Archive for the ‘Heroism’ Category

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Obit watch: January 5, 2024.

Friday, January 5th, 2024

Glynis Johns. IMDB.

Wow:

A year later [1963 – DB], she starred in her own short-lived CBS sitcom, Glynis, in which she played a mystery writer and amateur sleuth, and later, she was Lady Penelope Peasoup opposite Rudy Vallee as Lord Marmaduke Ffogg on the last season of ABC’s Batman.

Yes, she did do a guest spot on “Murder She Wrote“.

Wow^2: she was “Sister Anne” in “Nukie“.

Stephen Sondheim wrote “Send in the Clowns”, in “A Little Night Music”, with shorter phrasing to accommodate her. Although her voice, alternately described as smoky or silvery or wistful, was lovely, she was unable to sustain notes for long.

Be that as it may, I find her performance of that song incredibly haunting.

Maj. Mike Sadler has passed away at 103.

Mr. Sadler was one of the first recruits and the last surviving member of the S.A.S. from the year of its founding, 1941. Like a navigator at sea, he used stars, sun and instruments to cross expanses of the Libyan Desert, a wasteland almost the size of India, whose shifting, windblown dunes can be as changing and featureless as an ocean.
Compared with the commandos he guided on truck and jeep convoys — volunteer daredevils who crept onto Nazi airfields; attached time bombs to Messerschmitt fighters, Stuka dive bombers, fuel dumps and pilot quarters; then sped away as explosions roared behind — Mr. Sadler was no hero in the usual sense. Comrades said he might not have fired a single shot at the enemy in North Africa.
But he got his men to the targets — and out again. Without him, they said, the commandos could not have crossed hundreds of miles of desert, found enemy bases on the Mediterranean Coast, destroyed more than 325 aircraft, blown up ammunition and supply dumps, killed hundreds of German and Italian soldiers and pilots, or found their way back to hidden bases.

…

Mr. Sadler was intrigued by desert navigation. “What amazed me,” he told Mr. Rayment, “was that even with the vast, featureless expanses of the desert, a good navigator could pinpoint his exact location by using a theodolite, an air almanac and air navigational tables, and having a good knowledge of the stars.”
He spent weeks studying navigation techniques, including use of a theodolite — a telescopic device, with two perpendicular axes, used mainly by surveyors, for measuring angles in the horizontal and vertical planes. It was not unlike the sextant used by mariners to fix positions at sea.

…

In one of the epic stories of the North Africa campaign, Mr. Sadler and two sergeants escaped from the Germans and, with only a goatskin carrying brackish water, crossed 110 miles of desert on foot in five days. Hostile Bedouins stoned them, bloodying their heads, and stole their warm clothing, leaving them to shiver through freezing nights.
Starving except for a few dates, they were exposed to windblown sands that scraped them like sandpaper, a relentless sun that burned and blistered their faces, and swarms of flies that enveloped and tormented them. On the hot sands, their feet were masses of blisters after a few days. When they finally reached Free French lines, they looked like half-dead castaways in rags.
“We had long hair and beards and were looking very bedraggled,” Mr. Sadler recalled. “Our feet were in tatters — I don’t think we looked very much like soldiers.”

…

After his North Africa adventures as a desert navigator, Mr. Sadler returned to England and in 1944 parachuted into France after the Allied invasion of Normandy. He participated in sabotage operations against German occupation forces and won the Military Cross for bravery in action behind enemy lines.

Anthony Dias Blue, noted wine guy.

Mr. Blue was no populist. But he believed that good wine needn’t be expensive or difficult to appreciate; all that people needed, he said, was a guide, like him, to show them what was worth buying.

Posted in Heroism, History, Mixology, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 18, 2023.

Monday, December 18th, 2023

Lieutenant Colonel John Robert Pardo (USAF – ret.) passed away on December 5th, at the age of 89.

Captain (at the time) Pardo was a principal in of the most unusual flying stories to come out of the Vietnam war. On March 10, 1967, he was flying a bombing mission over Vietnam in an F4-C Phantom. Also flying with Cpn. Pardo and his weapons officer (1st Lt. Steve Wayne) was another Phantom flown by Capt. Earl Aman and 1st Lt. Robert Houghton. They were bombing a heavily defended North Vietnamese steel mill.

Both planes were hit by ground fire during the bombing run. Capt. Aman’s plane was the most seriously hit of the two. It lost a lot of fuel. So much fuel that there was no way Capt. Aman’s plane could make it out of enemy territory.

In a selfless act to save his fellow airmen, Pardo pushed Aman’s jet using the nose of his aircraft against Aman’s tailhook — a retractable hook on the underside of the plane used to assist with landing.
Pardo helped Aman’s Phantom decrease altitude by 1,500 feet per minute and guided the plane back into friendly territory.
Both aircrews then safely ejected over the Laotian border and were rescued by friendly forces.

This maneuver became famous as the “Pardo Push”.

Though it would seem his command would be greatly pleased with his selfishness, Lt. Gen. William Wallace ‘Spike’ Momyer, commander of the 7th Air Force in Vietnam, would reprimand him for sacrificing his multimillion-dollar jet in a rescue.
Facing a court-martial, Pardo was saved from punitive actions by his wing commander, Col. Robin Olds, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

Ltc. Pardo was awarded the Silver Star for his actions, but it was awarded twenty years later. Why, I do not know.

Aside from his Silver Star, his awards include the Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, Purple Heart, Air Medal with twelve Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Meritorious Service Medal.

And he was a good Texas boy. Born in Herne, died in College Station.

Here are two videos from the ‘Tube. One short:

One a bit longer:

San Antonio Express News (archived), which provides a few interesting details:

Fifteen years earlier, in 1952, Air Force Brig. Gen. Robinson Risner, a longtime San Antonio resident and Korean War fighter ace, had done something similar, pushing a crippled F-86 out of enemy territory to open water 60 miles away. The pilot of the damaged plane, Lt. Joe Logan, bailed out but drowned when he became tangled in the lines of his parachute.

…

But Pardo unknowingly had put himself on a collision course with an Air Force general who had earlier gained notoriety for criticizing the Tuskegee Airmen, the group of pioneering Black aviators who served with distinction during World War II.
Reports circulated that Lt. Gen. William Wallace “Spike” Momyer, commander of the 7th Air Force in Vietnam, wanted Pardo court-martialed for the risky maneuver.
Pardo was not court-martialed, but Momyer told Col. Robin Olds, Pardo’s wing commander, not to decorate him. That didn’t bother Pardo.
“I didn’t do it to get a medal,” he said.

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

Obit watch: October 9, 2023.

Monday, October 9th, 2023

Ellsworth Johnson passed away on September 30. He was 100.

Mr. Johnson was a member of one of the Operations Groups of the Office of Strategic Services in WWII. He was originally trained as a medic:

“My disappointment at being a medic was great,” he wrote in a memoir, “Behind Enemy Lines: The O.S.S. in World War II” (2019). “I knew that surgical training would at least keep me out of a ward where I could expect to be no more than a bedpan jockey.”
He drew a distinction between participating on the field of combat and treating its victims after the battle.
“I wanted to get into the fight,” he said in a television interview. “I didn’t want to see the results of the fight.”

…

In August 1944, he parachuted from the belly of a B-24 bomber 400 miles behind German lines to harass enemy troops and feed intelligence to London as the Allies were poised to invade southern France. His team and the French Resistance captured a vital dam and its hydroelectric power plant after forcing the German garrison guarding it to flee.
After serving in France for about a month, he and many of his comrades chose to transfer to the Pacific Theater as members of an Operations Group rather than be absorbed into the regular Army.
Joining recently trained Chinese paratroopers, Mr. Johnson and other Americans, all serving officially as advisers, jumped some 600 miles into Japanese-occupied territory in the summer of 1945.
“We learned to live under the noses of the enemy,” he wrote.
They successfully intercepted enemy supply lines and communications and inflicted casualties in an unsuccessful attempt to retake a town.

…

Technician 4th Grade Johnson (he was commissioned an honorary colonel in the Chinese Nationalist Army) received two Bronze Stars. Office of Strategic Services veterans were also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for intelligence and special operations during World War II. His missions remained classified until 1995, after which the Army determined that he met the requirements to join the Special Forces Regiment.

The OSS Operations Groups are considered a precursor to today’s Special Forces.

His death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law, Anna Johnson. It came four weeks after he was presented with an Army Special Forces tab and a Green Beret in a ceremony at the assisted living facility where he lived near Grand Rapids, Mich.
“This is an extremely rare event and, quite frankly, the last of its kind that will ever occur,” Major Russell M. Gordon, the director of public affairs for the 1st Special Forces Command, said of the ceremony.
And Maj. Gen. Patrick Roberson, the deputy commanding general of the Army Special Operations Command, said during the event: “Everything that he did in 1944 — we model ourselves on in our training and the operations that we conduct. It’s our origin story.”

Murray Stenson, cocktail guy.

He shunned attention, even as his fame grew alongside the rise of craft cocktails in the 2000s. When he was named the best bartender in America in 2010 by Tales of the Cocktail, an annual conference in New Orleans, he refused to go to the ceremony. He said he had a shift to fill.

…

Mr. Stenson was among a small group of bartenders who as early as the 1980s began to push back against the sickly sweet concoctions of the 1970s — Sex on the Beach, Harvey Wallbanger — in favor of elevated drinks made with quality ingredients, a seemingly obvious approach that was almost unthinkable when he began.

…

He was known, above all, for resurrecting a forgotten pre-Prohibition cocktail called the Last Word, made with equal parts gin, lime juice, green chartreuse and maraschino liqueur. He discovered it in a 1951 cocktail book and added it to his menu, and within a few years it had not only spread nationwide but had become the archetype for a whole genre of modern classic cocktails, like the Paper Plane and the Gin Blossom.

I’ve made myself a Last Word a couple of times, and I’ve had them when I’m out and about and drinking. The ones I make at home seem just a little sweet to my taste: the ones I get elsewhere I think are better balanced. If I can find Mr. Stenson’s recipe, I’ll compare it to the ones I’m using.

Mr. Stenson did not consider himself a mentor. He did not write books or become a highly paid brand ambassador, as many successful bartenders do, especially once they reach middle age and their bodies start to rebel against hours of constant standing. Well into his 60s, and even after open-heart surgery in 2012, he worked up to seven nights a week.
“I enjoy being behind the bar,” he told Imbibe magazine in 2012. “That’s where you meet all the really interesting people.”

Posted in Heroism, Mixology, Obits | Comments Closed

Brief historical note, suitable for use in schools.

Wednesday, October 4th, 2023

30 years ago yesterday and today, a group of UN soldiers (including US Special Operations troops, and units from Malaysia and Pakistan) went out on a mission to capture high-ranking members of the Somali National Alliance (SMA) in Mogadishu.

Things went bad. Then they went very bad. When it was all over, 18 US soldiers had been killed, and another 73 were wounded. One Malaysian Army soldier and one Pakistani soldier were also killed.

Battle of Mogadishu from Wikipedia.

Medal of Honor citations for Master Sergeant Gary Ivan Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randall David Shughart, killed in action during the battle.

Also killed:

  • Staff Sergeant Daniel Darrell Busch.
  • Sergeant First Class Earl Robert Fillmore, Jr.
  • Master Sergeant Timothy Lynn Martin.
  • Sergeant First Class Matthew Loren Rierson.
  • Corporal James E. Smith.
  • Specialist James M. Cavaco.
  • Sergeant James Casey Joyce.
  • Corporal Richard W. Kowalewski, Jr.
  • Sergeant Dominick M. Pilla.
  • Sergeant Lorenzo M. Ruiz.
  • Staff Sergeant William David Cleveland, Jr.
  • Staff Sergeant Thomas J. Field.
  • CW4 Raymond Alex Frank.
  • CW3 Clifton P. Wolcott.
  • CW3 Donovan Lee Briley.
  • Sergeant Cornell Lemont Houston, Sr.
  • Private First Class James Henry Martin, Jr.
  • Lance Corporal Mat Aznan Awang (Malaysian Army, posthumously promoted to Corporal).

I have been unable to find a name for the Pakistani soldier who was killed.

Black Hawk Down is still a heck of a book, in my opinion. The movie’s pretty good, too, but I’m not going to stake my life on it being 100% accurate. (Though I do believe the movie makers tried very hard.)

“Folly and Redemption: Thirty Years After Black Hawk Down” from The American Conservative.

Posted in Heroism, History | 2 Comments »

Where do we get such men?

Wednesday, September 6th, 2023

This is a Bell AH-1 “Cobra” helicopter.

It was commonly used as an attack helicopter during the Vietnam war. I would like for you to observe that it has two seats: one for the pilot and one for the co-pilot. It has no more seating inside. It is only designed to carry two people, plus armament and ammo. This will become significant in a little bit.

On Monday, Capt. Larry L. Taylor (United States Army – ret.) was awarded the Medal of Honor for actions on June 18, 1968.

(more…)

Posted in Helicopters, Heroism, History, Planes | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: April 26, 2023.

Wednesday, April 26th, 2023

NYT obit for Ken Potts, U.S.S. Arizona survivor. I think this one is a little better than the NYPost one I linked a few days ago.

I feel like I’m not giving Mr. Potts as much attention as I should, but since I posted the longer obit the other day, I also feel like this is mostly supplemental.

I am seeing reports that Bart Skelton, gun writer and son of Skeeter Skelton, has passed away. I don’t have anything I can link to at this time, but I’ll update if I do find something.

Alton H. Maddox Jr. has passed.

Mr. Maddox, along with C. Vernon Mason and the Rev. Al Sharpton, were the pivotal figures in the Tawana Brawley kidnapping and rape hoax.

Ms. Brawley was a few weeks shy of her 16th birthday when, in late November 1987, she cast herself as a victim of rank depravity: She, an African American teenager, had been abducted, she said, and held for four days near her home in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., a Dutchess County town about 60 miles north of New York City. She said she was sexually assaulted by a half-dozen white men.
Indeed, she was found in appalling condition. She lay dazed in a trash bag with some of her hair chopped off, feces smeared on her and “KKK” and a racial epithet written in charcoal on her body. Her assailants, Ms. Brawley said, included law enforcement officials.

…

Their insults were nonstop, their allegations outlandish. The Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia and the Irish Republican Army were somehow all involved, they said. They accused the state’s attorney general, Robert Abrams, who led a seven-month grand jury inquiry into the Brawley matter, of having masturbated over a photo of her.
Mr. Maddox, who was given to referring to whites as “crackers,” went on later to call New York “the Mississippi of the ’90s” and New York’s governor at the time, Mario M. Cuomo, “the George Wallace of the ’90s.”

