Cecil Stoughton, the chief photographer for the Kennedy White House, who documented its glittering public moments and its intimate private ones, and who captured its sudden end in one of the signal images of the 20th century — Lyndon B. Johnson’s swearing-in as president aboard Air Force One on Nov. 22, 1963 — died on Monday. Mr. Stoughton, who died at his home on Merritt Island, Fla., was 88.
|
|||
 |
 |
||
Cecil Stoughton/The White House
Lyndon B. Johnson’s swearing-in on Nov. 22, 1963.
His son Jamie confirmed the death.
Mr. Stoughton’s picture is the only photographic record of the Johnson administration’s abrupt, official beginning. At a precarious moment in the country’s history, it gave the public at least a semblance of continuity: one president sworn in as the widow of another looked numbly on.
A retired officer with the Army Signal Corps, Mr. Stoughton was the first official White House photographer. Photographers had taken pictures of presidents for more than a century before him, of course, but only with the advent of the Kennedy administration in January 1961 was a position created for a photographer attached to the White House.
From his West Wing office, Mr. Stoughton sat poised each day for the sound of a buzzer, which meant President John F. Kennedy was ready for his services. Over 35 months, Mr. Stoughton shot state dinners, receiving lines and visitors of all kinds, from foreign leaders to “50 singing Nuns,” as he later said.
But when the visitors left, Mr. Stoughton had the chance to capture the First Family in far more personal settings — in their White House quarters, at their vacation homes and on their many travels. In November 1962, he photographed the family at Thanksgiving, their last together.
The photograph Mr. Stoughton loved best, he often said, was a candid shot he took of the Kennedy children, Caroline and John Jr., dancing around their father’s desk as the president clapped and sang with unbridled joy.
Neither Mr. Stoughton nor his family minded the White House telephone that was installed in his Northern Virginia home, which could summon him to work at any hour. At least, Mr. Stoughton’s son said on Wednesday, they did not mind it very much.
Cecil William Stoughton was born on Jan. 18, 1920, in Oskaloosa, Iowa. At 11, after his parents separated, he spent a year or two at Boys Town, near Omaha, before rejoining his mother.
A fine baritone, Mr. Stoughton studied voice at what was then William Penn College in Oskaloosa. Before the United States entered World War II, he left to enlist in the Army, where he was assigned to a photographer-training program. This included a stint in New York studying with Alfred Eisenstadt and Margaret Bourke-White.
Mr. Stoughton was next sent to Hollywood for training in motion-picture photography. (His commander was Ronald Reagan, who later congratulated Mr. Stoughton on having beaten him to the White House.) Mr. Stoughton was afterward a combat photographer at Guadalcanal.
Not long after the war, Mr. Stoughton became a photographer in the Army’s Public Information Office. One of his pictures, in 1960, was of the discharge from the Army of Private 53310761, known in civilian life as Elvis Aaron Presley.
On Jan. 20, 1961, Mr. Stoughton was assigned to photograph President Kennedy’s inauguration. His work delighted the president, and Captain Stoughton, as he was then known, was assigned to the White House full time.
Mr. Stoughton was traveling in the Kennedy motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. After shots were fired, Mr. Stoughton’s driver raced to Parkland Hospital. As Mr. Stoughton waited outside the operating room, he saw Vice President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, being escorted from the hospital. He asked an official where they were going.
“The President is going to Washington,” he was told.
“So am I,” Mr. Stoughton replied.
He hitched a ride with a state trooper and made it to Love Field before Air Force One took off. He learned afterward that police officers on the tarmac, seeing his car hurtling toward the plane and fearing another attack, nearly fired on him. Mr. Stoughton climbed into the plane, the only photographer on board. He switched the color film in his Hasselblad camera for a roll of black and white: the wire services could not handle color.
The swearing-in began, and Mr. Stoughton, standing on a couch at the back of the plane, pressed the shutter. Nothing happened. He jiggled his camera — jiggled it hard. It came to life.
He took about 20 shots of the ceremony. He was so close to Jacqueline Kennedy that her bloodstained skirt did not appear in the finished photo. Continuing to shoot, he captured a wrenching image of the Johnsons consoling her, her eyes downcast, dark hair obscuring half her face.
Mr. Stoughton stayed on with the Johnson administration until 1965. In 1967, after retiring from the Army as a major, he became the chief still photographer for the National Park Service.
Mr. Stoughton’s first marriage, to Jacqueline Goodier, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, the former Faith Hambrook; their children, Jamie, Bill and Sharon Houghton; a son from his first marriage, Stephen; six grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
His published work includes a book, “The Memories — JFK, 1961-1963” (Norton, 1973; with Chester V. Clifton and Hugh Sidey). In 1968, after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Mr. Stoughton took photographs for Life magazine from the train carrying Mr. Kennedy’s body.
To the end of his life, Mr. Stoughton remained ardently, though quietly, interested in politics. Before he died, his son Jamie said, he took advantage of Florida’s early-voting provision to cast a ballot for Barack Obama.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
************************************************************************
PHILLIP REED, COUNCILMAN WHO FOUGHT FOR HEALTH ISSUES
Philip Reed, a former elevator salesman who became a champion of housing and health issues as an openly H.I.V.-positive member of the New York City Council, died on Thursday. He was 59 and lived on the Upper West Side.
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Philip Reed in 2005.
The cause was complications of pneumonia resulting from leukemia, said Geoffrey E. Eaton, who was Mr. Reed’s chief of staff on the Council.
Elected in 1997, Mr. Reed, a black, openly gay Democrat, represented a largely Latino district that encompassed parts of East Harlem, Manhattan Valley, the Upper West Side and the South Bronx. He left office in 2005 because of term limits.
