AURELIUS PIPER, SR., PAUGUSSETT TRIBE CHIEF
TRUMBULL, Conn. (AP) — Aurelius H. Piper Sr., hereditary chief of the Golden Hill Paugussett Indian Tribe, died on Aug. 3 at the tribe’s reservation in Trumbull. He was 92.
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Gary Guisinger, 1997
Aurelius H. Piper Sr.
His death was announced by tribal officials.
Mr. Piper, known as Big Eagle, was named chief in 1959 by his mother, Chieftess Rising Star, and later assumed responsibility for the tribe’s quarter-acre reservation in Trumbull.
Though small, the tribe, which has small reservations in Trumbull and Colchester, has been recognized by the State of Connecticut for more than 300 years. In 2004, however, the Bureau of Indian Affairs rejected the tribe’s request for federal recognition.
In the fight to be recognized, the Paugussetts filed claims to more than 700,000 acres of land, setting off a flurry of legal challenges. The land claims, which stretched from Middletown to Wilton and from Greenwich through lower Westchester County in New York, were eventually dropped, but could have been revived if the tribe had received federal recognition.
In 1993, Mr. Piper’s son Kenneth, also known as Moonface Bear, was the central figure in a 10-week armed standoff between state police and the Colchester faction of the tribe, over the sale of untaxed cigarettes on the reservation. Kenneth Piper died in 1996.
Mr. Piper traveled the world as a representative of the Golden Hill Tribe, Native Americans and other minority groups.
He served on many boards and commissions throughout Connecticut, fighting for the rights of American Indians and other minorities. He also served as a spiritual adviser to Native Americans in prison.
Mr. Piper served in the United States military during World War II, and took part in the troop landings in North Africa, according to the tribe.
He is survived by his wife, the former Marsha Conte; five children; and several stepchildren, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 13, 2008, on page B6 of the New York edition.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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DOTTIE COLLINS STAR PITCHER OF WOMEN’S BASEBALL LEAGUE
Dottie Collins, who was a star pitcher in women’s professional baseball in the 1940s and later played a major role in preserving the history of the women’s game, died Tuesday in Fort Wayne, Ind. She was 84.
National Baseball Hall of Fame Library
Dottie Collins in the 1940s.
The cause was a stroke, said her son-in-law, Michael Tyler.
Pitching for six seasons in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, created in 1943 to provide home front entertainment while many major leaguers were off to war, Collins dazzled opposing batters.
She pitched underhand, sidearm and overhand; she threw curveballs, fastballs and changeups; and in the summer of 1948, she pitched until she was four months pregnant.
She won more than 20 games in each of her first four seasons. She threw 17 shutouts and had a league-leading 293 strikeouts in 1945 for the Fort Wayne Daisies, when the women’s game resembled fast-pitch softball.
But Collins’s greatest contribution to women’s baseball may have come when its ball clubs had long been forgotten.
The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., had been considering an exhibition on women and baseball during the mid-1980s, but, as Ted Spencer, its chief curator, recalled in an interview, it had little material to display until Collins approached him.
“When I connected with Dottie, the ball started to roll,” Spencer said. “If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know where it would have gone.”
In 1987, Collins helped form an association of former players in the All-American league.
She drew on her contacts to provide the Hall of Fame with memorabilia from the league, spurring creation of its Women in Baseball exhibit in 1988. Now an enlarged, permanent collection, the exhibit inspired the 1992 Hollywood movie “A League of Their Own,” a reprise of women’s pro baseball during World War II.
Dottie Collins was born Dorothy Wiltse in Inglewood, Calif. Her father, Daniel, a welder for an oil company, taught her to pitch. She played women’s softball in Southern California, then joined the All-American league in 1944 with the Minneapolis Millerettes.
The Millerettes relocated to Fort Wayne, as the Daisies, in 1945, and Collins became a pitching mainstay for them. She had a career record of 117-76 and an earned run average of 1.83.
Some four decades after she retired, Collins reflected on major league ballplayers and said she was none too impressed in light of her feats.
“I pitched and won both games of a doubleheader once pitching underhand,” she told Susan E. Johnson in “When Women Played Hardball.”
“I think I could have pitched a doubleheader overhand, too,” she said. “I don’t think it would be that hard. Nowadays, the men can’t do it, but hell, they can’t do nothin’.”
The All-American league went out of business after the 1954 season, and the images of the young women in their one-piece tuniclike dresses, skirt above the knees, playing before enthusiastic crowds in cities like Fort Wayne and South Bend, Ind.; Rockford, Ill.; and Kenosha and Racine, Wis., faded.
Collins and her husband, Harvey, whom she married in 1946, raised a family in Fort Wayne, and like the other ballplayers of her day, she lost touch with former teammates. But the association that Collins helped found brought those women together again. Collins became its treasurer and an editor of its newsletter, and she was also a spokeswoman for the alumnae as interest in the women grew, an outgrowth of the Cooperstown tribute and the Penny Marshall movie, which starred Geena Davis, Madonna, Tom Hanks and Rosie O’Donnell.
Collins is survived by her daughter, Patricia Tyler of Fort Wayne; two grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2000.
