I am seeing reports (from Lawrence and in other places) that the great libertarian SF writer L. Neil Smith has died.
However, I have been unable to find a source for this that I am willing to give credibility, links, or page views to. I’ll either update or post a new obit if this changes.
Stipulated: he was a cranky old liberal whose politics drove me up a tree.
But: Lou Grant.
He made a point of largely avoiding comedy — out of fear, he said in a 2002 appearance at Vanderbilt University, and because “in those days you got discovered by doing the drama shows as a guest star.” But he agreed to audition for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” because, as he said in an Archive of American Television interview, Lou Grant “was the best character I’d ever been asked to do” in either television or film.
Lou was a hard-drinking, straight-shooting, short-tempered journalist who had tender emotions but did not plan to show them; a strong aura of professional and personal integrity; a fear that he had outlived his era; and “a great common core of honor,” as Mr. Asner told Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, the authors of “Love Is All Around: The Making of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’”
416 credits in IMDB as an actor. That’s impressive. And he did do more than a few cop shows, including both the good and bad “Hawaii 5-0”, but never a “Mannix”.
(Here’s an IMDB list of people with over 300 acting credits. Mr. Asner is listed at #92, but the list hasn’t been updated and his count is off. Also, many of the people ahead of him are either porn actors or voice actors: Mel Blanc comes in at #9 with 1,220 credits. Eric Roberts and James Hong are the first two non-porn, not primarily a voice actor, people I recognize: Roberts with 638 credits and Hong with 444 to date.)
(What about “Up”? No comment. I’ve never seen it.)
There are times when I just want to quote the entire NYT lead: not because I’m lazy (though I am) but because they encapsulate the obit so perfectly, anything I could say would be superfluous.
Seriously, just go read this one.
For the historical record, obits from the paper of record for:
David Roberts, noted climber and climbing writer.
Michael Nader, actor. He was “Dex Dexter” in “Dynasty”, and “Dimitri Marick” on “All My Children”, among other credits.
Once again, pushing the boundaries of an obit, but: if you would prefer to read about Dorothy Parker’s tombstone in the NYT instead of the NYPost, well, here you go.
(Technically, this popped up last night.)
It’s more like trying to pick up someone who doesn’t speak your language out of a crowd. At a f–king death metal concert at Madison Square Garden.
And it’s at triple capacity.
And only one door is open.
And the place is on fire.
I’m not a religious person, but the word that comes to mind is “biblical.” It’s like Hurricane Katrina meets Dien Bien Phu.
Charlie Watts. THR. THR 2. BBC.
I am slightly tempted to make “never call me your drummer again” a “leadership secret of a non-fictional character” – indeed, someone on Hacker News cited this as an example of managing a high-performing team – but I can’t condone punching a cow-orker. Even if they do suffer from “lead singer’s disease”.
Buckie Leach, coach of the US women’s foil team. Lee Kiefer, one of his team members, became the first US woman to win an individual gold at the most recent games.
Mr. Leach was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Lloyd Dobyns Jr., noted NBC news correspondent. He’s another one of those NBC news guys I remember from when I was young.
I intended to note this a few days ago, but it got past me: Igor Oleksandrovych Vovkovinskiy passed away at 38. Mr. Vovkovinskiy was the tallest man in the United States: 7 feet, 8 inches.
Bill Clotworthy. You almost certainly never heard of him, but you’ve seen his work.
Or, perhaps more accurately, you haven’t seen his work.
Mr. Clotworthy was a long time “standards and practices executive” – in other words, a network censor – for NBC. His nickname was “Doctor No”.
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In a 2002 interview, Clotworthy described one SNL sketch that never made it to air:
It revolved around “a bunch of guys in a fraternity house trying to light farts,” he recalled. “You didn’t see anything, but you heard the voiceover and then there was this big explosion, and Joe Piscopo was dressed as Smokey the Bear, and he came out and said that should be a lesson to everyone — don’t fart with fire.”
He said he was OK with it but was overruled by his boss.
