Obit watch: March 17, 2025.

March 17th, 2025

Guns magazine and American Handgunner are reporting the passing of John Taffin last week. Podcast.

I was fortunate enough to meet him in 2012, shake his hand, and say “thank you”. And I’ve written about some of his books, too.

I’m hoping at some point this week (or by next Sunday) I can get a special gun crankery post up in memory of the late Mr. Taffin. He struck me as a swell guy, and he knew his Smith and Wessons.

Gene Winfield, custom car builder. He did a considerable amount of work in Hollywood.

The Reactor was then used on three more series: “Star Trek,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Batman,” on which Catwoman (Eartha Kitt) used it as the Catmobile.

(Also “Bewitched”.)

He also designed cars for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”, “Get Smart”, “Sleeper”, and “Blade Runner”. And he designed the famous shuttle craft from a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Posted in Books, Cars, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Obits, Smith and Wesson, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 15, 2025.

March 15th, 2025

I lost pretty much the entire day yesterday to various things. I didn’t even get any pie.

One of the things that went by the wayside was obits, so here’s a quick and lazy roundup from the past few days. I have to rush off in a little bit to a wedding shower, and I’m not sure when I’m going to be back.

John Feinstein, sports writer and author. The only one of his books I’ve read is The Punch, which I wrote about a while back and thought was pretty good.

Chris Moore, artist. He illustrated quite a few SF books, and also did album covers for Fleetwood Mac and Rod Stewart.

Carl Lundstrom, who was one of the people behind the Pirate Bay website, died in a plane crash on Monday.

Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary, and one of the 892 Saturday Night Live hosts who have not committed murder. (I think that count is right, but it may be a little out of date.)

Larry Buendorf, retired Secret Service agent. He’s the guy who wrestled the gun away from Squeaky Fromme.

“Squeaky was back in the crowd, maybe one person back, and she had an ankle holster on with a .45,” he said, referring to a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol. “That’s a big gun to have on your ankle. So, when it came up, it came up low, and I happened to be looking in that direction, I see it coming, and I step in front of him, not sure what it was other than that it was coming up pretty fast, and yelled out ‘Gun!’ When I yelled out ‘Gun!’ I popped that .45 out of her hand.”
He added: “I got a hold of her fingers, and she’s screaming — the crowd is screaming — and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t have a vest on, I don’t know where the next shot is coming from,’ and that I don’t think she’s alone. All of this is going on while I’m trying to control her.”
“She turns around, and I pulled her arm back and dropped her to the ground, and agents and police come from the back of the crowd” as Ms. Fromme shrieked in disbelief, he said.
“She’s screaming, ‘It didn’t go off!’” he continued. “I had it in my hand. I knew what she was doing, she was pulling back on the slide, and I hit the slide before she could chamber a round. If she’d had a round chambered, I couldn’t have been there in time. It would’ve gone through me and the president.”

If the Times account is to be trusted, she had four rounds in the magazine and the hammer cocked, but she hadn’t chambered a round.

Kevin Drum, leftist political blogger.

He also invented Friday cat blogging.

Alan K. Simpson, former Republican senator from Wyoming.

He had been struggling to recover from a broken hip that he sustained in December, according to a statement from his family and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a group of museums of which he was a board member for 56 years. The statement said his recovery had been hindered by complications of frostbite to his left foot about five years ago that required the amputation of his left leg below the knee.

Raul M. Grijalva, current Democratic House rep from Arizona.

Mr. Grijalva (pronounced gree-HAHL-vah) disclosed last year that he had lung cancer and would not run for a 13th term in 2026. He died of complications of his treatment, his office said. He was absent from Washington for nearly a year, missing hundreds of votes in the narrowly divided House.

Posted in 1911, Art, Books, Guns, Heroism, Obits, Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »

Happy Pi Day!

March 14th, 2025

I’m sorry that today’s post is short and perfunctory. A confluence of events (Lent, eye doctor appointment, getting both eyes dialated) has left me unable to celebrate the day in the way I would like.

For those of you who are celebrating, please celebrate responsibly. Don’t contact your local math department saying you’ve squared the circle.

Posted in Geek | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 12, 2025.

March 12th, 2025

Junior Bridgeman, former NBA player and businessman.

