Dr. William P. Murphy Jr., another one of those unsung big damn heroes.
His most famous invention was probably the plastic blood bag:
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No matter what I may have thought of Lear’s politics, he served honorably in WWII (52 combat missions in B-17s).
John Nichols, author. (The Milagro Beanfield War)
Denny Laine, of the Moody Blues and Wings.
Tim Dorsey, mystery author. Obit from The Rap Sheet.
I’ve never read any of his books, but he seems to be generally classified as a member of the Florida School of Wackos genre. (See also: Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry).
Long before Florida Man became the Sunshine State’s unofficial mascot, there was Serge A. Storms, the antihero at the heart of Mr. Dorsey’s 26 novels, beginning with “Florida Roadkill” in 1999.
Brilliant and high-strung, Serge is also a serial killer who channels his homicidal urges into taking out various baddies he encounters during a series of improbable adventures around Florida. He usually rolls in the company of Coleman, his semi-lucid friend whose proficiency with various narcotics is so well known that strangers ask him for autographs.
The Firearm Blog coverage of the Remington Ilion shutdown. Per their story, Model 700 production had already shifted to Georgia earlier this year.
Betty Rollin, journalist and author.
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Readers’ response to “First You, Cry” was strong. “The letters I loved were from women who had it, sending me their cancer jokes,” Ms. Rollin told The Times in 1993, when the book was rereleased. “That kind of laughter is my favorite thing — it’s such a diffuser.”
She added: “Somebody once said that I was the first person to make cancer funny, which was the best compliment I ever had. I mean, cancer isn’t funny, but if you’ve got it and if you’re able to make jokes about it, I think that keeps you sane.”
Marty Krofft. THR. Thing I did not know: Sid and Marty got their start in the 1950s doing puppet shows…adult puppet shows.
Marty joined his brother full-time in 1958 after Sid’s assistant left, and they opened Les Poupees de Paris, an adults-only burlesque puppet show that played to sold-out crowds at a dinner theater in the San Fernando Valley.
“Les Poupees took us from an act, Sid’s act, to a business,” Marty said. Shirley MacLaine was there on opening night, and Richard Nixon came during his run for president.
Les Poupees went on the road and played world’s fairs in Seattle in 1962, New York in 1964 and San Antonio in 1968. It featured 240 puppets, mostly topless women, and Time magazine called it a “dirty puppet show.”
After that, it was so popular, “we couldn’t even get our own best friends in the theater,” Sid said. It drew an estimated 9.5 million viewers in its first decade of performances.
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Pufnstuf‘s psychedelic sets and costumes were a big hit with college kids, and The Beatles asked for a full set of episode tapes to be sent to them in England. The look of the show prompted many whispers that the brothers took drugs (pot for sure, maybe LSD as well?), something Marty denied.
“You can’t do a show stoned,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in January 2016.
The Kroffts followed Pufnstuf with The Bugaloos (1970-72), the Claymation series Lidsville (1971-73), Sigmund and the Sea Monsters (1973-75) and Land of the Lost (1974-76), which spawned an ill-fated Will Ferrell movie adaptation released in 2009. Those shows were wildly popular in syndication as well.
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In “Lost,” which premiered on NBC in 1974, a family plunges into another dimension populated by dinosaurs, primates called Pakuni and dangerous lizard-men called Sleestaks. Like “Pufnstuf,” the show was about the family’s attempts to get home while navigating their strange new surroundings.
Episodes were written by seasoned science fiction writers like Ben Bova, Larry Niven and Norman Spinrad, and a linguist developed a language of sorts for the Pakuni.
Question: is Land of the Lost the earliest TV show with a constructed language? (No, don’t say it: according to Wikipedia, development of the Klingon language didn’t begin until ST3, so LotL precedes.)
Charles Peters, founder of the Washington Monthly. When I was young, I spent a lot of time in the high school library, which had a subscription to the WM under Peters. I remember the magazine’s habit of challenging conventional wisdom and orthodoxy: for example, an article arguing that abortion should remain legal…but should also be a rare event, and should be strongly discouraged under almost all circumstances.
Bob Contant, co-founder of the St. Mark’s Bookshop in NYC. I’m mostly noting this here because of the insight it provides into NYC bookselling:
After working as the manager of the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, Mr. Contant, along with Mr. McCoy and two other colleagues, Tom Evans and Peter Dargis, opened the St. Mark’s Bookshop in November 1977 in a $345-a-month storefront at 13 St. Mark’s Place. (Today, apartments in the building sell for upward of $1.6 million, and the Thai-inspired dessert emporium on the ground floor offers Soku tangerine soju seltzer for $10 a can.)
