Dennis C. Eberhart. He was one of my uncles from my mother’s side of the family.
Gerald Shur, one of the founders of WITSEC. Here’s the NYT obit, but I would encourage folks to go read the very nice blog post by Pete Earley first.
Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category
Obit watch: September 6, 2020.
Sunday, September 6th, 2020Obit watch: September 5, 2020.
Saturday, September 5th, 2020Julia Reed, writer about food and the South. She wasn’t someone I was really familiar with, but reading her obit makes her sound like a barrel of fun.
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Ms. Reed earned her first byline at 19, when she was a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington and a part-time library assistant and phone answerer, as she put it, at Newsweek, a job she had held since she was a student at Madeira, an all-girls boarding school in Virginia.
When the school’s headmistress, Jean Harris, murdered her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the celebrity doctor and creator of the Scarsdale Diet, Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief sent Ms. Reed to get the Madeira angle. As Ms. Reed wrote, he woke her up with an order to head back to her old school. When she wondered why, he barked, “You idiot, your headmistress just shot the diet doctor!”
Ms. Reed liked to say she was sorry the doctor had to give his life in service to her career as a journalist.
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Cathy Smith is burning in Hell.
Ms. Smith is the woman who gave John Belushi the fatal speedball.
Obit watch: September 4, 2020.
Friday, September 4th, 2020With precise control, he had swing-and-miss stuff. He struck out more than 200 batters in 10 different seasons, a National League record, and on April 22, 1970, facing the San Diego Padres, he struck out a record 10 batters in a row to end the game. His total of 3,640 strikeouts in his 20 big-league seasons is sixth on the career list.
He was also a cerebral sort, a thinker who studied opposing hitters and pored over the details of each pitch — its break, its speed, its location. As he aged and his arm strength diminished, it was his strategic thinking and experience that extended his career.
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He was the team’s first bona fide star, known to New York fans as Tom Terrific and, more tellingly, The Franchise. The team was established five years before he arrived, and had not finished higher than ninth in the 10-team National League. Even then, the Mets had quickly earned a reputation for chuckleheaded ineptitude.
The Mets were hardly more inspiring in Seaver’s first two seasons, finishing 10th in 1967 and ninth in 1968, but Seaver himself served as the signal that the team’s fortunes were turning.
Until his arrival, no Mets pitcher had ever won more than 13 games in a season; Seaver won 16 his first year and 16 more the next.
He was the league’s rookie of the year in 1967, and was an All-Star nine times in 10 full seasons with the Mets. He had five seasons with more than 20 wins for the team, led the league in strikeouts five times and in earned run average three times. He won three Cy Young Awards as the league’s best pitcher.
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In what The New York Times called “one of the blockbuster trades in baseball history,” he was immediately sent to the Reds for four players of far lesser stature: Pat Zachry, Doug Flynn, Steve Henderson and Dan Norman.
“Dick Young dragged my wife and family into it, and I couldn’t take that,” Seaver said after the trade. “I called the Mets and said, ‘That’s it, it’s all over.’ This alliance or whatever it is — this alliance between Young and the chairman of the board — is stacked against me.”
The deal, which became known among Met fans as the Midnight Massacre — two other Mets, Dave Kingman and Mike Phillips were traded the same night — has been considered by many as the lowest point — or as The New York Post has called it, “the darkest day” — in Mets history.
It certainly didn’t work out for the Mets. Seaver shined for the Reds and without him, attendance at Shea Stadium plummeted for the Mets, who finished in last place three seasons in a row and didn’t win as many as 70 games until 1984.
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For his career he was 311-205 with an earned run average of 2.86.
Sophia Farrar. She’s kind of an obscure figure, but this gives me a chance to give the NYT another swift kick in the teeth.
Ms. Farrar tried to help Kitty Genovese.
Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times reported in a front-page article that 37 apathetic neighbors who witnessed the murder failed to call the police, and another called only after she was dead.
It would take decades for a more complicated truth to unravel, including the fact that one neighbor actually raced from her apartment to rescue Ms. Genovese, knowing she was in distress but unaware whether her assailant was still on the scene.
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“For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens,” the Times article began (there were actually only two attacks). “Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again.”
