Monday.

Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary, and one of the 892 Saturday Night Live hosts who have not committed murder. (I think that count is right, but it may be a little out of date.)

Larry Buendorf, retired Secret Service agent. He’s the guy who wrestled the gun away from Squeaky Fromme.

“Squeaky was back in the crowd, maybe one person back, and she had an ankle holster on with a .45,” he said, referring to a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol. “That’s a big gun to have on your ankle. So, when it came up, it came up low, and I happened to be looking in that direction, I see it coming, and I step in front of him, not sure what it was other than that it was coming up pretty fast, and yelled out ‘Gun!’ When I yelled out ‘Gun!’ I popped that .45 out of her hand.”
He added: “I got a hold of her fingers, and she’s screaming — the crowd is screaming — and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t have a vest on, I don’t know where the next shot is coming from,’ and that I don’t think she’s alone. All of this is going on while I’m trying to control her.”
“She turns around, and I pulled her arm back and dropped her to the ground, and agents and police come from the back of the crowd” as Ms. Fromme shrieked in disbelief, he said.
“She’s screaming, ‘It didn’t go off!’” he continued. “I had it in my hand. I knew what she was doing, she was pulling back on the slide, and I hit the slide before she could chamber a round. If she’d had a round chambered, I couldn’t have been there in time. It would’ve gone through me and the president.”

If the Times account is to be trusted, she had four rounds in the magazine and the hammer cocked, but she hadn’t chambered a round.

Kevin Drum, leftist political blogger.

He also invented Friday cat blogging.

Alan K. Simpson, former Republican senator from Wyoming.

He had been struggling to recover from a broken hip that he sustained in December, according to a statement from his family and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a group of museums of which he was a board member for 56 years. The statement said his recovery had been hindered by complications of frostbite to his left foot about five years ago that required the amputation of his left leg below the knee.

Raul M. Grijalva, current Democratic House rep from Arizona.

Mr. Grijalva (pronounced gree-HAHL-vah) disclosed last year that he had lung cancer and would not run for a 13th term in 2026. He died of complications of his treatment, his office said. He was absent from Washington for nearly a year, missing hundreds of votes in the narrowly divided House.

Posted in 1911, Art, Books, Guns, Heroism, Obits, Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 12, 2025.

Wednesday, March 12th, 2025

Junior Bridgeman, former NBA player and businessman.

Bridgeman played 12 seasons in the NBA, 10 of them with the Bucks and two with the LA Clippers. He averaged 13.6 points, 3.5 rebounds and 2.4 assists in 25 minutes per game over his career, during which he established himself as one of the game’s best sixth men. He also served as president of the National Basketball Players Association from 1985 to 1988.

He played at a time when NBA salaries were not what they are now:

Famously, Bridgeman made about $2.95 million in his NBA career and never more than $350,000 in a season. But after his career, he built a fast-food empire that, at its peak, totaled more than 450 restaurants nationwide. He became a Coca-Cola bottling distributor with territory across three states and into Canada. He bought Ebony and Jet magazines. He invested in NBA Africa.

ESPN ran a profile of Mr. Bridgeman back in September of last year, which I commend to your attention.

Bridgeman remained close with Fitzgerald and Neviaser. One of the main principles they emphasized: Whatever business you’re involved in, learn it from the ground up. Another: Make sure the right people are in the right positions — people you can trust. Bridgeman viewed those lessons through the lens of basketball. To have success in the game, he knew, you had to study it, you needed the right set of teammates. You needed chemistry. You needed a good culture.

…

“He’d be working in the restaurant like he was an hourly worker,” Moncrief said. “I witnessed that. I was thinking, what the heck is he doing in there flipping burgers, washing dishes, and he had those work pants on. But he understood the value of learning thoroughly what you’re investing in — very, very hands on.” Moncrief watched how Bridgeman would write out checks, a small task that could have easily been delegated. “He wanted to know where every check was going,” Moncrief said. “When money went out, he wanted to feel that.”

