CHARLES LAUFER, FOUNDER OF TIGER BEAT
Published: April 12, 2011
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“Let’s face it, we’re in the little girl business,” said Charles Laufer, with covers of his magazine Tiger Beat from the 1970s.
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Tiger Beat: Still Squeaky Clean After All These Years (April 17, 2011)
Titles were catchy, oddly innocent by later standards: “Shaun: A Junk Food Junkie?,” “Leif’s Sad Childhood,” “Bobby’s Favorite Type of Girls” and “Marie: Fighting With Donny?”
Mr. Lauder told The Los Angeles Times in 1974 that the newsstand price of Tiger Beat, then 75 cents, was the same as the price of a hot-fudge sundae, and that the magazine probably provided the same dollop of entertainment. He was even clearer in describing his mission in a 1979 interview with Parade magazine: “Let’s face it, we’re in the little girl business.”
Charles Harry Laufer was born on Sept. 13, 1923, in Newark, where his father, Isadore, owned a taxi company and was a state assemblyman. Charles was a star basketball player in high school before moving to Los Angeles, where he graduated from the University of Southern California. He taught English, journalism and history at two high schools.
To tempt his students to read more, Mr. Laufer in 1955 started a magazine called Coaster, which later became Teen, and which he sold in 1957. In 1965 he published a one-shot magazine crammed with Beatles photos. It sold 750,000 copies in two days. Later in 1965 he started Tiger Beat. Its mainstay, copied by so-called teenzines to this day, was “guys in their 20s singing La La songs to 13-year-old girls,” Mr. Laufer said in an interview with The Seattle Times in 1992.
His brother put up half the initial capital for Tiger Beat, but Charles ran it as publisher. His strategy to compete with 16 Magazine was to build promotional relationships with production and record companies.
But it was often Mr. Laufer’s own perspicacity that yielded the advantage. At a screening of new television shows in 1965 he saw the Monkees for the first time, and recognized Davy Jones from his performance in “Oliver!” on Broadway. Recognizing the Monkees’ potential, he put them on the cover of Tiger Beat. That put the still-struggling publication in the black, and he signed an exclusive deal for special Monkee magazines, Monkee picture books and Monkee love beads, which added to the bonanza.
Tiger Beat also used glossy paper (16 used newsprint) and a more advanced process for colored pictures. And it gave away bonus posters and ran contests in which readers could compete for stars’ personal belongings.
The Laufer brothers sold Tiger Beat in 1978 for a reported $15 million. Its circulation was then 700,000.
Charles Laufer stayed on as a consultant to the new owners for several years, then retired. Various combinations of his family members have since owned Bop and other teenage publications, as ownership of Tiger Beat passed through five or six companies. In 2003 Mr. Laufer’s son, Scott, bought Tiger Beat, which he now publishes with Bop.
Mr. Laufer’s first marriage, to Ottile Hangst, ended in divorce. In addition to his brother and his son, he is survived by his wife of 55 years, the former Dorothy Lacy; his daughters, Kerry Laufer, Laurie Fitzgerald, Teena Naumann and Julie Jenkins; and 10 grandchildren.
In 1985, Mr. Laufer told The Los Angeles Times that it would be hard to duplicate his success if he were just starting. “Today you have rock stars coming out and saying they’re bisexual, or you see four-letter words in print,” he said.
Still, some things never change: the cluttered collages of the covers of his day featuring the likes of David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman bear a striking resemblance to today’s Tiger Beat, with its endless renderings of Justin Bieber.
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GERALD A. LAWSON, PIONEER IN VIDEO GAMES
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: April 13, 2011
Gerald A. Lawson, a largely self-taught engineer who became a pioneer in electronic video entertainment, creating the first home video game system with interchangeable game cartridges, died on Saturday in Mountain View, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Santa Clara, Calif.
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Maria J. Avila Lopez/Mercury News
Gerald Lawson created interchangeable game cartridges, making early gaming consoles like the Fairchild Channel F possible.
The cause was complications of diabetes, said his wife, Catherine.
Before disc-based systems like PlayStation, Xbox and Wii transformed the video game industry, before techno-diversions like Grand Theft Auto and Madden NFL and even before Pac-Man and Donkey Kong became the obsession of millions of electronic gamers, it was Mr. Lawson who first made it possible to play a variety of video games at home.
