Senior Austin Police Department Officer Anthony “Tony” Martin passed away this morning.
According to news reports, he was returning home from work when he hit a car that turned left in front of him.
Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category
Obit watch: September 23, 2022 (supplemental).
Friday, September 23rd, 2022Obit watch: September 23, 2022.
Friday, September 23rd, 2022Hilary Mantel, author of historical fiction.
She was someone I’d heard of, but never read. I didn’t know, until I read the obit, that those three books are a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, and now I kind of want to read them.
Maarten Schmidt, astronomer. He did a lot of work on quasi-stellar radio sources, or “quasars”.
In 1962, two scientists in Australia, Cyril Hazard and John Bolton, finally managed to pinpoint the precise position of one of these, called 3C 273. They shared the data with several researchers, including Dr. Schmidt, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology.
Using the enormous 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in rural San Diego County, Dr. Schmidt was able to hone in on what appeared to be a faint blue star. He then plotted its light signature on a graph, showing where its constituent elements appeared in the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared.
What he found was, at first, puzzling. The signatures, or spectral lines, did not resemble those of any known elements. He stared at the graphs for weeks, pacing his living room floor, until he realized: The expected elements were all there, but they had shifted toward the red end of the spectrum — an indication that the object was moving away from Earth, and fast.
And once he knew the speed — 30,000 miles a second — Dr. Schmidt could calculate the object’s distance. His jaw dropped. At about 2.4 billion light years away, 3C 273 was one of the most distant objects in the universe from Earth. That distance meant that it was also unbelievably luminous: If it were placed at the position of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, it would outshine the sun.
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The question remained: If these objects weren’t stars, what were they? Theories proliferated. Some said they were the fading embers of a giant supernova. Dr. Schmidt and others believed instead that in a quasar, astronomers could see the birth of an entire galaxy, with a black hole at the center pulling together astral gases that, in their friction, generated enormous amounts of energy — an argument developed by Donald Lynden-Bell, a physicist at Cambridge University, in 1969.
If that was true, and if quasars really were several billion light years away, it meant that they were portraits of the universe in its relative infancy, just a few billion years old. In some cases their light originated long before Earth’s solar system was even formed, and offered clues to the evolution of the universe.
Sara Shane, actress. Other credits include the 1950s “Dragnet”, “The Outer Limits”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, and the “I Led 3 Lives” TV series.
The Times has published two obits over the past couple of days for people who weren’t all that famous, but were interesting for reasons.
John Train. He was a co-founder of “The Paris Review”. He was an author: among other things, he wrote three books about “remarkable names of real people”.
And he was also kind of a shadowy power broker:
Yet he was also an operator in high finance and world affairs who, by one researcher’s account, had ties to U.S. secret services. Mr. Train founded and ran a leading financial firm devoted to preserving the money of rich families, and he worked to support the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The multifariousness of his career defies definition, but one quality did underlie his many activities. Mr. Train exemplified the attitudes and values of the exalted class he was born into: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the postwar era. He was globe-bestriding but also self-effacing, erudite but also pragmatic, cosmopolitan but also nationalistic, solemn at one moment and droll the next.
Allan M. Siegal. This is one of those internal NYT obits, but Mr. Siegal was an old-line Times guy, so his obit is of some interest.
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“Readers will believe more of what we do know if we level with them about what we don’t” was one of Mr. Siegal’s favorite injunctions, articulated long before media outlets in the digital era began emphasizing transparency in news gathering and editing.
Another: “Being fair is better than being first.”
Mr. Siegal’s knowledge of grammar, history, geography, nomenclature, culture and cuisine was expansive. But on no subject was he more authoritative than The Times itself.
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In 2003, in the aftermath of a scandal in which the fabrications of a reporter, Jayson Blair, led to the fall of the newsroom’s top two managers, Mr. Siegal headed an internal committee that reviewed the paper’s ethical and organizational practices.
Among its recommendations was the creation of a new job: standards editor. Mr. Siegal was the first to be named to the position, adding the title to that of assistant managing editor, a post he held from 1987 until his retirement in 2006. At the time, his name had been listed among the paper’s top editors on the masthead, which appeared on the editorial page, more than twice as long as anyone else’s.
