The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand

For official information about The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand by Gregory Galloway and other related and non-related stuff.

[normajeanebaker]

Marilyn Monroe during a hair test by Milton Greene for The Prince and the Showgirl.  England, July 25th 1956

[gregorygalloway]

Mikhaíl Afanasyevich Bulgakov (15 May 1891 - 10 March 1940)

[gregorygalloway]

Virginia Woolf’s 4th novel, Mrs. Dalloway, was published by Hogarth Press (run by herself and husband Leonard) on 14 May 1925.

The novel, published just one month after The Common Reader (a collection of Woolf’s essays), received positive reviews and was the most commercially successful of any of her previous writing.

[39adamstrand]

On 14 May 2017, 81-year-old Peter W. Smith committed suicide in a hotel near the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. He left a carefully prepared file of documents, including a suicide note in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring.

Smith had been implicated in the HIllary Clinton email scandal, where, after then-candidate Donald Trump urged Russia to find Clinton’s “lost” emails, he had assembled a team to try and locate them. Smith had a history of doing opposition research, the formal term for unflattering information that political operatives dig up about rival candidates, and had focused much of his work on the Clintons.

Smith stressed in his suicide note that his reasons were “RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017" and timing related “TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.”

[eimhouse]

May 14, 1923

Sunlight Behind Light Cloud

7pm

New York from Manhattan Bridge

Photo by E. F. Bazzeghin

[39adamstrand]

Considered one of the most powerful women in China’s history, Jiang Qing (19 March 1914 – 14 May 1991) began acting at the age of 18. Using the stage name Lán Píng, she appeared in numerous films and plays and married the actor/director Tang Na in 1935. A public scandal erupted in 1937 when Jiang moved in with Zhang Min, a married man who led a theatrical troupe. Tang Na attempted suicide twice before the couple’s divorce in 1937.

In August 1938, she became secretary of the archives of the Communist party’s Military Commission, placing her in close proximity to 44-year-old Mao Zedong. Mao was divorcing his wife, and he and the 24-year-old Jiang soon began living together and by late 1938 she announced that she was pregnant.

In April 1969, Jiang became the first woman ever elected to the 21-member Politbureau, and as Mao’s health deteriorated in the 1970s, she exerted more control. When Mao died in September 1976, Jiang Qing and 3 others (the Gang of Four) tried to maintain control over China and on 5 October formally announced that Jiang should be named party chair. The Gang of Four was arrested the next day. The Chinese media began referring to Jiang as the “White-boned Demon.”

The Gang of Four were put on trial and convicted. Jiang received a suspended death sentence. She was released from prison in 1988 and placed under house arrest. Diagnosed with throat cancer in early 1991, the 77-year-old Jiang Qing hanged herself in her hospital room on 14 May 1991. Her obituary in the Chinese media made no mention of her political status, or that she was ever married to Chairman Mao.

[39adamstrand]

In December 1990, 42-year-old Margot Kidder was seriously injured in a car accident on the set of the television series Nancy Drew and Daughter which left her partially paralyzed. She was unable to work for the next 2 years, resulting in significant financial difficulties (she reportedly went nearly $1 million in debt),

Kidder had been diagnosed as bipolar in 1988, and the accident, lack of work, and financial stress (and her refusal to take medication) exacerbated her mental health issues. In 1996, Kidder disappeared for 4 days while having a manic episode and was placed in psychiatric care, where Kidder said she was finally able to “accept the diagnosis.”

Kidder continued to be public about her diagnosis and progress and in 2001 she was awarded the Courage in Mental Health Award from the California Women’s Mental Health Policy Council for her “public dialogue on mental illness.”

On 13 May 2018, the 69-year-old ended her life by overdose.

[39adamstrand]

Van Gogh moved to Arles in April 1888 and was inspired by the local landscape, painting mills, farmhouses, and especially the fields.

On 12 May, van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “I am in better health now. I have two new studies of a farm by the high road among cornfields.”

[gregorygalloway]

Homer Simpson (born 12 May 1956)

[dappledwithshadow]

Vincent van Gogh View of Arles with Irises in the Foreground 1888

[39adamstrand]

from Vincent’s letter to his brother Theo, 12 May 1888:

“I am in better health now… . I have two new studies… . A meadow full of very yellow buttercups, a ditch with iris plants with green leaves and purple flowers, the town in the background, a few gray willows - a strip of blue sky.If they don’t mow the meadow I’d like to do this study again, for the subject was very beautiful, and I had some trouble finding the composition. A little town surrounded by fields completely blooming with yellow and purple flowers; you know, it is a beautiful Japanese dream.”

[39adamstrand]

The George M. Verity (renamed from the Thorpe) docked at its new home on the banks of the MIssissippi River, where it will be turned into a museum. Photograph by Leo W. Gredell. 11 May 1961.

[gregorygalloway]

Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)

[39adamstrand]

Glen Sherley was an inmate at Folsom Prison in 1968 when Johnny Cash performed there. In fact, Sherley was in the front row when Cash sang Sherley’s song “Greystone Chapel.”

“The night before I was going to record at Folsom prison,” Johnny Cash said, “I got to the motel and a preacher friend of mine brought me a tape of a song called "Greystone Chapel. He said a convict had written it about the chapel at Folsom. I listened to it one time and I said, ‘I’ve got to do this in the show tomorrow.’ So I stayed up and learned it, and the next day the preacher had him in the front row. I announced, 'This song was written by Glen Sherley.’ It was a terrible, terrible thing to point him out among all those cons, but I didn’t think about that then. Everybody just had a fit, screaming and carrying on.”

Sherley was released from prison in 1971, and Cash was waiting for him at the prison gates. Cash tried to help Sherley, and hired him, but Cash became concerned about Sherley’s behavior and his threats of violence, that he fired him.

Sherley then worked for a cattle company and faded from public attention.

On 11 May 1978, he killed himself with a gunshot to the head.

[39adamstrand]

37-year-old Vincent van Gogh was nearing the end of his year-long stay at the asylum in Saint-Rémy and was preparing to move to the Paris suburb of Auvers-sur-Oise in order to be under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet in early May 1890.

On 11 May he wrote to his brother Theo: “[I]f I had not had my work, I should long ago have been even more broken. At present all goes well, the whole horrible attack has disappeared like a thunderstorm and I am working to give a last stroke of the brush here with a calm and steady enthusiasm. I’m working on a canvas of roses on bright green background and two canvases of large bouquets of violet Irises, one lot against a pink background in which the effect is harmonious and soft through the combination of greens, pinks, violets. On the other hand, the other violet bouquet (ranging up to pure carmine and Prussian blue) standing out against a striking lemon yellow background with other yellow tones in the vase and the base on which it rests is an effect of terribly disparate complementaries that reinforce each other by their opposition… .

“The day I leave depends on my having packed my trunk and finished my canvases, I’m working on the latter with so much enthusiasm that packing my trunk seems more difficult to me than doing the paintings. Anyway it won’t be long.“

[39adamstrand]

Blue and brown, Mississippi; Brown of eternal earth mingled with blue of sky: So deep, so vast, So lazily uncoiling; Tamed by mankind, you hint at wilds untamed. Bound by the chains Of tilted green leaves, Sometimes you snap your bonds, and surge on, strange and free — A loud brown wave, Overwhelming field and forest, Seething in eddies, surging in flying streams. Now lazily poised Below the yellow bluff, the Indian lookout, You weave you sinuous loops from sky to sky. So vast, so pure In flight, eternal river, Words cannot touch you there, for words are useless. You will endure.

from “Big River” by John Gould Fletcher (January 3, 1886 – May 10, 1950)

[39adamstrand]

In May 1939, 53-year-old John Gould Fletcher learned that he had received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Selected Poems (1938). He was the first Southern poet to receive the prize, but despite the prestigious award and induction into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Fletcher’s writing failed to find an audience. His last collection of poems, The Burning Mountain (1946), also failed to sell and he turned to an impressionistic history of his home state, but Arkansas (1947), attracted little attention out of the state.

Fletcher, who had struggled with depression in his life, grew increasingly despondent as his work failed to find an audience, and as his chronic arthritis (which had been diagnosed in 1936) worsened and on 10 May 1950, the 64-year-old Fletcher drowned himself in a shallow pond near his home in Little Rock, AR.

[39adamstrand]

In the early morning hours of 9 May 2010, Erica Blasberg sent a text message to her caddy that she would not be playing in a golf tournament scheduled for the next day.  Her caddy sent a message asking Blasberg if she was okay, but did not get a reply.

The 25-year-old Blasberg was with 42-year-old Dr. Thomas Hess at an exclusive golf resort outside Las Vegas. The couple was seen in the bar at the hotel before Hess took Blasberg to her home in nearby Henderson.

Phone records show that Hess tried to contact Blasberg numerous times the next day (Sunday, Mother’s Day), eight times that morning and nine times that afternoon before going to her home in Henderson and finding her body.

Blasberg was in bed with a dust mask over her mouth and a plastic bag over her head, secured by rubber bands.

Hess removed the suicide note and pills.  He did not know that Blasberg had been seeing a doctor for depression, or that Blasberg had been stockpiling medication.

In 2014, Hess went on trial for wrongful death, medical malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty, and was cleared of any wrongdoing in Blasberg’s death.

Blasberg’s suicide note was read at the opening of the trial on 7 May 2014, which read, “I’m sad and don’t want to be doing this right now. Sorry for all the people I’ve hurt doing this, but please understand how miserable and sad I am, and that I feel no way of escaping it.”