That account — epitomized by one neighbor’s stated excuse that “I didn’t want to get involved” — galvanized outrage, became the accepted narrative for decades and even spawned a subject of study in psychology: how bystanders react to tragedy. Except that with the benefit of hindsight, the number of eyewitnesses turned out to have been exaggerated; none actually saw the attack completely; some who heard it thought it was a drunken brawl or a lovers’ quarrel; and several people said they did call the police.
(Previously. Previously.)
Obit watch: September 2, 2020.
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020Kaing Guek Eav, also known as “Duch”, is burning in Hell.
Duch was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010 for atrocities he had committed as a commandant of the Tuol Sleng prison. At least 14,000 people died after being held there, most of them sent to a killing field after being tortured and forced to confess to often imaginary crimes. Only a handful survived.
Duch (pronounced doik) and Tuol Sleng prison became a symbol of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge as it devoured itself in paranoia and purges. Under the regime, from 1975 to 1979, at least 1.7 million people died from execution, torture, starvation, untreated disease or overwork.
A joint Cambodian-United Nations tribunal found Duch guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes as well as homicide and torture. The tribunal first sentenced him to 35 years, giving him credit for years already served in pretrial detention. A higher court within the tribunal later increased the sentence to life imprisonment without a right to appeal.
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The force of his personality dominated the courtroom, and his self-confidence sometimes hardened into condescension as he corrected a lawyer or witness about details of the case against him.
At one point, a judge reminded him that laughter was not an appropriate response to a question.
A panel of court-appointed psychiatrists said that Duch was “meticulous, conscientious, control-oriented, attentive to detail and seeks recognition from his superiors,” and that he exhibited “a strong presence of obsessive traits.”
One question hovered above the trial: the source of the “evil” — as he himself described it — that could have compelled him to scribble on a list of 17 children, “Kill them all.”
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During his trial, however, Duch seemed to doubt the validity of his work, telling the courtroom that while running the prison he did not believe most confessions that his torturers had extracted and that he then annotated and sent to his superiors.
“I never believed that the confessions I received told the truth,” he said. “At most, they were about 40 percent true.”
And he said he believed that only 20 percent of the people whose names had been extracted through torture were genuine opponents of the regime. Those people were in turn pursued, arrested and tortured until they, too, produced the names of imagined accomplices.
“The work expanded,” Duch said. “People were arrested illegally, right or wrong. I considered it evil eating evil.”
Obit watch: September 1, 2020.
Tuesday, September 1st, 2020McThag had this story the other day, but I was waiting:
Joe Ruby, co-creator of “Scooby-Doo”.
Mr. Ruby and Mr. [Ken] Spears had been working mostly as editors at Hanna-Barbera, the leading TV animation studio, when they were charged with creating a show that was a mash-up of “I Love a Mystery,” a popular radio show heard from 1939 to 1944 about three adventure-seeking pals; the 1948 horror-comedy movie “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”; and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” the 1959-63 sitcom about a hapless teenager.
The directive, which came from Fred Silverman, then the head of daytime programming at CBS, also asked that a pop song be embedded in each episode, as was done on “The Archie Show.” The idea was for the new series to be soothing and nonviolent, an answer to the moral panic about violence in the media in the wake of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, said Kevin Sandler, an associate professor of film and media studies at Arizona State University.
The pop song part didn’t work out. But Mr. Ruby and Mr. Spears hit all the other marks by writing an adorable half-hour comedy-mystery with a lovable and hapless Great Dane — a character modeled, they often said, on the character Bob Hope played alongside Bing Crosby in the “Road” movies. After 15 or so drafts, they realized that the dog, Scooby-Doo, was the star. (The artist was Iwao Takamoto, another Hanna-Barbera veteran, who died in 2007.)
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Hanna-Barbera was a relatively small studio at the time that was short of writers, and the pair started submitting gags and scripts on spec. They became network darlings and were the particular favorites of Mr. Silverman, said Mark Evanier, a television writer who later worked for Mr. Spears and Mr. Ruby. When Mr. Silverman moved to ABC, he took Mr. Spears and Mr. Ruby with him, and in 1977 he helped them set up their own studio.
Over the next 20 or so years, Ruby-Spears Productions created a slew of animated programs, among them “Thundarr the Barbarian,” starring a musclebound hero and set in a postapocalyptic future, and “Fangface,” featuring a lovable werewolf and a gang of teenagers — like “Scooby-Doo,” but with complications. The company also produced a reboot of “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and many other shows.
The obit does not discuss Scrappy-Doo at all, but the Wikipedia entry on same is enlightening.
Obit watch: August 29, 2020.
Saturday, August 29th, 2020Chadwick Boseman. Variety. THR.
This is one of those cases where I don’t have much to say: his death at 43 is shocking and is being covered pretty much everywhere by everybody, and I really have nothing to add.
Obit watch: August 28, 2020.
Friday, August 28th, 2020Gerald D. Hines, prominent developer.
At his death, Mr. Hines’s company had built 907 projects around the world, including more than 100 skyscrapers, many of them designed by architects like I.M. Pei, Harry Cobb, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Robert A.M. Stern and the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox.
Hines built the Lipstick Building (officially 885 Third Avenue) in Manhattan and Pennzoil Place, Williams Tower and Bank of America Plaza in Houston, all designed by Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It was behind the Salesforce Tower, designed by Mr. Pelli, which is the tallest building in San Francisco; the DZ Bank in Berlin, designed by Mr. Gehry; the sprawling Porta Nuova complex in Milan; the Diagonal Mar project in Barcelona; and the Aspen Highlands ski area in Colorado, a favorite project of Mr. Hines’s. (He had a home in Aspen and continued to ski into his 90s.)
Architecture was his passion, although it would probably be more accurate to say that what he cared about most was fusing a point of intersection between serious design and profit-making real estate development. He took issue with colleagues who saw creative architects as dangerous to the bottom line. Spending a little more to create a better building would pay off in the end, he believed, because tenants would spend more to be in a better building that had a distinctive identity, and that would benefit both his tenants’ businesses and his own.
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Ada Louise Huxtable, then the senior architecture critic of The New York Times, hailed Pennzoil in 1976 as a “rarity among large commercial structures: a dramatic and beautiful and important building.”
“It successfully marries art and architecture and the business of investment construction,” she added.Pennzoil was internationally acclaimed, and it led other developers to attempt the Hines formula of hiring celebrated architects and commissioning them to design one-of-a-kind towers that could be marketed as defining points of downtown skylines. (Not all of his peers were as good as Hines, however, in simultaneously encouraging creativity and controlling construction costs.)
The success of Pennzoil Place marked the beginning of a close and long relationship between Mr. Hines and the partners Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It would transform Mr. Johnson’s practice from a boutique firm designing mainly expensive civic and institutional projects into a major player in commercial architecture — one that would reshape skylines around the country. Hines also commissioned the Johnson firm to design Comerica Tower in Detroit, the Wells Fargo Center in Denver, 550 Boylston Street in Boston and 101 California Street and 580 California Street in San Francisco, among many others.
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hines made an unlikely pair: the intellectual architect who rarely stopped talking and loved gossip and controversy, and the buttoned-up developer so averse to grandstanding that he would keep a slide rule in his pocket and take it out and pretend to use it during a meeting to avoid having to speak. But before his death in 2005, Mr. Johnson told the writer Hilary Lewis that he considered Mr. Hines his “first and greatest client.”
Walter Lure. Interesting story: Mr. Lure was the rhythm guitarist for the Hearbreakers (also known as Johnny Thunders and the Hearbreakers, as opposed to Tom Petty’s Hearbreakers) one of those legendary NYC punk bands.
The Heartbreakers were together for a brief three years and recorded only one studio album, “L.A.M.F.,” released in 1977 on the British label Track Records. But among the bands that clustered around downtown clubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB during the early punk years, the Heartbreakers had an outsize reputation.
“They were probably the best band besides the Ramones and the Dictators,” Legs McNeil, a co-founder of Punk magazine and the co-author of “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” (1996), said in a phone interview. “But they’re kind of like mythical, you know, because no one ever saw them. And when they did, Johnny was usually too drugged out to perform.”
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After the Hearbreakers, he went into product testing for the FDA (he had an English major and a chemistry minor from Fordham) and from there went into Wall Street.
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He was also the last surviving member of the Heartbrakers (with the exception of Richard Hell, who was briefly the Heartbreakers bass player. Hell left/was fired from the band and formed Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Heartbreakers entry from Wikipedia.)
Obit watch: August 26, 2020.
Wednesday, August 26th, 2020For the historical record: Gail “Passages” Sheehy.
Justin Townes Earle, singer, songwriter, and son of Steve Earle. He was only 38.
Norman Carlson. He ran the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 1970 to 1987.