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Mr. Siegal was capable of withering criticism. His post-mortem critiques to subordinate editors and reporters — written in precise penmanship with a green felt-tip pen (known as “greenies” among the staff, they showed up well against black-and-white newsprint, he found) — could be as terse as “Ugh!” “How, please?” “Name names” and “Absurd!”
Once, having demanded that a headline combine several complex elements in a short word count, he found the result wanting: “As if written by pedants from Mars,” he declared.
But his rockets were also astute and instructive, guiding generations of editors and reporters in the finer points of style and tone. And perhaps because he was so demanding, his not-infrequent notes of praise were cherished all the more. “Nice, who?” was his trademark comment when he thought a headline or caption, by an anonymous editor, was especially artful. (The answer, the name of the editor, would appear — to the editor’s great pride — in the next day’s compilation of post-mortems, run off and stapled together by copy machine and distributed throughout the news department.)< Other critiques showed a biting sense of humor. “If this bumpkin spelling is the best we can do,” he once wrote of a subheadline that included a reference to “fois gras” (rather than foie gras), “we should stick to chopped liver.” When a headline allowed that the football coach Mike Ditka “should recover” from a heart attack, Mr. Siegal wrote: “Unless God returns our call, we shouldn’t predict in such cases.”
Obit watch: September 21, 2022.
Wednesday, September 21st, 2022Valery Polyakov, cosmonaut.
He was also a physician, specializing in space medicine. He volunteered for a mission to see how the human body would hold up in micro gravity on a proposed Mars trip.
That’s still a record.
He worked out while in space and returned looking “big and strong” — “like he could wrestle a bear” — Wired quoted the American astronaut Norman Thagard as saying.
Rather than be carried out of his capsule on his return, Dr. Polyakov walked on his own strength, sat down, stole a cigarette from a friend and began sipping brandy, according to “The Story of Manned Space Stations: An Introduction,” by Philip Baker.
Rev. John W. O’Malley, prominent Catholic historian.
He was prolific, publishing 14 books and editing eight more. He wrote in a breezy, precise fashion that managed to convey deep thoughts in simple terms, and many of his books sold as well among lay audiences as they did among academics. Several were translated into multiple languages.
“This approach is a form of correction to myself,” he said in a 2020 interview with Brill, his Dutch publisher. “I have to be humble enough to acknowledge that if the 10-year-old does not understand, it means that, deep down, I did not understand.”
Father O’Malley wore his learning lightly. Friends called him puckish. His personal page on the website for Georgetown’s Jesuit community lists the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini among his favorite artists, but also the outré filmmaker John Waters. (Father O’Malley was especially partial to Mr. Waters’s movie “Hairspray.”)
He was perhaps best known as a historian of the Jesuit order, which was founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540 to provide, according to conventional wisdom, the Vatican with a militant defense against the Reformation and to expand its influence through the founding of educational institutions.
Starting with “The First Jesuits” (1993), Father O’Malley showed that neither of those qualities were present at the order’s creation. By wading through thousands of letters written by Loyola and others, he concluded that the Jesuits were in fact designed as a pastoral project, intent on saving souls in the face of the dramatic social upheavals rocking Europe in the late medieval era, and only gradually took on their later reputation.
Arnold Tucker, Army quarterback.
At a time when college rules restricted substitutions, Tucker played not only quarterback but also safety, punt returner and kickoff returner. The one blemish on his team’s records was a 0-0 tie in a game against unbeaten Notre Dame in 1946 at Yankee Stadium.
That same year he earned first-team All-America honors and came in fifth in Heisman Trophy balloting — behind Blanchard and Davis, of course. (Davis won the trophy that year; Blanchard got his the year before.)
But before graduating in 1947, Tucker won the Sullivan Award as America’s outstanding amateur athlete. He was drafted by the Chicago Bears but never played professional football. For several years in the mid-1950s he was an assistant coach at West Point to Vince Lombardi, who went on to glory with the Green Bay Packers.
Blanchard and Davis were Felix “Doc” Blanchard and Glenn Davis, “Heisman Trophy-winning running backs remembered in football lore as Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside”. They somewhat overshadowed Mr. Tucker, who actually died on January 10, 2019.