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Those sound really cool. Amazon doesn’t list them, but there is a Kindle edition of Saturday Night Live: Equal Opportunity Offender: The Uncensored Censor.
Stretching the definition of an obit here, but: there was an unveiling ceremony for Dorothy Parker’s tombstone on Monday.
The story of Dorothy Parker’s ashes is almost as weird as the story of Evita’s body. After her death, her ashes sat in a crematory for six years, then in a filing cabinet in the former office of her (retired) lawyer. In 1988, her ashes were turned over to the NAACP (“In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and upon King’s death, to the NAACP.“)
The NACCP set up a memorial outside their headquarters in Baltimore. But when they moved in 2020, the organization returned the ashes to her family, who reburied them in Woodlawn Cemetery.
The New York Distilling Company in Williamsburg issued a commemorative gin to pay for the headstone.
Along with the gin, mourners left red roses near Parker’s grave, which lies next to those of her parents and grandparents.
The family plot is in a section of the 400-acre cemetery that includes the graves of writers such as Herman Melville and E.L. Doctorow — as well as a man dubbed “The Father of Mixology,’’ 19th century New York City bartender Jerry Thomas.
Brian Travers, founding member of UB40. Brain tumor got him at 62.
Marilyn Eastman, “Helen Cooper” in “Night of the Living Dead”.
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In 2015, music legend Bob Dylan singled out Hall for some harsh criticism in a rambling speech at a MusiCares event. He called Hall’s song, “I Love,” “a little overcooked,” and said that the arrival of Kristofferson in Nashville “blew ol’ Tom T. Hall’s world apart.”
The criticism apparently confused Hall, as he considered Kristofferson a friend and a peer, and when asked about Dylan’s comments in an 2016 article for American Songwriter magazine, he responded, “What the hell was all that about?”
The most successful rock ’n’ roll act to emerge from Nashville in the 1950s, Mr. Everly and his brother, Phil, who died in 2014, once rivaled Elvis Presley and Pat Boone for airplay, placing an average of one single in the pop Top 10 every four months from 1957 to 1961.
On the strength of ardent two-minute teenage dramas like “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Cathy’s Clown,” the duo all but single-handedly redefined what, stylistically and thematically, qualified as commercially viable music for the Nashville of their day. In the process they influenced generations of hitmakers, from British Invasion bands like the Beatles and the Hollies to the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel and the Southern California country-rock band the Eagles.
In 1975 Linda Ronstadt had a Top 10 pop single with a declamatory version of the Everlys’ 1960 hit “When Will I Be Loved.” Alternative-country forebears like Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris were likewise among the scores of popular musicians inspired by the duo’s enthralling mix of country and rhythm and blues.
Paul Simon, in an email interview with The Times the morning after Phil Everly’s death, wrote: “Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful. The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Tony Mendez, David Letterman’s “Cue Card Boy” and star of “The Tony Mendez Show”.
Mr. Chiba, who was trained in karate and other martial arts, began turning up on Japanese television in his early 20s. He was soon making movies as well, amassing more than 50 TV and film credits in Japan before the end of the 1960s. In the ’70s, with martial arts movies enjoying broad popularity thanks to the American-born Chinese star Bruce Lee, Mr. Chiba became widely known in Japan and beyond, especially because of “The Street Fighter” (1974) and its sequels.
“The Street Fighter,” in which his character battled gangsters, was so violent that when it was released in the United States it was said to have been the first movie given an X rating for violence alone.
“If nothing else,” A.H. Weiler wrote in a brief review in The New York Times in 1975, when the movie played in New York, “this Japanese-made, English-dubbed import illustrates that its inane violence deserves the X rating with which it has been labeled.” In 1996, when a DVD of the film was released, The Los Angeles Times said it was being “presented complete and uncut in all its eye-gouging, testicle-ripping, skull-pounding glory.”
You know, I’ve never seen “The Street Fighter”, and now I want to. (There’s a Shout! Factory blu-ray which is kind of pricy, but contains all three “Street Fighter” movies.)
