I wonder sometimes if I lean too much on the NYT for obits. I do try to pull obits from a variety of places (as long as they are trustworthy sources) and the paper of record doesn’t cover everyone, or cover them in a timely fashion.
But the Times also tends to publish obits for interesting people that I just don’t see elsewhere.
Two examples:
Si Spiegel. He was a pioneer of artificial Christmas trees.
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After American Brush unsuccessfully branched out into the Christmas tree business, Mr. Spiegel, by then a senior machinist, was tasked with closing the artificial tree factory. Instead, he began studying natural conifers, tweaked the brush-making machines to emulate the real trees and patented new production techniques.
He left the renamed American Tree and Wreath Company in 1979 and founded Hudson Valley Tree Company two years later., which began mass-producing 800,000 trees a year on an assembly line that turned one out every four minutes.
By the late 1980s, his company was generating annual sales of $54 million and employed 800 workers in Newburgh, N.Y., and Evansville, Ind. He sold the Hudson Valley Tree Company in 1993, retired as a multimillionaire and turned his attention to cultural, educational and social justice philanthropy.
Yes, he was Jewish. I wouldn’t ordinarily say that, but it is a key part of his origin story: he applied for commercial piloting jobs after WWII, but was consistently rejected because he was Jewish.
Mr. Spiegel celebrated Jewish holidays with his children, but when they were young, a Christmas tree was a winter holiday staple — first a real one, then the best of his fake ones.
“They were pagan symbols,” he told The Times. “My kids liked them.”
The other reason he’s interesting: he flew 35 missions over Germany as a B-17 pilot. On his 33rd mission, his B-17 was shot down and crash-landed in Poland, which was occupied by the Russians at the time.
Elleston Trevor, call your office, please. I don’t see any evidence that he ever wrote a book about his wartime experiences, but I wish he had: I am genuinely curious how they moved the B-17 engine.
Walter Shawlee, who the Times describes as “the sovereign of slide rules”.
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In the early 2000s, he was earning $125,000 a year fixing and reselling slide rules. The business paid for his two children to go to college, and it sent one of them to law school. His customer base took its most organized form in the Oughtred Society, a club named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican minister generally recognized to have invented the slide rule in the early 1620s.
Mr. Shawlee’s website developed a subculture of its own, with a network of slide rule-o-philes from Arizona to Venezuela to Malaysia digging on Mr. Shawlee’s behalf through the mildewed wares of old stationery stores and estate sales and school district warehouses in search of slide rules. In Singapore, a civil servant, Foo Sheow Ming, visited the back room of a bookstore and found 40 unopened crates of more than 12,000 slide rules in multiple varieties. On his website, Mr. Shawlee called the find “the absolute El Dorado of slide rules,” and Mr. Foo told The Journal that it was “the mother lode.”
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Lawrence gave me a slide rule tie clip one year, which looks like it may have come from Mr. Shawlee’s website. I treasure it, and wear it on special occasions.
Slide Rule Universe. I was previously unfamiliar with this site, but wow! It looks like a relic of the old school Web, which I absolutely love.
For the historical record: NYT obit for David Kahn.
The U.S. government considered [The Codebreakers] so volatile that the National Security Agency, the country’s premier cryptology arm, pondered how to block its publication. It even considered breaking into Mr. Kahn’s home in Great Neck, N.Y.
Eventually the agency chose more overt means, demanding that the publisher, Macmillan, not release it. The company refused; instead, MacMillan and Mr. Kahn submitted the text to the Department of Defense for review. Mr. Kahn agreed to cut a few paragraphs about Britain’s code-breaking efforts during World War II, which were still classified, but otherwise he kept the book intact.
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Seiji Ozawa, conductor.
Mr. Ozawa was the most prominent harbinger of a movement that has transformed the classical music world over the last half-century: a tremendous influx of East Asian musicians into the West, which has in turn helped spread the gospel of Western classical music to Korea, Japan and China.
For much of that time, a belief widespread even among knowledgeable critics held that although highly trained Asian musicians could develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they could never achieve a real understanding of its interpretive needs or a deep feeling for its emotional content. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa surmounted this prejudice by dint of his outsize personality, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer hard work.
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He found himself near the top of the American orchestral world in 1973, when he was named music director of the Boston Symphony. He scored many successes over the years, proving especially adept at big, complex works that many others found unwieldy.He toured widely and recorded extensively with the orchestra. But his 29-year tenure was, many thought, too long for anyone’s good: his own, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’.
Though relatively inexperienced in opera, he left in 2002 to become music director of the august Vienna State Opera, where he stayed until 2010. The rest of his life was mainly consumed with health issues and with dreams of a major comeback on the concert stage, which he was never able to achieve.
I have several aviation calculators – the E6B is a circular slide rule with a horizontal component one might have even seen Leonard Nimoy utilize in “a minor 60s SF television show”. But I also have a Planisphere tucked away somewhere. I hadn’t realized till I visited the Slide Rule Universe website, that it is simply a map in slide rule form.
I think I have a slide rule or two stashed away somewhere, and I know we still have some of my dad’s aviation rules (including an E6B, I believe) upstairs in the gun room/cookbook room.
Do they still teach using the E6B in flight school? I was reading one of Cloudberg’s recent pieces where they talked about Alaskan pilots using iPad software for all sorts of stuff (including ADS-B/collision avoidance) which sounds great. As long as it works, and the iPad is charged, and and and….seems to me you ought to have a no-batteries required backup.
Then again, I’m the kind of hairball who would probably learn to use a sextent and navigation tables as a backup to the GPS on my boat, too.
On an unrelated note, I did find the machine gun slide rule on SRU. They just have one, and it’s very nice: made out of solid aluminum.
But:
* it is $225
* it is set up and calibrated for the Vickers machine gun in .303 British, which is something I do not have
In 9th grade, in my combination electronics/physics class, we learned to use a slide rule. An amazing invention, I was surprised how useful it was at the time. Now we have handheld computers called phones that have more computing power than existed in the entire world when NASA launched the moon landing.
Heck a musical birthday card has more computing power than existed in the world in the 1950’s.
I think I was right on the edge: if I had been born a few years earlier, I probably would have learned slide rule use in high school.
As it was, calculators were cheap by the time I was in middle school. I think my personal first was a TI-30 I got for Christmas one year.
Which is weird, because I vivdly remember my dad paying $300 (in 1970s money!) for a Rockwell scientific calculator. (“You can’t go wrong with Rockwell, they’ve got a special treat/they’ve got big green numbers and little rubber feet…”)