There was a paid death notice published online and buried in the pages of The Miami Herald that January. And at the end of the year The Associated Press listed Tucker (just his name and age) among the many “notable sports deaths in 2019.” But his death was otherwise not widely reported in the mainstream press, which had, almost 80 years ago, chronicled his (and Blanchard and Davis’s) gridiron exploits and later, when their time came, gave both Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside substantial obituaries, Blanchard’s in 2009 and Davis’s in 2005.
Reached by phone on Tuesday, Tucker’s daughter, Patricia Nugent, confirmed his death. And when asked why it hadn’t gotten much publicity, she said that she had never reached out to the national news media. The Times discovered he had died in seeking to update an obituary about him that was prepared in advance in 2010.
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In his rookie season with the Dodgers, the team won the World Series, defeating the Chicago White Sox, who had their own outstanding base-stealer in Luis Aparicio. Wills stole 50 bases in 1960, his first full season, and went on to win the National League’s base-stealing title every year through 1965.
He was named the league’s most valuable player in 1962. He played on Dodger World Series championship teams again in 1963 and 1965 and a pennant-winner in 1966, teams powered by the pitching of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.
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Obit watch: September 20, 2022.
Tuesday, September 20th, 2022Marva Hicks, actress.
Other credits include “Mad About You”, “Babylon 5”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.
This pushes the boundary of obits a bit, but: two decomposed bodies were found yesterday in the home of the former mayor of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. As far as I can tell, the bodies have not been identified yet, but the police also apparently do not suspect criminal activity.
The pilot who died on Sunday at the Reno Air Races has been identified as Aaron Hogue. He was flying a L-29 in the Jet Gold race.
Mr. Hogue was also one of the owners of Hogue Inc., which makes various firearms accessories (including grips) and knives. (I touched on them briefly in my NRAAM coverage.)
Obit watch: September 19, 2022.
Monday, September 19th, 2022Henry Silva, actor. THR. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Bearcats!”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, and “Quark”.
Lawrence emailed an obit for Cristobal Jodorowsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s and the star of “Santa Sangre”.
There was a fatal crash at the Reno Air Races on Sunday. The pilot’s name has not been released yet, as far as I can determine, but I will update when I have more information. Coverage from the Reno paper (by way of archive.is).
Obit watch: September 15, 2022.
Thursday, September 15th, 2022Mark Miller. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Adam-12”, “The Name of the Game”, and “Harry O”.
Fred Franzia, cheap wine guy.
His most famous acquisition was Charles Shaw, a label with a strong reputation among winemakers that filed for bankruptcy in 1995. In 2002, Mr. Franzia started selling the wine exclusively at Trader Joe’s for $1.99 a bottle (in some cities, it can now cost up to $3.99). The wine became affectionately known as Two-Buck Chuck.
The company says it has sold over 1 billion bottles.
Two Buck Chuck is now $3.99? Thanks, Joe Biden!
(Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist, by Iosif Shkolovsky. Vodka bottles and wine bottles are pretty similar in size, right?)
Obit watch: September 14, 2022.
Wednesday, September 14th, 2022For a time, Mr. Starr was a household name, and his investigation into Mr. Clinton’s affair with a former White House intern, Monica S. Lewinsky, propelled issues of sex, morality, accountability and ideology to the center of American life for more than a year.
He became a Rorschach test for the post-Cold War generation, a hero to his admirers for taking on in their view an indecent president who had despoiled the Oval Office, and a villain to his detractors, who saw him as a sex-obsessed Inspector Javert driven by partisanship. His investigation tested the boundaries of the Constitution when it prompted the first impeachment of a president in 130 years and scarred both Mr. Clinton’s legacy and his own.
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He went on to serve as dean of the Pepperdine University’s law school in California and as president of Baylor University, but was demoted and later resigned from Baylor after an investigation found that the university had mishandled accusations of sexual assault against members of the football team. The investigators rebuked the university leadership, saying it had “created a perception that football was above the rules.”
Mr. Starr also drew criticism for representing the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein when he was accused of sex crimes against young girls in Florida and eventually made a plea agreement accepting only minor charges and a light sentence.
Irene Papas. THR. Other credits include “Z”, “The Guns of Navarone”, “We Still Kill the Old Way”, and “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”.
Obit watch: September 13, 2022.
Tuesday, September 13th, 2022An era has ended. Jean-Luc Godard has died at 91: per his legal advisor, he chose assisted suicide in a Swiss clinic due to “multiple disabling pathologies”. Alt link. THR. Variety.
As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr. Godard was one of several iconoclastic writers who helped turn a new publication called Cahiers du Cinéma into a critical force that swept away the old guard of the European art cinema and replaced it with new heroes largely drawn from the ranks of the American commercial cinema — directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.
When his first feature-length film as a director, “Breathless” (“À Bout de Souffle”), was released in 1960, Mr. Godard joined several of his Cahiers colleagues in a movement that the French press soon labeled La Nouvelle Vague — the New Wave.
For Mr. Godard, as well as for New Wave friends and associates like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, the “tradition of quality” represented by the established French cinema was an aesthetic dead end. To them it was strangled by literary influences and empty displays of craftsmanship that had to be vanquished to make room for a new cinema, one that sprang from the personality and predilections of the director.
Although “Breathless” was not the first New Wave film (both Mr. Chabrol’s 1958 “Beau Serge” and Mr. Truffaut’s 1959 “400 Blows” preceded it), it became representative of the movement. Mr. Godard unapologetically juxtaposed plot devices and characters inherited from genre films and emotional material dredged up, in almost diarylike form, from the filmmaker’s personal life.
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In 2010, Mr. Godard, long at odds with Hollywood, was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, but not without controversy. The award brought into focus long-simmering accusations that Mr. Godard held antisemitic views. He did not attend the ceremony at which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed the honor, and when an interviewer afterward asked him what the award meant to him, he was blunt.
“Nothing,” he said. “If the academy likes to do it, let them do it.”
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When his parents refused to support him financially, hoping that he would take more responsibility for himself, Mr. Godard began stealing money — from his family members and their friends and even from the office of Cahiers du Cinema. This went on for five years.
He distributed some of the proceeds to fellow filmmakers, lending Rivette enough money to make his film debut with “Paris Belongs to Us.”
“I pinched money to be able to see films and to make films,” he told The Guardian in 2007.
After his mother secured a job for him with a Swiss television outfit, he stole from his employer and, in 1952, landed in jail in Zurich. His father obtained his quick release, but only after Mr. Godard agreed to spend several months in a mental hospital.
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As the 1960s unfolded, Mr. Godard continued to work at a breakneck pace, turning out sketches for compilation films — including “RoGoPaG” (1963) and “Paris vu Par ” (1965) — alongside features like “Band of Outsiders” (1964), “Une Femme Mariée” (1964), “Pierrot le Fou” (1965) and “Masculin Féminin” (1966).
In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard plucked a character from the French popular cinema, the private detective and secret agent Lemmy Caution, along with the expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine, who had played Caution (or variations on the character) in many films, and dropped him down in a dystopian future ruled by a giant computer.
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As he grew older, Mr. Godard seemed more intolerant of other film directors. He quarreled bitterly with Truffaut, once his closest friends among the New Wave directors. He was especially scathing toward Steven Spielberg. In the 2001 film “In Praise of Love,” he portrays Spielberg representatives trying to buy the film rights to the memories of a Jewish couple who fought in the French Resistance. Commenting on the film’s sourness, the Times critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2002 that it “completes Mr. Godard’s journey from one of the cinema’s great radicals to one of its crankiest reactionaries.”
Mr. Godard’s personality was as difficult to warm to as many of his films were. Biographers filled paged after page with details of his feuds and schisms. He and his friend Truffaut got into a spat after the release of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” in 1973 and never reconciled before Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984. When a talk show interviewer reunited Mr. Godard and Ms. Karina in 1987, Mr. Godard’s indifferent response to a question about their romance caused Ms. Karina to leave the set.
This goes unmentioned in the obits, but I have to bring it up: “Made In U.S.A.”, about which I have written before. In brief: Goddard adapting a Westlake Parker novel, except he changed it around considerably and didn’t actually pay Westlake, leading to legal action. Pay the writer, you clown!
Lance Mackey. He won the Iditarod four times.
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But after his string of wins, he was burdened by personal problems, health scares and drug issues that prevented him from ever again reaching the top of the sport.
The treatment for his throat cancer cost him his saliva glands and ultimately disintegrated his teeth. He was then diagnosed with Raynaud’s syndrome, which limits circulation to the hands and feet and is exacerbated by the cold weather that every musher must contend with in the wilds of Alaska.
In the 2015 race, he couldn’t manipulate his fingers to do simple tasks, like putting bootees on his dogs’ paws to protect them from the snow, ice and cold. His brother and fellow competitor Jason Mackey agreed to stay with him at the back of the pack to help him care for the dogs.
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Mackey and his wife divorced after splitting up in 2011. She had earlier had three children who Mackey embraced as his own, Outside reported. During Mackey’s last Iditarod, in 2020, he raced with his mother’s ashes. He was later disqualified after testing positive for methamphetamine, and he entered rehab on the East Coast.
Months after the 2020 race finished, his partner, Jenne Smith, died in an all-terrain vehicle accident. They had two children.
He was 52. Cancer got him.
Javier Marías, prominent Spanish novelist. I’d never heard of the guy, though his name got mentioned a lot as a Nobel Prize candidate. But he sounds like someone I would have enjoyed drinking with.
Mr. Marías occupied a reputational perch in Spanish culture that would be almost inconceivable for an American author. His novels were greeted like blockbuster summer films, he received practically every prize available to a Spanish writer, and he was regularly considered a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the few awards to elude his grasp. Most critics considered him the greatest living Spanish writer; some said the greatest since Miguel de Cervantes.
He was more than just a famous novelist. Mr. Marías wrote a widely read weekly column in El País, Spain’s leading newspaper, where he set down his thoughts on everything from bike lanes (he hated them) to the Spanish government (which he also detested, regardless of the party in power).
He cultivated a public image as a curmudgeon, but in person he was generous and witty, inviting interviewers for long conversations in his dimly lit study, his fingers tweezering an ever-present cigarette. (One column he wrote in 2006, for The New York Times, castigated Madrid’s antismoking laws as “far more befitting of Franco than a democracy.”)
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He wore his fame lightly, and joked that such comparisons said less about his talents than they did about a general decline in literary achievement. When “The Infatuations” won the state-run National Novel Prize, one of Spain’s highest literary awards, he rejected the $20,000 in prize money, saying he did not want to be indebted to a government of any kind.
He did maintain one such relationship, though: In 1997 he became king of Redonda, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean. The fictional Kingdom of Redonda is something of a running in-joke among European artists, who occupy the throne and make up most of its peerage. After his predecessor, the author Jon Wynne-Tyson, abdicated in his favor, Mr. Marías took the royal name Xavier I.
Like most modern monarchs, his role was largely ceremonial, his primary duty being to dispense noble titles to other artistic worthies — he named the director Pedro Almodóvar the Duke of Trémula and Mr. Ashbery the Duke of Convexo.
As of press time, a successor to King Xavier I had not been named, though several pretenders claim the throne as theirs.
Obit watch: September 12, 2022.
Monday, September 12th, 2022Marsha Hunt. She was 104.
Credits include “Harry O”, the 1940 “Pride and Prejudice”, “Run for Your Life”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.
Bo Brundin. Other credits include “The A-Team”, “Raise the Titanic”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, and “The Day the Clown Cried”.
Jack Ging. Credits include “Wings”, “The A-Team”, “B.J. and the Bear”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “The Six Million Dollar Man”…
…and eight appearances on “Mannix”. (“The End of the Rainbow”, season 2, episode 5. “Medal for a Hero”, season 3, episode 14. “The Sound of Murder”, season 5, episode 17. “Lifeline”, season 5, episode 21. “A Puzzle for One”, season 6, episode 11. “A Game of Shadows”, season 6, episode 15. “A Night Full of Darkness”, season 7, episode 17. “A Choice of Victims”, season 8, episode 12. It looks like he was “Lt. Dan Ives” in all but “The End of the Rainbow”, in which he played “James Spencer”.)
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Edited to add: better obit for Mr. Ging from THR.
Obit watch: September 9, 2022.
Friday, September 9th, 2022Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez. Alt link.
The Exxon Valdez (pronounced val-DEEZ) ran aground on Alaska’s Bligh Reef a few minutes after midnight on March 24, 1989. “Evidently we’re leaking some oil and we’re going to be here for quite a while,” Captain Hazelwood radioed the Coast Guard in what turned out to be a vast understatement.
Captain Hazelwood had not been on the bridge when the accident occurred. The National Transportation Safety Board found that the ship’s third mate had failed to properly maneuver the vessel because of fatigue and excessive workload, and that Captain Hazelwood had failed to provide a proper navigation watch because he was impaired by alcohol. The Exxon Shipping Company and its Exxon Corporation subsidiary were found to have failed to provide a fit master and a rested and sufficient crew.
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The Exxon Valdez spill blackened 1,500 miles of the Gulf of Alaska coastline, home to rich fishing grounds and wildlife. It contributed to the passage by Congress of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which streamlined and strengthened the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to prevent and respond to catastrophic oil spills.
The spill killed 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles and as many as 22 killer whales, according to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, a joint federal-state monitoring agency.
A jury acquitted Captain Hazelwood of a felony charge of operating a vessel while intoxicated but convicted him on a misdemeanor charge of negligently discharging oil, resulting in a $50,000 fine and 1,000 hours of community service. The Coast Guard suspended his license for some nine months. He never returned to the seas.
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In June 1999, as the legal case dragged on, Mr. Hazelwood was taking time off from his job at a New York law firm and heading to Alaska to begin his community service, picking up trash in the city of Anchorage’s parks, when he told The New York Times in an interview, “As master of the vessel, I accept responsibility for the vessel and the actions of my subordinates.” He added: “I’ve never tried to avoid that. I’m not some remorseless oaf.”
“But,” he continued, “the crime I was convicted of is a B misdemeanor. There’s no lower crime in the State of Alaska. The judge had to come up with a sentence. I can understand it. I don’t have to agree with it.”
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In an interview for the book “The Spill: Personal Stories From the Exxon Valdez Disaster,” by Sharon Bushell and Stan Jones (2009), Mr. Hazelwood offered a “heartfelt apology” to the people of Alaska while suggesting that his notoriety was not deserved.
As he put it, “The true story is out there for anybody who wants to look at the facts, but that’s not the sexy story and that’s not the easy story.”
Obit watch: September 8, 2022.
Thursday, September 8th, 2022I started preparing the obit watch this morning, before things happened. Mike the Musicologist sent this over:
kinda sucks to be Bernard Shaw today#RIPBernardShaw
— Michael Malice (@michaelmalice) September 8, 2022
I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s passing…on November 22, 1963.
Bernard Shaw, former CNN anchor.
Shaw was CNN’s first chief anchor and was with the network when it launched on June 1, 1980. He retired from CNN after more than 20 years on February 28, 2001.
During his storied career, Shaw reported on some of the biggest stories of that time — including the student revolt in Tiananmen Square in May 1989, the First Gulf war live from Baghdad in 1991, and the 2000 presidential election.
NYT.
Anne Garrels, NPR correspondent.
As much as Anne Garrels loved Russia, she is probably best known for her reporting during the 2003 Iraq war. She was one of a handful of foreign reporters who remained in Bagdhad as the war began. As she told Susan Stamberg, she used a satellite phone for her reports and went to great lengths to conceal it from Iraqi authorities.
“And then I decided it would be very smart if I broadcast naked, so if that, god forbid, the secret police were coming through the rooms, that would give me maybe five minutes to answer the phone, pretend I’d been asleep and sort of go ‘I don’t have any clothes on!’ And maybe it would maybe give me five seconds to hide the phone,” she said.
NYT:
Her most acclaimed reporting came during the 2003 Iraq war. More than 500 journalists, including more than 100 Americans, covered the run-up to the war. But once the United States began the all-out bombing campaign known as “shock and awe,” she was one of 16 American correspondents not embedded with U.S. troops who stayed — and for a time was the only U.S. network reporter to continue broadcasting from the heart of Baghdad…
Once she was home, other reporters interviewed her about her ordeal. She told of subsisting on Kit Kat chocolate bars and Marlboro Lights, bathing by gathering water in huge trash cans, and powering her equipment by attaching jumper cables to a car battery, which she lugged up to her hotel room every night.
She was 71. Lung cancer got her.
Don Gehrmann. Hadn’t heard of him before, but he had an interesting story. He was a runner. In the “1950 Wanamaker Mile”, he ran the race in four minutes and 9.3 seconds.
It took him 314 days to win the race.
In the 1950 Wanamaker Mile, on Jan. 28, Gehrmann seemed to catch Fred Wilt at the tape, or did he? Both first-place judges said Wilt had won. Both second-place judges said Wilt had finished second. The finish-line picture from the phototimer was inadvertently blocked by a judge. And so it was left to the chief judge, Asa Bushnell, who was at the finish line, to make the call. He declared Gehrmann the winner, with a time of 4 minutes, 9.3. seconds.
But that did not settle the matter. Wilt, an F.B.I. agent when not competing and a future inductee of the National Track & Field Hall of Fame, protested, and 13 days later the Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union’s registration committee, reversing Bushnell, declared him the winner.
Then Gehrmann protested that decision, and the matter carried over almost a year later to the A.A.U.’s national convention in Washington. By a vote of 314 to 108 — 314 days after the race — that ruling body’s board of governors upheld the chief judge’s decision and declared Gehrmann, forevermore, the victor.
Some were skeptical. As Howard Schmertz, the Millrose Games’ assistant meet director in 1950, told The New York Times in 2011, “The final decision was made by maybe a dozen people who saw the race and a few hundred who didn’t.”
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God Save the Queen.
Thursday, September 8th, 2022Queen Elizabeth II dead at 96. BBC.
Edited to add: Formal NYT obit. Archive version. Borepatch.
Obit watch: September 7, 2022.
Wednesday, September 7th, 2022Peter Straub, noted writer.
Mr. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it. Novels like “Julia” (1975) and “Ghost Story” (1979) helped revivify a once-creaking field, even though he insisted that his work transcended categorization and that he wrote how he wanted, only to watch readers and critics pigeonhole him as a horror novelist.
Not that he could complain about what critics and readers thought. Starting with “Julia,” his third novel, about a woman who is haunted by a spirit that may or may not be her dead daughter, Mr. Straub won praise from reviewers and topped best seller charts with a type of story that had previously been sidelined as sub-literary.
“He was a unique writer in a lot of ways,” Mr. King said in a phone interview on Monday. “He was not only a literary writer with a poetic sensibility, but he was readable. And that was a fantastic thing. He was a modern writer, who was the equal of say, Philip Roth, though he wrote about fantastic things.”
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Dr. Ronald Glasser. He was another one of those folks I had not heard of before, but he wrote a highly acclaimed book, 365 Days.
Dr. Glasser was opposed to the war when he was drafted in August 1968.
He was assigned to a hospital in Zama, Japan — one of four frenetic Army hospitals in Japan that every month were receiving 6,000 to 8,000 injured troops airlifted from the battlefields of Vietnam during their 365-day tours of duty.
Dr. Glasser was originally assigned as a pediatrician to treat the families of military dependents in Japan. But, he wrote, “I soon realized that the troopers they were pulling off those medevac choppers were only children themselves.”
“365 Days,” published in 1971, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The playwright David Mamet hailed it in The Wall Street Journal as “the best book to come out of Vietnam, and yet the author wasn’t stationed there.”
Dr. Glasser explained in “365 Days” that he had never intended to become a writer, but that he felt compelled to record what he had seen and heard at the hospital. He dedicated the book to Stephen Crane, the author of the novel “The Red Badge of Courage,” which vividly described the bloody battlegrounds of the Civil War.
“I did not start writing for months, and even then it was only to tell what I was seeing and being told, maybe to give something to these kids that was all theirs without doctrine or polemics, something that they could use to explain what they might not be able to explain themselves,” Dr. Glasser wrote.
“As for me,” he continued, “my wish is not that I had never been in the Army, but that this book could never have been written.”
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The book was banned from some public libraries because it liberally quoted the soldiers’ use of profanity. Dr. Glasser was unapologetic.
“The truth as I saw it was that common language failed,” he testified in a court case contesting the ban. “It didn’t express their anguish. It wasn’t enough.”
Obit watch: September 5, 2022.
Monday, September 5th, 2022Great and good FotB RoadRich was kind enough to send over a couple of Frank Drake links: SETI.org. NASA’s astrobiology branch.
And, because that’s just the way these things work, the NYT posted an obit this afternoon:
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In what he called Project Ozma, after the Wizard of Oz, Dr. Drake alternately pointed the telescope at a pair of sunlike stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, each about 11 light-years from Earth. That telescope, known informally as the Ozmascope, is now on exhibit at Green Bank. The only signal he detected with it was from a rogue aircraft radar, but the effort drew the public’s attention.
