Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: May 5, 2021.

Wednesday, May 5th, 2021

Playing catch up once again:

Bobby Unser.

Unser conquered a fear of heights to capture the Pikes Peak climb a record 13 times, racing against the clock on a gravel road twisting through more than 150 turns with no guardrails overlooking drops of up to 1,000 feet. The previous Pikes Peak record of nine victories had been held by his uncle Louis.

He also won the Indianapolis 500 three times. Yes, three:

Unser bested Mario Andretti by 5.3 seconds in the 1981 race, but the next day officials gave the victory to Andretti after penalizing Unser one lap for illegally passing several cars under a caution. Had they imposed the penalty during the race, Unser might have made up the lap and won anyway, since he had the fastest car that season. An appeals panel reinstated Unser as the winner more than four months later but fined his team part of the winning purse.

Jason Matthews. This is a guy I’d never heard of, but am now intrigued by. He was a former CIA officer who wrote three spy novels (affiliate link) that are highly praised for their realism.

“I wake up every morning and I think, ‘Thank heavens for Vladimir Putin,’ ” Mr. Matthews told The Associated Press in 2017. “He’s a great character, and his national goals are the stuff for spy novels: weaken NATO, dissolve the Atlantic alliance, break up the European Union.”

Johnny Crawford. He was one of the original Mouseketeers, and later played Mark McCain, son of Lucas McCain, on “The Rifleman”.

Billie Hayes. Yes, “Witchiepoo”, but also “Mammy Yokum” in “Li’l Abner” (she replaced Charlotte Rae on Broadway, and played the role in the 1959 film version and the 1971 TV movie version).

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 3, 2021.

Monday, May 3rd, 2021

Getting caught up:

Pete Lammons, tight end for the New York Jets. He was 77, and participating in a fishing tournament in East Texas.

Major League Fishing, the sponsor of the tournament, said that Lammons, who was participating in the event, had fallen out of his boat on the Sam Rayburn Reservoir, a popular spot for bass fishing, and that the other man in the boat tried to rescue him. A team equipped with sonar recovered Lammons’s body a few hours later.

Olympia Dukakis, for the historical record. THR. Variety.

Jill Corey. This was a little before my time, but still an interesting story. She grew up in Avonmore, Pennsylvania (literally a coal miner’s daughter) but was discovered at 17 and went on to a career in music.

Before the end of the decade, Ms. Corey had a spot on the “Johnny Carson Show” (a variety show precursor to his late-night talk show) and the NBC series “Your Hit Parade,” in which a regular cast of vocalists sang the top-rated songs of the week.
For a time Ms. Corey even had her own show, 15 minutes of song that followed the news once a week, a programming format that placed many popular singers in similar slots across the networks.
She recorded many records and performed at Manhattan nightclubs like the Copacabana and the Blue Angel. (Mr. Miller, in tight control of her career, turned down Broadway roles for her because her nightclub work was more lucrative.) And she was courted by heartthrobs like Eddie Fisher and Frank Sinatra (as he and Ava Gardner were divorcing).
She also made a “terrible movie,” in her words, called “Senior Prom” (1958).

In one of those odd cases that seem so common during that decade, where the line between “romance” and “creepy stalking” becomes blurred, she was pursued by Don Hoak of the Pittsburgh Pirates (even though she was already engaged) and married him in 1961. She gave up singing, but Mr. Hoak died in 1969 and she went back to performing.

Posted in Movies, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 27, 2021.

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021

The NYT has published an obit for Dan Kaminsky that’s both respectful and timely.

His childhood paralleled the 1983 movie “War Games,” in which a young child, played by Matthew Broderick, unwittingly accesses a U.S. military supercomputer. When Mr. Kaminsky was 11, his mother said, she received an angry phone call from someone who identified himself as a network administrator for the Western United States. The administrator said someone at her residence was “monkeying around in territories where he shouldn’t be monkeying around.”
Without her knowledge, Mr. Kaminsky had been examining military websites. The administrator vowed to “punish” him by cutting off the family’s internet access. Mrs. Maurer warned the administrator that if he made good on his threat, she would take out an advertisement in The San Francisco Chronicle denouncing the Pentagon’s security.
“I will take out an ad that says, ‘Your security is so crappy, even an 11-year-old can break it,’” Mrs. Maurer recalled telling the administrator, in an interview on Monday.

