EUNICE JOHNSON, GAVE EBONY MAGAZINE ITS NAME
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Ebony
Eunice W. Johnson in 1991 at an Ebony Fashion Fair, largely by and for African-Americans.
The cause was renal failure, said Wendy Parks, a spokeswoman for the Johnson Publishing Company, which publishes Ebony and Jet magazines and sponsors the Fashion Fair. Mrs. Johnson and her husband, John H. Johnson, who died in 2005, founded Ebony in 1945. It was Mrs. Johnson who suggested that the magazine, geared to black readers, be named for the fine-grain dark wood.
What started as a favor to a friend — production of a fashion show to raise money for a hospital in New Orleans in 1958 — evolved into a grand traveling tour that has brought the latest creations from designers like Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta and Valentino to runways throughout the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.
Notable African-American models like Pat Cleveland, Judy Pace and Terri Springer have graced those runways. And the careers of black designers, including Lenora Levon, Quinton de’ Alexander and L’Amour, have been nurtured by the Ebony Fashion Fair.
One of the tour’s aims has been to bring attention to aspiring black designers. At the New York Hilton in 1974, for example, one showstopper was a white raincoat with loops dangling from the shoulders to hold an umbrella. The design, by a 17-year-old from Detroit, drew a standing ovation.
Over the years the fair has raised more than $55 million for civil rights groups, hospitals, community centers and scholarships.
It was not always easy. In the early years, when the chartered bus bearing the dozen or so models and the fashions selected by Mrs. Johnson stopped at gas stations in the segregated South, signs said, “No Blacks in the Ladies Room.”
Resistance also surfaced on renowned runways. “We were the ones who convinced Valentino to use black models in his shows back in the ’60s,” Mrs. Johnson told The New York Times in 2001. “I was in Paris, and I told him: ‘If you can’t find any black models, we’ll get some for you. And if you can’t use them, we’re not going to buy from you anymore.’ That was before he was famous.”
Something else perturbed Mrs. Johnson back then: the chore of mixing makeup colors to enhance the varied skin tones of her models. It gave her the idea of starting, in 1973, Fashion Fair Cosmetics, a prestige line that African-American women could buy, for the first time, in top department stores. Stars like Leontyne Price, Diahann Carroll and Aretha Franklin appeared in the company’s ads.
Within three years, the growing popularity of Fashion Fair Cosmetics prompted Revlon to introduce the Polished Ambers line for black skins, Avon to start Shades of Beauty and Max Factor to produce Beautiful Bronzes.
Eunice Walker was born in Selma, Ala., on April 4, 1916, one of four children of Nathaniel and Ethel McAlpine Walker. Her father was a physician, her mother a high school principal.
She graduated from Talladega College in Alabama in 1938 with a degree in sociology, and earned a master’s degree in social work from Loyola University in Chicago in 1941. She met Mr. Johnson at a dance in Chicago in 1940, and they married after she graduated from Loyola.
Mrs. Johnson is survived by her daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, who is chairwoman and chief executive of Johnson Publishing, and a granddaughter.
In 1942, with a $500 loan secured by furniture owned by Mr. Johnson’s mother, the Johnsons began publishing Negro Digest, a magazine modeled on Reader’s Digest. Within a year it had a circulation of 50,000. That inspired the couple to start Ebony, a monthly with flashy covers like those of Life magazine. Ebony now has a circulation of 1.25 million. Jet magazine, a weekly, was started in 1951 to highlight news of famous African-Americans; it now has a circulation of 900,000.
Mrs. Johnson, who was secretary-treasurer of the publishing company, continued to produce and direct the Ebony Fashion Fair through last year.
Over the years, hundreds of the shows have been held on Sunday afternoons, with women of all generations — many turned out in flowery hats, fine jewelry and proper dresses — leaving morning church services to get to the fair.
At the 1974 show in Manhattan, Mrs. Johnson drew a roar from the crowd when she stepped onstage during intermission and said that she could “run a fashion show from the audience.”
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MARY GARDINER JONES, CONSUMER ADVOCATE
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Harry Naltchayan/The Washington Post
Mary Gardiner Jones moving in at the trade commission.
The cause was congestive heart failure, her nephew Charles Watkins said. Ms. Jones leaves no immediate survivors.
Appointed in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Ms. Jones was the first woman to serve on the commission. In her nine years there, she became known as a foe of cigarette advertising on television and radio.
Ms. Jones became a consumer-affairs specialist by chance. Historically, the F.T.C. had focused on encouraging business competition; Johnson chose her, it was reported, because she was a lawyer with antitrust experience.
But in the many speaking engagements that followed her appointment, Ms. Jones found herself asked to talk about consumer issues like product safety and truth in advertising, widely seen as fit subjects for a woman. By her own later accounts, she ignored the sexism but seized the opportunity.
