ndrosen | Entries tagged with remembering the dead

There is a one page In Memoriam piece by Stanley Schmidt in the latest issue of Analog, reporting on the life and death of Michael F. Flynn, the sf author and statistician (not Michael T. Flynn, the Trumpist general). I remember reading Michael Flynn’s first story in Analog, “Slan Libh,” forty or so years ago; he went on to write many more stories, novels, and non-fiction pieces, and at least one physical letter to me (responding to a letter I had sent to Analog criticizing a couple of points in his “Introduction to Psychohistory” article).

He was an impressively skilled author, whom I had the privilege of interacting with at an sf convention once. I greeted him with, “Ave, Michaelis Eastoniensis.” He died in his childhood home in Easton, Pennsylvania, predeceased by his wife of forty-nine years, and survived by several siblings, children, and grandchildren. Michael, we could use more like you. Rest In Peace.

I heard through my sister of the death of Susan Charles, my sister having been notified by Susan Charles’s husband. Her first husband, Bob Charles, was an old friend of my parents, and I remember Bob and Susan Charles visiting us at my childhood home in State College, Pennsylvania; we stayed with them in Winnetka when we were driving back to State College from California, where my father had been teaching for a semester. I also saw her later, after Bob Charles’s death (he had heart problems and other issues, as I recall). When my sister had serious problems attempting to pursue postgraduate education (the first time; she later obtained a doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania), Susan was very kind and helpful to her.

Later, Susan Charles was there for when my father was dying, and a year afterward, when my mother was suffering her final illness. She was a good friend, and the world is poorer without her.

Rock music, or whatever they’re calling it these days, has never been my thing, and I have never been a fan of Sinead O’Connor. Nonetheless, I read the front page obituary of her in Thursday’s Washington Post, and I feel for her, although she wasn’t my kind of person. “I’m just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mikes now and then,” she is quoted as saying. Too true. She was a troubled soul, abused as a girl, who seems to have made a mess of her life, and then there was her late-in-life conversion to Islam, not a creed or a way of life which I much admire.

She was in some ways handed misfortune in life, by her upbringing, and perhaps by genes and brain chemistry. Perhaps she could have dealt with her problems better, but how can I judge? She was surely not the only human being scarred from her youth and unable to recover fully. Rest In Peace.

I recently learned by emails from two friends that the elderly Georgist Dr. William H. Batt has died. I had earlier heard that he was ill, and wanted to hear from people, so I sent him an email. I didn’t get around to making a phone call, or writing to him on paper. I wasn’t sure whether a telephone call would have been a welcome diversion or a nuisance, and with other things to do, I lost track. I do regret not saying something more to him these past few days.

We have long been friends and fellow board members of at least one Georgist organization. I remember his displays of geodata at Georgist conferences, using mapping to show the concentrations of land value in certain regions of towns. He was an early Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand back in the early sixties, and remained in touch with Thai friends, including a retired naval officer, Admiral Suchong if I have the name right, who had translated Henry George’s Progress and Poverty into Thai.

Dr. Batt had also been active in Albany, trying to influence New York State’s dysfunctional government toward land value taxation. In his old age, he had been companion of a retired woman doctor (of the medical sort, maybe a pediatrician; Bill Batt himself had a Ph.D. rather than an M.D.), whom I have had the pleasure of meeting. She died before he did.

Rest In Peace, both of you, Bill and Karen, rest in honored remembrance.

I happened to come across an article analyzing the work of theoretical physicists, in the sense of whose papers were cited most, how physicists were linked by citations, etc., and one prominent name (not at the very top, but prominent) was Joseph Polchinski. I remember him; I took a course in mathematical methods for physics from him back in the mid-80s, when I was a graduate student in physics at UT Austin. I remember him as a pleasant man, as well as someone with a scientific brain, so I thought I’d look him up, and see whether he was still at Austin, and just what he has accomplished in physics.

It turns out that he died of cancer a few years ago, after writing some notable papers. It’s a sad loss, and I’m glad to have known him, and disappointed that he died too young. Rest in peace.

Today marks my parents’ wedding anniversary; they were married for over fifty-eight years, until my father’s death did them part. Whatever else can be said of them, they remained, so far as I know, entirely faithful and loyal to each other, and my father, who had a temper and with whom I was often at loggerheads, deserves all due respect for sticking with my mother through her repeated bouts of illness.

Rest In Peace.

The other day would have been my father’s birthday, and he would have lived to celebrate it if he had managed the ninety-seven years which his own father spent above the earth. As it is, he hasn’t been with us for more than seven years. I meant to post something on his birthday itself, but things ate up time, and it was past midnight by the time I was through with work and exercise and dinner.

