Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Dr. Wilfred G. Bigelow, a cardiac surgeon who created a pathbreaking technique of cooling the body to allow open-heart surgery and also helped develop an early pacemaker, died Sunday in an extended-care facility in Toronto. He was 91. The cause was heart failure, his family said.

As a young surgeon at the University of Toronto in the 1940’s, Dr. Bigelow drew on his earlier research on hypothermia to theorize that cooling patients before an operation would curb the body’s demands for oxygen and slow its circulation, allowing for longer and safer access to the heart.

Dr. Bigelow successfully tested his theory on a dog in 1949 and announced the results at a meeting of the American Surgical Association in Colorado Springs in 1950. Three years later, the first successful surgery to use the cooling technique on a human was performed. In applying the technique, the patient was anesthetized and placed on a bed of ice to give surgeons a window of roughly 10 minutes of access to the heart.

The hypothermia technique was supplanted by the heart-lung machine in the 1960’s, although it is now used on parts of the heart during surgery in tandem with the machine to allow access to the heart for two or more hours.

Today’s ODDposting concerns a pioneer in open heart surgery
. Before the advent of heart-lung bypass machines
, literally putting patients on ice gave surgeons a ten-minute window to get in, do their thing, and get out. Worked mainly for simple congenital heart defects
. These days, more and more heart procedures are being done off the pump, and some even by robots. Danger Will Robinson
.

Speaking of hearts, heart disease kills over 150,000 people younger than 65
. (Maybe that little pain isn’t indigestion.) But, do you know that brushing your teeth and getting a regular teeth cleaning might lower your risk of developing coronary artery disease
? Gum infection has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Every 34 seconds, someone dies in the United States of heart disease. Now that’s one line you don’t want to cut into.

Make your tooth brush a weapon against heart disease. (and take that baby aspirin
.)

LA Times
David Bushnell, the founder of Bushnell Optical Corp. who helped make binoculars an affordable must-have item after World War II, has died. He was 91.

Bushnell died Thursday at his home in Laguna Beach of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife, Nancy, said.

Pasadena-based Bushnell Optical and its owner became famous, as well as financially successful, for marketing Japanese-made binoculars — and later telescopes, rifle scopes, camera lenses and other optical products — at half the price of competing goods manufactured in the U.S. or imported from Germany.

Bushnell products at eBay.com
Binoculars at eBay.com

NY Times
Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., whose fierce, flamboyant and electrifyingly effective advocacy in the O. J. Simpson murder trial captivated the country and solidified his image as a master of high-profile criminal defense, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 67.

The cause was a brain tumor, said a law partner, Peter J. Neufeld.

Mr. Cochran was already a prominent Los Angeles lawyer in 1994, when Mr. Simpson, the former football star, asked him to join and then lead the lawyers defending him on charges that he had killed his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a friend of hers, Ronald L. Goldman.

The televised trial riveted the nation for most of 1995 and rocked it that October, when the jury acquitted Mr. Simpson. He was later held responsible for the killings in a civil case, where another jury evaluated much of the same evidence against a more relaxed standard of proof.

Before the Simpson case, Mr. Cochran was best known for bringing police brutality cases on behalf of black clients and for representing celebrities in trouble. Both experiences proved valuable at the Simpson trial.

Drawing on his knowledge of the Los Angeles Police Department gleaned from his days in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, Mr. Cochran focused the Simpson jury’s attention on shortcomings in the department’s investigation of the killings and on the seeming racism of one of its detectives.

In the trial’s aftermath, Mr. Cochran’s name became a sort of shorthand, but one that meant different things in different contexts. To some, it stood for legal acumen. To others, a masterly rapport with the jury. To still others, the vexing roles of money and race in the justice system.

Mr. Cochran mostly enjoyed the references to him in films and on late-night television, where he was both admired as a singularly effective trial lawyer and mocked for his smooth style and court rhetoric.

He pleaded guilty to charges of extravagance and flamboyance.

NY Times
WASHINGTON, March 29 - Former Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, a conservative Democrat who supported civil rights legislation and was sometimes described as the conscience of the Senate, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Sheffield, Ala., near his home in Tuscumbia. He was 83.

His death was announced by his family.

Mr. Heflin, a large, bearlike man, was chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court before he was elected in 1978 to the Senate, where he served for 18 years.

Fellow senators often called him Judge Heflin, referring to his probity and his judicious approach to issues. For 13 years, he passed judgment on his colleagues as a senior member or chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics.

Mr. Heflin voted against the nominations of Clarence Thomas and Robert H. Bork to the United States Supreme Court. He said Mr. Thomas’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee suggested “contradictions, lack of scholarship, lack of conviction and instability.”

In his farewell address on the Senate floor in September 1996, Mr. Heflin noted that he came from “an ancestral background deeply rooted in the old Confederacy.” He was a nephew of Senator James T. Heflin, known as Cotton Tom, a vehement segregationist.

But Howell Heflin said he was “exceedingly proud” of his own civil rights record.

“It has been publicly stated by black leaders that I was the first senator from my state who believed in and supported the civil rights movement,” Mr. Heflin said in his farewell speech. “I worked to secure the extension of the Voting Rights Act; to appoint African-Americans and women to the federal bench and other federal offices; to support historically black colleges; to ensure passage of the civil rights restoration bill; to help pass the fair housing bill; and to establish a national holiday honoring the late Martin Luther King Jr.”

On civil rights, as on many other issues, Mr. Heflin advocated “compassionate moderation.”

NY Times
Harold Cruse, an outspoken social and cultural critic who was best known for his angry collection of essays, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” died Saturday in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 89. The cause was congestive heart failure, his companion, Mara Julius, said.

Largely self-educated and widely read, Mr. Cruse taught African-American studies at the University of Michigan and was one of the first blacks to get tenure at a major university without a college degree. He ranged over many subjects in his writing: politics, radicalism, music, culture and the situation of black people in America.

In “Crisis” he summed up a set of positions that left him isolated from almost everyone else in the political spectrum of the mid-1960’s.

He was against integration. “Integrate with whom?” he asked. He deplored the black-power movement as being all slogans and no political program. He opposed the back-to-Africa campaign, although he had grudging admiration for Garveyism. Despite a brief association with the Communist Party, he abominated Communists and liberals - in particular, Jewish intellectuals, whom he blamed for black anti-Semitism. He was critical of almost everyone, from James Baldwin to Ossie Davis to Lorraine Hansberry, for accepting too readily the premises of white culture.

He concluded that blacks must form their own political, economic, social and cultural base to work on all fronts toward an accommodation with capitalism as it was modified by the New Deal.

NY Times
Grant Johannesen, a pianist best known as an elegant interpreter of early-20th-century French music, died on Sunday at a friend’s home near Munich. He was 83 and lived in New York and Palm Beach, Fla.

His son, David Johannesen, announced the death.

Mr. Johannesen was a sensitive player who was more interested in exploring musical byways that fascinated him than in repeating the warhorses of the repertory, and as a teacher, he advised his students to follow a similar path. That is not to say that he ignored the standard works entirely: throughout his six-decade career, his recital programs often included music by Bach, Beethoven or Chopin amid contemporary American works and French scores, and he made superb recordings of Chopin in the 1950’s and of Schubert in the late 70’s.

Well, in the spirit of yesterday’s notation of Home pregnancy tests, today we’re ‘a little late.’ We assure you that this only relates to our ODDcomments.

So on March 30, 2005 we have mention of binoculars, creative piano players, a controversial author, and a Southern senator. Take the last letter of each of these words, mix them up, drop out a couple, and you come up with ’selser’, the name of blog dealing with Michigan fly fishing. We’re reaching, we’re reaching…

Anyway the big news is the death of Johnnie Cochran. Knock yourself out.

Answer to yesterdays questions: 1. Longest running show at Red Rock Amphitheatre: The Easter Sunday sunrise services, started in 1947. 2. The only show in North America The Beatles didn’t sell out was at Red Rocks, 1964. (We ODDfellows know a certain girl from Nebraska
who was there.)

Remember, ‘If the grave doesn’t fit, you cannot commit.’

LA Times
Dr. Georgeanna Seegar Jones, the pioneering endocrinologist whose studies of the female reproductive system laid the foundation for the modern home pregnancy test and who, with her husband, Howard, brought into being the first artificially conceived infant in the United States, died Saturday at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Norfolk, Va.

She was 92 and had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for nearly a decade, but the immediate cause of death was heart failure, said an official of Eastern Virginia Medical School, where the couple spent the last two decades of their joint career.

When British physicians Dr. Patrick C. Steptoe and Dr. Robert Edwards announced the birth of Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby” in the world, July 25, 1978, the Joneses had just completed distinguished careers at Johns Hopkins University and were moving into a planned semiretirement at the newly created eastern Virginia school. When a visiting reporter asked Howard Jones whether the same thing could be done in the United States, he said offhandedly that of course it could. All it would require was some money for research.

A few days later, a former patient of Georgeanna’s, grateful for her help in conceiving after many years of difficulty, offered them the money to get started. Three years later, on Dec. 28, 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr became the first U.S. baby to be conceived outside her mother’s body, and Howard and Georgeanna, then 71 and 69, respectively, became famous.

Novak’s Textbook of Gynecology
Home pregnancy tests at eBay.com

The Independant
Hugh McKenzie with his watercolour sketches made a particular contribution in recording the streets of the City and south-east London. For many years he could only practise his art in his spare time, yet his output even into old age remained prodigious.

Many examples can be seen in the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Maritime Museum, public galleries in Exeter and Nottingham, the Goldsmiths’ College permanent collection and the collections of various London boroughs. In addition, he sold well to private clients in galleries in the Blackheath, Greenwich, Deptford and Lewisham area where he lived. McKenzie was a key member of the Blackheath Art Society and a familiar figure with his sketchbook.

Hugh McKenzie was born in 1909 in Cromarty, in the north of Scotland, one of three children of William Ewart Gladstone McKenzie, a surveyor of taxes. Hugh showed early talent, exhibiting his first public work at the age of 10 - a picture of the Sherwood Foresters returning to a civic reception at the end of the First World War.

He attended the Slade School of Fine Art under Professor Henry Tonks, but hopes of making a living as a full-time artist during the Depression were slim. He became a clerk with the British, Foreign and Colonial Corporation, which had offices near the Guildhall. He later worked for a firm of stockbrokers nearby in Austin Friars.

Hugh McKenzie spent his lunchtimes looking around the City streets and buildings, occasionally making rapid sketches. He began to return at weekends or during summer evenings, later washing in the drawings at home. McKenzie cited several London topographical draughtsmen among his formative influences, including Sir Henry Rushbury and Sydney Robert Jones. He continued to improve his skills, studying part-time at Goldsmiths’ College, St Martin’s School of Art and in Woolwich.

ODDFLASH! LAWYER JOHNNIE COCHRAN IS DEAD. THE REV. JERRY FALWELL EXPERIENCED A RESPIRATORY ARREST AS A CONSEQUENCE OF VIRAL PNEUMONIA AND IS ON A RESPIRATORY AND ‘ON DECK.’ MORE DETAILS TOMORROW.

And now back to today’s news:

Water, colors, test tubes, watercolors, test tube babies and home pregnancy tests’oh what ODDassociations we have today. Hugh McKenzie’s technique for painting watercolors was ‘where his mood would take him.’ A mood
can also take one to a simple blue, life-changing test.

Did you know the name ‘McKenzie’ comes from the Gaelic word for ‘Comely’? This is interest to some people more than others. Do you know how to write ‘McKenzie’ in Chinese ? This is probably of interest to Scottish ex-pats in the Anhui Province of China. And, do you know that coal bed methane production is of emerging importance in Anhui, just as it is in Wyoming? And you know that Scots brought sheep and cattle to Wyoming? And did you know Ft. McKenzie is located in Sheridan, Wyoming , and Sheridan, Wyoming has two Chinese restaurants? And, did you know some of the best Chinese restaurants in the world are in London
and Hugh McKenzie sketched and painted in London? Oh, oh, I think we may need to adjust our medications .

Back to colors. A couple of days ago, we typed about Red Rocks Amphitheatre
. Two ODDquestions: Questions one–What is the longest running show at Red Rocks (number of years of performance)? Question two’this famous group never failed to sellout every show except one, and it was at Red Rocks. Name the group. Answers tomorrow.

Best wishes, and may all your early morning surprises be happy ones.