Rest In Peace Deaths Of Note

Former Prairie View A&M University President US Army Lieutenant General Julius Wesley Becton, Jr., passed away earlier this week at the age of 97.

He also served as FEMA Director under Presidents Ronald Reagan & George HW Bush from 1985 to 1989.
Julius W. Becton Jr. - Wikipedia

 
nemo1986 said:
Sandra Day O'Conner just passed away.
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3 very important people coming from finance, law and investment died in the past week.

I do not think they should be mourned, they had long, impactful lives.

What we should be mourning is the world, on account of all the dimwits and hacks that are incapable of filling their shoes.
 
Sandra Day O'Connor's story is just as amazing as well growing up on a Texas Cattle Ranch as her origin story and somehow ending up the surprise pick of President Ronald Reagan to be the first female Justice of the Supreme Court in 1981. Wouldn't be twelve years until Ginsburg joined the court, and some fools actually somehow think Ginsburg was the first Justice smh.

She was also interesting in that she didn't adhere to an overall judicial philosophy like most of the other Justices, left, right and Anthony Kennedy but decided cases on an individual basis which made her somewhat unpredictable despite being a moderate Conservative overall.

At 93 years old, her suffering from dementia can finally come to an end. Hopefully she's reunited with her Husband and Sister who preceded her.

Nice eleven article biography of her life done by the Arizona Republic back in 2019 (a few months after she retired from public life due to her health issues).

www.azcentral.com

Sandra Day O'Connor: Arizona ranch girl, American legend

Sandra Day O'Connor made history. She shaped history. Her life inspired others to blaze their own trails, in law and in other fields.
www.azcentral.com
 
Rest in Peace Sitcom Showrunner Norman Lear Passed Away at the Age of 101. He created a lot of popular sitcoms including the Family, Sanford & Son, Good Times and The Jeffersons.

www.joblo.com

Norman Lear, All in the Family and Sanford & Son producer, dies at 101

Norman Lear, the pioneer behind All in the Family, Sanford & Son, The Jeffersons, and so many more has died at 101.
www.joblo.com www.joblo.com

He retired from writing in the 80's to pursue political activism, mostly for liberal causes. He was married three times and had six kids.
 
Husky_Khan said:
Sandra Day O'Connor's story is just as amazing as well growing up on a Texas Cattle Ranch as her origin story and somehow ending up the surprise pick of President Ronald Reagan to be the first female Justice of the Supreme Court in 1981. Wouldn't be twelve years until Ginsburg joined the court, and some fools actually somehow think Ginsburg was the first Justice smh.

She was also interesting in that she didn't adhere to an overall judicial philosophy like most of the other Justices, left, right and Anthony Kennedy but decided cases on an individual basis which made her somewhat unpredictable despite being a moderate Conservative overall.

At 93 years old, her suffering from dementia can finally come to an end. Hopefully she's reunited with her Husband and Sister who preceded her.

Nice eleven article biography of her life done by the Arizona Republic back in 2019 (a few months after she retired from public life due to her health issues).

www.azcentral.com

Sandra Day O'Connor: Arizona ranch girl, American legend

Sandra Day O'Connor made history. She shaped history. Her life inspired others to blaze their own trails, in law and in other fields.
www.azcentral.com
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Details on services for former US Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor:

Lying in Repose
Monday, December 18th, 2023
10:30 AM to 8:00 PM
Great Hall of the US Supreme Court

Funeral Service
Tuesday, December 19th, 2023
11:00 AM
Washington National Cathedral
 
Husky_Khan said:
Rest in Peace Sitcom Showrunner Norman Lear Passed Away at the Age of 101. He created a lot of popular sitcoms including the Family, Sanford & Son, Good Times and The Jeffersons.

www.joblo.com

Norman Lear, All in the Family and Sanford & Son producer, dies at 101

Norman Lear, the pioneer behind All in the Family, Sanford & Son, The Jeffersons, and so many more has died at 101.
www.joblo.com www.joblo.com

He retired from writing in the 80's to pursue political activism, mostly for liberal causes. He was married three times and had six kids.
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Lear served in the United States Army during World War II.
 
Reagan Foundation Institute & AZ State Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) issuing statements on the passing of former US Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.


​
 
nemo1986 said:
Just found out David Drake passed away.
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Fuck!
I remember reading his web newsletter archive just a few weeks ago.
He was a true titan of military science fiction, while his pure aesthetic skill and world building were not as good as those of , say, Weber, he had a grittier, more down to Earth and more multifaceted characters.
I was afteid this would happen given how he said he could not write anymore because he could not hold the entire plot of w book in his mind, and on more recent photos he looked quite frail.

At least he had many years of happyness and a bunch of grandkids.

R.I.P. and let us hope he writes more Belisarius up there in the sky once he drags Eric Flint out of purgatory.
:cry:
:cry::cry::cry::cry::cry:
 
David Drake had a few fairly insightful newsletters, and I will quote one here.

