Charles Wright, who wrote three autobiographical novels about black street life in New York City between 1963 and 1973 that seemed to herald the rise of an important literary talent but who vanished into alcoholism and despair and never published another book, died on Oct. 1 in Manhattan. He was 76 and lived in the East Village.
The cause was heart failure, said Jan Hodenfield, one of Mr. Wright’s former editors; earlier in the year, he said, Mr. Wright had learned that alcohol had eroded his liver. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, Mr. Wright lived in the spare room of the Brooklyn apartment of Mr. Hodenfield and his family.
Mr. Wright’s three books were “The Messenger” (1963), “The Wig” (1966) and “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About” (1973), all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Together they describe a loner’s life on the fringes of New York society, his protagonists stand-ins for himself, working at low-level jobs, living in low-rent apartments, hanging out with lowlife personalities.
“The Messenger” was the best received of the three, perhaps because it told a more universal tale about being an outsider.
“The Wig” is a far angrier effort. “Malevolent, bitter, glittering,” the critic Conrad Knickerbocker wrote in The New York Times, adding that Mr. Wright’s style was “as mean and vicious a weapon as a rusty hacksaw,” and that he wielded it against blacks as well as whites. The book is an occasionally surreal, comic portrait of a black man, Lester Jefferson, who feels he must hide his blackness to achieve the acceptance and material rewards he thinks he deserves.
“Absolutely Nothing,” most of which had been previously published in columns that Mr. Wright wrote for The Village Voice, is a chronicle of seedy adventures — as a dishwasher and porter, as a lover, as a drunk — that some critics questioned as self-hating, though others found it evocative and disturbing. The three books were republished in a single volume by HarperCollins in 1993.
Charles Stevenson Wright was born June 4, 1932, in New Franklin, Mo. His mother died when he was 4, and his father, a railroad porter, sent him to live with his maternal grandmother. When he was 14, they moved to another central Missouri town, Sedalia.
By that age, Charles was an avid reader and knew he wished to be a writer; he dropped out of high school and spent his days in the library, and according to one story he told the Hodenfield family, he would read magazines in their bound stacks at the railroad station because he knew that once they got to the local drugstore, he wouldn’t be allowed in to look at them.
At 17, having read about the Handy Writers’ Colony in Marshall, Ill., newly founded by the novelist James Jones and others, he went there.
Mr. Wright served in the Army during the Korean War and moved to New York in his 20s. An early novel was rejected by Farrar, Straus, but an editor there encouraged him to write his own story, which became “The Messenger.” Over the next decade, his profligate habits — he told one interviewer his hobbies were smoking and drinking — seized hold of him. Mr. Hodenfield, who in the late 1960s was working at GQ Scene, a magazine for teenage boys, assigned him to write an article about Motown.
“He was a very strange man, and after we met I thought, ‘Well, this is not going to work,’ ” Mr. Hodenfield said. “Then he turned in the most perfect manuscript I’d ever received.”
The two men became friends, and when Mr. Hodenfield saw Mr. Wright, then 44, spiraling into oblivion, he offered him a room in his home. Mr. Wright leaves no survivors.
“He came to stay for a few weeks in 1976,” Mr. Hodenfield said. “And he stayed until just before he turned 64. He was a second father to both my children.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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CHARLES S. WRIGHT: BIOGRAPHY FROM ANSWERS.COM:
Wright, Charles S. (1932), novelist, columnist, short fiction writer, and black humorist. Charles Stevenson Wright was born and raised west of Columbia, Missouri, in the small town of New Franklin. Upon his release from the army in 1954, he wrote “No Regrets,” an unpublished novel about an affair between a black beatnik from New York City’s East Village and an upper-class white girl. Not until the 1960s would Wright begin publishing the blackly humorous, passionately idiosyncratic books that add tragic clarity to the nightmare of contemporary African American existence.
In The Messenger (1963), Wright draws so extensively upon his life that fact and fiction often blur. Realistically narrated in the first person by a fair-skinned black Manhattanite named Charles Stevenson, the novel dramatizes the isolation and alienation of persons who fall prey to America’s social, economic, and racial caste systems. Stevenson, a New York City messenger, constantly finds himself on the edges of power, yet is utterly devoid of any. A man perceived as neither black nor white, “a minority within a minority,” he is cast adrift in the naturalistic city of New York, where victory and defeat are accepted “with the same marvelous indifference.”
