I got nothing. I’ve been busy, occupied with personal issues, and a little under the weather, and didn’t have time to put together a good (or even decent) post.
So instead, I’m going to point you at a documentary that’s about 30 minutes long: “No Greater Love”.
This covers the four Catholic chaplains who received the Medal of Honor, and who I have written about previously:
Fr. Joseph O’Callahan
Fr. Emil Kapaun
Fr. Vincent Capodanno
Fr. Charles Watters
Today is the 40th anniversary of the FBI Miami gunfight.
Mike Wood has a good piece up at the RevolverGuy blog. I have heard through the grapevine that he’s working on a book about the incident, but I haven’t confirmed that directly with him. I still recommend Edmundo Mireles’s FBI Miami Firefight: Five Minutes that Changed the Bureau as the best current reference on the subject, followed by Massad Ayoob’s Ayoob Files 1985-2011 collection (which includes multiple columns about the gunfight).
In other, more cheerful news, DACK Outdoors has shut down and is planning to file for bankruptcy. I never dealt with them, because Mike the Musicologist did, and they tried to screw him over. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Master Gunnery Sgt. Juan Jose Valdez (USMC – ret.). He was 88.
Sergeant Valdez was the last American service member out of Saigon on April 30, 1975.
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Before loading helicopters at the embassy, Marines searched evacuees for weapons and threw any they found into a swimming pool. At dawn on April 30, Ambassador Graham Martin, carrying the American flag that had been lowered in the compound, boarded one of the last flights out. Sergeant Valdez and a handful of Marines stayed behind to protect his departure.
Panicked civilians soon broke through the gates and surged up the stairways of the chancery. The Marines retreated to the rooftop, barricaded the access door and waited for their own ride out. They could see North Vietnamese troops converging in the street.
Maj. James Kean, the commanding officer of the Marine guards, recalled years later in an interview with CBS News, “There were 17 divisions of North Vietnamese coming across the bridges into Saigon, and when the sun came up, we saw them.”
When the last helicopter, a CH-46 Sea Knight, descended to the rooftop, Sergeant Valdez stood back as Major Kean and nine enlisted men got on board first. Sergeant Valdez was nearly left behind: He was thrown off balance and fell on the rear boarding ramp as the pilot lifted off.
“The ramp, you could see behind me, it was starting to go up, and that helicopter wanted to get the hell out of there,” he recalled in a 2021 interview.
Staff Sgt. Mike Sullivan, one of the men already onboard, told The Los Angeles Times in 1990 what happened next.
“I looked at the back of the helicopter door, and I noticed two hands hanging there,” Sergeant Sullivan said.
Sergeant Valdez was grabbed and pulled aboard. It was approximately 8 a.m. on April 30, 1975. After a 30-minute flight, the chopper arrived at the U.S.S. Okinawa offshore.
When Holtz, slender and bespectacled, arrived at Notre Dame in 1986, taking on college football’s most pressure-packed post, he hardly projected the image of a tough coach who might inspire his players to win one for a latter-day Gipper.
“I’m not very smart and I’m not very impressive,” he remarked. “I’m 5-10, weigh 152 pounds, speak with a lisp, appear afflicted with a combination of scurvy and beriberi, and I ranked 234th in a high school class of 278.”
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He did have a short and unsuccessful season with the New York Jets in 1976, which was also Joe Namath’s final season.
His team was 3-10 when he resigned with one game left in the season, walking away from a five-year contact to become head coach at the University of Arkansas.
“God did not put Lou Holtz on this earth to coach pro football,” he said.
In his memoir, he wrote, “My short-lived tenure in the N.F.L. has been a source of embarrassment for me, not because the Jets didn’t do very well under my leadership (they did not), but as a result of a so-so commitment on my part.”
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When he was 28 years old with three young children, little family savings and his prospects of becoming a collegiate head football coach in doubt, Holtz set down life goals, professional and personal. He came up with 108 items.
While Notre Dame was preparing for its 1989 Fiesta Bowl game with West Virginia, he said he had accomplished 84 of those goals, among them sitting next to Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” meeting the pope and dining at the White House.
Holtz, a practicing Roman Catholic, met Pope John Paul II while touring the Vatican. Even before his award from President Trump, he was invited to the White House by President Ronald Reagan (who in the role of Notre Dame’s George Gipp in the 1940 film “Knute Rockne All American” implored Rockne from his deathbed to “just win one for the Gipper”). He also accepted invitations from Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas during part of Holtz’s coaching tenure there.
