DICK FRANCIS, BRITISH JOCKEY AND THRILLER WRITER
Dick Francis in New York in 2000.
Mr. Francis jumping Devon Loch, the horse he was racing for the queen mother in the 1956 Grand National.
The death was announced by a family spokeswoman.
The author of more than 40 novels, most of them set in the world of thoroughbred horse racing, Mr. Francis made it a point of honor to satisfy fans with one book a year for most of his career. His works have been translated into languages around the world.
Although his first novel, “Dead Cert” in 1962, was made into a feature film, television adaptations of his stories have been more successful, including a British series broadcast here in 1980 as part of the public television series “Mystery!” That series doubled sales of his books in the United States.
One of the most honored of genre authors, Mr. Francis was named to the Order of the British Empire and later made a commander. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America three times and was made a grand master, the group’s highest honor, in 1996. He also received the Diamond Dagger award, the highest honor of the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain, in 1990.
“I never really decided to be a writer,” he wrote in his autobiography, “The Sport of Queens,” “I just sort of drifted into it.” Before he turned to writing, Mr. Francis was already a celebrity in British sporting circles. Named champion jockey of the 1953-54 racing season by the British National Hunt after winning more than 350 races, he was retained as jockey to the queen mother for four seasons and raced eight times in the Grand National Steeplechase.
When Devon Loch, the horse he was racing for the queen mother in the 1956 Grand National, collapsed in a spectacular mishap just before he would have won, Mr. Francis feared, as he put it in his autobiography, that he would be remembered as “the man who didn’t win the National.” This setback, along with the accumulated miseries of injuries, forced him into early retirement at the age of 36.
But with the same pluck characteristic of the jockeys, trainers and other horsemen who serve as the heroes of his novels, he took a job writing sports articles for The Sunday Express of London and served as that newspaper’s racing correspondent for 16 years.
A chance encounter with a literary agent led to his writing “The Sport of Queens,” published the year after he retired. Emboldened by its success (and further motivated by his paltry wages as a journalist), he began writing “Dead Cert.”
Drawing on his experiences as a jockey and his intimate knowledge of the racetrack crowd — from aristocratic owners to Cockney stable boys — the novel contained all the elements that readers would come to relish from a Dick Francis thriller. There was the pounding excitement of a race, the aura of the gentry at play, the sweaty smells from the stables out back, an appreciation for the regal beauty and unique personality of a thoroughbred — and enough sadistic violence to man and beast to satisfy the bloodthirsty.
“Writing a novel proved to be the hardest, most self-analyzing task I had ever attempted,” Mr. Francis said, “far worse than an autobiography.” He went about his unaccustomed chore cautiously and methodically, as he might have approached a skittish horse. Working in pencil in an exercise book, he would labor over one sentence until he was satisfied that he could do no better, then move on to the next sentence.
“My ‘first draft’ is IT,” Mr. Francis revealed in his autobiography, noting that he never rewrote. “I’ve tried once or twice, but I haven’t the mental stamina and I feel all the time that although what I’m attempting may be different, it won’t be better and may very well be worse, because my heart isn’t in it.”
“Nerve” appeared two years after “Dead Cert.” The former jockey had hung up his boots for good, and had become a professional author.
After the death in 2000 of Mary Francis, his wife of 53 years and a close collaborator on his books, Mr. Francis expressed doubts that he would ever write another novel. “She was the moving force behind my writing,” he said. “I don’t think I shall write again other than letters now. So much of my work was her.”
Indeed, he didn’t write another novel until “Under Orders” in 2006. That novel brought back Sid Halley, the retired steeplechase jockey who was his champion sleuth.
A year later, Mr. Francis teamed up with his son, Felix Francis, to write “Dead Heat.” Father and son would go on to write two more novels together, “Silks” and “Even Money.” Felix Francis survives him along with another son, Merrick, five grandchildren and a great-grandson.
