A statement from the family of Donald Rumsfeld: pic.twitter.com/AlKYxVvqgF
— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) June 30, 2021
The NYT has a preliminary obit up. I’ll probably wait until tomorrow and post links to full obits from them and from the WP.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
NYT obit for John Langley, which (as usual) went up after I posted the other day.
Stuart Damon. He played “Dr. Alan Quartermaine” on “General Hospital” basically forever. He has a few other credits – mostly soaps – beyond that, including “Space: 1999” and “Star 80”.
Robert Sacchi, most famous for “The Man With Bogart’s Face”.
NYT obit for Frederic Rzewski, which went up after I posted yesterday.
John Langley. He was perhaps best known as the creator of “COPS”.
He also was involved in off-road racing, and apparently did quite well at that:
He died of an apparent heart attack while his team was competing in the “Coast to Coast Ensenada-San Felipe 250” this past weekend.
I have not seen this elsewhere, but “Reason” is reporting the death of libertarian economist Steve Horwitz.
Let us pause for a moment of silence in memory of FotB and valued commenter guffaw, who originated Gavrilo Princip Day.
“The Guns of August” is a long (almost 1:40) documentary adapted from Barbara Tuchman’s book.
Shameful confession: I greatly admire Barbara Tuchman. I loved The Proud Tower. I think Practicing History is an excellent collection of essays. I read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century a long time ago, but it was at the right time for me, and I’m fond of that book.
I have never been able to read The Guns of August. I have tried three times and just cannot get through it. I think it may be a matter of just too many people to keep track of…
Bonus: I may be pushing things a little bit, but here you go: “The Russian Civil War in Siberia” from “The Great War” channel.
It isn’t exactly WWI, but I believe (and I think Mike Duncan will agree with me) that the 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War were consequences of a lot of things, including WWI, so I’m including this here.
Bonus #2: This is an aspect of history I’m interested in, but I have not had a chance to sit down and watch this video yet. “Blood and Oil: The Middle East in World War I”. Looking at the description and comments, it may be somewhat biased: I would take this with some salt.
Note for myself: The T. E. Lawrence Society.
Mike Gravel, former Senator from Alaska and (later) presidential candidate.
Frederic Rzewski, noted pianist. I probably would not have made note of this, but Mike the Musicologist sent me this tweet:
I will write an obit tonight, but for now, the greatest gig poster in history: pic.twitter.com/aeyi0HvCrZ
— Ethan Iverson (@ethan_iverson) June 26, 2021
Ethan Iverson’s tribute. MtM notes: “And while ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated‘ is grotesque source material, the piece is stunning.”
There’s an abundance of John McAfee obits out there on the web. Take your pick from Hacker News: for the hysterical record, I’m linking to the NYT obit.
Promoted from the comments, and by way of great and good FotB Joe D.:
Edited to add NYPost headline:
John McAfee hideout traced to Spanish ‘ghost hotel’ with a bitcoin farm
Biden administration cracking down on ghost hotels in 3, 2, 1…
Flashback:
So I was at my local gun shop over the weekend…and they actually had a C96 in the display case for sale. I kid you not: it was the first one I’ve ever seen in the wild.
It even came with the “holster”. Really. That’s what they said. They were very careful about not calling it a “shoulder stock”. It was a “holster”. (They were also very clear that: once you got it home, what you did with the “holster” was your own damn business.)
The previous owner had even thrown in a box of ammo and some empty brass. The whole kit looked to be in pretty good shape (though I believe the clerk said the hammer had been replaced with a later period hammer, so it wasn’t quite all matching).
They were (are?) asking a mere $1,800 for it. Which is more than I’m willing to shell out right now. But if a Broomhandle Mauser is your cup of tea for a carry gun, feel free to drop me a line privately and I’ll hook you up with the shop.
Edited to add 6/24: Fun fact, which I just had the chance to research today. While a pistol with a shoulder stock is technically considered a short barrelled rifle (SBR) and falls under the National Firearms Act of 1934 regulations, there are certain specific items – “such as original semiautomatic Mauser “Broomhandles” and Lugers” – that are considered “collectors’ items” and are not subject to the NFA.
You can find the complete lists here, if you are that curious.
I am seeing reports that John McAfee has committed suicide in a jail in Spain. I have not been able to confirm those reports: they currently trace back to one Spanish newspaper.
