Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Dr. Conrad M. Riley, a versatile pediatrician who helped describe Riley-Day syndrome, a rare genetic childhood disorder that harms the nervous system and often leads to early death, died on July 5 at the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver. He was 91.

The cause was an aortic aneurysm, his family said.

In 1949, while working at Columbia University with Dr. Richard L. Day and others, Dr. Riley described a complex disease most commonly found in Jewish children, particularly those of Ashkenazi, or Eastern European, descent. The symptoms include seizures, insensitivity to pain, vomiting, extremes in blood pressure, inability to produce tears and delay in puberty.

The disorder, which is caused by a defective gene inherited from both parents, can lead to death before age 20. Among Ashkenazi children, the incidence of Riley-Day, or familial dysautonomia, is about 1 in 3,700. There is no known cure or effective treatment.

In 1960, Dr. Riley moved to the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where, broadening his research in the use of hydrocortisone to treat pediatric kidney disorders, he applied it to preventive medicine.

He was chairman of the university’s department of preventive medicine from 1961 to 1966 and, while continuing to practice as a pediatrician, served as an associate dean and a member of the health sciences ethics committee. Dr. Riley argued for liberalizing Colorado’s abortion law and for increasing the number of women and minority members accepted to the medical school.

NY Times
HEALDSBURG, Calif., Aug. 14 (AP) - Col. Joseph Rogers, a renowned aviator who flew aircraft in three wars and set a world speed record for a pilot in a single-engine jet, died on Aug. 6 at his ranch here in Northern California. He was 81.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.

Joseph Rogers grew up on a farm in Chillicothe, Ohio, joined the Army Air Corps at 17 and became a flight instructor in World War II.

He was a top fighter pilot during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, completing 270 missions, and served as vice commander of a fighter wing in Vietnam.

Colonel Rogers is perhaps best remembered for the single-engine world speed record he set in 1959 when he flew an F-106 Delta Dart that reached 1,525 miles an hour, a mark that still stands.

Many years later, in retirement, he worked successfully to have a restored Delta Dart brought to the Pacific Coast Air Museum, in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Among the honors he won while with the Air Force was its Top Gun Award, in 1963. His achievements also earned him a place at the mile-long Aerospace Walk of Honor near Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

NY Times
Julian C. Stanley, a psychologist and champion of academically gifted children who helped promote testing nationwide to identify promising students and then lobbied for special programs to challenge them, died on Friday in a hospital in Columbia, Md. He was 87.

The cause was pneumonia, his family said.

Dr. Stanley was a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University, where he began an early and influential study of mathematically talented children in 1971.

His research, known as the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, was an effort to measure the abilities of select students before they entered high school. Dr. Stanley had the students take college entrance exams and other standardized tests, which he found to be more reliable indicators of ability than tests geared specifically to elementary-level age groups. The study, which continues, is focused on students age 13 or younger who score 700 points or higher of a possible 800 on a part of the SAT, a score achieved by about one student in 10,000 in the younger age bracket.

Three very different persons are “Late” today (”Late” being the term used by Alexander Mccall Smith
in“In the Company of Cheerful Ladies” to describe those that have died. We ODDfellows guess that if you’re dead, and someone is expecting you, you are definitely going to be terminally late. But we digress.)

Dr. Conrad Riley described an unusual genetic disease among Jews of Ashkenazi origin
. He then went on to support the increased admission of women and minorities to medical school, as well as liberalization of abortion laws. Col. Joseph Rodgers set the speed record in single engine craft. It was a delta winged aircraft
, NOT a Dodge Dart
. The Delta Dart was a way cool aircraft. Click here
to listen to it. Dr. Julian Stanley spent his life studying and developing educational strategies for talented and gifted children. (ODDfellows were in the control group of “tedious and gastropodous children.”) One of Stanley’s findings was that children gifted in mathematics were more likely to have allergies, have myopia
, and be left handed. So, the next time you see a kid wearing thick glasses and picking their nose with their left hand, ask them to solve the Pythagorean Theorem
using Euclidean algebraic geometry .

The recent notables with lung cancer has spurred the publics’ interest in techniques for early diagnosis, once of which is the spiral CT scanner
. (No vet jokes about CAT scans
please.) The test is certainly sensitive, but the problem is, it’s not specific . As often as 60% of the time, the mass found may not be lung cancer, but patients still have to go through painful and dangerous biopsies to determine whether or not cancer is present. Results of a massive national study
, due out soon, should be helpful in sorting things out.

Speaking of sorting things out, it will probably take some time to do that in the Gaza Strip
. Up to this point, Israeli settlements certainly fared better than Scottish settlements in Panama
. (Scotts in Panama?) Looks like the Israeli settlements are On Deck
.