Mr. Francis was a formulaic writer, even if the formula was foolproof. He drew the reader into the intimate and remarkably sensual experience of the world of racing. His writing never seemed better than when his jockey-heroes climbed on their mounts and gave themselves up to what he called “the old song in the blood.”
This self-contained world was, of course, a reflection of a broader universe in which themes of winning and losing and courage and integrity have more sweeping meaning. As the critic John Leonard wrote, “Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses is like not reading Dostoyevsky because you don’t like God.”
After leading the reader into this subculture, Mr. Francis would then introduce an element of menace. A jockey is kidnapped (“Risk”). A jockey commits suicide (“Nerve”). A jockey is killed (“Slay-Ride”). Horses are stolen (“Blood Sport”). Horses are mutilated (“Come to Grief”). Horses are killed (“Bolt”). Horrific things also happen to owners, trainers, breeders and stable hands. Into this disordered universe rides the hero, usually a jockey or a former jockey.
Typically, the Dick Francis hero is a modest, decent fellow, a model of British valor and integrity, who restores order by asserting his superior moral values — and by going mano a mano with a ruthless villain who subjects him to unspeakable torture.
Those livid passages are as much a hallmark of Mr. Francis’s thrillers as his more celebrated horse races. Although he once said that the extreme violence in his books was a reflection of “life in general,” it was more likely a sense-memory of his own painful injuries. His collarbone was broken 12 times, his nose five times, his skull once, his wrist once, and his ribs too many times to notice. He rode 12 races (winning two) with a broken arm.
Dick Francis was born on Oct. 31, 1920, in Lawrenny, south Wales. As the son of a professional steeplechase rider and stable manager, he was introduced to horse racing early. Although he flew with the Royal Air Force during World War II, piloting fighter and bomber aircraft, the major flight research on “Flying Finish” and “Rat Race” was done by his wife.
His final novel, “Crossfire,” is scheduled to be published later this year.
A modest and reserved man, Mr. Francis took quiet pleasure in his success as an author. He once confessed to a moment of vanity when his publisher advertised a novel on the front of London buses. “I stood in Oxford Street watching them go by with an absolutely fatuous smile,” he said.
Yet, in looking back at the decade that he rode horses for a living, he would call those years “the special ones. The first growth; the true vintage. The best years of my life.”
********************************************************************
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, FASHION DESIGNER
By ERIC WILSON and CATHY HORYN
Published: February 11, 2010
Alexander McQueen, the renegade British fashion designer known for producing some of the most provocative collections of the last two decades, was found dead on Thursday morning in his London home, the police there said. He was 40.
Mr. McQueen’s family did not make a statement about the cause of death, but a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said it was not being treated as suspicious. A representative of Mr. McQueen, who would not speak for attribution, said the cause was apparently suicide.
Mr. McQueen’s death stunned the hundreds of international magazine editors and store buyers who had just convened in Manhattan for the first day of the fall collections at New York Fashion Week at Bryant Park.
Mr. McQueen often showed a dark streak in his collections, commenting on brutality toward women and what he saw as the inanity of the fashion world, and it carried over into his personal life. Though he had an acknowledged history of drug abuse and wild behavior, close friends said they were surprised by the news of his death. He had been deeply affected, in 2007, by the suicide of Isabella Blow, the eccentric stylist who had championed him, and he was said to be devastated by the death of his mother, Joyce, on Feb. 2, after a long illness.
“Creativity is a very fragile thing, and Lee was very fragile,” said the milliner Philip Treacy, who had worked with Mr. McQueen. He said he last saw the designer two weeks ago, when Mr. McQueen was preparing the fall collection that was to be presented in Paris on March 9.
“It’s not easy being Mr. McQueen,” Mr. Treacy said. “We’re all human. His mum had just died. And his mum was a great supporter of his talent.”
