June 6, 2010 · 5:54 PM
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IN REMEMBRANCE: 6-6-2010

ALI OLLIE WOODSON, SINGER IN THE TEMPTATIONS

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS   |   Visit Guest Book

Published: May 31, 2010

Ali Ollie Woodson, who led the Motown quintet the Temptations in the 1980s and ’90s and helped restore it to hit-making glory with songs like “Treat Her Like a Lady,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 58.

June 1, 2010    

Brennan Linsley/Associated Press

The Temptations, from left to right, Theo Peoples, Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Ali-Ollie Woodson, pose after being given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles in 1994.

The cause was cancer, said Billy Wilson, president of the Motown Alumni Association. He said Mr. Woodson’s wife, Juanita, told him about the death.

Mr. Woodson was not an original member of the group, which had several lineup changes since it started in the 1960s. But he played an integral part in keeping the Temptations from becoming just a nostalgia act.

By the early 1980s, the Temptations were no longer posting hit after hit as they had in the 1960s and ’70s with songs like “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “My Girl,” and “I Wish It Would Rain.”

The group had lost original members, and Mr. Woodson was brought in to replace Dennis Edwards, whose voice had defined the group in the 1970s.

Mr. Woodson helped the Temptations notch the R&B hits “Treat Her Like a Lady,” which he wrote; “Sail Away”; and “Lady Soul.”

In a review of a concert featuring the Temptations and the Four Tops in 1985, Stephen Holden described Mr. Woodson in The New York Times as “a charismatic young pop-funk singer with a husky, agile voice that breaks into unexpected falsetto riffs.”

He added that he put his playful stamp on several Temptations’ standards as well as more recent material “with his tricky punctuation, sassy humor and inventive acrobatics.”

Ollie Creggett was born Oct. 12, 1951 in Detroit.

He sang with the Temptations from 1984 to 1986, and then again from 1988 until 1996, when he began performing as a solo artist.

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RUE MCCLANAHAN, ACTRESS AND ‘GOLDEN GIRL’

 

NBC

Rue McClanahan, second from right, with her co-stars on the NBC sitcom “The Golden Girls”: from left, Estelle Getty, Bea Arthur and Betty White. The series ran from 1985 to 1992.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN   |   Visit Guest Book

Published: June 3, 2010

Rue McClanahan, who helped make “The Golden Girls” a long-running television hit playing the saucy, man-devouring Southern belle Blanche Devereaux (in one scene she made a date at her husband’s funeral), died Thursday in Manhattan. Unlike Blanche, she had no trouble admitting her age, 76.

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Rue McClanahan in “The Golden Girls” (youtube.com)

June 4, 2010    

Bert Andrews Photography

Ms. McClanahan in 1967.

Her manager, Barbara Lawrence, said Ms. McClanahan died of a brain hemorrhage at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She was treated for breast cancer in 1997 and had heart bypass surgery last year.

Ms. McClanahan was the youngest, by at least 10 years, of the four actresses who played the Golden Girls, well-dressed, clever-tongued, over-50 women who shared a house in Miami. The others were Bea Arthur (Dorothy), Betty White (Rose) and Estelle Getty (Dorothy’s mother, Sophia). Of the four, only Ms. White, 88, now survives.

The show seized the No. 1 rating its first night, in 1985, stayed in the top 10 for six seasons and captured bundles of Emmys, one of which went to Ms. McClanahan for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series in 1987.

The show, which was canceled in 1992 but carries on, profitably, in reruns, succeeded by putting smart, funny lines in the mouths of, well, seasoned women.

In one episode, Rose, a rather dense Pollyanna, wonders if it’s possible to love two men at the same time.

“Set the scene,” Blanche replies. “Have we been drinking?”

Some critics saw “The Golden Girls” as a progenitor of shows like “Sex and the City” (about four young women given smart, funny lines).

Ms. McClanahan had appeared in the sitcom “All in the Family,” which broke ground with topical humor, and its spinoff “Maude,” in which she played the best friend of the liberated, middle-aged title character (Ms. Arthur).