…

When his talk was complete, Mr. Kaminsky was approached by a stranger in the crowd. It was the administrator who had kicked Mr. Kaminsky off the internet years earlier. Now, he wanted to thank Mr. Kaminsky and to ask for an introduction to “the meanest mother he ever met.”

Posted in Geek, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 26, 2021.

Monday, April 26th, 2021

Les McKeown, of the Bay City Rollers.

I have not found a mainstream source for this yet, but it seems to have been confirmed in various places: Dan Kaminsky, noted security researcher.

His politics were not mine, and he was not a personal friend or even acquaintance of mine. But I was lucky enough to see him speak at DEFCON and Black Hat a few times, and the guy was wicked smart. Especially when it came to TCP/IP and DNS: man probably forgot more about DNS than I’ll ever know. (One of my favorite talks involved him demonstrating how he could run streaming audio, in real-time, over the Internet…by embedding data in DNS queries. I believe this was that talk.)

There’s a good Hacker News thread here, and an obit from The Register here.

When your Register hack asked Kaminsky why he hadn’t gone to the dark side and used the flaw to become immensely wealthy – either by exploiting it to hijack millions of netizens’ web traffic, or by selling details of it to the highest bidders – he said not only would that have been morally wrong, he didn’t want his mom to have to visit him in prison.

The Reg obit also includes a link to a playlist of Mr. Kaminsky’s talks on YouTube.

Posted in DEFCON, Geek, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 22, 2021.

Thursday, April 22nd, 2021

Tempest Storm.

I went back and forth on posting this, even though Lawrence sent me the obit from the Las Vegas paper. But what pushed me into posting this was that the NYT obit was from Margalit Fox, and she clearly had some fun writing it.

Routinely named in the same ardent breath as the great 20th-century ecdysiasts Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr and Gypsy Rose Lee, Ms. Storm was every inch as ecdysiastical as they, and for far longer. Almost certainly the last of her ilk, she was, at her height in the 1950s and early ’60s, famous the world over, as celebrated for her flame-red tresses as for her vaunted 40-inch bust.

…

Playing burlesque stages in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Bay Area, London and elsewhere, she was reported to earn $100,000 a year in the mid-1950s (the equivalent of about $950,000 today). Her breasts were said to be insured with Lloyd’s of London for $1 million. “Tempest in a D-Cup,” the headlines called her; “The Girl Who Goes 3-D Two Better.”
Visiting the University of Colorado in 1955, Ms. Storm precipitated a riot among eager male students that caused hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage — by doing nothing more than removing her mink coat.

…

Along the way she acquired four husbands and many lovers, among whom she said were John F. Kennedy (“He was a great man in everything he did,” she said) and Elvis Presley (“He really was the King”), while losing, night after night, her mink, gloves, gown, pearls and hat — though retaining her G-string and fishnet bra, and with them her virtue.
“I think taking off all your clothes — and I’ve never taken off all my clothes — is not only immoral but boring,” Ms. Storm told The Wall Street Journal in 1969. “There has to be something left to the imagination. If you take everything off, you please a few morons and chase all the nice people away.”

Peter Warner, sailor. You probably never heard of him, but his story is fascinating.

Especially the part about the shipwrecked boys.

The story of the 1966 rescue, which made Mr. Warner a celebrity in Australia, began during a return sail from Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, where he and his crew had unsuccessfully requested the right to fish in the country’s waters. Casually casting his binoculars at a nearby uninhabited island, ‘Ata, he noticed a burned patch of ground.
“I thought, that’s strange that a fire should start in the tropics on an uninhabited island,” he said in a 2020 video interview. “So we decided to investigate further.”
As they approached, they saw a naked teenage boy rushing into the water toward them; five more quickly followed. Recalling that some island nations imprisoned convicts on islands like ‘Ata, he told his crew to load their rifles.
But when the boy, Tevita Fatai Latu, who also went by the name Stephen, reached the boat, he told Mr. Warner that he and his friends had been stranded for more than a year, living off the land and trying to signal for help from passing ships.
Mr. Warner, still skeptical, radioed Nuku’alofa.
“After 20 minutes,” he said, “a very tearful operator came on the radio, and then amongst tears he said: ‘It’s true. These boys had been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. And now you have found them.’”

