HATTIE CLARKE ROBINSON, EDUCATOR WITH 65-YEAR CAREER
She was the first Black woman in Galveston certified to be a principal
By Harvey Rice
2008 Copyright Houston Chronicle
Oct. 31, 2008, 11:00PM
handout photo
Hattie Clarke Robinson
Robinson was the first black woman to be certified as a principal in the Galveston school district but never accepted a principal’s post, preferring to teach, said niece Connie Hebert, 58, of Galveston.
She taught for 65 years, often bringing home students from poor families or with disciplinary problems.
Robinson was born April 29, 1910, in Galveston.
She graduated from Central High School in 1928, and it appeared that she would be unable to realize her ambition of attending business school.
“Her parents didn’t have any money,” Hebert said. More daunting was the school policy of refusing to enroll black students.
Robinson took a job as a cook for a white family, gaining their admiration for wanting to attend business school.
“They knew the owner, and he invited her to come to his house,” Hebert said. “She had to come in the back door and take lessons in his kitchen.”
After graduating from business school, she used her earnings from a job as secretary at George Washington Carver Elementary School to help her family and pay her tuition at the then all-black Texas College, now Texas Southern University.
During a summer job as an elevator operator, she noticed a man who kept riding the elevator, Hebert said. The man asked her to dinner, but Robinson said she couldn’t accept without her father’s approval.
Her father approved, and she married Henry F. Robinson in 1943. They were married until his death in 1997.
Galveston’s school district hired her as its first visiting teacher, charged with going to the homes of students who missed school. The concept was new, and Robinson wrote a detailed explanation of how it should be done, Hebert said.
Robinson taught for 43 years in the school district and an additional two years as a substitute teacher after retiring, Hebert said.
Retirement didn’t suit her, so Robinson got a job teaching at Galveston Catholic School, where she taught for 10 years.
She moved to Heritage Christian Academy and taught there for 12 years, Hebert said.
Robinson had no children but raised her sister, Rose Virginia, and her nieces, Hebert and Henria Sue Bacon, as her own, Hebert said.
Services are scheduled at 10 a.m. today at Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church 6333 Texas 6, Hitchcock. Burial will be at Lakeview Cemetery in Galveston.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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STUDS TERKEL, LISTENER TO AMERICANS
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
The author Studs Terkel at the Algonquin Hotel on May 20, 1997, around the release of his book “My American Century.”
CBS, courtesy of Jeff Kisseloff
The actress Beverly Younger and Mr. Terkel on the Chicago set of his television variety show, “Studs’ Place,” around 1950.
Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre, and who for decades was the voluble host of a popular radio show in Chicago, died Friday at his home there. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by Lois Baum, a friend and longtime colleague at the radio station WFMT.
In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Mr. Terkel relied on his enthusiastic but gentle interviewing style to elicit, in rich detail, the experiences and thoughts of his fellow citizens. Over the decades, he developed a continuous narrative of great historic moments sounded by an American chorus in the native vernacular.
“Division Street: America” (1966), his first best seller and the first in a triptych of tape- recorded works, explored the urban conflicts of the 1960s. Its success led to “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” (1970) and “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do” (1974).
Mr. Terkel’s book “ ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II” won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
In “Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times” (1977), Mr. Terkel turned the microphone on himself to produce an engaging memoir. In “Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession” (1992) and “Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It” (1995), he reached for his ever-present tape recorder for interviews on race relations in the United States and the experience of growing old.
Although detractors derided him as a sentimental populist whose views were simplistic and occasionally maudlin, Mr. Terkel was widely credited with transforming oral history into a popular literary form. In 1985 a reviewer for The Financial Times of London characterized his books as “completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair revisionism and academic moralizing.”
The elfin, amiable Mr. Terkel was a gifted and seemingly tireless interviewer who elicited provocative insights and colorful, detailed personal histories from a broad mix of people. “The thing I’m able to do, I guess, is break down walls,” he once told an interviewer. “If they think you’re listening, they’ll talk. It’s more of a conversation than an interview.”
Mr. Terkel succeeded as an interviewer in part because he believed most people had something to say worth hearing. “The average American has an indigenous intelligence, a native wit,” he said. “It’s only a question of piquing that intelligence.” In “American Dreams: Lost and Found” (1980), he interviewed police officers and convicts, nurses and loggers, former slaves and former Ku Klux Klansmen — a typical crowd for Mr. Terkel.
Readers of his books could only guess at Mr. Terkel’s interview style. Listeners to his daily radio show, which was first broadcast on WFMT in 1958, got the full Terkel flavor as the host, with breathy eagerness and a tough-guy Chicago accent, went after the straight dope from guests like Sir Georg Solti, Toni Morrison and Gloria Steinem.
“It isn’t an inquisition; it’s an exploration, usually an exploration into the past,” he once said, explaining his approach. “So I think the gentlest question is the best one, and the gentlest is, ‘And what happened then?’ ”
Studs Terkel was born in the Bronx on May 16, 1912, the third son of Samuel Terkel, a tailor, and the former Anna Finkel, who had emigrated from Bialystok, Poland. In 1923 the family moved to Chicago. In the late 1930s, while acting in the theater, Mr. Terkel dropped his given name, Louis, and adopted the name Studs, from another colorful Chicagoan, James T. Farrell’s fictional Studs Lonigan.