June Peppas, a rookie with the 1948 Daisies, remembered how Collins “kind of played mother” to her and fellow rookies, teaching them how to conduct themselves as professional athletes, and how she provided emotional support for former teammates over the years.
“She had a lot of compassion for everybody,” Peppas said from her home in Florida. “She did a lot of letter-writing to support people who had problems. She was a good shoulder.”
When the Hall of Fame exhibit opened, many of the All-American league’s former players were on hand, accompanied by children who had never known of their mothers’ baseball exploits. Collins said she found the moment immensely gratifying.
“The movie is second place so far as we are concerned,” she told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1992. “Being accepted by Cooperstown was the greatest thing that happened to any of us.”
(A version of this article appeared in print on August 17, 2008, on page A22 of the New York edition.)
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ELEO POMARE, MODERN DANCE CHOREOGRAPHER
Eleo Pomare, a modern-dance choreographer whose mordant wit filtered through his angry social-protest pieces about the human condition and the plight of blacks in particular, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 70 and lived in Manhattan.
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Eleo Pomare Dance Company
Eleo Pomare in 1978. He and his dancers were among the first to capture onstage the street gait found in black neighborhoods.
The cause was cancer, said Glenn Conner, his companion and the executive director of the Eleo Pomare Dance Company.
As a dancer, choreographer and activist, Mr. Pomare first stunned audiences in the 1960s with works of great originality and forcefulness. Many were also performed on flatbed trucks in the streets as part of the Harlem Cultural Council’s Dancemobile project. Mr. Pomare was the project’s first artistic director.
In “Narcissus Rising,” his 1968 signature solo, he was a biker in a black leather jacket and scanty briefs, moving astride an invisible motorcycle as a hostile power symbol, both sensual and defiant toward the world he stared down.
The anger of his characters surfaced in many dances in which his gift for distilling emotion ranged over numerous themes. Leading an interracial company, Mr. Pomare and his dancers were among the first to capture onstage the street gait found in black neighborhoods.
Yet if urban America seemed his focus, his enduring masterpiece is arguably “Las Desenamoradas” of 1967, based on Federico García Lorca’s play “The House of Bernarda Alba” and set to a propulsive jazz score by John Coltrane. Although the five sisters and their despotic matriarch onstage were Spanish, Mr. Pomare universalized all into a study of love, hate and sexual yearning. The mother and daughters battled in extreme images of outlandish acrobatic physicality that skirted the comical, but also evoked deep insights into human behavior.
The piece was one of three by Mr. Pomare staged for other troupes by the American Dance Festival in its “Black Tradition in American Modern Dance” project to preserve the work of leading black choreographers. “Las Desenamoradas” was performed again in June by the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company at the festival in Durham, N.C.
The other Pomare works in the project were “Blues for the Jungle” (1966) and “Missa Luba” (1965), inspired by a Congolese Roman Catholic Mass.
In an essay for the festival’s 2001 public television series about black dance, “Free to Dance,” Jacqui Malone described the Pomare choreographic style as “characterized by unexpected shapes that twist, bend, fall and lean in continuous organic movement.”
Very much his own man, Mr. Pomare was not interested in the formal experiments of the mostly white dance avant-garde of the 1960s. Yet he differed from older black choreographers whom he admired by transforming the mainstream modern-dance idioms in which he had trained into something more raw and rebellious. In “Homemade Ice Cream” he spoofed Americana myths with bitter but hilarious wit.
Mr. Pomare also occasionally choreographed pure-movement pieces, including his 1983 “Back to Bach,” but returned to Expressionist influences he had encountered. The 1987 solo “Phoenix” was, he told Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times, “almost a portrait of the black male’s ability to survive.” He added, “You’re up, then knocked down, then you have to get up again.”
Eleo Pomare was born on Oct. 20, 1937, in Santa Marta, Colombia, and lived in Cartagena, Colombia, and Panama before moving to New York with his mother in 1947. Hoping be an actor, he enrolled at the High School of Performing Arts, where he was exposed to modern dancers like Martha Graham and decided to focus on dance. He also studied with black teachers and choreographers outside the school.
While still a student, he taught dance at the Boys’ Athletic League and presented his pupils’ performances in schools and churches. By 1958 he directed his own company, but in 1962, shortly after his first major concert, he left for Europe on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship.
After studying with the German Expressionist choreographer Kurt Jooss, he formed another company in Amsterdam.
Yet, as he told Ms. Dunning: “I began to feel Europe was taking a lot from me and not giving me what I went there to find. The vitality of the civil-rights movement brought me back.”
Mr. Pomare returned to the United States in 1964 and expanded his original company, which toured internationally. He also choreographed for other American and foreign troupes and festivals, and was a founding member of the Association of Black Choreographers.
In addition to Mr. Conner, Mr. Pomare is survived by three sisters.
Mr. Conner said that the Eleo Pomare Dance Company would continue to perform and preserve Mr. Pomare’s works.
(A version of this article appeared in print on August 14, 2008, on page B7 of the New York edition.)
