Obit watch: June 27, 2019.

June 27th, 2019

Lieutenant Colonel Robert J. Friend (USAF – ret.), one of the Tuskegee Airmen. He was the wingman for Col. Benjamin Davis Jr., the commanding officer of the 322nd Fighter Group.

He also had a distinguished post-war career, highlighted by running Project Blue Book from 1958 to 1963.

“Do I believe that we have been visited? No, I don’t believe that,” he said. “And the reason I don’t believe it is because I can’t conceive of any of the ways in which we could overcome some of these things: How much food would you have to take with you on a trip for 22 years through space? How much fuel would you need? How much oxygen or other things to sustain life do you have to have?”
But unlike many of his colleagues, he favored further research.
“I, for one, also believe that the probability of there being life elsewhere in this big cosmos is just absolutely out of this world — I think the probability is there,” he said.

According to the paper of record, there are 11 surviving Tuskegee Airmen. LTC Friend was 99.

Beth Chapman, wife of Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Edited to add: NYT obit for Beth Chapman.

Also, NYT on Etika.

Posted in History, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 26, 2019.

June 26th, 2019

Steve Dunleavy, noted tabloid journalist.

Mr. Dunleavy exposed Elvis Presley’s addiction to prescription drugs in Star and in a best-selling book that rankled Presley fans; scored exclusive interviews with the mother of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, and Albert DeSalvo, the confessed Boston Strangler; and championed police officers, smokers and gun owners, among others.
During his run on “A Current Affair,” from 1986 to 1995, he wrestled a bear in one segment and, in another, was bitten by a witness in a rape case when he confronted her with nude photographs of her.

That book, by the way, was: Elvis: What Happened?.

His columns in Star typically echoed the company’s conservative line, so much so that they earned him the “American of the Year” award from the right-wing John Birch Society — even though he was not a United States citizen and never became one.

…

Pete Hamill, who worked for both The Post and The News, was impressed by his drive. “I always thought he was writing his columns like he was double-parked,” Mr. Hamill said.

Rod Dreher has a tribute up as well, in which he quotes Hamill (after Dunleavy’s foot was run over by a snowplow):

“I hope it wasn’t his writing foot.”

NY Post.

By way of Lawrence: Herbert Meyer.

It was Meyer who, in a famous memo to Reagan in November 1983 when things were very tense with our intermediate-range missile deployments in Europe, wrote: “if present trends continue, we are going to win the Cold War.” Over eight vivid and tightly argued pages, Herb laid out the reasons that subsequently came to pass over the next decade.

Also by way of Lawrence: Desmond Amofah, YouTuber (under the handle “Etika”). He was 29.

His belongings were found on Manhattan Bridge on Monday. He had uploaded an eight-minute YouTube video in which he talked about suicide.
Etika was popular for playing and discussing Nintendo games on YouTube and the streaming platform Twitch.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Not quite an obit, but:

The head of the Massachusetts motor vehicle division has resigned after her agency failed to terminate the commercial driving license of a man whose collision with a group of motorcyclists on a rural New Hampshire road left seven bikers dead.

Posted in Books, Elvis, Media, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 24, 2019.

June 24th, 2019

Don Graham, noted Texas writer.

I’m actually pretty excited about his Giant book (though I want to watch the movie first). My mother wants to read his King Ranch book, and I’ve been trying to turn up a copy for her. And I have No Name on the Bullet, but have only read parts of it: I need to dig that out and give it a full reading.

Judith Krantz. I’m sure many people enjoyed her books.

Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, those poor people. Part 1. Part 2.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

More intersections.

June 19th, 2019

Mike the Musicologist and I were talking last night about this:

We speculated NRAM might be planning a week of SF related guns: sadly, today’s entry breaks the theme.

Posted in Books, Guns, Museums | Comments Closed

Noted.

June 18th, 2019

This is a good story, with an ending I didn’t expect.

(Hattip: Popehat.)

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

Tweet of the day.

June 17th, 2019

Because this sits at the extremely rare intersection of gun geekery and SF geekery:

Posted in Books, Guns, Museums | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 17, 2019.

June 17th, 2019

Death never takes a holiday.

