The U.S. Postal Service today will release stamps honoring the Negro Leagues, and to mark the occasion, Ed O’Keefe at the Washington Post takes a look at the agency’s only remaining employee who played for the all-black baseball teams. Cleophus Brown, 76, was a southpaw pitcher with a 100 mile-per-hour fastball for the Birmingham Black Barons and Louisville Clippers. Today, he drives a mail truck for the Postal Service in Birmingham and told O’Keefe he has no plans to retire. Brown said he usually doesn’t collect stamps, but he plans to get copies of the two stamps being released today.…
Browsing: noteable feds
Harvey Pekar, the sarcastic and irritable writer who chronicled his life and experiences as a Veterans Affairs Department file clerk in the underground comic book American Splendor, was found dead this morning at age 70. Pekar’s darkly humorous comic was about as far from standard superhero fare as could be. Besides his misadventures at the Cleveland VA, he wrote about his everyday troubles and anxieties, battles with cancer, family life, and love of jazz. But although his collaborations with artists such as Robert Crumb brought him fame (and several notorious appearances on David Letterman’s show), Pekar had to keep working…
Guenter Wendt, a NASA contractor who was in charge of launch pad activity during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, passed away today at 85. The German-born Wendt ruled his launch pads with an iron fist — so much so that astronauts affectionately dubbed him the “pad fuehrer.” “It’s easy to get along with Guenter,” astronaut Pete Conrad once said. “All you have to do is agree with him.” But deep down, astronauts such as Wally Schirra and Gordon Cooper appreciated his attention to detail and his dogged enforcement of the rules designed to keep them alive. As Wendt said…
Robert McNamara, the controversial former Defense Secretary who spent his twilight years apologizing for escalating the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, died early this morning in Washington. He was 93 years old. McNamara was a top manager at the Ford Motor Co. and had just taken over the company in 1960Â when President John F. Kennedy tapped him to run the Pentagon. According to the Washington Post, McNamara used his considerable management skills to tame the military’s massive bureaucracy: At the Pentagon, McNamara quickly put his own stamp on the sprawling military bureaucracy in what amounted to a management…
Mark Felt, the former associate director of the FBI who helped break the Watergate scandal, died yesterday at 95. Felt, who for decades hid his role in the scandal and was known only as Deep Throat, was the consummate whistleblower. As a career agent and the number two man at the FBI, Felt had firsthand knowledge of how the Nixon administration tried to sabotage the Bureau’s investigation into the Watergate burglary. He used that information to guide Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they dug into the scandal. Felt’s “Deep Throat” moniker, which was given to him…