Travel Thursday!
Today’s feature: “Flagships of the Air”, from American Airlines sometime in the 1940s. I picked this for one big reason: it features transcontinental flight on the DC-3, and I love me some DC-3s.
Bonus: We haven’t done a Pan Am video in a bit, and this even fits in with the America! theme. “Wings to Alaska”, from 1965.
Bonus bonus: Nothing to do with travel really, but I remember this song from one of the 8-track tapes we had kicking around in our old Suburban.
Cecilia Chiang has passed away at 100.
She was the woman who brought traditional Mandarin cooking to America.
The Mandarin, which opened in 1962 as a 65-seat restaurant on Polk Street in the Russian Hill section and later operated on Ghirardelli Square, near Fisherman’s Wharf, offered patrons unheard-of specialties at the time, like potstickers, Chongqing-style spicy dry-shredded beef, peppery Sichuan eggplant, moo shu pork, sizzling rice soup and glacéed bananas.
This was traditional Mandarin cooking, a catchall term for the dining style of the well-to-do in Beijing, where family chefs prepared local dishes as well as regional specialties from Sichuan, Shanghai and Canton.
In a profile of Ms. Chiang in 2007, The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that her restaurant “defined upscale Chinese dining, introducing customers to Sichuan dishes like kung pao chicken and twice-cooked pork, and to refined preparations like minced squab in lettuce cups; tea-smoked duck; and beggar’s chicken, a whole bird stuffed with dried mushrooms, water chestnuts and ham and baked in clay.”
The NYT obit mentions Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America (affiliate link), in which The Mandarin is profiled. My copy was a Christmas gift last year from my beloved and indulgent sister, and it is a swell book that I enthusiastically recommend. (Here’s a pretty good interview with Mr. Freedman from the “Eat My Globe” podcast.)
Billy Joe Shaver, Texas musician.
He was a close friend and associate of Connie Nelson’s ex-husband, Willie Nelson, who recorded many of Shaver’s songs over the years. He performed here often, in settings ranging from the Austin City Limits Music Festival to honky-tonk haven the White Horse. He appeared four times on the TV show “Austin City Limits.”
In addition to releasing his debut album “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” in 1973, he wrote almost all the songs on Waylon Jennings’ landmark album “Honky Tonk Heroes,” released that same year.
A song Jennings and Shaver co-wrote, “You Asked Me To,” was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1975. That was just one of many Shaver songs eventually recorded by hundreds of artists. Among them: “Ride Me Down Easy” (Jerry Lee Lewis), “Georgia on a Fast Train” (Johnny Cash), “Black Rose” (Willie Nelson) and “Live Forever” (actor Robert Duvall, on the soundtrack to the film “Crazy Heart”). Nelson also included Shaver’s song “We Are the Cowboys” on his latest record “First Rose of Spring,” released in July.
Shaver released more than two dozen albums of his own across the ensuing decades, initially for major labels such as Columbia Records and later for indies like New West and Houston-based Compadre. The most recent, “Long in the Tooth,” came out in 2014 on the Lightning Rod label.
South Texas Pistolero has a nice tribute up to Mr. Shaver and Jerry Jeff Walker.
Cocoanut Grove was the worst nightclub fire and the second-worst single building fire in US history.
Those of you who didn’t obsessively read the “disasters” section of the almanac are probably asking: what was the worst?
It was advertised as being “absolutely fireproof”. I get the impression that “theatre” in those days was pretty much a synonym for “firetrap”.
The video I am about to present also suggests that some of the building inspectors may have been bribed. (I know: bribes in Chicago? Who’d thunk it?)
Anyway, you probably see what’s coming. But you may not know how bad it was.
The official death toll, according to Wikipedia, was “at least 602 deaths”.
Bonus #1 and #2: a two-part documentary from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) about the MGM Grand Hotel fire of November 21, 1980.
