Obit watch: June 27, 2019.

June 27th, 2019

Lieutenant Colonel Robert J. Friend (USAF – ret.), one of the Tuskegee Airmen. He was the wingman for Col. Benjamin Davis Jr., the commanding officer of the 322nd Fighter Group.

He also had a distinguished post-war career, highlighted by running Project Blue Book from 1958 to 1963.

“Do I believe that we have been visited? No, I don’t believe that,” he said. “And the reason I don’t believe it is because I can’t conceive of any of the ways in which we could overcome some of these things: How much food would you have to take with you on a trip for 22 years through space? How much fuel would you need? How much oxygen or other things to sustain life do you have to have?”
But unlike many of his colleagues, he favored further research.
“I, for one, also believe that the probability of there being life elsewhere in this big cosmos is just absolutely out of this world — I think the probability is there,” he said.

According to the paper of record, there are 11 surviving Tuskegee Airmen. LTC Friend was 99.

Beth Chapman, wife of Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Edited to add: NYT obit for Beth Chapman.

Also, NYT on Etika.

Posted in History, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 26, 2019.

June 26th, 2019

Steve Dunleavy, noted tabloid journalist.

Mr. Dunleavy exposed Elvis Presley’s addiction to prescription drugs in Star and in a best-selling book that rankled Presley fans; scored exclusive interviews with the mother of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, and Albert DeSalvo, the confessed Boston Strangler; and championed police officers, smokers and gun owners, among others.
During his run on “A Current Affair,” from 1986 to 1995, he wrestled a bear in one segment and, in another, was bitten by a witness in a rape case when he confronted her with nude photographs of her.

That book, by the way, was: Elvis: What Happened?.

His columns in Star typically echoed the company’s conservative line, so much so that they earned him the “American of the Year” award from the right-wing John Birch Society — even though he was not a United States citizen and never became one.

…

Pete Hamill, who worked for both The Post and The News, was impressed by his drive. “I always thought he was writing his columns like he was double-parked,” Mr. Hamill said.

Rod Dreher has a tribute up as well, in which he quotes Hamill (after Dunleavy’s foot was run over by a snowplow):

“I hope it wasn’t his writing foot.”

NY Post.

By way of Lawrence: Herbert Meyer.

It was Meyer who, in a famous memo to Reagan in November 1983 when things were very tense with our intermediate-range missile deployments in Europe, wrote: “if present trends continue, we are going to win the Cold War.” Over eight vivid and tightly argued pages, Herb laid out the reasons that subsequently came to pass over the next decade.

Also by way of Lawrence: Desmond Amofah, YouTuber (under the handle “Etika”). He was 29.

His belongings were found on Manhattan Bridge on Monday. He had uploaded an eight-minute YouTube video in which he talked about suicide.
Etika was popular for playing and discussing Nintendo games on YouTube and the streaming platform Twitch.

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 surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Not quite an obit, but:

The head of the Massachusetts motor vehicle division has resigned after her agency failed to terminate the commercial driving license of a man whose collision with a group of motorcyclists on a rural New Hampshire road left seven bikers dead.

Posted in Books, Elvis, Media, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 24, 2019.

June 24th, 2019

Don Graham, noted Texas writer.

I’m actually pretty excited about his Giant book (though I want to watch the movie first). My mother wants to read his King Ranch book, and I’ve been trying to turn up a copy for her. And I have No Name on the Bullet, but have only read parts of it: I need to dig that out and give it a full reading.

Judith Krantz. I’m sure many people enjoyed her books.

Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, those poor people. Part 1. Part 2.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

More intersections.

June 19th, 2019

Mike the Musicologist and I were talking last night about this:

We speculated NRAM might be planning a week of SF related guns: sadly, today’s entry breaks the theme.

Posted in Books, Guns, Museums | Comments Closed

Noted.

June 18th, 2019

This is a good story, with an ending I didn’t expect.

(Hattip: Popehat.)

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

Tweet of the day.

June 17th, 2019

Because this sits at the extremely rare intersection of gun geekery and SF geekery:

Posted in Books, Guns, Museums | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 17, 2019.

June 17th, 2019

Death never takes a holiday.

Gloria Vanderbilt. I wouldn’t ordinarily post so soon after someone dies, but it’s clear the paper of record has had this one in the can for a while.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Back on the train…

June 17th, 2019

I’ve returned from my travel, for the record. I may talk a little about where I was at some point in the near future, but I probably won’t be doing a full fledged after action report.

One thing I will say: I can’t recommend the Sixth Floor Museum. It is expensive (a minimum of $30 for one person if you want to park your car), a Mongolian fire drill to get in to (you have to wait in line to buy tickets, or you can order them online. But either way, you then have to wait in line until your designated admission time comes around, then you have to wait in another line to actually get in the elevators up to the sixth floor.) and there’s just really not a whole lot to it that you don’t already know or haven’t heard. Most of the stuff there (Oswald’s rifle, Zapruder’s camera) isn’t even the original items (which are stored in the National Archives) but “reproductions” or similar items made around the same time.

It might be a good place to take your kids (but if you drive, you’re going to be out a minimum of $76 for a family of four) but I was generally disappointed.

Posted in Admin, Museums, Travel | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 15, 2019.

June 15th, 2019

Franco Zeffirelli.

A whirlwind of energy, Mr. Zeffirelli found time not only to direct operas, films and plays past the age of 80, but also to carry out an intense social life and even pursue a controversial political career. He had a long, tumultuous love affair with Luchino Visconti, the legendary director of film, theater and opera. He was a friend and confidant of Callas, Anna Magnani, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Coco Chanel and Leonard Bernstein.