The Messenger brought Wright recognition and modest commercial success, but initially his 1966 novel The Wig was not well-received. Today, however, many people would agree with Ishmael Reed‘s 1973 assertion that The Wig is “one of the most underrated novels by a black person in this century” (John O’Brien, Interviews with Black Writers, 1973).
Wright’s use of fantasy and hyperbole distinguishes The Wig from most African American fiction of the mid-1960s.Set” in an America of tomorrow,” the novel depicts the desperately failed efforts of a twenty-one-year-old black Harlemite named Lester Jefferson to live the American dream. The book ends with his literal (and willed) emasculation, after Jefferson learns that the money he has earned parading around the streets in New York in an electrified chicken suit will prove useless to his successfully courting the black prostitute he has idealized as his “all-American girl.”
The years between 1966 and 1973 found Wright in various foreign and domestic locales. But his literary psyche remained firmly planted in New York City, the setting of the nonfictional pieces he began writing for the Village Voice, Collected, amended, and supplemented, these columns came to comprise Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About (1973), a book filled with the same drug users, male and female prostitutes, abusive policemen, and underinquisitive detectives one finds in his novels. These, plus America’s unstinting racism, have rid Wright of his optimism as surely as Mr. Fishback rids Lester Jefferson of his masculinity at the end of The Wig.
In 1993, Wright’s novels were collected in a publication again titled Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About: Complete Novels. Reading this collection makes it clear that Charles Wright is an innovator who in breaking with traditional fictional modes during the 1960s helped to negotiate space for Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, and other African American avantgardists.
Bibliography
- Frances S. Foster, “Charles Wright: Black Black Humorist,” CLA Journal 15 (1971): 44–53. John O’Brien “Charles Wright,” in Interviews with Black Writers, 1973, pp. 245–257.
- Eberhard Kreutzer, “Dark Ghetto Fantasy and the Great Society: Charles Wright’s The Wig,” in The Afro-American Novel since 1960, eds. Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer, 1982, pp. 145–166.
- Frank Campenni “Charles (Stevenson) Wright” In Contemporary Novelists, ed., Susan Windisch Brown, 1996, pp. 1072–73
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IRENE DAILEY, ACTRESS OF STAGE AND TV
Irene Dailey, a late-blooming actress perhaps best known for her roles in television soap operas and for her portrayal of the quick-witted, sensitive mother, Nettie Cleary, in the 1964 Tony Award-winning drama “The Subject Was Roses,” died on Sept. 24 in Santa Rosa, Calif. She was 88 and lived in Guerneville, Calif.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Irene Dailey with Frank Langella in “The Father” in 1995.
The cause was colon cancer, her friend Arleen Lorrance said.
From 1974 to 1986, and then again from 1988 to 1994, Miss Dailey played Liz Matthews in “Another World” — an upper-class-bred matriarch of a middle-class family dealing with the convolutions of life in the fictional town of Bay City. For that role, Miss Dailey won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding actress in 1979.
For a year, in 1969, Miss Dailey played a role in the crime-mystery soap opera “The Edge of Night.” Her many other television credits included appearances on shows like “Ben Casey,” “Dr. Kildare,” “The Twilight Zone” and “The Defenders.” Miss Dailey’s film credits include roles in “No Way to Treat a Lady,” “Five Easy Pieces” and “The Amityville Horror.”
It was only after appearing in a long series of Broadway flops that, in 1964, Miss Dailey received critical acclaim in the United States. It was for her portrayal of the mother in Frank D. Gilroy’s three-character drama, “The Subject Was Roses.” The play dealt with an incompatible couple’s love for their 21-year-old son (with Jack Albertson as the father and Martin Sheen as the son) after the son returns after three years in the Army.
“Miss Dailey’s Nettie is a luminous creation,” Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times. “She can suggest hurt and desiccation with a stricken glance. Wearing a plain hat and coat and holding her purse, she can turn to walk out of her apartment so that her back conveys her utter defeat and despair.”
Miss Dailey was born in New York City on Sept. 12, 1920, the daughter of Daniel and Helen Ryan Dailey. Her father was the manager of the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. Her brother Dan Dailey gained fame as a song-and-dance man and Hollywood actor.
At 8, Irene Dailey was dancing in vaudeville, and at 18 she was working in summer stock.
With consistent bad luck, she kept winning parts in what she once said were 13 of Broadway’s worst shows. “Miss Lonelyhearts,” for example, had a nine-day run.