209 credits in IMDB. The man worked.
Apologies for the slowdown in posting. I’ve been working on my paper for the 2022 MLA convention on “Sexual Politics in ‘Hobgoblins‘”.
(Lawrence pointed out an interesting fact: “Road Rash” in “Hobgoblins” is the same actor who played “Maynard” in “Pulp Fiction”.)
Anyway, a couple of interesting gun politics stories by way of the NYT:
San Francisco’s district attorney on Wednesday sued three online retailers for selling “ghost guns,” untraceable firearms that can be made from do-it-yourself kits, part of an intensifying nationwide effort to stem the flood of deadly homemade weapons into American cities.
In a civil complaint filed in California Superior Court, District Attorney Chesa Boudin accused the companies — G.S. Performance, BlackHawk Manufacturing Group and MDX Corporation — of marketing a range of products in the state that furnish buyers with parts and accessories that can be quickly assembled into a functional firearm.
Note the phrasing: “…parts and accessories that can be quickly assembled into a functional firearm”, not firearms themselves. I am not familiar with California law, so I don’t know what the status of 80% parts kits is there, nor do I know if any regulations against same would pass constitutional muster.
But it feels like this is one of those things that doesn’t matter, much like Remington and Sandy Hook: they might be able to beat the case legally, but the criminal DA of San Francisco can make it expensive enough to cripple or even bankrupt the vendors.
Great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl put up a long – and, I think, fascinating – review on his blog of a vintage (1981) firearms/self defense guide from South Africa. I don’t recommend you follow the advice (and Karl does an excellent job of pointing out where it deviates from evolved practice today) but it is an interesting slice of history from a place only a few of us are familiar with.
Noted: the Smith and Wesson M&P 12. I’m kind of happy to see S&W back in the shotgun market, but I’m not wild about this particular gun.
Michael Thomas, author. (“Green Monday”.)
Nanci Griffith, noted folk singer.
While Ms. Griffith often wrote political and confessional material, her best-loved songs were closely observed tales of small-town life, sometimes with painful details in the lyrics, but typically sung with a deceptive prettiness. Her song “Love at the Five and Dime,” for example, tracks a couple’s romance from its teenage origins when “Rita was 16 years/Hazel eyes and chestnut hair/She made the Woolworth counter shine” through old age, when “Eddie traveled with the barroom bands/till arthritis took his hands/Now he sells insurance on the side.”
The song was a country hit in 1986 — but for Kathy Mattea, not for Ms. Griffith. Similarly, while Ms. Griffith was the first person to record “From a Distance,” written by Julie Gold, the song was later a smash hit for Bette Midler.
Ms. Griffith sometimes affected a folkie casualness toward mainstream success. She told Rolling Stone in 1993 that she didn’t mind that Ms. Mattea had the hit version of “Love at the Five and Dime”: “It feels great that Kathy has to sing that for the rest of her life and I don’t.”
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Donald Kagan, historian. I never met him, but he sounds like someone whose books I want to read.
Professor Kagan was considered among the country’s leading historians. His four-volume account of the Peloponnesian War, from 431 B.C. to 404 B.C., was hailed by the critic George Steiner as “the foremost work of history produced in North America in the 20th century.”
He was equally renowned for his classroom style, in which he peppered nuanced readings of ancient texts with references to his beloved New York Yankees and inventive, sometimes comic exercises in class participation, like having students form a hoplite phalanx to demonstrate how Greek soldiers marched into combat.
A strong believer in the timeless virtues of Western civilization and the need for countries to project power in a lawless world, Professor Kagan was often categorized as a conservative. He more or less agreed: He called himself a “Harry Truman Democrat,” but by the late 1960s he had come to believe that the Democratic Party, and much of the academic world, had drifted too far to the left.
He was hard to pin down, though. He disliked Richard Nixon and, more recently, Donald Trump, but he was a fan of Reagan, whose commitment to a strong military and willingness to confront the Soviet Union seemed to him to embody the Greeks’ “mental and intellectual toughness in confronting the human condition.”
