Let’s get down to it.
Paul Farnes. He was 101, and the last surviving RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.
…for three months, through the end of October, the R.A.F. battled the Luftwaffe for supremacy in the skies over Britain. Flying a Hurricane fighter for the 501 Squadron, Mr. Farnes, a sergeant pilot, proved supremely adept at attacking German aircraft.
In August alone he shot down three Junkers Ju Stuka bombers, a Dornier 17 light bomber and a Messerschmitt 109E fighter.At the end of September, as Mr. Farnes maneuvered his malfunctioning Hurricane back to the R.A.F.’s Kenley base, he spotted a German bomber flying directly at him at about 1,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘Good God,’ so I whipped out and had to reposition myself and managed to get ’round behind him,” he said in an interview with the website History of War in 2017. “I gave him a couple of bursts, and he crashed at Gatwick just on the point between the airport and the racecourse.”
…
Aerial warfare against the Germans meant breaking away from the squadron, finding something to shoot at, firing away, then breaking away to safety. But by Mr. Farnes’s account it was also enjoyable, because he was able to combine his love of flying with the mission to protect Britain.
“The C.O. would quite often pick the next members of the squadron that had to be at ‘readiness,’ and the two or three who weren’t picked would be pretty fed up,” he told History of War. “If you weren’t picked, you’d think, ‘Why can’t I go?’ I’m sure one or two must have felt, ‘Well, thank God I’m not going!’ But a lot of us were quite happy to go.”
I was a little young for “Wild Wild West” in first run; if it was syndicated in Houston when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. It could have been on the station we were never able to pick up (the same one OG “Star Trek” was on). And “Hawaiian Eye” was before my time. But if you’re my age or a little on either side of it, this was like candy for us:
He also appeared multiple times on “Mission: Impossible” and other series, either as the lead of some less than successful ones (“High Mountain Rangers”) or doing guest shots. He did do a “Mannix”. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4.) And I didn’t know this, but he played G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.
Orson Bean. Variety. THR. Interesting guy: I remember him from “Being John Malkovich” and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some of those old game shows on Buzzr. In the 1960s, he founded a progressive school in New York City.
Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)
When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.
In the 1980s, he settled down again and resumed acting. He was 91 years old when he died: he was hit by a car while walking, fell, and was run over by a second car (according to Variety).
After the jump, more obits.
Kevin Conway, another veteran actor on Broadway and in film. THR. He was in “F.I.S.T” and “Paradise Alley” among other movie credits, in “The Bronx Is Burning” for TV (he also was the Control Voice for an “Outer Limits” revival). And in theater, he was in “The Elephant Man” and “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?”.
Interesting piece of trivia: he played McMurphy in a 1970s off-Broadway revival of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, the same role Kirk Douglas played in the original 1963 Broadway production.
This one is for my beloved sister-in-law: Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce and his last direct descendant.
President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland, confirming the death in a statement, said Mr. Joyce had been “deeply committed to what he saw was the special duty to defend the legacy of the Joyce family in literary and personal terms,” though Mr. Higgins allowed that it was “not a task carried out in harmonious circumstances at all times.”
Stephen Joyce gleefully maintained an iron grip on his grandfather’s printed works, unpublished manuscripts, letters and other material, although his hold loosened somewhat on the 70th anniversary of James Joyce’s death, when most copyrights on his masterpieces like “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” expired. He said he was safeguarding the material’s literary integrity and defending them from critics and biographers, whom he likened to “rats and lice” that “should be exterminated.”
“I am not only protecting and preserving the purity of my grandfather’s work, but also what remains of the much abused privacy of the Joyce family,” he told The New Yorker in 2006.
With most legal constraints lifted and the material controlled by Stephen Joyce now part of his estate, its fate uncertain, the most likely immediate impact of his grandson’s death will be the freeing of aggrieved scholars to ventilate, without fear of retribution, about how Mr. Joyce had thwarted their research for decades.
Dyanne Thorne, B-movie actress. She is perhaps most famous as the titular “Ilsa” in “Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS” and the sequels “Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks”, “Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia”, and “Wanda, the Wicked Warden” (“an unofficial sequel of sorts from Jess Franco”).
I miss Gene. She was also in a X-rated version of “Pinocchio” and something called “Blood Sabbath”. Thing I didn’t know:
Thorne and [Howard] Maurer [“her husband of 44 years and frequent co-star”] for years ran a business in Las Vegas in which they served as non-denominational reverends to officiate weddings. She wrote scripts and he sang and played keyboards for the ceremonies.
Some clients would ask for an “Ilsa Wedding” — “Ilsa is an icon all over the world,” Maurer pointed out — and she would preside dressed in a military-style costume, with the swastika replaced by an American flag. Occasionally, Thorne and Maurer were flown out of state and even out of the country to perform the marriages, he said.
Last and least, Jhon Jairo Velásquez is burning in Hell. He was a YouTube “star”, but that’s not why I say he’s burning in Hell. His YouTube stardom was based on his previous career…hit man for Pablo Escobar.
Mr. Velásquez said he had murdered more than 300 people and been involved in the killings of 3,000 others, an account that has never been confirmed.
“I’m a professional killer, I killed for money,” he said in “Escobar’s Hit Man,” a 2017 documentary on the Russian television network RT. “I also killed out of love and respect for Pablo Escobar.”
Before his latest sentence, he had spent 22 years in prison for plotting the killing of a Colombian presidential candidate in 1989. After his release on parole in 2014, he achieved celebrity by posting dozens of videos on his YouTube channel, called Popeye Arrepentido (Remorseful Popeye), which had more than 1.2 million subscribers.
He also directed a movie about his life, wrote two books and hosted tours of Medellín. In some videos he would visit the graves of his victims and recount how he had murdered them.
He died – hopefully in great agony – of stomach cancer at 57.
Mr. Velásquez sought forgiveness from his victims’ families and insisted that he had changed, yet he would turn on those who refused to forgive him, like the son of a man who was killed in the crash of a plane that had been bombed by Mr. Velásquez’s cartel in 1989. He called the son a “bad man with an evil heart.”
A Netflix series, “Surviving Escobar,” was adapted from one of his books.
I just watched a special on the Battle of Britain tonight. Truly a tremendous victory for the Brits,with many brave souls lost. That was where the line by Churchill came from. Never have so many owed so much to so few.
Churchill was a man destined for greatness, in his time.
thanks for this post, it, like all of your posts, was a fitting memorial to all who have passed.
You left out the part where Bean became Andrew Breitbart’s father-in-law.
Thank you, pigpen51. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but I always appreciate your kind and thoughtful comments, and additional personal insights, on the obit watches.
I’m actually thinking about making another post in the near future, about Churchill and a historical oddity related to him.
And I suspect that some people would say I didn’t do justice to Jhon Jairo Velásquez. But those people can go join him.