I have spent the past few days running around with Mike the Musicologist, so I haven’t really had a chance to post obits. Not that I’m complaining, but I did get a little behind.
Marion Smith, cave explorer.
…he was roundly considered the Greatest of All Time. He explored 8,291 separate caves — far more than anyone on record, ever. He climbed up and down some two million feet of rope.
He was especially taken with vertical caving: He descended more than 3,000 underground pits deeper than 30 feet, often dangling freely in the abyss on a rope no thicker than a thumb.
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In 1998 Mr. Smith was part of a team of cavers who discovered a 4.5-acre, 350-foot-tall underground chamber in East Tennessee they named the Rumble Room. They kept it secret for four years while they explored and mapped it, and they revealed it to the public only when a nearby town threatened to use an adjacent cave as part of a new sewage system.
“I didn’t want to let the cat out,” Mr. Smith told The Tennessean newspaper in 2002. “I wanted to keep it in the bag longer.”
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Caves were his life, but exploring them was not his only passion. He was perhaps the world’s leading expert on the history of mining for saltpeter, a primary ingredient in gunpowder, which in the 19th century was often harvested from caves.
In the 2010s he joined with Joseph Douglas, a historian at Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin, Tenn., in a project to document the thousands of signatures left by Confederate and Union soldiers in Mammoth Cave, in central Kentucky. Mr. Smith was particularly taken with researching the men themselves, and he ultimately wrote about 80 miniature biographies.
“He called it the history of the obscure, but it took a great level of patience and attention to fine detail,” Dr. Douglas said in a phone interview.
Dino Danelli, drummer for the Rascals.
Sonya Eddy, actress.
Tom Browning, pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds.
On September 16, 1988, Browning tossed a perfect game against the Dodgers in a 1-0 victory, striking out Tracy Woodson to ensure his place in history.
Browning was 123-90 in his 12-season career, with his first 11 seasons in Cincy and two starts at the end of his career with the Royals. Browning was inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame in 2006.
Terry Hall, of The Specials and Fun Boy Three.
Stephanie Bissonnette. She was in “Mean Girls the Musical” and died at 32.
I don’t know if you ever came across the name Les Lowery, a saddle maker, who moved to Arizona and started his leather business. Later he moved to Shumway, AZ, but he had been a saddle maker and leather maker to the Hollywood stars. He apparently ran across a paralyzed young lady, whom he helped make wheelchairs and walking apparatus type equipment, that eventually allowed her to walk.
Anyway, he passed away, here in a small town near me, called Walkerville, MI on Nov. 3, at the age of 80.
Even if he was not well known, which I don’t know, I just felt like he deserved a mention, for his kindness to everyone that he seemed to come into contact with.
Not to put any of those you mentioned on a lower status, as I remember several of them, and may the RIP.