IN REMEMBRANCE: 3-8-2010

JEANNE HOLM, A PIONEER IN THE AIR FORCE

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: March 1, 2010

Jeanne M. Holm, the first woman to rise to the rank of general in the Air Force and the first woman to become a two-star general in any United States armed service, died on Feb. 15 in Annapolis, Md. She was 88.

March 2, 2010

Associated Press

Jeanne M. Holm attained the rank of Air Force general in 1971.

The cause was cardiovascular disease, her friend Norma Loeser, a retired Air Force colonel, said.

As a colonel and later after her promotion, General Holm pushed to increase women’s opportunities in the Air Force by more than doubling their number, vastly expanding the kinds of positions they could fill and ending policies that discriminated against women.

Her own rise could be seen as part of the change she helped engineer. Until she became a general, Air Force regulations restricted women to a rank of no higher than full colonel. And there could be only one of those: the head of the Women in the Air Force, popularly known as WAFs, in the manner that members of the Women’s Army Corps were known as WACs.

General Holm attributed her success in furthering women’s possibilities in the Air Force, including her own, to the beginnings of the women’s revolution. In an oral history interview, she pointed out that she had become head of the WAFs, and a full colonel, a little more than a year after Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), often considered the manifesto of the women’s movement.

By 1967, restrictions on how high women could rise in military rank were abolished.

Under General Holm’s leadership, only four of the Air Force’s specialties remained closed to women: pilot, navigator, missile operations and security police. She successfully pushed for opening R.O.T.C. to college women, the first service to do so. She made the Air Force the first service in which a woman commanded a mixed unit of men and women.

General Holm also greatly expanded the number of bases where women could serve, modernized uniforms and helped pave the way for women to be admitted to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

“I set about trying to open up as many fields as I could to women, using any gimmick I could,” she said in the oral history, which was recorded by the Library of Congress in 2003.

She even helped lawyers suing the Air Force for sex discrimination by giving them voluminous material from her files. One case resulted in a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1973 in Frontiero vs. Richardson. It ordered that military women with civilian husbands receive the same full family benefits that military men with civilian wives did.

“It was about equity,” General Holm said of her overall efforts, “and it was about overturning traditional roles and what women could do in society.”

Jeanne Marjorie Holm was born in Portland, Ore., on June 23, 1921. Her father died when she was very young, leaving her mother with three small children. They moved frequently, and her mother remarried when Jeanne was 15.

General Holm learned how to be a silversmith from a woman who was master of the trade. She worked with silver while volunteering for a women’s ambulance corps formed in anticipation of war. She joined the Army in 1942, a month after the creation of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

“I was between semesters, had nothing to do anyway and was flat broke,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1971.

General Holm was one of first enlisted women to be accepted in officer candidate school. After graduating as the equivalent of a second lieutenant, she became a training officer before returning home and attending Lewis and Clark College in Portland for two years.

Joining the Reserves, General Holm indicated in her application that she wanted to serve in the Air Force, which was just being created as a separate service. She was called up in October 1948 and worked in operations during the Berlin airlift and in the early part of the Korean War.

In 1952 she was the first woman to attend the Air Command and Staff School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. As she rose in the ranks, she took time to return to Lewis and Clark in 1956 to finish her studies and graduate.

In 1965 she was named a full colonel and director of the WAFs. In 1970, she put in her papers to retire. But Gen. Robert J. Dixon, the new personnel chief for the Air Force, urged her to stay, saying he was eager to help her increase opportunities for women.

In 1971, she was promoted to general. Two years later, she was given another star. The separate status of the WAFs was abolished in 1976, and women were accepted into the military on much the same basis as men.

General Holm received many decorations. The Air Force’s principal officer development program was named after her.

She is survived by a brother, Dale M. Holm.

General Holm became special assistant for women’s programs in President Gerald R. Ford’s administration. She proposed and helped lead an effort to remove sex bias from all federal laws anticipating that the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution would pass. It did not. She held lesser posts in the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

General Holm continued to speak out on women’s military issues after her retirement. In an interview with The Washington Post in 1980, she castigated what she called a “boys will be boys” attitude toward sexual harassment.

“In the military a racist is not allowed to act like one,” she said, “but it’s still sort of winked at to be sexist.”

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MODESTO CARTEGENA, HERO OF KOREA

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Published: March 4, 2010

Modesto Cartagena, who was cited for heroism in the Korean War while fighting in an Army regiment composed almost entirely of soldiers from Puerto Rico and acclaimed for its bravery, died Tuesday at his home in Guayama, P.R. He was 87.

March 5, 2010

United States Department of Defense

Modesto Cartagena in 2000.

The cause was a heart attack, said his son Modesto Jr.

