"Ted Williams' frozen head for batting practice at cryogenics lab" Sounds like a potential Futurama episode!
Posted on 10/04/2009 9:43:07 AM PDT by DogByte6RER
Ted Williams' frozen head for batting practice at cryogenics lab: book
BY Nathaniel Vinton
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Updated Friday, October 2nd 2009, 10:44 AM
Head of Ted Williams was abused by employees at Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., whistleblower says.
AP
Ted Williams, who spent his entire career with the Red Sox, died in 2002 at the age of 83.
'Frozen,' by former Alcor exec Larry Johnson, makes shocking claims about how employees treated Ted Williams' frozen head. Take our PollCryonics: Critical or near-criminal?
In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former exec at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., graphically describes how The Splendid Splinter" was beheaded, his head frozen and repeatedly abused.
The book, out Tuesday from Vanguard Press, tells how Williams' corpse became "Alcorian A-1949" at the facility, where bodies are kept suspended in liquid nitrogen in case future generations learn how to revive them.
Johnson writes that in July 2002, shortly after the Red Sox slugger died at age 83, technicians with no medical certification gleefully photographed and used crude equipment to decapitate the majors' last .400 hitter.
Williams' severed head was then frozen, and even used for batting practice by a technician trying to dislodge it from a tuna fish can.
The chief operating officer of Alcor for eight months before becoming a whistleblower in 2003, Johnson wrote his book while in hiding, fearful for his life.
He told the Daily News then he had received death threats and was moving from safehouse to safehouse. Johnson plans to come out of the shadows Tuesday, with his book and an appearance on ABC's "Nightline."
Johnson said he wired himself with an audio recorder for his last three months at Alcor, stole internal records and took gruesome photographs that are reproduced in the book.
The book describes other atrocities at Alcor's facility in Arizona, including the dismembering of live dogs that were injected with chemicals in experiments, and a situation in which human blood and toxic chemicals were dumped into a parking lot sewer drain.
It also also details suspicious circumstances involving the bodies of two people who are frozen in steel cylinders at Alcor: gay rights activist John Dentinger and Dora Kent, an elderly woman whose son, Saul Dent, gave Alcor lots of money.
Nothing in the book is as gruesome as Johnson's descriptions of what happened to Williams' body after it was sent to Alcor at the direction of the Williams' son John Henry Williams, who died of leukemia in 2004.
In 2003, The News reported that Buzz Hamon, the ballplayer's close friend and former director of the Ted Williams Museum in Hernando, Fla., sneaked into Alcor with the help of a mortician friend.
Hamon said he was "appalled" by the conditions there, where Williams' body and more than 50 others were stored in steel tanks alongside cardboard boxes and junk. Hamon died in 2004, reportedly committing suicide.
Johnson writes that holes were drilled in Williams' severed head for the insertion of microphones, then frozen in liquid nitrogen while Alcor employees recorded the sounds of Williams' brain cracking 16 times as temperatures dropped to -321 degrees Fahrenheit.
Johnson writes that the head was balanced on an empty can of Bumble Bee tuna to keep it from sticking to the bottom of its case.
Johnson describes watching as another Alcor employee removed Williams' head from the freezer with a stick, and tried to dislodge the tuna can by swinging at it with a monkey wrench.
The technician, no .406 hitter like the baseball legend, missed the can with several swings of the wrench and smacked Williams' head directly, spraying "tiny pieces of frozen head" around the room.
Johnson accuses the company of joking morbidly about mailing Williams' thawing remains back to his family if his son didn't pay his outstanding debt to the company.
Reprints of invoices show that Alcor president John Lemler charged $120,000 for the honor of "suspending" Teddy Ballgame's body.
A former paramedic, Johnson first blew the whistle on Alcor in a 2003 Sports Illustrated article about Williams' stored body.
He drew criticism at the time for an aborted attempt to sell photos online purportedly showing Williams' corpse.
Johnson said he hopes his book will help fulfill the wishes Williams expressed in his will - that his body be cremated and the ashes "sprinkled at sea off the coast of Florida, where the water is very deep."
"Ted Williams' frozen head for batting practice at cryogenics lab" Sounds like a potential Futurama episode!
ping
You might relate to this one!
Ping.
"It was humiliating..."
Wouldn’t it be better for bowling?
That’s going to be a massive headache of a lawsuit there.
Alcore’s response:
Alcor denies employee took swings at slugger’s frozen head
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/10/02/20091002sr-tedhead.html#
A better pic for this thread...
It’s just another way to get ahead in life......
"Jello Jack" was another whack favorite.
October 2, 2009: The Alcor Life Extension Foundation denies the outrageous allegations against it that have appeared in the media this week. Alcor especially denies mistreating the remains of baseball great Ted Williams. Larry Johnson, the ex Alcor staff member who made these allegations, was not employed at Alcor when Williams was cryopreserved. Johnson's previous attempts to profit from sensational and unfounded allegations against Alcor recently resulted in a court order prohibiting him from making further statements about Alcor. "Alcor is actively pursuing litigation regarding these allegations," says Alcor Executive Director, Jennifer Chapman.
You mean like Two heads are better than one or somebody is addicted to head?
I’m pretty sure that’s not approved by Major League Baseball.
Aside from the more philosophical problems people may have with Alcor, their more pressing practical problem seem to be that they have just never generated much business. This director was not able to change that so he figured the only way to advance his career was to go negative and write a book.
I noticed recently that Alcor is advertising for a new president.
Oy! Such a headache he’s going to have when they thaw him out.
Researchers have frozen, thawed, and re-installed a heart and a kidney in amimals. This kind of cryopreservation is very important in the transplant world as well.
As soon as the attending physician pronounces the patient dead there is an Alcor team standing by to lower body temp, inject drugs, and take other measures to reduce damage.
Once upon a time, when your heart stopped, you were legally dead. What kind of technology will we have in 100, 200, or 500 years?
As for the theological questions, would the Almighty not know that the frozen person would be revived?
Yes, crypreservation is a long shot, but as a scientist once told me, “When you have just been pronounced dead, cryonics is your only remaining option”.
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