PETER GRAVES, ‘MISSION – IMPOSSIBLE’ STAR
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Associated Press
Peter Graves in 1969, when he was in “Mission: Impossible.”
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Martin Agency
Mr. Graves in a Geico commercial, spoofing his own image.
He died of a heart attack at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., said Fred Barman, his business manager.
It was a testament to Mr. Graves’s earnest, unhammy ability to make fun of himself that after decades of playing square he-men and straitlaced authority figures, he was perhaps best known to younger audiences for a deadpan line in “Airplane!” (“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”) and one from a memorable Geico car insurance commercial (“I was one lucky woman”).
Born Peter Aurness in Minneapolis, the blond, 6-foot-2 Mr. Graves served in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and ’45, studied drama at the University of Minnesota under the G.I. Bill of Rights and played the clarinet in local bands before following his older brother, James Arness, to Hollywood.
His first credited film appearance was in “Rogue River” (1950), with Rory Calhoun. Mr. Graves’s getting a Hollywood contract for the picture persuaded his fiancée’s family to let her marry him. He changed his name for that movie to Graves, his maternal grandfather’s name, to avoid confusion with his older brother.
He soon found himself in classics like Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17” (1953), where he played a security officer with a secret; Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter” (1955); Otto Preminger’s “Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell” (1955); and John Ford’s “Long Gray Line” (1955).
Mr. Graves became known for taking all his roles seriously, injecting a certain believability into even the campiest plot. He appeared in westerns like “The Yellow Tomahawk” (1954) and “Wichita” (1955); a Civil War adventure, “The Raid” (1954); and gangster movies (“Black Tuesday,” 1954, and “The Naked Street,” 1955). He played earnest scientists in science fiction/horror films: “Killers From Space” (1954), “It Conquered the World” (1956) and “Beginning of the End” (1957, about giant grasshoppers in Chicago). There was also cold war science fiction anti-Communism: “Red Planet Mars” (1952).
Other movies included “East of Sumatra” (1953), “Beneath the 12-Mile Reef” (1953), “A Rage to Live” (1965), “Texas Across the River” (1966), “Sergeant Ryker” (1968), “The Ballad of Josie” (1968), “The Five-Man Army” (1969), “The Clonus Horror” (1979), “The Guns and the Fury” (1981), “Savannah Smiles” (1982), “Number One With a Bullet” (1986), “Addams Family Values” (1993), “The House on Haunted Hill” (1999) and “Men in Black II” (2002).
In 1955 Mr. Graves began his career as a television series regular as the star of “Fury,” a western family adventure series about a rancher named Jim Newton, his orphaned ward and the boy’s black stallion. It ran until 1960 on NBC, helped pioneer television adventure series and solidified Mr. Graves’s TV credentials.
Some of his hundreds of television credits include “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Whiplash” (1961), “The Dean Martin Show” (1970), the Herman Wouk mini-series “The Winds of War” (1983) and “War and Remembrance” (1988), “Fantasy Island” (1978-83) and “7th Heaven” (1999-2005). He served as the host or narrator for numerous television specials and performed in television movies of the week like “The President’s Plane Is Missing” (1973), “Where Have All the People Gone” (1974) and “Death Car on the Freeway” (1979).
Mr. Graves played his most famous television character from 1967 to 1973 in “Mission: Impossible,” reprising it from 1988 to 1990. He was Jim Phelps, the leader of the Impossible Missions Force, a super-secret government organization that conducted dangerous undercover assignments (which he always chose to accept). After the tape summarizing the objective self-destructed, the team would use not violence, but elaborate con games to trap the villains. In his role, Mr. Graves was a model of cool, deadpan efficiency.
But he was appalled when his agent sent him the script for the role of a pedophile pilot in “Airplane!” (1980). “I tore my hair and ranted and raved and said, ‘This is insane,’ he recalled on “Biography” in 1997. Some of the role’s lines (“Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”) looked at first as if they could get him thrown in jail, never mind ruining his career. He told his agent to tell David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the director-producers, to find themselves a comedian. He relented when the Zucker brothers explained that the secret of their spoof would be the deadpan behavior of the cast; they didn’t want a comedian, they wanted the Peter Graves of “Fury” and “Mission: Impossible.”
Mr. Graves used his familiar earnest, all-American demeanor in service of some of the comic movie’s most outrageous moments. He reprised the role of Captain Oveur in “Airplane II” in 1982.
Starting in the mid-1980s Mr. Graves was the host of a number of television science specials on “Discover.” In 1987, he became the host of the Arts and Entertainment Network’s long-running “Biography” series, narrating the lives of figures like Prince Andrew, Muhammad Ali, pioneers of the space program, Churchill, Ernie Kovacs, Edward G. Robinson, Sophia Loren, Jackie Robinson, Howard Hughes, Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Winters.
