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We must honestly face the fact that the movement
“We must honestly face the fact
that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the
whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one
day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in
America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question
about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask
that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply
saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole
society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s
marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces
beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you
see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who
owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You
begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a
world that’s two-thirds water?” These are questions that must be asked.” Martin Luther King, Jr., Address to the tenth-anniversary
convention of the SCLC (1967)
Ralph Taeger, Star of the 1960s TV series 'Hondo,' Dies at 78
REX USA
by Mike Barnes
Ralph Taeger, a rugged 1960s TV
actor who starred alongside James Coburn in two adventure shows and played
Hondo Lane in a series based on the John Wayne film, has died. He was 78.
Taeger died March 11 after a
long illness at Marshall Medical Center in Placerville, Calif., where he owned
a firewood business, his family announced.
Taeger played Mike Halliday
alongside Coburn in NBC's Klondike, which was set during the Alaskan gold rush
of the 1890s and debuted in October 1960. When the series ended after 18
episodes in February 1961, the two transitioned to another NBC show that same
month, playing Korean War veterans turned beachcombers in Acapulco. (That one
was gone after just eight installments.)
More than a decade after Wayne
starred as a cavalry officer who helps a young mother fend off Apaches in the
popular Warner Bros. Western Hondo (1953), Taeger reprised the role for an ABC
series. Bowing in September 1967, it was canceled after 18 episodes.
In The Twilight Zone episode
“From Agnes — With Love,” which aired on Valentine’s Day 1964, the hunky Taeger
gets the girl that another computer technician (Wally Cox) had been trying to
date. (The computer had given Cox's nebbishy character some bad advice.)
The episode was directed by
Richard Donner, who earlier had cast Taeger as a test pilot in X-15 (1961).
Taeger also starred in such
films as Stage to Thunder Rock (1964), A House Is Not a Home (1964), The
Carpetbaggers (1964) and The Delta Factor (1970), and he appeared in the TV
series Highway Patrol, Bat Masterson, Sea Hunt, The Six Million Dollar Man and
Father Murphy.
Born in New York City as the
son of German immigrants, Taeger played minor-league baseball for the Dodgers
before a leg injury ended his hopes for an athletic career.
Survivors include his wife of
47 years, Linda, and son Richard.
Twitter: @mikebarnes4
The Swinging Sixties’ Grooviest Art Dealer: In London, Remembering Robert Fraser
by
Edward M. Gómez
LONDON — Looking back at
history, one encounters certain individuals who reflect the changing attitudes,
social values, or cultural trends of their times, while certain others seem to
define and embody them; they’re the ones who become the symbols of the spirit
of an age.
The art dealer Robert Fraser
(1937–1986) became one such emblem of a particular place at a memorably
effervescent moment; his was “Swinging London” of the 1960s, with its explosion
of sexy-goofy fashion, its soundtrack of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and
its unabashedly open expressions of sexuality. Swinging, grooving, and fueled
by pot and pills, London in the sixties was a post-imperial pop-culture hub
whose tradition-busting, style-setting forces Fraser played a large role in
setting in motion.
Known as Britain’s main
purveyor of Pop Art in both its home-grown and imported, American varieties,
his Robert Fraser Gallery became London’s — and Europe’s — unrivaled, hip-art
emporium. Around Fraser and his exhibitions orbited a vast cast of friends,
admirers and associates, including, among others, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards,
Marianne Faithfull, and Paul and Linda McCartney; Francis Bacon, Jim Dine,
Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat; the
British Pop artists Peter Blake, Jann Haworth, Clive Barker, Richard Hamilton,
and Eduardo Paolozzi; and many forward-looking collectors. A master at
assembling exhibitions, Fraser was irresponsible when it came to running his
gallery and routinely neglected to pay his artists. Often he was drunk or
drugged-up, but still he managed to function. As Dine once observed, “Robert
knew everyone in the world at one point.”
Now, Pace London, a branch of
New York’s Pace Gallery, is presenting A Strong, Sweet Smell of Incense
(through April 1), an exhibition that pays homage to Fraser and the spirit of
the gallery that bore his name during two separate periods. The first lasted
from 1962 to 1969, when it was located at 69 Duke Street, near Grosvenor
Square. Its second incarnation lasted from 1983 to 1985 at 21 Cork Street, near
the Royal Academy of Arts. It closed after Fraser’s AIDS-related death at a
time when the disease was still new.
The exhibition has been curated
by Harriet Vyner, a younger friend of Fraser’s, who wrote his biography, Groovy
Bob (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), and by the British artist Brian Clarke,
who showed his work at Fraser’s gallery and was the dealer’s close friend.
Clarke, whose works have included abstract paintings affixed or embedded with
neatly cut wooden squares or crosses, might be best known in the US for the
reproduction of one of his tableaux that appeared on the cover of Paul
McCartney’s 1982 solo album, Tug of War. (An exhibition of Clarke’s works from
1977 through 1985 is being shown concurrently at Pace London; nearby, at its
annex, his new paintings and stained-glass works are on view.)
A Strong, Sweet Smell of
Incense takes its title from a newspaper headline about a famous drug bust at
Keith Richards’s house in February 1967, during which the police reportedly
found the Rolling Stones guitarist and his guests, including Fraser, Jagger,
and others, indulging in illicit substances — and a naked Marianne Faithfull
rolled up in a rug. They arrested Fraser for possession of 24 heroin pills.
Later, after being convicted, he would spend several months in prison.
In an interview at Pace London,
Vyner explained that she had been a close friend of Fraser’s goddaughter. She
first met Fraser in the late 1970s, when he took the two young women and
Malcolm McLaren to an Adam Ant concert. Through her interaction with the art
dealer during the last years of his life, along with the many interviews with
his friends and associates she did for her book (which takes the form of an
oral-history collection of reminiscences), she acquired a deep knowledge of his
personal history. “Believe it or not, since his death, not a lot has been
written about the influence of Robert’s gallery or its legacy,” Vyner told me.
“When he died, there wasn’t even an obituary in any of the major British
newspapers.”
Robert Fraser was the son of
Lionel Fraser, a wealthy banker whose father had worked as a butler for Harry
Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges, the London department store. A
self-made man, Lionel Fraser was highly respected and, in 1945, King George VI
bestowed upon him a distinguished civilian honor. Robert, his older brother
Nicholas, and their older sister, Janet, who died in young adulthood, grew up
in a privileged setting. Their mother, Cynthia, was a devout follower of
Christian Science, that 19th century strain of religious-philosophical
kookiness that holds that illness is merely an illusion (to be cured by prayer,
not doctors). In the years before World War II, Robert’s parents traveled to
Paris, where they gallery-hopped and enjoyed seeing works by such modern
artists as Paul Cézanne, Georges Rouault, Chaim Soutine, Pablo Picasso, and
Paul Klee.
As youngsters, Nicholas and
Robert attended a Christian Science school. Both went on to Eton, the legendary
prep school whose graduates regularly became captains of British industry and
government grandees. In Vyner’s book, the American industrialist and art
collector J. Paul Getty, who became one of Robert’s friends and gallery
customers, observes, “Robert transcended class, very much in a Sixties way. But
somehow he got sent to Eton, which is what formed him to a great extent. […]
It’s still one of the best places to learn arrogance.”
Nicholas Fraser explained to
Vyner that it was his parents’ “strong Puritan ethic” and “strict humorless
attitude to life” that shaped his younger brother more than their belief in
Christian Science and “gave him something to kick against.” But as many of the
speakers in Groovy Bob point out, Robert both embraced tradition and rejected
it. At Eton, he hated sports and loved learning about art. He also became fully
aware of his homosexuality.
After graduating from Eton,
Robert headed off to Uganda, where, in the waning days of empire, he served in
the King’s African Rifles. There, he made time for partying with colonial
administrators and even, it was later rumored, a brief fling with his sergeant
major, a skilled boxer named Idi Amin. After his Africa stint, Fraser made his
way to the United States, where he spent a few years in New York and Los
Angeles meeting artists and other key art world figures. He became friends with
such artists as Dine, Dennis Hopper, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. In
Groovy Bob, the art historian John Richardson, who also became Fraser’s friend,
remembers meeting him around 1960 and says, “My impression of him was [of
someone] bright, attractive, rather glamorous, not totally to be trusted, on
the make, very elegant, fun to be with, a bit secretive.”
Returning to England in 1962,
at the age of 25, he opened his gallery with a show of drawings by the French
modernist Jean Dubuffet, whose graffiti-inspired images shook up London’s staid
art scene. During a roller coaster ride of parties, exhibitions, sexcapades and
drugfests that unfolded throughout that decade, Fraser presented the work of
such artists as Richard Lindner, Henri Michaux, Bacon, Blake, Hamilton, Robert
Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Paolozzi, Patrick Caulfield, Bruce Conner, Hans
Bellmer, Bridget Riley, Haworth, Warhol, Dine, and many others.
In a dialog with Vyner that
appears in the current exhibition’s catalog, Clarke says the show tries to
capture “the buzz that Robert had.” He notes, “To many people he was grand, to
others groovy. Certainly, he had one foot in the 1960s, but also one foot very
much back in the 1950s.” Clarke adds that, “[d]espite all his wildness,” Fraser
“was drawn to that more formal era,” even if he played a big part in ushering
in a subsequent decade whose attitudes and aspirations seemed to obliterate those
that had come before them.
In late 1966, on the occasion
of a show of Dine’s works, Fraser’s gallery was served a summons under an
antiquated vagrancy law that prohibited the public display of “obscene”
material. As a statement issued by the gallery at that time indicated, 21 of
Dine’s drawings, “some of them showing various parts of the human body, were
seized by the police,” along with copies of the exhibition’s catalog. A court
later ruled the exhibition, but not the confiscated artworks, to have been
indecent and charged Fraser a fine. Referring to the British government’s
heavy-handedness, he sent a telegram to Dine in the U.S. It stated, “REGINA
VERSUS VAGINA. LOVE, ROBERT.”
Referring to Fraser’s lifestyle
at his home in London’s Mayfair district, the former Whitechapel Art Gallery
curator Bryan Robertson, who died in 2002, told Vyner in Groovy Bob, “[T]hey
were after Robert for drugs, quite simply.” Robertson called the Dine indecency
affair “one of those silly little vendettas that went on in the Sixties.”
In early 1967 came the drug
bust at Richards’s home, but before Fraser was convicted and sent to prison, he
art directed the famous cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band, whose unusual, three-dimensional collage concept had been devised by the
then husband-and-wife team of Hamilton and Haworth. The album’s cover image was
shot by the photographer Michael Cooper. Later that year, when the art dealer
was in jail, Cooper sent him an encouraging telegram. It said, in part, “MY DEAR
ROBERT ALL IS NOT BLACK […] REMEMBER THEY NAILED JESUS TO THE CROSS….”
A Strong, Sweet Smell of
Incense features a recreation of Fraser’s workspace in his original gallery,
complete with his modern, steel-and-glass desk, which is surrounded by
artworks. Among others, they include Haworth’s “Cowboy” (1964), a life-size
figure made of kapok and unbleached calico; Derek Boshier’s oil-on-canvas
abstraction, “Sam Spade” (1966); Barker’s “Art Box 1” (1966), made of
chrome-plated steel, chrome-plated bronze and Vitrolite; and Blake’s “Drum
Majorette” (1959), a tailor’s dummy decorated with military medals. Other works
on view in the gallery include Blake’s hand-painted drum from the Sgt. Pepper’s
album cover; a selection of Oldenburg’s large-scale electric plugs and outlets,
made of cardboard; Paolozzi’s abstract-bronze sculptures from the late 1950s
and mid-1960s; Bacon’s oil-on-canvas “Portrait of John Edwards” (1988); and
Basquiat’s oil-on-canvas portrait, “ROB’T FRAZER” (1984).
Also on view are Hamilton’s
lithograph made from a collage of newspaper articles describing the 1967 drug
bust at Richards’ house (“Swingeing London ’67,” 1967–68) along with two
paintings in different media that the artist produced using a photo from one of
those press reports. That photo shows Fraser and Jagger in the back of a car,
handcuffed together at the wrists and holding up their hands to shield their
faces from reporters’ cameras. Hamilton’s common title for these works is both
a pun on “Swinging London” and a reference to a remark Fraser’s sentencing
judge made when he noted that the punishment he was meting out was notably
“swingeing,” meaning severe, daunting or extreme.
The exhibition also features a
large vitrine packed with photographs, documents and printed items. Among them
are letters and telegrams from artists pleading for overdue payments. Others
show how chummy Fraser was with many of his art-buying customers.
After going into a short period
of receivership, since Fraser had not paid many of his creditors, his Duke Street
gallery plowed ahead, presenting exhibitions by such artists as Barker,
Caulfield, Blake, Haworth, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In mid-1969, though,
it mounted its last show, a selection of works by a group of American Pop
artists. Fraser’s consumption of booze and drugs was still going strong, and he
had become interested in Tantric art. He left England and spent the early 1970s
in India, then returned several years later to operate as a private art dealer
and to visit New York and savor its gritty charms. In 1983, he again opened a
London gallery, which became an overseas showcase for the work of such young
New Yorkers as Haring and Basquiat
At the time of his first
gallery’s closing, Fraser had told one art critic, “There has never been any
desire on the part of the English people for new things.” In Groovy Bob, the
artist Jann Haworth says, “[W]hen he did open the second gallery, where was
everybody? He was still putting on very interesting shows, but it was almost a
non-event.” Haworth partly blames “the mood of the times,” which were then
dominated by Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism. Nevertheless, Fraser’s cutting
edge sensibility was still at work, as when, for example, he persuaded London’s
Victoria and Albert Museum to acquire works by Jamie Reid, the punk-graphics
creator who had designed the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks record-album
cover, but the ailing art dealer’s involvement in his gallery declined along
with his health.
For McLaren, who is quoted in
Vyner’s book, Fraser had always been “right in the center of it, always wearing
those ubiquitous sunglasses” and looking “spookily cool.” Perhaps, as the lost
aura the artworks, letters and documents on display in A Strong, Sweet Smell of
Incense try to evoke, and as, overall, the exhibition suggests, McLaren was
right when he added that the decade of the 1960s “was not a pragmatic era” but
rather “the exact opposite — it was a romantic era.” The Robert Fraser he knew,
he noted, had been “part of a moment in pop culture, part of a time which could
afford to have such romantic figures….” After all, by the time McLaren, who
died four years ago, made those comments, the international art world had long
since become a totally corporatized behemoth, one whose swingeing hype had
decisively doused the flames of insouciance and replaced grooviness with greed.
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Hampton Hawes - The jazz pianist that John F. Kennedy saved.
Fifty years ago, John F.
Kennedy granted a presidential pardon to jazz pianist Hampton Hawes and helped
make him a legend.
Millions of Americans found
inspiration in John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, but few responded more
enthusiastically than jazz pianist Hampton Hawes. Hawes watched the speech from
a federal prison hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was serving a 10-year
sentence on drug charges. “That’s the right cat,” he later described his
reaction to the new president. “Looks like he got some soul and might listen.”
The following day, Hawes told a
prison official that he wanted to apply for a presidential pardon and against
all odds, President Kennedy responded.
Over fifty years ago, on August
16, 1963, JFK granted executive clemency to the pianist, and thus allowed one
of the most talented jazz artists of the era to resume his career.
The Hawes pardon would be one
of Kennedy’s last executive acts. Only 98 days later, JFK was shot in Dallas.
Kennedy granted clemency to 43 people during his last year in office. Hawes
received pardon No. 42.
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Noted in passing
Brian Carman (69)
one of five guys from Santa Ana High School—the Chantays—who in the early '60s
thought they could maybe play for dances at the community center. Carman and
bandmate Bob Spickard wrote “Pipeline,” an instrumental anthem to riding the
waves and living the surfing life that became one of southern California’s most
recognizable musical exports. Carman suffered from Crohn’s disease and an
ulcerated colon; he died in Santa Ana, California on March 1, 2015.
June Fairchild (68)
former Manhattan Beach prom queen, go-go dancer, and actress who appeared in
more than a dozen films, and, for a time, was an addict and alcoholic who slept
in a cardboard box on skid row in Los Angeles. Fairchild made a memorable
appearance as a druggie who snorted Ajax soap powder in Cheech & Chong’s Up
in Smoke (1978); she also had parts in Drive, He Said, a 1971 basketball film
directed by Jack Nicholson, and Thunderbolt & Lightfoot (1974) with Clint
Eastwood and Jeff Bridges. She died of liver cancer in Los Angeles, California
on February 17, 2015.
Lesley Gore (68)
singer-songwriter who topped the charts in 1963 at age 16 with her epic song of
teenage angst, “It’s My Party,” and followed it up with the hits “Judy’s Turn
to Cry” and the feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me.” Gore was discovered by
Quincy Jones as a teenager and signed to Mercury Records; she cowrote with her
brother, Michael, the Oscar-nominated “Out Here on My Own” from the film Fame
(1980). Although a nonsmoker, she died of lung cancer in New York City on
February 16, 2015.
Sam Andrew (73)
cofounder of the band Big Brother & the Holding Company, a mainstay of the
San Francisco rock scene of the ‘60s, who played a key role in singer Janis
Joplin’s (d. 1970) early career. The band was among the first and most
successful exponents of the so-called San Francisco sound, a mix of folk,
blues, and rock influences fueled by psychedelic drugs. Andrew had a heart
attack 10 weeks ago and underwent open-heart surgery. He died in San Rafael,
California on February 12, 2015.
Gary Owens (80)
mellifluous-voiced announcer on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968–73) and a
familiar part of radio, TV, and movies for more than 60 years. Owens hosted
thousands of radio programs in his long career and appeared in more than a
dozen movies and on scores of TV shows, including Lucille Ball and Bob Hope
specials. He also voiced hundreds of animated characters, was part of dozens of
comedy albums, and wrote books. He died in Los Angeles, California on February
12, 2015.
Dallas Taylor (66)
rock drummer who liked to say that he made his first million—and his last—by
the time he was 21. Taylor was a key sideman for Crosby, Stills, Nash &
Young; he played at Woodstock, appeared on seven top-selling albums, and bought
three Ferraris. He also stabbed himself in the stomach with a butcher knife and
drank so heavily that he required a liver transplant in 1990, five years after
becoming sober. He later became an addiction counselor specializing in
interventions and in reuniting alcoholics and addicts with their families. He
died in Los Angeles, California on January 18, 2015.
Darren Hugh
Winfield (85) one of the last of the Marlboro Men, a macho cowboy whose image
in advertising from the ‘50s to the late ‘90s made filtered cigarettes more
appealing to men. Previously Marlboros were marketed to women. Winfield’s
rugged good looks made him the face of Marlboro cigarettes in magazine and TV
ads from the late ‘60s to the late ‘80s. A real-life cowboy, he was discovered
in 1968 while working on the Quarter Circle 5 Ranch in western Wyoming. He died
in Riverton, Wyoming on January 12, 2015.
Ervin Drake (95)
songwriter and lyricist whose hit songs were recorded by such stellar
performers as Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Frankie Laine. Drake wrote the
words and music for the wistful “It Was a Very Good Year” in 1961 for Bob Shane
of the Kingston Trio. Sinatra heard it on his car radio, and his recording of
it on a comeback album in 1966 hit the Top 10. The Sinatra version has remained
a staple on radio and sometimes on TV; as the soundtrack to an extended film
montage, it opened the second season of the HBO series The Sopranos in 2000.
Drake died of bladder cancer in Great Neck, New York on January 15, 2015.
Anita Ekberg (83)
Swedish-born actress and sex symbol of the ‘50s and ‘60s who was immortalized
bathing in Rome's Trevi fountain in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960).
The scene where the blonde bombshell, clad in a black dress, her arms wide
open, calls out “Marcello,” remains one of the most famous images in film
history. Ekberg never starred in a Swedish film and was often at odds with
Swedish journalists, who criticized her for leaving the country and ridiculed
her for adopting an American accent. She remained in Italy for years, appearing
in scores of movies, many forgettable. She was hospitalized after Christmas and
died in Rome, Italy on January 11, 2015.
Don Harron (90)
Canadian comedian who entertained TV audiences in Canada and the US with his
comic alter ego Charlie Farquharson, a regular feature during the first 13
years (1969–82) of the long-running rural comedy series Hee Haw. Harron started
his career as an actor, appearing regularly on US TV shows in the ‘60s,
including The FBI, Mission: Impossible, 12 O’Clock High, The Outer Limits, and
Dr. Kildare. He died in Toronto, Canada after choosing not to seek treatment
for cancer, on January 17, 2015.
Lew Soloff (71)
trumpet player, an early member of Blood, Sweat & Tears whose later jazz
career included performances with his own ensembles and with Gil Evans, Ornette
Coleman, Chuck Mangione, Maynard Ferguson, and other giants of the genre.
Soloff joined Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1968, about a year after the
megagroup formed, and played trumpet and flugelhorn on numerous recordings,
being featured on the group’s eponymous album that in 1970 won a best-album
Grammy. He traveled the world with the jazz/rock band until leaving in 1973. He
died a day after suffering a heart attack while walking on a New York City
street, on March 8, 2015.
Al Delugach (89)
newspaper “rewrite man” and investigator who defied his own publisher to help
expose corruption in a St. Louis labor union in the ‘60s. Delugach and fellow
reporter Denny Walsh of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat spent three years
investigating the Steamfitters union, Local 562. In more than 300 stories they
revealed a pattern of labor racketeering that led to multiple federal
indictments for a kickback scheme related to the sale of insurance to the
union’s pension fund. The two reporters shared a 1969 Pulitzer Prize for local
investigative reporting. Delugach died of mesothelioma in Los Feliz, California
on January 4, 2015.
Rod Taylor (84)
ruggedly handsome Australian-born actor who helped actress Tippi Hedren to
battle swarms of vicious birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds.
Taylor’s first leading role was in the 1960 film version of the H. G. Wells
classic The Time Machine, but he was best known for costarring in the Hitchcock
film about a massive bird attack on a small northern California coastal town
(Bodega Bay). He also appeared in The Train Robbers and, most recently, in an
almost unrecognizable cameo role as the late British wartime prime minister
Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). Taylor,
who would have turned 85 on Jan. 11, died in Los Angeles, California two weeks
after suffering a fall, on January 7, 2015.
Donna Douglas (81)
actress who played the buxom tomboy Elly May Clampett on the hit ‘60s sitcom
The Beverly Hillbillies, the CBS comedy about a backwoods Ozark family who
moved to Beverly Hills after striking it rich from oil discovered on their land.
The series, which ran from 1962–71, also starred the late Buddy Ebsen and Irene
Ryan, and Max Baer Jr., who turned 77 on Jan. 4. Douglas died of pancreatic
cancer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on January 1, 2015.
Rev. Willie Barrow
(90) longtime civil rights activist. For decades Barrow was on the front lines
of the civil rights movement, working for Rev. Martin Luther King,
participating in the 1963 March on Washington, and in later years working to
stem Chicago’s gun violence. She died at a Chicago, Illinois hospital where she
was being treated for a blood clot in her lung, on March 12, 2015.
Frankie Randall
(76) singer and pianist, a Rat Pack favorite in the swinging ‘60s and a staple
of TV variety shows of that era. Besides his TV appearances with Dean Martin
and others, Randall recorded several songs, bringing his jazz-inflected,
supper-club approach not only to standards like “It Had to Be You,” but also to
the TV theme from Flipper and The Who’s rock anthem, “I Can See for Miles.”
Randall, who was closely identified professionally and socially with Frank
Sinatra (d. 1998), died of lung cancer in Indio, California on December 28, 2014.
Space rocks from 1960 Bruderheim Meteorite help usher in new age of geology
EDMONTON — In the quiet town of
Bruderheim, Alberta a curling bonspiel was supposed to be the highlight of the
night on March 4, 1960.
Stew Hennig is a city
councillor in Fort Saskatchewan, and grew up near the town northeast of
Edmonton.
“I was about nine years old, laying in my bed
and all of a sudden we heard this tremendous roar. At that time in 1960, with
all that was going on in the world, [my father and I] thought it was maybe a
rocket or missile or something.”
Once everyone realized it was
not a Cold War attack, the only battle happening on Alberta soil was the
scramble to collect a souvenir from the Bruderheim Meteorite.
Dr. Chris Herd, with the
department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta,
still studies the space rocks collected from that event.
“There was a bright flash in
the sky at about one in the morning over Edmonton and the area, and it resulted
in the fall of the Bruderheim Meteorite,” he began. “The rock that came into
the atmosphere might have been about the size of a desk, several metric tonnes
in weight going about 60,000 kilometres per hour.”
Having the ability to study
such asteroid fragments was a very big deal in 1960, especially when the race
to space was a point of national pride.
“It has essentially put us on
the map internationally in terms of having credibility to working on
meteorites,” explained Herd.
Hundreds of specimens were
collected from the Bruderheim area which allowed the U of A to trade meteorites
with other institutions. Currently, its meteorite collection is the third
largest in Canada, and the largest for a Canadian University.
The collection is now being
used to launch us into a new age of geology.
“Here are samples that are
coming from asteroids, and now we are at the stage where there are companies
wanting to go mine asteroids. So we are looking at it from the perspective of,
‘Alright, what is in there that might be of interest to miners in space in the
future?'”
Certainly, work done by the
university generations ago, that will benefit researchers for many more.
Leonard Nimoy sent a telegram to JFK urging him to rethink nuclear space tests
By Megan SpeciaFeb 27, 2015
Before Leonard Nimoy played the
iconic role of Spock on Star Trek, he was already an advocate for the
preservation of outer space, as well as life on Earth.
In July 1962, the United States
was preparing to test a hydrogen bomb by detonating it in outer space, 250
miles above the Pacific Ocean, as part of the Starfish Prime nuclear test. Nimoy,
it seems, believed this was a bad idea, and that then-President John F. Kennedy
should think twice about it.
See also: Leonard Nimoy dies at
83
Among the artifacts at the John
F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston is a small pink telegram
with a simple message of peace from Nimoy and his wife Sandra to Kennedy,
urging the president to cancel the bomb's detonation.
In it, Nimoy calls on Kennedy
"in the name of decency" to avoid polluting the environment with a
bomb, and to preserve children's right to "breathe clean air."
Controversially, on July 9,
1962, the detonation of the hydrogen bomb went ahead despite international
opposition. The explosion illuminated the sky over Hawaii, resulting in
blackouts and strange electrical malfunctions, and causing radioactive
particles to settle in the Earth's atmosphere.
Interestingly, Nimoy first
encountered Kennedy years before either had become a household name, when the
actor picked up the then-Massachusetts senator in a cab at the Hotel Bel-Air in
Los Angeles.
“I felt this sense of having
touched him somewhere along the line,” Nimoy said in an interview about the
encounter. “Kennedy became nationally known at that convention, and I felt a
great sense of being in touch with destiny then. It seemed that the man just
had to go where he was going.”
Nimoy died on Friday at the age
of 83.
Have something to add to this
story? Share it in the comments.
Charles Manson is getting married; US prisoner obtains marriage license
Christina Williams
Charles Manson has applied for
a marriage license and was approved, according to AP on Nov. 17. That’s right
folks; Charles Manson will soon be hitched. Her reasons for marrying him are
almost as confusing as to why someone would marry someone serving a life
sentence with no possibility for parole anytime soon.
Afton Elaine Burton- who calls
herself Star- is a 26-year-old woman that regularly visits him. She relocated
from her Midwestern home to California nine years ago for the sole reason to be
close to him. If you do the math, that means she moved to California when she
was only 17 years-old. The reason she is marrying him is simple; she believes
he is innocent. The couple must tie the knot so Burton can obtain key evidence,
that she believes could set him free. She said with a smile on her face,
"I love him."
She said they have 90 days to
get married. According to Burton, they would have been married last month, but
Manson was punished for his behavior and not eligible. He had three counts of
possessing a weapon and threatening the prison staff. She expects the wedding
day to be within a month. The prison holds marriages the first Saturday of each
month. Charles Manson will not be eligible for parole until the year 2027. He has
been in prison for most of his life. Do you think she will be able to get a new
trial for him? Is it possible he could be innocent?
March 8, 1965: First US combat troops arrive in Vietnam
It's 50 years since two
battalions of US Marines landed on beaches near Danang, heralding the direct
involvement of American combat units in the Vietnam War.
By Chas Early
America finally signalled its
intention to become fully committed to war in Vietnam with the arrival of 3,500
combat troops just north of Da Nang, on this day in 1965.
Men of the 9th Marine
Expeditionary Brigade were met by South Vietnamese officers, girls carrying
leis, sight-seers and four US soldiers holding a sign saying ‘Welcome, Gallant
Marines’.
It was all much to the dismay
of General William Westmoreland, the senior US officer in the country at that
time.
Both Westmoreland and General
Nguyen Van Thieu, chief of the South Vietnamese Armed Forces Council, had asked
for the troops to be "brought ashore in the most inconspicuous way
feasible".
Under the previous US president, John F.
Kennedy, the number of American military ‘advisors’ in the country had risen to
16,000.
The day after Kennedy’s
assassination, new president Lyndon Johnson stated that "the battle
against communism... must be joined... with strength and determination".
Throughout 1964 Johnson faced
pressure from domestic and foreign sources to negotiate a peaceful solution,
but after attacks on US ships off Vietnam in the ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident' in
August, Congress gave him the powers to take any action he deemed necessary to
protect South Vietnam.
By the following year it was
clear that South Vietnam, riven by internal dissent and unfocused leadership,
was losing its war with the communist North. And, with US air bases in the
country regularly being targeted for attacks, Johnson sent in the 3,500 marines
initially as a defensive security force.
The deployment was met with
anger from many quarters, with China and the Soviet Union threatening
intervention. Some 2,000 demonstrators including Vietnamese and Chinese
students attacked the US Embassy in Moscow, while a car bomb outside its Saigon
embassy killed 22 people.
Do you remember the US combat
troops arriving in Vietnam? Do you think anything could have been done to
prevent the war's escalation? Let us know in the comments section below.
Vietnam War escalation - Did
you know?
President Kennedy had wanted to
draw ‘a line in the sand’ over the spread of communism, and the aim of US
involvement in the country was to keep South Vietnam ‘free’ from the communist
North.
Kennedy had been keen to ensure
that US military personnel be deployed only to help train the South Vietnamese
Army; he had advocated a slow withdrawal of the advisors until 1965.
By early 1964, American
diplomats in Saigon and most of President Johnson’s advisors were advocating an
escalation of US military involvement in the conflict as the only way to secure
South Vietnamese neutrality.
Johnson was keen to avoid any
sign that he was committing to a war before the presidential election in
November 1964. Nevertheless, he stepped up bombing raids and covert operations
in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf incident in August.
There had been an engagement
with North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Tonkin Gulf on August 2, but a
reported second engagement on August 4 (which prompted the Congressional
resolution) was later revealed to be false.
In September, UN Secretary
General U Thant secured agreement from North Vietnam to engage in talks with
the US. Though Secretary of State Dean Rusk was informed, there is no evidence
that President Johnson ever learned of the offer.
There were 23,000 US military
personnel in Vietnam at the end of 1964. By the end of 1965 that figure had
risen to nearly 185,000.
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