Bernie Mac, a stand-up comic who played evil-tongued but lovable rogues in films like “Bad Santa” and “Mr. 3000” and combined menace and sentiment as a reluctant foster father on “The Bernie Mac Show” on Fox, died on Saturday in Chicago. He was 50 and lived near the city.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, his publicist, Danica Smith, said.
Mr. Mac, an angry stage presence with a line of scabrous insults, parlayed his success as a stand-up comedian onto the big screen in a string of comedies that usually cast him as wily con men like Pastor Clever in “Friday” (1995) and Gin, the store detective in “Bad Santa” (2003). He also excelled playing short-tempered misanthropes, notably in his starring role as Stan Ross, the nation’s most hated baseball player, in “Mr. 3000” (2004).
In 2001, the Fox network took a gamble on “The Bernie Mac Show,” an unconventional family comedy in which Mr. Mac portrayed a childless married comedian who reluctantly takes in his sister’s three youngsters when she goes into a drug-treatment program.
The irascible Mr. Mac made a different kind of TV dad, “more Ike Turner than Dr. Spock,” Chris Norris wrote in a 2002 profile for The New York Times Magazine. Mr. Mac’s special style of tough love — “I’m gonna bust your head till the white meat shows,” he warned his surly teenage niece — set the show apart from other family sitcoms and raised a few critical eyebrows. But audiences saw enough of the character’s soft center to find the show touching.
“The success of my comedy has been not being afraid to touch on subject matters or issues that everyone else is politically scared of,” Mr. Mac told The Times in 2001. “It’s a joke, believe me. I’m not trying to hurt anybody.”
Mr. Mac incorporated aspects of his stand-up act in the TV show, and during each episode would break the “fourth wall” and address the audience. On one show, he swiveled in his chair and said, “Now America, tell me again, why can’t I whip that girl?”
“The Bernie Mac Show” show ran for five seasons, and Mr. Mac received two Emmy nominations for outstanding lead actor in a comedy series, in 2002 and 2003.
Bernard Jeffrey McCullough was born in Chicago to a single mother who inspired him to become a comedian. He told a television interviewer in 2001 that when he was 5, he saw his mother sitting in front of the television set crying. “The Ed Sullivan Show” was playing, and Bill Cosby was on the show. When Mr. Cosby began telling a story about snakes in a bathroom, she started laughing despite herself. “When I saw her laughing, I told her that I was going to be a comedian so she’d never cry again,” Mr. Mac said.
His mother died of cancer when he was 16, and he was raised by his grandmother on the South Side of Chicago. His two brothers also died, one in infancy, the other of a heart attack in his 20s.
At the Chicago Vocational Career Academy, Mr. Mac was voted class clown by his graduating class. But already serious about his intended profession, he turned down the honor. “I said, ‘I’m funny. I’m a comedian. I’m not a clown,’ ” he later recalled. “My humor had changed from foolishness to making sense.”
After high school, Mr. Mac worked as a janitor, a mover and a school bus driver before finding a job at a General Motors plant. In 1976, he married his high school sweetheart, Rhonda. He is survived by his wife; a daughter, Je’Niece; and a granddaughter.
Desperate to become a comedian, Mr. Mac told jokes for tips on the Chicago subway and performed at comedy clubs, many of them off the beaten track. “When I started in the clubs, I had to work places where didn’t nobody else want to work,” he told The Washington Post. “I had to do clubs where street gangs were, had to do motorcycle gangs, gay balls and things of that nature.”
In 1983, he was laid off at G.M., and for a time his family had to move in with relatives. The same year, he contracted sarcoidosis, an immune system disorder that can attack the lungs. In 2005, he announced that the disease had gone into remission.
Plugging away at his comedy career, he caught the attention of Redd Foxx and Slappy White, who invited him to do off-the-cuff material in Las Vegas in 1989. A year later, Mr. Mac won the Miller Lite Comedy Search, a national contest, with profanity-laced monologues.
In 1990, he was invited to do two shows with Def Comedy Jam, a tour featuring young black comedians, which was filmed for HBO. Small film roles followed in “Mo’ Money” (1992), “Who’s the Man?” (1993) and “House Party 3” (1994). He also performed on the HBO variety series “Midnight Mac,” and with the Original Kings of Comedy, a tour that showcased some of the most popular contemporary black comedians. The tour, which grossed $59 million, generated several HBO specials and a film of the same name by Spike Lee.
Mr. Mac made the move to television reluctantly. “The people come to see you, the person they fell in love with,” he said. “But when they see you on TV, you become a whole other character, another person, and they become disappointed, and I wasn’t going to allow that to happen to me.”
Nevertheless, he appeared in a recurring role as Uncle Bernie on the UPN sitcom “Moesha” beginning in 1996, and in 2001, he took the plunge with “The Bernie Mac Show.”
Praised by the critics for its fresh, irreverent take on the family sitcom, it became one of Fox’s biggest hits.
The show coincided with a spate of films that made Mr. Mac, if not a box office star, a welcome comedic presence with roles in “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” (2001), “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001) and its two sequels, and “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” (2003).
Last month, Mr. Mac, a fervent supporter of Barack Obama, dismayed the candidate at a fund-raising dinner in Chicago. Delivering a stand-up routine, he told salacious jokes and drew a reprimand from Mr. Obama, who warned him, “Bernie, you’ve got to clean up your act next time.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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Whe I first heard that Bernie Mac had passed away yesterday, I could not believe it. Surely it must have been some mistake. He was only a few weeks ago performing stand-up comic routines making many people, even Obama himself, asking Bernie to tone it down on his acerbic wit that he was so famous for.
I cannot believe that Bernie will no longer be with us, giving us so much enjoyment the way he did on his TV show, “The Bernie Mac TV Show”. Many times when I had a rough day, and just downright refused to smile or come down easy, I would catch one of Bernie’s episodes from his show, and no matter what I felt like, Bernie would sit right there facing the screen audience with his asides and soliloquies about life with his family (as custodian of his sister’s three children), and sooner or later, he would say something that would defrost the angst of whatever kind of bad day I had, and soon I would be laughing like so many people around the country at his family’s antics.
Like so many viewers, I would be squirting milk, juice, soda, or some other liquid projectile from my nose when Bernie would sit and relate to the TV audience something that the young children did that put him into a dither.
Bernie could do that to you.
No matter what kind of day you had, no matter how riled up you may have been, Bernie made you SMILE.
So, here’s to you Bernie. Gone too soon from us.
Thanks for all the laughter, joy and merriment you gave us.
Thanks for all the memories we will cherish.
Thanks for making us. . . .SMILE.
Smile though your heart is aching; Smile even though it’s breaking.
When there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by.
If you smile through your fear and sorrow,
Smile and maybe tomorrow,
You’ll see the sun come shining through for you.Light up your face with gladness, hide every trace of sadness.
Although a tear may be ever so near,
That’s the time you must keep on trying,
Smile, what’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile, If you just smile.That’s the time you must keep on trying,
Smile, what’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile if you just smile.
When there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by.
If you smile through your fear and sorrow,
Smile and maybe tomorrow,
You’ll see the sun come shining through for you.Light up your face with gladness, hide every trace of sadness.
Although a tear may be ever so near,
That’s the time you must keep on trying,
Smile, what’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile, If you just smile.That’s the time you must keep on trying,
Smile, what’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile if you just smile.
BERNIE MAC DETAILED BIOGRAPHY SITE: http://www.whoabc.com/men/b/bernie-mac/
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ISSAC HAYES, SINGER-SONGWRITER WHO DEFINED THE ‘70S
Isaac Hayes, the singer and songwriter whose luxurious, strutting funk arrangements in songs like “Theme From ‘Shaft’ ” defined the glories and excesses of soul music in the early 1970s, died on Sunday in East Memphis, Tenn. He was 65.
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G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times
Isaac Hayes performed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an inductee in 2002.
The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said that Mr. Hayes’s wife, Adjowa, found him collapsed near a treadmill at his home in Cordova, an eastern suburb of Memphis, and he was pronounced dead an hour later. The cause of death was not known.
With his lascivious bass-baritone and dandy wardrobe, Mr. Hayes developed a musical persona that was analogous to the hyper-masculine, street-savvy characters of the so-called blaxploitation films of the era. In his theme song to Gordon Parks’s “Shaft” from 1971, the title character is summed up in a line that has become a classic of kitsch:
“Who’s a black private dick/Who’s a sex machine to yall the chicks?”
(Furthermore: “He’s a complicated man/But no one understands him but his woman.”)
The “Shaft” theme won an Academy Award and has become one of his best-known songs.
But Mr. Hayes’s career stretched far beyond soundtracks. For much of the 1960s and into the ’70s he was one of the principal songwriters and performers for Stax Records, the trailblazing Memphis R&B label, and in the 1990s he revived his career by providing the voice for the amorous and wise Chef on the cable television show “South Park.”
Isaac Hayes was born Aug. 20, 1942, in a tin shack in rural Covington, Tenn., to a mother who died early and a father who left home. He was largely raised by his grandparents, and worked in cotton fields while going to school. He began playing in local bands, and by early 1964, when he was 21, he was working as a backup musician for Stax. His first session was with Otis Redding.
Soon he began writing songs with David Porter, and their music — like “Soul Man” and Hold On, I’m Comin’” for Sam and Dave, and “B-A-B-Y” for Carla Thomas — came to embody the Stax aesthetic. It was tight, catchy pop, but full of sweat and grit, a proudly unpolished Southern alternative to Motown.
By the late 1960s Mr. Hayes was stepping out as a solo artist, and his reputation grew as much for his music as for his dress. The cover of his 1969 album, “Hot Buttered Soul,” pictured him in customary style: shaved head, dark shades, gold chains, bare chest. The album was similarly eccentric, consisting of just four songs, including lengthy, elaborate versions of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk on By” and Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” It also included spoken segments that he called raps, and the album became one of his biggest hits, reaching No. 8.
When he was approached to create the score to “Shaft,” one of the first all-black films by a major studio, Mr. Hayes said he also wanted the lead role. The part went to Richard Roundtree, but Mr. Hayes recorded the music anyway. It was done in four days with several members of the Bar-Kays, one of the house bands at Stax.
With a cymbal pattern borrowed from Mr. Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” which Mr. Hayes had arranged, the song layered funk guitars, horns, woodwinds and strings, prefiguring disco. It became a No. 1 hit.
In 1971 he followed up the “Shaft” soundtrack with “Black Moses,” a double album that was another ambitious expansion of the vocabulary of soul music. In its original issue, the cover folded out to reveal a portrait of Mr. Hayes in crucifix form.
In the mid-’70s Mr. Hayes’s finances collapsed and his music turned explicitly to disco, a career dead end. Through the 1970s and into the ’90s he acted in several films, including “Escape From New York” in 1981 and “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” in 1988. His music from this era sold poorly, but his career revived in 1997 when he began playing Chef on “South Park.” A Scientologist, he quit the show in 2006, saying that he had been offended by an episode that ridiculed Tom Cruise and other prominent Scientologists.
He had health problems in recent years but had continued to tour and work occasionally in film (he had a role in “Soul Men,” a comedy set for release in November and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac, the comedian who died Saturday).
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Porter, Mr. Hayes’s fellow songwriter, said that his friend was “recuperating from a stroke,” but added that “in the middle of all that he was still trying to have fun” and had even returned to his birthplace in Covington to go fishing.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hayes is survived by their son, Nana; and 11 other children from three previous marriages..
John M. Hubbell contributed reporting from Memphis.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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We are losing them left, and right. Now we have lost Issac Hayes, author of the “Theme From Shaft”, (for which he won an Academy Award as “Best Soundtrack”), and the album classic, “Hot, Buttered Soul” (my favourite Issac Hayes album of all time.)
Issac had been a singer/composer for a long time, but, it was his album, “Hot Buttered Soul”, that put him on the map in the world of R&B, Soul and Disco.
Issac will be missed, and though many young people of today know him as the character “Chef” from the cable TV series, “South Park”, Issac deserves to be remembered for his classy, soulful music that still stands the test of time.
I especially loved Issac in his role as the “Duke of New York, A #1″, in the film, “Escape From New York”. He was the baddest of the bad guys in that role.
Thanks Issac for all the lovely memories you leave us with.
RELATED LINKS:
ISSAC HAYES OFFICIAL SITE: http://www.isaachayes.com/
HOUSTON CHRONICLE: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5935110.html
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LEE YOUNG, JAZZ MAN AND PRODUCER
Lee Young, who emerged from a family with musical roots deep in New Orleans jazz, drummed for greats like Ellington and Basie, became a pioneering black man in music’s executive suites — and survived his musician brother, Lester, by a half century — died on July 31 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.
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Lee Young Family Collection
The jazz drummer Lee Young in Los Angeles about 1941.
The death was confirmed by his grandson Wren Brown.
In contrast to his brother, whose debilitating battle with alcohol and personal demons is almost as well known to jazz fans as his saxophone solos, Lee Young, a teetotaler, lived a long life of accomplishment in both performance and the music business.
His recollections, from touring in a carnival act as a child with Lester and their sister, Irma, in the 1920s; to playing drums and cutting his first records with Fats Waller in the 1930s; to helping forge a vibrant jazz scene in Los Angeles in the 1940s, were recorded by the oral history program of the University of California, Los Angeles.
His experiences included teaching Mickey Rooney to play drums for a movie and becoming the first black — and for several years the only one — to be a regular studio musician in Hollywood. He played drums and conducted for Nat King Cole.
Mr. Young played on literally thousands of records, said Phil Schaap, the jazz historian.
As a record producer, Mr. Young developed a reputation for knowing in advance what would sell, and discovered Steely Dan, the jazz fusion-rock band.
Mr. Schaap called Mr. Young “a most significant figure in jazz who directly connected us to the music’s early glories: the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the jazz age, the swing era and bebop.” Mr. Schaap also said that Mr. Young, who led an integrated band when that was unusual, was “a hero in the fight for integration.”
Leonidas Raymond Young was born in New Orleans on March 7, 1914, to parents who were both musicians and teachers. His father had learned to play instruments including the violin, trombone and bass as he traveled the deep South at the time jazz was sprouting in New Orleans.
Mr. Young’s father was a stern taskmaster, drilling music into his children by putting notes on a blackboard before they even started school. He made them into a novelty dancing act for traveling carnivals until they learned to play instruments. Lee, the youngest, had visited more than 30 states by the time he was 8.
Lee was different from Lester as a youth. Lester would practice his saxophone for hours; Lee would rather sneak off to play ball. Lester begged off some of the vaudeville gigs, particularly longer stays in cities like Minneapolis and Phoenix.
The family finally settled in Los Angeles, where Lee and his sister entertained at the dance marathons that were the rage during the Depression. By this time, Lee was performing most often as a drummer, having switched from the trombone; Lester had decided to specialize in saxophone instead of drums.
Lee attended high schools in Los Angeles. He began playing with Mutt Carey, a trumpeter and bandleader who had gotten his start in New Orleans, and also toured with Ethel Waters. He made his first records at 23 as Fats Waller’s drummer. He played with Lionel Hampton and others, and started his own orchestra, actually a smaller combo. His brother joined the band in 1941, and its stature grew exponentially. They toured for the U.S.O., broadcast with Billie Holiday and were a hit in New York.
LA Weekly said in 2004 that Mr. Young for years was the only black staff musician at a major studio. Mr. Schaap wrote that Mr. Young got his job by turning down a chance to be Stan Kenton’s drummer at a time when Kenton led the nation’s hottest band.
In 1953 Mr. Young became Nat King Cole’s drummer and conductor, Mr. Schaap said. From this pinnacle of the music world, he had new insights into the business side of music, and decided to join it. He produced for Vee-Jay, Motown and ABC/Dunhill Records.
Around 1937, Mr. Young met a teenager named Norman Granz on a tennis court and began playing against him regularly. Granz was enthralled when Mr. Young introduced him to jazz and went on to create Jazz at the Philharmonic, the all-star touring group that took the music out of smoky bars to jam in the concert halls; Mr. Young and his brother can be heard on some of the recorded jam sessions.
Lester Young died in 1959; Irma died in 1993. Lee Young is survived by his wife of 55 years, the former Louise Franklin Young; his daughter, Rosalind Brown of Los Angeles; his son, Lee Jr., of Los Angeles; his half-sister, Vivian Johnson of Louisiana; six grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Mr. Young was interviewed for a book, “Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles” (1999) and said that when the music industry was segregated, white musicians were paid for seven nights of work, even though they were given one day off, while blacks had to work all seven days for their pay.
“I just loved to play so much, I went to different clubs and told the guys that if they wanted a night off, I would play in their place,” Mr. Young said. “So I got a chance to play all kinds of music, because I used to let these guys off.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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KAREN PASQUALETTO, WHO LIVED BOLDLY WHILE FIGHTING CANCER
“I have plans, and cancer is interfering with my plans!” Karen Pasqualetto said by e-mail a few months ago.
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Todd Heisler/The New York Times
DRIVEN Karen Pasqualetto and her daughter, Isabel. She lived to see Isabel turn 2.
Ms. Pasqualetto was the subject of an article in The New York Times last year about the uneven quality of cancer treatment in the United States, and patients’ battles with conflicting medical advice, tight-fisted insurers and rugged courses of therapy. Uncommonly candid, seemingly incapable of whining, she fearlessly exposed both her toughness and her vulnerability in a way that made her an ideal interview subject and an irresistibly engaging human being.
Her situation was beyond grim. In July 2006, about a week after giving birth to her first child, she was found to have colon cancer that had already spread to her liver. A doctor said she had six months to live.
Ms. Pasqualetto refused to give up. A self-described Type A go-getter, at 35 she had already had one successful career, in technology start-ups, and had moved on to another, helping to found a Catholic school in Seattle and becoming a teacher there.
Now, she was even more driven: she could not bear the thought of leaving her daughter, Isabel, without a mother. So she unleashed her determination on the disease. She fired the first doctor, sought second and third opinions, and chose an oncologist who said he thought treatment could buy her more time. Eleven months later, after 22 rounds of chemotherapy, she watched Isabel take her first steps.
In June 2007, she took a bold step, one that her oncologist did not endorse. She flew to Baltimore for a grueling eight-hour operation at Johns Hopkins, in which surgeons removed 70 percent of her liver and a footlong segment of her intestine.
Though she knew there were no guarantees, Ms. Pasqualetto began to let herself think and dream a bit about the future.
But her reprieve was short-lived. By December, cancer had reappeared in her liver, and she went back on chemotherapy. The treatment was arduous and exhausting, but she still managed to travel to Washington in March, to speak to an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration about her experience with drugs used to treat anemia in cancer patients. She reminded the panel that even small improvements in quality of life mattered to patients who were terminally ill and eager to make the most of whatever time they had left.
In May, she said by e-mail, “We have been having as much of a normal life as colon cancer allows.” She added, “We have the support of family and friends and most of the time that is enough.”
She continued to make plans to show Isabel to the world, and the world to Isabel.
She wrote: “I always try to live my life, rather than be immersed in desperation.”
In mid-May, she learned that the cancer had spread to her lungs. She contemplated an experimental drug that had never been tested in humans before, and ultimately decided against it.
On July 12, she celebrated Isabel’s second birthday.
Ms. Pasqualetto, 37, died at home shortly after midnight on July 28, with family and friends by her side. She leaves Isabel; her husband, Chris Hartinger; her parents, John and Ruth; her sister, Jill; her brother, John; and her former students and countless friends and admirers who took heart from her grit and tenacity, and her will to live.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ANTHONY J. RUSSO, PENTAGON PRESS FIGURE
United Press International
Anthony J. Russo at a rally at the University of Florida in 1973.
Anthony J. Russo, a shaggy-haired, countercultural, unemployed policy wonk when he teamed up with Daniel Ellsberg, a more button-downed antiwar figure, to leak the voluminous, top-secret government history of the Vietnam War called the Pentagon Papers, died Wednesday in Suffolk, Va. He was 71.
Mr. Ellsberg announced the death on a Web site, antiwar.com. Mr. Russo suffered from heart trouble.
Mr. Russo chafed at being called the “Xerox aide” because of his role in finding a copying machine and working long nights to reproduce the 7,000-page study. In fact, it was Mr. Russo’s words — after weeks of conversations — that had definitively started the enterprise: “Let’s do it!” he said, according to Mr. Ellsberg’s book “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.”
The two started copying the next night in a Hollywood, Calif., advertising agency that was above a flower shop and was owned by Mr. Russo’s girlfriend. It had an inauspicious beginning; they mistakenly left on a burglar alarm and were interrupted by a policeman. He paced about, gave no sign of suspicions and left.
In June 1967, Robert S. McNamara, the defense secretary, set up the Vietnam Study Task Force, ultimately employing 36 analysts and historians, to prepare a classified history of the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967. Its 47 volumes revealed conversations at the highest levels of government that sometimes directly contradicted official statements, including the timing and the scale of the United States’ troop buildup.
It was classified “Top Secret — Sensitive.” David Rudenstine wrote in “The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case” (1996) that “sensitive” was not part of the official classification system. It was a signal the contents could cause embarrassment.
Mr. Ellsberg first offered the papers to several senators and Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser. He found no takers. He then offered them to newspapers.
The New York Times decided to publish the materials and was followed by other newspapers. The Times won a landmark case when the Supreme Court ruled that the government had not met the heavy burden of proof required to stop publication of something in advance.
But in the later trial of Mr. Ellsberg and Mr. Russo in Federal District Court, on charges of violating conspiracy, theft and espionage laws, other important issues were raised but not decided. One was whether the Espionage Act of 1917 prohibits publication of secret material, or whether it must be passed to an enemy to be a violation.
The men were cleared even though their case never reached a jury, because Judge William M. Byrne Jr. dismissed the case in May 1973 after several bizarre twists. These included the judge’s learning that the office of Dr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist had been burglarized and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had lost records of perhaps illegally taped telephone conversations, as well as the fact that during the trial, the judge himself was approached about becoming director of the F.B.I.
From Mr. Russo’s perspective, the ordeal — even the beatings he claimed to have endured after being imprisoned for refusing to testify to a grand jury — was worth it. “The case has messed up my life,” he said in an interview with The Times in January 1972, “but what difference does that make?”
Mr. Russo was born in Suffolk on Oct. 14, 1936, and grew up in a middle-class family. He earned a degree in aeronautical engineering at Virginia Tech in 1960, then worked for NASA, helping to design the space capsule. He next earned two master’s degrees at Princeton, one in aeronautical engineering and one in public affairs.
He went to work for the RAND Corporation, which sent him to Vietnam to work on a study that involved interrogating Vietcong prisoners, whom he admired for the strength of their convictions. He broke out in tears in court when telling of a prisoner’s reciting poetry to him.
After returning to work at RAND in California, Mr. Russo experimented with the counterculture, riding motorcycles and writing poetry, according to Peter Schrag in “Test of Loyalty: Daniel Ellsberg and the Rituals of Secret Government” (1974).
Tom Wells, in his “Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg” (2001), said that Mr. Ellsberg — who had worked on preparing the Pentagon Papers as an analyst and moved to RAND in 1968 — told Mr. Russo he wanted to meet “some hippies,” particularly women. Mr. Russo took him to a commune.
Mr. Russo became Mr. Ellsberg’s closest male friend at RAND, Mr. Wells wrote; their conversations increasingly turned to the 2 of the 15 copies of the Pentagon Papers that had been deposited at RAND.
Mr. Russo pushed Mr. Ellsberg to use his more influential position to make the contents public. At first, Mr. Russo told Mr. Wells, Mr. Ellsberg “rolled his eyes at the ceiling.”
But Mr. Ellsberg increasingly concentrated on how to release the study and how much of it to release. He eventually decided to hold back four of the volumes, covering 1964 to 1968, to avoid criticism that he had harmed the peace negotiations.
Mr. Ellsberg said in his obituary of Mr. Russo that he had thought Mr. Russo would not be in danger of prosecution. But it turned out Mr. Russo, too, was indicted. Both admitted doing everything charged in taking the documents to be copied and releasing them to newspapers, but contended that this did not constitute a violation of the law.
Mr. Russo had earlier refused to testify before a grand jury and was imprisoned until he agreed to do so, but he never had to testify. In a news conference after the final trial, he recalled that it was “in the bowels of that courthouse I was beaten up by guards.” Prison officials denied this.
Mr. Russo was married and divorced twice and had no children. He worked for the Los Angeles County Probation Department for many years.
He told The Times that the Pentagon Papers case had transformed him into a “committed, full-time radical.” He always credited the Black Panthers with being his strongest supporters.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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LOU TEICHER, OF FERRANTE AND TEICHER, POPULAR PIANO DUO OF THE ‘60S
Lou Teicher, half of the piano duo Ferrante & Teicher, whose florid and sentimental versions of movie themes and love songs made them gods of easy listening and earned them wide popularity beginning in the 1960s, died on Sunday in Highlands, N.C. He was 83 and lived in Sarasota, Fla.
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Scott W. Smith Collection
Lou Teicher, at right, with Arthur Ferrante in 1964. Their florid arrangements made them reigning princes of easy listening.
The cause was heart failure, said Scott W. Smith, Ferrante & Teicher’s manager.
A classically trained pianist who was something of a prodigy, Mr. Teicher was a musician of extraordinary dexterity, the speed and clarity of his and his partner’s playing being among their crowd-pleasing qualities. The two met as children at the Juilliard School of Music, and their friendship became a professional team in the mid-1940s. Eventually, with their hit recordings of the themes from the films “The Apartment” and “Exodus,” and “Tonight,” from “West Side Story,” among others, they became known as “the movie theme team.” And for their appearances onstage or on television in matching flashy outfits and at the keyboards of imposing instruments, they were called “the grand twins of the twin grands.”
Louis Milton Teicher was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Aug. 24, 1924. By the time he was 6, his family was living in New York City, and young Lou was enrolled at Juilliard. His future partner, Arthur Ferrante, then 9, was already there. Mr. Teicher graduated in 1940 and received an advanced degree in 1943. Both he and Mr. Ferrante joined the faculty. They began performing together in 1947, initially as a purely classical duo.
Eventually, of course, they became famous for a kind of virtuosic kitsch: grandiose, emotional playing, embellished with glissandi, spectacular arpeggios and a back-and-forth communication that often made it seem as if the pianos themselves were conversing.
“Although we were two individuals, at the twin pianos our brains worked as one,” Mr. Ferrante, now 86, said in a statement after Mr. Teicher’s death.
Playing alone or with orchestras, with a wide repertory of pop tunes, show music, movie themes and modernized classical scores, the two men performed more than 5,200 concerts; made more than 200 television appearances; entertained Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan; and from 1951 to 2001 recorded about 150 albums, the last dozen or so for their own recording company, somewhat paradoxically called Avant-Garde Records.
Actually, in the early days of their partnership, they did have experimental tendencies.
Influenced by John Cage, they made several recordings with “prepared pianos,” that is, pianos with objects like cardboard wedges, rubber stops and sandpaper inserted among the strings to create a variety of unexpected sounds. This was in the 1950s, when, in addition to making what they called their gimmick recordings, they were playing 100 or so concert dates a year. At the time, they appeared in small community halls where the programming was strictly classical and they performed two-piano arrangements of works by composers from Bach to Rachmaninoff.
Mr. Teicher is survived by his wife, Betty; three children, Richard, of Linden, N.J., Susan, of Urbana Ill., and David, of Westport, Conn.; and four grandchildren.
It was in 1959 that the producer Don Costa moved from ABC Records to United Artists, taking Ferrante and Teicher with him. There the two capitalized on the record company’s affiliation with a movie company; Mr. Costa was being sent the scores from United Artists films, and when he received the theme from “The Apartment,” he brought it to the two pianists; it became their first big hit.
“All of a sudden,” said Mr. Smith, their manager, “they’d show up at some small theater, or a church or wherever they were supposed to play, and people would be lined up outside the doors to get in, and they’d be saying, ‘Are you going to play ‘The Apartment’?’ ” Mr. Smith added: “And they’d say, ‘No, we’re going to play Bach and Tchaikovsky.’ And the people would say, ‘But we came to hear ‘The Apartment!’ Literally overnight, they had to come up with a whole new two-hour program. They said, ‘People think we’re pop stars!’ ”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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DAN “THE MAN” SEGURA, BELOVED TEJANO DJ
By Joey Guerra Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
July 30, 2008
Segura lived in Rosenberg and was a DJ on Puro Tejano 980 AM, the only station dedicated to the genre in Houston.
Segura was born in Flatonia and spent more than four decades in the music business, including stints with regional bands Gary and the Epics and Los Kasinos.
“We were hardcore Tejanos,” said James Torres, a former Epics guitarist who met Segura as a teenager. The pair also spent five years together at a radio station in Rosenberg.
Torres talked to Segura on Sunday night and said he was “tired but up in spirits.”
Radio colleague Abby Chavarrilla worked with Segura for many years at defunct Houston station KQQK and remembers him as a “funny, funny guy.”
“When I think of Dan, I smile,” Chavarrilla said. “He always had a really positive attitude on everything. He was always taking every situation and making light of it.
“He was my friend.”
Visitation is from 8 a.m. till noon Friday at the Chapel of Davis-Greenlawn Funeral Home in Rosenberg. Graveside services will be held at 4 p.m. Saturday at Greenlawn Memorial Park in Rosenberg.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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ERIC DOWLING, GREAT ESCAPE VETERAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
AUGUST 7, 2008
AP
This is an undated family handout photo of ‘Great Escape’ war hero Eric Dowling made available Wednesday.
LONDON — Eric Dowling, nicknamed “Digger” for helping excavate tunnels used in the breakout from a World War II German prison camp that became known as the “Great Escape,” has died. He was 92.
Dowling played a key role in planning the 1944 escape by 76 prisoners from Stalag Luft III prison near Sagan in eastern Germany — now Zagan, Poland. He forged documents, made maps and helped dig three tunnels code-named Tom, Dick and Harry.
The daring breakout was one of the most celebrated incidents of the war and inspired the 1963 film The Great Escape starring Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough.
All but three of the escapees were recaptured, and 50 of them were shot on the orders of Adolf Hitler to deter future attempts.
Over almost a year, prisoners surreptitiously dug the tunnels 30 feet underground, shored up with bedboards and wired with stolen electrical wire. Tom was discovered by guards and Dick was abandoned, but the 300-foot-long tunnel Harry was eventually completed.
Dowling was not among the more than 200 prisoners chosen by lottery to make the escape attempt on the cold and moonless night of March 24. By the time German guards discovered the breakout, 76 men had crawled free.
Son Peter Dowling said his father died at a nursing home near Bristol in southwest England on July 21, a day before his 93rd birthday. He said his father was not a fan of the movie.
“He wasn’t the greatest admirer of Americans and it didn’t go down too easily that one of them should be playing the starring role,” Dowling said. “Parts of it he acknowledged were quite realistic but then he felt it turned into something that was completely untrue.”
In particular, Eric Dowling felt the scene in which McQueen races to freedom on a stolen motorcycle, “was well over the top.”
“A lot of the reality of digging tunnels was left out too,” his son said.
Many of the film’s characters were composites of real people. Peter Dowling said the one that most resembled his father was a flight lieutenant nicknamed “The Forger,” played by Donald Pleasance.
Born in southwest England in 1915, Flight Lt. Eric Dowling flew 29 missions as a navigator with the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. He was shot down in April 1942 and sent to the prison camp for Allied airmen.
After the war Dowling served as an RAF air-accident investigator and later worked for British Aerospace on the supersonic Concorde jet.
Dowling’s wife, Agnes Marie, died in 1997. He is survived by his son and a daughter.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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ERIK DARLING, CO-DOUNDER OF “THE WEAVERS”, MUSICIAN BEST KNOWN FOR WALK RIGHT IN
ESTES THOMPSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS
AUGUST 7, 2008
RALEIGH, N.C. — Erik Darling, the reedy-voiced guitarist and banjo player who deftly stepped in when Pete Seeger left the pioneering folk-music group the Weavers, has died after battling lymphoma. He was 74.
He died Sunday in Chapel Hill, not far from Raleigh.
Darling was perhaps best known for his hit Walk Right In and for his arrangement of the iconic Southern true-crime ballad Tom Dooley, which inspired the Kingston Trio’s recording of the song that topped the charts in 1958. He was a member of the Tarriers, known for its version of The Banana Boat Song (Day-O) — the signature tune of Harry Belafonte.
Darling also replaced Seeger in the Weavers in the late 1950s, a few years after the band was blacklisted for its political views.
“He was immensely talented,” said Fred Hellerman, an original member of the group. “When he came into the Weavers to replace Pete Seeger, which was a pretty tall order, he not only did that, but he brought so much of his own talents to bear that it was overwhelming. It really was.”
Hellerman said Darling moved to Chapel Hill a couple of years ago to be near Willard Svanoe, a fellow member of the Rooftop Singers, the band with which he recorded “Walk Right In,” a No. 1 hit for Vanguard Records in 1963.
In an e-mail posted on Darling’s Web site, Svanoe said Darling died early Sunday.
The Weavers first burst on the scene in 1948 in Greenwich Village and had their first national hit in 1950 with Goodnight Irene. But during the red scare of the 1950s, their politics came under scrutiny and the group was brought in to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
They soon found themselves blacklisted, and disbanded in 1953. It wasn’t until a Christmas 1955 concert at Carnegie Hall that they re-emerged to rejoin the national folk-music revival they’d helped launch.
“He was an absolutely logical person to be brought in” after Seeger’s departure, Hellerman said. “Of the next generation of Weavers, I mean he was so outstanding that it was hard then or even now to imagine who else we could have brought in other than Erik.”
Hellerman said he didn’t learn until many years later that Darling was uncomfortable with his band mates’ leftist leanings.
Hellerman said they last spoke about a year ago, but he had received a package from Darling in the mail a couple of weeks ago. It was a copy of Darling’s recently published memoir, I’d Give My Life — A Journey by Folk Music. Hellerman said he couldn’t put it down.
Hellerman said he had been meaning to write to Darling and tell him how much he enjoyed the book.
“My big regret is that I didn’t get to do it,” he said. “I did have the chance, but I didn’t take advantage of it.”
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
2 Comments
August 11, 2008 at 10:00+00:00Aug
To all the dearly departed, Bernie Mac, Issac Hayes, Lee Young and others,
Rest in peace.
Stephanie B.
August 11, 2008 at 10:00+00:00Aug
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