At the beginning of his career, Mr. McQueen became a sensation for showing his clothes on ravaged-looking models who appeared to have been physically abused, institutionalized or cosmetically altered, all while peppering his audience with rude comments. “I’m not interested in being liked,” he said. He once mooned the audience of his show.
But he was enormously creative and intelligent, and he seemed to sense that the fashion industry needed to have its buttons pushed. His fall 2009 collection was the talk of Paris when, reacting to the recession, Mr. McQueen showed exaggerated versions of all of his past work on a runway strewn with a garbage heap of props from his former stage sets. He was suggesting that fashion was in ruins.
“The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem,” he said. “There is no longevity.”
In his work, Mr. McQueen drew on Orientalism, classicism and English eccentrics, and also his ideas about the future, combining them in ways that were complex and perplexing.
As designers have done for centuries, Mr. McQueen altered the shape of the body using corsetry and anatomically correct breast plates as a recurring motif. More recently, his work took on increasingly futuristic tones, with designs that combined soft draping with molding, or ones in which a dress seemed to morph into a coat. At his last show, in October, the models wore platform shoes that looked like the hulls of ships.
Lee Alexander McQueen was born in London on March 17, 1969. His father was a taxi driver; his mother was a social science teacher. His father wanted him to become an electrician or a plumber, but Lee, as he was always known, knew he wanted to work in fashion. His father, Ron McQueen, survives him, as do five siblings.
Aware of his homosexuality at an early age (he said he knew at age 8), he was taunted by other children, who called him “McQueer.” He left school at 16 and found an apprenticeship on Savile Row working for the tailors Anderson & Sheppard and then Gieves & Hawkes. In a story he repeated on some occasions but at other times denied, he was bored one day and wrote a derogatory slur in the lining of a jacket destined for the Prince of Wales.
By the time he was 21, Mr. McQueen had also worked for Angels & Bermans, the theatrical costume company, and for the designers Koji Tatsuno and Romeo Gigli. He then pursued a master’s degree at the Central St. Martins design college, where his graduate collection caught the attention of Ms. Blow. She acquired every piece of that collection and took him under her wing.
As he struck out on his own, Mr. McQueen was immediately recognized for his brashness. The models in his October 1993 collection walked the runway with their middle fingers extended, and their dresses were hand-printed to appear as if they were covered with blood; some of it looked fresh. He also showed trousers cut so low that they were called “bumsters.” Criticized at the time because some did not cover the rear, the trousers were credited with initiating a low-rise trend that eventually caught on with every mainstream jeans maker in the world.
Multimedia
Multimedia
Related
“His was a hard show to take, but at least it offered one solution to the identity crisis of London fashion,” wrote Amy M. Spindler, then the fashion critic of The New York Times.
In March 1995, at his most controversial, Mr. McQueen dedicated his fall collection to “the highland rape,” a pointed statement about the ravaging of Scotland by England. The models appeared to be brutalized, wearing lacy dresses with hems and bodices ripped open, their hair tangled and their eyes blanked out with opaque contact lenses. This had come on the heels of a spring collection that, paradoxically, was full of precisely tailored suits and crisp shirts.
He was called an enfant terrible and the hooligan of English fashion. The monstrous, sometimes sadistic, styling of his collections became a hallmark, as when he showed models wearing horns on their shoulders. A collection in 2000 was shown on models with their heads bandaged, stumbling inside a large glass-walled room with the audience on the outside as if its members were looking into a mental ward. But many of these motifs were actually based on historic scenes, from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch to the films of Stanley Kubrick. Mr. McQueen once said he had sewn locks of human hair into his jackets as a nod to Jack the Ripper.
“Nicey nicey just doesn’t do it for me,” he said.
In 1996, Mr. McQueen received an offer from LVMH, the luxury conglomerate, to be the designer of the white-glove couture label founded by Hubert de Givenchy, whose elegant little black dresses had been immortalized by Audrey Hepburn. Mr. McQueen, who succeeded John Galliano in the role, stoked the fires of the French press, however, when he dismissed Mr. de Givenchy’s past work as “irrelevant.” But the move enabled Mr. McQueen, who had struggled financially, to do something he had always wanted: to buy a house for his mother.
Though he worked for Givenchy until 2001, his tenure did not produce remarkable notices, other than frequent reports of bickering between him and management. His departure was typically confrontational. He shocked his employers by selling the majority stake of the Alexander McQueen label to LVMH’s biggest rival, the Gucci Group. The investment allowed him to show his own clothes in Paris, alongside the major French houses.
He had since opened stores in New York, London, Milan, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, licensed his name for fragrances and a lower-priced line called McQ, and made collections of sneakers and suitcases for the athletic company Puma. The deal with Gucci, he said, enabled him to turn his company into a commercially successful venture while retaining his design independence. The first shoes he showed for Puma, for example, included an image of his bare foot imbedded in the clear soles, and the suitcase was molded in the shape of a spine.
**********************************************************************************************
CHARLIE WILSON, TEXAS CONGRESSMAN LINKED TO FOREIGN INTRIGUE
Jack Gorden Jr., the mayor of Lufkin, confirmed the death. Memorial Medical Center-Lufkin said the preliminary cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest. Mr. Wilson had a heart transplant in 2007.
Mr. Wilson’s exploits to provide as much as $5 billion in arms to Afghan rebels were the subject of a book and the 2007 movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” directed by Mike Nichols. Tom Hanks portrayed Mr. Wilson and Julia Roberts played Joanne Herring, the conservative Houston socialite who first interested Mr. Wilson, a Democrat, in aiding the Afghans.
A former president of Pakistan, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, said it was hard to understate Mr. Wilson’s role. “All I can say is, ‘Charlie did it,’ ” he said on “60 Minutes” in 1988.
It was an unusual role for a congressman representing an unworldly East Texas district. From 1973 to 1996, Mr. Wilson kept his seat by balancing liberal views on many domestic issues with a hawkish stance on foreign policy and paying close attention to his constituents’ needs.
Until his secret role in Afghanistan became the stuff of Hollywood, Mr. Wilson’s fame was pretty much summed up by his nickname, “Good Time Charlie.” An article in Texas Monthly in 2004 said he gave his girlfriends nicknames like Snowflake, Tornado and Firecracker.
Mr. Wilson was able to help the Afghans from his seat on the House Appropriations Committee and from another on its subcommittee on foreign operations.
The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, invited by the pro-Communist government there in the face of an insurgency.
After he visited a refugee camp in Pakistan at the urging of Ms. Herring and saw wounded and maimed Afghan guerrilla fighters, Mr. Wilson vowed to help them and became a key figure in Congress for doing so, overtly pushing for humanitarian aid and covertly obtaining military help, a risky endeavor against a rival superpower. He often gathered his colleagues’ support by voting for military contracts that would serve their districts.
From a few million dollars in the early 1980s, support for the resistance grew to $750 million a year by the end of the decade. The financing was funneled to Afghanistan in secret by Mr. Wilson and other lawmakers.
The help went beyond money. When the Soviets deliberately killed camels and mules to cripple the Afghan fighters’ supply lines, he flew in Tennessee mules. When the Central Intelligence Agency refused to provide the guerrillas with field radios for fear that mujahedeen transmissions would be picked up by the Soviets, he sent an aide to Virginia to buy $12,000 worth of walkie-talkies from a Radio Shack outlet.
Particularly helpful were Stinger missiles from the United States, which were used to shoot down Russian helicopters and became what many consider a decisive factor in wearing down the Soviets. By February 1989, the Soviets had withdrawn and the United States ended its support.
In later years Mr. Wilson insisted that the United States had not made a mistake by supporting the Afghan rebels, among them Osama bin Laden and the Islamists who would form the Taliban regime. He said if the United States had helped rebuild Afghanistan, it would have remained stable and not become a safe haven for Al Qaeda.
Charles Nesbitt Wilson was born in Trinity, Tex., where his father was an accountant for a lumber company, on June 1, 1933. He told about his first political experience in the book from which the movie was made, “Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History” (2003) by George Crile.
Charlie was 13 when his dog strayed and a neighbor apparently fed it something that contained crushed glass. The boy first doused the man’s garden with gasoline and set it on fire. He then realized that the neighbor was a City Council member and used his learner’s permit to drive black voters to the polls to vote against him. The neighbor lost his seat by 16 votes.
Mr. Wilson attended the Naval Academy at Annapolis and graduated in 1956. He served four years in the Navy and went back to Texas, where he was elected to the State House of Representatives and then to the State Senate.
In 1972, he ran successfully for Congress, where he outmaneuvered a fellow Texan for a seat on the Appropriations Committee as well as a slot on its subcommittee on foreign operations.
Mr. Wilson is survived by his wife, the former Barbara Alberstadt, and his sister, Sharon Allison.
His rowdy behavior produced sensational headlines over the years. There were at least two midnight car crashes. He was investigated for cocaine use, and election-expenditure irregularities resulted in a $90,000 fine.
In an interview with Washingtonian magazine in 1996, Mr. Wilson said Texas voters put up with his antics in part because of the vicarious thrill they got in watching him. He added that he did not lie or whine when caught.
“I just say, ‘Well, yeah, I guess I goofed again’ and go about my business,” he said. “Those good Christians, you know, believe in the redemption of sin.”
When he announced his resignation in 1995, saying the job was not fun anymore, Mr. Wilson thanked his constituents for their tolerance.
“He was our favorite town character,” Mayor Gorden said. “He was a rascal but our rascal.”
*****************************************************************************************************
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN P. MURTHA, EX-MARINE AND IRAQ WAR CRITIC
Elected in 1974 and the first Vietnam combat veteran to serve in Congress, Mr. Murtha voted in 2002 to authorize use of military force in Iraq. But he evolved into a leading foe of the war as it was conducted under the administration of President George W. Bush.
“The war in Iraq is not going as advertised,” Mr. Murtha said in November 2005 as he demanded an immediate withdrawal of American troops. He called the Iraq campaign “a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.”
Mr. Murtha’s long involvement in Pentagon issues and his history of hawkishness made the criticism all the more influential.
In a statement Monday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called Mr. Murtha “a true patriot” and said that while they did not always agree, “I always respected his candor, and knew that he cared deeply about the men and women of America’s military and intelligence community.”
Before speaking out on the war, Mr. Murtha was not much known outside Washington or his district in southwestern Pennsylvania.
But he was alternately respected and feared by his colleagues on Capitol Hill as he used his influence to funnel hundreds of millions of federal dollars into his hard-luck district, where prosperity had vanished with the decline of the coal and steel industries.
Mr. Murtha used his position as the ranking Democrat on the Appropriation Committee’s military subcommittee to reward or punish colleagues in both parties, depending on whether they went along with the special items, or earmarks, that he tucked into bills for the benefit of his 12th Congressional District. More often than not, they did.
The chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, once described Mr. Murtha as someone “who likes to get things done with virtually no spoken words.”
Though Mr. Murtha, who was known as Jack, did not go out of his way to win friends among journalists, he understood the power of words. “Let me tell you the facts of life,” he often told balky legislators, as he recalled in an interview in 2006. “If you vote against this bill, you won’t have any input at all the next time.”
Nor did he apologize for the political horse-trading in which he was so adept. “Deal making is what Congress is all about,” he said.
As an ally of Representative Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Murtha helped navigate her rise to speaker of the House. Ms. Pelosi, in turn, backed him in his unsuccessful contest against Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland to become House Democratic leader.
While Mr. Murtha steered huge sums to his district and was able to rake in plenty of money for his campaigns, he lived modestly in Johnstown, Pa., where he owned a carwash.
Mr. Murtha, who served five years in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives before going to Washington, was a protégé of Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. of Massachusetts, who may not have coined the phrase that “all politics is local” but surely embraced it. So did John P. Murtha, who once boasted on a campaign billboard that “The ‘P’ stands for power.” (It actually stood for Patrick.)
When he drew fire from the political right for his shift on Iraq, Mr. Murtha said his criticism of the war in no way lessened his support for the Americans fighting in it.
“I don’t take a back seat to anybody for my service to my country,” Mr. Murtha said in a recent, profanity-spiced interview with his local newspaper, The Tribune-Democrat. But he said the killing of Iraqi civilians, even if accidental, and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners had undermined American efforts.
Mr. Murtha told The Tribune-Democrat that he had trusted people in the Bush administration too much when it came to Iraq. “I gave them the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “That was a bad mistake.”
A slogan in his first campaign for Congress was “One Honest Man Is Enough.” Yet he barely survived the Abscam affair that ruined several other politicians in the early 1980s. Mr. Murtha was shown on videotape turning down money from an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation posing as a “sheikh” but he expressed a willingness to talk about money later.
Despite that awkward moment, he was never charged, and he eventually testified against two other Abscam defendants.
Early in 2009, he came under scrutiny again, when it came to light that federal agents had raided the offices of the PMA Group, a major Washington lobbying firm, in November 2008 as part of an investigation into potentially improper campaign contributions.
Mr. Murtha was among the lawmakers lobbied by the firm (its founder, Paul Magliocchetti, had worked for the Defense subcommittee long dominated by him), and PMA’s executives and clients were major sources of contributions to Mr. Murtha’s campaigns. The firm’s specialty was helping clients obtain multimillion-dollar earmarks, Mr. Murtha’s stock in trade.
The PMA Group closed its doors after the investigation, and a Congressional ethics office declined to recommend formal investigations into the actions of Mr. Murtha and the other legislators. But the affair did nothing to dispel the impression that Mr. Murtha ran a busy political trading post.
The plainspoken Mr. Murtha’s statements sometimes got him in trouble. In October 2008, for example, he was criticized for saying that some of his own constituents were “redneck” and “racist” and might have trouble voting for Barack Obama for president.
Trying to explain away his remarks, Mr. Murtha told reporters that change was difficult for some people, “particularly older people” — this in a state that had at the time the second-highest population of elderly people in the country, after Florida.
But Mr. Murtha won handily anyhow, defeating a political unknown. On Election Night, he told his supporters, “You keep sending me back regardless of what I say.”
John Patrick Murtha was born in New Martinsville, W.Va., on June 17, 1932, and grew up in Mount Pleasant, Pa., about 45 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. He left Washington & Jefferson College in 1952 to enlist in the Marine Corps and go to Korea.
After graduating with a degree in economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1962, he rejoined the Marines, serving as an officer in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 and receiving a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in combat in the spring of 1967 and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry.
His survivors include his wife of 55 years, Joyce; a daughter, Donna; twin sons, John and Patrick, and three grandchildren.
As for his constituents, their support largely never flagged. The only close call at the polls for Mr. Murtha was his first run for Congress, a special election in February 1974 to fill the seat of Representative John P. Saylor, a Republican, who had died. Mr. Murtha won by fewer than 200 votes, out of some 120,000 cast.
Mr. Murtha left a legacy visible across southwestern Pennsylvania: roads, airports and hospitals there are named after him. Indeed, though he became a fixture in Washington, he remained, in his own eyes, one with the people back home.
“I know better than those damn people in the White House what needs to be done in my district,” he said.
***************************************************************************************************
FRED MORRISON, CREATOR OF POPULAR FLYING PLATE
|
|||
 |
 |
||
Wormhole Publishers
Fred Morrison in 1957 with his disc, then called a Pluto Platter.