…

For several years, beginning in in the late 1990s, Bridgeman stood before nearly 60 rookies in a hotel conference room as part of the league’s Rookie Transition Program, which the league founded in 1986 as part of its first efforts to help teach basics about financial literacy: budgeting, saving, taxes.
Bridgeman shared what he’d heard from former Bucks head coach Don Nelson: Their job was to play as hard as they can and make as much money as they can. He offered guardrails: Know the business well and put someone in charge who you trust, who is qualified. “More guys have lost money investing in deals with their second cousin on their mother’s side running it than anything else,” Bridgeman said. Doing something like that, he said, was a “blueprint for failure.”
He said that during a player’s career, doors would open, phone calls would be returned. So if a player were on the road in Detroit and wanted to become involved in the automobile industry, they would have the chance to reach out to the head of one of the automotive giants. Opportunities were everywhere. All they had to do was ask.

I’ve never been a big basketball fan, but Mr. Bridgeman sounds like a heck of a guy.

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 11, 2025.

Tuesday, March 11th, 2025

Jessie Mahaffey (Boatswain’s Mate Second Class, United States Navy – ret.) passed away on March 1st. He was 102.

Mr. Mahaffey served on the U.S.S. Oklahoma.

In December, Mr. Mahaffey told KTBS-TV of Shreveport, La., that Dec. 7, 1941, had started as a quiet Sunday.
He and five other sailors were chatting as they scrubbed the deck of the Oklahoma when they “heard a siren, saw planes and smoke,” he said, adding, “It must have only gone on for 45 minutes, but it was crazy.”
The Oklahoma was struck by as many as nine torpedoes. Within minutes, the battleship capsized, trapping hundreds of men below deck. “It didn’t take that long to come back to the other side,” he said. “It turned upside down and we had to slide over the bottom of the ship into the water.”
He managed to swim to the U.S.S. Maryland, another battleship that was moored at Pearl Harbor.
In total, 429 crew members from the Oklahoma were killed in the attack, which left more than 2,400 U.S. military personnel and civilians dead and nearly 1,800 wounded.

He went on to serve on the U.S.S. Northampton, which was sunk by the Japanese on November 30, 1942.

“The ship was sunk at midnight, and we had to stay on rafts the whole night,” Mr. Mahaffey told KTBS.

…

When he turned 100, in 2022, Mr. Mahaffey told KPLC-TV of Lake Charles, La., about the day he married Joyce Inez Mahaffey. “My best day would be marrying that little gal that just turned 18 years old,” he said. “Me, her and her brother went to that church.”
Ms. Mahaffey died in 2003. His survivors include his sons George and Clarence; several grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and a great-great-grandson.
After he was discharged from the Navy, Mr. Mahaffey returned to Louisiana, where he worked for Southwestern Bell, the regional phone company, for at least 30 years, his grandson said. Mr. Mahaffey, who was 5-foot-3, was a pole climber who refused to accept jobs that would require him to work indoors, John Mahaffey said.“They kept trying to give him promotions, to come inside, to take a desk job or to run the crews or to be a supervisor, and he would never take it,” he said.

…

In an interview on Sunday, John Mahaffey, his grandson, said that Mr. Mahaffey would talk about his time in the Navy only when his relatives would ask him about it, which they did often.

According to the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors, there are 14 remaining Pearl Harbor survivors.

John Mahaffey said his family had been told that his grandfather was one of just two or three remaining survivors from the U.S.S. Oklahoma.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 10, 2025.

Monday, March 10th, 2025

It has been a rough few days for baseball.

Frank Saucier, outfielder for the St. Louis Browns. He had a limited career due to injuries and the Korean War. Baseball Reference.

He is perhaps most famous as a historical footnote.

He was the only major league player removed from a game by his manager in favor of a 3-foot-7 circus performer.

Yes, he was the player who got benched in favor of Eddie Gaedel.

Art Schallock, pitcher for the Yankees and Orioles. He was, at the time of his death, the oldest living major league player. Baseball Reference.

Athol Fugard, South African playwright. He’s another one of those folks I’ve heard a lot about, but have no personal experience with his work.

It also hasn’t been a good time for music. D’Wayne Wiggins, of Tony! Toni! Tone!.

Joey Molland, the last surviving member of Badfinger. I feel like this is one of those areas where pigpen51 is better equipped to comment than I am.

Geoff Nicholson, author. I’ve never read any of his books, but the NYT obit makes him sound interesting.

His death, in a hospital, was from chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, his partner, Caroline Gannon, said. It is a rare bone marrow cancer, though, as Mr. Nicholson mordantly observed, “not rare enough, obviously.”