This is a historically interesting fire. The cause of the fire was determined to be an improperly installed refrigerated display case. The copper refrigerant lines ran through the same wall and were in contact with an aluminum electrical conduit. A combination of compressor vibration and galvanic corrosion wore through the conduit and wiring, eventually causing electrical arcing and a smouldering fire. The fire eventually got large enough to become visible: one of the hotel employees sounded an alarm, but then things got really bad.
A total of 85 people died. 61 of them were on upper levels of the hotel. They were away from the fire, but toxic gasses given off by the burning material were sucked into the air-conditioning system, stairwells, and seismic joints, killing them.
We’ve had war. We’ve had pestilence. We’ve had death. I don’t want to do famine.
How about something kind of fun, and relatively short? “The Railrodder” from the National Film Board of Canada. This popped up in my recs at random, and I think it’s kind of historically interesting: it was one of the last films Buster Keaton ever made, and his very last silent film appearance. (This is from 1965, and is in color.)
I spent some time trying to find Keaton’s Canadian safety video, but it didn’t turn up. So for bonus material: “Buster Keaton Rides Again” a longer video about the making of “The Railrodder”. Sort of. There’s more to it than that. It is also more than twice as long as the “The Railrodder”, but it has great footage of Keaton at work.
When I was a lad in school, we had to read excerpts from The Diary of Samuel Pepys. I didn’t like it much at the time. But now I’m an older person with more enjoyment of history, and I feel Pepys goes down much better when you read him as he intended to be read: in blog form.
And one thing I haven’t really addressed, even in a glancing oblique way, is the current crisis. No, the other one. No, the other other one.
Anyway, I know this is a little long, but there’s a shorter bonus video afterwards.
Bonus: from the same channel, but shorter, scientific, and even thematically appropriate for Halloween: “The Mystery of the Bog Mummies”.
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The song was by far Mr. Walker’s best-known composition, the only original of his — he typically performed songs written by others — to become a major hit. But perhaps his most enduring contribution to popular culture was as an architect of the so-called cosmic cowboy music scene that coalesced around Armadillo World Headquarters, an iconoclastic nightclub in Austin.
The reception Mr. Walker received in Austin, he often said, signaled the first time he felt truly validated as an artist. “Texas was the only place where they didn’t look at me like I was crazy,” he told Rolling Stone in 1974, referring to the freewheeling ethos he cultivated with fellow regulars at Armadillo World Headquarters like Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
“It was the first place where, when I got on the stage to play, they said, ‘Of course, why not?’ Other places, they said, ‘Aw, you’re just another Bob Dylan, trying to make it with your guitar.’”
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In a career that spanned six decades, Mr. Walker never had a Top 40 pop hit. But in his 1970s heyday, he and the Lost Gonzo Band, his loose-limbed group of backing musicians, made a number of definitive Texas outlaw recordings.
Foremost was “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” a boozing, brawling anthem written by Ray Wylie Hubbard that appeared on Mr. Walker’s 1973 album, “Viva Terlingua.”
“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest, the most vivid and intense and productive period of my life,” Mr. Walker wrote in his memoir.
“Greased by drugs and alcohol, I was also raising the pursuit of wildness and weirdness to a fine art,” he wrote. “I didn’t just burn the candle at both ends, I was also finding new ends to light.”
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Next week, the 6-1 Chiefs.
Science Sunday!
My plan for today’s videos feel through because there was less science and more history in them than I really felt comfortable with for Science Sunday. So I moved those to Monday.
Instead, from MIT:
“The Sound of Gravity”, about LIGO and the search for gravity waves.
Bonus #1: “Editing Ourselves”, about CRISPER.
Bonus #2: Not by way of MIT, but a short video clip from “Cosmos”: Carl Sagan explains the 4th dimension.
The Beverly Hills Supper Club fire was the third deadliest nightclub fire in the history of the United States.
What was the second deadliest?
I’m ashamed that I’ve never heard of this one: the Natchez Rhythm Club fire. 209 people died on April 23, 1940. It was the usual: the windows were boarded up to keep non-paying spectators from watching the performers, there were an estimated 746 people crowded into the building, and they’d decorated the place with Spanish moss strung on chicken wire…which was then sprayed with Flit.
