Out of the black…

May 12th, 2025

On Saturday, general manager of the Colorado Rockies Bill Schmidt came out in support of manager Bud Black.

“I think our guys are still playing hard, and that’s what I look at,” Schmidt told the Post. “Guys are working hard every day, they come with energy, for the most part. I don’t think we are [at that point of firing Black]. Guys still believe in what we are doing and where we are headed. We are all frustrated.”

Saturday night, the Rockies lost to the San Diego Padres…21-0.

Sunday, the Rockies fired Bud Black. Also out: bench coach Mike Redmond.

Black was in his ninth year as Rockies manager and had a career record with Colorado of 544-690. He is the winningest manager in franchise history.

I have been planning to do a loser update later this week. I’ve been waiting until we got to about the 25 percent mark in the season. However, I will say that right now, the Rockies are 7-33, for a .175 winning percentage. If my projections are correct, and this holds up for the rest of the season, I estimate that they will lose 133 games. Which would not just be “historically bad”, but would be the worst percentage in the modern era.

Posted in Firings, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 9, 2025.

May 9th, 2025

For the historical record: David H. Souter, former Supreme Court justice. WP (archived).

James Foley, director. The Saturday Movie Group has seen “Glengarry Glen Ross” and I thought it was pretty good. Other credits include “At Close Range” and “After Dark, My Sweet”.

“Rescue: HI-Surf”, the lifeguard series on one of the broadcast networks. I never saw an episode, just promos. But it looked a lot like a version of “Baywatch” that took itself way too seriously.

Also among the dead: “Lopez vs. Lopez” and “Night Court”. I greatly admire John Larroquette. But I also greatly admired Harry Anderson, and I just couldn’t see watching a “Night Court” without him.

“The Real Housewives New York City”. Between Pope Leo XIV and this being cancelled, I think it’s been a good week.

Posted in Law, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Walking the plank.

May 8th, 2025

The baseball season doesn’t really start until the ceremonial throwing out of the first manager.

Derek Shelton out as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

12-26 so far this season, for a .316 winning percentage. Not great, but better than the White Sox and Rockies.

306-440 in “five plus” seasons, according to ESPN.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 7, 2025.

May 7th, 2025

Dr. Philip Sunshine, one of the pioneers of neonatology and a big damn hero.

Before Dr. Sunshine and a handful of other physicians became interested in caring for preemies in the late 1950s and early ’60s, more than half of these unimaginably fragile patients died shortly after birth. Insurance companies wouldn’t pay to treat them.
Dr. Sunshine, a pediatric gastroenterologist, thought that many premature babies could be saved. At Stanford, he pushed for teams of doctors from multiple disciplines to treat them in special intensive care units. Along with his colleagues, he pioneered methods of feeding preemies with formula and aiding their breathing with ventilators.
“We were able to keep babies alive that would not have survived,” Dr. Sunshine said in 2000 in an oral history interview with the Pediatric History Center of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And now everybody just sort of takes this for granted.”

…

As chief of Stanford’s neonatology department from 1967 to 1989, Dr. Sunshine helped train hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of doctors who went on to work in neonatal intensive care units around the world. When he retired in 2022, at age 92, the survival rate for babies born at 28 weeks was over 90 percent.
“Phil is one of the ‘originals’ in neonatology, a neonatologist’s neonatologist, one of our history’s best,” David K. Stevenson, Dr. Sunshine’s successor as head of Stanford’s neonatal department, wrote in the Journal of Perinatology in 2011. “He stands comfortably among the great leaders in neonatology and is more than simply a pioneer. He is one of the creators of our discipline.”
Dr. Sunshine recognized that caring for preemies required both technical expertise and human connection. He urged hospitals to allow parents to visit neonatal intensive care units so they could hold their children, sensing that skin-to-skin contact between mothers and babies was beneficial.
He also gave nurses more autonomy and encouraged them to speak up when they thought doctors were wrong.
“Our nurses have always been very important caretakers,” Dr. Sunshine said in the oral history. “All through my career, I’ve worked with a nursing staff that often would recognize problems in the baby before the physicians would, and they still do that now. Well, we were learning neonatology together.”

Crew resource management: it isn’t just for airplanes.