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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JERRY WEXLER, A BEHIND-THE-SCENES FORCE IN BLACK MUSIC
Jerry Wexler, who as a reporter for Billboard magazine in the late 1940s christened black popular music rhythm and blues, and who as a record producer helped lead the genre to mainstream popularity, propelling the careers of Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and other performers, died on Friday at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 91.
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Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Jerry Wexler, center, with Ahmet Ertegun and Big Joe Turner.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Paul.
Mr. Wexler was already in his 30s when he entered the music business, but his impact was immediate and enduring. In 1987, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognized his contributions to American music by inducting him in only its second year of conferring such honors.
Mr. Wexler actually didn’t care for rock ’n’ roll, at least as it evolved in the 1960s and ’70s. Though he signed a British band called Led Zeppelin and eventually produced records by the likes of Bob Dylan, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits and George Michael, his main influence came in the 1950s and ’60s as a vice president of Atlantic Records, working largely with black artists who were forging a new musical style, which came to be called soul music, from elements of gospel, swing and blues.
“He played a major role in bringing black music to the masses, and in the evolution of rhythm and blues to soul music,” Jim Henke, vice president and chief curator for the Hall of Fame, said in an interview. “Beyond that, he really developed the role of the record producer. Jerry did a lot more than just turn on a tape recorder. He left his stamp on a lot of great music. He had a commercial ear as well as a critical ear.”
Mr. Wexler was something of a paradox. A businessman with tireless energy, a ruthless streak and a volatile temper, he was also a hopeless music fan. A New York Jew and a vehement atheist, he found his musical home in the Deep South, in studios in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Ala., among Baptists and Methodists, blacks and good old boys.
“He was a bundle of contradictions,” said Tom Thurman, who produced and directed a documentary about Mr. Wexler in 2000. “He was incredibly abrasive and incredibly generous, very abrupt and very, very patient, seemingly a pure, sharklike businessman and also a cerebral and creative genius.”
The title of Mr. Thurman’s documentary, “Immaculate Funk,” was Mr. Wexler’s phrase for the Atlantic sound, characterized by a heavy backbeat and a gospel influence. “It’s funky, it’s deep, it’s very emotional, but it’s clean,” Mr. Wexler once said.
Though not a musician himself, Mr. Wexler had a natural rapport with musicians, who seemed to recognize his instinct for how best to employ their gifts. In 1950, while he was still at Billboard, he encountered the young singer Patti Page and hummed for her a 1947 song he liked, “The Tennessee Waltz.” Her subsequent recording of it sold three million copies in eight months.
A few years later he was a partner at Atlantic, presiding over the 1954 recording session of Ray Charles’s breakout hit, “I Got a Woman.” He said later that the best thing he had done for Charles was to let him do as he pleased.
“He had an extraordinary insight into talent,” Charles, who died in 2004, said in “Immaculate Funk.”
Mr. Wexler wasn’t always a mere listener. In the mid-1960s, at a recording session with Wilson Pickett, Mr. Wexler wanted more of a backbeat in the song “In the Midnight Hour” but couldn’t explain in words what he wanted, so he illustrated it by doing a new dance, the jerk.
In the late 1960s and ’70s, he made 14 Atlantic albums with Ms. Franklin, whose musical instincts had been less than fully exploited at her previous label, Columbia. Mr. Wexler gave her more control over her songs and her sound, a blend of churchlike spirituality and raw sexuality, which can be heard in hits like “Respect,” “Dr. Feelgood” and “Chain of Fools.”
“How could he understand what was inside of black people like that?” Pickett asked in the documentary. “But Jerry Wexler did.”
Gerald Wexler was born in New York City on Jan. 10, 1917, and grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan at a time before the building of the George Washington Bridge, when swimming in the Hudson River was a summer pastime.
His parents were mismatched. His father, Harry, was a Polish immigrant who spent his entire working life as a window washer. His headstrong mother, Elsa, had higher aspirations for herself and especially for Jerry, the older of her two sons: she wanted him to be a writer.
Young Jerry didn’t care for school much, however; he frequented pool halls and record stores instead, and he went to Harlem jazz clubs at night. In 1936, as something of a last-ditch effort to straighten out her wayward son, Elsa Wexler enrolled him at Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (known today as Kansas State University) in Manhattan, Kan. There he first encountered a rural musical sensibility, and 100 or so miles away, in the lively musical scene of Kansas City, Mo., he could immerse himself in the blues.
Mr. Wexler left college after two years, joined the Army, served stateside during World War II, then returned to Kansas State and finished his degree. By 1949 he was back in New York, married and working as a cub reporter for Billboard. At the time the black popular-music charts in the magazine were gathered under the rubric Race Records.
“We used to close the book on a Friday and come back to work on a Tuesday,” Mr. Wexler recalled in an interview last fall with the Web site PopEntertainment.com. “One Friday the editor got us together and said, ‘Listen, let’s change this from Race Records.’ A lot of people were beginning to find it inappropriate. ‘Come back with some ideas on Tuesday.’
“There were four guys on the staff,” he continued. “One guy said this and one guy said that, and I said, ‘Rhythm and blues,’ and they said: ‘Oh, that sounds pretty good. Let’s do that.’
In the next issue, that section came out as Rhythm and Blues instead of Race.”
