Barbara Ann Teer, who gave up a promising career in commercial entertainment to concentrate on developing African-American culture in Harlem and who founded the National Black Theater there, died on Monday in Harlem. She was 71.
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Barbara Ann Teer in 2003.
She died of natural causes, said her daughter, Sade Lythcott.
Ms. Teer, who first went to Harlem in the 1960s as a teacher at Wadleigh Junior High School, became, over four decades, a Harlem nurturer, a Harlem cheerleader, a Harlem developer and a Harlem fixture.
A dancer and actor who appeared frequently in New York productions, on Broadway and off, she had grown tired of being offered stereotypical roles by white producers and became a fierce and eloquent advocate for black artists and a black culture independent of the white-dominated mainstream.
She announced her philosophy in a 1968 article in The New York Times, writing a call to arms to black artists in general and black theater artists in particular to declare and define themselves.
“For those brothers and sisters who are still tied to whitey and have not yet seen the need to shape their own black cultural art expression,” she wrote, “let’s look at one of whitey’s institutions: the American theater, an establishment developed, owned and operated by him for the sole purpose of making money.”
“We must begin building cultural centers where we can enjoy being free, open and black,” she added, “where we can find out how talented we really are, where we can be what we were born to be and not what we were brainwashed to be, where we can literally ‘blow our minds’ with blackness.”
For Ms. Teer this was not idle rhetoric. That year she founded the National Black Theater, an institution dedicated to the performing arts, community advocacy and the appreciation of the history and lifestyle of black Americans. The theater, which bought its own building at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue with financing she arranged, produces shows, lectures and other special events, presents art exhibits, conducts workshops and holds classes.
As executive director, not only was Ms. Teer in charge of fund-raising and administration, she also wrote and directed for a music, dance and theater troupe that appeared at Lincoln Center and on the public television program “Soul.” The company toured in Bermuda, Guyana, Haiti, South Africa and Trinidad, as well as in the United States.
Ms. Teer was especially drawn to the Yoruba people of Nigeria, which she visited many times and from which she brought Yoruba artists to New York to create works for the theater building.
Ms. Teer was born in East St. Louis, Ill., on June 18, 1937, and moved to New York City after earning a bachelor of arts in dance from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. On Broadway, Ms. Teer was dance captain in “Kwamina,” a 1961 show choreographed by Agnes de Mille, and appeared in 1966 as an actor in William Inge’s comedy “Where’s Daddy?”
She had an early, brief marriage to the actor and comedian Godfrey Cambridge, who died in 1976. In addition to her daughter, who lives in Manhattan, she is survived by a son, Michael Lythcott, also of Manhattan.
After receiving honorary doctorates in the mid-1990s from the University of Rochester and the Southern Illinois University, she referred to herself, and was known to colleagues, as Dr. Teer. “She had a deep appreciation for the historical significance of the African presence in the Harlem community,” said Howard Dodson, director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “She touched thousands of lives here, bringing to some the consciousness of their African origins that they’d either forgotten or were never in touch with, and providing for others a self-affirmation that was needed as they tried to navigate the waters of the American nation state.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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Randy Pausch, the professor whose “last lecture” made him a Lou-Gehrig-like symbol of the beauty and briefness of life, died Friday at his home in Chesapeake, Va. He was 47, and had lived five months longer than the six months a doctor gave him as an upside limit last August.
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Kaylin Bowers/Daily Progress, via Associated Press
A crowd filled an auditorium at the University of Virginia in November to hear from Randy Pausch, a former professor there.
The cause was metastasized pancreatic cancer, Carnegie Mellon University announced.
Professors are sometimes asked to give lectures on what wisdom they would impart if they knew it was their last chance. Soon after Dr. Pausch (pronounced powsh), a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, accepted that challenge, he learned he had months to live.
He hesitated, then went ahead with the lecture, on Sept. 18, 2007. He said he intended to have fun and advised others to do the same. He spoke of the importance of childlike wonder.
