In Memory: Jimmy Dean 1928 – 2010

The Working Man’s Country Music Singer has died:

Yahoo News Reports:

RICHMOND, Va. – Jimmy Dean, a country music legend for his smash hit about a workingman hero, “Big Bad John,” and an entrepreneur known for his sausage brand, died on Sunday. He was 81.

His wife, Donna Meade Dean, said her husband died at their Henrico County, Va., home.

She told The Associated Press that he had some health problems but was still functioning well, so his death came as a shock. She said he was eating in front of the television. She left the room for a time and came back and he was unresponsive. She said he was pronounced dead at 7:54 p.m.

“He was amazing,” she said. “He had a lot of talents.”

Born in 1928, Dean was raised in poverty in Plainview, Texas, and dropped out of high school after the ninth grade. He went on to a successful entertainment career in the 1950s and ’60s that included the nationally televised “The Jimmy Dean Show.”

In 1969, Dean went into the sausage business, starting the Jimmy Dean Meat Co. in his hometown. He sold the company to Sara Lee Corp. in 1984.

He was also a bit of a Conservative:

In the late ’60s, Dean entered the hog business — something he knew well. His family had butchered hogs, with the young Dean whacking them over the head with the blunt end of an ax. The Dean brothers — Jimmy and Don — ground the meat and their mother seasoned it.

The Jimmy Dean Meat Co. opened with a plant in Plainview. After six months, the company was profitable.

His fortune was estimated at $75 million in the early ’90s.

Having watched other stars fritter away their fortunes, Dean said he learned to be careful with his money.

“I’ve seen so many people in this business that made a fortune,” he told the AP. “They get old and broke and can’t make any money. … I tell you something, … no one’s going to play a benefit for Jimmy Dean.”

Rest in Peace, Mr. Dean. You have more than earned it.

(Fixed headline typo…. Sorry about that….)

May We Never Forget – 6/6/1944 – D-Day

God Help Us, if we ever forget this solemn day.

On June 6, 1944, The United States Armed Forces landed at Normandy Beach, to stop the tyrannical rule of Adolf Hitler.

May we never, ever forget…….

Memorial Day Video: Memorial Day Tribute to WWII Servicemen and Servicewomen

More from Richard Sullivan:

Memorial Day Video: VJ Day, Honolulu Hawaii, August 14, 1945

This comes via Richard Sullivan:

The Afternoon Music Express, Special Memorial Edition Presents: Lena Horne

We’ve lost one of the great ones.

A younger Lena Horne, Now that my friends is a looker!

From the New York Times:

Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She was 92 and lived in Manhattan.

Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley.

Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”

Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.

But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who did not do her own singing. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And in 1947, when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”

Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”

She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”

“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”

Lena Horne was an American original; not to mention she was quite the pretty lady. No other Country had anything remotely like Lena Horne, at least not in her heyday. Whenever I heard or saw the name Lena Horne; I thought glamor. Lena Horne was a Glamorous woman; and I mean that in the best way that I can muster.  Not only this; Lena Horne was a trailblazer. Back in the 1940’s, when racial segregation was at it’s height —- yes, that was a problem with Hollywood. Something the Democrats Advocated for years and yes, blacks flock to them now; how odd.   Anyhow, Lena Horne stood up to the bosses and did her own thing. Something that even I, a right of center blogger can admire. The lady just had guts and was a sassy, smoking hot woman on top of that.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Indeed she was. Rest in Peace Lena, you have more than earned it.

Lena Horne - 1917-2010 - Rest in Peace

Others Remembering: Feministing, nancynall.com, Don Surber, Shakesville, The Stranger …, Joe. My. God., The Awl, Another Black Conservative and ArtsBeat

Sad News: The Voice of Detroit Tiger Baseball is Dead – Ernie Harwell has died

To me, and everyone who grew up in Detroit in the 1980’s; this is the ultimate heart-ache.

Video:

This Story from the Detroit Free Press:

The Voice of Detroit Baseball - Ernie Harwell

He died in his apartment at Fox Run Village, a retirement center in Novi, with Lulu, his wife of 68 years, at his side. His death came eight months to the day after he revealed to his fans, in an interview with the Free Press, that he had a cancerous tumor in the area of his bile duct and that in late July he had been given only a few months to live.

“I’m ready to face what comes,” he said at the time. “Whether it’s a long time or a short time is all right with me because it’s up to my Lord and savior.”

In the ensuing months, in an emotional farewell ceremony at Comerica Park, in his columns for the Free Press and in interviews with national media, Harwell referred to death as his next great adventure, a gift handed down by God.

“I’ve had so many great ones,” he said. “It’s been a terrific life.”

Harwell had one of the longest runs by a broadcaster with one major league club, calling Tigers games for 42 seasons. For the first 32 of those seasons, he made and cemented his legacy by doing play-by-play on the radio. His Southern voice — rich and authoritative but not overbearing — became as distinctive to Michigan listeners as baseball itself.

Unlike some announcers in recent decades, Harwell didn’t litter his broadcasts with shouting, excessive talking or all-knowing pronouncements about players and managers. Listening to him was as pleasant as being at Tiger Stadium in the summertime. As he fell silent between pitches, listeners got to hear the sounds of the ballpark — the crowd’s buzz, the vendor’s cry — and absorb the rhythm of the game. Harwell thus became an ideal companion for a listener anywhere: the couch, the yard, the car or the boat.

“He’s a master craftsman,” former Tigers broadcaster Josh Lewin, now with the Texas Rangers, said in 2002. “He’s always kept it simple, which I think is part of his charm and staying power.”

In 2005, author and historian Curt Smith ranked Harwell as the third-greatest baseball announcer ever, only placing him behind Dodgers legend Vin Scully and Yankees stalwart Mel Allen. Just behind Harwell were St. Louis’ Jack Buck and New York’s Red Barber. Smith, a student of baseball broadcasting, had 10 criteria for his rankings, ranging from longevity and acclaim to voice and personality.

Beyond his consummate broadcasting skills, Harwell’s cheerfulness and friendliness made him a local treasure.

“He always had that warmth, that inviting lilt to his voice that always made you feel welcome,” Lewin said. “No one can do that like Ernie can.”

At home games, Harwell would report that a foul ball had been caught by “a man from Ypsilanti” or “a lady from Muskegon.” Of course he couldn’t know where the fan lived, but pretending that he did added a distinct local feel to his broadcasts.

On the day of his career-ending broadcast in 2002, he said, “I look on life as a joyous adventure.” He had lived by that ideal. He constantly conducted himself with joy, on and off the air. “Howdy, howdy,” he would greet friends and strangers, smiling and extending his hand.

Harwell was in his 80s when he returned to the radio in 1999 for four final years of broadcasting every Tigers game, home and away. He didn’t sound tired, old-fashioned or nostalgic, even as the Tigers in those years stacked one losing season on top of another. During Harwell’s final season, Boston Red Sox announcer Joe Castiglione said, “Ernie is the most contemporary octogenarian I know.”

The Detroit News remembers too:

Ernie has died.

After a battle against bile duct cancer, one he knew he would lose, Ernie Harwell died Tuesday. He was 92.

With his death, Michigan — and baseball — loses one of its most beloved figures.

For 55 years, Harwell was a major league broadcaster, 42 with the Tigers. He broadcast his last game Sept. 22, 2002.

Instead of moving away from the Detroit area, he spent his final years in Novi, still being part of our lives as an author and corporate spokesman.

William Earnest Harwell was born Jan. 25, 1918 in Washington, Ga.

As a boy, his family moved to Atlanta, where he grew up loving newspapers and baseball, which is how and why he became a paperboy and a batboy for his hometown minor league club, the Atlanta Crackers.

“I remember there was a drug store in Washington where they’d put me up on the counter and let me imitate the baseball announcers of the day, re-creating ball games,” Harwell said two years ago when he turned 90.

“I was tongue-tied at that time, though. I had a speech impediment. Words like sister came out thith-ter. But I was interested in baseball broadcasts even then, so I’d try to imitate the announcers. It wasn’t a very good imitation, but I tried.”

This is hardest things that I have ever tried to write in my life.  How does one explain someone like Ernie Harwell?  I will try my best.  However, I can tell you this; there is going to be a big hole in Detroit baseball for a very long time.

Ernie Harwell was a man from Georgia.  Detroit; from early 1950s until the late 1970s, experienced something called the “Appalachian Migration”, this is where people from the south, like say places like Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and other such places in the south, would come to Detroit to find work.  Listening to Ernie Harwell was like listening to home for these people.  People like my Father, who migrated from Middlesburo, Kentucky in 1967. People like me, who was his son.