Time for some haggis
and plantains.

LA Times
Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, a star in the Negro league and believed to be the oldest former professional baseball player, died of cancer Thursday in Chicago. He was 103.

Radcliffe was an all-star catcher and pitcher in the Negro league for half a century, playing for more than 30 teams.

Records were not always kept, but his biographer, Kyle P. McNary, estimated that Radcliffe had a .303 batting average, 4,000 hits and 400 homers in 36 years.

After starring as a pitcher and a catcher, he became a manager.

Damon Runyon gave him the nickname “Double Duty” after Radcliffe caught the first game, then pitched the second in a 1932 Negro League World Series doubleheader between the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Monroe Monarchs at Yankee Stadium.

Radcliffe caught a shutout by Satchel Paige in the first game, then pitched a shutout in the second, prompting Runyon to write that Radcliffe “was worth the price of two admissions.”

Ted “Double Duty” Radcliff, famed player in the Negro Baseball League
has died at age 103 years. He was the oldest living professional baseball player. Radcliff was an all-star pitcher and catcher for 50 years, and played for 30 different teams.

Oils at $67 a barrel
. Looks like a perfect storm of increased world-wide demand and limited refinery capacity. Change comes when pain becomes unbearable. Are we there yet?

We ODDfellows are loading up the old SUV
, making a down-payment on a tank of dinosaur bones, and heading out to do some rattlesnake hunting
(only kidding— “Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes?”

Remember the immortal words of Satchel Paige
, “Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

LA Times
Barbara Bel Geddes, a stage and screen actress who found lasting fame as the saintly matriarch on the long-running TV series “Dallas,” has died. She was 82.

Bel Geddes, a longtime smoker, died Monday of lung cancer at her home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, a relative told the San Francisco Chronicle.

She decided to take the role of Eleanor Southworth “Miss Ellie” Ewing on the CBS drama that ran from 1978 to 1991 because she was “flat broke” after spending six years caring for her second husband, who died of cancer in 1972.

“She was the glue that held the ship together there,” Larry Hagman, who played her son J.R. on “Dallas,” said Wednesday. “She was a wonderful woman — great to work with, great to direct.”

In 1980, she won an Emmy for her portrayal of the long-suffering mother who was the moral compass of the famously dysfunctional Ewings.

Appearing on the series was “great fun,” Bel Geddes said in 1982, but sometimes the story lines struck too close to home.

When Jim Davis, who played husband Jock Ewing, died in 1981, “it was like losing her own husband again,” “Dallas” producer Leonard Katzman told the Associated Press. “It was a terribly difficult and emotional time for Barbara.”

During the second season, Miss Ellie had a mastectomy, which mirrored Bel Geddes’ breast cancer experience in the early 1970s.

“I guess I dreaded dredging up the whole thing again,” Bel Geddes told The Times in 1979. But she made herself available for interviews to educate women about the importance of self-examination.

The actress with the warm smile found it amusing that she was often cast to play “well-bred ladies.”

“I’m not very well-bred, and I’m not much of a lady,” she told People magazine in 1982. She often cited a story about getting kicked out of Vermont’s Putney School at 16 for being a “disturbing influence” — she kissed boys.

“He always said I married him for the farm,” she (Barbara Bell Geddes) said in 1982, and laughed. Well, Barbara has bought the farm. Another of the 69,000 women
who will die in the U.S. this year due to lung cancer. You’ll remember Geddes as Eleanor Southworth “Miss Ellie” Ewing, on the 1978-1991 episodes of “Dallas.” In addition to being fired by Howard Hughes for “not being sexy enough,” Geddes starred in such movies as Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”

The Dallas actors weren’t all the healthy a bunch of actors. Larry Hagman
, who played J.R. had a liver transplant, Geddes underwent quadruple heart by-pass
, and Howard Keel who played Clayton Farlow died of colon cancer
. Something in the water of the ol’ South Fork Ranch
?

Patrick Duffy
, who played Bobby Ewing is now a very active devote Buddhist (some will find that to be somewhat of an oxymoron.) Speaking of Buddhists brings us to our latest ODD recommends. Like “Dallas,” “Bangkok 8” is full of sex, greed and duplicity. Unlike Dallas, in Bangkok 8, none of the snakes walk on two legs and wear cowboy hats. ( “Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes?”) We also recommend Little Oscar’s, “Grits ain’t Groceries,” as well as “The Professor and the Madman.” That’s good listenin’ and good readin’, although get ready for the scene where a penis gets cut off. (All males squirm now.)

We leave you with words of wisdom from J.R. Ewing, “Barnes just broke the cardinal rule in politics: never get caught in bed with a dead woman or a live man.”