His childhood was unhappy. His father was an invalid who suffered from heart disease. His mother was volatile and impetuous, given to unpredictable rages that kept the household on edge. “What nobody got from her was warmth and love, or at least not a display of it,” Mr. Terkel said.
After moving to Chicago, the Terkels managed hotels popular with blue-collar workers, and Mr. Terkel often said that the characters he encountered and the disputations he witnessed at the Wells-Grand Hotel on the Near North Side were his real education. Although he read avidly and feasted on Roget’s Thesaurus, he was, by his own reckoning, no scholar. He earned philosophy and law degrees at the University of Chicago, but after failing a bar exam he worked briefly for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in Chicago, doing statistical research on unemployment in Omaha. He then found work in Washington counting bonds for the Treasury Department.
When he returned to Chicago in 1938, Mr. Terkel, who once described his life as “an accretion of accidents,” joined the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program. He wrote scripts for WGN radio and, after appearing in “Waiting for Lefty” at the Chicago Repertory Group, found work in soap operas like “Ma Perkins” and “Road of Life.” What he called his “low, husky, menacing” voice made him a natural to play heavies.
“I would always say the same thing and either get killed or sent to Sing Sing,” he later recalled.
It was while performing with the Chicago Repertory Group that he took the name Studs. In 1939 he married Ida Goldberg, a social worker from Wisconsin whom he met while they were both with the Chicago Rep. She died in 1999. The couple had one son, Dan Terkell, who altered the spelling of his surname. Mr. Terkell, who lives in Chicago, is the only immediate survivor.
After a one-year stint writing speeches and shows in the special services of the Army Air Forces in 1942 and 1943, Mr. Terkel was discharged because his perforated eardrums, a condition resulting from childhood operations, made him unfit for overseas duty. He found work doing news, sports and commentary for commercial radio stations in Chicago, and in 1945 he was given his own radio show, “The Wax Museum,” on WENR.
Although “The Wax Museum,” which ran for two years, was primarily a jazz show, Mr. Terkel also followed his other enthusiasms, playing country music, folk, opera and gospel, as the mood seized him. He was one of the first to promote artists like Mahalia Jackson, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy and Burl Ives. On occasion he would invite composers or performers to sit down for an on-air interview. His passion for jazz led to his first book, “Giants of Jazz” (1957), a collection of biographies.
In 1950 Mr. Terkel became the star and host of “Studs’ Place,” a variety show set in a barbecue joint, with Mr. Terkel appearing as the owner, shooting the breeze with his staff and with the guest of the week. Along with “The Dave Garroway Show” and “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” it helped define the relaxed, low-key Chicago school of television.
In January 1952, with McCarthyism in full flower, NBC canceled the show shortly after picking it up for national broadcast, nervous because Mr. Terkel had a habit of signing petitions in support of liberal and left-wing causes. Executives in New York told him that he could clear his record by saying he had been duped into signing the petitions. Mr. Terkel refused. “Duped” made him sound stupid, he said.
Blackballed from commercial radio, Mr. Terkel found work in the theater, appearing in a national tour of “Detective Story” and in other plays. One day, in October 1952, he was surprised to hear Woody Guthrie on the radio. “I wondered, who plays Guthrie records except me?” he later recalled. “So I called WFMT. They were delighted to hear from me.”
In a partnership that would endure for 45 years, Mr. Terkel broadcast a daily hour of music, commentary and interviews, helping to build WFMT into a major fine-arts station. Although he shied away from actors and politicians, anyone else was fair game. The guest roster included figures as diverse as John Kenneth Galbraith, Garry Wills, Aaron Copland and Oliver Sacks.
In 1980, Mr. Terkel won a Peabody Award for excellence in journalism. His official title at the station, where he was instantly recognizable by his wayward white hair, red-and-white-checked shirts and well-chewed cigar, was Free Spirit.
In the 1960s, André Schiffrin, the publisher and editor who ran Pantheon Books, was looking for a writer to produce the American equivalent of Jan Myrdal’s “Report From a Chinese Village,” a collection of interviews that shed light on the lives of ordinary Chinese under Mao Zedong. Mr. Schiffrin called Mr. Terkel and suggested Chicago as a subject.
Mr. Terkel went out into the city’s neighborhoods, tape recorder in hand, and produced “Division Street,” an enormous success and the beginning of a lifelong relationship in which Mr. Schiffrin would propose an idea and Mr. Terkel would execute it.
“Division Street” consisted of transcripts of 70 conversations Mr. Terkel had with people of every sort in and around Chicago. Peter Lyon, reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, said it was “a modern morality play, a drama with as many conflicts as life itself.”
In “The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream” (1988), Mr. Terkel returned to an earlier subject and looked at it afresh. When Random House executives forced Mr. Schiffrin out as head of Pantheon in 1990, Mr. Terkel walked out with him and took his work to Mr. Schiffrin’s New Press. New Press published “My American Century” (1997), a “best of” compilation. That book was followed by two more volumes of memoirs, “Touch and Go” (2007), and “P.S.: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening,” to be published on Nov. 11.
