Obit watch: September 23, 2019.

Christopher Rouse, Pulitzer prize winning contemporary composer. I confess that I don’t know very much about his work, but he was a favorite of several close friends of mine.

(Edited to add: NYT obit.)

Davo Karnicar, a man who skied down Everest. He wasn’t “The Man Who Skied Down Everest” in the documentary (that was Yūichirō Miura, who is still alive at 86), but he skied non-stop from the summit to base camp – a 12,000 foot descent in four hours and 40 minutes. (Mr. Miura only descended 4,000 feet.)

His brother Andrej lost eight toes to frostbite during their descent on Annapurna in 1995. A year later, Davo lost two fingers to frostbite during a storm that killed eight climbers — a disaster detailed by Jon Krakauer in his book “Into Thin Air.”
And in 1997, Karnicar’s brother Luka and four other members of his rescue team died when a safety line connected to a helicopter broke during a training exercise.

In 2009, his fellow climber Franc Oderlap, who had accompanied Karnicar to Everest in 2000, was killed by falling ice while they were testing equipment on Manaslu, in the Nepali Himalayans. Karnicar was uninjured. In 2017, Karnicar climbed as far as base camp at K2 but abandoned his quest when he hurt his back.

According to the NYT obit, Mr. Karnicar was killed in a tree cutting accident at his home.

John L. Keenan, chief of detectives with the NYPD. He was most famous for leading the manhunt for the “Son of Sam”. There’s also an interesting historical side note:

…he took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge while in a Counter Intelligence Corps unit of the Fourth Infantry Division. He fought alongside J.D. Salinger, who was writing what became “The Catcher in the Rye” during lulls in combat and became a lifelong friend.

When Chief Keenan was honored at a retirement party at Antun’s restaurant in Queens in the summer of 1978, Mr. Salinger came down from his home in rural New Hampshire, where he zealously guarded his privacy, to join in the tribute.
Departing from the focus on police work, which had attracted some 300 officers to the party, Mr. Salinger told the crowd that Chief Keenan had been “a great comfort,” especially in a foxhole.

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