The boys had been shipwrecked for 15 months.

At first the boys lived off raw fish, coconuts and birds’ eggs. After about three months, they found the ruins of a village, and their fortunes improved — among the rubble they discovered a machete, domesticated taro plants and a flock of chickens descended from the ones left behind by the previous inhabitants. They also managed to start a fire, which they kept burning for the rest of their stay.
They built a makeshift settlement, with a thatched-roof hut, a garden and, for recreation, a badminton court and an open-air gymnasium, complete with a bench press. One of the boys, Kolo Fekitoa, fashioned a guitar out of debris from the boat, and they began and ended every day with songs and prayer.
They established a strict duty roster, rotating among resting, gathering food and watching for ships. If a fight broke out, the antagonists had to walk to opposite ends of the island and return, ideally having cooled off. When Stephen broke his leg, the others fashioned a splint; his leg healed perfectly.

Mr. Warner was 90.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Janet Warner, who said he had been swept overboard by a rogue wave while sailing near the mouth of the Richmond River, an area he had known for decades. A companion on the boat, who was also knocked into the water, pulled Mr. Warner to shore, but attempts to revive him were unsuccessful.

For the record, NYT obits for Felix Silla and Richard Rush.

Posted in Boats, Movies, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 21, 2021.

Wednesday, April 21st, 2021

Jim Steinman.

He had a fascinating career, which is detailed to some extent in his Wikipedia entry.

Todd Rundgren eventually agreed to produce the record, but no big label wanted it; Mr. Sonenberg often joked that he thought people were creating new record labels just for the purpose of rejecting “Bat Out of Hell.” Eventually Cleveland International Records, a small label distributed by CBS, took a chance.

One little known fact: he was working on a “Batman” musical. A stage musical, not a movie musical. But there were plans for Tim Burton to direct.

Steinman said about Burton and the project, “It’s more like his first two movies than any of the other movies. It’s very dark and gothic, but really wildly funny. It was my dream that he do this.”

I think a musical interlude is fitting here.

Monte Hellman, director. We haven’t seen “Two Lane Blacktop” yet, but we have watched “Cockfighter”. I can really only recommend that one to fans of Charles Willeford, but it seems like there are a lot of those folks out there…

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 20, 2021.

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

For the historical record, and because Lawrence has already posted: Walter Mondale. WP.

NYT obit for Richard Rush.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 19, 2021.

Monday, April 19th, 2021

Marie Supikova has passed on at 88.

She was one of a small number of survivors of Lidice.

Mrs. Supikova was 10 when Nazi forces arrived in Lidice, a village of about 500, on June 9, 1942. They were bent on avenging an attack by Czech parachutists on Reinhard Heydrich, a principal architect of the “final solution,” the Nazis’ plan to annihilate the Jewish people, which led to his death on June 4.
Looking to eradicate Lidice (LID-it-seh), the Nazis destroyed all the village’s buildings. They killed nearly 200 men, including Mrs. Supikova’s father, by a firing squad against a barn wall cushioned by mattresses. The women, including Mrs. Supikova’s mother, were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany.

…

While there, she was one of seven children chosen because of their appearance to be re-educated as Germans (the others were sent to gas chambers). They were moved to a school near Poznan, Poland, where they stayed for about a year until they were adopted by German couples.
Her new parents, Alfred and Ilsa Schiller, gave Marie a new name, Ingeborg Schiller, and a tiny room behind the kitchen in their home in Poznan. In an article in The New Yorker in 1948, Mrs. Supikova recalled that the Schillers had argued about her presence in the household.
“You and your Party friends!” she quoted Mrs. Schiller saying. “Why did they pick you to take this girl?” Mr. Schiller, she said, shouted back, “They have ordered us to make a German woman out of her and we are going to do it.”

After the war, she was reunited with her mother, who was dying of TB. (Her brother was also executed by the Nazis.)

