LEE A. ARCHER, JR., TUSKEGEE FIGHTER PILOT
Published: February 3, 2010
Lee A. Archer Jr., a pioneering black fighter pilot who was credited with shooting down four German planes, three in a single day, when he flew with the
Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, died Jan. 27 in Manhattan. He was 90 and lived in New Rochelle, N.Y.
Courtesy of the Archer Family
Lee A. Archer Jr. was credited with downing four German planes as a Tuskegee Airman in World War II.
Betsy Herzog
Later, in New York, he became an entrepreneur and investment manager.
His death was announced by his family.
For all his achievements as a military flier, Mr. Archer also forged a career in the business world as a prominent entrepreneur and investment manager.
As a combat pilot, he is best remembered for his exploits of Oct. 12, 1944, when he was in the midst of a furious series of dogfights over German-occupied Hungary. In a matter of minutes, flying a P-51 Mustang fighter with the distinctive red tail of the 332nd Fighter Group, known collectively as the Tuskegee Airmen, Lieutenant Archer shot down three German fighters.
At a time when the armed forces were segregated and the military brass was reluctant to give blacks combat responsibilities, the four squadrons of the Tuskegee unit proved time and time again that black pilots had the bravery and skills to escort American bombers to their targets and blow enemy planes out of the sky.
Lee Andrew Archer Jr. was born in Yonkers on Sept. 6, 1919. He became enthralled with aviation as a youngster in Harlem. Joining the Army out of New York University, hoping to become a pilot, he was assigned to a communications job at a post in Georgia because the Army did not want any black fliers. But when it began training black servicemen to fly at its Tuskegee airfield in Alabama, Mr. Archer joined the program and won his wings in the summer of 1943.
When he returned home in 1945, a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross, he found that nothing seemed to have changed in American society.
“I flew 169 combat missions when most pilots were flying 50,” Mr. Archer told The Chicago Tribune in 2004. “When I came back to the U.S. and down that gangplank, there was a sign at the bottom: ‘Colored Troops to the Right, White Troops to the Left.’ ”
But he remained in the armed forces, which were desegregated by President Harry S. Truman in 1948, and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1970.
In the business world, Mr. Archer worked at General Foods from 1970 to 1987, becoming chief executive of three of its investment arms, and in that role helped to finance dozens of companies, including Essence Communications and Black Enterprise magazine. He later founded the venture capital firm Archer Asset Management.
Mr. Archer ultimately maintained that he shot down five German planes — two on separate days in July 1944 in addition to the three in October 1944 — but said he had not been properly credited with one of those downings in July. Shooting down five planes would have brought him official designation as an ace, making him the only one among the Tuskegee Airmen.
In a 2008 review of wartime military records, Daniel L. Haulman of the Air Force Historical Research Agency found that Mr. Archer, while officially credited with four downings, was among the three leading Tuskegee pilots in shooting down enemy planes. His total was matched by Capt. Joseph D. Elsberry and Capt. Edward L. Toppins.
Mr. Archer is survived by his sons, Lee Archer III of Rome and Raymond and Roy, both of New Rochelle; a daughter, Ina, of Brooklyn; and four granddaughters. His wife, Ina, died in 1996.
In October 2005, Mr. Archer and two fellow Tuskegee veterans visited an air base at Balad, Iraq, to meet with 700 servicemen from a successor unit to his all-black outfit.
“This is the new Air Force,” he told The Associated Press. In the dining room, he said, he saw “black, white, Asian, Pacific Islanders, people from different parts of Europe.”
“This,” he said, “is what America is.”
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IMARI OBADELE, WHO FOUGHT FOR REPARATIONS
Published: February 5, 2010
Imari Obadele, a teacher and writer whose commitment to black empowerment fired a militant, sometimes violent effort to win reparations for descendants of slaves and to carve out, however quixotically, an African-American republic in the Deep South, died on Jan. 18 in Atlanta. He was 79.
United Press International
Imari Obadele, center, in a 1971 Republic of Afrika news conference in Jackson, Miss.
The cause was a stroke, said Johnita Scott, his former wife.
Mr. Obadele (pronounced oh-ba-DEL-ee) was president of what he called the Republic of New Afrika, a country that existed as an idea. His provocative proposal was to have Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina — the heart of the old Confederacy — removed from the union and given over to black Americans.
The demand drew the national news media’s attention. The New York Times called it “bizarre.”
The proposal emerged in 1968, the year the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Black separatism was on the rise, with some advocates resurrecting 19th-century proposals for blacks to return to Africa.
Mr. Obadele, who had despaired of integration into white society, demanded American land as payback for the centuries of abuse blacks had suffered. He also asked for billions of dollars and became a leader of the reparations movement.
His organization saw itself as fighting a war of national liberation. It had a uniformed militia and engaged in gun battles with the police in Detroit and Jackson, Miss.; a police officer died in each.
In the Jackson face-off — a raid on the group’s headquarters in 1971 — murder charges against Mr. Obadele were eventually dropped, though eight members of his group were convicted. A year later, Mr. Obadele was convicted of conspiring to assault an F.B.I. officer and served more than five years of a 12-year sentence.
Mr. Obadele and his supporters contended that they had become targets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation because of their political views, pointing to threats and raids by the police in the months before the Mississippi confrontation. Amnesty International in 1977 called Mr. Obadele a political prisoner, one of the first Americans so designated.
The F.B.I. was clearly watching the group, as internal agency documents showed when they later became public. A 1968 agency memorandum urged that Mr. Obadele “be kept off the streets”; another called him one of America’s “most violence-prone black extremists.”
In his critique of American race relations, Mr. Obadele, who had a doctorate in political science, argued that slaves should not have automatically been considered American citizens after their emancipation because they were offered no choice in the matter. If they had chosen not to become inferior members of a white society (the only possibility for them, as he saw it) or to move to another country, they should have been able to take land from the existing United States.
Mr. Obadele also started the advocacy group National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. Maulana Karenga, the black nationalist leader best known as the creator of Kwanzaa, the African-American celebration in December, wrote in 2008 in The Sentinel, a black newspaper in Los Angeles, that Mr. Obadele’s work for reparations was “essential.”
Mr. Obadele’s views fueled a debate that had started during Reconstruction. In recent years, the issue has re-emerged among black intellectuals with the publication in 2000 of Randall Robinson’s book “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks” and an effort by the Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree to assemble a top legal team to push for reparations.
Mr. Obadele was born Richard Bullock Henry in Philadelphia on May 2, 1930, one of 12 children. He was an avid Boy Scout and as a young man helped his brother Milton start a civil rights organization that had W. E. B. Du Bois as a speaker. When Milton moved to Detroit, Richard followed.
Richard worked there as a newspaper reporter and as a technical writer for the military. In 1963, he refused to let his son Freddy go to school and learn from textbooks he considered racist.
Richard’s brother was a close friend of Malcolm X, and after Malcolm’s murder in 1965, Richard and Milton Henry helped form the Malcolm X Society to promote his views. Malcolm, in the face of continuing bloodshed in the civil rights struggle, had become increasingly frustrated with the philosophy of nonviolent resistance espoused by Dr. King and others. The Henry brothers began to embrace black separatism.
In 1968, they and others formed the Republic of New Afrika and adopted African names; Milton became Gaidi Obadele. (Obadele is a Yoruba word meaning “the king arrives at home.”) At the group’s inaugural meeting in Detroit, about 200 delegates signed a declaration of independence and a “government in exile” was set up. Mr. Obadele was chosen information minister, and he published a handbook, “War in America.”
A paramilitary unit, the Black Legion, to be clad in black uniforms with leopard-skin epaulettes, was formed.
In March 1969, a gun battle erupted between police officers and the Black Legionnaires outside a Detroit church, leaving one officer dead. The militants were tried but not convicted in a trial that drew conflicting testimony about the confrontation.
The Republic of New Afrika splintered the next year, with Milton, or Gaidi Obadele, saying he now rejected violence. Imari, who had now been elected president, led about 100 followers to Mississippi to build a black nation. After a deal to buy 18 acres from a farmer collapsed, the group established a headquarters in a house in Jackson.
The local police and F.B.I. agents raided the house on Aug. 18, 1971. Some news reports said the purpose of the raid was to arrest a suspect in the Detroit killing. Others said the goal was to stop treasonous activities or to search for arms. Each side said the other fired first in a gun battle that left one officer dead.
Though indicted in the killing, Mr. Obadele was found to have been 10 blocks away during the raid and charges were dropped. But in a related proceeding, he was convicted of conspiracy to assault a federal agent and was sent to prison.
Mr. Obadele later earned a Ph.D. in political science from Temple University. He taught at several colleges, including Prairie View A&M University in Texas.
He is survived by his daughters Marilyn Obadele and Vivian Gafford; his sons Imari II and Freddy Sterling Young; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In 1983, Mr. Obadele was a defense witness in the trial of Cynthia Boston, a Republic of New Afrika member who was convicted in the holdup of a Brinks armored car in 1981. On the stand, he defended armed struggle.
“We cannot tell somebody who is underground what to do,” he said. “If people feel that they must attack people who have been attacking and destroying and harming our people, then that is a decision they have to make.”
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JACK BLOCK, WHO STUDIED YOUNG CHILDREN INTO ADULTHOOD
Published: February 6, 2010
Jack Block, a prominent psychologist of personality who in 1968 began studying a group of California preschoolers and for decades kept watch as they moved from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood, died on Jan. 13 at his home in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 85.
University of California, Berkeley
Jack Block
The cause was complications of a spinal cord injury he suffered 10 years ago, his daughter Susan Block said.
At his death, Professor Block was an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had taught from 1957 until his retirement in 1991.
Professor Block’s project began with more than 100 3-year-olds in the San Francisco area. He studied them again when they were 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 18, 23 and, finally, 32, when the study ended. Much of the work was conducted with his wife, Jeanne Humphrey Block, a collaborator until her death in 1981.
While other longitudinal studies examined the effects of I.Q. or social class on later life, the one by the Blocks focused on psychological makeup. At bottom, the questions they asked were these: What makes people turn out as they do, and to what extent can adult personality be predicted by childhood temperament?
“It was probably the only one of its kind that started with such young children,” Per F. Gjerde, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said of the Blocks’ study. Nowadays, Professor Gjerde said, “you would start at birth, but in 1968, age 3 was a very, very early beginning.”
Investigating the ways in which subjects’ early lives informed their later ones, the Blocks looked at issues like childhood responses to parental divorce, adolescent drug use and adult political affiliation.
In a 1986 study, for instance, they examined members of the original group whose parents eventually divorced. Conducted with Professor Gjerde, the study upended the received wisdom that divorce in and of itself causes disruptive behavior in children.
Instead, the authors found, children from the divorced families — in particular the boys — had displayed antisocial behavior years before the divorce took place. In other words, the boys’ behavior, with the stresses on family life it entailed, could have been a cause of divorce as well as a consequence.
A 1990 study, by Professor Block and Jonathan Shedler, found that teenagers who experimented with drugs in a limited way tended to be better adjusted than those who either used drugs habitually or abstained entirely.
Jacob Block, always called Jack, was born in Brooklyn on April 28, 1924. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford in 1951.
Besides his daughter Susan, Professor Block is survived by two other daughters, Jody Block and Carol Block; a son, David; and four grandchildren.
His books include “Lives Through Time” (Bancroft, 1971; with Norma Haan).
One of Professor Block’s studies drew particular notice in the news media. Published in The Journal of Research in Personality in 2006, it found that subjects who at 3 years old had seemed thin-skinned, rigid, inhibited and vulnerable tended at 23 to be political conservatives. On the other hand, 3-year-olds characterized as self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating and resilient were inclined to become liberals.
Pundits’ responses to the study ranged from enthusiastic approval to caustic dismissal, depending on the politics of the critic.
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FRANCES REID, ACTRESS OF STAGE AND DAYTIME TV
Published: February 5, 2010
Frances Reid, one of daytime television’s most enduring performers, who played the family matriarch Alice Horton on the soap opera “Days of Our Lives” for more than 40 years, died Wednesday in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 95.
NBC Universal
Frances Reid in 1965, in the first episode of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”
From left, the “Days of Our Lives” stars Melissa Reeves, Frances Reid and Kristian Alfonso, at an anniversary in 2005.
A spokeswoman for NBC, which broadcasts “Days of Our Lives,” confirmed the death.
Ms. Reid, who had a long history in the theater and on television behind her, took the role in “Days” somewhat reluctantly, she said in interviews, but agreed to it because roles of any kind for actresses in middle age were rare. She began with the show’s first episode in 1965 and stayed long enough in the role for Alice to become a great-great grandmother.
When the show was first broadcast on Nov. 8, 1965, Alice Horton was already a grandmother, and she and her husband, Tom, a doctor, were stellar citizens of the fictional town of Salem. They were lamenting the quietude in their home because all five of their children were grown and had moved out of the house.
But quietude was never a characteristic of the Horton family for long, nor of Salem. In the first episode, Alice’s granddaughter Julie was arrested for shoplifting.
Alice was known to “Days” aficionados for her spirited, loving nature, her sound counsel, her family values, her annual Christmas tree decorating party and her homemade doughnuts. Over the years she was a homemaker, a hospital volunteer and board member, a cosmetics company investor and the co-founder of a shelter for teenage runaways and destitute families.
This good-citizen résumé didn’t preclude her from taking part in some wacky plots, however. At one point she helped a man accused of a killing to escape from jail (her scheme involved drugged doughnuts) because she knew he was innocent. At another point she was presumed murdered by a serial killer — choked to death, also with doughnuts — only to be resurrected (along with a number of other victims) as a captive on a remote island that looked exactly like Salem.
Something of an anomaly in soap opera history, Alice was faithful to her husband, though in 1991 she learned that their marriage had never been legal, and she insisted he marry her again. Tom Horton died in 1994, when Macdonald Carey, the actor who played him, did.
Frances Reid was born on Dec. 9, 1914, in Wichita Falls, Tex., and she grew up mostly in Berkeley, Calif. Her father was a banker. Ms. Reid married a fellow actor, Philip Bourneuf, in 1940; he died in 1979. Information about survivors was not available.
She trained as an actress at the Pasadena Playhouse, and she appeared on Broadway more than a dozen times in the 1930s and 1940s, as Ophelia in “Hamlet,” Lady Anne in “Richard III,” Viola in “Twelfth Night” and Roxane in “Cyrano de Bergerac” opposite José Ferrer. Reviewing “Cyrano” in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Frances Reid plays an enchanting Roxane with a skimming touch and a daintiness of accent, as well as obvious enjoyment in the role.”
In the 1950s her career turned to television, and over a decade and a half she appeared in numerous shows. She played the title role in the soap opera “Portia Faces Life,” a short-lived adaptation from a radio serial about the trials and tribulations of a marriage, and had roles in other soaps like “As the World Turns” and “The Edge of Night.” She made appearances as well on dramatic anthology series like “Hallmark Hall of Fame” and prime-time dramas like “Wagon Train,” “Dr Kildare,” “Perry Mason” and “Mr. Novak.”
At her death Ms. Reid was still part of the “Days of Our Lives” cast, but she last appeared on the program in 2007. She was given a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.
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GEOFFREY BURBIDGE, WHO TRACED LIFE TO STARDUST
Published: February 6, 2010
Geoffrey Burbidge, an English physicist who became a towering figure in astronomy by helping to explain how people and everything else are made of stardust, died on Jan. 26 in San Diego. He was 84.
University of California, San Diego
Geoffrey Burbidge’s work in astronomy changed the field.
His death, at Scripps Memorial Hospital, came after a long illness, said the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Burbidge was a physics professor there for more than four decades and lived in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego.
A large man with an even larger voice, Dr. Burbidge was one of the last surviving giants of the postwar era of astronomy, when big telescopes were sprouting on mountain peaks in the Southwest and peeling back the sky, revealing a universe more diverse and violent than anybody had dreamed: radio galaxies and quasars erupting with gargantuan amounts of energy, pulsars and black holes pinpricking the cosmos, and lacy chains of galaxies rushing endlessly away into eternity.
As the director of Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, Dr. Burbidge pushed to open big telescopes to a larger community of astronomers. As a senior astronomer at the university in San Diego, he was, to the consternation of most of his colleagues, a witty and acerbic critic of the Big Bang theory.
In 1957, in a long, groundbreaking paper in The Reviews of Modern Physics, Dr. Burbidge; his wife, E. Margaret Burbidge; William Fowler of the California Institute of Technology; and Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University — a collaboration noted by their initials B2FH — laid out the way that thermonuclear reactions in stars could slowly seed a universe that was originally pure hydrogen, helium and lithium, the simplest elements in the periodic table, with heavier elements like oxygen, iron, carbon and others from which life is derived.
Stars like the Sun burn hydrogen into helium to generate heat and light for most of their lives, until they run out of fuel and fizzle, or so the story goes. But more massive stars can go on to ignite helium to produce carbon and oxygen and so forth. Eventually the star explodes, tossing the newly minted atoms into space, where they mix with gas and dust and are incorporated into future stars. Successive generations of stars that coalesce from cosmic dust, burn and then explode would thus make the universe ever richer in heavy elements.
Allan Sandage of Carnegie Observatories, an old friend of Dr. Burbidge’s, once explained it this way: “Every one of our chemical elements was once inside a star. The same star. You and I are brothers. We came from the same supernova.”
Or as the singer Joni Mitchell put it, “We are stardust.”
In a recent interview, Dr. Sandage described the B2FH collaboration’s work as “one of the major papers of the century.”
“It changed the whole landscape of the chemical evolution of the universe,” he said.
Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge was born in 1925 in Chipping Norton in England, in the Cotswolds hills halfway between Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon. His father, Leslie, was a builder. His mother, Evelyn, was a milliner. He was an only child and the first of his family to progress beyond grammar school.
He attended the University of Bristol intending to study history, but on discovering he could stay in college longer if he enrolled in physics, he did, and found he liked it. He furthered his studies at University College, London, from which he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1951.
Another turning point for him came when he befriended a recent Ph.D., Margaret Peachey, in a lecture course in London. An assistant director of the university’s observatory at the time, she would become a prominent astronomer in her own right. They married in 1948.
She survives him, along with a daughter, Sarah Burbidge of San Francisco, and a grandson.
It was under his wife’s influence that Dr. Burbidge became interested in the physics of stars, tagging along on observing trips as her assistant. He always joked that he had become an astronomer by marrying one.
On occasion the roles switched. Margaret’s application to observe on Mount Wilson, the mountain overlooking Pasadena, Calif., where modern cosmology began, was turned down on the grounds that there was no separate women’s bathroom. Dr. Burbidge booked the telescope time himself and his wife posed as his assistant, but they had to stay in an unheated cabin on the mountain, away from a dormitory housing other astronomers.
After stops by the Burbidges at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Cambridge University, Dr. Fowler arranged for them and Dr. Hoyle to go to Pasadena to complete the stellar nucleosynthesis work, for which Dr. Fowler was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Margaret Burbidge obtained a post at the California Institute of Technology, while Geoffrey Burbidge got a job at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories.
After yet another stop, this time at the University of Wisconsin, the Burbidges landed at the University of California, San Diego, in 1962.
By then astronomers had been riveted by the discovery of quasars: bright pointlike objects that were pouring out radio waves and whose visible light was severely shifted toward longer, redder wavelengths, like the sound of a siren going away, indicating that they were moving away at high velocity. According to the standard interpretation of life in an expanding universe, these redshifts, as they are called, meant that quasars were at great distance.
As a trained physicist, Dr. Burbidge was one of the first astronomers to investigate what could possibly be supplying the energy of such objects. At a meeting in Paris in 1958, he pointed out that the energy requirements for radio galaxies were already bumping up against the limits of known astrophysics.
“That was a very important development,” Dr. Sandage said. In time, that line of thinking would lead to the idea that quasars and radio galaxies were powered by the gravity of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, a widely held notion today.
Dr. Burbidge, however, soon parted ways with his colleagues on quasars and indeed on the Big Bang itself. The great energies required to produce them and their smallness led him to question whether quasars really were at cosmological distances. His doubts were buttressed by observations by Halton C. Arp, now of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, suggesting that quasars were concentrated around nearby active galaxies and might have been shot out of them.
A debate ensued, and almost all astronomers agree that it was one that Dr. Burbidge and his friends finally lost. The overwhelming consensus among astronomers is that the redshifts are what they appear to be, said Peter Strittmatter, director of the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Burbidge’s skepticism extended to cosmology. In 1990, he and four other astronomers, including Drs. Arp and Hoyle, published a broadside in the journal Nature listing arguments against the Big Bang.
Dr. Burbidge preferred instead a version of Dr. Hoyle’s Steady State theory of an eternal universe. In the new version, small, local big bangs originating in the nuclei of galaxies every 20 billion years or so kept the universe boiling. To his annoyance, most other astronomers ignored this view.
In a memoir in 2007, Dr. Burbidge wrote that this quasi-steady state theory was probably closer to the truth than the Big Bang. But he added that “there is such a heavy bias against any minority point of view in cosmology that it may take a very long time for this to occur.”
Despite his contrarian ways, Dr. Burbidge maintained his credibility in the astronomical establishment, serving as director of Kitt Peak from 1978 to 1984 and editing the prestigious Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics for more than 30 years. He was “a very clear-thinking heretic,” Dr. Strittmatter said.
Dr. Strittmatter recalled that as a young astronomer he was terrified of Dr. Burbidge. “Then I learned that what he liked was a good argument,” he said.
The Kitt Peak observatory had been built with support from the National Science Foundation as a sort of counterweight to the famous observatories in California like Mount Wilson and Palomar, whose giant telescopes were privately owned and available to only a few. Dr. Burbidge believed that Kitt Peak should act more as a service facility for all astronomers.
“His idea was to open up astronomy to all qualified astronomers,” Dr. Sandage said.
Dr. Burbidge never lost what Dr. Strittmatter called a “rebel’s instinct.” Dr. Sandage said Dr. Burbidge had called him up three times a week for 40 years to argue about the Big Bang.
“He delighted in bringing up all the details that didn’t quite fit,” Dr. Sandage said. In recent years, he added, as the evidence for the Big Bang mounted, Dr. Burbidge held his ground.
“I just didn’t understand that,” Dr. Sandage said. “I often wondered if he was just arguing with me to keep on the phone.”
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EARL A. BARTHE, A MASTER OF PLASTER
Published: February 2, 2010
Earl A. Barthé said that plastering and music “sort of rhyme.” Perched on a scaffold, he would burst into arias from “Carmen” or growl like
Muddy Waters when installing a ceiling medallion.
Nick Spitzer
Earl A. Barthé of New Orleans, was a fifth-generation plasterer.
“Curves,” Mr. Barthé said, “are conducive to the blues.”
A fifth-generation plasterer, the man known as Mr. B. epitomized the old-time craftsmen, from decorative masons to ironsmiths, who continue to provide a traditional flavor to the architectural jambalaya of New Orleans.
Mr. Barthé, who died on Jan. 11 at the age of 87, created cornices, friezes and ceiling medallions whose character and workmanship drew recognition from the Smithsonian and the National Endowment for the Arts. And when Hurricane Katrina flooded his home, shop and the city he loved, Mr. Barthé deployed his skills to help reassemble interiors, whether it was a Bourbon Street restaurant or a Ninth Ward shotgun shack.
Mr. Barthé (pronounced bar-THAY) died at his home in New Orleans, his son, Hurchail, said. At his funeral, Lionel Ferbos, who is 98 or 99 and a retired tinsmith, a fine trumpeter and a good friend of Mr. Barthé, led a traditional New Orleans ensemble in jazz versions of spirituals like “Just Over in the Gloryland.”
Mr. Barthé’s great-great-grandfather started the family plastering business in 1850 after arriving from Nice, France, via Haiti, and his son and a daughter will continue it.
Across the decades the family has made and refurbished the plaster and stucco of a city known for its distinctively vintage, eclectic look, from its louvered cypress shutters to its filigree iron.
In new construction like the Superdome to restoration of French Quarter architectural treasures, in working-class shotgun houses to the ornate tombs of the city’s cemeteries, Mr. Barthé did the plastering.
Along the way he became something of a cult hero to preservationists.
“He could do work in the 20th century that was modeled on practices of the 18th century,” John Michael Vlach, an anthropology and American studies professor at George Washington University in Washington, said in an interview.
In 2001, Mr. Barthé’s work was included in an exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art that traveled to the Smithsonian and elsewhere. He received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005. He had to borrow a suit to collect that award, for which he received a grant of $20,000.
Nick Spitzer, a Tulane anthropology professor and host of the public radio show “American Routes,” has called Mr. Barthé “the Jelly Roll Morton of plasterers,” referring to the celebrated New Orleans jazz pianist.
Jazz, in fact, figured in Mr. Barthé’s work. Mr. Spitzer said in an interview that many early jazz players of the same Creole-African heritage as Mr. Barthé worked in building trades. Johnny St. Cyr, a jazz banjo and guitar musician who played with Morton and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s, was also a plasterer.
And Mr. Barthé liked using musical terms in talking about his craft, saying he saw clarinets in his moldings and bass fiddles at the bottom of his arches. “It all have to be in tune,” he said in a Louisiana patois sprinkled with French phrases and hearty laughs.
Mostly he was about both preserving and carrying on a tradition.
He spoke of the thrill he would get when working in the St. Louis Cathedral or a plantation mansion and coming across the initials of an ancestor on a wooden lath beneath plaster he was restoring with the same techniques as the ancestor.
“It’s some precious work,” he said in an oral history interview in 2000 for the University of New Orleans Building Arts Project. “It’s like a diamond, like a jewel, and it’s for you to preserve it.”
Earl Antoine Barthé was born in New Orleans on June 4, 1922, and there was never doubt about his parents’ plans for him. “Ninety-nine percent of my male family are plasterers,” he said in the oral history.
He was imbued with legends, going back to his great-great-grandfather Leon, who left France in the early 1800s and then stopped in Haiti, where he got married.
“My daddy told me that Old Man Leon could look at you and produce you in plaster as he was looking,” Mr. Barthé said. “No sketches. No drawings, anything. That’s the type of mechanic he was.”
The young Mr. Barthé did a four-year apprenticeship in New Orleans and then traveled around the country, to New York and California, among other places, to plaster when things were slow at home.
“If you said you was from New Orleans, you can bet you got a job,” he said in the oral history. For almost two decades Mr. Barthé was business agent for the plasterers’ union. He integrated the union and accepted its first woman.
In addition to his son, Mr. Barthé is survived by his wife, the former Louise Soublet; three daughters, Trudy Barthé Charles, Sheila Cousins and Terry Barthé; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
After Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, Mr. Barthé fled to Texas with only a change of clothes. But he returned and resumed work and kept his family’s tradition alive. Though he lost his tools in the storm, he found his favorite in the back of his truck, a small trowel that had been his grandfather’s.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
(Feb. 1, 1966)
(Feb. 6, 1993)
(Feb. 7, 1999)
(Feb. 8, 1999)
(Feb. 10, 1992)
(Feb. 12, 2000)
(Feb. 15, 1984)
(Feb. 17, 1909)
(Feb. 17, 1966)
(Feb. 17, 1982)
(Feb. 18, 1967)
(Feb. 19, 1997)
(Feb. 20, 1895)
(Feb. 20, 1966)
(Feb. 21, 1938)
(Feb. 25, 1975)
(Feb. 27, 1928)
(Feb. 28, 1967)
Ann
