REP. STEPHANIE TUBBS JONES, LAWMAKER
Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the first African-American woman elected to the House of Representatives from Ohio and a leader in the fight against predatory lending practices, died Wednesday. She was 58.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio in 2005.
The cause was a ruptured brain aneurysm that Ms. Tubbs Jones suffered Tuesday, Eileen Sheil, a spokeswoman for the Cleveland Clinic, which owns the Huron Hospital in East Cleveland where the congresswoman died, told The Associated Press.
Ms. Tubbs Jones, a Democrat, was in her fifth term as representative of the 11th Congressional District, which includes most of the east side of Cleveland. Two years ago, she was re-elected with 83 percent of the vote. Before her first election to Congress, in 1998, she had been the chief prosecutor for Cuyahoga County in Ohio.
Considered a liberal, Ms. Tubbs Jones was a co-sponsor of legislative efforts to broaden health care coverage for low- and middle-income people and of programs supporting the re-entry of convicts into their communities. She was also the author of legislation requiring certification for mortgage brokers and stiffer penalties for predatory loans.
In June, Ms. Tubbs Jones voted against emergency supplemental financing for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I feel it important that we have a plan for a timely redeployment of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan before we continue funding what has become a seemingly endless war,” she said at the time.
When Congress officially ratified President Bush’s re-election in January 2005, Ms. Tubbs Jones joined Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, in initiating a rare challenge to what has historically been a polite formal ceremony. They were objecting to accepting Ohio’s 20 electoral votes for Mr. Bush, citing voting irregularities in the state.
Instead of holding a courteous joint session to certify the election, lawmakers were forced to retreat to their separate chambers for two hours of debate. In the end, the House voted 267 to 31 against the challenge; in the Senate, the vote was 74 to 1.
Stephanie Tubbs was born in Cleveland on Sept. 10, 1949. She graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 1971 and received her law degree there three years later.
From 1976 to 1979, she was an assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor. In 1981, she won election as a Cleveland Municipal Court judge, and 10 years later she was appointed chief prosecutor.
As chief prosecutor, Ms. Tubbs Jones was at the center of a controversy in 1998 when she refused to reopen an investigation into the 1954 murder of the wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard, dismissing new DNA evidence that Dr. Sheppard’s supporters said would have exonerated him.
The case had received nationwide coverage in the 1950s. Dr. Sheppard spent 10 years in prison before the Supreme Court ruled that his trial had been prejudiced by publicity. He was acquitted at a second trial, in 1966, and died in 1970. With the new evidence, Dr. Sheppard’s son was seeking to collect damages on behalf of his father. Ms. Tubbs Jones argued that the new DNA results would be inadmissible because the samples were too old.
Ms. Tubbs Jones’s husband of 27 years, Mervyn L. Jones Sr., died in 2003. She is survived by her son, Mervyn II.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
RELATED LINK: https://kathmanduk2.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/us-representative-congresswoman-stephanie-tubbs-jones-is-dead-at-58/
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LEROI MOORE, SAXOPHONIST IN DAVE MATTHEWS BAND
LeRoi Moore, a saxophonist whose fevered riffs embroidered the distinctive music of the Dave Matthews Band with florets of jazz and funk, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 46 and had a home in Los Angeles and a farm outside of Charlottesville, Va.
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Michael Kim/Associated Press, 2005
LeRoi Moore at Roseland.
Ambrosia Healy, the publicist for the band, confirmed his death. She said that Mr. Moore had been hospitalized when he had sudden complications in his recovery from an all-terrain-vehicle accident in late June.
The Dave Matthews Band has been touring with a substitute saxophonist. It performed at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday and was to play there Wednesday night.
The widely popular group now plays the nation’s largest arenas, but it had the humblest of origins.
Mr. Moore, a large man with a laconic nature who was wont to edge out of view on stage when he was not playing, was a founding member. The band began in Charlottesville in 1991 after Mr. Matthews, then working as a bartender, asked some local musicians to record songs with him for a demo tape. Mr. Moore, along with his childhood friend Carter Beauford, who became the band’s drummer, agreed to help him out, though Mr. Moore would later say he was not all that impressed when he first heard Mr. Matthews sing and play. Nonetheless, he became an integral part of the band’s signature sound, an eclectic pop that bolsters light melodies and Mr. Matthews’s acoustic guitar with the sinews and muscle characteristic of funk artists and jazzy fusion groups.
Mr. Moore did much of the arranging, and as a soloist, on flute occasionally as well as saxophone, he “could honk deep soul-band riffs or waft jazz lines,” as The New York Times music critic Jon Pareles wrote after a concert in 2003.
LeRoi Holloway Moore was born in Durham, N.C., on Sept. 7, 1961, and his family soon moved to Charlottesville, where his father was a teacher and a coach at Albemarle High School. A saxophonist throughout his school years, he attended James Madison University, where he studied tenor sax, but left after a year to become a professional musician. He was playing in the John D’earth Quintet at Miller’s, a bar in Charlottesville, when he met Mr. Matthews.
Mr. Moore, who was engaged to be married to Lisa Beane in November, is survived by his mother, Roxie, of Charlottesville, and two brothers, Rodney and Jeffrey, both of Atlanta.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
RELATED LINK: https://kathmanduk2.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/leroi-moore-dave-matthews-band-saxophonist-dead-at-46/
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HUA GUOFENG, TRANSITIONAL LEADER OF CHINA AFTER MAO
HONG KONG — Hua Guofeng, who helped steer China out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution after the death of Mao in 1976, but was pushed aside by Deng Xiaoping after a short stint as China’s top leader, died Wednesday in Beijing at 87, the state-controlled media reported.
Greg Baker/Associated Press
Hua Guofeng in 2007.
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Xinhua, via Associated Press
Hua Guofeng in 1976, at his first public appearance as China’s leader.
An official in Mao’s home county, Xiangtan, in Hunan Province in the 1950s, Mr. Hua enjoyed a meteoric rise in the last two years of Mao’s life only to lose power almost as quickly after the death of Mao, his political patron. But Mr. Hua was a bridge between the excesses of Mao’s personality cult and the more pragmatic government of Deng, easing China out of the paranoia and isolation that characterized the final years under Mao.