Starting in the early 1980s, government policies like the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing had led to mass incarceration, swelling inmate populations in both state and federal systems. Aiming to ease the stress on penitentiary inmates and staff, Mr. Carlson favored building more prisons; during his tenure, he created 20 new facilities, nearly doubling the existing number.
And in Marion, Ill., he established a tough new system of solitary confinement that became the model on which future supermax penitentiaries were based. These included the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo., known as the ADX; it is the toughest prison in the federal system, housing those who have been labeled the “worst of the worst.”
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Mr. Carlson was credited with professionalizing the Bureau of Prisons. He disciplined officers who beat inmates, setting a policy of zero tolerance for prisoner abuse. Guards were to call themselves corrections officers, and assistant wardens were to wear suits and ties. He often ate with prisoners and brought along his wife and children, to show that prison food was good enough for his own family.
And he was a stickler for cleanliness.
“Mr. Carlson viewed a dirty prison as a sign of poor management; consequently floors were highly polished and walls kept painted,” Mr. Earley wrote. He said that one warden was so eager to please the director that when the snow outside had turned muddy and brown, the warden had his staff sprinkle flour on it to make it look whiter before Mr. Carlson arrived.
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(Pete Earley’s The Hot House is a swell book about Leavenworth specifically, and to some extent about the Federal prison system in general. I enthusiastically recommend it if you’re interested in prisons or criminal justice issues.)
Obit watch: August 24, 2020.
Monday, August 24th, 2020Great and good FotB Borepatch has lost his mother.
If you haven’t already, please head over there to extend your sympathies.
Obit watch: August 20, 2020.
Thursday, August 20th, 2020Ben Cross. He was “Harold Abrahams”, one of the two runners in “Chariots of Fire”. He also had a part in the 2009 movie reboot of a second-rate SF TV series from the late 1960s.
Mary Hartline. My mother actually mentioned this to me the other day. She was one of the very early TV stars:
“Super Circus,” a live Sunday afternoon series on ABC, began in early 1949, when the television industry was still laying its coaxial cables. Ms. Hartline was a striking presence with her long, wavy hair, her majorette-style costumes — including her signature uniform, with musical notes on the thigh-high hemline — and white tasseled boots.
Between the show’s death-defying circus acts, she conducted the band’s lively musical numbers, performed comedy sketches with the clowns, guided young audience members through contest segments and delivered live commercials. (Everybody did it. The future newsman Mike Wallace, also a cast member, pushed peanut butter.)
Ms. Hartline, often called television’s first sex symbol (a lot of fathers, it seems, were watching, alongside their offspring), was a master of promotion. In addition to having her face on Kellogg’s cereal boxes, representing Canada Dry beverages and demonstrating the joys of the newest Dixie Cup dispenser, she had her own merchandise line.
Those three dozen products included the Mary Hartline doll (“all hard plastic with socket head, jointed arms and legs, sleep eyes, blond wig,” according to a recent auction-lot description), which can still bring hundreds of dollars at auction.
Dr. Jay Galst. Interesting sounding guy: he was professionally an ophthalmologist. But he grew up with a dad who brought bags of coins home from the grocery store for him to sift through (pulling out the rare ones), and he continued pursuing numismatics into his adulthood and professional career.
He specialized in coins and coin adjacent objects (“…tokens, medals and similar artifacts”) that were in some way related to eyes, and co-wrote a book on the subject with Peter van Alfen.
He also specialized in coins from ancient Judea.
Marvin Creamer, who sounds like another interesting guy, and died at 104. He:
…taught geography for many years at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J.
His expertise helped him become a history-making mariner, the first recorded person to sail round the world without navigational instruments. His 30,000-mile odyssey, in a 36-foot cutter with a small crew, made headlines worldwide on its completion in 1984.
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It is daunting enough to circumnavigate the Earth with the aid of modern global positioning technology, much less with medieval and Renaissance tools like a mariner’s compass and sextant.
But Professor Creamer, in the grip of an obsession that had held him for years, shunned even those newfangled contrivances, as well as a radio, a clock and a wristwatch. He chose instead to rely on his deep knowledge of the planet and its vagaries, and be guided by nothing more than wind, waves, the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night.
Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.
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…when the 66-year-old Professor Creamer set sail from Cape May, N.J., in his cutter, the Globe Star, in late 1982, he was widely considered unhinged: No mariner in recorded history had traversed the globe without at least a compass, used by sailors since the 12th century if not before, or a sextant, introduced in the 18th.
