Deaths of Famous People (2020)

[tomterp]

Local zeitgeist at its best.  Anyone who grew up here will have similar memories of Jhoon Rhee ads.

Remember the little boy at the very end of the commercial (see below) who says "nobody bodders me either"?   He is a fishing buddy of my neighbor, they go over to Riverbend Park a few times a year together to catch smallmouth bass.

[bluestreak]

One more interesting thing about Seaver and Brock. Brock was the batter that faced Seaver the most often. Seaver was the pitcher that Brock faced the most often. Seaver got the better of Brock as he had a career OPS of .636 against him.

[OldChelsea]

Toots Hibbert, founder of '70's reggae pioneers Toots and the Maytals, dead at 77: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/12/entertainment/jamaica-reggae-toots-hibbert-death-scli-intl/index.html

[JCA-CrystalCity]

Mind you, I came to this song through Robert Palmer's and the Clash's covers.

[DCFan]

RBG 87 RIP.

[Dave in Fairfax]

RBG 87 RIP.

I knew her late husband a little bit. The second funniest tax lawyer I've ever known.

[wj73]

RBG 87 RIP.

She was incredible. I took a Sex Discrimination Law class one semester in Law School. It seems that she was involved is just about every significant gender discrimination case. Rarely does a single lawyer have such broad influence in American jurisprudence. A staggering loss.

[JCA-CrystalCity]

She was incredible. I took a Sex Discrimination Law class one semester in Law School. It seems that she was involved is just about every significant gender discrimination case. Rarely does a single lawyer have such broad influence in American jurisprudence. A staggering loss.

the judge I clerked for was her senior by about 5 years. She litigated and lost one of the first gender discrimination cases RBG flipped.

[sixthree175]

RBG 87 RIP.

Yes, RIP.  Serious political implications.

[wj73]

the judge I clerked for was her senior by about 5 years. She litigated and lost one of the first gender discrimination cases RBG flipped.

At least your judge could say he or she lost to the best. Do you happen to remember which case that was? RBG’s genius was that early on, she often picked cases that challenged laws that treated men less favorably, such as setting a higher drinking age for men than for women, or Social Security laws that allowed widows to claim an allowance for surviving minor children but denied widowers that same benefit. But by bit she carefully built a body of gender discrimination case law that then allowed her to challenge more difficult discrimination cases. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to call her the Thurgood Marshall for gender discrimination.

[JCA-CrystalCity]

My Judge was Raya Dreben. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1993/08/01/judge-ginsburgs-gift/036d8f58-fef8-4af8-8eae-772a8d9dd0a0/

On the first day of her confirmation hearings, Ruth Bader Ginsburg told the story of Gwendolyn Hoyt. Hoyt was convicted in 1957 of the murder of her husband. Her jury was made up entirely of men, because the state in which she was tried virtually excluded women from jury service. The state was Florida. No woman had served on any jury there until 1949. The first woman elected to the Florida legislature introduced a bill to require women to serve. After a long debate in which opponents said they did not want "their wives and sisters exposed to the embarrassment of hearing filthy evidence," a compromise bill was passed that provided that women's names would be added to the jury pool only if they went to the county courthouse and registered their willingness to be considered eligible.

When Gwendolyn Hoyt came to trial in Tampa in 1957, only 218 of the more than 46,000 women voters in Hillsborough County had registered; the jury commissioner placed only 10 of those women's names in a pool of 10,000 names. It was no surprise that Gwendolyn Hoyt was tried by a jury of six men.

Hoyt protested that she was not being tried by a jury drawn from a cross-section of the community, a jury of her peers. That claim was denied by the trial judge, by the Florida Supreme Court and, in 1961, by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court. "Woman is the center of home and family life," wrote Justice John Marshall Harlan; if the state of Florida wished to offer women easy excuses from jury service, it could do so. The fact that offering some women the privilege of exemption put at risk the right of women like Gwendolyn Hoyt to a jury drawn from an authentic cross-section of the community did not distress most of the justices. As the assistant attorney-general for the state of Florida had argued, if men and women were truly equal, Hoyt should have had no objection to being judged by men.

Raya Dreben, a young graduate of Harvard Law School whose struggles in the early stages of her career were much like those Ginsburg experienced, assisted a Boston attorney, Herbert Ehrmann, in preparing for the Supreme Court. At Dreben's urging, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Hoyt. It was probably the first time that the ACLU had filed such a brief in a sex-discrimination case. The brief was written by Dorothy Kenyon, an ACLU director who had been one of the first women to graduate from New York University Law School. She had spent decades fighting for equal jury service for women in New York. The developments in the case were followed closely by Kenyon's close friend and colleague, the African American lawyer Pauli Murray, who had decided to go to law school in part because of her fury at convictions of blacks by "poll tax" juries.
...
But before Kenyon died, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had begun to work on the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. The project was committed to persuading the Supreme Court to reverse its decisions on three major 20th century cases that had sustained sex discrimination; one of those cases was Hoyt. Gwendolyn Hoyt had by then been released from prison (she now lives a quiet and exemplary life in her home town). And when Ginsburg completed writing the brief for Reed v. Reed in 1971, in which she was to persuade the Supreme Court to rule for the first time that arbitrary discrimination on the basis of gender was a denial of equal treatment under the law, she placed on it, as co-authors, the names of two women who had not written a word of it but who, in their lives and work, had made it possible. In acknowledgment of the intellectual debt that contemporary feminist legal argument owes to "those brave women," she has said, the title page of the plaintiff's brief in Reed bears the names not only of Ruth Bader Ginsburg but also of Dorothy Kenyon and Pauli Murray.

This is classic Ginsburg.  Keeping women off jury was thought to be a privilege due to their delicate nature.  Ginsburg went after various privileges for women and penalties for men based on gender to establish equality. 

Oh, another Dreben story:

Raya Dreben was one of the lucky ones when she graduated from Harvard Law School in 1954, a time when many women were turned away by the firms that came to woo their male classmates. A prominent Boston firm hired Dreben, but the partners wouldn't put her name on the door, on the stationery or in the phone book. They refused to go to lunch with her.

"If you wore pants," she recalls a senior partner telling her, "you could come with us."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1993/10/09/reunited-in-a-continuing-struggle/4ad89c89-3703-4947-823d-f714c7c0ad4b/
 She moved from this firm to another, Palmer and Dodge, where she made litigation partner. 

[imref]

Robert Gore, inventor of Gore-tex.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/robert-gore-inventor-gore-tex-fabric-dead-83-73117856

I had a chance to tour the WL Gore HQ a few years ago. They have a gore-tex museum showing the hundreds of different uses for gore-tex including in industrial and medical applications.

[GburgNatsFan]

Was the factory in Western Maryland? I have some recollection of it being in Frostburg or Cumberland or something.

Robert Gore, inventor of Gore-tex.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/robert-gore-inventor-gore-tex-fabric-dead-83-73117856

I had a chance to tour the WL Gore HQ a few years ago. They have a gore-tex museum showing the hundreds of different uses for gore-tex including in industrial and medical applications.

[imref]

Was the factory in Western Maryland? I have some recollection of it being in Frostburg or Cumberland or something.

The HQ is in Delaware.

[GburgNatsFan]

The HQ is in Delaware.

Yeah, I was in the wrong corner of the state. Manufacturing started in the Elkton area.

[imref]

Yeah, I was in the wrong corner of the state. Manufacturing started in the Elkton area.

IIRC, the elder Gore, Robert’s dad, invented a method of using Teflon to insulate wire, allowing for the construction of ribbon cable. He worked at DuPont, they had no interest in the product but offered to help him start a spin-off. Robert figures out how to make it thin and pliable, leading to all sorts of commercial use cases.

[JCA-CrystalCity]

IIRC, the elder Gore, Robert’s dad, invented a method of using Teflon to insulate wire, allowing for the construction of ribbon cable. He worked at DuPont, they had no interest in the product but offered to help him start a spin-off. Robert figures out how to make it thin and pliable, leading to all sorts of commercial use cases.

and spreading PFAS throughout cities

[imref]

and spreading PFAS throughout cities

Yeah. I was reading earlier of some of the environmental impact of PTFE, but it’s also widely used in surgical applications, industrial filtration and the like.

[DCFan]

and spreading PFAS throughout cities

That’s a huge concern in my new hometown. There is a former DuPont plant up the Cape Fear River that has been cranking out that stuff for years now. But even with new ownership (Chemours) it’s been getting in the river which is where Wilmington gets its drinking water from. Everyone has known about this for years and years which is why one of our first upgrades was to get a reverse osmosis water system.

[JCA-CrystalCity]

I honestly remember in the 90s when folks first started showing up with Teflon in their blood the toxicologists thought it was benign. Of course, Dupont did all the studies. GE did the same thing on PCBs.

[wj73]

My Judge was Raya Dreben. 

(snip)

Thanks! I remember learning about that case, but did not know all the background. Fascinating.

That Sex Discrimination class made quite an impression on me - 40 years later and I can still remember so many of the cases we discussed. RGB was incredible.

[imref]

Tommy DeVito, founding member of the Four Seasons, of COVID-19

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/22/entertainment/tommy-devito-four-seasons-died-from-covid-trnd/index.html

[NatNasty]

Toots Hibbert, founder of '70's reggae pioneers Toots and the Maytals, dead at 77: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/12/entertainment/jamaica-reggae-toots-hibbert-death-scli-intl/index.html

I saw him play once.  Good show.  Saw on the news the next day he wound up getting struck in the head by a vodka bottle courtesy of some dipcrap kid.

[bluestreak]

RIP Gale Sayers.

[varoadking]

RIP Gale Sayers.

Bummer...