October 13th 2011
James Van Doren died Oct. 12 at his home in Fullerton after a long illness. He was 72.
Van Doren and his older brother Paul had only sample sneakers to offer when they opened their first store, in Anaheim, in 1966. They took a dozen orders in the morning and delivered custom canvas deck shoes, made in their adjacent factory, in the afternoon.
Operating as the Van Doren Rubber Co., the brothers and two other co-founders planned to succeed by cutting out the middleman and selling their distinctive thick rubber-soled shoes directly to the public.
By the early 1970s, the company owed some of its success to Southern California's burgeoning skateboard culture. The shoes were especially valued for the sticky rubber soles that helped skaters grip their boards — an innovation devised by Van Doren.
From the start, the casual shoes were known by a single name: Vans.
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October 1st 2011
Despite being drafted by the old Baltimore Bullets of the NBA, Gent chose football over basketball after college. Signed as a free agent by the Dallas Cowboys, he played flanker from 1964 through 1968. At age 27, his NFL career was over. But he wasn't done with football.
In 1973 Gent published his first novel, "North Dallas Forty," which exposed a side of professional football few fans had seen before, as Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" had done for baseball three years earlier. Players experienced excruciating pain that endured long after the game's final whistle; they blew off steam afterward in raucous parties fueled by drugs, alcohol and sex; and management ruthlessly treated athletes as commodities, mere equipment to be used as long as possible and then discarded when they wore out.
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September 27th 2011
Shel Hershorn, a photojournalist who documented the tumult of the 1960s and then dropped out to live a rustic lifestyle in northern New Mexico, died Sept. 17 at a nursing home in Espanola, N.M. He was 82.
He rode the campaign trail with John F. Kennedy and photographed Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as he was loaded into an ambulance after being fatally shot by Jack Ruby.
But his widow, Sonja Hershorn, said he had lost his taste for journalism after Kennedy's assassination.
"It broke his heart and he just soured on the world," she said. "He just wanted to be a hippie. He just wanted to be totally out of American life. He had lost all faith."
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September 25th 2011
Seth Clips Vol. 11
August 17th 2011
Hendry, under the expert tutelage of Northside YMCA instructor Bill Price, became a table-tennis prodigy (Price went on to train Jimmy Connors in tennis). He won the junior nationals in 1935 at age fourteen, and the next year, competing against men old enough to drink and drive, he became the youngest player to ever win the prestigious Western Open, a distinction that earned him the holy grail of commercial athletic recognition, World Series be damned.
At the age of fifteen, Hendry had his grill emblazoned on a Wheaties box, inspiring a legion of would-be table-tennis champs to eat up but good every morning before school.
A couple more years of teenage dominance ensued before Hendry shelved his paddles to serve his country in World War II. Providing an early boilerplate for Michael Jordan's "quit while you're on top but leave the door cracked" style of retirement, Hendry wouldn't play table tennis competitively for another 40 years or so -- before coming back to regain his throne atop the sport in relatively short order.
Former St. Louis Table Tennis Club president Rich Doza has a favorite tourney yarn: the day then--72-year-old Hendry pulled off a shocking upset of twentysomething Peruvian champion Andr Wong (who'd just beaten then--U.S. champ Seemiller). This qualified him for the round of 32 at the U.S. Open in Midland, Texas.
"We're out in the center area, and we're warming up," begins Doza. "This guy comes by -- he's on the Japanese team. He says we have to leave 'cause he has a match. I said, 'So do we.'
"The guy couldn't believe he had to play this old man. He thought he'd be playing André Wong, and instead he's playing his grandfather. His English was a little shaky, so he just couldn't understand that George had beaten André Wong."
USA Table Tennis Hall of Fame
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