Mr. Reed fought for asthma-prevention legislation in a district that had one of the nation’s highest rates of the disorder. He promoted the development of housing for moderate- and low-income New Yorkers, and he fought a plan by the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to move the Museum of the City of New York from East Harlem to the old Tweed Courthouse, near City Hall. The relocation plan was reversed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
Born in New York on Feb. 21, 1949, Mr. Reed attended Ohio Wesleyan University but dropped out and received conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War. He spent 10 years as a salesman for Otis Elevator in San Francisco, where he was an advocate for gay rights.
Mr. Reed returned to New York in the late 1970s. He ran a program in Brooklyn for people with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. He had developed symptoms in 1981 that were later diagnosed as H.I.V. In the late ’80s, he became a Democratic district leader.
Mr. Reed ran unsuccessfully for the State Senate and City Council before winning the Council seat that had been held by Adam Clayton Powell IV.
He is survived by his twin sister, Elinor Reed, of Manhattan.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
************************************************************************
MICHAEL CRICHTON AUTHOR OF ‘JURASSIC PARK’ AND OTHER THRILLERS
Michael Crichton, whose technological thrillers like “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” dominated best-seller lists for decades and were translated into Hollywood megahits, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 66 and lived in Santa Monica, Calif.
Keith Bedford/Getty Images
Michael Crichton in 2002.
|
|||
|
 |
||
MGM
Michael Crichton in 1977.
A statement released by his family gave the cause as cancer, but provided no other details.
A doctor by training — he also created the hit television series “ER” — Mr. Crichton used fiction to explore the moral and political problems posed by modern technology and scientific breakthroughs, which in his books defied human control or ended up as tools used for evil ends. In his fictional worlds, human greed, hubris and the urge to dominate were just as powerful as the most advanced computers.
Mr. Crichton’s fast-paced narratives often involved the arcana of medical technology, computer science, chaos theory or genetic engineering. But by combining old-fashioned storytelling with up-to-date, gee-whiz science, the books made for a compelling formula that was adapted easily by Hollywood. His books sold in the tens of millions and almost routinely became movies, many of them blockbusters like “Jurassic Park” and the sequel, “The Lost World,” as well as “Rising Sun.”
Reviewers often complained that Mr. Crichton’s characters were wooden, that his ear for dialogue was tin and that his science was suspect. Environmentalists raged against his skeptical views on climate change, first expressed in the 2004 novel, “State of Fear,” and subsequently in various public forums. Even his severest critics, however, confessed to being seduced by his plots and unable to resist turning the pages, rapidly.
“He had a ferocious, brilliant intellect and the ability to write entertaining narratives,” said Lynn Nesbitt, his agent since “The Andromeda Strain.” “I can’t think of many writers who can match that.”
John Michael Crichton was born in Chicago, the oldest of four children, and grew up in Roslyn, on Long Island. His father was the editor of Advertising Age and later president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
At Harvard, after a professor criticized his writing style, the younger Mr. Crichton changed his major from English to anthropology and graduated summa cum laude in 1964. He then spent a year teaching anthropology on a fellowship at Cambridge University. In 1966 he entered Harvard Medical School and began writing on the side to help pay tuition.
Under the pseudonym John Lange — the German word for tall was a sly reference to his height, 6 feet 7 inches — he wrote eight thrillers. Under the name Jeffery Hudson, he wrote “A Case of Need” (1968), a medical detective novel that revolved around moral issues posed by abortion. It won an Edgar Award for best novel.
In 1969, after earning his medical degree, Mr. Crichton moved to the La Jolla section of San Diego and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Already inclining toward a writing career, he tilted decisively with “The Andromeda Strain,” a medical thriller about a group of scientists racing against time to stop the spread of a lethal organism from outer space code-named Andromeda.
With a breakneck, suspenseful plot that played out against a carefully researched scientific setting, the novel — he was now writing under his own name — became an enormous best seller and a successful 1971 Hollywood film, a pattern repeated many times in the years to come. More than a dozen of Mr. Crichton’s novels became movies, and he turned his hand to directing, screenwriting and producing for film and television along the way. A television version of “The Andromeda Strain” was shown on the A&E network in May.
After publishing the nonfiction book “Five Patients: The Hospital Explained” (1970), Mr. Crichton returned to the best-seller list with “The Terminal Man” (1972), an updated “Frankenstein” in which an accident victim goes on a killing spree after a tiny computer implant, intended to control his brain, malfunctions. Technology, for Mr. Crichton, never worked quite the way it was intended.
Having directed “Pursuit,” an adaptation of one of his early novels, for television, Mr. Crichton turned to film, directing the low-budget “Westworld” (1973), for which he wrote the screenplay, about a virtual-reality theme park that made it possible to enter ancient Rome or the old West. The film’s highlight was a showdown between a renegade android gunfighter, played by Yul Brynner, and a luckless businessman played by Richard Benjamin.
Mr. Crichton followed this quirky project with a series of departures. In his novel “The Great Train Robbery” (1975), he turned back the clock to Victorian England to tell the story of a genteel archcriminal (Sean Connery in the film) who relieves a speeding train of its cargo of gold bullion. Then came the novel “Eaters of the Dead” (1976), in which he plunged into the mist-shrouded world of the Vikings. “Jasper Johns” (1977), a straightforward biography of that painter, completed this rash of projects.
After directing his adaptation of the Robin Cook novel “Coma,” with Geneviève Bujold in the starring role, Mr. Crichton returned to familiar territory in the novel “Congo” (1980), about a team of hunters on a jungle expedition in search of a rare variety of diamond capable of being transformed into a power source more efficient than nuclear energy.
A remarkably facile writer, with a restless imagination, Mr. Crichton continued to juggle roles as a novelist, screenwriter and director. His marital schedule was also crowded. Mr. Crichton married five times. He is survived by his wife, the former Sherri Alexander, and by a daughter, Taylor.
|
|||
|
 |
||
Fox
A scene from “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” a 1997 film based on a novel by Michael Crichton.