In 1997, Mr. Graves was the subject of his own “Biography” presentation, “Peter Graves: Mission Accomplished.” In 2002, Mr. Graves was interviewed for a special about the documentary series, “Biography: 15 Years and Counting.”
Mr. Graves won a Golden Globe Award in 1971 for his performance in “Mission: Impossible” and in 1997, he and “Biography” won an Emmy Award for outstanding informational series.
In 1998, he joined his wife, Joan, in an effort to get Los Angeles to ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers from residential areas, testifying before the City Council, “’We’re all victims of these machines.”
In addition to his brother, he is survived by his wife, Joan Graves, and three daughters, Amanda Lee Graves, Claudia King Graves and Kelly Jean Graves.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 19, 2010
An obituary on Tuesday and in some editions on Monday about the actor Peter Graves misstated the history of the television series “Fury,” in which he starred. It ran from 1955 to 1960 on NBC, not from 1955 to 1959.
Rest in peace, Mr. Graves.
Rest in peace
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STEWART L. UDALL, CONSERVATIONIST IN KENNEDY AND JOHNSON CABINETS
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
Published: March 20, 2010
- Stewart L. Udall, an ardent conservationist and a son of the West, who as interior secretary in the 1960s presided over vast increases in national park holdings and the public domain, died on Saturday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. The last surviving member of the original Kennedy cabinet, he was 90.
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Edward Hausner/The New York Times
In 1965, Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall, second from left, discussed parks in New York with Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., left, and Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Jacob K. Javits.
Mr. Udall had been in failing health after a fall last week, according to his son Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico.
Though he was a liberal Democrat from the increasingly conservative and Republican West, Stewart Udall said in a 2003 public television interview that he found in Washington “a big tent on the environment.”
Though he was a liberal Democrat from the increasingly conservative and Republican West, Stewart Udall said in a 2003 public television interview that he found in Washington “a big tent on the environment.”
The result was the addition of vast tracts to the nation’s land holdings and — through his strong ties with lawmakers, conservationists, writers and others — work that led to landmark statutes on air, water and land conservation.
President Obama said in a statement Saturday night that Mr. Udall “left an indelible mark on this nation and inspired countless Americans who will continue his fight for clean air, clean water and to maintain our many natural treasures.”
Few corners of the nation escaped Mr. Udall’s touch. As interior secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he presided over the acquisition of 3.85 million acres of new holdings, including 4 national parks — Canyonlands in Utah, Redwood in California, North Cascades in Washington State and Guadalupe Mountains in Texas — 6 national monuments, 9 national recreation areas, 20 historic sites, 50 wildlife refuges and 8 national seashores. He also had an interest in preserving historic sites, and helped saved Carnegie Hall from destruction.
“Republicans and Democrats, we all worked together,” Mr. Udall said in a television interview with Bill Moyers. But by the time of that interview, Mr. Udall added that Washington had been overtaken by money and that people seeking public office fought for contributions from business interests that viewed environmental protection as a detriment to profit at best.
In his years in Washington, he won high regard from many quarters for his efforts to preserve the American landscape and to educate his fellow Americans on the value of natural beauty, points he made in his 1963 book “The Quiet Crisis.” The book, whose aim, he wrote at the time, was to “outline the land and people story of our continent,” sold widely.
It was Mr. Udall who suggested that John. F. Kennedy invite Robert Frost to recite a poem at Mr. Kennedy’s Inauguration. Mr. Udall accompanied Mr. Frost to the Soviet Union in 1962, a trip meant to foster better ties with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev.
Mr. Udall also held evenings at the Interior Department with the poet Carl Sandburg and the actor Hal Holbrook. In addition, he invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner to be the department’s writer in residence. It was Mr. Stegner’s presence that prompted Mr. Udall to write “The Quiet Crisis.”
Mr. Udall was also an early supporter of Rachel Carson, the biologist whose book “Silent Spring” brought attention to the environmental hazards of pesticide use.
Mr. Udall stepped onto the national stage in 1954, when he was elected to Congress from Arizona. In the hotly fought Democratic presidential primary of 1960, he urged his fellow Arizona Democrats to support Kennedy. When Kennedy won the White House, he nominated Mr. Udall as interior secretary
After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Udall was kept on by Lyndon B. Johnson.
“I think probably part of that was Lady Bird,” Mr. Udall said, referring to Mr. Johnson’s wife, with whom he collaborated on beautifying the nation’s capital and similar projects. “She treasured me and we were wonderful friends,” he added.