In September 1950, the 65th Infantry Regiment arrived at the South Korean port of Pusan. Over the next three years the regiment fought in nine major battles, including a blocking maneuver that helped Marines complete a fighting retreat from the Chinese Communist onslaught at the Chosin Reservoir in December 1950.

The Puerto Rican soldiers surmounted not only the Communist enemy but also prejudicial attitudes.

Brig. Gen. William Harris, the regiment’s commander during the early stages of the Korean War, was quoted by The Denver Post as having written after the war that he was reluctant to take the post because the Puerto Rican troops were disparaged in the military as a “rum and Coca-Cola outfit.” But, he continued, he came to view them as “the best damn soldiers in that war.” More than 3,800 members of the regiment were killed or wounded in Korea.

Sergeant Cartagena, a member of the regiment’s First Battalion, received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s highest award for valor after the Medal of Honor, for “extraordinary heroism” in a single-handed assault that enabled his company to seize a hill near Yonchon, South Korea, on April 19, 1951.

Sergeant Cartagena had charged ahead of his men, who were pinned down by a “well-entrenched and fanatically determined hostile force,” as his citation put it. His rifle was shot away from him and he was wounded by enemy grenades, but he dispatched five Communist emplacements by tossing grenades at them.

A native of Cayey, P.R., Mr. Cartagena was born on July 22, 1922. He fought in Europe during World War II, and besides the Distinguished Service Cross was awarded Silver and Bronze Stars in both World War II and Korea.

In addition to Modesto Cartagena Jr., he is survived by his sons Luis, Fernando and Vitin; his daughters, Sara and Wilma; his sisters, Maria and Virginia; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His wife, Sara, died in 1995.

The 65th Infantry Regiment became known as the Borinqueneers, the term derived from an Indian word for Puerto Rico denoting “land of the brave lord.” Its history was related in the 2007 television documentary “The Borinqueneers,” produced, directed and written by Noemi Figueroa Soulet.

On the 50th anniversary of the regiment’s arrival in Korea, Louis Caldera, the secretary of the Army, unveiled a plaque in its honor at Arlington National Cemetery. Mr. Cartagena attended in his old dress uniform, with its stripes denoting a sergeant first class.

“I’m just sorry that I’m too old to go to Afghanistan to fight,” he told The El Paso Times in 2002. “I’d do it all over again if I could.”

SOURCE

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GENE CHENAULT, RESHAPED ROCK RADIO

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: March 3, 2010

Gene Chenault, who with his business partner, Bill Drake, reshaped rock radio in the 1960s with prepackaged programming that delivered more music and fewer commercials to hundreds of stations, creating the automated format common today, died on Feb. 23 in Tarzana, Calif. He was 90 and lived in Encino, Calif.

Gene Chenault

The cause was non-Hodgkin lymphoma, his wife, Susan, said.

The programming, using reel-to-reel tapes of tightly spaced Top 40 hits, was primarily designed by Mr. Drake and marketed and syndicated by Mr. Chenault. It raised ratings at station after station and brought a certain big-city sound to many small towns. At the press of a button a local D.J. could jump in with his own boisterous one-liner — no more yarns about teenage romance — or a station-identifying jingle. To maximize the music, the Top 40 were sometimes edited, speeded up and pared to 30.

The new format gave rise to the stock phrases “boss jock” and “boss radio,” which first took hold at KHJ in Los Angeles in 1965. (The word boss was derived from California surfer slang for good, as in “That’s a boss wave.”) Within a year KHJ leapt from 12th to first place in the Los Angeles ratings. Its slogan: “Much More Music.”

“The big idea is to unclutter and speed up the pace,” Time magazine wrote of the Drake-Chenault format in August 1968.

“The next recording is introduced during the fade-out of the last one,” the article continued. “Singing station identifications, which sometimes run at oratorio length elsewhere, are chopped to 1 ½ seconds. Commercials are reduced to 13 minutes, 40 seconds an hour — almost one-third less than the U.S. average.” By cutting down on commercials, the stations could sell advertising at higher rates.

Newscasts were scheduled at unconventional times, usually 20 minutes after the hour, so that when the competition was reporting a local crime, the syndicated station was running a “music sweep” — three or four recordings back-to-back to lure away dial switchers.

It worked. Besides the rise of KHJ in Los Angeles, KGB in San Diego went from last to first in its market in 90 days. In New York an upstart FM station, WOR, brought in Mr. Chenault (pronounced sha-NAULT) and Mr. Drake when it decided to go up against the Top 40 powerhouses WABC and WMCA. By 1967 WABC was still the leading New York station, but WOR-FM was No. 2.

Marc Fisher, the author of “Something in the Air: Radio, Rock and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation” (Random House, 2007), said in an interview: “What Drake and Chenault did in California and then exported around the country was the idea that you could virtually automate the combination of hit music, D.J.’s with bigger-than-life personalities and the overall sense of possibility and danger that the rock revolution was bringing to pop culture.”