Addressing a meeting of the American Advertising Federation in 1969, Ms. Jones, known as a plain speaker, called for the “perpetual elimination from the marketplace” of “the gyp artist or the gimmick specialist.”
A Republican who became a Democrat later in life, Ms. Jones was mentioned by knowledgeable handicappers as a possible successor to Justice John M. Harlan of the Supreme Court after he retired in 1971, The New York Times reported that year.
Mary Gardiner Jones was born in Manhattan on Dec. 10, 1920, to Charles Herbert Jones and the former Anna Livingston Short. Hers was a distinguished family: established in America since the 17th century, they donated the land on Long Island that became Jones Beach State Park.
Reared in Manhattan and Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, Ms. Jones was ill at ease with her family’s social standing.
“I was always uncomfortable with the privileged life we led and distressed over the falseness of my family’s values,” she wrote in her memoir, “Tearing Down Walls: A Woman’s Triumph” (Hamilton Books, 2008). “My most vivid memories of the family are their constant fights over property.”
Ms. Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Wellesley in 1943 and a law degree from Yale in 1948. During World War II, she worked in Washington as an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. After being rejected by 50 law firms because of her sex, as she later recounted, she joined the New York firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine in 1948.
In 1953, Ms. Jones joined the antitrust division of the Justice Department as a trial lawyer. Among the cases on which she worked was an effort to enjoin American watch manufacturers from operating according to the dictates of a Swiss cartel, which controlled the industry worldwide. The cartel’s stranglehold threatened to put the American companies out of business, but the United States government had a keen interest in preserving the skills of the watchmakers who worked for those companies: with their mechanical abilities, they had proved useful to the American defense industry.
At the Federal Trade Commission, Ms. Jones was vocal in her opposition to cigarette advertising on the air, speaking in favor of a ban as early as 1967. The next year, the commission voted to recommend such a ban; enacted by Congress in 1970, it took effect in early 1971.
As a commissioner, Ms. Jones was also involved in an effort by the F.T.C. to break up an alleged monopoly of cereal makers and an effort to persuade the garment industry to put care instructions on clothing labels.
After leaving the commission in 1973, Ms. Jones taught law at the University of Illinois. She was later active with consumer and civic organizations, among them the Consumer Interest Research Institute, of which she was founder and president.
In 1975, at 55, Ms. Jones accepted her first corporate job, as vice president for consumer affairs of the Western Union Telegraph Company. The post, she was told, had been earmarked for a woman.
In an interview with Business Week the next year, Ms. Jones was asked whether she resented the company’s tokenism.
“Hell, no,” she replied. “It gives me a foot in the door.”
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MARY DALY, A LEADER IN FEMINIST THEOLOGY
Mary Daly in 1999, shortly before she left Boston College.
A friend, Linda Barufaldi, confirmed the death, saying Professor Daly had been in declining health recently.
A self-described “radical lesbian feminist,” Professor Daly maintained a long, often uneasy relationship with Boston College, the Jesuit institution where she had taught theology since the 1960s.
In 1999, Professor Daly left the college after a male student threatened suit when he was denied a place in her class on feminist ethics. She had long limited enrollment in some advanced women’s studies classes to women only, maintaining that the presence of men there would inhibit frank discussion.
Professor Daly did let men enroll in her introductory feminism courses and offered to tutor them privately in the advanced subjects.
Among the first American women to train as a Roman Catholic theologian, Professor Daly challenged orthodoxies from the start. She came to wide attention in 1968 with the publication of “The Church and the Second Sex” (Harper & Row), in which she argued that the Catholic Church had systematically oppressed women for centuries.
Her next book, “Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation” (Beacon, 1973), explored misogyny in religion in general.
“She is a central figure in 20th-century feminism,” Robin Morgan, the feminist writer and former editor of Ms. magazine, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
Professor Daly’s work was the subject of a critical anthology, “Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly” (Pennsylvania State University, 2000), edited by Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye.
If Professor Daly’s ideology placed her outside mainstream academic and religious life, then that, by her own account, was where she was glad to be. Formerly a practicing Catholic, she came to regard organized religion as irreparably patriarchal, in later years calling herself “post-Christian.” Where her scholarly concerns had once been largely theological, she gradually came to regard them as spiritual in the broadest sense of the word.
Mary Daly was born in Schenectady, N.Y., on Oct. 16, 1928. By the time she was an adolescent, the natural world seemed to resonate for her in a way it did for few others.
