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His Newman's Own brand foods has given over a quarter Billion dollars to charity. I particularly enjoy the popcorn and fig newmans. Farewell to a real man. The world was a better place because he was here.
My 2nd and final post on this subject. Newman said the highest honor he ever received was being named on Richard Nixon's enemy list. BTW I like Newman's lemonade too. My favorite Newman performance was in HUD.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was my first favorite film with may favorite pair of blue eyes - he was an extraordinary person who will be greatly missed!!
Choolie, I'll eat 50 eggs with you. My friend Anida (and yes that's how she spells it) told me of how she met him once. She was at a race or something and reporters were chasing him calling "Paul, Paul!" She stepped out and said "Hello Mr. Newman". She said it made him stop and talk to her to be addressed with respect and she said he was very nice. I like that image. That he was just a person who liked to be treated with respect. I also like his way of giving to children with cancer and his caring heart to donate earnings from his food to charity. My heart goes out to his family. It seems like all the good ones are going.
My parents took me and my older brother, Alfred, to the KB Silver Movie Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, to see "The Sting." I really enjoyed that movie. It was my first time seeing both Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
That scene from "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid" with Paul riding the bicycle to "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" by BJ Thomas was my favorite from that movie. I met BJ Thomas in 1995 and told him I used to play his song on the piano when I was a little kid. BJ hugged me! :)
Paul Newman, who died last week, took a carefully guarded secret to his grave — something that would have disgraced him in Hollywood.
Did he have a secret mistress? (No, that wouldn’t bother anybody.) Did he have a clandestine fleet of SUVs? (Now that’s more like it.) Was he addicted to McDonald’s hamburgers?
No, Paul Newman was a cautious but increasingly open supporter of nuclear power.
Newman’s journey from garden-variety left-wing environmentalism to nuclear advocacy began in 1992 when he played the role of General Leslie Groves, supervisor of the Manhattan Project, in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy. Richard Rhodes’s book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, was a primary source for the film, and Rhodes had just written Nuclear Renewal, making the case for a revival of the technology.
Rhodes and Newman both lived in Connecticut and became friends. Over the next few years the two men discussed nuclear power, and Newman gradually became a convert to the technology. Through Rhodes, Newman met Denis Beller, a professor of engineering at the University of Nevada, also an expert on nuclear energy.
“In all the meetings I had with Paul Newman, he struck me as very open-minded and inquisitive,” says Beller. “He came out to Nevada in 2002 and visited the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies, where several faculty members showed him research on the transmutation of nuclear waste. They also discussed why ideas like launching nuclear waste into the sun were not really practical. The visit ended with a trip to Yucca Mountain, where Kevin Phillips, the mayor of neighboring Caliente, whose front porch is only 50 yards from the rail line where waste would be transported, told Newman he was not opposed to the project. Later [Newman] told me, ‘That’s the most impressive thing I’ve seen.’”
The following, year, Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, hosted a dinner and debate about nuclear energy for high-level Washington policymakers and New York press executives in their Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. Both Beller and Rhodes helped arrange the event. (Rhodes says the meeting was held under the Chatham House Rule, where none of the participants can be identified, and he still does not feel at liberty to discuss it.) Beller later introduced Newman to two other advocates, Susan Eisenhower, whose Eisenhower Institute has promoted nuclear power as part of a legacy of Pres. Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, and Al Trivelpiece, former director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Eisenhower Institute arranged two more soirees in Newman’s apartment.
For a public figure, however — especially one connected with Hollywood — support for nuclear power is a risky position to take. Newman long directed the profits from his food business, Newman’s Own, into the Newman’s Own charitable foundation. His board of directors warned him that becoming an advocate of nuclear power would endanger fund-raising. “He told me that he had once written an oped in opposition to clear-cutting in the Northwest, and logging supporters had boycotted several restaurants that served Newman’s Own salad dressings,” said Beller. “He was very concerned that any public statements might hurt small businesses that carried his products.”
Newman did begin advertising his support for nuclear in connection with his other passion — auto racing. Ever since playing an Indy 500 driver in the 1968 movie Winning, Newman raced cars on his own. He finished in the top five in races at both Daytona and Le Mans, and won four national driving titles from 1976 to 1986. Over the years he also became friends with a racing opponent, Eddie Wachs, owner of E. H. Wachs, Inc., which has participated in the decommissioning of several reactors and helped rebuild the TVA’s Browns Ferry Unit I, which reopened in 2007.
In 2002 Newman and Wachs formed Newman Wachs Racing, which fielded two cars that carried 26 nuclear decals and a public service message promoting nuclear power. Two year later the Nuclear Energy Institute became aware of their effort and sponsored a car emblazoned with the message “Nuclear — Clean Air Energy,” which won the opening race of the 2008 Champ Car Atlantic season. The car and its racing crew subsequently visited several engineering schools around the country to encourage young people to enter the nuclear profession.
In the last few years, Newman became more public in his support of nuclear power. One of the biggest controversies in the New York area is the effort by environmental groups to shut down the Indian Point Nuclear Station, which provides New York City and Westchester County with 20 percent of their electricity. One leading opponent is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose opposition not only to Indian Point but to windmill farms off Martha’s Vineyard and Long Island Sound earned him an appearance with Al Gore and two movie stars on the cover of the “Green” issue of Vanity Fair (certainly an appropriately named publication). “Paul told me Kennedy tried to recruit him to oppose Indian Point for many years but finally gave up,” said Beller.
Instead, in May 2007, Newman did a tour of Indian Point and issued the following press release stating that “no Army or Navy base I’ve ever visited has been more armored. . . . The commitment to safety is clear.” The release also noted that the generator provided a million people with electricity while generating no greenhouse gases.
The statement received almost no attention in the press.
Anyone with the slightest intelligence and objectivity can see that we are weakening ourselves as a nation through our reliance on foreign oil, that so-called “renewables” can only add a small fraction to our output, and that nuclear offers a clean alternative with minimal environmental disruption. Countries such as France that have already made the nuclear transition have also achieved enormous economic benefits.
Had Newman declared himself a dyslexic or an alcoholic or a homosexual in his later years, Hollywood and the press would have lionized him for his courage and candor. Coming out for nuclear power, however, is a far more dangerous affair. It certainly doesn’t get you on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Comments
His Newman's Own brand foods has given over a quarter Billion dollars to charity. I particularly enjoy the popcorn and fig newmans. Farewell to a real man. The world was a better place because he was here.
Posted by: Dick | September 27, 2008 9:52 AM
I thought he would live to be a 100. A class act in every way.
Posted by: Stevie Ray | September 27, 2008 10:23 AM
And a damn fine looking guy; compelling and charismatic to the end.
Let's go eat 50 eggs in his honor. Who's with me?
Posted by: choolie | September 27, 2008 10:52 AM
My 2nd and final post on this subject. Newman said the highest honor he ever received was being named on Richard Nixon's enemy list. BTW I like Newman's lemonade too. My favorite Newman performance was in HUD.
Posted by: Dick | September 27, 2008 11:10 AM
"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid".
His Hole in the Wall camp for kids with Cancer is a wonderful place.
I was told He died of lung cancer. Smoked until 10 years ago, I think I was told.
Posted by: h | September 27, 2008 5:32 PM
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was my first favorite film with may favorite pair of blue eyes - he was an extraordinary person who will be greatly missed!!
Posted by: r | September 28, 2008 1:26 PM
Choolie, I'll eat 50 eggs with you. My friend Anida (and yes that's how she spells it) told me of how she met him once. She was at a race or something and reporters were chasing him calling "Paul, Paul!" She stepped out and said "Hello Mr. Newman". She said it made him stop and talk to her to be addressed with respect and she said he was very nice. I like that image. That he was just a person who liked to be treated with respect. I also like his way of giving to children with cancer and his caring heart to donate earnings from his food to charity. My heart goes out to his family. It seems like all the good ones are going.
Posted by: Heidi | September 28, 2008 6:01 PM
Love the scene when Redford said, "I can't swim!" and Newman laughed at him and said, "the fall will probably kill you".
Posted by: h | September 29, 2008 6:55 AM
A FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORY:
My parents took me and my older brother, Alfred, to the KB Silver Movie Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, to see "The Sting." I really enjoyed that movie. It was my first time seeing both Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
That scene from "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid" with Paul riding the bicycle to "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" by BJ Thomas was my favorite from that movie. I met BJ Thomas in 1995 and told him I used to play his song on the piano when I was a little kid. BJ hugged me! :)
Never had the chance to meet Paul Newman. :(
Posted by: Yvonne Christian | September 29, 2008 3:54 PM
Newman’s Own
The secret he took to the grave.
By William Tucker & Stephanie Gutmann
Paul Newman, who died last week, took a carefully guarded secret to his grave — something that would have disgraced him in Hollywood.
Did he have a secret mistress? (No, that wouldn’t bother anybody.) Did he have a clandestine fleet of SUVs? (Now that’s more like it.) Was he addicted to McDonald’s hamburgers?
No, Paul Newman was a cautious but increasingly open supporter of nuclear power.
Newman’s journey from garden-variety left-wing environmentalism to nuclear advocacy began in 1992 when he played the role of General Leslie Groves, supervisor of the Manhattan Project, in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy. Richard Rhodes’s book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, was a primary source for the film, and Rhodes had just written Nuclear Renewal, making the case for a revival of the technology.
Rhodes and Newman both lived in Connecticut and became friends. Over the next few years the two men discussed nuclear power, and Newman gradually became a convert to the technology. Through Rhodes, Newman met Denis Beller, a professor of engineering at the University of Nevada, also an expert on nuclear energy.
“In all the meetings I had with Paul Newman, he struck me as very open-minded and inquisitive,” says Beller. “He came out to Nevada in 2002 and visited the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies, where several faculty members showed him research on the transmutation of nuclear waste. They also discussed why ideas like launching nuclear waste into the sun were not really practical. The visit ended with a trip to Yucca Mountain, where Kevin Phillips, the mayor of neighboring Caliente, whose front porch is only 50 yards from the rail line where waste would be transported, told Newman he was not opposed to the project. Later [Newman] told me, ‘That’s the most impressive thing I’ve seen.’”
The following, year, Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, hosted a dinner and debate about nuclear energy for high-level Washington policymakers and New York press executives in their Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. Both Beller and Rhodes helped arrange the event. (Rhodes says the meeting was held under the Chatham House Rule, where none of the participants can be identified, and he still does not feel at liberty to discuss it.) Beller later introduced Newman to two other advocates, Susan Eisenhower, whose Eisenhower Institute has promoted nuclear power as part of a legacy of Pres. Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, and Al Trivelpiece, former director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Eisenhower Institute arranged two more soirees in Newman’s apartment.
For a public figure, however — especially one connected with Hollywood — support for nuclear power is a risky position to take. Newman long directed the profits from his food business, Newman’s Own, into the Newman’s Own charitable foundation. His board of directors warned him that becoming an advocate of nuclear power would endanger fund-raising. “He told me that he had once written an oped in opposition to clear-cutting in the Northwest, and logging supporters had boycotted several restaurants that served Newman’s Own salad dressings,” said Beller. “He was very concerned that any public statements might hurt small businesses that carried his products.”
Newman did begin advertising his support for nuclear in connection with his other passion — auto racing. Ever since playing an Indy 500 driver in the 1968 movie Winning, Newman raced cars on his own. He finished in the top five in races at both Daytona and Le Mans, and won four national driving titles from 1976 to 1986. Over the years he also became friends with a racing opponent, Eddie Wachs, owner of E. H. Wachs, Inc., which has participated in the decommissioning of several reactors and helped rebuild the TVA’s Browns Ferry Unit I, which reopened in 2007.
In 2002 Newman and Wachs formed Newman Wachs Racing, which fielded two cars that carried 26 nuclear decals and a public service message promoting nuclear power. Two year later the Nuclear Energy Institute became aware of their effort and sponsored a car emblazoned with the message “Nuclear — Clean Air Energy,” which won the opening race of the 2008 Champ Car Atlantic season. The car and its racing crew subsequently visited several engineering schools around the country to encourage young people to enter the nuclear profession.
In the last few years, Newman became more public in his support of nuclear power. One of the biggest controversies in the New York area is the effort by environmental groups to shut down the Indian Point Nuclear Station, which provides New York City and Westchester County with 20 percent of their electricity. One leading opponent is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose opposition not only to Indian Point but to windmill farms off Martha’s Vineyard and Long Island Sound earned him an appearance with Al Gore and two movie stars on the cover of the “Green” issue of Vanity Fair (certainly an appropriately named publication). “Paul told me Kennedy tried to recruit him to oppose Indian Point for many years but finally gave up,” said Beller.
Instead, in May 2007, Newman did a tour of Indian Point and issued the following press release stating that “no Army or Navy base I’ve ever visited has been more armored. . . . The commitment to safety is clear.” The release also noted that the generator provided a million people with electricity while generating no greenhouse gases.
The statement received almost no attention in the press.
Anyone with the slightest intelligence and objectivity can see that we are weakening ourselves as a nation through our reliance on foreign oil, that so-called “renewables” can only add a small fraction to our output, and that nuclear offers a clean alternative with minimal environmental disruption. Countries such as France that have already made the nuclear transition have also achieved enormous economic benefits.
Had Newman declared himself a dyslexic or an alcoholic or a homosexual in his later years, Hollywood and the press would have lionized him for his courage and candor. Coming out for nuclear power, however, is a far more dangerous affair. It certainly doesn’t get you on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Posted by: Danny | October 4, 2008 4:50 AM