For the most gratuitous use of the word “Belgium” in a serious post.
— Eternal Memri TV (@EMTVmemes) December 4, 2019
“Work and Play In Belgium”, a 1950 propaganda film (in color!) from the “Belgian Government Information Center of New York City”.
Bonus: at least part of this is set…in Bruges.
Alex Cord. He may have been best known as “Archangel” in “Airwolf”, but he had a significant body of work going back to the 1960s. No “Mannix”, but a lot of other cop shows, and multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, among other credits.
Patricia Hitchcock. Yes, Alfred’s daughter.
She had a few other credits, but retired in the 1970s.
Tony Esposito, Hall of Fame goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks.
Walter Yetnikoff, legendary head of CBS Records.
In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Yetnikoff somewhat reluctantly let Ron Alexenburg, the head of CBS’s Epic label, sign the Jacksons. Epic had wrested the group from Motown Records (which retained the rights to the group’s original name, the Jackson 5), and though Mr. Yetnikoff wasn’t overly impressed with the Jacksons’ initial albums for Epic, he cultivated a relationship with the group’s key member, Michael, supporting the young singer’s interest in expanding into solo work.
In 1982, that encouragement resulted in “Thriller,” still one of the top-selling albums in history.
…
Unfortunately, he was one of those people who didn’t just have issues: he had a lifetime subscription and a complete run of bound volumes.
…
…
Brian Mulheren. He was the man in the NYPD in the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, and to quote the NYT, he was a “veteran detective who as an audacious, deft and indefatigable one-man emergency management liaison between City Hall and the New York Police and Fire Departments became known as ‘Mr. Disaster’ and the ‘Night Mayor’…”
Mr. Mulheren played an outsize role for a first-grade detective. He was armed with a gold shield, but his uniform, such as it was — it typically consisted of a rumpled beige trench coat and a crumpled Irish tweed hat — was devoid of the stars and bars that define status on the police force.
Yet by sheer force of personality and the connections he had cultivated, he was deferred to by city commissioners and by police supervisors who outranked him when he arrived, often first, at the scene of a crisis in his black Lincoln Town Car, which was crowned with a forest of antennas that linked him to every emergency radio frequency in the city.
In the 1970s and ’80s, he served as City Hall’s wake-up call when an officer was shot or a firefighter was felled. Before the city established a full-fledged emergency management department, he seamlessly and almost single-handedly coordinated interagency strategies.
“He was one of those rare people who kept the N.Y.P.D. and the Fire Department together,” John Miller, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, said in an interview. “He basically created the organized response to chaos that we replicated and have used ever since.”
…
Mr. Mulheren was credited by Officer Steven McDonald’s family with saving his life when he was shot in Central Park by a teenage bicycle thief in 1986 and rushed in a patrol car to Metropolitan Hospital, where doctors said he was unlikely to survive.
In 2016, Mr. McDonald told Columbia, the Knights of Columbus magazine, that he vividly remembered Mr. Mulheren’s dauntless intervention.
“You might think he’s not going to make it, but we’re going to Bellevue,” Mr. Mulheren announced on his own initiative, according to “New York’s Finest,” a forthcoming book by Michael Daly.
“He had no rank or high station but stepped forward and said, ‘No, he’s not going to die; he just needs a second chance,’” Mr. McDonald recalled. “I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking through Brian to everyone there. Just like that like they loaded me up on a special ambulance and flew down to Bellevue Hospital, where they saved my life by the grace of God.”
…
In another emergency, when a firefighter was overcome and no ambulance was immediately available, Mr. Mulheren was said to have commandeered a city bus, told the passengers to debark and ordered the driver to take the injured man to the hospital.
Serving mostly under Mayors John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins, Mr. Mulheren, a police buff since childhood, insinuated himself into the department’s decisions to buy smaller patrol cars to economize on gas; change their color from green, black and white in the early 1970s to “grabber blue” with white accents to make them more visible and less intimidating; modernize lights and sirens; air-condition the cars; and improve radio communications. He also encouraged the Fire Department to requisition a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber to treat burn victims.
