+0000c31obeMon, 19 May 2008 18:17:46 +0000 5, 2006...10:00PMay
IN REMEMBRANCE: 5-18-2008
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Snyder, survived WWII Bataan Death March
Pastor bore his captors no bitter feelings
A unique and creative artist, he was not afraid to cross boundaries, change media
(I have been a bit under the weather lately, therefore I am posting my weekly “In Remembrance” a day late.)
JIMMY SLYDE, DANCER AND A GIANT OF RHYTHM AND TAP
Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
Jimmy Slyde performing at Town Hall in Manhattan in 2001.
Jimmy Slyde, one of the last great tap dancers of the big-band era, whose smooth moves carried him from swing and bebop to Broadway and the movies, died early on Friday at his home in Hanson, Mass. He was 80.
He died after a period of declining health, said Pete Peterson, a retired drummer who was a friend of Mr. Slyde’s for 51 years.
An elegant, engaging performer with a sharp wit, Mr. Slyde was one of the giants of rhythm tap, known for his great musicality, his impeccable timing and his ability to glide across the stage effortlessly. Closely affiliated with jazz, he worked with musicians like Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong during the big-band era. His strongest musical affinity was bebop; for years he worked closely with the pianist Barry Harris.
Born James Titus Godbolt in Atlanta in 1927, Mr. Slyde started tap dancing as a child in Massachusetts, where his family had relocated. While taking violin lessons at the New England Conservatory, he became interested in tap and soon decamped to Stanley Brown’s tap studio, where he was introduced to luminaries like Bill (Bojangles) Robinson. As a young man, he began performing in clubs with Jimmy Mitchell (the self-proclaimed Sir Slyde), using the name the Slyde Brothers, and soon was reborn as Jimmy Slyde, much in demand as an added attraction for the major big bands.
But as Mr. Slyde came into his own, opportunities for hoofers were drying up in America. In the 1970s he settled in Paris, where, with the help of Sarah Petronio, one of the pioneering women of tap, he helped introduce rhythm tap. He also appeared in the Paris production of the revue “Black and Blue,” which started in 1985, and performed in the production that opened on Broadway in 1989, which garnered 10 Tony nominations and 3 awards, starting something of a comeback for tap in the United States.
Mr. Slyde went on to appear in the film “Tap,” alongside Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis Jr., and also had roles in “The Cotton Club,” “ ’Round Midnight” and other movies. His numerous honors include a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1999, a Guggenheim fellowship in 2003 and a Dance Magazine award in 2005.
By many accounts a reluctant teacher, in the early 1990s Mr. Slyde was still one of several tap elders who presided over a series of legendary jam sessions at La Cave, a nightclub in Manhattan, which attracted an international array of dancers, including Savion Glover, Tamango, Max Pollak and Roxane Butterfly (the “Butterfly” came courtesy of Mr. Slyde).
Tradition, lineage and community are highly prized among tap dancers; in interviews Mr. Glover and Mr. Slyde described each other as being like family.
Mr. Slyde is survived by his wife, Donna, and a son, Daryl.
As Mr. Slyde’s health waned in recent years, he was increasingly absent from the tap festival circuit. But it was a rare tap event at which his name was not mentioned to warm applause.
“He’s the last of the Mohicans, or one of them, anyway,” said Jane Goldberg, a tap dancer and historian who recalled trekking to Massachusetts to study with him in 1982. She said she showed him all her hardest routines, only to have him tell her to do nothing but shuffles, a basic step, for the next three hours.
“His timing was impeccable,” she said, describing his ability to make the audience hear every sound in a phrase. “He was a real purist.”
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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ROBERT MONDAVI, NAPA WINE CHAMPION
Robert Mondavi, the California vintner who set in motion the rebirth of the Napa Valley wine industry and, to a generation of Americans, championed the idea that fine wine was an integral part of the good life, died Friday at his home in Yountville, Calif. He was 94.
Scott Manchester/The Press Democrat
Robert Mondavi at his 90th birthday party at Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley.
Bettmann/Corbis
Mr. Mondavi, left, and Baron Philippe de Rothschild in 1980.
His death was announced by the Robert Mondavi Winery.
The winery, hailed as an architectural masterpiece when it was built in 1966, set the style and tone for scores of wineries in later years and is still the valley’s most popular tourist attraction.
Under Mr. Mondavi, the winery grew into a $500 million-a-year business as it introduced to the United States European winemaking techniques like the use of French oak aging barrels and stainless-steel fermentation tanks.