But Dr. Pausch did not omit things that would break just about anybody’s heart. He spoke of his love for his wife, Jai, and had a birthday cake for her wheeled on stage. He spoke of their three young children, saying he had made his decision to speak mostly to leave them a video memory — to put himself in a metaphorical bottle that they might someday discover on a beach.
As the video of his lecture spread across the Web and was translated into many languages, Dr. Pausch also became the co-author of a best-selling book and a deeply personal friend, wise, understanding and humorous, to many he never met.
“His fate is ours, sped up,” wrote Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal columnist who covered the lecture on the chance it would be a good story, and helped bring it wider awareness. The book he wrote with Dr. Pausch, “The Last Lecture,” was published this year and became a No. 1 best seller; last week it was still No. 1 on The New York Times list of advice books.
Some of the millions who saw Dr. Pausch on YouTube and elsewhere wrote letters and e-mail to The Journal and many blogs. Some said he inspired them to quit feeling sorry for themselves, or to move on from divorces, or to pay more attention to their families. A woman said the video gave her the strength to escape an abusive relationship; others said they decided not to commit suicide because of it.
The effort and the effect, even before the book, have been likened to Mitch Albom’s book on lessons he learned from his dying college professor, “Tuesdays with Morrie” (1997).
Dr. Pausch said in an interview with USA Today that he had never read that book.
“I didn’t know there was a dying-professor section at the bookstore,” he said with typical sardonic wit.
Time magazine named Dr. Pausch one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and ABC declared him one of its three “persons of the year” for 2007. Oprah Winfrey promised him 10 minutes of uninterrupted speaking time, and he used it to give a condensed version of the lecture.
Randolf Frederick Pausch was born in Baltimore on Oct. 23, 1960. In his lecture, he praised his parents for letting him paint pictures on the walls of his room. Dozens of parents wrote him to say they followed this example and allowed their children to decorate in the same way.
Dr. Pausch graduated from Brown University, earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, taught at the University of Virginia for a decade and joined Carnegie Mellon’s faculty in 1997. In addition to working in the computer science department, he had appointments in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the School of Design.
His passion was creating programs he called computer worlds that students could use to create games. In fact, they were learning sophisticated computer skills. His annual virtual reality contest was highly anticipated, and work on virtual reality by some of his students won them the chance to experience weightlessness on an aircraft. They then used virtual reality techniques to mimic weightlessness.
Dr. Pausch received awards from academic and industry groups. Carnegie Mellon named a footbridge between its computer science and arts building for him to commemorate his efforts to link the fields.
Carnegie Mellon had a tradition of asking professors near the ends of their careers to deliver what it called “The Last Lecture,” but the name had been changed to “Voyages” when Dr. Pausch gave his. He bet with friends that no more than 50 people would attend. There was standing room only in the 400-seat auditorium.
Using images on a giant screen, he began by showing a slide of CT scans revealing 10 tumors on his liver. He then said he never felt better, and dropped to the floor to do push-ups, some one-handed.
He showed photos of himself as a boy, then listed his youthful dreams: to win giant stuffed animals at carnivals, to walk in zero gravity, to design Disney rides, to write a World Book entry (on virtual reality). He said he had accomplished them all.
But it turned out that other aspirations remained. When the director of the new “Star Trek” film heard that Dr. Pausch was a Trekkie, he invited him to appear in a cameo role, including a spoken line. When the Pittsburgh Steelers heard he had dreamed of playing pro football, they let him participate in a practice.
This March, Dr. Pausch testified before a House committee in Washington in favor of more money for researching pancreatic cancer. He held up an 8-by-10 picture of his three children and his wife, whom he noted would soon be his widow.
Dr. Pausch is survived by his wife, the former Jai Glasgow; his sons, Dylan and Logan; his daughter, Chloe; his mother, Virginia Pausch of Columbia, Md.; and his sister, Tamara Mason of Lynchburg, Va.
