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Thread: The RIP topic

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    Senior Member twobjshelbys's Avatar
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    The RIP topic

    Something yesterday reminded me that there should be a general topic for this subject.

    This topic is dedicated to the memories of those people who have had an affect on us.
    Cheers.
    Tony

    Nothing here yet.

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    Senior Member twobjshelbys's Avatar
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    Re: The RIP topic

    Art Linkletter passed away yesterday. Most of us over the age of 50 remember his TV shows with interviews with kids.

    Art Linkletter's Everyman charm

    By ROBERT LLOYD

    Los Angeles Times




    Art Linkletter, who died Wednesday at the estimable age of 97, had already had a long, long career in broadcasting when he crept into my consciousness as the host of "House Party," a CBS daytime television show that ran from 1952 to 1969 (with a final year on NBC) and most famously featured his interviews with small children. (Even at the age of some of his small-fry guests, I owned a well-thumbed paperback copy of his Charles Schulz-illustrated book, "Kids Say the Darndest Things.") Never talking down to them, or sinking to a grown-up's version of a child-eye's view, he was the master of this very particular form. On television, only Bill Cosby and David Letterman have done it nearly as well.
    In a time of rapid social change, Linkletter was a bulwark of old-fashioned amiability and politesse, and it is somehow no surprise to learn that he was Canadian (born Gordon Arthur Kelly in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in 1912), that his adoptive father was an evangelical preacher, and that he counted Norman Vincent Peale, the author of "The Power of Positive Thinking," as a mentor. But he had an impish streak, as well, which made his niceness alluring and kept his shows, as plain as they were, from ever being boring. (His attitude and approach are maintained today, on a somewhat grander scale, in the daytime shows of Bonnie Hunt and Ellen DeGeneres.) I imagine him going well with a cup of coffee and, in the foolish practice of the times, possibly a cigarette, as somewhere nearby a dryer turns.
    Linkletter himself neither smoked nor drank. He was in Hollywood but not of it, a family man - married 74 years - with a passel of kids of his own. One of them, Jack, who died in 2007, also became a TV host and was the original inspiration for the kid interviews, telling his father he wouldn't be going back to kindergarten "because I can't read, I can't write and they won't let me talk." Another, Diane, notoriously jumped to her death from a window, in 1969, at the age of 20, a suicide her father attributed to LSD; it turned Linkletter into an anti-drug crusader, which made him, for a while, a figure of counterculture ridicule.
    You have to respect him in the end, however, because his work was itself couched in a democratic respect for and a delight in ordinary humanness. Unlike, say, Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments, which are meant to make their subjects look stupid, or what we have currently agreed to call "reality television," which seeks to reduce unscripted behavior into trite melodrama, Linkletter's work was rooted in the belief that people are inherently interesting and entertaining: "People Are Funny" was the philosophical title of the stunt-oriented, audience-participation prime-time show he hosted on radio and then television from 1943-61.
    One of his gambits there was to inventory the contents of a woman's purse, an exercise that strikes me as much an exploration of human commonality and variety as it was a dodge to get a laugh at a stranger's expense. It may not have been conceived as such, but there's something in that trust in humble detail, that interest in small things, that feels quite radical to me. Television, which more and more reflects the short attention spans it encourages in its viewers, could use a little more of it.
    Even after he retired from full-time broadcasting, Linkletter flitted in and out of television, as a pitchman or guest or talking head, a proponent of proactive aging, for which he was a kind of poster oldster. And he briefly returned as a regular contributor to Cosby's late-'90s franchising of the old "House Party" segment, "Kids Say the Darndest Things." Younger viewers must have regarded him, to the extent they noticed him at all, as someone who might have meant something once. And he did, children. His methods were modest, but his vision, I think, ran deep.
    Cheers.
    Tony

    Nothing here yet.

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    Senior Member twobjshelbys's Avatar
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    John W. Finn - oldest surviving Medal of Honor winner

    John Finn was awarded his MOH for his acts during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/28finn.html

    John Finn, 100, Dies; Received Pearl Harbor Medal

    By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

    Published: May 27, 2010





    John W. Finn, the last survivor of the 15 Navy men who received the Medal of Honor for heroism during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, died Thursday at a nursing home in Chula Vista, Calif. He was 100 and had been the oldest living recipient of the medal, the nation’s highest award for valor.
    His death was announced by J. P. Tremblay, deputy secretary of the California Dept. of Veterans Affairs.
    On the morning of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes bombed the American battleships in Hawaii, plunging the nation into World War II, numerous acts of valor played out. Most of them took place aboard the stricken ships — in some cases efforts by the wounded and the dying to save their fellow sailors. Amid the death and destruction, Chief Finn, on an airfield runway, was waging a war of his own against the Japanese.
    A few minutes before 8 o’clock, Japanese planes attacked the Kaneohe Bay Naval Air Station, about 12 miles from Battleship Row at Ford Island, hoping to knock out three dozen Navy aircraft before they could get aloft.
    Mr. Finn, the chief petty officer in charge of munitions at the naval station and a veteran of 15 years in the Navy, was in bed in a nearby apartment with his wife, Alice. He heard the sound of aircraft, saw one plane flash past his window, then another, and he heard machine guns.
    He dressed hurriedly, and drove to the naval station. At first, he observed the base’s 20 miles-per-hour speed limit. But then, “I heard a plane come roaring in from astern of me,” he recalled decades later in an interview with Larry Smith for “Beyond Glory,” an oral history of Medal of Honor recipients.
    “As I glanced up, the guy made a wing-over, and I saw that big old red meatball, the rising sun insignia, on the underside of the wing. Well, I threw it into second and it’s a wonder I didn’t run over every sailor in the air station.”
    When Chief Finn arrived at the hangars, many of the planes had already been hit. He recalled that he grabbed a .30-caliber machine gun on a makeshift tripod, carried it to an exposed area near a runway and began firing. For the next two and a half hours, he blazed away, although peppered by shrapnel as the Japanese planes strafed the runways with cannon fire.
    As he remembered it: “I got shot in the left arm and shot in the left foot, broke the bone. I had shrapnel blows in my chest and belly and right elbow and right thumb. Some were just scratches. My scalp got cut, and everybody thought I was dying: Oh, Christ, the old chief had the top of his head knocked off! I had 28, 29 holes in me that were bleeding. I was walking around on one heel. I was barefooted on that coral dust. My left arm didn’t work. It was just a big ball hanging down.”
    Chief Finn thought he had hit at least one plane, but he did not know whether he had brought it down. When the attack ended, he received first aid, then returned to await a possible second attack. He was hospitalized the following afternoon.
    On Sept. 15, 1942, Chief Finn received the Medal of Honor from Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, in a ceremony aboard the carrier Enterprise at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Nimitz cited Chief Finn for his “magnificent courage in the face of almost certain death.”
    John William Finn was born on July 23, 1909, in Los Angeles County, the son of a plumber. He dropped out of school to join the Navy at age 17.
    He served stateside after he recovered from his Pearl Harbor wounds, became a lieutenant in 1944 and remained in military service after the war. He had been living on a cattle ranch in Pine Valley, Calif., about 45 miles east of San Diego, before entering the nursing home where he died.
    His survivors include a son, Joseph. His wife died in 1998.
    Ten of the 15 servicemen who received the Medal of Honor for their actions at Pearl Harbor died in the attack. Among them were Rear Adm. Isaac C. Kidd, commander of Battleship Division 1, who was aboard the Arizona when it blew up and sank; Capt. Franklin Van Valkenburgh, commander of the Arizona; and Capt. Mervyn S. Bennion, commander of the battleship West Virginia.
    Four of the Pearl Harbor medal recipients survived the war. Cmdr. Cassin Young, awarded the medal for reboarding and saving his repair ship, the Vestal, after being blown into the water, died in November 1942 in the battle for Guadalcanal.
    In 1999, Mr. Finn was among Pearl Harbor veterans invited to Hawaii for the premiere of the Hollywood movie “Pearl Harbor.” “It was a damned good movie,” he told The Boston Herald in 2001. “It’s helped educate people who didn’t know about Pearl Harbor and what happened there.”
    “I liked it especially,” he said, “because I got to kiss all those pretty little movie actresses.”
    Cheers.
    Tony

    Nothing here yet.

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    Senior Member mastersmech1's Avatar
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    Re: John W. Finn - oldest surviving Medal of Honor winner

    Elvis...


    RIP...

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    Re: John W. Finn - oldest surviving Medal of Honor winner

    Jim Morrison - RIP
    68fastback™ ;-)

    “When you tear out a man’s tongue you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say” -- George R. R. Martin

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    (the truth will set you free)



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    Senior Member Little Debbie's Avatar
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    Re: John W. Finn - oldest surviving Medal of Honor winner

    RIP, Wayne Davis, 12/14/63-5/27/08

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    Senior Member Stew's Avatar
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    Re: John W. Finn - oldest surviving Medal of Honor winner

    How about Gary Coleman, 2/8/68-5/28/10
    Stew

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    A veteran - whether active duty, retired, national guard or reserve - is someone who, at one point in his or her life, wrote a blank check made payable to "'The United States of America", for an amount "up to, and including my life". That is honor, and there are way to many people in this country who no longer understand it.

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    Quitter Joe G's Avatar
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    Re: John W. Finn - oldest surviving Medal of Honor winner

    Whatchutalkinaboutwillis??

    I didn't know Gary died today.
    Stangs United: We Have More Horsepower Than You

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    HSURB-N-ATOR HSURB's Avatar
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    Re: John W. Finn - oldest surviving Medal of Honor winner

    Quote Originally Posted by Joe G View Post
    Whatchutalkinaboutwillis??

    I didn't know Gary died today.
    Sure did. Party foul. Fell and had a head injury.

    That could have happened at Shelbyfest - just sayin'.

    HSURB®

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