R.B. GREAVES OF ‘TAKE A LETTER, MARIA’ FAME
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Published: October 2, 2012
R. B. Greaves, an R&B singer whose 1969 hit “Take a Letter, Maria” reached No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 68.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
R. B. Greaves, about 1970. He wrote “Take a Letter, Maria.”
His death was confirmed by his son, Shiloh Greaves.
“Take a Letter, Maria,” which Mr. Greaves wrote, is about a hard-working man who dictates a “Dear Jane” letter to his secretary after coming home to find his wife “in the arms of another man.”
He sings, more in acceptance than in anger: “So take a letter, Maria, address it to my wife/Say I won’t be coming home, gonna start a new life.”
Despite its theme of betrayal, the song remains upbeat and ends with the husband asking Maria out to dinner.
The song, which was recorded at the hitmaking Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama, went gold, selling more than a million copies.
Mr. Greaves was a nephew of the gospel and soul singer Sam Cooke, who was shot and killed by a Los Angeles motel manager in 1964.
Mr. Greaves’s 1970 version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Always Something There to Remind Me” reached No. 27 on the Billboard chart. (A version by the synth-pop group Naked Eyes hit No. 8 on the chart in 1983.) Among his other recordings were covers of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.”
Ronald Bertram Aloysius Greaves was born on Nov. 28, 1943, at an Air Force base in Georgetown in what was then British Guyana. He was raised on a Seminole reservation in California. In 1963 Mr. Greaves moved to England to perform and record as the frontman for Sonny Childe and the TNT’s.
He returned to America to record “Take a Letter, Maria” on Atco Records and “Always Something There to Remind Me,” both of which appeared on his album “R.B. Greaves.”
Mr. Greaves moved to Los Angeles and began to work in the technology industry after a failed attempt to revive his recording career in the late 1970s.
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CARROLL F. JOHNSON, SCHOOL INTEGRATOR
Published: October 6, 2012
Carroll F. Johnson, a Southern-born educator who was one of the first superintendents to voluntarily use busing to integrate an urban school district, doing so in White Plains in the 1960s, died on Monday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 99.
Teachers College, Columbia University
Carroll F. Johnson created a busing plan for White Plains that was used as a model.
He had been weakened by a long battle with blood infections, his son, Walter, said in confirming the death.
Dr. Johnson’s commitment to equal educational opportunities for minorities took root in the Jim Crow South of 1941, his son said. At the time, Dr. Johnson had just received a master’s degree in education from the University of Georgia when he watched as Gov. Eugene Talmadge stacked its board of regents with allies to force the ouster of Walter Cocking, the dean of the education school.
The governor said Dr. Cocking needed to be removed because he planned to create an integrated demonstration school.
The firing drew national attention, and it was not far from his mind, his son said, when he went to Westchester County in 1954 to run the White Plains schools. The Supreme Court had just issued its Brown v. Board of Education decision, ending legal segregation in the public schools.
The White Plains system’s student body was about 20 percent black then, with black students largely concentrated in a few neighborhood schools because of housing patterns. Dr. Johnson saw this as de facto school segregation, and he tried to redress it through a number of remedies, including building schools with special amenities to attract both white and black children.
By 1964, however, he had decided that the effort was too piecemeal and that black and white students remained largely isolated from one another. He put together what he called the White Plains Racial Balance Plan, which essentially called for busing hundreds of children so that no school had less than 10 percent minority enrollment or more than 30 percent. He also closed one school that had been overwhelmingly black.
To ease the way in putting the plan into effect, he built alliances with PTA leaders and the editor of the local newspaper. “He was a Southerner and kept his drawl, and I don’t think people saw him coming,” his son said.
The busing plan fell into place with remarkably little resistance. Four years later, the schools could report a rise in test scores for black students, no decline in white scores and no significant white exodus out of the school system.
Dr. Johnson said the key to the program’s success was that the busing went essentially one way: black children being transferred to white schools.
“Our residents wish, for the most part, to provide equal opportunity for all children — even at some inconvenience to themselves,” Dr. Johnson wrote in 1968 in evaluating the program. “But I do not believe that the majority of white parents would willingly have sent their own youngsters into center city schools.”
Dr. Johnson left White Plains in 1969 for Columbia University to become a professor of education administration and director of the Institute of Field Studies at Teachers College. In announcing his arrival, TC Week, a Teachers College publication, wrote that Dr. Johnson’s racial desegregation plan “became a model for other school systems in their desegregation efforts.”
In 1988, the White Plains system instituted a new way to bring racial balance to its student population, letting parents select among the schools in the district, with busing provided to students who live at a distance from the ones they choose.
Carroll Frye Johnson was born in Atlanta to Paul and Mattie Carroll Johnson on Jan. 16, 1913. His father died 18 months later, leaving Ms. Johnson to raise her son on her parents’ farm in Wildwood, Ga. Mr. Johnson received a partial scholarship to attend the University of Chattanooga (now the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga). He graduated in 1935.
Six years later, after he got his master’s degree in Georgia, he joined the Navy with the outbreak of World War II. An able swimmer with educational credentials, he was assigned to train recruits to swim under burning fuel. He was discharged in 1945 and went on to earn his doctorate in education from Columbia in 1950.
While working for Columbia, he was a consultant on roughly 150 searches for superintendents around the country, allowing him to further his commitment to moving more women and minorities into positions of power. “He was a champion for school integration, raising academic standards,” said Charles Fowler, who is executive secretary of Suburban School Superintendents, a national association. And, he added, “for significantly broadening the base of students studying to lead America’s schools.”
In addition to his son, Dr. Johnson is survived by his wife, Susan Kaye Johnson; a daughter, Katherine Sussman; a stepdaughter, Gillian Kaye; four grandchildren; a stepgrandchild; and two great-grandchildren.
Dr. Johnson kept a stack of newspaper clippings and letters from his fraught time in White Plains, according to an article about him published on a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Web site. He treasured one thank-you note in particular, from Dr. Errold D. Collymore, a black dentist.
“When you came to White Plains I was very apprehensive,” Dr. Collymore wrote, as quoted by the Web site. “I openly expressed my doubts and anxiety about a superintendent of schools for White Plains who came from Georgia.”
But, he added: “My early fears were unfounded and unfair. I have been greatly impressed with your fairness, your objectivity, your considerable administrative competence and your dignity and unmistakable humanity.”
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FRANK WILSON, MOTOWN SONGWRITER AND PRODUCER
Published: October 3, 2012
Frank Wilson, a Motown producer and songwriter who wrote or co-wrote some of the label’s biggest hits, including “Love Child,”performed by the Supremes, “All I Need” by the Temptations and“Castles in the Sand” by Stevie Wonder, died on Sept. 27 in Duarte, Calif. He was 71.
Najee Williams
Frank Wilson started his career as a performer and had one single, “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do).”
The cause was complications of a lung infection, his daughter Tracey Stein said. He had been treated for prostate cancer.
Mr. Wilson, who later became a born-again preacher, started his career as a performer and had one single, “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do),” which became an underground hit long after he recorded it. But he had his greatest success behind the scenes.
After joining the Detroit-based Motown in the mid-1960s at its newly opened Los Angeles office, he was involved in composing numerous other pop hits, among them“Chained,” for Marvin Gaye, and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” for Brenda Holloway. She recorded the song in 1967, and it went on to become an even bigger hit forBlood, Sweat and Tears two years later.
In 1968, with the Supremes struggling to remain at the top of the Billboard charts, Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy, gathered Mr. Wilson and a few other confidants to develop a bolder approach for the group. They came up with “Love Child.” Its taboo-breaking lyrics, about having a child outside marriage, helped propel the song to No. 1 on the pop charts in late 1968.
After the Supremes’ lead singer, Diana Ross, left to start a solo career a year later, Mr. Wilson produced the group’s next album and came up with subsequent Supremes hits like “Up the Ladder to the Roof”(1970), which he co-wrote, and “Stoned Love” (1970).
But in 1974 he had a born-again experience and began holding Bible-study sessions for singers at his house. In 1976 he quit Motown and went on to form a ministry for entertainers. With his second wife, P. Bunny Wilson, he founded a church, New Dawn Christian Village, in Los Angeles in 2004.
Frank Edward Wilson was born on Dec. 5, 1940, in Houston to James Wilson and Samanther Gibbs. His uncles had a singing group, and his mother taught him to play the piano by ear.
Mr. Wilson attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., but dropped out after his scholarship was revoked for joining a civil-rights protest in his sophomore year. He got a one-way bus ticket to Los Angeles, his daughter Tracey said.
Besides Ms. Stein, a child from his first marriage, to the singer Barbara Jean Dedmon, who died in 1966, he is survived by his wife and their four daughters, Launi King, Fawn Weaver, Christy Meeks and Gabrielle Wilson; a son from another relationship, Frank Wilson Jr.; three brothers, James, Leonard and Floyd; and a sister, Barbara Jean Hightower.
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BARRY COMMONER | 1917-2012 : SCIENTIST, CANDIDATE AND PLANET EARTH’S LIFEGUARD
Last Word: Barry Commoner: Dr. Commoner, an early environmentalist, warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons testing. He was an early champion of recycling, organic food and reducing fossil fuel use.
By DANIEL LEWIS
Barry Commoner, a founder of modern ecology and one of its most provocative thinkers and mobilizers in making environmentalism a people’s political cause, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 95 and lived in Brooklyn Heights.
Related in Opinion
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Dot Earth Blog: Barry Commoner’s Uncommon Life(October 1, 2012)
Jack Fahland/St. Louis Globe Democrat
Barry Commoner in 1971 at Washington University in St. Louis. He believed pollution, war and inequality were related issues.
His wife, Lisa Feiner, confirmed his death.
Dr. Commoner was a leader among a generation of scientist-activists who recognized the toxic consequences of America’s post-World War II technology boom, and one of the first to stir the national debate over the public’s right to comprehend the risks and make decisions about them.
Raised in Brooklyn during the Depression and trained as a biologist at Columbia and Harvard, he came armed with a combination of scientific expertise and leftist zeal. His work on the global effects of radioactive fallout, which included documenting concentrations of strontium 90 in the baby teeth of thousands of children, contributed materially to the adoption of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
From there it was a natural progression to a range of environmental and social issues that kept him happily in the limelight as a speaker and an author through the 1960s and ’70s, and led to a wobbly run for president in 1980.
In 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, Time magazine put Dr. Commoner on its cover and called him the Paul Revere of Ecology. He was by no means the only one sounding alarms; the movement was well under way by then, building on the impact of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” in 1962 and the work of many others. But he was arguably the most peripatetic in his efforts to draw public attention to environmental dangers.
(The same issue of Time noted that President Richard M. Nixon had already signed on. In his State of the Union address that January, he said, “The great question of the ’70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?” And he followed through: Among other steps, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in December 1970.)
Dr. Commoner was an imposing professorial figure, with a strong face, heavy eyeglasses, black eyebrows and a thick head of hair that gradually turned pure white. He was much in demand as a speaker and a debater, especially on college campuses, where he helped supply a generation of activists with a framework that made the science of ecology accessible.
His four informal rules of ecology were catchy enough to print on a T-shirt and take to the street: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Although the rules were plain enough, the thinking behind them required leaps of faith. Dr. Commoner’s overarching concern was not ecology as such but rather a radical ideal of social justice in which everything was indeed connected to everything else. Like some other left-leaning dissenters of his time, he believed that environmental pollution, war, and racial and sexual inequality needed to be addressed as related issues of a central problem.
A Critic of Capitalism
Having been grounded, as an undergraduate, in Marxist theory, he saw his main target as capitalist “systems of production” in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation that emphasized profits and technological progress with little regard for consequences: greenhouse gases, nonbiodegradable materials, and synthetic fertilizers and toxic wastes that leached into the water supply.
He insisted that the planet’s future depended on industry’s learning not to make messes in the first place, rather than on trying to clean them up. It followed, by his logic, that scientists in the service of industry could not merely invent some new process or product and then wash their hands of moral responsibility for the side effects. He was a lasting opponent of nuclear power because of its radioactive waste; he scorned the idea of pollution credit swaps because, after all, he said, an industry would have to be fouling the environment in the first place to be rewarded by such a program.
In a “Last Word” interview with The New York Times in 2006, videotaped to accompany this obituary online, Dr. Commoner elaborated on his holistic views and lamented the inability of society to connect the dots among its multitude of challenges, calling it “an unfortunate feature of political development in this country.”
Noting the success of movements that had promoted civil rights, sexual equality, organized labor, environmentalism and an end to the war in Vietnam, he said one might think that “if they would only get together, they could remake the country.” But, he added, that has not happened.
Then he said: “I don’t believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together. For example, if you’re going to revise the productive system to make cars or anything else in such a way as to suit the environmental necessities, at the same time why not see to it that women earn as much as men for the same work?”
Dr. Commoner’s diagnoses and prescriptions sometimes put him at odds with other environmental leaders. He is rightly remembered as an important figure in the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, a nationwide teach-in conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, and he himself regarded the observance as historically important. But Earth Day also illustrated the growing factionalization of a movement in which “environmentalism” comprised a number of agendas, all competing for attention and money, and could mean anything from ending the Vietnam War to growing one’s own cabbages.
That was the context for the rift between Dr. Commoner and advocates of population control, who saw environmental degradation as a byproduct of overpopulation. They had become a force on the strength of Paul R. Ehrlich’s huge best seller “The Population Bomb.” Conservationist groups like the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation were strong supporters of Dr. Ehrlich’s views.
Dr. Commoner took aim at the “neo-Malthusians,” as he called those who, like the English scholar Thomas Malthus, foresaw perils in population growth. In a panel discussion with Dr. Ehrlich in 1970, he said it was “a cop-out of the worst kind” to say that “none of our pollution problems can be solved without getting at population first.”
He elaborated in his best-known book, “The Closing Circle,” published the next year. Reducing population, Dr. Commoner wrote, was “equivalent to attempting to save a leaking ship by lightening the load and forcing passengers overboard.”
“One is constrained to ask if there isn’t something radically wrong with the ship.”
In the science establishment, Dr. Commoner’s standing was ambiguous. Along with eminent figures of the postwar years like the chemist Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he was concerned that the integrity of American science had been compromised — first by the government’s emphasis on supporting physics at the expense of other fields during the development of nuclear weapons, and second by the growing privatization of research, in which pure science took a back seat to projects that held short-range promise of marketable technologies.
It was a concern remarkably similar to that of the distinctly unradical Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned of the dangerous power of “the military-industrial complex” as he was leaving the presidency. But although Dr. Commoner had a record of achievement as a cellular biologist and founding director of the government-financed Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, he was seen primarily as the advocate for a politics that relatively few considered practicable or even desirable. Among other positions, he advocated forgiveness of all third world debt, which he said would decrease poverty and despair and thus act as a natural curb on population growth.
His platform did not get him very far in the 1980 presidential race, which he entered as thehead of his own Citizens’ Party. He won only about 234,000 votes as Ronald Reagan swept to victory. Dr. Commoner himself conceded that he would not have made a very good president. Still, he was angry that the questions he had raised had generated so little interest.
His own favorite moment of the campaign, he recalled many years later, was when a reporter in Albuquerque asked, “Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate, or are you just running on the issues?”
Barry Commoner was born on May 28, 1917, in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents, the former Goldie Yarmolinsky and Isidore Commoner, were Jewish immigrants from Russia, his father a tailor until he went blind. (The original family name, Comenar, was Anglicized at the suggestion of an uncle of Barry’s, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, chief of the Slavonic department at the New York Public Library.)
Young Barry grew up at a time when it was possible to be both a tough street kid and a studious sort. He spent hours in Prospect Park collecting bits of nature, which he took home to inspect under a microscope that Uncle Avrahm had given him.
He was so shy at James Madison High School that he was referred to a speech correction class, and after graduation he set out on the track of a quiet academic career. With money earned from odd jobs, he put himself through Columbia, earning honors in his major, zoology; election to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi; and a B.A. degree in 1937, at 20. He went on to do graduate work at Harvard, where he got a Ph.D. in cellular biology. He taught for two years at Queens College and served in the Naval Air Corps in World War II, rising to lieutenant. In 1947 he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis.
Role in Nuclear Test Ban
Parallel to his life as a public figure, Dr. Commoner had a reputation as a brilliant teacher and a painstaking researcher into viruses, cell metabolism and the effects of radiation on living tissue. A research team he led was the first to show that abnormal free radicals — groups of molecules with unpaired electrons — might be the earliest indicator of cancer in laboratory rats.
He found his political voice when he encountered the indifference of government authorities to the high levels of strontium 90 in the atmosphere from atomic tests. Quite simply, he said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune in 1993, “The Atomic Energy Commission turned me into an environmentalist.”
He helped organize the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information in 1958, and was eventually its president. Dr. Commoner told Scientific American years later that the committee’s task “was to explain to the public — first in St. Louis and then nationally — how splitting a few pounds of atoms could turn something as mild as milk into a devastating global poison.”
“At about that time,” he continued, “several of us met with Linus Pauling in St. Louis and together drafted the petition, eventually signed by thousands of scientists worldwide.” The petition was part of the scientific underpinning for President John F. Kennedy’s proposal of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 — “the first of continuing international actions to fully cage the nuclear beast,” Dr. Commoner said.
As the founding director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems in St. Louis, he led a staff drawn from many disciplines in investigating, among other things, lead poisoning in slums, the ecology of ghetto rats, the economics of conventional versus organic farming, and the pollution of rivers by fertilizer leaching.
Dr. Commoner moved the center from St. Louis to Queens College in 1981. He remained in the thick of things, helping to set up New York City’s trash recycling program and defending it against critics like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had declared the recycling law irresponsible.
In 2000, at 82, Dr. Commoner gave up the center’s directorship to concentrate on new research projects, including work on the effects of genetically altering organisms.
Waning Influence
By then he was no longer getting anything like the attention he had enjoyed in earlier times. Some experts had begun to think that his view of the planet, as a place harmoniously balanced by the trial and error of long evolution, left out too much complexity and too much potential for the unexpected.
Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, reviewing Dr. Commoner’s book “Making Peace With the Planet” for The Times in 1990, said that it “suffers the commonest of unkind fates: to be so self-evidently true and just that we pass it by as a twice-told tale.”
“Although he has been branded by many as a maverick,” Dr. Gould added, “I regard him as right and compassionate on nearly every major issue.”
Dr. Commoner married Ms. Feiner in 1980. He is also survived by two children, Lucy Commoner and Frederic, by his first wife, the former Gloria Gordon; and one granddaughter.
Dr. Commoner practiced what he preached. In his personal habits he was as frugal as a Yankee farmer, and as common-sensical. He drove or took taxis if the route by public transit took him far out of his way. On the other hand, he saw no need to waste electricity by ironing his shirts.
And when a Times writer once asked his Queens College office to mail some material, it arrived in an old brown envelope with the crossed-out return address of the botany department at Washington University — where he had last worked 19 years earlier.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
E. B. White, Essayist and Stylist, Dies at 86
(Oct. 1, 1985)
Alfred Smith, New York Governor, Dies at 70
(Oct. 4, 1944)
Charles E. Merrill, Founder of Merrill Lynch, Dies at 70
(Oct. 6, 1956)
Leo Durocher, Baseball Manager, Dies at 86
(Oct. 7, 1991)
Clare Boothe Luce, Playwright and Politician, Dies at 84
(Oct. 9, 1987)
Orson Welles, Innovator of Film and Stage, Dies at 70
(Oct. 10, 1985)
Robert E. Lee, Southern General, Dies at 63
(Oct. 12 , 1870)
Dean Acheson, Architect of Postwar Policy, Dies at 78
(Oct. 12, 1971)
Ed Sullivan, Television Host, Dies at 73
(Oct. 13, 1974)
Leonard Bernstein, Music’s Monarch, Dies at 72
(Oct. 14, 1990)
Thomas Alva Edison, Prolific Inventor, Dies at 84
(Oct. 18, 1931)
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poet, Dies at 58
(Oct. 19, 1950)
Anne Sullivan Macy, Aide to Helen Keller, Dies at 70
(Oct. 20, 1936)
Jackie Robinson, First Black in Major Leagues, Dies at 53
(Oct. 24, 1972)
Harry Houdini, Magician, Dies at 52
(Oct. 31, 1926)
Indira Gandhi, Who Left Imprint on India, Dies at 66
(Oct. 31, 1984)
Federico Fellini, Film Visionary, Dies at 73
(Oct. 31, 1993)
Ann