Dr. Pausch gave practical advice in his lecture, avoiding spiritual and religious matters. He did, however, mention that he experienced a near-deathbed conversion: he switched and bought a Macintosh computer.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
“RANDY PAUSCH’S A FINAL FAREWELL”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIysXLiA5s0
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JOHNNY GRIFFIN, JAZZ SAXOPHONIST
Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented American jazz musicians of his generation yet who spent most of his career in Europe, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived there for 24 years.
Steve Berman/The New York Times
Johnny Griffin at the Blue Note in New York in 1997.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Miriam, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert on Monday in Hyères, France.
Mr. Griffin’s modest height earned him the nickname the Little Giant; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as the Fastest Gun in the West; a group he led with his fellow saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was informally called the Tough Tenor band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard-bop tenor players. And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization.
In the early 1960s, embittered by the critical acceptance of free jazz, he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. Feeling that the American marketplace had no use for him (at a time when he was also having marital and tax troubles), he left for Europe, where he became a celebrated jazz elder.
“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything anymore,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.”
Indeed, Mr. Griffin’s work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.
Johnny Griffin was born in Chicago on April 24, 1928, and grew up on the South Side. He attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the famed high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, whose other students included the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.
Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: at age 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14 he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the blues guitarist and singer T-Bone Walker. At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, where he switched from alto to tenor. From then until 1951 he was based in New York City but mostly on the road.
By 1947 he was touring with the rhythm-and-blues band of the trumpeter Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan, with whom he made the first recordings for the Atlantic label. He entered the United States Army in 1951; stationed in Hawaii, he played in an Army band.
Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became forces in jazz. He heard them both with Billy Eckstine’s band in 1945 and, having first internalized the more balladlike saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, became entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of bebop, as the new music of Parker and Gillespie was known. In general his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.
Beyond the 1960s his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.
In the late 1940s he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk; he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his Army service he went back to Chicago, where he worked with Monk for the first time, a job that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet in New York in 1958. In 1967 he toured Europe with a Monk octet.
Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint in 1957. The following year he began recording a series of albums as a leader for the Riverside label. On “Way Out!,” “The Little Giant” and other Riverside albums, his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles for testing a musician’s mettle.
A few years later he hooked up with Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, with whom he made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to find them either thrilling or filled with too many notes. The Griffin-Davis combination was a popular one, and the two men would sporadically reunite through the ’70s and ’80s.
Mr. Griffin left the United States in 1963, settling in Paris and recording mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates, like the drummer Kenny Clarke, and sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, the Netherlands. He moved to the Côte d’Azur with his second wife, Miriam, in 1980, and then in 1984 to Availles-Limouzine, near Poitiers in midwestern France, where he lived thereafter.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Griffin’s survivors include four children: his daughters Jo-Onna and Ingrid and a son, John Arnold Griffin, all of the New York City area, and another daughter, Cynthia Griffin of Bordeaux, France.
Mr. Griffin stayed true to the small-group bebop ideal with his American quartet, including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington. The record he made with this group for the Antilles label in 1991, “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.
Every April for many years, Mr. Griffin returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase. During those visits he usually also spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York, before returning home to his quiet house in the country.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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EUGENE A. FOSTER; LINKED THOMAS JEFFERON TO SALLY HEMMINGS
Eugene A. Foster, a pathologist who helped establish genetically the long-alleged liaison between Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, and his slave mistress Sally Hemings, died July 21 in Charlottesville, Va. He was 81.
Leslie Close/The Daily Progress, 1999
Eugene A. Foster
His death followed a long bout with prostate cancer and leukemia, his wife, Jane Foster, said.
Dr. Foster spent most of his career at the University of Virginia Medical School and at the New England Medical Center at Tufts University. It was only after his retirement and return to Charlottesville that he burst into the public eye with his project on Jefferson.
As early as 1802, the second year of his first term, Jefferson was accused in an article in The Richmond Recorder of having fathered a family with Hemings, a slave on his estate. Such an affair was denied, Jefferson’s family later spreading the story that any physical resemblance between the president and the slave children could more probably be laid at the door of his young nephews Peter and Samuel Carr.
