Archive for June 29th, 2020

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 91

Monday, June 29th, 2020

You know what I feel like I haven’t done in a while? Naval aviation. And the F-4 Phantom.

Why not a three-fer, since I also really haven’t given the Blue Angels any love here.

“Diamond in the Sky”, from the early 70s. The team used the F-4J Phantom II from 1969 to December of 1974.

Bonus video: from approximately the mid-1970s, “Portrait The Blue Angels”. It feels like there should be a colon in there, but there isn’t officially. They were flying the A-4F Skyhawk from December of 1974 up to November of 1986: the Skyhawk is what they were flying the one time (so far) I’ve seen them perform.

Posted in History, Planes | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 29, 2020.

Monday, June 29th, 2020

Charles Webb. He wrote The Graduate.

“He had a very odd relationship with money,” said Caroline Dawnay, who was briefly Mr. Webb’s agent in the early 2000s when his novel “New Cardiff” was made into the 2003 movie “Hope Springs,” starring Colin Firth. “He never wanted any. He had an anarchist view of the relationship between humanity and money.”
He gave away homes, paintings, his inheritance, even his royalties from “The Graduate,” which became a million-seller after the movie’s success, to the benefit of the Anti-Defamation League. He awarded his 10,000-pound payout from “Hope Springs” as a prize to a performance artist named Dan Shelton, who had mailed himself to the Tate Modern in a cardboard box.
At his second wedding to Ms. Rudd — they married in 1962, then divorced in 1981 to protest the institution of marriage, then remarried around 2001 for immigration purposes — he did not give his bride a ring, because he disapproved of jewelry. Ms. Dawnay, the only witness save two strangers pulled in off the street, recalled that the couple walked nine miles to the registry office for the ceremony, wearing the only clothes they owned.

…

Fred, Mr. Webb’s wife, died in 2019, Mr. Malvern said, leaving him quite alone, although he is survived by his sons — David, a performance artist who once cooked a copy of “The Graduate” and ate it with cranberry sauce, and John, a director at the consulting and research firm IHS Markit — and his brother. Mr. Malvern said he did not know whether Mr. Webb had still been writing.

This one is for FotB of the blog Dave: Linda Cristal. She most famously played “Victoria Cannon” on “The High Chaparral”, and did a lot of bit parts on other series during the 1960s through to the 1980s. (Including “T.H.E. Cat“, “Search“, and “General Hospital”.)

Thomas Blanton. He was the last survivor of the three men convicted in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.

The bombing occurred on Sept. 15, 1963, a Sunday, at the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had been a center of civil rights activity in Birmingham. Three 14-year-olds — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — and an 11-year-old, Denise McNair, were killed in the blast, and many others were injured. The attack heightened national outrage over segregationist policies and racial oppression in the South.
“The Birmingham bombing holds a special place in civil rights history because of the randomness of its violence, the sacredness of its target and the innocence of its victims,” Kevin Sack wrote in The New York Times in 2000, when Mr. Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry were finally indicted in the case.
Mr. Cherry, tried separately, was convicted in 2002 and died in prison at 74 in 2004. A third man, Robert Chambliss, was convicted in 1977 and died in prison eight years later at 81. The last suspect, Herman Cash, died in 1994 at 75 without being tried.
All four were Klan members in the early 1960s.

Posted in Art, Books, Law, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Quote of the day.

Monday, June 29th, 2020

Now, how sad a thing it is, when we come to make sport of proclaiming men traitors, and banishing them, and putting them out of their offices, and Privy Council, and of sending to and going to the Tower: God have mercy on us!

—Diary of Samuel Pepys, 28 June 1667

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