Roger G. Kennedy, who was director of the National Park Service in the 1990s, said Mr. Udall “escaped the notion that all public land was essentially a cropping opportunity — the idea that if you cannot raise timber on it or take a deer off it, it wasn’t valuable.” On the other hand, Mr. Kennedy said, Mr. Udall understood that public lands like parks enhanced the economic value of privately held land nearby.
This lesson was sometimes communicated with difficulty. For example, in the 1960s, when the Kennedy administration, with Mr. Udall in the lead, began efforts to establish the nation’s first national seashores, people in regions including Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and Point Reyes in California objected that taking coastal land out of private hands would ruinously inhibit economic development.
Instead, the parks have been beacons for lucrative tourism.
On this and other fronts Mr. Udall pushed with a formidable combination of political acumen and political allies — including his brother Morris K. Udall, who succeeded him in Congress and in 1976 ran for president in a campaign that his elder brother managed. Much of the significant environmental and land-protection statutes that became law in the 1970s and ’80s, including the Endangered Species Act, bore their stamp and influence.
“That was a wonderful time, and it carried through into the Nixon administration, into the Ford administration, into the Carter administration,” Stewart Udall said. “It lasted for 20 years. I don’t remember a big fight between the Republicans and Democrats in the Nixon administration or President Gerald Ford and so on. There was a consensus that the country needed more conservation projects of the kind that we were proposing.”
Stewart Lee Udall was born on Jan. 31, 1920, in St. Johns, Ariz., a small community in Apache County in the northeast, into a family with strong ties to the Mormon Church. His mother, Louise Lee Udall, was a granddaughter of John Doyle Lee, who was executed in 1877 for his involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah, in which a wagon train of California-bound migrants were killed in 1857.
Mr. Udall served as a Mormon missionary in Pennsylvania and New York. During World War II, he was a gunner in the 15th Army Air Forces, serving in Europe.
He received bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Arizona. After graduating from law school in 1948, he started his own law practice in Tucson, where he and Morris later became partners.
After leaving Washington, he taught at Yale, practiced law and wrote several books including “The Myths of August” an account of the effects of uranium mining and nuclear weapons work in the Western desert.
That grew out of his representation of thousands of uranium miners, nuclear weapons industry workers, and citizens exposed to radiation from atomic weapons manufacturing and testing in the West.
Though he won the first case in 1984 in Federal District Court, an appeals court overturned the ruling and the United States Supreme Court declined in 1988 to hear arguments. Mr. Udall then turned to Congress, working with lawmakers of both parties, particularly Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The law, administered by the Justice Department, provided up to $100,000 for those sickened by radiation exposure, and issued a formal apology for harm done to those who were “subjected to increased risk of injury and disease to serve the national security interests of the United States.”
Throughout his life he relished physical challenges. He was an all-conference guard on the University of Arizona basketball team and he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, in East Africa, and Mount Fuji, in Japan, while heading American delegations to both regions. When he was 84, at the end of his last rafting trip on the Colorado River, Mr. Udall hiked up the steep Bright Angel Trail from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the south rim, a 10-hour walk that he celebrated at the end with a martini.
Mr. Udall’s wife, the former Irmalee Webb, died in 2001. Besides his son Tom, he is also survived by his other sons, Scott, Denis and Jay, and his daughters, Lynn and Lori, as well as eight grandchildren.
At his death, Mr. Udall was a senior member of one of the nation’s last and largest political dynasties — in the West it was often said there were “oodles of Udalls” in politics. His grandfather David King Udall served in the Arizona Territorial legislature; his father, Levi Udall, was for decades an elected judge in the Arizona Superior Court and later a justice and chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court; Morris Udall was followed to Washington by his son Mark Udall, elected in 2008 as a senator from Colorado, the same year that Tom Udall was elected.
But Tom Udall said that in recent years his father had become greatly concerned over the state of politics in the country, worrying “we were losing the bipartisanship in the environmental area.”
He added that Mr. Udall had recently written a letter to his grandchildren, urging them to focus on “trying to transform our society to a clean energy and clean job society.”
Cornelia Dean and Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting.
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FESS PARKER, WHO AS DAVEY CROCKETT SET OFF COONSKIN CRAZE
Fess Parker, whose television portrayal of the American frontiersman Davy Crockett catapulted him to stardom in the mid-1950s and inspired millions of children to wear coonskin caps in one of America’s greatest merchandising fads, died on Thursday at his home in the Santa Ynez Valley in California, where he ran a successful winery. He was 85.
Fess Parker in a vineyard in Los Olivos, Calif., in 2000.
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ABC, via Photofest
Fess Parker as Davy Crockett in an episode for the “Disneyland” television show.
Mr. Parker went rustic once again in the 1960s to play Daniel Boone for a new wave of young television watchers, but by the mid-1970s he had largely given up acting and become a successful businessman and real estate developer. In 1987, he and his son, Eli, purchased a 714-acre ranch and established the Fess Parker Winery and Vineyard.
