Legacy MattersShe fought against those who would say her life was not worth living. Hers certainly was.
When Harriet McBryde Johnson died earlier this month at the age of 50 from a congenital neuromuscular disease, obituaries called her a "disability-rights activist." This is far too narrow a description of her life. She was less a traditional activist than an acute social conscience. Ms. Johnson forced us to look at disability in a different way -- not as something that we should seek to eradicate, but as something that is integral to the human condition, a "natural part of the human experience," as the American Association of People With Disabilities puts it.
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She was brutally direct when she talked about disabilities, including her own. "Most people don't know how to look at me," she wrote, describing her severely twisted spine and her "jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin." But she abhorred the "veneer of beneficence" that overlay the arguments of those who said she would be "better off" without her disability. "The presence or absence of a disability doesn't predict quality of life," she argued, challenging Mr. Singer's support of what she called "disability-based infanticide."
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People with disabilities, she said, "have something the world needs."
George Carlin, 71, died of hear failure in Los Angeles shortly after being admitted for chest pains.
His comedic sensibility revolved around a central theme: humanity is a cursed, doomed species.
"I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas," he told Reuters in a 2001 interview.
Carlin told Playboy in 2005 that he looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a "heavenly CNN."
He's the only comedian whose case, the "Seven Words" went to the Supreme Court which upheld the right of the government to sanction radio stations for broadcasting offensive words when children might be listening.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).
"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"
New York Times, George Carlin, Splenetic Comedian, Dies at 71
By the mid-’70s, like his comic predecessor Lenny Bruce and the fast-rising Richard Pryor, Mr. Carlin had emerged as a cultural renegade. In addition to his irreverent jests about religion and politics, he openly talked about the use of drugs, including acid and peyote, and said that he kicked cocaine not for moral or legal reasons but after he found “far more pain in the deal than pleasure.” But the edgier, more biting comedy he developed during this period, along with his candid admission of drug use, cemented his reputation as the “comic voice of the counterculture.”
His best loved routine was Stuff.
My favorite is baseball and football
From Newsweek, The Russert Miracles
The first "Russert miracle," as attendees called it, happened at the private funeral service held at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown; the family of the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert had requested that Senators Obama and McCain to sit together, and the two presidential combatants obliged. CNN Washington Bureau chief David Bohrman, a former NBC producer, describes the scene to NEWSWEEK: "They sat side-by-side and spoke for twenty minutes. The body language was total friendship. They were warm and friendly and truly engaged in a conversation.... I kept thinking here we are at the funeral at the son of a sanitation worker and the presidential candidates are having their first one on one conversation here."
After the memorial service, the crowd moved to the rooftop where they saw the sky open up to a rainbow.
"After the magical experience of this service, to come out and see the rainbow and Luke at the bottom of it made the last dry eye weep," said NBC News executive Phil Griffin. The last song in the memorial service was, fittingly, "Somewhere over the Rainbow."
When asked his reaction to explain the sudden appearance of the rainbow at the exact moment, Luke Russert, his sparkly smile so reminiscent of his father's, said: "Is anyone still an atheist now?"
Howard Kurtz reports on the memorial service for Tim Russert,
From the three network anchors to a former governor to the Buffalo nun who taught him in seventh grade, Tim Russert's extended family bid farewell yesterday to "an unmade bed of a man, with an armful of newspapers and a cellphone to his ear," as Tom Brokaw described his colleague
But it was Peggy Noonan who grasped the essential point in A Life's Lesson.
When somebody dies, we tell his story and try to define and isolate what was special about it—what it was he brought to the party, how he enhanced life by showing up. In this way we educate ourselves about what really matters. Or, often, re-educate ourselves, for "man needs more to be reminded than instructed."
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The beautiful thing about the coverage was that it offered extremely important information to those age 15 or 25 or 30 who may not have been told how to operate in the world beyond "Go succeed." I'm not sure we tell the young as much as we ought, as clearly as we ought, what it is the world admires, and what it is they want to emulate.
In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn't. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn't, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better. That's what it really admires. That's what we talk about in eulogies, because that's what's important. We don't say, "The thing about Joe was he was rich." We say, if we can, "The thing about Joe was he took care of people."
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After Tim's death, the entire television media for four days told you the keys to a life well lived, the things you actually need to live life well, and without which it won't be good. Among them: taking care of those you love and letting them know they're loved, which involves self-sacrifice; holding firm to God, to your religious faith, no matter how high you rise or low you fall. This involves guts, and self-discipline, and active attention to developing and refining a conscience to whose promptings you can respond. Honoring your calling or profession by trying to do within it honorable work, which takes hard effort, and a willingness to master the ethics of your field. And enjoying life. This can be hard in America, where sometimes people are rather grim in their determination to get and to have. "Enjoy life, it's ungrateful not to," said Ronald Reagan.
Tim had these virtues. They were great to see. By defining them and celebrating them the past few days, the media encouraged them. This was a public service, and also what you might call Tim's parting gift.
Like everyone who was familiar with him on television, I was shocked at the sudden death of Tim Russert and then surprised at the outpouring of affection for him. But I shouldn't have been surprised, I loved him and everyone who knew him and millions who didn't loved him too. He was fair, tough, passionate and ebullient.
Tom Brokaw broke the news.
My friend and colleague collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work at NBC News...
Tim loved his family, his faith, his country, politics, the Buffalo Bills, the New York Yankees, and the Washington Nationals.
Tributes pour in from people in the media, collected at MediaBistro's TV Newser.
New York Times
Tim Russert, a fixture in American homes on Sunday mornings and election nights since becoming moderator of “Meet the Press” nearly 17 years ago, died Friday after collapsing at the Washington bureau of NBC News. He was 58 and lived in Northwest Washington.
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Mr. Russert, who was also the Washington bureau chief and a senior vice president of NBC News, had just returned in the last couple of days from a trip to Italy, where his family had celebrated the recent graduation of his son, Luke, from Boston College. When stricken, he was recording voice-overs for this Sunday’s program.
With his plain-spoken explanations and hard-hitting questions, Mr. Russert played an increasingly outsize role in the news media’s coverage of politics. The elegantly simple white memo board he used on election night in 2000 to explain the deadlock in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore — “Florida, Florida, Florida,” he had scribbled in red marker — became an enduring image in the history of American television coverage of the road to the White House.
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Behind the scenes, Mr. Russert’s colleagues at NBC News soon learned that he had a gift for making the most complex political machinations understandable and compelling.
“He had a better political insight than anyone else in the room, period,” said Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, who was then an up-and-coming producer.
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He really was the best political journalist in America, not just the best television journalist in America,” said Al Hunt, the Washington executive editor of Bloomberg News and former Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal
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In the Boston Globe, Mike Barnicle said
"Tim was uniquely without a mean bone in his body," Barnicle said last night. "He had a joy about him that was nearly unmatched. At the end of the day or the end of the week, there was a part of him that would pinch himself: 'Can you believe I'm allowed to do this show?' "
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Russert was shaped by his own father, known as "Big Russ," and by his childhood in Buffalo. The city remained his emotional touchstone for his entire life. "He's better able than anybody I know to live in two worlds," Brokaw told the Globe in 1997. "He has a house in a tony neighborhood in Washington, and his heart's in Buffalo." Byron Brown, the mayor of Buffalo, yesterday ordered all flags at city buildings lowered to half-staff in Russert's honor.
Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post
Russert wore many hats -- onetime Democratic operative, Washington insider, NBC bureau chief, MSNBC commentator, sports fanatic, committed Roman Catholic, biographer of his father, dubbed "Big Russ" -- but his greatest legacy was his sustained style of interrogation. Grounded in prodigious research, Russert would press his guests on past statements and contradictions, often for a full hour, spawning legions of imitators.
Friends were stunned by the news. "I just loved him," said Bob Schieffer, host of CBS's "Face the Nation." "When I scooped old Tim, I felt like I'd hit a home run off the best pitcher in the league."
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Despite his eventual wealth and house on Nantucket, Russert never seemed to forget the summers he spent emptying pails of spoiled food into a garbage truck. His patter was filled with average-Joe lingo and constant references to his beloved the Buffalo Bills. Russert viewed himself as a translator who made politics accessible to the average voter.
Russert wrote two best-selling books, "Big Russ & Me" and "Wisdom of Our Fathers," which brought fame to his working-class dad and enshrined Russert's reputation as a man of modest western New York roots.
Joe Klein in Time
Back when he was just starting in television — and ever since but particularly back then — Tim Russert was astounded by the joys of the job. Early on, he helped arrange an interview with the Pope for the Today Show — and Tim did it up right: He brought along red NBC News baseball caps for the Cardinals and a white one for the Holy Father. "He put it on!" Tim told me when he came home. "We have pictures!" Then he said, more quietly, "But, you know, it was really something being in his presence. You felt something holy. It was almost as if the air was different." And that was Tim — exuberant, irreverent, brilliant and devout, a thrilling jolt of humanity.
He will be missed. Condolences to all his family and friends
That terrific headlne comes from an article by Alex Beam in the Boston Globe
- Grave schism on the death beat.
Seems as if there are rival organizations of newspaper obituarists with the first one, the International Association of Obituarists, the brain child of a "good ol' Texas gal"" who prefers oddball venues and oddball guests. The upstart second group wants the conferences to be a little more 'boring'.
A rival obituarists guild, the Society of Professional Obituary Writers, sprang up to supplant Gilbert's IAO. ... "The IAO isn't really representative of what we are as a profession," says Cleveland Plain Dealer obituarist Alana Baranick, an interim board member of SPOW. "We have outgrown them. We will still enjoy going to their conference because they're so much fun."
Just how fun can be seen with this report from the 2004 conference in New Mexico, Reagan's Dead and He'll Be Deader.
In the closing minutes of the 6th Great Obituary Writers' International Conference (their title), one of the events that obituarists hate the most burst in on them. Just as Tim Bullamore, a Bath city councillor who writes for Fleet Street newspapers and the British Medical Journal, began an elaborate slide show on the glories of his city, where the conference takes place next year, someone rushed in and shouted: "Reagan's died!"
Gasps of astonishment, cries of surprise, uproar and confusion. Several delegates sprinted to the hotel lobby's public call boxes or grabbed cellphones. The bringer of the news was surrounded and peppered with questions. Bullamore's presentation was ruined. Finally, he grabbed the microphone and bellowed: "Reagan's dead and he'll be deader. Let's go on with the show."
He resumed his slides, but it wasn't the same. The 40th president of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan, had died inconveniently and thrust obituarists into disarray. But really, they loved it. One delegate, her eyes sparkling, gushed: "Isn't this just wild?"
I bet there's not a person over 30 who doesn't know Bo Diddley, doesn't like Bo Diddley, and isn't sad that he's gone.
Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.
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In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture.
His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.
Telegraph obituary
Had Diddley been able to copyright the hypnotic and highly distinctive rhumba-like beat that was his musical trademark he might have been able to retire many years ago as a very wealthy man, rather than having to eke out a living in his old age, playing night-clubs, as his health deteriorated.
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It was a mark of his standing as one of the founding fathers of pop music that he would become one of the first performers to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1987.
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For all his success, Diddley always maintained that like so many artists of his generation he had never received his just desserts, receiving only a flat fee for his early recordings and no royalty payments on sales. "I am owed. I've never got paid," he said. "A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun."
"Bo Diddley is one of the seminal American guitarists and an architect of the rock 'n' roll sound," said Terry Stewart, president and chief executive of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. "His unique guitar work, indelible rhythms, inventive songwriting, and larger-than-life personality make him an immortal author of the American songbook."
Singer Mick Jagger has paid tribute to singer-guitarist Bo Diddley as an "enormous force in music" and "a big influence on the Rolling Stones".
Jagger said the US rock 'n' roll pioneer, who has died at the age of 79, was "a wonderful, original musician".
Jagger, whose band recorded cover versions of Mona and Crackin' Up, said: "He was very generous to us in our early years and we learned a lot from him.
"We will never see his like again."
Looking quite sprightly at 100, Albert Hoffman, "the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known" died at 102.
Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.
He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.
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Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books.
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But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”
Hofmann was disappointed when his discovery was removed from commercial distribution. He remained convinced that the drug had the potential to counter the psychological problems induced by "materialism, alienation from nature through industrialisation and increasing urbanisation, lack of satisfaction in professional employment in a mechanised, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in wealthy, saturated society, and lack of a religious, nurturing, and meaningful philosophical foundation of life".
Father of LSD takes final trip
R.I.P.
On Marketplace radio yesterday, reporter Curt Nickish has an interesting piece about online obituaries called Another nail in newspapers' coffin about a new site now in beta called Tributes where people can place online obituaries, "keeping the memories alive".
When Jeff Taylor who started Monster.com, he moved help wanted ads from newspapers to the web.
Now he's trying to do the same thing with obituaries after not doing so well with Eons, a website targeted to those over 50.
In browsing through the obit section on Eons, looking for someone to interview, he came across the obituary I had posted about my mother with links to the three blog posts I had done about her.
That is how I came to be interviewed and how my mother's photo is now posted on Marketplace radio. Interestingly it nothing to do with the work I'm doing or the book I'm writing.
You can hear my lovely voice, part of the interview here.
Christopher Buckley's Eulogy for My Father
One October day in 1997, I arrived from Washington in Stamford for a long-planned overnight sail. As the train pulled into the station, I looked out and saw people hanging onto lampposts at 90-degree angles, trying not to be blown away by the northeast gale that was raging. Indeed, it resembled a scene from The Wizard of Oz. When the train doors opened, I was blown back into the carriage by the 50-mile-an-hour wind. I managed to crawl out onto the platform, practically on all fours, whereupon my father greeted me with a chipper, “We’ll have a brisk sail.”
I looked up at him incredulously and said, “We’re going out in this?”
Indeed we did go out in it. We always went out in it. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother, shrieking at him as the water broke over the cockpit and the boat pitched furiously in boiling seas, “Bill — Bill! Why are you trying to kill us?”