…

Mr. Nicholson was married for a time to Dian Hanson, a former model who edited a fetishist magazine, Leg Show. After living together in New York, the couple moved to Los Angeles when Ms. Hanson became the editor of sex-themed books for the luxury art publisher Taschen. Mr. Nicholson reveled in the 1960s kitsch of his home in a geodesic dome in the Hollywood Hills.

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

Obit watch: March 5, 2025.

Wednesday, March 5th, 2025

Congressman Sylvester Turner (Dem. – Houston).

Turner took over the seat of the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in January after serving two terms as mayor of Houston from 2016 to 2024. He was born and raised in Acres Homes, Houston, and attended the University of Houston and Harvard Law School.

…

Turner will be remembered for his decades-long service to Houston and its residents. He has represented his community at Houston City Hall and the Texas House of Representatives, notably fighting for the people of Houston’s historically black neighborhoods. Turner represents Texas’ 18th Congressional District, a historically significant seat once held by civil rights icons such as Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland, Craig Washington and Sheila Jackson Lee.

…

In 2015, Turner was elected the 62nd Mayor of Houston and was re-elected in 2019. Turner forged a path forward for Houston during some of the city’s most turbulent times, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey.

Lawrence.

Edited to add: The NYT did not have a story up when I posted, but they do now. I don’t see any coverage in the WP.

Edited to add 2: WP coverage, but it really doesn’t add anything.

James Harrison, big damn hero.

…Mr. Harrison was one of the most prolific donors in history, extending his arm 1,173 times. He may have also been one of the most important: Scientists used a rare antibody in his plasma to make a medication that helped protect an estimated 2.4 million babies in Australia from possible disease or death, medical experts say.

…

Mr. Harrison’s plasma contained the rare antibody anti-D. Scientists used it to make a medication for pregnant mothers whose immune systems could attack their fetuses’ red blood cells, according to Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
Anti-D helps protect against problems that can occur when babies and mothers have different blood types, most often if the fetus is “positive” and the mother is “negative,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. (The positive and negative signs are called the Rhesus factor, or Rh factor.)
In such cases, a mother’s immune system might react to the fetus as if it were a foreign threat. That can lead babies to develop a dangerous and potentially fatal condition, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, which can cause anemia and jaundice.

…

In Australia, scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne are working to create a synthetic version of the drug using what some have called “James in a Jar,” an antibody that can be made in a lab.
But for now, human donors are essential: The anti-D shots are made with donated plasma, and Mr. Harrison was one of about 200 donors among the 27 million people in Australia, Lifeblood said.
“It wasn’t one big heroic act,” Jemma Falkenmire, a spokeswoman for Lifeblood, said in an interview as she reflected on Mr. Harrison’s 64 years of donations, from 1954 to 2018. “It was just a lifetime of being there and doing these small acts of good bit by bit.”

FiveThirtyEight.

According to the Journal, the entire site is being axed and all 15 of its employees will be handed pink slips.

Selwyn Raab, journalist and author. He did a lot of reporting on the Mafia, and on people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes.

One was George Whitmore Jr., who had been imprisoned for the 1963 murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, roommates in an Upper East Side apartment — “career girls,” as the tabloids called them.
Mr. Raab, working first for the merged newspaper The New York World-Telegram and The Sun and then for NBC News and the New York public television station WNET-TV, uncovered evidence showing that Mr. Whitmore was elsewhere on the day of those murders and had no part in an unrelated attempted rape with which he was also charged.
Mr. Whitmore said that the police had beaten him, and that he had no lawyer during the interrogation. In 1996, his case was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark ruling that upheld a suspect’s right to counsel.
Mr. Raab wrote a book about the case, “Justice in the Back Room,” which became the basis for “Kojak,” the CBS series about a police detective, played by Telly Savalas, which ran for five years in the 1970s. “I’m not a detective,” Mr. Raab said. “I just look for the most reasonable approach to a story.”
He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years. Reporting for the paper, he uncovered evidence that helped free Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the middleweight boxer who was imprisoned for 19 years in the 1966 shooting deaths of three people in a bar in Paterson, N.J.
The Carter case was another instance of police coercion and prosecutorial overreach, one that also led to the conviction of another man, John Artis. Mr. Carter, who died in 2014, became something of a folk hero, his cause championed in a 1976 Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane,” and in a 1999 film, “The Hurricane,” in which Mr. Carter was played by Denzel Washington.