In one of the first moves during his chairmanship of the Chinese Communist Party and prime minister just after Mao died, Mr. Hua’s security forces arrested the Gang of Four, including Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, effectively ending the decade-long Cultural Revolution. That movement — an attempt by Mao to solidify his totalitarian grasp on the nation and purge Communist Party officials he considered insufficiently loyal to his revolutionary agenda — had left hundreds of thousands of people dead, hundreds of millions of people traumatized and China’s economy in a seemingly irreversible slump.
Mr. Hua also presided over initial attempts to reinvigorate the state-directed economy, revive the education system and allow urban residents banished to the countryside during Mao’s reign to return to their homes.
But he never managed to put his own stamp on policy in the post-Mao era, and his time in power was brief. His influence evaporated by the end of 1978, and he was stripped of his leadership positions in 1980 and 1981. He lived the rest of his life in political obscurity in Beijing, although he remained a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee through 1997.
Deng, a veteran of China’s revolutionary struggle who had been alternately promoted and punished by Mao during the previous three decades, used his influence in the army and the Communist Party to make a sharper break with Mao than Mr. Hua favored. But although Deng first reduced Mr. Hua’s influence and then eclipsed him, Mr. Hua helped hold the ruling party together during what might have been a more volatile political transition.
Deng and his allies undertook the gradual but ultimately transformative market-oriented economic changes that a quarter century later have made China a major economic power, showcasing its industrial might, explosive urban growth and national pride to the world during the Olympic Games.
The consensus that has emerged is that Mr. Hua, despite his powerful titles, played a minor role in shaping that outcome, but that he also did not try to suppress the wing of the ruling party that supported faster change.
“He was more a figure who was there when Chinese politics pivoted than himself being a pivotal figure,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a political scientist and China specialist at the University of Michigan. “He succeeded Mao briefly because he was a guy nobody felt could dominate, so he didn’t set off alarm bells in any camp.”
Mao was reluctant to let strong rivals to his rule emerge, purging able administrators like Deng when they seemed to be developing their own power bases. Only in the months before Mao’s death did he elevate Mr. Hua to top positions in the government and the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Hua’s greatest virtue for Mao appears to have been personal loyalty. When Mao forced the creation of large agricultural communes during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, he was challenged by his more moderate defense minister, Peng Dehuai.
Mr. Peng accused Mao of having become so out of touch with conditions in the countryside that he did not even know about problems emerging in his home county. Mr. Hua was a senior official in Hunan Province with experience in the county and shrewdly backed Mao against Mr. Peng, who was quickly purged.
The state-run newspaper People’s Daily later wrote, “In the course of this struggle, Comrade Hua Guofeng bravely stood the storm and resolutely protected and implemented Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line and policies.”
Mao’s agricultural policies played a central role in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese from famine in the early 1960s. But Mr. Hua moved up the ranks of the Communist Party and came to international attention in early 1975, when he was named minister of public security.
He became acting prime minister in January 1976, succeeding Zhou Enlai. Mao confirmed Mr. Hua as prime minister three months later, and appointed him deputy chairman of the Communist Party.
He succeeded Mao as the party’s chairman when Mao died five months later, and he still held China’s top positions when the Gang of Four was arrested. Some Western scholars now argue that the decision to arrest the Gang of Four was made by elder leaders of the military and internal security forces, and that Mr. Hua went along.
But the decision was possibly Mr. Hua’s most lasting achievement, finally ending the influence of Ms. Jiang, Mao’s wife, who was viewed by many Chinese as squandering economic growth and political stability in pursuit of power for herself.
Intentionally or not, he also permitted the more pragmatic Deng to emerge as China’s main policy maker. Deng tapped the expertise of more moderate economic planners, who began relaxing the state’s suffocating grip on all commercial activity, especially in southern China.
Mr. Hua was increasing marginalized in this new order. As the pace of change picked up, he was accused of slavishly adhering to the so-called two whatevers: whatever Mao said was right and whatever Mao did was right.
Having lost most of his influence by the end of 1978, Mr. Hua gave up the post of prime minister to Zhao Ziyang, one of Deng’s protégés, in September 1980. Mr. Hua was forced to relinquish his positions as chairman of the Communist Party and the central military commission in June 1981, and was succeeded in these posts by Hu Yaobang and Deng, respectively. Mr. Hua resigned from the Politburo in September 1982.
Mr. Hua is said to have married and had four children, but little is known outside China about his family.
Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong and William J. Wellman from New York.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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PERVIS JACKSON, ORIGINAL MEMBER OF THE SPINNERS
Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press
The Spinners in 1997. From left; John Edwards, Bobby Smith, Henry Fambrough, Pervis Jackson and Billy Henderson.
DETROIT (AP) — Pervis Jackson, the man behind the deep, rolling bass voice in a string of 1970s R&B hits by the Spinners, died here on Monday. He was 70.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Claudreen, who said he had recently learned he had cancer.
A native of the New Orleans area, Mr. Jackson was one of the original five members of the group, which started out in the late 1950s singing doo-wop in Detroit. They worked under the Motown label in the 1960s but shot to stardom after moving to Atlantic Records in the 1970s.
With songs like “Mighty Love,” “I’ll Be Around,” “One of a Kind (Love Affair)” and “Then Came You,” the Spinners were a constant on the R&B and pop charts in the 1970s.
The Spinners compiled 12 gold records, according to thespinnersmusic.com, the group’s Web site.
Mr. Jackson last performed on July 19 in California with the remaining original members of the group, Bobbie Smith and Henry Fambrough, and two new members, his wife said.
Mr. Jackson was to perform with the group later this month in South Africa and in Wales in September, Ms. Jackson said.
Besides Claudreen, whom he married in 1968, he is survived by four children.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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DR. RALPH D. FEIGIN, CHILDREN’S DISEASES BOOK EDITOR
Dr. Ralph D. Feigin, a former president of the Baylor College of Medicine who edited an authoritative textbook on infectious diseases in children, died on Aug. 14 in Houston. He was 70.
Allen Kramer/Texas Children’s Hospital
Ralph D. Feigin in 2007.
The cause was lung cancer, said his family, who said that Dr. Feigin had never smoked.
Dr. Feigin’s two-volume work, “Textbook of Pediatric Infectious Diseases” (1981), is intended for diagnosticians; it addresses diseases of the eye, respiratory system and other organs and traces measles and other contagious illnesses to their origins. A sixth edition of the book was recently issued and it remains a standard in its field, with chapters on diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites, as well as the medications and therapies used to combat them.