In the 1980s he directed a string of less than memorable films, including “Looker” (1981), “Runaway” (1984) and “Physical Evidence” (1989). The novel “Sphere” (1987), about the underwater discovery of a naval vessel from the future, struck many reviewers as a disappointment. He did manage to complete a well-regarded primer on computers, “Electronic Life” (1983), but for a time it seemed as though Mr. Crichton might have lost his magic touch.
Not so. In 1990 he published “Jurassic Park,” his immensely successful tale about a theme park inhabited by reconstituted dinosaurs who run wild after the park’s security system fails.
Part fantasy, part nightmare, the novel ingeniously blended the techno-thriller elements of Mr. Crichton’s previous work with the enduring appeal of T. rex and his prehistoric peers. The 1993 film version, directed by Steven Spielberg, became a phenomenal box-office success. Mr. Crichton returned to the dinosaur world in a sequel, “The Lost World” (1995), which Mr. Spielberg made into a film in 1997.
Those two men met during the filming of “The Andromeda Strain,” when Mr. Spielberg had just been hired as a television director by Universal.
“My first assignment was to show Michael Crichton around the Universal lot,” Mr. Spielberg said in a statement on Wednesday. He added: “Michael’s talent outscaled even his own dinosaurs of ‘Jurassic Park.’ He was the greatest at blending science with big theatrical concepts, which is what gave credibility to dinosaurs again walking the earth.”
Mr. Crichton took advantage of his medical training for a television series, “ER,” which he had been developing as a film, to be directed by Mr. Spielberg, when “Jurassic Park” pre-empted it. Rewritten for television, “ER” first appeared on NBC in 1994 and became a long-running hit.
The growing economic power of Japan inspired “Rising Sun” (1992), a political thriller with paranoid overtones. A murder investigation at the Los Angeles offices of a Japanese company uncovers a Japanese plot to displace the United States as a technological leader. A strange combination of crime novel and economic manifesto, the book became, as usual, a successful film, with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes as the detectives on the case.
After fending off charges of racism and xenophobia for “Rising Sun,” Mr. Crichton found himself in the thick of the debate on climate change with “State of Fear,” an eco-thriller in which evil environmentalists whip up hysteria over global warming to advance their sinister agenda.
Mr. Crichton was attacked by environmentalists for presenting a tendentious picture of the issue. In his defense, Mr. Crichton said that he accepted the reality of climate change but thought that its dangers could not be known with any certainty and had been exaggerated by environmentalists.
Mr. Crichton seemed to spin out his best-selling yarns effortlessly. A voracious consumer of scientific data and a vivid imaginer of unintended consequences, he drew on nanotechnology to populate “Prey” (2002) with horrible tiny robots. In “Next” (2006), his most recent novel, pioneering work in genetics and biotechnology unleashes creepy mayhem.
“He was extraordinarily knowledgeable about art, science and medicine,” Ms. Nesbitt, his agent, said. “He felt that he had a responsibility to educate as well as entertain.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
************************************************************************
JHERYL BUSBY, REVIVER OF THE MOTOWN LABEL
Jheryl Busby, a music executive credited with reviving the legendary Motown record label in the early 1990s after first bringing success to MCA Records, a company previously known in the industry as the Music Cemetery of America, died Tuesday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 59.
Associated Press, 1993
Jheryl Busby signed big acts.
The cause has not yet been determined, said Ed Winter, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Department, who said Mr. Busby had been found dead in a hot tub at his home.
Mr. Busby was chief executive of Motown, the industry icon founded in Detroit in 1959 by Berry Gordy Jr., from 1988 to 1995. He had been president of the black music division of MCA from 1984 to 1988.
As a young man starting out in the industry during the 1970s, Mr. Busby regarded Motown as “a label of hope and opportunity,” he told The New York Times in 1989.
“I thought it couldn’t get any better: president and C.E.O. of probably the most important record label in America in terms of black music,” he later added.
With a blend of pop and soul, Motown had transcended racial barriers and consistently topped both the black and pop charts with performers like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, the Jackson Five, the Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Spinners and the Four Tops.
But by the time Mr. Busby took over, the company had lost much of its luster, with some of its stars, including Ms. Ross and the Jacksons, defecting to other labels. Sales, which had reached nearly $100 million annually during the best years, had slipped to about $20 million, and the label was eighth on Billboard magazine’s rankings of black album sales.
Within a year, Mr. Busby persuaded Ms. Ross — who with the Supremes and on her own had helped defined the Motown sound with hits like her rendition of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” — to rejoin the company’s roster. “It’s like the queen returning home,” Mr. Busby said.
By then Motown had been acquired by a partnership of Boston Ventures, an investment firm, and MCA Inc. — the parent of MCA Records and Universal Studios — and moved to Los Angeles. The partnership paid $61 million to buy the company from Mr. Gordy.
Some of the stalwarts were still bringing profits to Motown. Under Mr. Busby, new stars were signed, including Queen Latifah, Boyz II Men, and Johnny Gill. In 1990, five Motown songs reached No. 1 on the R&B charts.
Mr. Busby’s Motown success was a reflection of his performance at MCA. After starting in the business as a merchandiser for Stax Records, he went on to various promotional and marketing jobs at Casablanca Records, Atlantic Records, CBS Records and A&M Records. In 1984, he moved to MCA and built, virtually from scratch, a black music division that by 1988 was bringing in $50 million in annual sales and for several years was No. 1 in black album sales.
In Mr. Busby’s first year at MCA, the company signed New Edition, its first hit black group since 1979. That success was followed by hits from a diverse selection of performers, including Jody Watley, the Jets, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Bobby Brown and Ready for the World. Mr. Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel” in 1988 eventually sold more than five million copies.