Gloria Vanderbilt. I wouldn’t ordinarily post so soon after someone dies, but it’s clear the paper of record has had this one in the can for a while.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Back on the train…

June 17th, 2019

I’ve returned from my travel, for the record. I may talk a little about where I was at some point in the near future, but I probably won’t be doing a full fledged after action report.

One thing I will say: I can’t recommend the Sixth Floor Museum. It is expensive (a minimum of $30 for one person if you want to park your car), a Mongolian fire drill to get in to (you have to wait in line to buy tickets, or you can order them online. But either way, you then have to wait in line until your designated admission time comes around, then you have to wait in another line to actually get in the elevators up to the sixth floor.) and there’s just really not a whole lot to it that you don’t already know or haven’t heard. Most of the stuff there (Oswald’s rifle, Zapruder’s camera) isn’t even the original items (which are stored in the National Archives) but “reproductions” or similar items made around the same time.

It might be a good place to take your kids (but if you drive, you’re going to be out a minimum of $76 for a family of four) but I was generally disappointed.

Posted in Admin, Museums, Travel | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 15, 2019.

June 15th, 2019

Franco Zeffirelli.

A whirlwind of energy, Mr. Zeffirelli found time not only to direct operas, films and plays past the age of 80, but also to carry out an intense social life and even pursue a controversial political career. He had a long, tumultuous love affair with Luchino Visconti, the legendary director of film, theater and opera. He was a friend and confidant of Callas, Anna Magnani, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Coco Chanel and Leonard Bernstein.

Twice elected to the Italian Parliament, Mr. Zeffirelli was an ultraconservative senator, particularly on the issue of abortion. In a 1996 New Yorker article, he declared that he would “impose the death penalty on women who had abortions.” He said his extreme views on the subject were colored by the fact that he himself was born out of wedlock despite pressure brought to bear on his mother to terminate her pregnancy.

Did everybody born after…1964? see “Romeo and Juliet” in high school? Or was that a limited local phenomenon?

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 14, 2019.

June 14th, 2019

Pat Bowlen, Denver Broncos owner. Not much to say about this, other than it will be interesting to watch the ownership situation play out. NYT. ESPN.

Anthony Price, British author of espionage novels. I had not heard of him before last week, but John le Carré praises his work highly in The Pigeon Tunnel.

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 13, 2019.

June 13th, 2019

Sylvia Miles, noted actress. She was nominated for Academy Awards for “Midnight Cowboy” and “Farewell, My Lovely”.

She was, however, beginning to acquire a reputation for going to every party possible in whatever town she was in. She would “attend the opening of an envelope,” the comedian Wayland Flowers was said to have remarked.

Gabriele Grunewald, competitive runner. She was first diagnosed with cancer in 2009, and continued her running career despite multiple recurrences.

…she discovered a new mass on her stomach, and surgeons cut a large tumor out of her liver. By 2017, they found new tumors, and she began interspersing chemotherapy sessions with training sessions — racing at an elite level while on her fourth bout with cancer.

She was 32.

NYT obit for Bill Wittliff.

Mary Max, wife of artist Peter Max.

Mr. Max, while still alive, apparently isn’t painting much these days. (I get the impression from the obit that he may have issues.) This led to an ugly legal dispute between Ms. Max (who was substantially younger than her husband) and Mr. Max’s son, who was trying to assert more control over his work.

The police said Ms. Max was found dead of an apparent suicide in her Upper West Side apartment at Riverside Drive and 84th Street at about 8:30 p.m. on Sunday.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Travel day.

June 12th, 2019

This time, the trip is relatively short. (I’m actually driving.) I expect to be at my destination late morning or early afternoon, and may possibly have some time after I get there, unpack, and unwind.

Blogging will be catch as catch can through Sunday.

Posted in Admin, Travel | Comments Closed

The vault, the vault, the vault is on fire…

June 11th, 2019

I haven’t had a chance to go through all of this yet, but it looks link worthy:

“The Day the Music Burned“, about the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

The scope of this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands of pages of depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.

…

Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.

This is the kind of telling detail I look for:

There were at least a dozen fire engines ringing the vault, and as Aronson looked around he noticed one truck whose parking lights seemed to be melting.

