If you can see your name here, it is no good sign

July 03, 2025

R I P of the day

Farina Sergio (b. 1926-09-08 / d. 2012-07-03) alias Sergio Pininfarina

He was an Italian automobile designer and Senator for life. In 1965 it was Sergio Pininfarina who personally persuaded Enzo Ferrari to adopt a "mid-engined" engine configuration for a new line of road cars, with the engine positioned behind the driver, but ahead of the rear wheels. The resulting Ferrari Dino Berlinette Speciale was presented at the Paris Motor Show in October, although it would be another two years before the cars were offered for sale. After his father's death in 1966, Pininfarina became chairman of the company. In 2006 Sergio and his son Andrea, who died in 2008 were named Honorary Chairmen of Pininfarina,

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Sad list (31)

Lewis
Jerry Lee. 2022-10-28

87

Born 1935-09-29. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Age

Jerry Lee Lewis was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Nicknamed "The Killer", he was described as "rock & roll's first great wild man". A pioneer of rock and roll and rockabilly music, Lewis made his first recordings in 1952 at Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studio in New Orleans, Louisiana, and early recordings in 1956 at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee. "Crazy Arms" sold 300,000 copies in the Southern United States, but it was his 1957 hit "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" that shot Lewis to worldwide fame. He followed this with the major hits "Great Balls of Fire", "Breathless", and "High School Confidential". His rock and roll career faltered in the wake of his marriage to Myra Gale Brown, his 13-year-old cousin once removed.

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Fletcher
Andrew John Leonard. 2022-05-26

60

Born 1961-07-08. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Unknown

Andrew John Leonard Fletcher, also known as Fletch, was an English keyboard player, DJ, and founding member of the electronic band Depeche Mode. In 2020, he and the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Fletcher was married to Gráinne Fletcher (née Mullan) for almost 30 years. The couple had two children. While Depeche Mode were touring with the band Blancmange in the early 1980s, Fletcher was renowned for his skill at chess. Neil Arthur of Blancmange has mentioned in interviews "never winning a game of chess with Andy Fletcher!" During the 1990s, Fletcher owned a restaurant called Gascogne located on Blenheim Terrace in St. John's Wood, London. He made a series of bad investments in the mid-1990s that led to a number of financial settlements involving Lloyd's of London and Daniel Miller. Writing about the 1993 Devotional Tour, Glyn Brown of The Independent said: "... an epic 180-show affair, became the definition of hell. Depeche Mode – down to Gore, Gahan and Andrew Fletcher – were barely on speaking terms, using separate limos and dressing rooms. The smack-blasted vocalist required cortisone shots just to perform, borderline alcoholic Gore suffered two stress-induced seizures, and Andrew Fletcher's deepening depression resulted, in the summer of 1994, in a full nervous breakdown."

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Boseman
Chadwick Aaron. 2020-08-28

43

Born 1976-11-29. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:cancer (colorectal)

Chadwick Aaron Boseman was an American actor. He portrayed several real-life historical figures, such as Jackie Robinson in 42 (2013), James Brown in Get on Up (2014), and Thurgood Marshall in Marshall (2017). He also played the superhero Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, including Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019) & Black Panther (2018), for which he won a NAACP Image Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Boseman's other film roles included 21 Bridges (2019) and Da 5 Bloods (2020). He died at age 43, after privately dealing with colon cancer for four years.

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Holloway
Nancy. 2019-08-28

86

Born 1932-12-11. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Age

Nancy Holloway (née Brown) was an American jazz, pop and soul singer and actress who was popular during the 1960s in France, where she continued to perform and live. In later life she became an active supporter of AIDS charities. She retired from performing in 2008, and died in Paris in 2019, aged 86.

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Kappelhoff
Mary Anne (alias: Doris Day). 2019-05-13

97

Born 1922-04-03. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Age

Doris Day (born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff) was an American actress and singer. She began her career as a big band singer in 1939, achieving commercial success in 1945 with two No. 1 recordings, "Sentimental Journey" and "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time" with Les Brown and His Band of Renown. She left Brown to embark on a solo career and recorded more than 650 songs from 1947 to 1967. After her third husband Martin Melcher died on April 20, 1968, Day was shocked to discover that Melcher and his business partner and advisor Jerome Bernard Rosenthal had squandered her earnings, leaving her deeply in debt. Rosenthal had been her attorney since 1949 when he had represented her in her uncontested divorce action against her second husband, saxophonist George W. Weidler. Day filed suit against Rosenthal in February 1969 and won a successful decision in 1974, but she did not receive compensation until a settlement was reached in 1979. Day also learned to her displeasure that Melcher had committed her to a television series that became The Doris Day Show. Day died of pneumonia at her home in Carmel Valley, California, at the age of 97. Her death was announced by the Doris Day Animal Foundation. As requested by Day, the foundation announced that there would be no funeral services, grave marker or other public memorials