Under Mr. Busby, the company also signed Mary J. Blige and the rappers Heavy D. and the Boyz to MCA.
By 1995, MCA was part owner and distributor of Motown. After a legal dispute with MCA, Mr. Busby left Motown. He later became head of the urban music division of the movie studio DreamWorks and, in 2004, founded Def Soul Classics Records.
Mr. Busby was born in Los Angeles on May 5, 1949. Information about his survivors was unavailable.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
*************************************************************************
JOHN DALY, PRODUCER OF ‘PLATOON’
LOS ANGELES (AP) — John Daly, a British-born producer whose credits include “Platoon,” “The Last Emperor” and other Oscar-winning movies, died Friday. He was 71.
The cause was cancer, his daughter, Jenny Daly, said.
Mr. Daly was chairman of Film and Music Entertainment. Over four decades, his companies produced films that earned 13 Oscars and 21 Oscar nominations, as well as many Golden Globes and other awards. “Platoon” won the Academy Award for best picture in 1987; “The Last Emperor” won it in 1988.
Born in London, Mr. Daly started in show business in 1967 when he joined with the British actor David Hemmings to form Hemdale, a company that managed rock bands like Yes and Black Sabbath.
Hemdale later became an independent film producer and distributor in Britain, releasing movies like “Tommy,” an adaptation of the rock opera by the Who, according to Film and Music Entertainment.
Under Mr. Daly’s stewardship, Hemdale produced more than 100 films that grossed more than $1.5 billion. He had been at the helm of Film and Music Entertainment since 2003.
In 2004, he co-wrote and directed “The Aryan Couple,” starring Martin Landau, which received awards at several film festivals in the United States.
Besides his daughter, he is survived by three sons, Michael, Julian and Timothy.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
************************************************************************
G. LARRY JAMES, OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST IN TRACK
G. Larry James, a former champion runner who won gold and silver medals in the racially charged 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, died Thursday, on his birthday, at his home in Galloway, N.J. He was 61.
Associated Press
G. Larry James with a silver medal in the 1968 Olympics.
The cause was colon cancer, said William Preston, the coordinator of cross-country and track and field at Richard Stockton College in Pomona, N.J. James had been the athletic director there for 28 years.
James, nicknamed the Mighty Burner, was an explosive runner, but deceptively so. Slender and carrying only 155 pounds on his 6-foot frame, he ran with a floating, almost feathery stride.
He won his Olympic laurels in Games best remembered for a black power demonstration staged by his fellow African-American teammates Tommie Smith and John Carlos during an awards ceremony in October 1968.
Standing on the winners’ platform, Smith, who had won the gold medal in the 200-meter dash, and Carlos, who had won the bronze in that event, bowed their heads and raised a black-gloved fist as the “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played.
The display of politics at the Games angered the International Olympic Committee, which forced the United States Olympic Committee to send the two home.
Three days later, in the 400-meter final, the United States swept the medals with Lee Evans first, James second and Ron Freeman third. Evans (43.86 seconds) and James (43.97) broke the world record.
At the medals ceremony, the three Americans wore black socks and black berets and raised their fists, but when the national anthem was played, they removed the berets and lowered their fists.
Two days after that, those three runners and Vince Matthews won the 4×400-meter relay in 3 minutes 56.16 seconds, earning gold medals and a world record that would last 24 years. There was no demonstration during the awards ceremony.
In 1974, in an interview with The New York Times, James expressed second thoughts about his participation in the protest. “I was young, and was expected to have answers to all kinds of questions,” he said. “I went along with people who were my idols. I still respect them, as athletes, but I’m my own man now.”
George Larry James was born Nov. 6, 1947, in Mount Pleasant, N.Y. “I started track in seventh grade because I couldn’t do anything else very well,” he told Track and Field News in 1968.
At White Plains High School, his main events were the intermediate hurdles and the triple jump. He went on to Villanova University, where he won four N.C.A.A. titles and broke or tied world indoor records at 440, 500 and 600 yards.
In the 1968 Penn Relays in Philadelphia, he ran the 440-yard anchor leg of a one-mile relay in 43.9 seconds, the fastest at the time.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Villanova and a master’s in public policy from Rutgers in 1987.
In 2003, he was elected to the National Track and Field Hall of Fame. He also served in the United States Marine Corps Reserves, achieving the rank of major.
He is survived by his wife of 37 years, the former Cynthia Daughtry; a daughter, Tamaiya Forbey of Galloway; a son, Larry, of Tulsa, Okla.; five grandchildren; a sister, Julia James of White Plains; and his mother, Martha James of Greenburgh, N.Y.
In 1973, James ran for the International Track Association’s new and short-lived professional circuit.
After his running career, he was a manager of United States track teams in international competitions and, beginning in 1980, dean of athletics and recreational programs and services at Richard Stockton College.
At Stockton, he helped secure training camps for the United States women’s Olympic basketball team in 1992, Saudi Arabia’s World Cup soccer team in 1994 and its Olympic soccer team in 1996. Last year, the college renamed its track and soccer facility “G. Larry James Stadium.”
In 1973, when the college was known as Stockton State College, he was assistant athletic director and coached the track team.
“Occasionally,” he told The Times, “I spot the boys 20 yards in a 440 and, if I catch them, they have to do three more laps.”
He usually caught them, he said.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
************************************************************************
JIMMY CARL BLACK, DRUMMER WITH FRANK ZAPPA’S MOTHER’S OF INVENTION
Jimmy Carl Black, the acerbic drummer of Frank Zappa’s mischievous and innovative rock band the Mothers of Invention, died on Saturday in Siegsdorf, Germany. He was 70.
Mark Sullivan/Contour, via Getty Images
Jimmy Carl Black in Hollywood, Ca., in 1975.
The cause was cancer, according to a spokeswoman for Rykodisc, the company that releases Zappa’s music.
Mr. Black was a steady and serviceable drummer, but he is best known for two pranks on the Mothers of Invention’s 1968 album, “We’re Only in It for the Money.” He is the bearded, long-haired figure on the cover wearing a white dress and a Mona Lisa grin, and on the album’s first song, “Are You Hung Up?,” he delivered his half-mocking signature line: “Hi, boys and girls, I’m Jimmy Carl Black — I’m the Indian of the group.”
Born James Inkanish Jr. of Cheyenne ancestry in El Paso, he adopted his stepfather’s name. After playing in country and rock bands, he moved to Los Angeles in 1964 and formed the Soul Giants. Zappa joined that group as a guitarist and quickly persuaded the members to play his own songs. As the Mothers of Invention, the band was remade in Zappa’s eclectic vision, and it became a leading light of underground rock as much for its music as for its caustic satires of the earnestness and indulgence of the hippie era.
“He joined the band, and three days later he took it over,” Mr. Black once said of Zappa, who died in 1993.
That lineup was abruptly disbanded by Zappa in 1969, though Mr. Black took part in Zappa’s 1971 film “200 Motels,” prominently singing the song “Lonesome Cowboy Burt.”
Thereafter Mr. Black had an intermittent musical career, briefly performing with Captain Beefheart, another member of the Zappa circle. He performed and ran a house-painting business with the British singer Arthur Brown, another veteran of 1960s rock, and since the early 1980s Mr. Black also played with Don Preston, Bunk Gardner and other former members of the Mothers of Invention, appearing as the Grandmothers.
His survivors include his wife, Monika, and six children.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
***********************************************************************
ROSELLA HIGHTOWER, NATIVE AMERICAN BALLERINA AND DANCE SCHOOL FOUNDER
Rosella Hightower, an Oklahoma-born ballerina of enormous flair and virtuosity who followed up a celebrated international career by founding the Centre de Danse Classique in Cannes, France, one of the world’s leading ballet schools, has died at her home in Cannes, her daughter said Tuesday. Miss Hightower was 88.
Maurice Seymour, via S. Hurok Presents
Rosella Hightower in the 1950s.
|
|||
|
 |
||
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times, 1989
Miss Hightower teaching a class for Dance Theater of Harlem.
Her daughter, Dominique Monet Robier, told Agence France-Presse that her mother died overnight, late Monday or early Tuesday, after suffering several strokes.
Miss Hightower was adored in Europe. After winning praise in the United States during the 1940s for her performances with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ballet Theater (as American Ballet Theater was known then) and Col. W. de Basil’s Ballets Russes, she went to Europe with the Grand Ballet de Monte Carlo (later called the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas), and became the first 20th-century American ballerina to hold a leading place on the European stage.
Yet she remained proud of being not only an American ballerina but also a Native American ballerina, of Choctaw descent. She was one of five Oklahoma-born American Indian ballerinas whose careers began in the 1940s, the others being Yvonne Chouteau, Moscelyne Larkin and the sisters Maria Tallchief and Marjorie Tallchief.
In 1991 the State of Oklahoma honored the five dancers when it dedicated a mural depicting them, titled “Flight of Spirit,” in the Great Rotunda of the State Capitol in Oklahoma City.
Miss Hightower won acclaim as early as 1943, when her dancing in the “Nutcracker” pas de deux with Ballet Theater caused John Martin, the dance critic of The New York Times, to declare, “Here, assuredly, is an American ballerina in the full sense of the term.”
In 1947, as a member of the de Basil company, a theatrical emergency made Miss Hightower an overnight sensation. Alicia Markova had been scheduled to portray the title role in “Giselle” at the troupe’s opening performance on March 20 at the Metropolitan Opera House. But when Miss Markova fell ill, Miss Hightower, who had never danced the part before, learned it in only five hours. Her performance, Mr. Martin wrote, “exhibited not only the assurance of the fine trouper but also the quality of the genuine artist.” (Miss Markova died in 2004.)
Miss Hightower was born on Jan. 10, 1920 in Ardmore, Okla., the only child of Charles Edgar and Eula May Flanning Hightower. A few years later, when her father found a job with the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway, the family moved to Kansas City, Mo., where Miss Hightower received her early dance training with Dorothy Perkins.
When the great choreographer and character dancer Léonide Massine appeared with the de Basil company in Kansas City in 1937, he invited Miss Hightower to Monte Carlo to join a new company he was organizing there. Arriving in Monte Carlo at her own expense, she found to her horror that she had no firm contract and that Massine was merely inviting people for further auditions.
Miss Hightower was eventually accepted into the new Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. A hard worker and a quick learner, she soon received Massine’s encouragement. It was also with the Ballet Russe that she first met André Eglevsky, who was to be her partner with several companies.
After World War II broke out, the Ballet Russe moved to New York. There, Miss Hightower became interested in the newly established Ballet Theater, joining it in 1941. In 1946 she joined the de Basil Ballet, which was then billing itself as Original Ballet Russe.
Besides Massine, Miss Hightower worked with choreographers like Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille and Bronislava Nijinska as she developed a remarkable versatility. But the greatest influence on her was Nijinska. Miss Hightower told the dance writer Lili Cockerille Livingston in “American Indian Ballerinas” (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997) that it was from Nijinska that she had truly learned the importance of rhythm in dancing.
In 1947 Miss Hightower made what was perhaps the most significant decision in her career. She accepted an invitation to become ballerina of a company being formed in Europe by the Marquis George de Cuevas, a Chilean-born patron of the arts. The Marquis kept renaming his troupe, at various times calling it Grand Ballet de Monte Carlo and Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas. But most dancegoers referred to it simply as the de Cuevas Ballet.
One reason for joining de Cuevas was the fact that Miss Hightower’s mentor, Nijinska, was working with the company. For Miss Hightower, Nijinska choreographed the glitteringly virtuosic “Rondo Capriccioso.”
With de Cuevas, Miss Hightower triumphantly danced the classics as well as many new ballets. Her greatest success in the modern repertory was John Taras’s “Piège de Lumière,” in which she portrayed an exotic butterfly who bewitches escaped convicts in a tropical forest.
Because Miss Hightower kept so busy in Europe, America saw little of her at the height of her powers. When the de Cuevas Ballet gave its only New York season in 1950, its leading dancers, Miss Hightower among them, were cheered. But the engagement as a whole was considered disorganized. Miss Hightower made a successful return to Ballet Theater as a guest artist during the 1955-56 season.
After de Cuevas died in 1961 and his company disbanded, Miss Hightower gradually retired from the stage, although she gave a series of successful gala performances with Sonia Arova, Erik Bruhn and Rudolf Nureyev in 1962.
She settled in Cannes, where in 1962 she opened the Centre de Danse Classique, soon recognized as one of Europe’s leading ballet schools. Miss Hightower also directed major companies, including the Marseilles Ballet (1969-72), the Ballet of the Grand Théâtre of Nancy (1973-74) in France and La Scala Ballet (1985-86) in Milan.
Her greatest challenge came as director of the Paris Opéra Ballet (1980-83), a huge company celebrated for its glorious history, unique style and bureaucratic red tape. Yet she successfully reorganized it before turning it over to her successor, Nureyev.
In 1991 the French experimental choreographer François Verret made a documentary film in homage to her, titled “Rosella Hightower.”
Miss Hightower married the French designer and artist Jean Robier in Paris in 1952. Their only child, Dominique Robier, was born in 1955. Ms. Robier, also a dancer, has performed with Maurice Béjart’s ballet company and the modern-dance groups of Régine Chopinot and Dominique Bagouet. No other information about survivors was available.
In 1975, the French government named Miss Hightower a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, the country’s premier honor.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
***********************************************************************
MARILYN FERGUSON, APOSTLE OF THE NEW AGE
Marilyn Ferguson, whose 1980 book “The Aquarian Conspiracy” became a bible of the New Age movement, died on Oct. 19 at her home in Banning, Calif. She was 70.
The Los Angeles Times, 1980
Marilyn Ferguson
The cause was believed to be a heart attack, said her daughter Kristin Ferguson Smith, of Los Angeles.
“A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical change in the United States,” Ms. Ferguson wrote in her best-selling book. “Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought and they may have even broken continuity with history.”
With a breathless sense of wonder and anticipation, Ms. Ferguson described ideas and discoveries that promised a new age of personal fulfillment and limitless potential. She surveyed pioneering work in mind-brain studies, holography, psychotechnologies, parapsychology, holistic medicine and a host of other emerging fields that, taken together, added up to “a benign conspiracy for a new human agenda.”
“The Aquarian Conspiracy,” which she once called “a synthesis of essential, life-giving truths,” was the New Age movement’s great catalog, gathering in one volume many of the ideas, theorists and attitudes that would gain cultural currency in coming years.
Some reviewers found Ms. Ferguson credulous, boosterish and highly selective in her presentation of scientific evidence, but readers responded enthusiastically to her tidings of the New Age. “It gave a name to something, and that something was a cultural movement that had not been seen from the broad perspective that she gave it,” said Jeremy P. Tarcher, her publisher. The moment was ripe. With books like “The Third Wave” by Alvin Toffler and “Megatrends” by John Naisbitt appearing about the same time, and the human-potential movement surging, Ms. Ferguson found herself propelled into a new career as a lecturer, motivational speaker and teacher, although her educational courses, she once said, were “more like shamanic journeys” than ordinary seminars.
Marilyn Grasso was born in Grand Junction, Colo. After attending Mesa College in Grand Junction and the University of Colorado, she began writing poetry and short stories. In 1968, she published “Champagne Living on a Beer Budget,” written with her second husband, Michael Ferguson. An early marriage ended in divorce, as did marriages to Mr. Ferguson and to Ray Gottlieb.
In addition to her daughter Kristin, she is survived by her son, Eric, of Beaumont, Calif.; her daughter Lynn Lewis, of Oakland; and six grandchildren.
While studying transcendental meditation in Los Angeles, and watching her children grow, Ms. Ferguson developed an interest in new findings on the brain and consciousness that led her to write “The Brain Revolution: The Frontiers of Mind Research” (1973). She also founded a journal devoted to the subject, Brain/Mind Bulletin, which turned out to be so successful that she created a companion publication, Leading Edge, in 1980. Described as “a bulletin of social transformation,” it dealt with politics, relationships, business and the arts.
While editing Brain/Mind, Ms. Ferguson began organizing information that was not suitable for it in folders. These supplied the raw material for “The Aquarian Conspiracy.” The book generated a belated sequel, “Aquarius Now” (2005), which made little impact. Aquarian energies, perhaps, had flagged. Or else the benign conspiracy had achieved the ultimate victory: its once revolutionary ideas now seemed commonplace.
Ms. Ferguson’s message was relentlessly positive. In the dawning new age, people would exercise their talents to the fullest; war and social hierarchies would disappear; and the human race, impelled forward by thrilling new scientific discoveries, would embrace the happiness that belonged to it by birthright. The future was not just bright, it was radiant. She once told an interviewer, “We are going to see a burst of creativity that will make the Renaissance pale in comparison.”
SOURCE: The New York Times; http://www.nytimes.com
***********************************************************************
AHMED AL-MIRGHANI, EX-PRESIDENT OF SUDAN
KHARTOUM, Sudan – Ahmed al-Mirghani, a former president of Sudan who was unseated by the military coup that swept the current head of state to power 19 years ago, died Sunday. He was 67.
His death was announced by state television, which quoted President Omar al-Bashir.
At his death, Mr. Mirghani was deputy leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and leader of a Sufi Muslim religious group. He led a five-member presidency council from May 1986 to June 1989, when the coup swept Mr. Bashir to power.
Mr. Mirghani was born in Khartoum on Aug. 16, 1941, to one of the most prominent families in Sudan, one that traces its lineage to the Prophet Muhammad. He received a postgraduate degree in economics from the University of London.
He was part of a transitional government that returned Sudan to civilian rule in 1986, when Sadiq al-Mahdi and his Umma Party won elections and took the Democratic Unionist Party into a coalition government.
Mr. Mirghani is perhaps best remembered for a peace agreement he signed in Ethiopia on Nov. 16, 1988, with John Garang, the longtime leader of a rebellion in southern Sudan. The agreement, with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, was intended to repeal the introduction of Shariah, the Islamic legal code, to the mainly Christian and animist south and the largely Arab north and build a new national consensus.
But the National Islamic Front, now defunct but then led by the maverick politician Hassan al-Turabi, left the government, saying the pact betrayed Islamic principles.
Then on June 30, 1989, Mr. Bashir, a career officer, seized power in a military coup backed by Mr. Turabi and the Islamists.
Mr. Mirghani was also a former ambassador to Cairo and the president of the Sudanese Islamic Bank. He was married and the father of three children.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
************************************************************************
JOHN RIPLEY, VIETNAM WAR HERO
Associated Press
November 2, 2008
Ripley’s son, Stephen Ripley, said his father was found at his Annapolis home Saturday after missing a speaking engagement on Friday. The son said the cause of death had not been determined but it appeared his father died in his sleep.
In a videotaped interview with the U.S. Naval Institute for its Americans at War program, Ripley said he and about 600 South Vietnamese were ordered to “hold and die” against 20,000 North Vietnamese soldiers with about 200 tanks.
“I’ll never forget that order, ‘hold and die’,” Ripley said. The only way to stop the enormous force with their tiny force was to destroy the bridge, he said.
“The idea that I would be able to even finish the job before the enemy got me was ludicrous,” Ripley said. “When you know you’re not going to make it, a wonderful thing happens: You stop being cluttered by the feeling that you’re going to save your butt.”
Ripley crawled under the bridge under heavy gunfire, rigging 500 pounds of explosives that brought the twins spans down, said John Miller, a former Marine adviser in Vietnam and the author of “The Bridge at Dong Ha,” which details the battle.
Miller said the North Vietnamese advance was slowed considerably by Ripley.
“A lot of people think South Vietnam would have gone under in ‘72 had he not stopped them,” Miller said.
Ray Madonna, president of the U.S. Naval Academy’s 1962 graduating class, served in Vietnam as a Marine at the same time and said his classmate saved countless U.S. and South Vietnamese troops.
“They would have been wrecked” if the tanks had crossed, Madonna said. He said Ripley also coordinated naval gunfire that stopped the tanks from crossing at a shallower point downstream.
“He was a Marine’s Marine, respected, highly respected by enlisted men, by his peers and by his seniors,” Madonna said.
Miller said Ripley, who was born in Radford, Va., descended from a long line of veterans going back to the Revolutionary War. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1962, after enlisting in the Marines out of high school and spending a year in naval school in Newport, R.I.
He earned the “Quad Body” distinction for making it through four of the toughest military training programs in the world: the Army Rangers, Marine reconnaissance, Army Airborne and Britain’s Royal Marines, Miller said. He was also the only Marine to be inducted in the U.S. Army Ranger Hall of Fame.
Ripley earned the Navy Cross and Silver Star for his service in Vietnam. He later served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was regimental commander at Camp Lejeune, N.C., among other postings.
After retiring from the Marines, he was president and chancellor of Southern Virginia College in Lexington, Va.
Stephen Ripley said his father had a deep and tenacious love for his country, the Marine Corps and his family.
“My Dad never quit anything and never went halfway on anything in his life,” he said. “He just was a full-throttle kind of person and those people that he cared about, he really cared about.”
Ripley is survived by his wife, Moline B. Ripley, 67; three sons, Stephen Ripley, 43, Thomas Ripley, 38, and John Ripley, 35; a daughter, Mary Ripley, 39; and eight grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements were pending.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
***********************************************************************
CLYDE WILSON, LEGENDARY HOUSTON PRIVATE EYE
By Anita Hassan
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
November 5, 2008
E. JOSEPH DEERING Chronicle file
Clyde Wilson was known for exposing wrongdoing among the elite.
After opening his first office in Houston in 1957, Wilson earned a reputation for exposing corruption. Some of his first cases shed light on wrongdoing by officials in Lufkin and Polk County.
“He was an icon in this business,” said his son Tim Wilson, who owns a private investigation company. “He was the one who brought private investigation to the forefront and made it respectable.”
Born in Houston in 1923, Clyde Wilson moved to Austin as a young child after his father passed away. He never made it past the ninth grade, Tim Wilson said.
Clyde Wilson was drafted into the military in the early 1940s and fought in World War II, receiving two Purple Hearts for his effort, his son said.
In 1942 he met his wife, Agnes, at an Austin hospital, where she was a nurse treating his mother. The couple married in January 1943 and had seven children.
Tim Wilson said it was never easy getting away with anything growing up with a father who was a private investigator.
In the 1970s, Clyde Wilson made international headlines negotiating the release of hostages in Ethiopia for Tenneco. He also uncovered the mishandling of Moody Foundation funds and fraud in the Hermann Estates.
Clyde Wilson was charged in the 1970s in federal court for wiretapping during one of his undercover cases. He pleaded no contest and was later given a presidential pardon.
