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Obit watch: February 16, 2024.

Friday, February 16th, 2024

Both the NYPost (archived for your pleasure) and Task and Purpose are reporting the death of Sgt. Chuck Mawhinney (USMC – ret.).

For those unfamiliar with Sgt. Mawhinney, he is considered to be the most successful sniper of the Vietnam War.

From 1968 to 1969, Mawhinney — still only a teenager — was credited with 103 confirmed kills.
An additional 216 kills were listed as “probable” since the enemies’ bodies were risky to verify in the active war zone.
Mawhinney had confirmed kills over 1,000 yards, with the average kill shot for snipers during the Vietnam War taken at a distance of 300 to 800 yards.

After the war, he kept his head down.

When Mawhinney returned home from the Vietnam War, he saw how veterans were being treated and quietly left his military life behind him. He loved to hunt and trap, and that’s what he did when he wasn’t working.

He worked for the Forest Service for 27 years.

Joseph Ward, one of his spotters, wrote a book in 1991. (Dear Mom: A Sniper’s Vietnam. Affiliate link.) The book didn’t get a lot of attention at first, but people found Ward’s mention of Sgt. Mawhinney’s record, and it rapidly became public knowledge.

Jim Lindsay, author of “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time,” met Mawhinney in 1979 at the Idle Hour tavern in Baker City, Oregon. Lindsay said that people seemed to not believe Mawhinney, but he confirmed that he did, in fact, have 103 confirmed kills and 216 unconfirmed kills during his 16 months of duty in Vietnam.
“Chuck’s platoon leader had kept track of the kills. He had the kill sheets and verified Chuck’s numbers,” Lindsay said. “So, there was no argument then. His life changed overnight. All of a sudden, everybody knew him.”

The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time on Amazon. (Affiliate link.)

Peter Senich, a military historian and author specializing in sniping and small arms, went to verify Ward’s claim in the Marine Corps archives and found he was wrong. Mawhinney didn’t have 101 kills — he had 103.
Mawhinney, a man who valued his privacy and was not seeking any fame for his actions in Vietnam, agreed to an interview with Senich in 1997, which was featured in the Baker City Herald.
“It’s an opportunity for me to get some recognition for a lot of the Vietnam vets that didn’t receive any recognition,” Mawhinney said.
“We were all there together. If I have to take recognition for it, that’s OK, because every time I talk to someone, I can talk about the vets. It gives me an opportunity to talk about what a great job they did.”

…

“He was a good man,” said Lindsay in an interview with The Oregonian Wednesday, sharing that Mawhinney never boasted about his kills and said he “did what I was trained to do.”
“He was a good father, a good husband and an asset to the community. He was a pretty cool cat.”

Not a bad way to be remembered.

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

Obit watch: February 13, 2024.

Tuesday, February 13th, 2024

Capt. Larry L. Taylor (United States Army – ret.) passed away on January 28th.

I wrote about Capt. Taylor back in September, when he received the Medal of Honor. Capt. Taylor is the guy who flew four men out of a hot LZ, with them hanging onto the sides of his Huey Cobra helicopter.

Bob Edwards, NPR guy. There was a time when I woke up to Bob Edwards in the morning…

Also among the dead Bobs: Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill. I’ve bought and used specialty products from Bob’s, though I never met Bob. 94 is a pretty good run.

David Bouley, prominent NYC chef.

Kelvin Kiptum, marathon runner. He was 24 and died in a car accident in Kenya.

This seems particularly sad. He set the men’s marathon record in Chicago last year: 2:00:35.

It was only his third marathon.

…

With hundreds of Kenyans having been barred from the sport in the past decade because of doping violations, his record drew not only wonderment, but also scrutiny. “My secret is training,” Kiptum, who was never accused of doping and had no drug suspensions, told reporters last fall. “Not any other thing.”

Many people think he had a shot at running a marathon in under two hours, which is sort of the Holy Grail of marathon running. He actually ran one in Vienna (in 2019) at 1:59:40, but that didn’t count as a record for reasons. He had said he was going to try to break the two-hour mark in Rotterdam in April.

Posted in Bread, Food, Heroism, Obits, Radio, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 9, 2024.

