David Roberts, noted climber and climbing writer.
Michael Nader, actor. He was “Dex Dexter” in “Dynasty”, and “Dimitri Marick” on “All My Children”, among other credits.
Once again, pushing the boundaries of an obit, but: if you would prefer to read about Dorothy Parker’s tombstone in the NYT instead of the NYPost, well, here you go.
Bill Clotworthy. You almost certainly never heard of him, but you’ve seen his work.
Or, perhaps more accurately, you haven’t seen his work.
Mr. Clotworthy was a long time “standards and practices executive” – in other words, a network censor – for NBC. His nickname was “Doctor No”.
…
In a 2002 interview, Clotworthy described one SNL sketch that never made it to air:
It revolved around “a bunch of guys in a fraternity house trying to light farts,” he recalled. “You didn’t see anything, but you heard the voiceover and then there was this big explosion, and Joe Piscopo was dressed as Smokey the Bear, and he came out and said that should be a lesson to everyone — don’t fart with fire.”
He said he was OK with it but was overruled by his boss.
…
Those sound really cool. Amazon doesn’t list them, but there is a Kindle edition of Saturday Night Live: Equal Opportunity Offender: The Uncensored Censor.
Stretching the definition of an obit here, but: there was an unveiling ceremony for Dorothy Parker’s tombstone on Monday.
The story of Dorothy Parker’s ashes is almost as weird as the story of Evita’s body. After her death, her ashes sat in a crematory for six years, then in a filing cabinet in the former office of her (retired) lawyer. In 1988, her ashes were turned over to the NAACP (“In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and upon King’s death, to the NAACP.“)
The NACCP set up a memorial outside their headquarters in Baltimore. But when they moved in 2020, the organization returned the ashes to her family, who reburied them in Woodlawn Cemetery.
The New York Distilling Company in Williamsburg issued a commemorative gin to pay for the headstone.
Along with the gin, mourners left red roses near Parker’s grave, which lies next to those of her parents and grandparents.
The family plot is in a section of the 400-acre cemetery that includes the graves of writers such as Herman Melville and E.L. Doctorow — as well as a man dubbed “The Father of Mixology,’’ 19th century New York City bartender Jerry Thomas.
Brian Travers, founding member of UB40. Brain tumor got him at 62.
Marilyn Eastman, “Helen Cooper” in “Night of the Living Dead”.
Apologies for the slowdown in posting. I’ve been working on my paper for the 2022 MLA convention on “Sexual Politics in ‘Hobgoblins‘”.
(Lawrence pointed out an interesting fact: “Road Rash” in “Hobgoblins” is the same actor who played “Maynard” in “Pulp Fiction”.)
Anyway, a couple of interesting gun politics stories by way of the NYT:
San Francisco’s district attorney on Wednesday sued three online retailers for selling “ghost guns,” untraceable firearms that can be made from do-it-yourself kits, part of an intensifying nationwide effort to stem the flood of deadly homemade weapons into American cities.
In a civil complaint filed in California Superior Court, District Attorney Chesa Boudin accused the companies — G.S. Performance, BlackHawk Manufacturing Group and MDX Corporation — of marketing a range of products in the state that furnish buyers with parts and accessories that can be quickly assembled into a functional firearm.
Note the phrasing: “…parts and accessories that can be quickly assembled into a functional firearm”, not firearms themselves. I am not familiar with California law, so I don’t know what the status of 80% parts kits is there, nor do I know if any regulations against same would pass constitutional muster.
But it feels like this is one of those things that doesn’t matter, much like Remington and Sandy Hook: they might be able to beat the case legally, but the criminal DA of San Francisco can make it expensive enough to cripple or even bankrupt the vendors.
Great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl put up a long – and, I think, fascinating – review on his blog of a vintage (1981) firearms/self defense guide from South Africa. I don’t recommend you follow the advice (and Karl does an excellent job of pointing out where it deviates from evolved practice today) but it is an interesting slice of history from a place only a few of us are familiar with.
