ODETTA, VOICE OF CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
 Nancy Siesel/The New York Times
Odetta at Radio City Music Hall in New York for a “Salute to the Blues” benefit concert in 2003.
Odetta, the singer whose resonant voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 77.
The cause was heart disease, her manager, Doug Yeager, said.
Odetta, who lived in Upper Manhattan, had been admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital three weeks ago with a number of ailments, including kidney trouble, Mr. Yeager said. In her last days, he said, she had been hoping to sing at the presidential inauguration for Barack Obama.
In a career of almost 60 years, Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall. She became one of the best-known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Her recordings of blues and ballads on dozens of albums influenced Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin and many others.
Odetta’s voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington to end racial discrimination.
Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger led to the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. “All of the songs Odetta sings,” she replied.
One of those songs was “I’m on My Way,” sung during the pivotal civil-rights March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. In a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word,” Odetta recalled the sentiments of another song she performed that day, “Oh Freedom,” which is rooted in slavery: “Oh freedom, Oh freedom, Oh freedom over me/ And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave/ And go home to my Lord and be free.”
Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life.
“They were liberation songs,” she said in the interview with The Times. She added: “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die or insist upon your life.”
Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles. Three years later Odetta discovered that she could sing.
“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.”
She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.
“The folk songs were — the anger,” she emphasized.
In a National Public Radio interview in 2005 she said: “School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music.”
In 1950 Odetta began singing professionally in a West Coast production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” but she found a stronger calling in the bohemian coffeehouses of San Francisco. “We would finish our play, we’d go to the joint, and people would sit around playing guitars and singing songs and it felt like home,” she said.
She moved to New York in 1953 and began singing in nightclubs like the storied Blue Angel, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair, her voice plunging deep and soaring high. Her songs blended the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” released in 1956, resonated with an audience eager to hear old songs made new.
Mr. Dylan, referring to that recording, said in a 1978 interview with Playboy, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He said he heard something “vital and personal,” and added, “I learned all the songs on that record.” The songs included “Muleskinner Blues,” “Jack o’ Diamonds” and “ ’Buked and Scorned.”
“What distinguished her from the start,” Time magazine wrote in 1960, “was the meticulous care with which she tried to recreate the feeling of her folk songs; to understand the emotions of a convict in a convict ditty, she once tried breaking up rocks with a sledgehammer.”
That year she gave a celebrated solo concert at Carnegie Hall and released a live album of it. Eight years later she was on stage there again, now with Mr. Dylan, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and other folk stars in a tribute to Woody Guthrie, which was also recorded for an album.
Odetta’s blues and spirituals led directly to her work for the civil rights movement. They were two rivers running together, she said in her interview with The Times. The words and music captured “the fury and frustration that I had growing up.”
Her fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and performed for President John F. Kennedy. But with King’s assassination in 1968, much of the wind went out of the sails of the civil rights movement, and the songs of protest and resistance that had been the movement’s soundtrack began to fade. Odetta’s fame flagged for years thereafter.
MultimediaLast Word: OdettaOdetta became a force of the folk music revival in the 1950s. In the 1960s her renditions of spirituals and blues became part of the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.
In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Medal of Arts. In 2003 she received a Living Legend tribute from the Library of Congress and a National Visionary Leadership award.
Odetta married three times: to Don Gordon, to Gary Shead, and, in 1977, to the blues musician Iverson Minter, known professionally as Louisiana Red. The first two marriages ended in divorce; Mr. Minter moved to Germany in 1983. There are no immediate survivors, Mr. Yeager, Odetta’s manager, said.
Odetta was singing and performing well into the 21st century — 60 concerts in the last two years, Mr. Yeager said — and her influence stayed strong.
In April 2007, a half-century after Mr. Dylan first heard her, she returned to Carnegie Hall to perform in a tribute to Bruce Springsteen. She turned one of his songs, “57 Channels,” into a chanted poem, and Mr. Springsteen came out from the wings to call it “the greatest version” of the song he had ever heard.