Friday, February 9th, 2024

I wonder sometimes if I lean too much on the NYT for obits. I do try to pull obits from a variety of places (as long as they are trustworthy sources) and the paper of record doesn’t cover everyone, or cover them in a timely fashion.

But the Times also tends to publish obits for interesting people that I just don’t see elsewhere.

Two examples:

Si Spiegel. He was a pioneer of artificial Christmas trees.

In 1954, he finally landed a permanent position with the American Brush Machinery Company, which was based in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He operated machines that manufactured brushes from wire and other materials for various industrial functions, including cleaning and scrubbing wood and metal finishing.

…

After American Brush unsuccessfully branched out into the Christmas tree business, Mr. Spiegel, by then a senior machinist, was tasked with closing the artificial tree factory. Instead, he began studying natural conifers, tweaked the brush-making machines to emulate the real trees and patented new production techniques.
He left the renamed American Tree and Wreath Company in 1979 and founded Hudson Valley Tree Company two years later., which began mass-producing 800,000 trees a year on an assembly line that turned one out every four minutes.
By the late 1980s, his company was generating annual sales of $54 million and employed 800 workers in Newburgh, N.Y., and Evansville, Ind. He sold the Hudson Valley Tree Company in 1993, retired as a multimillionaire and turned his attention to cultural, educational and social justice philanthropy.

Yes, he was Jewish. I wouldn’t ordinarily say that, but it is a key part of his origin story: he applied for commercial piloting jobs after WWII, but was consistently rejected because he was Jewish.

Mr. Spiegel celebrated Jewish holidays with his children, but when they were young, a Christmas tree was a winter holiday staple — first a real one, then the best of his fake ones.
“They were pagan symbols,” he told The Times. “My kids liked them.”

The other reason he’s interesting: he flew 35 missions over Germany as a B-17 pilot. On his 33rd mission, his B-17 was shot down and crash-landed in Poland, which was occupied by the Russians at the time.

Uncertain what to do with putative allies, the Russians awaited orders from their superiors. But instead of staying put, Mr. Spiegel and his fellow officers surreptitiously removed an engine and a tire from their own plane to repair another hobbled B-17 that had crashed nearby. They bartered for fuel and, on March 17, the combined crews escaped to Foggia, Italy, where they were able to notify their families back home that they had survived. Mr. Spiegel led two more missions, then returned home to New York on Aug. 31, 1945, but he would go back to England and Poland for reunions of his crew from the 849th Bomb Squadron of the 490th Bomb Group.

Elleston Trevor, call your office, please. I don’t see any evidence that he ever wrote a book about his wartime experiences, but I wish he had: I am genuinely curious how they moved the B-17 engine.

Mr. Spiegel, who died at 99 on Jan. 21 at his home in Manhattan, was among the last surviving American B-17 pilots of World War II, his granddaughter Maya Ono said.

Walter Shawlee, who the Times describes as “the sovereign of slide rules”.

…Inspired by this encounter with his youth, he created a website dedicated to slide rules. Before long, nostalgic math whizzes of decades past came across the site. Emails poured into Mr. Shawlee’s inbox. He began spending eight hours a day researching, buying, fixing and reselling old slide rules.

…

In the early 2000s, he was earning $125,000 a year fixing and reselling slide rules. The business paid for his two children to go to college, and it sent one of them to law school. His customer base took its most organized form in the Oughtred Society, a club named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican minister generally recognized to have invented the slide rule in the early 1620s.
Mr. Shawlee’s website developed a subculture of its own, with a network of slide rule-o-philes from Arizona to Venezuela to Malaysia digging on Mr. Shawlee’s behalf through the mildewed wares of old stationery stores and estate sales and school district warehouses in search of slide rules. In Singapore, a civil servant, Foo Sheow Ming, visited the back room of a bookstore and found 40 unopened crates of more than 12,000 slide rules in multiple varieties. On his website, Mr. Shawlee called the find “the absolute El Dorado of slide rules,” and Mr. Foo told The Journal that it was “the mother lode.”

…

Mr. Shawlee’s inventory included remarkable artifacts of science history. He offered a slide rule made for machine gun operators, with calculations for wind, elevation and range. He offered a slide rule for measuring metabolic rates, with different settings for age, sex and height. And he used his website to explore recondite points of slide rule-iana, writing, for example, about slide rules made by the U.S. government for calculating nuclear bomb effects.

…

He also sold slide-rule cuff links and slide-rule tie clips, which in some cases had been made by major slide-rule manufacturers as promotional items during what Mr. Shawlee called “the golden age of slide rules.” The tie clips proved so popular on the Slide Rule Universe that Mr. Shawlee worked with a small foundry to start manufacturing them himself.

Lawrence gave me a slide rule tie clip one year, which looks like it may have come from Mr. Shawlee’s website. I treasure it, and wear it on special occasions.

Slide Rule Universe. I was previously unfamiliar with this site, but wow! It looks like a relic of the old school Web, which I absolutely love.

In a phone interview, Ms. Shawlee said that thousands of the devices were still in the family’s home. She said she planned to continue selling them. As far as she knows, there is no prospect of another collector-expert-fixer-dealer-romantic like Mr. Shawlee emerging in “the slide-rule racket.”

For the historical record: NYT obit for David Kahn.

The U.S. government considered [The Codebreakers] so volatile that the National Security Agency, the country’s premier cryptology arm, pondered how to block its publication. It even considered breaking into Mr. Kahn’s home in Great Neck, N.Y.
Eventually the agency chose more overt means, demanding that the publisher, Macmillan, not release it. The company refused; instead, MacMillan and Mr. Kahn submitted the text to the Department of Defense for review. Mr. Kahn agreed to cut a few paragraphs about Britain’s code-breaking efforts during World War II, which were still classified, but otherwise he kept the book intact.

…

In a curious twist, in 1993, the N.S.A. invited Mr. Kahn to be its scholar in residence. Despite the agency’s earlier efforts to sideline his work, by the 1990s it had come to respect him for advancing the field of cryptology. In 2020, he was even named to its hall of fame.

Seiji Ozawa, conductor.

Mr. Ozawa was the most prominent harbinger of a movement that has transformed the classical music world over the last half-century: a tremendous influx of East Asian musicians into the West, which has in turn helped spread the gospel of Western classical music to Korea, Japan and China.
For much of that time, a belief widespread even among knowledgeable critics held that although highly trained Asian musicians could develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they could never achieve a real understanding of its interpretive needs or a deep feeling for its emotional content. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa surmounted this prejudice by dint of his outsize personality, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer hard work.

…

He found himself near the top of the American orchestral world in 1973, when he was named music director of the Boston Symphony. He scored many successes over the years, proving especially adept at big, complex works that many others found unwieldy.He toured widely and recorded extensively with the orchestra. But his 29-year tenure was, many thought, too long for anyone’s good: his own, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’.
Though relatively inexperienced in opera, he left in 2002 to become music director of the august Vienna State Opera, where he stayed until 2010. The rest of his life was mainly consumed with health issues and with dreams of a major comeback on the concert stage, which he was never able to achieve.

Posted in Books, Christmas, Geek, Heroism, History, Music, Obits, Planes | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: February 2, 2024.

Friday, February 2nd, 2024

Colonel Roger H.C. Donlon (United States Army – ret.)

Col. Donlon was the first person, and first Special Forces member, to receive the Medal of Honor for action in the Vietnam War.

His Medal of Honor citation:

Rank and organization: Captain, U.S. Army. Place and date: Near Nam Dong, Republic of Vietnam, 6 July 1964. Entered service at: Fort Chaffee, Ark. Born: 30 January 1934, Saugerties, N.Y. G.O. No.: 41, 17 December 1964.
Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while defending a U.S. military installation against a fierce attack by hostile forces.
Capt. Donlon was serving as the commanding officer of the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment A-726 at Camp Nam Dong when a reinforced Viet Cong battalion suddenly launched a full-scale, predawn attack on the camp. During the violent battle that ensued, lasting 5 hours and resulting in heavy casualties on both sides, Capt. Donlon directed the defense operations in the midst of an enemy barrage of mortar shells, falling grenades, and extremely heavy gunfire. Upon the initial onslaught, he swiftly marshaled his forces and ordered the removal of the needed ammunition from a blazing building. He then dashed through a hail of small arms and exploding hand grenades to abort a breach of the main gate. En route to this position he detected an enemy demolition team of 3 in the proximity of the main gate and quickly annihilated them. Although exposed to the intense grenade attack, he then succeeded in reaching a 60mm mortar position despite sustaining a severe stomach wound as he was within 5 yards of the gun pit. When he discovered that most of the men in this gunpit were also wounded, he completely disregarded his own injury, directed their withdrawal to a location 30 meters away, and again risked his life by remaining behind and covering the movement with the utmost effectiveness. Noticing that his team sergeant was unable to evacuate the gun pit he crawled toward him and, while dragging the fallen soldier out of the gunpit, an enemy mortar exploded and inflicted a wound in Capt. Donlon’s left shoulder. Although suffering from multiple wounds, he carried the abandoned 60mm mortar weapon to a new location 30 meters away where he found 3 wounded defenders. After administering first aid and encouragement to these men, he left the weapon with them, headed toward another position, and retrieved a 57mm recoilless rifle. Then with great courage and coolness under fire, he returned to the abandoned gun pit, evacuated ammunition for the 2 weapons, and while crawling and dragging the urgently needed ammunition, received a third wound on his leg by an enemy hand grenade. Despite his critical physical condition, he again crawled 175 meters to an 81mm mortar position and directed firing operations which protected the seriously threatened east sector of the camp. He then moved to an eastern 60mm mortar position and upon determining that the vicious enemy assault had weakened, crawled back to the gun pit with the 60mm mortar, set it up for defensive operations, and turned it over to 2 defenders with minor wounds. Without hesitation, he left this sheltered position, and moved from position to position around the beleaguered perimeter while hurling hand grenades at the enemy and inspiring his men to superhuman effort. As he bravely continued to move around the perimeter, a mortar shell exploded, wounding him in the face and body. As the long awaited daylight brought defeat to the enemy forces and their retreat back to the jungle leaving behind 54 of their dead, many weapons, and grenades, Capt. Donlon immediately reorganized his defenses and administered first aid to the wounded. His dynamic leadership, fortitude, and valiant efforts inspired not only the American personnel but the friendly Vietnamese defenders as well and resulted in the successful defense of the camp. Capt. Donlon’s extraordinary heroism, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.

The linked NYT obit provides a little more color. This was a wild battle.

Years later, Mr. Donlon said that among the fighters the Green Berets were training were many Vietcong sympathizers. When the shooting began, he told the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, the attackers made an announcement over a public address system in English and Vietnamese telling the sympathizers: “Lay down your weapons. We just want the Americans.” He estimated that there were only 75 dependable fighters to defend the camp.

He wrote two books. I think his first, Outpost of Freedom, was a pretty big seller at the time. We had a version of that in a “Reader’s Digest Condensed Book” at my house when I was a little kid, and I remember reading it pretty regularly. (That same Condensed book also had The Century of the Detective and The Yearling.) His other book was Beyond Nam Dong, about his post-war return.

In a 1995 return trip to Nam Dong, Mr. Donlon visited the overgrown graves of the South Vietnamese soldiers under his command who died in the battle. Beside him was Nguyen Can Thu, a former Vietcong political officer who had helped plan the attack. It was Mr. Thu, Mr. Donlon later said, who told him that 100 of the 300 Vietnamese he was training in the camp were Vietcong infiltrators.

David Kahn, cryptographic historian and author. (The Codebreakers.)

I read The Codebreakers (the original edition, the one with the key on the cover) when I was in middle school, and it was a big influence on me. I suspect there are a lot of other folks out there who can say the same thing. (Hattip: Bruce Schneier.)

Carl Weathers. THR. IMDB. Pretty well covered elsewhere, and I don’t have much to add.

Don Murray, actor. Other credits include “T.J. Hooker”, “Ghosts Can’t Do It”, and “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes”.

Jennell Jaquays, prominent D&D creator.

Over nearly five decades, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D&D and other role-playing games. In one of them, a red dragon roars while perched in front of a snow-capped mountain; in another, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a third, two Ghostbusters prepare to tangle with a field of animated jack-o’-lanterns.
Ms. Jaquays also crafted scenarios of her own. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are renowned for their pathbreaking designs.

…

In the early 1980s Ms. Jaquays went to work for Coleco, and she eventually oversaw the teams that designed games for the Coleco Vision, an early home video game console; one notable project was WarGames, an adaptation of the 1983 film.
Long after leaving Coleco, when video games were vastly more sophisticated, Ms. Jaquays designed levels for the first-person shooters Quake II and III and the military strategy game Halo Wars. She also made The War Chiefs, an expansion pack that let users play as Native American cultures vying for power against European civilizations in Age of Empires III.

Posted in Books, Cryptography, Heroism, History, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 1, 2024.

Thursday, February 1st, 2024

This is an obit that made me say “Wow.” when I read it.

Jack Jennings has died at the age of 104.

Mr. Jennings was a private in the British Army (1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment) and was serving in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942. He was one of “an estimated 85,000” soldiers captured and taken prisoner.

…Mr. Jennings spent the next three-and-half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).

He and the other POWs were put to work building the Burma Railway.

He survived the searing heat of the Indochinese jungle; a daily diet of rice, watery gruel and a teaspoon of sugar; and a battery of ailments: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria and renal colic. He developed a leg ulcer that required skin grafts, which were performed without anesthesia.
“At least 15 soldiers died each day of malaria and cholera,” Mr. Jennings told the British newspaper The Mirror in 2019. “I remember sitting in camp just counting the days I had left to live. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there alive.”

His memoir, Prisoner Without A Crime, is available from Amazon in the US.

This is also in the linked NYT obit, but if you don’t want to click over there to watch it, here’s the commercial Mr. Jennings did for the British National Lottery.

An estimated 12,000 to 16,000 P.O.W.s died during construction of the railway. Many civilian prisoners perished as well.

Two months after he came home, he married. He had at least two daughters. (“Complete information on survivors besides Mr. Jennings’ daughters was unavailable.”) The daughters believe he was the last survivor of the captured soldiers.

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

Obit watch: January 12, 2024.

Friday, January 12th, 2024

Russell Hamler, the last surviving member of Merrill’s Marauders.

After Pearl Harbor, Japan’s armed forces overran Southeast Asia, capturing Hong Kong, Singapore and Indochina. An American general, Joseph Stilwell, was forced into a humiliating retreat from Burma (now Myanmar). Allied leaders agreed in 1943 to send a force back into Burma, into what Winston Churchill called the “most forbidding fighting country imaginable.” It would be a long-range penetration unit, challenging Japanese control of the northern half of the country. The men would have only the weapons and supplies they could carry on mules or on their backs, with additional supplies dropped occasionally by parachute from planes.

…

The dense bamboo, tangled vines and banyan trees of the jungle, where men marched single-file in stifling tropical heat and humidity, was as much an enemy as the Japanese. Dysentery and malaria were endemic and rendered many men unfit for combat.
Mr. Hamler trekked until he wore holes in his boots, then walked on bare feet before receiving new footwear in one of the parachute drops, he recalled in an interview published in 2022 with Carole Ortenzo, a retired Army colonel and a member of Mr. Hamler’s extended family. Leeches sucked blood from his limbs and bugs “bored into your arms,” he recalled.
The Army supplied mostly K-rations, providing just 2,830 calories a day to men who were burning far more energy. Famished soldiers, Mr. Hamler recounted, dropped grenades into rivers, skimmed the dead fish and cooked them in their helmets.
“There had to be absolute silence at night in the jungle because any noise invited shelling from the Japanese,” Mr. Hamler said. Pairs of men dug foxholes nearby so one could sleep while his buddy stood sentry. When it was time to switch roles, the sentry tugged a rope attached to the sleeping man to wake him without uttering a sound.

…

Early in the fighting at Nhpum Ga, Mr. Hamler was hit in the hip by a mortar fragment and lay immobilized in his foxhole for more than 10 days, until Americans from the Third Batallion broke through to the village — by that point christened “Maggot Hill” by the Americans — and the Japanese retreated. The Marauders counted 400 enemy corpses. The Marauders lost 57 men, with 302 wounded. General Merrill himself suffered a heart attack just before the siege and was evacuated.

…

In May 1944, three months after the Marauders entered Burma, the airstrip in the town of Myitkyina, the mission’s key objective, fell to the Americans and Chinese troops who had reinforced them. In August, the heavily fortified town itself was captured. The Marauders were disbanded one week later. All told, the unit suffered 93 combat fatalities in Burma and 30 deaths from disease. Another 293 men were wounded and eight were missing. Most startling, an additional 1,970 men at one point were hospitalized with sicknesses, including 72 with what was described as “psychoneurosis.”
Mr. Hamler had been evacuated after the battle of Nhpum Ga in April to northern India, where he spent five weeks recuperating in a hospital. He was transferred back home to Pennsylvania and served as a military policeman until he was discharged in December 1945. He was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

He was 99.

It has been a bad few days for writers.

Lawrence sent over a report that David J. Skal died after a car accident on January 1st. I can’t find a trustworthy link for this, though it is confirmed by Wikipedia and the SF Encyclopedia.

Skal was a prominent cultural critic, who specialized in the horror genre. I was a pretty big fan of what I’ve read of his work: I particularly liked Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen and Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, but I feel like just about anything he wrote is worth picking up. (I haven’t read his Claude Rains book yet. I actually didn’t know he’d written one.)

He also appears in a lot of DVD commentary tracks. His Wikipedia entry has a good list. And he was from Garfield Heights, so he counts as another good Cleveland boy.

Terry Bisson, prominent SF and fantasy writer, although that may be minimizing his work somewhat.

Three things I want to link to:

  1. “They’re Made Out Of Meat”, a Bisson story that I find absolutely hilarious.
  2. Michael Swanwick’s profile of Terry Bisson.
  3. I didn’t know that the New Yorker had profiled him, but they did back in October.

(This is another obit where reliable links have been hard to find, and a second one Lawrence tipped me off to.)

Edward Jay Epstein, writer who the NYT describes as a “professional skeptic”. His first book was Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth which started out as his master’s thesis:

His book raised doubts about the commission’s finding that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin, basing them largely on what Mr. Epstein considered serious deficiencies in the panel’s investigation. “Inquest” was published a few months before “Rush to Judgment” by Mark Lane, another in a tsunami of books that suggested that the commission had been hampered by time constraints, by limited resources and access, and by Justice Warren’s demand for unanimity to make its conclusions more credible.
“It was the only master’s thesis I know of that sold 600,000 copies,” Professor Hacker, who now teaches at Queens College, said in a phone interview.

…

Mr. Epstein had an insatiable curiosity, writing about anything and everything, from the economics of Hollywood to the rape accusation against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, by a Manhattan hotel maid in 2011. (Mr. Epstein suggested that it had been a political setup staged to embarrass him. Mr. Strauss-Kahn and the maid ultimately settled her lawsuit against him.)

Bud Harrelson, shortstop for the Mets. (Hattip to pigpen51 on this.)

Harrelson played in the major leagues for 16 seasons, 13 with the Mets; he appeared in 1,322 games with the team, the fourth most in franchise history. (Ed Kranepool tops the list with 1,853 games played, followed by David Wright and Jose Reyes.)
Standing 5 feet 10 inches and weighing between 145 and 155 pounds at varying times, he wasn’t much of a threat at the plate. He had a .236 career batting average and hit only seven home runs. But he possessed outstanding range in the field and a strong arm. He won a National League Gold Glove Award in 1971 for his fielding, appeared in two All-Star Games and was inducted into the Mets’ Hall of Fame in 1986.

He played on the 1969 “Miracle Mets” team, and famously got into a brawl with Pete Rose in 1973.

Adan Canto. THR. IMDB.

Georgina Hale, British actress. Other credits include “The Bill”, “Doctor Who”, several “T.Bag” TV movies, and “Voyage of the Damned”.

Brian McConnachie, comedy writer and occasional actor.

Tracy Tormé. I usually don’t do obits for celebrity children just because they are celebrity children, but Mr. Tormé seems to have carved out a niche for himself as a TV and film writer.

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

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 »

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