The cause was cancer, said Phil Kennedy, the author with Mr. Morrison of “Flat Flip Flies Straight: True Origins of the Frisbee”(Wormhole Publishers, 2006).
Beloved of man and dog, the Frisbee has for more than half a century been the signature product of Wham-O, a toy and sporting-goods manufacturer based in Emeryville, Calif. The company has sold more than 200 million of the discs since acquiring the rights to Mr. Morrison’s Pluto Platter, as it was then known, in 1957.
At least since antiquity, mankind has been hurling flat, round objects — or flying discs, as they are known in aficionados’ parlance — aloft. But Mr. Morrison is widely credited as having designed the first commercial flying disc expressly manufactured and marketed as such.
Wham-O changed the name to Frisbee in 1958, influenced by the Frisbie Pie Company in Connecticut, whose tins Yale students hurled for sport. A Westerner whose plainspoken ways could be mistaken for gruffness, Mr. Morrison deplored the change.
“I thought the name was a horror,” he told The Press Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., in 2007. “Terrible.” (Before perfecting the Pluto Platter in 1955, Mr. Morrison had called earlier incarnations of his disc the Flyin’ Cake Pan, the Whirlo-Way and the Flyin-Saucer.)
But as his royalties mounted — he would realize millions of dollars over the years — Mr. Morrison revised his position on “Frisbee.”
Walter Fredrick Morrison, known as Fred, was born on Jan. 23, 1920, in Richfield, Utah; he moved with his family to Los Angeles as a teenager.
In 1937, Fred attended a picnic held by the family of his girlfriend, Lucile Nay, known as Lu. Before long, the fateful popcorn lid was thrown. The young couple soon discovered that Fred’s mother’s metal pie tins were far more durable. Mrs. Morrison’s reaction is not recorded.
As they tossed the tin on the beach one day, a passer-by offered to buy it for a quarter. The tin had cost five cents, and soon a thriving resale business was born, with Fred and Lu selling their Flyin’ Cake Pans at Southern California beaches and parks. They earned enough to marry.
In World War II, Mr. Morrison flew P-47 fighter-bombers in Europe, increasing his knowledge of aerodynamics. Returning to Los Angeles after the war, he worked as a carpenter, in his spare time putting his flying disc through successive refinements.
In 1948, he and a partner, Warren Franscioni, manufactured the Flyin-Saucer, the first plastic flying disc. It sold fitfully, and the two men parted company in 1950. The Pluto Platter was Mr. Morrison’s most refined disc. Flat and round, it had a raised central hub, with the names of the planets in raised plastic around the rim. The instructions, molded into the underside, were written by Lu Morrison and read like a Zen koan:
Play catch — Invent Games
To Fly, Flip Away Backhanded
Flat Flip Flies Straight
Tilted Flip Curves — Experiment!
Mr. Morrison was awarded United States patent No. 183,626 for his “Flying Toy” in 1958. In 1967, Ed Headrick Wham-O’s head of research and development, patented alterations to the disc’s shape that improved its aerodynamic ability, resulting in the familiar Frisbee of today.
For Wham-O, Mr. Morrison also invented the Crazy Eight Bowling Ball and the Popsicle Machine, a plastic form that could be filled with juice and frozen. Neither matched the success of the Frisbee, but by then it hardly mattered. In later years, he bred racehorses and flew airplanes.
Mr. Morrison’s marriage to Ms. Nay ended in divorce, as did several later marriages. His survivors include a son, two daughters and grandchildren.
Today, heirs of Mr. Morrison’s flying disc are everywhere, used in backyards worldwide and in organized pastimes like disc golf, a game standardized by Mr. Headrick in which discs are thrown at targets or into baskets, and the team sport known simply as Ultimate, modeled partly on soccer and using a heavy plastic disc.
All this sprang from the Pluto Platter that Mr. Morrison and his wife hawked at midcentury fairgrounds. As it sailed through the air straight and true, Mr. Morrison, a born showman, assured the crowd that his disc was gliding along an invisible wire.
To prove his point, as he recalled in interviews afterward, he offered to sell fairgoers 100 feet of the wire for one dollar. He threw in a Pluto Platter at no extra charge.
*********************************************************************************************************
NODAR KUMARITASHVILI, GEORGIAN OLYMPIC LUGER ATHLETE
February 12, 2010
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — A men’s Olympic luger from the country of Georgia died Friday after a high-speed crash during training. IOC president Jacques Rogge said the death hours before the opening ceremony “clearly casts a shadow over these games.”Nodar Kumaritashvili lost control of his sled, went over the track wall and struck an unpadded steel pole near the finish line at Whistler Sliding Center. Doctors were unable to revive the 21-year-old luger, who died at a hospital, the International Olympic Committee said.
Rescue workers were at his side within seconds, chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation started less than one minute after the crash, and he was quickly airlifted to a trauma center in Whistler.
Kumaritashvili struck the inside wall of the track on the final turn. His body immediately went airborne and cleared the ice-coated concrete wall along the left side of the sliding surface. His sled remained in the track, and it appeared his helmet visor skidded down the ice.
“It’s a very rare situation,” three-time Olympic champion and German coach Georg Hackl said before learning of the death and was clearly shaken moments after seeing Kumaritashvili tended to furiously by medical officials.
Olympic competition in men’s luge is scheduled to begin Saturday. It’s unclear if that schedule would be affected.
It was Kumaritashvili’s second crash during training for the Vancouver Games. He also failed to finish his second of six practice runs, and in the runs he did finish, his average speed was about 88 mph — significantly less than the speed the top sliders are managing on this lightning-fast course.
It was unclear how fast Kumaritashvili was going, although many sliders have exceeded 90 mph on this course. The track is considered the world’s fastest and several Olympians recently questioned its safety. More than a dozen athletes have crashed during Olympic training for luge, and some questioned whether athletes from smaller nations — like Georgia — had enough time to prepare for the daunting track.
At the finish area, not far from where Kumaritashvili lost control, athletes, coaches and officials solemnly awaited word on Kumaritashvili before eventually being ushered away. Access to the crash area was closed within about 30 minutes.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Shiva Keshavan, a four-time Olympian from India.
The remainder of men’s training was canceled for the day, with VANOC officials saying in a release that an investigation was taking place to “ensure a safe field of play.”
Kumaritashvili competed in five World Cup races this season, finishing 44th in the world standings.
Earlier in the day, gold-medal favorite Armin Zoeggeler of Italy crashed, losing control of his sled on Curve 11. Zoeggeler came off his sled and held it with his left arm to keep it from smashing atop his body. He slid on his back down several curves before coming to a stop and walking away.
Training days in Whistler have been crash-filled. A Romanian woman was briefly knocked unconscious and at least four Americans — Chris Mazdzer on Wednesday, Megan Sweeney on Thursday and both Tony Benshoof and Bengt Walden on Friday in the same training session where Zoeggeler wrecked — have had serious trouble just getting down the track.
“I think they are pushing it a little too much,” Australia’s Hannah Campbell-Pegg said Thursday night after she nearly lost control in training. “To what extent are we just little lemmings that they just throw down a track and we’re crash-test dummies? I mean, this is our lives.”
At the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, Nicholas Bochatay of Switzerland died after crashing into a snow grooming machine during training for the demonstration sport of speed skiing on the next-to-last day of the games. He was practicing on a public slope before his event was to begin.
Austrian downhill skier Ross Milne died when he struck a tree during a training run shortly before the 1964 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria. British luger Kazimierz Kay-Skrzypecki also died in a crash during training in Innsbruck.
At the 1988 Calgary Games, an Austrian team doctor, Jorg Oberhammer, died after being hit by a snow grooming machine.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press
Ann