Edited to add: the NYPost has the story, but they are crediting it back to that same Spanish newspaper.
Monday was the 90th anniversary of the strange death of Hubert Chevis, also known as “…the mysterious affair of Lieutenant Chevis and the Manchurian partridge“.
So that this isn’t a total waste of your time: here’s an old episode of a BBC Radio 4 podcast, “Punt PI”, covering the Chevis case, which I am listening to as I write this. (It is about 30 minutes long.)
This is a rather short article, but it includes photos of Mr. and Mrs. Chevis, and of the “J. Hartigan” telegram.
Joanne Linville, actress.
84 credits in IMDB. She did a few 70s cop shows (“The Streets of San Francisco”, “The Blue Knight”, “Barnaby Jones”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, “Columbo” and “Mrs. Columbo”, etc.). She also did a “Twilight Zone” (“The Passerby”), “The Invaders”, and an episode of a minor 1960s SF series.
Sang Ho Baek. He played baseball for George Mason University as a freshman this past season. After the season, he decided to have Tommy John surgery. He had the surgery on June 8th, and passed away on June 12th from complications.
He was 20 years old.
George Stranahan, colorful figure.
His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.
So he did:
The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”
He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.
He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.
He also did some ranching:
In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.
Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.
Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”
For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.
He was, of course, most famous as Herb Tarlek on “WKRP In Cincinnati” (and “The New WKRP in Cincinnati”, which I don’t think I ever saw an episode of).
His second credit in IMDB is “Equinox“, an odd film that we watched one Halloween season. I remember us saying, “Hey, is that Herb Tarlek? It sure looks a lot like him. Wait, it is!” (His first credit is “The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural”, the short film that was expanded into “Equinox”.) And somewhat oddly, he has some pre “WKRP” cop show credits…
…including, believe it or not, “Mannix”. (“Catspaw”, season 5, episode 13. He’s listed in IMDB as “Hypnotized man (uncredited)”.)
Heidi Ferrer, writer for “Dawson’s Creek”. She also wrote “The Hottie & the Nottie”. According to her family, she had been fighting COVID-19 for over a year, and took her own life.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Janet Malcolm, who you may remember from “The Journalist and the Murderer”.
Her essay began with one of the most arresting first sentences in literary nonfiction: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
Her pronouncement enraged the journalistic firmament. Many writers insisted that this was not how they treated their subjects and accused Ms. Malcolm of tarring everyone with the same broad brush.
But what galled some journalists about the piece the most, The Times reported in 1989, “was her failure, and that of her magazine, to disclose that Miss Malcolm had been accused of the same kind of behavior, in a lawsuit filed against her by the subject of an earlier New Yorker article.”
That earlier article, a 1983 profile of the flamboyant psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, led to a libel suit against Ms. Malcolm that hung over her during a decade of litigation and clouded her reputation even longer.
The legal allegations were different: The MacDonald suit accused Mr. McGinniss of fraud and breach of contract; the Masson suit accused Ms. Malcolm of libel. But both suits raised serious questions about journalistic ethics — Dr. MacDonald’s about the nature of writers’ obligations to their sources, and Mr. Masson’s about what constitutes quotations and what license, if any, reporters may take with them.
The journalistic community generally judged Ms. Malcolm harshly, mostly for the finding in the Masson case that she had cobbled together 50 or 60 separate conversations with the loquacious Mr. Masson and made them appear as if he had spoken them in a single lunchtime monologue.
“This thing called speech is sloppy, redundant, repetitious, full of uhs and ahs,” Ms. Malcolm testified in her defense in 1993 during the first of two jury trials. “I needed to present it in logical, rational order so he would sound like a logical, rational person.”
…
I’ve been reading the NYPost more recently, which is where I picked up on these two cases. However, I’m trying to use local sources when I can.
I don’t want to seem like I’m posting these to be exploitative. But both of these two crimes happened recently, and both have interesting elements to them.
1. The Murdaugh family in South Carolina is prominent in local legal circles.
In 2019, Paul Murdaugh, who was 20 years old, was charged with three felony counts of boating while intoxicated. He was involved in a boat crash that killed a 19 year old woman.
Last Monday, Paul Murdaugh and his mother, Maggie, were found shot to death on their property.
According to reports, both were shot with different weapons: Paul was apparently killed with a shotgun, while an “assault rifle” (I know, I know) was used to kill his mother.