An Italian immigrant’s son, Bob Mondavi, as he chose to be called, battled puritanical tradition, a hidebound wine industry, a skeptical public and even opposition within his own family as he fashioned himself into a symbol of America’s mid-century affluence and cultural coming of age.
With other promoters of good living like Julia Child and Alice Waters, he tried to lead the country away from shopworn Old World ways, insisting that Americans were second to none in creating elegance and enjoying it. Few did that better than he: he lived like royalty.
His business acumen never matched his romantic vision, however. He sold the company in 2004 after years of declining sales and bitter family dissension over how it should be run.
The company, which had become the Robert Mondavi Corporation and began selling shares to the public in 1993, was acquired by Constellation Brands, the world’s largest wine company, based in Fairport, N.Y., for $1.35 billion. Mr. Mondavi remained as chairman emeritus of the Mondavi unit.
In 2003, the year before it was sold, it was the sixth-largest winery in the United States, selling 9.7 million cases that year, according to Wine Business Monthly.
Mr. Mondavi was a master of the grand gesture. He championed California but led his employees on grand tours of Europe to see how other fine wines were made. Guests at Mondavi lunches found themselves sampling up to two dozen of the rarest French wines, opened to show that they were no better than California’s best. Many of America’s renowned winemakers trained at Mondavi.
“He wanted everyone to make it,” André Tchelistcheff, the legendary Beaulieu Vineyards winemaker, once said. “He wanted all California wines to be world class.”
Mr. Mondavi’s first wines were anything but world class. In 1936, fresh out of Stanford University with a degree in business and a few winemaking courses on his résumé, he went to work for Sunny St. Helena, a small Napa Valley winery partly owned by his father, Cesare Mondavi. Then known as Sunnyhill, the winery made wine from purchased grapes and sold it to others to bottle. By 1940, Bob Mondavi was the manager.
In 1943, he urged the family to buy the Krug Winery, then the oldest operating winery in the Napa Valley. Krug had fallen on hard times, and Cesare Mondavi was reluctant to approve the purchase — until his sons, Bob and Peter, explained how they could buy bulk wine from their own Sunny St. Helena, bottle it under the Krug label and make a fat profit. Cesare relented.
The sons ran Krug for 23 years, with Bob mostly on the road, selling, and Peter at home, making the wine.
His quest for ever-better wines led to tensions between the two brothers that finally erupted in 1965. The immediate cause was a fur coat that Bob had bought for his wife a few years earlier to wear to a dinner at the Kennedy White House. When, at a family council, Peter accused his brother of using winery money frivolously — for the coat — Bob struck him. The family rallied behind Peter and, at the age of 52, Bob was dismissed from Charles Krug.
Livened by lawsuits and court battles, the feud dragged on for 13 years, ending in 1979 when the Mondavi family was ordered to pay Bob $5 million for his Krug shares.
In 1965, however, he was jobless and, he said, almost broke. But he found investors, bought a famous vineyard at Oakville, south of St. Helena, and within a year had grown, harvested and fermented his first vintage under his own name, changing the pronunciation from mon-DAY-vi, which the family used, to mon-DAH-vi.
The winery, designed in spectacular mission-style by Cliff May, with an elegant campanile and a low entrance arch that framed the distant Mayacamas mountains, was completed in time for the 1967 harvest. It was the first new winery in the Napa Valley since the late 1930s.
Connoisseurs and wine critics were soon praising Mondavi wines for their quality. Behind the scenes, however, Mr. Mondavi began fighting for his corporate life. In 1969, his partners, who held a majority interest, sold their stake to the Rainier Brewing Company of Seattle, giving the beer maker 7 percent of the winery and all of its vineyards.
In 1977, the Molson Companies of Canada, which controlled Rainier, sold Rainier to the G. Heilman Brewing Company for $7.9 million, leaving Rainier a cash-rich shell. Mr. Mondavi bought the Rainier shares, adding them to his 25 percent equity, and finally took control of his winery and vineyards.
At the same time, the settlement with his family gave him the rights to a 5.5-million-gallon winery in Woodbridge, Calif., which he used for a new line of low-priced wines called Woodbridge. He also entered into a joint venture with Baron Philippe de Rothschild’s Château Mouton-Rothschild, creating Opus One, a separate Napa Valley winery that produces one of California’s rarest and most expensive wines, selling for more than $350 a bottle. Joint ventures in Latin America and Chile followed.