Mr. Parker was a genial, handsome, imposingly tall but somewhat obscure Hollywood actor when he was discovered by Walt Disney, whose company was about to produce a series of Davy Crockett episodes for “Disneyland,” his new ABC television show.
Disney had been searching for a quintessential American type to play the rough-hewn hero of the Alamo and had considered established stars like Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden and Ronald Reagan before deciding against them. When someone suggested James Arness, Disney went to see “Them!,” a well-regarded 1954 science-fiction movie in which Mr. Arness — who later went on to TV stardom on “Gunsmoke” — had a major role. Mr. Parker had a small but visible part in the film, and when Disney saw him — rugged-looking and well over 6 feet tall — he was said to have exclaimed, “There’s our Davy Crockett!”
The scriptwriter for the series, Tom W. Blackburn, and the head staff composer for the Disney organization, George Bruns, came up with a title song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” and it was introduced on the first episode of “Disneyland” on Oct. 27, 1954, to publicize the coming Crockett episodes.
The song, with multiple choruses, began:
Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee
Greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so he knew every tree
Kilt him a b’ar when he was only 3
Davy, Davy Crockett
King of the wild frontier
“The Ballad of Davy Crockett” would become stamped in the memories of a generation of young viewers. A number of artists, including Mr. Parker himself, recorded the song, and it sold in the millions. Bill Hayes’s version reached No. 1 on the pop charts. Tennessee Ernie Ford, Eddy Arnold, Burl Ives and Mitch Miller were among the others to come out with recordings.
The first episode of the Davy Crockett trilogy, “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter,” with Buddy Ebsen as Mr. Parker’s sidekick, George, was shown on Dec. 15, 1954. “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress” appeared on Jan. 26, 1955. By the time the last episode, “Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” was broadcast, on Feb. 23, 1955, the country was in a Crockett frenzy.
Children wore coonskin caps to school and wore them to bed. They wore them with their Davy Crockett plastic fringe frontier costumes while they played with their Crockett trading cards, their Crockett board games and puzzles, their Crockett color slide sets and their Crockett powder horns. They pestered their parents for Crockett toy muskets and Crockett bubble gum and Crockett rings and comic books.
By the end of 1955, The New York Times reported, American children had their choice of more than 3,000 different Davy Crockett toys, lunch boxes, thermoses and coloring books.
The Disney studio also turned episodes from the series into two feature films — “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” in 1955 and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates” the following year.
If the Disney scripts stretched the truth about Crockett, the final episode remained faithful to at least one historical fact. The real-life Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836 at the age of 49, and Mr. Parker’s Crockett fell there, too. But Disney, responding to a public outcry, brought him back for episodes in the 1955-56 season, including “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race.”
“Take off those black armbands, kids,” the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wrote, “and put on your coonskin caps, for Davy Crockett will hit the trail again.”
But not for long. By early 1956 interest had begun to flag, and as suddenly as it had begun, the craze ended.
Mr. Parker had brought a quiet, manly dignity to his portrayal of Davy Crockett. Paul Andrew Hutton, a historian at the University of New Mexico, said the character had given young children “an appreciation not only of history but of a kind of patriotism and self-sacrifice.”
Years later, Mr. Parker said, Vietnam veterans told him that watching his Crockett deal with fear when they were young had influenced their conduct in battle.
Mr. Parker continued to star for Disney in films like “The Great Locomotive Chase” (1956), “Westward Ho the Wagons!” (1956), “Old Yeller” (1957) and “The Light in the Forest” (1958).
But he began to chafe at the roles the Disney organization was offering him, and when he refused to appear in “Tonka,” the studio suspended him. He was unhappy, too, that Walt Disney had discouraged his being cast in “The Searchers,” the John Ford classic starring John Wayne, and “Bus Stop,” with Marilyn Monroe.
In 1963, Mr. Parker took to the stage as Curly in a touring production of “Oklahoma!” But the movie roles he wanted didn’t come his way.
In 1964 he put on buckskin again in the title role of “Daniel Boone.” That series ran for six years, but it didn’t capture the public’s imagination the way “Davy Crockett” had.
Fess Elisha Parker II was born in Fort Worth on Aug. 16, 1924, and grew up in San Angelo, where his family raised watermelons, peanuts and cattle. He attended Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Tex., before joining the Navy in World War II and participating in mopping-up operations in the Philippines. Afterward he attended the University of Texas and the University of Southern California.
He began acting professionally in 1951, in the national company of “Mister Roberts.” Shortly afterward, he made his film debut in “Untamed Frontier” (1952), with Joseph Cotten and Shelley Winters, and appeared in small roles in other films.
