Some notable people have left us over the last few weeks. Time to catch up....
James Lovell
Astronaut James Lovell died at the age of 92 earlier this month. Lovell was a veteran of two Gemini space flights when he, Frank Norman, and Bill Anders were tapped for the Apollo 8 mission and became the first human beings to visit the moon when their Apollo craft orbited the moon in December 1968. If you were around then, how could you ever forget the trio reading from the Book of Genesis while they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve.
Lovell will be most remembered, however, as the Commander of the Apollo 13 mission, the one that went wrong. When power and oxygen was lost in the command module, the lunar landing mission had to be aborted and Lovell and his crew of Fred Haise and Rusty Swigert, with the assistance of the NASA engineers and scientists on the ground somehow managed, while the world watched with bated breath, to get the craft in working order and back to earth safely with all three crew members surviving. I can recall my mother saying at the time that "if they get them back to earth safely it will be a bigger miracle than if they had landed on the moon itself."
Of course, the whole sage of that mission was immortalized back in 1995 with the Ron Howard directed movie, "Apollo 13" that starred Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell. If you've never seen the movie, you should. It is great movie about an amazing event in our history. Lovell himself even has a cameo as one of the ship's naval officers who welcomes the crew on board after they splash down in the ocean.
Ron Turcotte
Hall of Fame Jockey Ron Turcotte died last week at the age of 82. Turcotte won over 3,000 races in his career including two wins apiece in each of the Triple Crown races, and he is most famous for being in the irons on the great Secretariat when that horse won the Triple Crown of racing, the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes in 1973. Secretariat won each of those races in record times, and those speed records still stand in all three of those races fifty-two years later. For some reason, 21 year old me was all alone in our Saline Street house on that June afternoon, and I will never forget what I saw on television as Secretariat while "moving like a tremendous machine" won that Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths. It remains one of the most astonishing events that I have ever witnessed as a sports fan. (Treat yourself and watch that race HERE).
Five years after that Triple Crown year, Turcotte fell off of a horse during a race and became a paraplegic. He spent the rest of his life in and around the racing industry, helped raise awareness and funds for injured and retired jockeys, and by all accounts was a positive and terrific person.
The picture above is the famous one of Turcotte looking back at the field in the backstretch of that incredible race at Belmont park in 1973.
Joan Anderson
People like Joan Anderson are why I read the news obituaries and write Absent Friends posts. Anderson died last month at the age of 92, and this was the first paragraph in her obit in the Washington Post:
"On a trip to Sydney in 1956, Joan Anderson was amazed to discover a trend sweeping Australia's beaches and streets. People were 'doing the hoop' - twirling a sturdy circular ring of bamboo around their hips for exercise or just for fun."
Anderson was a native Australian who in 1945 married an American soldier and moved to the United States after WW II. After her return to the States from that 1956 vacation, she had her mother send her one of those hoops. Long story short, Anderson met with a guy from the Wham-O toy company, and made a handshake agreement to allow Wham-O to manufacture and market the hoops, now called Hula Hoops, and give the Andersons a penny for each hoop sold. Well, if your my age, you no doubt had a hula hoop when you were a kid, and all of your neighborhood friends did too. Four months after the Hula Hoop hit the market in 1958, over 25 million of them were sold, which would have meant 250 thousand 1958 dollars for the Andersons, but guess what? Wham-O reneged on that handshake deal. The Andersons had to go to court and ended up settling for $6,000 and "tried to cast the hula hoop from their minds" according to the Post obituary.
In 2018, a documentary film called "Hula Girl" was made about Joan Anderson and this story. I have tried to find it on several streaming platforms but have not been able to find it as yet. In it, Joan was quoted as saying, "The world isn't fair, but life goes on" and according to her family, she and her husband did just that.
So now you know about that goofy toy you had back there in the 1958-61 era. My late sister, Patty, by the way, was a whiz at the hula hoop.
RIP Jim Lovell, Ron Turcotte, and Joan Anderson
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