Reviewing a December 2006 performance, James Reed of The Boston Globe wrote: “Odetta’s voice is still a force of nature — something commented upon endlessly as folks exited the auditorium — and her phrasing and sensibility for a song have grown more complex and shaded.”
Mr. Reed called her “a majestic figure in American music, a direct gateway to bygone generations that feel so foreign today.”
In her 2007 interview with The Times, Odetta spoke of the long-dead singers who first gave voice to the old blues and ballads and slavery songs she sang. “Those people who made up the songs were the ones who insisted upon life and living, who reaffirmed themselves,” she said. “They didn’t just fall down into the cracks or the holes. And that was an incredible example for me.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
ODETTA’S MUSIC:
1.
 “ODETTA SPEAKS ABOUT HER LIFE AS AN ACTIVIST: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXVjM_4XHIE
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DOROTHY STERLING, CHILDREN’S AUTHOR
Dorothy Sterling, whose more than 35 books for children and adults included some of the first nonfiction works about black history for young readers, notably “Freedom Train,” about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, died on Monday at her home in Wellfleet, Mass. She was 95.
 Anne Fausto-Sterling
Dorothy Sterling in 2001.
The death was confirmed by her daughter, Anne Fausto-Sterling.
A New Yorker with a passion for trees, flowers and bugs, Ms. Sterling found many of her subjects while following up on questions about the natural world posed by her two children.
While casting about for a biographical subject, she found inspiration in Tubman and her work for the Underground Railroad, which led to the groundbreaking “Freedom Train” in 1954, as the civil rights movement gathered momentum. Her research for that book using the Schomburg collection of the New York Public Library resulted in a series of books designed to introduce young readers to black history. These included “Captain of the Planter: The Story of Robert Smalls” (1958), about a former slave who captured a Confederate gunboat and later became a congressman from South Carolina, and “Lucretia Mott: Gentle Warrior” (1964), a biography of that Quaker abolitionist.
“I had found a subject about which I cared deeply,” Ms. Sterling wrote for the reference work “Something About the Author.” “At the age of 40, I had finally become a writer.”
Dorothy Dannenberg was born in Manhattan in 1913. A precocious student, she was plucked from Public School 46 in Washington Heights and placed in a special class for gifted students at a school farther downtown. She later attended the Dalton School and, at 15, won entrance to Wellesley College. She found it disappointing and transferred to Barnard, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1934, just in time to enter the ranks of the unemployed.
While working for the Federal Writers’ Project she met and married Philip Sterling, an unemployed journalist and later an author, who died in 1989. In addition to her daughter, Anne, of Providence, R.I., she is survived by a son, Peter, of Philadelphia; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
In the 1940s, Ms. Sterling worked for Life as a researcher, but left in frustration at a system under which women, as researchers, fed material to men, who got the bylines. In the early 1950s she began writing books for children, starting with “Sophie and Her Puppies” (1951), a Life-style photo essay about the family dogs. Determined to write the biography of a strong woman who could inspire girls, she found her way to Tubman and discovered a new field of research.
“I was excited, but also bewildered and angry,” she wrote. “Why had I never heard of Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass or William Lloyd Garrison? Here was a wealth of information, dozens of inspiring stories to tell to young readers.”
Ms. Sterling wrote two books on black history for children, “Forever Free: The Story of the Emancipation Proclamation” (1963) and “It Started in Montgomery” (1972), and many more for young adults, notably “Tear Down the Walls!: A History of the American Civil Rights Movement” (1968) and “Black Foremothers: Three Lives” (1979).
She also wrote, for adults, “Tender Warriors” (1958), about students entering previously segregated schools. The book, based on interviews she conducted on a tour of the South in 1957, provided raw material for “Mary Jane” (1959), a young-adult novel.
Her last book was a political memoir, “Close to My Heart” (2005), which included an account of a successful late-life crusade on behalf of local shellfishers whose access to the beaches of Wellfleet was being blocked by wealthy homeowners. Ms. Sterling, who had moved to Wellfleet in the early 1970s, allowed the shellfishers to use her right of access. The stretch of beach at the end of her road is now officially named Sterling Path.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
DOROTHY STERLING’S BOOKS:
1.
 Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman by Dorothy Sterling (Mass Market Paperback – May 1, 1987)
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SUNNY VON BULOW, FOCUS OF SOCIETY DRAMA
Martha (Sunny) von Bülow, the American heiress who was first married to an Austrian playboy prince and then to a Danish-born man-about-society who was twice tried on charges of attempting to murder her, died Saturday at a nursing home in Manhattan. Mrs. von Bülow, who was 76, had been in a coma for nearly 28 years.
 Associated Press
Claus von Bülow in court during his attempted murder trial on Feb. 9, 1982.
Maureen Connelly, a spokeswoman for the family, confirmed the death. Mrs. von Bülow’s three children said in a statement that they “were blessed to have an extraordinary loving and caring mother.” The cause, as listed in the death certificate, was cardiopulmonary arrest, Ms. Connelly said.
Mrs. von Bülow’s death came 27 years, 11 months and 15 days after she was found unconscious on the floor of her bathroom in her mansion in Newport, R.I., on Dec. 21, 1980.
In her long, silent years at the Milstein Building at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital, and then at a nursing home on the Upper East Side, doctors said Mrs. von Bülow never showed any signs of brain activity; she was fed through a tube in her stomach. Yet there were always fresh flowers in her room, and photographs of her children and grandchildren sat on a bedside table. She was attended by private nurses, and her room, for some time, was guarded by private security personnel.
She is survived by her daughters, Annie-Laurie von Auersperg Kneissl Isham and Cosima Pavoncelli; her son, Alexander von Auersperg; and nine grandchildren.
Her second husband, Claus von Bülow, was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to kill her with injections of insulin so as to aggravate her hypoglycemia, a low blood sugar condition.
His trials were among the most sensational of the 1980s. News media from around the world were drawn to the drama of the beautiful heiress who lay in a twilight zone, the debonair husband accused of attempted murder and two royal children pitted against their younger stepsister, with the glittering social milieus of Newport and New York providing the backdrop.
Hollywood, too, could not resist. The trials became the subject of the 1990 movie “Reversal of Fortune” with Glenn Close as Mrs. von Bülow and Jeremy Irons as Mr. von Bülow.
The prosecutions were the result of an investigation initiated by Alexander von Auersperg and his sister Annie-Laurie von Auersperg Kneissl, known as Ala, the children from Mrs. von Bülow’s marriage to Prince Alfred von Auersperg. The accusations pitted the von Auerspergs against their stepfather and their half sister, Cosima von Bülow, and divided the loyalty of friends in Newport and New York.
In his first trial, in Newport in 1982, Mr. von Bülow was found guilty of twice trying to kill his wife and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He appealed and posted a $1 million bond believed to have been put up by his friend J. Paul Getty Jr., the oil tycoon.
The appeal was guided by Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, and the conviction was overturned on the grounds that certain information had not been made available to the defense and that there had been no search warrant when pills were sent for testing.
Mr. von Bülow was acquitted in 1985 after a second trial in Providence, R.I., where his chief defense counsel was Thomas P. Puccio.
A $56 million civil suit filed against Mr. von Bülow by his stepchildren was settled in 1987 with the stipulation that Mr. von Bülow agree to a divorce and not discuss the case publicly. The couple were divorced in 1988. Mr. von Bülow lives in London.
A principal prosecution witness at the trials, Maria Schrallhammer, Mrs. von Bülow’s longtime maid, testified that shortly before Christmas 1979, she became worried when Mr. von Bülow refused to call a doctor as his wife, moaning behind a locked door, sank into a coma. Mr. von Bülow said that he thought his wife was sleeping.