Over the years Mr. Parker made many guest appearances on television variety shows. He also had a short-lived series in 1962 called “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” based on the 1939 Frank Capra movie that starred James Stewart.
Mr. Parker married Marcella Rinehart in 1960 and died on her 84th birthday, Ms. Anash, the family spokeswoman, told The Associated Press. Besides his wife, he is survived by his son, Fess Elisha Parker III; his daughter, Ashley Parker-Snyder; and 11 grandchildren.
As a developer and entrepreneur, Mr. Parker had interests in luxury hotels and a mobile home park in addition to his winery, which had its first harvest in 1989. He also acquired a reputation for being sure of himself and determined to get his way. Playing Davy Crockett, he said, had made him that way.
And if Crockett had a shrewd side, so did the businessman in Mr. Parker, who understood the character’s continuing marketing power long after the ’50s craze had become a memory.
At his winery visitors almost invariably asked him about Crockett, and he was sure to direct them to the gift shop, where coonskin caps were for sale. And though he politely but consistently refused to wear one for their cameras, he was always happy to sign a Fess Parker wine label, bearing its familiar trademark: a tiny picture of a coonskin cap.
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EDMUND DINIS, PROSECUTOR IN CHAPPAQUIDDICK CASE
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: March 20, 2010
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Librado Romero/The New York Times
Edmund Dinis arriving at court in Edgartown, Mass., in 1970.
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His death was confirmed by Henry Arruda, the manager of WJFD-FM, the Portuguese-language radio station in New Bedford, Mass., that Mr. Dinis had owned since 1975.
Mr. Dinis (pronounced deh-NEES) was the district attorney for an area that included Cape Cod and the islands off the coast when a car driven by Mr. Kennedy plunged off a narrow bridge into a saltwater pond on Chappaquiddick, near Martha’s Vineyard, on July 18, 1969. Mr. Kennedy swam to safety, but Ms. Kopechne, a former secretary to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, drowned. The accident went unreported for about 10 hours.
A week later, after a medical examiner ruled the death accidental, Mr. Kennedy pleaded guilty to charges of leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence, and his driver’s license was suspended for a year.
Critics contended that Mr. Dinis had come under pressure from supporters of the Kennedy family and had not pressed the case sufficiently. After the sentencing, he filed a court motion requesting a full inquest to determine if there was sufficient evidence for further charges. The inquest was held, but a state court ordered that the findings be impounded.
In April 1970, Mr. Dinis brought the case before a grand jury. After meeting for two days and hearing less than 20 minutes of testimony from four witnesses, the jury voted not to indict.
In an interview on Wednesday, Leslie H. Leland, the grand jury foreman, said he believed that Mr. Dinis had not fully prosecuted the case. “The grand jury was the last stopgap to get to the truth of what happened at Chappaquiddick,” Mr. Leland said. “We were denied the ability to do that.” Mr. Dinis, he said, did not call “the witnesses that we wanted to have come before us,” and the judge refused to allow access to the inquest testimony.
Mr. Dinis, who had been district attorney for 10 years, was voted out of office in 1970.
Frank Sousa, director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, said of Mr. Dinis’s handling of the case, “There was no way for him to ultimately satisfy everyone,” according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Sousa added that “the community, particularly the Portuguese community, was enormously behind the Kennedys” and that “it really sort of did him in politically.”
Edmund Dinis was born on Oct. 4, 1924, on the island of St. Michael’s in the Azores, the Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. He was one of two children of Jacinto and Maria Dinis. The family emigrated to the United States, settling in New Bedford, where many people of Portuguese descent already lived. Jacinto Dinis served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives for more than 20 years.
After high school, Edmund joined the Army and became a French interpreter for Army intelligence during World War II. After the war, he studied law at Suffolk University. He served on the New Bedford City Council and later as a representative and then as a senator. He was elected district attorney in 1959.
Mr. Dinis is survived by his sister, Rosann Mulholland.
After losing the election in 1970, Mr. Dinis owned an insurance agency and a restaurant and practiced law. He acquired the radio station that became WJFD-FM in 1975. Throughout his years, Mr. Dinis championed Portuguese-American causes.
His 1976 campaign for a seat in Congress failed, as did his bid to reclaim the district attorney’s post in 1982.
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WAYNE COLLETT, TRACK MEDALIST BARRED BECAUSE OF A PROTEST
By FRANK LITSKY
Published: March 17, 2010
Wayne Collett, a runner who won a silver medal for the United States in the 1972 Munich Olympics and who was then judged to have acted so disrespectfully during the medal ceremony that the International Olympic Committee barred him as a competitor for life, died Wednesday. He was 60 and lived in Los Angeles.
Time Life Pictures — Getty Images
Wayne Collett during the medal ceremony for the 400 meters at the 1972 Olympics.
His death, at St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles, was caused by cancer, said Marc Dellims, the sports information director for U.C.L.A., where Collett had been a track and field star.
In 1972, Collett and his U.C.L.A. teammate John Smith were favored in the Olympic 400-meter dash. They advanced to the final along with Vince Matthews, another American. Matthews won the gold medal in 44.66 seconds, Collett finished second in 44.80 and Smith was injured early in the race and did not finish.
In the previous Olympics, in 1968 in Mexico City, the runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos, both African-Americans, had staged a demonstration during a medal ceremony to protest treatment of blacks in the United States. Olympic officials feared a repetition in Munich.
There, as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played, Matthews and Collett, also African-Americans, did not face the flag. They stood casually, hands on hips, their jackets unzipped. They chatted and fidgeted. When the anthem ended and they climbed off the stand, the crowd booed. Matthews twirled his medal and Collett gave a black power salute.
The I.O.C. called it a “disgusting display” and barred them.
Collett defended his actions many times. “I couldn’t stand there and sing the words because I don’t believe they’re true,” he once said, adding, “I believe we have the potential to have a beautiful country, but I don’t think we do.”
In 2002, he told The Los Angeles Times: “I love America. I just don’t think it’s lived up to its promise. I’m not anti-American at all. To suggest otherwise is to not understand the struggles of blacks in America at the time.”
With Matthews and Collett barred and Smith injured, the United States was short-handed and withdrew from the 4×400-meter relay, in which it would have been a strong favorite.
After returning from Munich, Jim Bush, Collett’s coach at U.C.L.A., defended him, telling Track & Field News, “I was disappointed in him and told him that to his face, but I love him just as much as before the Olympics.” He called Collett “the greatest athlete I ever coached.”
At the 1972 United States Olympic trials, Collett ran the fastest 400 time at sea level to that point.
At U.C.L.A., at 6 feet 2 inches and 180 pounds, he ran close to a world-record time in the 400-meter and 440-yard dashes and the 440-yard hurdles. He competed for U.C.L.A. from 1968-71, winning Pac-8 titles in the 440-yard intermediate hurdles and the 440-yard dash. He anchored three consecutive N.C.A.A. championship relay teams.
He was born on Oct. 20, 1949, in Los Angeles, where he took up track in high school.
At U.C.L.A., he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1971, an M.B.A. in 1973 and a law degree in 1977. He worked in a law practice and real estate and mortgage businesses. In 1992, he was elected to the U.C.L.A. Athletics Hall of Fame.
His survivors include his wife, Emily; his sons Aaron and Wayne II; and his mother, Ruth.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 20, 2010
An obituary on Thursday about Wayne Collett, an American runner who was barred from competing again in Olympic competition after he was judged to have acted disrespectfully during a medal ceremony in Munich in 1972, misstated the date of an interview with The Los Angeles Times in which he explained and defended his actions. It was 2002, not 1992.
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CHARLES MOORE, RIGHTS-ERA PHOTOGRAPHER
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Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated Press
Charles Moore in 2005. More Photos »
Slide Show
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Charles Moore/Black Star
James R. Jones, the Grand Dragon of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan, driving with his Klan robe to a rally in the mid-’60s. More Photos >
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Charles Moore/Black Star
Demonstrators huddled in a doorway, seeking shelter from high-pressure fire hoses, in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. More Photos >
His daughter Michelle Moore Peel said he died of natural causes.
Mr. Moore’s camera snapped the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. being arrested in Montgomery, Ala., in 1958, and James Meredith integrating the University of Mississippi in the face of a screaming mob in 1962.
He photographed Bull Connor using dogs and high-pressure hoses on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, and recorded a black man being viciously beaten by a white lawman during the “Bloody Sunday” march from Selma, Ala., in 1965.
These crisp, fluid black-and-white photographs appeared most prominently in Life magazine at a time when general-interest picture magazines remained such a powerful force that critics now speak of it as the “golden age of photojournalism.”
Both Senator Jacob K. Javits and the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. credited Mr. Moore’s images with building popular support for the passage of major civil rights laws in the mid-1960s. Critics have suggested that the fact that one does not see who is aiming the hose at the demonstrators seems to implicate the whole nation.
Mr. Moore, who was white, grew up in Alabama as the son of a Baptist minister, who not only denounced racism but who also occasionally preached in black churches. The son said he used his camera to continue the fight. But as a Southerner, he well knew the delicate line he had to walk.
On the one hand, he said in an interview with The Montgomery Advertiser in 2005, he refused to get on his knees and beg as racists had demanded. On the other, he said, he did everything possible to avoid confrontation, explaining that if he were arrested he couldn’t photograph.
“I’d let people trip me, jostle me, pull my hair and threaten to smash my camera,” he told The New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1997.
Hank Klibanoff, who with Gene Roberts wrote “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation” (2006), said in an interview Monday that Mr. Moore, almost always using a short lens, would immerse himself in the middle of the action. He often appeared in the pictures of other photographers who were standing back.
One of Mr. Moore’s images shook the author Paul Hendrickson to the core. The picture showed six Mississippi sheriffs and a deputy, some chortling, waiting to confront Mr. Meredith at Ole Miss. One appears to be showing the others how to swing a riot club.
Mr. Hendrickson wrote about the seven lawmen in “Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy” (2003). The photo is included in Mr. Moore’s 2002 book, “Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore.”
“It was a two-second grab shot,” Mr. Hendrickson said on Monday. “The greatest photographers see the image before they click it.”
Charles Lee Moore was born in Hackleburg, Ala., on March 9, 1931, and took his first pictures with a Kodak Brownie. He served three years in the Marines as a photographer and then attended the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif. He next applied for a job as a photographer with the morning and afternoon newspapers in Montgomery: The Montgomery Advertiser and The Montgomery Journal.
His training in fashion photography at Brooks helped him get the job, Mr. Klibanoff said. When Mr. Moore arrived at the newspapers’ office, Mr. Klibanoff said, he was sent to a country club where the photography editor was taking pictures of bathing beauties. The editor, who hated the job, was having trouble positioning everyone.
Mr. Moore took over, all went smoothly, and he was hired.
At the newspapers Mr. Moore quickly proved his versatility. An article in Editor & Publisher in 1961 praised him for “turning pictures of everyday people into dramatic, emotional experiences for readers.”
In 1962, Mr. Moore left the newspapers to start a freelance career. He worked for the Black Star picture agency, which sold much of his work to Life.
Mr. Moore is survived by his brother, Jim; his sons, Michael and Gary; his daughters, April Marshall and Michelle Moore Peel; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Mr. Moore went on to cover the Vietnam War and many other trouble spots. He then decided he wanted to “shoot beauty” and moved on to nature, fashion and travel photography, in addition to corporate work. But he always said his civil rights work was his most important, and in 1989 he received the inaugural Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism.
His civil rights success resulted in part from cunning and resourcefulness. After being arrested in Birmingham in 1963, he was desperate to get out of town with his film the next day, he said in a biography prepared by Black Star. But a police car blocked the entrance to the airport.
He and his colleagues sneaked along the side of the terminal building and boarded the airplane just as the stairs were about to be pulled away.
“We flew away as fugitives from justice,” Mr. Moore said.
It is with profound soorow that I mourn the passing of Mr. Charles Moore.
His were the first photos I ever saw of those brave and resilient Civil Rights workers who fought against the brutality of Jane Crow segregation and race hatred.
I still have my copy of Mr. Moore’s wonderful book, “Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore”, and it is beautiful and effective in its awesome photos which depicted a way of life that stunted the growth and freedoms not only of Blacks, but of Whites as well. A stunted world whose legacy still remains with the South.
My heartfelt thanks to you, Mr. Moore, for your photographs which will endure forever in preserving the memory of those who took a stand in those perilous and frightening times.
Rest in peace, Mr. Moore.
Rest in peace.
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LIZ CARPENTER, JOURNALIST, FEMINIST AND JOHNSON AIDE
By ENID NEMY
Published: March 20, 2010
- Liz Carpenter, who spent much of her life working the corridors of power in Washington as a newspaper reporter, an aide to Lyndon B. Johnson when he was vice president and press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson during her years in the White House, died on Saturday in Austin, Tex. She was 89.
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Harry Cabluck/Associated Press
Liz Carpenter in 2000, with “Start With a Laugh,” one of several books she wrote.
A dedicated feminist, Ms. Carpenter was a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus and joint chairwoman of ERAmerica, an organization that unsuccessfully fought for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.
Before joining the White House staff, she had covered Washington as a reporter for a news service she founded with her husband, Les Carpenter.
Widely known for her caustic and sometimes bawdy wit, Ms. Carpenter was irreverent about herself and her access to power during the Johnson years in Washington. She was also one of the few White House staff members who had no qualms about giving as good as she got, no matter the source.
“Why don’t you use your head?” Mr. Johnson once bellowed at her. She bellowed back: “I’m too busy trying to use yours!”
Ms. Carpenter’s association with the Johnsons began in 1960, when Johnson, then the Senate majority leader, was running for vice president on the Democratic ticket headed by Senator John F. Kennedy. One of her tasks was to stage rallies in the South that were known as Flying Tea Parties.