“Especially important was a startling communication from a clover blossom one summer day when I was about 14,” she wrote in an essay in The New Yorker in 1996. “It said, with utmost simplicity, ‘I am.’ ”
After earning a bachelor’s degree in English and Latin from the College of Saint Rose in Albany in 1950, she earned a master’s in English from the Catholic University of America and a Ph.D. in theology from Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind. She later earned two more doctorates, in philosophy and theology, from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
Professor Daly joined the Boston College faculty in 1966. In 1969, in a widely reported case, she was denied tenure, a development interpreted by many as a response to “The Church and the Second Sex.” After more than 1,500 students signed a petition supporting her — most were men, for the college did not admit women to its liberal arts division until 1970 — she was reinstated with tenure.
In 1999, when Professor Daly and Boston College parted company, a spokesman for the college said she had agreed to retire. She maintained she was forced to retire.
Critics alternately praised and condemned Professor Daly for her pyrotechnic, bitingly witty, eccentrically capitalized and punctuated style.
Most were enchanted by “Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language” (Beacon, 1987; with Jane Caputi). A lexicon of new, nonsexist English, the book contains original coinages, like “Mister-ectomy” (“a guaranteed solution to The Contraception Problem”), plus familiar pejoratives like “crone” and “hag,” rehabilitated as emblems of pride.
But some reviewers seemed discomforted by Professor Daly’s later prose, which appeared to dovetail ever more snugly with New Age rhetoric:
“Although I was not in a ‘trance’ when writing ‘Gyn/Ecology,’ I was in a special mode of creative consciousness, which stemmed, in part, from a will to overcome all phallocratically imposed fears and Move on the Journey of Gynocentric Creation,” she wrote in the 1990 edition of “Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism” (Beacon), originally published in 1978.
Professor Daly leaves no immediate survivors.
Her other books include “Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy” (Beacon, 1984) and “Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage: Containing Recollections From My Logbook of a Radical Feminist Philosopher (Be-ing an Account of My Time/Space Travels and Ideas — Then, Again, Now, and How)” (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
Reviewing “Pure Lust” in The New York Times Book Review in 1984, the religious-studies scholar Demaris Wehr wrote: “Mary Daly is an extraordinary woman and this is an extraordinary work, demanding unusual spiritual and intellectual effort from its readers. The effort is worth it.”
Ms. Wehr added, “Her powerful mind, her creative genius and her uncanny ability to put her finger on deep emotional, psychological and spiritual problems are ignored at our peril.”
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FREYA VON MOLTKE, PART OF A CORE OF NAZI RESISTANCE
Freya von Moltke in 2004
So, with a wife’s assent, began a famous challenge to Hitler. At the height of the Nazi victories, Count Helmuth James von Moltke invited about two dozen foes of Nazism, many of them aristocrats like himself, to imagine a new, better postwar Germany.
For him, his wife’s participation was essential, as she remembered the conversation in “Courageous Hearts: Women and the Anti-Hitler Plot of 1944,” a 1997 book by Dorothee von Meding.
The dissidents met at the count’s ancestral estate, Kreisau, which Bismarck had given his legendary great-great-uncle, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, for his victories over Austria and France.
It was a perilous act of resistance. As many as half of the dissidents were later executed, some for actively plotting to kill Hitler, others for thinking the unthinkable: they had marshaled logical, moral and religious arguments to question the legitimacy of the Third Reich. Their high-minded planning for a future without Nazis angered a regime that expected to endure 1,000 years.
Mrs. Moltke, who disdained the title of countess, was the last living active participant in the group. She died of a viral infection on Jan. 1 at her home in Norwich, Vt., her son Helmuth said. She was 98.
In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (1960), William L. Shirer said the Kreisau circle had provided “the intellectual, spiritual, ethical, philosophical and, to some extent, political ideas of the resistance to Hitler.”
They initially rejected violence, if only for fear of making Hitler a martyr. But as the killing went on, support for assassinating him grew. Indeed, military conspirators were pushing ahead. At 12:40 p.m. on July 20, 1944, a bomb they had planted in a suitcase beneath a table at which Hitler was sitting at the Wolf’s Lair field headquarters exploded. Hitler suffered only minor wounds.
Mrs. Moltke said she believed that her husband would have backed that assassination attempt — had he not already been in jail for warning a friend, Dr. Otto Kiep, who was plotting violence against Hitler, that Dr. Kiep risked imminent arrest. Count Moltke was never released. He was hanged, most likely by piano wire, in January 1945 after Gestapo agents had linked the assassination attempt at Wolf’s Lair to the Kreisau circle.
In fact, there is strong evidence that Count Moltke was in contact with the July 20 conspirators. Andreas Hermes, one of the few ringleaders who were not executed, told The New York Times in July 1945 that he “vividly” recalled Count Moltke’s participation.
Women who joined their husbands to oppose Hitler treaded the same dangerous ground as the men. Mrs. Moltke could have faced the death penalty simply for serving food and drinks to the conspirators. Her husband relied on her first impressions of people to make life-and-death judgments. She contributed ideas, particularly on legal issues, and her expertise.
In an enduring contribution, she gathered up Kreisau circle documents and letters from her husband and hid them in the estate’s beehives. In 1990 she published them as “Letters to Freya.” The papers have proved valuable to scholars for their gripping portrayal of heroic, almost certainly futile resistance, as well as for their glimpses at daily life in the Third Reich. In her later years, when the German government and others came to recognize her contributions, Mrs. Moltke expressed gratitude on behalf of other resistance widows as well. “We were all wives of our husbands,” she said.
Mrs. Moltke’s son said in an interview that the only surviving wife of a Kreisau circle member is Clarita von Trott, whose husband, Adam, played a central part in the July 20 plot and was executed in 1944.
Freya Deichmann, whose father was a banker, was born in Cologne on March 29, 1911. She attended idealistic work camps that brought young people of all classes together to share ideas and dreams. At 18, while on a vacation to Austria’s lake district, she met Count Moltke.
They married two years later, in 1931. He studied in Germany and Britain to become an international lawyer. In 1939, he was drafted to work in military intelligence. His boss, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, a covert foe of Hitler, encouraged him to use his legal and political expertise to save Jews and curb German atrocities. On trips abroad, he met with Allied officials to discuss a possible coup.
Mrs. Moltke was haunted by the first time she saw Hitler in 1931 or 1932. She had noticed a man in a dark movie theater, she told Ms. von Meding in “Courageous Hearts.” “I thought to myself, what terrifying eyes,” she said.
When the house lights went on, she saw who he was.
Mrs. Moltke earned a doctorate in law from Humboldt University in Berlin in 1935. She then took over management of Kreisau, then in eastern Germany and now part of Poland. The Kreisau circle began informally among friends, then became more serious as members assembled in small groups in Berlin to discuss specific subjects, like a new constitution. Larger meetings at Kreisau occurred in the spring and fall of 1942 and the spring of 1943.
The circle and the Moltke family benefited from the immense prestige of Count Moltke’s military ancestor. Another protection was the fervent pro-Nazi views of the manager of the estate; his local stature helped contain public denunciations of a family that refused to say “Heil Hitler.”
Mrs. Moltke’s letters to Count Moltke in prison concerned farm matters, like the wisdom of keeping a pair of ducks. She told her husband that the Gestapo officer who read all his letters had spoken nicely to her on a visit.
“They’re not really so bad,” she ventured.
“Except when they tear out your fingernails,” Count Moltke answered (though he was not tortured in that way, he said).
After the war, Mrs. Moltke moved to South Africa and did social work, but she grew to hate the country’s official system of racial segregation and eventually returned to Germany.
She moved to Vermont in 1960 to join the philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, whose wife had died. They had met in the youth camp movement and, after reuniting, remained companions until his death in 1973.
In 1998, she helped turn Kreisau — Krzyzowa in Polish — into a center to promote understanding between Germany and Poland. In 2004, a foundation named after her was set up to support it.
Besides her son Helmuth, Mrs. Moltke is survived by six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. Another son, Konrad, died in 2005.
The letters Mrs. Moltke hid in the beehives remain poignant. In the last one he wrote before his execution, Count Moltke said he would “gladly accompany” his wife “a bit further on this earth.”
“But then I would need a new task from God,” he continued. “The task for which God made me is done.”
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LHASA DE SELA, SINGER AND SONGWRITER
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Lhasa de Sela in 2006.
The cause was breast cancer, which she had been battling for almost two years, said her partner, Ryan Morey.
Ms. de Sela, who performed under the single name Lhasa, sang in English, Spanish and French. Her lyrics ranged from simple declarations of love and loneliness to dark stories steeped in the imagery of fairy tales. Her melodies drew from a range of sources, including Mexican folk songs and the music of French chanteuses like Édith Piaf, to whom her highly emotional delivery often drew comparisons.
Born in the small Catskills town of Big Indian, N.Y., in 1972, to a Mexican father and an American mother, she had a nomadic childhood and began singing in San Francisco when she was 13.
By the early 1990s she was living in Montreal, where, she told an interviewer in 2004, she performed in bars and learned “how to reach people, even people who were there for beer and conversation.” She was soon reaching hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
Though difficult to pigeonhole, Ms. de Sela’s songs were most often classified as world music. Her Spanish-language debut album, “La Llorona,” released in 1997, won a Juno, Canada’s equivalent of the Grammy, in the “global” category. Her trilingual second album, “The Living Road” (2003), was named one of the 10 best world music albums of the decade by The Times of London.
Her third and final album, “Lhasa,” recorded entirely in English, was released last year.
In addition to Mr. Morey, Ms. de Sela is survived by her parents, Alejandro Sela and Alexandra Karam; her stepmother, Marybeth Pettit; six sisters, Gabriela de la Vega, Samantha de la Vega, Ayin de Sela, Miriam de Sela, Sky de Sela and Eden Sela; and three brothers, Mischa Karam, Alex Sela and Ben Sela.
Among Ms. de Sela’s legions of devoted fans were many of her fellow musicians. “Her melodies are hypnotic,” the Canadian singer-songwriter Feist told The New York Times in 2005. “There’s something about her voice: you can tell her feet are planted on the ground, and she’s not even moving — maybe she’s just holding her arm out in front of her — and she’s just singing from the marrow of her bones.”
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VALERIA SPEARMAN, FORMER TSU FIRST LADY AND TENNIS ADVOCATE
By ROBERT STANTON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Jan. 9, 2010, 9:46PM
Handout photo
Valeria Spearman wanted everyone at TSU instilled with pride, her son said.
Valeria Elizabeth Benbow Spearman, former first lady of Texas Southern University, died Dec. 29 after a lengthy illness.
Spearman was married to the late Leonard H.O. Spearman Sr., who was also a U.S. ambassador.
“She was a proud first lady at TSU and for the folks in Houston,” said her son, Leonard Spearman Jr. of Katy. “She made sure that everything was first class — not only on the academic side, but with beauty pageants for students and events for faculty and staff. She wanted them to be sure they were proud to be part of TSU.”
Married 57 years
Valeria Spearman was born June 30, 1929, in DeLand, Fla., to Morris and Dinah Benbow. Her father was a businessman and World War I veteran; her mother was a schoolteacher and alumna of what is now Bethune-Cookman University.
Spearman attended what is now Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, where she was a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. While attending FAMU, she met her future husband in 1950, graduated and married him the same year, her son said.
The couple was married for 57 years, said Spearman Jr., an attorney and administrator at Thurgood Marshall School of Law at TSU.
“Family was the highest calling for her,” he said of his mother. “We always went back home to Florida, wherever we lived. Florida was still considered home. She always put family first.”
Uniting opponents
Valeria Spearman’s influence extended around the globe, as she supported her husband’s diplomatic activities in Rwanda and Lesotho. While in Rwanda, she organized tennis play between members of the opposing Hutu and Tutsi tribes, an accomplishment of which she was very proud, her son said.
“She loved tennis,” Spearman Jr. said. “She fell in love with tennis, and everywhere she went she established a tennis program.”
While in Washington, D.C., she persuaded then-Mayor Marion Barry to restore tennis courts in the southwest part of the city, her son said.
As first lady at TSU, she was instrumental in re-establishing the university’s tennis team.
The style and elegance that Valeria Spearman naturally exuded has become less prevalent in today’s fast-paced society, her son said.
“The crystal, the china, making sure they were all polished … you don’t see it as much,” he said. “You see more plastic, more informal activity and dressing down as opposed to dressing up.
“There was a sense of elegance,” he said.
Daughter, two sons
Valeria Spearman is survived by her three children, daughter Lynn V. Dickerson, and sons Leonard H.O. Spearman Jr. and Charles M. Spearman; seven grandchildren; and numerous cousins, nieces, nephews and friends.
Services were Friday, at Mabrie Memorial Mortuary in Houston. Burial will be Monday at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
In lieu of flowers, memorials in Valeria Spearman’s name may be made to TSU Athletic Fund (www.tsu.edu/giving), CurePSP (Progressive Supranuclear Palsy) Foundation (www.psp.org), St. Jude (www.StJude.org) and Stop Child Abuse Now of Northern Virginia (www.scanva.org).
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DAVID GERBER, AWARD-WINNING TELEVISON PRODUCER
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Kevin Parry/The Paley Center for Media
David Gerber
The cause was heart failure, his publicist, Jeff Sanderson, said.
Mr. Gerber received a 1973 Emmy Award as an executive producer of “Police Story,” which was named outstanding drama series. That show, an anthology series created by the novelist and former Los Angeles police officer Joseph Wambaugh, ran on NBC from 1973 to 1977. Mr. Gerber made television history with “Police Woman” (NBC, 1974-78), starring Angie Dickinson, the first successful police series with a woman as the lead.
His most honored work was “George Washington,” a three-night 1984 CBS mini-series starring Barry Bostwick in the title role. It won a Peabody Award and received six Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding limited series.
David Gerber was born on July 25, 1923, in Brooklyn, the son of Louie Gerber, a German immigrant butcher, and his Russian-born wife, Mollie. He served as a radio gunner in World War II, was shot down over Germany and became a prisoner of war. After the war, with the help of the G.I. Bill of Rights, he received a bachelor’s degree from what is now the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif.
After working in advertising and for talent agencies, he went into television. His earliest work as an executive producer, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, included “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” a supernatural romantic sitcom based on the 1947 film, and “Nanny and the Professor,” about a psychic housekeeper. Eventually he became a studio executive, handling television production at Columbia Pictures and MGM in addition to running his own production company.
“Beulah Land,” his six-hour 1980 NBC mini-series about an antebellum Georgia plantation, made news when a group affiliated with the N.A.A.C.P. protested its portrayal of black slaves as demeaning. The broadcast was delayed, but when the show did run, some critics found it more laughable than dangerous. John J. O’Connor of The New York Times declared it “ludicrous — in a sense, memorably so.”
Mr. Gerber, however, was something of a pioneer in multiracial television. Under his watch at Columbia, “That’s My Mama” — a 1974 ABC sitcom starring Clifton Davis as a hip, young Washington barber living with his mother — was one of the earliest prime-time series with an African-American cast, but it lasted little more than a season. While he was at MGM, “In the Heat of the Night,” a crime series inspired by the 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, began its six-season run in 1988 (first on NBC and later on CBS), with Howard E. Rollins Jr. and Carroll O’Connor in the leads. Mr. O’Connor, who played a bigoted Southern sheriff, won the Emmy for outstanding actor in a drama series after the show’s first season.
Mr. Gerber’s high-profile television films included “The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case” (1976), with a young Anthony Hopkins, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of Bruno Hauptmann, the convicted kidnapper; and “The Lost Battalion” (2001), about soldiers caught behind enemy lines in France in World War I.
His last big project was “Flight 93,” a 2006 television film about the events aboard the United Airlines plane that was taken over by terrorists on Sept. 11 and crashed in Pennsylvania. The film received seven Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding made-for-television movie, Mr. Gerber’s last.
He is survived by his wife of 39 years, Laraine Stephens, an actress. He had renamed the Northern California winery they founded in 1989 as Gerber Vineyards to honor her: Laraine Wines.
Mr. Gerber had a reputation for friendliness, and for taking the time to talk to employees at every job level. As he told a writer for The Los Angeles Times in 2001, his behavior was just a matter of thinking ahead: “I don’t know him, but he could be the next network president.”
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WILLIE MITCHELL, SOUL MUSIC PRODUCER
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Willie Mitchell, right, in the studio with Al Green.
The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Lawrence said.
The Willie Mitchell sound — prominent horns, delicately strummed guitars, some sweet organ and a steady, straightforward beat — is instantly recognizable on records by singers like Mr. Green, Ms. Peebles, Syl Johnson and O. V. Wright, and on the instrumentals Mr. Mitchell recorded as a bandleader. Both raw and sensuous, it became Hi’s signature sound as the label rose to prominence with Mr. Green in the 1970s.
Although its legacy has been less celebrated than those of Stax or Sun, two other pioneering record labels that got started in Memphis in the 1950s, Hi was an integral part of the development of the Memphis soul sound, and Mr. Mitchell is widely credited as one of its architects.
“We had just gone past what was called race music and blues, which was looked down upon, to this R&B, this soul,” Al Bell, a former owner of Stax who is chairman of the Memphis Music Foundation, said in an interview on Tuesday. “We worked with each other so we could grow and improve our music, and Willie provided that kind of leadership. His handprint, thumbprint, footprint, heart print is all over Memphis music.”
Mr. Mitchell’s sound owed much to the musicians he used at Royal Recording Studio, a converted movie theater that served as Hi’s headquarters. They included the Hodges brothers — Teenie on guitar, Charles on organ and Leroy on bass — as well Al Jackson and Howard Grimes on drums, whose light touch and rhythmic flexibility were central to Hi’s appeal.
“It’s the laziness of the rhythm,” Mr. Mitchell said in Peter Guralnick’s 1986 book “Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom.” “You hear those old lazy horns half a beat behind the music, and you think they’re gonna miss it, and all of a sudden, just so lazy, they come in and start to sway with it. It’s like kind of shucking you, putting you on.”
Born in Ashland, Miss., in 1928, Mr. Mitchell began his career as a trumpeter, leading a 10-piece touring band while still in his teens. After serving two years in the Army, he returned to Memphis in the mid-1950s and became a regular in the city’s clubs, distinguishing himself as a jazzy, sophisticated player.
In 1961 Hi Records, then four years old, signed Mr. Mitchell as a recording artist, and from 1964 to 1969 he scored a number of minor R&B hits, including “Soul Serenade” and “30-60-90.” But he began to make a greater mark as the label’s combination producer and talent scout, bringing in Ms. Peebles and others. (He also produced Bobby Bland’s 1964 album “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do” for another Memphis label, Duke.)
In 1968 Mr. Mitchell was booked to perform at a club in Midland, Tex., with a fledgling singer from Michigan named Al Green as his opening act. On hearing him rehearse, Mr. Mitchell invited Mr. Green to Memphis and promised to make him a star.
Coached by Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Green found his voice, and by 1971 he had reached No. 1 on the pop charts with “Let’s Stay Together.”
Mr. Mitchell’s style proved a perfect canvas for Mr. Green’s finely finessed vocals, and together they made 13 Top 40 hits between 1971 and 1976, when Mr. Green left secular music for gospel and a career as a minister. Mr. Mitchell acquired an ownership stake in Hi in 1970 and remained with the company until it was sold in the late 1970s.
With the sale of Hi, Mr. Mitchell bought Royal studio and continued to record there, preserving much of the equipment just as it had been in 1969. Among the artists he recorded were the blues guitarist Buddy Guy as well as John Mayer and Rod Stewart.
Mr. Mitchell’s two grandsons, Lawrence and Archie, whom he adopted as sons, continue to operate the studio. Mr. Mitchell is also survived by a stepson, Archie Turner; two daughters, Yvonne and Lorrain Mitchell; and a granddaughter.
When Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Green reunited in the 2000s to make two albums (“I Can’t Stop” and “Everything’s OK” ), Mr. Green recorded at Royal with the same microphone he had used in the 1970s.
Mr. Green has said that he owes much of his success to Mr. Mitchell, especially his coaching, beginning with their first recording sessions together. “I was trying to sing like Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke and Wilson Pickett,” Mr. Green said in a 2003 interview, recalling Mr. Mitchell. “He said, ‘Sing like Al Green.’ ”
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SANDRO, ARGENTINE POP SINGER
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Fernando Masobrio/Associated Press
Sandro waves to fans in Buenos Aires in 2003.
The cause was complications of heart and lung transplant surgery, said Dr. Claudio Burgos of the Italian Hospital, where Sandro died.
Sandro recorded numerous albums, appeared in more than a dozen movies and received a lifetime achievement award from the Latin Recording Academy in 2005. He also performed several times at Madison Square Garden.
Born Roberto Sánchez in Buenos Aires on Aug. 19, 1945, he began playing guitar as a youth. His career took off in the early 1960s, when he was lead guitarist for the band Los de Fuego.
During one performance, the group’s lead singer lost his voice. Mr. Sánchez relinquished his guitar, took over singing duties and began dancing to the rock rhythm. The crowd went wild.
He became the group’s frontman and adopted the name Sandro. His sensual, irreverent style, gyrating hips and black leather jacket sent young female fans into a frenzy and earned him the reputation as Argentina’s Elvis Presley, making him a star.
The band recorded two albums before Sandro went solo, turning to a more melodic, romantic repertory. His first starring movie role was in “Quiero Llenarme de Ti” (“I Want to Fill Myself With You”), a 1969 film named after one of his hit songs. He later starred in the Puerto Rican telenovela “Fue Sin Querer” (“I Didn’t Mean to Do It”).
In later years he had chronic lung disease. In 2001 he played shows with the assistance of a tube attached to a microphone.
He is survived by his wife, Olga Garaventa, whom he married in 2007. He had no children.
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BENJAMIN T. MULLER, GEOLOGIST
By CAROL CHRISTIAN
Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle
Jan. 5, 2010, 6:45PM
Family handout
Benjamin T. Muller, who spent nearly five months in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, died Saturday at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston. He was 85 and had been ill about a week, said a daughter, Madeline Bingamon of Houston.
Muller, whose war experience was recounted in previous Houston Chronicle stories and a History Channel documentary, was a tail gunner on B-25 bomber missions from Luzon in the Philippines.
After his plane was shot down in April 1945, Japanese troops held him on Hainan Island off the coast of China.
When liberated in August 1945, he weighed 80 pounds, Muller told the Chronicle in November 2000.
“I wouldn’t have lasted two more weeks,” Muller said.
Traveld the world
Born June 10, 1924, in Louisville, Ky., Muller grew up in El Paso and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942, shortly after graduating from El Paso High School.
After the war, he attended the University of Texas at El Paso on the GI Bill of Rights and was one course short of earning a degree in geology when he left school, said his son-in-law, Tab Bingamon.
“About 10 or 15 years ago, after he wrote the president of the university and gave him a little background, he was awarded his degree,” Tab Bingamon said.
The lack of a diploma didn’t stop Muller, who traveled the world in his 35 years as a geologist, his family said.