Noted: the Smith and Wesson M&P 12. I’m kind of happy to see S&W back in the shotgun market, but I’m not wild about this particular gun.
Michael Thomas, author. (“Green Monday”.)
Nanci Griffith, noted folk singer.
While Ms. Griffith often wrote political and confessional material, her best-loved songs were closely observed tales of small-town life, sometimes with painful details in the lyrics, but typically sung with a deceptive prettiness. Her song “Love at the Five and Dime,” for example, tracks a couple’s romance from its teenage origins when “Rita was 16 years/Hazel eyes and chestnut hair/She made the Woolworth counter shine” through old age, when “Eddie traveled with the barroom bands/till arthritis took his hands/Now he sells insurance on the side.”
The song was a country hit in 1986 — but for Kathy Mattea, not for Ms. Griffith. Similarly, while Ms. Griffith was the first person to record “From a Distance,” written by Julie Gold, the song was later a smash hit for Bette Midler.
Ms. Griffith sometimes affected a folkie casualness toward mainstream success. She told Rolling Stone in 1993 that she didn’t mind that Ms. Mattea had the hit version of “Love at the Five and Dime”: “It feels great that Kathy has to sing that for the rest of her life and I don’t.”
…
Donald Kagan, historian. I never met him, but he sounds like someone whose books I want to read.
Professor Kagan was considered among the country’s leading historians. His four-volume account of the Peloponnesian War, from 431 B.C. to 404 B.C., was hailed by the critic George Steiner as “the foremost work of history produced in North America in the 20th century.”
He was equally renowned for his classroom style, in which he peppered nuanced readings of ancient texts with references to his beloved New York Yankees and inventive, sometimes comic exercises in class participation, like having students form a hoplite phalanx to demonstrate how Greek soldiers marched into combat.
A strong believer in the timeless virtues of Western civilization and the need for countries to project power in a lawless world, Professor Kagan was often categorized as a conservative. He more or less agreed: He called himself a “Harry Truman Democrat,” but by the late 1960s he had come to believe that the Democratic Party, and much of the academic world, had drifted too far to the left.
He was hard to pin down, though. He disliked Richard Nixon and, more recently, Donald Trump, but he was a fan of Reagan, whose commitment to a strong military and willingness to confront the Soviet Union seemed to him to embody the Greeks’ “mental and intellectual toughness in confronting the human condition.”
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Professor Kagan fell in love with Cornell, especially the collegiality of its faculty. But in 1969, when armed Black students took over an administration building, demanding the creation of an Africana studies center and amnesty for fellow students who had been disciplined for an earlier protest, the university’s decision to negotiate with them struck him as a capitulation to violence. Months later he decamped for Yale. The crisis at Cornell was, he later said, the worst experience in his life.
Though he at first admired Kingman Brewster, Yale’s president, for his stand against campus radicalism, in 1974 Professor Kagan publicly criticized him after the university canceled a speech by William Shockley, a Stanford physicist and Nobel Prize winner who believed that Black people were genetically inferior. Professor Kagan strongly disagreed with Shockley’s views, but he believed the university should be exposing students to challenging points of view.
In response to that criticism, Mr. Brewster asked the historian C. Vann Woodward to write a report about campus speech, and later adopted many of its proposals that lined up with Professor Kagan’s views.
…
Professor Kagan’s passion for ancient Greece informed another of his great loves: sports. He liked to say that one root of his contrarian nature was that as a child in 1930s Brooklyn, he was a Yankees fan in a sea of Dodgers caps. Among his greatest moments, he said, was the year Yale asked him to serve as acting athletic director, a job he relished even as he continued to teach history.
He saw baseball as a Homeric allegory, one in which a hero — the batter — ventures from home and must overcome unforeseen challenges in order to return. That view set up one of his most celebrated articles: a withering review in The Public Interest of the columnist George Will’s book “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball” (1990).
“This is the fantasy of a smart, skinny kid who desperately wants to believe that brains count more than the speed, power and reckless courage of the big guys who can play,” Professor Kagan wrote.
For the most gratuitous use of the word “Belgium” in a serious post.
— Eternal Memri TV (@EMTVmemes) December 4, 2019
“Work and Play In Belgium”, a 1950 propaganda film (in color!) from the “Belgian Government Information Center of New York City”.
Bonus: at least part of this is set…in Bruges.
It was a busy weekend, and I’ve got a backlog. I hope I don’t miss anybody.
Damn. Said it before, I’ll say it again: “Night Court” was a swell show, and she was part of what made it swell.
Trevor Moore, comedian (“The Whitest Kids U Know”).
Jane Withers, actress.
She did other movie and TV work, including “Giant”, and played “Josephine the Plumber” in the Comet commercials.
Bobby Bowden, football coach.
“When I was at Alabama the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Auburn,’ he recalled in “The Bowden Way” (2001), his book on leadership written with his son Steve. “When I was at West Virginia they read ‘Beat Pitt.’ When I came to F.S.U., the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Anybody.’”
Bowden’s Seminoles beat most everybody. He coached Florida State to national championships in 1993 and 1999 and his teams finished in the top five of the Associated Press rankings every season from 1987 to 2000. The Seminoles were unbeaten in bowl games from 1982 to 1995.
He was, for a period of time, the coach with the most wins in college football. I phrase it that way, though, because this was after the NCAA vacated 111 of Joe Paterno’s victories over the Penn State scandal:
Coach Bowden now ranks second, with 377 career wins.
Paul Cotton, of Poco.
Mr. Cotton joined Poco, replacing the founding member Jim Messina in 1970, just in time to appear on the group’s third studio album, “From the Inside” (1971). Produced by Steve Cropper, the guitarist with the Memphis R&B combo Booker T. & the MGs, the project signaled a new artistic direction for the band, maybe nowhere so much as on the three songs written by Mr. Cotton.
Rooted more in rock and soul than in the country and bluegrass that had hitherto been the group’s primary influences, Mr. Cotton’s sinewy, blues-inflected guitar work and brooding baritone vocals on songs like the ballad “Bad Weather” greatly expanded Poco’s emotional and stylistic palette.
Herbert Schlosser, TV executive. Among other accomplishments: “Saturday Night Live” and “Laugh-In”.
Jon Lindbergh. Yes, he was Charles Lindbergh’s son, but he led an interesting life of his own.
He didn’t go into aviation like his father: instead, he became a pioneer of undersea research.
After college, he did postgraduate work at the University of California San Diego and spent three years as a Navy frogman, working with the Underwater Demolition Team. He appeared as an extra in the television series “Sea Hunt” and had bit parts in a few movies, including “Underwater Warrior” (1958).
He also worked as a commercial deep-sea diver and participated in several diving experiments. They included a 1964 project in the Bahamas called “Man-in-Sea” in which a submersible decompression chamber devised by Edwin Link allowed divers to stay deeper under water for longer periods.
As part of that project, Mr. Lindbergh and Robert Sténuit, a Belgian engineer, set a record by staying in a submersible dwelling for 49 hours at a depth of 432 feet, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen that allowed them to swim outside the dwelling without harm despite the enormous pressure of the water above. Mr. Sténuit wrote an account of the experiment in the April 1965 issue of National Geographic.
Mr. Lindbergh was also involved in the development and testing of the Navy’s Alvin deep-ocean submersible, which he used during the recovery of the hydrogen bomb in the Mediterranean. An American bomber had hit a refueling tanker in midair and dropped four hydrogen bombs, two of which released plutonium into the atmosphere, though no warheads detonated.
He later helped install Seattle’s water treatment system in icy waters as deep as 600 feet. Finding that he liked the area, he bought a secluded Georgian-style home on Bainbridge Island in the mid-1960s and raised his family there. He later farmed salmon in Puget Sound and in Chile as part of an emerging aquaculture industry and sold the fish to airlines and restaurants.