…

But in October 1988, the grand jury concluded in a 170-page report that Ms. Brawley had not come anywhere near the truth, dismissing her account as fiction. There was no evidence of sexual assault, it said; she had smeared herself with feces, written the racial slurs herself and faked being in a daze. Her motive was not made clear, but a boyfriend said later that she had wanted to avoid the wrath of her stepfather for having stayed out late.
For Mr. Maddox, the consequences were severe. In May 1990, after he refused to respond to charges of misconduct in the Brawley case, appellate judges in Brooklyn suspended his law license. He never bothered to seriously try getting it back. “The white man thought that after 13 years I’d be so much on my knees,” he said in 2003. “They don’t know me.”
There was also a price to pay in dollars. Steven Pagones, a Dutchess County prosecutor accused by the Brawley team of having assaulted her, won a defamation suit against Messrs. Sharpton, Maddox and Mason. Mr. Maddox was held personally liable for $97,000, a penalty that he paid with help from benefactors.
None of the three apologized for their roles in the hoax. Mr. Sharpton became a national figure with a television program. Mr. Mason, who was disbarred in 1995, became an ordained minister. And Mr. Maddox, who had moved to New York from Georgia in 1973, wrote columns for The Amsterdam News, offered radio commentary and for a while led a group called the United African Movement.

Posted in Guns, Heroism, History, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 24, 2023.

Monday, April 24th, 2023

I got a little behind while I was on vacation, so there’s a lot of catch-up here.

Ken Potts (USN – ret.) has passed away at the age of 102.

Mr. Potts was one of the two remaining survivors of the USS Arizona.

He was working as a crane operator shuttling supplies to the Arizona the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Pearl Harbor attack happened, according to a 2021 article by the Utah National Guard.
In a 2020 oral history interview with the American Veterans Center, Potts said a loudspeaker ordered sailors back to their ships so he got on a boat.
“When I got back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was afire,” He said in the interview. “The oil had leaked out and caught on fire and was burning.”
Dozens of ships either sank, capsized, or were damaged in the bombing of the Hawaii naval base, which catapulted the U.S. into World War II.
Sailors were tossed or forced to jump into the oily muck below, and Potts and his fellow sailors pulled some to safety in their boat.

This is the oral history referenced above:

USSArizona.org.

Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries.

Bud Shuster (R – Pennsylvania).

During his 28 years in Congress, including three terms as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Mr. Shuster managed to divert a disproportionately large share of federal highway trust funds into pedestrian crossings, access roads, interchanges, buses, road widening and the Bud Shuster Highway, which links State College, Altoona and the Pennsylvania Turnpike in southern Pennsylvania.
By 1991, he had perfected the earmarking of federal funds to his district so successfully that when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, was asked which state had reaped the biggest slice of the highway trust-fund pie, he replied, “The state of Altoona.”

Richard Riordan, former mayor of Los Angeles.

Posted in California Über Alles, Heroism, History, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 11, 2023.

Saturday, March 11th, 2023

Traute Lafrenz (who also went by Traute Lafrenz Page) has passed away at 103.

She was the last surviving member of the White Rose.

The White Rose was short-lived and never counted more than a few dozen members, most of whom were young and idealistic. Ms. Lafrenz (who later in life went by the name Traute Lafrenz Page) carried political leaflets and helped the group gain access to ink, paper and envelopes to produce and disseminate its anti-Hitler tracts, and to urge Germans to turn against the Nazis.
But the response to its activities, peaceful as they were, seemed to betoken the profound intolerance displayed by the Third Reich to any hint of opposition among Germans, even as it pursued the extermination of European Jewry and what it called “total war” against its adversaries.

…

While Ms. Lafrenz was a medical student in Hamburg, she met Alexander Schmorell, a central player in the White Rose, who introduced her to the leaders of the group, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, when she moved to Munich to continue her medical studies in the early 1940s.
Other leading players included Christoph Probst, Willi Graf and the group’s older mentor, Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy who was committed to liberal democracy.

…

The White Rose’s leaflets began appearing in the summer of 1942, but the project faltered in February 1943 with the arrest of Sophie and Hans Scholl, who were distributing fliers in a university building in Munich when Jakob Schmid, a janitor, spotted them and tipped off the Gestapo. Four days after their arrest, on Feb. 18, 1943, they were executed. Ms. Lafrenz attended her friends’ funeral, even though it was conducted under Gestapo surveillance.
Other members of the White Rose followed the grisly trail to execution; they were among an estimated 5,000 people beheaded under a revival of the use of the guillotine ordered by Hitler. The beheadings continued until January 1945.

Ms. Lafrenz was arrested in March of 1943. She was set to be tried at Bayreuth in April of 1945, but the US Army liberated the prison (and the prisoners) before the trial started.

