Tag: Memoriam

Last of the Kon-Tiki. | The Man Twice-Bombed.

“Twice he was captured and escaped, once by back-flipping over a snow bank and running off into the woods before his guards could use their weapons. A third time, surrounded by the Gestapo at a maternity hospital in Oslo where he had set up a transmitter in a chimney, he shot his way to freedom with a pistol.” Via a friend, Knut Haugland, WWII resistance fighter and last surviving member of the Kon-Tiki expedition, 1917-2010.

We may “play” Call of Duty nowadays, but this guy lived it. “He particularly objected to the word ‘heroes’ in the title. ‘I never use that word about myself or my friends,’ he told BBC4 Radio in 2003. “We just did a job.” Referring to the glider crashes and the killing of the survivors, he added: ‘Forty-one men were killed, and it could have been avoided. Because of the loss of life, you shouldn’t glorify the story.’“Update, and via several Twitterers: Also passing very recently, another unbelievable survivor of WWII: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 1916-2010. “On August 6, 1945, he was about to leave the city of Hiroshima, where he had been working, when the first bomb exploded, killing 140,000 people. Injured and reeling from the horrors around him, he fled to his home — Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west.“

Crazy. He’s like a real-life Pariah for the Atomic Age. “‘I think it is a miracle,’ he told The Times on the 60th anniversary of the bombings in 2005. ‘But having been granted this miracle it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world. For the past 60 years survivors have declared the horror of the atomic bomb, but I can see hardly any improvement in the situation.’“

Farewell, Bradlands.

Via @anildash, some sad news today: Brad Graham, one of the blogger old-school and an all-around friendly, funny guy, has apparently passed away. (1968-2010.)

I never met Brad in person, but we traded comments now and again and his sites — first, The BradLands and later Must See HTTP — could always be counted on for great pop culture commentary and sundry other quality links. Plus, he was always a very friendly and welcoming presence back in the early days, and he really helped everybody feel like they were part of a burgeoning online community. Farewell, Brad. You will be missed.

Update: The online wake is here.

Kenny wasn’t like the other kids.

“Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks, said on Monday, ‘Ken was a great guy. His personality really brought “Remote Control” to life, as well as a new style of programming for MTV. We were really flying by the seat of of our pants then, and Ken was the reason it worked.’” R.I.P. Ken Ober, 1957-2009. Well, that’s surprising — and depressing — news.

The Great Equalizer.

“That integrity shone through in the roles he played. I can’t ever remember, in all the productions he undertook, anyone having a bad word to say about him and he never had anything bad to say about anyone else either.” Sgt. Howie (and TV’s The Equalizer) finally had his appointment with the Wicker Man: R.I.P. Edward Woodward, 1930-2009.

People Who Died.

“I thought of Jim not as my doppleganger, exactly — that would have been ridiculous. But we were the same age, came from similar backgrounds (his old man was a saloon keeper; mine, a cop), and had something of the same spoiled altar boy’s worldview, and we both worshipped at the dual shrines of the Roundball and the Word.“

In Slate, editor Gerald Howard remembers the late Jim Carroll, best known as author of The Basketball Diaries and the album Catholic Boy. “Tall, slim, athletic, pale, and spectral as many ex-junkies are, Jim was a vivid presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is.“

Last of the Lions.

“Yes, we are all Americans. This is what we do. We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. And we can do it again. There is a new wave of change all around us, and if we set our compass true, we will reach our destination — not merely victory for our Party, but renewal for our nation.” — one year ago today.


Senator Ted Kennedy, 1932-2009. From the Immigration Act of 1965 to the health care reform battles of 2009, few Senators in our history have had the influence and reach of Sen. Kennedy. He was the brother that lived, and — say what you will about his personal foibles (and the assholes on the right no doubt will revel in them) — he spent a lifetime engaged in the struggle to make America a kinder, fairer, stronger, and wiser place. The Senate has lost one of its last, great liberals, and we are all the poorer for it.

That being said, “[f]or all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

That Les Paul Sound.

“‘For 10 years, I was a laugh,’ he told CNN in an interview. ‘[But I] kept pounding at them and pounding at them saying hey, here’s where it’s at. Here’s where tomorrow, this is it. You can drown out anybody with it. And you can make all these different sounds that you can’t do with a regular guitar.’” Lester William Polfuss, a.k.a. Les Paul, 1915-2009. “In 1948, after being involved in a severe car accident, he asked the doctor to set his arm permanently in a guitar-playing position.“

Some Kind of Wonderful.

“Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” John Hughes, 1950-2009.

Update: “None of the films that he made subsequently had the same kind of personal feeling to me. They were funny, yes, wildly successful, to be sure, but I recognized very little of the John I knew in them, of his youthful, urgent, unmistakable vulnerability. It was like his heart had closed, or at least was no longer open for public view. A darker spin can be gleaned from the words John put into the mouth of Allison in ‘The Breakfast Club’: ‘When you grow up … your heart dies.‘” By way of Listen Missy, Molly Ringwald remembers John Hughes in the NYT. An interesting companion piece to Alison Byrne Fields’ pen pal blog entry making the rounds soon after the untimely news.