Born with the rare disorder of tyrosinemia which prevents the body from breaking down an amino acid,
Laura Linehan received a new liver when she was only 2. Ten years later, she learned that she had hepatitis C, infected by the blood transfusion during transplant surgery. She needed another liver.
She moved from Melrose, Massachusetts to Jacksonville, Florida where she would have a better chance on the regional waiting list.
I keep telling myself I'm not going to give up," Miss Linehan wrote on her website. "This is my chance to live and that's why I am down in Florida, so that I can have a third chance at life."
A match was found Friday, but she had weakened during the wait. When doctors began operating, they found she would not survive transplant surgery, and she died that evening in the Mayo Clinic. Miss Linehan was 20.
Using the example of her own life, Miss Linehan had tried to raise awareness about the need for more organ donors, and the crucial role expediency plays in transplants. In Miss Linehan's case, her mother said, a day or two sooner might have made a difference.
"She had a job to do, and she finished it a littler earlier," Ann Linehan said. "She set her mind to it and now she's done, her time is through. I just like to think that she's in a better place, and she's no longer suffering, because she suffered terribly."
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"She was the most courageous person I've ever known, read about, or encountered. She was incredibly brave; she was resilient. It seemed as though anything that could go wrong, went wrong, and she would just come back for more. And she was never discouraged."
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"She had a lot of good years," her mother said of her daughter's childhood and youth. "I could not be more proud of her if she was a Harvard graduate than I am with her fight with liver disease. She worked so hard to overcome, she worked so hard to get awareness out there of the need for liver donors. I just want people to know that she was extremely successful. She certainly brought a community together - Melrose will never be the same."
Laura Linehan, at 20, used illness to boost organ donation.
Laura's website is provided by Caring Bridge which offers free personalized websites that support and connect loved ones during critical illness, treatment and recovery.
Terry Teachout on the William F Buckley memorial service held yesterday at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Home from the Sea
All I can tell you was that today’s service seemed as splendid as it could possibly have been. The cathedral was full of mourners, the choir loft full of singers, and the music was mostly appropriate to the occasion. Bill was a serious amateur musician who loved Bach above all things–he actually performed the F Minor Harpsichord Concerto in public on more than one occasion–so the organist played “Sheep May Safely Graze” and the slow movement of the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C Major. No less suitable were the sung portions of the Mass, drawn from Victoria’s sweetly austere Missa “O magnum mysterium,” and the closing hymn, the noble tune from Gustav Holst’s The Planets to which the following words were later set: I vow to thee, my country–all earthly things above–/Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love.
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Bill was the least weltschmerzy person imaginable. Henry Kissinger, who eulogized him this morning, alluded to that side of Bill’s personality when he remarked that Bill “was vouchsafed a little miracle: to enjoy so much what was compelled by inner necessity.” I couldn’t have put it better.
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Christopher Buckley, Bill’s son, followed Henry Kissinger, and gave just the sort of eulogy I’d expected from him, funny and light-fingered, putting much-needed smiles on our faces. Only at the end did he sound a darker note, quoting the lines from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” that he chose as the epitaph for a man who loved sailing as much as he loved Bach: Here he lies where he long’d to be;/Home is the sailor, home from the sea,/And the hunter home from the hill.
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Somehow you never imagine outliving the people who show you through the doors that lead to the rest of your life
Killing Fields photographer, Dith Pran, dies at 65 of pancreatic cancer.
The New York Times obit
Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday.
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Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.
He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.
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Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.
In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.
He escaped, and was reunited with his wife and family in San Francisco. In 1980 he became a photographer at the New York Times and six years later became a U.S. citizen beside his wife.
Along with the above photographs, The Times has a wonderful 6 minute multimedia piece called The Last Word: Dith Pran combining clips from the Killing Fields, interviews with Pran and Schanberg and photographs that tells his extraordinary life story.
"I promised myself that if I survived, I wouldn't stop talking about the killing fields..My people are suffering and this is their story.
From the London Telegraph obit
"I am a one-person crusade," he once said. "I must speak for those who did not survive and for those who still suffer… Like one of my heroes, Elie Wiesel, who alerts the world to the horrors of the Jewish holocaust, I try to awaken the world to the holocaust of Cambodia, for all tragedies have universal implications."
In his journal while imprisoned, Pran wrote
The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angka are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive.
He survived and his words, his actions and his photos live on.
Visionary science fiction writer Arthur Clarke has died at 90 in his home in Sri Lanka.
Associated Press obituary by Ravi Nessman
Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.
He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.
He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.
Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
New York Times obituary by Gerald Jonas
the formative event of his childhood was his discovery, at age 13 — the year his father died — of a copy of “Astounding Stories of Super-Science,” then the leading American science fiction magazine. He found its mix of boyish adventure and far-out (sometimes bogus) science intoxicating.
While still in school, Mr. Clarke joined the newly formed British Interplanetary Society, a small band of sci-fi enthusiasts who held the controversial view that space travel was not only possible but could be achieved in the not-so-distant future
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All told, he wrote or collaborated on close to 100 books, some of which, like “Childhood’s End,” have been in print continuously. His works have been translated into some 40 languages, and worldwide sales have been estimated at more than $25 million.
In 1962 he suffered a severe attack of poliomyelitis. His apparently complete recovery was marked by a return to top form at his favorite sport, table tennis. But in 1984 he developed post-polio syndrome, a progressive condition characterized by muscle weakness and extreme fatigue. He spent the last years of his life in a wheelchair.
Among his legacies are Clarke’s Three Laws, provocative observations on science, science fiction and society that were published in his “Profiles of the Future” (1962):
¶“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
¶“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
¶“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
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Mr. Clarke’s reputation as a prophet of the space age rests on more than a few accurate predictions. His visions helped bring about the future he longed to see.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit remembers Clarke.
I nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, but Yasser Arafat got it instead. I think it's pretty clear that Clarke would have been a better choice . . . .
Marvin Wald died a few days ago in California at the age of 90. He's not a famous writer but he gave us one of the most famous lines in American popular culture: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."
Ave atque vale This has been one of them from Mark Steyn
I've written Legacy Matters for several years now and I've never seen so many encomiums following a death of a great figure as I have read following the death of William F. Buckley.
The New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin, Sesquipedalian Spark of Right, tells the story of his remarkable life and achievements.
Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964 and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
President George W. Bush said Wednesday that Mr. Buckley “brought conservative thought into the political mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America’s victory in the Cold War.”
In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan
You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.
“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”
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“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”
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At the age of 50, Mr. Buckley crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his sailboat and became a novelist. Eleven of his novels are spy tales starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and beds the Queen of England in the first book.
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Mr. Buckley’s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would do if he won, he answered, “Demand a recount.” He got 13.4 percent of the vote.
John Tierney on A Giant of Conservatism
Simply Superlative by George Nash focuses on his enormous productivity.
During his nearly 60 years in the public eye, William F. Buckley Jr. published 55 books (both fiction and nonfiction); dozens of book reviews; at least 56 introductions, prefaces, and forewords to other peoples’ books; more than 225 obituary essays; more than 800 editorials, articles, and remarks in National Review; several hundred articles in periodicals other than National Review; and approximately 5,600 newspaper columns. He gave hundreds of lectures around the world, hosted 1,429 separate Firing Line shows, and may well have composed more letters than any American who has ever lived.
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William F. Buckley Jr. was arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century. For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure. He changed minds, he changed lives, and he helped to change the direction of American politics.
But it is the personal memories that are the most telling of his incredible generosity of spirit. Nyron Magnet writes The Unbought Grace of Life
his whole being provided an answer to that ultimate question, How then should we live?
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I saw his character become ever more clearly the unmistakable, irreplaceable Buckley: witty, cultivated, playful, urbane, gracious, brave, zestful, life-affirming, tireless, and gallant—the incarnation of grace. He taught many not only how to think but also how to be.
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He did all this with singular flair and joie de vivre. Moreover, he did it with a welcoming spirit which earned the gratitude of those whose lives he touched.
While at college, David Brooks wrote a smart-aleck parody of WFB's book Overdrive and when Buckley came to the University of Chicago to deliver a lecture, he said
“David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.”
That was the big break of my professional life.
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Buckley’s greatest talent was friendship. The historian George Nash once postulated that he wrote more personal letters than any other American, and that is entirely believable. He showered affection on his friends, and he had an endless stream of them, old and young.
Peggy Noonan writes May We Not Lose His Kind.
Buckley was a one-man refutation of Hollywood's idea of a conservative.... Bill Buckley's persona, as the first famous conservative of the modern media age, said no to all that. Conservatives are brilliant, capacious, full of delight at the world and full of mischief, too. That's what he was. He upended old clichés.
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With the loss of Bill Buckley we are, as a nation, losing not only a great man. When Jackie Onassis died, a friend of mine who knew her called me and said, with such woe, "Oh, we are losing her kind." He meant the elegant, the cultivated, the refined. I thought of this with Bill's passing, that we are losing his kind--people who were deeply, broadly educated in great universities when they taught deeply and broadly, who held deep views of life and the world and art and all the things that make life more delicious and more meaningful.
Larry Perelman, American born son of Russian Jewish refugees when 18 wrote to Buckley to thank him for emboldening Soviet Jews to come to this great nation and asked for the opportunity to express his gratitude by playing for him. Fourteen years later, he had The Last Supper with WFB on the last night of his life
it was just like any other Buckley dinner — i.e., it started with cocktails and ended with cognac.
He knew well that he was the most important person in my life after the two people who had actually given me life. I will cherish hundreds of memories of his boundless acts of generosity, which changed my life forever.
Christina Galbraith, daughter of Evan Galbraith, WFB's best friend, writes in Ember
He was a truly kind man, genuinely caring to anyone in his company. His kindness was not for show. It was discreet. He drove an hour every Sunday to take his house staff to Mass in Spanish; he opened his home to practicing musicians and supported innumerable young scholars.
Ed Capano, former publisher of the National Review, tells of his perfect charity
He practiced what I consider perfect charity: doing things for others that no one knew about. The Vietnam vet blinded in action who wrote to Bill asking if NR came out in Braille. NR didn't so Bill did the next best thing, he helped the vet get some of his eyesight restored by flying him to N.Y. and having a personal friend who happened to be one of the best ophthalmologists in N.Y. examine him and then successfully operate on him. Oh, and the vet married the nurse who took care of him. Or the time at a cover conference when I told him that a house I liked just came on the market and he asked me if I was going to buy it. I sheepishly told him that I couldn't afford the down payment. A few days later his secretary brought me a personal check from Bill for the down payment with a promissory note to pay him back whenever.
"The Sacred Elixir of Life" and Facing Death
Bill was philosophical — or better, religious — about death. His gleaming eyes, when I last saw him, seemed, at times, to look beyond you; it reminded me of what Robert E. Lee said of his own gaze in his last years: “My interest in Time and its concerns is daily fading away, and I am trying to keep my eyes and thoughts fixed on those eternal shores to which I am fast hastening.” Bill knew that he, too, was hastening towards those shores, as, of course, are we all. Not for him the megalomaniac egotism of Stalin, preposterously trying to bargain with the creator he had denied. Bill thought deeply about death; how else could he have achieved such a surpassing mastery of the obituary notice, that form which, in his hands, was not only a minor art, but also a means of understanding the value of life, even though it is lived in the shadow of death?
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Bill taught us much about what Auchincloss called “the sacred elixir of life.” In the last lines of his elegy of his wife, he taught us, too, something about how to die. He spoke then of the condolence he received from “a confirmed nonbeliever,” who for once would have liked to be mistaken, and hoped that, “for you, this is not goodbye, but hasta luego.” Bill said: “No alternative thought would make continuing in life, for me, tolerable.”
Charlie Rose's moving appreciation of William Buckley who talks about growing older and facing death.
A longer Rose tribute here where he realizes, "There is not always a tomorrow."
Andrew Malcolm at the LA Times gives us a private memory of WFB
And, Buckley recounted, instead of the outside scenery, he ended up that night in the dark cockpit watching instead his dying friend in admiration, still excited, still himself, exulting at the world's beauty as he came down slowly for a landing at the end of a long trip.
Then, Buckley looked at me and took a sip of his drink. "I hope at the end," he said, "I come in for my last landing the same way."
And so he did, after a last supper that started with cocktails and ended with cognac, he went to his desk to write and there he was found the next morning, that great generous spirit gone.
Five months after disappearing while flying over the Nevada desert, Steve Fossett was declared dead by a Chicago court.
Dozens of planes and helicopters spent more than a month searching 20,000 square miles of the western Nevada mountains, one of the most remote and uninhabited regions of the US.
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Throughout his life Mr Fosset had set more than 90 aviation records in balloons, fixed-wing aircraft, gliders and airships and 23 sailing records. Some 60 still stand.
On his sixth attempt, in 2002, he became the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon - in one unsuccessful bid he plunged five miles into the sea off Australia.
Three years later made the first solo, non-stop, non-refuelled flight around the globe in the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer.
He also swam the English Channel, completed the Ironman Triathlon and the Iditarod dog sled race and climbed the Matterhorn in Switzerland and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Everest, however, eluded him.
Mr Fossett, who earned his fortune as a financial trader, broke the round-the-world sailing record by six days in 2004 and even set world records for cross-country skiing.
The Telegraph obituary
Steve Fossett, who has been declared dead aged 63, made his fortune on the Chicago futures exchange and embarked on a dogged campaign to break more world records than any other sportsman in history; he set 116 records in hot air balloons, sailing boats, gliders and powered aircraft, getting into numerous scrapes and surviving several brushes with death.
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He was known in Britain for his friendship with Sir Richard Branson, an erstwhile rival balloonist who became a co-sponsor.
Branson once described Fossett as "a loner: half-Forrest Gump, half android" and suggested that he was not so much interested in sport for its own sake as in testing the limits of his own endurance: "If there's an ocean to swim, he'll choose Christmas Day and it must be snowing and, if possible, the only day in the last decade when the channel ices over," Branson observed. "That's Steve for you."
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At some point in his thirties Fossett typed out a list of his lifetime sporting goals. These included swimming the English Channel, climbing the highest mountains on six continents, establishing eight world records in sailing, and flying non-stop around the world in a balloon. Once his business was firmly established he set out to tick items off the list. He achieved them all - and more. He became a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Explorers' Club, and in 2002 won the Gold Medal of the Fédération Aeronautique Internationale.
An unbelievable life indeed.
The London Telegraph Charles Fawcett
Charles Fawcett, who died in London on February 3 aged 92, was a film maker and adventurer of great and generous passions that embraced Afghan freedom fighters and the much-married film actress Hedy Lamarr.
His unlikely - some would say unbelievable - life was informed by an impulse to stand up for the underdog mixed with a thirst for glamour and adventure. Fawcett charmed everyone he met with tales of swashbuckling intrigue and good deeds.
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In Paris Fawcett also took part in the rescue of a group of British prisoners-of-war who had been placed under French guard in a hospital ward by the Germans. By impersonating a German ambulance crew, Fawcett and a comrade marched in at 4am and ordered the French nurses to usher the PoWs out into the yard. "Gentlemen," he announced as he drove them away, "consider yourself liberated."
"You're a Yank," said a British voice.
"Never," came Fawcett's lilting southern burr, "confuse a Virginian with a Yankee."
Roy Scheider conveyed "an accelerated metabolism" in Jaws, Klute, The French Connection and All That Jazz.
Who knew he was a history major that planned on going to law school and served three years in the United States Air Force before he turned to acting?
For several years he suffered from multiple myeloma and died of complications from a staph infection at 75.
At the time of his death, Mr. Scheider was involved in a project to build a film studio in Florence, Italy, for a series about the history of the Renaissance.
Ann Althouse found the video Bye, bye my life good-bye where Scheider plays Joe Gideon in All That Jazz.
How surpassingly strange for his widow and family to have this video so widely available.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles, dead at 91.
From the Telegraph obituary
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who died on Tuesday, probably aged 91, had a profound influence on the Beatles' late career and repackaged ancient Hindu methods of transcendental meditation; TM, as it was known, was aimed at enabling western disciples to achieve a blissful oneness with the infinite in the still depths of the self - at the cost of minimum inconvenience.
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The Maharishi pursued his mission in India until 1958, when he conceived "the idea of the regeneration of the whole world through meditation". If one per cent of the world's community practised it, he reasoned, the flow of good vibrations would overwhelm mankind's natural urge to violence.
His claim that it was not necessary to pursue a life of monastic asceticism to attain enlightenment, and that, through TM, practitioners could enjoy "the positive experience of Heavenly Bliss" during their lifetimes, proved immediately attractive to westerners. In 1959 the Maharishi established a base in Hollywood, where he founded the Spiritual Regeneration Movement and set about marketing TM worldwide as the "Science of Creative Intelligence"
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Early on in his mission the Maharishi began to show messianic tendencies, dismissing as obsolete virtually every other means of developing self-awareness and claiming that all the wisdom of the ages was distilled in TM. During the 1970s he came up with yogic flying, the ultimate transcendental bliss that causes men and women to levitate.
Every so often, we get a glimpse of someone who shows us how great and good a human being can be. Sir Edmund Hillary, the beekeeper and the first man to reach the summit of Mt Everest along with his Sherpa guide Norgay Tenzing was such a man. His life is a model of inspiration for accomplishment and humility.
Sir Edmund Hillary, who died late yesterday aged 88, made his name as the first conqueror (with Norgay Tenzing) of Everest; just as impressive, though, was the use he made of his renown over the remainder of his life.
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Hillary developed a deep admiration for the Sherpa people, and through the Himalayan Trust which he established in the 1960s oversaw the building of 25 schools, two hospitals and a dozen medical clinics, as well as bridges and airfields.
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James (now Jan) Morris, who covered the expedition for The Times, wrote of Hillary working in the half-light, "huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakably assured, his energy almost demonic. He had a tremendous, bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some bright, burly diesel express pounding across America."
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Hillary remained determinedly low-key. "Having paid my respects to the highest mountain in the world," he recalled 46 years later in his autobiography View from the Summit (1999), "I had no choice but to urinate on it." Though he took Tenzing's photograph he did not bother to organise one of himself. And when he met Lowe at Camp VIII on the way down, he delivered the great news in a laconic fashion deemed too shocking for publication at that epoch: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Hillary's death at 88 calling it a "profound loss to New Zealand."
Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities. In reality, he was a colossus. He was an heroic figure who not only 'knocked off' Everest but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity.
The legendary mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist is the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived. But most of all he was a quintessential Kiwi. He was ours - from his craggy appearance and laconic style to his directness and honesty. All New Zealanders will deeply mourn his passing.
"Sir Ed's 1953 ascent of Mt Everest brought him world-wide fame. Thereafter he set out to support development for the Sherpa people of the Himalayas. His lifetime's humanitarian work there is of huge significance and lasting benefit.
New York Times
Standing atop that pinnacle in 1953 was an experience Sir Hillary would recollect many times in lectures and quiet conversations.
“The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map,” he told one interviewer. “I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.”
"We drew closer together as Tenzing brought in the slack on the rope. I continued cutting a line of steps upwards. Next moment I had moved onto a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing by space in every direction," Hillary wrote.
"Tenzing quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder. To our immense satisfaction we realized with had reached the top of the world."
Before Norgay's death in 1986, Hillary consistently refused to confirm he was first, saying he and the Sherpa had climbed as a team to the top. It was a measure of his personal modesty, and of his commitment to his colleagues.
London Times
From this moment of glory, Hillary’s career opened out into a lifetime of adventure and of widening interest. His own laconic summary of his active life as merely a “constant battle against boredom" gave part of the picture and was typical of his innate modesty and of his dislike of cant.
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Hillary’s achievement was crowned not only by a knighthood and by much public acclaim, by an exceptionally happy marriage to Louise Mary Rose of Auckland. They had a son and two daughters. Lady Hillary was an accomplished violinist and a woman of great vitality and goodness. Her death in 1975 in an aeroplane accident with their younger daughter was a tragedy that hit her husband very hard.
He is survived by his second wife, June Mulgrew, whom he married in 1990, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, a fellow adventurer who died in a passenger plane crash over Antartica.
New Zealand news We will not see his kind again
He died peacefully when his heart gave out.
"He retained his sense of humour right to the end. He was cheerful and joking...I suspect he knew his time was coming to an end," his friend Tom Scott says.
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A practical man, he knew only too well that death was not too far away.
In 2002 he said: "I don't think it particularly frightens me. I have had a long haul...I have had a marvellous life...I have had two wonderful wives...you can't do better than that...I have a very good life, an exciting one, many good adventures."
When a former CIA spy died Monday in Havana where he fled after exposing the names of U.S. intelligence operatives, one obituary writer is calling him what he was.
The London Telegraph has more on the man who died of peritonitis.
Former colleagues at the CIA claimed that Agee had been forced to resign from the agency in 1969 after complaints about his heavy drinking, poor financial management and attempts to proposition wives of American diplomats. They further alleged that Agee had become a KGB spy after being seduced by a Russian agent, and that he had effectively defected because he did not know how to extricate himself from his personal problems.
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In 1992 a high-ranking Cuban defector accused Agee of receiving up to $1 million in payments from the Cuban intelligence service; and in 1999 Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB librarian who had secretly copied thousands of files and then donated them to British intelligence, gave further details of his relationship with Communist agents
Army Major Andrew Olmstead, a veteran blogger, was a soldier his entire life, so when ordered to Iraq to teach members of the Iraqi Army, he went; but not before entrusting a just in case post to a friend.
I am leaving this message for you because it appears I must leave sooner than I intended. I would have preferred to say this in person, but since I cannot, let me say it here."
"Only the dead have seen the end of war."
Plato*
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Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer. The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who have read my writings haven't agreed with them.
Olmstead was killed in an ambush by insurgents.
Godspeed to a brave man who walked the walk and blogged about it.
Many bloggers weigh in with their appreciation for his character and his writings and condolences to his family here.
R.I.P.
George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman, Flashman being the gloriously politically incorrect rogue hero who delighted millions, died last week.
London Telegraph obituary
Although some critics saw the series as a satire on Victorian morality, its continued popular success was due to Fraser’s ability to make learning history enjoyable.
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In 1943 he joined the Border Regiment and served as an infantryman in North Africa and with the "Forgotten" Fourteenth Army in Burma. He was eventually commissioned in the Gordon Highlanders. Some of his finest writing is contained in his graphic recollections of his Burma service, Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), in which the affectionate portrait of his Cumbrian comrades demonstrated his keen eye for character and acute ear for dialogue.
John Keegan, in The Sunday Telegraph, justly called it "one of the great personal memoirs of World War II".
The Daily Mail published his "last testament" - How Britain has destroyed itself.
Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.
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That PC should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country's decline.
No generation has seen their country so altered, so turned upside down, as children like me born in the 20 years between the two world wars. In our adult lives Britain's entire national spirit, its philosophy, values and standards, have changed beyond belief.
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I know that some things are wonderfully better than they used to be: the new miracles of surgery, public attitudes to the disabled, the health and well-being of children, intelligent concern for the environment, the massive strides in science and technology.
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But much has deteriorated. The United Kingdom has begun to look more like a Third World country, shabby, littered, ugly, run down, without purpose or direction, misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic.
My generation has seen the decay of ordinary morality, standards of decency, sportsmanship, politeness, respect for the law, family values, politics and education and religion, the very character of the British.
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I had not realised how offensive the plain truth can be to the politically correct, how enraged they can be by its mere expression, and how deeply they detest the values and standards respected 50 years ago and which dinosaurs like me still believe in, God help us.
But the readers' reactions to the book were the exact opposite of critical opinion. I have never received such wholehearted and generous support.
I have not posted about Benazir Bhutto because I did not want to speak ill of the dead, especially as she was killed in such an awful fashion.
David Warren who knew her writes what I think is the best summation of the Bhutto legacy.
About not speaking ill of the dead, Flemming Rose says the Chechan historian Avtorkhanov would have none of it when Stalin died.
This is the obituary he penned in 1953.
Stalin has finally died. His wolfish heart has stopped beating, his diabolical mind has stopped operating. A man has passed away who had nothing human about him what so ever, no soul, no love, no compassion. A professionel tormentor’s cold hearted brutality and a bestial instinct for survival put him closer to the species of beasts than to mankind.
A man has passed away who immortalized himself through the killing of millions of human beings in the basements of the secret police, in the Siberian woods, the coalmines of Kolyma, the sands of Central Asia and the mountains of the Caucasus.
A man has passed away who created, consolidated and expanded the most reactionary and unprecedented system of state slavery.
A man has passed away who in his own image raised legions of greedy tormentors, that grabbed the fatherless throne.
A man has passed away who created and raised a first class army of international experts on rebellion, revolution and war who were ready to pull mankind into a new disaster for the ideas behind the system created by the dead demigod.
A man has passed away who for thirty years withou any punishment had been swimming in a sea of blood from our fathers and brothers, and rivers of tears from our mothers and sisters.
The most damned of all damned people who ever sat foot on this earth has passed away.
He doesn’t deserve a grave!
May his memory be damned forever!
A war of destruction on his legacy! That’s the verdict of our people. And that verdict will live on with future generations.”
One of the better end-of-the-year wrap-up stories is the New York Times and its The Lives They Lived that offers small obituaries for some lesser-known lives.
From Liz Claiborne who brought "separates" to the fashion world and the retail stores where women clamored to buy them, grateful for all the individual pieces, bright colors died in the same dye lot.
To Gloria Connors who while pregnant with her to-become-famous son Jimmy, built a tennis court behind her house and went on to become his coach.
“She dealt with the guys, and, you know, my mom was 5-foot-1, but damn right she was tough. Nobody was used to the best guy out there being taught by a lady. ...It was me and her against the world.”
And Joybubbles who was a small blind boy who loved the telephone and with his perfectly pitched ears, spoke to it in its own language, becoming the first phone freak.
When he discovered that the University of Pittsburgh had the complete run of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” on tape, he went on a pilgrimage: he rented an apartment nearby and spent hours in the library listening to every episode, sometimes hugging a stuffed globe, huddled under a blanket.
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“Take care of each other, stay strong, find some time to play,” he says at the end of most recordings. “Don’t let God laugh alone.”
The era of the old-time Boston pol has ended with the death of Dapper O'Neil.
Tip O'Neill was famous for saying, All politics is local. Dapper would say All politics is personal. What you said in public was for show, what you did in private was for real. If you could make people mad or make them laugh by something you said, you got extra points. He was both crass and hilarious.
Dapper went everywhere. As Whitey says, he would attend the opening of an envelope. Being no friends with the Bulgers neither the Senate President, Billy Bulger or his gangster brother Whitey who's still on the lam and the FBI's Most Wanted list, Dapper for years never went to Billy Bulger's Saint Patrick's day breakfast in Southie, "Who wants to go someplace where you can't piss for four hours." Whitey has videos from one time when he did attend.
Howie Carr wrote O'Neil was principal of the old school
Dapper O’Neil never made a dime in politics. Name me another modern pol in Boston you can say that about.
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Talk about a throwback - Dapper didn’t have a checking account. He paid cash for everything except his car (with the “Liberals: An American Cancer” bumper sticker).
Boston Globe, obit an era in Boston politics ends
Often the top vote-getter in City Council races, Mr. O'Neil became one of the more revered politicians in the city's history with his attentiveness to the smallest needs of constituents, even as his caustic statements about minorities, women, gays, and lesbians made him one of the most reviled.
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"The great irony of Dapper was his kindness and generosity to so many people," said Councilor Stephen J. Murphy, a longtime friend of Mr. O'Neil's. "At the same time, he fearlessly and deliberately violated the rules of political correctness. He'd say, 'Watch me get them going.' "
Dapper learned from a master, James Michael Curley whose life and career were fictionalized in Edwin O' Connor's book, The Last Hurrah and later made into a movie by John Ford in 1958, starring Spencer Tracy, but I'm not saying Dapper was "Ditto" in the movie.
(Long before there were Dittoheads, there was Ditto who aped every move and attitude of his beloved mayor.)
"The Last Hurrah" (Edwin O'Connor)
As former mayor Ray Flynn said,
That's what politics is supposed to be about, helping people. He learned it from Curley, and I learned it from them.
He'd go to four or five wakes a night," Flynn said. "When he'd come back from the wakes, I'd see him the next morning with little pieces of paper in his pocket. We'd go to breakfast at Amrhein's, and he'd pull out a little note with a name and phone number on it, and you could hardly read it."
Mr. O'Neil would often walk into Flynn's mayoral office without an appointment. "He was looking for a turkey or a ham for a poor family who had been burned out by a fire or to help some veteran friend of his who got laid off from work,"
A lot of politics was done at wakes because that's where you learned who was hurting. If you could help them, you'd have their vote and the votes of their family members for life. So maybe you cut some deals, crossed the line in a few places, to do a favor for a pal, politics was a game and a lot of fun.
For Dapper it was always about politics
He will be remembered as a throwback, a bigot, a larger-than-life character, a sexist, a champion of the little guy. He was all those things. But mostly he was a politician caught between two eras.
Boston Herald Love him or hate him, Dapper cared about Boston
Boston Maggie says
A lot of politicians come to the table with an agenda and for most that agenda is masked or hidden or worse......compromised. Dapper was never compromised. If he was helping you, he was grand. If he was on the other side of your issue.......well, he was your enemy. Anyone who is talking smack about Dapper, well that's just sour grapes.
Always a character
In 1992, O’Neil named himself “acting mayor” when then-Mayor Ray Flynn was trapped for 30 minutes in a Mattapan hospital elevator with two priests, city officials and his son.
“I am prepared to settle a lot of old scores,” O’Neil declared at the time.
In my earlier life, I grew up among Boston pols. My father and my grandfather were campaign workers for the Democrat Yankee, Endicott "Chub" Peabody, after whom it was said, three Massachusetts towns were named, Peabody, Marblehead and Athol. In junior high school, I had a crush on the Massachusetts senator, Jack Kennedy and as a freshman in high school, I handed out campaign literature when he ran for President which of course was totally unnecessary in Massachusetts. Later, I married Jack Flannery who had been Chief Secretary to another Massachusetts governor, Frank Sargent who was far more beloved even if he was a Yankee Republican. Jack was a wonderful writer whether it was speeches, op eds or his column, The Pols which ran three times a week for several years in the Boston Herald. The Pols was a political soap opera, a combination of fictional character and real politicians, that became an excuse to tell a lot of great stories about Boston pols, most of them true but you couldn't use their real names because the statute of limitations was still running.
That's what I miss about politics these days, the fun and the stories.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino said Wednesday.
It's the end of an era in Boston politics with the passing of Dapper O'Neil. He was the greatest storyteller there ever was. The real question is whether all those stories are true.
Nobody had more fun or had better stories than the old Boston pols and those days are over, that time is past.
When the wrong Maine woman was declared dead in an obituary in the Bangor Daily News, Anne E. Hathaway, 92, said
It's wonderful to find out how many friends you have. I just laughed and laughed and laughed."
I went to the pearly gates and opened the door and they didn’t have any strawberry shortcake and they didn’t like the way my hair looked."
She joked that she was looking better after having her hair styled Friday.
"I look better than I did when they printed the obituary," Hathaway said. "It’s okay and I’m still here."
Growing up, every one knew who the handsome, dare-devil Evel Knievel was, so fearless was he.
"Who do you think you are -- Evel Knievel?" asked thousands of mothers around the country.
But like all of us will sooner or later, he grew older and died yesterday of pulmonary fibrosis.
A last interview in USA Today
His ravaged, 155-pound body isn't composed of original parts. He has a new liver and a replacement hip, and most recently doctors inserted a drug pump in his abdomen. It gives little reprieve from the excruciating pain in a fused spine mangled by hundreds of perilous, cringe-inducing motorcycle jumps from the 1960s and '70s.
For years he cheated death, sometimes spectacularly so. Numerous crashes cemented his legend and all but guaranteed premature infirmity. These days, in what might be his last great gamble, Evel flies down the cosmic ramp of his final jump — the leap of faith.
While he has avoided the inevitable countless times, he no longer feels invincible. In fact, the bank robber-turned-international icon sounds apprehensive. After decades of hard jumps and harder living, including bouts with alcoholism, Evel tries to bridge the psychological chasm between mortality and eternity.
At the end, his son said, Evel realized that love is everything .
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The quest to uncover value and meaning from his earthly existence has greater urgency these days. Evel takes a notepad off a chair-side table and begins to read something that sounds like a eulogy, which friends say he has written.
"I hope I have lived a life that matters … I am ready to leave my loved ones …
"My wealth, my fame will amount to naught … My grudges, frustrations, resentments and jealousies will finally disappear."
A few months later, he converted to Christianity.
Knievel told how he had refused for 68 years to convert to Christianity because he didn’t want to surrender his lifestyle of "the gold and the gambling and the booze and the women." He explained his conversion experience by saying, "All of a sudden, I just believed in Jesus Christ."
Evel Knievel, the American motorcycle stunt rider who has died aged 69, combined a considerable talent for self-promotion with a hazardous capacity for bravery; among the several world records he held was that for the most bones broken by one person, 433
Tall, blonde and nearly handsome, in the 1970s Knievel appealed to America's love of excess, and to her need to be convinced that she had not gone soft, that the pioneer spirit still thrived.
Last ride for Evel Knievel, man of steel and scars
At 27, he became co-owner of a motorcycle shop. To attract customers, he announced he would jump 12 metres over parked cars and a box of rattlesnakes and continue on past a mountain lion tethered at the other end. Before a thousand people, he did the stunt but failed to fly far enough; his bike came down on the rattlesnakes. The audience was in awe.
"Right then," he said, "I knew I could draw a big crowd by jumping over weird stuff."
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He underwent as many as 15 major operations to relieve severe trauma and repair broken bones — skull, pelvis, ribs, collarbone, shoulders and hips. "I created the character called Evel Knievel, and he sort of got away from me," he said.
Fake obituary posted on YouTube to intimidate Councillor Alan Craig who has opposed the building of Europe's largest mosque in London near the 2012 Olympic site.
Opponent of 'mega-mosque' receives chilling death threat on YouTube.
What can you say except this is appalling?
About the death, I have long hesitated, I was long before I could tell my mind; and now I know it, and can but say that I am glad. If we could have had my father, that would have been a different thing. But to keep that changeling - suffering changeling - any longer, could better none and nothing. Now he rests; it is more significant, it is more like himself. He will begin to return to us in the course of time, as he was and as we loved him.
My favourite words in literature, my favourite scene - 'O let him pass,' Kent and Lear - was played for me here in the first moment of my return.
Letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, June 1887.
HT The Sheila Variation, "O Let Him Pass".
A new blog for me, Postman's Horn posts a letter every day by authors, writers, poets and painters because
A letter can provide that sense of everyday life, a glimpse of the the trials and tribulations of another human soul; and they can underscore the humanity of writers who have become so very famous.
My condolences to Yaacov Ben Moshe on the death of his father whose remarkable In Honor of a Great Dead White Man pays tribute to his greatest hero who
even though he always knew that life can be hard and even cruel, he never lost sight of the fact that it is always wonderful and miraculous at the same time
Especially in this month of All Saints and All Souls, we pay attention to the best of those who have passed before us because
The consequence is that human solidarity, to use that term, must belong much less to the crowd of our predecessors, than to the persons of the past who have realized, in a great way, the fine natural traits of man. Those who pass up the opportunity to serve their great memory, pass up an undoubted opportunity to help themselves, to correct themselves, and to improve themselves.
Charles Murras on All Souls Day
"I viewed my mission as one to save lives. I didn't bomb Pearl Harbor.
I didn't start the war. But I was going to finish it."
Paul Tibbets Jr, pilot of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb at Hiroshima, died at his home in Columbus, Ohio at 92.
Gen. Tibbets became a national hero with the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a historical turning point of the last century. He said he had no regrets over the more than 100,000 Japanese killed and wounded at Hiroshima, and made a point of saying he slept easily at night.
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In a public television documentary, "The Men Who Brought the Dawn," that aired on the 50th anniversary of the bombings, Gen. Tibbets said the bomb "saved more lives than we took" because an alternative would have been an invasion of mainland Japan.
"It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die," he said.
If you think that the bombing of Hiroshima was a mistake I urge you to read Charles McCarry, Hiroshima and the Firebombing of Tokyo.
The man who funded the Pequot Indians in Connecticut when they wanted to build a casino died yesterday. The Pequots had gone to 35 banks and investment houses and were turned down when they turned overseas to Malay-Chinese entrepreneur who became a billionaire by developing Genting Highlands, a casino in the highlands of the Muslim country of Malaysia.
Genting Highlands, the mountaintop casino and resort complex close to Kuala Lumpur, illustrates Malaysia's grudging relationship with gambling and, some have argued, with its entire Chinese community of 7.3 million. Lim Goh Tong, its creator, was granted permission to build a casino “on a 1,700m mountain, out of sight and out of mind”, as one journalist put it, in return for helping to build a tourist infrastructure in the newly independent federation. As his gambling retreat grew and grew — becoming “the Las Vegas of Malaysia” — it became an ever-greater affront to the Muslim majority but ever-more indispensable to a government in need of money.
His bet on Indian gaming in the United States was prescient. The rest is history. Foxwoods, now the world's largest casino, takes in an estimated $1 billion in revenue each year.
Lim Goh Tong's obituary in the London Telegraph has no mention of the role he played in the United States though the London Times obit does.
"An artist of impeccable grace and beauty" read the citation for Deborah Kerr's honorary Oscar in 1994 awarded after she was nominated six times as Best Actress, never winning one.
She died at 86 after suffering many years with Parkinson's disease.
Heaven Knows Mr. Allison with Robert Mitchum
London Telegraph obituary
Kerr was the unfadingly ladylike and prototypical English rose whose red-haired, angular beauty and self-possessed femininity distinguished more than 50 films in four decades of cinema.
She made serenity dramatic; and though her poise might be ruffled at critical moments in scenes of passion (most famously exemplified by her encounter on the beach with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity in 1953), her well-bred airs and social graces made her a model of British womanhood in Hollywood.
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......her type of refined sensuality proved refreshingly attractive, since it hinted at hidden desires and forbidden feelings, giving her acting an extra edge and interest.
You can see a clip of the famous kiss on the beach on YouTube.
Ann Althouse quotes from a New York Times piece that has since disappeared in the best summary of all.
She could be virginal, ethereal, gossamer and fragile, or earthy, spicy and suggestive, and sometimes she managed to display all her skills at the same time.
What an amazing, remarkable woman, Countess Andree de Jongh obituary in the London Telegraph.
She founded and organised the Comet Escape Line, the route from Belgium through France to Spain used by hundreds of Allied airmen to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe.
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Dédée de Jongh made more than 30 double crossings and escorted 116 evaders, including more than 80 aircrew. But on the night of January 15 1943 she was sheltering at Urrugne with three RAF evaders when she was betrayed. The house was stormed and she was captured. When interrogated under torture by the Gestapo, in order to save others she admitted being the leader of Le Reseau Comète.
The Gestapo, however, refused to believe that such a young and innocent girl could be in charge of an underground movement whose compass stretched from from Belgium to Spain.
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Dédée de Jongh was sent to Mauthausen and Ravensbruck concentration camps. For two years she lived on a diet of dirty potato and turnip soup, practising her nursing skills and trying to avoid being singled out. Although she survived, she had become gravely ill and undernourished by the time she was released by the advancing Allied armies in April 1945.
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After recovering her health Dédée de Jongh went to Buckingham Palace, in 1946, to receive the George Medal — the highest civilian award for bravery available to a foreigner. After the ceremony the RAF Escaping Society gave a dinner in her honour hosted by Air Chief Marshal Sir Basil Embry. The Americans awarded her the Medal of Freedom and the French appointed her a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. The Belgians appointed her a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold and awarded her the Croix de Guerre with palm. In 1985 she was created a countess by King Baudouin.
Then she went to the Belgian Congo to work in a leper colony and from there to Ethiopia.
Her philosophy was simple.
In 2000 she recalled: "When war was declared I knew what needed to be done. There was no hesitation. We could not stop what we had to do although we knew the cost. Even if it was at the expense of our lives, we had to fight until the last breath."
David Muffett, London obit in the Telegraph
David Muffett, who has died aged 88, applied the skills he had honed when dealing with cannibals in colonial Africa to battling education ministers and teaching unions in his role as chairman of Hereford and Worcester County Council education committee.
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In 1960 he apprehended the Tigwe of Vwuip, a northern Nigerian tribal chief who had eaten the local tax collector. The Tigwe had apparently been so impressed by the man's ability to acquire money on demand that he had — understandably — decided to try to assimilate his powers.
It was not so much this particular misdemeanour that bothered Muffett; what really worried him was the fact that a UN delegation was due to visit the area, and "I wasn't about to have one of them eaten. I considered that it would be a highly retrogressive step."
via Mark Steyn
Christopher Hitchens writes a moving piece about a young boy killed in Iraq by an IED who was in part persuaded to enlist by Hitchens' own pro-war articles.
I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.?
Overwhelmed to be invited to the scattering of ashes of the man he never knew, Hitchens quotes Shakespeare from MacBeth
Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier's debt;
He only lived but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm'd
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.
This being Shakespeare, the truly emotional and understated moment follows a beat or two later, when Ross adds:
Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end.