Mr. Mondavi’s children — R. Michael Mondavi, Tim Mondavi and Marcia Mondavi Borger — all worked for the family business, his sons eventually becoming co-chairmen. But as early as the 1980s, there were signs of internal discord. And after the company went public, in 1993, Michael and Tim left the company after their father publicly criticized them for, among other things, emphasizing low-priced wines at the expense of the company’s signature fine wines.
Robert Gerald Mondavi was born in Hibbing, Minn., on June 18, 1913. His father, Cesare, and his mother, Rosa Grasso Mondavi, were natives of Sassoferrato, in the Marches region of Italy. Cesare first worked in iron mines, then opened a grocery store and saloon in Virginia, Minn., and finally became a grape buyer, traveling to California to buy fruit for his winemaking neighbors in Minnesota.
In 1923, he moved the family — there were four children — to Lodi, Calif., then the wine grape capital of the country. Robert became a football star at Lodi Union High School, played rugby at Stanford, and married his high school sweetheart, Marjorie Declusin. After more than 35 years and three children, the marriage ended in divorce in the late 1970s.
In 1980, Mr. Mondavi married Margrit Biever, a Swiss-born, multilingual woman who had worked at the winery. They donated millions to establish the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Service at the University of California, Davis, as well as Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, in Napa.
As the winery faced tough competition from cheaper brands and its stock prices declined, Mr. Mondavi for a time was in danger of not being able to cover those gifts, according to Julia Flynn Siler in a 2007 book, “The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.” Eventually, however, the gifts were covered.
Mr. Mondavi wrote about his own life in a 1998 autobiography, “Harvests of Joy.” After the company was sold in 2004, Mr. Mondavi traveled the world, into his 90s, as an ambassador for wine.
He is survived by his wife and children as well as his brother, Peter, and nine grandchildren.
For all the family strife he had known, there was one bittersweet moment late in Mr. Mondavi’s life, when he went back to winemaking, briefly, with his brother Peter, with whom he had split 40 years before. Together, using equal amounts of grapes from the Robert Mondavi and Peter Mondavi family vineyards, the brothers produced one small barrel of wine, of 60 magnums. It was sold for charity at the 2005 Napa Valley Auction, fetching more than $400,000.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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REV. WILBURN SNYDER, SURVIVOR OF BATAAN DEATH MARCH
Snyder, survived WWII Bataan Death March
Pastor bore his captors no bitter feelings
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
The Rev. Wilburn Snyder, a Baptist pastor who survived the Bataan Death March in the Philippines during World War II, died Tuesday in the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He was 85.
Although Snyder endured the horrors of captivity in a Japanese prison camp and suffered lasting effects from that ordeal, he bore no bitter feelings for his captors, said his daughter, Theda Cuellar of Houston.
“He had no hatred towards those people,” Cuellar said. “As a Christian, he put away all that hatred, but he wanted people to know what they went through,” Cuellar said.
Twice during his years in the camp, Snyder, suffering from malaria, was “put out with the dead people,” but his Army buddy brought him back both times, she said.
“There was no medicine in the camp and the buddy stole some from the Japanese and nursed him,” Cuellar said.
When in December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, Snyder was a combat medic in the Army with the 3rd Battalion of the 31st Infantry Regiment. After U.S. forces surrendered in 1942, Snyder, along with thousands of American and Filipino defenders on the Bataan peninsula, was forced to march about 80 miles to the prison camp. On this journey, a large number of them perished.
After the war, Snyder returned to the Houston area and joined Ethyl Corp. as a pipefitter. A co-worker conducted a Bible study group which Snyder joined. He eventually became a Baptist minister.
Churches Snyder served as a pastor in the Houston area included Kashmere Garden, Northwood Manor, East Houston and Candlestick Baptist churches, Cuellar said. Snyder also was chaplain for the Gulf Coast Chapter of the American Ex-Prisoners of War.
“My dad was caring, loving, and most of all loved his Lord, his family and his country. He was a very good dad,” Cuellar said.
Wilburn L. Snyder was born on Jan. 23, 1923, in Plain Dealing, La., the son of Mary and G.A. Hammer. He was a graduate of Lee High School in Baytown and attended Lee College and the University of Houston. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Florence, and his brother, Clyde Snyder.
In addition to Snyder’s daughter, Theda Cuellar, survivors include his wife, Lan’l Snyder of Baytown; sons, Kyle Snyder of Goliad, David Smith of Crosby and Gregg Smith of Baytown; another daughter, Renae Haskins of Pasadena; brothers, A.J. Hammer of Baytown, C.J. Snyder and Michael Snyder, both of Louisiana; sisters, Margaret Selzler of North Carolina and Judy Knippers and Faye Harris, both of Louisiana.