(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitters.)

Posted in Bookmarks, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 11, 2019.

June 11th, 2019

Bill Wittliff, Texas writer. Among his credits: the screenplay for “Lonesome Dove”.

Bushwick Bill, Houston area rapper with the Geto Boys. NYT. This is an odd one: there were reports on Sunday that his family was denying Bushwick Bill had passed, which may have been correct at the time, but I guess his status changed at some point during the day…

Bushwick Bill had an early brush with death in 1991. High on PCP and grain alcohol, he said, he got into an altercation with his girlfriend and was shot in the right eye, a trauma he described in harrowing detail on “Ever so Clear,” from his 1992 solo debut album “Little Big Man.”
He said in interviews that he had been pronounced dead, toe-tagged and taken to the morgue. “I was actually on the cold slab,” he said in 2014. (He told differing stories about the shooting; in some accounts his mother had shot him.)
The incident was immortalized on the album cover of “We Can’t Be Stopped,” which features a photo of Bushwick Bill taken in the hospital. Flanked by Willie D and Scarface, he is shown on a stretcher, his eye blood-red, the day before he had surgery to remove it. He later said that he had been so medicated, he didn’t know the photo was being taken, and that he didn’t see the album cover until after its release.

You’ve probably seen that cover. If not, it’s in the HouChron Warning! slide show Warning!.

Noted:

In the 1990s, he announced that he was renaming himself Dr. Wolfgang von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother-Funk Stay High Dollar Billstir.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 10, 2019.

June 10th, 2019

Nicky Barnes, the other (after Frank Lucas) legendary NYC heroin dealer of the late 1960s and 1970s.

I would use the “bad week for dope dealers” joke, but Mr. Barnes actually died in 2012: his death was not reported until late last week.

Mr. Barnes estimated that he had earned at least $5 million selling heroin in the several years before his 1977 conviction — income he had augmented by investing in travel agencies, gas stations, a chain of automated carwashes and housing projects in Cleveland and Pontiac, Mich. He also marketed something called a flake-burger, made from remnants of butchered beef.
By the time he audaciously agreed to be photographed for the cover of The Times Magazine and an article inside, he had a record of 13 arrests as an adult and no convictions.

Unfortunately, being profiled in the Times Magazine and called “Mister Untouchable” caused a certain amount of tsuris on the part of Jimmy Carter, who ordered the Justice Department to go all out after Mr. Barnes. In 1977, he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

While he was imprisoned, though, his wife and former business parters took over his herion empire and began running it into the ground. Mr. Barnes ended up agreeing to testify against all of them, and was released from prison because of his cooperation in 1998.

After his release, Mr. Barnes entered the Witness Protection Program.

He told neighbors and colleagues, if they asked, that he was a bankrupt businessman, worked at a Walmart and dreamed of opening a Krispy Kreme franchise. He drove to work in a used car, lived in a mostly white neighborhood and put in a 40-hour workweek.

Because he was in witness protection, his death was not reported at the time. Apparently, it only came to light now because various people got to wondering what had happened to Mr. Barnes after Mr. Lucas died: Mr. Barnes’s daughters and anonymous sources confirmed his death.

David Bergland, 1984 Libertarian Party presidential candidate.

Posted in Cops, Law, NYPD, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

June 8th, 2019

The Houston Texans have fired general manager Brian Gaine.

Lawrence tipped me off to this and forwarded a link to Battle Red Blog, which uses the word “bonkers” to describe this. It does seem odd to me: the season hasn’t started, after all. But it makes more sense to fire him after the draft – especially if the draft was a bust – than to fire him before and leave a new GM scrambling.

But was the draft that bad for the Texans? Honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t follow it closely.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 7, 2019.

June 7th, 2019

Malcolm John (Mac) Rebennack Jr.

You know him better as Dr. John.

Mr. Rebennack belonged to the pantheon of New Orleans keyboard wizards that includes Professor Longhair, James Booker, Huey (Piano) Smith and Fats Domino. What distinguished him from his peers was the showmanship of his public persona.
Onstage as Dr. John, he adorned himself with snakeskin, beads and colorful feathers, and his shows blended Mardi Gras bonhomie with voodoo mystery.
He recorded more than 30 albums, including jazz projects (“Bluesiana Triangle,” 1990, with the drummer Art Blakey and the saxophonist David Newman), solo piano records (“Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack,” 1981) and his version of Afropop (“Locked Down,” 2012). His 1989 album of standards, “In a Sentimental Mood,” earned him the first of six Grammy Awards, for his duet with Rickie Lee Jones on “Makin’ Whoopee!”

…

As many albums as he made, however, Mr. Rebennack said he had earned more money cutting jingles. His clients included Popeyes chicken, Scott tissue and Oreo cookies. He also reached younger generations with his theme songs for the sitcom “Blossom” and the cartoon show “Curious George,” and through his Muppet musician doppelgänger, Dr. Teeth, leader of the Electric Mayhem.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Not a historical note.

June 6th, 2019

I really don’t have anything to say about the 75th anniversary of D-Day that I haven’t already said.

Borepatch has a couple of good posts up. Also worth noting: “D-Day + 75: Arms of the Airborne“. (Edited to add: Also, Lawrence.)

(When I win the $520 million in the MegaMillions drawing this coming Friday, I think the second full-auto gun I’m going to buy (after the Thompson) will be a vintage BAR. Or a Colt Monitor.)

Posted in Guns, History | Comments Closed

Historical note.

June 4th, 2019

I’ve written about this before, but I couldn’t let today pass without noting:

It is the 45th anniversary of Ten Cent Beer Night.

Semi-oddly (I guess because it isn’t a big anniversary) there’s nothing about it on Cleveland.com today. Not seeing anything on MLB.com either, and DuckDuckGo doesn’t turn up a whole lot.

I did find this amusing (but old) article from ESPN.

Let us pause to remember. Cheap nasty beer is optional.

Posted in History, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 3, 2019.

June 3rd, 2019

Leah Chase, New Orleans restaurateur.

I haven’t managed to eat at Dooky Chase yet, though I have heard of it (probably by way of Calvin Trillin). As much as I prefer to link to local obits, I like the way the NYT puts it:

Mrs. Chase possessed a mix of intellectual curiosity, deep religious conviction and a will always to lift others up, which would make her a central cultural figure in both the politics of New Orleans and the national struggle for civil rights. “She is of a generation of African-American women who set their faces against the wind without looking back,” said Jessica B. Harris, who is an author and expert on food of the African diaspora and who said Mrs. Chase treated her like another daughter. “It’s a work ethic, yes, but it’s also seeing how you want things to be and then being relentless about getting there.”

…

Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”

…

Mrs. Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

I love this, too:

During that period, Mrs. Chase started catering the openings of fledgling artists so they could offer hospitality to people who had come to admire – and, perhaps, buy – their creations. She helped them pay their bills, and she hung their works in the restaurant.
This love of art, born when she studied art in high school, led to service on the boards of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase also sat on the boards of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

…

Mrs. Chase regularly provided food for nonprofit organizations’ fundraisers and refused to submit bills, said Morial, the widow of one New Orleans mayor and the mother of another.
“She provided food for the Amistad Research Center and would not take money. That was her contribution,” said Morial, an Amistad board member. “We’d tell her this was a fundraiser. She said, ‘I know, and you need all the money you can raise.’”

My feelings about baseball are well known, but I thought this was an interesting obituary: Marc Okkonen.

Mr. Okkonen, a commercial artist and baseball aficionado with an appreciation for vintage apparel, spotted flaws in the purported uniforms of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs and wondered why they were not precise replicas of the originals from 1939, when the movie takes place. Given how thoroughly documented baseball’s history is, he thought, accurate details would not have been too difficult to uncover.
But, to Mr. Okkonen’s surprise, he could find no single volume containing images of historic uniforms, so he set out to fill that void. He spent the next five years poring through books, microfilms and archives, including those at the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame, to find images of every home and road uniform worn by all major league teams, starting in 1900.

And then he wrote that book: Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide. This is the kind of obsessive historical study that I find admirable, in the same way that (for example) some people document the minute details of Smith and Wesson history…

(Eight days and a wake-up in country, and then I’m off to the S&WCA symposium.)

Roky Erickson, noted psychedelic musician with the 13th Floor Elevators. I wish I had more to say about this, but I pretty much missed the psychedelic era. Also, the treatment of Roky Erickson (and Daniel Johnston) locally seemed, to me, to be kind of “let’s point and laugh at the weirdo”. Not everyone was that way: I’m sure there were some people who were motivated by compassion and love of the music, but I felt like that was an undercurrent running through the scene. Perhaps some of my musician readers will have more to say on the subject.

(Edited to add 6/4: NYT obit for Mr. Erickson.)

Last and least: infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas, whose life was adapted into “American Gangster”.

Richard M. Roberts, who led the prosecution of Mr. Lucas in New Jersey, had befriended him in recent years but was under no illusions about what he did long ago. “In truth,” Mr. Roberts told The New York Times in 2007, “Frank Lucas has probably destroyed more black lives than the K.K.K. could ever dream of.”

Posted in Books, Clothing, Cops, Food, Law, Movies, Music, NYPD, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 31, 2019.

May 31st, 2019

Leon Redbone has died. He was 127.

Well, that’s what the press release said. Most sources I see say he was 69, though Wikipedia footnotes that as “disputed”.

The “Variety” obit (hattip: Lawrence) is pretty good. If it seems like I’m giving Mr. Redbone short shrift, well, I don’t have a lot to say: I never really caught that particular gene. I’ve been told he was on “Prairie Home Companion” a lot, but since that show basically makes me want to stab myself in the thigh repeatedly with a spork…

Also among the dead: Thad Cochran, congressman for 45 years.

His 45-year tenure was the longest of any currently serving member of Congress. His 39 years in the Senate was the 10th-longest stretch in history, and he was that body’s third longest-serving incumbent, behind only Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

And finally, Claus von Bülow, who was not a murderer. Really. Two out of three courts said so.

Seriously, this was one of the great true crime circuses of the 1980s. Mr. von Bülow was charged with attempting to murder his wife by giving her an overdose of insulin. She went into hypoglycemic comas twice (in December of 1979 and December of 1980). She recovered the first time, but her second coma was irreversible.

Mr. von Bülow was convicted in his first trial, but that conviction was overturned on appeal. (His legal team included Alan Dershowitz, Eliot “Client #9” Spitzer, and Jim “Mad Money” Cramer.) He was tried a second time and acquitted.

I’m glossing over a lot of stuff here (because I don’t have time), including the testimony in the second trial from Truman Capote and Johnny Carson’s wife. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary, though you have to read both the Sunny and Claus articles. (There’s a great story in one of them about Norman Mailer and his wife attending a dinner party with Claus and Dershowitz. You have to read it: I won’t spoil the punchline.)

Sunny von Bülow never recovered from her second coma, and remained in a vegetative state until she died in 2008.

Posted in Law, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 30, 2019.

May 30th, 2019

I haven’t found a print obituary to point to yet, but Lawrence tipped me off to a Facebook post: multiple award winning horror writer Dennis Etchison has passed on.

Also by way of Lawrence: Louis Levi Oakes, last of the Mohawk code talkers.

The veteran was one of 17 Mohawks from Akwesasne, which straddles the Quebec, Ontario and New York state borders, who received code-talker training while stationed in Louisiana.
Kanien’kéha, the Mohawk language, was one of 33 Indigenous languages used during the war to send encoded messages between Allied forces so enemies could not understand what was being said.

…

“I only knew Levi for a very short period of time, but he meant a tremendous amount to me,” said Marc Miller, parliamentary secretary to Canada’s minister of Crown-Indigenous relations. “I can only imagine what he meant to his family and his people who had the privilege of knowing him for far longer.
“Due to the secrecy of his mission in WW II, the extent of his contributions as a Mohawk code talker have only recently been known and honoured. My hope is that we continue to honour his memory and contributions in death much longer than we did in life.”

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 29, 2019.

May 29th, 2019

Tony Horwitz, prominent journalist and best-selling author. (Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes)

His wife, Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, said he had collapsed while walking in Chevy Chase, Md., and was declared dead at George Washington University Hospital. The cause has not yet been determined, she said.

He was only 60.

“Last week I saw my cardiologist,” Mr. Horwitz wrote in The Times last month. “He told me I drink too much.”
Mr. Horwitz acknowledged his occupational hazard, but made a case for what he called bar-stool democracy. His sojourn in the South, he said, had him discarding stereotypes and seeing blue-collar conservatives as “the three-dimensional individuals I drank and debated with in factory towns, Gulf Coast oil fields and distressed rural crossroads.”
He expressed the hope that they would remember him not as “one of those ‘coastal elites’ dripping with contempt and condescension toward Middle America,” he wrote, but “rather, as that guy from ‘up north’ who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down.”

Posted in Books, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 27, 2019.

May 27th, 2019

Bart Starr, one of the greatest of the Green Bay Packers. NYT.

Starr’s name may have been the most flamboyant thing about him. But he proved to be skilled, sly and, by at least one measure, incomparably successful: He won three N.F.L. championships (for the seasons played in 1961, ’62 and ’65) in the pre-Super Bowl era, and then the first two Super Bowls, in January of 1967 and ’68. That Packers’ run of N.F.L. championships helped bring new attention to professional football as it moved into the Super Bowl era. (With his victory in 2019, Tom Brady has won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots.)
Starr was named the league’s most valuable player in 1966 and received the same honor in Super Bowls I and II. He was selected to the Pro Bowl four times. And on a team known for running — with the flashy Paul Hornung and the rugged Jim Taylor (who died in October) — Starr was one of the league’s most efficient passers. He led the N.F.L. in that crucial category in three seasons and, on average, for all of the 1960s — even though his rival Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts was often viewed as better. Starr set career records for completion percentage, 57.4, and consecutive passes without an interception, 294.

Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist.

Much as atoms can be slotted into the rows and columns of the periodic table of the elements, Dr. Gell-Mann found a way, in 1961, to classify their smaller pieces — subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and mesons, which were being discovered by the dozen in cosmic rays and particle accelerator blasts. Arranged according to their properties, the particles clustered in groups of eight and 10.
In a moment of whimsy, Dr. Gell-Mann, who hadn’t a mystical bone in his body, named his system the Eightfold Way after the Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment. He groaned ever after when people mistakenly inferred that particle physics was somehow related to Eastern philosophy.
Looking deeper, Dr. Gell-Mann realized that the patterns of the Eightfold Way could be further divided into triplets of even smaller components. He decided to call them quarks after a line from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”

Edmund Morris, biographer. I’m slowly working my way through his Theodore Roosevelt biographies, and I’d argue he’s at least as famous for those as he is for Dutch:

The columnist George Will attacked “Dutch” as “dishonorable,” and the writer Joan Didion accused Mr. Morris of resorting to the fictional device to conceal his own inadequacies as a fact-gatherer.
One of his toughest critics, Michiko Kakutani of The Times, called the book a “loony hodgepodge of fact and fiction” about a president that mimicked “the very blurring of reality and state-managed illusion that that president was often accused of perpetrating.”

No judgment intended here: this is in last place because it is breaking news. Bill Buckner passed away a short time ago.

Buckner was dependable at the plate, registering a .300 batting average in seven seasons and accumulating 2,715 hits and 174 home runs during his two decades in the Major Leagues. He won the National League’s batting title in 1980 and was an All-Star in 1981, when he was with the Chicago Cubs.

He was most famous, unfortunately, for bobbling a play during game 6 of the World Series in 1986, costing the Red Sox the game and probably the Series. But there are other Sox fans who can speak with more authority on Mr. Buckner and his legacy.

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Physics, Politics, Science, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 23, 2019.

May 23rd, 2019

Dick Ellis, noted local TV anchorman and journalist.

Former KVUE anchor Judy Maggio, who sat next to Ellis at the anchor desk in the 1980s, said she considered Ellis a brother.
“We went through the golden years of TV together,” she said. “He never stopped wanting to be a newsman. He never stopped wanting to be a journalist. He just loved it.”

…

“From elections to tragedies, he told Austin about pivotal moments,” longtime Austin radio host Bob Cole said. “He helped define our community, not just with information but with a real human quality. People didn’t just trust him, they loved him.”

KVUE.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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