Scenes from the Mercury-Redstone 4 mission on July 21, 1961 when Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom became the second American to fly in space. After a suborbital flight lasting 15 minutes and 37 seconds, a problem with the hatch of his spacecraft “Liberty Bell 7” led his capsule to sink after splashdown. It was salvaged from the Atlantic in 1999. (NASA)
I wonder where he got that?
Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you. Khalil Gibran
Half of what I saw is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you, Julia. John Lennon
Here's a truth about the 60s
The reality is that VERY FEW people dressed like this in the 1960s. People did dress like this BUT NOT MANY.....yet the way the media portrays it every young person was decked out like this, no, not so.
A video call between Finnish Prime Minister Urho Kekkonen, who is speaking with an employee of the Ericsson corporation. This was one of the first videophones, which were developed in the 1960s. These seemed like the wave of the future, but mostly flopped due to their high prices – a call could cost the equivalent of hundreds of dollars in today’s money.
Linda Cristal, Actress on 'The High Chaparral,' Dies at 89
The Buenos Aires-born star also
appeared on the big screen in 'The Alamo,' 'Two Rode Together' and 'Mr.
Majestyk.'
Linda Cristal, the Golden
Globe-winning actress who portrayed Victoria Cannon, the wife of Leif
Erickson's character, on the 1967-71 NBC Western The High Chaparral, has died.
She was 89.
Cristal died Saturday at her home
in Beverly Hills, her son Jordan Wexler told The New York Times.
On the big screen, Cristal
appeared with Jock Mahoney in The Last of the Fast Guns (1958), with John Wayne
in The Alamo (1960), with James Stewart in John Ford's Two Rode Together (1961)
and with Charles Bronson in Mr. Majestyk (1974).
In 1959, she won her first Golden
Globe — as most promising newcomer (female) — for her turn as an Argentine
beauty who takes a trip to Paris with Tony Curtis' character in the comedy The
Perfect Furlough (1958), directed by Blake Edwards.
According to her 2019 memoir, A
Life Unexpected, Cristal read about a new series being shot called The High
Chaparral one morning in The Hollywood Reporter and barged into a meeting of
studio execs led by David Dortort, creator of the show (as well as Bonanza).
She went on to appear on 96 episodes
of The High Chaparral as the strong-willed daughter of a powerful Mexican rancher
and young wife of Erickson's "Big John" Cannon. She was nominated for
two Globes, winning in 1970, and two Emmys, for her performance.
Marta Victoria Moya was born in
Buenos Aires on Feb. 23, 1931, and raised in Uruguay. When she was 13, her
parents died of carbon monoxide poisoning while in their car. She appeared in
several Mexican films before working alongside Dana Andrews in Comanche (1956).
Her résumé also included the
films The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) and Panic in the City (1968), a run on
the soap opera General Hospital and guest-starring stints on such TV shows as
Rawhide, Bonanza, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Barnaby Jones and Fantasy
Island.
She was married to industrialist
Robert W. Champion, half-brother of dancer Gower Champion, from 1958-59 and to
actor Yale Wexler, with whom she had sons Gregory and Jordan, from 1960-66.
I still don't like her....she's creepy.
Yoko Ono, 87, ailing and using
wheelchair, is 'slowing down,' insiders say
The widow of John Lennon hasn't
been photographed in public for more than a year
By Isabel Vincent | New York Post
Three years ago, when the
National Music Publishers’ Association presented Yoko Ono with their Centennial
Song Award, Sean Lennon pushed his mother onto the stage at Cipriani 42nd
Street in a wheelchair — shocking some who didn’t realize the formidable
avant-garde artist was incapacitated.
But in her signature shades, black leather
jacket and white Panama hat, the widow of John Lennon didn’t seem to miss a
beat when she began a short acceptance speech by ¬addressing the elephant in
the room.
“Thank you, thank you, thank
you,” she said, clutching the award in one hand and a microphone in the other
as Sean whispered to her about what was going on. “I’ve learned so much from
having this illness. I’m thankful I went through that.”
While it’s not clear what
“illness” she was referring to, Ono, now 87, is still ailing, requires
round-the-clock care and rarely leaves her sprawling apartment in The Dakota, a
source close to her staff told The Post. In photos taken at rare public
appearances — including a women’s march in Columbus Circle last year and at a
commemoration of John in Liverpool in May 2018 — Ono is confined to a wheelchair,
or walks with great difficulty using a cane, often leaning on a caregiver or
Sean for support.
She has also been selling off
some real-estate assets in recent years.
“She has definitely slowed down,
like anyone at that age,” said Elliot Mintz, a close family friend who has
known Ono for nearly 50 years, and has acted as a family spokesman,
representing the John Lennon estate since the former Beatle’s murder in
December 1980. “But she is as sharp as she once was.”
'Sean is her best friend'
Mintz told The Post he last saw
Ono at her 87th birthday party in February. He was one of more than 30 guests,
including Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner, singer Cyndi Lauper and
Ono’s daughter, Kyoko, 56, from her pre-John marriage to film producer Anthony
Cox.
Two years after their divorce in 1971, Cox
fled with Kyoko and raised her in Christian fundamentalist communes. Ono fought
for years for Kyoko, who began reaching out to her mother after John’s murder.
According to Mintz, Ono is now very close to Kyoko as well as Sean, her
44-year-old son with Lennon.
“Sean is her best friend,” said
Mintz. “They have dinner two or three times a week, and he occasionally brings
his mom out as a guest star in his band.”
Sean organizes Ono’s birthday
party every year, painstakingly obsessing over the decorations and flower
arrangements, Mintz said. In February, he took over Bar Wayo at the South
Street Seaport for the party, where guests celebrated over champagne. In
previous years, Sean and Ono have taken to the stage to perform.
But this year, the celebration
was more low-key. “She blew out the candles with Sean and she was among the
last to leave,” Mintz told The Post. “She was in good spirits. I helped her
into her wheelchair and gently helped her into her car.”
Mintz would not comment on Ono’s
¬personal medical history. “She is a particularly special being,” he said. “In
these 87 years, she’s lived 400.”
Yoko Ono was born in 1933 into a
Tokyo banking family whose fortunes suffered during World War II. The family
faced starvation and was often forced to barter household items for food while
they sought refuge from Allied bombing raids.
Despite the wartime deprivations,
Ono ¬inherited her family’s business acumen. In addition to becoming an
avant-garde artist who once opened her show at MoMA by screaming into a
microphone, she is also a hard-nosed businesswoman — a prodigious investor in
real estate who, after her marriage to John in 1969, began to amass a
mini-empire of properties that spanned New York City, the Hudson Valley, the
Hamptons, Palm Beach, Ireland and England. She has also collected a sizable art
collection that includes works by her old friend Andy Warhol.
Assets of $700 million
Today, Ono has reported assets of
$700 million. She still owns multimillion-dollar properties in Manhattan as
well as hundreds of rolling acres in upstate Delaware County, public records show.
She lives in the same sprawling nine-room apartment, on the seventh floor of
The Dakota, that she once shared with John. She also keeps an adjacent unit at
the West 72nd Street building for visitors, and two small one-room spaces
without kitchens that she uses for staff, a source told The Post. And she has
an office on the first floor that was once used by John as a recording studio.
“She would wake up early every
morning, go downstairs to the studio and handle the family business, allowing
John to be a househusband,” said Mintz, adding that John had no real business
sense, and often needed her help to figure out the most mundane financial
matters, such as how much to tip a waiter when he paid for a meal at a
restaurant.
But Ono has been shedding assets.
In 2017, she sold a building at 110 W. 79th St. that she had owned since 1988.
She bought the property, housing two residential units, for just under $500,000
and unloaded it for $6,450,000, public records show. In 2013, she sold a
5,700-square-foot penthouse at 49-51 Downing St. in the West Village, which
Sean occupied for years, for $8.3 million.
Although Ono still owns more than
600 acres near the town of Franklin, NY, locals say it’s been ages since they
saw her in the area where she used to vacation with Sean and groups of friends.
John and Ono bought the property and 100 Holstein cattle to set up a breeding
operation before he was gunned down by Mark David Chapman in front of The
Dakota on Dec. 8, 1980.
“We haven’t seen her for a very
long time,” said Roland Greefkes, an iron artisan who made a wrought-iron gate
for Ono’s property. “I never met anyone quite like her. She is really something
special.”
in northeastern Pennsylvania,
Jan. 17, 2013. (Associated Press).
That sentiment is echoed by the
directors of charities she has long supported. Although the charity she began
with John, the Spirit Foundations, had contributions of only just under $25,000
from her in 2018, Ono does most of her charitable giving directly. At the start
of the coronavirus pandemic in New York, she donated $250,000 to Montefiore
Medical Center in The Bronx, to support frontline health-care workers.
“Montefiore was specifically chosen
because Yoko wanted to assist a hospital in a community hit hard by COVID that
didn’t have the ability to turn to wealthy donors and board members the way
Cornell, NYU, Mount Sinai and others in Manhattan can,” said Mintz.
She has also recently supported
musicians she has worked with in the past who have fallen on hard times. She
helped Stanley Bronstein, who played in her Plastic Ono Band, when he needed
emergency medical care, Mintz said.
Her pet cause
But hunger remains her pet cause.
“I remember being hungry and I know it’s so difficult to just be hungry,” Ono
said in a 2013 interview. “One day I didn’t bring a lunchbox. The other kids
asked, don’t you want to eat? I just said, no, I’m not hungry.”
Ono recently donated $50,000 to
the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, which during the pandemic has provided
thousands of meals to out-of-work and needy residents in her Upper West Side
neighborhood. And she has a 30-year relationship with WhyHunger, a New
York-based nonprofit fighting food deprivation around the world.
“She has been a true
philanthropic partner,” Noreen Springstead, the group’s executive director,
told The Post. “She is the most energetic, the most vivacious person and is
very hands-on. She has been incredibly invested for more than three decades.”
A few years ago, Ono allowed
Why¬Hunger to license John’s “Imagine” song lyrics and drawings for a global
anti-hunger campaign, helping the charity raise nearly
$7 million for its projects in
New York and around the world, Springstead said.
And it was for “Imagine,” the
1971 utopian anthem, that Ono collected the Centennial Song Award for her late
husband in 2017. While she sat in her wheelchair onstage, the hosts of the
National Music Publishers’ Association surprised her with a second prize of her
own — after playing an old audio clip from John saying that Ono should be
credited as a co-writer on “Imagine.”
“That should be credited as a
Lennon-Ono song because a lot of it — the lyric and the concept — came from
Yoko,” said the former Beatle in a voice-over. “But those days I was a bit more
selfish, a bit more ¬macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution.”
Ono beamed as Sean whispered the
news to his mother.
“This is the best time of my life,”
she told the audience.