In 1997, Mr. Terkel received the National Book Foundation Medal for contributions to American letters.
In “Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times,” Mr. Terkel took on his toughest interview, and many critics found the book frustrating for its refusal to delve too deeply into its author’s personal life and feelings. Mr. Terkel acknowledged the justice of the complaint.
“I’ve met hundreds, no, I’ve met thousands of interesting people, and I’ve been so caught up with them and fascinated by them and intrigued with them, it’s almost like there’s no room inside me to be interested in my own feelings and thoughts,” he told an interviewer.
It may be the one time in his life that Mr. Terkel’s ruling passion failed him. “I don’t have to stay curious, I am curious, about all of it, all the time,” he once said. “ ‘Curiosity never killed this cat’ — that’s what I’d like as my epitaph.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
RELATED LINKS:
An Appraisal
He Gave Voice to Many, Among Them Himself
Chris Walker/The Chicago Tribune, via Associated Press
Studs Terkel in 1992, taking a bus home after working on his show at WFMT radio in Chicago. Among Mr. Terkel’s oral-history books: “Working” (1974).
It is, in fact, impossible to separate Studs Terkel’s political vision from the contours of his oral history.
Studs Terkel at the Printer’s Row Book fair. (Tribune / Charles Osgood)
STUDS TERKEL GAVE A VOICE TO THE VOICELESS
Picture a young Stuart Dybek in blue-collar Chicago, feeling at one with the pulse of life on the city’s streets and finding, through the radio, a kindred soul in Studs Terkel.
- Reaction to the death of Studs Terkel at 96
- Mary Schmich: Truly, the end of an era
- His bookshelf spans a century
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ES’KIA MPHAHLELE, CHRONICLER OF APARTHEID
Es’kia Mphahlele, a South African writer whose 1959 memoir, “Down Second Avenue,” vividly dramatized the injustices of apartheid and became a landmark work of South African literature, died Monday in Lebowakgomo, South Africa. He was 88.
Simon Mathebula/Sunday Times, via Associated Press
Es’kia Mphahlele in 2003.
His death was reported by Raks Seakhoa, a friend, The Associated Press said.
Although Mr. Mphahlele (pronounced Mm-pah-FAY-lay) wrote essays, short stories and novels, he was best known for “Down Second Avenue,” a searing account of his boyhood and early manhood. Its depiction of traditional rural life, and of violence and oppression in a black township in Pretoria, reflected the experience of countless thousands of his fellow black South Africans.
“He was in many ways the father of modern black South African writing,” said Leon de Kock, the head of the school of literature and language studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “His death closes a certain bracket in our literature, what we used to call protest literature, literature in the resistance mode that included exile and return.”
In an essay in The Star, a Johannesburg newspaper, the journalist and editor Barney Mthombothi wrote, “If Nelson Mandela is our political star, Mphahlele was his literary equivalent.”
Ezekiel Mphahlele — he later Africanized his first name — was born in Marabastad Township, Pretoria, but spent much of his boyhood in Maupaneng, a large village outside Pietersburg (now Polokwane). At 13, he and his brother and sister returned to Pretoria, moving in with their maternal grandmother in a house on Second Avenue in a teeming slum neighborhood.
Collecting and delivering the laundry that his grandmother washed for white customers, Ezekiel learned his place in South African society. At the same time, he excelled in school and attended a progressive secondary school that left him, he later said, “detribalized, Westernized, but still African.” The conflict, both social and artistic, between African and Western identities would become an important theme in his work.
After training as a teacher, Mr. Mphahlele worked as a secretary at a school for the blind and began contributing short stories to Drum, New Age and other magazines. In 1945 he married Rebecca Mochadibane. Four of their children survive him: Anthony, Motswiri, Chabi Robert and Puso.
While teaching English and Afrikaans at a Johannesburg high school, he earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature from the University of South Africa and published his first book of stories, “Man Must Live” (1946). His career as an educator came to a sudden halt, however, after he publicly agitated against the discriminatory Bantu Education Act. Barred from teaching in South Africa, he struggled to survive and in 1957 emigrated.
“I was suddenly seized by a desire to leave South Africa for more sky to soar,” he wrote at the end of “Down Second Avenue.” He was, he complained, “shriveling in the acid of my bitterness.”
A wandering life ensued, as he wrote and taught in Nigeria, France, Kenya and Zambia. In the early 1970s he taught at the University of Denver, where he had earned a doctorate in 1968, and in 1974 accepted a full professorship in the English department of the University of Pennsylvania.
While in exile he completed his memoir, as well as a second volume of stories, “The Living and the Dead” (1961), which explored the intricate, difficult relations between black and white South Africans. Stylistically, the sharp, jabbing prose of his memoir evolved into the more indirect, often wry voice of the stories in “In Corner B” (1967).
In his first novel, “The Wanderers” (1971), Mr. Mphahlele offered a sweeping view of African racial problems as seen through the eyes of an exile very much like himself, unable to live in South Africa but ill at ease in freer African states. While in exile, he also published two well-regarded works of criticism, “The African Image” (1962) and “Voices in the Whirlwind” (1972).
In 1977 Mr. Mphahlele surprised friends and family by giving up his university post to return to South Africa. “I couldn’t grasp the cultural goals of the Americans,” he told The New York Times. “I found them so fragmented. I asked myself, ‘What am I contributing to American education?’ I had no answer.”