His work at Billboard attracted the attention of Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, then a small independent label focusing on black music. When his partner, Herb Abramson, went into the Army, Mr. Ertegun asked Mr. Wexler to join the company in 1953.
Over the next decade Mr. Wexler’s drive, his sales and promotion skills, and, according to the business practices of the day, his indulging in payola — the bribery of disc jockeys to play a company’s records — helped make Atlantic a leader in the recording industry. In the 1950s the company produced records by the Drifters, the Clovers, Joe Turner, Ruth Brown and, in partnership with the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the Coasters.
In the 1960s, however, Mr. Wexler and Mr. Ertegun began to take different paths. Mr. Ertegun gravitated toward rock ’n’ roll, while Mr. Wexler — was drawn to the niche sounds he found in places like Memphis, where a small label, Stax Records, its principal studio located in a former movie palace, had gathered a mix of black and white musicians and produced a sound based on spontaneity and improvisation.
Mr. Wexler brought Otis Redding and Dusty Springfield, among others, to Memphis. (Eventually, Springfield chose to record her vocals in New York.) Later, after hearing a recording Percy Sledge had made at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, he began producing records there as well, bringing singers like Pickett and Ms. Franklin to work with local musicians.
In his autobiography, “Rhythm and the Blues” (Knopf, 1993), written with David Ritz, Mr. Wexler wrote candidly and self-critically about a personal life that he acknowledged had been intemperate, replete with adulterous liaisons and profligate drug use.
Mr. Wexler’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his son, who lives in High Bridge, N.J., he is survived by his wife, Jean Arnold, and a daughter, Lisa Wexler of Kingston, N.Y. Another daughter, Anita, died of AIDS in 1989.
In the early 1970s Mr. Wexler helped resurrect the career of Willie Nelson with two albums for Atlantic, but he left the label in 1975. (It had been bought by Warner Brothers in 1967.)
Later he produced Bob Dylan’s 1979 album “Slow Train Coming,” a celebration of the singer’s embrace of Christianity, for Columbia. When Mr. Dylan accepted his first Grammy Award for best male rock vocal performance, for the song “Gotta Serve Somebody,” he first thanked God and then Jerry Wexler.
In the 1980s Mr. Wexler helped Linda Ronstadt with her career-changing album of Sinatraesque standards, “What’s New,” a project begun when she spent an afternoon with Mr. Wexler listening to records and for the first time heard the 1930s singer Mildred Bailey.
“When I said I wanted to sing like that, Jerry said the best way was to get a pianist and learn how those songs are done,” Ms. Ronstadt told The New York Times in 1983. She added, “One thing Jerry Wexler taught me was that if you’ve got a sexy or torchy song, you mustn’t attitudinize on top of it, because it sounds redundant.”
Given the chance, Mr. Wexler would have produced to the end and beyond.
“I asked him once,” said Mr. Thurman, the filmmaker, “ ‘What do you want written on your tombstone, Jerry?’ He said, ‘Two words: More bass.’ ”
(A version of this article appeared in print on August 16, 2008, on page 17 of The New York edition.)
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/arts/music/16wexler.html?ref=obituaries
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DARREN TAYLOR, FORMER GANG MEMBER AND DIRECTOR OF “UNITY ONE”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Darren Taylor, a former gang member who turned peacemaker and brokered a truce between warring gangs after the Los Angeles riots in 1992, died Monday in San Diego. He was 42.
The cause was cancer, said his sister, Adrienne Galloway.
Mr. Taylor, who was known as Bo, was a member of the Crips gang as a teenager but became a peace activist after the riots.
The founder of Unity One, which worked to prevent gang violence through intervention and education, Mr. Taylor also taught life management skills to inmates at the Los Angeles County jail.
Last year, Mr. Taylor was the host of a midnight call-in program on a Los Angeles radio station. The program attracted a wide range of callers, including police officers and prisoners, who discussed gang violence, poverty and community issues.
Survivors include Mr. Taylor’s wife, Marlene Oglesby-Taylor, and his mother, Charlene Taylor.
(A version of this article appeared in print on August 14, 2008, on page B7 of the New York edition.)
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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GEORGE FURTH, ACTOR AND PLAYWRIGHT
George Furth, a playwright who collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on the Tony Award-winning musical “Company” and who was a ubiquitous character actor whose distinct profile enlivened dozens of popular television series as well as movies like “Blazing Saddles,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Shampoo,” died on Monday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 75.
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Barlow-Hartman, via Associated Press
From left, Stephen Sondheim, George Furth and Harold Prince.
Dennis Aspland, his friend and agent, confirmed his death. Mr. Aspland said that he did not know the precise cause, but that Mr. Furth had been in the hospital for a lung infection.
A lanky man with a seemingly natural kinetic nervousness and a perpetual expression of worry, Mr. Furth was often cast as an odd duck, a milquetoast or a stammery, uneasy type with something to hide. A list of his television credits describes a history of popular series from the 1960s to the ’90s, from “The Defenders,” “The Farmer’s Daughter,” “Honey West,” “F Troop,” “The Monkees” and “McHale’s Navy” to “All in the Family,” “Little House on the Prairie,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Wings,” “Murphy Brown,” “L.A. Law” and “The Nanny.”
