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RIP

Kirk Douglas, ‘Spartacus’ Actor and Hollywood Icon, Dead at 103

“Kirk’s life was well lived, and he leaves a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come,” son Michael says

Kirk Douglas, the beloved actor whose roles in 'Spartacus,' 'Lust for Life' and 'Champion' made him a Hollywood icon, has died at age 103.

Kirk Douglas, the epitome of old-school Hollywood star power whose intense performances conveyed his characters’ fiery and sometimes conflicted core, died Wednesday at the age of 103.
“It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103,” his son Michael said in a statement (via People). “To the world, he was a legend, an actor from the golden age of movies who lived well into his golden years, a humanitarian whose commitment to justice and the causes he believed in set a standard for all of us to aspire to. But to me and my brothers, Joel and Peter, he was simply Dad, to Catherine, a wonderful father-in-law, to his grandchildren and great-grandchild their loving grandfather, and to his wife, Anne, a wonderful husband.
“Kirk’s life was well lived, and he leaves a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come, and a history as a renowned philanthropist who worked to aid the public and bring peace to the planet,” Michael added. “Let me end with the words I told him on his last birthday and which will always remain true. Dad, I love you so much, and I am so proud to be your son.”


Three times nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, Douglas was one of American cinema’s finest tough guys; his muscular jaw and mischievous eyes able to suggest formidable men who might have dark secrets beneath their handsome surface. In movies as varied The Bad and the Beautiful, Spartacus, and Lust for Life, Douglas reveled in film acting’s sheer combustibility, delivering portrayals that were models of physicality and brute force. He was also among the first actors to segue into producing as a means to exert more creative control, helping to launch his son Michael’s career when he gave him the rights to the book-turned-play One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which earned a Best Picture Academy Award in 1975. “I never had any intentions of being a movie star,” Douglas said in 1957. “I never thought I was the type. My only aim was to become a stage actor…[S]omeone had asked me to come to Hollywood, so I thought I’d take a chance.”
Born Issur Danielovitch in December 1916 to Jewish immigrants, Douglas grew up in upstate New York, dreaming of acting as an escape from a small-town community rife with anti-Semitism. “I wanted to be an actor ever since I was a kid in the second grade,” he recalled in his Nineties. “I did a play, and my mother made a black apron, and I played a shoemaker. And my father, who never interested himself in what I was doing, was in the back, and I didn’t know it. After the performance, he gave me my first Oscar: an ice cream cone. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Attending St. Lawrence University, Douglas would befriend fellow aspiring actor Karl Malden and then move on to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he met Lauren Bacall. His career was temporarily stalled by World War II — Douglas joined the Navy in 1941 after failing the Air Force’s psychological test — but was given a medical discharge in 1944. Upon returning to civilian life, Douglas snagged theater work, including the role of a soldier in 1945’s The Wind Is Ninety, which attracted the attention of film producer Hal B. Willis, who gave him a screen test and brought him to Hollywood. Indeed, Douglas’ first film role came in a Willis production, 1946’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.
Three years later, Douglas starred in Champion, about an amoral, ambitious boxer. The role landed him his first Academy Award nomination and cemented his persona as a bruising onscreen presence not to be taken lightly. The actor’s uncompromising demeanor was reflected offscreen as well: In 1955, he formed his own production company, Bryna Productions, named after his beloved mother. Douglas’ aim was to find material that spoke to his passions, rather than being at the mercy of others to determine his career destiny. “The impact of television brought enormous changes in the Hollywood studios, with fewer and fewer films being produced,” Douglas once recalled. “Many stars found themselves unemployed and I wasn’t about to let it happen to me.…It was a matter of survival. It still is.”

Douglas’ survival instincts translated into his performances during the 1950s. Whether playing an unscrupulous journalist in Billy Wilder’s acidic character portrait Ace in the Hole or a soulless producer in The Bad and the Beautiful (the latter netting him his second Oscar nomination), the actor brought unsettling amounts of intensity to characters whose moral rot shone all over their face. But he was just as eloquent playing the hero: His portrayal in Paths of Glory (1957) of a principled World War I French colonel defending the honor of three of his soldiers during a rigged court proceeding is a stunning display of righteous decency. (It also began a friendship with then-rising director Stanley Kubrick, whom Douglas would bring on board to helm 1960’s Spartacus.)

 

Kirk Douglas as Spartacus Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images 

Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, became arguably his finest performance and certainly his most blistering. The film remains one of the most vivid portraits of artistry ever committed to screen, with Douglas pouring his soul out to play the troubled, brilliant painter, a role that would earn him his third Oscar nomination. “I don’t think I’d be much of an actor without vanity,” he confessed to biographer Tony Thomas. “I was terribly disappointed not to win [an Oscar], especially for Lust for Life. I really thought I had a chance with that one.…However, I don’t want to appear ungrateful. I’ve been very lucky. Few people manage to do what they want in life. I have.”
Douglas continued to work steadily through the Sixties and Seventies, but his next great achievement might have been pursuing the rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s anti-authoritarian 1962 novel about a rebel instigating an uprising at a mental institution. Douglas turned the book into a Broadway play in which he was the star, but after years of frustration in which no Hollywood studio would consider adapting the work for the screen, he gave the rights to his son Michael. The eventual movie version, which starred Jack Nicholson, won five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor. In an ironic twist, Douglas’ son had an Academy Award before he did. (Kirk would eventually receive an Honorary Oscar in 1996.)

In his later years, Douglas easily transitioned to the role of revered elder statesman, playing lovable rascals in lightweight comedies like Tough Guys (1986) and Oscar (1991), the former being the sixth and final film in which he’d co-star with his good friend Burt Lancaster, whose drive to become a producer in the 1950s inspired Douglas’ own pursuit of the same aspiration. In 1996, shortly before accepting his Honorary Oscar, Douglas suffered a stroke that severely impaired his speaking ability. He wrote about the experience in his memoir My Stroke of Luck with candor and dark humor: “The doctor’s words echoed in my mind: It’s just a minor stroke. Yeah, minor to you, major to me.”
As Douglas got older, his reputation was further burnished retroactively for his willingness to stand up to the 1950s Hollywood blacklist, fighting to get disgraced screenwriters credits on his pictures — particularly Dalton Trumbo, who had written Spartacus. “I’m very proud that Spartacus broke the blacklist, because that was very important,” Douglas once said with pride. In 1991, he received the Writers Guild of America’s Robert Meltzer Award for his commitment to ending the blacklist, and in 2012, he wrote a book, I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist, that highlighted his role in hiring Trumbo, an outspoken communist, for the swords-and-sandals epic. (That same year, journalists John Meroney and Sean Coons offered evidence arguing that Douglas overstated his importance in ending the Hollywood blacklist. Their contention was that the actor-producer wasn’t nearly as courageous as he claimed to be and that he actually threatened those who wouldn’t go along with his version of events.)
Nonetheless, Douglas leaves behind a legacy of indomitable performances and, more importantly, a bare-knuckle ruggedness rarely seen in today’s far tamer Hollywood. In a 1969 interview with Roger Ebert, Douglas proclaimed, “Being a star doesn’t really change you,” he said. “If you become a star, you don’t change — everybody else does. Personally, I keep forgetting I’m a star. And then people look at me and I’m reminded. But you just have to remember one thing: The best eventually go to the top. I think I’m in the best category, and I’ll stay at the top or I’ll do something else. I’m not for the bush leagues.”

 -Rolling Stone

Aloha Airlines Flight 243

On February 11, 1990 a movie was released in the USA called ‘Miracle Landing’. The film tells the story of Paradise Airlines Flight 243 flying from Honolulu to Hilo, which was involved in a terrifying explosive decompression when a large section of the forward roof blows off. After the pilots battle to keep the stricken jet in the air, the airliner eventually lands and the terrified passengers are safely evacuated. It is then discovered that one of the flight attendants was missing, after being sucked out of the aircraft during the explosion.

But ‘Miracle Landing’ was more than just a dramatic made-for-television movie. The on-screen portrayal of Paradise Airlines Flight 243 was taken from the real life events aboard Aloha Airlines Flight 243 on April 28, 1988.
It was the usual sunny Hawaiian day at Hilo International Airport (ITO), where Aloha Airlines Boeing 737-297 (N73711) ‘Queen Liliuokalani’, the 152nd Boeing 737 airframe to be built, was being readied for another island hop to Honolulu International Airport (HNL).

Aloha Airlines was formed in 1946 and plied the inter-island routes of the Hawaiian archipelago until its demise in 2008. The Hilo to Honolulu island hop was a popular flight and many of the passengers were regular travellers who knew the crew well. Looking after the 89 passengers that day was veteran Purser Clarabelle (CB) Lansing. Lansing had been flying for 37 years, becoming one of Aloha’s first flight attendants when she joined the airline after leaving high-school. CB was very popular, both with passengers and colleagues alike and had even appeared in adverts for the airline. “She was very personable. She reminds you of the top-of-the-line flight attendants you see on the major carriers” said Dale Randles a Honolulu resident who flew Aloha to Maui once a week. “She was very attractive, a beautiful woman. You could ask her anything and she’d answer your questions”. 

 Aloha Airlines staff pose with a retro-liveried 737 on the airlines 60th anniversary in 2006.


Helping Lansing in the cabin was Jane Sato-Tomita and Michelle Honda, who had been working for Aloha for 14 years. In the flight deck Captain Robert Schornsteiner was assisted by First Officer Madeline “Mimi” Tompkins and the pair were joined on the jump-seat by an FAA Air Traffic Controller. 

 

Passengers slowly began boarding and settled themselves in for the short flight. As one lady entered the jet through the forward door she noticed, what looked like, a large crack in the fuselage. Not wanting to cause a fuss she said nothing and took her seat.  

At 13:25 Hawaii–Aleutian Standard Time (HST), flight 243 took off from Hilo and soon reached its cruising altitude of 24,000 feet. In the cabin the flight attendants quickly got to work carrying out the inflight service. Michelle Honda had finished her duties and decided to grab some lunch. Lansing was known by her crew to be a pretty ‘by-the-book-person’ so rather than sitting with her colleagues in the galley, Honda returned to her crew station. “Because she (Lansing) adhered to the rules and regulations, I think it saved my life. We weren’t congregating. I was in my position. Jane was in hers.” Honda later explained.
From her seat, Honda spotted Lansing in a galley mirror, still out in the cabin collecting glasses. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh God’, and took out my little purple plastic bag. I didn’t look up. The guilt was there because I had been sitting down and I went down the aisle and turned around to face the aft so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes”. 
And then, at around 13:48 HST it happened. The blast hit Honda on the left shoulder and pushed her to the ground. There were screams and then silence. 

The explosive decompression had torn off a large section of the roof, consisting of the entire top half of the aircraft skin extending from just behind the cockpit to the fore-wing area, a length of about 18.5 feet (5.6 m).
First Officer Tompkins was flying the aircraft when she suddenly heard a loud ‘whooshing’ sound and noticed pieces of grey insulation floating above the cabin. Captain Schornstheimer felt the aircraft roll to the left and right and the controls went loose. As he turned round to see what had happened he could see “blue sky where the first-class ceiling had been”.
As Honda lay on the floor her training told her that the aircraft was experiencing a rapid decompression. “There was a smoke-like vapour in all the debris flying around” Honda later explained. “Paper, fiberglass, asbestos. It was kind of white. That’s why I say blizzard, although it wasn’t cold.” 

Pictures taken of the inside of the cabin of N73711 after the accident show the extensive damage.

Terrified she grabbed hold of the metal bars under the passenger seats and held on for dear life. “My first concern was keeping my breathing shallow because I couldn’t get to an oxygen mask” she said. “You can pass out. I didn’t want to get to that point.” 

She realised that the aircraft was still flying and she had a job to do. “I remember being on the floor” she later told The Washington Post. “Crawling up the aisle rung by rung, telling people to put on life-vests. I remember looking up at people on my back and calling up and helping them take out the vests. One mother asked me to help her son. He was across the aisle in a B seat. He was scared, but he didn’t say anything. You could see it in his face. His eyes were searching. I think everybody had that look.”
Honda could barely move against the wind. “The passengers were reaching out and holding me as I went by and grabbed their arms. The closer you came to the hole, the more intense the wind was. I didn’t know if I would have stayed in the aircraft if I let go, and I wasn’t about to find out”. 

A bloodied seat highlighting the terrible injures some of the passengers sustained.

Her colleague Jane Sato-Tomita was knocked unconscious and lay bleeding in the aisle at the most exposed part of the jet. “The first time I saw her I thought she was dead. She was just on the borderline of the hole. Her head was split open in the back and she was under debris” Honda said. “My central thought was to get Jane to the back of the aircraft. I tried to move her and drag her back, but I couldn’t get her. I didn’t realise she was unconscious”. Instead she asked passengers seated around her to try and hold her down. 
The cabin itself had suffered extensive damage. Some of the oxygen masks had dropped but were not working. Two large ceiling panels had also come loose, landing on the heads of passengers which Honda managed to heave into the empty rows at the back off the plane.

Under the intense strain the floor had buckled, obscuring the view of the cockpit. Indeed one passenger even asked if it was still there. Until that moment, Honda had been meticulously working through her emergency checklist, she hadn’t even thought about the pilots and now the terrifying prospect that they had been ejected in the explosion dawned on her. 
“I guess that it is so ingrained that we takeoff and we land and our cockpit is there that I didn’t even think ‘Are they flying this?’ I assumed they were there as we were making turns” she said. Crawling to the rear, Honda tried to call the pilots but the inter phone cables has been severed in the explosion. She went back in to the aisle and for reasons she does not understand asked a man if he knew how to fly. 
“When they (passengers) had time to start asking questions, I felt there was a potential for hysteria” Honda said. “The man in the F seat, he was starting to look apprehensive after my not being able to talk to the cockpit.”
Then, in the distance the island of Maui loomed dead ahead. Honda explained “I first thought we were going to go straight into the head of Maui. This is when I saw the plane veering towards the right and I knew we were going to make a landing on Maui.”
In the flight deck Schornstheimer and Tompkins battled with the controls of the badly damaged jet and as they precariously descended towards Kahalui Airport (OGG), the number one engine failed due to the debris ingested following the decompression. 

Debris can clearly be seen around the #2 engine.

The blast had been so powerful that it had blown Honda’s shoes off. She later found them in the aisle, but her stockings were in shreds and her skirt and blouse were covered in blood. She would only open her eyes to tiny slits for fear of flying debris, which also pushed in to her throat every time she yelled a command. When she began to yell ‘Heads down!’ No sound came out. “I thought to myself ‘Voice commands? Yeah, right”. 
As the 737 descended lower, Honda crawled back up the aisle and lay next to the unconscious Sato-Tomita, “I grabbed her belt and her waist and held on to the metal retainer bars”.
The jet kissed the runway at 13:58 HST, just over ten minutes after the emergency had began. When they eventually came to a stop, Honda began yelling “We made it! We made it!”. An off-duty crew member called Amy Jones-Brown struggled free from her seat and began to help Honda with the evacuation. 

The scene on the ground was horrifying. Passengers seated near the hole were covered in blood after being battered and cut by flying debris. Honda recalled her anguish about an 84-year-old woman who sat so quietly in the front of the coach section when the flight had began and who was now fighting for her life with serious head injuries. 
Jane Sato-Tomita was seriously injured. Bleeding and disoriented she was evacuated off the 737 with the other passengers. Only now, once everyone had escaped did the horrifying realisation dawn on them that Lansing was gone. “Nobody saw her leave” Honda later emotionally told the press. 

A terrifying image showing the damaged caused by the decompression, as the emergency evacuation commenced. First Office Tompkins can be seen at door 1L

A couple seated in the first class section later studied a photo of Lansing and said she was the one serving them a drink when the roof of the plane blew off. Passenger William Flanigan explained “She (Lansing) was just handing my wife a drink. She had stopped and told us this was the last call. We were going to be descending. And then whoosh! She was gone. Their hands just touched when it happened.”
The subsequent investigation revealed that the 19 year old Boeing 737 had accumulated 35,496 flight hours prior to the accident, those hours included over 89,680 flight cycles (takeoffs and landings), owing to its use on short flights. This amounted to more than twice the number of cycles it was designed for. Fatigue cracking around the rivets was also discovered. The aircraft was basically an accident waiting to happen.

But another, more harrowing hypothesis as to the planes catastrophic decompression, was put forward by pressure vessel engineer Matt Austin. He claimed that the aircrafts fuselage may have failed initially as intended, opening a ten-inch square vent. As the pressurised air in the cabin escaped at over 700 mph, CB Lansing became wedged in this hole instead of being thrown clear. This then created a seal which temporarily blocked the air from escaping; which in turn caused a surge of extreme air pressure back in to the plane – known as a fluid hammer or water hammer effect – causing further damage to the already fragile fuselage, before ripping it open like a tin can.

A bloodied imprint was found on the side of the fuselage, adding more weight to Matt Austin’s ‘fluid-hammer’ effect. 

Authorities searched for Lansing’s body for three days but it was never found. “She was a wonderful employee, a great lady. Our passengers loved her” Stephanie Ackerman, a spokeswoman for Aloha later said.  

Clarabelle ‘CB’ Lansing

 

Michelle Honda later described how, like many of us, one of her greatest fears was that she would panic in an emergency and forget her drills and procedures. However she remained so calm that she was even able to play down the severity of the incident to her 11-year old daughter. “I told her ‘Mommy’s got a mechanical and I’m not going to be home for a while.”
Michelle Honda, Jane Sato-Tomita and Amy Jones-Brown also went on to praise their passengers “A lot of attention has been focused on our efforts and the valiant efforts of the pilots, but we would also like to thank the passengers who helped keep us on the aircraft.”
The recollections after the accident became more painful for Honda. Speaking to The Washington Post she described the mental image of the man with the strip of fuselage stapled to his face, causing tears to well in her eyes. “He said could you take this off? I was trying to pull it away. But I realised the staples had stapled in to the side of his face and his face was being pulled by the staples. I told him I couldn’t help him. At that point, I figured from my first aid training to leave that kind of stuff in”.

Rep. Patricia Saiki, R-Hawaii, is flanked by Aloha Airlines flight attendants Amy Jones- Brown, left, and Michelle Honda during a ceremony on Capitol Hill Wednesday, June 22, 1988. The ceremony was held to pay tribute to C.B. Lasing.

 

Michelle Honda is a true heroine. Despite her own injuries and fears she crawled along the aircraft floor checking on passengers, making sure they were strapped in, wearing life-jackets and comforting the injured. Then on the ground she led a successful evacuation and even visited her passengers at the hospital twice to check on their progress. Her heroic efforts helped ensure that no passenger lost their lives that day. 
She later reacted to her praise with deep humility, declining the label of ‘hero’ and saying she was just ‘doing her job’ and this is why Michelle Honda, Clarabelle ‘CB’ Lansing, Jane Sato-Tomita, Amy Jones Brown, Captain Robert Schornsteiner and First Officer Madeline “Mimi” Tompkins join our ‘Angels Of The Sky’.

Gov. John Waihee poses with the crew of Aloha Airlines’ ill-fated flight 243 when they were presented with letters of commendation. From left to right – Captain Robert Schornsteiner, First Officer Madeline “Mimi” Tompkins, Jane Sato-Tomita, Gov. Waihee, Michelle Honda and Amy Jones-Brown.

Events like this make us remember why we do our job and serve as a reminder to the world that we are Aviation’s ‘First Responders’. We are onboard every flight to ensure safe passage of their journey. When tragedy strikes we are there to save lives. 
© confessionsofatrolleydolly.com by Dan Air
NB The quotes from Michelle Honda used for this article are taken from an interview in The Washington Post May 18, 1988 ‘A Flight Attendant’s Moments In The Maelstrom’

-Confessions Of a Trolley Dolly

Greensboro sit-in

Greensboro sit-in, act of nonviolent protest against a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, that began on February 1, 1960. Its success led to a wider sit-in movement, organized primarily by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), that spread throughout the South.

African American students (left to right: Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, William Smith, and Clarence Henderson) holding a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, February 2, 1960.© UPI/Bettmann/Corbis

The sit-in was organized by Ezell Blair, Jr. (later Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond—all African Americans and all students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. Influenced by the nonviolent protest techniques of Mohandas Gandhi and the Journey of Reconciliation (an antecedent of the Freedom Rides) organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, the four men executed a plan to draw attention to racial segregation in the private sector. Enlisting the aid of Ralph Johns, a local white businessman who was sympathetic to their cause, the students, who came to be dubbed the Greensboro Four, planned their social action in great detail.
On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, the Greensboro Four entered a Woolworth’s general merchandise store that had a dining area. The men bought small items and retained the receipt as proof of purchase, before sitting down at the store’s lunch counter. While blacks were allowed to patronize the dining area, they were relegated to a standing snack bar, as the lunch counter was designated for “whites only.” The Greensboro Four politely requested service at the counter, remaining seated while their orders were refused by the waitstaff. The lunch counter manager contacted the police, but Johns had already alerted the local media. The police arrived, only to declare that they could do nothing because the four men were paying customers of the store and had not taken any provocative actions. The media response, however, was immediate. A photo of the Greensboro Four appeared in local newspapers, and the protest quickly expanded.
The following day the Greensboro Four returned to the Woolworth’s lunch counter, accompanied by some 20 other black university students. The scene played out again February 3–4, with protestors filling virtually all the available seats and spilling out of the store and onto the sidewalk outside. Within weeks, national media coverage of the protest led to sit-ins being staged in cities across the country. Soon dining facilities across the South were being integrated, and by July 1960 the lunch counter at the Greensboro Woolworth’s was serving black patrons. The Greensboro sit-in provided a template for nonviolent resistance and marked an early success for the civil rights movement.

Encyclopaedia Britannica