FotB RoadRich sent over a nice obit for David Rathbun. He spent 26 years with Cirrus Aircraft, and did a lot of work on the SR20, SR22, SR22T, and the SF50 Vision Jet.
This was in the days before VCRs, DVDs, and widespread availability of older movies for easy viewing. Most famously, he got involved with Groucho Marx.
The charges against him are “40 counts of possession of child exploitative material, a misdemeanor, and 16 counts of distribution of child exploitative material, a felony, according to the Prince George’s County Police Department.”
A small bonus: I can’t say for sure that Mr. Wojahn is a card-carrying, dues-paying member, of Criminal Mayors Against Law-Abiding Gun Owners, but: he did sign this “Bipartisan Mayors Call for Background Checks” letter, along with 99 other mayors (including the late unlamented Lori Lightfoot and Lovely Warren), so I feel like calling him a member is a safe bet.
For those of you going, “Who?”, he was perhaps most famous as the guy in the rubber suit in “Creature From the Black Lagoon” and the two sequels (“Revenge of the Creature” and “The Creature Walks Among Us”). He had quite an interesting career beyond those:
He was also intimately involved with “Flipper” and “Gentle Ben”. He directed two movies, “Salty” and “Mr. No Legs“, the latter of which sent me down a rabbit hole based on the description (from an obit Lawrence sent me): “centered on a man with shotguns built into his wheelchair”.
I don’t think that begins to cover how crazy “Mr. No Legs” sounds. Richard Jaeckel! Lloyd Bochner! John Agar! Rance Howard!
Mr. Vollrath plays the titular character. In real life, he was a Korean war vet who lost both legs due to injuries sustained in combat. He went on to become “the first person to earn a black belt in karate while training out of a wheelchair”, and did a lot of work promoting accessibility to martial arts training for the disabled before his death in 2001.
And the greatest American pole vaulter was probably Cornelius Warmerdam, who set world records in the 1940s (using bamboo poles) but never got to compete in the Olympics because of WWII.
Apologies once again for the direct NYT links, but archive.is is being balky once again. In general, I’ve found that opening the links in a new private or incognito window lets you bypass their paywall, although that seems to be having issues today as well.
Paul Berg, DNA pioneer. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1980 (with Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger) for his work on recombinant DNA.
Barbara Bosson. Other credits include “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, one episode of a spinoff from a minor SF TV series of the 1960s, “Cop Rock”, “The Last Starfighter”, “Capricorn One”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. She was “Miss Riley”. We actually watched that episode a couple of weeks ago because it was the next one in sequence: the “Miss Riley” part was extremely small, and as I best as I can recall, had no lines.)
I hate reducing an actor to just one role, and I know he had other accomplishments as a comedian (who got dropped on his head by Hulk Hogan, and bought a house in France as a result) and an author. But man, what a role.
We’re trying to work our way through all of the Sam Peckinpah movies, but we don’t have “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” yet. And this weekend is “The Last of Sheila” because Raquel Welch.
Other credits include “Hec Ramsey”, “Banacek”, “Nickelodeon” (the Peter Bogdanovich movie), and “A Town Called Hell”.
archive.is seems to be working better today, so here’s the NYT obit.
He was 17 (I’ve seen other sources say 18). He was found unconscious in his room and died in a hospital.
Stanley Wilson, former cornerback for the Lions. He was 40, and this is sad.
In August of last year, he was arrested “after he allegedly broke into a Hollywood Hills home, took a bath in an outdoor fountain and raided the property”. He was held in police custody until February 1st, when he was declared not competent to stand trial and was transferred to a psychiatric facility.
If I had thought about it, I would have prepared a longer post. However, I’ve been distracted by other projects, and would have completely missed this if it wasn’t for McThag.
(Edited to add: I should clarify, since this is a little confusing: the “Texas” above is the 1892 USS Texas, not the 1914 USS Texas.)
Side note: one of the tour guides at the Texas made an interesting comment, and I’d like to do more research on this. In brief, the Germans pioneered modern welding.
Because of arms limitation treaties after WWI, the weight of battleships was limited. If you rivet battleship plates together, you have to overlap the plates. But if you weld battleship plates, you can basically butt the plates together rather than overlapping. This allows you to use less plate. Less plate means bigger battleship within the weight limitations.
I’d really like to find some good sources on welding history. I think that’d be a technically interesting area to explore.
Anyway, remembering the Maine: somewhere I have what I believe is a first edition of Rickover’s How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed. (Affiliate link goes to a Naval Institute Press reprint edition.)
Edited to add 2: Thanks to valued commenter Chuck Pergiel for providing a link to his post on the Maine.
Drachinfel. This one is short:
The USS New Jersey. This is a little under 30 minutes.