A 9/11 Tribute to LTJG Darin H. Pontel, USN

This 2,996 Tribute is dedicated to Darin Howard Pontell

When Darin Pontell was 14, he decided that he would join the Navy. His older brother Steven was a Navy pilot, and he was killed in a crash on the USS Lexington off Pensacola, Florida in 1989.

"When that happened, Darin mentioned that he'd like to pick up where his brother Steven left off, to complete the circle," his father, Gary Pontell, said.

Darin Pontell, a native of Arlington Heights who moved with his family to Baltimore in 1985, graduated with honors from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1999. Upon graduation, he reported to the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Command in Dam Neck, VA. He was assigned to Carrier Air Wing Seven as the Collections Officer. He was later deployed to the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. He received the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, Naval Commendation Medal, Navy Achievement Medal and National Defense Service Medal.

Lt. Pontell married Devora Sue Wolk, a lawyer, in March 2001. He began working at the Pentagon in April and celebrated his 26th birthday that August. He and his new bride lived in Gaithersburg, MD.

"He was thoughtful and generous and wanted to make everyone around him happy," said Devora. " He would do whatever it took to make his family and friends smile."

He was completing his second night of training in a new position with the Chief of Naval Operations Intelligence Plot at the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. He and six colleagues were piecing together information about the attacks on the World Trade Center when American Airlines Flight 77, a highjacked Boeing 757, crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 AM. The jet aircraft slammed into the west side of the Pentagon, where the CNO-IP office was located.

"When he returned to the Pentagon, we felt he was so safe," his father said. "Who would have thought of the Pentagon as a target?"

"He was a good kid. He liked athletics," his grandfather said, and described him as "a computer wizard. He was smart. He had an awful lot of friends."

"I had known my husband since we were about 11," stated his wife Devora. "All he wanted to do was go to the Naval Academy like his older brother, but it was a challenge for him to get in and make it through the four years and graduate with honors. And this is his Naval Academy ring that he wore every day, that marked his accomplishment; he accomplished something that he had set his mind to when he was so young. He was proud to be a Naval Academy graduate and an officer in the U.S. Navy.”

Before Darin Pontell went to the Naval Academy, he worked with his father, an architect, who was left with one son, Michael, now 38.

"Darin and his brother Mike were my best friends," Gary Pontell said shortly after the attack on the Pentagon. "And being that both of them were such family people, we always spent a lot of time together. That's what I'm going to miss. The Sunday afternoons and Sunday evenings. I'm going to miss the phone calls."

It can only be presumed that Lt. Pontell and his colleagues were killed immediately. He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart Medal.

Darin Pontell was buried next to his brother in the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation Cemetery.

He is fondly remembered by former shipmates and many others.

Please visit these other 2,996 Tributes that we and some of our friends have created:

• 2,996 Tribute to James B. Reilly by DragonDude
• 2,996 Tribute to Fran Riccardelli by JargonTalk
• Remembering Paul E Jeffers by Willo's Web
• 9-11 Tribute to Nicole Miller by AZAnnie

tags: 2996, Darin Pontell, USN, Pentagon, Flight 17, Naval Academy, Purple Heart, Francis Riccardelli, 911, World Trade Center, security, terrorism, lexidiem, Homeland Security, September 11th, 9-11, James B Reilly, Flight 11, Flight 175, wtc

Marilyn Monroe: A Diamond is Forever

Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her home in Los Angeles on August 5, 1962, and thus a legend began.

She was discovered lying face down and nude on her bed. There was a telephone in her hand, and empty prescription pill bottles were all around the room. Dr. Thomas Noguchi conducted a preliminary autopsy, the results were analyzed, and Coroner Theodore Curphey determined that Marilyn died from an overdose of barbiturates. The Los Angeles police Department concluded that her death was "caused by a self-administered overdose of sedative drugs and that the mode of death is probable suicide."

Whether Marilyn committed suicide or not has been the source of great debate for 44 years and conspiracy buffs have had an endless field day with their speculations.

Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortenson in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. Her mother suffered from emotional problems, so a string of foster parents and in an orphanage brought up Norma Jean. At the age of 16 she married James Dougherty (1921–2005), an aircraft factory worker. He went to sea in the merchant marine, and she began work at the Radioplane Company. Asked to model for an article in Yank magazine, she soon quit her job to become a full-time model.

In 1946 she divorced Dougherty and went to Hollywood. She signed a short-term contract with 20th Century Fox, taking as her screen name Marilyn Monroe. She had a few bit parts and then returned to modeling, posing nude for a now-famous calendar in 1949.

Marilyn began to attract more attention in 1950 after her minor role appearances in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve. Audiences took note of the voluptuous blonde, and she soon won a new contract from Fox. Her acting career escalated in the early ‘50s with performances in Love Nest (1951), Monkey Business (1952), and Niagra (1953). She won international fame for her sex-symbol roles in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), and There's No Business Like Show Business (1954).

She attracted further publicity when she married baseball legend Joe DiMaggio in 1954, but they divorced within a year. It is said, though, that DiMaggio was the great love in her life.

The Seven-Year Itch (1955), in which she starred with Tom Ewell, demonstrated her talents for comedy roles, and featured the classic scene where she stands over a subway grating while her white skirt billowed up by the wind from a passing train. Directed by Billy Wilder, moviegoers loved it. She studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York in 1955, resulting in a well-reviewed performance in Bus Stop (1956). Marilyn's third marriage was to playwright Arthur Miller in 1956. She made The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957 with Laurence Olivier, which was not a commercial success.

She rebounded in 1959 and gave an acclaimed performance in the hit comedy Some Like It Hot, starring with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, and directed by Billy Wilder. Filmed in black & white, it has been acclaimed worldwide as one of the greatest movie comedies ever made, ranking first on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest comedies, as well as #14 on their list of the 100 best American films. The film won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy. Marilyn Monroe won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in Musical or Comedy, and Jack Lemmon won for Best Actor in Musical or Comedy.

This is the original movie trailer for Some Like It Hot:



Let's Make Love (1960) had Marilyn paired with Yves Montand. The final movie that she completed was The Misfits (1961), in which she shared star billing with Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach. It was directed by John Huston and written by Arthur Miller, whom she divorced just one week before the film's opening.

There was speculation that Marilyn was considering reconciliation with Joe DiMaggio. After being on a plane flight that experienced trouble, she sent DiMaggio a telegram on September 22, 1961 that stated, "When the plane was in trouble I thought about two things, you and changing my will. Love you, I think, more than ever."

Marilyn's first nude movie scene was filmed for Something's Got to Give, but her chronic absence from the set caused her to be fired a week after her 30th birthday on June 8, 1962. She was eventually re-hired, but the film was never completed. Video clips of her nude pool scene exist.

Acclaimed photographer Bert Stern had three sessions with Marilyn Monroe for Vogue magazine in late June 1962, just six weeks before her death. These sessions produced some beautiful and unique images of Marilyn, and they were later published in a book, Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting. There is an excellent YouTube video of some of these images set to the tune from the Norma Jean & Marilyn movie.

Monroe was suffering from depression, and was under regular psychiatric care by 1961. During the last months of her life, she lived as a virtual recluse in her bungalow in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. Her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, noticed Marilyn's bedroom light on after midnight on August 5, 1962. The door was locked and Marilyn didn’t respond to the housekeeper’s calls, so she called Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson. He responded and accessed the room by breaking a window. He found Marilyn dead when he entered the room and the police were called. The subsequent autopsy found a fatal amount of sedatives in her system, and her death was ruled probable suicide.

Over the years there have been a number of conspiracy theories about her death, and most of this focus is around love affairs she was alleged to have with both John and Robert Kennedy. The theorists claim that the Kennedy family had something to do with her death because they feared she would make their love affairs public, along with other "government secrets" she was gathering. Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General in his older brother John’s cabinet, was in Los Angeles on August 4, 1962, and the Attorney General was alleged to have visited Marilyn on the night of her death. The conspiracy theorists claim that he quarreled with her, but the credibility of these and other claims is questionable.

So besides numerous retrospectives, photos, conspiracies, FBI files and speculation, what are we left with? That can be debated from a number of points, but the some of the lyrics from a song Marilyn sung in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, "Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend" may give us the answer.

Time rolls on and youth is gone
and you can't straighten up when you bend
but stiff back or stiff knees
you stand straight at Tiffany's
but Diamonds, Are A Girl's Best Friends

According to Advertising Age, the #1 advertising slogan of the century is "Diamonds are forever", which has been used by DeBeers since 1948. If that’s true, then Marilyn Monroe has left us with diamonds with all the films, music and books that survive her.

Forty-four years after her death, Marilyn Monroe still remains a major cultural symbol. The unknown details of her final performance only add to her mystique.

Our lexidiem is diamonds.

Giving-Credit-Where-It’s-Due Department: This piece was actually inspired in a roundabout way by an article written by my friend Amit Agarwal in Digital Inspiration, entitled No Diamonds please, Girls prefer Plasma TV, to which I responded with suitable comments.

Additional Material

YouTube: Candle In the Wind by Elton John
YouTube: Beautiful - a tribute to Marilyn Monroe
Amazon.com: Marilyn Monroe DVDs



Technorati tags: Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jean, Joe DiMaggio, Robert Kennedy, suicide, conspiracy, Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, Lexidiem, JargonTalk, nude, sexy, DVD, Diamonds are forever, video, YouTube, Digital Inspiration, Amazon.com,

Mickey Spillane, You'll Be Remembered

Legendary author Mickey Spillane, the creator of the best-selling, "hard-boiled" Mike Hammer detective novels, died Monday in his hometown of Murrells Inlet, SC. He was 88.

Born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn, NY, began his writing career during high school. After a brief time at Kansas State Teachers College, he returned to New York City to work in retail, but that bored him.

Spillane's true avocation was writing, so he found a job with a firm known as Funnies, Inc., a firm which later became Marvel Comics. There he wrote wrote text fillers and scripts for comics such as "The Human Torch" and "Edison Bell, Boy Inventor," and was one of the originators of the
"Captain Marvel" comics.

His first book, "I, the Jury" was written in only nine days. It became such success that he quickly produced five more Mike Hammer detective novels 1950 and 1952. "The Long Wait" (1951) sold 3 million copies in a single week in 1952. There were many young men from that era of the '50s and '60s who were quite "moved" for lack of a better term) by prose like this:

"No, Charlotte, I'm the jury now, and the judge, and I have a promise to keep. Beautiful as you are, as much as I almost loved you, I sentence you to death."

(Her thumbs hooked in the fragile silk of the panties and pulled them down. She stepped out of them as delicately as one coming from a bathtub. She was completely naked now. A sun-tanned goddess giving herself to her lover. With arms outstetched she walked toward me.

Lightly, her tongue ran over her lips, making them glisten with pssion. The smell of her was like an exhilarating perfume. Slowly, a sigh escaped her, making the hemispheres of her breasts quiver. She leaned forward to kiss me, her arms going out to encircle my neck.)

The roar of the .45 shook the room.

Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in. A thin trickle of blood welled out.

I stood up in front of her and shoved the gun into my pocket. I turned, and looked at the rubber plant behind me. There on the table was the gun, with the safety catch off and the silencer still attached. Those loving arms would have reached it nicely. A face that was waiting to be kissed was really waiting to be splattered with blood when she blew my head off. My blood. When I heard her fall I turned around. Her eyes had pain in them now, the pain preceding death. Pain and unbelief.

"How c-could you?" she gasped.

I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.

"It was easy," I said.

Like so many others, I read "I, the Jury" at a rather young age, and felt that I had gotten away with reading something really erotic, but not really pornographic. Actually there were other books that had their "really dirty" sections, such as Grace Metalious' "Peyton Place" (1956), and later any number of novels by Harold Robbins, but there were many Mickey Spillane books to choose from, and they all seemed to have a certain comfortable familiarity to them.

Many of Spillane's Mike Hammer novels were made into movies, including the film classic "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955). Spillane himself starred in "The Girl Hunters" (1963), in which he played his creation, Mike Hammer. This was one of the rare occasions in film history where an author of a popular character later depicted his own character.

He married his second wife, Sherri Malinou, in 1965. She was a model who later posed in the nude for the cover of his book "The Erection Set" 1972. He dedicated the book to her.

Spillane appeared as a writer who is murdered in the TV series Columbo. He also appeared in a series of commercials for Miller Lite beer, which parodied his tough-guy image. Often criticized for his writing style and characterizations, with book sales of over 200 million, he remains one of the most successful writers of this era.

Mickey Spillane was apparently a victim of cancer. He wowed millions with Mike Hammer's shoot-'em-up sex and violence will be remembered by many of us.

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.
~ Mickey Spillane

It should also be noted that another South Carolina resident, Robert Brooks, died of natural causes on Sunday at his home in Myrtle Beach. He was 69.

Brooks was the chairman of the Hooters restaurant chain famous for its scantily clad waitresses, and he made his fortune from the firm which uses the slogan "Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined" for its style of cuisine and service.

Hooters opened its first restaurant in 1983 and Mr. Brooks, with a group of other investors, bought franchise rights a year later. "Good food, cold beer and pretty girls never go out of style," he told Fortune magazine in 2003.

This coincidence makes one wonder if Mickey Spillane and Robert Brooks knew each other.

Lexidiem: "hard-boiled"

Technorati tags
Mickey Spillane
Mike Hammer
Robert Brooks
Hooters
lexidiem