Obit watch: April 4, 2020.

April 4th, 2020

Rear Adm. Edward L. Feightner (United States Navy – ret.).

In his 34 years of Navy service, as a combat pilot in the Pacific, an instructor and a test pilot, Admiral Feightner flew more than 100 types of planes.
While he was a junior Navy officer, he twice shot down three Japanese planes on a single day and took part in battles in the Caroline Islands, the Marianas and the Philippines.
In the late 1940s, he became one of the early test pilots at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. He flew or analyzed the systems for fighters, transports, helicopters and just about any other type of aircraft envisioned by the Navy.
He became the head of the Navy’s fighter design program and was twice awarded the Legion of Merit for his testing and administrative activities. He received four Distinguished Flying Crosses for his combat exploits.
In the early 1950s, Admiral Feightner was a member of the Navy’s Blue Angels, whose close-formation flying and acrobatics thrilled crowds at air shows.

…

Admiral Feightner was credited with his first “kill” when he shot down a Japanese dive bomber off the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942. He downed three torpedo bombers off Rennell Island on Jan. 30, 1943, and became an ace (a pilot with at least five kills) when he shot down a Zero fighter off the Palau island chain in March 1944.
He shot down another Zero off Truk in April 1944 and downed three Zeros off Formosa (now Taiwan) on Oct. 12, 1944.

Admiral Feightner was 100 when he passed.

Ira Einhorn is burning in hell.

Einhorn was found guilty of fatally bludgeoning his girlfriend, Helen “Holly” Maddux, 30, in 1977 and stuffing her body into a trunk that he kept in his Powelton apartment for 18 months. In 1981, just before his trial, he fled to Europe, and he remained on the lam for two decades. He was extradited from France in 2001, and a Philadelphia jury convicted him of first-degree murder in 2002 in Maddux’s slaying. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Steven Levy’s book on the case, The Unicorn’s Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius is available in a Kindle edition, and that’s probably the way to go if you want to read it. (As far as I know, that’s the only book about the case, though it was written before Einhorn’s capture and extradition: I don’t know if Levy updated subsequent editions or the Kindle version.)

Posted in Heroism, History, Law, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 3, 2020.

April 3rd, 2020

Great and good FOTB Borepatch tipped me off to the death of Bill Withers. The paper of record has a preliminary obit up, which will probably be replaced with a full one later.

The NYT does have what I think is a fascinating obit for William Frankland. Dr. Frankland was a pioneering allergist.

Dr. Frankland was best known in professional circles for a number of groundbreaking clinical studies. In 1954, he proved that pollen proteins were the parts of plants most useful in preseason allergy inoculations, and in 1955, he debunked the efficacy of treating asthma with bacterial vaccines.
He was an early proponent of using allergen injections to desensitize patients with severe allergies and developed immunotherapy serums for hay fever sufferers with pollen from one of the world’s largest pollen farms, which he operated outside London until the late 1960s.
It was while investigating desensitization to insect bites that Dr. Frankland allowed the South American insect Rhodnius prolixus to bite his arm at weekly intervals. The eighth bite sent him into life-threatening anaphylaxis, from which a nurse revived him with repeated shots of adrenaline.

…

Dr. Frankland had a pollen trap installed on the roof of St. Mary’s and began distributing daily pollen counts to the British news media in the early 1960s, one of the first allergists to do so. Pollen counts are now a staple of weather reports around the world.

He worked with Alexander Flemming, treated Saddam Hussein, and spent time during WWII as a Japanese prisoner of war.

Dr. Frankland was 108 when he died.

Over his career, Dr. Frankland published more than a hundred articles and academic papers on allergies, including four that he wrote after turning 100. He accumulated many honors, including being named a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2015.

Rod Dreher has a nice post up about Terry Teachout and the death of Mr. Teachout’s wife.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 4

April 3rd, 2020

Today’s video goes out to Lawrence, who (among his other virtues) is a tank fan.

Here’s another bonus entry for today: “Crack That Tank”.

Posted in History | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 2, 2020.

April 2nd, 2020

I’ve been an irregular reader of Terry Teachout’s “About Last Night” blog for a while now. I don’t watch that much theater, in NYC or elsewhere, but I enjoy reading his writing. And I also enjoy the historical videos he posts on a regular basis.

I’ve been following him more closely in the past few weeks. Mr. Teachout’s wife has been mortally ill with pulmonary hypertension, and (after months of waiting) received a double lung transplant in early March.

She passed away on Tuesday. I’m heartbroken for Mr. Teachout (even though I don’t know him personally), and extend my condolences to him from afar.

Lawrence sent over the obit for Adam Schlesinger, Fountains of Wayne guy and film and television composer.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 3

April 2nd, 2020

Last night, I realized that we are coming up on the 50th anniversary of a historic (and awful) event. I’m working on a post that will go up on that date, which is a few days away.

In the meantime, I thought maybe I’d post some things that are thematically appropriate for the anniversary of that event.

Have you ever said to yourself, “Self, what’s the right way to do a felony vehicle stop?”

Well, now you know. Or at least, now you know what the recommended procedure was in 1973.

I would ordinarily say, “Don’t try this at home”, but if your home life is such that you’re thinking about doing felony vehicle stops there, nothing I can say is really going to make any difference.

Posted in Cops, Law | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 2

April 1st, 2020

Continuing with the “random stuff that popped up in my YouTube recommendations” theme, here’s one of those Navy training videos. This one is actually better quality than some of the other ones I’ve been watching, and contains a lot of nice action shots: “The Job Of The EA-6B Prowler”:

Bonus video #1: this actually wasn’t a random YouTube recommendation, but something McThag linked to a while back that might be interesting to some folks: “Defensive Electronic Countermeasures”, a 1962 training film about various then current ECM gear. It is a little longer than I’d like (close to 30 minutes instead of 15), but I think it is a nice historical artifact.

Bonus video #2: also not random, and nothing to do with military aviation. I actually saw this on whatever the broadcast game show channel was this morning, and was amused: Robert Moog (and two other guys) on “To Tell the Truth”:

It particularly amuses me that the first question asked…is about P.D.Q. Bach.

Posted in History, Music, Planes | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…

March 31st, 2020

…I’m gonna go have me some fun!
And what do you consider fun?
Fun, natural fun!”
–Tom Tom Club, “Genius of Love”

Now that I’m on indefinite home confinement (like the rest of Travis County) I’ve found myself not just reading more, but also watching more crap on YouTube.

“Crap” may not actually be fair. I’ve enjoyed the USCSB videos for a while now. AOPA’s Air Safety Institute videos are educational as well. And, yes, I’ve been watching my share of Ian’s videos in these times of struggle. Shamefully, I’ve also been watching clips from “Bar Rescue”.

My point, and I do have one, is: some interesting things have been showing up in my YouTube recommendations, and I thought I’d start highlighting those. At least, until the crisis passes.

Rules: I want to keep them short, and ideally want to pick ones that people haven’t heard of. So no “Surviving Edged Weapons”, because that’s close to an hour and half and has been highlighted on Red Letter Media. But I think at least some of these will be vintage police training videos…

…let’s start with this one, “Vehicle Ambush: Counterattacks”. If for no other reason than that awesome 1970’s wakka jawakka opening soundtrack.

Tomorrow: I’m trying to decide if I want to go with Jack Webb (although I don’t think the video quality is all that great) or possibly a vintage US Navy training film. (Nothing about VD, though.)

Posted in Cars, Cops, Guns, Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 30, 2020.

March 30th, 2020

Krzysztof Penderecki, noted contemporary classical composer.

Mr. Penderecki was most widely known for choral compositions evoking Poland’s ardent Catholicism and history of foreign domination, and for his early experimental works, with their massive tone clusters and disregard for melody and harmony. Those ideas would reverberate for decades after he himself had pronounced them “more destructive than constructive” and changed course toward neo-Romanticism.
(His decision to move on was partly political: The Polish avant-garde movement had created an unhealthy illusion of freedom in a country living under Communism, he said. But it was also artistic: Experimentation had reached an impasse, he told a Canadian interviewer in 1998, because “we discovered everything!”)
Still, it was compositions from the wild first decade of his career, including “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (1960), “Polymorphia” (1961) and the “St. Luke Passion” (1966) that brought him lasting international recognition while he was still a young man.
The threnody, in particular, is a much-studied example of startling emotional effects created from abstract concepts. Following a score that often looks more like geometry homework than conventional notation, it forces an ensemble of 52 string instruments to produce relentless, nerve-jangling sounds that can suggest nuclear annihilation. Yet it was said that Mr. Penderecki dedicated it to the victims of Hiroshima only after hearing the piece performed.

John Callahan, soap opera actor. (“Falcon Crest”, “Santa Barbara”, “All My Children”, “Desperate Housewives”, “Days of our Lives.”)

David Schramm. He was “Roy Biggins” on “Wings”, and also did some Broadway and off-Broadway work.

Joe Diffie, country music star. Borepatch has a much better tribute than I could write.

Posted in Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 27, 2020.

March 27th, 2020

The gentleman who blogs at “Say Uncle” lost his wife earlier this week.

I check out Uncle’s site somewhere between every other day and every day: he’s been on top of what’s going on in the gun sphere for as long as I’ve been following him. I join with everyone else in that sphere in extending my condolences to him and to his people.

Fred “Curly” Neal, legendary Harlem Globetrotter.

In one of the most highly anticipated elements of the Globetrotters’ routine, Neal would dribble all over the court, frequently sliding on his knees, never losing control of the ball no matter how close to the hardwood he had lowered himself. Then he would bounce the ball through a flailing defender’s legs near the free-throw line and dribble in for an uncontested layup to finish off the move.
“Oh my gosh, he revolutionized ball handling,” Nancy Lieberman, who played for the Generals against the Globetrotters in 1988, said in a phone interview. “Everything you see Kyrie Irving doing and Steph Curry doing now, all of it started with the Trotters. The Trotters made dribbling a show.”
Neal’s trickery and showmanship established him as one of the team’s foremost stars, alongside the likes of Meadowlark Lemon and Hubert “Geese” Ausbie. Known for wearing ever-present white pads over his knees and an array of red, white and blue wristbands, Neal helped the Globetrotters’ barnstorming ensemble become a regular feature of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” in an era when the National Basketball Association did not have a robust national television presence as it does now.

Mark Blum, knock-around actor. He worked on Broadway, was in “Crocodile Dundee”, did some other movies, and a non-trivial number of TV guest shots.

Mr. Blum was an omnipresent figure in the Off Broadway world for decades, but his biggest moment in the spotlight came in 1989 after he played a time-traveling 20th-century playwright who befriends Gustav Mahler, in the Playwrights Horizons production of Albert Innaurato’s “Gus and Al.”

…

He had a notable Broadway career as well, appearing in nine productions over three and a half decades. He made his Broadway debut as a particularly versatile theater professional — playing an unnamed Venetian (one of four), understudying two roles and acting as assistant stage manager in “The Merchant” (1977), set in 16th-century Venice and inspired by a certain Shakespearean classic.
Other Broadway roles included Eddie, the young main character’s recently widowed and debt-ridden father, in Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” (1991), with Irene Worth; Spalding Gray’s campaign manager in “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2000), a role he reprised as a replacement in the 2012 revival; Leo Herman, a.k.a. Chuckles the Chipmunk, the detestable host of a children’s television show, in “A Thousand Clowns” (2001); and Juror No. 1, the reasonable foreman, in “Twelve Angry Men” (2004).

…

He appeared in almost 30 films, including “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985), as a married hot-tub salesman; “Crocodile Dundee” (1986); and “Shattered Glass” (2003). His most recent, “The Pleasure of Your Presence,” a romantic comedy about a wedding in the Hamptons, has been completed but not yet scheduled for release.
Over the decades he appeared on dozens of prime-time series — among them “Miami Vice,” “Roseanne,” “Frasier” and three shows in the “Law & Order” franchise — and he remained active into 2020. He appeared in 30 episodes of the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle” as Union Bob, a rules-obsessed symphony orchestra piccolo player. His most recent roles were on the drama series “You,” as a mysterious bookstore owner and stroke victim; “Succession” (2018-19); and “Billions,” in an episode scheduled to air in May.

Posted in Guns, Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 26, 2020.

March 26th, 2020

Lawrence sent me this the other day, but I forgot to note it in yesterday’s roundup.

Stuart Gordon, director and writer. THR.

He was probably most famous for “Re-Animator” (which, as you know, Bob, was based on an H.P. Lovecraft story). He also directed “From Beyond”, and some less well known works (“Space Truckers”, “Robot Jox”).

Posted in Lovecraft, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

I heartily endorse this event or product. (#18 and #19 in a series)

March 25th, 2020

I’ve actually never been to the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. I haven’t been to NYC in more than 30 years.

But I’ve ordered a few things from them online. I’m not a steady customer, but I do like them. I also like Otto Penzler. I’ve never met him, but I hope to one of these days (assuming we’re not all dead by then).

The Mysterious Bookshop has always struck me as being kind the kind of place that just barely hangs on. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense: pretty much any bookshop exists on the edge, doubly so if it is a specialty shop, and triply so if it is a specialty shop in NYC.

As you might guess, they’ve been hit pretty hard by recent events, and could use a little help. Why not go pick up something from them? I have (or else I wouldn’t be asking you). If you’re not a mystery fan, maybe you know someone who is. If you can’t think of anything you’d like to pick up right now, they sell gift cards (for you, or that other person who is a mystery fan).

I’d hate to see them close for good behind this thing. If you’ve still got a job, and have a little money that you’re not spending at bars or eating out or on gas for your car, how about throwing them a few dollars?

===

Based on the recommendation of FOTB (and official firearms trainer for WCD) Karl Rehn, I ordered a copy of FBI Miami Firefight: Five Minutes that Changed the Bureau from Ed Mireles’s website.

I ordered it on Friday, because it isn’t like I don’t have enough books to read while I’m under confinement. (I’d actually been meaning to order it for a while: I didn’t want it to disappear on me.) It was in the mailbox on Tuesday. Which I personally think is pretty darn impressive, under the current circumstances.

I flipped through it some last night, and, while I haven’t read all of it, my first impression is: I’m liking it more than I am the other true crime book I’m reading at the moment (which deals with another famous shootout: I may write more about that one after I finish it.) I do want to throw an endorsement Mr. Mireles’s way, though, just based on him getting the book out the door that fast.

Posted in Books, Endorsements, Guns | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 25, 2020.

March 25th, 2020

Terrence McNally, noted playwright.

Mr. McNally’s Tony Awards attest to his versatility. Two were for books for musicals, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “Ragtime” (1998), and two were for plays, and vastly different ones: “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1995), about gay men who share a vacation house, and “Master Class” (1996), in which the opera diva Maria Callas reflects on her career.
And those prize winners were only a small part of his oeuvre. With some three dozen plays to his credit, as well as the books for 10 musicals, the librettos for four operas and a handful of screenplays for film and television, Mr. McNally was a remarkably prolific and consistent dramatist.

Hattip on this to Lawrence, who also pointed out that Mr. McNally did a guest shot on “The Greatest American Hero”. He actually did guest shots on a small hand full of TV shows, including “Salvage I” (that sounds like a “blink and you’d miss it” appearance), “CHiPs”, and “The Young and the Restless”.

Speaking of hattips, great and good FOTB Borepatch sent over an obit for Albert Uderzo, co-creator (with the late René Goscinny) of Asterix and Obelix.

Edited to add: NYT obit.

A followup from “The Drive” that I’ve been meaning to post for a couple of days: Kenny Rogers, dirt racer.

Rogers paired up with Sprint Car Hall of Famer C.K. Spurlock and campaigned his own team for several years before the two formed Gambler Chassis Company. Taking its name from Rogers’ famous song The Gambler, this project was anything but a gimmick. The company would go on to win races with stars like Steve Kinser, Sammy Swindell, and Doug Wolfgang behind the wheel. Simply put, Gambler cars were consistently some of the fastest in the United States, taking victories at primetime events like the Knoxville Nationals.

Posted in 1970s, Cars, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 24, 2020.

March 24th, 2020

Lawrence sent over an obit for prolific British actor David Collings, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation from another site.

Eric Weissberg, multi-instrumentalist musician, but perhaps most famous as a banjo guy. Specifically, “Dueling Banjos”.

As a session player he appeared on Judy Collins’s “Fifth Album,” contributing guitar to her 1965 version of “Pack Up Your Sorrows.” He played banjo on John Denver’s 1971 Top 10 pop hit, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” His fretwork was heard on albums like Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” (1974), Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) and the Talking Heads’ “Little Creatures” (1985). He collaborated with jazz musicians like Bob James and Herbie Mann as well.
“Dueling Banjos” did not, as the song’s title suggests, involve two banjoists pitting their skills against each other. Instead it showcased Mr. Weissberg’s three-finger Earl Scruggs-style banjo in a sprightly call-and-response — more of a dance than a fight — with the flat-picked acoustic guitar of his collaborator, Steve Mandell.

…

When it appeared on the soundtrack for “Deliverance,” a movie based on the James Dickey novel of the same name, it was mistakenly copyrighted to Mr. Weissberg.
A lawsuit was settled in Mr. Smith’s favor. Mr. Weissberg always maintained that Warner Bros. had credited him as the song’s composer without his knowledge or consent.

Eli Miller. No, you probably never heard of him. He was one of the last of New York City’s door to door seltzer delivery men, who worked “from 1960 until he retired in 2017.”

When Mr. Miller started his business, hundreds of seltzer men plied the streets; when he retired, there were only a handful. Through all of the intervening decades, he appeared at his customers’ homes bearing a wooden box of pewter-topped bottles filled with authentic seltzer.
“It’s not the stuff you buy in the plastic bottles in the store, which has about five pounds of pressure,” Mr. Miller said in a video that accompanied an article about him in The New York Times in 2013.
What Mr. Miller brought customers, he said, was triple-filtered New York City water, without salt, sugar or other additives, pressurized to about 60 to 80 pounds per square inch — perfect for enjoying plain or spritzing into an egg cream.

…

Mr. Miller was inducted into the Brooklyn Jewish Hall of Fame in 2017. His fellow inductees that year included the television personality Judge Judy Sheindlin and Ira Glasser, a former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 21, 2020.

March 21st, 2020

Kenny Rogers. Borepatch.

He was an avid photographer as well. He published two volumes of his work: “Kenny Rogers’ America” (1986), an assortment of photos of national landmarks and other places of interest, and “Your Friends and Mine” (1987), a collection of portraits of fellow celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson.

…

Mr. Rogers was also a successful entrepreneur. His best-known enterprise was Kenny Rogers Roasters, a chain of chicken restaurants he opened with John Y. Brown Jr., the former governor of Kentucky and chief executive of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Opened in 1991, the chain — which was, among other things, the subject of a memorable episode of “Seinfeld” — closed in the United States 20 years later but has continued to prosper overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Boris Yaro, LAT photographer. He famously took multiple photos of Robert Kennedy immediately after the shooting.

There’s another story about Mr. Yaro’s photography: that one involves a suicidal man and Muhammad Ali, but you’ll have to read the obit for that one.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 20, 2020.

March 20th, 2020

Molly Brodak. She was a poet, and wrote a book about her childhood, Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir.

“Bandit,” her first published nonfiction work, was an unsparing account of her dysfunctional childhood with her father, Joseph Brodak, a tool and die worker who began robbing banks in the summer of 1994 to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, Molly was barely a teenager.
Mr. Brodak robbed 11 banks in and around Detroit that summer. He would hand a teller a note demanding cash and gesture that he had a gun in his jacket pocket (he didn’t). He wore a floppy hat and a fake mustache that earned him the sobriquet “the Super Mario Brothers Bandit,” after the similarly attired video game character. He was caught, spent seven years in prison and was released in 2001, then served another prison sentence for robbing more banks in 2009.

She was only 39 years old. The NYT quotes her husband as stating she died by suicide.

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.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Roy Hudd, prominent British actor. He played “Archie Shuttleworth” on “Coronation Street”, and, according to Lawrence, did a fair amount of horror.

Posted in Books, Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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