Oh, wow. I opened up a post so I could update some obits from the past couple of days, and the first thing I saw was: John le Carré. The current NYT obit is a preliminary one: they promise a longer one soon, and I may update with some personal thoughts when that posts.
In the meantime, Charley Pride.
A bridge-builder who broke into country music amid the racial unrest of the 1960s, Mr. Pride was one of the most successful singers ever to work in that largely white genre, placing 52 records in the country Top 10 from 1966 to 1987.
Singles like “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” — among his 29 recordings to reach No. 1 on the country chart — featuried a countrypolitan mix of traditional instrumentation and more uptown arrangements.
At RCA, the label for which he recorded for three decades, Mr. Pride was second only to Elvis Presley in record sales. In the process he emerged as an inspiration to generations of performers, from the Black country hitmaker Darius Rucker, formerly of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, to white inheritors like Alan Jackson, who included a version of “Kiss an Angel” on his 1999 album, “Under the Influence.”
…
Nevertheless, the dignity and grace with which Mr. Pride and his wife of 63 years, Rozene Pride, navigated their way through the white world of country music became a beacon to his fans and fellow performers.
“No person of color had ever done what he has done,” Mr. Rucker said in “Charley Pride: I’m Just Me,” a 2019 “American Masters” documentary on PBS.
Mr. Pride himself was more self-effacing in assessing his impact but nevertheless expressed some satisfaction in having a role in furthering integration. “We’re not colorblind yet,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but we’ve advanced a few paces along the path, and I like to think I’ve contributed something to that process.”.
Tommy Lister. Apparently, he was most famous as “Deebo” in “Friday” (which we watched last night: while he’s good in it, the movie itself is not good), but he had a long list of other credits.
Norman Abramson. You may never have heard of him, but he was one of the developers of ALOHAnet.
The wireless network in Hawaii, which began operating in 1971, was called ALOHAnet, embracing the Hawaiian salutation for greeting or parting. It was a smaller, wireless version of the better known ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, which allowed researchers at universities to share a network and send messages over landlines. The ARPAnet was led by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded the ALOHAnet.
“The early wireless work in Hawaii is vastly underappreciated,” said Marc Weber, an internet historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet.”
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Some of the data-networking techniques developed by Professor Abramson and his Hawaii team proved valuable not only in wireless communications but also in wired networks. One heir to his work was Robert Metcalfe, who in 1973 was a young computer scientist working at Xerox PARC, a Silicon Valley research laboratory that had become a fount of personal computer innovations.
Mr. Metcalfe was working on how to enable personal computers to share data over wired office networks. He had read a 1970 paper, written by Professor Abramson, describing ALOHAnet’s method for transmitting and resending data over a network.
“Norm kindly invited me to spend a month with him at the University of Hawaii to study ALOHAnet,” Mr. Metcalfe recalled in an email.
Mr. Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC adopted and tweaked the ALOHAnet technology in creating Ethernet office networking. Later, Mr. Metcalfe founded an Ethernet company, 3Com, which thrived as the personal computer industry grew.
I’ve been holding on to this one for a few days: William Aronwald. He was a prosecutor in the 1970s, working on organized crime cases around New York. He went into private practice later on. But that’s not the reason his obit is noteworthy.
On March 20, 1987, his father, George M. Aronwald, was shot and killed in a laundry in Queens. The senior Aronwald’s death was kind of a puzzle: he was 78, worked as a hearing officer for the Parking Violations Bureau, and shared an office listing with his son. Why would anyone want to kill him? Turns out…
…Mr. Cacace, acting on the orders of an imprisoned crime boss, Carmine Persico, had arranged to have William Aronwald killed, according to news accounts.
The reasons were vague — Mr. Persico was said to have thought Mr. Aronwald had “been disrespectful,” as one article put it. Mr. Aronwald later speculated that he had been targeted in retaliation for his testimony in one of the trials of the mobster John Gotti.
In any case, a prosecutor said later, the hit men, brothers named Vincent and Eddie Carini, were shown a piece of paper with only the name “Aronwald” on it. They killed the wrong Aronwald. And that wasn’t all, a 2003 article in The New York Times reported:
“After the botched assignment, Mr. Cacace had his hit men killed, prosecutors said. Then, they added, he had the hit men who had killed the hit men killed.”
“Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.”