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Professor Kagan fell in love with Cornell, especially the collegiality of its faculty. But in 1969, when armed Black students took over an administration building, demanding the creation of an Africana studies center and amnesty for fellow students who had been disciplined for an earlier protest, the university’s decision to negotiate with them struck him as a capitulation to violence. Months later he decamped for Yale. The crisis at Cornell was, he later said, the worst experience in his life.
Though he at first admired Kingman Brewster, Yale’s president, for his stand against campus radicalism, in 1974 Professor Kagan publicly criticized him after the university canceled a speech by William Shockley, a Stanford physicist and Nobel Prize winner who believed that Black people were genetically inferior. Professor Kagan strongly disagreed with Shockley’s views, but he believed the university should be exposing students to challenging points of view.
In response to that criticism, Mr. Brewster asked the historian C. Vann Woodward to write a report about campus speech, and later adopted many of its proposals that lined up with Professor Kagan’s views.
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Professor Kagan’s passion for ancient Greece informed another of his great loves: sports. He liked to say that one root of his contrarian nature was that as a child in 1930s Brooklyn, he was a Yankees fan in a sea of Dodgers caps. Among his greatest moments, he said, was the year Yale asked him to serve as acting athletic director, a job he relished even as he continued to teach history.
He saw baseball as a Homeric allegory, one in which a hero — the batter — ventures from home and must overcome unforeseen challenges in order to return. That view set up one of his most celebrated articles: a withering review in The Public Interest of the columnist George Will’s book “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball” (1990).
“This is the fantasy of a smart, skinny kid who desperately wants to believe that brains count more than the speed, power and reckless courage of the big guys who can play,” Professor Kagan wrote.
For the most gratuitous use of the word “Belgium” in a serious post.
— Eternal Memri TV (@EMTVmemes) December 4, 2019
“Work and Play In Belgium”, a 1950 propaganda film (in color!) from the “Belgian Government Information Center of New York City”.
Bonus: at least part of this is set…in Bruges.
Alex Cord. He may have been best known as “Archangel” in “Airwolf”, but he had a significant body of work going back to the 1960s. No “Mannix”, but a lot of other cop shows, and multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, among other credits.
Patricia Hitchcock. Yes, Alfred’s daughter.
She had a few other credits, but retired in the 1970s.
Tony Esposito, Hall of Fame goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks.
Walter Yetnikoff, legendary head of CBS Records.
In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Yetnikoff somewhat reluctantly let Ron Alexenburg, the head of CBS’s Epic label, sign the Jacksons. Epic had wrested the group from Motown Records (which retained the rights to the group’s original name, the Jackson 5), and though Mr. Yetnikoff wasn’t overly impressed with the Jacksons’ initial albums for Epic, he cultivated a relationship with the group’s key member, Michael, supporting the young singer’s interest in expanding into solo work.
In 1982, that encouragement resulted in “Thriller,” still one of the top-selling albums in history.
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Unfortunately, he was one of those people who didn’t just have issues: he had a lifetime subscription and a complete run of bound volumes.
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Brian Mulheren. He was the man in the NYPD in the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, and to quote the NYT, he was a “veteran detective who as an audacious, deft and indefatigable one-man emergency management liaison between City Hall and the New York Police and Fire Departments became known as ‘Mr. Disaster’ and the ‘Night Mayor’…”
Mr. Mulheren played an outsize role for a first-grade detective. He was armed with a gold shield, but his uniform, such as it was — it typically consisted of a rumpled beige trench coat and a crumpled Irish tweed hat — was devoid of the stars and bars that define status on the police force.
Yet by sheer force of personality and the connections he had cultivated, he was deferred to by city commissioners and by police supervisors who outranked him when he arrived, often first, at the scene of a crisis in his black Lincoln Town Car, which was crowned with a forest of antennas that linked him to every emergency radio frequency in the city.
In the 1970s and ’80s, he served as City Hall’s wake-up call when an officer was shot or a firefighter was felled. Before the city established a full-fledged emergency management department, he seamlessly and almost single-handedly coordinated interagency strategies.
“He was one of those rare people who kept the N.Y.P.D. and the Fire Department together,” John Miller, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, said in an interview. “He basically created the organized response to chaos that we replicated and have used ever since.”
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Mr. Mulheren was credited by Officer Steven McDonald’s family with saving his life when he was shot in Central Park by a teenage bicycle thief in 1986 and rushed in a patrol car to Metropolitan Hospital, where doctors said he was unlikely to survive.
In 2016, Mr. McDonald told Columbia, the Knights of Columbus magazine, that he vividly remembered Mr. Mulheren’s dauntless intervention.
“You might think he’s not going to make it, but we’re going to Bellevue,” Mr. Mulheren announced on his own initiative, according to “New York’s Finest,” a forthcoming book by Michael Daly.
“He had no rank or high station but stepped forward and said, ‘No, he’s not going to die; he just needs a second chance,’” Mr. McDonald recalled. “I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking through Brian to everyone there. Just like that like they loaded me up on a special ambulance and flew down to Bellevue Hospital, where they saved my life by the grace of God.”
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In another emergency, when a firefighter was overcome and no ambulance was immediately available, Mr. Mulheren was said to have commandeered a city bus, told the passengers to debark and ordered the driver to take the injured man to the hospital.
Serving mostly under Mayors John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins, Mr. Mulheren, a police buff since childhood, insinuated himself into the department’s decisions to buy smaller patrol cars to economize on gas; change their color from green, black and white in the early 1970s to “grabber blue” with white accents to make them more visible and less intimidating; modernize lights and sirens; air-condition the cars; and improve radio communications. He also encouraged the Fire Department to requisition a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber to treat burn victims.
He was 73 years old, and passed away due to COPD. His family attributes his condition to inhalation of debris at the WTC site after the 2001 attacks.
I did not give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about the Olympics. As a matter of fact, I believe they should have been cancelled this year, they should remain cancelled for all time, and cities should use the money to provide free guitar picks for the poor.
So I missed this story last week, but you know it is the kind of thing I can’t pass up, and I don’t think it got a lot of attention.
The coach of the German modern pentathlon team was disqualified on Saturday.
As it happens, “modern pentathlon” is one of the few Olympic sports I care much about: how can you not like a combination of swimming, fencing, running, horses, and shooting? (Plus: Patton. Minus: they are apparently using laser guns these days, instead of real pistols.)
But that’s not why the story is interesting. She was disqualified because…
I believe we have video of the event.
Okay, I’m sorry, that was a cheap joke, but it never gets old. Here is the actual footage:
Bundestrainerin Kim Raisner: "Hau mal richtig drauf. Hau richtig drauf!" Dann schlägt sie selber noch mit der Faust zu (Sekunde 23).@DOSB Das muss Konsequenzen haben.#ARD #Fünfkampf pic.twitter.com/JIBpqEGR6M
— Max Möhrike Ⓥ (@der_veganer) August 6, 2021
I can’t pass this up. I’m sorry.
But the flaming hyenas watch is not going all Cuomo, all the time. No, we have other news to report.
Democratic Arizona state senator Otoniel “Tony” Navarrete resigned yesterday.
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Navarrete was arrested last week on seven felony charges: five involving sexual conduct with a minor, one for attempted sexual conduct with a minor and a seventh charge of child molestation.
The arrest came after a 16-year-old boy went to Phoenix police with allegations of abuse dating from 2019. The probable cause statement also alleged that Navarrete attempted sexual conduct with a 13-year-old boy.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Edited to add: from Mike the Musicologist, “New York has successfully flattened the perv.”
It was a busy weekend, and I’ve got a backlog. I hope I don’t miss anybody.
Damn. Said it before, I’ll say it again: “Night Court” was a swell show, and she was part of what made it swell.
Trevor Moore, comedian (“The Whitest Kids U Know”).
Jane Withers, actress.
She did other movie and TV work, including “Giant”, and played “Josephine the Plumber” in the Comet commercials.