As the East Village exploded with punk vibrancy and business boomed, the store moved to more spacious quarters at 12 St. Mark’s Place in 1987. Six years later, the two remaining partners, Mr. Contant and Mr. McCoy, were invited by the Cooper Union to relocate nearby to the institution’s new dormitory development at 31 Third Avenue, a sleek, award-winning space designed by Zivkovic Associates. They were able to do so thanks to a generous loan from Robert Rodale, a publisher of wellness books and magazines.
But the 2008 recession, combined with a proposed doubling of the store’s $20,000-a-month rent, made the space unaffordable, even after support from Salman Rushdie and Patti Smith, a crowdsourcing campaign that raised $24,000 and a concession by Cooper Union in 2011 to reduce the rent temporarily.
In 2014, the store moved to its fourth and final home, at 136 East Third Street, a side street, as a commercial tenant in a city housing project a half-mile southeast of the original location. Mr. Contant bought out Mr. McCoy for $1, and by the time he grudgingly shuttered the bookshop in its last incarnation in 2016, he owed the city something like $70,000 in back rent; he also owed hefty sums to publishers and wholesalers and some $35,000 in unpaid sales tax. Mr. Contant went bankrupt.
To be fair:
The store never invested in potential revenue add-ons like regular book fairs or readings, and it never sold used books, offered deep discounts or opened an in-store cafe.
Instead, it stubbornly stuck to its classic business model. It sold avant-garde literature, books from small independent presses on subjects like queer theory and anarchy, artisanal greeting cards, art monographs, photo albums of Russian prison tattoos and a selection of 2,000 magazines and underground newspapers, as well as booklets that hungry local writers delivered on consignment.
Willie Hernández, relief pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. ESPN.
The left-handed Hernández had a 13-year career but is mostly known for his role as the closer on one of the most dominant teams in the past 40 years. The 1984 Tigers, led by Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker and Jack Morris, opened 35-5 and cruised to the AL East title with a 104-58 mark before sweeping Kansas City in the AL Championship Series and beating San Diego in a five-games World Series.
Hernández had a 9-3 record and 32 saves in 33 chances in 1984, with a 1.92 ERA over 80 games and 140⅓ innings. He is among just 11 pitchers to win the Cy Young and MVP in the same year, edging Kansas City’s Dan Quisenberry for Cy Young in 1984 and Minnesota’s Kent Hrbek for MVP.
(Thanks to pigpen51 for the tip.)
Herbert Gold, novelist.
Carlton Pearson. I had not heard of him previously, but I find his story interesting. He was a prominent evangelist who ran a megachurch in Tulsa. He was a board member of Oral Roberts University. And then…
While watching a TV report in the 1990s on children starving during the Rwanda genocide, Bishop Pearson had an epiphany. He could not believe that God would consign innocent souls to hell who had not accepted Jesus Christ as savior before their deaths. He concluded that hell does not exist, except as earthly misery created by human beings; that God loves all mankind; and that everyone is already saved.
It was a view he shared in interviews and preached at his church, the Higher Dimensions Family Church, which he co-founded in 1981 and which grew into one of the largest in Tulsa, known for its multiracial pews in a city and a faith, evangelical Christianity, that was largely segregated.
“I believe that most people on planet Earth will go to heaven, because of Calvary, because of the unconditional love of God and the redemptive work of the cross, which is already accomplished,” Bishop Pearson told The Tulsa World in 2002, adding that he included Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists among the loved. “I’m re-evaluating everything,” he said.
This led to him being branded a heretic, leaving the denomination he’d been ordained in, and losing his megachurch.
Mr. Bogle, Bishop Pearson’s agent, said he often asked him about whether he regretted the loss of prestige, income and worshipers that followed his turning away from Pentecostal Christian orthodoxy.
“I said, ‘You’ve lost a lot of money, don’t you think you should have just shut up?’” Mr. Bogle said. “He would always say, ‘No, I don’t believe I made a mistake.’”
I could do three, maybe four, very short posts covering and updating about various news items.
Or I could do one post hitting all of those items, even though it wouldn’t be as organized as doing multiple posts. But it’d just be one post, and maybe slightly more substantial. So one post it is.
Obit watch: A.S. Byatt, noted British author (Possession).
George Brown, drummer for Kool & the Gang.
Non-flaming non-hyenas watch: Mike the Musicologist sent over a link (but I’m using the Post‘s instead) stating that the gun charges against NYC Councilwoman Inna Vernikov are going to be dropped. Turns out that her gun was unloaded and also missing the recoil spring assembly, so it couldn’t be fired.
This actually makes me feel less sympathetic to her. It seems like she was carrying the gun as a prop, not because she felt a need for protection. And that doesn’t strike me as being very smart.
Firings watch: Chris Partridge, linebackers coach at the University of Michigan. This does seem to be tied to the ongoing scandal.
There are somewhat more than hints in that article and this one that UMich has found out some things about what’s been going on that are causing tsuris.
I think I promised old gun sights last time, so old gun sights is what you’re getting…
Michael Bishop, one of the great SF writers of our day. Lawrence sent over a Facebook link from Asimov’s, and Michael Swanwick has a very nice obit on his blog.
I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Bishop in person twice, once at a signing in Houston and the other at an Armadillocon (back in the day when I was still going to those). He always treated me with a great deal of kindness, which surprised me. But I guess it shouldn’t have: the word everyone seems to use when describing Mr. Bishop is “kind”. I think I made him smile when I brought breakfast tacos for an 8 AM Sunday morning science fiction poetry panel.
I didn’t know (as Mr. Swanwick points out) that he was a “sincere Christian”. We never got to the point where we talked about religion. But I think I’m going to ask my people to say a prayer for the repose of his soul Sunday morning. He was a good man. I liked his writing, and his passing leaves a hole in the world.
Officer Jorge Pastore of the Austin Police Department. He was killed during a SWAT standoff Saturday morning. Two apparent hostages and the suspected shooter also died in the incident.
Pastore’s passing was one of three deaths in total for the Austin Police Department over the weekend.
Two other officers died in separate incidents, one retired officer in a car crash and another officer died by suicide.
Peter Seidler, chairman and controlling owner of the San Diego Padres.
Other credits include “Quincy M.E.”, “Adam-12”, “Perry Mason”, and (the original) “The Fugitive”.
Louise Glück, poet and winner of the Nobel Prize (also the Pulitzer and the National Book Award).
Two things that popped up in my reading that I thought were worth sharing.
1. CrimeReads has a fairly good piece by Keith Roysdon (generally one of their less pretentious writers): “To Film and Thrive in L.A.: Three Lesser-Praised Friedkin Films Are Classics“.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen “To Live and Die in L.A.” and I’d kind of like to see it again. My feelings about “Sorcerer” are well known. I’ve never seen “Cruising” but I do want to as part of my “watch all of Friedkin’s films” project.
2. “Facts of Life: For Outdoorsmen and Ordinary Gentlemen” by Richard (The Scout Rifle Study) Mann.
I think there’s some pretty sound advice here. You should interpret that as “it agrees with my prejudices”. For example:
And:
I have several favorite bookstores.
One of those is Chartwell Booksellers in New York, which I have never visited but have done business with by mail. Chartwell is a bookshop specializing in Winston Churchill books and related items.
They turned 40 on April 11th of this year, and have been celebrating by doing a series of readings. The first one was John Lithgow reading from William Manchester’s The Last Lion.
I thought some folks might get a kick out of the most recent reading: Bryan Cranston reads from Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins.
They are less than halfway through the series (the Cranston video is #19 out of a planned 40), so it might be worth subscribing to their YouTube channel so you can see what comes next.
Here’s something else I thought was interesting. I was tipped off to it by the second edition of Holstory, R.E.D. Nichols and John Witty’s book about the history of holsters in the 20th Century. I’ve written about that book previously (in both editions) so I won’t repeat myself here.
This is legendary holster designer Chic Gaylord’s appearance on “What’s My Line?” on May 1, 1960.
I’ve set the video to start with Mr. Gaylord’s appearance, but it won’t hurt you to watch the whole thing. The guest before him was Gloria Bale, a very cute trapeze artist. (If she was 17 at the time, she’d be 80 today, so there’s a chance she’s still alive. Miss Bale, if you’re out there somewhere, I hope you had a wonderful life.) And the mystery guest is Laurence Harvey.
This is a nice flashback to a time when guns were less demonized then they are today (well, NYC possibly excepted). I really like Dorothy Kilgallen’s “Ooooo, I’d like one of those.” My only complaint is that they don’t show Mr. Gaylord with any of his products, but I’m sure there were practical and legal reasons why they couldn’t do that.
“Will this parade of Samworth books ever end?” cries my loyal reader.
Actually, yes. I think this is the final Samworth I have to catalog…so far. I’m still short of a complete set.