A long line of Jefferson historians, most recently Joseph Ellis, had concluded that an affair was unthinkable.
“After five years mulling over the huge cache of evidence that does exist on the thought and character of the historical Jefferson, I have concluded that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote,” Mr. Ellis wrote in 1996.
The following year, Annette Gordon-Reed, a black lawyer, sized up the same evidence and reached the opposite conclusion: a liaison was very likely, although it could not be proved, Ms. Gordon-Reed wrote in her book “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.”
Dr. Foster played a remarkable role in helping substantiate this challenge to the consensus view. He had resumed a project to test whether Jefferson was the father of Hemings’s children, after hearing of a new genetic technique of tracing ancestry through the Y chromosome, which descends through the male line.
Jefferson had no male descendants, but blood samples from five descendants of his uncle, Field Jefferson, provided Dr. Foster with the authentic Jefferson Y chromosome. He also tested descendants of the Carrs and of Hemings’s son Eston.
Dr. Foster found in 1998 that the Jefferson Y chromosome differed from that of the Carr family, but was identical to that of Eston Hemings’s lineage.
His report was a model of scientific caution, saying that he could not rule out the possibility a Jefferson other than Thomas was the father of Eston.
But that seemed unlikely, he said, after taking account of all the historical evidence, which included Jefferson’s recorded presence at Monticello at the conception of all Hemings’s known children, a fact noted by the historian Winthrop Jordan.
Dr. Foster’s report, Ms. Gordon-Reed said, “was an enormous boost to my book,” because it ruled out the Carrs, the historians’ favorite candidates as fathers of the Hemings children. The report, and her study, “helped change the consensus on the Jefferson and Hemings story, from a belief it could not possibly have happened to a belief that it did happen,” she said.
Dr. Ellis was one historian who admitted error and said he had changed his mind in light of the new evidence.
The consensus was not achieved without some attacks on Dr. Foster’s findings. But he took them “pretty much in stride.” Ms. Gordon-Reed said.
Besides his wife, Dr. Foster is survived by three children, Susannah Baxendale of Culver City, Calif.; Ethan Foster of Sedona, Ariz., and Rebecca Foster of Charlottesville; and a brother, Roger Foster of Long Beach, N.Y.
In a 1998 interview about the Jefferson case, Dr. Foster expressed surprise that people had so willingly let him take specimens of their blood.
“The whole business has been a coming together of improbable events,” he said.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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PAUL BENTLEY, DETECTIVE WHO ARRESTED LEE HARVEY OSWALD
Correction Appended
Paul Bentley, the Dallas police detective who snapped the handcuffs on Lee Harvey Oswald 80 minutes after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Monday at his home in Dallas. He was 87.
Jim MacCammon, courtesy of Howard Upchurch
Paul Bentley, right, with Lee Harvey Oswald in custody outside the Texas Theater in Dallas.
His death was confirmed by Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the exhibit that occupies the floor in the former Texas School Book Depository from which Oswald fired his 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle at the 35th president.
When Detective Bentley hurtled over several rows in the Texas Theater that day, Nov. 22, 1963, to get to the slim man pointing a pistol at another police officer, he had no idea that the man was Kennedy’s killer.
“At the time of the arrest, I had no knowledge whatsoever that this might possibly be our suspect in regards to the assassination of the president,” Detective Bentley told WFAA-TV in Dallas in a 1963 interview.
But he did know that the man might be a suspect in the shooting of Officer J. D. Tippit, who had been killed half an hour earlier when he confronted Oswald on a nearby street some 45 minutes after Kennedy was shot.
The assistant manager of a shoe store near the theater, in the Oak Cliff section southwest of downtown, had told the ticket taker that a man acting suspiciously had sneaked into the theater.
“The person who saw him suggested that she call the police, because he might be connected to either the shooting of the president or of Officer Tippit,” Mr. Mack said in an interview on Thursday.
Detective Bentley was at a police station when reports arrived that someone had fired on the president’s motorcade and, soon afterward, that an officer had been shot. He went to the site of the Tippit shooting, then to the theater.
“Bentley and several other officers went up to the balcony,” Mr. Mack said. “Officer Nick McDonald went through the back door, behind the screen, and stood on the stage. The shoe store manager was with him and pointed out the guy who had been acting suspiciously. As McDonald approached, Oswald stood up and said, ‘Well, it’s all over now.’ ”
When Officer McDonald came close, Oswald punched him and drew a pistol. Detective Bentley raced down from the balcony.
“That’s when I tried to get as close to him as possible, trying to grab the weapon,” he said in an oral history given to the museum in 1994. “I came over the backs of seats,” twisting his right ankle between two of them, and, along with other officers, subdued Oswald.
Photographs of Oswald in custody show a cut over his eye. It was caused by the Masonic ring Detective Bentley was wearing during the scuffle, about 20 rows back from the movie screen.
Seated in the patrol car to the left of Oswald during the ride downtown, Detective Bentley heard a dispatcher say Oswald was the prime suspect in the Kennedy shooting. “I turned to him, and I said, ‘Did you shoot President Kennedy?’ ” Detective Bentley recalled. “He said, ‘You find out for yourself.’ ”
Paul Lester Bentley was born in Dallas on June 29, 1921. He served in the Army Air Forces in World War II and joined the Dallas police in 1947. He retired from the department in 1968, then became security director for First National Bank in Dallas.
He is survived by his wife of 66 years, the former Mozelle Robertson; a sister, Mildred Waldroop; a son, James; and one grandson.
Two days after the Kennedy assassination, while being escorted through the basement of the Dallas city jail, Oswald was shot to death by Jack Ruby. At Ruby’s left at that moment, memorably captured by cameras, was Detective Jim Leavelle, wearing a light-colored Resistol. Clutching Ruby’s right arm, trying to wrench away his pistol, was Detective L. C. Graves — Detective Bentley’s brother-in-law.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 26, 2008
An obituary on Friday about Paul Bentley, a Dallas detective who helped capture the presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald , included an incorrect identification from a museum curator, in some editions, for the brand of hat worn two days later by Jim Leavelle, a Dallas police detective photographed escorting Oswald when he was killed. It was a Resistol, not a Stetson.
An obituary on Friday about Paul Bentley, a Dallas detective who helped capture the presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald , included an incorrect identification from a museum curator, in some editions, for the brand of hat worn two days later by Jim Leavelle, a Dallas police detective photographed escorting Oswald when he was killed. It was a Resistol, not a Stetson.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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SIDNEY CRAIG, CO-FOUNDER OF ‘JENNY CRAIG’
Sidney Craig, who with his wife, Genevieve, founded Jenny Craig Inc., the chain of weight-loss centers, which would eventually open more than 600 centers in four countries, died Monday at his home in Del Mar, Calif. He was 76.
Cara Thomas-Maskell/Associated Press
Sidney and Genevieve Craig cheering on one of their racehorses in 1992. They established a chain of weight-loss centers.
The death was confirmed by Patti Larchet, who is now chief executive of the company.
Mr. Craig was a partner in a small chain of women’s weight-loss salons called Body Contour in the 1970s when he met Genevieve Guidroz Bourcq, who was working at one of those salons, in New Orleans. Soon after, she became national director of operations for Body Contour, and in 1979, they married.
Three years later, the couple sold their interest in Body Contour and moved to Melbourne, Australia, where — using the diminutive of Ms. Craig’s given name — they opened the first Jenny Craig center.
Emphasizing long-term weight reduction through lifestyle changes, and offering counseling as well as prepared calorie-controlled meals, the company eventually opened centers in New Zealand, Canada and the United States. There were 655 Jenny Craig locations in 2006, when the company was bought by Nestlé for $600 million.
The Craigs were also owners of thoroughbred horses. In 1995, they bought a 237-acre breeding ranch in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. Five years ago, one of their horses, Candy Ride, won the $1 million purse at the Pacific Classic at the Del Mar racetrack.
A longtime goal of Mr. Craig’s was to win the Kentucky Derby. To that end, in 1992, Ms. Craig bought her husband a $2.5 million present for his 60th birthday: a horse named Dr Devious. The colt finished seventh in the Kentucky Derby but went on to win the Epsom Derby in England.
Sidney Harvey Craig was born in Vancouver, B.C., on March 22, 1932. His family later moved to California. For a time, Mr. Craig attended California State University, Fresno. Then, after serving in the Navy, he became an instructor for Arthur Murray Dance Studios. He eventually owned five Arthur Murray franchises.
His successful investments led to his stake in the Body Contour chain and the meeting with his future wife.
Besides his wife, Mr. Craig is survived by three daughters, Denise Merlone, Michelle Weinger and Susan McKenna; two sons, Steven and Jason; and 13 grandchildren.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ELEANOR FRIEDE, EDITED 1970 FABLED ‘SEAGULL’
Eleanor Friede, the book editor who sent “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” on its nonstop flight to publishing glory in 1970, died on July 14 at her home in Charlottesville, Va. She was 87.
Her death was confirmed by her stepdaughter, Kennedy Friede Golden.
In 1969, while working as an editor at Macmillan, Ms. Friede agreed to look at a much-rejected, very short tale by Richard Bach, a retired Air Force pilot and aviation writer. The fable, about a seagull named Jonathan who veers from his flock to seek freedom and flying perfection, charmed her.
“I think it has a chance of growing into a long-lasting standard book for readers of all ages,” Ms. Friede wrote in a memo to senior editors.
It was a good hunch. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” for which Mr. Bach received a $2,000 advance, became one of the biggest successes in publishing history, selling more than 3 million copies in hardcover.
Eleanor Kask was born in Rochester, N.Y., and grew up in Valley Stream on Long Island, where she haunted the town’s public library. Just weeks after graduating cum laude from Hofstra University, she got a job at World Publishing and began working her way up the ladder in publicity and marketing.
She married Donald Friede, an editor at World, in 1951. He died in 1965.
In 1968, when she was marketing director at Macmillan, Jeremiah Kaplan, the company’s president, coaxed her into moving to the editorial side. A keen amateur flier, she published aviation books, and, by serendipity, found her way to Mr. Bach.
In 1974 Ms. Friede was offered her own imprint at Delacorte Press, where she continued to publish flying books as well as works by writers like Françoise Sagan, Jorge Amado and Hugh Downs. In the early 1980s, after Doubleday acquired Delacorte, she started Eleanor Friede Books, a literary agency.
Inevitably, the soaring seagull hovered over her career right to the end, but Ms. Friede did not seem to mind. “You know, I really am very fond of the little creature,” she told The New York Times in 1981. “I have done and am doing other things. It’s really O.K. to be the seagull lady.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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FRANK PETO, TEACHER WHO FLED COMMUNISTS, TAUGHT IN HISD, AT TSU
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Frank Peto, a teacher and philosopher who fled his native Hungary in 1948 during the Soviet occupation and made a new life in Houston, died Friday in a Houston hospital. He was 96.
In Houston, Peto taught at Lamar High School and Texas Southern University.
In the 1960s, Peto took African-American students at TSU to services at white churches in Houston in an attempt to racially integrate the churches, said his daughter Miranda Peto, of San Francisco.
“They walked in defiantly,” she said. “At some churches, they were cold-shouldered, but at others, they were welcomed.”
Peto ran unsuccessfully for the Houston Independent School District board in the 1960s and in 1972 in a 22nd Congressional District race as a candidate of the Sophocratic Party, which he founded. The party was based on a philosophical movement.
Frank D. Peto was born in Szeged, Hungary, on Jan. 23, 1912.
He earned a doctorate in German and educational psychology in 1936 from the Francis Joseph University in Szeged and a doctorate in philosophy in 1940 from the University of Paris-Sorbonne.
In May 1940, Peto voluntarily joined the French army as it struggled against the Germans.
After the French surrender, Peto returned to Hungary.
In 1948, the Communists learned he had been secretary general of the Liberty Party, an anti-Communist group. Before they could arrest him, Peto fled to Austria.
In 1950, Peto was admitted to the United States.
After struggling in menial jobs, Peto came to Houston in 1956, the same year he was naturalized.
From 1956 to 1959, he taught French, German and Latin at Lamar High School. From 1960 to 1977, he taught French language and literature at TSU.
Peto defined Sophocracy as “the rule of the best thoughts” and an outgrowth of another of his concepts, the Cosmic Way. Not a religion, the Cosmic Way rejected the idea of a deity as a personality and father image and was based on the ability of man to shape his own destiny, he once said.
Peto, however, did not reject religion. He recognized it as “a potent, deep-seated force in man.”
Other survivors include his wife, Ulrike Fritsch Peto of Houston; a son, Lel Peto, of Houston; daughter, Melinda Peto Delmonico of Golden, Colo.; his son-in-law, Scott Delmonico; and a sister, Lilly Parducz of Szeged.
A memorial service and reception are scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Bradshaw-Carter Memorial & Funeral Services, 1734 W. Alabama.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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DEANE HLAVATY, CARHOP FOR PRINCE’S HAMBURGERS OF HOUSTON, TEXAS
She also traveled world as long-time travel agent
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Deane Hlavaty, one of the famed carhops at Prince’s Hamburgers in the 1930s and who later worked for decades for a Houston travel agency, died Thursday in a Houston hospice. She was 89.
When she was 17, she joined the carhops at Prince’s on what was then called “the end of Main” Street near Brays Bayou.
Prince’s soon became a popular spot in Houston for hamburgers, milkshakes and carhops after it opened in 1934.
The carhops wore scanty shorts, towering hats and served customers on trays braced on their cars’ doors.
Hlavaty later worked in reservations for Braniff Airways in downtown Houston.
In the 1940s, she worked for Stoddard’s Tours & Travel Service in downtown Houston and later near the Texas Medical Center. Hlavaty stayed with the company until she retired in 1994.
As a travel agent, Hlavaty traveled extensively, visiting virtually every part of the world, said her daughter, Sonja Earthman Novo of Houston.
Deane Hlavaty was born Eva Homerine Dean Jan. 1, 1919, in Emerson, Ark., the youngest of six children of Homer and Jessie Dean. Her father died before she was born, and she grew up in the homes of relatives, Novo said.
Hlavaty disliked her first name and later used Deane instead, her daughter said.
She married Henry “Hank” Hlavaty, a violinist and member of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. They were divorced in 1963.
“She was intelligent, loved jokes and fun, and was great with her grandkids,” said her other daughter, Carole Deane Christensen of Willis. She also is survived by grandchildren, great-grandchildren, cousins and nieces and nephews.
A funeral Mass is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. today at All Saints Catholic Church, 215 E. 10th St. Burial will be in Earthman’s Resthaven Cemetery.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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DOROTHY SINCLAIR, PIONEER KUHT PRODUCER WHO DEVELOPED EDUCATIONAL SHOWS AT NATION’S FIRST PUBLIC TV STATION
She developed educational shows at the nation’s first public TV station
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Dorothy Sinclair, a pioneer in the University of Houston’s KUHT (Channel 8), the nation’s first public TV station, and a producer of educational TV programs for children, died Wednesday at her daughter’s Houston home. She was 93.
Sinclair also wrote an elementary-grade textbook, Early Days in Texas, and another children’s book, Tales of the Texians, which she published herself.
Dorothy Elliott Tutt Sinclair was born Nov. 26, 1914, in Spartanburg, S.C., the daughter of George and Maude Yarborough Tutt. She grew up in Winston-Salem, N.C., graduating from R.J. Reynolds High School.
She attended Converse College in South Carolina and Mars Hill College in North Carolina before earning a degree from the University of North Carolina in 1935. She later earned a master’s degree in communications from the University of Houston.
At UNC, Sinclair studied the violin before switching to English, French and Latin. She later taught Latin in rural Hamlet, N.C., where she met Brownlow “Brownie” Wilson Sinclair. They married in 1938.
During World War II, Dorothy Sinclair worked as a reporter in Georgia and as a continuity writer for a women’s radio show. She later landed a job as an advertising director for a women’s department store in Winston-Salem.
After the war, the Sinclairs moved to Lubbock and then to Houston, where Dorothy was an advertising copy writer.
In 1952, she began producing educational TV programs with the Houston Independent School District and UH. This effort evolved into KUHT (Channel 8), the university’s public broadcasting station, said her granddaughter, Ashley Laumen Willett of Houston.
In 1965, Sinclair became executive director of Gulf Region Education Affiliates, which in its first year produced 105 programs for school districts in the region, according to the station’s Web site. By 1968, the organization served more than 468,000 students through a full daily Channel 8 program, according to the Web site.
Brownie Sinclair died in 1978. Dorothy Sinclair retired in 1984.
“She was very elegant, always,” Willett said. “She spoke eloquently, always witty and pithy.
You couldn’t help but like her. She had a calm, positive energy.”
Survivors include three sons, George Lott Sinclair of Humble, Brownlow Wilson Sinclair Jr. of Katy and Douglas Elliott Sinclair of College Station; and a daughter, Diane Yarborough Sinclair Laumen of Houston.
A memorial service is scheduled for 1 p.m. today at Memorial Drive United Methodist Church, 12955 Memorial.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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B. DON MAGNESS, “MR. MISS TEXAS”
Associated Press
FORT WORTH, Texas — B. Don Magness, the colorful, cigar-chomping showman dubbed Mr. Miss Texas and credited with shaping the state’s beauty pageant into the nation’s largest state pageant, has died.
Magness, 75, died Thursday at a hospice care center following complications from an April stroke, according to Thompson’s Harveson & Cole funeral home.
He was the former director of the Miss Texas pageant. His ability to create beauty contest winners and run the organization that featured them was legendary. Over the decades, contestants he coached were crowned Miss Texas and went on to wear Miss America tiaras, too.
“He was very well respected,” Richard La Boon, an associate produce for the Miss Texas pageant, said in a story in Friday’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “He was like the patriarch of the group. I will miss seeing his good smile and a cigar sticking out of his mouth.”
Friends and associates recalled his flashy personality, razor-sharp wit and sense of humor. A 1990 Life magazine article showed him posing in a bubble bath while gnawing on his trademark cigar.
The story, which described him as charming, quick and clever, noted his interest in what was best for the Miss Texas program and said he “sounds like Archie Bunker with a Texas twang.” Soon after that, allegations were raised that he made lewd remarks to contestants and he resigned under pressure as pageant director.
He said he regretted the article and apologized.
His family said he continued to volunteer for the organization.
Magness, a former Haltom City mayor pro tem, initially became affiliated with beauty pageants while working on the local level with the Miss Haltom City pageant in 1962. He began working at the state pageant level three years later. He went on to serve as director of the Southern Region of the National Association of Miss America Scholarship Pageants as well as treasurer and president.
A member of the Miss Texas Hall of Honor, he created the Miss Texas’ Outstanding Teen program.
Magness, who attended Texas Christian University, worked as a sports reporter for the Fort Worth Press. He held numerous positions in promotion, advertising and concessions management, which helped him land a job as manager of the Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium and Coliseum in 1965.
For 33 years he worked for the city of Fort Worth, eventually becoming the city’s public events director.
“He served the city well and did it with style and flamboyance,” former Fort Worth Mayor Kenneth Barr said. “He was in entertainment, and he had a promoter’s flair for what the public wanted to see.”
The funeral will be 11 a.m. Thursday at what is now known as Will Rogers Memorial Center.
Survivors include his wife, Jean Magness; son Scott Magness, of Fort Worth; stepson Brian Jones, of Keller; three stepgrandsons and a sister.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 