A co-editor of the project, Dr. James D. Cherry, who is a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the idea for a comprehensive discussion of children’s diseases was conceived in the 1960s and developed in the ’70s, “at a time when there was no book out there quite like it.” Dr. Cherry said that, by inviting other physician-researchers to contribute chapters and using Dr. Feigin’s “organizing skill and encyclopedic knowledge,” the textbook has grown to 3,500 pages. Dr. Cherry and Dr. Feigin also wrote sections of the book themselves.
At Baylor, Dr. Feigin was chairman of the department of pediatrics and physician in chief at Texas Children’s Hospital, which is affiliated with Baylor, before being named president of its medical school. While Dr. Feigin was president, from 1996 to 2003, Baylor attracted research grants from the National Institutes of Health and led the nation in grants for pediatric studies in 2003 and 2004.
A colleague at the children’s hospital, Dr. Martin I. Lorin, said the hospital had grown “at a steady and accelerating rate” under Dr. Feigin’s leadership, enlarging its campus, recruiting additional staff members and increasing its patient capacity to about 450 beds from 200 beds in the 1970s.
Earlier, while at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1960s, Dr. Feigin conducted novel laboratory research on how the time of day may affect the outcome of both infection and vaccination. In work with other scientists, he studied how natural and daily fluctuations of amino acids in the bloodstream can govern the actions of infectious agents like viruses or bacteria. In laboratory mice, for example, the researchers found that bacterial infections introduced at 4 a.m. were the least likely to harm their hosts.
Dr. Cherry said the results, which were published in the journal Nature, remained intriguing but had yet to be explored fully.
Ralph David Feigin was born in Manhattan. He graduated from Columbia before earning his medical degree from Boston University in 1962.
From 1965 to 1967, he conducted research on infectious diseases for the Army in Frederick, Md. Dr. Feigin was a professor of pediatrics at Washington University before moving on to Baylor in 1977.
He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1995.
Dr. Feigin is survived by his wife of 48 years, Judith Zobel Feigin, a psychologist at Texas Children’s Hospital; three children, Susan Harris of Houston and Michael Feigin and Debra Sukin, both of The Woodlands, Tex.; a sister, Carol Bierman of Lansdale, Pa.; and six grandchildren.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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RONNIE DREW, FOLK SINGER AND GUITARIST WHO FOUNDED THE DUBLINERS
John Cogill/Associated Press
Ronnie Drew performed at a pub in Dublin for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, center, and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern in 1999.
Ronnie Drew, the gravelly voiced folk singer and guitarist who founded the Irish group the Dubliners and also sang with the Pogues and other rock bands, died on Saturday in Dublin. He was 73.
Mr. Drew, who had throat cancer, died in St. Vincent’s Private Hospital, his family said in a statement.
Known for his distinctive long white beard and deep voice, Mr. Drew and three other musicians — Luke Kelly, Ciaran Bourke and Barney McKenna — became the original members of the Ronnie Drew Group in 1962. Unhappy with the name, Mr. Drew changed it to the Dubliners, after the novel by James Joyce, which Mr. Kelly was reading at the time.
The group got started singing in Irish pubs, accompanied by Mr. Drew on Spanish guitar, which he learned while teaching English in Spain during the 1950s. He spent two stints with the Dubliners, from 1962 to 1974 and again from 1979 to 1995.
The Dubliners became widely known in Europe, as well as the United States, for bold versions of traditional Irish folk songs.
“You can take the hardest rock band on the earth and they sound like a bunch of girls next to the Dubliners,” Bono, the lead singer of U2, once said of the group.
Two of the group’s earliest hits, released in 1967, were folk songs: “Black Velvet Band,” which describes the deportation of a tradesman to Australia, and “Seven Drunken Nights,” a bawdy tale whose last two verses were considered too indelicate for public broadcast, leading to a ban by Irish radio. Regardless, the hits earned the band a spot on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1968.
Mr. Drew, a teetotaler in later life, was as well known in Ireland for his drinking antics and sharp quips as his music. Liam Collins, writing in The Belfast Telegraph on Tuesday, recalled a story told by Mr. Drew’s son, Phelim, about the morning the singer stopped into an empty pub for a cocktail. The bar’s only other patron looked at Mr. Drew and remarked, “I thought you were off the drink.”
“I am,” Mr. Drew replied, “but I have a gin and tonic every now and again. I find it helps me to mind my own business. Would you like one?”
Told that Michael Flatley, a founder of Riverdance, earned £1 million a week, Mr. Drew was asked what he would do if he took in a similar amount. “Work two weeks and then stop,” he said, according to Mr. Collins.
Mr. Drew was born Sept. 16, 1934, in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, south of Dublin. His wife, Dierdre McCartan, whom he married in 1963, died last year, and he was buried next to her on Tuesday in Greystones, County Wicklow. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Cliodhna, and five grandchildren.
In 1987 Mr. Drew and the Dubliners linked up with the Pogues, a group best known for blending traditional Irish and punk music, to record a fast-moving version of “The Irish Rover,” which became a British hit.
Earlier this year the Irish music world paid tribute to Mr. Drew in another hit song, “The Ballad of Ronnie Drew,” with proceeds benefiting the Irish Cancer Society. The ensemble included U2, members of the Dubliners, Bob Geldof, Andrea Corr, Sinead O’Connor and Glen Hansard, the Oscar-winning composer, who phoned in his section of the song while on tour.
Mr. Drew, by then bald, his distinctive hair lost to chemotherapy treatments, looked on with delight as members of the ensemble performed the song on Irish television.
In a statement Saturday on U2’s Web site, U2.com, Bono said that Mr. Drew “has left his earthly tour for one of the heavens,” adding: “They need him up there. It’s a little too quiet and pious.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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LEVY MWANAWASA, ZAMBIAN PRESIDENT
JOHANNESBURG — President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia, whose economic policies won the confidence of international donors and whose robust criticism of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe made him an anomaly among African heads of state, died Tuesday in France, seven weeks after a stroke. He was 59.
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Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Levy Mwanawasa at the United Nations in September 2007.
His death, at Percy Military Hospital in Clamart outside Paris, was announced by Vice President Rupiah Banda in the state news media; he called for a week of national mourning.
Mr. Mwanawasa has no obvious successor. Mr. Banda is expected to continue as acting president until a new election, which must be held within 90 days under Zambia’s Constitution.
Inside Zambia, a poor, landlocked nation of nearly 12 million people in southern central Africa, Mr. Mwanawasa may best be remembered as a crusader against corruption. Upon taking office in January 2002, he took on, among others, his predecessor, Frederick Chiluba.
“Everyone thought he was going to be Chiluba’s puppet, but he showed very quickly that he took orders from no one,” said Dipak Patel, a former minister of commerce, trade and industry under Mr. Mwanawasa.
Outside Zambia, the president became well known recently for his outspoken criticism of Mr. Mugabe, a liberation hero who has led his nation into such an economic catastrophe that Mr. Mwanawasa called it “a sinking Titanic.”
In April, while Zimbabwe’s government was withholding the results of the presidential election, Mr. Mwanawasa, acting as the leader of the Southern Africa Development Community, convened a special meeting of the 14-nation bloc and openly upbraided Mr. Mugabe.
Mr. Mwanawasa was expected to continue with similar rebukes at a meeting of the African Union in Egypt on June 29. But just hours before the opening session, he had a stroke and was hospitalized. Mr. Banda said Monday that the president’s condition had worsened and he underwent emergency surgery.
Levy Patrick Mwanawasa was born in Mufulira, a city amid the copper mines of northern Zambia. A law graduate of the University of Zambia, he later became a strong advocate for multiparty democracy.
When Mr. Chiluba defeated the nation’s founding president, Kenneth Kaunda, in the 1991 election, Mr. Mwanawasa was named vice president. He served until 1994, when he resigned, complaining that corruption had infested the government.
Nevertheless, when Mr. Chiluba left office, he endorsed Mr. Mwanawasa as his successor, apparently assuming that his choice would safeguard the secrets of a government that had much to conceal.
Mr. Mwanawasa was not a lively campaigner. His speaking style was so uninspiring that some called him “The Cabbage.” He narrowly won the election with just 29 percent of the vote, the rest split among 10 other candidates.
As president, Mr. Mwanawasa shined a light on official corruption. Mr. Chiluba still faces charges in Zambia. In a civil case, a British court found him guilty last year of channeling $46 million from state coffers through bank accounts in London.
As the anticorruption campaign garnered headlines, Mr. Mwanawasa instituted policies of fiscal austerity that won over Western donors. Much of Zambia’s foreign debt was forgiven.
Investors were attracted to Zambia, a copper-rich nation.
But though Zambia has enjoyed sustained economic growth, poverty remains an overwhelming fact of life for most of the population. In 2006, before his re-election, Mr. Mwanawasa called the enduring impoverishment “one of my failures.”
Mr. Mwanawasa is survived by his wife, Maureen, and six children.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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MANNY FARBER, ICONOCLASTIC FILM CRITIC AND ARTIST
Manny Farber, a painter whose spiky, impassioned film criticism waged war against sacred cows like Orson Welles and elevated American genre-movie directors like Howard Hawks and Sam Fuller to the Hollywood pantheon, died on Monday at his home in Leucadia, Calif. He was 91.
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Collection of Charles J. Williams and Sharon M. Little, San Diego
“Domestic Movies,” a 1985 bird’s-eye still life by Manny Farber.
His death was confirmed by Jean-Pierre Gorin, a friend and colleague at the University of California at San Diego.
Mr. Farber, a quirky prose stylist with a barbed lance, responded to film viscerally. He despised what he called the “art-infected” films of cinematic greats like Welles and Alfred Hitchcock — “the water-buffaloes of film art,” he once called them — preferring the work of genre directors like Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh and William A. Wellman, who transformed pulp material and genre conventions into “private runways to the truth.”
In a famous essay for Film Culture magazine in 1962, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” he lambasted the portentous, meaning-laden cinema of Welles and his progeny and praised the freewheeling, instinctive work of underrated directors of crime, western and horror films.
“A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity,” Mr. Farber wrote.
In his view, “Citizen Kane” ran a distant second, if that, to “The Curse of the Cat People” or “Winchester ’73.”
Emanuel Farber was born in 1917 Douglas, Ariz., near the Mexican border, where his father ran a dry-goods store. His two brothers became psychoanalysts, and one of them, Leslie H. Farber, gained fame as an author.
He enrolled first in the University of California at Berkeley, then transferred to Stanford, and finally studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design.
After college, instead of plunging into an art career, he traveled east to live with Leslie near Washington and became a carpenter; he moved to New York in 1942 to pursue a career as a painter and critic.
He started out as an Abstract Expressionist and in the 1960s produced works on shaped, unframed Kraft paper. In the 1970s he developed an idiosyncratic style of still life. Often depicted from a bird’s-eye view, it incorporated pop objects like candy bars or alluded to scenes from his favorite films.
Retrospectives of his work were held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 1985 and at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2003.
Mr. Farber’s film criticism appeared in a bewildering variety of publications. In 1942 he succeeded Otis Ferguson as film critic for The New Republic, and in the late 1940s he became the film critic for The Nation, succeeding James Agee. He later wrote on film for Commentary, Artforum, Film Culture, Film Comment and the girlie magazine Cavalier.
“He was up there in the Clement Greenberg category as a critic, but operating on a wavelength so unusual that he was hard to peg, which is how he wanted it,” said Kent Jones, the associate director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “He understood film in a very immediate way — he could see the plasticity of it, the beauty of film in motion, in a way no one else could.” In 1970, Mr. Farber began teaching film at the University of California at San Diego, from which he retired in 1987. His teaching methods were unorthodox. As he talked, he showed snippets of film, sometimes with the sound off and sometimes run backward through the projector.
Later in his career he began writing his film criticism in collaboration with his wife, Patricia Patterson, also an artist. She survives him, along with his daughter, Amanda Farber of San Diego, and a grandson. His first two marriages ended in divorce.
Although he initially favored American directors, Mr. Farber embraced the work of Europeans like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. His last piece of film criticism, for Film Comment in 1977, was on the Belgian director Chantal Akerman.
A sampling of his film criticism appeared in “Negative Space,” first published in 1971; in 1998, Da Capo Press published an expanded version of the book.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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JOHNNY MOORE, FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE JAMAICAN GROUP THE SKATALITES
KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) — Johnny Moore, a trumpeter and founding member of the pioneering Jamaican ska and reggae band the Skatalites, died on Saturday. He was 70.
He died at a friend’s house after being released from the hospital where he had cancer treatment last week, said Herbie Miller, a music promoter.
Mr. Moore helped form the Skatalites in 1964 along with the saxophonists Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso and the trombonist Don Drummond.
In the months the group was together, it set about infusing jazz, movie themes and other genres with ska style. It broke up in the mid-1960s, but regrouped in New York two decades later. Two of the group’s albums, “Hi-Bop Ska!” and “Greetings From Skamania,” were nominated for Grammy awards.
Their music has influenced bands like 311, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and No Doubt.
Mr. Moore lived in New York City for 14 years but returned to Jamaica in the early 1980s. He last toured abroad about eight years ago with the reggae artist Bunny Wailer, and in recent years he made occasional appearances at Kingston clubs.
He is survived by four children.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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DORIVAL CAYMMI, SINGER OF BRAZIL
Dorival Caymmi, a Brazilian singer and songwriter who helped lay the foundations of bossa nova, wrote Carmen Miranda’s first hit and gave legendary voice to the romance of the beaches, fishing villages and bathing beauties of his native Bahia, died on Saturday at his home in Rio de Janeiro. He was 94.
The cause was multiple organ failure, according to accounts in the Brazilian news media.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, praised him as “one of the founders of Brazilian popular music.”
Mr. Caymmi’s career encompassed 60 years and about 20 albums, the last one released four years ago. But his influence transcended such measurable milestones and found enduring expression in the music of Brazilian greats like Antonio Carlos Jobim, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.
In an introduction to an anthology of Mr. Caymmi’s work in 1994, Jobim, the driving force behind bossa nova, a sophisticated jazz style derived from samba, wrote: “Dorival is a universal genius. He picked up the guitar and orchestrated the world.”
From the beginning of his career, Mr. Caymmi musically imbued his country with a rhythmic, romantic identity that went well with Brazil’s enticing geography and sultry, bikini-clad women. His first and immediately popular song, written at 16, “O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?” (“What Is It About Brazilian Women?”), set the tone.
That song became the first hit of Carmen Miranda, whose well-displayed limbs, extravagant hats and exuberant voice made her a global sensation as the Brazilian Bombshell. In 1996, the publication News From Brazil said Mr. Caymmi taught Ms. Miranda to move her arms and hands with the music, which became her trademark.
Songs like “Marina” (1944) and “O Samba da Minha Terra” (1941) inspired the greats of bossa nova.
Mr. Caymmi’s easygoing style was compared by some to that of Bing Crosby, not least because of his similar velvety baritone.
The laid-back Andy Williams and Perry Como sang Mr. Caymmi’s “Das Rosas,” translated as “And Roses and Roses” by the American lyricist Ray Gilbert.
Romero Lubambo, a Brazilian guitarist who lives and plays in the United States, said in an telephone interview on Monday that it was impossible to overstate Mr. Caymmi’s public recognition in his own nation.
“Everybody who is alive in Brazil today has probably heard of him,” he said.
Writing in The New York Times in 2001, Ben Ratliff said Mr. Caymmi was perhaps second only to Jobim “in establishing a songbook of this century’s Brazilian identity.” A large part of this was evoking the life and dreams of working-class people, particularly fishermen.
Dorival Caymmi was born on April 30, 1914, in Salvador, the capital of Bahia state. He had several jobs, including that of journalist, and won a songwriting contest in 1936 as part of Salvador’s carnaval. Two years later he went to Rio de Janeiro to study law and perhaps look for a job as a journalist.
But he went into the music business, and firmly established himself with the song Ms. Miranda performed in the movie “Banana-da-Terra” (1939). He became a regular on Radio Nacional, and his fame grew. He recorded for five decades, both singing solo with his own guitar accompaniment and backed by bands and orchestras.
Mr. Caymmi married the singer Adelaide Tostes, who used the stage name Stella Maris.
She survives him, along with their sons, Dori and Danilo, and their daughter, Nana, who are all also successful musicians.
News From Brazil reported that Mr. Caymmi’s nearly 70-year marriage survived some carousing on his part. It told of his wife’s finding him in a bar surrounded by women. She slammed a table, broke a glass, punched him, and left.
“He was a hard act to follow,” she said, “but it was worthwhile.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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GENE UPSHAW, N.F.L. UNION CHIEF
They called Gene Upshaw the Governor because he carried himself like a leader from the time he arrived in the N.F.L. from the tiny Texas College of Arts and Industries.
Jim McIsaac/Getty Images
Gene Upshaw was a guard for the Raiders for 16 years, and he played in three Super Bowls.
For 15 years, he was such a bedrock of the Oakland Raiders’ offensive line that he became the first player used exclusively at guard to be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And in an extraordinary second act, for 25 sometimes contentious years, he led the players union through the tumult of a strike, the gambit of decertification, the victory of free agency, an explosion in player salaries and the debate over provisions for retired players.
Late Wednesday night, with his union preparing for another contract negotiation with owners, Upshaw died at age 63 of pancreatic cancer. The union confirmed his death Thursday. His death stunned the N.F.L. because almost nobody knew he had been ill. Upshaw had appeared so gaunt at the recent Hall of Fame induction ceremony that some of those who saw him worried about his health. Upshaw was found to have cancer only last Sunday, when his wife took him to the hospital while the family was on vacation.
His death was so unexpected that earlier this week, the union had scheduled a news conference for him on Sept. 4 to discuss labor issues. Upshaw died with his wife and three sons beside him at his home in the Lake Tahoe region of California. At Giants practice Thursday, the team had a moment of silence in his honor before practice began.
“It’s devastating,” said Jeffrey Kessler, the union’s outside counsel.
On Thursday, the union’s executive committee voted unanimously to appoint Richard Berthelsen the interim executive director. Berthelsen is the union’s longtime general counsel and was a member of the negotiating committee for 37 years, during which he grew close to Upshaw. He will probably remain in the position until the union’s annual meeting in March and perhaps longer, until a new contract is negotiated. Among the former players who could seek the job are Trace Armstrong and Troy Vincent, both of whom have been active in union issues.
The negotiations are expected to be difficult. In May, team owners opted out of the current collective bargaining agreement, forcing negotiations to avoid playing the 2010 season without a salary cap and having a work stoppage in 2011.
“Losing him is like losing a chunk of myself,” Berthelsen said by telephone. “The game is better off for him having played it, and it’s better off for him having led the union than it would have been with any other single individual.”
Born in 1945 in Robstown, Tex., Upshaw picked cotton as a child, and he played just a year of high school football. But he earned N.A.I.A. All-American honors and was the Raiders’ first-round pick in the 1967 draft. He became a dominating guard when Oakland was at its zenith and is the only player to appear in three Super Bowls in three different decades for the same team. He played in 217 games and in many of them he anchored the left side of the Raiders’ offensive line with the Hall of Fame tackle Art Shell and the Hall of Fame tight end Dave Casper.
“They basically ran to the left, if they ran 30 running plays, 28 of them were going to be that way,” said Indianapolis Colts Coach Tony Dungy, who was a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers at the time. “I don’t know if you can put three better players together, ever, than those three guys.”
The former Raiders coach Tom Flores said the qualities Upshaw displayed in the locker room — confidence, intelligence and an outgoing, upbeat personality — made his ascension to union chief predictable. “He became a politician in the classroom,” Flores said in a telephone interview.
In 1980, Upshaw was part of a core of veterans that Flores turned to in order to bring the team together. After missing the playoffs a year earlier in Flores’s first season as coach, the Raiders were 2-3 heading into a game against the San Diego Chargers, whom they trailed by two games.
“I said, ‘You have to take care of the locker room for me,’ ” Flores said. “ ‘I need your help.’ ”
The Raiders won that game, 38-24, and went on to win that season’s Super Bowl.
But Upshaw’s power as the first African-American head of a major players union ultimately eclipsed his playing career. Drawn to politics early in his career, he became the head of the players association in 1983 at a time when the union was in dire financial straits.
“He built that organization from the ground up, and he fought fights all the way,” Armstrong said.
In 1987, the players struck, which led to games with replacement players. By 1993, Upshaw and the former N.F.L. commissioner Paul Tagliabue had negotiated a deal that gave players the right to free agency in exchange for a salary cap.
It was a landmark decision for the N.F.L., assuring a measure of competitive balance, starting a period of sustained labor peace and helping to send revenues and player salaries soaring. The salary cap is $116 million per team this season and, according to owners’ figures, players will be paid a total of $4.5 billion this season. Upshaw recently said that if the league ever played a year without the cap, he would not sell it to the players again.
But his greatest achievement as a labor boss was the establishment of free agency, which granted football players the same freedom of movement that players in other sports already had.
For years, Upshaw had been accused of being too close to Tagliabue, although Upshaw’s history as a player increased his currency with active players when he explained details of new deals. But before the last contract extension was approved in March 2006, Tagliabue had to ask Upshaw for a postponement to the start of that season’s free agency period to buy more time after negotiations broke down. Upshaw gave the owners 72 hours. Just after the clock expired, owners approved a deal that gave players 60 percent of revenues. Owners found the deal so favorable to players that it became untenable for them just two years later.
“If that’s what happens when you’re too close, I recommend everybody be too close,” said Robert K. Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots. “If anybody got an edge in that deal, he got it. It’s the reason we had to opt out of the arrangement. It just goes to show you people can be nice and cooperative, but that doesn’t mean you’re co-opted.”
Tagliabue said in a statement: “In both careers, if you hit him in the head, he could hit you back twice as hard — but he didn’t always do so. He was very tough but also a good listener. He never lost sight of the interests of the game and the big picture.”
In recent years, Upshaw came under withering criticism from a vocal band of retired players who believed he had not done enough to protect their interests, particularly those of players with health problems. Berthelsen said he believed Upshaw was hurt by the criticism, and Upshaw sometimes seemed frustrated as he tried to make the case that he had secured more assistance and benefits for retirees than anyone else had.
Upshaw’s public responses were often impolitic: he sometimes told reporters that he did not work for the retired players, and he once famously said of the Hall of Fame guard Joe DeLamielleure, one of Upshaw’s most consistent critics, “I’d like to break his neck.”
“Upshaw carried that Oakland Raider intimidation all the way to being the union leader he became,” said Sam Huff, a Hall of Fame linebacker. “That’s unfortunate, because he left a lot of guys out. He didn’t take care of the old guys. You want to feel sorrier than you do. It’s a mixed feeling that I have today.”
In April, Baltimore Ravens kicker Matt Stover e-mailed a plan to other union members to identify a successor to Upshaw and to potentially force Upshaw out by next spring, a year before his contract was to expire. Stover later said he was trying to get the union to prepare for the future, and other active players criticized Stover.
Upshaw’s response was typical for him: proud, stubborn and unmistakably blunt. He vowed that he would never leave his post until the next labor deal was done. It was months before Upshaw would learn he was dying. And as union leaders struggled with their grief Thursday, they began to prepare for the first round of talks without him.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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JAMES HOYT, LIBERATOR OF NAZI CAMP
ASSOCIATED PRESS
AUGUST 15, 2008
DES MOINES, IOWA — James Hoyt, one of four U.S. soldiers who discovered the Buchenwald concentration camp as World War II neared its end, has died. He was 83.
Hoyt’s wife, Doris, said he died Monday in his sleep at home in rural Oxford.
Hoyt served in the Army’s 6th Armored Division during World War II, earning a Bronze Star. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest battle fought by American troops in World War II.
Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps established by Nazi Germany, was liberated in April 1945. It is estimated that 56,000 prisoners lost their lives at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945.
“There were thousands of bodies piled high,” Hoyt said in 2005. “I saw hearts that had been taken from live people in medical experiments. … Seeing these things, it changes you.”
He said he had “horrific dreams” and received therapy at a Veterans Affairs hospital. Hoyt returned to Oxford after the war and worked more than 30 years with the U.S. Postal Service. He retired in 1992.
Doris Hoyt said her husband of 59 years rarely spoke about his service in World War II.
“I didn’t find out about a lot of it until after he passed,” she said. “He kept it all to himself.”
Besides his wife, Hoyt is survived by six children, 11 grandchildren, a brother and a sister.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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ALBERT VARGO, WELL-KNOWN RESTAURATEUR
By Lynwood Abram Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
August 20, 2008
“He was a very charming person, very good to work for,” said Jesus Medrano, who for 13 years has been general manager of Vargo’s Restaurant at 2401 Fondren in southwest Houston.
Medrano, who joined the organization 21 years ago as a busboy, said he had a good relationship with Vargo and his family.
For more than 40 years, Vargo’s, originally founded on an 11-acre site, has been noted for its extensive gardens, including a lake and swans and strolling peacocks.
Vargo’s was sold in 1996. After that, Medrano said, Vargo often dropped by to have a cup of coffee and relive old times. “He would often say: ‘This is my place,’ ” Medrano said.
“He looked upon it as his toy,” Medrano said.
Vargo loved the restaurant, but he thought at the sale that it was time to golf and be with his children and grandchildren, said his wife, Janis Gay Vargas of Houston.
Albert James Vargo was born on June 25, 1924, in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Paul Vargo and Anna Jasko Vargo.
During World War II, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps at age 17. A gunner on B-17 bombers in the 8th Air Force stationed in England, he was shot down twice, but escaped serious injury, his wife said.
In the mid-1950s, Vargo came to Houston, and owned the first Fish and Chips franchise in Houston. He later was a maitre d’ at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel.
In 1959, Vargo and his brother, Frank, bought the Black Angus Restaurant on Weslayan at West Alabama.
In 1965, Al left the Black Angus to open Vargo’s Restaurant, which quickly became a popular spot for dining and receptions. Frank Vargo died in 2003.
In addition to his wife, survivors include three daughters, Amanda Vargo of Houston, Denise Cheatum of Fort Myers, Fla., and Cathy Pool of Houston; and two sons, Alex Vargo of Houston and Dale Vargo of Georgetown.
Visitation is scheduled from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday at Forest Park Westheimer Funeral Home, 12800 Westheimer. Mass is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Michael Catholic Church, 1801 Sage.
Private burial will be in Forest Park Westheimer Cemetery.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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LEA WEEMS, DEATH CAMP SURVIVOR
Sent to Houston after WWII, she was active with the Holocaust Museum
By Mike Tolson Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
August 18, 2008
R. Clayton McKee For The Chronicle
Lea Weems and her family are travelling to Germany in March to commemorate some of her family history. Photo by R. Clayton McKee/For the Chronicle
Lea Krell Weems, whose childhood escape from a Nazi concentration camp ultimately led to many years of work with Holocaust remembrance groups, died Sunday of multiple myeloma. She was 76.
Born in Mannheim, Germany, Weems and her sister Ruth lived with their parents in Sinsheim until 1940, when they were rounded up and sent to a camp in southern France.
They were saved when their parents released them to the care of the French child welfare organization Oeuvre de Secour aux Enfants. They spent the remainder of the war in French orphanages and with a foster family.
“My mother gave us away and we never saw her again,” Weems told the Chronicle in 1997. “She must’ve known what was going to happen. I can’t get over this part because I think of giving my kids away, what it would be like. I think I couldn’t be that unselfish. Did I feel abandoned? Absolutely not. They were so brave and courageous and unselfish.”
Because their parents later perished in Auschwitz, the sisters were brought to the United States by a grandfather who had managed to emigrate here before the U.S. was in the war.
He died shortly after the girls arrived and they eventually were relocated to Houston by Jewish Family Services to complete their schooling.
Weems and her sister married and raised families of their own. In later years, Weems devoted her energy to educating people about the Holocaust. She spoke to students and did numerous media interviews, served on the board of directors of Holocaust Museum Houston and on its executive committee, and was President of the Houston Council of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. She also served on the board of OSE, the French agency that saved her.
“The museum meant a lot to her and she meant even more to the museum — she will truly be missed,” said Walter Hecht, chairman of the museum board. “She was an inspiration to everyone who ever knew her. She really knew how all of the survivors felt. She made it clear what their needs were and what they wanted to see happen at the museum, such as the importance of teaching about hatred and bigotry and apathy, which is part of our mission.”
Susan Myers, executive director of the museum, said Weems never viewed herself as someone special because she was a survivor, often saying that she was simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“But what she did with her life after the Holocaust made her truly someone special,” said Myers.
Survivors include her husband, Charles; sons David, Jeff and Gary Markowitz; daughter Judy Mucasey; stepson Chris Weems; stepdaughter Heather Paulson; sister Ruth Steinfeld; and 13 grandchildren.
A graveside service will be at 9:30 a.m. today at Emanu El Memorial Park.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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HOLLYWOOD JOINS MEMPHIS FOR A FAREWELL TO ISSAC HAYES
Matthew Craig/Commercial Appeal, via Associated Press
The Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis paid tribute to Isaac Hayes. An event was held in his honor on Monday in nearby Cordova.
Correction Appended
CORDOVA, Tenn. — It was easy to tell the Hollywood Scientologists from the Memphis music people as they passed the gantlet of television cameras and entered the suburban Memphis megachurch to pay tribute to Isaac Hayes. They were on the whole paler and skinnier and showed rather more cleavage than is considered properly funereal here in the South.
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Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Isaac Hayes
Karen Pulfer Focht/European Pressphoto Agency
Among those at the tribute to Mr. Hayes were the actress Kelly Preston, who talked about his humanitarian work.
Bill Waugh/Associated Press
The Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, whom the Rev. Frank Thomas joined after the service, spoke at the tribute.
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Karen Pulfer Focht/European Pressphoto Agency
Singer Bootsy Collins also attended the tribute.
The Memphians, on the other hand, tended toward vintage dresses and dark three-piece suits with expertly origamied handkerchiefs and matching ties.
Then there was the soul royalty, like Bootsy Collins, who wore a get-up involving wide pinstripes, a kerchief, and rhinestone-coated sunglass lenses with peepholes in the shape of stars, and the actual royalty, like Princess Naa Asie Ocansey of Ghana, who wore gold and red African finery and managed to get surprisingly low to the ground when she danced.
But there were also thousands of regular people, wearing regular clothes, who poured into the sanctuary of the Hope Presbyterian Church.
For a superstar known for his slick image and “bedroom baritone,” as one speaker called it, Mr. Hayes was deeply involved in the workaday life of his hometown, where he recently appeared on a billboard with a local congressman, Steve Cohen, who was fighting off a challenger. The billboard read, “Can you dig it?”
Mr. Hayes was also involved in literacy programs in Memphis schools, and in 1997, he and Lisa Marie Presley started the Church of Scientology Mission of Memphis.
“Isaac was not only a famous musician, but he was an accessible famous musician in his hometown,” said David Porter, with whom Mr. Hayes wrote “Soul Man” and other hits for Stax, the recording studio that defined what came to be known as the Memphis sound.
The first glimpse of Mr. Hayes, in a video clip from “Wattstax,” the 1972 concert in response to the Los Angeles riots, showed him in a multicolored cape that reached the floor. But people here knew him in a less glamorous light.
One attendee, Cora Williams, 88, said she had known Mr. Hayes as a child in Covington, Tenn., when their families attended church and singalongs together.
Another guest, Elvis Calvin, said: “I pulled Isaac out of a hole. He got stuck in the mud in his Lincoln, and we pulled him out. He came to the house. I got photos from that day.”
This feat apparently earned Mr. Calvin, a funeral director in Coldwater, Miss., a seat in the V.I.P. section.
Mr. Hayes returned to his hometown seven years ago, after a stint in New York, mostly to be closer to his 11 children and 16 grandchildren. He died at 65, after a stroke on Aug. 10 in his home.
There was oration by the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and musical interludes by Chick Corea, Kirk Whalum and Doug E. Fresh, the original human beatbox.
The jumbled hoopla seemed fitting for Mr. Hayes, a man who shaved his head at a time when Afros were chic, and cut an 18-minute track when songs were radio-ready at three minutes and change.
The stories fit into two general categories. Anne Archer and Kelly Preston, both actresses and Scientologists, detailed Mr. Hayes’s humanitarian work here and in Africa, while Al Bell, a co-owner of Stax, told how he came up with the name of Mr. Hayes’s first big album, “Hot Buttered Soul,” from a magazine advertisement for hot buttered rum.
Afterward, when asked what he made of the two factions coming together on one stage, Mr. Porter laughed. “Each of those components,” he said, “loved Isaac Hayes.”
On stage, the Rev. Alfreddie Johnson, a Scientologist, explained how Mr. Hayes might have become interested in the religion in the early 1990s, when he was filming a movie scene in the hotel in the Scientology Celebrity Center International in Los Angeles.
Mr. Johnson was coming out of the bathroom. “He came up to me,” Mr. Johnson recalled, “and he said, ‘Brother to brother, what are these white folks doing up in here?’ ”
Mr. Johnson told him that he was teaching Scientology learning techniques to gang members in Compton, Calif., in an effort to get them off the streets.
Word that a Scientology minister would be presiding over the tribute on Monday produced angry chatter on the Internet aimed at the religion, which some people consider to be a manipulative cult, and at the Christian church that agreed to play host to the program.
Though that report proved to be incorrect, the audience seemed apprehensive when Scientologists, who spoke openly about their faith, were on stage.
Local anecdotes drew a warmer response.
Craig Brewer, the Memphis filmmaker best known for “Hustle and Flow,” said he had insisted that the role of the bartender in that movie be cast with a local actor. It went to Mr. Hayes.
In an interview before the program, Mr. Brewer said that even among the outsize characters of the Memphis music world, Mr. Hayes stood out as an original. “You take Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Johnny Cash. After a while, Memphis was like a conveyor belt for these personalities. Boy, did Isaac come along and blindside everyone.”
Mr. Brewer noted Mr. Hayes’s knack for turning the tables.
“In a place that has a history of white artists taking black musical styles and making money off them, here is Hayes taking Glen Campbell songs and Burt Bachrach songs and making them so much his own that you question their origin,” he said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 20, 2008
Two picture captions on Tuesday with an article about a farewell for the singer and songwriter Isaac Hayes misstated the nature of the event near Memphis . It was a tribute to Mr. Hayes — not his funeral, which was a private service held on Sunday.
Two picture captions on Tuesday with an article about a farewell for the singer and songwriter Isaac Hayes misstated the nature of the event near Memphis . It was a tribute to Mr. Hayes — not his funeral, which was a private service held on Sunday.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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U. S. REPRESENTATIVE STEPHANIE TUBBS JONES REMEMBERED AS PIONEER
AP – 18 minutes ago
CLEVELAND –
August 30, 2008
A former president and a presidential hopeful were among those who paid tribute Saturday to the late Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Ohio’s first black congresswoman who was remembered as a pioneering spirit, loyal friend and dedicated public servant.
Former President Bill Clinton called Jones one of his family’s closest advocates and advisers, recalling how she tirelessly worked to help Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s failed presidential bid, even as it was in its final stages.
“You have given me and my family more, you have given your people and this country more than you will ever know,” Clinton said.
Tubbs Jones died Aug. 20 at age 58 of a brain hemorrhage caused by an aneurysm.
Hundreds of people, including family, friends and well-wishers, packed the memorial service at Public Hall in downtown Cleveland to remember her.
Besides being the Ohio’s first black congresswoman, Tubbs Jones was also the first black woman to serve on the powerful House Ways and Means committee, and serve in Ohio as a county judge, common pleas judge and prosecutor.
“If this work was hard or overwhelming, if she ever felt any loneliness in so often being the first, you never would’ve known it,” Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said. “Because Stephanie was not a complainer. She always had that big smile, even when times were tough. Self-pity was never an option as far as Stephanie was concerned.”
Obama said the loyalty Tubbs Jones showed to his chief rival for his party’s nomination spoke to her strength of character.
“During this most recent contest, Stephanie and I started off on different sides and she _ we would see each other and she just said to me, ‘This is what it means to be a friend for me,'” Obama said. “And all I could say is ‘I understand.'”
Tubbs Jones, who chaired the House Ethics Committee, was a passionate opponent of the war in Iraq, voting in 2002 against authorizing the use of military force. Just as the war was starting in March 2003, she was one of only 11 House members to oppose a resolution supporting U.S. troops in Iraq.
She studied sociology at Case Western Reserve University on a full scholarship that she attributed to affirmative action efforts. After graduating, she worked for the city sewer district and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Tubbs Jones was also elected Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge and county prosecutor before running for Congress.
Her friends said Tubbs Jones could be irreverent _ she lovingly called Rep. Tim Ryan her “white son” _ and she routinely made her congressional staff traditional southern meals.
“What struck me most about Stephanie was how, even after a decade in Congress, she was so utterly unaffected by the ways of Washington,” Obama said. “She was still a home girl. Stephanie couldn’t put on airs if she tried.”
Former Rep. Louis Stokes made Tubbs Jones his hand-picked successor in 1998 to represent Ohio’s heavily Democratic 11th District. She served five terms.
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 
Thank You!