JOHN CEPHAS, GUITARIST WITH THE DUO CEPHAS AND WIGGINS
John Cephas, a guitarist and singer who kept the Piedmont blues style alive as part of the duo Cephas and Wiggins, died on Wednesday at his home in Woodford, Va. He was 78.
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Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
John Cephas, right, on guitar and Phil Wiggins on harmonica in 2007.
The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, his companion, Lynn Volpe, said.
Less celebrated than the raw Delta blues of Mississippi or its electrified offshoot in Chicago, the jaunty and melodic Piedmont sound developed in the coastal plains of Virginia and the Carolinas. Characterized by a lilting rhythm and complex fingerpicking guitar, it has echoes of ragtime and perhaps older music as well; some scholars trace its origins to the country dance bands of the colonial era.
Since teaming with the harmonica player Phil Wiggins in 1977, Mr. Cephas had been one of Piedmont style’s most prominent exponents, winning a National Heritage Fellowship in 1989 from the National Endowment for the Arts. Cephas and Wiggins were regulars at music festivals around the world.
With a mellow baritone shaped by his early years in gospel groups, Mr. Cephas sang folk and blues standards like “John Henry” and “Key to the Highway,” as well as original pieces he wrote with Mr. Wiggins. He picked guitar in the banjolike manner he learned from relatives in tiny Bowling Green, Va., and from records by Blind Boy Fuller and Blind Blake.
“John had very direct connection with the tradition,” said Barry Bergey, director of folk and traditional arts for the N.E.A. “He’s one of those figures that bridges the great divide between contemporary culture and his own personal heritage, dating back to the 1930s and ’40s.”
John Cephas was born in Washington but was reared in Bowling Green, 75 miles to the south, and throughout his life he retained a close connection to the town. He worked in Washington, as a carpenter at the armory of the Army National Guard, but he built his house in Woodford, just outside of Bowling Green.
After playing with the barrelhouse piano player Big Chief Ellis for a few years, Mr. Cephas met Mr. Wiggins in 1976 at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington. The two soon began playing together as a guitar-harmonica duo, like the best-known modern Piedmont players, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, whose careers stretched from the ’40s to the ’60s.
Mr. Cephas and Mr. Wiggins released their first few albums together through a German label, L+R, and their American breakthrough came with “Dog Days of August,” which won a W. C. Handy Award in 1987 for best traditional blues album.
The duo went on to record more than a dozen albums, most recently “Richmond Blues,” released last year by Smithsonian Folkways. Their last performance was in November in Ashland, Va., a short drive from Bowling Green.
In addition to Ms. Volpe, his survivors include nine children.
Mr. Cephas was an enthusiastic advocate for Piedmont blues. Cephas and Wiggins traveled widely overseas as part of tours sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development, and the group’s performances were punctuated by Mr. Cephas’s avuncular lessons in blues history.
“The music itself, played in the technique that we play it, when people hear, it is so emotionally captivating,” he told The Washington Post in an interview in 2003. “You hear that wonderfully melodic, alternating thumb and finger, you just stop and say, ‘I want to go hear more of that!’ It’s instant emotional appeal, and people all over, wherever they heard it, they’re just drawn to it.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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SYDNEY CHAPLIN, ACTOR WHO DODGED HIS FATHER’S SHADOW
Sydney Chaplin, who emerged from the shadow of his famous father, Charlie Chaplin, to carve out a successful stage career that included leading roles opposite Judy Holliday in the musical “Bells Are Ringing,” and Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl,” died on Tuesday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 82.
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Photofest
Sydney Chaplin, center, with Judy Holliday and Jerome Robbins in a scene from the 1956 musical “Bells Are Ringing.”
His death followed a stroke, Jerry Bodie, a friend, told The Associated Press.
Mr. Chaplin was the younger of two sons his father had with his second wife, the ingénue Lita Grey. After his parents’ divorce in 1927, he was reared by his maternal grandmother and encountered his father only intermittently until he reached adulthood. When Charlie Chaplin wrote “Limelight,” however, he had Sydney in mind for the part of Neville, the young composer who wins the heart of Claire Bloom. Sydney later appeared in his father’s final film, “A Countess from Hong Kong” (1967).
Mr. Chaplin, described as a child as “restless, turbulent, independent” by the magazine Screenland, made his reputation on his own, and on the stage. His performance as the answering-service client whom Holliday’s character falls for in “Bells Are Ringing” earned him a Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical in 1957.
In The New York Times Brooks Atkinson praised him as “an admirable leading man,” noting his “warmth, taste, skill and grace.” These qualities were on display once more in “Funny Girl,” in which his performance was rewarded with a Tony nomination for best actor in a musical in 1964.
Sydney Earle Chaplin, named for his father’s half-brother, was born in Los Angeles. He made a nuisance of himself at several schools before dropping out and trying to enlist in the Army at 17. He failed at that too, but was drafted a year later and served as a bazooka man in Europe with the Third Army under George Patton.
On returning to the United States, he joined with a group of undergraduates at the University of California, Los Angeles, to form the Circle Players, a semiprofessional company named for its commitment to theater in the round. The group attracted national attention for its ambitious productions, the first of them staged in a former funeral parlor. It presented several plays by William Saroyan, including the world premiere of “Sam Ego’s House.”
In the 1950s Mr. Chaplin appeared in several less than memorable films, including “Land of the Pharaohs,” “Abdulla the Great” and “Pillars of the Sky,” a western.
“I wasn’t a leading man,” he told Cue magazine in 1957. “So they slapped a coat of dark greasepaint on me and cast me as an Indian or an Egyptian.”
He did achieve leading-man status on the musical stage, although he had never sung until he auditioned for “Bells Are Ringing.” He later took a starring role in “Subways Are for Sleeping,” also by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne, and in “Funny Girl” he held his own opposite Ms. Streisand as Nicky Arnstein, the gambler who woos Fanny Brice. In the film version of the play, the part went to Omar Sharif. Mr. Chaplin left the show in 1965 after a dispute with the director and spent the next several years making films in Europe.
In the late 1980s he opened a restaurant, Chaplin’s, in Palm Springs, Calif. It closed in the early 1990s.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. His survivors include his wife, Margaret Beebe
Chaplin; a son by his first marriage, Stephan; and a granddaughter. The actress Geraldine Chaplin, a daughter of Charlie Chaplin and his fourth wife, Oona, is one of his eight half-siblings.
“I’m no genius,” he told The Daily News in 1957. “I don’t have Dad’s capacity for work. I just want to be a good actor.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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HORTON FOOTE, PLAYWRIGHT AND SCREENWRITER WHO CHRONICLED AMERICA
Rod Aydelotte/Associated Press
Horton Foote on the set of “The Traveling Lady” at the Mabee Theatre at Baylor University in February 2004. More Photos >
Horton Foote, who chronicled a wistful American odyssey through the 20th century in plays and films mostly set in a small town in Texas and who left a literary legacy as one of the country’s foremost storytellers, died on Wednesday in Hartford. He was 92 and lived in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and Wharton, Tex.
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
From left, Arthur Miller, John Guare, Maria Irene Fornes, Edward Albee and Horton Foote. More Photos »
Mr. Foote died after a brief illness, his daughter Hallie Foote said. He had recently been living in Hartford while adapting his nine-play “Orphans’ Home Cycle” into a three-part production that will be staged next fall at the Hartford Stage Company and the Signature Theater in New York.
In a body of work for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and two Academy Awards, Mr. Foote was known as a writer’s writer, an author who never abandoned his vision even when Broadway and Hollywood temporarily turned their backs on him.
In screenplays for movies like “Tender Mercies,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Trip to Bountiful,” and in plays like “The Young Man From Atlanta” and “The Carpetbagger’s Children,” Mr. Foote depicted the way ordinary people shoulder the ordinary burdens of life, finding drama in the resilience by which they carry on in the face of change, economic hardship, disappointment, loss and death.
Robert Duvall, an actor who was one of Mr. Foote’s most frequent interpreters, making his screen debut in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962) and winning an Oscar for best actor in “Tender Mercies” (1983), said on Wednesday that “Horton was the great American voice.” He added, “His work was native to his own region, but it was also universal.”
Frank Rich, who as chief theater critic of The New York Times in the 1980s was one of Mr. Foote’s champions, once called him “one of America’s living literary wonders.” On Wednesday Mr. Rich described Mr. Foote as “a major American dramatist whose epic body of work recalls Chekhov in its quotidian comedy and heartbreak, and Faulkner in its ability to make his own corner of America stand for the whole.”
In 1986, in an interview with The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Foote expounded on the themes that run through his work, saying, “I believe very deeply in the human spirit and I have a sense of awe about it because I don’t know how people carry on.” He added: “I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them, to kill them, to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and they don’t ask quarters.”
Mr. Foote spent most of his life writing about such people. In more than 60 plays and films, most set in the fictive town of Harrison, Tex., he charted their struggle through the century by recording their familial conflicts.
He often seemed to resemble a character from one of his plays. Always courteous and courtly, he spoke with a Texas drawl. He enjoyed good food and wine, but he usually opted for barbecue and iced tea or fried chicken with a Coca-Cola when he was home in Texas. He was jovial with a wry humor, and his white hair and robust frame gave him the appearance of a Southern senator or the favorite uncle who always had a story. Harper Lee, a lifelong friend since Mr. Foote adapted her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” once said that Mr. Foote “looked like God, only cleanshaven.”
Albert Horton Foote Jr., one of three sons of Albert Horton Foote and the former Hallie Brooks, was born March 14, 1916, in Wharton, Tex., a town about 40 miles southwest of Houston. His father was a haberdasher and his mother taught piano.
Although he boarded a train for Dallas at 16 to pursue acting, Mr. Foote never really left home. From his first efforts as a playwright, he returned again and again to set his plays and films amid the pecan groves and Victorian houses with large front porches on the tree-lined streets of Wharton. His inspiration came from the people he knew and the stories he heard growing up there.
Mr. Foote spent two years studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, then went to New York to become a Broadway star. He continued his studies there with Tamara Daykarhanova, a Russian émigré, and joined Mary Hunter’s American Actors Company. While rehearsing a production of one-acts, Ms. Hunter had her cast perform improvisations based on life in the actors’ hometowns. After Mr. Foote performed his, Agnes De Mille, who was doing choreography for another show, asked Mr. Foote if he had ever considered writing.
“No,” he replied. “What on earth would I write about?”
Ms. DeMille, who became a lifelong friend, gave Mr. Foote the age-old advice to every beginning playwright. “Write what you know about,” she said.
Mr. Foote went home that night and wrote a one-act called “Wharton Dance,” about the Friday-night dances in his hometown. He wrote the lead part for himself. The company performed the play in an evening of one-acts.
Related
His Kind of Town (August 19, 2007)
Mr. Foote on ‘Trip to Bountiful’
Interview With Horton Foote (youtube.com)
Excerpt: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ (youtube.com)
Trailer: ‘The Trip to Bountiful’ (youtube.com)
Times Topics: Horton Foote
Mr. Foote continued to pursue acting and appeared in a few other plays. Then, during a trip home, he decided to write another play. This time he spread a large canvas, writing a three-act, multilayered drama set in a small-town drugstore. He called it “Texas Town,” and the American Actors Company staged it in 1941, with Mr. Foote in the lead.
To Mr. Foote’s and the company’s surprise, Brooks Atkinson, the critic for The Times, came to see it. Atkinson called it an “engrossing portrait of small-town life.” He praised it for being “simply written” and for giving “a real and languid impression of a town changing in its relation to the world.” He added, “Mr. Foote’s play is “an able evocation of a part of life in America.”
To support himself, Mr. Foote took various jobs, including night elevator operator and bookstore clerk. While working in the bookstore a Vassar student came in looking for a summer job. Her name was Lillian Vallish. Mr. Foote asked her on a date, and the two were married the next year, on June 4, 1945. They had four children and remained together until Ms. Foote’s death in 1992.
Besides his daughter Hallie, an actress who became a main interpreter of her father’s plays, Mr. Foote is survived by his three other children — Horton Jr., who also acted and directed and is a restaurant owner in New York; Walter, a lawyer; and Daisy, also a playwright — and two grandchildren.
After World War II, Mr. Foote and Lillian moved to Washington to run the King Smith School along with Vincent Donehue. (Mr. Foote had been barred from serving in the military during the war because of a hernia.) The new theater fashion in those years was to blend words, music and dance into one theatrical experience, and Mr. Foote tried to write in the new form. One achievement during the Washington years was that Mr. Foote opened the King Smith theater to all races, the first integrated audiences in the nation’s capital.
Mr. Foote returned to New York in 1950, just as television was beginning to command America’s attention and producers like Fred Coe were recruiting writers to work for it. Mr. Donehue was hired by Mr. Coe to produce a weekly TV show for children that starred Gabby Hayes, the cowboy movie star and Roy Rogers sidekick.
Mr. Foote went to work for Mr. Coe at NBC, and his first assignment was to help write weekly half-hour episodes of “The Gabby Hayes Show.” In his spare time he continued to write plays. One, “The Chase,” in 1952, introduced Kim Stanley to Broadway, although it did not have great critical success.
Mr. Coe shortly signed Mr. Foote to a contract to write nine one-hour dramas for television. Mr. Coe liked to have one-page plot synopses from his writers, but for his third TV drama, Mr. Foote recalled, he didn’t know how to put it on paper. So, by his account, he just told Mr. Coe the plot.
“It’s about an old lady who wants to go home,” Mr. Foote said.
“That’s it?” Mr. Coe asked
“That’s it,” Mr. Foote replied.
“Go ahead,” Mr. Coe said. “I trust you.”
“The Trip to Bountiful” starred Lillian Gish as the gentle and long-suffering widow Carrie Watts. The play would have several incarnations over Mr. Foote’s life, including a version on Broadway, a revival Off Broadway, a London production and, three decades later, a 1985 movie for which Geraldine Page would receive an Academy Award for best actress and Mr. Foote was nominated for the screenplay.
Mr. Foote went on to write 10 plays for television, mostly for Television Playhouse and mostly directed by Mr. Donehue. When Mr. Coe moved from NBC to CBS, Mr. Foote wrote several teleplays for “Playhouse 90,” including adaptations of the Faulkner stories “Old Man” and “Tomorrow.” Faulkner was so impressed with the latter that he offered to split the publication royalties with him.
Television had moved to the West Coast by this time, and Mr. Foote’s work in TV there led to his first film projects. One of them was to adapt a screenplay of Ms. Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about a white Southern lawyer defending a black man on rape charges. For his screenplay Mr. Foote received his first Academy Award. Gregory Peck won best actor for his performance as the lawyer, Atticus Finch, and the film introduced to the screen a young actor named Robert Duvall as the eccentric Boo Radley.
Mr. Foote had another film success with “Baby, the Rain Must Fall” (1965), a reworking of his play “The Traveling Lady.” The film starred Steve McQueen.
But Mr. Foote’s Hollywood honeymoon began to sour. His next Hollywood venture was to adapt his play “The Chase” into a screenplay. But studio executives were unhappy with the script, and the producer Sam Spiegel hired Lillian Hellman to rewrite it. When the final film version was released, almost none of Mr. Foote’s original material remained. Mr. Foote was then hired by Otto Preminger to work on a screenplay for “Hurry Sundown” (1967), but the producer never used a word of his dialogue, although Mr. Foote appeared in the credits as a co-writer.
The experiences so depressed Mr. Foote that he moved to New Hampshire to live on a farm, and even contemplated giving up writing. It was after the death of his parents that Mr. Foote began the nine-play cycle called “The Orphans’ Home,” inspired by his father’s family and spanning 1902 to 1928. The first of these plays were staged in New York by Herbert Berghof, who with his wife, Uta Hagen, ran the H-B Theater workshop. It marked the start of the Foote revival.
If Brooks Atkinson helped launch Mr. Foote’s first career as a writer, it was Mr. Rich, of The Times, who helped start his revival with enthusiastic reviews of the cycle’s plays. Producers started paying attention to Mr. Foote’s work again, and a new generation of audiences was introduced to his work.
One of those who applauded Mr. Foote’s return was the director and producer Alan J. Pakula, who had hired him to write the screenplay for “Mockingbird.” “In a seemingly undramatic way,” Mr. Pakula said, Mr. Foote “has a specific voice, a specific style, and he has never abandoned it, even though it has cost him.”
While Mr. Foote worked on “The Orphans’ Home” cycle, his agent, Lucy Kroll, suggested he write an original screenplay. He began working on a story about a group of young singers trying to break into country and western music. When his daughter Hallie reminded him that Mr. Duvall could sing, Mr. Foote started molding a character for him.
The movie, “Tender Mercies,” was written specifically with Mr. Duvall in mind for the role of Mac Sledge, a washed-up, alcoholic singer who finds redemption in the love of a young Vietnam War widow and her small son. The film was shot in Waxahachie, Tex., for only $4.5 million, and at first no studio wanted to distribute it. But, Mr. Duvall went on to win the best-actor Academy Award and Mr. Foote received his second Oscar for the screenplay.
With his new success, Mr. Foote again turned toward writing movies, but this time he pursued an independent route. With his wife, Lillian, as producer and the rest of his family acting or working behind the scenes, he made movies of two plays in the “The Orphans’ Home” cycle, “1918” and “On Valentine’s Day.” Both were shot in Waxahachie, cost under $2 million each and starred Hallie Foote.
The second act of Mr. Foote’s career was given an extended run by the Signature Theater, an Off Off Broadway company that devoted its 1994-95 season to his work. One of the Foote plays that season had been written some years earlier, but had never been performed. It was “The Young Man From Atlanta” and was about a couple nearing retirement in Houston in the 1950s and trying to come to terms with their grown son’s suicide and suspected homosexuality. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.
As the 21st-century dawned, Mr. Foote wrote “The Carpetbagger’s Children,” a play in which three grown daughters of a carpetbagger look back over their lives and the 20th century in alternating monologues. It was staged at Lincoln Center and drew sold-out audiences in an extended run. Another revival of “The Trip to Bountiful,” with Lois Smith, was a hit for Signature Theater, and Mr. Foote scored a Broadway success with the revival of “Dividing the Estate,” under Michael Wilson’s direction.
Mr. Wilson, director of the Hartford Stage, and James Houghton of the Signature, put together the production of “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” that will be staged in the fall and was Mr. Foote’s lifelong dream.
Mr. Foote had all but completed work on adapting those plays at his death. Only a week ago, he had seen a preview performance of the stage version of “To Kill a Mockingbird” at the Hartford Stage Company and had been anticipating the staging of “Dividing the Estate” there in April.
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing,” he said in a 1999 interview. “I write almost every day. I’d write plays even if they were never done again. You’re at the mercy of whatever talent you have.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/theater/05foote.html?ref=obituaries
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TOM COLE, SCREENWRIGHTER FOR ‘SMOOTH TALK’ AND PLAYWRIGHT FOR ‘MEDAL OF HONOR RAG’
Tom Cole, whose screenplay for the 1986 film “Smooth Talk” helped propel the young Laura Dern to stardom and whose enduring play “Medal of Honor Rag” explored the psychological torment of a black soldier serving in Vietnam, died on Feb. 23 at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 75.
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Tom Cole
The cause was multiple myeloma, his wife, Joyce Chopra, said.
“Smooth Talk,” based on a Joyce Carol Oates story about a teenage girl exploring her sexual identity, was the surprise hit of the Sundance Film Festival. It was widely praised for its complex, understated treatment of the main character’s wobbly entrance into adulthood.
“In this age of movies designed to satisfy teenagers’ fantasies about themselves, ‘Smooth Talk’ has the shock value of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ seen among a bunch of not-great screwball comedies of the Depression era,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times.
The film was directed by Ms. Chopra, who had produced the television version of “Medal of Honor Rag” for American Playhouse on PBS in 1982.
Charles Thomas Cole was born in Paterson, N.J., the son of David L. Cole, a prominent labor arbitrator. After graduating from Harvard in 1954, he entered the Army, which sent him to its language school in Monterey, Calif., to learn Russian.
In 1959 he traveled to the Soviet Union as an interpreter with a government-sponsored exhibition intended to showcase American science, technology and culture. His job was to explain American-made farm machinery to Russian visitors. While in the Soviet Union, he witnessed the “kitchen debate” between Richard M. Nixon and Nikita S. Khrushchev.
On returning to the United States, Mr. Cole earned a master’s degree in Russian at Harvard and later taught Russian and English literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His Russian experiences provided material for several stories in his first book, “An End to Chivalry” (1965).
His first marriage, to Ellen Nurnberg, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Sarah Rose Cole of Cambridge, Mass.; a brother, Morrill, of Grand View, N.Y.; and a sister, Elizabeth, of Manhattan.
“Medal of Honor Rag” was inspired by the true story of Dwight Johnson, a black Vietnam veteran who was shot to death while holding up a convenience store in Detroit in 1971. The police later discovered that he had won the Medal of Honor for valor in combat.
Mr. Cole, intrigued, wrote a concise two-character play in which a troubled black war hero confronts a determined white psychiatrist. The role of Dale Jackson, the veteran, was performed Off Broadway by Howard E. Rollins Jr. in 1976 and became a plum part for other black actors in subsequent productions. In 2005 a Los Angeles version produced by Will Smith starred the rap star Heavy D.
Mr. Cole went on to write two more plays. “Fighting Bob,” about Robert La Follette, the progressive senator from Wisconsin, was produced at the Astor Place Theater in 1981. “About Time,” a two-character play about an elderly couple talking around the subject of death, became a signature performance piece for James Whitmore, who appeared in the original production at the John Houseman Theater in 1990.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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RHENA SCHWEITZER MILLER, AIDED FATHER’S WORK
Rhena Schweitzer Miller, the only child of the Nobel laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer and the director, in the late 1960s, of the hospital that her father and mother opened 96 years ago in a rain forest in west central Africa, died last Sunday at the home of one of her daughters in Pacific Palisades, Calif. She was 90.
Erica Anderson/Syracuse University’s Schweitzer Collection, via Associated Press, 1963
Rhena Schweitzer Miller with her father, Dr. Albert Schweitzer.
The death was confirmed by Dr. Lachlan Forrow, president of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, the organization that raises funds in the United States for the hospital and supports medical personnel who work in underserved areas around the world. Mrs. Miller helped organize the fellowship program at her father’s behest in 1940.
The hospital was started by Dr. Schweitzer and his wife, the former Helene Breslau, in a chicken coop in a tiny village near what is now Lambaréné, Gabon. Gabon was then a part of French Equatorial Africa. Dr. Schweitzer, an Alsatian-born theologian, musician and physician, resigned a college position to go to Africa in 1913 so that he and his wife could serve the native population.
The hospital now has 12 medical buildings with approximately 150 beds and treats about 35,000 outpatients a year. Mrs. Miller took over as director in 1965, after her father died, and ran the hospital until 1970.
That year, she married David Miller, who had been chief medical adviser to the Red Cross in Nigeria. Dr. Miller, a heart specialist, had gone to the hospital in Gabon in 1965 to help treat Dr. Schweitzer. For more than two decades, though they lived in Atlanta, the Millers worked together to offer medical care to people in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Yemen, India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Haiti. Dr. Miller died in 1997.
Rhena Schweitzer was born on Jan. 14, 1919, in Alsace-Lorraine, which was returned to France later that year; for more than 45 years before World War I it was part of Germany.
Two years earlier, during the war, her parents had been arrested by the authorities in French Equatorial Africa because they were German and sent to a prison camp in France; their hospital was closed. Dr. Schweitzer returned to Africa in 1924, leaving his family in Europe. His wife and daughter were at the hospital intermittently over the next 20 years.
In 1939, Miss Schweitzer married Jean Eckert, an organ builder she met in Paris; they later divorced. She became a medical technician in the late 1950s, then returned again to the hospital in Gabon, where she met Dr. Miller.
Mrs. Miller is survived by four children from her first marriage: a son, Philippe; three daughters, Monique Egli, Christiane Engel and Catherine Eckert; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
During the Nigerian-Biafran civil war and famine in the late 1960s, Mrs. Miller opened the hospital in Lambaréné to Ibo children from Biafra; and when the hospital was full she took some of them into her home there. She told The New York Times in 1968 that 20 beds had been moved into her home.
The children had to sleep two to each bed, she said, but “they have beautiful foam mattresses from the United States, and a staff member has been painting children’s drawings on the cots.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ROBERT E.A. LEE, PRODUCER OF ‘A TIME FOR BURNING’
Robert E. A. Lee, a longtime head of communications for the Lutheran Church, who helped bring to the screen two highly regarded but controversial films — “A Time for Burning,” a landmark documentary about American race relations, and “Martin Luther,” a biography of the father of Protestantism that was banned in several places — died on Feb. 27 at his home in Baldwin, N.Y. He was 87.
Barbara Lee Greenfeldt, 2007
Robert E. A. Lee
The cause was cancer, his family said.
From 1954 until 1988, Mr. Lee was the executive secretary of Lutheran Film Associates, as the organization is now known. Run collaboratively by the church’s two main branches — the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod — the organization has created and distributed films and television programs on religious subjects since the early 1950s.
From 1969 to 1988, Mr. Lee was also the executive director for communications of the Lutheran Council in the United States of America, a pan-Lutheran organization.
Released in 1966, “A Time for Burning” was one of the signal documentaries about the civil rights movement. The film chronicled a searing chapter in the life of the Rev. William Youngdahl, the Lutheran pastor of an all-white congregation in Omaha. Seeking to promote fellowship between the races, Mr. Youngdahl proposed a program in which 10 couples from his congregation would visit 10 couples in all-black Lutheran churches in the area.
As the documentary showed, Mr. Youngdahl’s efforts to draw black people into his congregants’ orbit and vice versa created a furor that divided his congregation and led him to resign. The film also profiled Ernest Chambers, a young black barber in Omaha who spoke candidly about his anger and bitterness toward white people.
Mr. Lee was the executive producer of “A Time for Burning,” which was directed by William C. Jersey and Barbara Connell.
“ ‘A Time for Burning’ would never have happened without Robert Lee,” Mr. Jersey said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Here we are, we’re doing a scriptless film, and our hero is forced to resign. So then what do we do? And Bob Lee, who’s representing the church, has this trial by fire with others within the church who say, ‘We’re making a film about the church’s failure?’ He says, ‘We should do it,’ and we finish the film. So he was vindicated, but in 1965, that was a big risk — for an institution to say, ‘We’re flawed.’ ”
Turned down by the three major networks, “A Time for Burning” was broadcast on public television in October 1966, to critical acclaim. Writing in The New York Times, Jack Gould called the film “the most accomplished and sensitive hour of television this season.”
For commissioning the documentary, the Lutheran Church was widely praised both for capturing the nation’s racial conflict in microcosm and for its unflinching examination of racism within its own fold.
Later released theatrically, “A Time for Burning” received an Oscar nomination for best documentary. In 2005 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry, a select list of movies chosen to be preserved for their cultural, historical or aesthetic significance.
Mr. Lee began his film career with “Martin Luther,” a biographical drama made in 1953. Directed by Irving Pichel, it starred the Irish-born actor Niall MacGinnis in the title role. Mr. Lee, who at the time worked in Minneapolis as the assistant director of public relations for the Evangelical Lutheran Church, was brought in as the film’s chief publicist.
Though reviewers praised “Martin Luther,” the film was banned in several places with large Roman Catholic populations, including the Canadian province of Quebec. (The ban extended to public screenings only; in 1955, when the film was shown privately at 11 Protestant churches in Montreal, about 25,000 people saw it in the course of a single week, The New York Times reported.)
In 1956 the Chicago television station WGN-TV canceled a planned broadcast of “Martin Luther”; it was shown there the next year by a rival station, WBKB.
The tensions between Catholics and Protestants that the film engendered were widely reported in the news media in the United States and elsewhere. “Martin Luther” received Oscar nominations for art direction and cinematography.
Mr. Lee’s other pictures for Lutheran Film Associates include “Question 7” (1961), a drama about Christian life in East Germany that he produced with Lothar Wolff, and “The Joy of Bach” (1980), a television film starring Brian Blessed.
Robert Edward Alexander Lee was born on Nov. 9, 1921, in Spring Grove, Minn. An accomplished trumpeter and singer, he earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, in 1942. His interest in broadcasting began at the campus radio station, where he was the host of a popular show, “Hymns We Love,” on which he also sang. In World War II Mr. Lee served in the Pacific as a Navy pilot, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Mr. Lee’s wife, the former Elaine Naeseth, whom he married in 1944, died in 2000. He is survived by their six children, Peg Harris, Barbara Greenfeldt, Sigrid Lee, Richard Lee, Sylvia Lee-Thompson and Paul Lee; two sisters, Juliet Seim and Naomi Hysell; eight grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Mr. Youngdahl, the pastor at the center of “A Time for Burning,” went on to hold pulpits around the country and now lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Mr. Chambers, the barber, became a nationally prominent civil rights activist as a result of the film and went on to serve in the Nebraska State Senate. As a result of a constitutional amendment in 2000 that imposed term limits on the state’s lawmakers, he stepped down in January after 38 years in office, the longest-serving state legislator in Nebraska history.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ALAN LANDERS, ‘WINSTON MAN’
Alan Landers, who started smoking at 9 and became a model for advertisements of Winston cigarettes and Tiparillo cigars, then contracted lung cancer and became a highly visible crusader against smoking, died Friday at his home in Lauderhill, Fla. He was 68.
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Mark Mirko/West Palm Beach Post, via Associated Press
Alan Landers in 1997 showing a surgery scar and holding a Winston ad in which he, on left, appeared in the mid-1960s.
Robin Levine Carns, a niece, said the cause was complications of treatment for cancer of the larynx, which Mr. Landers attributed to smoking, as he did his two lung cancers and heart disease.
As a foe of smoking, Mr. Landers billed himself as the Winston Man, in reference to his modeling for advertisements using the notoriously ungrammatical encomium “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” He visited hundreds of schools, made appearances for the World Health Organization and testified before Congress.
His argument was his personal story. He told of puffing through literally cartons of cigarettes in photographic sessions as he sought to achieve the ideal spiral of smoke while not letting ash at the tip of the cigarette exceed a quarter-inch. He said he was not warned of the hazards of smoking and called the industry “the biggest con of the 20th century.”
To dramatize his point, Mr. Landers would rip open his shirt to show scars from his operations.
In 1995, a spokeswoman for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company told The Associated Press that there were warnings on cigarette packages at the time of Mr. Landers’s modeling that he was free to read. Calls to the company’s public relations department on Tuesday were not returned.
Wayne McLaren, one of the models for the Marlboro Man, also became an antismoking spokesman before he died of lung cancer. Janet Sackman, who was once the Lucky Strike girl, has supported antismoking efforts since she lost her larynx and part of a lung to cancer.
Mr. Landers sued Reynolds in 1995, saying the company had exposed him to health risks without warning him, and the matter is finally coming to trial on April 13. His lawyer, Norwood S. Wilner, said Mr. Landers’s family was deciding how to proceed.
Mr. Landers was not part of a class-action suit filed in 1994 in Florida involving up to 700,000 smokers, which won a jury award of $145 billion in 2006. The State Supreme Court voided the award, saying each smoker’s damages must be decided individually. In February, a jury awarded a smoker’s widow $8 million in the first such decision.
Mr. Wilner said Mr. Landers was not included in the original class-action case because “we wanted him to be able to speak for himself.”
Alan Stewart Levine was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 30, 1940, and grew up watching movies; his twin brothers, who were ushers, let him in free. He told USA Today in 1995 that he began to smoke “before my bar mitzvah.” At 17, he joined the Army, which gave him a “smoke break” five minutes after each hour. He developed a smoking habit of two-and-a-half packs a day.
He went to New York, took acting classes and worked for several modeling agencies in succession. He appeared in magazines like Vogue, Cosmopolitan and GQ, and was once a centerfold in Playgirl. One of his biggest modeling jobs was with Reynolds, which he said paid him $3,000 to $5,000 a day.
In 1998, The Palm Beach Post reported that in a deposition Mr. Landers said he had modeled in Winston print advertisements only for a one-week shoot. Mr. Landers acknowledged this to the newspaper, as well as its report that he had once had a cocaine addiction and had pleaded guilty to two armed robberies.
Mr. Landers had small parts in television series and in Woody Allen’s movie “Annie Hall” and ran an acting school in Los Angeles for many years.
Mr. Landers, who never married, is survived by his brother, Jack Levine, of Destin, Fla.
Over the years, some people questioned how Mr. Landers could have been as ignorant of the dangers of smoking as he said he was, particularly after the surgeon general in 1964 officially reported that it caused cancer. He answered that his addiction was too strong, and the warnings not sufficiently forceful.
Mr. Wilner offered another possible explanation, one relevant to Mr. Landers’s lawsuit: “He knew a lot less than R. J. Reynolds did.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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IAN CARR, JAZZ TRUMPETER AND AUTHOR OF MILES DAVIS BIOGRAPHY
Ian Carr, a Scottish-born trumpeter who, like his formidable influence, Miles Davis, was an early practitioner of jazz-rock fusion and later repaid his artistic debt by writing Davis’s biography, died on Feb. 25 in London. He was 75.
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Martyn Goddard/Rex Features
Ian Carr
The cause was complications after pneumonia and a series of mini-strokes, Alyn Shipton, Mr. Carr’s biographer, said in an e-mail message. An obituary on the Web site iancarrsnucleus.net — dedicated to the music of Mr. Carr and the band, Nucleus, which he founded nearly 40 years ago — said that Mr. Carr had Alzheimer’s disease.
As a writer and researcher, composer and bandleader, Mr. Carr contributed to jazz history both by making music and by explaining it. He started Nucleus in late 1969, a time when jazz musicians were just beginning to find ways of appropriating the tools of rock ’n’ roll. Nucleus mingled traditional jazz instruments (like trumpet, soprano and tenor sax) with rock band staples (like electric bass and electric guitar) and melded improvisations with a driving, creative bass line and urgent, forward-leaning rhythms. It was a hit at the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival that year as well.
The band, which had several different rosters, dissolved in the 1980s, though there were several reunions for concert dates and recordings into the 21st century. Its sound was clearly related to that of the rock-infused records Davis was producing as the 1960s turned to the 1970s — “In a Silent Way,” “Bitches Brew” and “A Tribute to Jack Johnson” — and Nucleus pre-dated several better-known bands that became mainstays of jazz-rock fusion, including Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
In its heyday in the 1970s, Nucleus recorded a dozen or so albums, including “Belladonna,” “Alleycat” and “Out of the Long Dark,” the last reflecting Mr. Carr’s battle with depression. (Mr. Shipton appropriated the title for his 2006 biography.)
Mr. Carr wrote for several jazz publications, and his first book, “Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain,” was published in 1973, but his 1982 book, “Miles Davis: A Critical Biography,” was the high point of his writing life. An evenhanded assessment of Davis’s life and music, it distinguished itself by its careful analysis of Davis’s playing and his innovations. Writing about the book in The New York Times Book Review, Bill Zavatsky lauded the clarity of Mr. Carr’s writing and his ability to explain musical technique to the lay reader. (The book was expanded and revised in the 1990s and republished as “Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography.”)
“He has come as close as any writer can,” Mr. Zavatsky wrote, “to upsetting Davis’s famous dictum that music can’t be talked about and should be left to speak for itself.”
Ian Henry Randell Carr was born April 21, 1933, in Dumfries, Scotland, and was reared in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in northeastern England. He began playing trumpet as a student at King’s College there, which was then a part of Durham University, and received a degree in English and a teaching certificate. He served in the British Army, and afterward, living in Italy, he began playing with local jazz groups.
In 1961 his first band in England, the EmCee Five (which also included his brother), recorded a tune, “Let’s Take Five!,” which received wide radio play. Over the next few years he played with a number of prominent musicians, including John McLaughlin (later at the center of the Mahavishnu Orchestra) and Eric Burden, of the Animals. Before starting Nucleus, he joined with the guitarist Don Rendell to formed the Rendell/Carr Quintet, which became one of Britain’s best-known jazz bands of the decade.
Mr. Carr’s first wife died in childbirth. His second marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter, Selina.
In later years, in addition to playing with revived incarnations of Nucleus and other bands, Mr. Carr wrote a book about the pianist Keith Jarrett, contributed to several jazz reference books and was a consultant for television documentaries about Davis and Mr. Jarrett.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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QUENTIN MEASE, HOUSTON CIVIL RIGHTS PIONEER;
LEAVES LEGACY OF COMMUNITY SERVICE
By DANE SCHILLER
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Feb. 24, 2009, 9:51PM
Nick de la Torre Houston Chronicle
Quentin R. Mease, 100, talked earlier this month at his Houston home about his long involvement with the NAACP and other causes.
Mease broke his hip in a weekend fall and learned he had pneumonia after he was rushed to Memorial Hermann Hospital.
He was especially known for his work with the YMCA, the Harris County Hospital District and the Urban League. Earlier this month, he was given special recognition by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Born in Iowa on Oct. 25, 1908, Mease came to Houston in 1948 to help establish the Third Ward’s South Central YMCA. When it opened in 1955, the facility was intended for blacks in a segregated city.
“Quentin Mease was a legend among us,” said Clark Baker, president of the YMCA of Greater Houston.
“He was never one to take a back seat. He marched up front. He led up front. He leaves us with a legacy of service, and Houston, the world, is a better place because he was here,” Baker said.
Mease served as one of seven community leaders on the Harris County Hospital District’s first governing board in 1966 and was chairman for 19 years.A Houston rehabilitation hospital is named in his honor.
“Mr. Mease was a continuing inspiration to us all for his unfaltering commitment to enhancing health care services in our community,” Hospital District President David S. Lopez told employees in a message distributed Tuesday.
“His compassion for others and his emphasis on exceptional patient care are hallmarks of his legacy to our organization,” Lopez said.
This month, Mease recalled some of his earlier experiences for the Houston Chronicle, discussing how life could be painful for a black even far from the South, in his native Iowa. He said he endured snide remarks and suspicious looks and that hotel rooms sometimes suddenly became unavailable.
After the death of his father, who was a miner and labor leader, in 1920, the Mease family moved from a small Iowa town to Des Moines, and he became involved in the NAACP.
He earned a master’s degree and was an Air Force officer in World World II, according to his longtime assistant, Bertha Woodley.
After the war, Mease was hired by the YMCA. When he arrived, Houston was segregated.
“I wasn’t entirely unaccustomed to it after living in Iowa,” Mease said of segregation. “But we knew things had to change.”
Woodley recalled him as a man who went out of his way to help others. “He knew everybody and was always willing to help anybody he could,” she said. “All you had to do was call.”
Sheldon Stovall, the YMCA’s vice president for diversity in Houston, said that to the end, Mease largely took care of himself. “He was 100 years old, a very proud man,” he said.
Mease was especially excited to see Barack Obama elected president and kept a photo he was given by the Obama campaign, Stovall said.
Mease, who wrote a memoir, On Equal Footing, was preceded in death by his wife, Jewell. He is survived by a daughter, Barbara Ransom, of Oakland, Calif.
Services are pending.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
Ann