Though boss jocks could be raucous, there was a certain homogeneity to the formula. “The positive spin is that they brought a more professional kind of entertainment to places that had been fairly amateurish,” Mr. Fisher said. “But if you look at their work from today’s perspective, they emerge as the founding fathers of predictable, automated music-radio formats.”

Still, by 1975, Drake-Chenault Enterprises, their consulting company in Canoga Park, Calif., was serving about 350 client stations with makeover advice and totally automated packages in six formats. In 1979 the company produced “The History of Rock ’n’ Roll,” a 50-hour documentary that met with phenomenal success. Stations clamored to schedule it, first as a blockbuster weekend special, then in repeat broadcasts of shorter segments.

Lester Eugene Chenault was born in Eldorado, Okla., on June 12, 1919, one of two sons of Leonard and Fannie Burnett Chenault. When he was 4 the family moved to Los Angeles.

Besides his wife, the former Susan Akiko, Mr. Chenault is survived by his son, Mark; his daughter, Carol Moore; and four grandchildren.

While in high school Mr. Chenault got an acting job at a radio station in Los Angeles. On graduating he was hired by KFRE in Fresno, Calif., but was soon drafted into the Army. After World War II he and a friend started a station in Fresno, KYNO; he eventually acquired full ownership.

In 1962 Mr. Chenault hired Mr. Drake, a brash up-and-coming D.J. who shared some of his new boss’s notions of rock ’n’ roll programming. As KYNO’s new program director Mr. Drake, who died in 2008, adopted a jampacked playlist and pared down the D.J. talk. Within a year its major local rival, KMAK, switched to country music.

“Gene Chenault’s name is less familiar than that of his partner, programmer Bill Drake,” the Museum of Broadcast Communications’s Encyclopedia of Radio says of the partners. “Yet behind the impact of Drake’s contributions to the Top 40 format were Chenault’s management skill and marketing concepts. The two men altered U.S. radio and American popular culture in the 1960s.”

An early version of the Web summary for this article mistakenly referred to Mr. Chenault as “Ms.”

SOURCE

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THEODORE L. CROSS, CHAMPION OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND A BIRD PHOTOGRAPHER

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: March 3, 2010

Theodore L. Cross, a publisher, investor and entrepreneur who also had parallel careers as a writer on civil rights issues and a noted photographer of birds, died on Sunday in Fort Myers, Fla. He was 86 and had homes in Princeton, N.J., and on Sanibel Island, Fla., and Nantucket.

Mary Cross

Theodore Cross wrote two books on black capitalism.

Multimedia

Birds of Courage

Half a Lifetime Spent in Pursuit of Waterbirds (December 15, 2009)

The cause was heart failure after a recent fall, his wife, Mary S. Cross, said.

At his death, Mr. Cross was the editor and publisher of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, a quarterly publication he founded in 1993. (The journal’s online edition is published weekly at jbhe.com.)

Mr. Cross, who was white, was a recognized authority on the economics of black empowerment. He wrote two books on the subject, “Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto” (Atheneum, 1969) and “The Black Power Imperative: Racial Inequality and the Politics of Nonviolence” (Faulkner, 1984).

He was also the founder of Business and Society Review, a journal about business ethics and corporate responsibility that began publication in 1972.

Mr. Cross came to wide attention in 1987, when he tried to acquire the venerable book publisher Harper & Row, reportedly offering about $190 million. He was outbid by Rupert Murdoch, who bought the company, now known as HarperCollins Publishers, for about $300 million.

Originally a lawyer, Mr. Cross made his reputation in business by buying faltering periodicals and making them highly profitable. In 1983, for instance, he and two partners bought Investment Dealers’ Digest, then a money-losing financial weekly, for $800,000. In 1986, in a widely reported transaction, they sold the publication for about $40 million.

With his brothers, Warren and Gorham, Mr. Cross started Warren, Gorham & Lamont, a publisher of professional journals about banking, real estate and other fields, in 1975. The company was sold in 1980 for about $60 million, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Theodore Cross’s other business ventures included the JPT Publishing Group, a professional publisher he helped found in 1987.

In later years, Mr. Cross released two lavish books of photographs, “Birds of the Sea, Shore, and Tundra” (Grove/Atlantic, 1989) and “Waterbirds,” published last year by W.W. Norton & Company.

Reviewing “Waterbirds,” Natural History magazine called it “extraordinary,” adding: “The color photographs, so richly detailed that you can see texture in each feather, convey deep empathy with the natural world. The birds preen, strut, and pose — as if the photographer were not just watching from a distance, but sharing intimate moments with good friends.”

Theodore Lamont Cross II was born on Feb. 12, 1924, in Newton, Mass. After serving as a naval officer in the Pacific in World War II, he received a bachelor’s degree in English from Amherst College in 1946. In 1950, he earned a law degree from Harvard, where he was an editor of The Harvard Law Review.

As a young lawyer, Mr. Cross became general counsel for the Sheraton Corporation of America, the hotel chain. In the early 1960s, Sheraton sent him to San Francisco to put an end to a sit-in over racially discriminatory hiring practices at one of its hotels. The task made him uneasy.

“It seemed to me that I was working on the wrong side for the wrong people,” Mr. Cross told Fortune magazine in 1987.

He took a leave of absence and became involved in civil rights work, participating in the second of the three historic voting rights marches that began in Selma, Ala., in 1965. A lifelong Democrat, Mr. Cross later advised the Johnson and Nixon administrations on economic development opportunities for black Americans.

In his 50s, Mr. Cross became ardently interested in birds. Over the next three decades, he traveled with his camera to Siberia, South America and many other places in search of elusive quarry.

In 2004, he founded Birders United to Defeat Bush, a Florida organization that invoked President George W. Bush’s environmental record to marshal support for Senator John Kerry in that year’s presidential election.

Mr. Cross’s first marriage, to Sheilah Ross, ended in divorce. Besides his wife, Mary, whom he married in 1974, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Amanda Cross and Lisa Pownall-Gray; his brother Gorham; a sister, Margaret Bean; three stepdaughters, Stuart Warner, Ann Anderson and Polly Warner; three grandchildren; and eight step-grandchildren.

For all his accomplishments, it was for a single omission that Mr. Cross said he wished to be remembered. As he told The St. Petersburg Times last month, he wanted his epitaph to read thus:

He Passed on

To a Better World

Still Waiting for

A Perfect Picture

Of a Reddish Egret.

SOURCE

AARON COHEN, NASA ENGINEER

By A. G. SULZBERGER

Published: March 7, 2010

Aaron Cohen, an engineer who worked on the spacecraft used in the Apollo moon program and who later, as director of the Johnson Space Center, helped NASA recover after the Challenger explosion, died Feb. 25 at his home in College Station, Tex. He was 79.

NASA

Aaron Cohen in 1982.

The cause was prostate cancer, which he had been fighting for years, said one of his sons, Daniel.

During a three-decade career at NASA, Mr. Cohen rose to briefly hold the agency’s No. 2 position. He had already contributed to the development of generations of spacecraft. He performed engineering work for the moon landing missions, managed the space shuttle orbiter project, and helped start the space station program while running the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“The three major spaceflight programs the U.S. has undertaken to date, he played an important role in,” said John M. Logsdon, professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

Michael L. Coats, the Johnson Space Center’s current director, wrote in a message to employees announcing Mr. Cohen’s death that his efforts had been critical to the successes of all six American lunar landings. He was a leader in the space program for more than three decades, “with scientific and programmatic experience that is unparalleled,” Mr. Coats wrote.

The Texas-born son of Russian immigrants, Mr. Cohen was working in the private sector in 1962 when he jumped at the opportunity to join the fledgling American space program. “It was, to him, the engineering project of the century: putting people in space and getting them back safely,” said his son, Daniel Cohen. “He felt like if there was a job to do, this was it.”

In 1986, after seven astronauts died in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Mr. Cohen took over as director of the Johnson Center, which is home to mission control, the astronaut program, the space shuttle program and other major NASA programs. In that uncertain period, Mr. Cohen viewed his job as rebuilding confidence in the organization and eventually getting Americans back in space, three years later.

“Aaron provided the critical and calm guidance needed at the Johnson Space Center to successfully recover from the Challenger accident and return the space shuttle to flight,” Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the administrator of NASA, said in a statement.

Mr. Cohen left NASA in 1993. He then taught engineering at Texas A&M University, his alma mater. He is survived by his wife, Ruth, and his three children, Daniel, David, and Nancy Santana.

In an interview, Christopher C. Kraft Jr., who worked with Mr. Cohen and preceded him as the director of the Johnson Center, called him a problem-solver with an obsession for details. “He was a very great engineer,” he said.

Mr. Cohen “sometimes bugged people to death, but that was the job,” Mr. Kraft added. “That’s what it took.”

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Multimedia

Notable Deaths of 2008

Those who passed from the scene last year included the folk singer Odetta, the actors Heath Ledger and Charlton Heston, and the writers David Foster Wallace and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The Lives They Lived

For 2008, an unabashedly idiosyncratic collection of profiles of 24 very different lives, all memorably lived.

The Music They Made

In Remembrance: Vivid Personalities of a Decade

By WILLIAM McDONALD

The widely known may be people we never knew, but their deaths can feel personal and compel us to take measure of what has slipped from our own lives.