DEBBIE HALEY, POLITICAL ACTIVIST, TEXAS BLACK CAUCUS LEADER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Debbie Haley didn’t just preach the importance of education. She practiced it in her family, her son said.
“There was no fooling around in this household,” Anthony Haley said. “Everybody was expected to get an education. We did our homework. We were all involved with the schools, in sports and clubs.”
“Her prime interest was the arts,” said Carole Pinkett, a New Yorker and longtime friend of Haley’s.
“She didn’t waste words. She never spoke unless she had a plan. Debbie loved to laugh and loved social life.”
Leona Deborah Penn Haley was born on Feb. 24, 1935, in Queens, a borough of New York City, the daughter of Edward and Rella Penn. She was a graduate of Queens College.
From 1958 to 1966, Haley taught in elementary schools in New York and Nashville, Tenn. In 1968, Haley and her husband, a physician, moved to Houston.
“They chose Houston because it was a growing city in the Sun Belt, where they thought their services were needed,” Anthony Haley said.
Debbie Haley was a president of the Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County. For years, she also was a board member of the United Negro College Fund.
In addition to her son Anthony, survivors include her husband, Ronald Haley of Houston; two other sons, Sean Haley of Pearland and Kyle Haley of North Hollywood, Calif.; and a daughter, Rhonda Sewell of Sugar Land.
A celebration of life is scheduled for 10 a.m. today at St. James’ Episcopal Church, 3129 Southmore.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/deaths/5461686.html
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RICHARD KNERR, CO-CREATOR OF THE HULA HOOP, FRISBEE
Company gave us such fads as the Hula Hoop, Frisbee
Los Angeles Times
When a friend told Knerr and Melin about a bamboo ring used for exercise in Australia, they devised their own version without seeing the original. They ran an early test of the product in 1958. Within four months, 25 million of the hoops had been sold, according to Wham-O.
In the 1985 book American Fads, Richard Johnson wrote that “no sensation has ever swept the country like the Hula Hoop.”
The company founders experienced another “wow” moment when former Air Force pilot Fred Morrison was spotted at the beach playing with his invention, the Pluto Platter. They bought the rights, modified it and renamed it Frisbee before releasing it in 1958.
In 1982, the founders sold the company for $12 million to Kransco Group Cos. Mattel Inc. bought Wham-O in 1994 and resold it to a group of investors in 1997.
Knerr, who was known to linger in toy stores, told the Los Angeles Times in 1994: “If Spud and I had to say what we contributed, it was fun. But I think this country gave us more than we gave it. It gave us the opportunity to do it.”
Melin died in 2002.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/deaths/5465308.html
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BRAD RENFRO, PROMISING YOUNG ACTOR
Struggling with drugs and alcohol, he may have been drinking with friends the night before he died
Associated Press
Paramedics pronounced him dead at 9 a.m., said Craig Harvey, chief investigator for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. The cause of death was not immediately determined, Harvey said, but an autopsy could be conducted as early as Wednesday.
Renfro had reportedly been drinking with friends the evening before his death, Harvey said.
Renfro’s lawyer, Richard Kaplan, said he did not know whether the death was connected to any problems with addiction.
“He was working hard on his sobriety,” Kaplan said. “He was doing well. He was a nice person.”
Renfro recently completed a role in The Informers, a film adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel that stars Winona Ryder, Brandon Routh and Billy Bob Thornton.
“Brad was an exceptionally talented young actor and our time spent with him was thoroughly enjoyable,” Marco Weber, president of the film’s production house, Senator Entertainment, said in a statement.
The actor served 10 days in jail in May 2006 after pleading no contest to driving while intoxicated and guilty to attempted possession of heroin.
The latter charge stemmed from his arrest in Los Angeles’ Skid Row area, when he attempted to buy heroin from an undercover officer in 2005.
For several years he was better known for that drug bust and the resulting criminal case than for acting.
After one court appearance, he talked to reporters about drug rehabilitation, saying he was “tired of paying the consequences” for drinking and drug use and eager to get clean.
“It’s definitely been an eye-opener,” he said of his rehab program.
Other run-ins with the law included a 1998 charge of cocaine and marijuana possession, for which he avoided jail time in a plea deal. He was also placed on probation in January 2001 and ordered to pay $4,000 for repairs to a 45-foot yacht he and a friend tried to steal in Florida in August 2000.
He was arrested again in May 2001 and charged with underage drinking, violating the terms of his probation, and was ordered into alcohol rehab the following March.