She bore witness to her Holocaust experience when she testified in October 1947 at the Nuremberg trial of members of the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office. Then only 15, Marie was one of three people — two teenagers and one middle-aged woman — to testify that day about the massacre and their lives afterward.

…

Before Mrs. Supikova’s mother died, she took her daughter to the ruins of Lidice.
“She told Marie, ‘We’re going to see your father,’” said Elizabeth Clark, a retired journalism lecturer at Texas State University, San Marcos, who is writing about Lidice for a faculty writing project. “Marie didn’t understand at first that they were going to the mass grave where he had been buried.”

Rusty Young, one of the founding members of Poco. I feel like I’m giving him short shrift, and perhaps tim will weigh in on this one. Poco was just a little before my time.

Catching up on a couple from the past few days when I’ve been tied up: Helen McCrory, “Harry Potter” and “Peaky Blinders” actress. She also did quite a bit of work in British theater.

Felix Silla. He was “Cousin Itt” on “The Adams Family”, and (as I understand it) played the physical role of “Twiki” on “Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century”. (Mel Blanc did the voice.)

McThag also did a nice tribute to him.

Posted in History, Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 15, 2021.

Thursday, April 15th, 2021

Frank Jacobs, one of the old time “Mad” magazine guys.

Working with artists like Mort Drucker (who died last year), George Woodbridge and Gerry Gersten, Mr. Jacobs parodied movie musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” (which he turned into a sendup of suburbia in “Antenna on the Roof”); critiqued the policies of President Ronald Reagan in a line-by-line satire of Poe’s “The Raven”; wrote obituaries of comic-strip characters like the hapless office worker Dilbert (who suffocated from a lack of ventilation in his cubicle) and the working-class layabout Andy Capp (whose death was caused by a drunken driver); and devised Christmas carols for dysfunctional families.

…

A fan of musical theater, Mr. Jacobs teamed with Mr. Drucker to turn “West Side Story” into “East Side Story,” a musical battle at the United Nations between gangs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet premier (and gang leader) Nikita Khrushchev sang:

When you’re a Red
You’re a Red all the way
From your first Party purge
To your last power play!
When you’re a Red,
You’ve got agents galore;
You give prizes for peace
While they stir up a war.

John Naisbitt, Megatrends guy.

Finally, Burt Pugach died on Christmas Eve last year, though his death was not widely reported until now.

I wrote a little about this case when his wife died, but that was a long time ago. In brief: Mr. Pugach was married, and carrying on an affair with Linda Riss. She found out he was married and broke it off. He wasn’t having any of that and continued to pursue her.

Finally, he hired thugs – he claims to “beat her up”. The thugs threw lye in her face and left her blind. Mr. Pugach was disbarred, his wife divorced him, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, released after 14 years…

…and after being released, he married Linda Riss, and they stayed married until her death in 2013.

Mr. Pugach left a legacy of recriminations and legal challenges over changes in his will that left a majority of his $18 million in assets to his caregiver. The latest version of the will disinherited several friends and reduced a planned bequest to the foundation for the visually impaired that he had established to honor his wife, Linda Riss Pugach, who died in 2013.
His assets have been frozen while the challenges are adjudicated, said Peter S. Thomas, a lawyer for the foundation, and Peter Gordon, who had drafted earlier versions of Mr. Pugach’s will. Those earlier versions had provided about $10 million for the foundation and roughly $5 million for Shamin Frawley, the 52-year-old caregiver with whom Mr. Pugach (pronounced POO-gash) had been living in Flushing since last year.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 14, 2021.

Wednesday, April 14th, 2021

Ray Lambert, another Amercian badass, has passed away at 100.

A native of Alabama, Staff Sgt. Lambert was leading a unit of medics with the Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the Army’s First Division. He had taken part in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily and had already earned three Purple Hearts and two Silver Stars before his war came to an end on the morning of June 6, 1944, on Omaha Beach.
He was in the first wave of Allied forces as they crossed the English Channel and stormed German defenses strung along the coast of northern France, beginning the long offensive that would culminate in Germany’s defeat. His brother Bill, also a medic, was with him.
In heavy surf, Ray Lambert was helping a wounded soldier when a landing craft’s ramp dropped on him, pushing him to the bottom. The water was deep as the medics scrambled off the craft.
“When we went under the water, they had barbed wire and you had to try to get through that,” Mr. Lambert said in an interview in 2019 with the American Homefront Project, a public radio effort, “and there were mines tied to that. So we had a lot of guys get tangled up. A lot of the underwater mines went off and killed some guys.”
But he made his way to the beach to tend to the wounded, amid withering fire from German bunkers above.
At one point he scanned the beach for something behind which he could safely treat the wounded. He spotted a lump of leftover German concrete, about eight feet wide and four feet high.
“It was my salvation,” he said. (A plaque installed in 2018 recognizes the concrete as “Ray’s Rock.”)
“Again and again, Ray ran back into the water,” President Trump told a crowd gathered for the ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery, on a bluff overlooking the beach. “He dragged out one man after another. He was shot through the arm. His leg was ripped open by shrapnel. His back was broken. He nearly drowned.”
As Mr. Trump spoke, Mr. Lambert sat behind him wearing a purple “D-Day Survivor” cap. At the end of his speech, the president turned to him and said, “Ray, the free world salutes you.”
Only seven of the 31 soldiers on Mr. Lambert’s landing craft survived. He and his brother, who was also badly wounded, were hospitalized in England.

Mary Ellen Moylan, early and influential ballet dancer who worked with George Balanchine. Noted here because this is one of those odd ones: she actually died almost a year ago, but her passing went unnoticed until recently.

Lee Aaker. This is a sad one. He was a child actor: he played “Rusty” on “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin”, and appeared in “Hondo” and “The Atomic City”, among other credits. His last one in IMDB was an episode of “The Lucy Show” in 1963, when he was 20.

Aaker had suffered a stroke and died April 1 near Mesa, Arizona, Paul Petersen, the former Donna Reed Show star who serves as an advocate for former child actors, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Aaker had battled drug and alcohol abuse during this life and was alone with one “surviving relative that could not help him,” Petersen said, adding that Aaker’s death certificate lists him as an “indigent decedent.”
For Petersen, it marked another sad end to the life of a Hollywood child actor. “You are around just to please everyone,” he said, “and when there’s nothing left, they are done with you.”

Lawrence sent over an obit from ZeroHedge, and the NYT now has it as breaking news: Bernie Madoff is burning in Hell.

Posted in History, Law, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 13, 2021.

Tuesday, April 13th, 2021

Richard Rush, film director.

He doesn’t have a lot of IMDB credits, but two significant ones: “Freebie and the Bean”, which I’ve seen described as “the first buddy cop movie” (citation needed), and “The Stunt Man” (which I remember as being a very good movie I’d love to watch again).

He also directed “Color of Night”, which I have heard is a completely ridiculous film with Bruce Wills full frontal nudity.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 11, 2021.

Sunday, April 11th, 2021

John Clabburn, television director in Australia. He was 52.

I note this here to make a point: not a political one, but a safety one.

Stop. The. Bleed.

Clabburn was trimming hedges with a new power saw at his home when he cut his hand. He fell ten feet from his ladder and was soon discovered by his wife. He had just bought the chain saw that day.
His death was attributed to cardiac arrest from the blood loss from his slashed hand.
“When I went out to the back garden, he was crawling on the ground on his stomach, said Clabburn’s wife, Melissa, speaking to the Daily Telegraph. “There was so much blood, he was clutching his torso.
“I kept getting towels to stem the flow, but the blood wouldn’t stop.”
“All he said was, ‘Call an ambulance now,’” she said. “One minute we were admiring how straight the hedge was looking and what a great job he had done — he was so meticulous, he had a great eye for detail — the next, John was in an ambulance. He kept it together for me, but I know he would have been in incredible pain.”

Stop the Bleed Australia.

Real Response.

Posted in Obits, Safety, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 10, 2021.

Saturday, April 10th, 2021

James Hampton. He was “Hannibal Dobbs”, the bugler on “F-Troop” and knocked around movies and TV quite a bit: “The Rockford Files”, “Sling Blade”, “The Longest Yard” (the original)…

…and, yes, “Mannix”. (“Hardball”, season 8, episode 24, the very last episode.)

Ramsey Clark, attorney general under LBJ.

He went beyond lawyering. In 1972, with the war in Vietnam dragging on, Mr. Clark met with Communist officials in Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, and publicly criticized American conduct of the war. That began a pattern: In 1980, months after Iranian revolutionaries had attacked the United States Embassy in Tehran and taken Americans hostage, he went to that city with nine other Americans, in violation of a travel ban, to help resolve the crisis and participate in a conference in which he criticized the United States for having supported Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi before he was deposed.
Six years later he met with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and denounced United States airstrikes against that country.
In November 1990, as the United States prepared for the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Clark, who had criticized the American deployment of forces in the gulf, consulted with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The next year he filed a complaint with the International War Crimes Tribunal accusing President George Bush of war crimes.
In 2011, he condemned NATO’s bombing campaign against Qaddafi’s government. In 2013, he said Iran had no intention of building a nuclear bomb and denounced sanctions against that country. Later, he protested lethal attacks by unmanned American drone aircraft on other nations.

Martina Batan, NYC contemporary art dealer. But there’s a bit more to the story than that.

Her brother was murdered at 14. His death devastated Ms. Batan: the case has never been solved.

When she was 53, Ms. Batan decided to kick up the dust of her past and hired a private detective to look into the 1978 murder case. The events that transpired were documented in “Missing People,” directed by David Shapiro, who followed Ms. Batan for four years. The investigation uncovered vital new information about the murder, but it also added to her despair.

Posted in 1970s, Law, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 9, 2021.

Friday, April 9th, 2021

For the historical record: Prince Philip. BBC.

Anne Beatts, one of the early SNL writers.

Ms. Beatts often wrote the parodies of TV commercials that the show used at the time, and sometimes she appeared in them. Mr. Zweibel especially remembered an absurdly overachieving housewife she played in one fake ad — the woman’s secret was a product called Speed.

Not embedded here because it is in the obit.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 8, 2021.

Thursday, April 8th, 2021

Sgt. Charles H. Coolidge (US Army – ret.), Amercian badass. He was 99.

Leading a section of heavy machineguns supported by 1 platoon of Company K, he took a position near Hill 623, east of Belmont sur Buttant, France, on 24 October 1944, with the mission of covering the right flank of the 3d Battalion and supporting its action. T/Sergeant. Coolidge went forward with a sergeant of Company K to reconnoiter positions for coordinating the fires of the light and heavy machineguns. They ran into an enemy force in the woods estimated to be an infantry company. T/Sergeant. Coolidge, attempting to bluff the Germans by a show of assurance and boldness called upon them to surrender, whereupon the enemy opened fire. With his carbine, T/Sergeant. Coolidge wounded 2 of them. There being no officer present with the force, T/Sergeant. Coolidge at once assumed command. Many of the men were replacements recently arrived; this was their first experience under fire. T/Sergeant. Coolidge, unmindful of the enemy fire delivered at close range, walked along the position, calming and encouraging his men and directing their fire. The attack was thrown back. Through 25 and 26 October the enemy launched repeated attacks against the position of this combat group but each was repulsed due to T/Sergeant. Coolidge’s able leadership. On 27 October, German infantry, supported by 2 tanks, made a determined attack on the position. The area was swept by enemy small arms, machinegun, and tank fire. T/Sergeant. Coolidge armed himself with a bazooka and advanced to within 25 yards of the tanks. His bazooka failed to function and he threw it aside. Securing all the hand grenades he could carry, he crawled forward and inflicted heavy casualties on the advancing enemy. Finally it became apparent that the enemy, in greatly superior force, supported by tanks, would overrun the position. T/Sergeant. Coolidge, displaying great coolness and courage, directed and conducted an orderly withdrawal, being himself the last to leave the position. As a result of T/Sergeant. Coolidge’s heroic and superior leadership, the mission of this combat group was accomplished throughout 4 days of continuous fighting against numerically superior enemy troops in rain and cold and amid dense woods.

Sgt. Coolidge was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions. He was the oldest living MoH recipient. (The current oldest is now Hershel W. Williams, who is 97.)

NYT obit for Alcee Hastings.

Edited to add: throwing some backlinks Lawrence’s way.

Posted in History, Obits, Politics | 3 Comments »

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