The RIP Famous Person Thread

[misskit]

The difference in this man's Gomer Pyle dopey character and Nabor's personality in real life is amazing. He had a great voice.

[Maanaam]

Golly shazam!
Not sure what the Neighbours reference is.

[misskit]

^ Damn spellchecker.

[Maanaam]

^ Doh, lol. I didn't even hear it in my head, though I should have. The fact that an Aussie soap is called Neighbours got me to thinking.

[harrybarracuda]

Apparently he sang this song at the Indy 500 for 36 years. *

Had a hell of a voice even in later years.




* I should add only once a year <heh>

[bobo746]

Suprise,suprise,suprise. RIP Jim.

[bobo746]

Mitch Margo, who took 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' to No. 1 in 1961, dead at 70

Family members said Margo died Nov. 24 in Studio City but did not give a cause.
Margo was a 14-year-old attending high school in Brooklyn, New York, when he formed The Tokens, the Times reported.
The group based “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on a recording of a Zulu folk song, turning it into a doo-wop hit. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts on Dec. 23, 1961, and stayed there for three weeks before being supplanted by Chubby Checker’s hit “The Twist,” which hit No. 1 for the second time on Jan. 13, 1962.
The Tokens followed up with several minor hits, including “I Hear Trumpets Blow” and “Portrait of My Love,” the Times reported.
Margo teamed with his brother Phil and two others in The Tokens. He later produced hits for bands such as The Chiffons and Tony Orlando and Dawn. He also wrote musical scores for television projects and did artwork for children’s books, the Times reported.
“Mitch was an adjective-defying human being,” Noah Margo, a nephew who played drums for the

[uncle junior]

A wimba way

[misskit]

Earworm!

[bobo746]

British showgirl at centre of Profumo Affair Christine Keeler dies aged 75

CHRISTINE Keeler, the central figure in the sex-and-espionage Profumo affair that rocked Cold War Britain, has died at 75.
Her son, Seymour Platt, posted on Facebook that Keeler died on Monday at a hospital near Farnborough in southern England.

A naked photo of Keeler straddling the back of a chair is among the most famous U.K. images of the 1960s.
The Sun reports that Keeler was the showgirl whose colourful love life propelled her to the centre of the most famous British scandal of the 20th century — and helped bring down the government.
She was born in Uxbridge, Middlesex, in 1942 and raised in Berkshire by her mum and stepdad.
She claimed in a later memoir she was sexually abused by her stepfather, who she said beat her mother and drowned her puppies.
She also said she aborted her own child with a knitting needle after falling pregnant to a US airman aged 17.



Christine Keeler: Famous John Profumo affair showgirl dies

[harrybarracuda]

French king of rock, Johnny Hallyday, dies at 74
AFP-JIJI
DEC 6, 2017




PARIS – France’s best-known rock star, Johnny Hallyday, has died at age 74 after a battle with lung cancer, his wife, Laeticia, said on Wednesday.


Hallyday was a leather-clad would-be Elvis who earned love and scorn over five decades spent belting out American rock ‘n’ roll.


While he was never taken seriously abroad, Hallyday was by far the best-known rocker in France.


“There is something of Johnny in all of us,” said the French presidency in a statement after his wife announced his death.


Former President Nicolas Sarkozy — an adoring fan who once tried to tempt him back from tax exile in Switzerland — said he represented “part of our personal history … our memories and emotions.”


Known simply as Johnny, Hallyday sold more than 100 million albums and headlined 50 major tours — the last this summer, when he teamed up with veteran French rockers for the “Old Scoundrels” tour.


Inspired by Elvis Presley, he broke from France’s classic chanson tradition in the late 1950s, rocking like his U.S. idols and summoning the rebellious spirit of James Dean with his quiffed hair and leather clothes.


He drove his young fans wild, attracting 100,000 to a Paris square in 1963 and prompting scenes of hysteria that had been unseen until then in a conservative France led by the stiff Gen. Charles de Gaulle.


“He embodies the emergence of French youth culture and rock ‘n’ roll,” said Serge Kaganski of the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles.


Defying the view that France, then a land of crooners and jazz, could not rock, Hally—day had his big break with the 1960 hit “T’aimer Follement” (“Makin’ Love”) and later belted out French versions of songs such as Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.”


Even as the decades rolled by and politicians began to curry his favor, he kept his bad-boy image alive with a colorful private life, ticking off many rock rites of passage.


He attempted suicide in 1966 and collapsed on stage in 1986.


He married five times — twice to the same woman, the daughter of one of his oldest friends and songwriters.


In 1998 he admitted taking cocaine and said he had suffered a difficult childhood with an alcoholic father who first abandoned the family when Johnny was just 8 months old.


He settled down for a while with the actress Nathalie Baye, with whom he had a daughter, Laura Smet, who followed her mother onto the big screen.


By then, Hallyday had married model Laeticia Boudou, who was 31 years his junior, and adopted two Vietnamese children.


Born Jean-Philippe Leo Smet to a Belgian father and French mother in Paris on June 15, 1943, the singer was brought up by his aunt, an actress, and mentored by an American relative, Lee Halliday, from whom he took his stage name.


Often ridiculed by cartoonists and television comics as a man of little intellect, Hallyday had brief moments of kudos, including starring in films by directors Jean-Luc Godard and Patrice Leconte.


Further acclaim came in 2009 for his performance as a retired hit man out to avenge his murdered family in Johnnie To’s thriller “Vengeance.”


Critics described him as “mesmerizing,” with The New York Times saying that “with his ruined face and pale snake eyes Mr. Hallyday holds the screen.”


“I’m not nearly as dumb as people think,” Hallyday said in an interview. “I think this vision of me belongs to the past.”


There was no doubting his cross-generational popularity — a phenomenon foreigners often found bewildering.


“There is, in the very deep public affection for Johnny, something that goes beyond the sexes and social classes,” said his friend the singer Jean-Jacques Goldman.


He was made a knight of the French Legion of Honor in 1998 by President Jacques Chirac, who called him “the idol of the young.”


“Johnny Hallyday is a real star who has successfully merged two cultures, the French and the American,” Chirac said.


But a few years later, Johnny went into tax exile in Switzerland and Los Angeles — where he was often photographed on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle — claiming that French taxes were too high.


Yet fame outside the French-speaking world eluded him.


“He’s a rock icon in France,” Kaganski said. “But for the English or the Americans, it’d be like the English trying to sell us Camembert.”


“My international career? It’ll happen if it happens,” Hallyday once said in an interview. “But I don’t specially want to succeed elsewhere. It’s better to be king in one’s own country than a prince elsewhere.”

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture...lyday-dies-74/

[harrybarracuda]

British showgirl at centre of Profumo Affair Christine Keeler dies aged 75


CHRISTINE Keeler, the central figure in the sex-and-espionage Profumo affair that rocked Cold War Britain, has died at 75.
Her son, Seymour Platt, posted on Facebook that Keeler died on Monday at a hospital near Farnborough in southern England.

A naked photo of Keeler straddling the back of a chair is among the most famous U.K. images of the 1960s.
The Sun reports that Keeler was the showgirl whose colourful love life propelled her to the centre of the most famous British scandal of the 20th century — and helped bring down the government.
She was born in Uxbridge, Middlesex, in 1942 and raised in Berkshire by her mum and stepdad.
She claimed in a later memoir she was sexually abused by her stepfather, who she said beat her mother and drowned her puppies.
She also said she aborted her own child with a knitting needle after falling pregnant to a US airman aged 17.



Christine Keeler: Famous John Profumo affair showgirl dies

Sobering image, this one, eh?

[harrybarracuda]

Max Clifford, former celebrity publicist, dies aged 74




Disgraced former celebrity publicist Max Clifford, 74, has died in hospital after collapsing at Littlehey Prison in Cambridgeshire, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice has said.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/max...d-74-1-4635539

[Neo]

Cheggers is dead.! Only 60

[harrybarracuda]

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Battling it for a while by all accounts.

Keith Chegwin has died aged 60 after battling lung condition

[kmart]

Aw, that's a bummer. Cheggers used to be great on kids tv. "Cheggers Plays Pop" actually had some decent acts on as well back in the day.

[Khaotom]

Just waiting for someone to come forward alleging he groped them on swapshop now..

[bobo746]

Bruce Brown, 80, Dies; His ‘Endless Summer’ Documented Surfing

Bruce Brown, whose documentary “The Endless Summer,” which followed two surfers on an epic adventure in pursuit of the perfect wave, became an unlikely hit when it was released nationally in 1966, died on Sunday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 80.
His son Dana said the cause was probably heart failure.
Mr. Brown had been making surfing films — mainly for his fellow surfers — since the late 1950s. But as he contemplated making “The Endless Summer,” he had a bigger mission: to change the way surfers had been depicted in popular culture.
He had been surfing since age 11 and believed that surfers were not beach bums or losers.
With a budget of $50,000, he set out in 1963 with two Southern California surfers, Robert August and Mike Hynson, and a Bolex 16-millimeter camera for Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, Tahiti, New Zealand and Hawaii, following the surf over several months as if summer would never end.

[bobo746]

Pat DiNizio, Smithereens Singer, Dead at 62

Pat DiNizio, the lead singer and songwriter of the New Jersey rock group the Smithereens, died Tuesday at the age of 62.


From synth pop and rap to metal and funk, 100 best albums of the Eighties selected by the editors of Rolling Stone

The Smithereens confirmed DiNizio's death in a statement. No cause of death was provided, but the singer had experienced numerous health issues and injuries in recent years.
"It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Pat DiNizio, lead singer and songwriter of the influential New Jersey rock band, The Smithereens - America's Band," the band wrote on Facebook. "Pat was looking forward to getting back on the road and seeing his many fans and friends. Please keep Pat in your thoughts and prayers."
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pat-dinizio-smithereens-singer-dead-at-62-w513988

[misskit]

Charles Jenkins, Cold War Defector To North Korea, Dies At 77

In 1965, Charles Jenkins, a young U.S. Army sergeant stationed at the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea, made what he described decades later as the biggest mistake of his life: He got drunk, deserted his post and crossed over to North Korea.


Jenkins spent the next four decades as a Cold War trophy of Pyongyang and the last years of his life — after being freed in 2004 — on a small, isolated island in Japan with his wife, Hitomi Soga, a Japanese citizen who had also been freed after being abducted by North Korean spies in 1978.


On Tuesday, Japan's NHK broadcaster announced that Jenkins had died at age 77. The cause was not immediately announced.


Born in Rich Square, N.C., Jenkins dropped out of school at age 15 to sign up for the Army. However, it was not until years later, at age 24, after his second posting to South Korea, that he made the decision that changed his life. In a 2006 interview with The Independent, he called it "the biggest mistake I ever made."


"I know I was not thinking clearly at the time and a lot of my decisions don't make sense now, but at the time they had a logic to them that made my actions seem almost inevitable," Jenkins wrote in 2008 in The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea.


He said he thought he would be handed over to the Soviet Union and eventually returned to the U.S. in one of the semi-regular prisoner exchanges that were a fixture of the Cold War.


"I was so ignorant," Jenkins told The Washington Postin a 2008 interview, describing his life in North Korea as like living in a "giant, demented prison."


For the first eight years in North Korea, it was a literal prison: He was held in a small room with three other American defectors. They were forced to memorize the works of North Korean founder Kim Il-sung – earning a beating for any error.


(It was announced in August that fellow deserter James Joseph Dresnok, who crossed the border three years before Jenkins, had died the previous year "pledging loyalty to the 'great leader Kim Jong-Un,' his sons said," according to The Telegraph)


Jenkins later acted in propaganda movies and taught English to North Korean spies and military cadets.


In 1980, he says he was "presented" with Soga and forced to marry her, but that the two later fell in love. North Korea eventually acknowledged its program of kidnapping Japanese citizens. In 2002, Pyongyang released Soga, who returned to Japan. Two years later, Jenkins and the couple's two daughters were allowed to join her.


After his release, Jenkins served 25 days in a U.S. military brig and was debriefed for two months about his knowledge of the secretive regime and its sensitive installations.


But even in his final years on Sado island, Jenkins never stopped looking over his shoulder.


"My life is not worth five cents, I know that," he told The Independent in 2006. "I don't think they [North Korea] have the nerve to come and get me, but they could assassinate me with a bullet through the head from a distance."

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...rea-dies-at-77

[harrybarracuda]

Professor Heinz Wolff: Bioengineering pioneer and TV presenter, dies aged 89

Renowned scientist was face of long-running BBC programme The Great Egg Race




Professor Heinz Wolff, a bioengineering pioneer and TV presenter, has died aged 89.

The renowned inventor and social reformer suffered heart failure on 15 December, his family said in a statement released through Brunel University London.

Prof Wolff was a former adviser to the European Space Agency and presented BBC2's long-running science show The Great Egg Race from 1977 to 1986, with his trademark bow tie, German accent and energetic persona endearing him to viewers.

He came to Britain as a Jewish refugee with his father and other relatives from Berlin in September 1939 as an 11-year-old on the day the Second World War broke out.

He attended school in Oxford before working in haematology at the city's Radcliffe Infirmary, where he invented a machine for counting patients' blood cells, and graduated from University College London with a first-class degree in physiology and physics.

Much of his early career was spent in bioengineering, a discipline he established and named that seeks to solve real-world problems using scientific concepts.

Prof Wolff founded the Brunel Institute for Bioengineering in 1983 after 30 years working for the Medical Research Council. He later became an emeritus professor working on a time-backing scheme which aimed to solve societal issues connected to the elderly population.

“Working with Heinz was like being at the centre of an ideas factory," said Dr Gabriella Spinelli, his colleague on the scheme. "He was fiercely curious and always had new avenues to explore.”

Colleagues at Brunel also recalled his penchant for practical jokes, including arriving at his 80th birthday party celebrations on a scooter propelled by fire extinguishers.

Close friend Professor Ian Sutherland, who took over directorship of the institute when Prof Wolff retired in 1995, said: "Heinz was a most inventive and inspirational leader.

"There was nothing he loved more than having a team of people around him devising completely new ways of doing things."

Sporting a bow tie and tufts of hair above the ears, Prof Wolff became known to British television audiences in the 1970s and 1980s on the The Great Egg Race, which encouraged teams to invent useful objects out of limited resources.

His on-screen career began in 1966 on Panorama with Richard Dimbleby, where he produced a radio pill that could measure pressure, temperature and acidity in the gut.

Speaking in 2016, he recalled: “Richard swallowed one and when I gently poked him, the radio receiver squealed appropriately. The BBC had faith in me because I didn’t need a script and I was comfortable talking in front of a camera lens.”

Alongside his regular television appearances, Prof Wolff's scientific endeavours would continue to flourish.

He was made an honorary member of the European Space Agency in 1975, and his research into how human beings could survive in hostile environments culminated in his co-founding of Project Juno which, in 1991, led to Dr Helen Sharman becoming the first British astronaut and the 15th woman in space when she spent eight days in orbit on the Russian Mir space station.

Prof Wolff had honorary doctorates from several universities, as well as fellowships of the Biological Engineering Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Institute of Biology, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society of Arts. He was awarded the Edinburgh Medal for outstanding contribution by a scientist to society in 1992.

He was also a strong supporter of local charities, including over 25 years as a trustee and then Life President of the Hillingdon Partnership Trust.

Professor Julia Buckingham, vice-chancellor and president of Brunel University London, said: "Heinz's remarkable intellect, ideas and enthusiasm combined to make him the sparkling scientist we will so fondly remember.

"He was a wonderful friend and supporter to staff and to students - and an inspiration to all of us."

Prof Wolff was married to Joan until her death in 2014, and had two sons and four grandchildren.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/professor-heinz-wolff-bionengineering-scientist-tv-presenter-social-reformer-dies-aged-89-the-great-a8114161.html

[bobo746]

Most aussie's will know this bloke.

Rory O’Donoghue


Back in 1966, as he prepared to perform in a Sydney University revue, Grahame Bond was introduced to a teenage musician called Rory O’Donoghue. Despite his age, O’Donoghue was already something of a veteran of the stage. Bond knew at once that he had found a collaborator unlike any other.

“It was a magic that just happened,” he says. “It’s something I’ll never experience again, the joy of being on stage with him. He was just such a consummate professional.”
O’Donoghue, best known for his work with Bond on the Aunty Jack Show on the ABC, died in a Sydney hospital last Wednesday. He was 68.
A widely admired musician, actor, teacher and athlete, [at]O’Donoghue teamed up with Bond for the Aunty Jack Show in 1972-73. The show was a surreal comedy that startled conservative tastes, ending each week with Bond telling viewers to tune in again or he would “come round to your house and I’ll rip yer bloody arms off”.
O’Donoghue, who played Thin Arthur in the series, went on to write music for television, film and advertising jingles, and taught music at schools across Sydney



http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/rory-odonoghue-brought-multiple-talents-to-aunty-jack-show/news-story/617b79bef4d297f195889293426ad9ee

[harrybarracuda]

Clifford Irving, Author of a Notorious Literary Hoax, Dies at 87




Clifford Irving, left, facing reporters in 1972, as a grand jury in Manhattan took up the literary-hoax case against him.

Clifford Irving, who perpetrated one of the biggest literary hoaxes of the 20th century in the early 1970s when he concocted a supposedly authorized autobiography of the billionaire Howard Hughes based on meetings and interviews that never took place, died on Tuesday at a hospice facility near his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87.

His wife, Julie Irving, confirmed the death. She said he was admitted to the hospice over the weekend after receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer about a week ago.

Mr. Irving hit on the idea for “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes” after reading “The Case of the Invisible Billionaire,” an article about him published in the December 1970 issue of Newsweek.

Hughes, a notorious eccentric and recluse who had not spoken to the press since 1958, had just quit Las Vegas to take up residence on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Mr. Irving, a modestly successful novelist and nonfiction writer, was intrigued.

He had recently published an as-told-to memoir, “Fake!: The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time.” Perhaps inspired by his subject, he came up with a wild scheme.

He convinced editors at McGraw-Hill, his publisher, that Hughes had contacted him to express admiration for “Fake!” and proposed collaborating on a similar project.

After studying a Hughes letter reproduced in the Newsweek article, Mr. Irving forged letters from Hughes to back up the story. He began calling his publisher from exotic locations where, he claimed, he was meeting with Hughes and developing a close relationship. He was betting that Hughes hated the limelight so much that he would never step forward to debunk anything written about him.

Mr. Irving succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. McGraw-Hill paid an advance of $750,000 for the book. Life magazine bought the serial rights for $250,000, and Dell obtained the paperback rights for $400,000.

Over the ensuing months, as publication neared, Mr. Irving bluffed his way past editors, lawyers, handwriting experts and even skeptical journalists who had interviewed Hughes in the past. The CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace grilled Mr. Irving on “60 Minutes” and came away convinced.

At the end of 1971, with McGraw-Hill and Life ready to go to press, the scheme began to unravel. Mr. Hughes went public and denied knowing Mr. Irving, first through a representative and later in a conference call with seven journalists based in Los Angeles.

Swiss banking investigators soon discovered that a Zurich bank account belonging to “H. R. Hughes” had been opened by Mr. Irving’s wife, Edith Irving, a German-born Swiss citizen, using a forged passport with the name Helga R. Hughes.
As the evidence piled up, the house of cards collapsed. In March 1972, the Irvings pleaded guilty to conspiracy in federal court. In state court, along with Mr. Irving’s research assistant, Richard Suskind, they pleaded guilty to conspiracy and grand larceny. Mr. Irving was given a prison sentence of two and a half years and served 17 months. Mr. Suskind received a sentence of six months, of which he served five.

Mrs. Irving served only two months of a two-year sentence, the remainder having been suspended. But immediately after being released from Nassau County Jail, she returned to Switzerland, where she served 16 months of a two-year sentence for larceny and forgery.

With Mr. Suskind, Mr. Irving recounted the debacle in “Clifford Irving: What Really Happened,” published by Grove Press in 1972. (It was reissued in 1981 as “The Hoax.”)

“I had never realized I was committing a crime — I had thought of it as a hoax,” Mr. Irving wrote in the book.
Money, he insisted, was not the motive.

“The whole Hughes affair had been a venture into the unknown, a testing of myself, a constant gauntlet of challenge and response,” he wrote.

Clifford Michael Irving was born in Manhattan on Nov. 5, 1930, to Jay and Dorothy Irving. His father, who had changed his name from Irving Joel Raefsky, was a cartoonist and illustrator who did covers for Collier’s magazine and drew a syndicated strip, Pottsy, about an amiable New York policeman.

He graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan in 1947 and from Cornell University, which he had entered at 16, in 1951 with a degree in English. Smitten with Ernest Hemingway as a writer and role model, he traveled widely and worked at an odd assortment of jobs. At various times he was a copy boy at The New York Times, a Fuller Brush salesman in Syracuse and a machinist’s assistant in Detroit.

Mr. Irving went to the Spanish island of Ibiza in 1953 and became, in time, a permanent resident. There he finished his first novel, “On a Darkling Plain,” a coming-of-age story with a questing, alienated protagonist much like the author.
He went on to try his hand at a psychological thriller, “The Losers” (1958), and a period drama, “The Valley” (1960), set in 19th-century New Mexico. He hatched the Hughes hoax after taking up residence on Ibiza.

After serving his prison sentence, Mr. Irving wrote several novels with a legal setting, as well as true-crime books, including “Daddy’s Girl: The Campbell Murder Case” (1988), “Trial” (1990) and “Final Argument” (1993).

Orson Welles drew on “Fake!” and on the Hughes hoax when making his 1974 film, “F for Fake,” in which Mr. Irving plays a prominent role. The Danish director Lasse Hallstrom dramatized the affair in “The Hoax” (2006), with Richard Gere as Mr. Irving.

In 2012, the fake Hughes autobiography was published under the title “Clifford Irving’s Autobiography of Howard Hughes” as an e-book. (The cover proclaimed, “Until now, the most famous unpublished book of the 20th century.”) He also published “Jailing: The Prison Memoirs of 0040, a k a Clifford Irving” as an e-book.

Mr. Irving was married six times. He married Julie Schall in 1998. Besides her, he is survived by three sons, Josh, Ned and Barnaby; and one grandson.

Mr. Irving offered different explanations for the Hughes affair at different times. In his later years, he dismissed it as nothing more than a joke.

But in certain moods, he looked on the episode with something like awe. It had to be admitted, he wrote in “What Really Happened,” that “a certain grandeur had rooted itself into the scheme, and I could still spy a reckless and artistic splendor to the way we had carried it out.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/o...ies-at-87.html

[toslti]

In summary (though there are 2 days to go)

Notable deaths 2017 - BBC News

[harrybarracuda]

Retired US Astronaut Young Dies at 87



Veteran U.S. astronaut John Young, who walked on the moon and even smuggled a corned beef sandwich into orbit during one of his six missions in space, has died at age 87, NASA said Saturday.
Young, a former Navy test pilot, in 1972 became the ninth of 12 people ever to set foot on the moon.
"We're saddened by the loss of astronaut John Young," the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said on Twitter.
The time and cause of Young's death were not immediately clear.
Young became one of the most accomplished astronauts in the history of the U.S. space program. He flew into space twice during NASA's Gemini program in the mid-1960s, twice on the Apollo lunar missions and twice on space shuttles in the 1980s.
He retired in 2004 after 42 years with the U.S. space agency.


Moon mission
The Apollo 16 mission in April 1972, his fourth space flight, took Young to the lunar surface.
As mission commander, he and crewmate Charles Duke explored the moon's Descartes Highlands region, gathering 90 kilograms (200 pounds) of rock and soil samples and driving more than 26 kilometers (16 miles) in the lunar rover to sites such as Spook Crater.
Recalling his lunar exploits, Young told the Houston Chronicle in 2004: "One-sixth gravity on the surface of the moon is just delightful. It's not like being in zero gravity, you know. You can drop a pencil in zero gravity and look for it for three days. In one-sixth gravity, you just look down and there it is."
Young's first time in space came in 1965 with the Gemini 3 mission that took him and astronaut Gus Grissom into Earth orbit in the first two-man U.S. space jaunt. It was on this mission that Young pulled his sandwich stunt, which did not make NASA brass happy but certainly pleased Grissom, the recipient of the snack.
Astronaut Wally Schirra, who was not flying on the mission, bought the corned beef sandwich on rye bread from a delicatessen in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and asked Young to give it to Grissom in space. During the flight, as they discussed the food provided for the mission, Young handed Grissom the sandwich.
NASA later rebuked Young for the antics, which generated criticism from lawmakers and the media, but his career did not suffer.
Rehearsal for moon landing
His May 1969 Apollo 10 mission served as a rehearsal for the historic Apollo 11 mission two months later in which Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon.
Young and his crew undertook each aspect of that subsequent mission except for an actual moon landing.


Young's fifth space mission was as commander of the inaugural flight of NASA's first space shuttle, Columbia, in 1981. In 1983, he became the first person to fly six space missions when he commanded Columbia on the first Spacelab trek, with the crew performing more than 70 scientific experiments.
He never went to space again. Young had been due to command a 1986 flight that was canceled after the explosion of the shuttle Challenger earlier that year. He ended up as the only person to fly on space shuttle, Apollo and Gemini missions.
Young was born September 24, 1930, in San Francisco and grew up in Orlando, Florida. After receiving a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952, he entered the Navy and graduated from its test pilot school. NASA picked him in 1962 for its astronaut program.

https://www.voazimbabwe.com/a/retire...s/4196730.html