Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Andrew Toti, who designed the Mae West flotation vest that saved thousands of downed World War II pilots, including former President George H.W. Bush, has died. He was 89.

Toti died March 20 at his rural Modesto home of unspecified causes.

“Please tell [your father] a grateful Navy man who benefited from his invention sends his best wishes,” Bush wrote Toti’s daughter, Andrea Pimental of Sacramento, last fall when the inventor opened his Andrew Toti Museum of Innovations near Modesto.

Bush was wearing a Mae West vest when, as a torpedo bomber pilot, he was shot down over the Pacific during World War II.

The vest came into being because Toti’s mother was a worrier. At 16, the youth had acquired a boat and built the engine into a powerhouse, and, because he couldn’t swim, she feared he might drown.

To reassure her, Toti invented a personal life preserver.

“The first one was filled with duck feathers,” he told the Modesto Bee at the museum’s opening. “That was too bulky and heavy, so I switched to air.”

The life vest consisted of two pneumatic compartments of rubber-coated yellow fabric that could be inflated separately by blowing into a tube, plus automatic carbon-dioxide inflation systems operated by pulling respective cords. The vest was anchored by waist and crotch straps.

The War Department heard about the invention and paid Toti $1,600 for the rights to what was dubbed the Mae West vest, after the buxom film star.

LA Times
Arthur G. Salisbury, 88, the retired Air Force major general who commanded American fighters in the World War II “Palm Sunday Massacre,” died March 20 in Colorado Springs, Colo. He had been in declining health for several years.

On April 18, 1943, Palm Sunday, Salisbury was leader of the 57th Fighter Group flying P-40 Warhawks in the North African theater. They intercepted a German air armada near Tunisia and, in 20 minutes of fierce battle, downed 76 transport planes and 13 Messerschmitt fighters.

The following year, Salisbury went to England as commander of the 84th Fighter Wing and was one of the first Army Air Force officers to land on the Normandy beaches during the D-day invasion. He was shot down three times during the war.

P40 Warhawk memorabilia at eBay.com

NY Times
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — The drummer from popular 1980s Australian rock band Crowded House hanged himself in a park in southern Australia, an emergency services spokeswoman said Monday. Paul Hester, 46, failed to return home after taking his two dogs for a walk on Friday night.

The drummer’s body was later found in a park near his home in the southern city of Melbourne.

Metropolitan Ambulance Service spokeswoman Liraje Memishi said ambulance officers arrived on the scene shortly after midday Saturday and reported that Hester had “attempted suicide'’ and suffered strangulation.

Officers declared Hester dead more than 20 minutes later, Memishi said.

“They attempted resuscitation but he was dead when they arrived. There was nothing they could do,'’ she said.

Memishi said she could not confirm where Hester’s body was found, but reports have suggested he was discovered hanging from a tree.

Hester played in several small bands before joining the New Zealand group Split Enz in 1983. He and Split Enz singer Neil Finn formed Crowded House in 1985 with bass player Nick Seymour.

Crowded House was one of Australia’s most successful bands in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with international hits such as “Don’t Dream it’s Over'’ and “Weather with You.'’

Rumour has it that Mr. Hester formerly with Crowded House was
discovered hanging around a park in southern Australia. Death by hanging is
apparently a leading method of choice for suicides in certain parts of Australia. We may never know what drove him, but
perhaps Mr. Hester sought only liberation and relief.

A life vest or a Mae West
certainly helped thousands of downed WWII pilots find liberation and relief from drowning. One of those so saved
was a torpedo bomber pilot who went on to become
the 41st President of the United States.

Arthur Salisbury spent WWII dispensing liberation and relief first in
the North African theater of
the war and later as part of Operation Overlord - the Normandy invasion on D-Day.

‘Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over’; grab your vest and go make a difference.

LA Times
LONDON — James Callaghan, the affable, self-educated sailor’s son who rose from poverty to become prime minister in the dying years of consensus politics in postwar Britain, died Saturday on the eve of his 93rd birthday.

Callaghan died at his family home in East Sussex, south of London, 11 days after the death of Audrey, his wife of 67 years, a family spokeswoman said. The cause of the former prime minister’s death was not announced.

Callaghan, who entered Parliament as a Labor Party lawmaker in 1945, was prime minister from 1976 to 1979. He was the only British politician to hold, at different times, the posts of prime minister, chancellor of the exchequer (treasury chief), foreign secretary and home secretary.

Callaghan succeeded Harold Wilson in April 1976 and governed until May 1979, when strikes, financial crises and party divisions cost him the election against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party.

“He was one of the generation who fought in the war and came back determined to build a better, fairer and different Britain in peace,” Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a statement. “In later times, I sought his counsel on many occasions and found his judgment and common sense invariably sound.”

Callaghan’s rise to become the country’s fourth Labor prime minister took stamina, unflappability and an instinct for the middle road.

Known as “Sunny Jim,” he was 64 when he inherited a quarreling party — barely clinging to a parliamentary majority — and an economy battered by double-digit inflation, rising wages and a plummeting pound.

Many saw him as simply a caretaker, minding the store until the Thatcherites moved in with their free-market, union-bashing doctrine.

Yet in two years, helped by the North Sea oil bonanza and $4 billion in bailout loans, the sterling recovered, inflation retreated and most workers voluntarily restrained wage demands.

As Britain returned to the black again, Callaghan approached the 1979 election running even with the Tories.

But in late 1978, the unions, fed up with wage restraints, launched their “winter of discontent.” Strikes left bodies unburied, garbage uncollected, trains paralyzed, cancer patients without medical care and children locked out of classrooms.

Callaghan stuck to his mild-mannered style. Returning from a summit in the Caribbean, he remarked, “I do not feel there is mounting chaos.”

That was not what the public wanted to hear. It wanted strong, decisive government, and the following year Thatcher ousted Callaghan with a comfortable majority.

Like Winston Churchill, Callaghan never attended college, saying he earned his degree at “the university of life.”

NY Times
Katherine A. Lathrop, a pioneering researcher in nuclear medicine and a member of a University of Chicago team that developed an isotope widely used to locate and diagnose cancers, died on March 10 at a nursing home in Las Cruces, N.M. She was 89.

The cause was advanced dementia, her family said.

A versatile scientist with degrees in biology, chemistry and physics, Ms. Lathrop was named a professor of radiology at Chicago, where she taught for four decades, without having received a doctorate.

In 1945 and 1946, she participated in the Manhattan Project as a junior chemist in the metallurgical laboratory in Chicago, studying the effects of radioactive materials on animals. Later, as part of a research effort led by Dr. Paul V. Harper, she investigated the qualities of technetium, a radioactive element discovered in the 1930’s.

Ms. Lathrop and the Chicago team experimented with an isotope, technetium 99m, by injecting it into a patient’s bloodstream and then tracing its path through the brain, heart, kidney, liver and other organs.

A scan of the isotope, also called a radionuclide or radiotracer, yielded images to help diagnose and record the size and growth of cancers and other tumors. Dr. Harper’s team also found technetium was less radioactive and had a shorter half-life than many other isotopes, and was therefore less dangerous to patients. A scanning system for technetium was perfected in 1963 and was used to perform a successful brain scan. The isotope remains in clinical use worldwide and is often used to scan bones.

NY Times
Henry George Greene, an architect and developer who designed more than 80 theaters for stage shows and movies in the 1960’s and 70’s, died on March 13 at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was 93.

His death was announced by his family.

As consulting architect for the American Broadcasting Company, Mr. Greene built movie houses across the country, from San Francisco to Salt Lake City to Flint, Mich., to Buffalo.

His creations included the Cine Capri, an 800-seat theater in Phoenix with a vast single screen that made it a showcase for blockbuster movies like Star Wars, which played there for more than a year.

“This theater was so popular that when it was closing they had 250,000 signatures to save it, which at the time was the largest petition ever in the state of Arizona,” said Andreas Fuchs, a theater consultant and co-author of “Cinema Treasures,” a survey of America’s movie palaces.

The Cine Capri was torn down in 1998, but multiscreen theaters in Oklahoma City and Scottsdale, Ariz., include large auditoriums that bear its name and replicate its interior.

In the early 1970’s, Mr. Greene designed ABC’s entertainment center in Los Angeles: a 4.5-acre compound that comprised stores, offices, two movie theaters, a restaurant and a six-level underground garage. Part of the Century City development, it also included a 2,000-seat theater operated by the Shubert Organization in its first foray into California.

The complex was ABC’s West Coast headquarters for almost 30 years, until the network moved to Burbank, Calif., in 2000. It was dismantled last year.

A pioneering female nuclear scientist, a gifted architect with a love for movies and theater, and a former prime minister of Great Britain head up today’s ODD listings. If you have ever had a bone scan
– say, for a fracture in your foot due to a rugby injury
– you have Katherine Lathrop to thank for this injection of technology and high concentrations of isotopes into your blood stream. Just think of it as augmenting the ’stardust’
concentrations in your body. But as the saying goes from the new U2 album, ‘How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb’
– ‘from the brightest star comes the blackest hole.’ Lathrop also was a participating researcher on the Manhattan Project
– seems like we all have a little creation and destruction in all of us, with or without extra radioactive isotopes. Speaking of creation and destruction, Henry G. Greene created some of the more memorable theater houses across the United States during the ’60s and ’70s, only to have his artistry usurped by
24-screen movie theaters of our current super-size era with reclining chairs, 15 minute advertisements (once only reserved for television) and five dollar bags of popcorn . Let’s hope that venues such as Red Rocks Amphitheater
, naturally formed and humanly augmented, however close to the now-defunct Rocky Flats Atomic Energy Plant
, remain out of the path of human destruction. As Bono said during U2’s famous concert at Red Rocks
back in 1983, ‘Hey, this is Red Rocks!’ before climbing the stage scaffolding to get to the top of one of the rock walls that forms part of the natural amphitheater. During this concert, U2 was touring their newly released album ‘War,’
a guitar-driven journey into the nature of world war, Thatcherism, nuclear holocaust, religious politics, and America-as-Pop-Icon. Considering the history (and the last name), of our last ODD-ity for today James Callaghan, we wonder what he made of this album and these rebel rockers from Ireland.

Whether you believe in réincarnation
, Resurrection
, or your stardust
merging with the universe, thanks for reminding us that life isn’t necessarily a Dead End
.

LA Times
Paul Henning, the television writer and producer who created “The Beverly Hillbillies,” which became one of the biggest hits of the 1960s and spawned the popular rural-comedy spinoffs “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres,” died Friday. He was 93.

Henning, who had a series of minor strokes in recent years, died of natural causes at Providence St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank, his family said.

After writing for radio’s “Fibber McGee and Molly” in the late 1930s, Henning wrote for George Burns and Gracie Allen’s radio and television shows. He also created, produced and wrote “The Bob Cummings Show,” a popular situation comedy about a wolfish photographer; it ran from 1955 to 1959.

Inspired in part by memories of camping trips to the Ozarks as a Boy Scout, Henning came up with a fish-out-of-water idea for a series that made television history: A “poor mountaineer” unexpectedly strikes oil and moves his newly wealthy family out of a cabin in the Ozarks into a mansion in the hills of Beverly.

“The Beverly Hillbillies,” starring Buddy Ebsen, Irene Ryan, Donna Douglas and Max Baer Jr., debuted on CBS in September 1962.

The series was immediately attacked by some critics, who did not take a liking to Jed, Granny, Elly May and Jethro and wanted nothing to do with the Clampetts or their “cee-ment pond.”

“If television is America’s vast wasteland,” sniffed one critic, “the ‘Hillbillies’ must be Death Valley.”

“The series aimed low and hit its target,” wrote UPI’s Rick DuBrow.

Even Henning’s wife, Ruth, later conceded to a reporter that she preferred “something a little more sophisticated.”

The average American TV viewer, however, took to the new show like a starving mountain man to a mess o’ possum shanks.

Possum hunting in New Zealand: A practical guide to hunting methods, preparation, and sale of skins
Paul Henning: Reminiscences (New York Times oral history program)

LA Times
Ernest Childers, a Native American veteran who received the Medal of Honor while serving with the Army’s 45th Infantry Division in Italy during World War II, has died. He was 87.

Childers died March 17 at a hospice in Tulsa, Okla., after a series of strokes, his family said. He had lived in nearby Coweta.

“This extraordinary man was the very embodiment of courage under fire,” Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry said in a statement. “His life was and is a true inspiration.”

A Muscogee (Creek) Indian from Broken Arrow, Okla., Childers was a second lieutenant when his division hit the beach at Salerno in early September 1943.

Despite fracturing his instep Sept. 22 in a shell crater amid the predawn darkness near Oliveto, Childers led eight of his men up a hill toward enemy machine gun nests. Ordering his men to give him covering fire, he continued advancing alone.

“Moving forward along the edge of the field under mortar and artillery shelling, he was fired upon by two German riflemen from a nearby house,” his Medal of Honor citation reads. “Returning the fire, Childers killed both. Continuing his advance, he moved behind an enemy machine gun nest and killed its two occupants with his carbine.

“He then made his way to a spot near the second nest and, using rocks as simulated grenades, caused the gunners to stand up. He killed one with his carbine, while the other German was accounted for by one of Childers’ men who had moved around to the left side of the field.”

The second lieutenant continued his advance up the hill and single-handedly captured a German mortar observer.

“Childers’ indomitable courage and coolness under fire from a determined enemy,” the citation reads, “enabled his battalion to continue its advance.”

In an interview with the Daily Oklahoman in 1994, he said: “Heroism was the furthest thing [from] my mind that day. I was just trying to stay alive and help keep my buddies alive.”

45th Infantry memorabilia at eBay.com

NY Times
George Peck Caulkins Jr., a businessman, civic leader and philanthropist, and one of the handful of skiing enthusiasts who developed Vail, Colo., died on Thursday at his home in Denver. He was 83.

His death followed a long illness, his family said.

Mr. Caulkins, who made his fortune in the oil business, joined a small band of promoters who happened upon Vail in the late 1950’s, when it was nothing but a snow-smothered mountain pass in the Colorado Rockies. The group raised the money to create what eventually ballooned into a busy and pricey resort replete with tanned celebrities and Tyrolean chalets.

At the outset, Mr. Caulkins and Peter Seibert, an experienced mountaineer and ski-area operator, proselytized among wealthy skier friends and raised $100,000 in seed money. Still short $1 million, they set off in Mr. Caulkins’s Porsche to scour the country, offering 100 partnerships at $10,000 apiece, to be sold by the Caulkins Securities Corporation.

“We drove around putting on a dog and pony act,” Mr. Seibert later recalled, “in living rooms, in country clubs, wherever we could.”

The idea caught on, given an added boost by the still-fresh memory of the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, Calif. The first Vail ski trails and a gondola lift opened in 1972

Your dream ski home at eBay.com
Vail collectables (wow!) at eBay.com

Ski hills, hillbillies, and a hero who captured a hill ODDly seem to make up today’s theme. Ernest Childers charged up a hill in Italy and won the Congressional Medal of Honor . He was a hero
. Paul Henning was a prolific creator and writer of television series, including The Beverly Hillbillies. He also conceived Petticoat Junction
Petticoat Junction. (Considering the theme song lyrics
that included, ‘Lot’s of curves you bet’, we ODDfellows have wondered whether or not Henning was having some fun with us by having Petticoat Junction located in ‘Hootervile–made you look, didn’t we.) George Calkins was a successful oil man who helped create a little ski hill called ‘Vail’. By-the-way, when oh when will Vail put a high speed quad
into its classic back bowls
? (China Bowl doesn’t count’too many gasping Texans.)

Vail’s founders and other Colorado ski pioneers trace their history back to the 10th Mountain Division
‘a pretty salty group of guys who trained at Camp Hale , Colorado and, like Childers, fought in Italy. The 10th have well-deserved notoriety, but toughest ski-troop group was The First Special Service Force. The First Special Service Force
was a combined United States-Canada brigade trained in skiing, parachuting, amphibious landing, and all things commando. The German’s at Anzio
called them, ‘The Devil’s Brigade.’

That’s it for today. Keep your tips up, and don’t cut the lift line.