There’s pretty extensive coverage on “The State” website. I do want to highlight this editorial, “Another Murdaugh tragedy. Another reason to lose faith in the criminal justice system“, which pretty clearly implies that the state was doing a lousy job of prosecuting Paul Murdaugh.
2. Ashley Henley was a Mississippi state representative from 2016 to 2020.
On December 26th last year, Ms. Henley’s sister-in-law, Kristina Michelle Jones, was found dead in her trailer home after a fire.
On Sunday night, Ms. Henley was found dead outside her sister-in-law’s trailer.
It isn’t clear to me, from what I’ve read, if the fire was ruled accidental or purposeful, or if there even was a ruling. (Law enforcement now says they are re-investigating it.)
I feel like I should have something more here, but the only thing I can come up with is irresponsible speculation. There’s an obvious theory of the crime in the Murdaugh case (and the Post is reporting the family received threats prior to the shooting) but the obvious isn’t always true.
As for the Henley case, there’s an obvious theory for that, too, if you’ve ever watched any legal show on television. But life isn’t like “Perry Mason”: people generally don’t get murdered because they “got too close to the truth”. I don’t think it is even clear that there was a crime involved before the murder, let alone that Ms. Henley was killed for that reason.
But, as is frequently the case, somebody’s going to get a true crime book out of one or both of these cases.
Brigitte Gerney passed away a few days ago. She was 85.
You probably never heard of her, but this is a great story. On May 30, 1985, she was pinned under a collapsed crane in New York City.
Mrs. Gerney was walking home to United Nations Plaza from her dentist’s office on East 69th Street, past the foundation for a 42-story apartment building on Third Avenue between 64th and 63rd Streets, when the 35-ton base of the crane tipped over onto the sidewalk, trapping her at the edge of the excavation.
“It was like an earthquake,” she testified a year later. “The pavement cracked up under me. I remember my bag flying out of my hands. I heard the noise of all the bones cracking in my legs. I’m sure I screamed, ‘Help me, help me, get me out!’ But I was alone.”
She continued: “I said, ‘Can’t you cut my legs off and take me out? I have two children. I have to live.’ But they said they couldn’t do that, that I would bleed to death.”
“I never believed I would get out,” she said. “I thought I was dying.”
She was asked if she wanted a priest, she added, “and I said yes.”
Three cranes were dispatched to help stabilize the toppled one while rescue workers extricated Mrs. Gerney, who remained conscious the entire time.
She was pinned for six hours.
James Essig of the 19th Precinct, among the first on the scene, was awarded a medal for valor. Paul Ragonese of the Emergency Service Unit was elevated to detective, retired from the bomb squad in 1988 and now handles security for the Durst Organization.
“What kept me alive is that he held my hand,” Mrs. Gerney said of Detective Ragonese.
He said at the time, “She is the most courageous man or woman I ever met.”
It took 13 operations (including skin grafts and microsurgery) but the doctors were able to save her legs, and she was able to walk again.
The accident and its aftermath were front-page news for more than a year. The contracting company and the construction foreman were convicted of assault and endangerment. The foreman was fined $5,000 and placed on five years’ probation. The crane operator, who was unlicensed and who had been ordered by the foreman to take over after the regular operator had left for the day, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault. He was spared a prison sentence after Mrs. Gerney urged compassion.
In 1988, she was awarded $10 million in damages, to be paid in monthly installments.
…
Mrs. Gerney’s first son drowned when he was a toddler. She was seriously injured in 1982 when the cable car she was riding at a Swiss ski resort disengaged and plunged to the ground. She survived lung cancer in 1980. Her husband died of colon cancer in 1983. After the crane accident, a doctor who had treated her, and whom she planned to marry, was shot dead by a retired fireman who had been awaiting a decision on his medical disability claim.
“Her reaction to this horrible litany of misfortune?” her son said. “She would say: ‘On the one hand, only in a place like New York does a crane fall on you when you are walking home from the dentist. On the other hand, only in New York would they shut down half the city, have these crazy, brave people crawl under a teetering crane to save you, and then have the best doctors in the world somehow rebuild your smashed legs.’”
I am an old man.
In other news, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” opened (and by “opened”, I mean official opening, as opposed to the endless stream of previews) 10 years ago Monday.