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Brown
Susan. 2018-08-31

86

Born 1932-05-04. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Age

Susan Brown was an American television and film actress and interior designer. She was best known for her roles on daytime soap operas, particularly General Hospital; in 1979, she was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for her role on the show. Brown died in Los Angeles, California from complications of Alzheimer's disease at the age of 86.

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Brown
DuShon Monique. 2018-03-23

49

Born 1968-11-30. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Infection

DuShon Monique Brown was an American actress known for her performances as Nurse Katie Welch on the Fox series Prison Break and Connie in the NBC series Chicago Fire. Brown checked herself into the hospital earlier in the week of her death, after experiencing chest pains, but was released after undergoing tests. She died at St. James Olympia Fields Hospital on March 23, 2018. The Cook County coroner scheduled an autopsy on March 24, 2018. On May 31, 2018, the Cook County Medical examiner confirmed the death was the result of sepsis of an unknown etiology. Obesity and high blood pressure were also cited as the reason of sudden death.

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Héritier
Françoise. 2017-11-15

84

Born 1933-11-15. Domain:Philosophy. Cause of death:Age

She was a French anthropologist, ethnologist, and feminist. She was the successor of Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France (Chair of Comparative Studies of African Societies from 1982 to 1998, now emeritus professor). Her work dealt mainly with the theory of alliances and on the prohibition of incest (both theories based on the notion of exchange of women). In addition to Lévi-Strauss, she was also influenced by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. She was replaced by Philippe Descola, who is the current holder of the chair of anthropology at the Collège. She died the day of her birthday in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.

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Stubblefield
Clyde Austin. 2017-02-18

73

Born 1943-04-18. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Kidney failure

He was an American drummer best known for his work with James Brown. A self-taught musician, he was influenced by the sound of natural rhythms around him. His drum patterns on Brown's recordings are considered funk standards. He recorded and toured with Brown for six years and settled in Madison, Wisconsin, where he was a staple of the local music scene. Often uncredited, samples of his drum patterns were heavily used in hip hop music. He was the recipient of an honorary doctorate in fine arts. He survived cancer in 2000 and coped with kidney disease since 2002. Pop icon Prince, who considered Stubblefield a drumming idol, was a major financial supporter and had paid for about $80,000 of the drummer's health care costs, it was disclosed in 2016, since Stubblefield had no health insurance.

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Gemma
Giuliano. 2013-10-01

75

Born 1938-09-02. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Accident

Giuliano Gemma was an Italian actor. He is best known internationally for his work in Spaghetti Westerns, particularly for his performances as the title character in Duccio Tessari's A Pistol for Ringo (1965), Captain Montgomery Brown/'Ringo' in Tessari's The Return of Ringo (1965), the title character in Michele Lupo's Arizona Colt (1966), Scott Mary in Tonino Valerii's Day of Anger (1967) and Michael "California" Random in Lupo's California (1977). In Italy, his advantageous musculature makes him a recurring actor in peplums and westerns, but he is best known in France for his participation in the film series Angelique, Marquise of Angels. On 1 October 2013, Gemma died following a car accident in Cerveteri, near Rome. He was taken to a hospital in Civitavecchia and pronounced dead shortly after his arrival. Two other passengers, a man and his son, were also injured in the accident.

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Tavarez
Shannon Skye. 2010-11-01

11

Born 1999-01-20. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:cancer (blood)

She was an American child actress. She appeared in the Broadway theatre production of The Lion King by Walt Disney Theatrical, where she played the role of the young lion cub Nala.
Tavarez died at the age of 11 at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York, due to acute myeloid leukemia. The lights at the Minskoff Theatre, where The Lion King was playing, were dimmed the night she died. In a statement released following her daughter's death, Odiney Brown said that "Shannon's dream was to perform on stage, and that she did."