“Traute Lafrenz was not at the center of the White Rose,” Mr. Waage wrote. “She did not physically write any of the leaflets — but she did just about everything else. She helped lay the foundation for the revitalization of cultural heritage as a weapon against brutality; she helped make the distribution of the leaflets as practical as possible and helped to spread them.”
In the postwar era, Ms. Lafrenz remained stubbornly reticent about her activities. “I was a contemporary witness,” she told Bild Zeitung in 2018. “Given the fates of the others, I am not allowed to complain.” Her daughter Renee told the newspaper that she had not learned of her mother’s wartime struggle until 1970.
Indeed, it was only on Ms. Lafrenz’s 100th birthday, on May 3, 2019, that she was awarded Germany’s Order of Merit, a high civilian honor. The citation said she “belonged to the few who, in the face of the crimes of national socialism, had the courage to listen to the voice of her conscience and rebel against the dictatorship and the genocide of the Jews. She is a heroine of freedom and humanity.”

Suzy McKee Charnas, noted SF writer. I believe Lawrence mentioned this to me a while back, but I could not find a link I was willing to use. The NYT obit says she passed away January 2nd, but “her death was not widely reported at the time”.

Ms. Charnas, whose books were well regarded but who, by her account, did not make a living from her writing, was best known for her science fiction. But she also wrote vampire fiction, young adult fantasy novels with women as central characters, and a memoir about taking care of her father in his later years after a long period of estrangement.

The obit gives a lot of space to her “The Holdfast Chronicles” series.

In an epic that began with “Walk to the End of the World” (1974) and concluded 25 years later with “The Conqueror’s Child,” Ms. Charnas conceived a dystopic world in which an escaped female slave, Alldera, leads the rebellious Free Fems to brutally conquer and enslave their former male masters. The men had faulted women for the near-destruction of humanity, called the Wasting.

…

The other books in the Holdfast series are “Motherlines” (1978) and “The Furies” (1994). “The Conqueror’s Child” won the 1999 James Tiptree Jr. Award (now called the Otherwise), a literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that explore gender.
She also won two other science fiction and fantasy awards: a Nebula for a novella, “Unicorn Tapestry,” which is a chapter in her 1980 novel, “The Vampire Tapestry,” and the basis for her play, “Vampire Dreams”; and a Hugo, for “Boobs,” a short story.
“Suzy, to me, was a lot like David Bowie,” said Jane Lindskold, a science fiction and fantasy writer who knew Ms. Charnas from a writers’ group in Albuquerque. “She followed her own muse. She could have just written only vampire books, but she did what she wanted to do.”

…

Science fiction was not the only genre she explored. In “The Vampire Tapestry,” she created Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire posing as an anthropology professor.Writing in The Washington Post, the fantasy writer Elizabeth A. Lynn praised the novel, saying it “works on many levels — as pure adventure, as social description, as psychological drama and as a passionate exploration of the web that links instinct, morality and culture. It is a serious, startling and revolutionary work.”
The director Guillermo del Toro, who is known for his science fiction and horror films, was an admirer of “The Vampire Tapestry.” He called it “flawless” on Twitter in 2015 and, after Ms. Charnas’s death, said, “It may be her masterpiece.”

The paper of record has a habit of running retrospective obits under the heading “Overlooked No More” for people who didn’t get an obit at the time. To the best of my knowledge, they still have not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.

However, this one struck home for me: Dilys Winn, mystery bookstore founder and writer.

When she opened Murder Ink — believed to be the nation’s first bookstore devoted entirely to the genre — she didn’t even have a window sign. But inside the store, compact though it was, one could find every type of mystery: British cozies, unsettling gothics, suspense thrillers, novels about hard-boiled detectives, police procedurals and even unpublished manuscripts — 1,500 titles in all.

…

Winn enjoyed hosting events so much that she sold the bookstore in 1975 and began holding Sunday afternoon mystery talks (admission $5) at the Steinway Concert Hall on the Upper West Side featuring mystery writers, editors and other guest speakers. She organized a 16-day mystery reader’s tour of the United Kingdom, with sites of interest that included the Tower of London, Jack the Ripper’s London neighborhood and the London docks. Excursions to Scotland and Wales provided more opportunities to commune with mystery writers, crime reporters and, supposedly, ghosts.
All the while, Winn was feverishly working on her opus: “Murder Ink.” Published by Workman Press in 1977, it included offbeat essays by established figures and Winn herself (under various nom de plumes), along with character studies, photographs, quizzes and even a guide to “terrible edibles” one might avoid — or seek, depending on the motive. In 1978, the Mystery Writers of America conferred an Edgar Allan Poe award on Winn, and the next year she published a sequel, “Murderess Ink: The Better Half of Mystery.”

I bought my mother a copy of Murder Ink as a present one year, so of course I read it. I loved it. I still think that’s a pretty swell book, and I want to say that’s one of the key books in influencing my lifelong love of mysteries.

