Legacy MattersIn the Washington Post, Jonathan Mummolo writes that the Father Who Died Saving Son Known for Sacrifice
If you ever ran into Nokesville dad Thomas S. Vander Woude, chances are you would also see his son Joseph. Whether Vander Woude was volunteering at church, coaching basketball or working on his farm, Joseph was often right there with him, pitching in with a smile, friends and neighbors said yesterday.
When Joseph, 20, who has Down syndrome, fell into a septic tank Monday in his back yard, Vander Woude jumped in after him. He saved him. And he died where he spent so much time living: at his son's side.
"That's how he lived," Vander Woude's daughter-in-law and neighbor, Maryan Vander Woude, said yesterday. "He lived sacrificing his life, everything, for his family."
Vander Woude, 66, had gone to Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Gainesville on Monday, just as he did every day, and then worked in the yard with Joseph, the youngest of his seven sons, affectionately known as Josie. Joseph apparently fell through a piece of metal that covered a 2-by-2-foot opening in the septic tank, according to Prince William County police and family members.
Vander Woude rushed to the tank; a workman at the house saw what was happening and told Vander Woude's wife, Mary Ellen, police said. They called 911 about 12 p.m. and tried to help the father and son in the meantime.
At some point, Vander Woude jumped in the tank, submerging himself in sewage so he could push his son up from below and keep his head above the muck, while Joseph's mom and the workman pulled from above.
For those who knew him, Vander Woude's sacrifice was in keeping with a lifetime of giving.
"He's the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back," said neighbor Lee DeBrish. "And if he didn't have one, he'd buy one for you."
Vander Woude was a pilot in Vietnam, a daughter-in-law said. After the war, he worked as a commercial airline pilot and in the early 1980s moved his family to Prince William from Georgia. In the years to come, he would wear many hats: farmer, athletic director, volunteer coach, parishioner, handy neighbor, grandfather of 24, husband for 43 years.
What a remarkable man. May he rest in peace.
Olive Riley began blogging at 108 to share stories from her life in the Australian outback, during two world wars and raising children on her own.
She delighted in her notoriety because she said it kept her mind fresh. She died singing a happy song as she did every day.
Ronni Bennet muses on the longevity of elderbloggers and leaves good advice for leaving a final blog post at the ready.
When Dr. Pepperberg put Alex parrot in his cage last Thursday night, he looked at her and said,"You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you."
Next day he was found dead in his cage.
Brainy Parrot Dies, Emotive to the End.
In 1977, when Dr. Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex from a pet store, scientists had little expectation that any bird could learn to communicate with humans, as opposed to just mimicking words and sounds. Research in other birds had been not promising.
But by using novel methods of teaching, Dr. Pepperberg prompted Alex to learn scores of words, which he could put into categories, and to count small numbers of items, as well as recognize colors and shapes.
He lived through horror of the holocaust. He refused to swear allegiance to and then escaped from Communist Romania. When horror came to Virginia Tech, he saw it for the evil it was and sacrificed his life to save his students.
Liviu Librescu, 76, a professor of aerospace and ocean engineering, died holding the door against horror. He saved a classroom of students, giving them time to jump out the window, while he held the door shut with his body until the gunman, Seung-hui Cho, forced it open and shot him dead.
My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Librescu's son, Joe Librescu, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home outside Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping.
Librescu emigrated to Israel, then to the United States where he and his wife enjoyed two decades of peace and prosperity.
The story of his heroic act shot around the world. But he is mourned by those who knew him and those who loved him, from the academic community in Romania where he was recognized with honorary degrees for his academic work, to his friends in Israel, and to his wife and son who, in their grief, must be immensely proud.
Our deep condolences and our salute to a brave hero.
Update. Joe Katzman writes
In the Jewish community, the response to hearing of a loved one's death is "may his memory be a blessing." Prof. Librescu's clearly is, demonstrating what real matryrdom is about - dying not to kill others, but to save them.
For those with faith Our dead are not absent and Love never ends.
The great and sad mistake of many people -- among them even pious persons -- is to imagine that those whom death has taken, leave us. They do not leave us. They remain! Where are they? In darkness? Oh no! It is we who are in darkness. We do not see them, but they see us. Their eyes, radiant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes . . . Oh infinite consolation! Though invisible to us, our dead are not absent. They are living near us, transfigured into light, into power, into love.
Just two months after his father shot his mother to death and then killed himself, Ernest Gallo got a wine recipe from the public library and took $5900 to begin making and selling wine for 50 cents a gallon.
Little did he know that the E&J Gallo Winery would become an empire selling 75 million cases of wine and changing the way ordinary Americans drank wine. Nor did he imagine that drinking his own wine help him live until age 97, or that he would become immensely wealthy and die peacefully surrounded by his family.
"My father died knowing that he had lived life to its fullest," his son said in a statement.
AP
Ernest Gallo, the marketing genius who parlayed $5,900 and a wine recipe from the Modesto Public Library into the world's largest winemaking empire, died Tuesday at his home in Modesto. He was 97.
"He passed away peacefully this afternoon surrounded by his family," said Susan Hensley, vice president of public relations for E.& J. Gallo Winery.
LA Times
"No one worked harder to build the base of American wine drinkers that we have today," Joseph Ciatti, owner of the nation's largest grape and bulk wine broker, said Tuesday. "Ernest made quality wine for the masses at a good price."
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When the Gallo brothers started the business, the joke was that Ernest's goal was to sell more wine than Julio could make, and Julio's was to make more wine than Ernest could sell.
Washington Post
If some Americans were uncertain about placing a bottle of wine on their table or of opening one at their parties, Mr. Gallo allayed their fears and stimulated their desires with his advertising, using billboards and later television. From 1948 to 1955, Gallo sales grew almost fourfold.