Newsletter #128


Posted on October 14, 2022 by admin


DrakeNews #128: October 14, 2022
Dear people,
I am now 77. I had a modest dinner party in a restaurant for family and a few old friends. Jonathan and his wife were present, also grandson Tristan, now a sophomore at ECU, and his girl friend. I now have a tee-shirt reading ECU grandad.
Tristan's an athlete like Jonathan, only built for quickness rather than power. I'd say I was proud of both of them, only I didn't have much to do with it. Click here for photo.
I got to thinking about success. I always figured that a writer could expect three material things from his work: money, readership and awards, I wanted enough money for a comfortable life and enough readers to sustain that income. I never cared about awards.
My friend Eric Flint wanted a fourth thing: fame. How different that is from the other three was driven home when his widow had to declare bankruptcy. Eric was a good writer and apparently (to me) successful. It turns out that it's expensive to keep up the appearance of being successful–being famous, in other words. Eric spent more money on this than he earned, so he died famous but owing a lot of money.
I'd seen this before with Karl Wagner. In that case I'd been close enough to have seen Karl pissing away money–travelling frequently to the UK and buying Jack Daniels for his friends. As an imported liquor, Jack Daniels was extremely pricey in the UK while even in the US Karl had briefly switched to lower-priced George Dickel to save money. He decided he preferred Jack Daniels. He never made a serious attempt that I saw to stop drinking before it killed him because his image as a hard-drinking writer was more important to him than his life.
I didn't see what Eric overspent his income on. But he also died broke, with a major reputation in the field which he sustained with loans.
There are other writers that do the same. They may be good writers and nice people, but their image is more important than their writing.
My writing was always been the main thing to me. That's why I've retired from writing. I can no longer keep a whole work my head, so I can no longer write to my satisfaction. I don't want to turn out inferior stuff, and I'm not financially required to do so.
For now I'm signing off. Be well, people, and be as nice as you can to other folks.
—Dave Drake
Chatham County, NC 27312
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Newsletter #128 – David Drake

By all accounts, he lived a happy life and died a happy man.

Growing up, I remember finding the Baen free library and reading first some Bujold and more notable writers, then discovering David Weber and Eric Flint and David Drake.
I liked other Baen writers more at the time, but through many if them, you could see a link to Drake's writing.
Ranks of Bronze, Warlord, the Slammers novels, you could hear echos of them in all those other works.

And above all, Drake wrote profoundly human and while not necessarily likable, realistic characters.
 
And here is the official farewell from Baen editor Toni Weisskopf.

A note on the passing of David Drake, from Baen Publisher Toni Weisskopf:

Dave Drake was my friend, and my colleague, for more than three decades. He passed away peacefully this weekend, on Sunday, in fact. If he were here, I'd be tempted to tell him that he took that whole "day of rest" thing a little too far. . . . He was appreciative of gallows humor; we published two volumes of his humorous stories at Baen starting with All the Way to the Gallows. Of course, that wasn't what he was best known for. The modern subgenre of military science fiction accreted around the core of Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories, those that Jim Baen first published in Galaxy magazine, and then at Ace, with an introduction by Jerry Pournelle. Jim continued to publish Dave everywhere he went: first Ace, then Tor, then Baen. The two of them made a great team.


I enjoyed everything Dave wrote, from his chatty reports on foreign travels, to his thoughtful Christmas cards. Still, I had my favorites among his literary works. The standalone novel Starliner was one of them, pure adventure science fiction and as light and carefree as Dave ever got. Redliners, another; the quintessential volume of military SF, and Dave in a very different mode. If you want to read one book to get a feel for his work, this is it. I loved the RCN series, buddy stories loosely inspired by Jim Baen's favorite Napoleonic naval novels by Patrick O'Brien, written after Redliners, and thus after some demons had been, if not laid to rest, at least come to terms with. His Old Nathan fantasy stories, so evocative of the place he'd come to live, and inspired by his friend Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John stories. The Lord of the Isles series with the great brother and sister team of Cashel and Ilna. His two Belisarius-inspired series with both S.M. Stirling and Eric Flint (and later Tony Daniel). The Lacey SF stories. The Vettius Roman fantasy stories. From his start writing horror and dark fantasy short stories, to the last far-future Arthurian novels of The Spark, The Storm and The Serpent, he remained a fascinating storyteller.


He was an incredibly talented writer, and game for anything. He considered himself a craftsman, and consistently downplayed his talents and contributions, but they were many and his works will last—they already have. But not the least of his contributions to the field was his generosity to his fellow writers—and editors, like me--through collaborations, short stories in anthologies, and time spent sharing his knowledge of the field. And he always delivered.


Dave was a collector and fan of pulp magazines, and he helped keep the pulps alive not only with his own small press with his friend Karl Edward Wagner, Carcosa, but also through his advocacy of such stories with Jim Baen. So, too, Rudyard Kipling, which resulted in two Kipling-centric volumes. And he translated Latin for fun (for examples of which, see his website: https://david-drake.com/).


He was a man of honor, and sometimes that made him prickly. But he was also decent and kind down to his bones, and you will see many, many examples of this in the testimonies pouring forth on social media. But I am very glad that his good friend Mark Van Name made sure that he understood he was appreciated before he died when he put together the festschrift Onward, Drake! Onward, Drake!. He appeared many times on the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast, as an interviewee, and even reading poetry, and we'll do a roundtable retrospective of his career in January.


More can and will undoubtedly be written about Dave, but I'll close this short appreciation of him and his life with words he often used to end telephone conversations: Go do good things!
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From Baen Books Science Fiction & Fantasy - Home Page
 
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