In the 1990s, he was in the middle of a political slander case that current state Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, filed against a local television station.
One of Clyde Wilson’s most public cases ended in adultery charges that broke up billionaire Donald Trump’s marriage to his first wife, Ivana.
Clyde Wilson was married 61 years. His wife died in 2003.
He is survived by his children, Ruth, Mary, Kathryn, Amy, Tim, Clyde and Henry. He had 35 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.
A viewing will be at 7 p.m. Tuesday at George H. Lewis Sons, 1010 Bering. Services will be at 10 a.m. Wednesday at St. Cecilia Catholic Church, 911 Bunker Hill.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
**************************************************************************
JOHN LEONARD, BOOK CRITIC WHO BACKED AUTHOR TONI MORRISON
BBy Hillel Italie Associated Press
Novemebr 7, 2008
Leonard died at Mount Sinai Hospital Wednesday night from complications from lung cancer, stepdaughter Jen Nessel said.
A former union activist and community organizer, Leonard was an emphatic liberal whose career began in the 1960s at the conservative National Review and continued at countless other publications, including The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly. He was also a TV critic for New York magazine, a columnist for Newsday and a commentator for CBS Sunday Morning.
Leonard had the critic’s most fortunate knack of being ahead of his time. He was the first major reviewer to assess Morrison’s fiction and the first major American critic to write about Marquez. As the literary director for radio station KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., Leonard featured the commentary of Pauline Kael, before she became famous as a film critic for The New Yorker. Leonard was also an early advocate of Mary Gordon, Maxine Hong Kingston and other women writers.
“He really put a lot of us on the map,” said Gordon, who eventually became friends with Leonard. “He was generous, warm, funny, and he didn’t make the mistakes that other men make with women writers. There was no discomfort or condescension with him, no feeling that he was the great man from on high. He was like a very tender big brother.”
His good work was appreciated. When Morrison traveled to Stockholm in 1993 to collect her Nobel Prize, she brought Leonard along, “one of the most incredible experiences of his life,” Leonard’s stepdaughter said. Studs Terkel, who died Oct. 31, once called him “a literary critic in the noblest sense of the word, where you didn’t determine whether a book was ‘good or bad’ but wrote with a point of view of how you should read the book.”
Said Leonard’s good friend, Kurt Vonnegut: “When I start to read John Leonard, it is as though I, while simply looking for the men’s room, blundered into a lecture by the smartest man who ever lived.”
Leonard treated his subjects like lovers — to be protected, assailed, embraced. Literature was sweet madness. In 2007, accepting an honorary prize from his peers at the National Book Critics Circle, Leonard observed that “for almost 50 years, I have received narrative, witness, companionship, sanctuary, shock, and steely strangeness; good advice, bad news, deep chords, hurtful discrepancy, and amazing grace.
“At an average of five books a week … I will read 13,000. Then I’m dead. Thirteen thousand in a lifetime, about as many as there are new ones published every MONTH in this country.”
Leonard’s own books included Black Conceit, This Pen for Hire and Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures.
Raised by a single mother, Leonard was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Washington, New York City and Long Beach, Calif. He dropped out of Harvard University, moved to New York and was taken on by William F. Buckley at the National Review after Buckley spotted a magazine article written by Leonard that scorned Greenwich Village.
“At one point, his job was monitoring the left-wing press,” Leonard’s stepdaughter said with a laugh.
Garry Wills, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg and also a former National Review writer, remembered Leonard as a “terrific stylist” and an obvious talent at the magazine, where Buckley prized quality as much as politics.
“He was extraordinarily knowledgeable about literature. He always knew everything,” Wills said Thursday, adding that he regretted Leonard stopped writing fiction after such early novels as Wyke Regis and The Naked Martini.
“I thought he had a lot of promise, but John thought he was better off writing criticism.”
Although gravely ill near the end, Leonard did make sure to vote Tuesday, for Barack Obama, needing a chair as he waited at his polling place on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
“That was very important to him,” Nessel said.
Leonard is survived by his second wife, Sue Leonard; two children; one stepchild; and three grandchildren. A public memorial is planned for February.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Dale Carnegie, Author, Dies at 66
(Nov. 1, 1955)
Bob Kane, the Cartoonist Who Created ‘Batman,’ Dies at 83
(Nov. 3, 1998)
Henri Matisse, One of France’s Greatest Painters, Dies at 84
(Nov. 3, 1954)
Cy Young, Famed Pitcher, Dies at 88
(Nov. 4, 1955)
Leonid Brezhnev, Former Soviet Leader, Dies at 75
(Nov. 10, 1982)
Jerome Kern, Noted Composer, Dies at 60
(Nov. 11, 1945)
Lucretia Mott, 19th-Century American Feminist, Dies at 87
(Nov. 11, 1880)
Percival Lowell, Astronomer and Author, Dies at 61
(Nov. 12, 1916)
Lionel Barrymore, Veteran Screen and Stage Star, Dies at 76
(Nov. 15, 1954)
Margaret Mead, Anthropologist and Author, Dies at 76
(Nov. 15, 1978)
Sam Rayburn, 79, Who Served 17 Years as House Speaker, Dies
(Nov. 16, 1961)
Gerard Swope, 84, Ex-G.E. Head, Dies
(Nov. 20, 1957)
Jack London, Novelist, Dies at 40
(Nov. 22, 1916)
Eugene O’Neill, Playwright Who Won Nobel Prize, Dies at 65
(Nov. 27, 1953)
Enrico Fermi, Architect of Atomic Bomb, Dies at 53
(Nov. 28, 1954)
1 Comment
November 10, 2008 at 10:00+00:00Nov
interresting blog u got here m8
———————————————————
http://www.image-shared.com the most used image sharing, hosting and upload site. Create galleries and stuff for free !
Support this website and click some ads
Thanks and cu there ^^