Miss Dailey ran a lampshade store and worked as a waitress while making the Broadway rounds. Then, in 1960, she tried her luck in London. She was the 47th actress to try out for the lead in “Tomorrow — With Pictures,” about an American woman trying to take over a British newspaper empire. She got the part and drew rave reviews.
“Every plummy-voiced English rose of an imitation actress should be dragged to see Miss Dailey,” The Daily Express critic wrote. “She sweats love, breathes hate, weeps desire.”
In an interview with Time magazine at the time, Miss Dailey said: “I shall be 40 in September. I have nothing, really nothing. I’m not married. I have no children.”
“All I really care about is the theater,” she continued. “But now, for the first time, I know in my stomach that my work is good.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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NADIA NERINA, ROYAL BALLET DANCER
Nadia Nerina, a principal ballerina for the Royal Ballet known for her technical virtuosity, lightness afoot, effortless-seeming jumps and joyful charm onstage, especially in comedic roles, died Monday at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the French Mediterranean coast west of Nice. She was 80.
Denis de Marney, via the Royal Ballet
Nadia Nerina as she appeared in “Coppelia” in the mid-1950s.
Her death, after a long illness, was announced by the Royal Ballet. No cause was specified.
Ms. Nerina joined the Royal Ballet in 1947, when the company was still known as the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, and over the next decade and a half became a distinctly bright light within the company’s remarkably luminous roster of ballerinas, which included Moira Shearer, Margot Fonteyn, Svetlana Beriosova and Antoinette Sibley. In 1956, she was cast by Kenneth McMillan, in his first ballet, “Noctambules,” as an aging woman who is restored, in a sinister narrative, to her youthful beauty; in 1963 she appeared in the title role of Robert Helpmann’s “Elektra.” But her gifts were most in evidence in sunnier works like “Cinderella,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake,” “The Firebird,” “Les Sylphides” and “Giselle.”
Her star never rose higher than it did in 1960, when she was invited to perform with both the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad and the Bolshoi in Moscow. That same year saw the premiere of her most famous lead role, Lise in “La Fille Mal Gardée,” Frederick Ashton’s reworking of an 18th-century ballet by Jean Dauberval based on a painting by Pierre Antoine Baodouin. Its wispy plot notwithstanding — a young girl, Lise, in love with the handsome Colas, defies the wishes of her mother that she marry a wealthy dolt — it was widely viewed as a delight at the time, even a masterpiece, and over the ensuing decades entered the contemporary canon, in no small measure because of its leading lady.
“Ashton’s new ‘Fille’ is an unabashedly lyrical, bravura showcase for pixieish (5 feet 4 inches, 105 pounds) Nadia Nerina,” Time magazine declared on its premiere, calling Ms. Nerina “the company’s most polished virtuoso.”
Nadine Judd was born in Bloemfontein, in central South Africa, on Oct. 21, 1927. Several accounts of her life assert that she took her first dance lessons on the advice of a doctor, who said she had weak feet. She left South Africa at 16 for London, where she studied at both the Rambert school and Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. She joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet — it assumed the name Royal Ballet in 1956 — as a soloist in 1947. For her stage name she chose a variation of nerine, a South African flower.
In 1948, in Ashton’s “Cinderella,” with Fonteyn in the lead role, Ms. Nerina announced her presence in a solo as the spring fairy. She became a favorite of Ashton, who cast her in new works like “Homage to the Queen,” “Variations on a Theme by Purcell” and “Birthday Offering,” and eventually as the lead in existing works like “Ondine,” “Cinderella” and “Sylvia.” She became a principal dancer for the company in 1952.
By the early 1960s Ms. Nerina was often spoken of as the natural heir to Fonteyn. But her career path was diverted by the defection of Rudolf Nureyev, who joined the Royal Ballet and whose pairing with Fonteyn postponed Fonteyn’s expected retirement and revitalized interest in her career. Ms. Nerina danced successfully with Nureyev, but their relationship was often testy. He discomfited Ms. Nerina’s frequent partner Erik Bruhn by aggressively critiquing his performances.
