This is not really a blog of bandits, it really is a blog about men like me.

Around this time 5 years ago I lost my right eye, well not completely. It shrunk after 2 failed retina re-attachments operations, and ever since I have lost all vision. I now have what’s called a Scleral Shell(ocular prosthetics) in front of the eye.

When it happened I thought my wotld would cave in on me. Luckily to say it didn’t even not the retina getting detached in my left eye. Thankfully that operation was a success.

I was surprised to find out how many people have only one eye. Below is just a summary of the more famous one eyed “bandits” throughout history.

Horatio Nelson

Horatio Nelson – (29 September 1758 – 21 October 1805) Horatio was a British admiral and was one of the first to go against the conventional tactics of his time by cutting through the enemy’s lines in the Napoleonic Wars. Horatio became blind in one eye early in his Royal Navy career, he would use his blindness as cockiness during certain fights. In those days a retreat or surrender was shown via a system of signal flags, when friendly or enemy ships would display the flags Horatio would bring his telescope to his blind eye and say carry on with the attack, I see no signals.

 

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Sammy Davis, Jr.

Sammy Davis, Jr. — Lost his left eye in an car wreck in 1954. Depressed from the loss, he thought his career was over until his friend Frank Sinatra told him that that he was at a crossroads, that he could either fade away or overcome the loss and go on to greatness. Weeks later, at Sammy’s first public appearance since the crash, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and others made a surprise appearance on stage — all wearing eyepatches. After that, Sammy went on to be one of the great entertainers of all time, and a member of the famous “Rat Pack”

James Joyce

Famous Irish Author who lost an eye and then went on to compose some of his greatest works. Author of: Dubliners, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake

Peter Falk

Peter Michael Falk (September 16, 1927 – June 23, 2011) was an American actor, best known for his role as Lieutenant Columbo in the long-running television series Columbo, which ran from 1968-2003

Born in New York City, Falk was the son of Michael Peter Falk (1897–1981), owner of a clothing and dry goods store, and his wife, Madeline (née Hochhauser; 1904–2003),an accountant and buyer.Both of his parents were Jewish,coming from Poland and Russia on his father’s side, and from Hungary and the Czechoslowakia on his mother’s side.

Falk’s right eye was surgically removed when he was three because of a retinoblastoma; he wore an artificial eye for most of his life. The artificial eye was the cause of his trademark squint. Despite this limitation, as a boy he participated in team sports, mainly baseball and basketball. In a 1997 interview in Cigar Aficionado magazine with Arthur Marx, Falk said: “I remember once in high school the umpire called me out at third base when I was sure I was safe. I got so mad I took out my glass eye, handed it to him and said, ‘Try this.’ I got such a laugh you wouldn’t believe.”

Raoul Walsh

One of Hollywood’s most prolific and respected action directors, Raoul Walsh was also one of the longest-lived figures in film, with a career that spanned almost a half-century.

After running away from home as a boy and working in a variety of capacities, including as a cowboy in the West, Walsh drifted into stage acting in New York and later into motion pictures as an actor.

He became an assistant director to D.W. Griffith and, in 1914, made his first movie. By the mid 1920s, Walsh had a reputation for direct, straightforward, no frills narrative, and his style was particularly suited to action films and outdoor dramas, although his biggest film of that decade was the fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad, produced by and starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr., which continues to be shown seven decades later.

In 1929 he had to give up the leading role of the Cisco Kid when a jackrabbit jumped through a windshield and he lost an eye.

His work in the 1930s, mostly for 20th Century-Fox, embraced comedy and drama in equal measure, but it was with Warner Bros., beginning at the end of the 1930s, that Walsh came into his own, directing such classics as The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive By Night (1940), High Sierra (1941), Desperate Journey (1942), and Northern Pursuit (1943), starring James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Errol Flynn

Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder, born in Los Angeles in 1947, is a guitarist, composer and producer, though he gained his world-wide reputation primarily as a Slide-Guitarist.

He played in Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, and has also accompanied such artists as Gordon Lightfoot, the Rolling Stones (Let it Bleed), Eric Clapton, Randy Newman, John Lee Hooker and many others.

Film scores have included Paris Texas, The Long Riders, and Trespass
The man behind the much praised Buena Vista Social Club.

He has been awarded two world music Grammies

” I’ll never forget it.”
Ry Cooder is talking about his first encounter with a guitar, more than 50 years ago. “The guitar was a three-quarter-size four-string tenor”. Cooder was 4 years old, well into a yearlong recuperation from an accident that had cost him his left eye.

“I took Ry Cooder for all I could get.” Keith Richards on Ry’s guitar technique.