The brothers' winery, which began with a staff of three -- Mr. Gallo, his wife, Amelia, and his brother -- grew to have more than 4,600 employees and a presence in more than 90 countries
From a review by Will Blythe entitled Food for the Soul. of Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison.
Note how he records his family's history before he goes, so the memory is not lost.
In Donald’s opening monologue, a rambling family history for the benefit of his children, recorded by Cynthia, his wife and teenage sweetheart, Donald announces, “It seems I’m to leave the earth early but these things happen to people.” His mind remains clear while his body becomes “desiccated road kill,” as K puts it. Barely able to swallow, he must sniff rather than taste a final meal of barbecued pork ribs. However, Donald doesn’t rage against the dying of the light, nor indulge in the deathbed histrionics of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich. Dying seems to strike him as no more an aberration than birds returning to their roost at dusk. His mortality evokes the sense of a man going home at twilight, of — echoing the book’s lovely title — returning to earth. A luminous, sad calm pervades this novel.
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Donald’s dignified death is of a piece with his life (my father, a doctor, once said that in his experience people died as they lived, in character right to the end).
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This regal suicide marks only the halfway point of “Returning to Earth.” The novel’s subject now becomes an absence; Donald’s survivors must learn to negotiate the hole left in them by his departure. ... In treating the raggedy contours of grief, Harrison shows no patience with that banality known as “closure.” “There’s much talk about ‘healing’ these days before the blood is dry on the pavement,” Donald’s brother-in-law, David, complains.
The "inventor" and developer of Lexis Nexis, the vast electronic database used by law firms, the news industry and libraries, died November 12.
H. Donald Wilson, 82, died of a heart attack in front of his computer at his home.
From the Washington Post.
"He was essentially a practical visionary," said Paul G. Zurkowski, president of the Information Industry Association from 1969 to 1989. "At the time, the technologies were just emerging and people were focusing on the technology, but Don focused on their application to publishing."
Mr. Wilson started by developing a business plan for an engineer's invention of how to better search text for certain words or phrases. That plan became a company that started LexisNexis, now the world's largest online electronic library of legal opinions, public records, news and business information.
Born during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, died in Iraq, the remarkable arc of the life of Tung Nguyen says much about sacrifice and what it means to be an American writes Seth Gitell in the New York Sun.
If you've ever drunk Australian wine and enjoyed it, you have Len Evans to thank.
When asked what his greatest achievement was, Evans replied, "To make people want to drink wine for the sheer fun of it. To show the enjoyment in wine. You know, wine's a bloody drink. It's just a lovely drink."
Steve Waterson pens a wonderful tribute to his father-in-law, Len Evans in A Man in Full.
One summer evening 15 years ago Len Evans grabbed a good bottle of burgundy and led me out to his veranda for the would-be son-in-law conversation. As the sun fell behind the Hunter Valley's Brokenback range, we got to the part where he gauged my prospects. I was struggling with some banal career decision: one path boring but financially secure, the other much more interesting but relatively poorly paid. Seeking approval, I ventured that the sensible thing might be to go dull and safe. Len thought for a moment, turned to me and asked: "How many lives are you planning to have?"
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Most of the time, the expression "living life to the full" is a platitude. Len turned it into a masterclass, and we were his students. His professional face was that of the wine man, and according to those equipped to judge, he had few rivals in the world for depth of knowledge. Fewer still could match his palate; none could equal his contribution to Australia's wine industry. But to celebrate that expertise alone is to limit him. To my eye, his greatest love was people. His adored wife Trish, his children and grandchildren came first, without question, but I know of no one who took more energetic pleasure in friends and strangers, entertaining them with wine, song, fine food and, above all, laughter.
Via Tim Blair, Len Remembered.
The obituary for the man who put Australian wine on the map
Dominick Dunne, one of the few people who knew him when he was poor writes about the last days of Aaron Spelling in the current Vanity Fair.
He had become a deeply unhappy man, living sick and isolated in the biggest house in town, cut off from nearly everyone, estranged even from his daughter, and fearful that he was being betrayed. "There wasn't anybody sitting in there with him," one of his friends informed me. "Just a maid with a vacuum cleaner, cleaning the room."
How sad is that. Money can buy a lot of things, but not a good death.
Here is the N.Y. Times obituary.
Vanity Fair has not put Dunne's article online but there is a very good photo essay, Rare Scenes from 9/11.
Sometimes the way someone dies just fits. There's no disrespect to say David Bright died a good death, doing what he loved most.
Researcher Dies After Andrea Doria Dive
David Bright, a leading researcher into underwater exploration and shipwrecks, has died after diving to the site of the Andrea Doria off Nantucket, where he was working in preparation for the wreck's 50th anniversary. He was 49.
Bright, of Flemington, N.J., resurfaced from a dive late Saturday with decompression sickness and went into cardiac arrest, according to the Coast Guard. He was pronounced dead at Cape Cod Hospital a short time later.
Bright was a historian and an experienced technical diver who had explored the Titanic, Andrea Doria and other shipwrecks many times - 120 times for the Andrea Doria
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"His passion has been growing for a little over 30 years, all kinds of shipwrecks and getting to know them," Elaine Bright, his wife of 23 years, said Monday.
"It's very traumatizing to his entire family but we know that he's happy. It's a very sad thing, but water, scuba diving was what he wanted to do," she said.
R.I.P. and condolences to his family.
A seventy-seven year old Italian man, clasping the tricolore, died instantly as he fell from a ladder as he tried to attach Italy's flag to a pole.
Man dies hoisting flag for World Cup final
He could have been only happier if he tried to hoist it after Italy's victory. A great way to go.
R.I.P.