This is breaking, and I may have more later on: “Kinky” Friedman, Texas musician, author, and politician. KVUE. KSAT. HouChron (archived). (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Bill Cobbs, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “A Mighty Wind”, “The Slap Maxwell Story”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.
Finally, a weird one:
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Frederick Crews, literary critic and anti-Freudian.
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One unlikely cause that he devoted himself to in recent years was to assert the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys and is now in prison.
“I joined the small group of skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort,” Professor Crews wrote in one article in 2021, adding, “believe it or not, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone.”
Tamayo Perry, surfer and actor. He was 49, and apparently died after a shark attack.
“Back to Tulsa AGAIN? You were just there in November.”
True that. But the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association tries to rotate the symposiums around the country: “West Coast” one year (that was last year’s Glendale symposium), “East Coast” one year (Concord in 2022 and again next year), and “Central” (Tulsa this year).
I’m glad to say that this year’s hotel (which we were also at in 2021) was very very happy to see us. Last year’s hotel…wasn’t, and I’ll just leave it at that. The Renaissance Tulsa Hotel & Convention Center, on the other hand, could not have been more accomodating. (They did have “No Firearms or Weapons” stickers on the doors, but I never heard anything about anybody being hassled by the hotel staff.) I was privy to a conversation between one of my friends (who is a S&WCA officer) and one of the hotel managers, and the manager was very excited about having us back. We tip well, we don’t throw loud obnoxious parties, we have our own security, and we don’t trash the place.
There are two popular questions people ask me. Well, maybe one “popular” question and one not-so-popular.
“Did I buy any guns?” Answer: yes, but we’re still going through the transfer process. Once that’s complete, I plan to do a post. Here’s a hint:
“Did I buy any books?” asked nobody, ever. Answer: Yes! My book buddy from the Association came down from Canada and brought a stack of books. He thought I might be interested in “some” of them and planned to put the others on his sales table. I bought the whole lot, which came out to ten books by my count. This includes two new-to-me Samworths, one duplicate Samworth that’s in better shape than my copy, three Jack O’Connor books that I didn’t have, and some miscellaneous books from other publishers. I will be annoying my loyal reader with posts on those books as time permits.
Additionally, I happened to be working the registration table with another gentleman who, it turned out, was also a gun book person. He had somehow wound up with a spare copy of a recent gun book and gifted his spare to me.
I also picked up a fair amount of old paper, some of which my book buddy threw in as part of my purchase and some of which I bought from other dealers. I may scan and post some of this, especially when I do the gun post.
(And as a side note: the night before I left, I got two huge and heavy packages from an auction lot I’d placed a lowball bid on, and won. The lot was for old “gun and ammo” books. So I’ll be sharing interesting bits from that lot as well.)
Since Sunday was an off day, I drove up to Oklahoma City specifically to see the 45th Infantry Division Museum, which is now known as the Oklahoma National Guard Museum (and which is moving to a new facility). You may recognize the 45th Infantry Division Museum from such hits as:
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
I thought it was a very nice museum. They had me when I discovered there was an entire room devoted to Bill Mauldin.
Here. Have a random photo of some bazookas.
I’m very glad I went, especially now. As I noted above, the museum is moving to a new location. And I got into a conversation with the curator, who told me that they are planning to deaccession some things, as the new museum will be placing more emphasis on “telling stories”. I think that’s kind of a shame. Where else are you going to see this?
Except maybe in “The Green Berets“.
I encourage you to go now, if you’re in the area and have the opportunity. I would actually like to spend more time at the museum, but I wanted to get back in time for dinner and to take a couple of photos in Muskogee:
The first Girl Scout cookie sale took place in Muskogee in 1917. I could not find a reference to price at the time, but in 1922, the Girl Scouts recommended selling home-baked cookies for “25 to 30 cents per dozen”. $6 in 2024 money works out to 32 cents in 1922 money, and 24 cents in 1917 money, according to the inflation calculator I like to use.
I took a group of my friends to Siegi’s Sausage Factory and, as far as I could tell, everyone loved it. Another large group of my friends took me to the White River Fish Market and Restaurant, which I liked, but which was in a really gritty part of Tulsa.
We also went to an Abuelo’s one night, because it was very near the hotel. I went by myself one night to a place Mike the Musicologist calls “The Laugh-In Restaurant”: Sake 2 Me Sushi. It is all-you-can-eat, but I wasn’t wild about the sushi.
And Sunday night’s celebratory dinner was at The Chalkboard, because I haven’t been in forever and wanted some Beef Wellington.
Everything went smoothly. No complaints here, except that eight hours in a car does get a little tiring.
Usual thanks to the usual suspects. You know who you are. (It appears that word has gotten around within S&WCA circles that I have a blog.)
Seriously, I thought by now I’d have a clever intro for this. But I don’t. My Strategic Clever Reserves are exhausted. So why don’t we jump into this one? Warning: I think this is longer than usual…
…it’s rolling ’round the bend,
And I ain’t gun book blogged
Since I don’t know when…
Sort of scans, don’t it? And it was April 25th.
Anyway, I have a stack downstairs that’s getting precarious, even more so than the stack upstairs. So here’s a few for today, and maybe a few more in the next few days.
Happy 150th birthday, G. K. Chesterton!
“The Innocence of Father Brown” on Project Gutenberg.
“You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology.”
I didn’t want to post an obit watch yesterday because I thought it would distract from Memorial Day. So catching up…
Bill Walton. ESPN. Boston Globe (archived).
Richard “It’s a Small World” Sherman. NYT (archived).
Don Perlin, comic artist. (“Moon Knight”)
Adele Faber, author. I’m not a parent, but I have heard a lot of raves for How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.
FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Al Ruddy. He produced a couple of movies, and co-created “Hogan’s Heroes” and “Walker, Texas Ranger”.
Not exactly an obit, but Lee Goldberg wrote a nice tribute to Roger Corman.
He was cheap, but he paid us on time, treated us well and was a wonderful, creative collaborator.
Kabosu, the Shiba Inu who became a symbol of Dogecoin.
Hatitp to RoadRich, whose eulogy I will borrow: “Much sad. Very respect. No bite.”
Bob McCreadie. This is kind of a weird one, but actually not that weird by NYT standards. He was a prominent dirt track racer. Dirt track racing is apparently a big deal in parts of the East Coast, but not so much in NYC. The slightly surprising thing to me is that the paper of record treats him and his career with respect:
McCreadie was dirt racing’s perfect Everyman: Scrawny, bespectacled, with a bushy beard, he chain-smoked, cursed vigorously and hauled his racecars with his own pickup truck instead of the fancy trailers that many of his contemporaries used.
In northern New York, where he lived, the news media covered him with roughly the same exuberance with which New York City newspapers covered Babe Ruth in his heyday. The Post-Standard of Syracuse mentioned him more than 1,200 times in his career.
“He looked like a country bumpkin,” Ron Hedger, a longtime writer for Speed Sport Insider, said in a phone interview. “The fans identified with him, and they really loved him. There was always a mob of people waiting in line for an autograph.”
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In his best year, McCreadie won somewhere between $300,000 and $400,000 in race prizes. But his aggressive racing style had an occupational hazard: dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of crashes.
“You’re looking at someone who’s run thousands of races,” he told The Post-Standard in 2006. “If you tried to do percentage-wise out of the total — maybe 5 percent.”
This just in: Caleb Carr, author. You’ve probably at least heard of The Alienist:
He was also a prominent military historian. And he was horribly abused as a young boy by his father, the Beat author Lucien Carr.
Morgan Spurlock, of “Super Size Me” fame. NYT (archived) which I prefer:
But the film also came in for subsequent criticism. Some people pointed out that Mr. Spurlock refused to release the daily logs tracking his food intake. Health researchers were unable to replicate his results in controlled studies.
And in 2017, he admitted that he had not been sober for more than a week at a time in 30 years — meaning that, in addition to his “McDonald’s only” diet, he was drinking, a fact that he concealed from his doctors and the audience, and that most likely skewed his results.
The admission came in a statement in which he also revealed multiple incidents of sexual misconduct, including an encounter in college that he described as rape, as well as repeated infidelity and the sexual harassment of an assistant at his production company, Warrior Poets.
C. Gordon Bell, pioneering computer developer.
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At a time when computer companies like IBM were selling multimillion-dollar mainframe computers, Digital Equipment Corporation, which was founded and run by Kenneth Olsen, aimed at introducing smaller, powerful machines that could be purchased for a fraction of that cost. Mr. Bell was hired from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in 1960 as the company’s second computer engineer. He designed all its early entrants into what was then called the minicomputer market.
The PDP-8, a 12-bit computer introduced in 1965 with an $18,000 price tag, was considered the first successful minicomputer on the market. More important, Digital Equipment Corporation’s minicomputers were sold to scientists, engineers and other users, who interacted directly with the machines in an era when corporate computers were off limits to such users, housed in glass-walled data centers under the watchful eye of specialists.
“All the D.E.C. machines were interactive, and we believed in having people talk directly to computers,” Mr. Bell said in a 1985 interview with Computerworld, an industry publication. In this way, he presaged the coming personal computer revolution.
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…Mr. Bell took what became a six-year sabbatical to teach at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but he returned to the company as vice president of engineering in 1972. Reinvigorated and brimming with new ideas, he oversaw the design of an entirely new computer architecture: The VAX 780, a fast, powerful and efficient minicomputer, was a huge success, fueling sales that by the early 1980s had made D.E.C. the world’s second-largest computer maker.
“Gordon Bell was a giant in the computer industry,” said Howard Anderson, founder of the Yankee Group, a technology industry research firm that tracked the market in that era. “I give him as much credit for D.E.C.’s success as Ken Olsen. He believed in the primacy of engineering talent, and he attracted some of the best engineers in the industry to D.E.C., which became a place of great ferment.”
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Shirley Conran, British author. She wrote a famously smutty book. Lace, which was a huge bestseller. It features unorthodox use of a goldfish, and the memorable line “All right. Which one of you bitches is my mother?”.
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David Sanborn, jazz saxophonist. NYT (archived).
Alex Hassilev, the last surviving original member of the 1960s folk group the Limeliters.
Before Beatlemania gripped America’s youth in 1964, the country fell in love with the tight harmonies and traditional arrangements of folk music — and few acts drew more adoration than the Limeliters, a trio made up of Mr. Hassilev, Glenn Yarbrough and Lou Gottlieb.
Mr. Hassilev played banjo and guitar and sang baritone, not only in English but in French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian, all of which he spoke fluently. His bandmates were equally brainy: Mr. Gottlieb had a doctorate in musicology and Mr. Yarbrough once worked as a bouncer to pay for Greek lessons.
Urbane and witty, they packed coffeehouses and college auditoriums with a repertoire that mixed straight-faced folk standards like “The Hammer Song” and cheeky tunes like “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear,” “The Ballad of Sigmund Freud” and “Charlie the Midnight Marauder.”
They broke up in 1965, but reformed in various arrangements through the years.
Alice Munro, Nobel prize winning author.
Ms. Munro was a member of the rare breed of writer, like Katherine Anne Porter and Raymond Carver, who made their reputations in the notoriously difficult literary arena of the short story, and did so with great success. Her tales — many of them focused on women at different stages of their lives coping with complex desires — were so eagerly received and gratefully read that she attracted a whole new generation of readers.
Ms. Munro’s stories were widely considered to be without equal, a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes. She portrayed small-town folks, often in rural southwestern Ontario, facing situations that made the fantastic seem an everyday occurrence. Some of her characters were fleshed out so completely through generations and across continents that readers reached a level of intimacy with them that usually comes only with a full-length novel.
She achieved such compactness through exquisite craftsmanship and a degree of precision that did not waste words. Other writers declared some of her stories to be near-perfect — a heavy burden for a writer of modest personal character who had struggled to overcome a lack of self-confidence at the beginning of her career, when she left the protective embrace of her quiet hometown and ventured into the competitive literary scene.
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The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien ranked Ms. Munro with William Faulkner and James Joyce as writers who had influenced her work. Joyce Carol Oates said Munro stories “have the density — moral, emotional, sometimes historical — of other writers’ novels.” And the novelist Richard Ford once made it clear that questioning Ms. Munro’s mastery over the short story would be akin to doubting the hardness of a diamond or the bouquet of a ripened peach.
“With Alice it’s like a shorthand,” Mr. Ford said. “You’ll just mention her, and everybody just kind of generally nods that she’s just sort of as good as it gets.”
Both Lawrence and Joe D. sent over additional obits for Dick Rutan: AP. AVWeb (which was not there when I looked yesterday). Air Force Times. My thanks to both gentlemen.
C.J. Sansom, mystery author. I’d never heard of him, but now I want to read his books. He specialized in historical mysteries, and had an ongoing series with “Matthew Shardlake”, a “hunchbacked lawyer-turned-detective” in Tudor England.
His first book, “Dissolution,” is set in a remote monastery in 1537, as Henry VIII is dispossessing Catholic monks of their lands and riches after the king’s rupture with Rome. Shardlake is sent there by his patron, Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, to investigate a murder. He finds corruption, sexual depravity and more suspicious deaths.
Published in 2003, “Dissolution” was a popular success, and Mr. Sansom was signed to a multibook deal. He went on to publish six more Shardlake mysteries over 15 years. More than three million copies are in print.
His second installment, “Dark Fire” (2005), set during a sweltering London summer, includes child murder and culminates in Cromwell’s real-life execution in 1540. A reviewer, Stella Duffy, writing in The Guardian, praised Mr. Sansom for offering a dizzying window on the times: “Tudor housing to rival Rachman, Dickensian prisons, a sewage-glutted Thames, beggars in gutters, conspiracies at court and a political system predicated on birth not merit, intrigue not intelligence.”
You know, I feel like between Mr. Sansom and Hilary Mantel, at some point, I’m going to have to go to the Cromwell…
Paul Auster, author. (The New York Trilogy)
I wish I could say more about this. I know Auster was an important mainstream writer, but I’ve never read anything by him.
…they read as fast as lightning…
Needs some work.
After the jump, some more old gun books, and one new one.
In haste: Death finally caught the Midnight Rider.
Daniel C. Dennett, author.
An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.
According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.
For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.
Mr. Dennett irked some scientists by asserting that natural selection alone determined evolution. He was especially disdainful of the eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose ideas on other factors of evolution were summarily dismissed by Mr. Dennett as “goulding.”
Apologies for being silent yesterday. I have not been feeling well pretty much all week. While I’ve been to our local Quack In the Box and gotten prescriptions, and while they seem to be helping with some things, they’re not helping as much as I would like with others. Then again, I haven’t taken the full course of antibiotics yet.
Joe Flaherty, SCTV guy. While the obit is silent on his cause of death, I do not believe he blowed up real good.
John Barth, writer. I’ve seen Giles Goat-Boy cited as a cyberpunk precursor, but have never actually read it.
Christopher Durang, playwright. I’d actually heard of him, but I’ve never seen a performance of “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You”. I think I’d kind of like to, if only to push myself outside of my comfort zone.