In 1951, while working in the Texas panhandle town of Pampa, he met Ruby Potts, a home economist for Gray County. The couple married in 1952 and moved more than 20 times in the first few years of their marriage before settling in Houston.
“He was always on the go,” Ruby Muller said. “It was fun, exciting and adventuresome. We met lots of exciting people.”
Long motorcycle trips
As the oil industry entered the lean period of the mid-1980s, Muller took early retirement and bought a BMW motorcycle, said Mike Murphy, who met Muller through the BMW Club of Houston.
Murphy said he accompanied Muller on numerous long rides, including what was probably Muller’s last one to a national rally in Lima, Ohio, five years ago.
“We picked up some friends in Louisville and rode up there with them,” Murphy said. “Ben had friends literally all over the U.S.”
On another trip to Taos, N.M., Murphy said he and Muller were in a group who met a trucker hauling hay.
“Ben went and talked to the truck driver because he wanted to know everything about the hay,” Murphy said. “Ben would talk to everybody. He had a huge thirst for knowledge.”
Other survivors include daughters Cynthia Elsik, Pasadena; Kathleen Muller, Anchorage, Alaska; Elizabeth Miller, Houston; and sisters Flora Daude, Temple; and Ellen Brooks, El Paso.
The funeral is at 11 a.m. today at Geo. H. Lewis and Sons, 1010 Bering .
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ART CLOKEY, ANIMATOR WHO CREATED THE CHARACTER ‘GUMBY’
LOS OSOS, Calif. (AP) — Animator Art Clokey, whose bendable creation Gumby became a pop culture phenomenon through decades of toys, revivals and satires, died Friday. He was 88.Clokey, who suffered from repeated bladder infections, died in his sleep at his home in Los Osos on California’s Central Coast, son Joseph told the Los Angeles Times.
Gumby grew out of a student project Clokey produced at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s called “Gumbasia.”
That led to his making shorts featuring Gumby and his horse friend Pokey for the “Howdy Doody Show” and several series through the years.
He said he based Gumby’s swooping head on the cowlick hairdo of his father, who died in a car accident when Clokey was nine. And Clokey’s wife suggested he give Gumby the body of a gingerbread man.
Clokey said that though Gumby eventually became one of the most familiar toys of all time, he was at first resistant to roll out the bendable doll.
“I didn’t allow merchandising for seven years after it was on the air,” Clokey told San Luis Obispo Tribune in 2002, “because I was very idealistic, and I didn’t want parents to think we were trying to exploit their children.”
Clokey also created the moralizing and often satirized claymation duo “Davey and Goliath.”
The Lutheran Church hired Clokey to make the “Davey and Goliath” shorts, and Clokey used the money to help bring a Gumby series back to television in the 1960s.
Eddie Murphy brought a surge in Gumby’s popularity in the 1980s with his send-up of the character on “Saturday Night Live” as a cigar-smoking show business primadonna.
Clokey said he enjoyed Murphy’s profane Gumby.
“Gumby can laugh at himself,” Clokey told the Tribune.
Murphy’s Gumby brought new toy sales and eventually led to a new syndicated series starting in 1988.
It was only then that Clokey started seeing serious financial returns on his creation.
“It took 40 years,” he said.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press
TOKYO (AP) — Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, has died at age 93.Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip for his shipbuilding company on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city.
He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, about 300 kilometers (190 miles) to the southwest, which suffered a second U.S. atomic bomb attack three days later.
On Aug. 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, ending the war.
The mayor of Nagasaki said “a precious storyteller has been lost,” in a message posted on the city’s Web site Wednesday. Yamaguchi died Monday morning of stomach cancer, the mass circulation Mainichi, Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers reported.
Yamaguchi was the only person to be certified by the Japanese government as having been in both cities when they were attacked, although other dual survivors have also been identified.
“My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die,” Yamaguchi was quoted as saying in the Mainichi newspaper last year.
In his later years, Yamaguchi gave talks about his experiences as an atomic bomb survivor and often expressed his hope that such weapons would be abolished.
He spoke at the United Nations in 2006, wrote books and songs about his experiences, and appeared in a documentary about survivors of both attacks.
Last month he was visited in the hospital by filmmaker James Cameron, director of “Titanic” and “Avatar,” who is considering making a movie about the bombings, according to the Mainichi.
Immediately after the war, Yamaguchi worked as a translator for American forces in Nagasaki and later as a junior high school teacher.
Japan is the only country to have suffered atomic bomb attacks. About 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
Yamaguchi is one of about 260,000 people who survived the attacks. Some bombing survivors have developed various illnesses from radiation exposure, including cancer and liver illnesses.
Certification as an atomic bomb survivor in Japan qualifies individuals for government compensation, including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press
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