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Brown
David. 2008-04-13

51

Born 1957-02-15. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Unknown

Nathaniel Benjamin Levi Bar-Jonah, born David P. Brown was an American convicted felon who was serving a 130-year prison sentence without the possibility of parole in Montana after being convicted of kidnapping, aggravated assault, and sexual assault of various children. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In 1974 he pleaded guilty to impersonating a policeman and assaulting an eight-year-old boy, for which he received one year of probation. In 1977, Brown was convicted of the kidnapping and attempted murder of two boys and was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison.
While in prison he was transferred to the Bridgewater State Hospital for Sexual Predators. In 1991, he changed his name to Nathaniel Benjamin Levi Bar-Jonah. Later in the same year, Superior Court Judge Walter E. Steele ruled that Massachusetts had failed to prove that Bar-Jonah was dangerous and he was released before moving to Great Falls, Montana.
Bar-Jonah was arrested in 1999, again and initially for impersonating a police officer. After searching his home and finding, among other things, many pictures of young children cut out of magazines and a bone that was identified as belonging to an unknown young male, Montana police charged Bar-Jonah with kidnapping and sexual assault.
Bar-Jonah was convicted of kidnapping, aggravated assault, and sexual assault. He was given a 130-year prison sentence. He maintained his innocence up until his death.
Montana authorities were unaware of Bar-Jonah's past trouble in Massachusetts, a fact that was cited by activists campaigning to force former sex offenders to register.
Nathaniel Bar-Jonah was found unresponsive early Sunday. He had been in poor health.

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Day
Bobby (alias: Bobby Byrd). 2007-09-12

73

Born 1934-08-15. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Cancer

Best known as James Brown's longtime sideman and co-vocalist on songs such as Licking Stick - Licking Stick, Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine and Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved.

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Browne
Roscoe Lee. 2007-04-11

81

Born 1925-05-02. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Cancer

With a strong sense of himself, Browne was determined not to accept stereotyped and demeaning roles that had routinely been offered to black actors, and he resisted emulating fellow actors.

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Brown
James. 2006-12-25

73

Born 1933-05-03. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Pneumonia

james Brown was eventually interred 2 months after is death, on March 10, 2007.
Maybe not for long...

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Kaplansky
Irving. 2006-06-25

89

Born 1917-03-22. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age

Irving Kaplansky was a mathematician, college professor, author, and musician. Kaplansky or "Kap" as his friends and colleagues called him was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Polish-Jewish immigrants. Kaplansky made major contributions to group theory, ring theory, the theory of operator algebras and field theory and created the Kaplansky density theorem, Kaplansky's game and Kaplansky conjecture. He published more than 150 articles and over 20 mathematical books. Kaplansky was the doctoral supervisor of 55 students including notable mathematicians Hyman Bass, Susanna S. Epp, Günter Lumer, Eben Matlis, Donald Ornstein, Ed Posner, Alex F. T. W. Rosenberg, Judith D. Sally, and Harold Widom. He has over 900 academic descendants, including many through his academic grandchildren David J. Foulis (who studied with Kaplansky at the University of Chicago before completing his doctorate under the supervision of Kaplansky's student Fred Wright, Jr.) and Carl Pearcy (the student of H. Arlen Brown, who had been jointly supervised by Kaplansky and Paul Halmos). Kaplansky was also an accomplished amateur musician. He had perfect pitch, studied piano until the age of 15, earned money in high school as a dance band musician, taught Tom Lehrer, and played in Harvard's jazz band in graduate school. He also had a regular program on Harvard's student radio station. After moving to the University of Chicago, he stopped playing for two decades, but then returned to music as an accompanist for student-run Gilbert and Sullivan productions and as a calliope player in football game parades. He often composed music based on mathematical themes. One of those compositions, A Song About Pi, is a melody based on assigning notes to the first 14 decimal places of pi, and has occasionally been performed by his daughter, singer-songwriter Lucy Kaplansky.

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Brown
Philip. 2006-02-09

89

Born 1916-04-30. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Pneumonia

Known for his role as Luke Skywalker's uncle, Owen Lars, in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977).

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Brown
David McDowell. 2003-02-01

46

Born 1956-04-16. Domain:Other. Cause of death:Accident

He was a United States Naval Captain and a NASA astronaut. He was killed on his first space flight, when the Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107) disintegrated during orbital reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. Brown became an astronaut in 1996, but had not served on a space mission prior to the Columbia disaster.

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Bottom
River (alias: River Phoenix). 1993-10-31

23

Born 1970-08-23. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:alcohol, other drugs

His career was cut short, when he died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine (also known as a speedball).
Phoenix collapsed from a drug overdose of heroin and cocaine (known as a speedball) outside the Viper Room, a Hollywood night club partially owned by actor Johnny Depp until 2004. On the night of Phoenix's death, River was to perform onstage with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. At some point in the evening Phoenix went to the bathroom to take drugs with various friends and dealers. It is reported that an acquaintance offered him some Persian Brown (a powerful form of methamphetamine mixed with opiates, which is then snorted) and soon after consuming the drug he became ill. Upon leaving The Viper Room, he collapsed onto the sidewalk and began convulsing for eight minutes. His brother Joaquin, sister Rain and actress Samantha Mathis were at the scene. Joaquin dialed 911; during the call Joaquin was unable to determine whether River was breathing. River had, in fact, already stopped breathing. Paramedics arrived on the scene and found Phoenix in asystole (flat line), when they administered drugs in an attempt to restart his heart. He was rushed to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center via an ambulance. Further attempts to resuscitate Phoenix (including the insertion of a pacemaker) were unsuccessful. He was pronounced dead at 1:51 a.m. PST on the morning of October 31, 1993

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Vaughan
Stephen (alias: Stevie Ray Vaughan (SRV)). 1990-08-27

35

Born 1954-10-03. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Accident

Drug addiction and alcoholism took a toll on Vaughan in mid-1986. Cocaine and Crown Royal whiskey were among his addictions. After becoming acutely ill in Germany while on tour, Vaughan managed to struggle through three more shows (one of those shows was recorded and released by the name Live alive)and was finally admitted into a hospital in London. Dr. Victor Bloom, who has helped Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend with their addictions, told Stevie he was a month away from dying. After a struggle to get sober in London, he then flew to Atlanta, Georgia to a rehabilitation center. He eventually recovered fully from his addictions and became a teetotaler.
On August 25, 1990, Vaughan and Double Trouble finished up the summer leg of the tour with shows at Alpine Valley Music Theatre, just outside of East Troy, Wisconsin. The show also featured Robert Cray and his Memphis Horns along with Eric Clapton's set. Alex Hodges, Double Trouble's tour manager, arranged flight by helicopter with Omni Flights.
At the end of the show, Vaughan was informed by a member of Clapton's crew that three seats were open on one of the helicopters returning to Chicago with Clapton's crew, enough for Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, and Jimmie Vaughan's wife Connie. It turned out there was only one seat left, which Stevie Ray Vaughan requested from his brother, who obliged. Stevie strapped himself next to Clapton's crew. It was 12:44 am. Pilot Jeffrey Browne guided the copter off the ground as the lights flashed below. Seconds later, the mistake was made. After just a few seconds in the copter, the pilot banked the machine into a 300-foot high hill with the twisted metal scattered over an area of 200 square feet. All on board were killed instantly. No one realized that the crash had occurred until the helicopter failed to arrive in Chicago, and the wreckage was only found with the help of its locator beacon. The main cause of the crash was believed to be pilot error.

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Elvgren
Gil. 1980-02-29

65

Born 1914-03-15. Domain:Art. Cause of death:Unknown

Elvgren was a commercial success. His clients ranged from Brown and Bigelow and Coca-Cola to General Electric and Sealy Mattress Company. In addition, during the 1940s and 1950s he illustrated stories for a host of magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping.
His death occured on a 29th february, which is very unusual, and interesting for this deadabase.

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Radnitzky
Emmanuel (alias: Man Ray). 1976-11-18

86

Born 1890-08-27. Domain:Art. Cause of death:Age

He died in Paris and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads: unconcerned, but not indifferent. When Juliet Browner died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads, together again. Juliet set up a trust for his work and made many donations of his work to museums.

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Enright
Ray. 1965-04-03

69

Born 1896-03-25. Domain:Directing. Cause of death:Heart attack

He was an American film director. He directed 73 films between 1927–53, many of them for Warner Bros. He oversaw comedy films like Joe E. Brown vehicles, and five of the six informal pairings of Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell. Enright was born in Anderson, Indiana, and died in Hollywood, California, from a heart attack.

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Browning
Charles Albert (alias: Tod Browning). 1962-10-06

82

Born 1880-07-12. Domain:Directing. Cause of death:cancer (throat)

Browning's career spanned the silent and talkie eras. Best-known as the director of Dracula (1931), the cult classic Freaks (1932), and classic silent movie collaborations with Lon Chaney, Sr., Browning directed many movies in a wide range of genres.
After Miracles for Sale, Browning did some scenario work for MGM. In 1942 he retired and moved to Malibu. He became such a recluse that soon after his wife died in 1944, Variety accidentally published an obituary for him. Even his neighbors rarely saw him. In the late 1950s he developed throat cancer, necessitating tongue surgery. When his brother Avery died in 1959, he attended the funeral from a private room and would not let family members see him. Tod Browning was found dead at age 81, on October 6, 1962, in the bathroom of some friends in Malibu. He is interred in Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, Los Angeles.

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Collyer
Homer Lusk. 1947-03-21

66

Born 1881-11-06. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Accident

Homer Lusk Collyer and Langley Wakeman Collyer (October 3, 1885 – c. March 9, 1947), known as the Collyer brothers, were two American brothers who became infamous for their bizarre natures and compulsive hoarding. For decades, the two lived in seclusion in their Harlem brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street) where they obsessively collected books, furniture, musical instruments, and myriad other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to crush intruders. In March 1947, both were found dead in their home surrounded by over 140 tons of collected items that they had amassed over several decades. Since the 1960s, the site of the former Collyer house has been a pocket park, named for the brothers.

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Miller
Glenn. 1944-12-15

40

Born 1904-03-01. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Murder

Alton Glenn Miller , was an American jazz musician and band leader in the swing era. He was one of the best-selling recording artists from 1939 to 1942, leading one of the best known "Big Bands". Miller's signature recordings include, "In the Mood", "Tuxedo Junction", "Chattanooga Choo Choo", "Moonlight Serenade", "Little Brown Jug", and "Pennsylvania 6-5000". While travelling to entertain U.S. troops in France during World War II, Miller's plane disappeared in bad weather. His body was never found and his death is presumably on December 15, 1944. In fact, on December 15, 1944, Miller, now a major, was to fly from the United Kingdom to Paris in France, to play for the soldiers who recently had liberated Paris. His plane departed from RAF Twinwood Farm, in Clapham, Bedfordshire, but disappeared over the English Channel. Miller's remains and the wreckage of the plane (a single-engine UC-64 Norseman, USAAF serial 44-70285) have never been found. Since Miller's disappearance more than sixty years ago, there have been many theories about what happened. Buddy DeFranco, one of the leaders of the post-war Glenn Miller orchestra, told biographer George T. Simon of the many theories of Miller's disappearance that were told to him while he was leading the band in the 1970s. DeFranco said "If I were to believe all those stories, there would have been about twelve thousand four hundred and fifty eight people there at the field in England seeing him off on that last flight!" Miller's plane may have been bombed accidentally by Royal Air Force aircraft over the English Channel after an abortive air raid on Siegen, Germany. One hundred and thirty-eight Lancaster bombers, short on fuel, jettisoned approximately 100,000 incendiaries in a designated area before landing, per standing orders. The logbooks of Royal Air Force navigator Fred Shaw recorded that he saw a small single-engined monoplane spiraling out of control and crashing into the water. If this was indeed Miller's plane, the RAF crews were not culpable for the plane carrying Miller straying off course into their designated drop area. However, a second source, while acknowledging the possibility, casts doubt on the version, citing other RAF crew members flying the same mission who state the drop area was in the North Sea, a more likely location. Miller's surname resides on the 'Wall of Missing' at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial. A monument stone was also placed in Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut next to the campus of Yale University. General Jimmy Doolittle said, “[...]next to a letter from home, that organization was the greatest morale builder in the European Theater of Operations.

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Brown
Ernest William. 1938-07-22

72

Born 1866-11-29. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:alcohol, other drugs

He was a British mathematician and astronomer, who spent the majority of his career working in the United States. His life's work was the study of the Moon's motion (lunar theory) and the compilation of extremely accurate lunar tables. He also studied the motion of the planets and calculated the orbits of Trojan asteroids. A heavy smoker, Brown suffered from bronchial trouble for much of his life. He was afflicted by ill-health during most of the six years of his retirement, and died in New Haven, Connecticut.

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Howard
Robert. 1936-06-11

30

Born 1906-01-22. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Suicide

Robert Ervin Howard was a classic American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion" and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of "a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror." Throughout all of this time, Howard continued to be dogged by fits of increasingly unbearable melancholy and depression, and he maintained his belief in the validity of suicide as an escape from the nightmarish pain. All of his close friends had become married and were immersed in their careers, Novalyne Price had left Cross Plains for graduate school, and his most reliable market, Weird Tales, had grown far behind on payments. Most importantly, his home life was falling apart — after decades of struggle, his mother was finally nearing death, and the constant interruptions of care workers at home combined with frequent trips to various sanatoriums for her care made it nearly impossible to write. Several times in 1935 – 36, whenever his mother's health precipitously threatened to give out, he made veiled allusions to his father about planning suicide, something both parents made efforts to talk him out of. In June 1936, as Hester Howard slipped into her final coma, her son maintained a death vigil with his father and friends of the family, getting little sleep, drinking huge amounts of coffee, and growing more despondent — perhaps, given his exhaustion, deliriously so. On the morning of June 11, 1936, told by a nurse that his mother would never again regain consciousness, he walked out to his car in the driveway, took a borrowed .38 automatic from the glove box, and shot himself in the head. His father and another doctor rushed out, but the wound was too grievous for anything to be done. Howard lived for another eight hours, dying at 4 p.m.; his mother died the following day. They were both buried on June 14, 1936 in a double funeral in Greenleaf Cemetery in Brownwood, Texas. Howard's death sent shockwaves of grief through the weird fiction community, vividly documented in the pulps and fanzines of the era, and marked the beginning of the end of the magazines' Golden Age. H. P. Lovecraft was severely affected by the death of his friend, and within a year would die himself of intestinal cancer. Clark Ashton Smith (the third member of the great triumvirate of Weird Tales ), was stricken by the deaths of Howard and Lovecraft as well as those of his own parents, and soon stopped writing fiction himself, fading from the scene.

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Calmette
Gaston. 1914-03-16

56

Born 1858-07-30. Domain:Journalism. Cause of death:Murder

Gaston Calmette was a French journalist and newspaper editor. At 6pm on 16 March 1914, he entered the offices of Le Figaro in the company of his friend, the novelist Paul Bourget. Caillaux's second wife Henriette was waiting for him, wearing a fur coat and with her hands in a fur muff. To Bourget's surprise, Calmette agreed to see her in his office. There, Madame Caillaux exchanged a few words with him, then pulled out a .32 Browning automatic pistol she had been concealing within the muff and fired six shots. Calmette was hit four times and was critically wounded, dying six hours later. Caillaux made no attempt to escape and newspaper workers in adjoining offices quickly summoned a doctor and the police. She refused to be transported to the police headquarters in a police van, insisting on being driven there by her chauffeur in her own car, which was still parked outside. The police agreed to this and she was formally charged upon reaching the headquarters. During the campaign against Joseph Caillaux, which was orchestrated by Louis Barthou and Raymond Poincaré, Le Figaro published several letters from the Minister's private correspondence. Madame Caillaux's motive was fear that the newspaper would also make public a love letter that showed how her husband was already having a relationship with her during his first marriage. Joseph Caillaux had to resign his post the next day, but during a spectacular trial later that year his wife was acquitted.

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Garnier
Octave. 1912-05-14

23

Born 1889-12-25. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder

On May 14, 1912 Garnier and René Valet were killed in a shootout with French authorities when their safe house in Nogent-sur-Marne was raided by police. Armed with seven 9 mm Browning semi-automatics and two long-barreled Mausers, the two outlaws, who had barricaded themselves inside the rental house, faced 50 detectives, 250 police from Paris, Republican Guards, and 400 Zouaves from Nogent. As the six hour stand-off stretched on, Valet and Garnier burned 10,000 stolen francs but managed to hold back the army outside.
At midnight, having failed to remove the bandits, French authorities succeeded in positioning one and a half kilograms of melanite in the house. The resulting explosion rendered the structure's inhabitants unconscious and Garnier was then executed by a 9 mm shot to the right temple. Both men were buried in unmarked graves.
A memoir, found by police on Garnier's body explained his criminal activities and summed up: "It's for all these reasons that I rebelled, it's because I didn't want to live this life of present-day society, because I didn't want to wait and maybe die before I'd lived, that I defended myself against the oppressors with all the means at my disposal..."

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