In the mid-1970s, he was director of engineering and marketing for the newly formed video game division of Fairchild Semiconductor, and it was under his direction that the division brought to market in 1976 the Fairchild Channel F, a home console that allowed users to play different games contained on removable cartridges. Until then, home video game systems could play only games that were built into the machines themselves. Mr. Lawson’s ideas anticipated — if they did not entirely enable — a colossal international business.
In March, Mr. Lawson was honored for his innovative work by the International Game Developers Association, an overdue acknowledgment for an unfamiliar contributor to the technological transformation that has changed how people live.
“He’s absolutely a pioneer,” Allan Alcorn, a creator of the granddaddy of video games, Pong, said in an interview with The San Jose Mercury News in March. “When you do something for the first time, there is nothing to copy.”
Mr. Alcorn was the first design engineer at Atari, whose own cartridge console eventually dominated the home video game market.
At 6 feet 6 inches and well over 250 pounds, Mr. Lawson cut an imposing figure. A modest man but a straight talker who was known to one and all as Jerry, he was among only a handful of black engineers in the world of electronics in general and electronic gaming in particular.
Gerald Anderson Lawson was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 1, 1940, and grew up mostly in Queens. His parents encouraged his intellectual pursuits. His father, Blanton, was a longshoreman by profession and a voracious reader of science books by inclination; his mother, Mannings, was a city employee who was also president of the PTA at the nearly all-white school Jerry attended. There he had a first-grade teacher who changed his life.
“I had a picture of George Washington Carver on the wall next to my desk,” he said in a 2009 interview with the publication Vintage Computing and Gaming. “And she said, ‘This could be you.’ ” He went on: “This kind of influence led me to feel, ‘I want to be a scientist. I want to be something.’ ”
As a boy he pursued a number of scientific interests, ham radio and chemistry among them. As a teenager he earned money repairing television sets. He attended both Queens College and the City College of New York, but never received a degree. In the early 1970s, he started at Fairchild in Silicon Valley as a roving design consultant. While he was there he invented an early coin-operated arcade game, Demolition Derby. Along with other Silicon Valley innovators, he belonged to a hobbyists’ group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. Two of its other members were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, later the founders of Apple.
“I was not impressed with them — either one of them, actually,” Mr. Lawson said in the 2009 interview, and though he didn’t say why, he declined to hire Mr. Wozniak for a job at Fairchild.
After inventing Demolition Derby, Mr. Lawson was put in charge of the company’s video game division. He and his team came up with cartridges that could be loaded with different game programs and then inserted into the console one at a time. This allowed the company to sell individual games separately from the console itself, a business model that remains the cornerstone of the video game industry.
A crucial element of the invention was the use of a new processor, the Fairchild 8; another was a mechanism that allowed for repeated insertion and removal of cartridges without damaging the machine’s semiconductors. Video hockey and tennis were programmed into the F Channel console; additional games available on cartridge included Shooting Gallery, Video Blackjack and Alien Invasion.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1965, Mr. Lawson is survived by a brother, Michael, of Queens, and two children, Karen and Marc, both of Smyrna, Ga.
After he left Fairchild in 1980, Mr. Lawson founded a company, Videosoft, that created games, and worked as a consultant.
“I don’t play video games that often; I really don’t,” he said in the 2009 interview. “First of all, most of the games that are out now — I’m appalled by them.” Most are concerned with “shooting somebody and killing somebody,” he said.
“To me, a game should be something like a skill you should develop — if you play this game, you walk away with something of value.”
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BILLY BANG, JAZZ VIOLINIST INSPIRED BY VIETNAM EXPERIENCE
By STEVE SMITH
Published: April 13, 2011
Billy Bang, a violinist whose gritty, expressive and spirited playing earned admiration in contemporary jazz circles, died on Monday at his home in Harlem. He was 63.
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Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
Billy Bang performing in 2008.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, said Jean-Pierre Leduc, his friend and agent.
Prominent as a bandleader and a sideman throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Bang achieved his most substantial success with the 2001 album “Vietnam: The Aftermath,” which featured music inspired by his time serving in the Army during the Vietnam War, played with peers who had also served. The album — and a 2005 sequel, “Vietnam: Reflections,” which included Vietnamese musicians — in turn inspired “Redemption Song,” a 2008 documentary film about him.
Born William Vincent Walker in Mobile, Ala., on Sept. 20, 1947, Mr. Bang moved with his mother to Harlem as an infant. He studied violin in school and took up drums and flute independently. He briefly attended the exclusive Stockbridge prep school in Massachusetts with no music curriculum, then dropped out, moved to the Bronx and was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam.
After a struggle with alcohol and drugs on his return to America in the late 1960s, which he recounted in his liner notes for “Vietnam: The Aftermath,” Mr. Bang identified the free-jazz scene created by players like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman as a means for addressing issues of race and social justice. Taking up the violin again, he studied with the prominent avant-garde jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins, became immersed in the 1970s downtown loft-jazz ferment, and went on to collaborate with idiosyncratic musical auteurs like Kip Hanrahan and Bill Laswell.
In 1977, with the guitarist James Emery and the bassist John Lindberg, Mr. Bang founded the String Trio of New York, a durable group that wedded chamber-music intimacy and rigor to free-jazz gusto in a manner few other bands had achieved. Over time he honed a signature sound: grainy and penetrating, but more lyrical than strident.
Even at his most exploratory, Mr. Bang pledged allegiance to swing-era violin forebears like Stuff Smith and Ray Nance. In a 1985 review for The New York Times, Jon Pareles described him as “one of the pre-eminent young jazz violinists — he can swing and he plays in tune, two qualities rarely found in the same musician.”
During the 1980s Mr. Bang made a series of well-regarded albums for the Italian label Soul Note, and in 1986 he left the String Trio of New York to concentrate on his own projects. He also played in Sun Ra’s Arkestra throughout the 1980s and ’90s.
A collaboration with the pianist D. D. Jackson in 1996 brought Mr. Bang to the attention of the Canadian label Justin Time, where Mr. Leduc was a consulting producer. After Mr. Bang made two albums for the label, Mr. Leduc offered to finance a project inspired by Mr. Bang’s Vietnam experience.
Long haunted by his memories, Mr. Bang overcame initial reluctance and embraced the project, for which he enlisted as collaborators fellow veterans like the saxophonist Frank Lowe, the trumpeter Ted Daniel and the drummer Michael Carvin.
“Here we had all these grown men in a macho idiom like jazz, in the studio, ‘Let’s hit it,’ ” Mr. Leduc said in an interview Tuesday. “They would do a take, and then people would have to go out of the studio between takes to cry, because it was so powerful. And it was so cathartic for everybody.” The music was swaggering, agitated and elegiac by turns, Mr. Bang’s playing brash, folksy and reminiscent at times of Vietnamese string sounds.
“Vietnam: The Aftermath” changed Mr. Bang’s life, Mr. Leduc said, leading not only to the sequel album and the documentary but also to extensive media coverage and large, enthusiastic audiences touched by his story.
Mr. Bang is survived by his companion, Maria Arias; two daughters, Hoshi Walker and Chanyez Chamberlain; two sons, Jay Walker and Ghazal Walker; and a granddaughter.
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TREVOR BANNISTER, STAR OF ‘ARE YOU BEING SERVED?’
15 April 2011 Last updated at 11:37 ET
Are You Being Served? star Trevor Bannister has died aged 76, his brother has confirmed.
The actor suffered a heart attack on Thursday at his allotment in Thames Ditton, Surrey, John Bannister said.
The actor was best known for his role as ladies’ man Mr Lucas in the 1970s BBC sitcom set in a department store but he also worked in the theatre.
“He was a good lad, we were all very fond of him,” Mr Bannister told BBC News.
He added his brother had been doing some repair work on his shed when he became ill.
Frank Thornton, who appeared as Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served?, told the BBC he had “many, many happy memories” of his co-star.
“He was a very good friend over a long time,” he said.
“We often met with him and his wife – he was recently at my 90th birthday celebrations in January and that was the last time we saw him. We shall miss him sorely.”
Born in Durrington, Wiltshire, and the youngest of three children, Bannister did two years’ National Service before going to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.
During his career, which spanned five decades, he appeared in TV shows including The Avengers, Dixon of Dock Green, The Saint and Z-Cars.
He also made regular appearances in the theatre and in pantomime.
More recently, the actor had a stint in the long-running BBC series Last of the Summer Wine.
In 2009, the actor led the tributes to his Are You Being Served? co-star Wendy Richard and gave a reading at her funeral.
Speaking to the BBC at the time about his experiences of working on the sitcom, he said: “The joy of that particular show was the fact that most of us had known each other before we came to do it.
“We loved working with each other and had a lot of respect for each other. I think that fun and enjoyment conveyed itself through the screen.”
He is survived by his second wife Pam and three sons Simon, Timothy and Jeremy.
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