A celebration of life is scheduled at 10 a.m. today at First Baptist Church, 206 Woolfe, in Galena Park. Burial will be in San Jacinto Memorial Park Cemetery.
(Article cortesy of the Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com )
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ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG’S ART EXPRESSED A LOVE OF LIFE
A unique and creative artist, he was not afraid to cross boundaries, change media
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG - PIONEER IN POP ART: http://www.chron.com/life/photogallery/Robert_Rauschenberg.html
Texas native Robert Rauschenberg, the prolific painter/sculptor/jack-of-all-trades who for decades stretched the definition of art, has died.
“He was one of the greatest inventors, in art, of the last 50 years,” said Josef Helfenstein, director of the Menil Collection. “Since the 1950s, he reinvented art all the time. He changed media. He crossed boundaries. He has a unique place in the history of postwar art.
“Jasper Johns said that no one has invented more than Rauschenberg since Picasso — and I think that’s a good way to look at it,” said Helfenstein, who curated the 2007 Menil show Robert Rauschenberg: Cardboards and Related Pieces, the artist’s last museum exhibit.
Rauschenberg died of heart failure Monday night at his home in Florida following a short illness, said Jennifer Joy, spokeswoman for his New York gallery, PaceWildenstein. He was 82.
Born in Port Arthur and raised in the Church of Christ, as a boy, Rauschenberg planned to become a preacher. But at age 15, he changed his mind.
“I wasn’t proper for that job,” he once told the Chronicle, “because I was not going to see evil in everything, and I was not about to give up my own life to get the promise of one later. I’ll take my chances and make the best of this world.”
That love of life, with all its wildness and imperfections, was almost the only thing that defined his art. In the ’50s, when Abstract Expressionists held their paintings above messy everyday life, Rauschenberg dragged street junk to his studio and incorporated it into “combines” — scandalous-seeming combinations of painting and sculpture.
Bed consisted of his pillow and quilt, mounted on wood, then painted and drawn on. Other pieces incorporated tires, stuffed farm animals, police barriers, light bulbs, tennis balls and stained-glass windows. To Rauschenberg, everything was material.
Even other art. Once, he erased a Willem de Kooning drawing and declared his erasure to be art.
Another time, he recruited his friend the composer John Cage, to drive a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of paper. Automobile Tire Print, he called the resulting work.
Sometimes, his work wasn’t even an object, but an event. He frequently immersed himself in collaborations with dancers such as Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. For 1963’s Pelican, he donned a helmet and parachute, then roller-skated to a sound collage of his own making.
In 1954, Rauschenberg met the then-unknown artist Jasper Johns. The New York Times said the intimacy of their relationship during the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art.
His vision of art was, literally, big. In Houston, a 1998 Rauschenberg retrospective curated by the Menil Collection spilled out of that museum and into the Contemporary Arts Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In New York, the same show commanded both Guggenheims.
During that retrospective, the MFAH showed 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece, a collection of paintings and sculpture that Rauschenberg had begun seven years before. It stretched 1,420 feet.
But even then, Rauschenberg wasn’t finished with it. He planned to continue it, he said, until “the final day.” It was a diary of his artwork, and he had no intention of retiring. He liked the idea that 1/4 Mile might someday grow to two miles.
In a review of Robert Rau- schenberg: A Retrospective, former Chronicle art critic Patricia C. Johnson wrote that the 1998 exhibit “compresses five decades of ceaseless artistic investigation into 300 choice objects. It also reveals that, at 71, this seminal artist still is the enfant terrible he was when he began to rattle art’s cages half a century ago. The massive exhibit, spread across Houston’s three art museums, attempts to give shape to an artist who, like an ever-changing chimera, is quite impossible to pin down or summarize.”
Rauschenberg’s last museum show, at the Menil, coincided with a show of Rauschenberg’s recent photo collages at Texas Gallery.
“He loved to work,” said Fredricka Hunter of Texas Gallery. “He never wavered from that,” even after two strokes left him unable to use his right hand. He attended the 2007 gallery opening in his wheelchair, still a charismatic, powerful personality.
“He was probably the most important 20th-century hero that I’ll ever know,” Hunter said.
Born in Port Arthur on Oct. 22, 1925, Ernest Milton Rauschenberg adopted the name Robert and took his first art class at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1947 after serving in the Navy.
The GI Bill enabled him to study at the Académie Julian in Paris and the avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where the legendary Josef Albers was teaching.