Bobby Bowden, football coach.
“When I was at Alabama the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Auburn,’ he recalled in “The Bowden Way” (2001), his book on leadership written with his son Steve. “When I was at West Virginia they read ‘Beat Pitt.’ When I came to F.S.U., the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Anybody.’”
Bowden’s Seminoles beat most everybody. He coached Florida State to national championships in 1993 and 1999 and his teams finished in the top five of the Associated Press rankings every season from 1987 to 2000. The Seminoles were unbeaten in bowl games from 1982 to 1995.
He was, for a period of time, the coach with the most wins in college football. I phrase it that way, though, because this was after the NCAA vacated 111 of Joe Paterno’s victories over the Penn State scandal:
Coach Bowden now ranks second, with 377 career wins.
Paul Cotton, of Poco.
Mr. Cotton joined Poco, replacing the founding member Jim Messina in 1970, just in time to appear on the group’s third studio album, “From the Inside” (1971). Produced by Steve Cropper, the guitarist with the Memphis R&B combo Booker T. & the MGs, the project signaled a new artistic direction for the band, maybe nowhere so much as on the three songs written by Mr. Cotton.
Rooted more in rock and soul than in the country and bluegrass that had hitherto been the group’s primary influences, Mr. Cotton’s sinewy, blues-inflected guitar work and brooding baritone vocals on songs like the ballad “Bad Weather” greatly expanded Poco’s emotional and stylistic palette.
Herbert Schlosser, TV executive. Among other accomplishments: “Saturday Night Live” and “Laugh-In”.
Jon Lindbergh. Yes, he was Charles Lindbergh’s son, but he led an interesting life of his own.
He didn’t go into aviation like his father: instead, he became a pioneer of undersea research.
After college, he did postgraduate work at the University of California San Diego and spent three years as a Navy frogman, working with the Underwater Demolition Team. He appeared as an extra in the television series “Sea Hunt” and had bit parts in a few movies, including “Underwater Warrior” (1958).
He also worked as a commercial deep-sea diver and participated in several diving experiments. They included a 1964 project in the Bahamas called “Man-in-Sea” in which a submersible decompression chamber devised by Edwin Link allowed divers to stay deeper under water for longer periods.
As part of that project, Mr. Lindbergh and Robert Sténuit, a Belgian engineer, set a record by staying in a submersible dwelling for 49 hours at a depth of 432 feet, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen that allowed them to swim outside the dwelling without harm despite the enormous pressure of the water above. Mr. Sténuit wrote an account of the experiment in the April 1965 issue of National Geographic.
Mr. Lindbergh was also involved in the development and testing of the Navy’s Alvin deep-ocean submersible, which he used during the recovery of the hydrogen bomb in the Mediterranean. An American bomber had hit a refueling tanker in midair and dropped four hydrogen bombs, two of which released plutonium into the atmosphere, though no warheads detonated.
He later helped install Seattle’s water treatment system in icy waters as deep as 600 feet. Finding that he liked the area, he bought a secluded Georgian-style home on Bainbridge Island in the mid-1960s and raised his family there. He later farmed salmon in Puget Sound and in Chile as part of an emerging aquaculture industry and sold the fish to airlines and restaurants.
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Charles Lindbergh lived long enough to see Jon flourish in his career and was relieved that his son had not followed him into aviation. “He removed any burden of his own career from his son’s shoulders,” Mr. Berg wrote in his biography, by telling Jon that much of what had first attracted him to aviation in the 1920s no longer existed.
“Thirty years ago, piloting an airplane was an art,” Charles Lindbergh told his son, but it no longer seemed like an adventure.
Rather than become a flyer, Charles Lindbergh added, “I think I would follow your footprints to the oceans, with confidence that chance and imagination would combine to justify the course I set.”
Nach Waxman. He founded Kitchen Arts and Letters, a Manhattan bookstore specializing in food related books.