…
Charles Lindbergh lived long enough to see Jon flourish in his career and was relieved that his son had not followed him into aviation. “He removed any burden of his own career from his son’s shoulders,” Mr. Berg wrote in his biography, by telling Jon that much of what had first attracted him to aviation in the 1920s no longer existed.
“Thirty years ago, piloting an airplane was an art,” Charles Lindbergh told his son, but it no longer seemed like an adventure.
Rather than become a flyer, Charles Lindbergh added, “I think I would follow your footprints to the oceans, with confidence that chance and imagination would combine to justify the course I set.”
Nach Waxman. He founded Kitchen Arts and Letters, a Manhattan bookstore specializing in food related books.
In one instance, Mr. Waxman counseled Citibank on its banquet menu for the Venezuelan finance minister; in another, he found Indigenous recipes from New Guinea for the American Museum of Natural History’s dining room during an exhibition on rain forests.
“He could make helpful recommendations, obtain the very cookbook you needed, search for out-of-print editions and discuss the authors,” said Florence Fabricant, a food and wine writer for The New York Times.
Mr. Waxman once said that about two-thirds of his customers were culinary careerists purchasing professional tools. “Knives are one tool,” he told The Times in 1998. “Books are another.”
…
“It’s really the professional business that’s the gratifying business,” Mr. Waxman told The Times in 1995. “People who are expanding their skills and the scope of their work. I will tell you, when the lease was up a few years ago, I gave serious thought to moving the store to a second floor somewhere just to make it a place for motivated people, not casual drop-ins. The people who come here have a language in common.
“Just sitting and selling books is boring,” he said. “It’s making change and putting books in bags. What’s fun is helping people solve their problems.”
Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is “too busy to read” is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final. History teaches that we face nothing new under the sun. The Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. All Marines read a common set; in addition, sergeants read some books, and colonels read others. Even generals are assigned a new set of books that they must consume. At no rank is a Marine excused from studying. When I talked to any group of Marines, I knew from their ranks what books they had read. During planning and before going into battle, I could cite specific examples of how others had solved similar challenges. This provided my lads with a mental model as we adapted to our specific mission.
Reading shed light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present…
—Call Sign Chaos, Jim Mattis and Bing West
(Obviously, I like this quote. Gen. Mattis was speaking more in the context of history, especially military history. But I think this can be extended way out: the more I think about it, the more I think that all books – history, science, biography, books about farming, even fiction – are a honor and a gift from someone who sat down to have a “conversation” with you, and it is worth your time and effort, even if you are not a combat Marine, to “take advantage of such accumulated experiences”.
Of course, some of those people who are trying to have a conversation with you are the kind of person who would be called a “bore” in social circles. There’s no obligation to read, or to finish, everything: just to keep an open mind.)
Bonus quote of the day, from the same source:
“What is a Marine doing here?” Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin asked when I entered her office.
“Madam Ambassador,” I said, “I’m taking a few thousand of my best friends to Afghanistan to kill some people.” She smiled and said, “I think I can help you.” Never before had I personally experienced a diplomat’s impact so directly.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Joe McKinney. He was a San Antonio based horror writer who won two Bram Stoker awards.
…
He was 52.
William F. Nolan, SF writer. His most famous work (co-authored with George Clayton Johnson) was Logan’s Run, basis for the movie of the same name.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Kurt Westergaard, cartoonist.
He gained global notoriety in 2005 for his controversial depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten, which published 12 editorial cartoons of the principal figure of Islam under the headline, “The Face of Mohammed.”
Westergaard was behind the most controversial of the cartoons published by the paper, showing the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, according to the BBC. The cartoon intended to make a point about self-censorship and criticism of Islam.
He was 86, and died in his sleep.
Edwin Edwards, former governor of Louisiana.
In January 2011, Mr. Edwards was released from a federal prison in Oakdale, La., after serving more than eight years of a 10-year sentence for bribery and extortion by rigging Louisiana’s riverboat casino licensing process during his last term in office.
Six months later he married. And in the fall, he rode in an open convertible through cheering crowds waving Edwards-for-governor signs at an election-day barbecue. “As you know, they sent me to prison for life,” he told them. “But I came back with a wife.”
Before Mr. Edwards, no one had ever been elected to more than two terms as governor of Louisiana. Indeed, the state constitution prohibits more than two consecutive terms. But from 1972 to 1996, with a couple of four-year furloughs to stoke up his improbable comebacks, Mr. Edwards was the undisputed king of Baton Rouge, a Scripture-quoting, nonsmoking teetotaler who once considered life as a preacher.
Henry Parham. He served in the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion during D-Day.
…
His battalion hoisted large balloons to heights of up to 2,000 feet over Omaha and Utah beaches between D-Day and August 1944, carrying out the mission during the night hours so the balloons would not be spotted by incoming German planes. The balloons were tethered to the ground by cables fitted with small packets of explosive charges. German planes that became entangled in them were likely to be severely damaged or downed.
Mr. Parham’s section of the balloon battalion had reached Omaha Beach in the hours after the arrival of the first waves of infantrymen. (The other section was assigned to Utah Beach.) When the balloonists stepped off small boats, they witnessed a scene of carnage. The American forces, raked by German fire from high ground, had taken heavy casualties.
“We landed in water up to our necks,” Mr. Parham once told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Once we got there we were walking over dead Germans and Americans on the beach. Bullets were falling all around us.”
Mr. Parham told CNN in 2019: “I prayed to the Good Lord to save me. I did my duty. I did what I was supposed to do as an American.”
He was 99.
Thomas Cleary, noted translator and writer.
William Smith, prolific actor. He has 274 credits in IMDB, including the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Rich Man, Poor Man”, “Darker Than Amber”, “Any Which Way You Can”, and “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”.
Let us pause for a moment of silence in memory of FotB and valued commenter guffaw, who originated Gavrilo Princip Day.
“The Guns of August” is a long (almost 1:40) documentary adapted from Barbara Tuchman’s book.
Shameful confession: I greatly admire Barbara Tuchman. I loved The Proud Tower. I think Practicing History is an excellent collection of essays. I read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century a long time ago, but it was at the right time for me, and I’m fond of that book.
I have never been able to read The Guns of August. I have tried three times and just cannot get through it. I think it may be a matter of just too many people to keep track of…
Bonus: I may be pushing things a little bit, but here you go: “The Russian Civil War in Siberia” from “The Great War” channel.
It isn’t exactly WWI, but I believe (and I think Mike Duncan will agree with me) that the 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War were consequences of a lot of things, including WWI, so I’m including this here.
Bonus #2: This is an aspect of history I’m interested in, but I have not had a chance to sit down and watch this video yet. “Blood and Oil: The Middle East in World War I”. Looking at the description and comments, it may be somewhat biased: I would take this with some salt.
Note for myself: The T. E. Lawrence Society.
This is a little newer than I usually like to use, and I have not watched all of it yet. But I have linked to DeviantOllam before, I trust his content, and I don’t think he’s quite as popular in the gun community as hickok45 or Forgotten Weapons…
“Gun Storage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Gun Safes and Locks”.
From the wonderful folks at Wilson Combat: “Gun Guys Ep. 34 with Bill and Ken”. This time, they discuss “Elmer Keith, the .44 Magnum, and the .357”. I like this because it serves as a decent introduction to Elmer Keith (who I have touched on before) for those folks who are interested in guns, but came after the Elmer Keith era.
Jerry Miculek shoots his S&W 5906 Performance Center pistol (which was apparently an overrun from a contract with the Mexican Special Forces). Bonus: 9MM Incendiary ammo.
I watched this over the weekend (it popped up in my recommendations). Then I started looking at 5906 pistols on GunBroker…
Random acts of hoplobiblophilia:
Modern Gunsmithing by Clyde Baker. This is only “fair” at best, and yes, that is a crappy dust jacket. But this is one of those original Samworth/Small-Arms Technical Publishing Company editions that are hard to find. Ran across this at HPB, and paid what I think is about the same price as I would have paid on ABEBooks.
One of the odd things about Samworth’s books is that he didn’t use a printers key, so it’s hard to tell what printing one of his books is. You have to rely on internal clues, like the advertising pages in the back of the book: while the original copyright is 1933, the advertising page in the back is dated September 1950, and includes some SATPCO post-WWII books.
Wow. Maybe I will be able to get it together to do Bloomsday greeting cards before the 100th anniversary of Ulysses next year.
In the meantime, please to enjoy: by way of Hacker News, vintage recordings of James Joyce actually reading from his works.
Claudia Barrett. She did some Westerns and detective shows (including an appearance on “77 Sunset Strip”, making her the second person from that series to get an obit this week), but was out of acting by 1964.
She may be most famous as the female lead in “Robot Monster“.
Ernie Lively. He knocked around quite a bit (his first credit was 1975, and his last was 2020). He appeared multiple times on “The West Wing”, “Murder She Wrote” and “The Dukes of Hazzard”. However, he seems to be most famous as the father of “Bridget” in the two “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” movies. (“Bridget” was played by his daughter, Blake Lively.)
Professor Hollander joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1962 and taught beloved classes on Dante for 42 years. For medievalist scholarship, the three-volume translation he produced with Ms. Hollander found a wide degree of public interest, including two admiring reviews in The New Yorker.
In one, in 2007, the New Yorker critic Joan Acocella called all three volumes of their translation “the best on the market.” (The Hollanders produced “Inferno” in 2000, “Purgatorio” in 2003 and the last volume of the epic allegorical work, “Paradiso,” in 2007.)
…
The couple brought complementary strengths to the project. Ms. Hollander, the author of five books of poetry, attended to the music of the language. Professor Hollander ensured the translation’s accuracy and wrote introductions to each volume, along with notes to the text.
Ms. Acocella estimated that the notes amounted to 30 times the length of “The Divine Comedy” itself. That was Professor Hollander’s style. He interpreted moralistically and theologically passages usually appreciated for their beauty. His erudition wore down fellow scholars. He reported that A.B. Giamatti, the Renaissance expert and former president of Yale University, once asked him, “Are you going to try to ruin this scene for me too, Hollander?”
One of the reasons I wanted to post this here (other than, he sounds like a really nifty guy: you should read the whole obit, especially the part about his stroke) is that I wanted to ask the huddled, wretched masses: does anybody have any experience with Dante translations, and can you recommend a good one?
Other than the Hollander one, Thomas Harris (yes, that Thomas Harris) likes the Robert Pinsky translation. Anthony Esolen (a writer I greatly admire) has also done a transalation
I could just read Rod Dreher’s book and see if he recommends one: I do want to read How Dante Can Save Your Life (and that’s actually what started me on this quest), but I’m having trouble finding a decent copy at a decent price.
(All links are Amazon affiliate links, for the record.)
Speaking of Rod Dreher, this is a beautifully written post about the death of a friend. Followup.
I’ve actually bought a fair number of used gun books over the past few months. I didn’t bother writing about them here because they were pretty much all semi-crappy copies of books that I bought for reading purposes, not really worthy of a blog entry.
This is something I ran across today at Half-Price Books that I found interesting for more than one reason.
Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa by Arthur H. Neumann. This is a reprint of the original 1898 edition, and volume 3 in the “Library of African Adventure” series from St. Martin’s Press. It has a little wear to the top and bottom of the dust jacket, but not too bad, and was purchased for about half of what “good” copies are going for on Amazon.
The other reason I found this interesting: you know who edited the “Library of African Adventure” series?
No, not that guy: he had his own series. The “Library of African Adventure” was edited by…noted SF writer Mike Resnick. Which is no great shock, as Resnick wrote extensively about Africa: it was simply an unexpected find.
Now I want to find the other volumes, especially since I’ve completed my Capstick set.
There is also something called “Resnick’s Library of African Adventure” that comes up when you search Amazon. I’m not 100% sure it is the same series – I suspect it is, but the bibliographical information on Amazon is scant, and the covers seem…less subdued.