At Witwatersrand University, where he was the first black professor, he taught African literature and created a department devoted to the subject.
He also wrote two more novels, “Chirundu” (1980) and “Father Come Home” (1984), as well as a second volume of memoirs, “Afrika My Music” (1984).
In 2002 he founded the Es’kia Institute, an arts organization devoted to preserving traditional African culture.
“An African cares very much where he dies and is buried,” he told the reference work Contemporary Authors after returning to South Africa. “But I have not come to die. I want to reconnect with my ancestors while I am still active.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ESTELLE REINER, COMEDY MATRIARCH
Estelle Reiner, who as the wife of Carl Reiner and the mother of Rob Reiner was the matriarch of one of the leading families in American comedy, and who delivered one of the most memorably funny lines in movie history herself, died on Saturday at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 94.
She died of natural causes, said Rob Reiner, who was responsible for his mother’s moment of widest fame.
That occurred in the 1989 film “When Harry Met Sally,” when Mr. Reiner, as director, cast his mother as a customer in a New York delicatessen. In the scene, she watched as a woman at a nearby table, played by Meg Ryan, faked a very public (and very persuasive) orgasm. After Ms. Ryan subsided, a waitress approached Mrs. Reiner for her order.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” Mrs. Reiner said.
The American Film Institute made that line No. 33 on its list of the Top 100 quotations from movies, just ahead of Lauren Bacall’s seductive invitation to Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not”: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”
His mother’s place on the list, Mr. Reiner said, gives him a thrill.
“I look at it and I see ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!’ I see ‘I coulda been a contender!’ ” Mr. Reiner said. “I see Clark Gable and Marlon Brando. And there’s Estelle Reiner!”
Estelle Lebost was born on June 5, 1914, in the Bronx, where she graduated from James Monroe High School. She was a painter and visual artist early in life (she met her husband while designing sets for shows at hotels in the Catskills), and after turning 60 she became a cabaret singer, recording several CDs and performing regularly as late as 2005. She studied acting with Lee Strasberg and Viola Spolin and had small roles in several other film comedies, including “Fatso” (1980), with Dom DeLuise, and “The Man With Two Brains” (1983), with Steve Martin.
But her deepest influence on American comedy has to do with family, her own and one she inspired. In addition to Rob and Carl Reiner, whom she married in 1943, she is survived by another son, Lucas; a daughter, Annie; and five grandchildren, all of Los Angeles.
Carl Reiner created the 1960s comedy series “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” based on his experience writing for Sid Caesar, a volatile and demanding star. Carl Reiner played the Caesar character, named Alan Brady; Mr. Van Dyke was Mr. Reiner’s alter ego, Brady’s head writer, Rob Petrie, who was married to Laura, a pre-Mary Richards Mary Tyler Moore. The Petries lived in New Rochelle, N.Y., the home of the Reiners, on Bonnie Meadow Road, the same street as the Reiners.
“Basically he wrote his own life,” Rob Reiner said of his father.
So that would mean Mary Tyler Moore was … ?
“My mother was Mary Tyler Moore, yes,” Mr. Reiner said.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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JACQUES PICCARD, SCIENTIST WHO EXPLORED THE DEEP SEAS
GENEVA (AP) — Jacques Piccard, a scientist and underwater explorer who plunged deeper beneath the ocean than any other man, died Saturday, his son’s company said. He was 86.
Pierre Andrieu/A.F.P. — Getty Images
Jacques Piccard in 2001.
Mr. Piccard died at his Lake Geneva home in Switzerland, according to the company, Solar Impulse.
Exploration ran in the Piccard family. Mr. Piccard’s father, Auguste, a physicist, was the first man to take a balloon into the stratosphere. His son, Bertrand, was the first man to fly a balloon nonstop around the world.
Jacques Piccard helped his father invent the bathyscaphe, a vessel that allows people to descend to great depths. On Jan. 23, 1960, he and Lt. Don Walsh of the United States Navy took the vessel, named the Trieste, into the Mariana Trench in the Pacific to a depth of 35,800 feet, nearly seven miles below sea level. It remains the deepest human dive ever.
“By far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole,” Mr. Piccard said. “We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all.”
Solar Impulse said the discovery of living organisms at such a depth played a crucial role in the prohibition of nuclear waste dumping in ocean trenches.
After the dive, Mr. Piccard continued to research the deep seas and worked for NASA.
He also built four mid-depth submarines, mesoscaphes, including the first tourist submarine. During the Swiss National Exhibition in 1964, he took 33,000 passengers into the depths of Lake Geneva.
Born in Brussels in 1922, Mr. Piccard was 9 when his father took his balloon into the stratosphere. He studied in Switzerland and worked as a university economics teacher, but abandoned teaching to help his father design the bathyscaphe.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
In April 1999, when Bertrand Piccard completed a round-the-world balloon trip with a Briton, Brian Jones, his team drew on Jacques’s experiences in the Gulf Stream to work out how best to use the jet stream to speed the balloon around the world.