Mrs. von Bülow eventually recovered at Newport Hospital, where tests indicated a high level of insulin. A few months later, the maid said, she found in Mr. von Bülow’s closet a small black bag containing syringes, yellow paste and white powder. She said she had passed these on to Ala von Auersperg, who had the family physician analyze the contents. They were determined to be Seconal and a paste form of Valium. Ms. Schrallhammer said that she kept an eye on the bag and that some months later found insulin in it.
On Dec. 21, 1980, Mrs. von Bülow was again found unconscious and taken to Newport Hospital. Shortly afterward, an investigator working on behalf of the two older children searched the house and found a black bag said to contain three hypodermic needles, one with traces of a sedative and insulin.
Mrs. von Bülow, who had inherited $75 million, was depicted by the defense as a reticent woman who drowned her insecurities in alcohol and was familiar with drugs. The von Auersperg children, backed by Ms. Schrallhammer, claimed that Mrs. von Bülow needed as little as two drinks to appear that she had had too much.
The prosecution put Alexandra Isles, a socialite and former actress who had been Mr. von Bülow’s mistress, on the stand to admit that she had given Mr. von Bülow an ultimatum about dissolving his marriage. It was noted, too, that a divorce would have voided the $14 million that Mr. von Bülow would have inherited under his wife’s will and left him with an annual income of $120,000 from a trust.
Mr. von Bülow acknowledged that he and his wife had discussed divorce, but he denied that the issue was another woman. He initiated the talks, he said, because he wished to return to work and his wife did not agree. He had been working intermittingly as a broker.
Mrs. von Bülow, the former Martha Sharp Crawford, was born in Manassas, Va., on Sept. 1, 1932, the only child of Annie-Laurie and George W. Crawford, a former chairman of Columbia Gas and Electric Company of Pittsburgh, who died in 1935. Mrs. Crawford, the daughter of Robert Warmack, founder of the International Shoe Company, was remarried in 1957 to Russell Aitken, a sculptor. She died in 1984, leaving an estate estimated at $100 million.
Her daughter was originally nicknamed Choo-Choo because she was born in her father’s railway car, and later called Sunny because of her disposition. She attended the Chapin School in Manhattan and St. Timothy’s School in Maryland, and she had an elaborate debut in 1949. She was 24 when she married Prince Alfred von Auersperg, a 20-year-old tennis pro at the exclusive Schloss Mittersell in Austria.
The couple settled in Munich and later in Kitzbühel, Austria. Ala von Auersperg was born in 1958 and Alexander the following year. The marriage ended in divorce in 1965. The princess had few interests in common with her husband, did not share his ardor for big-game hunting in Africa and disliked his flirting. She also missed the United States. The prince received $1 million and two houses in a settlement.
(In a twist of fate, Prince von Auersperg went into an irreversible coma in 1983 after an automobile accident in Austria. He died in 1992.)
The year after her divorce, the princess married Claus von Bülow, whom she had met years earlier in London. He was originally neither a von nor a Bülow. His mother was divorced from his father, Svend Borberg, a playwright and drama critic who was convicted of collaborating with the Nazis by a Danish court after the war. He was sentenced to four years in prison, released after 18 months and died shortly after.
Claus grew up with his mother and maternal grandfather, Frits Bülow, a former minister of justice in Denmark and a successful businessman. Claus adopted the Bülow name and added “von” as a young adult. At the time of his marriage, Mr. von Bülow was a senior aide to Mr. Getty.
The couple settled in an imposing Fifth Avenue apartment facing Central Park. A short time later, following the lead of her mother, Mrs. von Bülow acquired a Newport estate, Clarendon Court, a 23-room Georgian mansion on 10 acres overlooking the sea. Mrs. von Bülow had the huge lawn lowered 17 feet to improve the view of the ocean.
The house had been the setting for the 1956 musical “High Society,” starring Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. The property was sold in 1988 for $4.2 million; the same year, an auction of von Bülow furniture, paintings, porcelains and silver brought more than $11.5 million.
A daughter, Cosima, was born in 1967, and the three siblings apparently got along well until their mother’s comas aroused the suspicions of the von Auersperg children. Miss von Bülow supported her father during his trials and as a result was cut out of her maternal grandmother’s will. When Mrs. Aitken died in 1984, Miss von Bülow filed suit claiming that family members had turned her grandmother against her. In a 1987 settlement, Mr. von Bülow renounced all his claims to his wife’s fortune in return for his daughter’s receiving a share of Mrs. Aitken’s estate, equal to those of her half sister and half brother.
Ms. Connelly, the family spokeswoman, said the three siblings, after a long period of estrangement, are “reconciling and moving forward together as a family, because that is what their mother would have wanted.”
After the trials, the von Auerspergs founded the Sunny von Bülow National Victim Advocacy Center, with headquarters in Fort Worth, Tex., and the Sunny von Bülow Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation in New York. The author Dominick Dunne wrote about the case and had known Mrs. von Bulow since she was a debutante. He said on Saturday that she had been portrayed unfairly in the film as an emotionally frail alcoholic. He said she was a “beautiful and shy” woman who “really did not like the social life, although she was totally associated with the social life.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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PAUL BENEDICT, ACTOR IN ‘THE JEFFERSONS’
BOSTON (AP) — Paul Benedict, the actor who played the British neighbor Harry Bentley on the sitcom “The Jeffersons,” was found dead Monday on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 70.
 Richard Feldman
Paul Benedict in 1982.
His brother, Charles, said the authorities were still investigating the cause of death.
Mr. Benedict, who was born in New Mexico, began his acting career in the 1960s in the Theater Company of Boston, alongside future stars like Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino.
Mr. Benedict went on to appear in a number of movies, including a role as the oddball director in “The Goodbye Girl” with Richard Dreyfuss. But he was mainly known for his role as Bentley in “The Jeffersons,” which ran on CBS from 1975 to 1985.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
PAUL BENEDICT, DIRECTING RICHARD DREYFUS’S CHARACTER IN ‘THE GOODBYE GIRL’:
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GEORGE DOCHERTY, PASTOR WHO INFLUENCED THE ‘PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE’
ALEXANDRIA, Pa. (AP) — The Rev. George M. Docherty, who was credited with helping to push Congress to insert the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, died on Thursday at his home in central Pennsylvania. He was 97.
His wife, Sue Docherty, announced the death, saying Mr. Docherty had been in failing health for about three years.
In 1952, Mr. Docherty, then pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, just blocks from the White House, gave a sermon saying the pledge should acknowledge God. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and was unfamiliar with the pledge until he heard it spoken by his 7-year-old son, Garth.
“I didn’t know that the Pledge of Allegiance was, and he recited it, ‘one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” ’ he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2004. “I came from Scotland, where we said ‘God save our gracious queen,’ ‘God save our gracious king.’ Here was the Pledge of Allegiance, and God wasn’t in it at all.”
There was little effect from that initial sermon, but Mr. Docherty delivered it again on Feb. 7, 1954, after learning that President Dwight D. Eisenhower would be at the church.
The next day, Representative Charles G. Oakman, Republican of Michigan, introduced a bill to add the phrase “under God” to the pledge, and a companion bill was introduced in the Senate. Eisenhower signed the law on Flag Day that year.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
‘THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE’:
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RAYMOND LEDERER, ABSCAM FIGURE
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Raymond F. Lederer, a Pennsylvania Democrat who resigned his seat in Congress and was imprisoned for taking a bribe in the Abscam investigation conducted by the F.B.I., died Monday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 70.
The cause was lung cancer, said his son, Miles.
In all, six House members and one senator, Harrison A. Williams Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, were convicted in the case.
Mr. Lederer, who was first elected to Congress in 1976, was videotaped on Sept. 11, 1979, at a New York motel accepting $50,000 in cash from two undercover agents posing as representatives of a fictitious Arab sheik. He told the agents, “I can give you me,” in return for the money, which was shared with several co-defendants.
Mr. Lederer won re-election in 1980 while under indictment and was convicted in January 1981. He resigned his seat in April, the day after the House ethics committee voted to expel him.
Mr. Lederer’s first elected office, in 1974, was a State House seat that had been held by his father and older brother and, more recently, by his sister-in-law.
After serving 10 months in prison, Mr. Lederer worked as a roofer, helping to deliver supplies to job sites.
Born in Philadelphia on May 19, 1938, he graduated from Roman Catholic High School, and attended Saint Joseph’s College, Community College of Philadelphia and Penn State University.
After briefly working as an assistant engineer with the state highways department, he worked for, and later ran, the Philadelphia Probation Department.
He is survived by his wife, Eileen; sons, Miles and Joseph; daughters, Mary Beth Baranosky, Patricia Green, Diane Benson and Claire Hampton; 15 grandchildren; a sister; and four brothers.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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RAMON S. VELEZ, THE SOUTH BRONX PADRINO
Ramon S. Velez, who was the son of a poor Puerto Rican farmer and became the baron of a sweeping array of poverty programs in the South Bronx, receiving high praise for registering hundreds of thousands of Hispanic voters and stinging criticism for profiting from his humanitarian initiatives, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 75.
 The New York Times
Ramon S. Velez in 1970.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his wife, Caroline, said.
Starting with a $50,000 grant from the Johnson administration’s war on poverty, Mr. Velez built his social services agency, the Hunts Point Multi-Service Center, into a vast program encompassing centers for the elderly, housing, health clinics and substance-abuse programs. His other involvements ranged from community colleges to hospitals to leading the fight to abolish language requirements for Spanish-speaking voters.
For years, Mr. Velez controlled the Puerto Rican Day Parade with an iron fist, and in 1995 expanded the event nationally.
His political friends included Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, and a generation of Hispanic politicians he recruited and groomed for office. Representative Jose E. Serrano, a Bronx Democrat, said in a statement that most Puerto Rican elected officials who have held office since the 1970s “were elected in large part because of Ramon Velez’s work organizing the community.”
Mr. Velez himself served in only one elective office, as a city councilman for a single term in the mid-1970s. He ran for Congress twice, unsuccessfully.
“He was El Jefe,” former Mayor Edward I. Koch said in an interview on Tuesday. The words are Spanish for “the Boss.” He said Mr. Velez had supplied services of great benefit to the Hispanic community.
Henry J. Stern, now the president of New York Civic, a watchdog group, served with Mr. Velez on the City Council, and in an interview recalled him as a large man who radiated “a sense of power.” He was “the emperor of the South Bronx,” Mr. Stern said.
Mr. Velez’s power derived from the $300 million in government funds that his organization attracted during a quarter of a century. With hundreds of employees, and thousands of patients and clients, he had a ready-made campaign machine, used by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Some of the money, without question, flowed into Mr. Velez’s own pocket, at least through suppliers he set up, and this penchant for establishing private corporations to do business with his public endeavors raised many questions. Investigators combed through his financial dealings for decades, but no charges were ever brought against him.
For a time, Mr. Koch would say that Mr. Velez epitomized the abuse of Great Society poverty programs, calling him a “poverty pimp” and a “povitician,” but he eventually warmed to him.
“I ascertained he was wrongly accused,” Mr. Koch said on Tuesday.
Mr. Velez often boasted that he had been more carefully investigated by law enforcement than the gangster John Gotti had been. Newsday said in 1998 that Mr. Velez was “accused of everything but being dumb.”
Ramon Santiago Velez Ramirez was born on April 19, 1933, in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, where his father raised cows, plantains and citrus fruits. He graduated from Inter-American University of Puerto Rico, studied law at the University of Salamanca in Spain, served in the United States Army and came to New York at the age of 28. He got a job as a welfare worker and moonlighted as a commentator at a radio station.
He is survived by his wife, Caroline Fitzpatrick; six children; six grandchildren; two sisters; and a brother.
Mr. Velez was called Padrino, or Godfather, by his followers. The Daily News reported in 2000 that many people routinely kissed his ring.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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JESSIE THOMPSON, AN ADVOCATE FOR BLACK BUSINESSES
SHE HAD BEEN OFFICE MANAGER FOR HOUSTON CITIZENS CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
By Jennifer Latson
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Dec. 6, 2008 10:25PM
 HANDOUT PHOTOThompson, a mentor and adviser, was described as a consummate planner.
As office manager for the city’s oldest black business network, the Houston Citizens Chamber of Commerce, she served as mentor, adviser and den mother for decades. Members of Houston’s business community say she leaves behind a void of institutional knowledge.
“Miss T touched a lot of lives, from new members of the chamber to students seeking internships to people who have gone on to run their own businesses,” said James Heggie, a former president of the chamber, which was founded in 1935. “I would call her my Texas grandmother.”
Thompson was well-read in business principles and knew as much or more about the Houston business community as the chamber’s board members. “If one of the chairpersons was too busy to send her a report, she would create the report,” Heggie said.
She never married or had children. She devoted her time to the chamber and to her church, the Fifth Ward’s St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church, where she taught religious classes.
“She was married to the chamber and married to the church,” Heggie said.
Thompson nurtured a legion of younger members of the church and the chamber, many of whom considered her an adopted mother or grandmother.
“She taught me what it means to be committed to an idea,” said Alfred J. Calloway, a former Houston City Council member who met Thompson when he joined the chamber in 1971. “Even though she never owned a business and never ran for president (of the chamber), she knew the value of protecting and advocating for black ownership of businesses.”
While Thompson worked largely behind the scenes, her legacy lives on in the younger generation she inspired, Calloway said.
“I’m not the only person who benefited from Miss Thompson’s tutelage and support,” he said. “Whenever we might come up against an issue that could frustrate some, she was always there to remind us of a similar incident that happened 20 years earlier. We kept our perspective, knowing that we weren’t necessarily blazing new trails, but that we were working to finish what had already been started.”
Thompson came from humble origins in Houston’s Second Ward, where her mother worked as a maid and her father at a steel plant. Those who knew her say she commanded attention through her poise, sophistication and intelligence.
“She was a great writer,” said Barbara Perry, one of Thompson’s “adopted daughters.” “She really taught me how to organize my thoughts and put them on paper.”
Thompson was generous in sharing her knowledge, along with everything else she had to offer, Perry said.
“She showed you how to love without getting credit for it,” Perry said. “For Christmas, she would get a bunch of $2 bills and send them to everybody. She said, ‘If you keep this, you’ll never be broke.’ “
Thompson was described as a consummate planner. Even after she retired in 2002, she organized church fundraisers and functions until her battle with cancer sapped her strength. The church will have its 115th anniversary next year: Thompson planned the banquet.
She died Monday. Services were Saturday at St. Mark church.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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ALEXY II, RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH PATRIARCH
By Jim Heintz Associated Press
Dec. 5, 2008, 4:15PM
 Sergey Ponomarev APRussian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II presided over a vast post-Soviet revival of faith but was accused of making the church a force for nationalism.
The Moscow Patriarchate said he died at his residence outside Moscow, but did not give a cause of death. Alexy had long suffered from a heart ailment.
Alexy became leader of the church in 1990, as the officially atheist Soviet Union was loosening its restrictions on religion. After the Soviet Union collapsed the following year, the church’s popularity surged. Church domes that had been stripped of their gold under the Soviets were regilded, churches that had been converted into warehouses or left to rot in neglect were painstakingly restored and hours-long Masses on major religious holidays were broadcast live on national television.
By the time of Alexy’s death, the church’s flock was estimated at including about two-thirds of Russia’s 142 million people, making it the world’s largest Orthodox church.
But Alexy often complained that Russia’s new religious freedom put the church under severe pressure and he bitterly resented what he said were attempts by other Christian churches to poach adherents among people who should have belonged to the Orthodox church.
These complaints focused on the Roman Catholic Church, and Alexy refused to agree to a papal visit to Russia unless the proselytization issue was resolved.
However, Alexy lived long enough to see another major religious dispute resolved. In 2007, he signed a pact with Metropolitan Laurus, the leader of the breakaway Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, to bring the churches closer together. The U.S.-based ROCOR had split off in 1927, after the Moscow church’s leader declared loyalty to the Communist government.
Alexy successfully lobbied for the 1997 passage of a religion law that places restrictions on the activities of religions other than Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. Under his leadership, the church also vehemently opposed schismatic Orthodox churches in neighboring Ukraine, claiming the Ukrainian church should remain under Moscow’s control.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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BEVERLY GARLAND, ACTRESS OF ‘MY THREE SONS’ AND HOLLYWOOD HORROR MOVIES
Associated Press
Dec. 6, 2008, 8:18PM
 AMCBeverly Garland starred in It Conquered The World (1956)
Garland died Friday at her Hollywood Hills home after a lengthy illness, her son-in-law Packy Smith told the Los Angeles Times.
Garland made her film debut in the 1950 noir classic “D.O.A.,” launching a 50-year career that included 40 movies and dozens of television shows.
She gained cult status for playing gutsy women in low-budget exploitation films such as “The Alligator People” and a number of Roger Corman movies including “Gunslinger,” “It Conquered the World” and “Naked Paradise.”
“I never considered myself very much of a passive kind of actress,” she said in a 1985 interview with Fangoria magazine. “I was never very comfortable in love scenes, never comfortable playing a sweet, lovable lady.”
Garland showed her comedic chops as Bing Crosby’s wife in the short-lived sitcom “The Bing Crosby Show” in the mid-’60s.
She went on to be cast in “My Three Sons” as the second wife of MacMurray’s widower Steve Douglas during the last three seasons of the popular series that aired from 1960 to 1972.
Her television credits also include “Remington Steele,” “Scarecrow and Mrs. King,” “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and “7th Heaven.”
Garland was born Beverly Fessenden in Santa Cruz, Calif., in 1926, and grew up in Glendale. She became Beverly Garland when she married actor Richard Garland. They were divorced in 1953 after less than four years of marriage.
In 1960, she married real estate developer Fillmore Crank, and the couple built a mission-style hotel in North Hollywood, now called Beverly Garland’s Holiday Inn. Garland, whose husband died in 1999, remained involved in running the North Hollywood hotel.
She was the honorary mayor of North Hollywood and served on the boards of the California Tourism Corp. and the Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/movies/08garland.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries
‘IT CONQUERED THE WORLD’ TRAILER:
WATCH THE MOVIE!:
‘SWAMP WOMEN’ TRAILER:
‘THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE’ TRAILER;
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
James Baldwin, Eloquent Civil Rights Writer, Dies at 63(Dec. 1, 1987) Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies at 74(Dec. 1, 1917) William Shawn, New Yorker’s Gentle Despot, Dies at 85(Dec. 8, 1992) Ralph Bunche, Nobel Winner, Dies at 67(Dec. 9, 1971) Branch Rickey, Dominant Baseball Figure, Dies at 83(Dec. 9, 1965) Indomitable Grandma Moses Dies at 101(Dec. 13, 1961) Thomas Watson, Manufacturer of First Phone, Dies at 80(Dec. 13 , 1934) Roger Maris, Home Run Record-Setter, Dies at 51(Dec. 14, 1985) Walt Disney, Who Founded an Empire on a Mouse, Dies at 65(Dec. 15, 1966) Astronomer Carl Sagan Dies at 62(Dec. 20, 1996) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Novelist, Dies at 44(Dec. 21, 1940) George Patton, a Brilliant Soldier, Dies at 60(Dec. 21, 1945) Richard Rodgers, Renowned Composer, Dies at 77(Dec. 30, 1979) Star Outfielder Roberto Clemente Dies at 38(Dec. 31, 1972) Elliot Richardson, Who Stood Up to Nixon, Dies at 79(Dec. 31, 1999) |
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