Twice elected to the Italian Parliament, Mr. Zeffirelli was an ultraconservative senator, particularly on the issue of abortion. In a 1996 New Yorker article, he declared that he would “impose the death penalty on women who had abortions.” He said his extreme views on the subject were colored by the fact that he himself was born out of wedlock despite pressure brought to bear on his mother to terminate her pregnancy.

Did everybody born after…1964? see “Romeo and Juliet” in high school? Or was that a limited local phenomenon?

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 14, 2019.

June 14th, 2019

Pat Bowlen, Denver Broncos owner. Not much to say about this, other than it will be interesting to watch the ownership situation play out. NYT. ESPN.

Anthony Price, British author of espionage novels. I had not heard of him before last week, but John le Carré praises his work highly in The Pigeon Tunnel.

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 13, 2019.

June 13th, 2019

Sylvia Miles, noted actress. She was nominated for Academy Awards for “Midnight Cowboy” and “Farewell, My Lovely”.

She was, however, beginning to acquire a reputation for going to every party possible in whatever town she was in. She would “attend the opening of an envelope,” the comedian Wayland Flowers was said to have remarked.

Gabriele Grunewald, competitive runner. She was first diagnosed with cancer in 2009, and continued her running career despite multiple recurrences.

…she discovered a new mass on her stomach, and surgeons cut a large tumor out of her liver. By 2017, they found new tumors, and she began interspersing chemotherapy sessions with training sessions — racing at an elite level while on her fourth bout with cancer.

She was 32.

NYT obit for Bill Wittliff.

Mary Max, wife of artist Peter Max.

Mr. Max, while still alive, apparently isn’t painting much these days. (I get the impression from the obit that he may have issues.) This led to an ugly legal dispute between Ms. Max (who was substantially younger than her husband) and Mr. Max’s son, who was trying to assert more control over his work.

The police said Ms. Max was found dead of an apparent suicide in her Upper West Side apartment at Riverside Drive and 84th Street at about 8:30 p.m. on Sunday.

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 surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Travel day.

June 12th, 2019

This time, the trip is relatively short. (I’m actually driving.) I expect to be at my destination late morning or early afternoon, and may possibly have some time after I get there, unpack, and unwind.

Blogging will be catch as catch can through Sunday.

Posted in Admin, Travel | Comments Closed

The vault, the vault, the vault is on fire…

June 11th, 2019

I haven’t had a chance to go through all of this yet, but it looks link worthy:

“The Day the Music Burned“, about the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

The scope of this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands of pages of depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.

…

Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.

This is the kind of telling detail I look for:

There were at least a dozen fire engines ringing the vault, and as Aronson looked around he noticed one truck whose parking lights seemed to be melting.

(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitters.)

Posted in Bookmarks, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 11, 2019.

June 11th, 2019

Bill Wittliff, Texas writer. Among his credits: the screenplay for “Lonesome Dove”.

Bushwick Bill, Houston area rapper with the Geto Boys. NYT. This is an odd one: there were reports on Sunday that his family was denying Bushwick Bill had passed, which may have been correct at the time, but I guess his status changed at some point during the day…

Bushwick Bill had an early brush with death in 1991. High on PCP and grain alcohol, he said, he got into an altercation with his girlfriend and was shot in the right eye, a trauma he described in harrowing detail on “Ever so Clear,” from his 1992 solo debut album “Little Big Man.”
He said in interviews that he had been pronounced dead, toe-tagged and taken to the morgue. “I was actually on the cold slab,” he said in 2014. (He told differing stories about the shooting; in some accounts his mother had shot him.)
The incident was immortalized on the album cover of “We Can’t Be Stopped,” which features a photo of Bushwick Bill taken in the hospital. Flanked by Willie D and Scarface, he is shown on a stretcher, his eye blood-red, the day before he had surgery to remove it. He later said that he had been so medicated, he didn’t know the photo was being taken, and that he didn’t see the album cover until after its release.

You’ve probably seen that cover. If not, it’s in the HouChron Warning! slide show Warning!.

Noted:

In the 1990s, he announced that he was renaming himself Dr. Wolfgang von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother-Funk Stay High Dollar Billstir.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 10, 2019.

June 10th, 2019

Nicky Barnes, the other (after Frank Lucas) legendary NYC heroin dealer of the late 1960s and 1970s.

I would use the “bad week for dope dealers” joke, but Mr. Barnes actually died in 2012: his death was not reported until late last week.

Mr. Barnes estimated that he had earned at least $5 million selling heroin in the several years before his 1977 conviction — income he had augmented by investing in travel agencies, gas stations, a chain of automated carwashes and housing projects in Cleveland and Pontiac, Mich. He also marketed something called a flake-burger, made from remnants of butchered beef.
By the time he audaciously agreed to be photographed for the cover of The Times Magazine and an article inside, he had a record of 13 arrests as an adult and no convictions.

Unfortunately, being profiled in the Times Magazine and called “Mister Untouchable” caused a certain amount of tsuris on the part of Jimmy Carter, who ordered the Justice Department to go all out after Mr. Barnes. In 1977, he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

While he was imprisoned, though, his wife and former business parters took over his herion empire and began running it into the ground. Mr. Barnes ended up agreeing to testify against all of them, and was released from prison because of his cooperation in 1998.

After his release, Mr. Barnes entered the Witness Protection Program.

He told neighbors and colleagues, if they asked, that he was a bankrupt businessman, worked at a Walmart and dreamed of opening a Krispy Kreme franchise. He drove to work in a used car, lived in a mostly white neighborhood and put in a 40-hour workweek.

Because he was in witness protection, his death was not reported at the time. Apparently, it only came to light now because various people got to wondering what had happened to Mr. Barnes after Mr. Lucas died: Mr. Barnes’s daughters and anonymous sources confirmed his death.

David Bergland, 1984 Libertarian Party presidential candidate.

Posted in Cops, Law, NYPD, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »