A life well lived.

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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Tue Aug 23, 2016 8:18 am

If I may copy Arneb's post from elsewhere;

Arneb wrote:Dr Donald Henderson: On Friday, the man who rid the world of smallpox died.

A doctor and epidemiologist, he joined the WHO smallpox program amd developed the concept of the ring inoculation - the focus lay on identifying and inoculating the contacs of infected persons first, doing surveillance on them and inoculation their contats, in turn, if one of them fell ill.

With 2.4 billion inoculation doses and 200,000 helpers, he spent 300 million before the last smallpox case in 1977 and the declaration that the world was free of smallpox in 1980.

I say this was a life well lived, and a very, very good deal for the world.


Edited to linkify and quotify. -Lance
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Arneb » Tue Aug 23, 2016 8:52 am

Yes, it truly belongs here, too!
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Lianachan » Fri Feb 03, 2017 1:31 pm

I've only recently heard of Ivan Vasilyevich Smirnov - a worthy inductee.

Dikipedia wrote:Ivan Vasilyevich Smirnov or Iwan Smirnoff (Russian: Ива́н Васи́льевич Смирно́в; January 30, 1895 – October 28, 1956) was a Russian World War I flying ace and naturalized Dutch aviator who pioneered the Europe to South East Asia routes. He was born to a poor peasant family, but through courage and good fortune managed to become an officer in the Imperial Russian Air Service. After surviving extremely dangerous infantry combat, he trained as a pilot, and was subsequently credited with 11 aerial victories during World War I. When the October Revolution ended his participation in the war, he deserted and became an itinerant pilot. He would serve short spells in the Royal Air Force, the Volunteer Army of Anton Denikin, Handley Page and SNETA. The Russian emigrant subsequently piloted for KLM for the next 25 years, pioneering air routes to the Dutch East Indies in the process. In December 1941, Smirnov returned to military flying during the frenzied air evacuation of Dutch nationals. After the Dutch East Indies were overrun by the Japanese, he joined the U.S. Air Transport Command. Despite official attempts to ground the aged and oft wounded pilot, he served through war's end. He then returned to KLM. After the inevitable grounding (after 30,000+ flying hours), he continued with the company as its chief advisor.


Not listed in that summary are adventures like escaping from a WW1 PoW camp in Singapore, and crash landing a C-47 full of passengers on an Australian beach in the middle of nowhere having been shot down by three Japanese Zeros.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Fri Feb 03, 2017 2:33 pm

That man certainly packed a lot in.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Lianachan » Wed Jul 12, 2017 12:45 pm

A local lad, to me anyway, this time. Johnnie Matheson.

Summary wrote:He walked into wartime captivity with a haversack full of looted French franc notes of doubtful value from a bombed bank in St Valery - and more than five years later drove across a war-torn Europe heading for his Highland home in a brand new BMW car festooned with American stars and stripes, a legitimate fortune in pounds sterling in his pocket.

In between times, Seaforth Highlander Johnnie Matheson of the fourth battalion, a native Gaelic speaker and former shinty player, escaped from his German captors no less than five times.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Wed Jul 12, 2017 1:53 pm

A life well lived indeed.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Lianachan » Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:33 pm

Another local lad for me - Donald McBane
this site wrote:Donald McBane was a Scottish Highlander and one of the most accomplished duelists of the 18th century. During the span of his extraordinary career as a soldier, prize fighter, fencing master, and brothel manager, McBane took part in 16 battles, 15 skirmishes, and nearly 100 duels or personal combats. He published his book, The Expert Sword-Man’s Companion, in 1728 where he recounts it all.


I want to read that book.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Mon Oct 16, 2017 9:37 pm

Indeed.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Wed Nov 15, 2017 1:38 pm

I think this is our first Frenchie: Brigitte Friang a resistance fighter, captured and tortured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbrück. Post war she became a journalist who went to French Indo-China, went through military para training and did a number of combat drops into a variety of shit storms including Dien Bien Phu. She managed to survive all that and lived to a ripe old age.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Mon Mar 05, 2018 4:48 pm

A double act Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm. Motor cycle racing women who became nurses in The Salient during the Great War. With added Belgian nobility and assorted pilots.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Mon Sep 17, 2018 1:31 pm

Entirely unknown to me before today, which is the 70th anniversary of his assassination: Folke Bernadotte Swede and all round good chap.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Tue Jun 16, 2020 8:33 am

Saiful Azam was a fighter pilot who fought for various nations, born in India he joined the Pakistan Air Force after Partition fighting in the 1965 War, flew for the Jordanians while on secondment shooting down 3 or 4 Israeli planes in 1967, then transitioned into the Bangladesh Airforce after 1971. He later became a politician.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Wed May 26, 2021 12:47 pm

Another pilot, one I was sort of aware of but didn't know the full story. Eric "Winkle" Brown, pilot and test pilot of this parish.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Lianachan » Wed May 26, 2021 4:36 pm

I’ve not been commenting on these, but I have been reading them! Winkle has quite a lot of aviation records and firsts under his belt.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Lianachan » Fri May 28, 2021 4:20 pm

May 18, 1953: Jacqueline Cochran, flying a Canadian-built F-86 Sabre at Edwards AFB, Calif., became the first woman to fly faster than sound. She averaged 652.337 mph on a 100-kilometer closed-course to earn the women's jet speed record.

Cochran was also the first woman to land and take off from an aircraft carrier, the first woman to reach over Mach 1 in a Northrop T-38 Talon, the first woman to pilot a bomber across the North Atlantic (in 1941) and later to fly a jet aircraft on a transatlantic flight, the first female pilot to make a blind (instrument) landing, the only woman ever to be president of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (1958–1961), the first woman to fly a fixed-wing, jet aircraft across the Atlantic, the first female pilot to fly above 20,000 ft with an oxygen mask, and the first woman to enter the Bendix Transcontinental Race.

Jackie still holds more distance and speed records than any pilot living or dead, male or female.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby g-one » Fri May 28, 2021 7:32 pm

That's just awesome.

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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Arneb » Mon May 31, 2021 10:48 am

Robert Marchand, who died a few days ago, age 109.

Robert Marchand was a lifelong amateur sportsman, specifically, a cyclist. As such, he holds a number of records:
1-hour WR in the UCI class 105+ years (which was created for him): 22.574 km
1-hour WR in UCI class 100-104 years: 26.952 km
Record participation in the Ardèchois race in the 65+ age range: 12 times; he has a pass named after him.
Oldest participant to complete the Paris-Roubaix (yes, THAT Paris-Roubaix) amateur version, at 86
Made a 100 km race at 100 years of age, in 4:17:27 h, amounting to an average speed of 23.3 km/h

He was a lifelong member of the French Communist Party, and a busy labour union activist. He once refused to accept a sports medal from the hands of the Républicain heealth minister in 2009.

Take that, Lance Armstrong!
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Mon May 31, 2021 11:25 am

Chapeau M. Marchand.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Thu Oct 21, 2021 9:00 pm

Betty Knox the original Betty of Wilson, Kepler and Betty. Music hall artiste, war correspondent and reporter of the Nuremburg Trials.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Arneb » Wed Apr 06, 2022 2:46 pm

Boris Romanchenko was born in Sumy. Soviet Union, on 20 Jan, 1926. In 1942, he was captured by the German invasion army and detained to do forced labour in the coal pits under Dortmund in the Ruhrgebiet. After a failed attempt to escape, he was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp. He saw four German concentration camps, Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Mittelbau-Dora, and Bergen-Belsen, surviving them all. After the War, he was conscripted into the Red Army serving in the Soviet Occupied Zone and later GDR. He returned home in 1950, studying in Charkov to become a mining engineer.

As a citizen of Ukraine, he engaged in memorial work, becoming active in in concentration camp survivor groups, becoming Vie President of the Buchenwald Survivors Committee. In a ceremony there in 2015, he spoke again, in Russian, the Buchenwald oath: We will take up the fight until the last culprit stands before the judges of the people. Our watchword is the destruction of Nazism from its roots. Our goal is to build a new world of peace and freedom. This is our responsibility to our murdered friends and their relatives.

Boris Timofeyevich Romanchenko was killed in his home in Charkiv on March 18, 2022, when a grenade fired by the Russian invasion army hit his appartment building. He was 96 years old. The Bundestag commemorated him with a minute of silence on March 22.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Lance » Wed Apr 06, 2022 8:55 pm

*sigh*
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However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

==========================================

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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Lianachan » Wed Apr 06, 2022 9:17 pm

Yeah. No words for that really.
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Heid the Ba » Fri Sep 22, 2023 9:31 am

I don't know much about this guy's life but he had one wild morning in 1914. Lucky or unlucky? Torpedoed on three different ships within an hour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenman_Wykeham-Musgrave
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Lance » Fri Sep 22, 2023 2:12 pm

Heid the Ba wrote:I don't know much about this guy's life but he had one wild morning in 1914. Lucky or unlucky? Torpedoed on three different ships within an hour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenman_Wykeham-Musgrave

I sure hope he bought a lottery ticket the minute he was dry!
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Re: A life well lived.

Postby Arneb » Sat Sep 30, 2023 3:51 pm

Pfr. Uwe Holmer died on 25 September this year, aged 94.

He was a GDR citizen, and as a reverend, that automatically meant he had a difficult life. He served several parishes, mostly in the North of the GDR before becoming head of the Lobetaler Anstalten, which was the largest institution in the GDR (despite being church-run) caring for the physically and mentally disabled. None of his 10 children, despite good or very good grades, were allowed into high school, let alone university. Holmer and his family were under constant Stasi surveillance and, not infrequently, direct pressure: To work as informal collaborators, to divulge communications under confessional secret, etc.

As you might know, Erich Honecker was taken into custody in the course of the "Turnoaround" (Wende) period in 1989. He was released for health reasons in January 1990. At that point, the former nomenklatura homes in Wandlitz had been seized, and the former Secreetary General and his wife literally had nowhere to live. Holmer freed up tow rooms in his service residence in Lobetal, and had them move in. During a 10-week period, Holmer cared for his guests, spending evenings with them, sharing meals and an occasional drink, fended off journalists, etc. His answer to questions why on Earth he did this was simple: Love thy enemy. And: Hatred is not a good basis for a new beginning in our people. He held steady under sometimes viscious attacks of the "no forgiveness" crowd.

The Honeckers (his wife, Margot, had been the GDR's long-time Education Secretary and was a particularly vitriolic ideologue) eventually escaped justice in the GDR by retreating to a Soviet army base, from where they were flown to Moscow. After re-unification, the deal with the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops in exchange for a lot of money and some face-saving guarantees included delivering Erich Honecker to German justice. I don't remember if his wife returned to Germany to be at his side during his trial, but she later went to Chile, where a daughter lived. When Erich was finally released for health reasons, he joined his family in South America for the short rest of his life.
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