There was George Kell on TV and there was Ernie Harwell on the radio.  That was Detroit Baseball.  Ernie was home on the radio for many people.

I have many fond memories of walking with my Dad through Patton Park in Detroit over to the softball diamond, to watch the games over there; all the while carrying his little black portable radio, with Ernie Harwell on the radio.

Old Memories — Old Detroit — My Childhood.

The Diamond is still there, my Dad is now 64, and Ernie is gone.

The just do not build them like that anymore.

It is truly a dark day in Detroit baseball.

Rest in Peace Ernie.

“I wanted to be a newspaper writer, but when I got out of college in 1940, none of the papers in Atlanta had an opening. So I auditioned with a radio station, got lucky, won the audition, and that’s how I got into radio.

“I didn’t know anything about radio, though. I just took a shot at it.”

That he did, and did it damned well he did.

He will be truly missed, at least by this Blogger. 🙁

Update: Statement from Senator Carl Levin:

Video:

Transcript:

WASHINGTON – Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., delivered the following statement on the Senate floor today:

“For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.”

Mr. President, spring after spring, for four decades, a man named Ernie Harwell would recite those words. He would recite them at the beginning of the first baseball broadcast of spring training. And those are the words that would tell the people of Michigan that the long, cold winter was over.

Ernie was the radio voice of the Detroit Tigers for 42 years, and in that time, there may have been no Michiganian more universally beloved. Our state mourns today at his passing, yesterday evening, after a battle with cancer. He fought that battle with the grace, the good humor, and the wisdom that Michigan had come to expect, and even depend on, from a man we came to know and love.

This gentlemanly Georgian adopted our team, and our state, as his own. And his career would have been worthy had he done nothing more than bring us the sound of summer over the radio, recounting the Tigers’ ups and downs with professionalism and wit, as he did.

But without making a show of it, Ernie Harwell taught us. In his work and his life, he taught us the value of kindness and respect. He taught us that, in a city and a world too often divided, we could be united in joy at a great Al Kaline catch, or a Lou Whitaker home run, or a Mark Fidrych strikeout. He taught us not to let life pass us by “like the house by the side of the road.”

In 1981, when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, Ernie told the assembled fans what baseball meant to him. “In baseball democracy shines its clearest,” he said. “The only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rulebook. Color merely something to distinguish one team’s uniform from another.” That was a lesson he taught us so well.

Mr. President, I will miss Ernie Harwell. All of Michigan will miss the sound of his voice telling us that the winter is past, that the Tigers had won a big game, or that they’d get another chance to win one tomorrow. We will miss his Georgia drawl, his humor, his humility, his quiet faith in God and in the goodness of the people he encountered. But we will carry in our hearts always our love for him, our appreciation for his work, and the lessons he gave us and left us and that we will pass on to our children and grandchildren.

Movie: Isle Of Wight 1970

I present this movie, not to mock; but as abstract of history. This is the actual documentary of the festival — without all the music.

The film shows the clash between the Capitalists, Anarchists and the hippies; who came just to have a good time.

Notable items: The utter hypocrisy of the performers, who all the while saying, “it’s not about the money!”; all the while demanding large sums of cash for their performances. The old man swearing in proper British English, the Festival promoter swearing at the crowd — “You can go to hell!” The nutty baroness — Who the hell was she, anyone know?

It is all rather amusing… and a rather interesting look at our past.

Exit Question: How many of these people are still alive? and how many are in Government in England?

On a Technical Note, there is a section, that is repeated in one of the parts. Be aware of that… No, you’re not tripping; but quite obviously someone was, when they edited this for YouTube! 😉 😀 😛

My Other Hobby in the spotlight on NPR

I thought some of you might be interested in this:

Stanley Hardman, an amateur radio operator, and his family look at transmitting equipment in 1939.

Only a few years ago, blogs listed ham radio alongside 35 mm film and VHS tape as technologies slated to disappear.

They were wrong.

Nearly 700,000 Americans have ham radio licenses — up 60 percent from 1981, a generation ago. And the number is growing.

Ham radio will never have the sex appeal of the iPhone, but it does have a certain nerd appeal, says Allen Weiner, an analyst at the technology research firm Gartner.

“If it creates its own experience, that’s really what’s key here,” he says. “If it just emulates an experience that you can get online, it’s not going to grow.”

via Ham Radio Growing In The Age Of Twitter : NPR.

A very interesting article about a very interesting hobby. Check it out! 😀