Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
March 2, 1982: Science fiction author Philip K. Dick is taken off life support. He has suffered two strokes, with brain death following the second stroke.
March 5, 1963: Musicians Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins perish when their Piper PA-24 Comanche aircraft crashes in a forest in Tennessee during stormy weather. The pilot is also killed. Cline’s epitaph reads, “Death Cannot Kill What Never Dies: Love.”
arianravan from Arnold, MD, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
March 5, 1977: In an unfortunate accident at the South African Grand Prix, English driver Tom Pryce struck and killed 19-year-old race marshall Frederik "Frikkie" Jansen van Vuuren, whom he couldn’t have seen in time. Jansen van Vuuren had run across the track with a fire extinguisher to rescue Italian driver Renzo Zorzi. Zorzi was trapped in his burning car while trying to remove the oxygen pipe from his helmet.
The 40-pound fire extinguisher struck Pryce’s car and came through his windshield, striking Pryce in the head, forcing his helmet upward at a sharp angle, causing severe head and neck injuries that killed him instantly. Pryce’s car struck Jacques-Henri Laffite’s car and both vehicles struck the barrier and came to a stop.
Zorzi was not injured. The eventual winner of the 1977 South African Grand Prix was Austrian driver Niki Lauda, who had almost burned to death in the 1976 German Grand Prix.
Daniel Brühl, Niki Lauda and Peter Morgan at the premiere of Rush in Vienna, Austria. 30.09.2013. Elena Ringo http://www.elena-ringo.com, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
March 5, 1982: Albanian-American comedian John Belushi dies of a drug overdose.
March 8, 1941: American author Sherwood Anderson dies of peritonitis in Colón, Panama. He and his wife Eleanor, who were frequent travelers, had been taking a cruise to South America when Anderson began having abdominal discomfort. An autopsy revealed internal injuries caused by swallowing a toothpick.
March 8, 1989: Iran breaks diplomatic ties with the U.K. since the U.K. will not denounce Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses.
March 10, 1948: Zelda Fitzgerald, by then the widow of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, has checked herself into Highland Hospital in what is now Montford Area Historic District in Asheville, North Carolina for treatment of her severe depression. She is awaiting an electroconvulsive therapy treatment in a locked room when a fire breaks out in the hospital kitchen. With no way to escape the locked room, she is killed by the fire.
March 12, 2015: Author Terry Pratchett dies of Alzheimer’s disease.
March 15, 1937: H.P. Lovecraft dies of cancer of the small intestine at age 46.
March 16, 2009: Nicholas Hughes, the 46-year-old son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, dies by suicide. According to his sister Frieda, Hughes struggled with depression. Frieda was two years old and Nicholas one year old when their mother died by suicide.
March 23, 1969: Assia Wevill, an advertising copywriter and poetry translator who escaped the Nazis as a young woman, drinks a glass of water laced with sleeping pills, drinks a glass of whisky, and turns on the gas in her apartment. She lies down on a mattress with her 4-year-old daughter Alexandria (nicknamed Shura) and they both die of asphyxiation. Shura’s father was English poet Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath. Hughes and Wevill (married to a Canadian poet) allegedly began their affair before Plath’s suicide.
March 26, 1664: Samuel Pepys celebrates his Stone Feast, commemorating the day he had a kidney stone removed by the horrific, pre-anesthesia 17th century surgical method. He writes in his famous diary:
“This being my solemn feast for my cutting of the stone, it being now, blessed be God! this day six years since the time; and I bless God I do in all respects find myself free from that disease or any signs of it, more than that upon the least cold I continue to have pain in making water, by gathering of wind and growing costive, till which be removed I am at no ease, but without that I am very well.”
March 27, 2004: Richard Lancelyn Green, a noted scholar of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is found dead in his home at the age of 50. His sister, who worries when he doesn’t answer his phone, finds him face-down on this bed, garotted with a shoelace tightened with a wooden spoon. In his last days, Green has been observed acting erratically and complaining that an unnamed American was following him and that his apartment was bugged. Green’s paranoia seemed to stem from his actions in trying to stop an auction of Doyle’s papers, which Green believed were part of a collection Doyle’s daughter had intended to be donated to the British Museum rather than auctioned to the public. It remains unclear whether Green was murdered or staged his suicide to seem like a murder, as a character had done in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”
March 28, 1941: Virginia Woolf, knowing that another bout of severe mental illness is coming on, fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the River Ouse. She is 59 years old. Most likely, her illness was bipolar disorder.
Lesekreis, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
March 29, 1911: The New York State Library, located inside the State Capitol building in Albany at the time, is badly damaged in a fire at the Capitol building. The fire destroys an estimated 450,000 books and 270,000 manuscripts, including many historical documents relating to early Dutch settlers in New York state.
March 31, 1855: Charlotte Brontë and her unborn child die, most likely due to hyperemesis gravidarum. In modern times, their lives could have been saved by something as simple as an IV injection of fluids and electrolytes.
March 31, 1931: While flying to participate in a movie called The Spirit of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame head football coach Knute Rockne is killed when his Transcontinental & Western Air airliner crashes near Bazaar, Kansas. Seven other people are killed in the crash. Rockne is 43 years old.
March 31, 1995: Singer/fashion designer Selena (in full, Selena Quintanilla Pérez) is murdered by her hanger-on Yolanda Saldívar when it appears Selena is about to confront Saldívar about financial misdeeds. At a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi, Texas, Saldívar shoots Pérez once in the right shoulder as Pérez walks away. Pérez is rushed into emergency surgery but is pronounced dead on the operating table.
March 31, 2019: Roman Catholic priests in Gdańsk, Poland, perform a “spring cleaning” that includes burning books and other objects they consider “harmful to our faithful.” These include Harry Potter books, books from the Twilight series, an African-style face mask, and a Hello Kitty umbrella. Exactly how Hello Kitty was thought to be attacking the Catholic faith is unclear.
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February 16, 1957: Actor and reading enthusiast LeVar Burton is born in Landstuhl, West Germany. His father Levardis Robert Martyn Burton Sr. was serving as a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer at the time. Burton’s mother Erma Gene was a teacher and social worker.
These are some of my favorite episodes of the podcast LeVar Burton Reads.
Previous Installment in the "Bummer" Series: Bummer New Year
February 1, 1891: Newspaper publisher Ignacio Martínez is assassinated by two men in Laredo, Texas, because they disagree with his newspaper’s criticism of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz.
February 2, 2014: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Truman Capote in Capote, dies of an apparently accidental overdose of prescription medicine and heroin.
February 3, 1959: “The Day the Music Died,” when early rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were all killed in a plane crash outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The musicians had performed at Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom and were on their way to their next show in Minnesota. This accident is remembered in poetic form through the Don McLean song “American Pie,” recorded on May 26, 1971.
February 7, 1497: On Shrove Tuesday in Florence, followers of the monk Girolamo Savonarola burn art, books, their cosmetics, fancy clothes, playing cards, and other cultural objects they associate with sin in the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities. Sadly, irreplaceable ancient art and manuscripts were lost to this religiously-fueled war on anything that represented luxury.
Ironically, Savonarola will later be excommunicated and convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. As punishment, he is hanged and his body burned in the same plaza where the Bonfire of the Vanities occurred. It will be forbidden for any Christian to possess copies of Savonarola’s writings.
February 10, 2005: Playwright Arthur Miller dies of bladder cancer.
February 11, 1963: Poet Sylvia Plath, who struggles with clinical depression, dies by suicide, inhaling gas by placing her head inside an unlit gas stove. She is 30 years old.
February 11, 2012: 48-year-old singer/actress Whitney Houston is found unresponsive in the bathtub of her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Paramedics attempted CPR but are unable to revive her. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office attributes her death to atherosclerotic heart disease, cocaine use, and drowning. (Ok, this one's not really "literary." I'll allow it.)
February 12, 1980: Two days after 34-year-old Patricia Frazier of Texas saw a CBS network TV broadcast of the movie The Exorcist, Frazier kills her 4-year-old daughter Khunji and cuts out her heart. According to Dr. Leon Morris, a psychologist who spoke with Frazier after the crime, Frazier believed Khunji was possessed by demons and trying to harm her (Patricia). A jury of her peers finds Patricia Frazier not guilty by reason of insanity.
February 13, 1945: U.S. and U.K. forces drop incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany, causing fires with the intention of destroying munitions factories in that city. A second round of bombs are dropped in the early hours of February 14th, calculated to hamper the efforts of rescuers on the scene of the first round of bombings and fires. It’s estimated that between 22,000 and 25,000 Germans are killed, almost all of them civilians.
Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is there as an American prisoner of war being held by the German army. The experience forms the basis of his science fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
February 14, 1929: In what becomes known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, Al Capone’s gangsters line up seven members of Bugs Moran’s rival gang and machine gun them to death. Police arrive in time to find one survivor, Frank Gusenberg, suffering from 14 bullet wounds. They ask Gusenberg to name his killer, but Gusenberg refuses before he succumbs to his injuries.
February 14, 1989: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issues a pronouncement urging faithful Muslims to assassinate Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s magical realist novel The Satanic Verses depicts a fictional version of the Prophet Mohammad as a character, which the Ayatollah considers blasphemous.
February 15, 1998: 89-year-old war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, struggling with ovarian and liver cancer and failing eyesight, chooses to end her own life by swallowing cyanide.
February 17, 1673: French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who wrote under the pen name Molière, suffers a tuberculosis-induced pulmonary embolism while performing in his own play The Invalid. He finished out the show, but was carried immediately home afterward, where he died.
February 18, 1718: French-born English writer Peter Anthony Motteux dies of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation inside a brothel, although the circumstances of his death were considered suspicious at the time. This may be the oldest recorded case of autoerotic asphyxiation.
February 19, 2013: The body of Canadian student and tourist Elisa Lam is discovered in the water tower atop the Stay on Main hotel in Los Angeles, California. Lam is believed to have entered the tank of her own volition and accidentally drowned, possibly while experiencing the effects of withdrawal from her psychiatric medications.
February 25, 1983: Playwright Tennessee Williams dies of an apparently accidental overdose of the barbiturate medication Seconal.
February 26, 2015: Australian author Jessica Ainscough, age 29, dies of a rare cancer, epithelioid sarcoma. In 2008, her doctors suggested amputating her affected left arm at the shoulder, which would have given her a greater than 50% chance of surviving for ten years or more. Ainscough chose to treat her cancer with alternative therapies rather than having the amputation. She used the alternative treatments for six years, only returning to conventional medical treatments near the end of her life when she developed a tumor that bled continuously for ten months.
February 28, 1916: The Turn of the Screw author Henry James dies of pneumonia.
February 29, 1960: Melvin Purvis II, the FBI agent who shot and killed John Dillinger (and who was played by Christian Bale in Public Enemies), dies by suicide.
Now, after all that bad news, if you want to take a little Public Enemies sidebar and learn about the song "Blue Moon," read here.
Host Rob Harvilla begins the episode by talking about how one of Erykah Badu's songs that samples a Kool & The Gang song reminds him of Ron Harper's Basketball Camp. Ron Harper reminds me of the Chicago Bulls, so I said this.
To me, a salient fact about Ron Harper is that he and Toni Kukoč have matching shark tattoos. But that's just me. My thing about Toni Kukoč is, I love him.
P.S. My brother and his family gave me a gift card for the winter holidays. I picked out these books:
One is Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951)-adjacent. The other is a book about British witches written by Juno Dawson, a trans woman, one of America's most-banned authors, and definitely not transphobic.
And now, because I happen to be in between day jobs at the moment, please enjoy the following affiliate audiobook link.
January 3, 2014: Islamist extremists burn the Christian books of Al-Saʼe Library in Tripoli, Lebanon.
January 5, 2015: Danish martial artist/model/actor Khan Bonfils is rehearsing for a London stage production of Dante’s Inferno when he collapses suddenly. Paramedics are unable to revive him, and the 42-year-old is pronounced dead at the scene.
January 7, 2015: Two Islamist extremists target the headquarters of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Twelve people are killed, including five cartoonists and two editors.
January 8, 1970: Actor George Ostroska, playing the lead role in a St. Paul, Minnesota, production of Macbeth, dies of a heart attack at the beginning of the play’s second act. Ostroska is 32 years old.
January 9, 1946: Poet Countee Cullen dies at age 42 of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning (kidney failure).
January 11, 1879: The Birmingham Central Library in England catches fire and loses about 49,000 of its 50,000 books and other circulating materials.
January 12, 1965: Author Lorraine Hansberry dies of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.
January 14, 1898: Mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll, dies of pneumonia while suffering from influenza.
January 19, 1729: Restoration-era playwright William Congreve dies of complications from internal injuries he suffered in a September 1728 carriage accident.
January 23, 1943: Algonquin Round Table wit Alexander Woollcott, who regularly performed on the radio, appeared in a panel discussion about Adolph Hitler on CBS Radio. Listeners noticed he was uncharacteristically quiet during the discussion.
In fact, Woollcott was having a heart attack. He wrote “I am sick” on a pad to paper to let the other participants know he needed medical attention. He died in the hospital a few hours later.
January 28, 1960: African-American folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston dies from heart disease after suffering a stroke.
January 29, 1933: Poet Sara Teasdale overdoses on sleeping pills, an apparent suicide. She is 48 years old.
January 30, 2006: 55-year-old playwright Wendy Wasserstein dies of lymphoma.
Illustration for "The Children's Dickens: Stories selected from various tales" (1909) London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton by Gilbert Scott Wright (24 July 1880 – 1958). This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1928.
December 16, 1913: Ambrose Bierce writes to his literary secretary, “I am going to Mexico with a pretty definite purpose which is not at present discloseable. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that’s a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico–ah, that is euthanasia!”
Neither Bierce’s literary secretary nor any of his other acquaintances ever heard from him again after this letter.
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