SIR EDMUND HILLARY, CLIMBED TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD
Sir Edmund Hillary, the lanky New Zealand mountaineer and explorer who with Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide, won worldwide acclaim in 1953 by becoming the first to scale Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, died Friday in Auckland, New Zealand. He was 88.
His death was announced by Prime Minister Helen Clark of New Zealand.
In the annals of great heroic exploits, the conquest of Mount Everest by Hillary and Norgay ranks with the first trek to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen in 1911 and the first solo nonstop trans-Atlantic flight by Charles Lindbergh in 1927.
By 1953, nearly a century after British surveyors had established that the Himalayan peak on the Nepal-Tibet border was the highest point on Earth, at 29,035 feet, or 8,850 meters, many climbers considered the mountain all but unconquerable.
The summit is up where today’s jets fly: an otherworldly place of yawning crevasses and hurricane-force winds, of perpetual cold and air so thin that the human brain and lungs do not function properly.
Multimedia
Numerous Everest expeditions had failed, and dozens of experienced mountaineers, including many Sherpas, the Nepalese people famed as climbers, had been killed – buried in avalanches or lost and frozen in sudden storms that roared over the dizzying escarpments.
One who vanished, in 1924, was George Leigh Mallory, known for snapping, when asked why someone would climb Everest, “Because it is there!” His body was found in the ice 75 years later, in 1999, about 2,000 feet below the summit.
Hillary and Norgay were part of a Royal Geographical Society-Alpine Club expedition led by Colonel Henry Cecil John Hunt – a siege group that included a dozen climbers, 35 Sherpa guides and 350 porters carrying 18 tons of food and equipment.
Their route was the treacherous South Col, facing Nepal.
After a series of climbs by coordinated teams to establish ever-higher camps on the icy slopes and perilous rock ledges, Tom Bourdillon and Dr. Charles Evans were the first team to attempt the summit, but gave up at 28,720 feet – 315 feet from the top – beaten back by exhaustion, a storm that shrouded them in ice and oxygen-tank failures.
Hillary, then 33, and Norgay, 39, made the next assault. They first established a bivouac at 27,900 feet on a rock ledge 6 feet wide and canted at a 30-degree angle. There, holding their tent against a howling gale as the temperatures plunged to 30 degrees below zero, they spent the night.
At 6:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953, cheered by clearing skies, they began the final attack. Carrying enough oxygen for seven hours and counting on picking up two partly filled tanks left by Evans and Bourdillon, they moved out. Roped together, cutting toe-holds with their ice axes, first one man leading and then the other, they inched up a steep, knife-edged ridge southeast of the summit.
Halfway up, Hillary recalled in “High Adventure” (Oxford University Press, 1955), they discovered soft snow under them. “Immediately I realized we were on dangerous ground,” he said. “Suddenly, with a dull breaking noise, an area of crust all around me about six feet in diameter broke off.” He slid backward 20 or 30 feet before regaining a hold. “It was a nasty shock,” he said. “I could look down 10,000 feet between my legs.”
Farther up, they encountered what was later named the Hillary Step – a sheer face of rock and ice 40 feet high that Hillary called “the most formidable obstacle on the ridge.” But they found a vertical crack and managed to climb it by bracing feet against one side and backs against the other. The last few yards to the summit were relatively easy.
“As I chipped steps, I wondered how long we could keep it up,” Hillary said. “Then I realized that the ridge, instead of rising ahead, now dropped sharply away. I looked upward to see a narrow ridge running up to a sharp point. A few more whacks of the ice axe, and we stood on the summit.”
The vast panorama of the Himalayas lay before them: fleecy clouds and the pastel shades of Tibet to the north, and in all directions sweeping ranks of jagged mountains, cloud-filled valleys, great natural amphitheaters of snow and rock, and the glittering Kangshung Glacier 10,000 feet below.
There was a modest celebration. “We shook hands and then, casting Anglo-Saxon formalities aside, we thumped each other on the back until forced to stop from lack of breath,” Hillary remembered.
They took photographs and left a crucifix for Hunt, the expedition leader. Norgay, a Buddhist, buried biscuits and chocolate as an offering to the gods of Everest. Then they ate a mint cake, strapped on their oxygen tanks and began the climb down.
Four days later, the news was flashed around the world as a coronation gift of sorts to Queen Elizabeth II, who was crowned on June 2. The queen promptly made Edmund Hillary a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, while Norgay received the George Medal of Britain and other honors.
Worldwide heroes overnight, they were greeted by huge crowds in India and London. A controversy over whether Hillary or Norgay had been first to stand on the summit threatened briefly to mar the celebrations, but Hunt declared, “They reached it together, as a team.”
Hillary continued his life of adventure, climbing mountains and once crossing the Antarctic continent, lecturing and making public appearances, and serving as New Zealand’s high commissioner, or ambassador, to India, Bangladesh and Nepal from 1985 to 1988.
Like Hillary, Norgay, whose name was sometimes rendered Norkay, never again attempted to climb Everest. He died in 1986.
In more than five decades since the first successful assault on what climbers call the top of the world, more than 3,000 people, including Hillary’s son, Peter, and Tenzing Norgay’s son, Jamling, have reached the summit of Everest, while more than 200 have died in the attempt.
Today, Everest expeditions are almost commonplace. On a single day in 2003, 118 people were reported to have made it. Some veteran climbers have criticized the “commercialism” and “circus atmosphere” surrounding Everest climbing. Hillary added his voice to the lament in 2003 as crowds gathered for the 50th anniversary celebrations in Katmandu, Nepal.
Tough, rawboned, 6 feet 5 inches tall, with a long, leathery and wrinkled face, Hillary was an intelligent but unsophisticated man with tigerish confidence on a mountain but little taste for formal social doings. For many years after the Everest climb, he continued to list his occupation as beekeeper – his father’s pursuit – and he preferred to be known as Ed.
During the Southern Hemisphere summer of 1957-58 a British Commonwealth team that included Hillary crossed the Antarctic on an overland route that traversed the South Pole.
The expedition, using tractors, was led by Sir Vivian Fuchs, but Hillary and a party of New Zealanders made the dash over the pole.There was debate afterward about credit, but a book by Hillary and Sir Vivian belittled the differences. In 1960, Hillary led a highly publicized but unsuccessful search for the Abominable Snowman.
In 1985, accompanied by Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, Hillary flew a twin-engine ski plane over the Arctic and landed at the North Pole. He thus became the first to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest.
Standing atop that pinnacle in 1953 was an experience Hillary would recollect many times.
“The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map,” he told one interviewer. “I am a lucky man. I have had a dream, and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.”
Hillary formed a foundation, the Hillary Himalayan Trust, that raised millions and built schools, clinics, airfields and other facilities for the Sherpa villages in Nepal.
He also wrote or was a co-author of 13 books, including “No Latitude for Error” (Hodder & Stoughton, 1961), about the Antarctic experience.
For many years, Hillary was president of New Zealand’s Peace Corps and an important voice in his country’s conservation efforts.
Edmund Percival Hillary was born on July 20, 1919, in Tuakau, near Auckland, the son of Percival Augustus Hillary and Gertrude Clark Hillary. His father was a commercial beekeeper and Edmund and a younger brother, Rexford, worked on the family farm. Edmund began climbing as a youth while attending public schools in Auckland. He went to Auckland University and served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II. After the war, he took climbing instruction from leading alpinists, began to specialize in ice-climbing techniques, climbed in the Swiss Alps and got to know British mountaineers with Himalayan experience.He began climbing peaks of more than 20,000 feet in Nepal. As his reputation grew, Hunt chose him as a member of the 1953 expedition that conquered Everest. Four months after Everest, Hillary married Louise Mary Rose, the daughter of a mountain climber. They had three children, Peter, Sarah and Belinda. In 1975, Louise and Belinda were killed when their small plane crashed on takeoff from Katmandu Airport. In 1979, Hillary was to have been commentator on an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight over the Antarctic but had to withdraw because of a schedule conflict. His friend and fellow mountaineer Peter Mulgrew took his place. In one of the worst aviation accidents in history, the plane crashed on Mount Erebus, a volcano on Ross Island in McMurdo Sound, and all 257 aboard were killed. Hillary married June Mulgrew, his friend’s widow, in 1989. Besides June, Hillary is survived by his daughter, Sarah; his son, Peter; and six grandchildren. A footnote to the lore of Everest was added in 1999. Using global positioning system equipment, an expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society and others revised the elevation of the summit upward by seven feet, from 29,028 to 29,035.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/11/asia/obits.php
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
ERIC WOODS, HOUSTON RAP PIONEER
Artist known as O.G. Style had recently fallen ill
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Eric Woods, a Houston rap pioneer who recorded as O.G. Style, died Thursday night. According to friends, Woods, 37, felt ill Wednesday night and was taken to St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. He suffered from a brain hemorrhage and slipped into a coma Thursday morning.
Regional ripples
I Know How To Play Em’, the album Woods and DJ Boss recorded as O.G. Style, is out of print today. It’s also a tough find: Used copies on Amazon.com are on sale for more than $40. That album included the popular Catch ‘Em Slippin’, which Woods (as Original E), DJ Boss and local producer/engineer Carlos Garza created based on an old sample of a song by New Orleans singer King Floyd.Garza said he and Woods listened to hundreds of records at Garza’s duplex to find the right sample. They assembled “a skeleton” for the song with just turntables and a drum machine.
“Plain and simple, we were just trying to find something that sounded like a hit single,” Garza said.
Woods and DJ Boss built the song up from the demo into the version that appeared on the O.G. Style album. Another song from that album made regional ripples. Free World, with its “sitting in the Harris County jail” hook, was the flip side to a 12-inch of Slippin’.
Peers and fans say Woods’ style stood out on these songs.
“He was a real lyrical rapper,” said K-Rino. “A real skillful artist, real clever with wordplay. He had a hell of a voice and his delivery was as good as anybody’s. He was one of the best Houston ever produced. It’s a shame he was in a category of forgotten rappers.
“There’s a new generation coming up that don’t even know who these people are who built the foundation for what happens today. The new guys don’t mention guys like O.G. Style on BET and MTV. And then they get written out of history.”
K-Rino and UGK rapper Bun B appear on O.G. Style’s single Steppin’ on Toes and addresses that issue.
“It was about representing the South and how weak the game had gotten in Houston,” K-Rino said. “He wanted to get three originals, OGs, together and really rep that. That song was really tight. And it never got heard.”
‘He was independent’
A lack of national exposure didn’t keep O.G. Style from recording. He remained active up until the week of his death.”We were always friends, but he kind of did his own thing,” said Garza, who last produced O.G. Style in 2000. “He would move from producer to producer to get a recording done. He had to, he was independent. He couldn’t wait. When he was ready to do something, he did it. He was go-getter, and he was focused, and he never gave up.”
O.G. Style and Smurk were about to begin work on a new album, combining some new material with re-recorded tracks from Return of Da Game, the final album he made before his death.
“It was still going to sound like new material because a lot of people hadn’t heard that last album,” said Smurk, who appeared on Return of Da Game and a mixtape called Mixed Drinks, Blunts & Exstacy with O.G. Style. “He had another new album he was working on. This was just untimely, man.”
He doesn’t plan to abandon the project entirely, though. One of Woods’ sons, also named Eric, is a teenage rapper.
“When I went to see him at the hospital last night, his son told me, ‘We’re still gonna get it done.’ I told him I was gonna hold him to that,” Smurk said.
O.G. Style included commentary about a lot of his work on his Web site. With Return of Da Game, he wrote, “I’ve learned how to do songs and not just be a rapper. This is a grown folks’ rap album.”
It ended up being his last. But the Internet has made his music easier to find and allows an early voice of Houston rap to be heard.
“You have to give credit to him,” said K-Rino, “He got love everywhere in this city. He was always concerned with the present state of rap in Houston — the direction, the subject matter. Him being from that first era, he was just trying to bring it back to the true essence of what it was.”
Smurk said his first impression of his friend was one that endured until his death. “O.G. Style was the bomb,” he said. “If that term sounds old school, well, I said it intentionally.”
Woods is survived by his wife, Shelley, their five children, his father and three siblings.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/deaths/5429677.html
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
THE PUBLIC FACE FOR NASA
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Malpass retired from the JSC newsroom in 1999.
Outside of work, Malpass volunteered many years with the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure and taught Sunday school at First United Methodist Church.
Malpass was diagnosed with breast cancer about 20 years ago and had been in remission for many years, family friend Gwen Griffin said.
The cancer recurrence did not keep her from going to work, as her retirement was short-lived. She returned to work as a receptionist with Griffin Integrated Marketing.
“When she came to work for us she still had no hair and she wore bandanas,” said Griffin, who owns the company.
“She would come into work with her chemo pack on. She said she’d rather be in the office than at the hospital. We called her our ‘sunshine’ in the office.”
Malpass was born on July 8, 1940, in a log cabin in Penhook, a tiny town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southern Virginia. After graduating from Franklin County High School, she attended the Philips Business School in Lynchburg, Va.
In 1963, she married Al Malpass, whom she had met in Oklahoma City. That same year the couple moved to Houston.
Pat Malpass died at her home on Monday.
Aside from her husband, Malpass is survived by her daughter, Sherri Malpass Wagner; son-in-law, Hulse Wagner; and grandchildren Holly, Lynn and Will Wagner, all of Houston; sister Shelba English and her husband, Page, of Gladehill, Va.; as well as several nieces and nephews.
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. today at the University Baptist Church, 16106 Middlebrook Drive in Houston, with a reception to follow at the Malpass home. A family service will be held at a later date at the Potter family cemetery in Penhook, Va.
Friends and family members said that Malpass was adamant about making donations to the Susan G. Komen Foundation in lieu of “wastefully killing flowers.”
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/deaths/5445646.html
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
JACQUELINE CLAUSWALKER, STUDIES LED TO BETTER SPINAL CARE
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
In 1964, she joined TIRR, where paralyzed victims of spinal injuries were undergoing rehabilitation.
Devoted to painting, ClausWalker studied art at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. She produced about 500 paintings, most of which she gave away.
Her husband, Robert Walker, a petroleum engineer, died in 1976.
Survivors include a niece, Ann Lindenfield, of Englewood, N.J.; a nephew, Alan Lindenfield of New York City and East Hampton, N.Y.; and friend, Elizabeth Paris of Houston.
A memorial service will be held at a later date.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/deaths/5448660.html
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PHILLIP AGEE, EX-CIA AGENT
The Associated Press
Wednesday, January 9, 2008; 2:40 PM
“He was a friend of the Cuban revolution,” she said.
Granma, Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper, published a small story Wednesday, describing Agee as “a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the peoples’ fight for a better world.”
Brian Latell, a former top Cuba analyst at the CIA, said he never met Agee, but “of course I know him by his reputation, by his betrayal of his former colleagues and of the CIA and of his country.”
Soviet and Cuban defectors alleged Agee had received money or aid from communist intelligence services, and critics noted he spent several months in Cuba after retiring from the CIA.
In denying Agee a new passport in 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz cited CIA reports that said he was a paid adviser to Cuban intelligence, had trained Nicaraguan security officials and had instructed security officials in Grenada before a U.S. invasion toppled a communist government there.
Agee said that he disclosed the identities of his former colleagues to “weaken the instrument for carrying out the policy of supporting military dictatorships” in Greece, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.
Those regimes “were supported by the CIA and the human cost was immense: torture, executions, death squads,” he said.
After years of living in Spain and Germany _ occasionally underground, fearing CIA retribution _ Agee began spending more time in Havana, where he opened the travel site with European and Cuban government investors in 2000. It offers package tours and other help getting to an island that is largely off-limits to Americans because of the embargo.
One of Agee’s last essays was published in Granma International newspaper in 2003 shortly after the Cuban government arrested 75 leading dissidents and political activists.
“To think that the dissidents were creating an independent, free civil society is absurd,” he wrote, “for they were funded and controlled by a hostile foreign power and to that degree, which was total, they were not free or independent in the least.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/09/AR2008010901101.html
Ann
maaan thats real fucked up to hear tha bad news that eric (o.g. style) woods has checked up outta here because hes is one of the pioneers of the houston base rap game like chad (pimp c.) butler houston texas his neiborhood 4th ward we gone miss him dearly (shakin my head)