His 513-day journey would entail nearly a year on the sea, plus time in ports for repairs and reprovisioning. It would take the Globe Star to Capetown, South Africa; Hobart and Sydney, Australia; Whangara, New Zealand; and the Falkland Islands off Argentina before its triumphant return to Cape May on May 17, 1984 — an event that Professor Creamer gleefully described as “one small step back for mankind.”
Obit watch: August 18, 2020.
Tuesday, August 18th, 2020Great and good FotB Borepatch was kind enough to send over an obit for Don Williams. But I’m seeing other reports that Mr. Williams actually passed away almost three years ago, and I’m having trouble sorting out what’s what. I’m going to argue, though, that good music is timeless.
Speaking of good music: Julian Bream.
And not speaking of music at all: Charles Wetli. He was a forensic pathologist and medical examiner, first in Dade County, Florida, then as the chief medical examiner of Suffolk County, Long Island.
He’d been at that job for 18 months when TWA 800 happened. He took a lot of flack for some of his decisions:
When the bodies were not immediately recovered and identified, family members directed their fury at Dr. Wetli. They worried that swift action regarding their loved ones had become secondary to the retrieval of forensic evidence for a criminal investigation.
Beyond that, families and politicians accused him of making blunders that only compounded their grief — he did not immediately work around the clock, he initially refused the help of pathologists from other jurisdictions and he did not allow most family members to see what remained of their loved ones.
But the obit points out that a lot of those decisions were defensible: there was no point in doing autopsies around the clock if they didn’t have fingerprints or dental records, which it took time to get from the families. And he didn’t ask for help initially because he wanted to make sure he had a good process in place with his own people before bringing in others.
And as for letting family see the remains…
In spite of all this:
Obit watch: August 13, 2020.
Thursday, August 13th, 2020Sumner Redstone, media mogul.
Beginning with a modest chain of drive-in movie theaters, Mr. Redstone negotiated, sued and otherwise fought to amass holdings that over time included CBS, the Paramount film and television studios, the publisher Simon & Schuster, the video retail giant Blockbuster and a host of cable channels, including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. At their peak, the businesses were worth more than $80 billion.
Toward the end of his life, he controlled about 80 percent of the voting stock in Viacom and CBS, presiding over both through National Amusements. And almost to the end, his grip was tight and his enthusiasm undiminished.
I’d heard of the man, in the context of his recent legal struggles, but this was something I did not know:
It was in 1979 that Mr. Redstone almost died in a fire at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, started by a disgruntled former hotel employee late at night, when most guests, including Mr. Redstone, were asleep.
“I was enveloped in flames,” he wrote. “The fire shot up my legs. The pain was searing.” He staggered to the window and hung from a ledge on an upper floor until firefighters rescued him. He suffered third-degree burns over 45 percent of his body, and it took five operations over several months to restore him to health.
He was 97.
Kurt Luedtke. He was a journalist with the Detroit Free Press:
At The Free Press, Mr. Luedtke became the first writer of Action Line, a column that cut through red tape and helped solve readers’ problems. It ran on the front page for 14 years and was copied throughout the newspaper industry.
By 1967, he had been named assistant city editor. That summer, Detroit exploded in one of the most destructive periods of civil unrest in the nation’s history. Five days of violence, fueled by deep frustration with racism, unemployment and police brutality, left 43 people dead, most of them African-American. More than 1,300 buildings were burned, and the National Guard and Army were called in.
Mr. Luedtke joined his reporters on the streets, dodging bullets and bayonets. After the riots, he assembled notes from other reporters, who had conducted more than 300 interviews, and wrote a hard-hitting article that concluded that few of the 43 who died had been rioters and that their deaths had mostly been avoidable. The article was part of a Free Press package that won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.
He also wrote about how, during the rioting, the police had stormed the Algiers Hotel and killed three young Black men who were staying there. That infamous episode became the subject of a book, “The Algiers Motel Incident” (1968), by John Hersey, author of “Hiroshima” (1946), and of a critically acclaimed movie, “Detroit” (2017), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
He left the newspaper and went into screenwriting. His first produced screenplay was “Absence of Malice”, which you may remember for Wilford Brimley’s short but significant appearance. He was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, but lost to “Chariots of Fire”. He did win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “Out Of Africa”.