My father and I had considerable conflict over the years, both of us being all too prone to pride and anger, but we did in the end reconcile. I hope that during the last few weeks of his life, after a (presumed) series of mini-strokes left him mentally incapacitated, he thought well of me with whatever remained of his mind. (Some part of him was left, and the last time I saw him, he could speak in grammatical sentences and with his typical cadences; the trouble was that his sentences did not relate coherently to each other, or to what was actually going on around him.). Whatever his faults, he brought me up in a house full of books, and made great efforts to have me educated. Rest In Peace.

I remember Professor Della Roy from my years as a graduate student at Penn State. We were never very close, but I recall her fondly as a nice lady, and quieter than her loud, exuberant husband, Professor Rustum Roy. He was director of the Materials Research Laboratory, and on my committee for my M.S. thesis; she was a specialist in concrete, which was not my area of materials science. Nonetheless, we did exchange a few words now and then.

Rest in Peace.

Monday’s Washington Post includes an obituary of William F. Clinger, dead at ninety-two, who was for a number of years my Congressman, representing a district in Pennsylvania that included State College, where I grew up and later attended graduate school. I met him once, when he was visiting campus, and, if I recall correctly, participating in some kind of panel discussion. He recognized my name because I was an involved citizen who had written letters to him about public issues of the day.

He was concerned about the budget deficit, and I remember that he introduced a bill to build a deficit clock, showing how much money the federal government was borrowing each second, and how large the accumulated national debt was. He also introduced the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995, which Bill Clinton signed into law, implementing part of the Republican Party’s Contract with America; in those days, I was a Republican.

The last paragraph of the obituary reads: “In 2016, he was among 30 GOP former elected officials who signed a public letter urging Republicans to not vote for presidential nominee Donald Trump. He signed a similar letter before the 2020 presidential election.”

Let us remember the Honorable William Floyd Clinger; today’s GOP could use more men like him.

Let us pause to remember those have died for the United States, some of them buried only two miles or so from where I sit, in Arlington National Cemetery. We should thank them, whatever their individual faults and misdeeds, that the Slaveowners’ Rebellion was crushed, that Wilhelmine Germany did not dominate Europe, that the Third Reich and Imperial Japan did not extinguish freedom and the rule of law from the world, and that Communist aggression was blunted in Korea and then in Southeast Asia.

I do not imagine that every exercise of American military power has been blameless or successful; there was, for example, the bloody suppression of Philippine independence. Nonetheless, with all my country’s sins, it is easy to picture a world dominated by another power, with another kind of government and set of traditions, being far worse.

A few hours ago, I found myself missing my parents, now dead for six and a half and five and a half years. There is no more chance to call my father to discuss politics and current events, or to drive to Philadelphia and see my mother, and hear her tell anecdotes from her childhood. She would remember such things when she lost track of what I had told her five minutes before. Rest In peace.

I have heard by email of the death of one of my Georgist friends, Paul Justus, age seventy, a few weeks ago. Apparently, he went out for a walk, and suddenly died, presumably of a heart attack or stroke. He was active in several Georgist organizations, and the author of Young George and the Dragon: An Economic Fairy Tale. I just had the impression of a pleasant, personable man.

Rest in Peace.

Reason magazine carried an obituary of Walter Williams, a black economist and obstreperous libertarian.

I heard him speak at Penn State once, back when I was a graduate student in Materials. I don’t remember everything he said, but he talked about the superiority of the free market in getting people to work together and provide for each other’s needs; he said that ranchers in Wyoming (or wherever) wouldn’t provide New Yorkers they didn’t know or like with steak out of the goodness of their hearts, but the market made it profitable for them to do so, so people in Manhattan got to eat. He wanted limited government and a balanced budget; this was back when balancing the budget was controversial, instead of being firmly rejected by both major parties.

Afterward, during the Q&A, some white student reproved Williams for rejecting the views of his ancestors and the whole black community, or words to that effect (I don’t believe he presented an argument that Williams’s ideas were wrong). I don’t recall the whole exchange, but Dr. Williams definitely wasn’t intimidated.

Rest In Peace.

The retired professor of Economics Mason Gaffney died on July 16, as a youth of 96, failing in his ambition to make it to his hundredth birthday. I had the honor of knowing him, meeting him at several Georgist conferences. He became a widower not too long ago, and leaves behind multiple children from his two marriages. He was a nice man to talk and interact with, although he could be mordant about the injustices and idiocies of the world. His youthful Georgism survived his advanced study of economics in a context where such views were unpopular, and he obeyed Abraham Lincoln’s precept that we should stand for the right as best God gives us to see the right.

He not only held what I see as the right opinions, but had an analytical mind, which he applied to improving our understanding of the world, “our” meaning not only dedicated Georgists, but anyone who would read his professional papers and popularizations. In particular, he followed Henry George in believing that land speculation leads to periodic recessions, but explained in a more satisfactory manner exactly how this happens. There is plenty of food for thought to be found at his website, https://masongaffney.org.