In one famous incident, Nureyev, in a performance of “Giselle” with Fonteyn, created a sensation by inserting 16 entrechats-six — a figure in which, in a single jump, the legs open and close and open and close with the right leg first passing behind and then in front of the left — into the choreography of the second act. Ms. Nerina, feeling this was simply showing off and not artful, rebuked Nureyev when she danced “Swan Lake.” She inserted 32 entrechats-six to replace the 32 continuous fouettées — whiplike turns that are elegant but less muscular — in the ballet’s “Black Swan” pas de deux. Nureyev, seated in the hall with Ms. Nerina’s husband, Charles Gordon, stormed out.
Mr. Gordon, a banker whom Ms. Nerina married in 1956, survives her. They had no children.
In addition to possessing unquestioned gifts as a dancer, Ms. Nerina was known for her physical appeal. Often described as sexy — a recent article in The Daily Telegraph of London noted that she could not walk down the street without being whistled at — she caught the eye of more than one male dance critic.
“Miss Nerina is completely adorable,” the critic for The New York Times, John Martin, wrote after seeing her lead performance in “The Sleeping Beauty” in 1953. “She is pretty as a picture, has great charm and can dance like a million dollars. Her body is beautifully placed, giving her lovely, free arms and an unusually articulated torso. There are simply no problems of movement for her, and never so much as a hint of an ugly one. When Miss Nerina has developed a musical phrase to equal her command of the physical medium, we shall all be fighting to drink Champagne out of her slippers.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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EILEEN HERLIE, ACTRESS OF TV, AND “ALL MY CHILDREN” FAME
Eileen Herlie, for 32 years the wise matron Myrtle Fargate on the ABC soap opera “All My Children” and earlier an acclaimed performer on Broadway and the London stage, died Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 90 and lived in Manhattan.
Steve Fenn/ABC, 2000
Eileen Herlie
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Francesca James, a longtime friend.
First appearing on “All My Children” in 1976, Miss Herlie portrayed Myrtle as an irrepressible, truth-talking figure offering advice to denizens of the fictional town of Pine Valley, and particularly to the sexy, sassy Erica Kane, played by Susan Lucci. Three times (in 1984, 1985 and 1986) she was nominated for Daytime Emmy Awards as outstanding supporting actress in a drama series. She gave her last performance in June.
Though best known in her later years for her soap opera role, Miss Herlie had a prestigious career from the mid-1940s into the 1970s, working with luminaries like Tyrone Guthrie, Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Rex Harrison, Peter Ustinov, Cecil Beaton, John Huston, Mel Brooks and Jackie Gleason.
Her range, from Shakespeare to musicals, regularly drew praise. In 1959 she played Lily in the Broadway production of “Take Me Along,” the boisterous musical based on Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!”
Reviewing that show, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times wrote: “Did you know that Eileen Herlie could sing in a voice that is beautifully cultivated? In America she has played farce, Shakespeare and modern drama with unvarying excellence. Here she is in musical comedy. Her affectionate Lily, the instinctive lady and the inevitable schoolteacher, is a lovely performance brought to a fine glow.” Miss Herlie received a Tony nomination for her role in “Take Me Along.”
Miss Herlie also had roles in 10 films, including “For Better, for Worse” (1954), “Freud” (1962) and “The Seagull” (1968).
Eileen Isobel Herlihy was born in Glasgow on March 18, 1918. Her father, Patrick, and her mother, the former Isobel Cowden, frowned on their daughter’s theatrical aspirations. Still, while working for an insurance company, she joined the Scottish National Theater.
She soon left for London and after several smaller roles was cast as the queen in Jean Cocteau’s “Eagle Has Two Heads.” It was her breakthrough, with critics particularly praising her 27-minute soliloquy.
In 1948, Miss Herlie was cast as Queen Gertrude opposite Olivier in his screen version of “Hamlet.” She reprised the role 16 years later on Broadway, opposite Richard Burton. After playing the milliner Irene Molloy in Thornton Wilder’s “Matchmaker,” Miss Herlie moved to the United States in 1955 and played the same role on Broadway.
She performed in nine Broadway shows, including “All American” in 1962, opposite Ray Bolger. She and Bolger sang the musical’s best-known song, “Once Upon a Time,” a Charles Strouse-Lee Adams tune later popularized by Tony Bennett.
Miss Herlie’s two marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her brother, Alfred Herlihy of Glasgow.
Miss James, who knew Miss Herlie for more than 30 years, said on Friday that her friend often recalled how Olivier had prompted her for her role as his mother in the movie version of “Hamlet.”