At the movie’s Detroit premiere, he was interviewed by an old friend, Mort Crim, a local television anchor. In an online tribute on Monday, Mr. Crim recalled their conversation:
“He said, ‘Crim, you and I both went to journalism school; I ended up kissing Meryl Streep, and you end up interviewing me. Where did you go wrong?’”
Bill Yeoman, noted University of Houston football coach.
Yeoman was the man responsible for turning the University of Houston football program from relative obscurity into national prominence in two-and-a-half decades. He guided the Cougars to four Southwest Conference championships and 11 bowl games, posting a 6-4-1 mark in postseason competition.
Off the field, Yeoman played a key role early in the integration of college athletics with the signing of running back Warren McVea in 1964 as the Cougars’ first African-American Football student-athlete.
The Cougars had 17 winning seasons under Yeoman, including nine campaigns with at least eight victories. UH finished nationally ranked 11 times, concluding the 1976 season with its highest national ranking at No. 4 by both the Associated Press and United Press International.
Obit watch: August 12, 2020.
Wednesday, August 12th, 2020Joan Feynman, noted astrophysicist. She was 93.
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In 1971, Feynman accepted a job at the NASA Ames Research Center, where she developed a way to detect solar coronal mass ejections from the sun by searching for the presence of helium in solar wind. She would go on to hold positions at the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado; the National Science Foundation; and Boston College. In 1985, Feynman accepted a position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where she would conduct research until her retirement.
As part of her research at JPL, Feynman identified the mechanism that leads to the formation of auroras and developed a statistical model to determine the number of high-energy particles expelled from coronal mass injections that would hit a spacecraft during its lifetime. After her retirement from a senior scientist position in 2003, Feynman continued to conduct research on the impact of solar activity on the early climate of the Earth and the role of climate stabilization in the development of agriculture.
“Joan Feynman leaves a legacy of exemplary scientific research, having made important contributions to our understanding of the solar wind, the earth’s magnetosphere, and the origin of auroras,” said APS CEO Kate Kirby. “Despite being discouraged to pursue science by women in her family, she persevered, and her accomplishments serve as an inspiration to women who wish to pursue a career in science.”
For the record, she was Richard Feynman’s younger sister. There’s a story:
Her pioneering work on these processes led to an understanding of the mechanism responsible for auroras. She found this work wonderful, and her immediate reaction was to tell her brother, who’d first introduced her to these beautiful phenomena all those years before.
But then a second thought crossed her mind. “Richard is pretty smart, and if I tell him about an interesting problem, he’ll find the answer before I do and take all the fun out of it for me.” So Joan decided to strike a deal with him. “I said, Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe. And he said OK!”
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Her brother Richard had kept his original promise to her not to work on auroras. Despite an impressive polymath career in which he applied his genius to a spectacular spectrum of problem-solving across the fields of maths, physics, chemistry, and biology, he had never turned his attention to Joan’s chosen field.
But then he traveled to Alaska, an important centre for aurora studies. On a tour of the facility, the head of the lab pointed out many of the interesting geophysical phenomena that were yet to be explained. “Would you be interested in working on it?” he enquired. Richard responded that he would, but added that he’d have to ask his sister’s permission. Joan remembers that he came back and told her the story. “I’m sorry Richard,” she replied, “but I’m not giving you permission.” Richard duly reported back that his sister had refused to allow him to study auroras!
Word of this story eventually got round, and people would come up to Joan at conferences and ask her if it was true. At one meeting, a colleague from UCLA told the gathering that he wanted “to publicly thank Richard Feynman for not studying aurora, so that we can all have some fun!”
Obit watch: August 11, 2020.
Tuesday, August 11th, 2020Wayne Fontana, of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, one of those British Invasion bands that was (sadly) before my time.
His interpretations bridged two prominent trends of the day. At a commercially rich time for folk music, Mr. Lopez drew on the beauty of the genre’s tunes while souping them up with the sharp rockabilly beats employed by hitmakers like Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins.
“Making songs danceable helped me a lot,” Mr. Lopez told The Classic Rock Music Reporter in 2014, adding, “Discotheques back in those days were not only playing my songs, they were playing my album all the way through.”
For yet another draw, Mr. Lopez punctuated many of his songs with joyous hoots and trills drawn from Mexican folk, emphasizing his ethnic heritage at a time when many Latin performers kept theirs hidden. “I’m proud to be a Mexicano,” he told The Seattle Times in 2017.
