HENRIETTA BELL WELLS, ONE OF THE REAL GREAT DEBATERS
MS. WELLS BROKE DEBATE WALL
She was the only female on 1930 team for Wiley College who participated in the first collegiate interracial debate in the U.S.
For The Chronicle
“I told him I don’t know anything about debating and I don’t have any money to take off from class to be on the debate team,” Wells recalled during a December interview with the Houston Chronicle. “I was the only girl, and I was the only freshman. They (the boys) didn’t seem to mind me.”
The success of the Wiley College debate team was memorialized recently in the film The Great Debaters, starring Denzel Washington. Wells met Washington and Jurnee Smollett, the young actress who played the female debater in the film. Wells, who later married an Episcopal priest, did work as a social worker and was a teacher in the Houston Independent School District.
In 1967 she wrote, “the school system was in the process of desegregating, and I was the first African-American teacher placed at the all-white Bonner Elementary School. I had no difficulties adjusting. I taught there for five years until the program I was in was discontinued.”
Wells, the third president of the Houston area alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, was a member of St. James Episcopal Church in Third Ward for about 40 years.
“It was not unusual for her to contribute to a number of causes even if she could have done with spending those resources on herself. She would sometimes deny herself things for somebody else,” said Cox.
Friends say they were pleased that she got a chance to see The Great Debaters before her death in a private screening..
“This is a bittersweet time for all of those who loved Mrs. Henrietta Wells,” said Glenice Como, a lay minister at St. James Episcopal Church. “The movie served to give the world a peek into her life and hopefully it challenged us to make our own mark as trailblazers.”
The family will have a private funeral service. Plans for a public memorial service are pending.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/deaths/5580587.html
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Melvin B. Tolson, second from left, with Henrietta Bell and the rest of the 1930 debate team at Wiley College in Marshall, Tex.
Her friend Edward Cox confirmed the death.
The story of the team, called the Great Debaters in last year’s movie of the same name, began in 1924 at Wiley College, a small liberal arts college in Marshall, Tex., founded a half century earlier by the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate “newly freed men.”
Melvin B. Tolson arrived at the all-black school that autumn to teach English and other subjects. He also started a debate team.
Mr. Tolson, who would win wide distinction as a poet, saw argumentation as a way to cultivate mental alertness. Wiley was soon debating and defeating black colleges two and three times its size.
In 1930, Mr. Tolson decided to break new ground. He managed to schedule a debate with the University of Michigan Law School, an all-white school. Wiley won. Other debates with white schools followed, culminating with Wiley’s 1935 victory over the national champion, the University of Southern California.
Mr. Tolson’s stunningly successful debate team was portrayed in “The Great Debaters,” directed by Denzel Washington. Describing the cinematic young debaters in The Chicago Sun-Times, the critic Roger Ebert wrote, “They are black, proud, single-minded, focused, and they express all this most dramatically in their debating.”
In the fall of 1930, Henrietta Bell, who would later marry Wallace Wells, was a freshman in an English class taught by Mr. Tolson. The professor urged her to try out for the debate team, because she seemed to be able to think on her feet. She was the first woman on the team.
In an interview with The Houston Chronicle in 2007, she said the boys “didn’t seem to mind me.”
But the work was far from easy. Miss Bell attended classes during the day, had three campus jobs and practiced debating at night. The intensity of debating was reflected in Mr. Tolson’s characterization of it as “a blood sport.”
But the hard work paid off. In the interview with The Chronicle, Mrs. Wells declared, “We weren’t intimidated.”
Henrietta Pauline Bell was born on the banks of Buffalo Bayou in Houston on Oct. 11, 1912, and raised by a hard-pressed single mother from the West Indies. When riots broke out in 1917 over police treatment of black soldiers at a World War I training camp, the family’s house was searched. Mrs. Wells recalled being unable to try on clothes in segregated stores.
She did not debate in high school but was valedictorian of her class. She earned a modest scholarship from the Y.M.C.A. to go to Wiley, Episcopal Life reported.
In the spring of 1930, Miss Bell, her teammates and her chaperone arrived at the Seventh Street Theater in Chicago. It was the largest black-owned theater in town, because no large white-owned facility would admit a racially mixed audience, according to an article in The Marshall News-Messenger. Mrs. Wells remembered a standing-room-only crowd.
She wore a dark suit and had her hair cut in a boyish bob. In an interview with Jeffrey Porro, one of the screenwriters of “The Great Debaters,” she felt very small on that very big stage. “I had to use my common sense,” she said.
She remembered Mr. Tolson urging her to punch up her delivery. “You’ve got to put something in there to wake the people up,” he had said.
Mrs. Wells told The Chronicle, “It was a nondecision debate, but we felt at the time that it was a giant step toward desegregation.”
She debated for only one year, because of the need to work for money. She kept up with drama, which Mr. Tolson also coached. After graduating from college, she returned to Houston, where she met Mr. Wells and married. He was a church organist and later an Episcopal minister. She worked as a teacher and social worker.
Mrs. Wells advised Mr. Washington on the movie, using her scrapbooks as visual aids. She urged him to play Mr. Tolson, something he at first was not inclined to do. He called her “another grandma.”
Mr. Wells died in 1987. Mrs. Wells left no immediate survivors.
Her advice to today’s students was straightforward: “Learn to speak well and learn to express yourself effectively.”
She learned this lesson directly from Mr. Tolson, whom she called her crabbiest and best teacher. He was known for issuing intellectual challenges immediately upon entering the classroom.
A typical salutation: “Bell! What is a verb?”
An obituary on Wednesday about Henrietta Bell Wells, the last living member of the famed Wiley College debate team of 1930, misstated her date of birth. It was Oct. 11, 1912 — not Jan. 11, 1912 .
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ETHEL TELFORD TAUGHT HISD FIRST-GRADERS FOR 20 YEARS
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Visitation is scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday at Greater Mount Moriah Baptist Church, 1205 Clinton Park. Services will be at 11:30 a.m. at the church. Burial will be in Houston National Cemetery.
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| GENOA LEILANI ‘AUNTY GENOA’ KEAWE, ENDURING AND BELOVED VOICE OF HAWAIIAN MUSIC | , | ||
FEBRUARY 25, 2008 HONOLULU (AP) – Aunty Genoa Leilani Keawe, one of the most enduring and beloved voices in Hawaiian music, died Monday. She was 89. Family members say the icon of traditional music in the islands died in her sleep at home in Papakolea. Her son, Eric K. Keawe of Keawe Records, says she had suffered health problems over the last decade but always managed to bounce back into the limelight. Known widely as Aunty Genoa, she recorded more than 20 albums, dating back to vinyl 78 rpm and 33 1/3 rpm albums, and about 150 singles. Born Genoa Leilani Adolpho, Keawe marriedEdward P. Keawe-Aiko. They had 12 children. Keawe’s life in music started in Laie, center of Mormon culture in Hawaii. She sang with the island Mormon choir and said her sister, Annie, was a great influence on her music as they sang church songs together. She began her professional career in 1939, singing for bandstand shows in Kailua and at the Officers Club before World War II with George Hookano and his band. Keawe sang on the radio and on early TV, she became a regular on the “Lucky Luck Show,” hosted by Robert Luck. She also sang on the nationally broadcast “Hawaii Calls” and at several clubs and hotels on Oahu. She received many music awards and took traditional Hawaiian music across Asia, Canada, Switzerland, Brazil and many U.S. cities. She performed on a trip to Russia when she was in her 80s. http://www.legacy.com/theolympian/obituaries.asp?Page=Lifestory&PersonID=104296857 |
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BUDDY MILES, DRUMMER TO JIMI HENDRIX
His death was announced on his Web site, which said he had been battling congestive heart disease.
Mr. Miles played with a brisk, assertive, deeply funky attack that made him an apt partner for Hendrix. With his luxuriant Afro and his American-flag shirts, he was a prime mover in the psychedelic blues-rock of the late 1960s, not only with Hendrix but also as a founder, drummer and occasional lead singer for the Electric Flag. During the 1980s, he was widely heard as the lead voice of the California Raisins in television commercials.
George Allen Miles Jr. was born in Omaha and began playing drums as a child. An aunt gave him his nickname, after the big-band drummer Buddy Rich.
Mr. Miles was 12 years old when he joined his father’s jazz group, the Bebops. As a teenager, he also worked with soul and rhythm-and-blues acts, among them the Ink Spots, the Delfonics and Wilson Pickett. By 1967, he had moved to Chicago, where he was a founding member of the Electric Flag.
That band included a horn section and played blues, soul and rock; it made its debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and released its first album in 1968. But the Electric Flag was short-lived. Mr. Miles then formed the Buddy Miles Express; its second album, “Electric Church,” was produced in part by Hendrix, whom he had met when both were sidemen on the rhythm-and-blues circuit.
Mr. Miles also appeared on two songs on “Electric Ladyland,” the groundbreaking Hendrix double album released in 1968. After Hendrix disbanded his group the Jimi Hendrix Experience, whose two other members were British, he formed a new trio, Band of Gypsys, with African-American musicians, Mr. Miles and Billy Cox on bass.
On the last night of the 1960s, a New Year’s Eve show at the Fillmore East, they recorded “Band of Gypsys,” an album that included “Them Changes.”
Mr. Miles also worked in the studio with Hendrix and appears on “The Cry of Love,” which was released after Hendrix died in 1970. Mr. Miles rerecorded “Them Changes” with his own band, and it became a hit and a blues-rock staple; Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood performed it on Monday at Madison Square Garden.
Through the 1970s, Mr. Miles made albums with his own bands. He also made a live album with Carlos Santana in 1972 and sang on the 1987 Santana album “Freedom.” In all, he appeared on more than 70 albums, working with Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Barry White, John McLaughlin and George Clinton, among other musicians.
Mr. Miles served a prison term for grand theft in the late 1970s and later another term for auto theft in the early ’80s. After he emerged in 1985, advertising recharged his career. He sang lead vocals for the California Raisins, a fictional group whose Claymation commercials were so popular that they led to a string of albums. Two of them, “California Raisins” and “Meet the Raisins,” were certified platinum for shipping a million copies each.
Mr. Miles also produced commercials for Cadillac and Harley Davidson and performed on them. He and Mr. Cox recorded an album, “The Band of Gypsys Return,” in 2004. Mr. Miles continued to perform even after suffering a stroke in 2005.
He is survived by his partner, Sherrilae Chambers.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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RON CHAPMAN, ‘CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON’ ACTOR
His death was confirmed by his son Ben Chapman III, who said he had been suffering heart and breathing problems.
Mr. Chapman, a decorated Korean War veteran and real estate executive, played the monster known as the Gill Man when he was a contract player for Universal Pictures. Released in 1954, the movie was the quintessential 3-D black-and-white monster movie of the 1950s.
Mr. Chapman, who was 6 feet 5 inches tall, got the Gill Man part because of his size. He said there were actually two actors who played the part. He was the creature on land; Ricou Browning was the actor in the water sequences.
In publicity photos Mr. Chapman was the one beneath the foam-rubber body suit and the large-lipped headpiece. Julia Adams was the object of his affection.
The Gill Man is shot and stabbed in the final moments of the film. He sinks into the depths of the water, only to return in a pair of sequels that never replicated the success of the original. Neither featured Mr. Chapman.
Mr. Chapman had a Web site (the-reelgillman.com), where his fans could contact him.
Ben Chapman was born on Oct. 29, 1928, in Oakland, Calif., but was reared in Tahiti. When he was 12 or 13, his family moved to San Francisco.
He served in Korea with the Marine Corps, earning a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. He also earned two Purple Hearts for battle injuries to his legs, which doctors wanted to amputate. Instead, he nursed himself back to health.
Besides his son Ben, he is survived by his companion of 25 years, Merrilee Kazarian, who often referred to herself as “Mrs. Creature”; another son, Grant Chapman of Las Vegas; a stepdaughter, Elyse Maree Raljevich of Coto De Gaza, Calif.; and a sister, Moea Baty of Los Angeles.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
FOR A DETAILED ARTICLE ON RON CHAPMAN: http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2008/Feb/22/ln/hawaii802220360.html
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DAN SHOMRON, LEADER OF ENTEBBE AIRPORT RESCUE
The cause was the effects of a stroke he suffered three weeks ago, a spokeswoman at Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv, where General Shomron had first been treated, told The Associated Press. He died at the Beit Lowenstein Rehabilitation Center in Raanana, The Jerusalem Post said.
On the night of July 3, 1976, Israeli commandos and paratroopers flew 2,500 miles in transport planes to the Entebee airport, surprised and killed hijackers who had demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners, rescued the captives taken from a hijacked Air France plane, and flew back to Israel with them.
The raid was punctuated by what seemed like a Hollywood touch. Several commandos rolled out of one of the planes in a black Mercedes carrying a Ugandan flag in the hopes that soldiers at the airport loyal to the Ugandan ruler Idi Amin would think he was in the car and fail to realize that a rescue operation was under way.
The Israeli soldiers and General Shomron were greeted as heroes when they returned home, and the raid gained a legendary aura.
But the operation did not succeed without cost. Three Israelis who were among the hostages died in the raid, as did Lt. Col. Jonathan Netanyahu, the commander of a special forces unit in the raid and the brother of a future Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a 2006 interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv, General Shomron, the chief infantry and paratroop officer when he led the raid, acknowledged, “I like in particular the movie in which Charles Bronson portrayed me,” recalling “Raid on Entebbe” (1977).
But, he said: “I also felt some kind of envy from the military and it was not comfortable for me. Around the world, until today, they look at me like something from a different world, a super super-hero, something not natural. I don’t like that feeling of being an advertisement.”
General Shomron was born on a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley. He fought as a paratrooper in the Sinai campaign in 1956 and was recognized as the first Israeli paratrooper to reach the Suez Canal in the 1967 war. He was picked as the chief of the general staff in 1987 and held the post until he retired from military service in 1991.
In October 2006, General Shomron was appointed to investigate the performance of Israel’s armed forces during the fighting in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah guerrillas. In a report, he criticized Israeli commanders for poor organization.
General Shomron, who was chairman of Israel Military Industries after he retired, is survived by his wife and two children.
The Entebbe raid ended a harrowing week for the remaining captives who had been aboard an Air France airbus bound from Tel Aviv to Paris that had been hijacked shortly after a stop in Athens.
The plane, which originally carried 244 passengers and 12 crew members, had been flown to Libya for refueling, then on to Entebbe Airport, where the remaining hostages were held in a dusty, unused old terminal.
In his interview with Maariv, General Shomron reflected on the significance of the Entebbe raid, putting aside for the moment the spectacular manner in which it was carried out.
“The hijacking of the Air France plane and the demands of the hijackers to release Palestinian terrorists came during a difficult period for the war on terror, which operated then on the system of hostage-taking,” he said, citing the heavy toll from past attacks on the Israeli city of Maalot and the seizure of the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv.
“We were busy in those days to convince the world that one does not bow to terrorism,” he said.
After learning of the general’s death, the Israeli president, Simon Peres, called him “one of the greatest commanders” the Israeli military had ever known and said the Entebbe raid “earned its mythic status since we all saw it as impossible.”
General Shomron was asked in 2006 about his most vivid recollection of the rescue.
“When the hostages board the evacuation plane, are helped up, each one checking his family that everyone is present,” he said. “That was a strong moment that I can’t forget.”
A picture caption with an obituary on Wednesday about Dan Shomron, the Israeli military officer who led the raid to free hijacked hostages at Entebbe airport in 1976, misstated his rank at the time the picture was taken, in 1987. He was a major general, not a brigadier general. (He became a lieutenant general later in 1987.)(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )___________________________________________________________________________
William F. Buckley Jr. in his National Review office, 1984 More Photos »
Mr. Buckley suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son, Christopher, said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. “He might have been working on a column,” Christopher Buckley said.
William Buckley, with his winningly capricious personality, his use of ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare to an anteater’s, was the popular host of one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine National Review.
He also found time to write more than 50 books, varying from sailing odysseys to spy novels to dissertations on harpsichord fingering to celebrations of his own dashing daily life. He edited at least five more.
In 2007, he published a history of the magazine called “Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription” and a political novel, “The Rake.” His personal memoir of Senator Barry M. Goldwater is scheduled to be published this spring, and he was working on a similar volume on President Ronald Reagan at his death.
The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 newspaper columns, titled “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-size books. His collected papers, which were donated to Yale, weigh seven tons.
Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal postwar America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Mr. Goldwater in 1964 and saw his dreams fulfilled when Mr. Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
President Bush said Wednesday that Mr. Buckley “brought conservative thought into the political mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America’s victory in the Cold War.”
To Mr. Buckley’s enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian, termed him “the scourge of liberalism.”
In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaited his copy every two weeks — “without the wrapper.”
“You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.
“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”
War on Liberal Order
The liberal primacy Mr. Buckley challenged had begun with the New Deal and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale, from which he graduated with honors in 1950, as a den of atheistic collectivism.
“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”
Mr. Buckley wove the tapestry of what became the new American conservatism from libertarian writers like Max Eastman, “free market” economists like Milton Friedman, traditionalist scholars like Russell Kirk and anti-Communist writers like Whittaker Chambers. He argued for a conservatism based on the national interest and a higher morality.
He found his most receptive audience in young conservatives who were energized by Barry Goldwater’s emergence at the Republican convention in 1960 as the right-wing alternative to Nixon. Some met in September 1960 at the Buckley family home in Sharon, Conn., to form Young Americans for Freedom. Their numbers — and influence — grew.
Nicholas Lemann observed in Washington Monthly in 1988 that during the Reagan administration “the 5,000 middle-level officials, journalists and policy intellectuals that it takes to run a government” were “deeply influenced by Buckley’s example.” He suggested that neither moderate Washington insiders nor “Ed Meese-style provincial conservatives” could have pulled off the Reagan tax cut and other policy transformations.
Speaking of the true believers, Mr. Lemann continued, “Some of these people had been personally groomed by Buckley, and most of the rest saw him as a role model.”
Mr. Buckley rose to prominence with a generation of talented writers fascinated by political themes, people with names like Mailer, Capote, Vidal, Styron and Baldwin. Like the others, he was a magnet for controversy. Even people on the right — from members of the John Birch Society to disciples of the author Ayn Rand to George Wallace to moderate Republicans — frequently pounced on him.
People of many political stripes came to see his life as something of an art form — from racing through city streets on a motorcycle to a quixotic campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 to voicing startling opinions like favoring the decriminalization of marijuana. He was often described as liberals’ favorite conservative, particularly after suavely playing host to an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” on public television in 1982.
Norman Mailer may indeed have dismissed Mr. Buckley as a “second-rate intellect incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row,” but he could not help admiring his stage presence.
“No other act can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door and the snows of yesteryear,” Mr. Mailer said in an interview with Harper’s Magazine in 1967.
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From The Times Magazine: The Buckley Effect (October 2, 2005)
Mr. Buckley’s vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and described in newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long words), became the stuff of legend. Less kind commentators preferred the adjective “pleonastic” (using more words than necessary).
And, inescapably, there was that aurora of pure mischief. In 1985, David Remnick, writing in The Washington Post, said, “He has the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat.”
William Francis Buckley was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the sixth of the 10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley. His parents had intended to name him after his father, but the priest who christened him insisted on a saint’s name, so Francis was chosen.
When the younger William Buckley was 5, he asked to change his middle name to Frank and his parents agreed. At that point, he became William F. Buckley Jr.
The elder Mr. Buckley made a small fortune in the oil fields of Mexico and Venezuela and educated his children with personal tutors at Great Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Conn. They also attended exclusive Roman Catholic schools in England and France.
Family’s Deep Catholicism
Young William absorbed his family’s conservatism along with its deep Roman Catholicism. At 14, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School, a preparatory school 15 miles across the New York line from Sharon.
In his spare time at Millbrook, young Bill typed schoolmates’ papers for them, charging $1 a paper, with a 25-cent surcharge for correcting the grammar.
He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a year at the University of Mexico studying Spanish, which had been his first language. He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946 and managed to make second lieutenant after first putting colleagues off with his mannerisms.
In his 1988 book, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives,” John B. Judis quoted Mr. Buckley’s sister Patricia as saying that the Army experience changed Mr. Buckley. “He got to understand people more,” she said.
Mr. Buckley then entered Yale, where he studied political science, economics and history; established himself as a fearsome debater; was elected chairman of The Yale Daily News; and joined Skull and Bones, the university’s most prestigious secret society.
As a senior, he was given the honor of delivering the speech for Yale’s Alumni Day celebration, but was replaced after Yale’s administration objected to his strong attacks on the university. He responded by writing his critique in the book that brought him to national attention, in part because he gave the publisher, Regnery, $10,000 to advertise it.
Published in 1951, “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’ ” charged the powers at Yale with having an atheistic and collectivist bent and called for the firing of faculty members who advocated values out of line with what he saw as Yale’s traditional values.
After a year in the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City (his case officer was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to participate in the Watergate break-in), Mr. Buckley went to work for the American Mercury magazine, but resigned to write on his own.
Over the next few years, Mr. Buckley worked as a freelance writer and lecturer and wrote a second book with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell. Published in 1954, “McCarthy and His Enemies” was a sturdy defense of the senator from Wisconsin, who was then at the height of his campaign against communists, liberals and the Democratic Party. The book made the New York Times best-seller list.
In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as a voice for “the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order,” with a $100,000 gift from his father and $290,000 from outside donors. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication “stands athwart history yelling Stop.”
It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying that Southern whites had the right to impose their ideas on blacks who were as yet culturally and politically inferior to them. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should be denied the vote.
Mr. Buckley did not accord automatic support to Republicans. For President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom National Review was founded in part to oppose, the magazine ultimately managed only a memorably tepid endorsement: “We prefer Ike.”
Circulation increased from 16,000 in 1957 to 70,000 at the time of Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, to 115,000 in 1972. It is now 166,000. The magazine has always had to be subsidized by readers’ donations, supplemented by Mr. Buckley’s lecturing fees.
Along with offering a forum to big-gun conservatives like Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Robert Nisbet, National Review cultivated the career of several younger writers, including Garry Wills, Joan Didion and John Leonard, who would shake off the conservative attachment and go their leftward ways.
National Review also helped define the conservative movement by isolating cranks from Mr. Buckley’s chosen mainstream.
“Bill was responsible for rejecting the John Birch Society and the other kooks who passed off anti-Semitism or some such as conservatism,” Hugh Kenner, a biographer of Ezra Pound and a frequent contributor to National Review, told The Washington Post. “Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”
Mr. Buckley’s personal visibility was magnified by his “Firing Line” program, which ran from 1966 to 1999. First carried on WOR-TV and then on public television, it became the longest-running program with a single host — beating out Johnny Carson by three years. He taped 1,504 programs, including debates on scores of topics like “Resolved: The women’s movement has been disastrous.”
There were exchanges on foreign policy with Norman Thomas, feminism with Germaine Greer, and race relations with James Baldwin. Not a few viewers thought Mr. Buckley’s toothy grin before he scored a point resembled nothing so much as a switchblade.
To the New York City politician Mark Green, he purred: “You’ve been on the show close to 100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you learned anything yet?”
At age 50, Mr. Buckley crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his sailboat and became a novelist. Eleven of his novels are spy tales starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and beds the Queen of England in the first book.
Others of his books included a historical novel with Elvis Presley as a significant character, another about the Nuremberg trials, a reasoned critique of anti-Semitism and journals that more than succeeded in dramatizing a life of taste and wealth — his own.
Mr. Buckley’s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would do if he won, he answered, “Demand a recount.” He got 13.4 percent of the vote.
In retrospect, the mayoral campaign came to be seen as the beginning of the Republican Party’s successful courtship of working-class whites who later became “Reagan Democrats.”
Unlike his brother James, who served as a United States senator from New York, Mr. Buckley generally avoided official government posts. He did serve from 1969 to 1972 as a presidential appointee to the National Advisory Commission on Information and as a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations in 1973.
In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his way, Mr. Buckley gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches, about 70 a year over 40 years, he once estimated. In 1999, he stopped “Firing Line,” and in 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. He wrote his last spy novel (the 11th in his series), sold his sailboat and stopped playing the harpsichord publicly.
But he began a new historical novel and kept up his columns, including one on the “bewitching power” of “The Sopranos” television series. He commanded wide attention by criticizing the Iraq war as a failure.
On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Aldyen Austin Taylor, died. Mr. and Mrs. Buckley called each other “Ducky.”
He is survived by his son, Christopher, of Washington; his sisters, Priscilla L. Buckley of Sharon, Conn., Patricia Buckley Bozell of Washington, and Carol Buckley of Columbia, S.C.; his brothers, James L., of Sharon, and F. Reid, of Camden, S.C.; a granddaughter; and a grandson.
In the end it was Mr. Buckley’s graceful, often self-deprecating wit that endeared him to others. In his spy novel “Who’s on First,” he described the possible impact of his National Review through his character Boris Bolgin.
“ ‘Do you ever read the National Review, Jozsef?’ asks Boris Bolgin, the chief of KGB counter intelligence for Western Europe. ‘It is edited by this young bourgeois fanatic.’ ”
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Laura Visitacion-Lewis, a New York State Supreme Court justice.
Mr. Lewis devoted his life to helping prisoners and other clients who could not pay him. His toughest fight lasted 12 years and took him from the New York State parole board to regulatory panels to state court to federal court, including the Supreme Court of the United States.
It ended on Dec. 21, 2007, when Governor Spitzer pardoned Mr. Lewis’s client Frederick Lake, who had been paroled a decade earlier after serving six years in state prison for armed robbery. Except for Gov. George E. Pataki’s pardon of the comedian Lenny Bruce in 2003, it was the first pardon by a New York governor since 1979.
“Lawyers dream about cases like this,” Mr. Lewis said at the time.
Mr. Lewis’s father, Salim L. Lewis, began his career as a shoe salesman and rose to lead the Wall Street firm of Bear, Stearns. He pioneered the selling of huge blocks of stock and was a prominent philanthropist.
John David Bonner Lewis was born on May 4, 1943, in Manhattan. He attended the Collegiate School in Manhattan, the Pomfret School in Connecticut, and graduated from Harvard and Columbia Law School.
As an adult, he deliberately deserted his upper-class way of life. He began giving his money away, to down-and-out clients and to causes like Indian welfare, and never stopped.
In 1970, he went to work for a federally financed legal services agency in a basement storefront at Avenue D and Third Street on the Lower East Side. Three years later, he joined the Legal Aid Society, which represents indigent clients in New York City. He first worked on criminal cases, and then on appeals for the society.
He interrupted his work for the society to work as a legal secretary for Judge Elliott Wilk, then on the civil court and later on the State Supreme Court. Justice Wilk, who died in 2002, was known for his decisions in favor of the homeless and against landlords.
In 1983, Mr. Lewis started a private practice, mainly taking clients who could not afford to pay him much, if anything. One client who did not fit this definition was Anthony Salvatore Casso, a mobster with the distinction of being the first mob defector booted out of the federal witness protection program.
Mr. Lewis represented many less-well-off prisoners, including Francisco Sanchez, an inmate at Elmira Correctional Facility, whose face was slashed by another prisoner. In 2002, the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, used the case to expand the definition of what dangers correctional officials should be expected to foresee.
American Indians were a major concern for Mr. Lewis. In cases involving New York State Indians, he helped define the application of a 1790 federal law to land that tribes claimed New York State had inappropriately acquired from them.
He also worked at the United Nations and elsewhere to help redress the grievances of the Yanomami people of Brazil, whose lives were being disrupted by gold miners. He persuaded Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, a leader, to come with him to meet Javier Perez de Cuellar, the secretary general of the United Nations. Mr. Perez repeatedly approached the president of Brazil to help the native people.
Mr. Lewis organized behind the scenes to influence the United Nations General Assembly to pass a declaration last year giving native peoples the right of self-determination. He donated more than $1 million to the Indian Law Resource Center.
In the Lake case, Mr. Lewis worked closely with Claudia Slovinsky and at least 13 other lawyers over the years. Despite an ever-accumulating pile of evidence indicating that Mr. Lake may have been wrongly convicted, Governor Spitzer’s pardon did not address guilt or innocence.
Mr. Lewis first became involved in the case in 1996 after receiving a letter Mr. Lake sent from prison. The lawyer wrote a 127-page brief that secured Mr. Lake’s parole on the first effort, an unusual occurrence.
Immigration authorities almost immediately began trying to deport Mr. Lake as a convicted criminal. Though there were countless legal twists and turns, many involving the arcana of immigration law, it was the original parole document that is believed to have informed the governor’s decision to pardon. The document first argued against Mr. Lake’s guilt, then described his rehabilitation.
Mr. Lewis is survived, in addition to his wife, by their daughter, Cari Lewis-Osborne; two brothers, Roger, of Oklahoma City, and Salim B., whose whereabouts are unknown; a sister, Bonnie Lewis of North Salem, N.Y.; and a granddaughter.
Justice Visitacion-Lewis said she had grown up poor in housing projects and was working as a secretary at the legal services agency when she met Mr. Lewis. He urged her to complete her undergraduate degree and to go to law school, then helped her do it.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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I.W. MARKS, JEWELER, LEFT LEGACY IN BUSINESS, FINE ARTS
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
‘Sincere and loving’
While Marks gave most of his charitable dollars to local arts institutions, he also was devoted to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.”Whatever Irv did, he gave 100 percent, whether he was focused on his family, his business or the many charities he became involved in,” said Leroy Shafer, chief operating officer of the livestock show and rodeo.
Paul Somerville, chairman of the show’s board of directors and Marks’ friend of 30 years, called him “one of the most sincere and loving guys that I’ve ever known.”
Irving William Marks was born in Chicago in 1934. As a boy, he and his dad, Samuel, listened to radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoons, a tradition that was the start of Marks’ lifelong love for opera and symphonic music.
Samuel Marks died when I.W. was 13. The teen helped support himself and his family with a part-time job in a local jewelry store, and as the years passed, he earned a degree from Wright College, part of City Colleges of Chicago, and also attended Roosevelt University and Northwestern University.
As a young adult, Marks held a number of different jobs, including a position with Wembley Ties. The company transferred Marks to Houston in 1963, and he opened the jewelry store at 3841 Bellaire in 1978. Over the years, he expanded the space to 10,000 square feet, from 500 square feet, and he and his sons Bradley and Daniel opened a second store in Sugar Land in 2004.
Marks often said it was important for small and mid-sized business people to support the arts, and if he was able to promote his business with plugs at the same time, so much the better. For example, he was the first to realize the flip side of a concert ticket was an ideal place to advertise.
But, Marks’ family says, he supported the local arts scene because he saw it as a leavening and broadening agent in his adopted city, not for the sake of publicity. He donated time and money to the Houston Grand Opera, the Houston Symphony, the Houston Ballet, the Society for the Performing Arts, the Alley Theatre and the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music.
He also helped to renovate two theaters and a lecture hall at the Jewish Community Center.
‘Stinging sense of humor’
For all those good works, Marks recently received his fifth arts award from the Business Committee for the Arts, a national nonprofit organization based in New York. In 2006, IW Marks Jewelers also was named to The BCA 10: Best Companies Supporting the Arts in America.Judith Jedlicka, president of BCA, agreed that Marks “was so passionate about the arts,” but added that “his generosity went well beyond that. He’d be in a hospital, for example, and the staff would take super care of him. Afterwards, he’d find out what they needed and write a check.”
In 2000, Marks spent an extended period as a patient at Memorial Hermann TIRR, then known as The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research. After a check from Marks, the institution was able to build a much-needed therapeutic gym.
Marks also served many years on the board of Crime Stoppers of Houston.
Another former board member, Chronicle Editor Emeritus Jack Loftis, remembers Marks had “a stinging sense of humor that he regularly aimed toward close friends.”
Usually they sat side by side, Loftis said, adding, “I cannot recall ever leaving a meeting without my ego being good-naturedly hammered by a Marks observation. But he always expected similar treatment, got it and enjoyed a big laugh.”
Marks’ wife and mother of his children, Diane Golman Marks, died in 1995. Survivors include his present wife, Shelly Ann Sjolund Marks; two sons Daniel and Bradley Marks; a sister, Ruth Silver; daughters-in-law Susan and Melissa Marks; and grandchildren, William and Andrew Marks, all of Houston.
Shelby Hodge contributed to this report.
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JAMES PAUL TAYLOR, USED FISHING TO TEACH, INSPIRE MATH STUDENTS
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Marguerite Siebenhoven, a Fondren counselor, said Taylor believed fishing was a learning tool because it helped keep students balanced, kept them out of their city environment and taught them that the world can be peaceful.
The best students were seldom assigned to Taylor’s class, Carmichael recalled, “but as many of his kids would pass the test as people who had the top students.”
Carmichael, who taught at Fondren for 27 years, said Taylor was the only teacher at the school who had been there longer than she had. Taylor excelled at motivating disadvantaged children, she said. “If you taught at Fondren, you had a lot of those,” Carmichael said. “He did well with those kids.”
Former student Samantha Ealey, 27, credits Taylor with putting her on the right path by giving her the encouragement she needed.
“Mr. Taylor was one of those teachers that did more than just teach,” Ealey said. “He knew who was from a single-parent home.”
Taylor was born Jan. 26, 1942, in Jennings, La. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Southern University and A&M College at Baton Rouge, La., and a master’s degree at Texas Southern University. He taught at two schools in Louisiana before joining Fondren in 1971.
In addition to his daughter, Cheryl George, Taylor is survived by his wife, Georgiana Taylor; and four other children: Greg Taylor, Angela Taylor, and Olivia Taylor Denkins, all of Houston, and Reginald Taylor, 53, of Great Falls, Mont.
Services are scheduled for 10 a.m. today at St. Benedict Catholic Church, 4025 Grapevine St.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES (COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES):
Howard Carter, Egyptologist, Dies at 66
(March 2, 1939)
Albert Sabin, Polio Researcher, Dies at 86
(March 3, 1993)
Fred Friendly, TV News Pioneer, Dies at 82
(March 3, 1998)
Joseph Stalin, Russian Dictator, Dies at 73
(March 5, 1953)
Louisa May Alcott, Author of ‘Little Women,’ Dies at 55
(March 6, 1888)
John Philip Sousa, Band Leader, Dies at 77
(March 6, 1932)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jurist and Philosopher, Dies at 93
(March 6, 1935)
Georgia O’Keeffe, Shaper of Modern Art, Dies at 98
(March 6, 1986)
William Howard Taft, 27th President, Dies at 72
(March 8, 1930)
Ann
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