They also made use of some of the ideas used by Auguste Piccard in his pioneering flights, including the notion of only partly inflating the balloon at takeoff to allow for the expansion of the gases at higher altitudes, and the use of an airtight capsule.
In a statement on Saturday, Bertrand Piccard said his father “passed on to me a sense of curiosity, a desire to mistrust dogmas and common assumptions, a belief in free will, and confidence in the face of the unknown.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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GERALD ARPINO, BALLET CHOREOGRAPHER AND JOFFREY CO-FOUNDER
Gerald Arpino, a founder of the Joffrey Ballet and a distinctly American choreographer whose works popularized dance with their trendy finger on the nation’s pulse, died on Wednesday at his home in Chicago. He was 85.
M. Spencer Green/Associated Press, 2006
Gerald Arpino
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Stephanie Berger for The New York Times
The Joffrey Ballet in Gerald Arpino’s “Suite Saint-Saëns,” at New York City Center in 2005.
His death came after a long illness, said Christopher Clinton Conway, the Joffrey’s executive director, who did not specify a cause.
Mr. Arpino, who was the Joffrey’s artistic director from 1988 to last year, founded the company in New York with Robert Joffrey in 1956 as a small touring troupe. Mr. Joffrey, who died in 1988, was its original artistic director; Mr. Arpino was considered its resident choreographer. He moved the company to Chicago in 1995.
Mr. Arpino’s seemingly unstoppable creativity gave birth to a multitude of new ballets that encompassed counterculture rock hits like his 1970 “Trinity”; political protest pieces; several bold, erotically tinged works; and a cascade of sparkling plotless ballets, which attracted new audiences by capitalizing on the Joffrey dancers’ youth and energy.
“The time we’re in now is a time of disease and terrors, corruption and indecision in politics,” Mr. Arpino told The New York Times in 1988, when he succeeded Mr. Joffrey as artistic director. “The artist in dance must return to social statements. The abstract form is necessary, but you can’t intellectualize life, you have to live it.”
For many in the ballet world, especially purists who admired George Balanchine’s plotless ballets, these were fighting words. Critics of Mr. Arpino found his few erotic pieces, even if comic, sometimes tasteless.
Yet for Mr. Arpino, there was no need to apologize for trying to reach a wider audience. Certainly, there was no doubt about his craft, fluency and imagination.
“Bob and I came from the true grit of American background,” Mr. Arpino said in the 1988 interview, referring to Mr. Joffrey. “We know our own society. Ballet is still a foreign term to my brothers.”
In Mr. Arpino’s view, he and Joffrey were typical Americans who came from traditional families. Mr. Arpino was proud of his Italian heritage and was known to express himself more colorfully than the more subdued Joffrey.
A taste of his slang-oriented personality as a director was accurately depicted in “The Company,” Robert Altman’s 2003 movie about the Joffrey Ballet. Although most of the dancers played themselves, Mr. Arpino was portrayed by Malcolm McDowell, who had observed Mr. Arpino in rehearsals and captured his intonations and gestures. (In the movie, his character is named Alberto Antonelli.)
Mr. Arpino was born on Staten Island and grew up there, but his relatives often visited the family-owned hotel near Sorrento, Italy. “I come from a John Travolta family,” he said. “My sisters and brothers were marvelous ballroom dancers.” He is survived by a cousin and a great grandnephew.
Joffrey’s father was Afghan, his mother was Italian and he grew up in Seattle. The two met in Seattle through their mothers, who were friends, after World War II, and began to pursue what Mr. Arpino called an American vision for ballet.
It was a personalized vision to which they held fast as directors. Both presented revivals from Europe, but the accent was on new American works. Both men also battled to retain artistic control of their company.
In 1964 Rebekah Harkness, chief patron of the original Joffrey Ballet, sought to change the company’s name. Fearing that she would wrest artistic control from him, Joffrey broke with her and formed a new, reorganized Joffrey Ballet in 1965.
When the company, often in a fragile financial state, encountered even more severe financial problems, a faction of the Joffrey board sought to remove Mr. Arpino as artistic director in 1990. Mr. Arpino withdrew his ballets, and public reaction and the support of the board reconfirmed his position as artistic director. He reorganized the company legally as Joffrey Ballet Chicago after supporters in Chicago provided financial aid. When he stepped down from his post last year, he was succeeded as artistic director by Ashley C. Wheater, once a dancer in the troupe.
Mr. Arpino attended Wagner College on Staten Island for one year, and then enlisted in the United States Coast Guard Reserve in 1942. In Cold Bay, Alaska, Russian sailors came aboard his frigate and danced. It was his existential moment, setting him on a course toward dance. Soon after his ship docked in Seattle in 1945, he met Joffrey.
Joffrey took him to his ballet teacher, Mary Ann Wells. Mr. Arpino studied with her and, later, in New York, studied at the School of American Ballet, Balanchine’s school, and with the modern dancer May O’Donnell.
A severe injury in 1963 ended his dance career, but he had already started choreographing in 1961, and after the Joffrey toured internationally, including in Russia, he found his calling. “I turned a negative into a positive,” he said. “I’ve always done that.”
SOURCE; The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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MERL SAUNDERS, JAZZ AND ROCK KEYBOARDIST
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Merl Saunders, a jazz and rock keyboardist best known for his collaboration with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, died here on Friday. He was 74.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said his son Merl Saunders Jr.
Born in San Mateo, Calif., Mr. Saunders attended high school with Johnny Mathis in San Francisco. One of Mr. Saunders’s first performances, his son said, was a high school event with Mr. Mathis.
Mr. Saunders made some of his most notable music in the 1960s and ’70s when he teamed up with Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist and singer. The Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders Band recorded two albums in the 1970s, and the two played together on an array of projects until Garcia’s death in 1995.
In 1990, Mr. Saunders and Garcia released the album “Blues From the Rainforest,” which achieved success on the New Age music charts.
Besides Merl Jr., Mr. Saunders is survived by his companion, Deborah Hall; another son, Tony; a daughter, Susan Mora; six grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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GERARD DAMIANO, DIRECTOR OF ‘DEEP THROAT’
Documentary Productions
Gerard Damiano in a 2005 documentary on “Deep Throat.”
Gerard Damiano, a hairdresser turned filmmaker whose best-known work, “Deep Throat,” created sensation in every possible meaning of the term when it was released in 1972, died on Saturday in Fort Myers, Fla. He was 80 and had lived in Fort Myers in recent years.
The cause was complications of a stroke he had last month, his son, Gerard Jr., said.
Written and directed by Mr. Damiano under the name Jerry Gerard, “Deep Throat” was “pornography’s ‘Gone With the Wind’ in terms of grosses,” The New York Times wrote in 1973. It attained emblematic status as one of the first hard-core films to reach a wide general audience, from self-conscious Middle Americans to self-congratulatory celebrities. “Porno chic,” the news media often called it.
Over three and a half decades, “Deep Throat” has been damned by religious groups, decried by feminists, defended by First Amendment advocates, derided by critics and debated by social scientists. It dragged for years through local and federal courts around the country in a welter of obscenity trials in which it was variously banned, unbanned and rebanned. All this had the effect, observers agreed, of sustaining acute public interest in the film.
In what was perhaps the movie’s most enduring legacy, its title became the pseudonym of The Washington Post’s clandestine source in its coverage of the Watergate scandal. In 2005, W. Mark Felt, a former second-in-command at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, identified himself as Deep Throat.
“Deep Throat” was shot in six days for not much more than $25,000 — money put up, as has been widely reported, by associates of the Colombo crime family. By 2005 it had grossed more than $600 million, Entertainment Weekly reported.
The film’s premise was medical in nature. Its attractive young heroine suffered from a condition previously unrecorded in the annals of science, which The Times Magazine in 1973 described as “an eccentricity of her anatomy” that caused her to find oral sex “more gratifying than conventional intercourse.”
With the film, Mr. Damiano gave its star, née Linda Boreman, what is generally believed to have been her first speaking role. He also bestowed upon her the screen name Linda Lovelace. In later years, Ms. Boreman denounced the film as depicting her “rape.” She died in 2002, of injuries suffered in an auto accident.
“Deep Throat” had a small renaissance in 2005, with the release of “Inside Deep Throat,” a documentary history of the film. In the documentary, a spate of luminaries, among them Dick Cavett, Susan Brownmiller and Helen Gurley Brown, hold forth on “Deep Throat’s” s enduring cultural significance.
Mr. Damiano’s other well-known films as a director include “The Devil in Miss Jones” (1973), “Memories Within Miss Aggie” (1974) and “The Story of Joanna” (1975). His many other credits, only some of which can be rendered in a family periodical, include “Teenie Tulip” (1970), “Future Sodom” (1987) and “Young Girls in Tight Jeans” (1989).
Gerardo Rocco Damiano was born in New York City on Aug. 4, 1928. As a youth, he worked as a shoeshine boy in Times Square and as a busboy in a Manhattan Automat. At 17, he joined the Navy, serving four years.
After leaving the Navy, Mr. Damiano spent 12 years as an X-ray technician at Jamaica Hospital in Queens. He later became a hairdresser, with three successful beauty shops in Queens.
An avid amateur photographer who shot weddings and baby pictures, Mr. Damiano began his film career in the late 1960s at the suggestion of his accountant.
Mr. Damiano’s three marriages ended in divorce. His second marriage, to Barbara Walton, produced two children: Gerard Jr., of Fort Myers and Queens, and a daughter, Christar, of Fort Myers. They are his only immediate survivors.
In interviews over the years, Mr. Damiano credited his work as a hairdresser with having given him a keen understanding of women. This helped him greatly, he made clear, in his later career.
“I was just a nice guy, which is why I think I did pretty well,” he told The News-Press of Fort Myers in 2005. “I mean, I’d meet an actress and have to say, ‘Sit down, take your clothes off — I’m going to ask you to do some nasty things.’ You have to be pretty nice.”
SOURCE: The New York Times; http://www.nytimes.com
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ALFRED C. GLASSELL, JR., PHILANTHROPIST, ENERGY INDUSTRY PIONEER
Oct. 29, 2008, 11:44PM
GARY FOUNTAIN FOR THE CHRONICLE
Alfred C. Glassell Jr. served Houston’s fine-arts museum for decades.