He also did some acting:
(We finally watched the movie of “The Dirty Dozen” a few weeks ago. I have to admit: it is much better than the book, especially since the movie actually has an ending, and the people responsible for the movie actually bothered to film it.)
Obit watch: August 10, 2020.
Monday, August 10th, 2020For the record: William English (one of the people who helped build the first mouse) and Frances Allen, noted computer scientist and researcher. Both of these have been extensively covered in a lot of places, which is why I’m only noting them here.
Terry Cannon. My feelings about baseball are well known, but Mr. Cannon sounds like my type of person. He founded the Baseball Reliquary:
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The first induction, in 1999, exemplified the shrine’s type of inductee: Curt Flood, who helped pave the way for free agency by challenging baseball’s reserve clause, which tied a player to his team year after year unless an owner traded or released him; Bill Veeck, the maverick owner of several teams; and [Dock] Ellis, a thoughtful, idiosyncratic Black pitcher, mostly for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who spoke out on racial issues.
Ellis attended his induction ceremony and wept, saying that Major League Baseball had never honored him. He recalled receiving a letter from Jackie Robinson (a 2005 shrine inductee) urging him to continue to push for change in baseball.
“He was crying his eyes out,” Ms. Cannon, who is also the reliquary’s artistic director, said in an interview. “I had to reach over and pat his hand to bring him back.”
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Mr. Cannon was, indeed, a serious scholar, but the artifacts he collected invariably prompted a smile — as did his use, at his wife’s suggestion, of the word “reliquary,” which means a container for holy relics.
There is the jockstrap worn by the 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel, who appeared as a pinch-hitter for the St. Louis Browns in 1951 in a stunt conceived by Mr. Veeck. And there is the sacristy box that a priest used in 1948 to give the last rites to Babe Ruth, who died nearly a month later.
Then there are the curlers that Ellis wore on the field during batting practice at Three Rivers Stadium after Ebony magazine wrote about his hairstyle.
“I was interested in things that other museums weren’t interested in collecting,” Mr. Cannon told Pasadena Weekly in 2017. “Like, if they wanted bats and gloves, I wanted things to keep famous stories alive. It was more interesting to find a desiccated hot dog that Babe Ruth partially digested than a signed baseball or bat.”
Richard Lapointe. This is an incredibly sad story worth noting here.
In March of 1987, Bernice Martin was raped and murdered, and her apartment was set on fire. She was 88 years old, and the grandmother of Mr. Lapointe’s wife. Mr. Lapointe, who was born with a brain malformation that left him with limited mental capability, was interrogated by the police. Eventually, he signed three confessions to the crime, “though their legitimacy was open to debate“.
He was convicted in 1992 and sentenced to life. But almost immediately people raised questions about the conviction.
Among those who smelled a miscarriage of justice from the start was Tom Condon, a columnist for The Courant. Ten days after the conviction, he began his column this way:
“Richard Lapointe is short, chubby and owlishly homely. He wears a hearing aid and thick glasses. He is meek and deferential. He is not very bright.
“Watching him on the witness stand and examining the record, it is hard to believe that on one night in his 46 years, and one night only, he turned into a crazed psychopathic sex killer.
“It is so hard to believe, that maybe he didn’t.”
…
Among other issues, Mr. Lapointe’s disability may have left him particularly inclined to please others, including pleasing the police by signing confessions. And his disability may also have left him so poorly coordinated that he was physically incapable of doing the crime.
It was not until 2015 that the Connecticut Supreme Court intervened, examining an argument that exonerating evidence had not reached the defense. Its ruling reversing the conviction did not mince words.
“The petitioner was forty-two years old when he allegedly committed one of the most brutal crimes in our state’s history — the rape, torture and murder of a defenseless eighty-eight year old woman, a person who, by all accounts, was like a grandmother to him,” the majority opinion read. “Although there is abundant evidence in the record concerning the petitioner’s simplemindedness, his peculiarities and his very rigid way of thinking, one searches the record in vain for evidence that he ever was physically violent, that he suffered from a mood disorder, psychosis, drug addiction or anything else that could explain why, after visiting the victim every Sunday for years, he suddenly went back to her apartment on the Sunday in question and brutally murdered her, without his wife noticing either that he had left their house or any change in his demeanor or appearance upon his return.”
He lived for five years after his release. According to people who knew him, he had dementia and had been hospitalized with COVID.