President Trump talking about re-opening Alcatraz prompted two stories in the NYPost that are moderately worth linking:
1) An interview with Charlie Hopkins, who is 93, and is allegedly the last surviving Alcatraz inmate.
2) A second interview, this time with Jolene Babyak. Ms. Babyak’s father worked in the federal prison system. Her family lived on Alcatraz twice, and she’s written several histories over the years.
On Saturday, general manager of the Colorado Rockies Bill Schmidt came out in support of manager Bud Black.
Saturday night, the Rockies lost to the San Diego Padres…21-0.
Sunday, the Rockies fired Bud Black. Also out: bench coach Mike Redmond.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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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):
and Cora Sue Collins (previously).
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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.”
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”.
Hooray! At least for those of you who live within reasonable driving distance of Galveston, or are willing to travel.
This sounds like it could be a lot of fun. If you go on this tour, please feel free to report back here.
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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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.
Julia Parsons passed away on April 18th at the age of 104.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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.
The paper of record ran a nice obit for Peter Lovesey. (Previously.)
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.”
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…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.
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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.”
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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”.
I don’t know what to make of this story. I don’t feel like it qualifies for flaming hyena status yet, but I do feel like it is noteworthy.
Up until yesterday, Matthew Bruderman was the chairman of Nassau University Medical Center. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Bruderman announced he was cooperating with the FBI and Department of Justice in an investigation. Specifically, Mr. Bruderman claims that New York state and Long Island have stolen at least $1 billion from the organization.
Wednesday night, Mr. Bruderman’s house was burglarized. However, the only thing allegedly taken was…documents tied to the investigation.
Bruderman wasn’t home at the time of the robbery and only found out after police called to inform him they had recovered a binder with his name on it in a car driven by an unidentified couple, he said.
“I was confused because that was the binder I had on my desk when I left,” he said.
Bruderman said he later found his backdoor pried wide open.
The binder, he said, contained “sensitive” materials related to the ongoing federal investigation, including documents and records tied to the financial misconduct he claims to have uncovered while reviewing hospital finances and state reimbursements.
Things that make you go “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”:
At the heart of the alleged scheme is a little-known federal program called the Disproportionate Share Hospital Fund — meant to help keep afloat struggling hospitals such as NUMC, which treat large numbers of low-income patients on Medicaid and Medicare.
Under the program, the federal government agrees to give hospitals tens of millions of dollars in funding as long as their state matches the investment.
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According to [Bruderman’s] review of internal financial records, previous hospital leadership allegedly “borrowed” what was supposed to be the state’s matching share from an offshore account tied to a Cayman Islands trust, originally set up to cover the medical center’s legal bills.
That money would be temporarily transferred into the hospital’s general fund just long enough to fool the feds into thinking New York had paid its share — unlocking the federal portion of the funding, he claimed.
But once the federal funds cleared, the state’s contribution would allegedly be moved right back offshore.
That would mean those matching funds vanished into the shadows in a conspiracy that could’ve included top officials.
More things that make you go “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”: Mr. Bruderman was fired on Thursday.
Bruderman, who was unpaid in his position as chairman, told The Post he was shocked by his firing and is the victim of a political scandal.
“I was told if I didn’t resign today, like a coward, I would be removed. I was told [Gov.] Kathy Hochul wanted my head for exposing the corruption and previously supporting Lee Zeldin. I was told I don’t understand how powerful these people are and the lengths they would go to hurt me. I refused to resign and they had no choice but to remove me,” Bruderman told The Post.
Again, I don’t know what to make of this. A lot of the coverage seems to be from Mr. Bruderman’s point of view, and I won’t rule out the possibility that he’s trying to divert attention away from his own activities. On the other hand, I’m absolutely not going to rule out the idea that New York state and Nassau County officials are as crooked as a three-dollar bill, and have been doing exactly what Mr. Bruderman claims.
In other news, and I guess this qualifies as a flaming hyena: Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan has been arrested by the FBI.
Flores Ruiz, 30, had appeared before Dugan April 18 for a pre-trial conference on three misdemeanor battery charges.
ICE agents showed up outside the courtroom with a federal warrant for Flores Ruiz’s arrest but were asked by court officials to wait until the hearing had ended before cuffing him, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, citing law enforcement sources.
Before the agents could enter, Dugan allegedly directed Flores Ruiz and his lawyer out a side door and through a private hallway to avoid apprehension.
Judge Dugan is charged with “obstruction of justice and concealing a person from arrest”. The NYTimes has additional coverage, including a link to the charging document, but share links aren’t working for me right now. I’ll try to update later.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Steve McMichael, legendary Chicago Bear.
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Lulu Roman, perhaps most famous for “Hee Haw”.
IMDB.