For the historical record: NYT obits for Lulu Roman (previously):

“The next thing you know, I’m on a plane to Hollywood and riding a limo to the CBS studios,” Ms. Roman said in 2006. “The first person I saw was Carol Burnett, with my mouth wide open. She said, ‘Shut your mouth, child. You’re fixin’ to be one of us.’”

and Cora Sue Collins (previously).

As Miss Collins aged, her roles dwindled. Before her 17th birthday, she said, she was a victim of harassment when Harry Ruskin, a screenwriter at MGM whom she viewed as a father figure, offered her a big role if she would sleep with him. She turned him down, started to cry and left his office.

…

She reported Mr. Ruskin’s behavior to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where she was a contract player at the time. But, as she recalled, he said, “You’ll get used to it, sweetie.” Soon after, he threatened to keep her from ever working in movies again.
“Mr. Mayer, that’s my heartfelt desire,” she said she told him, adding, “It was the best decision of my life.”

Posted in Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 5, 2025.

May 5th, 2025

Charley Scalies, actor. Other credits include “12 Monkeys” (the movie), “Homicide: Life on the Street”, and “Law and Order” (also “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit”).

This one is for friend of the blog Dave: Will Hutchins, actor. He was a guest on some Westerns in the 1960s and even had his own show, which I’d never heard of, “Sugarfoot”. Other credits include “Perry Mason”, “The New Perry Mason”, “The Horror at 37,000 Feet”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, and “The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington”.

Posted in Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Tourist advisory (also, brief historical note).

May 2nd, 2025

Hooray! At least for those of you who live within reasonable driving distance of Galveston, or are willing to travel.

Starting May 4, the Battleship Texas Foundation is offering an exclusive tour every Sunday in May and June. The Normandy Tour is by reservation only and will focus on the role of the ship in the WWII D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Battleship Texas Foundation.

This sounds like it could be a lot of fun. If you go on this tour, please feel free to report back here.

(Previously on WCD.)

Posted in History, Museums, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 2, 2025.

May 2nd, 2025

Ruth Buzzi. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “Night Gallery”, “Emergency”, “Medical Center” (“Ruth Buzzi and Don RIckles portray two comically depressive characters who fall in love at Medical Center.”), and, of course…

I missed this, but: Ted Kotcheff passed away on April 10th. NYT (archived).

He refused to direct the first, “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (1985), because of the violence that the character unleashes.
“I read the script, and I said, ‘In the first film he doesn’t kill anybody,’” he told Filmmaker magazine in 2016. “In this film he kills 74 people.’”

Other credits include “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?”, “Fun with Dick and Jane” (the 1977 one), and “North Dallas Forty”.

Odile de Vasselot passed away on April 21st. She was 103.

Ms. de Vasselot (pronounced de-VASS-euh-low) was one of thousands of young Frenchwomen and men who quietly went to war against the Germans invaders after the country’s defeat in 1940 during the Battle of France. She began modestly, chalking the Lorraine Cross, adopted by General de Gaulle as a symbol of the Resistance, on walls and tearing down the propaganda posters of the Germans and their French Vichy-regime confederates. By the war’s end, she was going on dangerous nocturnal missions.

…

Her chance came, she said, when a friend put her in touch with a member of a Resistance group known as the Zero network, in June 1943. (Other accounts offer a different chronology.) She was asked to deliver Resistance mail and newspapers to network members in Toulouse, taking the night train on Friday and returning the next day.

…

By the end of the year, arrests had made it dangerous to work with the Zero network. Ms. de Vasselot joined another group, known as the Comet network, and for two months, until early 1944, walked through mud and swamps at the Belgian front, meeting up with Allied airmen and parachutists, giving them money and forged papers, and accompanying them to France, where they could make their way to neutral Spain.

…

She rejoined the Zero network that summer, as the allies were creeping their way toward Paris, and was sent on new missions throughout France.

Bobby Torre, maître d’ at J.G. Melon. This is one of those “questionable notability” ones – a NYC bar guy? – but it is also the kind of obit the paper of record does well, and is kind of fun.

When he was on the job at Melon’s, leaning by the entry on a bar stool a little too tall for him, glasses pushed up on his head and a pencil behind his ear, Mr. Torre would chat you up while you waited for a table and your burger with cottage fries.
Something would remind him of a saloon regular nicknamed Ronda Lasagna. That produced tales of a place he called “the Yankee Stadium of belly dancers.” From there, his mind would travel to a gay bar known as “the Wrinkle Room,” where “every guy with a trick said it was their nephew,” as he recalled. (Mr. Torre had run a mob-connected gay bar himself at one point.)

…

In his heyday there, he could charm rowdy patrons into a bear hug. But he was also capable of pinning a purse snatcher against the bathroom door until officers from the 19th Precinct arrived.
His fervor extended to his Roman Catholic faith. Mr. O’Neill sometimes had to ask Mr. Torre to stop blessing everyone at the bar. But without his religiosity, it is hard to imagine Mr. Torre performing his acts of kindness so cherished by customers.
He covered checks. He made hundreds of annual birthday calls. Melon’s is near several hospitals, and he would spend hours sitting with the ill, relatives of the ill and new mourners. That patient sympathy, offered alongside free cheeseburgers and fries, became part of stories told and retold by families who visited Melon’s during a crisis.

…

Mr. Torre also claimed to be an expert in martial arts. Michael Burrell, a former Melon’s bartender, recalled ribbing him: “Yeah, Bob, you’re a black belt.”
In fact, Mr. Valenti confirmed, his uncle studied not only jiu-jitsu, but also judo, Wing Chun kung fu and hapkido.

Posted in 1970s, Heroism, History, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Short random “gun” crankery.

May 1st, 2025

I have a long gun book/gun post that I’ve been working on for a while, and which is about 85% done. I just need to take some photos and make a final proofreading pass.

I thought things would be less busy after Easter and my birthday. Ha ha ha ha ha. It looks like I’m not going to get much free time to work on that post until Thursday of next week. (Not that I’m complaining that much: Mike the Musicologist and I are planning to go to a fun show this weekend and then eat beef. And Tuesday night I will be assisting the police with their inquiries once again.)

So here’s something to tide you over:

On top, a Model “945M” (I think that’s the model) butane lighter, which was a kind and thoughtful gift from FotB RoadRich.

On the bottom, a GI-Joe scaled M79 grenade launcher, purchased off eBay and inspired by this discussion over at McThag’s place.

Posted in Guns | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 1, 2025.

May 1st, 2025

Julia Parsons passed away on April 18th at the age of 104.

A lover of puzzles and crosswords while growing up in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression, Mrs. Parsons deciphered German military messages that had been created by an Enigma machine, a typewriter-size device with a keyboard wired to internal rotors, which generated millions of codes. Her efforts provided Allied forces with information critical to evading, attacking and sinking enemy submarines.

…

The unraveling of the Enigma puzzle began in the late 1930s, when Polish mathematicians, using intelligence gathered by French authorities, reverse-engineered the device and began developing the Bombe, a computer-like code-breaking machine. The Poles shared the information with British authorities.

…

At the U.S. Naval Communications Annex in Washington, Mrs. Parsons and hundreds of other women used the Bombe to decipher German military radio transmissions, revealing information that was instrumental in shortening and winning the war, historians have said.
“We tried to figure out what the message was saying, then we drew up what we called a menu showing what we thought the letters were,” she told The Washington Post in 2022. “That was fed into the computer, which then spat out all possible wheel orders for the day. Those changed every day and the settings changed twice a day, so we were constantly working on them.”

…

More than 100,000 women joined the WAVES during the war. In 1943, she left Pittsburgh for officer training at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she took courses on cryptology, physics and naval history. After her training, she was sent to the Naval Communications Annex, in Washington.
One day, an officer there asked if anyone could speak German. She had taken two years of the language in high school, so she raised her hand.
“They shot me off to the Enigma section immediately, and I began learning how to de­code German U­-boat message traffic on the job, Day 1,” Mrs. Parsons said in an interview with the Veterans Breakfast Club, a nonprofit organization. “Enemy messages arrived all day from all over the North Atlantic, plus the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay.”

…

In 1997, Mrs. Parsons visited the National Cryptologic Museum near Washington, just another tourist interested in American history.
“The exhibits there astounded me,” she said in the Veterans Breakfast Club interview. “Here was every sort of Enigma machine — early models, late models — on display for all to see, with detailed explanations of how they worked.”
She asked a tour guide why the machines were on display. The guide replied that the Enigma work had been declassified in the 1970s. Mrs. Parsons hadn’t known. She spent rest of her life visiting classrooms and giving interviews, eager to tell her story.“It’s been good to break the silence,” she said. “Good for me, and for history.”

Posted in Cryptography, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 30, 2025.

April 30th, 2025

David Horowitz, noted conservative commentator. Twitter X. NYT. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Priscilla Pointer, actress. Other credits include “Blue Velvet”, “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “McCloud”, and “Mrs. Columbo”.

Andrew Gross, thriller writer. He may have been best known for the books he wrote with James Patterson.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 29, 2025.

April 29th, 2025

The paper of record ran a nice obit for Peter Lovesey. (Previously.)

Except for the grumpy part, Mr. Lovesey’s son said, Superintendent Diamond was a stand-in for his creator, who was bitterly opposed to technology. Mr. Lovesey wrote in longhand for decades before briefly and reluctantly switching to an electric “golf ball” Olivetti typewriter and then, finally, a word processor, which threw him entirely. During the pandemic, his son said, he mistakenly downloaded Zoom 25 times.

Cora Sue Collins, actress. She was 98.

Collins was born on April 19, 1927, in Beckley, West Virginia. Her mom brought her and her older sister to Los Angeles just before Collins turned 4.
“On the third day we were here, I went with my mother to enroll my older sister in school,” she told Danny Miller in a wonderful 2015 interview. “We were walking up to the entrance of the school, my sister and I each holding one of my mother’s hands, when this huge car came screeching up.
“A woman jumped out of the car and said, ‘Excuse me, would you like to put your little girl in pictures?’ Of course my mother said, ‘Yes!’ The woman said, ‘Get in the car with me, there’s a big casting going on right now at Universal.’”
They made it on their own to the studio, where Collins was quickly tapped to play Pudge in the 1932 comedy The Unexpected Father, starring ZaSu Pitts and Slim Summerville. “Wait till you see Cora Sue,” wrote one reviewer of her performance. “Just four, she walks away with everything.”

…

…Collins portrayed Sylvia Sidney’s daughter in Jennie Gerhardt and was the main attraction at the premiere of Queen Christina at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where she was accompanied by MGM chief Louis B. Mayer after arriving in a miniature coach pulled by Shetland ponies. (Garbo refused to do any publicity for her films.)
Collins signed a contract with MGM in 1934 for $250 a week — about $5,900 in today’s dollars — and appeared in 10 features that year, including Black Moon with Fay Wray, The Scarlet Letter with Colleen Moore, The World Accuses with Dickie Moore and Treasure Island with Jackie Cooper.

…

She played the juvenile delinquent daughter of a court judge in Youth on Trial (1945) and appeared in Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), then retired from acting at age 18. “I wanted to enjoy the luxury of anonymity,” she said.

IMDB.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 28, 2025.

April 28th, 2025

David Paton, big damn hero, died on April 3rd. He was 94.

I take blindness kind of personally. Dr. Paton was a prominent ophthalmologist. In the early 1970s, he started thinking about blindness in developing countries: there were a lot of folks, he believed, that were losing their eyesight because of things that could be prevented or treated. But how to get doctors and training to the developing world?

He considered shipping trunks of equipment — almost the way a circus would — but that presented logistical challenges. He pondered the possibility of using a medical ship like the one that the humanitarian group Project Hope sent around the world. That was too slow for him.
“Shortly after the first moon landing in 1969, thinking big was becoming a reality,” Dr. Paton wrote.
And then a moonshot idea struck him: “Could an aircraft be the answer? A large enough aircraft could be converted into an operating theater, a teaching classroom and all the necessary facilities.”

…

In 1980, Mr. Trippe helped persuade Edward Carlson, the chief executive of United Airlines, to donate a DC-8 jet. The United States Agency for International Development contributed $1.25 million to convert the plane into a hospital with an operating room, a recovery area and a classroom equipped with televisions, so local medical workers could watch surgeries.

This was the birth of Orbis International.

…the organization is on its third plane, an MD-10 donated by Federal Express.
From 2014 to 2023, Orbis performed more than 621,000 surgeries and procedures, according to its most recent annual report, and offered more than 424,000 training sessions to doctors, nurses and other providers.

David Thomas, of Pere Ubu and Rocket From the Tombs, and a good Cleveland boy.

Lar Park Lincoln, actress. Other credits include “Space: Above and Beyond”, “House II: The Second Story”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

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