Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Obit watch: October 22, 2019.

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019

Scotty Bowers, alleged pimp to the stars.

If “pimp to the stars” seems harsh, well, that’s what he called himself:

Mr. Bowers’s raunchy best seller, “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars,” written with Lionel Friedberg, left out few details as it told of his metamorphosis from gas-station employee to hookup-provider and sex partner to the rich and famous.
Men he knew from his military service during World War II began socializing at the gas station where he worked, and he paired those who were willing with the Hollywood people who found their way to him by word of mouth. Although he described catering to all sorts of sexual combinations, he said he had often surreptitiously provided willing men to male Hollywood figures and willing women to female ones in an era when being gay could ruin a career.
He wrote of funneling women to Katharine Hepburn, of having a sexual encounter himself with Spencer Tracy, of arranging same-sex partners for the duke and duchess of Windsor.

I’m not linking to his book for the same reason I use the term “alleged” above: Mr. Bowers was, most probably, a damn liar. (Speak no ill of the dead? Mr. Bowers had no problem telling stories about people who were dead and couldn’t defend themselves, so I see no reason not to give him the same treatment.)

Larry Harnisch at the “Daily Mirror” blog did a 26 part series on the book back in 2012. Here’s his obit for Mr. Bowers, which contains links to all 26 parts.

Matthew Wong. I had not heard of him, but the NYT calls him a “painter on the cusp of fame”. Some of the pictured artwork is, to me, striking: I really like “Winter’s End”, to take one example.

He was 35 years old.

The New York gallery Karma, which represented him, said the cause was suicide. His mother, Monita (Cheng) Wong, said Mr. Wong was on the autism spectrum, had Tourette’s syndrome and had grappled with depression since childhood.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Posted in Art, Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 20, 2019.

Sunday, October 20th, 2019

Nick Tosches, fiction writer and biographer.

One of his most attention-getting biographies followed in 1992. It was “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,” about Dean Martin.
“Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man,” he wrote of Martin. “And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.”
For Mr. Tosches, Martin was a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths. (Martin himself died in 1995 at 78.)
“I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age,” Mr. Tosches told The New York Times in 1992.
“Life is a racket,” he added. “Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.”

If everything is a racket, is anything worthwhile? Like trying to help out the poor?

Dr. Paul Polak, a former psychiatrist who became an entrepreneur and an inventor with a focus on helping the world’s poorest people create profitable small businesses, died on Oct. 10 in Denver. He was 86.

…

In an era when foreign aid is largely based on charity, Dr. Polak (pronounced POLE-ack) instead advocated training people to earn livings by selling their neighbors basic necessities like clean water, charcoal, a ride in a donkey cart or enough electricity to charge a cellphone.
Although the nonprofit companies he created did accept donations, their purpose was to help poor people make money. His target market was the 700 million people around the world surviving on less than $2 a day, and he traveled all over the world seeking them out.

…

His most successful project was in foot-powered treadle pumps to pull water out of the ground. Beginning in 1982, he sold millions for about $25 each in Bangladesh and India, he said. The company he created for the project, iDE for International Development Enterprises, now operates in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The cost included the mechanism, which could be built in a local welding shop, and drilling the well. Dr. Polak’s organization trained thousands of welders and drillers. The customers — small farmers — supplied the foot power and long bamboo handles for the pumps, the device resembling a crude elliptical trainer.
To sell them, Dr. Polak ran a publicity campaign: a singing, dancing Bollywood-style movie about a couple that could not marry because her father could not afford a dowry. But once he bought a pump and could grow vegetables in the dry season, when they fetch more money, love triumphed.

…

By contrast, he said, the World Bank was subsidizing expensive diesel pumps that drew enough water to cover 40 acres. They were handed out by government agents, who could be bribed, he said, and the richest landowner would thus become “a waterlord,” who could drain the aquifer supplying everyone else’s wells and then charge them for water.
“It was very destructive to social justice,” Dr. Polak said.
Another franchise company he started in India was Spring Health, which uses battery power to convert salt into chlorine. The bleach is used to disinfect local water, which is then sold door-to-door in refillable containers.
Franchisees get caps and shirts with distinctive blue raindrops, and street theater troupes help uneducated people make the connection between dirty water and diarrhea, which sickens millions of children every day and, when chronic, can leave them mentally and physically stunted.

Bill Macy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Maude’s husband. But he knocked around a bunch of other stuff too.

Samuel Hynes, literature professor, author, and WWII torpedo bomber pilot. I’ve heard that Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator is a terrific book: anyone out there care to comment?

Not an Oracle guy, but for the historical record: Mark Hurd.

Sara Danius. She was the first woman to head the Swedish Academy. The Academy gives out the literature prize, and she was behind Bob Dylan winning in 2016. She was forced out in 2018.

I note this obit here less because of interest in the literature Nobel, and more because I find that it contains a remarkably high level of editorializing for a NYT obit.

She herself was never accused of wrongdoing. But she was the public face of a global institution whose reputation had been severely damaged.
Behind the scenes, her enemies within the academy sought to protect the accused man. They resisted her attempts to bring in law enforcement and forced her out.
When she left, Ms. Danius acknowledged that her colleagues had lost confidence in her leadership. She also defiantly suggested that arrogant and anachronistic forces within the academy had invoked the institution’s traditions to deny accountability.
“Not all traditions are worth preserving,” she said.
Her abrupt departure infuriated many women — and many men as well — across Sweden, a country that prides itself on gender equality. She was widely viewed as a scapegoat.

…

The man at the center of the sex scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault, was found guilty last year of raping a woman in 2011 and sentenced to two years in jail. In his appeal of the verdict, the appeals court found him guilty of raping the same woman twice and extended his sentence.
In addition, his wife, Katarina Frostenson, a poet who resigned from the academy, was accused of leaking the names of prize recipients to Mr. Arnault on at least seven occasions so that their friends could profit from bets. The two have denied all charges and said they were the objects of a witch hunt.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Geek, History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

The lazy man’s obit watch: October 17, 2019.

Thursday, October 17th, 2019

I thought about covering this myself, but Lawrence did a much better job on the death of Patrick Day.

For the historical record: Rep. Elijah E. Cummings.

Posted in Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 16, 2019.

Wednesday, October 16th, 2019

I’m sorry I’m a little late on these: I had one of those “don’t feel much like blogging” days yesterday.

Harold Bloom, noted critic.

Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.

…

Armed with a photographic memory, Professor Bloom could recite acres of poetry by heart — by his account, the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser’s monumental “The Fairie Queen.” He relished epigraphs, gnomic remarks and unusual words: kenosis (emptying), tessera (completing), askesis (diminishing) and clinamen (swerving).
He quite enjoyed being likened to Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century critic, essayist, lexicographer and man about London, who, like Professor Bloom (“a Yiddisher Dr. Johnson” was one appellation), was rotund, erudite and often caustic in his opinions. (Professor Bloom even had a vaguely English accent, his Bronx roots notwithstanding.)Or if not Johnson, then the actor Zero Mostel, whom he resembled.
“I am Zero Mostel!” Professor Bloom once said.

John Giorno, avant-garde poet. Back when I shopped for compact discs, I used to see copies of “You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With” all over the place. Never bought one, though: I’m a big Laurie Anderson fan, but how often was I going to listen to spoken word stuff by Giorno and William S. Burroughs? Probably not very often, was my considered opinion.

(There’s a little bit of Giorno available from iTunes, mostly as tracks on compilation albums. They do have “The Best of William S. Burroughs from Giorno Poetry Systems”, but that’s $40 for 69 tracks.)

NYT obit for Robert Forster, just for the historical record.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 12, 2019.

Saturday, October 12th, 2019

By way of Lawrence, Robert Forster.

Yeah, he was great in “Jackie Brown”, which I still think is Tarantino’s most restrained and disciplined movie. But he did a lot of other movie and TV work to varying degrees of success. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t a “Twin Peaks” guy, so I missed him there. But he was in “Avalanche”, “Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence”, and “The Black Hole”, he did guest shots on many series (“Magnum, P.I.”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Police Story”), and he was in a few unsuccessful series (“Banyon”, “Nakia”, “Karen Sisco”).

Aleksei Leonov, Russian cosmonaut and the first man to walk in space.

What Mr. Leonov did not reveal until many years later was that he and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel I. Belyayev, who was also an Air Force pilot, were fortunate to have survived.
Mr. Leonov’s specially designed suit had unexpectedly inflated during his walk, and its bulk was preventing him from getting back inside the Voskhod.
“I knew I could not afford to panic, but time was running out,” he recalled in the book “Two Sides of the Moon” (2004), written with the astronaut David Scott, about their experiences in space.
Mr. Leonov slowly deflated the suit by releasing oxygen from it, a procedure that threatened to leave him without life support. But with the reduced bulk, he finally made it inside.
“I was drenched with sweat, my heart racing,” he remembered.
But that, he added, “was just the start of dire emergencies which almost cost us our lives.”
The oxygen pressure in the spacecraft rose to a dangerous level, introducing the prospect that a spark in the electrical system could set off a disastrous explosion or fire.
It returned to a tolerable level, but the cosmonauts never figured out the reason for the surge.
When it came time for the return to Earth, the spacecraft’s automatic rocket-firing system did not work, forcing the cosmonauts to conduct imprecise manual maneuvers during the descent that left them in deep snow and freezing temperatures in a remote Russian forest, far from their intended landing point.
It took several hours for a search party to find them and drop supplies from a helicopter, and they spent two nights in the forest, the first one inside their spacecraft and the second one in a small log cabin built by a ground rescue crew, until rescuers arrived on skis. They then took a 12-mile ski trek to a clearing, where a helicopter evacuated them.

He also survived an attempt to kill Leonid Brezhnev, but you’ll have to read the obit for that story.

Anna Quayle. The name didn’t ring any bells with me, but she was in a bunch of stuff: “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Casino Royale” (the first one, with David Niven), “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off”, and the list goes on.

…died on Aug. 16, although her death was not announced by her family until early October. She was 86.
Her family did not say where she died or specify the cause. She had received a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia in 2012.

Posted in 1970s, Geek, History, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 11, 2019.

Friday, October 11th, 2019

The Francis Currey obit provoked a lively and delightful string of comments. Please go read them, if you haven’t already. And my thanks to Lawrence, pigpen51, and thinkingman.

I held this one from yesterday because I didn’t want to detract: Karen Pendleton, one of the original Mouseketeers.

In 1983, Ms. Pendleton was a passenger in a car accident that injured her spinal cord and left her paralyzed from the waist down. Eight years later, she earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Fresno; she went on to earn a master’s in psychology there.
After the accident, she became an advocate for disability rights — she served on the board of the California Association of the Physically Handicapped — and worked as a counselor at a shelter for abused women.

…

Ms. Pendleton was often reminded that fans of the Mouseketeers felt great affection for the show. In 1986, when she was a judge for a beauty pageant for women in wheelchairs, she met a woman with polio who said she had been abused by her parents.
“She said, ‘Being able to see you on “The Mickey Mouse Club” was the only happy part of my childhood,’” Ms. Pendleton recalled in 1995. “My eyes just filled up with tears.”

Bjorn Thorbjarnarson. This is one of those obscure but interesting obits: Dr. Thorbjarnarson was a surgeon who specialized in operations involving the biliary tract. Among his patients: the Shah of Iran.

Dr. Thorbjarnarson led a team of surgeons in removing the shah’s gallbladder, a portion of his liver and several gallstones blocking a bile duct — all under highly unusual circumstances.
“Armed guards controlled the traffic to the patient’s room, and all blinds were always down,” Dr. Thorbjarnarson wrote in a letter in response to “The Shah’s Spleen: Its Impact on History,” an article in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, in 2010. “Threatening calls were received by nurses attending, but none to me. Outside, the hospital was surrounded by a howling mob, controlled by barricades, calling for the shah’s head.”

He also operated on Andy Warhol, and was sued.

Warhol’s estate continued a private investigation, however, and in 1991 filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the hospital (now known as NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center) and individuals involved in his care. At a trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that year, the estate’s lawyers argued that doctors and nurses had neglected Warhol’s postoperative care and given him an unsafe amount of intravenous fluids.

…

Lawyers for the hospital, as well as for Dr. Thorbjarnarson and Dr. Denton S. Cox, the attending physician and Warhol’s longtime doctor, contended that Warhol had been well enough to watch television and make telephone calls from his hospital room as he recovered. An autopsy gave the cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, which the hospital argued was related to Warhol’s poor health and not caused by medical error or negligence.

I know it is an obit (De mortuis nil nisi bonum) and it is from the NYT, but i do think the paper makes a good case that Dr. Thorbjarnarson and the hospital weren’t responsible for Warhol’s death. Warhol was a gravely ill man who was deathly afraid of hospitals (being shot by Valerie Solanas will do that to you). He put off treatment until he couldn’t any longer, and even tried to talk Dr. Thorbjarnarson into treating him at Warhol’s home.

“Dr. Thorbjarnarson refused Warhol’s entreaties and found himself justified three days later, when the sick man was at last on the operating table,” Mr. Gopnik said, adding, “The surgeon found a gallbladder full of gangrene.”

The case was settled out of court.

Posted in Geek, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 10, 2019.

Thursday, October 10th, 2019

My morning went down the drain (for reasons I’m not authorized to talk about) so I’m only getting to this now:

Francis Currey, American badass.

Here is his citation from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s website:

He was an automatic rifleman with the 3d Platoon defending a strong point near Malmedy, Belgium, on 21 December 1944, when the enemy launched a powerful attack. Overrunning tank destroyers and antitank guns located near the strong point, German tanks advanced to the 3d Platoon’s position, and, after prolonged fighting, forced the withdrawal of this group to a nearby factory. Sgt. Currey found a bazooka in the building and crossed the street to secure rockets meanwhile enduring intense fire from enemy tanks and hostile infantrymen who had taken up a position at a house a short distance away. In the face of small-arms, machinegun, and artillery fire, he, with a companion, knocked out a tank with 1 shot. Moving to another position, he observed 3 Germans in the doorway of an enemy-held house. He killed or wounded all 3 with his automatic rifle. He emerged from cover and advanced alone to within 50 yards of the house, intent on wrecking it with rockets. Covered by friendly fire, he stood erect, and fired a shot which knocked down half of 1 wall. While in this forward position, he observed 5 Americans who had been pinned down for hours by fire from the house and 3 tanks. Realizing that they could not escape until the enemy tank and infantry guns had been silenced, Sgt. Currey crossed the street to a vehicle, where he procured an armful of antitank grenades. These he launched while under heavy enemy fire, driving the tankmen from the vehicles into the house. He then climbed onto a half-track in full view of the Germans and fired a machinegun at the house. Once again changing his position, he manned another machinegun whose crew had been killed; under his covering fire the 5 soldiers were able to retire to safety. Deprived of tanks and with heavy infantry casualties, the enemy was forced to withdraw. Through his extensive knowledge of weapons and by his heroic and repeated braving of murderous enemy fire, Sgt. Currey was greatly responsible for inflicting heavy losses in men and material on the enemy, for rescuing 5 comrades, 2 of whom were wounded, and for stemming an attack which threatened to flank his battalion’s position.

He was 94. His death leaves two surviving recipients of the Medal of Honor from WWII.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: October 8, 2019.

Wednesday, October 9th, 2019

Marshall Efron, public television personality of the early 70s.

I’d heard the name, but really didn’t have any association with him: I was very young when “The Great American Dream Machine” was on the air, and I wasn’t much older when “Marshall Efron’s Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School” came around the first time. (The latter was supposedly re-run frequently, but I’ve never seen an episode.)

By the time “Dream Machine” appeared, Mr. Efron had also begun acting in movies, including the first feature by a young director named George Lucas, the science fiction thriller “THX 1138” (1971). He would continue to act and do voice work in films and television throughout his career. His voice credits included the series “The Smurfs” and “The Biskitts” in the 1980s and the animated films “Ice Age: The Meltdown” (2006) and “Horton Hears a Who!” (2008).

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

Obit watch: October 7, 2019.

Monday, October 7th, 2019

Ginger Baker, noted drummer.

Both as a member of the ensemble and as a soloist, Mr. Baker captivated audiences and earned the respect of his fellow percussionists with playing that was, as Neil Peart, the drummer with the band Rush, once said, “extrovert, primal and inventive.” Mr. Baker, Mr. Peart added, “set the bar for what rock drumming could be.”

Random thought: could Mr. Baker play “YYZ”?

Mr. Baker’s appearance behind the drum kit — flaming red hair, flailing arms, eyes bulging with enthusiasm or shut tight in concentration — made an indelible impression. So, unfortunately, did his well-publicized drug problems and his volatile personality.
Mr. Baker, who by his own count quit heroin 29 times, was candid about his drug and alcohol abuse in his autobiography, “Hellraiser,” published in Britain in 2009.

Got to give it to the man: he was persistent.

He was also, by all accounts, not a very likable man. Journalists who interviewed him tended to find him uncooperative at best, confrontational at worst. The hostility between Mr. Baker and Mr. Bruce, which sometimes led to onstage altercations, was the stuff of rock legend. The 2012 documentary “Beware of Mr. Baker” — the title is taken from a sign outside the house in South Africa where he was living at the time — begins with footage of Mr. Baker physically attacking the film’s director, Jay Bulger.

Lawrence put “Beware of Mr. Baker” on our big movie list. We actually want to watch this, but man! That is a hard movie to find: the DVD and Blu-Ray are “unavailable” from Amazon, and they do list it under “Prime Video” but it’s currently “unavailable” there as well. The movie’s website is apparently now owned by a domain squatter who uses it to advertise casinos, and we haven’t been able to check Netflix or Hulu (not being subscribers to either one).

Rip Taylor, comedian and game show guy.

Mr. Taylor was often confused with the character actor Rip Torn, who died in July.

This.

I kind of got overtaken by stuff over the weekend, so here’s your historical record obit for Diahann Carroll. Little mentioned in her obits, but well known to us common sewers connoisseurs: she was also in “The Star Wars Holiday Special“.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 3, 2019.

Thursday, October 3rd, 2019

Bill Bidwill, owner of the Arizona (formerly St. Louis) Cardinals.

Under Bidwill’s ownership, the Cardinals toiled in mediocrity. They had five winning seasons from 1972 until Ken Whisenhunt was hired as head coach in 2007, Michael’s first year in charge. The Cardinals went to their first and only Super Bowl the next season.

I’m wondering if we’re going to see an NFL team for sale soon, and if that’s going to result in a possible relocation. LA and Las Vegas are off the map…but with the St. Louis Rams gone, and a past history for the Cardinals there…?

John Rothman. Kind of an obscure figure, but interesting: he pioneered electronic access to the NYT archives.

Working on the index led Mr. Rothman to think about how computers could store, sort and deliver abstracts of Times content to users at the paper and other locations, like public libraries, universities and major corporations. He proposed the Information Bank — the Times Index writ large — in 1965 and began working on it with IBM the next year.

…

In 1972, Times staff members began testing the Information Bank as a research tool. It would soon augment the paper’s archives, known as the morgue, where file cabinets are packed with clippings dating to the 19th century. In Times Talk, the paper’s in-house newsletter, Mr. Rothman assured colleagues that “once the basic methods” of searching the Information Bank were mastered, “retrieving the information is quite simple.”
In late 1972, the first installation of the Information Bank outside The New York Times was made at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library. Within six months, its 14 customers included NBC, The Associated Press, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Library of Congress, Exxon and the Chase Manhattan Bank.

I’ve been running behind, so for this historical record: Jessye Norman.

Posted in Geek, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: September 26, 2019.

Thursday, September 26th, 2019

Jacques Chirac est mort. NYT.