“Spot”, or Glen Lockett, noted record producer for SST Records.

As the in-house producer for SST from 1979 to 1985, Mr. Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream — the college-radio mainstream, at least.
He produced or engineered more than 100 albums for SST, including classics like Black Flag’s “Damaged” (1981), Descendents’ “Milo Goes to College” (1982), Meat Puppets’ first album (1982), Minutemen’s “What Makes a Man Start Fires?” (1982) and Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” (1984).

I never got into any of SST’s stuff (I tried listening to Hüsker Dü) but I’ve always liked the SST poster I saw once at a record store in Houston. “Home taping is killing the music industry. Keep up the good work.”

Rick Scheckman. He was David Letterman’s film coordinator.

Scheckman joined Late Night With David Letterman in March 1982, a month after the show debuted on NBC. The writers called on Scheckman so often, he was given a full-time job as film coordinator.
“If 20 minutes before tape time, the writers suddenly came up with a bit that required film of a monkey washing a cat, Shecky knew where to find it,” writer Mark Evanier wrote on his blog.
When Letterman moved to CBS in 1993, Scheckman came along and remained with the Late Show through its 2015 conclusion. For those 33-plus years, his stuff was referred to as “Shecky Footage,” Letterman archivist Don Giller pointed out in a tribute post on YouTube.
As did many Letterman behind-the-scenes staffers, Scheckman often wound up in front of the camera, playing, for example, Elvis Presley; a naked man in the shower with a copy machine; a fan of Star Wars and Pokémon; and himself, getting shot by Bruce Willis (“Yippee ki yay, Shecky!!”), as seen in another tribute video.

Tributes from Mark Evanier and Leonard Maltin.

Otis Taylor, of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Over an 11-year career that began in 1965, when Kansas City was one of the top teams in the American Football League, Taylor was one of quarterback Len Dawson’s key offensive targets. (Dawson died last year at 87.) Tall and acrobatic with soft hands, he was the prototype for the big receivers who would come to dominate the position.
In 1966, his breakout season, Taylor caught 58 passes for 1,297 yards, an average of 22.4 yards a catch. Five years later, after the A.F.L.’s merger with the N.F.L was finalized, Taylor led the league with 1,110 receiving yards, and United Press International named him the N.F.L.’s player of the year.

…

When the Chiefs faced the Vikings in Super Bowl IV on Jan. 11, 1970, it was their second appearance in the championship game. They had lost to the Green Bay Packers, 35-10, in the first Super Bowl.
The Vikings were 13 ½-point favorites, but the Chiefs handled them easily. Kansas City was leading, 16-7, late in the third quarter when Dawson tossed a short pass to Taylor. He shook off a tackle from Earsell Mackbee, a cornerback; faked Karl Kassulke, a safety; and ran in for a 46-yard touchdown. Their 23-7 victory would be the Chiefs’ only Super Bowl win until 2020; they won the championship again last month.
“That’s it, boys!” Chiefs coach Hank Stram said gleefully from the sideline. “Otis!”

…

In his rookie season, when he started four of Kansas City’s 14 games, he caught 26 passes for 446 yards. He emerged as a star the next season, and over his career he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times and was a first-team All-Pro twice.
He caught a total of 410 passes in his career for 7,306 yards, with 57 touchdowns. He ranks third in Chiefs history in receiving yards, after Tony Gonzalez and Travis Kelce.

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Music, Nazis, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 10, 2022.

Saturday, December 10th, 2022

Colonel Joseph William Kittinger II (USAF – ret.) has passed away at the age of 94.

Col. Kittinger severed honorably in Vietnam:

He flew 483 fighter-plane missions in the Vietnam War before he was shot down and taken prisoner.

…

Mr. Kittinger flew three tours of duty in Vietnam, became a squadron commander and shot down a North Vietnamese jet. His fighter was downed in May 1972, and he spent 11 months in the prison camp known as the Hanoi Hilton.
He retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1978 and was a multiple winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

He was also the first man to fly a balloon solo across the Atlantic.

…in the 106,000-cubic-foot (3,000 m3) Balloon of Peace, from September 14 to September 18, 1984, launched from Caribou, Maine and organized by the Canadian promoter Gaetan Croteau. As an official FAI world aerospace record, the 5,703.03-kilometre (3,543.70 mi) flight is the longest gas balloon distance flight ever recorded in the AA-10 size category. For the second time in his life, he was also the subject of a story in National Geographic Magazine.

He is perhaps most famous for the act that got him his first National Geographic story.

On August 18, 1960, he jumped out of a balloon at an altitude of 102,800 feet.

He free fell for 13 seconds, protected against air temperatures as low as minus-94 degrees by specialized clothing and a pressure suit. And then his small, stabilizer parachute opened as planned to prevent a spin that could have killed him. He free fell for another 4 minutes and 36 seconds, descending to 17,500 feet before his regular parachute opened.