“After she was cast,” Miss James said, “Olivier called her on the phone and told her, ‘Eileen, we are going to do this with Freud’s Oedipal complex in mind.’ And she said, ‘Oh, what a good idea, Larry.’ Then she hung up, called a friend and asked, ‘What’s an Oedipal complex?’ ”
The film did conjure sexual desire between mother and son, abetted perhaps by the fact that she was 11 years younger than he was.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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JORG HAIDER, AUSTRIAN RIGHTIST
BERLIN — Jörg Haider, the controversial and charismatic far-right politician who transformed Austria’s politics in recent decades, died of injuries sustained in a car accident early Saturday. He was 58.
Dieter Nagl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Jörg Haider’s right-wing party made gains in last month’s vote.
Mr. Haider’s sudden death touched off an outpouring of shock and mourning in Austria, and it occurred at a crucial political moment for the country: between the parliamentary election in Austria two weeks ago, in which right-wing parties made tremendous gains, and the formation of the new government.
Mr. Haider, the governor of the province of Carinthia and the leader of the right-wing Alliance for Austria’s Future, was a populist politician known for his strong anti-immigrant and anti-European Union stances. He was most notorious for a series of outrageous statements, including praising the Waffen-SS and the employment policies of the Nazi government. Yet in Austria, his legacy may be the way that he helped put an end to the dominance of the two biggest political parties, the left-leaning Social Democratic Party and the conservative People’s Party.
“The spectrum in Austria is totally different today from what it was yesterday,” said Thomas Hofer, an independent political consultant in Vienna. “This is the end of an era. He was more controversial than any other, but also one of the most politically talented individuals in the country’s history.”
Austria’s two mainstream parties suffered significant losses in September’s election. The Social Democratic Party and the People’s Party had been governing together in an uneasy coalition.
Nearly a third of voters voiced their discontent by turning to Mr. Haider’s former party, the Freedom Party, and his new one, the Alliance for Austria’s Future, which placed fourth, nearly tripling its share of the vote to 11 percent from the last vote two years ago.
The result was a political comeback to the national stage for Mr. Haider, after leaving the Freedom Party, which he led and raised to prominence in the decades before. But his death also left the Alliance leaderless at a crucial moment. “For us, this is the end of the world,” said Stefan Petzner, the party’s secretary general.
Austrian news media were filled with photographs of Mr. Haider’s black sedan, crushed after flipping over several times. Mr. Haider was wearing his seat belt at the time of the accident, the police said, but his injuries were so grave that he had died by the time he reached the hospital.
Mr. Haider’s death has led to an outpouring of emotion hardly ever seen in Austria, compared by some observers to the swell of mourning in Britain after Princess Diana’s death in 1997. Mr. Petzner, 27, openly wept on Austrian television recalling how he had said goodbye on Friday night to his boss. Gerhard Dörfler, Mr. Haider’s deputy and now the acting governor of Carinthia, said, “The sun has fallen from the sky.”
Condolences rushed in from across the political spectrum. President Heinz Fischer, a Social Democrat, called Mr. Haider a “politician of great talent,” and said he was “deeply affected” by the news.
Even those opposed to Mr. Haider mourned his death on Saturday. “I did not particularly like him,” said Almut Rieken, 67, in the village of Lanzendorf in Carinthia, “but I still feel touched by it.”
The political fallout of Mr. Haider’s death was far from clear. Some analysts said they believed that it would hasten the reconciliation between the major parties, others saw an opening for a right-wing coalition government.
“This will unify the right-wing camp,” said Emmerich Tálos, professor of political science at the University of Vienna. Mr. Tálos said that Mr. Haider’s legacy would be the way that he brought the right wing back into the mainstream of Austrian politics, from a position of weakness in the 1970s and early 1980s. “He made the right in Austria a truly relevant political factor in the party system,” he said.
Jörg Haider was born in Upper Austria, the son of a shoemaker, to parents who were both active Nazis. He went on to study law before becoming active in the Freedom Party.
As leader of the Freedom Party, his greatest success came in 1999 when the party captured 27 percent of the vote. After the conservatives formed a coalition with the Freedom Party in 2000, it provoked international outrage and sanctions by other European countries.
He is survived by his wife, Claudia, and two daughters. According to news reports, he was planning to celebrate his mother’s 90th birthday over the weekend.
Nicholas Kulish reported from Berlin, and Eugen Freund from Lanzendorf, Austria.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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KIM CHAN, WHO HAD ROLES IN TV AND ‘KING OF COMEDY’
Kim Chan, an actor who became a familiar face in a variety of Asian roles, notably as Jerry Lewis’s butler in the Martin Scorsese film “The King of Comedy,” a character who did furious battle with an obsessed fan played by Robert De Niro, died on Sunday in Brooklyn.
His niece Judy Gee, who confirmed his death, said that he was probably 93 or 94.
From bit parts as a houseboy or a Japanese soldier, Mr. Chan worked his way up to playing dignified old men with access to the wisdom of the East, as he did in “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues,” a spinoff of the 1970s television series “Kung Fu” that ran from 1993 to 1997.
He actually played two roles in that series: the apothecary and martial arts expert Lo Si, “the Ancient,” and the evil monk Ping Hai.
Mr. Chan, who emigrated to the United States from the province of Canton, China, as a boy, discovered show business while working in his family’s restaurant, the House of Chan, which was in the theater district of Manhattan.
The outgoing Mr. Chan began picking up walk-on parts on the stage. He made his film debut in “A Face in the Crowd” (1957), playing a radio announcer, Ms. Gee said. He went on to play a theater cashier in “The Owl and the Pussycat,” a Korean flower vendor in “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a dim sum cook in “Cadillac Man,” the Thai fast-food vendor Mr. Kim in “The Fifth Element,” Uncle Benny Chan in “Lethal Weapon 4” and Jackie Chan’s father in “Shanghai Knights.”
He was a producer of one of his final films, “Zen Noir” (2004), a murder mystery in which he played a character described on the film’s Web site (zenmovie.com) as “an infuriatingly obscure Zen teacher, who does a lot of strange things with oranges.”
His survivors include a son, Michael Chandler, of Queens.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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HARRY W. ALBRIGHT, JR., BANKING SUPERINTENDENT
Harry W. Albright Jr., who as superintendent of the New York State Banking Department in the early 1970s championed the needs of consumers, died Sunday in Valhalla, N.Y. Mr. Albright, who later became chief executive of the Dime Savings Bank of New York, was 83 and lived in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Harry W. Albright Jr. in 1988
His daughter Deborah Albright confirmed the death.
Mr. Albright, a protégé of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and his close aide, was state banking superintendent from 1972 to 1974. In March 1974, a nine-member advisory committee he had created recommended that New Yorkers be allowed to open checking accounts at savings banks — a convenience for depositors and a source of profits for the savings banks. Two months later, Mr. Albright approved the policy. Until then, depositors could open checking accounts only at commercial banks.
Mr. Albright also pushed for more liberal terms for home mortgages and criticized as excessive the late charges levied by some mortgage lenders. In 1973, he warned all state-chartered lending institutions to stop discriminating against women in granting loans.
In urging the elimination of “archaic notions that foster sex discrimination,” he maintained that such a change would be sound banking practice.
“Today, many women have jobs with substantial income and expected tenure, and thus represent an excellent market for financial services,” he said. “It’s simply good business to serve this market fairly and equally, without regard to considerations of sex.”
Harry Wesley Albright Jr. was born in Albany on March 19, 1925, the son of Harry and Ruth Kerwin Albright. His father was a bank president.
After serving in the Army from 1942 to 1946, Mr. Albright graduated from Yale in 1949, and received a law degree from Cornell. He worked at a law firm in Albany until 1967, when Governor Rockefeller chose him as his deputy secretary. He later became executive secretary and appointments officer, in charge of personnel changes. As an aide to the governor, he was a strong proponent of preserving the Adirondack mountains.
In 1974, when President Gerald R. Ford chose Mr. Rockefeller as vice president, Mr. Albright went to Washington as special counsel to the vice president. A year later, he was named president of the Dime, one of the largest savings banks in the state. He became its chairman and chief executive in 1980 and retired in 1990.
Mr. Albright’s wife of 54 years, the former Joan Diekman, died in 2006. In addition to his daughter Deborah, of Bronxville, Mr. Albright is survived by two other daughters, Kimberly Vaugeois of Washington and Joan Shannon of Pocantico Hills; three sons, Harry Albright 3rd of White Plains; Peter, of Manhattan; and John, of Weston, Conn.; a sister, Marjorie Billings of Albany; and eight grandchildren.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ERNEST BEUTLER, STUDIED BLOOD DISEASES
Dr. Ernest Beutler, a leading hematologist whose studies opened an important new window onto the treatment of leukemia, died on Oct. 5 in San Diego. He was 80.