In one instance, Mr. Waxman counseled Citibank on its banquet menu for the Venezuelan finance minister; in another, he found Indigenous recipes from New Guinea for the American Museum of Natural History’s dining room during an exhibition on rain forests.
“He could make helpful recommendations, obtain the very cookbook you needed, search for out-of-print editions and discuss the authors,” said Florence Fabricant, a food and wine writer for The New York Times.
Mr. Waxman once said that about two-thirds of his customers were culinary careerists purchasing professional tools. “Knives are one tool,” he told The Times in 1998. “Books are another.”
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“It’s really the professional business that’s the gratifying business,” Mr. Waxman told The Times in 1995. “People who are expanding their skills and the scope of their work. I will tell you, when the lease was up a few years ago, I gave serious thought to moving the store to a second floor somewhere just to make it a place for motivated people, not casual drop-ins. The people who come here have a language in common.
“Just sitting and selling books is boring,” he said. “It’s making change and putting books in bags. What’s fun is helping people solve their problems.”
Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president.
J.R. Richard, former pitcher for the Houston Astros. NYT. Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.
Richard, who was part of the Astros’ inaugural Hall of Fame class in 2020, pitched all 10 of his big league seasons with the Astros before his career was cut short when he suffered a stroke while playing catch inside the Astrodome on July 30, 1980.
“He was one of the greatest pitchers we ever had and probably would have been in the Hall of Fame if his career was not cut short,” Richard’s former Astros teammate Enos Cabell said in a statement released by the team. “On the mound, he was devastating and intimidating. Nobody wanted to face him. Guys on the other team would say that they were sick to avoid facing him. This is very sad news. He will be missed.”
Before the stroke, Richard was one of the most dominant pitchers in baseball, leading the league in strikeouts in back-to-back seasons in 1978 and 1979. In that 1979 season – when he set a franchise record with 313 strikeouts, which was broken by Gerrit Cole in 2019 – he also led the National League in ERA at 2.71.
Col. Dave Severance (USMC – ret.) has passed away. He was 102.
The flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, captured by an Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, was taken when the battle for Iwo Jima was far from over. In the days that followed, Colonel Severance earned the Silver Star, the Marines’ third-highest decoration for valor after the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. The citation stated that in a firefight for a heavily defended ridge, he “skillfully directed the assault on this strong enemy position despite stubborn resistance.”
Colonel Severance, a captain at the time, commanded Easy Company of the 28th Marine Regiment, Fifth Marine Division — part of the 70,000-man Marine force that sought to seize Iwo Jima, 7.5 square miles of black volcanic sand about 660 miles south of Tokyo. The island, defended by 21,000 Japanese troops, held airstrips that were needed as bases for American fighter planes and as havens for crippled bombers returning to the Mariana Islands from missions over Japan.
Amid heavy casualties, the Marines by the fifth day of combat on Iwo Jima had silenced most opposition from Japanese soldiers dug into caves on Mount Suribachi, an extinct volcano 546 feet high at Iwo Jima’s southern tip.
In midmorning, a group of Marines from Easy Company raised a flag at the summit, a ceremony photographed by Sgt. Louis Lowery of the Marine magazine Leatherneck. When James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy, who was on the beach below, saw the flag, he requested that it be kept as a memento. After it was returned to the beach, Colonel Severance sent another group of his Marines to bring a larger flag to the mountaintop.
It was the raising of the second flag that was portrayed in Mr. Rosenthal’s dramatic photograph.
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Alvin Ing, actor. He was in the original Broadway production of Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” and the revival in 2004. He also appeared in the 2002 revival of “Flower Drum Song”.
He also did some movie and TV work, including “The Final Countdown” and the bad “Hawaii Five-0”.
I’m taking a very short break (should be operational again late Monday or possibly Tuesday morning).
In the meantime, please to enjoy this: Dale “Snort” Snodgrass at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. (About an hour and 20 minutes.)
Bonus: Tomcat demo flight at the Cleveland Air Show, 1996.
Austin Police officer Andy Traylor passed away last night.
His death came as a result of severe injuries sustained in a traffic accident on Wednesday.