Awful Announcing:
ESPN.
I’ve said before, I have a high barrier for linking to ESPN feature articles. (I don’t even really like linking to ESPN news articles, except maybe as supplemental material. Sometimes I have to, but I generally prefer local news sources.)
Master Sergeant Charles Norman Shay (US Army – ret.) He was 101.
Mr. Shay, a member of the Penobscot Nation of Maine, was one of about 175 Native Americans among the 34,000 Allied troops who came ashore on [Omaha] beach, into the teeth of some of the bloodiest fighting of D-Day in the opening act of the liberation of France during World War II.
Mr. Shay was awarded the Silver Star for saving soldiers who had been cut down by heavy German machine-gun fire after disembarking from their landing craft into the waves. In 2007, he received France’s Legion of Honor for his actions that day.
“I saw there were many wounded men who were floundering in the water, who could not help themselves, and I knew that if nobody went to help them, they were doomed to die,” Mr. Shay recalled in a 2010 interview for the Library of Congress.
He continued: “I proceeded to get as many men as I could out of the water by turning them over on their backs and grabbing them under their shoulders. I don’t know where my strength came from, but they say once the adrenaline starts flowing in your body you can do unbelievable feats.”
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From 2018 until his death, Mr. Shay lived in northwestern France, in the home of a caretaker, Marie-Pascale Legrand, not far from the beaches where the World War II invasion took place. Ms. Legrand, who met Mr. Shay at a commemoration ceremony in Normandy in 2016, said in an interview that he had been lonely living in Maine and was not getting adequate health care. After visiting him there, she invited him to move to Normandy.
For several years, Mr. Shay performed a sage-burning ceremony overlooking Omaha Beach in honor of the dead. He was one of a very few American veterans able to attend D-Day commemorations in Normandy in 2020 and 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Frank Gehry. THR. The Onion (by way of Lawrence). Previously on WCD.
“You go into architecture to make the world a better place,” Mr. Gehry said in 2012. “A better place to live, to work, whatever. You don’t go into it as an ego trip.”
He added: “That comes later, with the press and all that stuff. In the beginning, it’s pretty innocent.”
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, actor. Other credits include “Thunder in Paradise”, “Renegade”, “Jake and the Fatman”, and a spin-off of a minor 1960s SF TV series.
Col. Robert L. Stirm (USAF – ret.). He was 92.
You may not recognize the name, but you probably recognize the photo.
That’s his 15-year old daughter Lorrie in front. His wife is wearing the corsage. The photographer, Slava Veder, won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.
His will to survive as a P.O.W., he later said, was built on memories of his domestic life and the hope of returning one day to his family. Those thoughts sustained him after he was shot down and forced to eject from his F-105 Thunderchief during a bombing mission over North Vietnam on Oct. 27, 1967, and they continued to sustain him in prison camps, including the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was starved, tortured and subjected to mock executions.
He held the rank of major at the time he was taken prisoner and was eventually elevated to colonel. He was among 591 American prisoners of war released as part of Operation Homecoming after the Paris Peace Accords ended the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
The photo sort of hides what was really going on.
Three days before he landed at Travis Air Force Base, he was handed what he described as a “Dear John” letter from his wife.
“I have changed drastically — forced into a situation where I finally had to grow up,” his wife of 18 years wrote. “Bob, I feel sure that in your heart you know we can’t make it together — and it doesn’t make sense to be unhappy when you can do something about it. Life is too short.”
“I love you — we all love you,” she continued, “but you must remember how very unhappy we were together.”
Her daughter says she had an affair while Col. Strim was in captivity.
They divorced in 1974.
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I’ve been hacking around for the past few days, and will be today as well. So I don’t have as much time as I would like to put together a proper post.
Instead, I’m going to refer you to two outside sources.
Heather King (who is a great writer) did a “Credible Witnesses” piece in this month’s Magnificat about Michael Anthony Monsoor. I can’t find it online, so instead I’m going to quote from his Congressional Medal of Honor citation.
The award was posthumous.
UPS Flight 2976 was flying from Muhammad Ali International Airport to Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Hawaii. I’m kind of cynical about naming things after people, but if there are two people who deserve to have an airport named after them, it is probably Ali and Inouye.
I don’t know if most people remember Daniel Inouye. He was a long-time senator from Hawaii (until he died in 2012). Yes, he was a Democrat. But the man had cojones like you wouldn’t believe.
He was in the 442nd Infantry Regiment during WWII. You may remember the 442nd Infantry Regiment as “the guys who were of Japanese ancestry and decided to fight for the United States anyway”.
He was leading an assault in Italy on April 21, 1945. From his Congressional Medal of Honor citation:
Wikipedia describes his right arm as being blown mostly off at the elbow: the rifle grenade didn’t explode, but the impact resulted in a blunt force amputation. Wikipedia further describes Lt. Inouye seeing his arm lying on the ground…with a live hand grenade clenched in it.
So what did he do? He waved the men off who were coming to help him, because he was afraid his hand was going to unclench at any moment. Then he pried the live grenade out of his right hand with his left and threw it into a German bunker.
He and Bob Dole met in a rehab hospital after the war and were lifelong friends.
Sen. Inouye was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on June 21, 2000, along with 19 other members of the 442nd.
Bjorn Andresen. There’s a certain lack of notability here, but I think it is offset by the sadness of this story.
Mr. Andresen was 15 when Luchino Visconti cast him as Tadzio, the object of desire in his adaption of “Death In Venice”.
Visconti called him “the most beautiful boy in the world”.
Visconti was also fixated on Mr. Andresen. During the boy’s screen test, the director asked him to strip to his swimsuit.
“When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn’t comfortable,” Mr. Andresen told Variety after the release of “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World,” a 2021 documentary about him directed by Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri. “I wasn’t prepared for that. I remember when he posed me with one foot against the wall, I would never stand like that.
“When I watch it now,” he said, “I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me.”
He told The Guardian that Visconti was “the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.”
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During the making of “Death in Venice,” Visconti acted protectively toward Mr. Andresen. But the boy felt unprepared when Visconti took him to a gay club after the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1971.
In the documentary, Mr. Andresen recalled feeling besieged by “voracious looks, wet lips and rolling tongues” and getting drunk to cope with the unwanted attention. He wondered if Visconti, who was gay, was testing him to see if he was also gay, which he wasn’t.
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Over the last 20 years or so, his flowing hair became gray and he obscured his face behind a beard that made him look something like Ian McKellen as the wizard Gandalf in the “Lord of the Rings” films.
Mr. Andresen continued to act, mostly on television in Sweden but also in films, including a memorable turn in Ari Aster’s 2019 horror movie, “Midsommar.” He was also a keyboard player in a dance band, a composer of jazz and bossa nova music, the arranger of the music for a Swedish production of “The Rocky Horror Show,” and the manager of a small theater in Stockholm.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Pierre Robert, long time Philadelphia DJ. The NYPost ran one as well.
This isn’t quite an obit, but I don’t know where else to put it. I also don’t quite know how to write about it, so I’m just going to do the best I can.
Officer Lauren Craven of the La Mesa (California) Police Department was killed on October 23rd. She was 25 years old, and had joined the department in February of 2024.
She came upon a deadly rollover crash on Interstate 8 northeast of San Diego just before 10:30 p.m. last Monday, officials said.
She reported the incident over the radio before stepping out and walking toward a car that had flipped over.
Craven was struck by another car, which triggered a chain reaction, smashing into the vehicles involved in the initial crash.
David Pearce was sentenced yesterday.
Pearce met Christy Giles, 24, and Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola, 26, at a rave party in Los Angeles and lured them back to his place — plying them with fentanyl-laced coke and drugged drinks and then refusing to call for help when they overdosed.
A witness claimed Pearce said “dead girls don’t talk” when he begged the killer to call 911.
Instead, Pearce dragged their limp bodies into his Toyota Prius and dumped them on the sidewalk in front of two different hospitals.
After the girls were murdered and scumbag Pearce was charged, seven other women came forward and said they’d been assaulted by him.
It came out yesterday, during the sentencing, that one of those women was Ms. Craven.
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Pearce was sentenced to a total of 146 years in prison for his crimes…
She was assaulted by someone who isn’t even worth being called “human”, but she didn’t let that stop her. She worked her butt off to get through the police academy and get sworn in as an officer, and she died a hero.
Anybody else notice that there’s an awful lot of dust in the air today?
We’re still dealing with the fallout from the July Hill Country floods. I’ve heard that there’s still one family missing a child from Camp Mystic. (The most recent story I could find said there were two people missing, but that’s from mid-September.)
On Wednesday, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) honored a bunch of game wardens for bravery. Many (but not all) were honored for actions during the flooding.
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That’s not all of them: I just picked a few off the list.
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I hope I’m not invading anyone’s privacy here, so I’ll just say Conner Sumbera is a relative of a close friend of the blog, which is why I singled him out. But you should go read the whole press release for yourself: all of these people deserve mad props, and should never have to pay for a drink when they’re out in public ever again.
Lt. Colonel George Hardy (USAF – ret.). He was 100.
Colonel Hardy, a Philadelphia native, was 19 and had never even driven a car when he began aviation cadet training in September 1944 at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama. By early the next year, in the closing months of the war in Europe, then-Second Lieutenant Hardy was assigned to an Army Air Forces base in Italy, from which he flew 21 missions accompanying bombers to their targets over southern Germany in early 1945.
In addition to those high-altitude missions in P-51 Mustang aircraft, he made strafing runs on German trains, trucks or river barges and was once struck by small-arms fire. He knew he was hit, he recalled to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, when he saw a flash of light coming through the cockpit floor, which was usually dark.
He also flew 45 missions during the Korean War, and 70 during the Vietnam War.
Wikipedia says he was the last surviving member of the Tuskegee Airmen who saw combat during WWII.
Updated NYT obit for Jane Goodall. This includes corrections that were added today.
Marilyn Knowlden, child actress. She was 99. IMDB.
…Ms. Knowlden’s parents did not even take her to see her own films, fearful that she would develop a titanic ego. Her father, who managed her career, refused to let her be bound by a studio contract.
As a result, “I was always a freelance actor, so I had complete freedom to choose my roles,” she told Mr. Thomas. “If you were under contract like Judy Garland or Shirley Temple, you went to a studio school and really lost your ordinary life. I went to public school, had a very normal life, and then occasionally would go off and make a film.”
Playing catch-up after returning from my trip:
Ens. Donald McPherson (US Navy – ret.) He was 103. National WWII Museum.
I love the NYT opening:
On April 6, 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa in the final months of World War II, a 22-year-old Navy ensign, Donald McPherson, was piloting a Hellcat fighter with “Death N’ Destruction” painted on the side.
As his squadron, the VF-83, joined an aerial assault on the island of Kikaijima, between Okinawa and mainland Japan, Mr. McPherson spotted Japanese dive-bombers rushing toward him from below. He lowered the nose of his Hellcat and fired, notching his first hit before positioning himself behind a second enemy plane.
“By using full throttle, my Hellcat responded well, and I squeezed the trigger, and it exploded,” he said, referring to the enemy plane, in an interview for Fagen Fighters WWII Museum in Granite Falls, Minn. “Then I turned and did a lot of violent maneuvering to try to get out of there without getting shot down.”
Also, I love Hellcats. Ens. McPherson shot down three kamikazes attacking the USS Ingraham in a subsequent engagement, making him an ace.
Although he never flew a plane again, Mr. McPherson was reintroduced to the F6F Hellcat when Fagen Fighters museum — which restores, displays and flies World War II-era planes — refurbished a similar one in 2021, soliciting his approval to paint it navy blue, the color of his plane, and adding the “Death N’ Destruction” motto. He reacquainted himself with the aircraft in person that year when it was flown to a ceremony at an airport in Beatrice, Neb.
At a 2022 event at the Fagen Fighters museum, Mr. McPherson said, “You people just can’t believe what all this has meant to me. That beautiful airplane.”
With a smile, he asked Evan Fagen, the museum’s chief pilot, “Can I take it home with me?”
The National WWII Museum and other reports I’ve seen refer to him as the last surviving WWII ace. The NYT obit seems to hedge that a bit by referring to him as “one of the last surviving American combat pilots from World War II recognized by the American Fighter Aces Association as combat aces”.
He received three Distinguished Flying Crosses and four Air Medals, and was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2015.
Humpy Wheeler, NASCAR guy. I probably would have let this go past if it wasn’t for this:
…he transformed race day into a carnival. With his taste for Hollywood-level stunts, he might just as easily have been called the Cecil B. DeMille of motorsports. The clowns, trapeze artists, elephants and tigers he brought in to perform in the speedway’s infield in 1980 were only a start.
He once collaborated with the 82nd Airborne Division, garrisoned in Fort Bragg, N.C., to restage the U.S.-led 1983 invasion of the Caribbean nation of Grenada, complete with wood fortifications, troops and helicopters.
“The mortars were blanks,” the sportswriter Tommy Tomlinson recalled in a recent post on Substack, “but the dynamite that blew up two houses placed on the infield was very real.”
David Ketchum, actor. IMDB.
Theodore Friedman, lawyer. I think this is an interesting story. He was a personal injury specialist, and known as a zealous advocate for his clients.
Maybe a little too zealous, as he was disbarred in 1994.
Mr. Friedman’s disbarment exposed an underside to his turn-it-to-11 style of lawyering. Accused of 23 counts of professional misconduct — including intentional dishonesty, filing a false affidavit and soliciting false testimony from a witness — he lost his law license after a special referee affirmed 14 of the charges. He was disbarred by the Appellate Division of the First Department, a state court that oversees civil and criminal appeals in Manhattan and the Bronx.
His disbarment was seen by some in the legal community as unfair, by others as a comeuppance for sleaze, and by still others as a cautionary tale about the limits of overzealous advocacy.
He reapplied for his license several times, and was ultimately reinstated to the bar in 2010.
Ron Turcotte, jockey. He was most famous as the jockey who Secretariat to the Triple Crown.
Secretariat, a big coppery chestnut nicknamed Big Red who, like Riva Ridge, was owned by Penny Chenery of Meadow Stable and trained by Lucien Laurin, made up for that disappointment in spectacular fashion. He powered to victory in the Derby and the Preakness, setting track records that still stand. He then demolished the competition in the Belmont Stakes to become the first Triple Crown winner since Citation in 1948.
Secretariat’s Belmont remains one of the most celebrated performances in racing history. Under Turcotte’s supremely confident handling, he cruised by the competition on the backstretch, “moving like a tremendous machine” in the famous race call by Chic Anderson, then drew off to win by an astounding 31 lengths. He broke the track record set by Gallant Man in 1957 by just under three seconds — the equivalent of 13 lengths — and set a new world record for the mile-and-a-half distance on the dirt, one that still stands and has never been approached.
Flight Lt. John Cruickshank (RAF – ret.). He was 105.
He and his crew were flying a submarine patrol mission in a Catalina flying boat on July 17, 1944 when they spotted a U-boat. They made a first pass over the boat, strafed it, and tried to drop depth charges. The depth charges didn’t release. So they made a second pass at the submarine.
But the submarine’s crew had them lined up in their sights. The Catalina, and Lt. Cruickshank, were shot all to hell. The bombardier was killed. Lt. Cruickshank managed to release the depth charges and sink the sub.
The crew put him in a bunk for the return flight back to base, which was five hours.
John Appleton, an airman who helped the flight lieutenant after he was hit by shrapnel — his injuries included two serious lung wounds and 10 penetrating leg wounds — told the Imperial War Museum in a 1995 interview that he was sure his commanding officer was mortally wounded. He meant to keep him comfortable as he died.
“I realized he must be in terrible pain,” Mr. Appleton recalled. “I can see blood started to soak through into his chest, even through all his pullovers and flying gear, and so on. But he hadn’t mentioned any of this at all.”
Lt. Cruickshank refused morphine for his pain. He knew that the co-pilot couldn’t land the plane by himself. He actually kept the plane flying for another hour once they got back to base, so they could land in daylight. And he had the crew carry him back to the cockpit and prop him in his seat so he could help land the plane.
Lt. Cruickshank was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions. He was the last surviving Victoria Cross recipient from WWII.
This was literally just published as I was writing this: James Dobson, of “Focus on the Family”.
Captain James A. Lovell Jr. (USN – ret.) NASA page.
Captain Lovell, a former Navy test pilot, flew for some 715 hours in space, the most of any astronaut in the pioneering Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs forged by the United States as it vied with the Soviet Union to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
He took part in two Gemini missions that orbited Earth and was one of the three astronauts aboard Apollo 8, the first spaceflight to orbit the moon, before he was chosen by NASA for Apollo 13.
I’m sure all my readers know what happened with Apollo 13. If you don’t, there’s a really good movie about Apollo 13, and a lot of details in the obit.