Bridgeman played 12 seasons in the NBA, 10 of them with the Bucks and two with the LA Clippers. He averaged 13.6 points, 3.5 rebounds and 2.4 assists in 25 minutes per game over his career, during which he established himself as one of the game’s best sixth men. He also served as president of the National Basketball Players Association from 1985 to 1988.

He played at a time when NBA salaries were not what they are now:

Famously, Bridgeman made about $2.95 million in his NBA career and never more than $350,000 in a season. But after his career, he built a fast-food empire that, at its peak, totaled more than 450 restaurants nationwide. He became a Coca-Cola bottling distributor with territory across three states and into Canada. He bought Ebony and Jet magazines. He invested in NBA Africa.

ESPN ran a profile of Mr. Bridgeman back in September of last year, which I commend to your attention.

Bridgeman remained close with Fitzgerald and Neviaser. One of the main principles they emphasized: Whatever business you’re involved in, learn it from the ground up. Another: Make sure the right people are in the right positions — people you can trust. Bridgeman viewed those lessons through the lens of basketball. To have success in the game, he knew, you had to study it, you needed the right set of teammates. You needed chemistry. You needed a good culture.

…

“He’d be working in the restaurant like he was an hourly worker,” Moncrief said. “I witnessed that. I was thinking, what the heck is he doing in there flipping burgers, washing dishes, and he had those work pants on. But he understood the value of learning thoroughly what you’re investing in — very, very hands on.” Moncrief watched how Bridgeman would write out checks, a small task that could have easily been delegated. “He wanted to know where every check was going,” Moncrief said. “When money went out, he wanted to feel that.”

…

For several years, beginning in in the late 1990s, Bridgeman stood before nearly 60 rookies in a hotel conference room as part of the league’s Rookie Transition Program, which the league founded in 1986 as part of its first efforts to help teach basics about financial literacy: budgeting, saving, taxes.
Bridgeman shared what he’d heard from former Bucks head coach Don Nelson: Their job was to play as hard as they can and make as much money as they can. He offered guardrails: Know the business well and put someone in charge who you trust, who is qualified. “More guys have lost money investing in deals with their second cousin on their mother’s side running it than anything else,” Bridgeman said. Doing something like that, he said, was a “blueprint for failure.”
He said that during a player’s career, doors would open, phone calls would be returned. So if a player were on the road in Detroit and wanted to become involved in the automobile industry, they would have the chance to reach out to the head of one of the automotive giants. Opportunities were everywhere. All they had to do was ask.

I’ve never been a big basketball fan, but Mr. Bridgeman sounds like a heck of a guy.

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 11, 2025.

March 11th, 2025

Jessie Mahaffey (Boatswain’s Mate Second Class, United States Navy – ret.) passed away on March 1st. He was 102.

Mr. Mahaffey served on the U.S.S. Oklahoma.

In December, Mr. Mahaffey told KTBS-TV of Shreveport, La., that Dec. 7, 1941, had started as a quiet Sunday.
He and five other sailors were chatting as they scrubbed the deck of the Oklahoma when they “heard a siren, saw planes and smoke,” he said, adding, “It must have only gone on for 45 minutes, but it was crazy.”
The Oklahoma was struck by as many as nine torpedoes. Within minutes, the battleship capsized, trapping hundreds of men below deck. “It didn’t take that long to come back to the other side,” he said. “It turned upside down and we had to slide over the bottom of the ship into the water.”
He managed to swim to the U.S.S. Maryland, another battleship that was moored at Pearl Harbor.
In total, 429 crew members from the Oklahoma were killed in the attack, which left more than 2,400 U.S. military personnel and civilians dead and nearly 1,800 wounded.

He went on to serve on the U.S.S. Northampton, which was sunk by the Japanese on November 30, 1942.

“The ship was sunk at midnight, and we had to stay on rafts the whole night,” Mr. Mahaffey told KTBS.

…

When he turned 100, in 2022, Mr. Mahaffey told KPLC-TV of Lake Charles, La., about the day he married Joyce Inez Mahaffey. “My best day would be marrying that little gal that just turned 18 years old,” he said. “Me, her and her brother went to that church.”
Ms. Mahaffey died in 2003. His survivors include his sons George and Clarence; several grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and a great-great-grandson.
After he was discharged from the Navy, Mr. Mahaffey returned to Louisiana, where he worked for Southwestern Bell, the regional phone company, for at least 30 years, his grandson said. Mr. Mahaffey, who was 5-foot-3, was a pole climber who refused to accept jobs that would require him to work indoors, John Mahaffey said.“They kept trying to give him promotions, to come inside, to take a desk job or to run the crews or to be a supervisor, and he would never take it,” he said.

…

In an interview on Sunday, John Mahaffey, his grandson, said that Mr. Mahaffey would talk about his time in the Navy only when his relatives would ask him about it, which they did often.

According to the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors, there are 14 remaining Pearl Harbor survivors.

John Mahaffey said his family had been told that his grandfather was one of just two or three remaining survivors from the U.S.S. Oklahoma.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 10, 2025.

March 10th, 2025

It has been a rough few days for baseball.

Frank Saucier, outfielder for the St. Louis Browns. He had a limited career due to injuries and the Korean War. Baseball Reference.

He is perhaps most famous as a historical footnote.

He was the only major league player removed from a game by his manager in favor of a 3-foot-7 circus performer.

Yes, he was the player who got benched in favor of Eddie Gaedel.

Art Schallock, pitcher for the Yankees and Orioles. He was, at the time of his death, the oldest living major league player. Baseball Reference.

Athol Fugard, South African playwright. He’s another one of those folks I’ve heard a lot about, but have no personal experience with his work.

It also hasn’t been a good time for music. D’Wayne Wiggins, of Tony! Toni! Tone!.

Joey Molland, the last surviving member of Badfinger. I feel like this is one of those areas where pigpen51 is better equipped to comment than I am.

Geoff Nicholson, author. I’ve never read any of his books, but the NYT obit makes him sound interesting.

His death, in a hospital, was from chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, his partner, Caroline Gannon, said. It is a rare bone marrow cancer, though, as Mr. Nicholson mordantly observed, “not rare enough, obviously.”

…

Mr. Nicholson was married for a time to Dian Hanson, a former model who edited a fetishist magazine, Leg Show. After living together in New York, the couple moved to Los Angeles when Ms. Hanson became the editor of sex-themed books for the luxury art publisher Taschen. Mr. Nicholson reveled in the 1960s kitsch of his home in a geodesic dome in the Hollywood Hills.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Sports, Theatre | 1 Comment »

All gun books, all the time!

March 7th, 2025

This time on “What’s Been Added to my Library of Gun Books” recently, a special all gun books edition! No diversions into subjects such as absinthe or old bibles. Just some new and new old gun books. But I am going to include a gun crankery photo.

Since this is going to be gun book heavy, I’m following my usual policy of inserting a jump so the non-book, non-gun, and non-book non-gun people can skip easily to the next post…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Sarcasm, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 5, 2025.

March 5th, 2025

Congressman Sylvester Turner (Dem. – Houston).

Turner took over the seat of the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in January after serving two terms as mayor of Houston from 2016 to 2024. He was born and raised in Acres Homes, Houston, and attended the University of Houston and Harvard Law School.

…

Turner will be remembered for his decades-long service to Houston and its residents. He has represented his community at Houston City Hall and the Texas House of Representatives, notably fighting for the people of Houston’s historically black neighborhoods. Turner represents Texas’ 18th Congressional District, a historically significant seat once held by civil rights icons such as Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland, Craig Washington and Sheila Jackson Lee.

…

In 2015, Turner was elected the 62nd Mayor of Houston and was re-elected in 2019. Turner forged a path forward for Houston during some of the city’s most turbulent times, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey.

Lawrence.

Edited to add: The NYT did not have a story up when I posted, but they do now. I don’t see any coverage in the WP.

Edited to add 2: WP coverage, but it really doesn’t add anything.

James Harrison, big damn hero.

…Mr. Harrison was one of the most prolific donors in history, extending his arm 1,173 times. He may have also been one of the most important: Scientists used a rare antibody in his plasma to make a medication that helped protect an estimated 2.4 million babies in Australia from possible disease or death, medical experts say.

…

Mr. Harrison’s plasma contained the rare antibody anti-D. Scientists used it to make a medication for pregnant mothers whose immune systems could attack their fetuses’ red blood cells, according to Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
Anti-D helps protect against problems that can occur when babies and mothers have different blood types, most often if the fetus is “positive” and the mother is “negative,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. (The positive and negative signs are called the Rhesus factor, or Rh factor.)
In such cases, a mother’s immune system might react to the fetus as if it were a foreign threat. That can lead babies to develop a dangerous and potentially fatal condition, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, which can cause anemia and jaundice.

…

In Australia, scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne are working to create a synthetic version of the drug using what some have called “James in a Jar,” an antibody that can be made in a lab.
But for now, human donors are essential: The anti-D shots are made with donated plasma, and Mr. Harrison was one of about 200 donors among the 27 million people in Australia, Lifeblood said.
“It wasn’t one big heroic act,” Jemma Falkenmire, a spokeswoman for Lifeblood, said in an interview as she reflected on Mr. Harrison’s 64 years of donations, from 1954 to 2018. “It was just a lifetime of being there and doing these small acts of good bit by bit.”

FiveThirtyEight.

According to the Journal, the entire site is being axed and all 15 of its employees will be handed pink slips.

Selwyn Raab, journalist and author. He did a lot of reporting on the Mafia, and on people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes.

One was George Whitmore Jr., who had been imprisoned for the 1963 murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, roommates in an Upper East Side apartment — “career girls,” as the tabloids called them.
Mr. Raab, working first for the merged newspaper The New York World-Telegram and The Sun and then for NBC News and the New York public television station WNET-TV, uncovered evidence showing that Mr. Whitmore was elsewhere on the day of those murders and had no part in an unrelated attempted rape with which he was also charged.
Mr. Whitmore said that the police had beaten him, and that he had no lawyer during the interrogation. In 1996, his case was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark ruling that upheld a suspect’s right to counsel.
Mr. Raab wrote a book about the case, “Justice in the Back Room,” which became the basis for “Kojak,” the CBS series about a police detective, played by Telly Savalas, which ran for five years in the 1970s. “I’m not a detective,” Mr. Raab said. “I just look for the most reasonable approach to a story.”
He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years. Reporting for the paper, he uncovered evidence that helped free Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the middleweight boxer who was imprisoned for 19 years in the 1966 shooting deaths of three people in a bar in Paterson, N.J.
The Carter case was another instance of police coercion and prosecutorial overreach, one that also led to the conviction of another man, John Artis. Mr. Carter, who died in 2014, became something of a folk hero, his cause championed in a 1976 Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane,” and in a 1999 film, “The Hurricane,” in which Mr. Carter was played by Denzel Washington.

Posted in Books, Heroism, Law, Obits, Politics, Texas, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 3, 2025.

March 3rd, 2025

David Johansen, of the New York Dolls. Later on in life, he also performed under the stage name “Buster Poindexter”. THR.

Lee Goldberg has posted nice obits for Joseph Wambaugh and Gene Hackman.

[Wambaugh] told me the secret to his cop novels was taking fellow cops to Ruth’s Chris, buying them a steak and some drinks, and letting them talk…and then just listening to what they had to say. Not so much to the specific stories, but the way they *told* their stories, what were the key details that matter to them, the observations they made, the language they used, how they held their bodies as they spoke… it never failed to inspire him.

Olive Sturgess, actress. “The Raven” is actually a pretty swell movie, less horror and more humor than you’d expect. Other credits include “The Rookies”, “Ironside”, and “Petticoat Junction”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 28, 2025.

February 28th, 2025

Another day, another damn.

Joseph Wambaugh. THR. I don’t see anything in the LATimes yet.

Mr. Wambaugh hoped to keep both careers, as a cop and a writer, but his celebrity and his frequent appearances on television talk shows made police work untenable. Suspects wanted his autograph or his help getting a film role. People reporting crimes asked that he be the one to investigate. When his longtime detective partner held the squad car door open for him one day in 1974, he knew it was time to go.

The story I’ve heard is that, as a working cop, he went to interview a robbery victim. The guy had blood streaming down his head, and Det. Wambaugh asked him if he could describe the suspect. The victim responded by asking him what George C. Scott was like. He quit shortly after, because he realized his fame was getting in the way of doing his job.

Many critics loved him. “Let us forever dispel the notion that Mr. Wambaugh is only a former cop who happens to write books,” the crime and mystery writer Evan Hunter wrote of “The Glitter Dome” in The New York Times Book Review in 1981. “This would be tantamount to saying that Jack London was first and foremost a sailor. Mr. Wambaugh is, in fact, a writer of genuine power, style, wit and originality, who has chosen to write about the police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general.”

…

“I’m very interested in the concept of the sociopath, very interested, because my conscience has bothered me all my life,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “Talk about regrets — I have about 20 every day. I was educated in Catholic schools, and they did that to me. So I have to cope with a conscience all the time. And I’m interested in a creature who has none of that.”

I tell people I read The Blue Knight at a very inappropriate age. Because I try to be family friendly here, I won’t describe the scene I most vividly remember. I got pretty far behind in Wambaugh’s fiction, but I think I’ve read all his non-fiction books. Obviously, The Onion Field had a huge impact on me, but The Blooding and Fire Lover are pretty good, too.

I kind of wish I’d met him.

Yet he was a shy, prickly loner who rarely gave interviews, had few friends aside from police officers, didn’t have a literary agent and even played golf alone. He sprinkled his books with cop scorn for the wealthy, especially for entertainment stars in Beverly Hills. His own Southern California homes were modest mansions in upscale places like Newport Beach, San Diego and Rancho Mirage.

(Is it just me, or does he look a little like Nicholas Cage in those photos from the 1970s?)

Boris Spassky, of Fischer-Spassky fame.

When they played the first match, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Mr. Fischer, with his brash personality, was something of a folk hero in the West. He was widely portrayed as a lone gunslinger boldly taking on the might of the Soviet chess machine, with Mr. Spassky representing the repressive Soviet empire.
The reality could not have been further from the truth. Mr. Fischer was a spoiled 29-year-old man-child, often irascible and difficult. Mr. Spassky, at 35, was urbane, laid back and good-natured, acceding to Mr. Fischer’s many demands leading up to and during the match.
The match almost did not happen. It was supposed to start on July 2, but Mr. Fischer was still in New York, demanding more money for both players. A British promoter, James Slater, added $125,000 to the prize fund, which doubled it to $250,000 (about $1.9 million today), and Mr. Fischer arrived on July 4.
The match was a best-of-24 series, with each win counting as one point, each draw as a half point and each loss as zero. The first player to 12.5 points would be the winner.
In Game 1, on July 11, Mr. Fischer blundered and lost. Afterward, he refused to play Game 2 unless the television cameras recording the match were turned off. When they were not, Mr. Fischer forfeited the game.
The match seemed in doubt, but a compromise was worked out to move the match to a tiny, closed playing area behind the main hall.
Mr. Fischer won Game 3, his first victory ever against Mr. Spassky, and proceeded to steamroll him, winning the match 12.5 to 8.5.
Mr. Spassky’s sportsmanship was on full display in Game 6 of the match, which by then had been moved back into the main hall. When Mr. Fischer won the game, taking the lead for the first time in the match, Mr. Spassky joined with the spectators in standing and applauding his victory.

Pilar Del Rey, actress. Other credits include “Police Story” (which, as you know, Bob, was a Joseph Wambaugh creation), the “Travis McGee” TV movie, “The Forbidden Dance”, the 1960s “Dragnet”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Bird of Prey”, parts 1 and 2, season 8, episodes 20 and 21. She played “Marquesa”.)

Michael Preece, prominent TV director. Other credits include “Stingray”, “B.J. and the Bear”, “Renegade”, “Jake and the Fatman”…

…and, as a script supervisor before being a director, “Mitchell”, “The Getaway”, and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit”, season 1, episode 20. “Eight to Five, It’s a Miracle”, season 1, episode 21.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Chess, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Of making many books there is no end…

February 27th, 2025

It has been a difficult week. I thought it might cheer me up some to catalog more gun books for the library. As the saying goes, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn.”

This time, though, I have one that’s only sort of tangentially a gun book, and one that’s not a gun book at all. I’ll get into the reason for that one later.

Van Halen mode on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Cops, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Law, Mixology, O'Connor | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 27, 2025.

February 27th, 2025

Damn.

Gene Hackman. THR 1. THR 2. Tributes. NYT 1. NYT 2. IMDB.

I was a big fan of his when I was younger, even though I wasn’t allowed to watch any of his movies (except when they showed up on television). I still am. He was one of the greats. And I have no idea what his politics were.

Some of the less often cited movies in his body of work that I’d recommend: “The Conversation”, “Prime Cut”, and “The Royal Tenenbaums” (though I think that’s a bit twee). And of course, “Young Frankenstein”.

He also did an episode of “The F.B.I.”, and where is my boxed blu-ray set of that?

Michelle Trachtenberg. THR. Tributes. IMDB.

Never was a “Buffy” fan, but 39 is way too young for anyone to die.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »