Obituaries

Extravagantly produced by Alan Parsons in the style of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”, it might be the most bombastically over the top pop hit of the 1970s not to have been sung by Freddie Mercury.

Stu Rasmussen obituary
First openly transgender mayor in America who became the subject of protests and counterprotests and inspired a musical

OK, and small town America handles it all very well indeed:

Then, three weeks later, members of the Westboro Baptist Church, an aggressively homophobic hate group based in Topeka, Kansas, arrived in Silverton to “speak some words of truth to this 60-year-old pervert”. The locals were having none of it. Two hundred of them staged a counterprotest. Some of the men dressed in women’s clothes to show solidarity with Rasmussen. Others waved placards proclaiming “Not In Our Town”, “Stu Rocks” and “Jesus Loves Stu”. They drove the intruders out.

Thing is, I know the name of that town. Think I’m right in this, that’s where the Mack Fontana novels are set. Fire chief who ends up having detectoring adventures.

The mayor, a major character, is a tough blonde broad who ends up bedding, at one time or another, near all the male characters except the hero.

But what fun to find out that reality is so much more interesting than a mere novel?

From Bob Dole’s farewell letter: “I’m a bit curious to learn if I am correct in thinking that Heaven will look a lot like Kansas.

…And to see, like others who have gone before me, if I will still be able to vote in Chicago.”

Ronald Jones liked to tell the story about the ambassador who called Claridge’s during the Coronation and asked to speak “to the king”. The switchboard operator replied: “To which king, if you please, sir?”

At the age of seven she was traumatised when her 62-year-old father left her 42-year-old mother and ran off with an 18-year-old blonde accordion player.

The obit writer’s joy. Sure, OK, showman runs off with showgirl, write me something new. Oh, an accordion? No, no, that’s got to, gotta, go in.

Nor really the name:

Frank Giblett obituary
Bomb disposal expert who was awarded the George Medal for his persistent courage during the Eoka campaign in Cyprus

What’s that line? Not all heroes wear a cape? Nor, perhaps we should add, look like they should either.

At just 5ft 6in and slightly built

Sahl then dined with Nixon, who told him, “Don’t forget to keep a candle under my ass, and under Kennedy’s too. It’s good for America.”

Not that I’m falling off the edge and thinking that he was a great President or anything. But that plus his walking away from the way the Ds stole that election for Kennedy are admirable.

Southgate shopping centre in Bath was the last of OLP’s big retail developments before recession brought commercial property development to a halt by the mid-Seventies. By now Luder was a marked man. “We used Bath stone but they still called it a concrete monstrosity,” he said.

They pulled down a perfectly good Georgian slum to build that. According to folk tales, had 17 pubs in it…..

Owen Luder was responsible for some of Britain’s most hated buildings. Yet to aficionados of brutalism, he was owed a debt of gratitude for sculptural concrete creations such as the Tricorn shopping centre in Portsmouth and the Trinity Centre multistorey car park in Gateshead.

Here’s the thing. I seriously doubt that he ever lived in anything he or his practice designed. And if he did it wouldn’t have been in brutalist style. There’s a significant antinomianism in British architecture. This is for the proles, we the special will live in something else.

Myself I’d cure the entire planning and architecture systems quite easily. Anyone involved must live in what is built. forcibly.

Perhaps the most pointless, and most successful, of Poynter’s products was “the little black box”. There were various iterations, but essentially the user activates it by flipping a switch. A small hand then emerges to pull the switch back. That was all: the toy existed solely to turn itself off.

Jean-Paul Belmondo, star of Breathless, dies aged 88

Astaire enjoyed some success as a racehorse breeder and owner (including Lester Piggott’s).

An owner whom Lester rode for, rather than Lester’s owner perhaps?

He had promised the American vendor that he would make the event special, and it was. Having dismissed Grosvenor House and the Dorchester as impractical venues for the sale of “Ten Important Motor Cars’’, he picked up a colleague’s casual remark and hired the Albert Hall for 24 hours. Getting the Bugatti inside and on to a specially built ramp over the stalls was an experience that everyone agreed was suboptimal. At 21ft long, nearly 7ft wide and weighing more than three tonnes, it would not go through the doors.

A frustrated and furious Brooks was persuaded to go home to bed while his team wrestled with the problem. Luckily the night manager announced that he was going to take his break, and he was confident that when he returned there would be no sign that the doorway architrave might have been temporarily removed.

Rules are rules and they must never be noticed to be broken.

She also recalled that the women were kept strictly apart from the men in the Olympic village, which ensured there were no distractions. She told The Olympian newsletter in 2019. “There was a fence round our part, with sentries on the gates. The only people to have fun were the pole-vaulters.”

Striker for England and Ipswich and also:

A man of contrasts, he appeared on stage playing the bongos with his favourite band Deep Purple but was also president of his local gardening club and organised its annual outing to the Chelsea Flower Show.

OBITUARY
Robert Downey Sr
Arthouse director and father of the Hollywood actor of the same name whose film Putney Swope is cited as a cult classic

The son’s name is Robert Downey Jr……..

McCall, a quietly spoken, expository Scot who was ideologically opposed to the “high-pitched left”, took the IPCS out on strike again in 1981 in an industrial action that effectively stopped the Royal Mint printing money.

The Mint, err, mints coins. The Bank of England – through De La Rue I think?- prints notes.

So the strike could have stopped the Mint minting, the BoE printing, but it’s unlikely to have stopped the Mint printing….

…..his school survived coup, rebellion and humanitarian crisis.

Almost single-handedly he grew it from a beaten earth patch shaded by a tree, where he first taught street children in about 1960, to a double campus today offering the full primary curriculum. So good are the results that Asra Hawariat, which means “Footsteps of the Apostles”, routinely tops annual grade tables. In all he was responsible for educating 120,000 pupils.

On the occasions when he was picked up by the security forces, detention rarely lasted long. So numerous are his alumni that he would soon find a friendly official, policeman or community leader to intervene on his behalf.
…

This was Asfaw’s first encounter with Addis, then the imperial seat of Ras Tafari, better known by his crown name Haile Selassie. The little boy felt he belonged so after briefly returning to Bulga he ran away, back to the capital, surviving on his wits, sleeping for a year among the graves of a city centre cemetery.
….
His life changed when an Armenian woman dropped some of her groceries. Asfaw rushed to pick up the shopping before it spoilt, a good Samaritan gesture rewarded with a domestic job in her household. When not doing chores, he enrolled at school for the first time in his life, cramming eight years of primary syllabus into two.

A scholarship followed, to the General Wingate School, named in honour of Orde Wingate the colourful British officer who helped to drive Italian occupiers out of Ethiopia. Its common room of colonial-era diaspora teachers helped Asfaw to become fluent in English.

Soon he was putting word round the same graveyards and street corners that he used to inhabit, urging waifs to come to him for schooling. After his own school hours were done and still in his teens, he would turn from student to teacher, convening ad hoc classes under a tree between the Wingate campus and the Church of Petros and Paulos. The roll surged, helped in part because Asfaw made sure that all scraps from the refectory at Wingate were not thrown away but offered to his new pupils.

Committed to teaching, he left Wingate without graduating but not before petitioning the emperor for support. With a waft of the imperial hand, the land surrounding the original tree was transferred in perpetuity to the new school.

In the early days the pupils chipped in by building what they could. Often only a fence separated classrooms so a teacher’s voice could carry allowing two classes to be taught at once. Asfaw moved onsite to a shack, living there for years, hardly bothered when the roof let in the rain.

Visitors would find children sleeping on shelves, tumbling to the floor when their classes began. Asfaw was a man of strong Christian faith, praying routinely, and driven in part by nagging self-doubt, fretting whether the students were going to become good citizens, good neighbours. He was a voracious reader and student of contemporary thinking; a friend remembers him being fascinated by a theory of modernising traditional education espoused in the book Deschooling Society.

Self-deprecating almost to a fault, Asfaw courted little publicity. When he was persuaded to attend a ceremony in Sweden to receive the World Children’s’ Prize for the Rights of the Child in 2001, he had to borrow a suit and a pair of shoes.

Late in life he married a former student, Senayet. She survives him along with their two daughters, Liya and Besiem, and a son, Yisihaq. All of them won scholarships to American universities.

Thousands of former students turned out for his funeral, watching solemnly as the coffin bearing their “Gashe” [guide] was interred not far from the tree-shaded spot where he first began teaching.

Asfaw Yemiru, Ethiopian school founder, was born c 1941. He died of pneumonia on May 8, 2021, aged about 80

Her easy rapport with her subjects persuaded Paul Newman to pose for her barefoot at his Connecticut home, clutching two beers and dressed in a “Get Really Stoned” T-shirt.

The blind subeditor strikes again….

“I don’t need inspiration from real children,” he liked to say. “The real test is the child within me.”

Eric Carle, children’s author and illustrator,

Having been set free by Allied troops, he travelled through Nagasaki a few weeks after its destruction. All he could see was a landscape “completely black. Here and there was a chimney. All the houses were just stone and rubble.” As he looked across it he thought, “good for the Americans”.

Having worked on the Burma railway as slave labour, then sent to the coal mines as slave labour.

Forced to carry back-breaking railway sleepers, Bras witnessed lives being thrown away daily for no reason at all. He had to watch his friends’ executions, knowing that if he intervened he would be executed too. Some 13,000 prisoners of war died during the construction of the railway, as did 100,000 native workers. It is estimated that one died for every sleeper laid.

Might not be a wholly empathic reaction but……

When the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies, Bras’s father was taken captive and killed. Soldiers put a tube down his throat and filled it with water until his stomach burst.

Even with all that, a highly perceptive man:

He liked the British, finding the Welsh and Scots pleasingly direct and the English less sincere but very amusing. Dad’s Army made him weep with laughter.