The NYPost has provided a vivid reminder not only that we must die, but that tomorrow is not promised to anyone.
On their homepage right now:
“Actress in Thailand dies after falling from speedboat on restaurant trip with friends“. Nida Patcharaweeraphong was 37.
“Minnesota college student killed after house she was dog-sitting at explodes“. Kailey Mach was 20.
“2 killed when BMW plunges off parkway, onto Amtrak tracks in NYC: cops“.
John Landy, runner, sportsman, and historical footnote.
Mr. Landy was the second man to run the mile in less than four minutes.
On August 7, 1954 (48 days after Landy’s record) he and Roger Bannister went head to head in Vancouver, BC.
As expected, Landy led from the start, building a 15-yard lead. But Bannister — by then Dr. Bannister — closed in on the last lap, and Landy could sense him coming. Rounding the final turn, he peeked over his left shoulder to see where Bannister was. But Bannister was on his right, and as Landy’s head was turned, Bannister stormed by him, and won, in 3:58.8. Landy came in second, in 3:59.6.
It was the first time two men had bettered four minutes in the same race. Today, a statue outside the stadium commemorates the moment.
Mr. Landy cut his foot the night before the race, and ran on four stitches.
Above all, Landy was a sportsman, as exemplified in a startling moment in the 1956 Australian track and field championships in Melbourne, just before the Olympics there.
Landy had entered the race hoping to break the world record for the mile. But with the race underway, a 19-year-old competitor, Ron Clarke, was bumped only strides ahead of him and fell to the track. Landy leapt over him and, as he did, accidentally spiked him on his right shoulder. Landy stopped, ran back to Clarke, brushed cinders from Clarke’s knees and said, “Sorry.”
“Keep going,” Clarke said. “I’m all right.”
Clarke got up, and he and Landy started after the others, who by then were 60 yards ahead. Landy caught them and won in 4:04.2.
Gordon Moyes, an Australian minister who was there, later called it “the most incredibly stupid, beautiful, foolish, gentlemanly act I have ever seen.”
Lawrence sent over an obit for Veronica Carlson, noted actress in Hammer horror films.
Joe Wanenmacher, founder and owner of the Tulsa Arms Show, one of (if not the) largest gun shows in the world.
Mike the Musicologist and I have been lucky enough to attend a few of the Tulsa shows. The obit says that Mr. Wanenmacher had mostly handed off operational responsibilities to his other family members, but he still built the show into what it is today. Our hat is off to him.
(Hattip on this to our great and good friend David Carroll.)
Sandy Nelson, drummer and subject of one of the most interesting obits I’ve read in the NYT recently.
He had a big hit in 1959 with “Teen Beat”, which was based on a drum riff he heard in a strip club:
“While they were looking at these pretty girls in G-strings, guess what I was doing?” he told The Las Vegas Weekly in 2015. “I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit.”
“He was doing kind of a ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to a jazz standard. “‘Bum ta da da dum’ — small toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat.’”
He had a second big hit with “Let There Be Drums” in 1961. In 1963, he had a motorcycle accident and lost part of his right leg: he retrained himself to play the bass with his left leg.
He did a bunch of instrumental albums in the 1960s and 1970s, many of which featured covers:
But he also continued to do experimental work:
His friend and fellow musician Jack Evan Johnson said that Mr. Nelson was especially proud of “The Veebles,” a whimsical five-track concept album released on cassette in 2016 that had an extraterrestrial sound and theme.
“It’s about a race of people from another planet,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996, when the long-gestating project was just beginning to take shape. “They’re gonna take over the Earth and make us do nothing but dance, sing and tell dumb jokes.”
(I checked: there was a CD version of this, but it is out of print. Amazon and Apple Music do not show a digital version, though some of Mr. Nelson’s other work is available from both.)
Mr. Nelson acknowledged that he had not handled his early success well.
“I spent most of the money on women and whiskey, and the rest I just wasted,” he told The Review-Journal.
…
Yes. He dug a cave in his backyard.
The project took him 12 years.
“I got a ‘cave tour’ once,” Mr. Johnson said by email, “and it was quite something, precarious even — dug down at a very steep angle into the hard desert soil, with no kind of support structure whatsoever and just enough room to scoot down into it for a ways until the room opened up at the bottom.”
“He had an electric keyboard down there,” he added.
Kenny Burrough, wide receiver for the Houston Oilers during the 1970s.
Other than the original “Hot Lips”, credits include a guest spot on an early episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Back to School”, “T.H.E. Cat”, “Coronet Blue”, the legendary “Delgo“, and a whole bunch of other stuff…
…including “Mannix”. (“The Solid Gold Web“, season 2, episode 23. She plays a former love interest of Mannix.)
Followup NYT obits for Bob Beckel, Gary Brooker, and The Amazing Johnathan.
William Kuenzel has passed away from cancer at the age of 60. I’m noting his obit because this is a bizarre and troubling case, that got Robert M. Morgenthau (NYC’s liberal DA) and Edwin C. Meese III on the same side.
Mr. Kuenzel was arrested in November of 1987 and charged with killing a convenience store clerk. His roommate, Harvey Venn, initially told police Mr. Kuenzel was probably asleep at home, but later changed his story and claimed Mr. Kuenzel pulled the trigger. Mr. Venn got a reduced sentence for testifying against Mr. Kuenzel. Mr. Kuenzel refused to plead out.
It gets worse.
Mr. Kuenzel met with more than 20 years of resistance to his hope for a new trial because of a late filing of an appeal in 1993 — a procedural issue that he could never overcome in state and federal courts even after Alabama’s state assistant attorney general in 2010 turned over evidence that had been withheld at the original trial. It included handwritten notes from Mr. Venn’s police interview in which he said that Mr. Kuenzel had been in bed at the time of the shooting.
The cache of new evidence also included a transcript of the grand jury testimony of a witness who had been equivocal about seeing Mr. Kuenzel and Mr. Venn in the store as she drove by in a car, but who testified with more certainty at the trial. Her testimony provided critical corroboration of Mr. Venn’s assertion that Mr. Kuenzel had been an accomplice.
The Supreme Court refused to review his case in 2013, and again in 2016.
Had he not died, he would have eventually been scheduled for execution.
Mark Lanegan, singer. (Queens of the Stone Age, Screaming Trees)
The Amazing Johnathan (John Edward Szeles).
…
Gary Brooker, of Procol Harum.
Arthur Feuerstein. He’s probably one of those people you’ve never heard of, but the obit fascinates me (for reasons that will become apparent shortly).
Mr. Feuerstein was a chess player. A really good chess player. How good?
Over his career, Mr. Feuerstein had a record of one win, one loss and three draws with Mr. Fischer.
More:
At the 1956 United States Junior Championship, he took third, behind Mr. Fischer. He then edged Mr. Fischer for the United States Junior Blitz Championship, in which each player had five minutes for the entire game.
The third Rosenwald tournament, played in October 1956 at the Manhattan Chess Club, is usually remembered because of Mr. Fischer’s remarkable win against Donald Byrne, Robert’s younger brother. But Mr. Fischer finished in a tie for eighth, while Mr. Feuerstein was third — just behind Arthur Bisguier, another New York prodigy, who had won the United States Championship two years earlier.
Then, in the 1957-58 championship, Mr. Feuerstein tied for sixth with Arnold Denker, a former champion, and Edmar Mednis, a future grandmaster. Mr. Fischer, who was then only 14, won the championship, beating Mr. Feuerstein in the process for the first and only time…
The NYT obit describes the 1950s as being “a golden age for the game in the United States, particularly in New York City”. It would probably have a limited audience, but I’d read a book about this time in the chess world.
Anyway, Mr. Feuerstein didn’t want to turn pro. He thought professional chess was “too unstable and too poorly paid”, so he went into the corporate world. But he continued to play as an amateur.
Then, one day in 1973, Mr. Feuerstein, his wife, and their dog were driving to their vacation home. They got hit by a semi.
The dog was killed. Mrs. Feuerstein broke her back and spent six weeks in a cast.
Mr. Feuerstein suffered a horrible head injury. The doctors on his case gave his wife an extremely negative prognosis.
Then one day Mr. Feuerstein woke up, pulled the breathing tube out and began trying to talk. A nurse called Alice, who rushed to the hospital. She found him playing chess with the neurosurgeon, who had also been called.
Years later, in a profile that appeared in 2012 in Chess Life, the magazine of the United States Chess Federation, the game’s governing body, Alice Feuerstein said her husband, after waking, did not even know what a toothbrush was. But, Mr. Feuerstein recalled, “I remembered everything about chess, even my openings.” He also recalled that he had won that game with the doctor.
This isn’t a miracle story. According to the obit, Mr. Feuerstein was never able to work full-time again.
But he did return to competition at something approaching his pre-accident ability, sometimes beating grandmasters, and he remained a master-level player into his late 70s.
He played his last tournament in October 2015, when he was nearly 80, and scored 50 percent, with one win, one loss and a draw.
Cancer got him at 86.
A mega sized roundup today, mostly due to FotB RoadRich.
Frank Pesce. Among his credits (other than the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies and “Top Gun”) are guest spots on “Jake and the Fatman”, “Miami Vice”, “Airwolf”, “Blue Thunder” (the series), and “The Master”.
Lindsey Pearlman. She appeared on “Vicious”, “Chicago Justice”, and “General Hospital”, among other credits. She was 43.
Zoe Sozo Bethel, Miss Alabama 2021.
Bob Beckel. He used to host “The Five” on the Fox News Channel.
Beckel was campaign manager during Democratic Party nominee Walter Mondale’s ill-fated run for the presidency in 1984.
He also served in the State Department during the Carter administration.
Peter Earnest. He used to work for the CIA…and went on to become the first executive director of the International Spy Museum. I’ve never been there, but my beloved and indulgent sister and her family have. One of these days, I have to make it back to DC.
Just in case you were wondering. Also:
Jim Hagedorn, House member from Minnesota.
Gail Halvorsen, the original “Candy Bomber” from the Berlin Airlift. Instead of writing a fuller obit here, I’m going to point you to the much better one Borepatch wrote.
For the historical record: NYT obit for Ian McDonald.
A long time ago, I wrote about reading Car and Driver when I was in high school.
“Ferrari Reinvents Manifest Destiny” was one of those pieces of writing that hit me right between the eyes at exactly the right time.
…
…
P.J. O’Rourke wrote an awful lot of other great stuff, but this is what I’ll remember him for.
NYT. John Podhoretz. National Review. (Edited to add: Reason.)
I’m going to miss him.
Kathryn Kates, actress. She was most famous as the bakery counterwoman on two episodes of “Seinfeld”, and also appeared several times on “Law and Order: SVU”, “Orange Is the New Black”, and other TV shows.
IMDB. Everybody plays up “Ghostbusters”, but he also did “Stripes”, produced “Animal House”…and let’s not forget “Cannibal Girls”. (Never seen it, but it sounds like it could be fun.)
Ian McDonald, co-founder of King Crimson and Foreigner.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Lars Eighner. I’m not sure how many people outside of Austin recognize that name. For those long time Austinites, this should be a blast from the past.
Mr. Eighner lost his job and spent three years homeless on the streets of Austin with his dog. He wrote periodically for the “Austin Chronicle”, and eventually published Travels With Lizbeth about that experience. He published two other books after that, but those were less successful.
I’m going to put this last obit behind a jump. I’m noting it because it’s a sad sundae with chopped sad and a sad cherry on top.
NYT obit for Douglas Trumbull.
NYT obit for Bob Wall. Includes the Bruce Lee vs. “O’Hara” fight from “Enter the Dragon”.
Luc Montagnier, one of the discoverers of the human immunodeficiency virus.
It’s complicated.
…
From this sample Dr. Montagnier’s team spotted the culprit, a retrovirus that had never been seen before. They named it L.A.V., for lymphadenopathy associated virus.
The Pasteur scientists, including Dr. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who later shared the Nobel with Dr. Montagnier, reported their landmark finding in the May 20, 1983, issue of the journal Science, concluding that further studies were necessary to prove L.A.V. caused AIDS.
The following year, the laboratory run by the American researcher Dr. Robert Gallo at the National Institutes of Health, published four articles in one issue of Science confirming the link between a retrovirus and AIDS. Dr. Gallo called his virus H.T.L.V.-III. There was some initial confusion as to whether the Montagnier team and the Gallo team had found the same virus or two different ones.
When the two samples were found to have come from the same patient, scientists questioned whether Dr. Gallo had accidentally or deliberately got the virus from the Pasteur Institute.
And what had once been camaraderie between those two leading scientists exploded into a global public feud, spilling out of scientific circles into the mainstream press. Arguments over the true discoverer and patent rights stunned a public that, for the most part, had been shielded from the fierce rivalries, petty jealousies and colossal egos in the research community that can disrupt scientific progress.
There was a lawsuit: an out-of-court settlement was mediated by Jonas Salk.
Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Gallo shared many prestigious awards, among them the 1986 Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, which honored Dr. Montagnier for discovering the virus and Dr. Gallo for linking it to AIDS. And in 2002 they appeared to have resolved their rivalry when they announced that they would work together to develop an AIDS vaccine. Then came the announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology.
Dr. Gallo had long been credited with linking H.I.V. to AIDS, but the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine singled out its discoverers, not him, in awarding half the prize jointly to Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Barré-Sinoussi. (The other half was awarded to Dr. Harald zur Hausen of Germany “for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer.”)
…
…
…
Last May, he added fuel to the spread of false information about Covid-19 vaccines by claiming, in a French video, that vaccine programs were an “unacceptable mistake” because, he said, vaccines could cause viral variants.
And in January, in an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal written with the Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, he criticized President Biden’s vaccine mandates. The authors said it was “irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for the government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen.”
Douglas Trumbull, noted SFX guy.
Some of his credits:
He also did effects and was an executive producer on “The Starlost“, and did effects for the first movie based on a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
I can’t find it online now (I tried both DuckDuckGo and Bing) but I have a vivid memory of an advertisement in the late 70s/early 80s, possibly in “Scientific American”, featuring Douglas Trumbull endorsing HP calculators. When the time came, that was a big motivator for me to go the RPN route.
George Crumb, composer.
“Black Angels” (1970), one of Mr. Crumb’s best-known works and a reaction to the Vietnam War, was an early example of his imaginative eclecticism. It is scored for an amplified string quartet and features techniques such as tapping the strings with thimbles. A mournful fragment from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet is interrupted by fierce bow strokes and human shouts.
The grimly claustrophobic music of the first movement, “Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects,” was deemed sufficiently scary to be used on the soundtrack for the horror film “The Exorcist.”
…
Other pieces were equally theatrical and sometimes featured ritualistic elements. A recording of whale songs made by a marine scientist inspired his “Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)” for electric flute, cello and amplified piano (1971). The performers wear black half-masks; Mr. Crumb also specified that (where possible) the performance take place under blue lighting. He used various extended techniques, like strumming the piano strings with a paper clip, to create eerie sonorities.
Each movement of his orchestral piece “Echoes of Time and the River” (awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968) features processionals in which small groups of musicians move around the stage in patterns and directions specified in the score — requirements Mr. Crumb later acknowledged were rather impractical.
John C. Koss, headphone innovator.
Mr. Koss and his friend Martin Lange Jr., an engineer, developed a portable stereo phonograph in 1958 that they called a “private listening station.” It had a turntable, speakers and a privacy switch that let users plug headphones into a jack. But most of the headphones available, like those used by telephone operators, shortwave radio users and pilots, were incompatible and not stereophonic.
So they rigged up cardboard cups that contained three-inch speakers and chamois pads from a flight helmet, and they attached them to a headband made of a bent clothes hanger covered with a rubber shower hose.
“And, oh man, whew, it was just bouncing in my ears,” Mr. Koss said in an undated video interview on the Koss Corporation’s website. “It was a great sound. Now the whole thing was there. Anybody that listened to it, it was like the first time you drove in a car or the first time you did anything.”
…
Jean-Jacques Beineix, French director. His first movie was “Diva”.
I wanted to see “Diva” when it was theatrically released because: moped chase in a subway. But at the time, this was impossible for me. I don’t recall it ever playing when UT had a film program. But now, it is available in a reasonably priced Kino Lorber blu ray (affiliate link). And I believe it is on the list: if not, it will be shortly.
He also directed “Betty Blue”, which seems to have divided critics. Interestingly, before “Diva”, he worked as a second assistant/second unit director on several films…including “The Day the Clown Cried”.
Sister Janet Mead, Australian nun…and, with all due respect, musical footnote.
Sister Janet’s recording of “The Lord’s Prayer,” which featured her pure solo vocal over a driving drumbeat — she had a three-octave range and perfect pitch — became an instant hit in Australia, Canada and the United States. It soared to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 during Easter time in 1974, and she became one of the few Australian recording artists to have a gold record in the United States.
The record sold more than three million copies worldwide, two million of them to Americans. Nominated for the 1975 Grammy Award for best inspirational performance, it lost to Elvis Presley and his version of “How Great Thou Art.”
Along with Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” famously covered by the Byrds in 1965, “The Lord’s Prayer” is one of the very few popular songs with lyrics taken from the Bible.
…
She later described the period of her record’s success as a “horrible time,” largely because of demands by the media.
“It was a fairly big strain because all the time there are interviews and radio talk-backs and TV people coming and film people coming,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Shunning the spotlight, she declined most interview requests and all offers to tour the United States.
…