President Trump talking about re-opening Alcatraz prompted two stories in the NYPost that are moderately worth linking:
1) An interview with Charlie Hopkins, who is 93, and is allegedly the last surviving Alcatraz inmate.
2) A second interview, this time with Jolene Babyak. Ms. Babyak’s father worked in the federal prison system. Her family lived on Alcatraz twice, and she’s written several histories over the years.
Hooray! At least for those of you who live within reasonable driving distance of Galveston, or are willing to travel.
This sounds like it could be a lot of fun. If you go on this tour, please feel free to report back here.
Other credits include “Night Gallery”, “Emergency”, “Medical Center” (“Ruth Buzzi and Don RIckles portray two comically depressive characters who fall in love at Medical Center.”), and, of course…
I missed this, but: Ted Kotcheff passed away on April 10th. NYT (archived).
He refused to direct the first, “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (1985), because of the violence that the character unleashes.
“I read the script, and I said, ‘In the first film he doesn’t kill anybody,’” he told Filmmaker magazine in 2016. “In this film he kills 74 people.’”
Other credits include “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?”, “Fun with Dick and Jane” (the 1977 one), and “North Dallas Forty”.
Odile de Vasselot passed away on April 21st. She was 103.
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Bobby Torre, maître d’ at J.G. Melon. This is one of those “questionable notability” ones – a NYC bar guy? – but it is also the kind of obit the paper of record does well, and is kind of fun.
When he was on the job at Melon’s, leaning by the entry on a bar stool a little too tall for him, glasses pushed up on his head and a pencil behind his ear, Mr. Torre would chat you up while you waited for a table and your burger with cottage fries.
Something would remind him of a saloon regular nicknamed Ronda Lasagna. That produced tales of a place he called “the Yankee Stadium of belly dancers.” From there, his mind would travel to a gay bar known as “the Wrinkle Room,” where “every guy with a trick said it was their nephew,” as he recalled. (Mr. Torre had run a mob-connected gay bar himself at one point.)
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In his heyday there, he could charm rowdy patrons into a bear hug. But he was also capable of pinning a purse snatcher against the bathroom door until officers from the 19th Precinct arrived.
His fervor extended to his Roman Catholic faith. Mr. O’Neill sometimes had to ask Mr. Torre to stop blessing everyone at the bar. But without his religiosity, it is hard to imagine Mr. Torre performing his acts of kindness so cherished by customers.
He covered checks. He made hundreds of annual birthday calls. Melon’s is near several hospitals, and he would spend hours sitting with the ill, relatives of the ill and new mourners. That patient sympathy, offered alongside free cheeseburgers and fries, became part of stories told and retold by families who visited Melon’s during a crisis.
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Mr. Torre also claimed to be an expert in martial arts. Michael Burrell, a former Melon’s bartender, recalled ribbing him: “Yeah, Bob, you’re a black belt.”
In fact, Mr. Valenti confirmed, his uncle studied not only jiu-jitsu, but also judo, Wing Chun kung fu and hapkido.
Julia Parsons passed away on April 18th at the age of 104.
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At the U.S. Naval Communications Annex in Washington, Mrs. Parsons and hundreds of other women used the Bombe to decipher German military radio transmissions, revealing information that was instrumental in shortening and winning the war, historians have said.
“We tried to figure out what the message was saying, then we drew up what we called a menu showing what we thought the letters were,” she told The Washington Post in 2022. “That was fed into the computer, which then spat out all possible wheel orders for the day. Those changed every day and the settings changed twice a day, so we were constantly working on them.”
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More than 100,000 women joined the WAVES during the war. In 1943, she left Pittsburgh for officer training at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she took courses on cryptology, physics and naval history. After her training, she was sent to the Naval Communications Annex, in Washington.
One day, an officer there asked if anyone could speak German. She had taken two years of the language in high school, so she raised her hand.
“They shot me off to the Enigma section immediately, and I began learning how to decode German U-boat message traffic on the job, Day 1,” Mrs. Parsons said in an interview with the Veterans Breakfast Club, a nonprofit organization. “Enemy messages arrived all day from all over the North Atlantic, plus the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay.”
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In 1997, Mrs. Parsons visited the National Cryptologic Museum near Washington, just another tourist interested in American history.
“The exhibits there astounded me,” she said in the Veterans Breakfast Club interview. “Here was every sort of Enigma machine — early models, late models — on display for all to see, with detailed explanations of how they worked.”
She asked a tour guide why the machines were on display. The guide replied that the Enigma work had been declassified in the 1970s. Mrs. Parsons hadn’t known. She spent rest of her life visiting classrooms and giving interviews, eager to tell her story.“It’s been good to break the silence,” she said. “Good for me, and for history.”
My Personal Top Ten List of Wikipedia Lists
10. “List of stoffs”. How can you not like a list with a name like that? Also, as you know, Bob, I’m both a bit of a plane geek and a military history geek. And as you also know, Bob, the famous ME-163 ran on T-Stoff and Z-Stoff (in the A variant) or C-Stoff (in the B and C variants.) (At least, I think that’s the case. The Wikipedia article is a little confusing.)
(I’ve been thinking about doing a Kickstarter for another million-dollar idea: a small rocket engine that attaches to a snowboard and runs on T-Stoff and Z-Stoff, maybe about the size of an old Apollo RCS motor. Why take the lift when you can rocket up the slope and board back down? And why just board back down when you can rocketboard back down? Think of the extreme fun!)
(No, I haven’t done the math on this. Yet.)
9. “List of lists of lists”. “This is a list of articles that are lists of list articles on the English Wikipedia. In other words, each of the articles linked here is an index to multiple lists on a topic. Some of the linked articles are themselves lists of lists of lists.” So do we need a “Lists of lists of lists of lists” entry?
8. “List of animals awarded human credentials”. This one would be higher on the list if it wasn’t just cats and dogs (well, except for one chicken and one goldfish). Really, is there nobody out there who has obtained a diploma for their sloth or slow loris? (And if the answer is “No, there isn’t” I sense a great need. Senator Shoshana, I’ve never met you and this is crazy, but here’s my number, so call me, maybe, about diplomas for sloths?) Honorable mention: “Non-human electoral candidates”.
7. “List of helicopter prison escapes“. I guess this is mostly personal nostalgia. When I was (mumble mumble) years old, “Breakout” was released. I thought a movie about a prison break by helicopter was incredibly cool. I never actually it in theaters because my parents wouldn’t let me watch PG-rated movies. I still haven’t seen it, and in retrospect it was probably a mediocre Bronson action film, But: Robert Duvall! John Huston! Randy Quaid! And it’s available on blu-ray from Kino Lorber.
Setting aside my personal nostalgia, this is still a good list. I’ve written before about the crazy Garrett Brock Trapnell story, but that’s not the only good one. “I told him it was our Minister of Defence leaving.” “The 3-passenger helicopter was so overloaded with 5 occupants that it barely cleared the fence, while flying away in a hail of gunfire that injured one guard.” “One of the skids caught on the razor wire, causing the helicopter to catapult over the fence and crash into the prison grounds.” Is it just me, or do there seem to be a disproportionate number of helicopter escapes in France and Canada?
6. “List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response“. Everyone knows about “The Rite of Spring” (or thinks they know: I would really love to find a good reliable history of what actually happened the night of the premiere). But there are other great moments in this entry. Some of them even involve artists I like. “One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing ‘Stop, stop, I confess.'” “Artist Man Ray reportedly punched a man in the nose, Marcel Duchamp began hurling obscenities at a fellow audience member, and Erik Satie was heard shouting, ‘What precision! What precision!'”. “…Futurists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti fighting members of the audience in the stalls.” (Futurism! There’s a rabbit hole for you.)