It isn’t everyone who gets Tom Hanks to play them in a movie. (And Jim Lovell played the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, which gives him a Bacon number of 1.)
Captain Lovell’s first space mission came in December 1965 when he orbited Earth with Lt. Col. Frank Borman in Gemini 7, a flight of more than 330 hours that included the first rendezvous of two manned spacecraft, the type of maneuver that would have to be carried out for a moon landing.
Captain Lovell commanded Gemini 12 in November 1966, flying with Maj. Buzz Aldrin of the Air Force, who in July 1969 became the second man to walk on the moon, after Neil Armstrong, in the flight of Apollo 11.
Gemini 12 carried out 59 orbits of Earth over four days to close out the Gemini program.
Captain Lovell was the command module pilot on the six-day journey of Apollo 8 at Christmastime 1968, joining with Colonel Borman and Maj. William A. Anders as the first men to orbit the moon, looping around it 10 times.
William H. Webster, former head of both the CIA and the FBI.
Sgt. Jake Larson (United States Army – ret.). He was 102.
In January 1942, he was stationed in Northern Ireland as part of the Army V Corps, also known as the Victory Corps. It played critical roles in the D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge.
As an operations sergeant, Mr. Larson assembled the planning books for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy. He ran onto Omaha Beach while German machine gunners sprayed the beach with gunfire.
He told The New York Times in 2019 that he remembered jumping off his landing craft into frigid water up to his neck amid explosions. He hid behind a pile of sand and asked a soldier if he had any dry matches to light a cigarette, as his were all wet.
“I looked again and there was no head under the helmet,” Mr. Larson said. “I thank that guy today. In that instant I had the ability to get up and run.”
He said that he weighed 120 pounds at the time.
“I don’t think the Germans were capable of shooting a toothpick, so I made it to shore,” he said. His unit, though, suffered significant losses.
During the pandemic, his grand daughter set up a TikTok account for him.
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The first video was posted in June 2020, and about 225 more followed as he quickly gained hundreds of thousands of followers.
Initially, he recounted in detail the preparations for D-Day, the operation itself, and the aftermath. But soon he added a recurring feature in which he opened letters and packages from his followers, and shared their contents in videos.
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Mr. Larson was the last surviving member of his company.
“I am the last man,” he told The Times, while wearing a pin on his hat with the shield and motto of his military regiment, “To the last man.”
The Luckiest Man in the World: Stories from the life of Papa Jake on Amazon.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner. NYT (archived). IMDB. This is being well covered everywhere, and I have nothing to add. Except maybe: be careful swimming.
Jimmy Hunt, actor. Interesting story: he retired from acting at 14, and died at 85. IMDB.
Edwin Feulner, Heritage Foundation guy.
Tom Troupe, actor. Other credits include “Planet of the Apes” (the TV series), “The F.B.I.”, “Kelly’s Heroes”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. He was “Ben Holland”.)
Eileen Fulton, actress. Other credits include “Nero Wolfe” (the 1959 series), “Naked City”, and “Our Private World”.
My oldest nephew got married this past weekend.
While it was certainly a fun time, it was also a busy one, so I didn’t have as much time to prepare a Memorial Day post as I would have liked.
I’ve written before about the Catholic chaplains who have received the Medal of Honor. You can find those posts here, here, here, here, and here.
There are four other chaplains who received the Medal of Honor, all during the Civil War:
The links above go to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society pages for each man. The citations are a lot shorter than those for 20th and 21st century recipients. I don’t know enough about CMOH history to comment intelligently on this.
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The actual wedding ceremony yesterday was outdoors. Some of us had to hang out outside after the ceremony for photo taking. It was hot – at least 94 degrees fondly Farenheit – and I was wearing a suit, so I was getting more than a little warm under the collar.
And then, out of nowhere, down the path, came two charming young women with miniature donkeys. Even better, the miniature donkeys had saddlebags loaded with ice cold beer and hard seltzer. Their timing was impeccable. And the donkeys were very charming.
I commented later to Mike the Musicologist that, between this and the Wienie 500, America really is the greatest country on Earth. Do you think they have donkeys bearing cold drinks in North Korea? Or Communist China? Of course not.
And it is because of the contributions of men like Hall, Haney, Hill, and Whitehead that we can have nice things like this today. Remember.