A year later, in November 1961, 10 scientists, including luminaries like the young Carl Sagan and John Lilly, who was trying to learn to communicate with dolphins, convened at the Green Bank observatory to ponder the extraterrestrial question. (They did so secretly, fearing professional ridicule.) After Dr. Lilly’s research, they called themselves the Order of the Dolphin.
It was at Green Bank that Dr. Drake, who had planned the meeting, derived his famous equation as a way of organizing the agenda. It consists of seven factors, which range over all human astronomical knowledge and aspiration. Some are strictly empirical, like the rate at which stars are born in the Milky Way and the fraction of those stars with habitable planets. Others are impossibly mystical, like the average lifetime of a technological civilization — 1,000 to 100 million years was the guess. Multiply all the factors together and you get the putative galactic census.
In the realms in which astronomers have actually gotten new data, the old guesses of the Dolphins have held up well, said Seth Shostak, an astronomer and spokesman at the SETI Institute. NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite and ground-based telescopes have verified optimistic estimates of the abundance of potentially habitable Earth-size planets, and scientists know from the Kepler mission that there could be 300 million of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
“These guys were either enormously lucky or amazingly prescient,” Dr. Shostak said of the Dolphins.
At the same time, scientists have discovered that life on Earth is tougher and more versatile than scientists had thought, thriving in weird places like boiling undersea vents. “There is so much evidence for lots of pathways to the origin of life,” Dr. Drake said.
Just for giggles, and since I don’t believe I’ve posted this before, here’s a paper I wrote back when I was at St. Edward’s on the Fermi Paradox, Drake’s Equation, and Clarke’s “The Sentinel”. (Yes, this was for an English class. Ask me about that class sometime.)
Moon Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans.
“They were passing segregation laws every other day, and the one hand that would go up and say no was his,” recalled Norman Francis, a longtime friend and the former president of Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black Roman Catholic institution in New Orleans. In the fall of 1952, Mr. Francis became the first Black student to be admitted to Loyola Law School, also in New Orleans. When Mr. Francis arrived early on the first day of classes, Mr. Landrieu was one of three white students who approached him.
“Those three guys walked up to me and said, ‘We want you to know that if you ever need a friend, we’re going to be your friend,’” Mr. Francis said in an interview for this obituary in 2013.
Obit watch: August 31, 2022.
Wednesday, August 31st, 2022Richard Roat, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Columbo” and “McMillan & Wife” (he missed “McCloud” for the trifecta, but also did “Hec Ramsey” and “Banacek”), and “Westworld” (1973).
William Reynolds. Where is my “The F.B.I.” box set, darn it? Other credits include “Dragnet 1967”, “Pete Kelly’s Blues” (the TV series), “All That Heaven Allows”, “Francis Goes to West Point”, and “Project U.F.O.”
Roland Mesnier, former White House pastry chef.
The French-born Mr. Mesnier served as a member of the chief executive’s kitchen cabinet for nearly 25 years. He catered to the idiosyncratic tastes of five presidents, their wives and their guests, an experience he chronicled in several books.
Mr. Mesnier was hired in 1979 by the first lady, Rosalynn Carter, and served until he retired in 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush. He worked from a modest space in the East Wing, armed with about 300 original pastry molds and an eclectic set of tools, including an ice pick, a coat hanger and a tire-pressure gauge.
Despite the president’s background as a legume farmer, he reported, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter disdained peanuts and sweets in their family’s recipe for a sticky cheese ring — a recipe, Mr. Mesnier said, “that no one tried to steal.” He rated it on a par with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “atrocious concoction of Coca-Cola-flavored jelly served with black glacé cherries.”
Nancy Reagan often skipped meals but partook of dessert. (She routinely denied her husband chocolate, but Mr. Mesnier smuggled mousse to President Reagan when the first lady was out of town.)
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In 2001, Mr. Mesnier took three weeks and 80 pounds of gingerbread, 30 pounds of chocolate and 20 pounds of marzipan to construct a replica of the 1800 White House for the Christmas holiday.
He sometimes served flaming desserts — but, he said, he gave that up after a woman’s fox shawl caught fire when she leaned across the table at a holiday reception.