5. “List of sausages“. As you know, Bob, I am somewhat food obsessed. There are a bunch of Wikipedia food lists I could probably pick, but I happen to be fond of sausages. I wonder how hard it would be to organize a sausage tour of Germany? (I’d include Volkswagen currywurst in that tour, but I’m not if VW would let a tourist group eat in their canteen.) Also, I’m wondering if there’s any way to get Noumboulo in the US…
4. “List of Latin phrases”. Because sometimes in business it is useful to be able to toss out a reference like “alea iacta est” or “fiat justitia ruat caelum” and see who picks up on it. Honorable mention: “Glossary of French expressions in English“. I don’t have as many opportunities to use any of these, except “pour encourager les autres“.
3. “List of winless seasons”. Yes, this does include the NFL, and yes, the 2008 Lions and the 2017 Cleveland Browns are on the list. But there’s more to it than just the NFL. Have you ever wondered if a cricket team has lost all of their matches in a season? What about rugby? Or “association football”? (“In the 2010–11 Ukrainian Second League (3rd tier on the Ukrainian pyramid), FC Veres Rivne lost all 14 out of 22 scheduled games before being expelled from the league due to failure of payment of league dues; in addition, they also did not score a single goal at home.” Now that’s a mark to strive for.)
2. “List of canceled Las Vegas casinos”. I’ve linked to this before, but it is still a favorite of mine. Honorable mention: “List of Atlantic City casinos that never opened”.
And at number one on the hit parade…
1. “List of television series canceled after one episode”. Not only is this a subject near and dear to my heart (epic failure) but I love the way this list is organized: “Canceled before the first episode finished airing”, “Canceled after two episodes, seen back-to-back on premiere night”, “Special cases”, and etc.
I was busy traveling in elephants yesterday. By the time we got in, got unpacked (do you know how long it takes to unpack an elephant?) and got something to eat…it was late.
So: Val Kilmer, for the historical record. NYT. THR.
Not much to say, really, except that I think both “Heat” and “Tombstone” are pretty good movies. I actually like “Tombstone” better than “My Darling Clementine” (which we watched last week) on the OK Corral movie front.
Charlotte Webb has passed away at 101.
Ms. Webb was one of the last surviving Bletchley Park codebreakers.
Ms. Webb, known as Betty, was 18 when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, and was assigned to work at the base in Buckinghamshire where Bletchley Park was located. From 1941 to 1945, she helped in the decryption of German messages, and also worked on Japanese signals.
In 2015, Ms. Webb was appointed as Member of the Order of the British Empire and in 2021 she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious honor.
Sian Barbara Allen, actress.
Other credits include “Sword of Justice”, “The Rockford Files”, “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, and “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Patty Maloney. Other credits include one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Trapper John, M.D.”, and voice work in the 1978 “Lord of the Rings”.
Sgt. Joe Harris (United States Army – ret.) has passed away. He was 108, and is believed to have been the oldest surviving paratrooper.
Mr. Harris was a member of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, nicknamed the Triple Nickles (the word was deliberately misspelled) after their unit designation and the three buffalo nickels that formed their insignia.
He had enlisted in the Army in 1941, and he volunteered to join the 555th soon after it was formed in 1943. The Army was still rigidly segregated, and most Black service members served in support roles; the battalion was designed as an early step toward the military’s eventual desegregation.
It never served overseas. Instead, in 1945 it was transferred from its base in North Carolina to rural Oregon as part of a confidential program known as Operation Firefly.
The Triple Nickles were assigned to parachute in and fight fires started by Japanese balloon bombs.
Mr. Harris and his unit became the front line in fighting the blazes. Jumping from C-47 cargo planes, they wore leather football helmets with wire-mesh face masks and carried a brace of firefighting tools, including the Pulaski, a specialized tool that combines an ax and an adze.
They were trained to aim for trees, to avoid landing in dangerously rugged territory. Among their gear was a 50-foot rope that they would use to drop to the ground after getting snared in branches.
Mr. Harris performed 72 jumps, fighting fires started by the bombs as well as by lightning and other natural causes. He was honorably discharged in late 1945. The Army was desegregated in 1947, and the 555th was incorporated into the 82nd Airborne Division.
Richard Chamberlain. THR. IMDB.
Bruce Glover. Other credits include the 1973 “Walking Tall”, “Bearcats!”, and “The Six Million Dollar Man”.
Richard Norton, “Actor, Martial Arts Expert, Trainer and Stuntman”. Other credits include “Gymkata”, “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and “Road House 2: Last Call”.
Group Captain John A. Hemingway (RAF- ret.) died on Monday. He was 105. NYT. BBC.
Gp Capt Hemmingway was the last known survivor of the Battle of Britain. He flew Hurricanes.
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Flying afterward in defense of Britain, Mr. Hemingway was intercepting German bombers over the English Channel on Aug. 18 when his Hurricane was shot up.
“Somebody clobbered me,” he told The Daily Mirror in 2018. “They hit me in the engine. It covered the inside of the cockpit with oil, and things got very smelly and hot. I had no hope of getting to England, so I bailed out and landed in the sea.
“There were jellyfish everywhere,” he continued. “I started swimming. Two hours later, a rowboat from a lightship bumped into me.”
He climbed aboard, grabbed an oar and helped the crew return with him to England.
Later in August, Mr. Hemingway survived a third close call, this time while pursuing a German bomber over southeastern England. As he told The Daily Mirror: “I got a Dornier in my sight and started to pull around and have a second go. That was it — ‘bang, bang’. There was smoke everywhere.” He bailed out. “I landed in the Pitsea marshes, where I faced the local Home Guard,” he said.
He added wryly, “I could speak reasonable English, so they didn’t shoot me.”
Mr. Hemingway was an Allied flight controller during the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The next year, in April, he was a squadron commander in Italy when his Spitfire fighter was downed by the Germans. He bailed out again and was rescued by farm workers, who disguised him in peasant clothing and smuggled him to the British lines.
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(Hattip: Borepatch, who actually beat me to an obit for once.)
Jessie Mahaffey (Boatswain’s Mate Second Class, United States Navy – ret.) passed away on March 1st. He was 102.
Mr. Mahaffey served on the U.S.S. Oklahoma.
In December, Mr. Mahaffey told KTBS-TV of Shreveport, La., that Dec. 7, 1941, had started as a quiet Sunday.
He and five other sailors were chatting as they scrubbed the deck of the Oklahoma when they “heard a siren, saw planes and smoke,” he said, adding, “It must have only gone on for 45 minutes, but it was crazy.”
The Oklahoma was struck by as many as nine torpedoes. Within minutes, the battleship capsized, trapping hundreds of men below deck. “It didn’t take that long to come back to the other side,” he said. “It turned upside down and we had to slide over the bottom of the ship into the water.”
He managed to swim to the U.S.S. Maryland, another battleship that was moored at Pearl Harbor.
In total, 429 crew members from the Oklahoma were killed in the attack, which left more than 2,400 U.S. military personnel and civilians dead and nearly 1,800 wounded.
He went on to serve on the U.S.S. Northampton, which was sunk by the Japanese on November 30, 1942.
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When he turned 100, in 2022, Mr. Mahaffey told KPLC-TV of Lake Charles, La., about the day he married Joyce Inez Mahaffey. “My best day would be marrying that little gal that just turned 18 years old,” he said. “Me, her and her brother went to that church.”
Ms. Mahaffey died in 2003. His survivors include his sons George and Clarence; several grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and a great-great-grandson.
After he was discharged from the Navy, Mr. Mahaffey returned to Louisiana, where he worked for Southwestern Bell, the regional phone company, for at least 30 years, his grandson said. Mr. Mahaffey, who was 5-foot-3, was a pole climber who refused to accept jobs that would require him to work indoors, John Mahaffey said.“They kept trying to give him promotions, to come inside, to take a desk job or to run the crews or to be a supervisor, and he would never take it,” he said.
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According to the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors, there are 14 remaining Pearl Harbor survivors.
This time on “What’s Been Added to my Library of Gun Books” recently, a special all gun books edition! No diversions into subjects such as absinthe or old bibles. Just some new and new old gun books. But I am going to include a gun crankery photo.
Since this is going to be gun book heavy, I’m following my usual policy of inserting a jump so the non-book, non-gun, and non-book non-gun people can skip easily to the next post…
It has been a difficult week. I thought it might cheer me up some to catalog more gun books for the library. As the saying goes, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn.”
This time, though, I have one that’s only sort of tangentially a gun book, and one that’s not a gun book at all. I’ll get into the reason for that one later.
You may not recognize the name, but I think you’ll recognize him from the photos.
He was the Secret Service agent who jumped on the back of the limo when JFK was shot, and kept Mrs. Kennedy from falling out.
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When he retired from the Secret Service in 1975, he was the assistant director responsible for all protective forces.
In December 2013, the Secret Service honored him at its James J. Rowley Training Center in Maryland, erecting a bronze plaque next to a street it named Clint Hill Way.
But the accolades and his ascendancy in the agency could not overcome Mr. Hill’s feelings of guilt. He blamed himself for not reacting a split second faster to the sound of gunfire, becoming convinced that he had missed a chance to save President Kennedy’s life. His emotional turmoil resulted in his retirement in 1975 at age 43, at the urging of doctors.
In honor of Valérie André, I am declaring a moratorium on French and French Army jokes for the next 72 hours.
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In 120 combat missions in the early 1950s in the dense jungles and soggy rice paddies of Indochina, where the French were trying without success to repulse Communist guerrillas, Dr. André flew 168 wounded soldiers from the battlefields to hospitals in Hanoi — including enemy soldiers, when there was room on the two litters mounted on her single-seat Hiller chopper.
She later flew 365 missions into combat zones in North Africa, where Algerians were seeking independence from France. In 1976 she was promoted to general, the first woman to be elevated to that rank in the French Army.
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She was 102 when she died.
Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart Jr. (USAF – ret) has passed away. He was 100.
He was one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen who saw combat during WWII. (That’s the way the paper of record phrases it. I wondered about that phrasing, but according to Wikipedia (I know, I know):
He flew 43 missions — almost one every other day — from late winter 1944 into the spring of 1945.
On one mission, to attack a Luftwaffe base in Germany, Lieutenant Stewart and six other American pilots were baited into a dogfight with at least 16 German fighter planes. Firing his machine guns and performing risky aerial maneuvers, he downed three enemy aircraft in succession, fending off a potential rout.
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, cited for having “gallantly engaged, fought and defeated the enemy” with no regard for his personal safety.
Prince Karim Al-Hussaini, also known as The Aga Khan IV.
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Dick Button, figure skating guy. I’ve never been a big skating fan, but I remember Mr. Button from when I was young and actually watched some of the Olympics.
Iris Cummings Critchell. She was 104.
She competed as a swimmer in the 1936 Summer Olympics, and was the last surviving member of the American team.
She flew with the Woman’s Air Force Service Pilots, ferrying planes across the country for shipping overseas.
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In addition to her work at Harvey Mudd College, Ms. Critchell created aviation outreach programs for public high schools, developed manuals for the Federal Aviation Administration and worked as a pilot examiner there for more than 20 years. She was a longtime member of the Ninety-Nines, a nonprofit organization supporting female pilots.
She also competed in women’s transcontinental air races, known informally as the Powder Puff Derby, a term coined by Will Rogers. In 1957, she finished first in a race to Philadelphia from San Mateo, Calif., sharing an $800 prize with her co-pilot, Alice Roberts.