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.
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.
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.
In great haste, because this is breaking and I have seven minutes left on my coffee break:
Baltimore mayor Catherine E. Pugh resigned today.
The mayor has been on leave since April 1st, dealing with health issues.
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…
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.
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”.
℣. Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine
℟. Et lux perpetua luceat ei:
℣. Requiescat in pace.
℟. Amen.https://t.co/23fdagOt6d— Fr. Brendon Laroche (@padrebrendon) April 15, 2019
"My pen halts, though I do not." RIP Gene Wolfe. Thank you, and godspeed. pic.twitter.com/Iw8mOtuOrt
— Jeffrey Alan Love (@jeffreyalanlove) April 15, 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 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:
"My definition of a great story has nothing to do with "a varied and interesting background." It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure." – Gene Wolfe
— Dean Bradley (@DeanBradleySFF) April 15, 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.
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.
…
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:
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.
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.
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…
Later that year…
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.
Kind of a brief one, but I didn’t get to use this trope last night, so what the heck:
The Baltimore Sun has a good summary of the “Healthy Holly” scandal that’s threatening to take down Mayor (and former state Senator) Catherine Pugh.
There’s also a “special section” that collects links to their other stories. My personal favorite so far:
How the rise of the self-publishing industry contributed to the problems for Baltimore’s mayor
I’m not kidding. That’s an actual headline from an actual article.
Come on. It’s Baltimore, gentlemen: if it wasn’t this, it would have been something else. Grifters gonna grift, and technology doesn’t change that.
If I was a book collector and had $100,000 to spend, what should I spend it on?
Let’s see. For that money, I could maybe get two copies of the UK first of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Or maybe just one.
Or I could be like this guy, who paid $100,000 for one book from “Healthy Holly LLC”.
Should I even mention that this guy does business with the city of Baltimore? And that “Healthy Holly LLC” is the mayor’s publishing company?
It doesn’t sound as interesting as Harry Potter, but it may be equally rare:
Bonus: the mayor has an “upscale second hand boutique” that’s been selling Groupons. (Groupons? Those are still a thing?) But when a reporter bought one and went to visit yesterday afternoon…
Getting back to the books, it’s a shame nobody can find them: Lawrence has a birthday coming up, and he’s a connoisseur of books published by political hacks to get money under the table.
Richard Erdman, noted character actor. He was on “Community”, which I never watched. But before that, he seems to have done guest shots on many TV shows of the 1970s and 1960s (except “Mannix”). Like everyone else in Hollywood, he was also in “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, and played Hoffman in “Stalag 17”.
Al Silverman passed away on Sunday. He worked in publishing, spending 16 years with Book of the Month Club and later becoming an editor with Viking Books.
Before that, he was a freelance sportswriter and later editor in chief of “Sport” magazine. While he was editing “Sport”, he met and wrote about Gayle Sayers, who was recovering from a knee injury. Ultimately, Mr. Silverman and Mr. Sayers collaborated on Mr. Sayers’s autobiography, I Am Third. And, in turn, a chapter from that book became the basis for “Brian’s Song”.
Another great story:
When the running back Paul Hornung was celebrated for leading the Green Bay Packers to the 1961 National Football League championship, Sport awarded him a 1962 Corvette. Mr. Hornung soon after sold the car and got into a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service in United States Tax Court after he failed to disclose the full market value of the car as part of his gross income for 1962.
“My father testified to Hornung’s defense that he should not pay income tax on the car,” Brian Silverman said. His father argued that the car was an unsolicited reward for Mr. Hornung’s talents and thus should be tax-exempt — “the same as a Nobel Prize, because football was Hornung’s art and he performed it to an award-winning degree.” Mr. Hornung lost the case.
Or is it hoplobibilophilia? What do you call it when you have a fondness for gun books?
Whatever it is, I have the fever. And the only cure is…more cowbell, er, buying more books. Now it’s your turn to suffer for my -phila.
Seriously, I’ve picked up a couple of books lately that I want to endorse and document Lawrence style. (Please do not confuse “Lawrence style” with “Gangnam style“.) Half-Price Books has been having another coupon sale, but the first two books here I actually ordered new from the publishers.