The Scripps Research Institute
Dr. Ernest Beutler, in 2000.
The cause was lymphoma, said a spokesman from the Scripps Research Institute in the La Jolla section of San Diego, where Dr. Beutler (pronounced BOYT-ler) was chairman of the department of molecular and experimental medicine until stepping down last month; he did wide-ranging research in biochemistry and medical genetics, especially inherited blood-borne disease.
In the 1980s, Dr. Beutler and his colleagues at Scripps developed and tested a new drug, 2-CdA, which was found to be highly effective in treating hairy cell leukemia, a rare but potentially fatal disease of the blood and bone marrow. With Dr. Dennis A. Carson, Dr. Lawrence D. Piro and others, Dr. Beutler attacked abnormal white blood cells in leukemia patients using a single infusion of the new drug, which was modeled in part on an enzyme that breaks down a toxic byproduct of normal cellular metabolism.
Their impressive results, reported in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1990, showed that 11 of the first 12 patients treated with 2-CdA experienced a complete remission from leukemia for up to four years, an “extraordinary insight and an important practical contribution” to cancer research, said Dr. Marshall A. Lichtman, a professor of hematology and oncology at the University of Rochester.
Hoping to extend their clinical successes, the Scripps researchers also tried the drug on patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the most common form of the disease. But those results were less promising and led to partial remissions in about half of those treated and complete remissions in only two patients. Even so, Dr. Lichtman said, 2-CdA remains the primary therapy for the hairy cell form of leukemia and has subsequently been used to treat multiple sclerosis.
Dr. Beutler went on to investigate the role of iron in the blood, and how an overload of iron can contribute to diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver and metabolic problems. Building on his earlier research into iron deficiency and metabolism, he identified a genetic mutation that can cause an accumulation of excessive levels of iron, known as hemochromatosis, especially in those of African descent.
The mutation had been discovered independently by an Italian researcher, Dr. Antonello Pietrangelo, and the two researchers elected to publish their results simultaneously in the journal Blood Cells, Molecules and Diseases in 2003. The findings revealed one pathway for iron overload, which was previously thought by some scientists to be connected chiefly to problems with diet.
In other work, Dr. Beutler studied Gaucher’s disease, a disorder that interrupts an enzyme the body needs to break down certain types of fats. With others at Scripps, he helped refine the testing for Gaucher’s, which is most prevalent among descendants of Eastern European Jews, and argued for a new approach to its treatment. In the early 1990s, the annual cost of treating an adult with the disease could approach $370,000, a figure that made the drug Ceredase, designed to replace the missing enzyme, one of the world’s most expensive medications. Dr. Beutler and others proposed, with some success, that smaller doses of Ceredase could be just as effective as the accepted regimen and far less expensive.
Ernest Beutler was born in Berlin and grew up in Milwaukee. He enrolled in the University of Chicago at the age of 15 and received his medical degree there in 1950, when he was 21.
After teaching at Chicago, Dr. Beutler was named chairman of the division of medicine at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., in 1959. He then moved to Scripps, as head of the division of hematology-oncology, in 1978. In 1982, Scripps named him chairman of its department of molecular and experimental medicine.
In the 1970s, Dr. Beutler became a founding editor of Williams Hematology, a standard reference that covers the management of lymphomas and leukemias and other blood disorders. He contributed to eight editions of the work and was considered an authority on iron metabolism and anemias.
In 1979, he was president of the American Society of Hematology.
Dr. Beutler is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Brondelle Fleisher; three sons, Dr. Bruce Beutler, chairman of the department of genetics at Scripps, of San Diego, Dr. Steven Beutler of Redlands, Calif., Earl Beutler of Encinitas, Calif.; a daughter, Dr. Deborah Beutler of Pasadena; and eight grandchildren.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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J. EARL WILLIAMS, EX-UH PROFESSOR, WAR ON POVERTY RECRUIT
By Lynn Abram
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
October 6, 2008
Family Photo
James Earl Williams
An authority on vocational education, Williams figured in establishing the Houston Community College system, said James Noland, a friend and former colleague at UH.
In the 1960s, Williams was director of the manpower division of the now-defunct Office of Economic Opportunity, which oversaw the programs of the War on Poverty.
“Earl will be remembered for his independent mind, friendly spirit and uncanny wit,” Noland said. “He worked to further democratic opportunities, sponsoring anti-poverty programs to banish injustice, increase equality and enhance dignity through vocational and technical education.”
James Earl Williams was born on July 16, 1922, in Fonde, Ky., the son of Hobert Williams, a coal miner, and Beatrice Dephonis Seal Williams.
In 1940, Earl Williams graduated from Knoxville High School. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1941, and served as an enlisted man in the Pacific theater during World War II.
After the war, Williams graduated with a degree in economics and political science from Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tenn., completing the four-year course in 2 1/2 years, said his wife, Marjorie Hybarger Williams.
Williams also earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He later returned to the University of Tennessee to take part in a study of economic conditions in Appalachia.
Before joining UH in 1966, Williams taught at Austin Peay College at Clarksville, Tenn., and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
At UH, Williams taught on the graduate level and headed the university’s Center for Human Resources.
In 1978, Williams joined Georgia State University in Atlanta. In 1980, he returned to Houston, where he worked independently in labor/management arbitration.
In addition to his wife, survivors include two brothers, Hobert Williams of Morristown, Tenn., and Jack Williams of Knoxville; and a sister, Janice Hines of Cleveland, Tenn.; and nieces, Terri Mullen of Cleveland, Tenn., Carmen Brice of Lake Oswego, Ore., and Catherine Humphreys of Louisville, Ky.
A memorial service is scheduled at 2 p.m. Oct. 15 at the chapel at Parkway Place, 1321 Park Bayou. Private burial was in Memorial Oaks Cemetery.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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MEXICAN DIRECTOR, SERVANDO GONZALEZ HERNANDEZ, WHO FILMED 1968 MASSACRE
By John Rice – Associated Press
October 7, 2008
MEXICO CITY — Servando Gonzalez Hernandez rose from gofer at a Mexican film studio to become a director in Hollywood. But he may be most remembered in Mexico for a film that nobody ever saw.
Gonzalez, who died in Mexico City on Saturday at age 85, was the government’s chief documentary filmmaker when he said “a military type” asked him to set up six cameras around a Mexico City plaza in 1968 and film the events below.
What occurred was the Tlatelolco massacre, when soldiers opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators and — by varying accounts — 25 to 350 people died in one of the most controversial events in Mexican history.
Gonzalez told the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada last year that the man who hired him appeared after the raw film was developed and took it all away.
“He disappeared. I never knew anything about that material,” he said. “I haven’t even known who has it.”
Gonzalez got his start at 13 as an apprentice at Estudios Clasa and gradually learned the trade, rising to become head of the film laboratory at Latin America’s largest film operation, Estudios Churubusco, before setting out to make movies himself.
His best-known work abroad was “The Fool Killer,” a 1965 film starring Anthony Perkins and Dana Elcar. It wasn’t the first Hollywood production by a Mexican director, but it was among very few at that time.
Gonzalez’s made other notable films in Mexico, including “Viento Negro” (“Black Wind”) of 1965, “El Elegido” (“The Chosen One”) of 1977 and “El Ultimo Tunel” (“The Last Tunnel”) of 1987 — the most expensive movie of the 1980s by Mexico’s film industry, said Jose Antonio Valdes, a researcher at the Cineteca Nacional, a film archive.
Relatives did not release a cause of death, but several Mexican newspapers said Gonzalez had suffered from cancer. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.nytimes.com
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 
While I should not rejoice over anyone’s death, I must force myself to have compassion for Haider. I can’t see him as anything other than a nazi. Not saying my feelings are moral, just being honest. Now I’m a bit worried that Strache (who is said to be much further to the right) will become more popular.
I wrote a bit about him here
http://revolutionwatch.com/?p=147
“While I should not rejoice over anyone’s death, I must force myself to have compassion for Haider.”
Understandable.
The purpose of my “In Remembrance” posts is to do the following:
-alert readers to the deaths of known, and unknown people;
-people who have had an impact on the lives around them, both near, and far;
-and people who have created either “good” for the world” or “bad” for the world.
Whether that person is a Charles Wright, a Paul Newman, an Isaac Hayes. . . .or a Jorg Haider.
In the end, they all have left a legacy behind.
Either a legacy that has caused the most good for humankind. . . .or a legacy that has caused the most evil for humankind.
Thanks for stopping by.
(I left a comment on your link).
Very good information. Excellent page. I live in Mexico.
My site is http://www.fzln.org.mx
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