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Obit watch: May 30, 2019.

Thursday, May 30th, 2019

I haven’t found a print obituary to point to yet, but Lawrence tipped me off to a Facebook post: multiple award winning horror writer Dennis Etchison has passed on.

Also by way of Lawrence: Louis Levi Oakes, last of the Mohawk code talkers.

The veteran was one of 17 Mohawks from Akwesasne, which straddles the Quebec, Ontario and New York state borders, who received code-talker training while stationed in Louisiana.
Kanien’kéha, the Mohawk language, was one of 33 Indigenous languages used during the war to send encoded messages between Allied forces so enemies could not understand what was being said.

…

“I only knew Levi for a very short period of time, but he meant a tremendous amount to me,” said Marc Miller, parliamentary secretary to Canada’s minister of Crown-Indigenous relations. “I can only imagine what he meant to his family and his people who had the privilege of knowing him for far longer.
“Due to the secrecy of his mission in WW II, the extent of his contributions as a Mohawk code talker have only recently been known and honoured. My hope is that we continue to honour his memory and contributions in death much longer than we did in life.”

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

Obit watch: May 29, 2019.

Wednesday, May 29th, 2019

Tony Horwitz, prominent journalist and best-selling author. (Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes)

His wife, Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, said he had collapsed while walking in Chevy Chase, Md., and was declared dead at George Washington University Hospital. The cause has not yet been determined, she said.

He was only 60.

“Last week I saw my cardiologist,” Mr. Horwitz wrote in The Times last month. “He told me I drink too much.”
Mr. Horwitz acknowledged his occupational hazard, but made a case for what he called bar-stool democracy. His sojourn in the South, he said, had him discarding stereotypes and seeing blue-collar conservatives as “the three-dimensional individuals I drank and debated with in factory towns, Gulf Coast oil fields and distressed rural crossroads.”
He expressed the hope that they would remember him not as “one of those ‘coastal elites’ dripping with contempt and condescension toward Middle America,” he wrote, but “rather, as that guy from ‘up north’ who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down.”

Posted in Books, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 27, 2019.

Monday, May 27th, 2019

Bart Starr, one of the greatest of the Green Bay Packers. NYT.

Starr’s name may have been the most flamboyant thing about him. But he proved to be skilled, sly and, by at least one measure, incomparably successful: He won three N.F.L. championships (for the seasons played in 1961, ’62 and ’65) in the pre-Super Bowl era, and then the first two Super Bowls, in January of 1967 and ’68. That Packers’ run of N.F.L. championships helped bring new attention to professional football as it moved into the Super Bowl era. (With his victory in 2019, Tom Brady has won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots.)
Starr was named the league’s most valuable player in 1966 and received the same honor in Super Bowls I and II. He was selected to the Pro Bowl four times. And on a team known for running — with the flashy Paul Hornung and the rugged Jim Taylor (who died in October) — Starr was one of the league’s most efficient passers. He led the N.F.L. in that crucial category in three seasons and, on average, for all of the 1960s — even though his rival Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts was often viewed as better. Starr set career records for completion percentage, 57.4, and consecutive passes without an interception, 294.

Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist.

Much as atoms can be slotted into the rows and columns of the periodic table of the elements, Dr. Gell-Mann found a way, in 1961, to classify their smaller pieces — subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and mesons, which were being discovered by the dozen in cosmic rays and particle accelerator blasts. Arranged according to their properties, the particles clustered in groups of eight and 10.
In a moment of whimsy, Dr. Gell-Mann, who hadn’t a mystical bone in his body, named his system the Eightfold Way after the Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment. He groaned ever after when people mistakenly inferred that particle physics was somehow related to Eastern philosophy.
Looking deeper, Dr. Gell-Mann realized that the patterns of the Eightfold Way could be further divided into triplets of even smaller components. He decided to call them quarks after a line from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”

Edmund Morris, biographer. I’m slowly working my way through his Theodore Roosevelt biographies, and I’d argue he’s at least as famous for those as he is for Dutch:

The columnist George Will attacked “Dutch” as “dishonorable,” and the writer Joan Didion accused Mr. Morris of resorting to the fictional device to conceal his own inadequacies as a fact-gatherer.
One of his toughest critics, Michiko Kakutani of The Times, called the book a “loony hodgepodge of fact and fiction” about a president that mimicked “the very blurring of reality and state-managed illusion that that president was often accused of perpetrating.”

No judgment intended here: this is in last place because it is breaking news. Bill Buckner passed away a short time ago.

Buckner was dependable at the plate, registering a .300 batting average in seven seasons and accumulating 2,715 hits and 174 home runs during his two decades in the Major Leagues. He won the National League’s batting title in 1980 and was an All-Star in 1981, when he was with the Chicago Cubs.

He was most famous, unfortunately, for bobbling a play during game 6 of the World Series in 1986, costing the Red Sox the game and probably the Series. But there are other Sox fans who can speak with more authority on Mr. Buckner and his legacy.

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Physics, Politics, Science, Sports | Comments Closed

Photo of the day.

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019

Technically, this is a couple of days old, and I’m not going to reproduce it here, out of respect for the NYT‘s intellectual property rights.

But if you ever wanted to see a large photo of Thomas Harris (yes, the Hannibal guy) holding a live possum named Bruce…here you go.

Posted in Books, Mammals, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 18, 2019.

Saturday, May 18th, 2019

Herman Wouk, noted author. (The Caine Mutiny, adapted into the Humphrey Bogart movie and a Broadway play, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial”. The Winds of War, basis for the ABC mini-series. War and Remembrance, basis for another ABC mini-series.)

And the list goes on. He was quite prolific, and died just short of 104.

“In the long run justice is done,” he told Writer’s Digest in 1966. “In the short run geniuses, minor writers and mountebanks alike take their chance. Imaginative writing is a wonderful way of life, and no man who can live by it should ask for more.”

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 6, 2019.

Monday, May 6th, 2019

Rachel Held Evans, Christian author.

An Episcopalian, Ms. Evans left the evangelical church in 2014 because, she said, she was done trying to end the church’s culture wars and wanted to focus instead on building a new community among the church’s “refugees”: women who wanted to become ministers, gay Christians and “those who refuse to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith.”
Ms. Evans’s spiritual journey and unique writing voice fostered a community of believers who yearned to seek God and challenge conservative Christian groups that they felt were often exclusionary.
Her congregation was online, and her Twitter feed became her church, a gathering place for thousands to question, find safety in their doubts and learn to believe in new ways.

…

Ms. Evans was known to challenge traditional — and largely male and conservative — authority structures. She would spar with evangelical men on Twitter, debating them on everything from human sexuality to politics to biblical inerrancy.
One of those men, Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said that he was her theological opposite in almost every way, but that she had always treated him with kindness and humor.
“I was on the other side of her Twitter indignation many times, but I respected her because she was never a phony,” Mr. Moore said. “Even in her dissent, she made all of us think, and helped those of us who are theological conservatives to be better because of the way she would challenge us.”

She wasn’t someone I’d ever heard of (until I read the NYT obit) and I suspect there are a lot of things we’d disagree on. But there’s something about her story that touches me, and 37 years old is just too young to die.

Statement from her website.

It strikes me today that the liturgy of Ash Wednesday teaches something that nearly everyone can agree on. Whether you are part of a church or not, whether you believe today or your doubt, whether you are a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic or a so-called “none” (whose faith experiences far transcend the limits of that label) you know this truth deep in your bones: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.”
Death is a part of life.

Posted in Books, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Healthy Holly update.

Thursday, May 2nd, 2019

In great haste, because this is breaking and I have seven minutes left on my coffee break:

Baltimore mayor Catherine E. Pugh resigned today.

“Dear citizens of Baltimore I would like to thank you for allowing me to serve as the 50th mayor. It has been an honor and privilege,” Pugh, 69, said in a statement read by Silverman. “I’m sorry for the harm that I have caused to the image of the city of Baltimore and the credibility of the office of the mayor. Baltimore deserves a mayor who can move our great city forward.”

The mayor has been on leave since April 1st, dealing with health issues.

Posted in Books, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Hoplobibilophilia.

Tuesday, April 30th, 2019

My birthday was a week ago last Saturday (April 20th).

You know what this means, right?

Right. I’ve been buying books.

I ordered some things off of my Amazon wish list, since there were several items available used in the right combination of price and condition. Right now, I’m reading Tuchman’s Practicing History: Selected Essays: since that’s a collection of shorter work, I’m also planning to start Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War and alternate the two for variety.

(And, yes, I kind of want to see the Netflix series based on Five Came Back. Between that and “The Highwaymen”, I’m really tempted to get a Netflix trial, even though I refuse to pay for television.)

(Other things that were in the Amazon batch: The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics, which won an Edgar a few years back. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, for your obligatory Catholic content (CathCon?). More seriously, I like a lot of O’Connor, I know Rod Dreher is a big Walker Percy fan and I’d like to understand why, and I’m kind of interested in Merton. (Though, going back to Mr. Dreher again, I’m not sure now that I want to read Merton.) And The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy.)

Mike the Musicologist came up Friday night and we spent the weekend running around. We had a very good joint birthday dinner (Lawrence‘s is a few days before mine) at Lonesome Dove.

After dinner, we went back to Lawrence‘s and watched the 1943 “Stormy Weather“. “Stormy Weather” sort of presents itself as a loose “biography” of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (renamed “Bill Williamson” for the film). In truth, the biographical elements are an extremely thin skeleton…upon which is hung a whole bunch of fantastic musical performances by Robinson, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, the Nicholas Brothers, and others.

(I love this entry from Wikipedia about the Nicholas Brothers: “Gregory Hines declared that if their biography were ever filmed, their dance numbers would have to be computer generated because no one now could emulate them.“)

Unfortunately, our plans for Sunday fell through (they caught the kangaroo) but we were able to spend the afternoon talking about kitchen remodeling with some friends of ours. Yes, this is the exciting life of a 54-year-old.

I took Monday off (another perk of being a full-time Cisco employee: you get a free day off on or around your birthday) and went running errands with Mom. This involved stopping at both the Round Rock and central Half-Price Books locations. And HPB sent me a 15% off your total purchase coupon for my birthday. And it just so happened that they had a whole bunch of interesting gun books…

(more…)

Posted in Books, Food, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Movies, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 20, 2019.

Saturday, April 20th, 2019

NYT obit for Gene Wolfe.

Warren Adler, novelist. He is perhaps most famous as the author of The War of the Roses, which was adapted into the Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner film.

James W. McCord Jr., leader of the Watergate burglars.

On June 17, 1972, four expatriate Cubans and Mr. McCord, chief of security for the Nixon re-election campaign and a leader of the White House “plumbers” unit assigned to plug information leaks, broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington to fix problematic listening devices that they had planted weeks earlier.
But a night watchman alerted the police, and they were caught, odd burglars in business suits carrying cameras and walkie-talkies. E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent, and G. Gordon Liddy, the re-election committee’s general counsel, who ran the break-in from a nearby hotel room, fled but were soon arrested. Mr. McCord revealed at an arraignment that he had once worked for the C.I.A., and the unraveling began.

Interesting thing about this obit: Mr. McCord apparently passed away in June of 2017, but his death was not widely reported until recently.

Lorraine Warren, “psychic” fraud.

This was noted elsewhere earlier in the week, but for the historical record: Geraldyn M. “Jerri” Cobb, noted pilot and an early recruit for the astronaut program.

Posted in Books, History, Law, Movies, Nixon, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Gene Wolfe.

Tuesday, April 16th, 2019

Michael Swanwick. I love that story about the bags full of old books: I have a similar feeling to Wolfe’s sometimes when I’m watching an old movie, or (yes) handling an old book.

Brian Doherty at Reason’s “Hit and Run”.

Lawrence.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 16, 2019.

Tuesday, April 16th, 2019

Thanks to Alan Simpson for providing Gene Wolfe obit links. I’m still holding off a bit on posting here, as I’d like to see some things come together first.

In the meantime: Georgia Engel, Ted Baxter’s girlfriend/wife on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”. Apparently, she also had a gig on “Everybody Loves Raymond”, but I was one of the people who didn’t love Raymond. And she had a pretty substantial theater career, both before and after MTM.

“I was walking down the street one day after ‘Dolly’ closed to cash my unemployment check for $75,” Ms. Engel told The Toronto Star years later, “when I ran into John and he told me I had to be in his play ‘The House of Blue Leaves.’ I was so thrilled, until I got my first paycheck. I was making $74, one dollar less than unemployment.”

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

Obit watch: April 15, 2019.

Monday, April 15th, 2019

I am seeing unconfirmed reports that Gene Wolfe, one of the greatest SF authors ever to walk the face of the earth, has passed away.

I’ll try to link to reliable obits when I find them.

Edited to add:

Posted in Books, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 10, 2019.

Wednesday, April 10th, 2019

Charles Van Doren has passed away at the age of 93.

I wrote a little about this a while back, but to recap: Mr. Van Doren was from a cultured and educated family, had batchelor’s and master’s degrees, taught at Columbia University, and was “handsome, personable” with “an honest look about him”.

He was recruited by Albert Freedman to appear on the quiz show “Twenty-One” (he didn’t even own a TV at the time), and knocked off Herb Stempel, the reigning champion. (From some accounts I’ve seen, the producers basically felt Mr. Van Doren was “more appealing” to the audience than Mr. Stempel.)

Mr. Van Doren won $129,000 in 1956 money (the paper of record claims that’s equivalent to $1 million today).

In succeeding months, as rumors and skepticism over TV quiz shows grew, some contestants admitted that the programs had been fixed. The networks denied it, and Mr. Van Doren insisted that he had not taken part in any deceptions. Besides misleading the press and public, he continued to deceive his family and friends, and even lied to a Manhattan grand jury about his performances.
But on Nov. 2, 1959, he told congressional investigators that the shows had all been hoaxes, that he had been given questions and answers in advance, and that he had been coached to make the performances more dramatic.

Mr. Van Doren served a suspended sentence for second-degree perjury (for lying to the grand jury), went on to work for Encyclopaedia Britannica, and wrote a couple of books after he retired. (He also collaborated on some books with Mortimer Adler.)

The famous New Yorker article from 2008.

As far as I can tell, Herb Stempel is still alive at the age of 92.

Posted in Books, History, Law, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch part 2: April 9, 2019.

Tuesday, April 9th, 2019

Lt. Colonel Richard E. Cole (United States Air Force – Ret.)

He was 103.

Lieutenant (at the time) Cole was Jimmy Doolittle’s co-pilot on the Tokyo raid. He was the last survivor of Doolittle’s Raiders.

As Mr. Cole remembered it: “The tune ‘Wabash Cannonball’ kept running through my mind. One time I was singing and stomping my foot with such gusto that the boss looked at me in a very questioning manner, like he thought I was going batty.”

…

Doolittle, Lieutenant Cole and the other three crewmen of their plane bailed out in rain and fog soon after their bomber crossed the Chinese coast as darkness arrived. Lieutenant Cole landed in a pine tree atop a mountain and was unhurt except for a black eye. He made a hammock from his parachute and went to sleep. At dawn, he began walking, and late that day he made contact with Chinese guerrillas.
He was soon reunited with Doolittle, who had come down in a rice paddy, and their three fellow crewmen. The five joined up with other stranded airmen who had been rescued. The Chinese took them all on an arduous journey, much of it by riverboat, to an air strip, where they were picked up by a United States military transport plane and flown to Chungking, the headquarters for the Nationalist Chinese.

For the record:

Three of the 80 Doolittle raiders were killed in crash landings or while parachuting. Eight others were captured by the Japanese. Three of them were executed, another died of disease and starvation in captivity, and four survived more than three years of solitary confinement and brutality.

Lt. Cole went on to fly transport planes over the Hump. He also served with the 1st Air Commando Group.

Lt. Cole’s page on doolittleraider.com which contains some great photos. Obit from MySanAntonio.com. I had no idea the gentleman lived in Comfort (about 90 minutes up the road from me). Cool story from the Express News in 2018.

Dick Cole’s War: Doolittle Raider, Hump Pilot, Air Commando sounds like a fascinating book.

Rest in peace, soldier.

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Obits, Planes | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 7, 2019.

Sunday, April 7th, 2019

Vonda N. McIntyre, noted SF writer, passed away on Monday, but I did not know about this until Lawrence mentioned it last night. The NYT obit is datelined Friday, but I’m thinking it must have been posted late in the day.

Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, for the historical record.

Ly Tong. He was a pilot with the South Vietnamese Air Force.

A man who never accepted defeat, Mr. Ly Tong considered it his personal mission to take back his country from the Communists, who have ruled it since winning the Vietnam War in 1975.

So, in 1992, he…

…hijacked a commercial airliner after takeoff from Bangkok, ordered the pilot to fly low over Ho Chi Minh City — known as Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, before the Communist victory — and dumped thousands of leaflets calling for a popular uprising.
He then strapped on a parachute and followed the leaflets down to certain capture. He was released six years later in an amnesty and returned to the United States, where he had become a citizen after the war.

That takes us to 1998. In 2000…

…Mr. Ly Tong burnished his anti-Communist credentials with a flight over Havana in a rented plane, scattering leaflets as he had in Vietnam. He was commended on his return by Cuban-Americans in Florida, who gave him a victory parade.

Later that year…

…Mr. Ly Tong made a second trip over Ho Chi Minh City, sending down a new cascade of leaflets, which he had signed “Global Alliance for the Total Uprising Against Communists.”

He spent another six years in a Thai prison for that. The paper of record states he was unarmed and nobody was hurt during either of his hijackings, which makes me wonder about the definition of “hijacking”. But I digress.

In his final and most bizarre act of defiance, in 2010 in California, Mr. Ly Tong assaulted a Vietnamese singer whom he deemed sympathetic to the government of Vietnam. Disguised as a woman, he walked to the edge of the stage, reached up as if to hand the singer a bouquet and squirted a liquid, which may have been pepper spray, in her face. He was sentenced on multiple charges to six months in jail and three years’ probation. He appeared at his trial in drag.

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Obits, Planes, Politics | 1 Comment »

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