This is a 30 minute documentary from 2012 called “The Rhythm Club Fire”.
Bonus #1 and #2: The only thing we learn from history is…that we learn nothing from history. Or, “Fire after fire, the lessons are the same…” The worst nightclub fire in US history took place on November 28, 1942. It was also the second-worst single-building fire in US history. I feel pretty confident that the vast majority of my readers have heard of this one: Cocoanut Grove.
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Many patrons attempted to exit through the main entrance, the same way they had entered. The building’s main entrance was a single revolving door, which was rendered useless as the crowd stampeded in panic. Bodies piled up behind both sides of the revolving door, jamming it until it broke. The oxygen-hungry fire then leaped through the breach, incinerating whoever was left alive in the pile. Firemen had to douse the flames to approach the door. Later, after fire laws had tightened, it would become illegal to have only one revolving door as a main entrance without being flanked by outward opening doors with panic bar openers attached, or have the revolving doors set up so that the doors could fold against themselves in emergency situations.
Other avenues of escape were similarly useless; side doors had been bolted shut to prevent people from leaving without paying. A plate glass window, which could have been smashed for escape, was boarded up and unusable as an emergency exit. Other unlocked doors, like the ones in the Broadway Lounge, opened inwards, rendering them useless against the crush of people trying to escape. Fire officials would later testify that had the doors swung outwards, at least 300 lives could have been spared.
492 people died.
From the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA): “Cocoanut Grove Survivors Tell Their Stories”.
Also from the NFPA: “What we still don’t know about the Cocoanut Grove fire”.
If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it’s not funny.
So I’m bending the rules today. Really bending them. I’m posting two long videos, neither of which I have watched all the way through yet, and one of which is a “free with ads” documentary. As always, you are more than welcome to skip over today’s entry, or just read the linked articles if you prefer.
I could sit here and post gun related posts for the next 365 days, if I wanted to. But I like to break things up: military aviation one day, private/commercial aircraft another day, the occasional gun post, some food, Travel Thursday, Science Sunday…I just wanted to post something outside of normal and not creepy or horrifying or both today. I might go back to the disaster theme tomorrow, and then we’ll have Science Sunday. (Also, I want to bookmark these for myself.)
Today’s feature: “Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much”, a documentary about Ted Slauson.
“Ted who?” Ted Slauson is a man who spent a lot of time watching “The Price Is Right”, memorized the various price amounts (there was a fairly fixed rotation at the time) and, in 2008, was part of a “scandal” when he may (or may not) have helped a contestant place an exact bid on a showcase. Here’s a 2010 Esquire article if you’re one of those folks who prefers reading articles to watching documentaries.
Bonus: You can’t have a game show scandal without Michael Larson, who people may actually remember. (Well, you also can’t have a game show scandal without “Twenty-One”, but I’ve already covered Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel.)
For those who don’t: Michael Larson was a guy with a VCR. He started taping episodes of the old “Press Your Luck” game show, and realized that the board wasn’t random: there were only five patterns, and Mr. Larson memorized them all. He knew where and when to stop to win big bucks and miss “whammies”. (If this doesn’t make any sense to you, you were not a child of the 1980’s, and don’t worry: the video demonstrates.)
Anyway, he flew to LA, managed to get on the show, and won $110,237. In inflation adjusted dollars, that’s still the largest amount ever won in one day on a game show. CBS had to break the episode into two thirty minute segments, because Larson’s run went on so long.
Wikipedia entry. “The Man Who Got No Whammies” from Priceonomics.
“Big Bucks: The ‘Press Your Luck’ Scandal”, originally from the Game Show Network.
Shot:
Blue Bell releases two holiday flavors: Christmas Cookies and Peppermint
Chaser:
The former president of Blue Bell Creameries has been charged with wire fraud for allegedly trying to cover up a 2015 listeria outbreak linked to the company’s ice cream that killed three people in Kansas and sickened several others, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday.
A federal grand jury in Austin returned a seven-count indictment Tuesday charging Paul Kruse with six counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to a Justice Department statement.
(I like my Blue Bell. But they sure burned through a lot of goodwill with the whole listeria thing.)
I did want to make note of the shutting down of Quibi, which is probably getting more coverage than the service got in the seven months it was running.
They didn’t even offer a desktop/TV option until two weeks ago, as I understand it. Someone on Reddit mentioned a couple of examples of Quibi’s content:
“Chrissy’s Court”, “an American comedic arbitration-based court show starring television personality and model Chrissy Teigen and her mother, Vilailuck “Pepper Thai” Teigen“.
“Dummy”, “…based on a real life experience between [Cody] Heller and her partner Dan Harmon, in which she discovered that he had a sex doll.” (“Cody Heller” was played by Anna Kendrick. “Dan Harmon” was played by “Donal Logue”.)
Okay, I’m not being 100% fair. They apparently had a remake of “The Fugitive” with Kiefer Sutherland (as a cop), and a version of “Most Dangerous Game“, among others.
I’m just amused that they managed to flush $2 billion down the drain and have nothing to show for it except a couple of minor Emmy awards. If I understand the stories I’ve read correctly, they don’t even have the rights to their content: the producers can go upload it to YouTube or sell it to some other channel, now that Quibi is gone.
Travel Thursday!
How about…America?
“Canyon Country”, from FoMoCo and 1954, visiting the Grand Canyon. This crosses Arizona off the list.
Bonus #1: “Pacific Paradise”, another Hawaii travel film from the 1960s. This is a Universal production, and I don’t think it is tied to any specific airline.
Bonus #2: I think this is stretching the travel theme just a little, but this is RoadRich bait: “Flight Plan”, a promo film for American Airlines showing how the airline develops flight plans. “There are no actors in this picture. Every one is an American Airlines employee working at his regular job.”
He was 92. NYT. James Randi Educational Foundation.
Goodbye to the truly Amazing James Randi, our inspiration, mentor and dear friend. We will love you forever. @jref pic.twitter.com/bwgvWnvcoD
— Penn Jillette (@pennjillette) October 21, 2020
The rest of Penn’s Twitter feed is worth reading, too. I love the lead of the NYT obit:
But in later years, Mr. Randi was not so much an illusionist as a disillusionist. Using a singular combination of reason, showmanship, constitutional cantankerousness and a profound knowledge of the weapons in the modern magician’s arsenal, he traveled the country exposing seers who did not see, healers who did not heal and many others.
Their methods, he often said, were available to any halfway adept student of conjuring — and ought to have been transparent to earlier investigators, who were sometimes taken in.
“These things used to be on the back of cornflakes boxes,” Mr. Randi, his voice italic with derision, once told the television interviewer Larry King. “But apparently some scientists either don’t eat cornflakes, or they don’t read the back of the box.”
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Though his pursuit of Mr. Popoff was a consuming passion, Mr. Randi’s white whale was indisputably Mr. Geller, who had been famed since the 1970s for feats like bending keys and spoons, which he said he accomplished by telepathy.
Not so, said Mr. Randi, who explained that these were ordinary amusements, done by covertly bending the objects in advance.
In 1973, Mr. Geller made a disastrous appearance on “The Tonight Show” in which he was unable to summon his accustomed powers: On Mr. Randi’s advice, the show’s producers had supplied their own props and made sure Mr. Geller had no access to them beforehand.
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The world is a smaller, colder, lesser place today.
Randi, responding to someone who compared psychic debunking to “the machine-gunning of butterflies”:
That writer never saw the distraught faces of parents whose children were caught up in some stupid cult that promises miracles. He never faced a man whose life savings had gone down the drain because a curse had to be lifted. He never held the hand of a woman at a dark seance who expected her loved one to come back to her as promised by a swindler who fed on her belief in nonsense. “Nothing is funnier…?” Tell that to the academics who lost their credibility by accepting the nonsense about telepathy that came out of the Stanford Research Institute. “The machine-gunning of butterflies?” Explain that to those whose spent their time and money trying to float in the air because a guru said they could. Are the “dangers of mass popular delusion” not “so menacing”? Mister, go dig up one of the 950 corpses of those who died in Guyana and shout in its face that Reverend Jim Jones was not dangerous.
—Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions
It is going to be one of those two obit watches days, for reasons.
Marge Champion, of Marge and Gower Champion fame. She was 101.
Ms. Champion was a child of Hollywood, the daughter of a dance coach who taught her ballet, tap and the twirls, kicks and glorious sweeps of the ballroom. She performed at the Hollywood Bowl as a girl and as a teenager was a model for three Walt Disney animated features, her graceful moves transposed to the heroine of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), to the Blue Fairy that gave life to the puppet in “Pinocchio” (1940) and to the hippo ballerinas tripping lightly in tutus for “Dance of the Hours” in “Fantasia” (1940).
But her career came to little until 1947, when she and Gower Champion, a childhood friend, became partners both professionally and personally. In the next few years, they were pivotal in a transition from the escapist musicals of the Depression to an exuberant new age of postwar television, successors to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first dance team to achieve national popularity through television.
The Champions did not possess the sheer magic of Astaire and Rogers or rival their stardom in Hollywood. But as television began to permeate American homes in 1949, they joined the weekly “Admiral Broadway Revue,” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, on the Dumont and NBC networks, and delivered something new: narrative dances that sparkled with pantomime, satire, parody and touches of nostalgia.
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As their audiences grew into the millions, Hollywood beckoned. The Champions played themselves in “Mr. Music” (1950), a light comedy with Bing Crosby about a sidetracked songwriter. In “Show Boat” (1951), with Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, the Champions were members of the onboard troupe of entertainers and sang as well as danced. In “Lovely to Look At” (1952), a remake of “Roberta” also with Keel and Grayson, the Champions sang and danced a memorable number, “I Won’t Dance.” In their first roles with top billing, they played married dancers loosely based on themselves in “Everything I Have Is Yours” (1952).
The Champions radiated the vitality of young America, looking even in middle age like a couple of fresh-scrubbed teenagers. They were extraordinarily handsome — she a petite brunette with the blushing cheeks and sincere brown eyes of the girl next door; he a tall, slender letterman with a crew cut and a dreamboat face. They were in constant motion, swirling, dipping, leaping. John Crosby of The New York Herald Tribune called them “light as bubbles, wildly imaginative in choreography and infinitely meticulous in execution.”
Father John Vakulskas. No, you probably never heard of him. He was an ordained Catholic priest and spent 45 years in the Sioux City Diocese.
But his major ministry was to carnival workers.
Father Vakulskas was all of 25 and an assistant pastor in Le Mars, Iowa, when he received a call from a carnival owner’s wife. Her husband was seriously ill, and her frantic first impulse was to call a priest for help — because in the days before 911, as Father Vakulskas learned, few hospitals would send help for a carnival worker.
Father Vakulskas prevailed upon a doctor in town to visit the man, as Mr. Hanschen, of the Showmen’s League, noted in a speech in 2016, when Father Vakulskas was inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame. The diagnosis was exhaustion, ptomaine poisoning and double pneumonia. (It had been a cold and rainy summer, and the man had been working around the clock.) The doctor ordered bed rest, the man recovered, and the couple proposed that Father Vakulskas begin a ministry for carnival people.
On his retirement in 2014 from the Sioux City Diocese, Father Vakulskas moved to Florida and served six parishes there.
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Often clad in robes emblazoned with circus insignia, he baptized babies in fonts sometimes improvised from buckets or tubs, officiated at marriages and heard confessions from Catholics who were, in carnival parlance, copping a plea.
You didn’t have to be Catholic, though, to be welcomed by the man everyone learned to call Father John, a big, burly priest who embraced those of all faiths and of no faith at all. His work began mostly after midnight, when the crowds had left the midway, the lights had been dimmed and the growl of generators ruffled the silence.
“I’m just a common priest,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “It might sound schmaltzy, but I love families and the good times. But I’m there for the sorrows, too. To be accepted on the carnival fairground is a good indication that God is representative.”
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And by the way: