Borepatch put up an excellent obit for Dolly Parton, much better than anything I’ve written or could write. I strongly, strongly encourage you to go over and read it.
(I’d never heard the “my aunt had a sofa just like it” story before. And it made me laugh. Hard.)
The NYT has a nice obit for Azriel Blackman (may require registration or an email address or something).
Mr. Blackman is another one of those people who wasn’t necessarily famous, but who the paper of record does a good job of covering.
He was an airline mechanic for American Airlines. He worked for them for 80 years.
No, that’s not a typo. Eighty years. Eight. Zero.
The first aircraft he worked on was the amphibious Sikorsky flying boat. He serviced more than a dozen kinds of planes over the next eight decades, including the Douglas DC-3, the Convair CV-240, the Lockheed Constellation, the Boeing 377 and the McDonnell Douglas MD-80.
After enlisting in the Army, he served in the Korean War, repairing helicopters for Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals. Following his discharge in 1952, he returned to American at LaGuardia, then moved as a crew chief to New York International Airport, better known as Idlewild Airport, in 1960, three years before it was renamed for President Kennedy.
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In 2012, American honored Mr. Blackman’s tenure by flying him around New York City in a restored, propeller-driven DC-3, part of the airline’s fleet that carried passengers between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s. He sat in the cockpit as it flew along the Hudson River, over Central Park and past the former site of Aviation High.
“He was taken aback by all of that,” his son said. “He didn’t really know how to accept praise of that magnitude. In his mind, he didn’t feel he had done anything extraordinary. He loved going to work. He considered the people he worked with family, and it was enjoyment to him. That was his real reward.”
He was 100 when he passed.