Obituaries -- names from the old Forum

[pbrower2a]

Christine Maggiore, pseudoscientific crank (AIDS denial)*
former US Senator Claiborne Pell
Helen Suzman, South African politicain and Apartheid opponent*
oldest living person of the time
Donald Westlake, mystery writer
"Willie", pet cat of the George W. Bush White House*
Father Richard John Neuhaus, Lutheran clergyman converted to Catholicism and influential theologian
Patrick "The Prisoner" McGoohan, Irish-English actor*
Ricardo Montalbán, Mexican-born US actor*
Trammell Crow, real-estate developer*
John Clifford Mortimer, British barrister
Andrew Wyeth, painter
Bill Stone, last British veteran of both World Wars
William Murray Werber, baseball player and businessman -- last living teammate of Babe Ruth*
John Updike, writer
Lukas Foss, conductor and composer*
Gerry Niewood, Coleman Mellett,   musicians in the Chuck Mangione band - airplane crash*
Paul Harvey, radio huckster and right-wing ideologue*
Kelly Groucutt, rock musician
Leonore Annenberg, philantrhropist*
Natasha Richardson, British actress*
Jade Goody, British reality TV star
Jack Dreyfus, entrepreneur in mutual funds*
Maurice Jarre, film composer*
George Kell, HOF baseball star and broadcaster (Detroit Tigers)*
John Hope Franklin, historian
Raul Recardo Alfonsín, Argentine politician, freely-elected successor of a nasty military regime*
Alan Livingston, record executive (getting the Beatles on contract with Capitol Records
John Colin Campbell Jordan, British neo-Nazi*

Quote:Good riddance to a fascist pig!

   John Colin Campbell Jordan (19 June 1923 - 9 April 2009) was a leading figure in postwar Neo-Nazism in Britain. In the far-right nationalist circles of the 1960s, Jordan represented the most explicitly 'Nazi' inclination in his open use of the styles and symbols of the Third Reich.

   Through organisations such as the National Socialist Movement and the World Union of National Socialists, Jordan advocated a pan-Aryan "Universal Nazism".

   Although later unaffiliated with any political party, Jordan remained an influential voice on the British far right.

   At Cambridge Jordan had formed a "Nationalist Club", from which he was invited to join the short-lived British Peoples Party, a group of former British Union of Fascists members led by Lord Tavistock, heir to the Duke of Bedford. Jordan soon became associated with Arnold Leese and was left a house in Leese's will, which became the Notting Hill base of operations when Jordan launched the White Defence League in 1956. Jordan would later merge this party with the National Labour Party to form the British National Party in 1960, although he would split from this after a quarrel with John Bean, who felt that Jordan's open National Socialism was a bar to progress.

   Jordan then founded the National Socialist Movement (in 1962, this later became the British Movement in 1968) along with John Tyndall. In August 1962, Jordan hosted an international conference of National Socialists at Guiting Power in Gloucestershire. This resulted in the formation of the World Union of National Socialists, of which Jordan was the commander of its European section throughout the 1960s, and at which he was elected "World Führer" with George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party as his deputy. On 16 August, Jordan and Tyndall, together with Martin Webster, Denis Pirie and Roland Kerr-Ritchie were charged under the Public Order Act 1936 with attempts to set up a paramilitary force called Spearhead, based on the SA of Nazi Germany. Undercover police had observed Jordan leading the group in military manoeuvres. He was sentenced to 10 months imprisonment.

   In October 1963, while John Tyndall was still in prison, Jordan, who had just been released, married Tyndall's fiancée, Françoise Dior, the former wife of a French nobleman and the niece of the French fashion designer Christian Dior. This hasty marriage, on 5 October 1963, was ostensibly to prevent her deportation as an undesirable alien. When Tyndall was eventually released, the marriage caused friction, and he split with Jordan in 1964 to form the Greater Britain Movement. In 1967 Jordan was again prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for 18 months under the Public Order Act 1936 for distributing a leaflet “The Coloured Invasion”, a vituperative attack on black and Asian people.

   In the Leyton byelection of 1965 Jordan was punched at a public meeting by Denis Healey, then Secretary of State for Defence. The fracas came about because the far right were using the by-election to stir up inter-racial hatred to defeat the Labour candidate (and Foreign Secretary) Patrick Gordon-Walker. He had already been defeated in the October 1964 general election in the Smethwick constituency after racist campaigning tactics by the successful Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths.

   Jordan reorganised the National Socialist Movement as the British Movement in 1968, but in 1974 he was obliged to step down from the leadership in favour of Michael McLaughlin. His demise was further accelerated by his arrest for shoplifting lingerie from Marks and Spencer. Magistrates in Birmingham convicted him of the offence, and he was fined £50 on 15 June 1976.

   In the 1980s, Jordan revived Gothic Ripples, originally Leese's publication, as his personal political project.

   Jordan maintained ties to groups led by Kevin Watmough, such as the White Nationalist Party and the British Peoples Party as well as the American National Socialist Workers Party. In 2000, he expressed scepticism over the efforts of the British National Party to soften its hard right stance.

   Colin Jordan died at his Pateley Bridge home on 9 April 2009.

   Source: Wikipedia.

   What a schmuck -- someone who stands for the ideology that so many of his heroic British peers sacrificed greatly to fend off in those heroic months of 1940 and 1941!

JG Ballard, British novelist
former US Representative Orton Ballard (D-Utah)
Mark "the Bird" Fidrych, colorful baseball pitcher
David Kellerman, CEO of Fannie Mae, suicide*
Beatrice Arthur, actress*
Delara Darabi, victim of harsh judicial process in Iran*
Jack Kemp, American politician and Republican VP nominee in 1996
Dom DeLuise, comedian*
Roh Moo-hyun, former President of South Korea*
Eonald Takaki, academic*
David Carradine, actor
Ernest R. May, historian
Koko Taylor, Blues singer
Silvio Sergio Bonaccorsi Barbato, Air France 447, Brazilian conductor*
John Eddy, astronomer*
Ed McMahon, actor, sidekick (Johnny Carson), voiceover artist*
Farrah Fawcett, actress
Michael Jackson, singer
Billy Mays, pitchman
Karl Malden, actor*
Steve McNair, retired NFL quarterback, humanitarian -- murder victim
Robert S. MacNamara, public administrator
Oscar Mayer, entrepreneur (cold cuts)
Walter Cronkhite, TV journalist.

 pbrower2a 

Quote: Originally Posted by Child of Socrates
R.I.P., Uncle Walter.
We lost a great one, a journalist with some credibility for his dispassionate delivery of the news on a medium that intellectual elites despised. Flawed as the format of 30-minute news at 6:30 PM is, and even he recognized its limitations (Read a newspaper!), it was far less flawed when he and such GI contemporaries as Howard K. Smith, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley competed for early-evening audiences. Millions accepted it as their sole source of news, and they almost got away with it (not that I suggest doing so now, as those who relied upon the evening news broadcasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC were shown to have been more likely to get the War in Iraq wrong). With him and GI newspeople on TV, TV news had newspaper connections; after him, TV news eventually became more like entertainment if not outright propaganda at its absolute worst.

world's oldest man at the time
Corazon Aquino, Philippine President and successor to a nasty dictator*
Budd Schulberg, screenwriter*
John Hughes, director
Mike Seeger, folk singer*
Les Paul, musician
Robert Novak, journalist
Jonathan Laster (brother of one of our posters -- we can get sentimental)
Senator Edward Kennedy*
Dominick Dunne, TV star
Larry Knechtel, rock musician
Larry Gelbart, screenwriter*
August Niels Bohr, Danish physicist (son of Niels)*
oldest woman of the time -- and she was proud to vote as an African-American for Barack Obama
Framl Batten, founder of The Weather Channel
Norman Borlaug, agronomist (Green Revolution)*
Patrick Swayze, actor
the real Norma Rae
Jody Powell, Press Secretary for President Jimmy Carter*
Henry Gibson, comedian
Mary Travers, singer (Peter, Paul, and Mary)
Irving Kristol, neo-conservative thinker*
Bill Safire, journalist?
Alicia de Larrocha, classical pianist*

---

(someone as unworthy of mention as could be)
Susan Atkins, murderer (Tate-LaBianca slayings associated with the Manson cult)
Marek Edelman -- Holocaust survivor, Polish political acticist and cardiologist*
Isaac Gelfand -- Soviet and Russian mathematician*
Lü Zhengcao -- last living general of the Chinese Communist revolution*
Al Martino -- smooth singer*
George Tuska, comic book artist*
Elizabeth Clare Prophet, survival cultist preacher
Ignacio Ponseti -- innovative physician*
Soupy sales -- comedian
Yoshiro Muraki -- Japanese set designer (for some Kurosawa films)*
Claude Lévi-Strauss, French anthropologist*
Vitaly Ginzburg -- Soviet nuclear physicist*
Mr. Fatahian -- victim of political persecution in Iran*
Lino Lacedelli -- Italian mountaineer, first person to scale K2.
Albert Crewe -- atomic physicist
H C Robbins Landon -- British musicologist