Posted in Books, Heroism, Law, Obits, Politics, Texas, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 3, 2025.

Monday, March 3rd, 2025

David Johansen, of the New York Dolls. Later on in life, he also performed under the stage name “Buster Poindexter”. THR.

Lee Goldberg has posted nice obits for Joseph Wambaugh and Gene Hackman.

[Wambaugh] told me the secret to his cop novels was taking fellow cops to Ruth’s Chris, buying them a steak and some drinks, and letting them talk…and then just listening to what they had to say. Not so much to the specific stories, but the way they *told* their stories, what were the key details that matter to them, the observations they made, the language they used, how they held their bodies as they spoke… it never failed to inspire him.

Olive Sturgess, actress. “The Raven” is actually a pretty swell movie, less horror and more humor than you’d expect. Other credits include “The Rookies”, “Ironside”, and “Petticoat Junction”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 28, 2025.

Friday, February 28th, 2025

Another day, another damn.

Joseph Wambaugh. THR. I don’t see anything in the LATimes yet.

Mr. Wambaugh hoped to keep both careers, as a cop and a writer, but his celebrity and his frequent appearances on television talk shows made police work untenable. Suspects wanted his autograph or his help getting a film role. People reporting crimes asked that he be the one to investigate. When his longtime detective partner held the squad car door open for him one day in 1974, he knew it was time to go.

The story I’ve heard is that, as a working cop, he went to interview a robbery victim. The guy had blood streaming down his head, and Det. Wambaugh asked him if he could describe the suspect. The victim responded by asking him what George C. Scott was like. He quit shortly after, because he realized his fame was getting in the way of doing his job.

Many critics loved him. “Let us forever dispel the notion that Mr. Wambaugh is only a former cop who happens to write books,” the crime and mystery writer Evan Hunter wrote of “The Glitter Dome” in The New York Times Book Review in 1981. “This would be tantamount to saying that Jack London was first and foremost a sailor. Mr. Wambaugh is, in fact, a writer of genuine power, style, wit and originality, who has chosen to write about the police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general.”

…

“I’m very interested in the concept of the sociopath, very interested, because my conscience has bothered me all my life,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “Talk about regrets — I have about 20 every day. I was educated in Catholic schools, and they did that to me. So I have to cope with a conscience all the time. And I’m interested in a creature who has none of that.”

I tell people I read The Blue Knight at a very inappropriate age. Because I try to be family friendly here, I won’t describe the scene I most vividly remember. I got pretty far behind in Wambaugh’s fiction, but I think I’ve read all his non-fiction books. Obviously, The Onion Field had a huge impact on me, but The Blooding and Fire Lover are pretty good, too.

I kind of wish I’d met him.

Yet he was a shy, prickly loner who rarely gave interviews, had few friends aside from police officers, didn’t have a literary agent and even played golf alone. He sprinkled his books with cop scorn for the wealthy, especially for entertainment stars in Beverly Hills. His own Southern California homes were modest mansions in upscale places like Newport Beach, San Diego and Rancho Mirage.

(Is it just me, or does he look a little like Nicholas Cage in those photos from the 1970s?)

Boris Spassky, of Fischer-Spassky fame.

When they played the first match, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Mr. Fischer, with his brash personality, was something of a folk hero in the West. He was widely portrayed as a lone gunslinger boldly taking on the might of the Soviet chess machine, with Mr. Spassky representing the repressive Soviet empire.
The reality could not have been further from the truth. Mr. Fischer was a spoiled 29-year-old man-child, often irascible and difficult. Mr. Spassky, at 35, was urbane, laid back and good-natured, acceding to Mr. Fischer’s many demands leading up to and during the match.
The match almost did not happen. It was supposed to start on July 2, but Mr. Fischer was still in New York, demanding more money for both players. A British promoter, James Slater, added $125,000 to the prize fund, which doubled it to $250,000 (about $1.9 million today), and Mr. Fischer arrived on July 4.
The match was a best-of-24 series, with each win counting as one point, each draw as a half point and each loss as zero. The first player to 12.5 points would be the winner.
In Game 1, on July 11, Mr. Fischer blundered and lost. Afterward, he refused to play Game 2 unless the television cameras recording the match were turned off. When they were not, Mr. Fischer forfeited the game.
The match seemed in doubt, but a compromise was worked out to move the match to a tiny, closed playing area behind the main hall.
Mr. Fischer won Game 3, his first victory ever against Mr. Spassky, and proceeded to steamroll him, winning the match 12.5 to 8.5.
Mr. Spassky’s sportsmanship was on full display in Game 6 of the match, which by then had been moved back into the main hall. When Mr. Fischer won the game, taking the lead for the first time in the match, Mr. Spassky joined with the spectators in standing and applauding his victory.

Pilar Del Rey, actress. Other credits include “Police Story” (which, as you know, Bob, was a Joseph Wambaugh creation), the “Travis McGee” TV movie, “The Forbidden Dance”, the 1960s “Dragnet”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Bird of Prey”, parts 1 and 2, season 8, episodes 20 and 21. She played “Marquesa”.)

Michael Preece, prominent TV director. Other credits include “Stingray”, “B.J. and the Bear”, “Renegade”, “Jake and the Fatman”…

…and, as a script supervisor before being a director, “Mitchell”, “The Getaway”, and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit”, season 1, episode 20. “Eight to Five, It’s a Miracle”, season 1, episode 21.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Chess, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 27, 2025.

Thursday, February 27th, 2025

Damn.

Gene Hackman. THR 1. THR 2. Tributes. NYT 1. NYT 2. IMDB.

I was a big fan of his when I was younger, even though I wasn’t allowed to watch any of his movies (except when they showed up on television). I still am. He was one of the greats. And I have no idea what his politics were.

Some of the less often cited movies in his body of work that I’d recommend: “The Conversation”, “Prime Cut”, and “The Royal Tenenbaums” (though I think that’s a bit twee). And of course, “Young Frankenstein”.

He also did an episode of “The F.B.I.”, and where is my boxed blu-ray set of that?

Michelle Trachtenberg. THR. Tributes. IMDB.

Never was a “Buffy” fan, but 39 is way too young for anyone to die.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 25, 2025.

Tuesday, February 25th, 2025

Clint Hill.

You may not recognize the name, but I think you’ll recognize him from the photos.

He was the Secret Service agent who jumped on the back of the limo when JFK was shot, and kept Mrs. Kennedy from falling out.

Thirteen days after the assassination, in a ceremony attended by Mrs. Kennedy, Mr. Hill received the highest award bestowed by the Treasury Department — the agency that oversaw the Secret Service at the time — for his “extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.”

…

When he retired from the Secret Service in 1975, he was the assistant director responsible for all protective forces.
In December 2013, the Secret Service honored him at its James J. Rowley Training Center in Maryland, erecting a bronze plaque next to a street it named Clint Hill Way.
But the accolades and his ascendancy in the agency could not overcome Mr. Hill’s feelings of guilt. He blamed himself for not reacting a split second faster to the sound of gunfire, becoming convinced that he had missed a chance to save President Kennedy’s life. His emotional turmoil resulted in his retirement in 1975 at age 43, at the urging of doctors.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: February 24, 2025.

Monday, February 24th, 2025

Joy Reid’s show on MSNBC.

MSNBC’s president suggested Sunday that blindsided staffers of liberal host Joy Reid’s canceled show can apply for other jobs within the progressive network as she confirmed the group of employees would be canned, according to a report.

Just gonna slide in here before Lawrence does…

Lynne Marie Stewart. Other credits include the animated 1995 “The Tick”, “The Running Man”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Son of the Beach”.

Roberta Flack.

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Tom Fitzmorris, who was the food guy in New Orleans for many years.

Mr. Fitzmorris had a corny sense of humor, which often involved jokes about the phrase “soup du jour.” (A customer asks what the soup du jour is; the waitress says, “I don’t know. They change it on me every day.”) He also liked to play elaborate April Fool’s pranks. He once made up a new restaurant that he said was opening near Commander’s Palace and described the fictitious competitor with such detailed admiration that Ella Brennan, then an owner of Commander’s Palace, dispatched her daughter, Ti Martin, to investigate.
Ti Martin, now one of the restaurant’s proprietors, remembered him as a particularly harsh critic, not out of meanness but because he wanted things done in a way he perceived as proper. When she ran out of iced tea at a restaurant she had just opened, he went on about it on his show for what she said seemed like an hour.
“But he was right,” she said. “Who runs out of iced tea?”

Posted in Food, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 17, 2025.

Monday, February 17th, 2025

Eleanor Maguire passed away in early January. She was 54. Cancer got her.

I think this is a fascinating obit. She was a cognitive neuroscientist who did a lot of early and influential work using MRI scanning to study the brain, especially the hippocampus.

Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.
“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.”

She was watching TV one night and came across “The Knowledge“, about London taxi drivers and their qualifying exams. (That’s a rabbit hole worth going down if you’re unfamiliar with it.)

In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London.
The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes — meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.
But that didn’t solve the mystery of why the taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire kept digging. Using M.R.I. machines, she measured different regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those in the brains of people who weren’t taxi drivers.
“The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects,” she wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she found, correlated with the length of a cabby’s career: The longer the cabby had driven, the bigger the hippocampus.

…

She followed up with other studies. One showed that the hippocampi of bus drivers — whose routes were set rather than navigated from memory — didn’t grow. Another showed that prospective taxi drivers who failed their tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in the process.
The implications were striking: The key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable.
In a roundabout way, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes — people who train their brains to memorize vast amounts of information quickly — who used this method, and observed that its effectiveness was “reflected in its continued use over two and a half millennia in virtually unchanged form.”

…

In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future scenarios. One taxi driver, for instance, struggled to make his way through busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Other amnesiacs couldn’t imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a trip to the beach.
“Instead of visualizing a single scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, the patients reported seeing just a collection of disjointed images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” the journal Science News reported in 2009.
The hippocampus, it turns out, binds snippets of information to construct scenes from the past — and the future.

(See also.)

Jim Guy Tucker, former governor of Arkansas. You may remember him from such hits as Whitewater.

He had been among the most promising figures in Arkansas politics and a rival to Mr. Clinton in Arkansas’s Democratic Party. But he was forced to resign as governor in July 1996, after serving less than two years of his term.
Two months earlier, he had been convicted in a federal court in Little Rock. He had been prosecuted by independent counsel, a team led by Kenneth W. Starr, for receiving a fraudulent loan from a small business development company, Capital Management Services, in the mid-1980s.
In August 1996, Judge George Howard Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock sentenced him to four years’ probation — Mr. Tucker avoided jail because of testimony about a serious health condition — and ordered him to pay $294,000 in restitution to the Small Business Administration. By then Mr. Tucker had already quit the governor’s mansion; he would never hold office again.

…

The loan — for $150,000, according to the historian Jeannie M. Whayne of the University of Arkansas — should never have gone to Mr. Tucker’s water and sewer services company. Other sources say nearly $3 million was lent to Mr. Tucker and his co-defendants, James B. and Susan McDougal, who were also convicted in May 1996.
Capital Management Services “was supposed to make loans to companies where at least half the owners were ‘disadvantaged’ in some way,” the veteran Arkansas journalist Ernie Dumas, described as the dean of the Arkansas political press corps by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, wrote in an unpublished manuscript.
But David Hale, the banker who ran Capital Management Services and was the key witness for Mr. Starr’s prosecution team, “never told any of his borrowers that, and few, if any, of them would have qualified,” Mr. Dumas wrote. “Tucker and the McDougals learned of the special designation, for disadvantaged people, at the trial.”

…

At the end of 1996 he received a liver transplant, which he credited with saving his life. Two years later, Mr. Starr was after him again, and Mr. Tucker pleaded guilty to tax fraud “to avoid going to prison,” Mr. Dumas wrote.
“The Justice Department and the I.R.S. eventually acknowledged that Starr had charged Tucker with violating a section of the federal bankruptcy code that did not even exist at the time of a cable-television transaction in the 1980s,” Mr. Dumas added. “The government eventually concluded that it might owe Tucker money but could not discern how much. It sent him and his wife a check for $1.44, which he framed and put on his wall.”

Ron Travisano, noted advertising guy.

FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Kevin Lacey, “pilot, philanthropist, businessman and Discovery Channel character”. He was part of the cast of “Airplane Repo”.

Rich met him a few times at fly-ins (and sent over a photo, which I don’t have his permission to reproduce here), and says he was a really down-to-earth guy with a lot of stories. As Rich put it, he was the kind of person you could just walk up and talk to.

Facebook.

Posted in Law, Neuroscience, Obits, Planes, Politics, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 10, 2025.

Monday, February 10th, 2025

Tom “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” Robbins.

Alongside works by Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins paperbacks, dog-eared and torn, were common sights on the bookshelves and bedside milk crates of the late hippie era, between the tail end of the Vietnam War and the rise of Ronald Reagan’s America. He became one of the rare writers to achieve both a cult following and mega-best-seller status.

Noted for the W&L alums in the audience:

As a teenager he told his parents he wanted to be a novelist. His father, hoping to push his son toward a more practical career, persuaded him to enroll at Washington and Lee University, a Virginia school known for its journalism program. As a sports reporter for the campus newspaper, he was edited by Tom Wolfe.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 6, 2025.

Thursday, February 6th, 2025

In honor of Valérie André, I am declaring a moratorium on French and French Army jokes for the next 72 hours.

She became a brain surgeon, a parachutist and a helicopter pilot who was said to be the first woman to fly rescue missions in combat zones for any military force. She was also the first Frenchwoman to be named a general and was a five-time winner of the Croix de Guerre, for bravery in Indochina and Algeria.

…

In 120 combat missions in the early 1950s in the dense jungles and soggy rice paddies of Indochina, where the French were trying without success to repulse Communist guerrillas, Dr. André flew 168 wounded soldiers from the battlefields to hospitals in Hanoi — including enemy soldiers, when there was room on the two litters mounted on her single-seat Hiller chopper.
She later flew 365 missions into combat zones in North Africa, where Algerians were seeking independence from France. In 1976 she was promoted to general, the first woman to be elevated to that rank in the French Army.

…

According to the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, she was one of the first 12 women in the world to receive a helicopter pilot rating and the first woman to fly a helicopter into combat zones.

She was 102 when she died.

Posted in Helicopters, Heroism, History, Obits, Planes | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 5, 2024.

Wednesday, February 5th, 2025

Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart Jr. (USAF – ret) has passed away. He was 100.

He was one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen who saw combat during WWII. (That’s the way the paper of record phrases it. I wondered about that phrasing, but according to Wikipedia (I know, I know):

On February 2, 2025, Lt Col. Harry Stewart Jr. died, thus leaving Lt. Col. George Hardy as the last surviving member of the original 355 Tuskegee Airmen who served in World War II. James H. Harvey, III, who did not serve in combat during World War II but who did later manage to be a member of the USAF’s inaugural “Top Gun” team in 1949 and serve in combat missions in the Korean War, lives as well, as does Lt. Eugene J. Robertson, who also did not serve in World War II combat missions.)

He flew 43 missions — almost one every other day — from late winter 1944 into the spring of 1945.
On one mission, to attack a Luftwaffe base in Germany, Lieutenant Stewart and six other American pilots were baited into a dogfight with at least 16 German fighter planes. Firing his machine guns and performing risky aerial maneuvers, he downed three enemy aircraft in succession, fending off a potential rout.
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, cited for having “gallantly engaged, fought and defeated the enemy” with no regard for his personal safety.

Prince Karim Al-Hussaini, also known as The Aga Khan IV.

Urbane, cosmopolitan and often media-averse, the Aga Khan — born Prince Karim Al-Hussaini — rejected the notion that expanding his personal fortune would conflict with his charitable ventures. He said his ability to prosper complemented his duty to enhance the lives of Ismaili Muslims, a branch of the Shiite tradition of Islam with a following of 15 million people in 35 countries.

…

His projects included developing the island of Sardinia’s ritzy Costa Smeralda resort area, breeding thoroughbred racehorses and establishing health initiatives for the poor in the developing world.

…

Even though he had no inherited realm in the manner of other hereditary rulers, the Aga Khan’s fortune was variously estimated at $1 billion to $13 billion, drawn from investments, joint ventures and private holdings in luxury hotels, airlines, racehorses and newspapers, as well as from a kind of Quranic tithe levied on his followers.

Posted in Heroism, History, Horses, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

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