He settled in New York in 1950. It was the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, but Rauschenberg would have no truck with it.
He lived on day-old bread and buttermilk and imposed on himself “a kind of morality,” he told the Chronicle in 1998.
“If I couldn’t find material to do an artwork walking around the block once, I wouldn’t do it.”
In later years the block included the entire world: his home on Captiva Island in Florida as well as countries from Mexico to Tibet that have participated in his artists’ collaborative, the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange.
But his moral rule never fundamentally changed.
“I have a great curiosity, and I switch materials often when I can’t think of anything new to do,” Rauschenberg told the Chronicle before the three-museum retrospective in Houston.
“Problems turn me on. They are limitations, and somehow, limitations not only insist on what you can’t do but sometimes force you to do something that you couldn’t think of before.”
Rauschenberg is survived by his partner of 25 years, artist Darryl Pottorf, and his son, Christopher.
(Article courtesy of the Houdton Chronicle: http://www.chron.com )
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BURLEY L. BULLOCK, NOTED HOUSTON JEWELER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Burley L. Bullock, a former executive at Zales Jewelers who later founded Bullock Estate and Diamonds in Houston and Corpus Christi, has died after a fight with cancer. He was 84.
Bullock also founded the International Watch & Jewelry Guild, which today has more than 5,000 members worldwide who buy, sell and trade timepieces, estate jewelry and diamonds.
“He was an entrepreneur,” said his wife, Olga Cortez Bullock. “He was unbelievable. He could see the future very well before people would even think of certain things.”
Bullock, who died Saturday, was remembered Monday by family, friends and business associates as a devoted family man who is credited for establishing the market for the resale of fine watches.
“He started something that no one even thought about years ago when he started developing these watch shows for different dealers and collectors to buy and sell watches,” said Harold Reese, owner of Harold Reese Jewelry.
Olga Bullock said she and her husband started the IWJG “out of a briefcase.” There are members in 52 countries.
Gene Wall, president of an advertising agency that handles the Bullock account, said Bullock had personal contact with his customers, including those who were selling jewelry that belonged to a deceased relative.
“Mr. Bullock always took them into a closed, secured room and treated them with respect. It wasn’t like going to a pawnshop,” said Wall, who called Bullock a second father.
One of Bullock’s sons, James R. Bullock, said he and his siblings are in the jewelry business, some of them working for his father’s company.
“He was the type of gentleman who wanted the most and expected the best from all of us,” he said.
James Bullock, who specializes in buying watches for the family’s business, said his father started out as a salesman for Zales in 1940 and worked his way up to executive senior vice president by the time he left in 1972. At that time, he opened his own business.
Burley Bullock was born May 24, 1923, in Rocky Mount, N.C. He served in the Army during World War II.
He also is survived by another son, Mickey Bullock; daughters, Jana Lynn Jackson and her husband, Danny; and Christina LeDoux and her husband, Charlie.
The family will receive friends from 6-8 p.m. today at Forest Park Westheimer, 12800 Westheimer. Funeral will be 10 a.m. Wednesday in the Forest Park chapel, followed by interment in the memorial Mission Mausoleum in the funeral home’s cemetery.
(Article courtesy of the Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com )
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IRENA SENDLER, WHO SAVED 2,500 CHILDREN FROM THE HOLOCAUST
Associated Press
WARSAW, Poland — Irena Sendler — a Polish social worker who helped save some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto and giving them false identities — has died. She was 98.
Sendler died at a Warsaw hospital this morning, her daughter, Janina Zgrzembska, told The Associated Press. She had been hospitalized since last month with pneumonia.
Born in Warsaw, Sendler served as a social worker with the city’s welfare department, masterminding the risky rescue operations of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany’s brutal World War II occupation.
Records show that Sendler’s team of some 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.
Under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto’s sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler and her assistants went inside in search of children who could be smuggled out and given a chance of survival by living as Catholics.
Babies and small children were smuggled out in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages. Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.
In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps — Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.
When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.
“It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child,” Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler’s team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. “Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come.”
After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.
In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland’s communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983.
Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland. Only in her final years, confined to a nursing home, did she finally become one of Poland’s most respected figures, with President Lech Kaczynski and other politicians backing a campaign that put her name forward for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sendler is survived by her daughter and a granddaughter.
(Article courtesy of the Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com )
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The cause was complications of dehydration, said Jean-Yves Riocreux, the bishop of Pontoise.
Cardinal Gantin, the son of a railway worker, was archbishop of Cotonou in Benin before going to Rome. He worked closely with Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
One of the last cardinals to be named by Pope Paul VI, Cardinal Gantin spent more than 30 years in the Roman Curia. He served as head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace Commission and head of the Congregation for Bishops. That office is responsible for the world’s bishops and is one of the top Vatican positions.
While at the Vatican, Cardinal Gantin was known for maintaining close ties to the people of Benin, returning often to visit his native country.
Cardinal Gantin’s high church function also made him a symbol of success in Benin.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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HARVEY SCHEIN, PROMOTOR OF ‘BETAMAX’ AT SONY
By BRUCE WEBER
Harvey L. Schein, who led the Sony Corporation of America in the 1970s and doubled its size in spite of championing the failed Betamax video recording system and clashing with Sony’s top Japanese executives, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 80, and had homes in Manhattan; Washington, Conn.; and Sanibel, Fla.
The cause was lymphoma, said his son Justin.
It was in 1967 that Mr. Schein — a former protégé of William S. Paley at CBS who helped build CBS’s international record business — negotiated an agreement as president of CBS International for a new record company, CBS/Sony Records, with Akio Morita, the visionary co-founder of Sony, who at that time was its executive vice president. By 1971 Mr. Morita was president of Sony, and the next year, believing its American subsidiary needed American leadership, he turned to Mr. Schein, naming him president and chief executive.
Among the first Americans to reach the upper echelons of a major Japanese company, Mr. Schein led Sony America from 1972 to 1978, and his tenure was both successful and stormy. In the middle of it in 1976, Sony brought to market the Betamax, its first portable videocassette recorder. The machine, and its recording-and-playing format, initiated a famous corporate battle that the company lost after a rival company, JVC, developed a different format, the Video Home System (or VHS), which became the industry standard.
But Betamax also initiated a legal battle that essentially paved the way for the entire home video boom. In 1976, alarmed by what they saw as the parasitic nature of the home recording of television programs and fearing that people who recorded television shows to watch later would never tune in to reruns, MCA/Universal and Walt Disney Productions filed suit against Sony, charging copyright infringement and asking for an injunction against sales of the Betamax.
The suit was highly public. Mr. Schein appeared on Walter Cronkite’s nightly newscast with Sidney Sheinberg, the president of MCA/Universal, who called him a “highwayman.” And even though the publicity did not ultimately save the Betamax, it did help build consumer enthusiasm for new possibilities in home entertainment.
A determined cost-cutter and a believer in short-term profits, Mr. Schein increased Sony’s annual sales to $750 million from $300 million, according to John Nathan’s history of the company, “Sony: The Private Life” (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and according to a 1980 article in The New York Times, increased earnings sevenfold, to $60 million.
He was often, however, in conflict with Tokyo’s corporate culture, and Mr. Morita was perpetually trying to quell what he saw as Mr. Schein’s profit-chasing in favor of longer-term thinking.
Harvey Lester Schein was born in the Bronx on Sept. 15, 1927. His father, Morris, was in the textile business. He graduated from New York University and Harvard Law School and served briefly in the United States Naval Reserve before the end of World War II. He began his career in the entertainment business in the 1950s as a lawyer for Columbia Records, then a division of CBS.
In addition to his son Justin, who lives in Brooklyn, he is survived by his wife of 44 years, Joy; a second son, Mark, of Manhattan; and three grandchildren.
After his departure from Sony, Mr. Schein worked at Warner Communications and then became president of the Polygram Corporation, a record company that represented the American arm of another international company, the Polygram Group, which was based in the Netherlands and West Germany.
He left after two years to become president of Skyband, a Rupert Murdoch-owned broadcasting service for delivering subscription television programming by satellite. The company was short-lived.
Published accounts of Mr. Schein’s management style generally describe his temper and his abrasiveness in colorful terms, and it was these things, according to Mr. Nathan, that finally alienated Mr. Morita and brought Mr. Schein’s days at Sony to an end. In 1977, Mr. Morita suggested he give up the presidency of Sony America and assume the chairmanship instead, purposely creating a distance between Mr. Schein and management responsibility.
“I knew as I listened to him he was saying sayonara,” Mr. Schein said.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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DOTTIE RAMBO, GOSPEL SINGER AND SONGWRITER
Dottie Rambo, a singer and prolific songwriter who was one of the most successful women to write songs in gospel music, died early Sunday when her tour bus ran off a highway near Mount Vernon, Mo. She was 74 and lived in Nashville.
Her death was announced by her daughter, Reba Rambo-McGuire, who is also a singer.
With songs recorded by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Vince Gill and Whitney Houston, and a busy recording and touring career of her own, Ms. Rambo has been ubiquitous in gospel since the early 1960s. Many of her songs have become hymnal standards, including “I Go to the Rock,” “We Shall Behold Him,” “I Will Glory in the Cross” and “He Looked Beyond My Fault (and Saw My Need),” which uses the tune of “Danny Boy.”
The audience for Ms. Rambo’s style of Southern gospel is chiefly white. But she broke through the genre’s racial boundaries as one of the first white artists to use black backup singers. Her 1968 album of spirituals, “It’s the Soul of Me,” became one of her most successful solo projects, but it caused a stir in the gospel world when it won a Grammy Award for Best Soul Gospel Performance, a category whose winners were usually black.
Born Joyce Reba Luttrell in Anton, Ky., she left home at 12 and married Buck Rambo at 16. While still a teenager she made a publishing deal with Jimmie Davis, a two-time governor of Louisiana who was both composer and singer of “You Are My Sunshine” and other hits.
In her group with her husband, the Singing Rambos (later the Rambos), she sang inspirational lyrics in a folksy alto and helped develop a sound that had links to both country music and black gospel.
She toured widely on her own and with her groups — the Rambos played for soldiers in Vietnam in the late ’60s — until 1989, when a back injury temporarily halted her career. She returned in 2003, with a hit duet with Ms. Parton, “Stand by the River.” She resumed a brisk touring schedule, with about 150 concerts a year, said her agent, Beckie Simmons. Ms. Rambo was shuttling between engagements in Illinois and Texas when she died.
But it was as a songwriter that Ms. Rambo had her greatest influence. She wrote more than 2,500 songs, according to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, which inducted her into its ranks last year. While she never crossed over to pop as a performer, her songs found mainstream exposure through other artists; Ms. Houston recorded “I Go to the Rock” for the soundtrack to her film “The Preacher’s Wife” in 1996.
Ms. Rambo’s marriage to Buck Rambo ended in divorce.
In addition to her daughter, of Franklin, Tenn., who is married to the singer Dony McGuire, she is survived by a sister, Nellie Slaton, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; two brothers, Jerry Luttrell of Madisonville, Ky., and Freddie Luttrell of Sturgis, Ky.; three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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MURRAY JARVIK, WHOSE RESEARCH HELPED LEAD TO A NICOTINE PATCH
(Correction Appended)
Murray Jarvik, a psychopharmacologist who was among the first to study the hallucinogenic drug LSD and whose later research on the physiology and psychology of smoking was instrumental in the development of the nicotine patch, died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 84.
Murray Jarvik
The cause was pulmonary edema from congestive heart failure, said his son Jeffrey.
Dr. Jarvik had a distinctly two-part career, the first beginning in 1953 when, shortly after earning his doctorate in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, he accepted a fellowship in the psychiatry department of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. His job there was to study a relatively unknown substance then called d-lysergic acid, a psychotropic drug inadvertently discovered a decade earlier by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who died April 29.
“It sounded interesting to me,” Dr. Jarvik told the journal Addiction in a 2001 interview. “I put notices in The Village Voice newspaper, asking for volunteers, and hippies would volunteer to be subjects. I gave them LSD and various psychological tests I had worked out.”
It would be revealed only later, to Dr. Jarvik and to the public, that the financing for his research had come from the Central Intelligence Agency, which throughout the 1950s was looking for chemical agents to use as truth serums and other weapons in conducting the cold war. The results of his experiments, largely concerned with the effect of the drug on memory, contributed to some of the first published work on its perceptual and physiological effects.
In addition to his son Jeffrey, who is known as Jerry and lives in Seattle, Dr. Jarvik’s survivors include his wife of 53 years, Lissy; another son, Laurence, of Washington; and three grandchildren. Dr. Robert Jarvik, who developed the first artificial heart to be transplanted in a human being, is his nephew.
At Mount Sinai, he met his wife, then an intern, who wandered accidentally into his laboratory and was a heavy smoker, which became a factor in the crucial pivot in his career. So was his move to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he became an assistant professor in the emerging field of psychopharmacology in 1955.
Mrs. Jarvik said Monday that her husband had always thought smoking was harmful and that he was amazed it was so difficult for her to quit. By the time the surgeon general’s report on the wages of smoking appeared in 1964, he had already begun the second phase of his career, trying to answer a not-so-simple question.
“He was always looking for the reason,” Mrs. Jarvik said. “Why do people smoke?”
At Einstein, Dr. Jarvik taught monkeys to smoke. He and an associate, Dr. Elizabeth Van Lier, made cigarette smoke — or something very much like it — available to captive monkeys through sucking tubes and then observed their behavior. Within a few days, The New York Times Magazine reported at the time, “the monkeys were ‘smoking’ heavily.” In 1970, he published a seminal paper asserting that smoking was, indeed, an addiction and that nicotine was a prime contributing factor.
In 1972, Dr. Jarvik moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he spent the remainder of his career. (He took his monkeys with him.) In California, he turned his attention to methods of treating addiction to smoking. He did experiments with nicotine gum, and in the 1980s, with a young associate, Jed Rose, he began looking into the idea of quelling the smoking addiction with a nicotine patch.
The idea for a skin patch, said Dr. Rose, now the director of the Center for Nicotine and Smoking Cessation Research at Duke University, actually originated in 1981 and came from his brother Daniel, also a young doctor, who had just read about the transdermal administration of other medicines, like scopolamine for motion sickness.
Dr. Rose experimented on himself, rubbing himself with tobacco leaves and measuring his body’s physiological responses. With his brother and Dr. Jarvik as co-authors, he subsequently published two studies, one in 1984, which reported nicotine could be absorbed through the skin, and a second in 1985, reporting that nicotine under the skin could reduce cravings in smokers.
The three men applied for a nicotine patch patent in 1988; it was granted in 1990.
Murray Elias Jarvik — who always thought of himself as a New Yorker, his son Jerry said — was born on June 1, 1923, in the Bronx. His father, Jacob, was an upholsterer.
His lifelong battle with heart problems was brought on by a bout of rheumatic fever at 12. As a student at George Washington High School, he and a classmate finished first in what was then the Westinghouse science competition with a working model of an iron lung, made out of wood. He developed polio himself when he was 28.
A routine chest X-ray in 1992 found that he had lung cancer. It was caught early and he was cured. He never smoked, though he did take LSD, according to his son Jerry, though he did not talk about it much.
Dr. Jarvik went to City College of New York and received a master’s degree in science at U.C.L.A. before earning his doctorate at Berkeley and a medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco.
“It is strange that people should go to such lengths to burn and then inhale some vegetable matter,” Dr. Jarvik wrote in an introduction to a 1977 report for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Research on Smoking Behavior.” “We must find out what is rewarding about it.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 16, 2008
An obituary on Tuesday about Dr. Murray Jarvik, whose research helped lead to the nicotine patch to fight smoking addiction, misstated the year in which he learned he had lung cancer , although he was a nonsmoker. It was 1992, not 1982.
An obituary on Tuesday about Dr. Murray Jarvik, whose research helped lead to the nicotine patch to fight smoking addiction, misstated the year in which he learned he had lung cancer , although he was a nonsmoker. It was 1992, not 1982.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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JOHN PHILLIP LAW, ACTOR OF ‘BARBARELLA’ FAME
LOS ANGELES (AP) — John Phillip Law, the strikingly handsome movie actor who captured attention as an angel in the futuristic “Barbarella” and a lovesick Russian seaman in “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” died Tuesday at his home here.
He was 70.
His death was announced to The Los Angeles Times by his former wife, Shawn Ryan, who did not give a cause.
With vivid eyes, blond hair and imposing physique, Mr. Law was much in demand by filmmakers in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
He gained wide notice in 1966 with Alan Arkin, Carl Reiner and Theodore Bikel in “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” Norman Jewison’s cold war comedy in which a Soviet submarine runs aground off a peaceful New England island town. The French director Roger Vadim put Mr. Law’s looks to good use in his 1968 science fiction film “Barbarella,” which starred Jane Fonda, then Vadim’s wife, as a sexy space traveler in the faraway future. Mr. Law wore wings to portray Pygar, a blind angel.
His career also included television and varied foreign and American films, like “The Red Baron” (1971), “The Hawaiians” (1970) and “Hurry Sundown” (1967). Mr. Law was a California native, born in 1937 to the actress Phyllis Sallee and her husband, a police officer. After some extra work as a child, his interest in acting was renewed in a college drama class.
He appeared onstage in New York for a while before breaking into the movies, spending some time working with the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Erik Erikson, Who Reshaped Views of Human Growth, Dies at 91
(May 12, 1994)
Rita Hayworth, Movie Legend, Dies at 68
(May 14, 1987)
Jeannette Rankin, First Woman in Congress, Dies at 92
(May 18, 1973)
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