MILDRED LOVING, WHO FOUGHT FOR RACIALLY-MIXED MARRIAGES
By DIONNE WALKER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
RICHMOND, Va. –
Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.
Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.
“I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble – and believed in love,” Fortune told The Associated Press.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.
“There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause,” the court ruled in a unanimous decision.
Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero – just a bride.
“It wasn’t my doing,” Loving said. “It was God’s work.”
Mildred Jeter was 11 when she and 17-year-old Richard began courting, according to Phyl Newbeck, a Vermont author who detailed the case in the 2004 book, “Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers.”
She became pregnant a few years later, she and Loving got married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Mildred told the AP she didn’t realize it was illegal.
“I think my husband knew,” Mildred said. “I think he thought (if) we were married, they couldn’t bother us.”
But they were arrested a few weeks after they returned to Central Point, their hometown in rural Caroline County north of Richmond. They pleaded guilty to charges of “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” according to their indictments.
They avoided jail time by agreeing to leave Virginia – the only home they’d known – for 25 years. They moved to Washington for several years, then launched a legal challenge by writing to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who referred the case to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Attorneys later said the case came at the perfect time – just as lawmakers passed the Civil Rights Act, and as across the South, blacks were defying Jim Crow’s hold.
“The law that threatened the Lovings with a year in jail was a vestige of a hateful, discriminatory past that could not stand in the face of the Lovings’ quiet dignity,” said Steven Shapiro, national legal director for the ACLU.
“We loved each other and got married,” she told The Washington Evening Star in 1965, when the case was pending. “We are not marrying the state. The law should allow a person to marry anyone he wants.”
After the Supreme Court ruled, the couple returned to Virginia, where they lived with their children, Donald, Peggy and Sidney. Each June 12, the anniversary of the ruling, Loving Day events around the country mark the advances of mixed-race couples.
Richard Loving died in a car accident that also injured his wife. “They said I had to leave the state once, and I left with my wife,” he told the Star in 1965. “If necessary, I will leave Virginia again with my wife, but I am not going to divorce her.”
(Article courtesy of http://www.forbes.com )
Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
(See related post: https://kathmanduk2.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/mildred-loving-matriarch-of-interracial-marriage-passes-at-68/ )
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BILL HARGROVE, OLDEST LEAGUE BOWLER
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Associated Press
ATLANTA — By the time Bill Hargrove was recognized last year as the nation’s oldest league bowler, his eyesight had deteriorated so much he could hardly see the pins.
But he kept at it, armed with a mental image of them. He was still bowling last week, just before he was hospitalized and died Monday of congestive heart failure — four days shy of turning 107.
Hargrove died at Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville, a spokeswoman said Thursday. He lived nearby in Clermont.
He earned national attention in May 2007, after turning 106, when the United States Bowling Congress dubbed him “the oldest league bowler ever.”
Hargrove began bowling in 1924. For decades, he played a version known as duckpin bowling. As duckpins faded, Hargrove took up the more popular form of bowling, played with a larger ball. He said it helped him cope with the 1973 death of his wife and gave him something to look forward to after he retired.
“I love it,” Hargrove said when the league honored his longevity. “It puts you on trial as far as your ability. And your ability comes and goes. I’m fighting it all the time.”
(Article courtesy of the Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com )
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JAMES ALBERT “BERT” FANETTE, KEYBOARDIST TO SONNY AND CHER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
James Albert “Bert” Fanette, a longtime Houston-area keyboardist who played country, pop and jazz and grooved with Sonny and Cher on their 1971 Live album, died Sunday in Nederland of an apparent heart attack. He was 65.
Influenced by his mother, a classical violinist, and two piano-teaching aunts, Fanette, a Port Arthur native, began music lessons while in elementary school. His mother “strapped him to the stool,” said his wife, Jeannett Fanette.
Inspired by the smooth jazz band Spyro Gyra, vocalist Al Jarreau and jazz great-turned-fusion guru Miles Davis, Bert Fanette turned his talent to whatever the market demanded. “He really loved jazz,” his wife said. “He played rock. Played some country. He’s been in bands that have to play a little of everything.”
The family home was furnished with a grand piano, a Hammond B-3 electric organ and a tangle of electric keyboards. “We had instruments coming out the kazoo,” his wife said.
Fanette dabbled in music his entire adult life, his wife of nearly 43 years said. But with family responsibilities, he became a drafter of piping equipment for the oil and gas industry. On occasion, Fanette played with Texas blues musicians Johnny and Edgar Winter, and with the Buddy Wright Five, The Night Shift and The Family Tree.
Arguably the high point of his career came in the early ’70s when he played organ on the Sonny and Cher Live album for MCA. The disc featured a workout of the pop duo’s biggest hits.
Fanette was primarily known for his prowess on the electric organ, recalled his former bandmate, University of Miami jazz guitar professor Randall Dollahon. “All those people who were the best in their field were always trying to get Bert to play with them,” Dollahon said. “He was highly regarded.”
Though longtime Houston residents, Fanette and his wife had lived in Bellville for the past eight years.
Family members described Fanette as “very nice, courteous, very opinionated and stubborn.”
“He just couldn’t sit still,” Jeannett Fanette said. “He did not like to sit down. If he could eat standing up, he would.”
Fanette played his last gig Friday night at an area youth camp — he donated his paycheck to the camp — then drove to Nederland, where the family was moving his mother into a neighborhood near relatives. The musician spent Saturday cleaning out the garage at his mother’s former home in Port Arthur, said his daughter, Nicole Stonehouse.
Stonehouse said her father routinely awakened about 3 a.m. to get an early start on his drafting job, and Sunday he was up hours before sunrise. He talked briefly with his mother, who offered to fix him breakfast, then went back to bed.
“He was rubbing his right arm, kind of squeezing it,” Stonehouse said, “but he was always fidgety, always scratching himself, so his mother didn’t think anything of it.”
A short time later, Jeannett Fanette awoke to her husband’s ominously loud snoring. “He always snored like a freight train,” Stonehouse said, “but this was really loud. She didn’t think that sounded right.
“She tried to rouse him and couldn’t. He was unresponsive. They immediately called 911.”
Fanette died shortly after arriving at a Port Arthur hospital.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Fanette is survived by three grandchildren; his mother, Marie “Mickie” Fanette of Nederland; and two brothers, Marty and Kenneth Fanette, both of Nederland.
Visitation will be at 10 a.m. today at St. Cyril of Alexandria Catholic Church in Houston, with a funeral Mass following at 11 a.m.
A framed copy of the Sonny and Cher Live album will be positioned near the casket.
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LEON EGUIA, ONE OF THE FIRST HISPANICS IN THE HFD
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Leon Eguia, one of the first Hispanics to become firefighters in the Houston Fire Department and a former president of LULAC Council No. 60, died Sunday in a Houston hospital. He was 86.
Eguia’s interest in the League of United Latin American Citizens developed after he encountered prejudice upon returning to Texas after serving as a paratrooper in World War II.
He recounted that, while visiting his grandmother in Lockhart, he walked into a drug store in his Army uniform but was told by a clerk: “We don’t serve Mexicans here.”
This differed from Eguia’s experiences in the Army, he said in an oral history interview at the University of Texas at Austin.
In the Army, he said, he never experienced discrimination. “It’s all about real comradeship,” Eguia said. “You look out for each other and at the same time have some fun.”
Although he fought in the Battle of the Bulge with the 82nd Airborne Division in the bitter winter of 1944, Eguia emerged unscathed.
“We were baptized into battle on Christmas Eve 1944,” he said.
After the war, he got a job in a clothing store in Corpus Christi and eventually returned to Houston, where in 1957 he was among the first Hispanic firefighters hired by the HFD.
For part of his 20 years with the department, Eguia also worked in alterations in clothing departments at Foley’s and Montgomery Ward stores, said his son, Edward Eguia.
In 1953-54, Eguia served as president of LULAC Council 60. He also was a charter member of Knights of Columbus Council 802 at St. Patrick Catholic Church and a former president of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a charitable organization, at the church.
Leon Lara Eguia was born in Houston on Nov. 13, 1921, the son of Narciso C. Eguia and Maria Lara Eguia. He recalled in the oral history interview that, during the Great Depression in the early 1930s, he and his brother shined shoes on Saturdays to help with family expenses. His mother died when he was 15, and his father never remarried.
Although his father wanted him to quit school and find a full-time job, Eguia said he stayed in school and graduated in 1938 from the old Sam Houston High School. He said he did work after school at Stein’s clothing store downtown, earning $1 a day selling suits and learning to make alterations.
“He wanted to be an attorney,” said his son, Edward Eguia. “He was very intelligent and was the rock of the family, straightforward and strong.”
Eguia also is survived by his wife of almost 60 years, Antonia Ramirez Eguia of Houston; daughters Gloria Duran and Alice Pina, both of Houston; another son, Leon Eguia Jr. of Scottsdale, Ariz.; sisters Tille Gonzales and Ida Zermeno; and his brother, Ernest Eguia, all of Houston.
Visitation will be 6 to 8 p.m. today at Heights Funeral Home, 1317 Heights Blvd. The rosary will be recited at 7 p.m.
The Mass of Christian burial will be at 10 a.m. Wednesday at St. Patrick Catholic Church, 4918 Cochran. Burial will be in Houston National Cemetery.
(Article courtesy of the Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com )
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DIANA BARNATO WALKER, ACCLAIMED WWII PILOT
LONDON — Diana Barnato Walker, an heiress to a South African diamond mining fortune who took up flying in the 1930s and became a celebrated aviator as one of a group of women who delivered new fighters and bombers to combat squadrons in World War II, died on April 28. She was 90.
United Press International
Diana Barnato Walker set a speed record as a pilot in 1963.
Her son, Barney Walker, said that Mrs. Walker died in a hospital near her sheep farm in Surrey, and that the cause was pneumonia.
Mrs. Walker, a granddaughter of Barney Barnato, a co-founder of the De Beers mining company in Johannesburg, was 18 years old when she discovered her calling in 1936. Seeking a break from the social whirl of a young debutante in London, she paid £3 for a flying lesson in a Tiger Moth biplane at the Brooklands Motor Racing Circuit and never turned back.
In 1941, after serving as a nursing auxiliary with the British expeditionary force, which had been driven from France by the German invasion the year before, she passed rigorous tests and became a member of what The Times of London described in 2005 as “the pluckiest sisterhood in military history,” the women’s arm of the Air Transport Auxiliary. Only a little over five feet tall, Mrs. Walker often needed a special cushion to allow her to reach the controls of the aircraft she flew.
Known as the “Atagirls,” the transport auxiliary pilots — 108 by the war’s end in 1945 — joined more than 500 male pilots in delivering many of the most renowned aircraft of the war to squadrons across Britain. Mrs. Walker, like the other women in the group, flew Spitfire, Hurricane and Mustang fighters, as well as Wellington and Hampden bombers, though not heavy bombers; only male pilots were judged to have the physical strength to handle those.
Mrs. Walker alone delivered 260 Spitfires during her four years in uniform, according to wartime records. In one month, September 1944, she delivered 33 aircraft of 14 types. Pilots were often asked to fly in poor weather, without instruments, without combat weaponry and frequently without radios.
A total of 16 women piloting the ferry runs were killed in the war, nearly one in six, a ratio that aviation historians say was worse than that suffered by the Royal Air Force’s wartime fighter pilots.
Mrs. Walker, who survived many brushes with death, wrote in her 1994 autobiography, “Spreading My Wings,” that she owed her survival to a “guardian angel.” Twice the unarmed planes she was flying came were attacked by German aircraft, and she emerged uninjured.
There were light moments. The incident that amused her most occurred when she tried aerobatic maneuvers in a Spitfire and found herself flying upside down, unable to right the aircraft. “While I was wondering what to do next, from out of my top overall pocket fell my beautifully engraved silver powder compact,” she wrote. “It wheeled round and round the bubble canopy like a drunken sailor on a wall of death, then sent all the face powder over everything.”
After she managed to right the plane and land, a “very tall and handsome” R.A.F. pilot hopped onto the wing and told her that he and his fellow pilots had been told to expect “a very, very pretty girl” at the controls, but that “all I can see is some ghastly clown.”
Born on Jan. 15, 1918, Diana Barnato Walker was the daughter of Woolf Barnato, a London-based financier who, as chairman of the Bentley car company, won the Le Mans 24-hour race in France three times in succession from 1928.
In 1942 she became engaged to a Battle of Britain fighter ace who later died in a Spitfire crash. In 1944, she married another decorated Spitfire pilot, Derek Walker, and flew alongside him, each in a Spitfire, to a honeymoon in Brussels. He was killed in a flying accident six months after the war ended in 1945. She subsequently began a 30-year relationship with Whitney Straight, an American-born graduate of Cambridge University who was a grand prix racing driver in the 1930s and a Battle of Britain fighter ace. Barney Walker, her survivor, is their son.
Mrs. Walker continued to fly after the war, when she flew her own light aircraft around Britain encouraging young women to take up careers in aviation through an organization known as the Women’s Junior Air Corp. She bought the sheep farm in Surrey and became master of the local fox hunt.
In 1963, at the age of 45, she became the first British woman to fly faster than sound when she piloted a two-seat R.A.F. Lightning fighter at a speed of 1,262 miles an hour over the North Sea. That made her, briefly, holder of the world air speed record for women; it was broken in 1964 by Jacqueline Cochran Odlum, one of more than a dozen American women who had flown with the Air Transport Auxiliary during the war.
In 1964, Mrs. Odlum, flying an F-104G Starfighter, raised the record to 1,429 miles an hour.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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JOSEPH EGAN, LAWYER WHO FOUGHT NUCLEAR WASTE SITE
WASHINGTON — Joseph R. Egan, a nuclear engineer-turned-lawyer who led Nevada’s legal campaign to block a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, died Wednesday at his home in Naples, Fla. He was 53.
Evan Vucci
Joseph R. Egan in 2004.
The cause was gastroesophageal cancer, his family said.
Mr. Egan, in an obituary he wrote weeks ago that was posted on his law firm’s Web site after his death, said that he had arranged for his ashes to be spread at Yucca Mountain, in Southern Nevada, with the words “radwaste buried here only over my dead body.”
Mr. Egan’s wife, Patricia, said by telephone on Friday that Mr. Egan had been cremated, adding, “We are going to do it.”
Legal challenges by Mr. Egan’s firm, Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch, have helped set back the Energy Department’s project at Yucca by years. In 2001 he filed a lawsuit raising a variety of legal objections to the site, which was chosen by Congress. In 2004 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with one challenge, that the repository should be judged over one million years, not over 10,000 years as the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency had planned. The Yucca project’s fate is not clear today, 10 years after it was to have opened.
Mr. Egan’s specialties included nuclear nonproliferation law. He lobbied the federal government to take back highly enriched uranium that could be useful in a weapons program but had been exported to various countries under the Atoms for Peace program beginning in the 1950s.
On behalf of workers and an environmental group, he sued Lockheed Martin for illegal waste storage and disposal when it operated a government-owned uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Ky. The Justice Department later joined the lawsuit. He filed an antitrust suit against the operator of a nuclear waste dump in Utah on behalf of a client who wanted to open a competing dump in Texas. (The suit was settled after the Texas site opened.)
Mr. Egan earned an undergraduate degree in physics from M.I.T., and then two master’s degrees, in nuclear engineering and in technology and policy. He worked as a nuclear reactor engineer for Commonwealth Edison in Illinois and later for the New York Power Authority. He received a law degree from Columbia University, and was a partner at Shaw Pittman in Washington and a senior associate at LeBoeuf Lamb Greene & MacRae in New York before founding his own firm in Washington.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Egan is survived by two children, Jennifer and Warren, of Naples; his parents, Dick and Lucy Egan of Melrose, Minn., where Mr. Egan grew up; a brother, Timothy, of Billings, Mont.; and three sisters, Michelle Langlas of Naples and Anne Gant and Denise Loonan, both of Minneapolis.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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CHARLES R. ELLIS, PRESIDENT OF JOHN WILEY & SONS
Charles R. Ellis, an executive who led the venerable family-owned publishing house John Wiley & Sons back to fiscal health in the 1990s after a period of misdirected expansion, died on May 4 in Paris. He was 72 and had homes in Paris and Manhattan.
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Charles R. Ellis
The cause was cancer, said Susan Spilka, a spokeswoman for Wiley.
Wiley, now an international publisher of textbooks, business books and scholarly journals as well as trade books (including Frommer’s travel guides, the “CliffsNotes” study guides and the “For Dummies” how-to series), was founded in a Lower Manhattan print shop in 1807 and celebrated its 200th anniversary last year.
Mr. Ellis was president and chief executive from 1990 to 1998, taking over after the company made forays outside its core businesses, in particular into business education and training.
Mr. Ellis refocused the company, selling off a new acquisition, the Wilson Learning Corporation, and strengthening the core areas with acquisitions of his own, including Alan R. Liss Inc., a leading life-sciences publisher.
“There was a period in the ’80s when the company floundered, and he brought it back to profitability,” Ms. Spilka said.
During his tenure the company was listed for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange and began an Internet business, putting all its journals online in 1997.
Mr. Ellis, who was keenly interested in intellectual property protections, made Wiley one of the first publishers to develop a digital object identifier — or D.O.I. — system, for embedding identifying marks in electronic books and journals to track their use in cyberspace. From 1992 to 1994, he was chairman of the Association of American Publishers.
Charles Richard Ellis was born in Manhattan on July 20, 1935. He graduated from Princeton and for a time worked as an assistant for the philosopher Bertrand Russell, later receiving an M.A. from Columbia. Before joining Wiley, he had worked at several other publishers, including Pergamon Press, D.C. Heath and the science and health publisher Elsevier, based in the Netherlands.
He is survived by his wife, Sandi; a son, Kenneth, from an earlier marriage; four stepchildren, Christopher Moore of Baltimore, Shannon Moore of Paris, Patrick and Nicholas Moore; nine grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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EDDY ARNOLD, COUNTRY SINGER WITH POP LUSTER
NASHVILLE — Eddy Arnold, the gentleman crooner who took country music uptown and sold more than 85 million recordings over seven decades, died Thursday. He was 89.
ABC
Eddy Arnold, a hitmaker in pop and country, in the 1950s.
Eddie Arnold sings ‘Make the World Go Away’
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Associated Press
Eddy Arnold in his office in Brentwood, Tenn., in 2002.
His death, at a care facility near Nashville, was confirmed by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
From his debonair attire to the savvy with which he adapted his sound to popular trends, Mr. Arnold personified the evolution of country music in the years after World War II from a rural vernacular to an idiom with broad mainstream appeal.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a country-and-western singer,” he told a reporter for The Charlotte Observer of North Carolina in 1968. “With the type material I do, I’m really a pop music artist.” He added, “I want my songs to be accepted by everyone.”
Mr. Arnold was a harbinger of the lush, orchestral Nashville Sound, made popular by the likes of Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline in the late 1950s and ’60s. His greatest success was on the country charts, where, taken together, his singles have spent more time — including more time at the top — than those of any other singer in the music’s history.
Thirty-seven of his hits crossed over to the pop charts. The biggest of those, “Make the World Go Away,” reached the pop Top 10 during the fall of 1965, when it was heard on the radio with the latest records by the Beatles, the Supremes and the Rolling Stones.
At the heart of Mr. Arnold’s appeal was his lustrous, purling singing voice. Unlike many of his Nashville peers, he sang not through his nose but from his diaphragm. Influenced by crooners like Bing Crosby and Gene Autry, he favored romantic ballads and novelties over songs about drinking and cheating. Intimacy was his calling card.
Reviewing an appearance he gave at Carnegie Hall in March 1968, Robert Shelton wrote of Mr. Arnold in The New York Times: “His singing is smooth, earnest, buoyant and uncomplicated. He is sentimental and direct. For women he seems to be a non-challenging romantic figure, and for their husbands a non-threatening man to have around the turntable.”
He was known to draw inspiration in his music from his wife of 66 years, Sally Gayhart Arnold — Miss Sally to the country music world — who died on March 11 at 87.
Mr. Arnold’s early peak of popularity was from 1945 to 1954, during which he had 57 consecutive singles in the country Top 10. Nineteen of those hits reached No. 1. Two of them, “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)” and “I Wanna Play House With You,” were later recorded by Elvis Presley, who patterned his crooning style after Mr. Arnold’s.
In 1943 Mr. Arnold hired Col. Tom Parker as his manager. A former carnival barker, Mr. Parker later directed the career of Presley.
Mr. Arnold effectively used radio and television as a platform for promoting his music. He hosted a series of network variety shows and appeared as a guest on the likes of Milton Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater.” He also starred in the Hollywood movies “Feudin’ Rhythm” (1949) and “Hoedown” (1950).
Mr. Arnold was among the first country singers to perform in the casino rooms of Las Vegas, appearing at the Sahara as early as 1953. He announced his retirement from performing 46 years later in Las Vegas, at the Orleans Hotel and Casino. That year, at 81, he had his final record on the charts, a remake of his 1955 hit “The Cattle Call,” sung with LeAnn Rimes, then a teenager.
Richard Edward Arnold was born May 15, 1918, in rural Henderson, Tenn. His father died after Mr. Arnold turned 11; several months later creditors foreclosed on the family farm, forcing the Arnolds to become sharecroppers.
Music became a way out of poverty for Mr. Arnold. He began playing the guitar when he was 7. Ten years later he was performing in beer halls and cafes and singing on the radio in Jackson, Tenn. He went on to work on radio shows in Memphis, St. Louis and Nashville before becoming, in 1940, the lead singer of Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys, a popular act on “The Grand Ole Opry.” Three years later he struck out on his own and formed the Tennessee Plowboys.
He made his early recordings, on which he not only sang but also played guitar, in New York and Chicago under the supervision of Steve Sholes, who led the country and R&B divisions of RCA. He later recorded in Nashville, working with, among others, the guitarist Chet Atkins as his producer.
The rise of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s saw singers like Presley supplanting Mr. Arnold and other perennial hitmakers on the country charts. Mr. Arnold considered retiring from the music business to focus on his already successful ventures in real estate development.
Instead he dropped his plowboy image and recast himself as a cabaret-style singer clad in a tuxedo and backed by a string section. More Perry Como than Hank Williams, he was the embodiment of hillbilly music’s move from the country to the city.
Mr. Arnold was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1966 and won the Country Music Association’s first Entertainer of the Year award the next year.
He is survived by his children, Richard Edward Jr. of Nashville and Jo Ann Pollard of Brentwood, Tenn.; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Arnold is the subject of two biographies, both published in 1997: “Eddy Arnold: I’ll Hold You in My Heart,” by Don Cusic, and “Eddy Arnold: Pioneer of the Nashville Sound,” by Michael Streissguth. As he told Mr. Streissguth, Mr. Arnold carried a sound but simple philosophy about his work:
“I’ve always picked good songs even though they were considered country. I always picked a good lyric, and that gave me a wider audience than just the country buyers. I did that on purpose. I just wanted a good song. I never was political about songwriters. I still believe that if you always record good songs, you can have a good career.”
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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BEVERLEE MCKINSEY, ACTRESS IN DECADES OF SOAP OPERAS
Beverlee McKinsey, a well-known soap opera actress of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s who played memorably strong women on “Another World” and “Guiding Light,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 72 and lived in Los Angeles.
NBC, via Photofest
Beverlee McKinsey in “Texas” in the early 1980s.
The cause was complications of a kidney transplant, her son, Scott McKinsey, said.
From 1970 to 1979, Ms. McKinsey played Iris Carrington, a manipulative, father-obsessed woman, on “Another World,” broadcast on NBC. She reprised the role in 1980 and ’81 on the spinoff “Texas,” also on NBC.
From 1984 to 1992, Ms. McKinsey played the wealthy matriarch Alexandra Spaulding on “Guiding Light,” on CBS.
Beverlee Magruder was born on Aug. 9, 1935, in McAlester, Okla. She earned a bachelor’s degree in drama from the University of Oklahoma in 1956. In the 1960s and afterward she made guest appearances on many TV shows, including “Mannix,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “McMillan & Wife.”
On Broadway, Ms. McKinsey appeared in the short-lived play “Mert & Phil” (1974), which starred Estelle Parsons. She played the young wife, Honey, in the original London production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1964, opposite Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill.
Ms. McKinsey returned briefly to soap operas in 1994, in the role of Myrna Slaughter on “General Hospital,” on ABC.
Ms. McKinsey’s first marriage, to Mark McKinsey, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Angus Duncan. She married her longtime companion, Berkeley Harris, shortly before his death in 1984. Besides her son, a director of “General Hospital,” she is survived by a grandson.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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IRVINE ROBBINS, ICE CREAM ENTREPRENEUR AND MAESTRO OF 31 FLAVORS
Irvine Robbins, who with his brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, started the Baskin-Robbins chain of ice cream stores — together concocting quirky flavor combinations with names like Daiquiri Ice, Pink Bubblegum and Here Comes the Fudge — died on Monday near his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 90.
Tony Korody/Sygma
Irvine Robbins sampled some of his wares in 1976.
He died of natural causes, his daughter Marsha Veit said.
The company name could have been Robbins-Baskin. Although it was Mr. Robbins who opened the first store, at the intersection of Adams and Palmer Streets in Glendale, Calif., on Dec. 7, 1945, and it was three years more before he and Mr. Baskin became partners, they took a carefully familial approach to deciding who would come first in the name of what eventually became a vast international enterprise. They flipped a coin.
“They worked closely on everything,” Ms. Veit said. “They would come up with ideas for flavors based on what was happening at the time, like Cocoa a Go-Go, when go-go dancers were popular. They would sit in the kitchen tasting, making sure the best ingredients were used.”
The company’s famous “31 flavors” (essentially one for each day of the month, but actually 34 when chocolate, vanilla and strawberry were included) have varied, numbering more than 1,000 over the years, according to its Web site. They include Nuts to You, Baseball Nut, Rocky Road, Candi-date, Cafe Olé, Huckleberry Finn, chocolate cheesecake, pineapple coconut and Mr. Robbins’s personal favorite, Jamoca almond fudge.
One day in 1964, Ms. Veit said, he received a phone call from a reporter for The New York Post, asking what flavor Baskin-Robbins was planning to introduce to celebrate the Beatles’ arrival for their appearance on Ed Sullivan’s television show. Caught unaware, he came up with Beatlenut, and then scrambled to find an unnamed flavor with nuts in it to match. Two days later, it was in all the company’s stores. By then, there were about 650 Baskin-Robbins stores nationwide.
In a 1976 interview in The New York Times, in which he said he ate three or four scoops a day, Mr. Robbins said that Americans had become adventurous in their ice cream choices. “They’re not embarrassed to ask for some of these wild flavors,” he said. “I think we’ve had a little bit to do with making it more acceptable.”
At the time, Mr. Robbins was still chairman of Baskin-Robbins, although the company had been sold to United Fruit in 1967, the year Mr. Baskin died. When Mr. Robbins retired in 1978, the chain had more than 1,600 stores in the United States, Canada, Japan and Belgium. Baskin-Robbins, along with Dunkin’ Donuts, is now part of Dunkin’ Brands, with 5,800 stores in 34 countries.
“We were in the franchising business before the word was popular,” Mr. Robbins said.
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Dec. 6, 1917, Mr. Robbins was the son of Aaron and Goldie Chmelnitsky Robbins, immigrants from Poland and Russia, respectively. When Mr. Robbins was a child, the family moved to Tacoma, Wash., where his father became a partner in a dairy.
As a teenager, Mr. Robbins worked at the retail store connected to the dairy where, among other products, ice cream was sold at a nickel a cone — “a pretty big one, too,” he said. He soon realized that he could double or triple sales with playful labeling: “Super Banana Treat” replaced a sign that said “three scoops of ice cream, a slice of banana, two kinds of toppings.”
“I got the idea that the way to sell ice cream was not through a grocery store but through a specialty store,” he said.
After Mr. Robbins graduated from the University of Washington in 1939 and served in the Army in World War II, he was able to test that idea. He cashed in an insurance policy his father had given him as a bar mitzvah present and used the $6,000 to open his first store.
By 1953, the partners sold the eight stores they owned to the managers and began making far more money producing ice cream at a plant in Burbank, Calif. An advertising agency designed the Baskin-Robbins logo, the chocolate-and-cherry-dotted signs and the “31 flavors” concept.
Mr. Robbins married Irma Gevurtz in 1942. Besides his wife and his daughter Marsha, of Mount Kisco, N.Y., he is survived by another daughter, Erin Robbins of Grass Valley, Calif.; a son John, of Soquel, Calif.; two sisters, Shirley Familian, who was Mr. Baskin’s wife, and Elka Weiner, both of Los Angeles; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Ice cream never melted from Mr. Robbins’s mind. When the family lived in Encino, Calif., the house had a soda fountain inside and a swimming pool outside shaped like an ice cream cone. After the company was sold in 1967, Mr. and Mrs. Robbins rented an apartment in Balboa at Newport Beach, to be near the boat they had bought and christened The 32d Flavor.
(Article courtesy of Te New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Marlene Dietrich, Symbol of Glamour, Dies at 90
(May 6, 1992)
Ann