…

Taking part in experimental Air Force programs in the skies over New Mexico in the late 1950s and early ’60s to simulate conditions that future astronauts might face, Mr. Kittinger set records for the highest balloon flight, at 102,800 feet; the longest free fall, some 16 miles; and the fastest speed reached by a human under his own power, descending at up to 614 miles an hour.

Those records were broken by Felix Baumgartner in 2012. Col. Kittinger assisted Mr.Baumgartner in the jump.

Mr. Kittinger piloted the Excelsior I balloon to 76,400 feet in November 1959, then prepared to jump out of his gondola. What happened next almost cost him his life.
His left arm caught on the door as he emerged, and the delay in freeing himself caused the premature deployment of the small parachute designed to prevent him from going into a catastrophic spin. The parachute caught Mr. Kittinger around the neck and sent him spinning. He tumbled toward Earth at 120 revolutions per minute, but his main parachute opened at 10,000 feet, as designed, slowing him down and saving his life.
A little more than three weeks later, he was aloft again, climbing to 74,400 feet in Excelsior II before jumping out.
In August 1960, soaring to 102,800 feet in the Excelsior III balloon, Mr. Kittinger eclipsed by almost 1,300 feet the altitude record set by Major David Simons of the Air Force in 1957 in his Man High II balloon.
And then Mr. Kittinger jumped from a gondola once more. “I said, ‘Lord, take care of me now,’” he recalled. “That was the most fervent prayer I ever said in my life.”
The right glove of his pressure suit had failed during his ascent, leaving his hand swollen and in pain, but he was otherwise in fine shape when he touched down.

I’ve said this before, but I really liked Craig Ryan’s The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space (affiliate link) and the price on it seems much more reasonable than the last time I looked.

When Joe Kittinger was 13, he once scrambled atop a 40-foot-high tree to snare some coconuts, ignoring warnings to stay put. His father recalled that venture as symbolizing the derring-do that would be his son’s life.
As the elder Mr. Kittinger put it: “Everybody wants coconuts, but nobody has the guts to go up there and get them.”

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 1, 2022.

Thursday, December 1st, 2022

Sgt. Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura (US Army – ret.)

Sgt. Miyamura received the Medal of Honor for actions during the Korean War. He was the first living Japanese-American MoH recipient. (Pvt. Sadao Munemori received the MoH in 1946, but his award was posthumous.)

Mr. Miyamura was drafted in 1944 and assigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Japanese American unit that compiled a storied World War II combat record in Europe while people of Japanese heritage on the West Coast were placed under armed guard at desolate inland internment camps, feared as security risks, which they were not.

He stayed in the reserves post-WWII and was called up to serve in Korea.

He became a squad leader in the Third Infantry Division in an integrated Army, the military having been desegregated after World War II.

From his Medal of Honor citation:

Cpl. Miyamura, a member of Company H, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. On the night of 24 April, Company H was occupying a defensive position when the enemy fanatically attacked, threatening to overrun the position. Cpl. Miyamura, a machine-gun squad leader, aware of the imminent danger to his men, unhesitatingly jumped from his shelter wielding his bayonet in close hand-to-hand combat, killing approximately 10 of the enemy. Returning to his position, he administered first aid to the wounded and directed their evacuation. As another savage assault hit the line, he manned his machine gun and delivered withering fire until his ammunition was expended. He ordered the squad to withdraw while he stayed behind to render the gun inoperative. He then bayoneted his way through infiltrated enemy soldiers to a second gun emplacement and assisted in its operation. When the intensity of the attack necessitated the withdrawal of the company Cpl. Miyamura ordered his men to fall back while he remained to cover their movement. He killed more than 50 of the enemy before his ammunition was depleted and he was severely wounded. He maintained his magnificent stand despite his painful wounds, continuing to repel the attack until his position was overrun. When last seen he was fighting ferociously against an overwhelming number of enemy soldiers. Cpl. Miyamura’s indomitable heroism and consummate devotion to duty reflect the utmost glory on himself and uphold the illustrious traditions on the military service.

He was taken prisoner and spent 28 months as a POW.

The medal had been awarded in December 1951, eight months after Corporal Miyamura was captured. He was listed as missing at the time, but some four months after the honor was bestowed in secret, his name was included in a partial list of POWs provided by the Chinese.
The Army did not reveal the awarding of the medal until he was released, since it feared his captors would take vengeance on learning of it. As General Osborne told him, “You might not have come back alive.”
In October 1953, Mr. Miyamura, then a sergeant, was formally presented with the medal, the military’s highest award for valor, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a White House ceremony.

Noted:

After the war, Miyamura met Terry Tsuchimori, a woman from a family who had been forced to live at the Poston internment camp in southwestern Arizona following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They married in 1948 and had three children.

Terry died in 2014. Sgt. Miyamura was 97 when he passed. His death leaves Col. Ralph Puckett Jr. as the only surviving MoH recipient from the Korean War.

Lawrence has also posted an obit, which I commend to your attention.

Gaylord Perry, legendary spitballer.

He became the first of six pitchers to win the Cy Young Award in both leagues, capturing it as the American League’s best pitcher with the Cleveland Indians (now named the Guardians) in 1972 and the National League’s leading pitcher with the San Diego Padres in 1978. His older brother, Jim Perry, won the award in 1970 with the A.L.’s Minnesota Twins.
Gaylord Perry, who pitched for eight teams, was a five-time All-Star, pitched a no-hitter for the San Francisco Giants against the St. Louis Cardinals in 1968 and won at least 20 games five times. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991.
He combined with his brother Jim for 529 victories, No. 2 on the career list for brothers, behind Phil and Joe Niekro’s 539.

…

Perry wrote that his Giants teammate right-hander Bob Shaw taught him the spitter in 1964, when he was first starting to develop his legal pitches.
He said that after wetting the ball with saliva, he graduated over the years to “the mud ball, the emery ball, the K-Y ball, just to name a few.”
“During the next eight years or so, I reckon I tried everything on the old apple but salt and pepper and chocolate sauce toppin’,” he wrote in the vernacular of his rural North Carolina roots.

…

Perry was a brilliant pitcher with or without a spitter. His 3,534 strikeouts are No. 8 on the career list, and his 5,350 innings pitched are No. 6. He threw 303 complete games.
But he reached the postseason only once, winning one game and losing one when his Giants lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1971 National League Championship Series.

…

Gaylord Perry had 314-265 record, having pitched, in order, for the Giants, Indians, Texas Rangers, Padres, the Rangers again, the Yankees, the Atlanta Braves, the Mariners and the Royals.

Christine McVie, of Fleetwod Mac fame. I’m sorry if I’m giving this one short shrift, but I feel like it has been well covered by others who are better qualified to talk about her (and the band’s) legacy.

Posted in Heroism, History, Music, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Veterans Day.

Friday, November 11th, 2022

I’ve been struggling with where I wanted to go after finishing my ongoing series, and I’ve also been struggling a little with time constraints. It just doesn’t feel like there’s enough time in the days for me to do everything I want to do.

So: “Chaplain Medal of Honor Recipients” from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

I’ve already covered five of these men (see the first link). It’s interesting to me that the other four men were all MoH recipients during the Civil War.

And for those who complain that Veterans Day is to honor all veterans, while Memorial Day is for those who died in service: all four men survived the war. Three died after 1900: the fourth died in 1899.

It’s also interesting to me how short the Medal of Honor citations are for the Civil War veterans, as opposed to the longer much more detailed ones for the veterans of the 20th Century wars. I feel sure there are historical reasons for that, but I haven’t done enough research on Medal of Honor history to know what those reasons are.

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Obit watch: July 7, 2022.

Thursday, July 7th, 2022

Bradford Freeman. He was 97.

Mr. Freeman was a private first class assigned to a mortar squad in Easy Company, Second Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. He took part in the unit’s jump behind Utah Beach in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, carrying an 18-pound mortar plate strapped to his chest. Landing in a pasture filled with cows, he helped a fellow soldier with a broken leg hide before joining the rest of his squad.
He fought with Easy Company in its battles with the Germans in France, its parachute drops into the German-occupied Netherlands and the Battle of the Bulge, in bitter cold and snow.
He was unscathed in the fighting at the Bulge’s strategic town of Bastogne, Belgium, but he was wounded at nearby Noville in mid-January 1945. “A Screaming Mimi came in howling and it exploded in my leg,” he told the American Veterans Center in an April 2018 interview, referring to the nickname given by G.I.s to the Germans’ devastating multiple rocket launchers. He returned to Easy Company in April 1945 and participated in its occupation of Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s abandoned mountain retreat near the Austrian border, and then in the occupation of Austria.

According to the paper of record, he was the last surviving member of Easy Company.

Ni Kuang. Interesting guy: he wrote a bunch of screenplays for Shaw Brothers movies, and went on to write a lot of Chinese SF and fantasy. He also hated Commies.

His 1983 novel, “Chasing the Dragon,” was widely cited as a prescient description of the political backdrop that prompted pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, followed by a sweeping crackdown.
In the book, Mr. Ni writes about an unnamed metropolis that is reduced to a shell of itself:

There’s no need to destroy the architecture of this big city, no need to kill any of its residents. Even the appearance of the big city could look exactly the same as before. But to destroy and kill this big city, one only needs to make its original merits disappear. And all that would take are stupid words and actions coming from just a few people.

When asked by Mr. Shieh of RTHK what disappearing merits he meant, Mr. Ni said, “Freedom.”
“Freedom of speech is the mother of all freedoms,” he continued. “Without freedom of speech, there is no other freedom at all.”

I saved James Caan for last because I wanted to put in a jump. NYT.

Possible spoilers follow for two of his best movies:

(more…)

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