Today brings us another basket of departables, making it tough to decide who gets to be Obit’s Dead of the Day. Take today. In the world of music, we’ve got one of the three B’s, Johannes Brahms, going to his full rest in 1897; Richard D’Oyly Carte, who introduced Gilbert to Sullivan and took his final bow in 1902; and Kurt Weill, composer of “The Threepenny Opera” and “The Rise and Fall of The City of Mahagonny” who saw his last whisky bar in 1950.
In crime, we’ve got a dandy double-header: Jesse James, shot by the coward Robert Ford on this day in 1882, and Bruno Hauptmann, convicted of killing the Lindberg baby—the most notorious crime of the first half of the 20th Century—executed by electric chair in 1936. You want actors? We’ve got actors: Conrad Veidt, the smoothly evil Major Strasser of the Third Reich in “Casablanca,” took his final bow in 1943, less than a year after the part that made him an American star; and Warren Oates, a tough guy both soulless (in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch”) and soulful (the cult classic “Two Lane Blacktop”), but probably best known as Sgt. Hulka, the straight man to Bill Murray’s antics in “Stripes.”
We’ve even got a pair of writers: Graham Greene, whose meticulously written spy novels are the antithesis of James Bond, filled with nondescript men pressed into service and wracked with Catholic guilt over the betrayals that come with the job,,turned his last page in 1991. “Our Man In Havana” might be the most horrifyingly funny spy novel ever written; a mousy vacuum cleaner salesman becomes a figure of Cold War intrigue in pre-Castro Cuba. Michael Kelly, the first US journalist killed covering the war in Iraq, typed his last -30- in 2003, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the Oscar-winning (“Howards End”) screenwriter famed for her long collaboration with James Merchant and Ismail Ivory, best known for their adaptations of “A Room With A View,” “Heat and Dust,” “The Remains of the Day,” wrote her final “fade out” in 2013.”
But even with such a stellar group to chose from, we decided that in the current moment when the Parkland shooting survivors are flexing their muscles to make sane gun laws a reality, we remember another person who took on the gun lobby after a tragedy: Sarah Brady, who died today in 2015.
She was the wife of James Brady, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who was shot in the head during the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan March 30, 1981. His injury left him disabled, with slurred speech and partial paralysis, confining him to a wheelchair. The two of them started the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which lobbied for stricter gun control and assault weapons restrictions. It worked hard in the face of massive NRA activity against it, and the Brady Bill—introduced by then-Queens, NY representative Charles Schumer—was finally signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993.
Thanks to the Brady Bill, background checks are a part of many gun sales. Lets hope the Parkman students and the supporters (there’s still time to get your tickets for the May 24th Fun Lover’s Unite! benefit we told you about in February) can build on her legacy.
Leave a Reply