NYT obit for Sid Haig, which is dated the 23rd but didn’t show up on their obit page until yesterday.

One I’ve been meaning to note all week: Mark von Hagen. You probably haven’t heard of him, but: he was the guy the NYT hired to determine if the paper should return Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer.

Professor von Hagen’s resulting eight-page report was highly critical of the coverage but made no recommendation about the prize. Only in interviews after the report was released did he suggest that the award be revoked because of what he described as Mr. Duranty’s “uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime.” In his view, he said, Mr. Duranty had fallen “under Stalin’s spell.”
“He really was kind of a disgrace in the history of The New York Times,” Professor von Hagen was quoted as saying.
In the end, however, the Pulitzer board decided that it did not have enough grounds to annul the award, which was bestowed in 1932.

Posted in History, Media, Obits | 2 Comments »

Ice water looked at him and said, “Damn, dude, you COLD!”

Wednesday, September 25th, 2019

Captain Alfred Haynes, big damn hero, has passed away at 87.

Aviation buffs know this name well. For everyone else: Captain Haynes was the pilot of United Airlines Flight 232 on July 19, 1989. He was flying a DC-10 to Chicago from Denver.

About an hour into the flight, the engine mounted in the tail of the plane “exploded”. (It was later determined that a cracked fan disk had disintegrated.) Fragments of engine parts took out all three of the plane’s hydraulic systems. This was something that was never supposed to happen: the crew was actually in radio communication with United maintenance people who flat out could not believe the plane had lost all hydraulics (since the plane had three redundant systems). This was supposed to be impossible, and there were no procedures for dealing with this kind of emergency.

Without hydraulics, the pilots lost all normal control of the plane: they couldn’t move the flaps, elevators, or rudder. They couldn’t steer the plane or control ascent or descent. Captain Haynes and his crew (which included a DC-10 instructor pilot for United) figured out how to control the aircraft using only the engine throttles. They flew the plane for 44 minutes to Sioux City, Iowa, varying power to the engines to turn, climb and dive.

“Nothing in United’s training would have prepared the pilot for something like this,” John P. Ferg, a former director of flight operations for the airline, told The New York Times at the time. “By all laws of airmanship, he shouldn’t have gotten that close to the runway.”
Without the standard tools for slowing and steering the plane, Mr. Haynes approached Runway 22 of Sioux Gateway Airport going much too fast and descending at a much steeper angle than what was normal for a landing. As the plane tried to touch down, the right wing clipped the ground and the aircraft broke apart amid smoke and flame.

There were 296 people on the plane. 184 survived. 112 died.

Mr. Haynes would often say in later years that his thoughts were with those who did not survive — 111 that day and another a month later.
“It was very hard to get past the guilt of surviving,” he told New York magazine in 2009. “My job had been to get people from point A to point B safely, and I didn’t do it. I felt that I had killed them.”

Many of the accounts I’ve seen say that Captain Haynes resisted being called a hero. But:

Because of a promotion the airline was running, there were numerous children on the flight. One was Mr. [Spencer] Bailey, who was 3 at the time and today is a journalist and host, with Andrew Zuckerman, of the podcast Time Sensitive. He remembers nothing of the crash but learned about the efforts of the crew in later years.
“I would not be here, alive and typing this sentence, were it not for the actions of Captain Haynes and those who were in the cockpit with him,” he said by email. His mother, Frances, died in the crash, but his older brother Brandon survived.
“Brandon and I both know that day will always remain a part of us, but our lives continue onward, growing far beyond it,” Mr. Bailey said. “And for this fact, that we lived on and were able to grow up past July 19, 1989, we largely have Captain Haynes to thank.”

And:

After the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board programmed the conditions faced by the United 232 crew into a flight simulator to see if anything could be gleaned that could be incorporated into pilot training. It found, basically, that what Mr. Haynes and his crew had accomplished defied too many odds to be reduced to a pat lesson.

I emphasized “and his crew” above for a reason. After he retired, Captain Haynes traveled around the country giving talks. I always wanted to see one of his presentations, but never did. (There’s an archived transcript of one here.) One of the things he emphasized was the importance of crew resource management (CRM) which was a relatively new concept at the time. (The FAA didn’t make CRM training mandatory until after the incident, but it was already part of United’s training.)

Sometimes the captain isn’t as smart as we thought he was. And we would listen to him, and do what he said, and we wouldn’t know what he’s talking about. And we had 103 years of flying experience there in the cockpit, trying to get that airplane on the ground, not one minute of which we had actually practiced, any one of us. So why would I know more about getting that airplane on the ground under those conditions than the other three. SO if I hadn’t used CLR, if we had not let everybody put their input in, it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have made it.

…

We’ve lost several airplanes because everybody was working on the problem and nobody was flying the airplane. One of them was down in the Everglades. Everybody was working on the problem and the airplane flew into the ground. Not to criticise the pilots, because everybody wants to do their share to get the problem solved. But somebody has got to fly the airplane. Bill immediately took hold of the airplane, immediately called ATC and said we lost an engine and had to get a lower altitude, was turning off the airway, all those things you’re supposed to do. So my attention now is diverted to Dudley to shut the engine down.

Great moment from the CVR transcript:

Sioux City Approach: United two thirty-two heavy, the wind’s currently three six zero at one one three sixty at eleven. You’re cleared to land on any runway …
Captain: [Laughter] Roger. [Laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?

(That CVR transcript is also the final act of “Charlie Victor Romeo“.)

He was also a well regarded Little League ump, which makes me smile:

“If he weren’t an airline pilot, he could be a professional umpire,” Jim Chavez, a Little League district administrator, said in 1989, when Mr. Haynes was in the news because of the crash. “He knows the book. When Al calls a strike, you know it’s a strike.”
On Dan Haynes’s Facebook page, the many tributes to his father were as apt to mention the umpiring as they were the heroics.
“A legend in aviation for sure,” one reads, “but he was so much more. I’ll never forget seeing him at the Little League regionals in San Bernardino, where he was the master of ceremonies. He gave a great speech in front of thousands, and then went into a booth behind the outfield, put an apron on, and started selling corn on the cob to raise $ for LL.”

(Subject line hattip: adapted from something FotB RoadRich once said about a different pilot in a different context. Errors and omissions are mine alone: I welcome any additions and/or corrections anyone has to offer.)

Posted in Heroism, Obits, Planes | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 25, 2019.

Wednesday, September 25th, 2019

Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Reason. Rolling Stone.

I have to be honest: I am not a DeadHead. Never have been. I’m not really the person to look to for an obit or an appreciation. But i do think he did some good work. How about a musical interlude?

(I actually really like the Indigo Girls cover of this, but I can’t find a good version on YouTube.)

(Obligatory.)

Dr. Robert McClelland. He was one of the surgeons who treated John F. Kennedy at Parkland.

Inside, as doctors began lifesaving measures, it was clear that Kennedy’s condition was grave. His face was swollen, his skin bluish-black and his eyes protuberant, suggesting great pressure on his brain, Dr. McClelland told the Warren Commission in 1964 during its investigation of the assassination.
The lead surgeon, Dr. Malcolm O. Perry II, asked Dr. McClelland to assist in an emergency tracheotomy, and Dr. McClelland inserted a retractor into the incision that Dr. Perry had made in Kennedy’s neck to help accommodate a breathing tube.
Dr. McClelland’s position at the head of the gurney on which Kennedy lay gave him a close look at the severe wound at the back of the president’s head that had been caused by a second bullet.
The “posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted,” he told the commission. About a third of the president’s brain tissue was gone, he said.

Ironically, Dr. McClelland also treated Lee Harvey Oswald after he was shot.

A. Alverez, “British poet, critic and essayist” who had an unusual relationship with Sylvia Plath before she died. He also wrote about suicide and about the World Series of Poker: I’m pretty sure I’ve read The Biggest Game in Town, but I don’t know where my copy is right now.

I have one more obit to post, but that will go up later: I’m running out of time before work starts, and I want to do it right. Look for that one around mid-morning or posslbly lunch. Hint: this person was a big damn hero.

Posted in Books, History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Connections.

Monday, September 23rd, 2019

We watched the original “Night Stalker” Saturday night.

(Hi, Pat!)

That KL Studio Classics blu-ray is pretty awesome: the remaster is sharp and amazingly vivid. (I didn’t see “Night Stalker” when it was originally aired: I was (mumble mumble) years old and my parents wouldn’t let me watch it. This is actually the first time I’ve seen it, but my basis for comparison is the DVD of the TV series and the MeTV rebroadcasts: both seem a little muddy. If KL does a remaster of the series, I am there, man. And I plan to pick up the “Night Strangler” sooner rather than later now.)

The blu-ray also includes some good extras, including an interview with the director, John Llewellyn Moxey (who passed away in April of this year, at 94. I don’t recall seeing his obit reported.)

Anyway, Mr. Moxey was a prolific TV director: his credits include ten episodes of “Mannix”…

…including “End Game“, one of several episodes involving an old Army buddy of Mannix that’s out to get him…(“End Game” is a pretty tense and solid episode: it seems to show up a lot on the top ten episode lists I’ve seen.)

…and “A Ticket to the Eclipse“, another episode featuring an old Army buddy of Mannix that’s out to get him…

…and this time, the old Army buddy is played by none other than Darren McGavin his own self.

Just one of those curious connections that pop up sometimes. (Mr. Moxey seems to imply in his interview that he and Mr. McGavin didn’t know each other well, but they (and their wives) became close friends during the “Night Stalker” filming. Which is odd, because “A Ticket to the Eclipse” aired September 19, 1970, while “Night Stalker” aired January 11, 1972. So “Ticket” was probably filmed at least a year before “Night Stalker”. But, you know, maybe it took filming on location in Las Vegas to make them friends.)

(Lawrence: “Everyone in this movie looks hot.”)

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

Obit watch: September 23, 2019.

Monday, September 23rd, 2019

Christopher Rouse, Pulitzer prize winning contemporary composer. I confess that I don’t know very much about his work, but he was a favorite of several close friends of mine.

(Edited to add: NYT obit.)

Davo Karnicar, a man who skied down Everest. He wasn’t “The Man Who Skied Down Everest” in the documentary (that was Yūichirō Miura, who is still alive at 86), but he skied non-stop from the summit to base camp – a 12,000 foot descent in four hours and 40 minutes. (Mr. Miura only descended 4,000 feet.)

His brother Andrej lost eight toes to frostbite during their descent on Annapurna in 1995. A year later, Davo lost two fingers to frostbite during a storm that killed eight climbers — a disaster detailed by Jon Krakauer in his book “Into Thin Air.”
And in 1997, Karnicar’s brother Luka and four other members of his rescue team died when a safety line connected to a helicopter broke during a training exercise.

…

In 2009, his fellow climber Franc Oderlap, who had accompanied Karnicar to Everest in 2000, was killed by falling ice while they were testing equipment on Manaslu, in the Nepali Himalayans. Karnicar was uninjured. In 2017, Karnicar climbed as far as base camp at K2 but abandoned his quest when he hurt his back.

According to the NYT obit, Mr. Karnicar was killed in a tree cutting accident at his home.

John L. Keenan, chief of detectives with the NYPD. He was most famous for leading the manhunt for the “Son of Sam”. There’s also an interesting historical side note:

…he took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge while in a Counter Intelligence Corps unit of the Fourth Infantry Division. He fought alongside J.D. Salinger, who was writing what became “The Catcher in the Rye” during lulls in combat and became a lifelong friend.

…

When Chief Keenan was honored at a retirement party at Antun’s restaurant in Queens in the summer of 1978, Mr. Salinger came down from his home in rural New Hampshire, where he zealously guarded his privacy, to join in the tribute.
Departing from the focus on police work, which had attracted some 300 officers to the party, Mr. Salinger told the crowd that Chief Keenan had been “a great comfort,” especially in a foxhole.

Posted in Cops, Law, Music, NYPD, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »