Some Friday Reads

 I cannot believe I neglected to mention the death of nearly a year ago soul great Sam Moore, who was one of the duo Sam & Dave, a major R&B act of the 1960s and one of the most dynamic of acts.

I don't know how I could have ignored it.  I mean, it was in the news, and I still didn't note it on this blog.  Moore was 89 years old at the time of his death last January.   Dave Prater, who had a rocky relationship with Sam, died in an auto accident in 1988.

Snip:

In the beginning, Moore actually wanted to be a preacher.

"I would get out, you know, on Saturdays and put a table out front," Moore said. "And I had a comic book, opened it up, that was my Bible. And I think I repeated the Lord's Prayer about 40 times."

Moore's mother would be watching. "But where my mother took issue with me - when I would come out from around my pulpit and I would pass the hat," he recalled with a laugh.

"I love the comic book as Bible part," Mason said.

"Yes, yes. Archie," said Moore.

Moore's music career began in gospel groups. In 1957, he was set to replace the great Sam Cooke in "The Soul Stirrers."

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"Unitary executive" is just a fancy euphemism for dictator.  The far right is notorious for trying to put a benign spin on a toxic concept.

Of course, this notion applies only to Republican presidents.  Democratic presidents have no such dictatorial powers.

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Obituary:  Diane Crump, a pioneer female jockey who was the first woman to ride in the Kentucky Derby, died yesterday of an aggressive form of brain cancer.  She was 77 years old.

During her days as a jockey

Snip:

Crump went on to win 228 races before riding her last race in 1998, a month shy of her 50th birthday and nearly 30 years after her trailblazing ride at Hialeah Park in Florida on Feb. 7, 1969.

Crump was among several women to fight successfully at the time to be granted a jockey license, but they still needed a trainer willing to put them in a race and then for the race to run. Others were thwarted when male jockeys boycotted or threatened to boycott if a woman was riding.

Photographs of Crump's walk to the saddling area at Hialeah show her protected by security guards as a crowd pressed in on all sides. Six of the original 12 jockeys in the race had refused to ride, Mark Shrager wrote in his biography, "Diane Crump: A Horse Racing Pioneer's Life in the Saddle." Among them were future legends Angel Cordero Jr., Jorge Velasquez and Ron Turcotte, who four years later would ride Secretariat to win the Triple Crown.

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Unbelievable, but it was a different era.  Not really surprising about Cordero and Turcotte, because both of them were very right-wing politically.

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