He was 73 years old, and passed away due to COPD. His family attributes his condition to inhalation of debris at the WTC site after the 2001 attacks.
I did not give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about the Olympics. As a matter of fact, I believe they should have been cancelled this year, they should remain cancelled for all time, and cities should use the money to provide free guitar picks for the poor.
So I missed this story last week, but you know it is the kind of thing I can’t pass up, and I don’t think it got a lot of attention.
The coach of the German modern pentathlon team was disqualified on Saturday.
As it happens, “modern pentathlon” is one of the few Olympic sports I care much about: how can you not like a combination of swimming, fencing, running, horses, and shooting? (Plus: Patton. Minus: they are apparently using laser guns these days, instead of real pistols.)
But that’s not why the story is interesting. She was disqualified because…
I believe we have video of the event.
Okay, I’m sorry, that was a cheap joke, but it never gets old. Here is the actual footage:
Bundestrainerin Kim Raisner: "Hau mal richtig drauf. Hau richtig drauf!" Dann schlägt sie selber noch mit der Faust zu (Sekunde 23).@DOSB Das muss Konsequenzen haben.#ARD #Fünfkampf pic.twitter.com/JIBpqEGR6M
— Max Möhrike Ⓥ (@der_veganer) August 6, 2021
I can’t pass this up. I’m sorry.
But the flaming hyenas watch is not going all Cuomo, all the time. No, we have other news to report.
Democratic Arizona state senator Otoniel “Tony” Navarrete resigned yesterday.
…
Navarrete was arrested last week on seven felony charges: five involving sexual conduct with a minor, one for attempted sexual conduct with a minor and a seventh charge of child molestation.
The arrest came after a 16-year-old boy went to Phoenix police with allegations of abuse dating from 2019. The probable cause statement also alleged that Navarrete attempted sexual conduct with a 13-year-old boy.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Edited to add: from Mike the Musicologist, “New York has successfully flattened the perv.”
It was a busy weekend, and I’ve got a backlog. I hope I don’t miss anybody.
Damn. Said it before, I’ll say it again: “Night Court” was a swell show, and she was part of what made it swell.
Trevor Moore, comedian (“The Whitest Kids U Know”).
Jane Withers, actress.
She did other movie and TV work, including “Giant”, and played “Josephine the Plumber” in the Comet commercials.
Bobby Bowden, football coach.
“When I was at Alabama the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Auburn,’ he recalled in “The Bowden Way” (2001), his book on leadership written with his son Steve. “When I was at West Virginia they read ‘Beat Pitt.’ When I came to F.S.U., the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Anybody.’”
Bowden’s Seminoles beat most everybody. He coached Florida State to national championships in 1993 and 1999 and his teams finished in the top five of the Associated Press rankings every season from 1987 to 2000. The Seminoles were unbeaten in bowl games from 1982 to 1995.
He was, for a period of time, the coach with the most wins in college football. I phrase it that way, though, because this was after the NCAA vacated 111 of Joe Paterno’s victories over the Penn State scandal:
Coach Bowden now ranks second, with 377 career wins.
Paul Cotton, of Poco.
Mr. Cotton joined Poco, replacing the founding member Jim Messina in 1970, just in time to appear on the group’s third studio album, “From the Inside” (1971). Produced by Steve Cropper, the guitarist with the Memphis R&B combo Booker T. & the MGs, the project signaled a new artistic direction for the band, maybe nowhere so much as on the three songs written by Mr. Cotton.
Rooted more in rock and soul than in the country and bluegrass that had hitherto been the group’s primary influences, Mr. Cotton’s sinewy, blues-inflected guitar work and brooding baritone vocals on songs like the ballad “Bad Weather” greatly expanded Poco’s emotional and stylistic palette.
Herbert Schlosser, TV executive. Among other accomplishments: “Saturday Night Live” and “Laugh-In”.
Jon Lindbergh. Yes, he was Charles Lindbergh’s son, but he led an interesting life of his own.
He didn’t go into aviation like his father: instead, he became a pioneer of undersea research.
After college, he did postgraduate work at the University of California San Diego and spent three years as a Navy frogman, working with the Underwater Demolition Team. He appeared as an extra in the television series “Sea Hunt” and had bit parts in a few movies, including “Underwater Warrior” (1958).
He also worked as a commercial deep-sea diver and participated in several diving experiments. They included a 1964 project in the Bahamas called “Man-in-Sea” in which a submersible decompression chamber devised by Edwin Link allowed divers to stay deeper under water for longer periods.
As part of that project, Mr. Lindbergh and Robert Sténuit, a Belgian engineer, set a record by staying in a submersible dwelling for 49 hours at a depth of 432 feet, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen that allowed them to swim outside the dwelling without harm despite the enormous pressure of the water above. Mr. Sténuit wrote an account of the experiment in the April 1965 issue of National Geographic.
Mr. Lindbergh was also involved in the development and testing of the Navy’s Alvin deep-ocean submersible, which he used during the recovery of the hydrogen bomb in the Mediterranean. An American bomber had hit a refueling tanker in midair and dropped four hydrogen bombs, two of which released plutonium into the atmosphere, though no warheads detonated.
He later helped install Seattle’s water treatment system in icy waters as deep as 600 feet. Finding that he liked the area, he bought a secluded Georgian-style home on Bainbridge Island in the mid-1960s and raised his family there. He later farmed salmon in Puget Sound and in Chile as part of an emerging aquaculture industry and sold the fish to airlines and restaurants.
…
Charles Lindbergh lived long enough to see Jon flourish in his career and was relieved that his son had not followed him into aviation. “He removed any burden of his own career from his son’s shoulders,” Mr. Berg wrote in his biography, by telling Jon that much of what had first attracted him to aviation in the 1920s no longer existed.
“Thirty years ago, piloting an airplane was an art,” Charles Lindbergh told his son, but it no longer seemed like an adventure.
Rather than become a flyer, Charles Lindbergh added, “I think I would follow your footprints to the oceans, with confidence that chance and imagination would combine to justify the course I set.”
Nach Waxman. He founded Kitchen Arts and Letters, a Manhattan bookstore specializing in food related books.
In one instance, Mr. Waxman counseled Citibank on its banquet menu for the Venezuelan finance minister; in another, he found Indigenous recipes from New Guinea for the American Museum of Natural History’s dining room during an exhibition on rain forests.
“He could make helpful recommendations, obtain the very cookbook you needed, search for out-of-print editions and discuss the authors,” said Florence Fabricant, a food and wine writer for The New York Times.
Mr. Waxman once said that about two-thirds of his customers were culinary careerists purchasing professional tools. “Knives are one tool,” he told The Times in 1998. “Books are another.”
…
“It’s really the professional business that’s the gratifying business,” Mr. Waxman told The Times in 1995. “People who are expanding their skills and the scope of their work. I will tell you, when the lease was up a few years ago, I gave serious thought to moving the store to a second floor somewhere just to make it a place for motivated people, not casual drop-ins. The people who come here have a language in common.
“Just sitting and selling books is boring,” he said. “It’s making change and putting books in bags. What’s fun is helping people solve their problems.”
Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president.
J.R. Richard, former pitcher for the Houston Astros. NYT. Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.
Richard, who was part of the Astros’ inaugural Hall of Fame class in 2020, pitched all 10 of his big league seasons with the Astros before his career was cut short when he suffered a stroke while playing catch inside the Astrodome on July 30, 1980.
“He was one of the greatest pitchers we ever had and probably would have been in the Hall of Fame if his career was not cut short,” Richard’s former Astros teammate Enos Cabell said in a statement released by the team. “On the mound, he was devastating and intimidating. Nobody wanted to face him. Guys on the other team would say that they were sick to avoid facing him. This is very sad news. He will be missed.”
Before the stroke, Richard was one of the most dominant pitchers in baseball, leading the league in strikeouts in back-to-back seasons in 1978 and 1979. In that 1979 season – when he set a franchise record with 313 strikeouts, which was broken by Gerrit Cole in 2019 – he also led the National League in ERA at 2.71.
Col. Dave Severance (USMC – ret.) has passed away. He was 102.
The flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, captured by an Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, was taken when the battle for Iwo Jima was far from over. In the days that followed, Colonel Severance earned the Silver Star, the Marines’ third-highest decoration for valor after the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. The citation stated that in a firefight for a heavily defended ridge, he “skillfully directed the assault on this strong enemy position despite stubborn resistance.”
Colonel Severance, a captain at the time, commanded Easy Company of the 28th Marine Regiment, Fifth Marine Division — part of the 70,000-man Marine force that sought to seize Iwo Jima, 7.5 square miles of black volcanic sand about 660 miles south of Tokyo. The island, defended by 21,000 Japanese troops, held airstrips that were needed as bases for American fighter planes and as havens for crippled bombers returning to the Mariana Islands from missions over Japan.
Amid heavy casualties, the Marines by the fifth day of combat on Iwo Jima had silenced most opposition from Japanese soldiers dug into caves on Mount Suribachi, an extinct volcano 546 feet high at Iwo Jima’s southern tip.
In midmorning, a group of Marines from Easy Company raised a flag at the summit, a ceremony photographed by Sgt. Louis Lowery of the Marine magazine Leatherneck. When James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy, who was on the beach below, saw the flag, he requested that it be kept as a memento. After it was returned to the beach, Colonel Severance sent another group of his Marines to bring a larger flag to the mountaintop.
It was the raising of the second flag that was portrayed in Mr. Rosenthal’s dramatic photograph.
…
…
…
…
Alvin Ing, actor. He was in the original Broadway production of Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” and the revival in 2004. He also appeared in the 2002 revival of “Flower Drum Song”.
He also did some movie and TV work, including “The Final Countdown” and the bad “Hawaii Five-0”.
I’m taking a very short break (should be operational again late Monday or possibly Tuesday morning).
In the meantime, please to enjoy this: Dale “Snort” Snodgrass at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. (About an hour and 20 minutes.)
Bonus: Tomcat demo flight at the Cleveland Air Show, 1996.
Austin Police officer Andy Traylor passed away last night.
His death came as a result of severe injuries sustained in a traffic accident on Wednesday.
Carl Levin, Senator from Michigan.
Richard Lamm, Colorado governor.
As a state lawmaker from 1966 to 1974, he also campaigned against Denver’s hosting the 1976 Olympics even though the city had been awarded the Games. He argued that it would damage the environment and sap state funds. Colorado voters rejected spending government money on the Games, and the event was shifted to Innsbruck, Austria.
Denver voters later passed an initiative requiring voter approval for any future proposals to host the Olympics. Mr. Lamm once said that he had been treated as a “pariah” by the business community over the episode.
Two quick legal stories that I find interesting, ripped from the pages of the NYT.
1. Remember the Bonhomme Richard fire, about a year ago? Totally wiped out the ship?
The Navy has charged one of the crew with aggravated arson and “willfully hazarding a vessel”. Which is just kind of…wow. I don’t know what to say.
2. Lawrence Handley has pled guilty to two counts of second-degree kidnapping and one count of attempted second-degree kidnapping. He could get anywhere from 15 to 35 years in prison, and frankly I’m surprised he’s not getting the death penalty, or a life sentence for felony murder.
Mr. Handley decided to hire two guys to kidnap his wife.
Mr. Handley’s lawyer, Kevin Stockstill, said in an interview that his client had been using methamphetamine and cocaine for days when he hatched the plan to have his wife kidnapped. He said that Mr. Handley had planned to “come in as a hero” and rescue Ms. Handley in an effort to “win her back.”
“It was certainly not logical thinking, but when you’re doing a lot of meth and cocaine, I guess it seemed rational to him,” Mr. Stockstill said. “It turned out to be a terrible decision.”
(As a side note, “Mr. Handley had run software and vitamin businesses and had been the chief executive of a series of drug treatment centers that sold in 2015 in a deal worth about $21 million…”)
Anyway, the two men pulled off the kidnapping successfully. But as they were making their getaway, sheriff’s deputies noticed the van driving “erratically” and tried to pull it over. They didn’t know anything about the kidnapping at the time.
A police chase ensued.
Supplemental: NYT obit for Dusty Hill.
City Journal tribute to Jackie Mason. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
The quirky products certainly sounded like inventions Americans could live without — an Inside-the-Shell Electric Egg Scrambler, spray-on fake hair in a can, the Pocket Fisherman (“the biggest fishing invention since the hook … and still only $19.95!”), and the counter-size Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ (“Set it and forget it!”), one of his biggest successes.
His redesigned 1975 Veg-O-Matic is enshrined in the Smithsonian’s American Legacies collection alongside the Barbie doll, and comedian Dan Aykroyd vigorously parodied both salesman and machine in Bass-O-Matic skits on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1970s.
George Rhoads. I had not heard of him previously, but his work sounds really cool.
Mr. Rhoads’s colorful “audio-kinetic ball machines,” which evoked the workings of watches and roller coasters, were built of comically designed tracks and devices like loop-the-loops and helical ramps, and were usually six- to 10-feet high. Scores of the machines have been installed in children’s hospitals, malls, science museums and airports and elsewhere in a dozen countries, but mostly in the United States and Japan.
“Each pathway that the ball takes is a different drama, as I call it, because the events happen in a certain sequence, analogous to drama,” he said in an interview in 2014 with Creative Machines, which makes ball machines based on and inspired by his designs. “The ball gets into certain difficulties. It does a few things. Maybe there’s some conflict. They hit or they wander, whatever it is and then there’s some kind of dramatic conclusion.”
One of his most frequently viewed machines, “42nd Street Ballroom,” was installed in 1983 in the lobby of Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, where it remained. Eight feet tall and eight feet wide, the sculpture shows its plates spin, its levers flip and its 24 billiard balls roll down ramps. As was typical of his machines, numerous balls move independently, letting gravity guide them and, when they reach the bottom, they are returned to the top by a motorized hoist.
Joey Jordison, drummer and founding member of Slipknot.
Rick Aiello, actor. (“Do The Right Thing”, lots of TV credits including “18 Wheels of Justice”)
For the record, he was Danny Aiello’s son.
Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is “too busy to read” is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final. History teaches that we face nothing new under the sun. The Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. All Marines read a common set; in addition, sergeants read some books, and colonels read others. Even generals are assigned a new set of books that they must consume. At no rank is a Marine excused from studying. When I talked to any group of Marines, I knew from their ranks what books they had read. During planning and before going into battle, I could cite specific examples of how others had solved similar challenges. This provided my lads with a mental model as we adapted to our specific mission.
Reading shed light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present…
—Call Sign Chaos, Jim Mattis and Bing West
(Obviously, I like this quote. Gen. Mattis was speaking more in the context of history, especially military history. But I think this can be extended way out: the more I think about it, the more I think that all books – history, science, biography, books about farming, even fiction – are a honor and a gift from someone who sat down to have a “conversation” with you, and it is worth your time and effort, even if you are not a combat Marine, to “take advantage of such accumulated experiences”.
Of course, some of those people who are trying to have a conversation with you are the kind of person who would be called a “bore” in social circles. There’s no obligation to read, or to finish, everything: just to keep an open mind.)
Bonus quote of the day, from the same source:
“What is a Marine doing here?” Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin asked when I entered her office.
“Madam Ambassador,” I said, “I’m taking a few thousand of my best friends to Afghanistan to kill some people.” She smiled and said, “I think I can help you.” Never before had I personally experienced a diplomat’s impact so directly.
I am seeing reports that Dusty Hill of ZZ Top has passed, but I have not yet found a reliable source for this.
I’ll update here if I do find one.
Edited to add: short preliminary obit from the Statesman. Variety.
EtA2: NYPost.
EtA3:
RIP Dusty Hill – great bassist, great Texan, great Hill pic.twitter.com/Cf7Pf1s3Y4
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 28, 2021
This is another one of those NYT style obits for someone who wasn’t so famous, but was still a figure worth noting. Mr. Elidrissi emigrated from Morocco to the United States in 1966 and got a job as a bellhop at the Waldorf Astoria…
…where he worked until 2017.
…
He remembered encountering Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter.
“‘Here you go, Mr. President,’” he recalled saying in greeting the candidate, “and he goes, ‘No, no, don’t call me that yet!’ So I say, ‘Look, Mr. President, you’re going to win and when you win send me something for my son.’ Later that year, he sent us a signed picture made out to my son.”
When Reagan returned to the hotel years after leaving office, he greeted Mr. Elidrissi by saying, “‘You’re still here, Jim!’”
Stretching the definition of an obit just a wee bit…
Spoiler: it looks like pretty much all of these guys were older than dirt.
It seems that I have been blogging for twelve years as of today.
This is, frankly, a number that astonishes me. I really don’t know what to say, beyond the obligatory anniversary post.
And also, thanks to the readers and contributors: Borepatch, Lawrence, Joe D, tim kies, Glypto Dropem (who left a very perceptive comment the other day on chest seals and pennies), Jimmy McNulty, RoadRich, The Real Kurt, Heather Dobrott, and a bunch of other folks I’m probably unintentionally forgetting.
Twelve years. I mean, seriously, the mind boggles. The blogger goes to get another cup of coffee. (In the current official mug of WCD. There is a story behind this, which I may tell at some point: but for now, I do not get any royalties from the sale of these mugs by the NYPost Store.)
Mike the Musicologist sent me a story that I missed.
The mayor of Rochester, New York, Lovely Warren, was indicted on July 16th. For the second time.
The first time was back in October for campaign finance violations.
This time? Would you believe…guns?
The other half of the couple is Timothy Granison, her husband, who has his own set of problems. Specifically, he and five other people have been charged with “conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine”.
Mayor Warren lost the Democratic primary last month, so she will not be serving another term. She has not been implicated in the dope ring, either.
Noted:
Guess that answers that question.
Michael Enzi, fomer Senator from Wyoming. He’s the second prominent person I’ve seen recently who has died as a result of a bicycle accident (the other one was Greg Knapp, an assistant coach for the Jets).
I guess the moral is: be careful out there.
Dale “Snort” Snodgrass was killed in a plane crash over the weekend. The Drive put up a very nice obit for him.
You may not have heard his name, and you wouldn’t recognize him from this photo. But if you follow military aviation at all, you will recognize this photo.
…
I have not had a chance to watch this yet, but Ward Carroll did a live stream tribute to Mr. Snodgrass on Sunday night. Here it is for bookmark purposes (about 40 minutes):
Supplemental Steven Weinberg obits: NYT. Statesman.
Jackie Mason, comedian.
Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.
“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”
The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”
…
After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”
Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.
The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”
“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”
…
For the record (and per Wikipedia), “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went through 182 preview performances.
…
Laura Foreman. She was a prominent and well-regarded reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s: so much so that she got hired by the NYT.
Her focus was Philadelphia’s 1975 mayoral race, in which the brash and cocky incumbent, Frank L. Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was seeking a second term.
One of Mr. Rizzo’s close allies was Mr. Cianfrani, a longtime ward boss who became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential lawmakers. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer.
Rumors began circulating that the two were involved romantically, but Ms. Foreman denied them, and the editors discounted them.
After she got hired by the NYT, it came out that the rumors were true: “…the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car.”
The Times told her she had to resign, even though the conduct in question had occurred at another paper. The Times, in fact, said initially that her work had comported with the highest ethical standards. But according to an account that Ms. Foreman wrote in The Washington Monthly in 1978, A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’s executive editor, told her that because the paper was writing tough stories at the time about conflicts of interest involving Bert Lance, a close Carter adviser, it couldn’t very well harbor a conflict of its own.
To others, Mr. Rosenthal uttered an unforgettable comment that has been rendered several different ways but in essence said that he didn’t care if his reporters were having sex with elephants — as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Roberts, the Inquirer editor, appointed the paper’s top investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to dig into the affair. They produced a 17,000-word article, published on Oct. 16, 1977, that exposed internal rivalries at the paper and found that editors had looked the other way to protect a favored reporter, Ms. Foreman. It was among the first instances of a newspaper turning its investigative artillery on itself.
She married Mr. Cianfrani, but never worked in journalism again. Ms. Foreman actually passed away over a year ago, but her death was only recently reported.
A burning in Hell watch, by way of Lawrence: Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game” killer.
A longhaired photographer who lured women by offering to take their pictures, Mr. Alcala was convicted of killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in Orange County, Calif., and two women in New York, all between 1971 and 1979, the authorities said.
Investigators had also suspected him of, or had linked him to, other murders in Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona, New Hampshire and Marin County, Calif., the department said.
…
In 1978, six years after he was convicted of molesting [removed – DB], Mr. Alcala appeared in a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar as “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game.”
The host described him as “a successful photographer,” according to a YouTube video. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”
Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on a date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.
I am seeing reports that Steven Weinberg, one of the great physicists, has died.
The University of Texas has a tribute up, but I have not found a mainstream news source reporting this yet.
…
…
Lawrence sent over an obit for Joe McKinney. He was a San Antonio based horror writer who won two Bram Stoker awards.
…
He was 52.
…here I am at Camp Granada Quinebarge.
The rustic overnight camp abruptly shut down earlier this month after just six days. Camp directors informed parents, who had shelled out $3,400 for two weeks, that they needed to pick up their children the next morning, following a “summer of challenges” capped off by delays from the camp’s food supplier that made continuing untenable.
The decision to close the 85-year-old camp in Moultonborough, N.H., in the middle of the summer left campers bereft, counselors stewing, and some parents furious. Soon, stories began to circulate of problems that went much deeper than late deliveries: counselors hired just days before camp and lacking basic training; a counselor punched in the face by a child and a camper later hit in the head by the same child; dirty dishes provided at multiple meals; at least four campers vomiting and getting quarantined, while some parents said they weren’t informed; and staff quitting and being fired in high numbers.
…
I had to post this for two reasons. One is that I can’t pass up a good Fyre Festival reference. And the other? I also can’t pass up a good classical reference.
When you are stealing stuff, you’ve gone too far. Especially if you are stealing stuff from Valley Forge.
The rifle was made by Johann Christian Oerter. This is the rifle.
The rifle turned up again in July of 2018.
Mr. Gavin pled guilty yesterday. I would have thought the statute of limitations would have run out on this, but the NYT reports he pled to one count of “disposing of an object of cultural heritage stolen from a museum”, which I guess is how they got around that. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. (Insert obligatory note on maximum sentencing in the federal system, especially for a 78 year old man with no prior record as far as I can tell.)
I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is a later edition of the Shumway book. (And this is the most current edition, with an added co-author.)
…