Glassell was a pioneer in the energy industry and a guiding light for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as well as multiple other cultural and educational organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution. One of his proudest accomplishments, however, was catching a record-setting 1,560-pound black marlin off the coast of Peru in 1953. It remains the largest marlin ever caught.
Locally, art lovers will remember Glassell for his decades of service to Houston’s fine-arts museum. First elected to the board of trustees in 1970, he became its chairman in 1990.
“He started collecting art in his 30s and just gave it away,” museum director Peter C. Marzio said. “How many people will do that?”
Glassell’s passion for art was inspired by his world travels. He collected West African gold — such as personal adornments and ceremonial regalia — and gave it to the MFAH. The Alfred C. Glassell Collection of African Gold, as it is known, occupies its own galleries in the MFAH’s Caroline Wiess Law Building.
MFAH curator Frances Marzio said Glassell assembled the greatest collection of African gold in the world. Portions of the renowned collection have been borrowed by museums across the globe, including the Pushkin in Moscow. He was also an early contributor and supporter of the Museum of African Art that is a part of the Smithsonian.
“He was inspired,” she said about her old friend. “He was ahead of the curve always. He appreciated diverse cultures before it was fashionable to do so.”
The MFAH began to outgrow its space just as Glassell became chairman of the board. After a decade of his planning and fundraising, the Audrey Jones Beck building opened in 2000, across Main Street from the existing museum. He also was a major force behind the Glassell School of Art, the teaching arm of the MFAH.
Lynn Wyatt, a longtime friend of Glassell’s, said she served on several MFAH committees during his tenure as museum board president.
“He took that job very seriously,” she said. “Instead of being a figurehead, he was at every committee meeting, and he was very, very present and would give his opinion. He was very hands on, which I think we all totally appreciated.
“I feel like those of us knew him were lucky to have him in our lives,” she said.
Rich Kinder, chairman and CEO of the pipeline company Kinder Morgan, was recruited by Glassell to serve on the board. The two men shared a love of art, an affection for Houston, and the twin interests of hunting and fishing.
Kinder remembers visiting a model of Glassell’s marlin that now hangs in the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural Science. Kinder took photos and introduced Glassell to interested passers-by.
“Alfred was absolutely thrilled,” Kinder said.
Kinder said that when the museum’s director told Glassell the marlin was about to become a part of a new oceanic exhibit, Glassell quipped, “Just don’t put it next to a whale. I don’t want my marlin to look like a minnow.”
The exhibit includes footage of Glassell catching the fish with a hand-held rod and reel that was used in the 1958 film The Old Man and the Sea.
Glassell was born in 1913 in Cuba Plantation near Shreveport, La. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a history degree in 1934, served in the U.S. Army during World War II, then moved to Houston in 1945.
Glassell, a lifelong advocate for marine biology research, organized scientific expeditions aboard his vessel, the Argosy, for Yale University in 1957 and for the University of Miami in 1961. A research laboratory in Miami bears his name.
He also was a supporter of the Smithsonian, where he was an honorary member of the national board. In 1990, the Smithsonian’s Benefactors’ Circle recognized him for his lifetime of patronage.
Glassell is survived by his wife, Clare; and five children: Curry Glassell, Alfred C. Glassell III, Lisa Ford, Alison Ford Duncan and Emily Ford Embrey; and six grandsons. Services will be Monday. Details are pending.
Chronicle writer Douglas Britt and former Chronicle art critic Patricia C. Johnson contributed to this report.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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BETTY WAGNER SPANDIKOW, CO-FOUNDER OF LA LECHE LEAGUE
October 30, 2008
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
In 1956, Betty Wagner Spandikow was pregnant with her fifth child when she met with a group of women in Franklin Park to talk about something on all of their minds — breast-feeding.
Word got around. Soon, they organized themselves as La Leche League, a group dedicated to helping breast-feeding mothers.
Mrs. Spandikow was one of seven suburban women who founded the organization, naming it for the Spanish word for milk so their meeting notices could be printed in newspapers without offending the sensibilities of the time.
Mrs. Spandikow, of Glen Ellyn, died Sunday. She was 85 and had had a stroke two years ago and also had Alzheimer’s disease, said Jane Crouse, spokeswoman for the Schaumburg-based La Leche League International.
In addition to being a co-founder of the breast-feeding advocacy group, Mrs. Spandikow was its executive director for 19 years, until her retirement in 1991. She was an early advocate of such family-friendly policies as flex time, setting business hours at La Leche League to let working mothers get home for their school-age children.
She also co-authored The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, which has sold more than 2 million copies.
Mrs. Spandikow was born Betty Redmond in September 1923, grew up in the Chicago area and worked in accounting before starting a family. She raised seven children.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press.
SOURCE: The Chicago Sun-Times: http://www.suntimes.com
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CHARLES NICODEMUS, FEARLESS REPORTER ‘NEVER LET GO’
October 31, 2008
Chicago’s grand public library on South State Street carries Mayor Harold Washington’s name, but without the efforts of Charles Nicodemus, it probably wouldn’t exist.
Mr. Nicodemus’ tenacity as a Chicago Sun-Times reporter forced the city to abandon a plan to put the library in a former department store on State Street and build the architectural showcase instead.