A native of Knoxville, Tenn., Renfro’s film career began when he was 12, acting opposite Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones in The Client. His other credits included Sleepers, Deuces Wild, Apt Pupil and The Jacket.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/celebrities/5457819.html
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/celebrities/5470771.html
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HEATH LEDGER, AUSTRALIAN ACTOR
Heath Ledger at the 78th annual Academy Awards in March, 2006. Mr. Ledger was found dead Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 28. More Photos >
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Related
Throngs Gather in City as News Spreads at the Speed of Technology (January 23, 2008)
City Room: Heath Ledger, Actor, Is Found Dead at 28 (January 22, 2008)
Times Topics: Heath Ledger Past articles and additional information about the actor.
As word of the death spread, a crowd had gathered outside the apartment in SoHo in time to see Mr. Ledger’s body removed. More Photos »
The police said Mr. Ledger, 28, was found naked on the floor near the bed in an apartment in SoHo that he had been renting. The chief police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said the police did not suspect foul play.
“There was no indication of a disturbance,” he said, adding that there were no signs that Mr. Ledger had been drinking. Nor were any illegal drugs found in the loft, which takes up the entire fourth floor. Neighbors said Mr. Ledger had occupied it for several months.
Police officials said that a bottle of prescription sleeping pills was found on a nearby night table, but that they did not know whether the pills had anything to do with Mr. Ledger’s death. Officers who checked the apartment found other prescription medications in the bathroom. A spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office said an autopsy would be conducted on Wednesday.
Mr. Browne said no obvious indication of suicide, like a note, was found in the bedroom.
Mr. Ledger had become a familiar figure in his SoHo neighborhood — and something of a fixture in gossip columns — since moving there after he broke up with the actress Michelle Williams, who played his wife in “Brokeback Mountain.”
There were reports of hand-holding and lip-locking with various actresses and models, and sightings at restaurants and cocktail bars. He had clashed with paparazzi in Australia, but in New York, where there is no shortage of problem-causing partygoers, “he certainly wasn’t one of them,” said Paul Sevigny, an owner of the Beatrice Inn, a West Village club that Mr. Ledger frequented.
“He was really polite and nice,” said Mr. Sevigny.
The police said Mr. Ledger’s body was found after a masseuse arrived at the apartment at 2:45 p.m. for her regular appointment with Mr. Ledger. A housekeeper let her in and knocked on the door of Mr. Ledger’s bedroom. No one answered.
The housekeeper and the masseuse pushed open the bedroom door and saw Mr. Ledger, unconscious, on the floor. They shook him but could not revive him, and then called for help, the police said. The housekeeper told officers that she had heard him snoring in the bedroom around 12:30 p.m., the police said.
As word of Mr. Ledger’s death began circulating, fans and camera crews converged on the street outside the apartment, at 421 Broome Street, between Crosby and Lafayette.
Neighbors said Mr. Ledger was friendly. Julie McIntosh, a hairstylist at a salon a few doors down the block from the apartment, said she saw him on the street once or twice a week. She said she had seen him with his 2-year-old daughter a couple of times.
“He seemed happy,” she said, recalling how she had run into him outside the salon last month and joked, “When are you going to come in and let me wash your hair?”
Others in the crowd said their first reaction to word of his death was disbelief. Nicole Vaughan, 24, a law student at New York University, was in a seminar about Jesus when someone sent her a message about Mr. Ledger. She checked the Web, then walked to the apartment “because of the way our generation is; we sort of feel we’re a part of each other’s lives.”
Vanessa Yuille, 29, a record-company manager who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said her vigil outside the apartment building was a way of paying tribute to what Mr. Ledger did the night she saw him in a Williamsburg restaurant last summer. “A guy fell off a motorcycle in front of the restaurant,” she said, “and it was Heath Ledger who went to see if the guy was all right.”
More recently, Mr. Ledger had made the rounds in Manhattan.
A cocktail waitress at a downtown hotel bar that regularly draws celebrities said he showed up one night last week with some friends, ordered bottled water, as he always did, and stayed for an hour or two. “He looked fit,” said the waitress, who would give her name only as Renee for fear of jeopardizing her job. “He looked healthy.”
The Associated Press reported that his father, Kim Ledger, called his death “tragic, untimely and accidental.” An uncle, Neil Bell, said the family was taken by surprise. “He was in good spirits and having a wonderful time on this Terry Gilliam movie,” he said, referring to “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” scheduled for release next year.
Mr. Bell, whom Mr. Ledger once cited as the inspiration for his character in “Brokeback Mountain,” added: “They were all flying to Vancouver for a shoot on this movie. Heath flew into New York to go home for a bit.”
Mr. Ledger’s publicist, Mara Buxbaum, said that she was too upset to talk about Mr. Ledger’s death.
Heathcliff Andrew Ledger was born on April 4, 1979, in Perth, Australia, where a local theater company cast him in “Peter Pan” when he was 10. That role led to parts on children’s television programs, and to the 1992 film “Clowning Around” and the television series “Ship to Shore.”
But the magazine Current Biography said he was also a champion at chess and go-kart racing as a youngster, and played field hockey until his coach forced him to choose between that sport and drama.
After appearing in a short-lived Australian television series, he moved to Los Angeles in 1999. His first Hollywood film was the teenage romantic comedy “10 Things I Hate About You,” a send-up of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” in which he appeared opposite Julia Stiles.
He passed up other roles in teen films. “I feel like I’m wasting time if I repeat myself,” he said in a 2007 interview with The New York Times. He paid a price, running so low on money that, according to Current Biography, he was borrowing from his agent. The magazine quoted him as telling The Evening Standard in London, “I was literally living off ramen noodles and water, because I was sticking to my game.”
The payoff came in an audition for Mel Gibson’s film “The Patriot” — Mr. Ledger’s second audition; he had walked out of the first, saying his first was no good. He later appeared in “A Knight’s Tale” and “Monster’s Ball” in 2001, and in four films released in 2005: “Lords of Dogtown,” “Casanova,” “The Brothers Grimm” and the cowboy romance that established him as a major star, “Brokeback Mountain.”
“Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. “It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn.” Mr. Ledger was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor, but the Oscar went to Philip Seymour Hoffman for “Capote.”
Still, Mr. Ledger was viewed as a significant talent on the rise. Although he was notoriously choosy about his roles, he was well-liked by directors and his fellow actors, an amiable presence on the set who gave little indication if he was experiencing personal turmoil.
“I had such great hope for him,” Mr. Gibson said in a statement. “He was just taking off and to lose his life at such a young age is a tragic loss.”
Mr. Ledger met Ms. Williams while filming “Brokeback Mountain.” They began a romance and moved to Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, where their comings and goings were widely noted in the New York tabloids and on celebrity-oriented Web sites. Ms. Williams gave birth to their daughter, Matilda Rose, on Oct. 28, 2005.
Until they separated last summer, he, Ms. Williams and Matilda were the darlings of Brooklyn, photographed around Boerum Hill. But Mr. Ledger often clashed with paparazzi — most intensely back home in Australia.
In January 2006, photographers sprayed him with water pistols at the Sydney premiere of “Brokeback Mountain.” Mr. Ledger left the country soon after, and was quoted as saying he was sick of Australia because the photographers were so intrusive. The paparazzi accused him of spitting on them, which he denied. Later that year, blogs reported that he and Ms. Williams had made obscene gestures at photographers in Mexico.
But a Brooklyn blog, the Brownstoner, proudly posted this comment from The Daily Telegraph after he and Ms. Williams bought their house near Smith Street: “Ledger, who’s had a rocky relationship with the paparazzi in Australia, has found Brooklyn’s residents to be a good deal mellower. ‘He’s very nice and they’re very sweet people,’ said his neighbor Margaret Cusack. ‘We got to go to the premiere of “Brokeback Mountain” — he gave us tickets.’ ” Reached on Tuesday after Mr. Ledger had died, Ms. Cusack said she would not comment.
After splitting up with Ms. Williams — and jilting Brooklyn — Mr. Ledger remained a favorite of tabloids and photographers. He was linked to the model Gemma Ward, and last month Page Six reported that Mr. Ledger and the actress Kate Hudson had been seen “kissing and making out” at a West Village restaurant. (Her publicist denied it.)
Mr. Ledger’s death shook Warner Brothers, which is scheduled to release his next film on July 18 — “The Dark Knight,” a big-budget sequel to “Batman Begins.” Mr. Ledger plays the Joker, Batman’s archnemesis.
The studio had already started to roll out a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign. The film’s dominant marketing image, cheered by fans when it was unveiled late last year, shows Mr. Ledger in costume, painting the question “Why So Serious?” in what appears to be blood.
In a recent interview with WJW-TV, a Fox affiliate in Cleveland, about “I’m Not There,” in which he was one of several actors playing the music legend Bob Dylan, Mr. Ledger struck a philosophical note. He responded to a question about how having a child had changed his life:
“You’re forced into, kind of, respecting yourself more,” he said. “You learn more about yourself through your child, I guess. I think you also look at death differently. It’s like a Catch-22: I feel good about dying now because I feel like I’m alive in her, you know, but at the same hand, you don’t want to die because you want to be around for the rest of her life.”
Associated Press
“To the best of our knowledge she was the last full-blooded Eyak alive,” Galloway said Tuesday.
Jones also was the last person alive who was fluent in Eyak, a branch of the Athabaskan Indian family of languages, said Michael Krauss, a linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who collaborated with Jones for years in an effort to preserve the Eyak language.
“With her death, the Eyak language becomes extinct,” Krauss said.
Jones was honorary chief of the Eyak Nation. The Eyak ancestral homeland runs along 300 miles of the Gulf of Alaska from Prince William Sound, near the fishing village of Cordova, eastward across the Copper River Delta to the town of Yakutat. By the 21st century, only about 50 Eyaks remained, according to the university’s Alaska Native Language Center, which Krauss directs.
Jones was a survivor from the start, her daughter said. Many of her siblings died young when smallpox and influenza tore through the Eyak Nation of south-central Alaska, “wiping out just about everyone but her family,” Galloway said.
“She was a woman who faced incredible adversity in her life and overcame it,” Galloway said. “She was about as tenacious as you can get.”
Jones was born in Cordova on May 14, 1918, and grew up on Eyak Lake, where her family had a homestead. She married Oregon fisherman William F. Smith on May 5, 1948. He worked his way up the coast and put down roots in Alaska when he reached Cordova and met her mother, Galloway said.
The couple had nine children, seven of whom are still alive. None of them learned Eyak because they grew up at a time when it was considered wrong to speak anything but English, Galloway said.
Jones moved to Anchorage in the early 1970s to be closer to her children. She struggled with alcoholism until she was in her early 50s, and quit drinking, Galloway said.
Jones twice spoke at the United Nations on peace and the importance of indigenous languages, Galloway said. She also became active in environmental issues.
“There was a transformation of our mother into a very pro-active, politically active individual,” Galloway said.
Krauss described Jones as a “wonderfully ordinary Eyak lady who lived to a ripe old age not because of an easy life but because of a rather hard life, coming up and surviving as an Eyak in the 20th century.”
For the last 15 years, Krauss said, Jones was the last of her kind.
“That was a tragic mantle that she bore with great dignity, grace and spirit,” he said.
With Jones’ help, Krauss compiled an Eyak dictionary and grammar. Jones, her sister and a cousin told him Eyak tales that were made into a book.
She wanted a written record of the language so future generations would have the chance to resurrect it, Krauss said.
Nearly 20 native Alaskan languages are at risk of becoming extinct, he said.
“This is the beginning of the end unless we do something,” Krauss said. “Alaska Native languages are the intellectual heritage of this part of the world. It is unique to us and if we lose them we lose what is unique to Alaska.”
(Article courtesy of the Houston Chronicle, http://www.chron.com )
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SUHARTO, FORMER INDONESIAN DICTATOR
Suharto during a ceremony in 1967 in which he replaced President Sukarno. More Photos »
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Mr. Suharto had been hospitalized on Jan. 4 with heart, lung and kidney problems, according to medical officials of Pertamina Hospital in Jakarta. His condition worsened dramatically over the weekend and he lost consciousness and stopped breathing on his own, they said.
A statement issued by the chief presidential doctor, Marjo Subiandono, said he was declared dead at 1:10 p.m. The cause of death was given as multi-organ failure.
Mr. Suharto was driven from office in 1998 by widespread rioting, economic paralysis and political chaos. His rule was not without accomplishment; he led Indonesia to stability and nurtured economic growth. But these successes were ultimately overshadowed by his pervasive and large-scale corruption; repressive, militarized rule; and a convulsion of mass bloodletting when he seized power in the late 1960s that took at least 500,000 lives.
As the leader of one of the world’s most populous countries, Mr. Suharto and his family became notorious for controlling state enterprises and taking kickbacks for government contracts, for siphoning money from state charities and for committing gross violations of human rights.
Yet Mr. Suharto remained virtually untouchable to the end, even as his successors in a new democratic system repudiated his rule. He was never charged with the killings committed under his command, and managed to escape criminal prosecution for embezzling millions of dollars, possibly billions, by having himself declared mentally incapable to stand trial. A civil suit against him was pending at his death.
After he was forced from office, he tried to give the appearance of a frail and humiliated former potentate, but he could be seen jogging and swinging a golf club at his home in the center of Jakarta. His health deteriorated in his final years and he became something of a recluse.
In his last days, a parade of the country’s power elite visited the hospital to pay their respects.
Mr. Suharto — who like many Indonesians used only one name — stepped down on May 21, 1998, just two months after arranging to have himself elected to a seventh five-year term. He departed with an apology to the nation. “I am sorry for my mistakes,” he said. But his quiet statement came only after the deaths of 500 student protesters, an event that shocked the people into a consensus that the president must go.
When demonstrators occupied the Parliament building, once-docile legislators finally called on the president to resign.
Like his predecessor, Sukarno, Mr. Suharto worked to forge national unity in a fractious country of 200 million people comprising 300 ethnic groups speaking 250 languages and inhabiting more than 17,000 islands spread over a 3,500-mile archipelago.
Sukarno had also fallen from power in a wave of violence, one that swept the country in 1965 after an attack that was officially portrayed as an abortive leftist coup. Mr. Suharto, one of the few senior military officers to escape execution on the first day of that uprising, moved decisively against the insurgents and effectively took control of the country.
Mr. Suharto dealt gingerly with Sukarno, a founding father of the nation who still had support within the army. Sukarno was kept as a figurehead while Mr. Suharto, a relatively little known major general, waited three years to officially succeed him, in 1968.
In the following years, governing through consensus, traditional mysticism, military repression and authoritarian control, President Suharto restored order to the country and presided over an era of substantial development. Many Indonesians benefited from his programs, but none more so than members of his family, who became billionaires many times over. Last year, he topped a new list of world leaders who had stolen from state coffers. The list, by the United Nations and the World Bank, cited an estimate that he had embezzled $15 billion to $35 billion.
Enigmatic and Magical
Mr. Suharto was an unlikely character to play such a major role in his country’s destiny. He was a private person, and although he wielded complete power, he spoke in gentle tones, smiled sweetly to friend and foe and presented himself as a man of humble origins, shy, retiring and enigmatic. Short and thick set, he almost invariably dressed in a Western business suit or a safari jacket once he gave up his military uniform, and a black songkok, the flat traditional Indonesian cap.
Read the rest of this article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/world/asia/28suharto.html?hp
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CHRISTIAN BRANDO, TROUBLED SON OF MARLON BRANDO
The cause was pneumonia, said the lawyer, David Seeley.
Mr. Seeley said Mr. Brando was taken to the hospital, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, on Jan. 11.
“This is a sad and difficult time for the family,” Mr. Seeley said.
Christian Brando was born May 11, 1958. His father, who died in 2004, was a reigning figure in Hollywood, and Christian Brando had small roles in a handful of movies. But he was better known for his brushes with the law.
He spent five years in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter in 1990 for killing his half-sister’s boyfriend, Dag Drollet, at the Brando family’s estate.
Mr. Brando said he had accidentally shot Mr. Drollet as they struggled for a gun during an argument over whether Mr. Drollet, 26, had beaten the half-sister, Cheyenne Brando, who was pregnant.
Ms. Brando, who later gave birth to Mr. Drollet’s son, committed suicide in 1995 after losing custody. She was 25.
Mr. Brando’s ex-wife, Deborah Brando, sued him for domestic violence in 2005. She claimed that shortly after their 2004 marriage, Mr. Brando repeatedly beat her and threatened to kill her in the presence of her teenage daughter.
Mr. Brando countersued, alleging that his ex-wife broke into his home and beat him because he wanted to annul their marriage only 10 weeks after exchanging vows.
The lawsuits were settled last year on undisclosed terms.
Mr. Brando was charged Jan. 10, 2005, with two counts of spousal abuse, and he pleaded guilty. He was placed on three years’ probation and ordered to participate in drug and alcohol rehabilitation and in a spousal-abuse prevention program.
Mr. Brando also was the one-time lover of Bonnie Lee Bakley, who was shot to death in 2001. At one time, Ms. Bakley claimed Mr. Brando had fathered her child, but tests showed it belonged to the actor Robert Blake, whom she later married.
Mr. Blake was tried for her murder and acquitted, but was later ordered to pay $30 million in a wrongful death lawsuit. In the civil case, Mr. Blake’s lawyer suggested that Mr. Brando was the killer. Mr. Brando, who had denied any involvement, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on the stand during the trial.
Mr. Seeley said Mr. Brando was not married at the time of his death and did not leave any children.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com )
2 Comments
February 23, 2008 at 10:00+00:00Feb
Thanks you for reposting my mother’s obituary. (IN REMEMBRANCE, 1-27-2008; DEBBIE HALEY, POLITICAL ACTIVIST, TEXAS BLACK CAUCUS LEADER). I am not sure how you found it, but she was a sister with a beautiful soul.
February 23, 2008 at 10:00+00:00Feb
Dear Mr. Haley,
My condolences to you on the loss of your mother.
Your comments are most welcomed.
Please come by and visit as often as you wish.