Perhaps his most memorable role was as Woodcock, the loyal railway employee who allows himself to be blown up not once, but twice, by Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy, rather than let the train he is riding be robbed.
“Butch, you know if it were my money, there’s nobody I’d rather have steal it than you,”
Woodcock calls memorably through a locked door, moments before it explodes in his face for a second time. “But you see, I am still in the employment of E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad.”
As a playwright, Mr. Furth reached Broadway several times, both on his own and as a collaborator. “Twigs,” his play about four women from the same family, all played by Sada Thompson, received mixed reviews when it opened on Broadway in 1971, though Mr. Furth’s script had a fan in Walter Kerr of The New York Times, who called its four interconnected pieces “funny and touching and freshly conceived.”
A short-lived comedy, “The Supporting Cast,” appeared in 1981; and a more serious play, “Precious Sons,” a family drama with conscious echoes of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and William Inge, received serious critical treatment when it appeared in 1986, but the prevailing judgment was that Mr. Furth’s noble ambition for his play outstripped his achievement. He also wrote the book for the Kander and Ebb musical “The Act,” a 1977 vehicle for Liza Minnelli.
In his best-known works, however, he was overshadowed by his writing partner, Mr. Sondheim, with whom he wrote three shows: two musicals, “Company” and “Merrily We Roll Along”; and a nonmusical mystery, “Getting Away With Murder.” “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Getting Away With Murder” were famous failures, though “Merrily,” which closed after 16 performances in 1981, would be revised more than once and become a favorite among Sondheim devotees.
But “Company,” a wry, cynical, sometimes bitter look at marriage through the trepidatious eyes of a bachelor, was a hit, not just for Mr. Sondheim’s score (with songs like “Barcelona,” “Sorry-Grateful” and “The Ladies Who Lunch”) but also for Mr. Furth’s book, an adaptation of a play he had written, comprising 11 loosely connected episodes about couples in which one actress was to play all the wives.
“Company” won a Tony for best musical in 1971, and Mr. Furth won a Tony of his own for his book. The show had two full Broadway revivals, the latest in 2006.
Mr. Furth, who leaves no immediate survivors, was born George Schweinfurth in Chicago on Dec. 14, 1932. He graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in speech, and did graduate work at Columbia. He made his Broadway stage debut in 1961 and his movie debut in 1964 in Gore Vidal’s political drama “The Best Man.” His long show business career took place as much behind the scenes as in public view.
“Nobody had a larger group of completely devoted friends than George,” Warren Beatty, the actor and director who first met Mr. Furth at Northwestern in the 1950s, said in a telephone interview on Monday. They worked together on the films “Shampoo” and “Bulworth,” but Mr. Furth was an adviser to him as well, Mr. Beatty said: “His intelligence was of inestimable value to me in the work I’ve done.”
(A version of this article appeared in print on August 12, 2008, on page C9 of the New York edition.)
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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VIVIAN YEN, ‘IRON LADY’ OF TAIWAN CARS
Vivian W. Yen, the “Iron Lady” of Taiwan’s motor industry as chairwoman of the Yulon Group and one of the island’s wealthiest women, died in Taipei on Saturday. She was 95.
Born in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province, Mrs. Yen and her husband, Yen Ching-ling, moved to the island in 1948, a year before Taiwan and the Chinese mainland split at the end of a civil war.
The couple founded the Tai Yuen Textile Company, which under her management quickly developed into the country’s leading textile company, cashing in on Taiwan’s export boom from the 1960s to ’80s.
In 1953, her husband founded the Yue Loong motor company, which began assembling cars under Nissan’s license in the 1960s.
There were suspicions after he died in 1981 that the company might close.
But Mrs. Yen acquired the nickname Iron Lady for her tenacity after the company in 1986 successfully introduced Taiwan’s first locally designed sedan in a six-year project at a cost of $146 million.
The company, which changed its logo and name to Yulon in 1992, continued to thrive and expand.
A venture with Nissan, Yulon Nissan Motor, promotes Nissan-branded cars in Taiwan and other Asian markets.
Yulon has also invested in an automaker in China and set up a joint venture in Taiwan with the General Motors Corporation to sell and assemble G.M. models.
Her son, Kenneth K. T. Yen, took over as chairman last year, and the business diversified to include textiles, electronics and construction.
Besides her son, her survivors include a granddaughter.
(A version of this article appeared in print on August 12, 2008, on page C8 of the New York edition.)
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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THEODORE SOLOTAROFF, FOUNDER OF ‘THE NEW AMERICAN REVIEW’
Correction Appended
Theodore Solotaroff, who in 1967 started The New American Review as a highly unusual showcase for a rising generation of writers, including Philip Roth, William H. Gass and Mordecai Richler in just the first issue, died on Friday at his home in East Quogue, N.Y. He was 80.
Virginia Solotaroff/W.W. Norton
Theodore Solotaroff
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his son Jason.
The New American Review, which dropped the “New” along the way, operated as a kind of open house for fiction writers and practitioners of the new journalism. A literary journal produced as a paperback book (with a paperback price), its first issue offered readers the work of 29 writers, not only fiction but also nonfiction by Conor Cruise O’Brien, Stanley Kauffmann and Theodore Roszak.
