Archive for February, 2025

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Bagatelle (#126).

Friday, February 7th, 2025

I don’t know how many of my readers are familiar with the story of “The Man Who Rode The Thunder”, Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin.

I know Lawrence is, because we’ve talked about it before. FotB RoadRich may know the story as well.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, here’s a good brief overview from Dr. Dabbs. Elevator pitch: LTC Rankin was forced to bail out of his F-8 Crusader…into a thunderstorm.

I have a paperback copy of The Man Who Rode the Thunder in a box somewhere, but I don’t remember it being in my elementary school library. If it had been, I would have been all over that like flies on a severed cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Heroism, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 6, 2025.

Thursday, February 6th, 2025

In honor of Valérie André, I am declaring a moratorium on French and French Army jokes for the next 72 hours.

She became a brain surgeon, a parachutist and a helicopter pilot who was said to be the first woman to fly rescue missions in combat zones for any military force. She was also the first Frenchwoman to be named a general and was a five-time winner of the Croix de Guerre, for bravery in Indochina and Algeria.

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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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According to the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, she was one of the first 12 women in the world to receive a helicopter pilot rating and the first woman to fly a helicopter into combat zones.

She was 102 when she died.

Posted in Helicopters, Heroism, History, Obits, Planes | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 5, 2024.

Wednesday, February 5th, 2025

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):

On February 2, 2025, Lt Col. Harry Stewart Jr. died, thus leaving Lt. Col. George Hardy as the last surviving member of the original 355 Tuskegee Airmen who served in World War II. James H. Harvey, III, who did not serve in combat during World War II but who did later manage to be a member of the USAF’s inaugural “Top Gun” team in 1949 and serve in combat missions in the Korean War, lives as well, as does Lt. Eugene J. Robertson, who also did not serve in World War II combat missions.)

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.

Urbane, cosmopolitan and often media-averse, the Aga Khan — born Prince Karim Al-Hussaini — rejected the notion that expanding his personal fortune would conflict with his charitable ventures. He said his ability to prosper complemented his duty to enhance the lives of Ismaili Muslims, a branch of the Shiite tradition of Islam with a following of 15 million people in 35 countries.

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His projects included developing the island of Sardinia’s ritzy Costa Smeralda resort area, breeding thoroughbred racehorses and establishing health initiatives for the poor in the developing world.

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Even though he had no inherited realm in the manner of other hereditary rulers, the Aga Khan’s fortune was variously estimated at $1 billion to $13 billion, drawn from investments, joint ventures and private holdings in luxury hotels, airlines, racehorses and newspapers, as well as from a kind of Quranic tithe levied on his followers.

Posted in Heroism, History, Horses, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 3, 2025.

Monday, February 3rd, 2025

Fay Vincent, former MLB commissioner. ESPN.

“List of people banned from Major League Baseball“.

Merle Louise Simon, who worked extensively with Stephen Sondheim.

Ms. Simon — who worked for most of her career under the name Merle Louise — began her run in Sondheim shows with “Gypsy,” in 1959, and continued with “Company” (1970), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1979) and “Into the Woods” (1987), Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine’s interpretation of fairy tales. (Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy,” and the music and lyrics for the other shows.)
“Steve had a real history with Merle,” Mr. Lapine, who directed Ms. Simon in three roles, including the Giant in “Into the Woods,” said in an email. Mr. Sondheim, he added, “loved the energy she brought to the rehearsal room and the stage. Merle was usually the smallest person in the room but always the most ebullient and with the most glorious voice.”

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She played Susan, a Southern belle going through a divorce, in “Company,” a series of vignettes that revolve around a bachelor learning about love, marriage and divorce from his married friends. She was then cast as the Beggar Woman, the crazed, long-lost wife of the title character in “Sweeney Todd,” a barber who slits the throats of unsuspecting clients.

Hey! New York Times! Spoilers!

Suzanne Massie.

An American-born author of books about Russian culture who spoke the language, Ms. Massie held a romantic view of what she called the Russian “soul,” and she formed a bond with a president who liked to understand and communicate complex issues through anecdotes about average people.

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She became “Reagan’s window on the Soviet Union,” the historian James Mann wrote in “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan” (2009), a study of his role in ending the Cold War. “She described the country and the Russian people to the president in terms that he understood and found useful.”
It was Ms. Massie who taught Mr. Reagan the Russian proverb “Doveryai no proveryai” (“Trust but verify”), which he uttered to Mr. Gorbachev when they met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 — and repeated so often that Mr. Gorbachev grumbled about it.

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Although Ms. Massie corresponded with Mr. Reagan and met with him before and after trips she made to Moscow — including a private lunch on the Oval Office patio with the president and the first lady, Nancy Reagan — memoirs by Reagan officials involved in U.S.-Soviet relations portray her as a minor figure.
But Mr. Mann wrote that she “played a more significant role” than is generally known. She served as an unofficial emissary, carrying messages between Mr. Reagan and Moscow, and she humanized Russians for Mr. Reagan at a time when he was revising his view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and reaching out to Mr. Gorbachev to ease nuclear tensions.

She was married to Robert K. Massie.

The couple’s first child, Robert, had hemophilia. Caring for him, which the Massies described in a searing memoir, “Journey” (1975), turned out to be an unlikely portal into Russian culture and, ultimately, the Oval Office.
The Massies learned that Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, the last of the Romanovs, had a son with hemophilia. Mr. Massie went on to write a best-selling history, “Nicholas and Alexandra” (1967), with Ms. Massie serving as editor and researcher. Seeking some respite from raising a disabled child, she took Russian lessons.

After their divorce, she married Seymour Papert.

James Carlos Blake, one of those authors I have heard of but have not read. The NYT compares him to Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.

Rebellious, nomadic and prone to divorce (he was married four times), Mr. Blake was nearly as colorful a character as the ones who populated his fiction. Before turning to writing full time in his late 30s, he had been a paratrooper, snake catcher, mechanic, swimming-pool maintenance man, jail officer and teacher.

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“Violence is the most elemental truth of life,” he told GQ magazine in 2012. “It’s the central shaper of history, the ultimate determiner of whether A or B is going to get his way. When push comes to shove — as so much has a way of doing — all moral considerations go out the window and it all becomes a matter of who’s going to be the last man standing.”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Sports, Theatre | Comments Closed

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