For 44 years, first with the old Chicago Daily News and then for the Sun-Times, Mr. Nicodemus “proved you could fight City Hall and win,” said his longtime friend and colleague, Harlan Draeger.
A reporter who was as admired by his co-workers as he was feared by shady public officials, Mr. Nicodemus died of pancreatic cancer Thursday at his home in Boulder, Colo. He was 77.
Mr. Nicodemus, known to many of his colleagues as “Nico,” wrote thousands of stories in the course of his career. Some of them helped send politicians and other governmental officials to jail.
He was denounced publicly by politicians, including Mayor Richard J. Daley and Paul Powell, the longtime Illinois House speaker and secretary of state. But he was also praised by people like Robert F. Kennedy, who, as U.S. attorney general in 1962, brought criminal charges for mismanagement in military purchasing and credited Mr. Nicodemus’ reporting on the subject.
Called ‘a liar’ by the mayor
In perhaps his best-known investigation, Mr. Nicodemus’ reporting in the mid-1980s revealed dire problems with the plan to put the library in an old Goldblatt’s store on State.
Noting structural deficiencies, Mr. Nicodemus found that much of the building’s space couldn’t be used for book collections because floor supports were so weak.
When the Library Board voted in 1986 to build the new library, library president Cannutte Russell said the reporter’s stories had “sparked the debate, which led us to reconsider.”
Mr. Nicodemus, who grew up on the North Side, started his career with the City News Bureau, a wire service renowned as a journalism boot camp.
Hired by the Daily News in 1956, Mr. Nicodemus served in a variety of jobs, from night police and criminal courts reporter to what he once called “the banquet and VIP beat.”
After successes unearthing toll-road land-buying irregularities and police scandals, in 1960 Mr. Nicodemus took his talents to the Daily News’ Springfield bureau, where he revealed Illinois House Speaker Powell’s connections with the horse-racing industry. Powell died with more than $1 million in racetrack stock.
In 1962, Mr. Nicodemus was assigned to the paper’s Washington bureau, where he turned his attentions to uncovering Pentagon waste and problems with the M-16 rifle being used by the U.S. military in Vietnam.
Mr. Nicodemus was known for his fearlessness. By 1968, he was back in Chicago and had a notable clash with Mayor Richard J. Daley. Mr. Nicodemus asked the mayor if, on the floor of the Democratic National Convention being held in Chicago, Daley had screamed an obscenity at Sen. Abraham Ribicoff. Daley furiously shouted at Mr. Nicodemus, calling him “a liar.”
When the Daily News folded in 1978, Mr. Nicodemus jumped to its sister paper, the Sun-Times. But he was outraged over what he saw as the company’s favoritism in deciding which reporters to keep. That outrage led him to get involved in the reporters union, the Chicago Newspaper Guild.
Mr. Nicodemus would serve as Guild president during much of the 1980s. He was the “most stalwart Guild leader that we ever had, a tower of strength,” said the organization’s executive director, Gerald Minkkinen. “He was the last guy management wanted to hear from when there was a problem.”
Mr. Nicodemus was also known for writing long memos to his bosses, critiquing the operation of the newspaper.
One story that won a place in Chicago newspaper lore involved the time, in 1999, when a Commonwealth Edison spokesman left a message on Mr. Nicodemus’ voice mail. The spokesman was on a conference call with another executive and thought he had disconnected from the Sun-Times phone system. Instead, in a conversation that ended up being left on the reporter’s voice mail, the spokesman told the exec that he should never give Mr. Nicodemus his pager number: “For the rest of your life, this man will get you.
And, for God’s sake, don’t give him your home number! You’ll have to have it changed!”
Overflowing files
When Mr. Nicodemus retired in 2000, Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown, who teamed with him on investigative reports over the years, wrote that “once Nico sank his teeth into something, he never let go.”
Sun-Times editorial page editor Tom McNamee recalled how Mr. Nicodemus, in questioning officials, would “ask the same question six different ways if he didn’t get an honest answer.”
“He’d finally say, ‘I’m asking this question over and over because you have yet to give me an honest answer,’ ” McNamee said.
Mr. Nicodemus spent long hours at the paper, surrounded by overflowing files and envelopes of notes and documents. His son, James, said his father often worked at home, sometimes through the night. “He was not a 9-to-5 person,” the son said.
In 1967, as the Daily News’ political writer, Mr. Nicodemus wrote that he saw his job as “making clear how the straphanger on the Lake Street L, the north suburban housewife, the South Side ghetto dweller and the Old Town hippie can, and must, flex their individual political muscles to better control the politicians of both parties who are now controlling them.”
It came as a surprise to some, but the pear-shaped Mr. Nicodemus was an outdoorsman who enjoyed camping with his wife, Virginia, and their four children. He was particularly fond of rock climbing, which his colleague Draeger found appropriate.
“He was obsessed with vertical surfaces,” Draeger said. “Obstacles existed to be overcome.”
Besides his wife and his son James, Mr. Nicodemus is also survived by sons Matthew and Andrew; a daughter, Laura; a brother, Wade Nicodemus, and two grandchildren.
Services in Boulder are pending.
SOURCE: The Chicago Sun-Times: http://www.suntimes.com
1 Comment
November 3, 2008 at 10:00+00:00Nov
Good read. Thank you for sharing this article.