For the next decade, with many a financial hiccup, The New American Review, whose back-cover blurb proclaimed it “a writer’s magazine for the new literary audience,” presented Americans and scattered foreigners (including the then-unknown Ian McEwan), as well as cultural journalism. Nearly all of it was filtered through the fine-tuned sensibilities of Mr. Solotaroff.
Its politics, if it had any, were vaguely liberal, its aspirations lofty but nonspecific.
In an editor’s note, Mr. Solotaroff announced that his publication would studiously avoid “the tendency toward cult and coterie by which literary magazines usually define their particular territory and assert their standards.” It would not be, in other words, Partisan Review or Commentary. Instead, with mass-market print runs of more than 100,000, it would appeal to an untapped audience ready to savor the finest in current fiction and journalism executed with literary flair. Mr. Solotaroff believed, incorrectly, that this formula could be a paying proposition.
Issued three times a year, The New American Review was less a magazine with recognizable departments and columnists than a rolling literary anthology that accommodated fiction writers as diverse as Donald Barthelme, Michael Herr, E. L. Doctorow, Harold Brodkey and Robert Coover. In its pages, readers encountered Kate Millett on sexual politics, Norman Mailer on Henry Miller, A. Alvarez on Sylvia Plath and Michael Rossman on the spiritual satisfactions of building your own geodesic dome.
Mr. McEwan, in a blurb he wrote for Mr. Solotaroff’s essay collection “The Literary Community,” said that “as the most influential editor of his time, he shaped not only the tastes, but the direction of American writing.”
Theodore Solotaroff, known as Ted, was born and raised in Elizabeth, N.J., where his father owned a plate-glass company that yielded scant income during the Depression. A tyrant of mythic proportions, Ben Solotaroff brutalized his sensitive, artistic wife, Rose, and beat Ted, often threatening “to break your spirit once and for all,” Mr. Solotaroff recalled in his first memoir, “Truth Comes in Blows.”
Both parents left their mark. “He was an odd combination of ferocity and tenderness,” said his son Paul, a senior writer for Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. “His sons saw the former and his writers the latter.”
After serving in the Navy after high school, Mr. Solotaroff, a rabid sports fan, entered the University of Michigan, whose football games he had often listened to on the radio. He played basketball as a freshman and earned a degree in English.
He also married a fellow student, Lynn Ringler. The marriage ended in divorced, and she died in 1994. His marriages to Shirley Fingerhood and Ghislaine Boulanger, both of Manhattan, ended in divorce.
In addition to his sons Paul, of Brooklyn, and Ivan, of New Town, Pa., both from his first marriage, he is survived by his sons Jason, of Montclair, N.J., from his marriage to Ms. Fingerhood, and Isaac, of Brooklyn, from his marriage to Ms. Boulanger; his wife, Virginia Solotaroff of East Quogue; a brother, Robert, of Minneapolis; and six grandchildren.
After college, Mr. Solotaroff headed to New York to make his way as a writer. Instead he waited tables. Discouraged, he entered the University of Chicago and had nearly completed a dissertation on Henry James when fate derailed his planned academic career.
Mr. Roth, a fellow student, recommended him to the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, who wanted an essay on American Jewish writers. Mr. Solotaroff’s contribution caught the eye of Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, who hired him as an editor at the magazine in 1960.
After several years at Commentary (which was steering politically rightward under Mr. Podhoretz and whose internal dramas provided the backdrop for a further volume of memoirs Mr. Solotaroff was writing at the time of his death), he became editor of Book Week, the Sunday book supplement of The New York Herald Tribune.
When The Herald Tribune closed, in 1966, Mr. Solotaroff found work at the New American Library, a publisher of quality paperbacks. There he proposed a thick literary magazine along the lines of The Anchor Review, once published by Doubleday, and New World Writing, published by the New American Library in the 1950s. Stanley Moss was hired as its poetry editor, succeeded by Richard Howard.
Although a critical success, the magazine struggled financially. In 1970 New American Library withdrew its support. Simon & Schuster and later Bantam stepped into the breach, but in 1977, with Issue No. 26, the magazine breathed its last, after publishing the work of 500 different writers, 200 short stories, 300 poems and 130 essays.
Mr. Solotaroff went to work as an editor at Harper & Row, now HarperCollins, where he edited Russell Banks, Sue Miller, Max Apple and Bobbie Ann Mason. Ms. Mason, in a telephone interview, called him “one of the last of the great editors,” someone who “cared about every line.”
After retiring, he worked on his memoirs. A second installment, “First Loves,” appeared in 2003. His essays have been collected in several volumes, including “The Red Hot Vacuum” and “A Few Good Voices in My Head.”
“He had very high expectations of himself,” said his son Jason. “Unfortunately these extended to the golf course. He could never believe that he hit the ball as badly as he did.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 14, 2008
An obituary on Tuesday about Theodore Solotaroff, founder of The New American Review, misspelled the given name of a writer who was in its first issue. He was Mordecai Richler, not Mordechai.
An obituary on Tuesday about Theodore Solotaroff, founder of The New American Review, misspelled the given name of a writer who was in its first issue. He was Mordecai Richler, not Mordechai.
(A version of this article appeared in print on August 12, 2008, on page C8 of the New York edition.)
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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MAHMOUD DARWISH, LEADING PALESTINIAN POET
JERUSALEM — Mahmoud Darwish, whose searing lyrics on Palestinian exile and tender verse on the human condition led him to be widely viewed as the pre-eminent man of Palestinian letters as well as one of the greatest contemporary Arab poets, died Saturday night in Houston after complications from heart surgery. He was 67.
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Abbas Momani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Palestinians in Ramallah, West Bank, held a vigil on Sunday in honor of Mahmoud Darwish, who died Saturday in Houston.
Mr. Darwish, a heavy smoker, was known to suffer from health problems. Still, his death was received among Palestinians with shock and despair.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, declared three days of mourning on Sunday, saying that Mr. Darwish was “the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project,” adding, “Words cannot describe the depth of sadness in our hearts.”
Yasir Abed Rabbo, secretary of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said, “No one could have imagined that Mahmoud’s voice could disappear.”
The Palestinian Authority will give Mr. Darwish a state funeral in the West Bank on Tuesday, the first since Yasir Arafat died in 2004.
Twice divorced with no children, Mr. Darwish had the straight hair, wire-rim glasses and blue blazer of a European intellectual and was, paradoxically for someone seen as the voice of his people, a loner with a narrow circle of friends. He was uncomfortable in public, where he was widely recognized, but he cared deeply about young Arab writers and published their work in the Ramallah-based journal that he edited, Al Karmel.
And while he wrote in classical Arabic rather than in the language of the street, his poetry was anything but florid or baroque, employing a directness and heat that many saw as one of the salvations of modern literary Arabic.
“He used high language to talk about daily life in a truly exceptional way,” said Ghassan Zaqtan, a Palestinian poet and a close friend. “This is someone who remained at the top of Arabic poetry for 40 years. It was not simply about politics.”
Nonetheless, politics played a major role in Mr. Darwish’s life and work. Born to a middle-class Muslim farming family in a village near Haifa in what is today Israel, Mr. Darwish identified strongly with the secular Palestinian national movement long led by Mr. Arafat.
Mr. Zaqtan and Mr. Abed Rabbo said he was the author of Mr. Arafat’s famous words at the United Nations General Assembly in 1974: “I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
He also wrote the Palestinian declaration of independent statehood in 1988 and served on the executive committee of the P.L.O. But he quit in the early 1990s over differences with the leadership and moved firmly out of the political sphere, lamenting the rise of the Islamist group Hamas and what he viewed as the bankruptcy of Palestinian public life.
Mr. Darwish first gained a following in the 1960s for his frank political poems, and to some extent they remain the source of his fame. Among his best known was “Identity Card” from 1964, in which he attacked Israel’s desire to overlook the presence of Arabs on its land:
“Write down!/I am an Arab/ and my identity card number is 50,000/I have eight children/And the ninth will come after a summer.”
It ends: “Therefore!/Write down on the top of the first page:/I do not hate people/Nor do I encroach/But if I become hungry/The usurper’s flesh will be my food/Beware …/Beware … /Of my hunger/And my anger.”
There were other harsh political works in the following two decades, but those who knew Mr. Darwish said he had often expressed little pride in them, preferring his more personal and universal poems. He told The New York Times in a 2001 interview in Paris: “Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother.
She’s not a symbol.”
During the war that led to Israel’s independence, Mr. Darwish and his family, from the Palestinian village of Al Barweh, left for Lebanon. The village was razed but the family sneaked back across the border into Israel, where Mr. Darwish spent his youth.
Politically active fairly early, he was arrested several times and was a member of the Israeli Communist Party. He left in 1971 and lived in the Soviet Union, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and France.
After Mr. Arafat set up the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza in the mid-1990s, Mr. Darwish came to live in Ramallah, where he rented a house. He said he never really felt at home there — he made clear that exile for him was increasingly an emotional rather than a purely political dilemma — and wrote more comfortably when in Europe.
He maintained a wide circle of literary acquaintances, including Israelis, and he said he fully supported a two-state solution.
His work earned him a number of international literary awards and was translated into more than 20 languages, more than any other contemporary Arab poet, according to Mahmoud al-Atshan, a professor of Arabic literature at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.
There was at first some question of where he would be buried, as some close to him sought to persuade Israel to let him be buried in the area of his home village. But the mayor of Ramallah said Mr. Darwish would be buried in Ramallah, the effective Palestinian capital of the West Bank.
(A version of this article appeared in print on August 11, 2008, on page B6 of the New York edition.)
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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JEANNENE ZIMMERMAN, HELPED HIV-POSITIVE CHILDREN
by Allen Turner
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
August 13, 2008
Family photo
Jeannene Zimmerman was the daughter of a Russian immigrant distributor of Decca records.
Jeannene Zimmerman, a state health case worker who was drawn to the challenge of working with HIV-positive children, died Sunday of heart disease. She was 63.
A genial polymath whose interests included jazz and classical music and French literature, Zimmerman was gifted with the ability to interact with a wide range of people, engaging them and never leaving them feeling diminished by the encounters, her family recalled.
“She was generous,” her sister, Sandy Zimmerman, said.
The daughter of a Russian immigrant distributor of Decca records, Zimmerman was reared in a musically astute family. Occasionally, her sister said, Decca recording artists would stay at the family’s Houston home.
That interest in music was manifest early in Zimmerman’s career when she managed a record store near Hobby Airport. The shop stocked not only country, rock and rhythm and blues recordings, Sandy Zimmerman said, but an extensive offering of classical and jazz discs.
Zimmerman was an avid reader. For a time, she managed a Bookstop store in Sharpstown. Even after her career moved in other directions, her sister said, Zimmerman continued to work Saturdays at the Brown Book Store, a shop specializing in books dealing with technical subjects.
“Working in a bookstore was like a candy shop for her,” her sister said. “At least three times a year I’d get a book with a note saying she thought I’d find it interesting. She did that with everybody.”
Zimmerman married young, had a child, then returned to the University of Houston to finish her degree in French literature. In the 1970s, she became a champion of women’s rights. She was among founding members of Congregation Shaar Hashalom in Clear Lake City.
As a case worker with the Houston office of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, Zimmerman was drawn to working with HIV-positiive youngsters.
“She’d get them set up with doctors, she’d work with other charitable groups to obtain food, lodging and counseling,” said her co-worker Angela Miller-Allen. Although the work was emotionally draining, Miller-Allen said, “She always put her client first, no matter what.”
She was especially concerned with educating the public about the availability of Medicaid services for children.
In addition to Sandy Zimmerman, survivors include a daughter, Lori Ramon of Seattle, Wash.; a son, Noah Ramon, of Houston; mother, Jeane Martin, of Houston; brother, Max Zimmerman of Houston; sisters, Sophi Zimmerman of Houston, and Barbara Zimmerman and Sandy Zimmerman, both of Austin.
Services will be at 11:30 a.m. today at Congregation Emanu El.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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DR. RODOLFO E. MILANI, HOUSTON ANESTHESIOLOGIST WHO FLED PERON’S DICTATORSHIP
by Renee C. Lee
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
August 11, 2008
His medical career expanded for more than 40 years and began in his native country of Argentina, where he was a nationally recognized leader in his speciality. After he moved to the United States, he worked at Methodist Hospital for 30 years, retiring in 1988 at 71.
Milani, who was born in Posadas, Argentina, graduated from the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in 1941. He worked and studied in Stockholm, Sweden, and London before he started teaching and practicing anesthesiology in Buenos Aires in 1943.
He co-founded the Argentine Association of Anesthesiology in 1949 and served as its president.
In January 1955, he uprooted his wife, Irma, and their four children and left behind a successful practice to move to the United States. He was dissatisfied with the dictatorship of then-President Juan Peron and had become vocal in his opposition, said his son, Rodolfo Milani
”It was a bad climate for free expression,” the younger Milani said. “He was not under the gun to leave, but he felt it was not a good place to be. He wanted his children to have an opportunity to live in a free state and be able to live in a democracy. When he left, most of his family and friends thought he was crazy.”
He wanted to come to the United States because of its medical advances, which he thought to be cutting edge. He saw Houston as a budding medical community with a tremendous future, his son said.
Before Milani started work at Methodist, he had a fellowship at M.D. Anderson Hospital. He then joined the anesthesiology group at Jefferson Davis Hospital, where he also taught and did clinical investigations. He also served as assistant professor of anesthesiology at Baylor College of Medicine.
”He was a very fine physician and an outstanding anesthesiologist,” said Dr. John Overstreet, who was chief of surgery at Methodist Hospital from the mid-1950s through 1980s and worked closely with Milani.
Overstreet said Milani was instrumental in bringing a number of Central and South American patients to Houston for medical care.
Milani was an advocate and promoter of the Texas Medical Center throughout Latin America, said family members. He provided physician referrals and facilitated hospital admissions for patients.
Many remember Milani as a cheerful and selfless man. He son said some people have referred to him as an ”Old World gentleman.”
“Nothing ever got him down,” the younger Milani said. ”He was always there to lift your spirits. He was a wonderful father and the embodiment of the American dream.”
He also loved both Argentina and the United States. He and his family became American citizens in 1961.
Milani was a mentor to many young physicians including his own grandson, Dr. Robert Ritter, 34, a urologist in Amarillo.
”When I was 12 he took me on rounds with him and that got the ball rolling,” Ritter said.
Milani participated in Ritter’s graduation from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in 2001. Graduates with family members who were doctors were allowed to wear their academic regalia on stage. ”It was a great time for us,” Ritter said.
Milani was preceded in death by his wife of 56 years, Irma Castiglioni Milani. In addition to his son, of Miami, he is survived by daughters Marcela Ritter of Findlay, Ohio; Lucrecia Milani of Houston; and Lili Baehr of Camarillo, Calf.; eight grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
The Mass of Christian Burial will be at 2 p.m. today at Holy Rosary Catholic Church, 3600 Travis.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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