Thursday Reads, Including Obits

 The big obit of today was politician-turned-infamous talk show host Jerry Springer, 79, who died after a short bout with pancreatic cancer.  He was once mayor of Cincinnati, but then he discovered there was much more fame and fortune to make in trash TV than in politics.  His talk show ran for 27 years before it ended in 2018.  It lasted way longer than shows with Geraldo Rivera or Morton Downey, Jr., the latter who didn't last that long literally.

Snip:

Gerald Norman Springer was born Feb. 13, 1944, in a London underground railway station being used as a bomb shelter. His parents, Richard and Margot, were German Jews who fled to England during the Holocaust, in which other relatives were killed in Nazi gas chambers. They arrived in the United States when their son was 5 and settled in the Queens borough of New York City, where Springer got his first Yankees baseball gear on his way to becoming a lifelong fan.

He studied political science at Tulane University and got a law degree from Northwestern University. He was active in politics much of his adult life, mulling a run for governor of Ohio as recently as 2017.

He entered the arena as an aide in Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign. Springer, working for a Cincinnati law firm, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1970 before being elected to city council in 1971.

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It was news to me he had a law degree. 

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The woman who was at the center of the Emmitt Till murder case in 1955, Carolyn Bryant Donham, 88, died in Louisiana according to a coroner there.

Snip:

Later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and J.W. Milam, took Emmett from his bed and ordered him into the back of a pickup truck and beat him before shooting him in the head and tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River. They were both acquitted of murder by an all-White jury following a trial in which Carolyn Bryant testified that Emmett grabbed and verbally threatened her.

Milam, who died in 1980, and Bryant, who died in 1994, admitted to the killing in a 1956 interview with Look magazine.

In 2007, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Donham on any charges.

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Secretariat's jockey Ron Turcotte, the last remaining member of Team Secretariat, remembers the all-time great fifty years after the legend won the Triple Crown.

Snip:

Turcotte credits his wife, Gaetane, and his daughters for treating him like "nothing happened to me — like I was the same man I was when I was riding." Lynn Turcotte has tried to get her father to slow down in his old age, but he tells her he'll keep going for Big Red, the horse with a supersized heart.

"He said, 'Secretariat was so good to me, the least I can do is let his memory and legacy live on,'" Lynn Turcotte said. "That's why he does what he does."

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Turcotte is 81 years old and been confined to a wheelchair since a racing accident in 1978. ____________________________________

Fifty years later, Secretariat remains the king of horse racing.

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