Mr. Romero was a teenage busboy working in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in June 1968 when [Robert F.] Kennedy, moments after giving a victory speech in the California Democratic primary, came walking through and was shot in the head by an assassin.
Mr. Romero rushed to Kennedy and held him as he lay on the floor mortally wounded. Mr. Romero later said he had struggled to keep the senator’s head from hitting the floor.
Dave Anderson, sportswriter for the NYT.
Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen passed away on September 5th, one day before her 93rd birthday.
It was 1940, Germany had invaded the Netherlands, and she and her sister, Truus, who was two years older, had been recruited by the local Dutch resistance commander, in the city of Haarlem.
“Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: Sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus Menger-Oversteegen recalled in a 2014 book, “Under Fire: Women and World War II.” “We told him we’d like to do that.”
Then the commander added, “ ‘And learn to shoot — to shoot Nazis,’ ” she said.
“I remember my sister saying, ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’ ”
The sisters, along with a lapsed law student, Hannie Schaft, became a singular female underground squad, part of a cell of seven, that killed collaborators and occupying troops.
The three staged drive-by shootings from their bicycles; seductively lured German soldiers from bars to nearby woods, where they would execute them; and sheltered fleeing Jews, political dissidents, gay people and others who were being hunted by the invaders.
…
“Yes, I’ve shot a gun myself and I’ve seen them fall,” Freddie Oversteegen told a TV interviewer. “And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.”
Still, she justified killing collaborators, who had betrayed her neighbors, and foreign soldiers, who had invaded and occupied her country.
“We had to do it,” she said. “It was a necessary evil.”
Ms. Oversteegen also rebutted criticism that the resistance had provoked German retaliation against innocent civilians.
“What about the six million Jews?” she said. “Weren’t they innocent people? Killing them was no act of reprisal. We were no terrorists. The real act of terror was the kidnapping and execution of innocent people after the resistance acted.”
Hannie Schaft was arrested, tortured, and killed shortly before the end of the war. Truus and Freddie Oversteegen created the National Hannie Schaft Foundation in her memory. Truus Oversteegen died in 2016.
I’m a day or two behind on this, but: Inverted Jenny #49 is now accounted for.
As far as anyone was able to determine, the stamp went from William T. Robey (the guy who discovered the error and bought the sheet of 100 stamps) to Eugene Klein (who bought the sheet from Robey for $15,000) to Col. E.H.R. “Ned” Green (who bought the sheet from Klein for $20,000 and split it up). After Green, nobody knew where #49 was until recently.
Mr. Lyons said the Illinois man’s 91-year-old father had been a stamp collector, but the stamp had come from his mother’s side of the family. A great-uncle apparently bought it after the sheet of 100 was broken up, and after the great-uncle died, the great-aunt left it to the man’s mother in the 1930s.
“It spent all those years in bank vaults, which was a good thing for the stamp,” he said. Mr. Lyons said the man, who has asked not to be identified, could not explain why his father never put it in an album with his other stamps.
This is way cool. Because the stamp was never mounted and spent most of the time in safety deposit boxes, it is in very good shape. According to the article in Linn’s Stamp News, the stamp has been graded at 90 XF.
If it goes up for auction…an XF-SUP 95 graded Inverted Jenny went for $1.35 million in 2016. I can easily see this one going for over a million.
The only Inverted Jenny unaccounted for at the moment is #66: that one was part of a block of four that was stolen in 1955. The other three stamps eventually resurfaced.
Inverted Jenny website maintained by Siegal Auctions. This includes a very useful interactive reconstruction of the entire sheet.
That’s “Canadian Content” for those of you in my audience unfamiliar with the term.
I don’t remember how I stumbled across this, but yesterday I discovered “The Devil at Your Heels”, a 1981 documentary by Robert Fortier which is available at the National Film Board of Canada’s website.
Perhaps surprisingly to some people, this is not a movie about blues music. “Devil” is a documentary about Ken Carter, a semi-famous Canadian stunt driver, and his attempt to jump a car from the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River to the US side: a distance of about one mile.
According to the background blog entry on the film, Fortier originally intended this to be a short documenting the jump.
It took five years just to get to the point where Carter was actually able and ready to make the attempt. And Fortier kept filming in spite of the setbacks: rain interfering with construction of the jump ramp, exploding rocket fuel tanks, Carter’s attempts to raise money…
I “watched” about 55 minutes of it yesterday while puttering around doing other things, and plan to finish watching it in the next couple of days. There is a twist at the end which I spoiled for myself, but I won’t do that to you. (If you search for “Ken Carter” or “The Devil at Your Heels” on Wikipedia, you’ll find the twist.) From what I saw, I think this is another Canadian documentary that’s worth your attention. It isn’t quite as bat guano insane as “Project Grizzly“, but it’s still fun.
The whole movie is also available in high-def on YouTube, again thanks to the NFB:
Somehow, while searching around looking for more stuff about Ken Carter and the jump, I ran across this article on AutoFocus, a Canadian auto news site, about Jacques Ostiguy. Ostiguy was a Canadian designer, noted for his work on the Chrysler Cordoba and for Bombardier (the company that made Ski-Doo snowmobiles).
I wanted to note this because I love this quote in the article:
(Content warning: article may not be 100% safe for work in some environments. There are no explicit drawings in the article itself, but some people might take offense at the headline.)
Captain Lawrence E. Dickson passed away on December 23, 1944.
On Dec. 23, 1944, Captain Dickson got into a P-51 Mustang fighter plane at Ramitelli Air Base in Italy for a reconnaissance mission. Later, as he piloted the plane during the return flight, it experienced engine failure, the agency said.
Ms. Andrews said she learned from a wingman who flew alongside her father that two other planes flew alongside Captain Dickson’s plane as it descended until it disappeared.
Some witnesses told officials that they saw the plane crash and roll over, the canopy jettisoned.
Officials from D.P.A.A. said Captain Dickson was not seen ejecting from the plane.
(Note: as far as I am aware, the P-51 in 1944 did not have ejection seats.)
Captain Dickson was one of the Tuskegee Airmen. The crash site was not found until 2012, remains were not recovered from the site until 2017, and DNA analysis was not completed until last Friday.
Yesterday was a bad day for wrestling.
Nikolai Volkoff (an alias for Josip Nikolai Peruzovic) passed away on Sunday. He was 70.
Peruzovic, who was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005, was best known in the world of professional wrestling for his over-the-top Soviet/Russian character during his time in the World Wide Wrestling Federation (later the WWF) in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. In reality, Peruzovic was born in what was then Yugoslavia and now stands as part of Croatia.
Peruzovic’s most famous run came as part of the then-WWF’s explosion in popularity in the mid-1980s, as he teamed with the Iron Sheik to form one of the most successful heel teams in the history of pro wrestling while being managed by the legendary “Classy” Freddie Blassie. He famously sang the Soviet Union’s national anthem while the Iron Sheik taunted and stoked the anger of crowds around the world by playing upon real-life conflicts.
Volkoff and the Iron Sheik won the tag team championship in 1985.
Brian Christopher Lawler, son of Jerry Lawler, who wrestled as “Brian Christopher” also died on Sunday. Apparently, he was in jail on a DWI charge and committed suicide in his cell.
Ron Dellums, former Congressman.
Two obits that I thought made an interesting juxtaposition:
Mary Ellis, who died at 101.
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Oksana Shachko, who the paper of record describes as “a Ukrainian artist and a founder of Femen, a women’s rights group famous for its topless political protests”.
Together with the Pussy Riot punk group in Russia, Femen became part of a post-Soviet protest phenomenon that sometimes drew a violent reaction. In 2011, Femen said that Ms. Shachko and other activists had been abducted in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, after campaigning in front of the K.G.B. headquarters there. Several members were beaten up in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, in 2013 ahead of a visit by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Ms. Shachko and several other activists from the university town of Khmelnytsky, Ukraine, founded Femen in 2008. After a few conventional protests, they decided to demonstrate topless, often with political slogans written on their bodies.
…
In 2013, members of Femen ran topless in front of Mr. Putin as he visited Germany, drawing a grin and two thumbs up from him before guards wrestled the activists to the ground.
Ms. Shachko, along with several other Femen members, moved to Paris that same year and was granted political asylum by the French authorities. She maintained that the group’s members had been pursued by Russian special services and that the agents had planted a grenade in Femen’s office in Kiev, along with a photograph of Mr. Putin.
Ms. Shachko was 31. According to the NYT obituary, her death is being investigated as a suicide.
Adrian Cronauer, the inspiration for “Good Morning, Vietnam”.
Mr. Cronauer, who in reality was not quite the wild man the film suggested — later in life he worked for Republican causes and became a lawyer — admitted to some unease when he first saw the screen portrayal. But he got over it.
“Finally I said: ‘Wait a minute. It was never intended to be a biography. It’s a piece of entertainment. Sit back, relax and enjoy it,’ ” he said. “And that’s what I did.”
Annabelle Neilson. I can’t stand celebrity for celebrity’s sake, and I don’t worship celebrities in general. But there’s something about this story I find touching.
She eventually got over her heroin problem, became a model, and was introduced to fashion designer Alexander McQueen. She went on to become his model, muse, and girlfriend until his death in 2010.
She also wrote children’s books. Ms. Neilson was 49 when she died.
Claude Lanzmann, noted film director (“Shoah”).
Saman Gunan, former Thai Navy SEAL. He volunteered as part of the rescue mission for the trapped soccer team, and apparently ran out of air while delivering fresh air tanks to the cave.
Shoko Asahara is burning in Hell, along with six of his followers.
I’m not very well read in Haruki Murakami, but Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche impressed me, and I commend it to your attention.
Daisy Kadibil, Aboriginal Australian.
When she was eight…
Daisy was taken from her home in Jigalong, an Indigenous community in the Pilbara region in northwestern Australia, where she had grown up. A sister, Molly, and a cousin, Gracie, were also seized, and all three girls were sent to an Indigenous settlement near the Moore River, just north of Perth, the nearest city, about 800 miles to the south.
There, longing for home, they sought to escape. In 1931 they succeeded, embarking on foot on a treacherous nine-week trek north across rough terrain and using as their guide a barbed-wire fence that had been built to keep rabbits away from pastureland — an astonishing feat that inspired a book and the acclaimed 2002 Australian movie “Rabbit-Proof Fence.”
Daisy was the last survivor of the three.
For the historical record: Joe Jackson.
A large handful of interesting obits showed up over the weekend. I decided I’d save them and do a round-up today.
Officer Norberto Ramon of the Houston Police Department passed away on Friday. He had been undergoing treatment for colon cancer, but was told it had spread and was incurable. He intended to seek medical treatment in Oklahoma, but, as it turned out, this was right before Harvey hit Houston…
Prior to the storm, Ramon had been assigned desk duty. Flooding prevented him from getting to the office, so he went to the nearest station, the Lake Patrol, to help while the storm raged.
At Lake Patrol, he filled in for an officer of the seven-man squad. He worked nonstop for three days, seeing adults, seniors and mostly children to safety.
The HPD estimates he rescued 1,500 people during the storm. Officer Ramon was 55 years old, and had been with HPD for 25 years.
Reinhard Hardegen, German submarine commander who sank two ships off Long Island in 1942.
Yvette Horner, noted French accordion player.
William Reese, rare book dealer. I was previously unaware of Mr. Reese or his shop, but after reading his obit, I want a copy of Six Score: The 120 Best Books on the Range Cattle Industry. Stuff like that is already up my alley anyway.
Stephen Reid, bank robber and author.
Along with Patrick Mitchell, who was known as Paddy, and Lionel Wright, Mr. Reid was a member of a group of well-dressed bandits who came to be known as the The Stop Watch Gang. The name appeared to have come from F.B.I. investigators who noticed that at least one gang member, usually Mr. Reid, wore a stopwatch around his neck to keep holdups within the group’s self-imposed two-minute time limit.
While there is no precise accounting of their crimes, the police have estimated that the gang participated in at least 100 holdups during the 1970s and ′80s, getting away with about $15 million.
Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Blues Brother and noted sideman.
Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post has published an obit for Gardner Dozois, as best as I can tell.
Approximately 50 years ago today
LAT retrospective. Steve Lopez column.
In case you were wondering, Sirhan is still alive, still in prison, and his next parole hearing will be in 2021.
I wish I could say more about this: I was barely three at the time.
Today is the fifth anniversary of the Southwest Inn fire in Houston.
Looking back over the blog, I didn’t write much about it at the time because I was running around a lot. I did touch on it a few years later.
The Houston Fire Department responded to a fire at a restaurant that was connected to the hotel. It blew up into a major conflagration, and while HFD was trying to put out the fire, the roof collapsed.
Four firefighters were killed instantly: Engineer Operator Robert Bebee, Firefighter Robert Garner, Captain Mathew Renaud, and Firefighter Anne Sullivan. HFD Captain William Dowling sustained serious injuries, and passed away in 2017.
For the historical record: Alan Bean. NYT. NASA.
I'd like to share the story of a personal interaction I had Alan Bean, Apollo Moon-walker and artist. In 2010, I needed more information about something Alan had seen when he was on the Moon. I was researching how rocket exhaust blows soil and dust during lunar landings. /1
— Dr. Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) May 27, 2018
Gardner Dozois, one of the great figures of science fiction, passed away yesterday. Michael Swanwick. Lawrence.
He was a fantastic writer: “Dinner Party”, “A Special Kind of Morning”, “Chains of the Sea”, “The Peacemaker”, “Flash Point”, “Solace”.
He didn’t write as much as I would have liked, because he became an editor. Well, not just an editor, but one of the greatest editors science fiction ever saw. He edited Asimov’s Science Fiction for 20 years, “… winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor 15 times in 17 years from 1988 to his retirement from Asimov’s in 2004.” He also edited thirty four volumes of the massive Year’s Best Science Fiction collection: “Stories selected by Gardner Dozois for the annual best-of-year volumes have won, as of December 2015, 44 Hugos, 41 Nebulas, 32 Locus, 10 World Fantasy and 18 Sturgeon Awards.”
He was also a personal friend of mine. I wrote about this a little, a long time ago, and I’m still more than a little raw over Gardner’s death. During the 90s, we spent a lot of time online in the old Delphi system. There was a regular Wednesday night book-ish SF chat. And then Gardner and his life partner Susan Casper and some other folks (not named here for their privacy) and I had a smaller, private chat at 11:59 on Friday night, where we commiserated over each other’s struggles and celebrated our successes. We were all a lot younger then, and could stay up until 2 or 3 AM solving the problems of the world.
Gardner was also a veteran, though he didn’t see combat. I would retell the safety column story here, but I can’t do it justice: maybe someone else can. I will say that one of my enduring memories of Gardner is “…OR YOU WILL DIE!”
The ending of “A Special Kind of Morning” has always resonated with me, ever since I first read it.
So, empathy’s the thing that binds life together, it’s the flame we share against fear. Warmth’s the only answer to the old cold questions.
So I went through life, boy; made mistakes, did a lot of things, got kicked around a lot more, loved a little, and ended up on Kos, waiting for evening.
But night’s a relative thing. It always ends. It does; because even if you’re not around to watch it, the sun always comes up, and someone’ll be there to see.
It’s a fine, beautiful morning.
It’s always a beautiful morning somewhere, even on the day you die.
You’re young—that doesn’t comfort you yet.
But you’ll learn.
It was a beautiful morning yesterday, Gardner.
This is not quite an obit, but seems fitting: in memory of PFC Joshua Fleming.
This isn’t me being lazy, hand to God: this is me pointing out some things other people wrote that deserve wider attention.
1. There’s a good (and by “good”, I mean “reflects my biases”) op-end in the Statesman that’s a response to the complaints about the academy (previously discussed here):
…
2. Pat Cadigan (who, as we all know, is two orders of magnitude smarter than I am) takes apart a misguided recommendation from the Macmillan Cancer Support folks: avoid using the “fighting” metaphor.
3. South Texas Pistolero on two recent books about Pearl Harbor and Curtis LeMay.
The Summers and Swan book looks interesting: I plan to keep an eye out for it. I have heard the Kimmel and Short theory before, though: when we rewatched “Tora! Tora! Tora!” recently, one of the themes that stood out for me was that Kimmel and Short got the shaft because of stupid decisions above them.
See also: “Thank God For the Atom Bomb” by Paul Fussel.