“The name of the game,” Ms. Carpenter once recalled, “was to take those funny-talking Kennedy ladies from Massachusetts, with Lady Bird at the helm, and hit Texas and other states in the Bible Belt and prove that Roman Catholics didn’t have horns and tails.”
After the election, Ms. Carpenter was named Mr. Johnson’s executive assistant. She was in the motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. She wrote the brief speech Mr. Johnson delivered at the foot of Air Force One when he returned to Washington as the 36th president. (“This is a sad time for all people,” he said, adding, “I ask for your help — and God’s.”)
Ms. Carpenter spent the next five years as Mrs. Johnson’s press secretary. She coordinated news coverage of the White House weddings of both Johnson daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines, and Mrs. Johnson’s many trips, including a widely publicized raft trip down the Rio Grande in 1966. She wrote about her White House years in a 1970 book, “Ruffles and Flourishes.”
In 1971, out of the White House, Ms. Carpenter turned her energy to women’s causes, including the fight for an Equal Rights Amendment. Her efforts to establish the National Women’s Political Caucus grew out of a commitment to seeing more women elected to state and federal posts.
Earlier, Ms. Carpenter was a prime mover in the battle to permit women to join the National Press Club, which had been an important institution in Washington for reporters as well as politicians since its founding in 1908. Before being accepted as members, women with press credentials fought to be admitted at least to the club luncheons at which visiting heads of state customarily appeared.
“We made a great breakthrough in 1956,” Helen Thomas, a reporter who has covered Washington since World War II, once recalled. “Liz Carpenter got them to agree to let us sit in the balcony of the ballroom, in purdah, and listen to the luncheon speaker as we looked down on our press colleagues and the public relations men and the lobbyists as they ate.”
It was not until 1971 that women were admitted as members.
In her 1987 memoir “Getting Better All the Time,” Ms. Carpenter credited Eleanor Roosevelt with helping to open doors for women in the press. It was Mrs. Roosevelt, she said, who forced the wire services to hire women by allowing only women to cover her news conferences and who saw to it that “the stories were about substance, not hats.” Ms. Carpenter was among the reporters at one of those events.
From 1972 to 1976, Ms. Carpenter was a vice president of Hill & Knowlton, a Washington public relations firm. She did some lobbying for clients like the Wine Institute and Sears, Roebuck & Company but spent most of her time planning promotional events. She returned to Texas in 1976.
Mary Elizabeth Sutherland was born in Salado, Tex. on Sept. 1, 1920, the middle of five children — three brothers and one sister — of Thomas Shelton Sutherland, a rancher who later went into the road construction business, and Mary Elizabeth Sutherland. A sixth-generation Texan, she counted among her forebears one who wrote the Texas Declaration of Independence and one who died at the Alamo.
The family later moved to Austin, where Ms. Carpenter was editor of her high school newspaper. She went on to the University of Texas at Austin and studied journalism. As a graduation present in 1942, she took a trip to Washington and decided to stay, finding work as an assistant to the correspondent for 26 small Michigan newspapers.
She also looked up her congressman from Texas but found he had gone off to war. Instead, she met the congressman’s wife — Lady Bird Johnson — who was running his office. It was the beginning of their long friendship.
In Washington, in 1944, she married Les Carpenter, a high school sweetheart who had been a fellow journalism student at the University of Texas. The Johnsons attended their wedding.
Shortly afterward, Ms. Carpenter got a job as a reporter with United Press. When the war ended, the couple organized the Carpenter News Bureau in Washington, reporting for some 20 Southwestern newspapers. Mr. Carpenter died in 1974.
In addition to her daughter, of New York, Ms. Carpenter is survived by a son, Scott, of Vashon, Wash., a granddaughter and a grandson.
Her daughter said the most enduring lesson her mother had instilled at home was “remember to laugh.”
At 71, after her children had long since left the house, Ms. Carpenter became the unexpected mother of the three youngest children of her brother Tom Sutherland, who had died of cancer. When the mother of the children, who ranged from 11 to 16, and their older siblings were unable to look after them, Ms. Carpenter took charge.
That experience was captured in “Unplanned Parenthood: The Confessions of a Seventy-something Surrogate Mother,” a book Ms. Carpenter wrote in 1994.
Ms. Carpenter maintained her close ties with the Johnsons after their return to Texas and in 1992 organized Mrs. Johnson’s 80th birthday party for 1,000 guests in Austin. Mrs. Johnson died in 2007.
“It never occurred to me not to work,” Ms. Carpenter said in a 1987 interview, shortly after she had undergone a mastectomy, adding, “I had a restless spirit that kept drawing me to new adventures.” She never hesitated, she said, “to charge hell with a bucket of water.”
Liz Robbins contributed reporting.
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 