She also acted in movies as well as on and off Broadway. In 1970 she won an Obie for her role in the Off Broadway show “Who’s Happy Now?,” a family drama by Oliver Hailey in which she played the father’s mistress. She reprised the role on PBS in 1975.

In her autobiography, “My First Five Husbands … and the Ones Who Got Away” (2007), Ms. McClanahan wrote that one of her proudest moments was getting a letter from Tennessee Williams about her performance as Caitlin Thomas, the poet’s wife, in “Dylan,” Sidney Michaels’s play about Dylan Thomas.

“Your work is that rare combination of earthiness and lapidary polish,” Williams wrote, “that quality being utterly common and utterly noble. Frippery combined with fierceness.”

But it was Ms. McClanahan’s part in “The Golden Girls” that stands out in popular memory.

To Ms. McClanahan, “The Golden Girls” was special for allowing its women to be funny and many-sided, not stock figures, recognizing “that when people mature, they add layers,” as she told The New York Times in 1985.

“They don’t turn into other creatures,” she added. “The truth is, we all still have our child, our adolescent and our young woman living in us.”

Eddi-Rue McClanahan was born in Healdton, Okla., on Feb. 21, 1934. Her first name was a contraction of her parents’ middle names. She dropped the Eddi when, mistaken for a man, she was drafted into military service after high school. She grew up in towns in Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana as her father, a building contractor, moved around.

She made her stage debut at age 4 in a local production of “The Three Little Kittens.” “A character actor even then,” she told People magazine.

She was offered dance scholarships to college but chose to major in drama at the University of Tulsa. She graduated with honors in 1956.

Moving to New York to study ballet and drama, Ms. McClanahan made her professional debut in 1957 at the Erie Playhouse in Erie, Pa. On a scholarship she took a four-week acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where one of her roles was Blanche DuBois in Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire.” She later said that her Blanche on “Girls” was inspired by both Blanche DuBois and Scarlett O’Hara of “Gone With the Wind.”

For most of the next decade she appeared onstage in New York. She originated the role of Lady MacBird in “MacBird!,” Barbara Garson’s comic melding of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ascent to power and “Macbeth.” Ms. McClanahan’s Broadway debut was as a prostitute in Murray Schisgal’s “Jimmy Shine,” which starred Dustin Hoffman as an unsuccessful abstract painter.

Reviewing “Who’s Happy Now?” in 1969, Edith Oliver wrote in The New Yorker that Ms. McClanahan’s portrayal of an innocent, sunny waitress was a “first-rate comedy performance that is always legitimate — no hokum, nothing but truth.”

Ms. McClanahan had been appearing sporadically on television and in low-budget movies when Norman Lear tapped her for a spot on “All in the Family” in 1972. She played half of a married couple who, after being invited to dinner, reveal that they are swingers.

Mr. Lear also cast her for a guest appearance on “Maude,” a part that grew into a regular role as Vivian Harmon, Maude’s fluttery, unliberated friend.

Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment, got the idea for “Girls” after seeing statistics showing that about 37 percent of Americans were at least 45 years old. He passed the concept on to Susan Harris, a television writer who had created series like “Benson” and “Soap.” She was inspired by her grandmother, who had remained active until her death at 93.

“A gift from the gods,” Ms. McClanahan called her placement in the series. NBC decided to cast her against the unworldly type she had played on “Maude” and give her the sex-charged role. Betty White, who had played the man-hungry Sue Ann Nivens on the “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” was the ditsy Rose.

After “The Golden Girls” ended in 1992, Ms. McClanahan appeared in a spinoff, “The Golden Palace.” She also had roles in movies like “Out to Sea,” a comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and on Broadway in “Wicked.” Away from acting, she delivered a lecture titled “Aging Gracefully” and campaigned for animal rights.

Ms. McClanahan is survived by her sixth husband, Morrow Wilson; her son, Mark T. Bish; and her sister, Dr. Melinda Lou McClanahan.

Ms. McClanahan, who never tired of talking about Blanche, was wise to her. Though Sophia, the dotty mother of the witty, dominant Dorothy, could be pointed, calling Blanche “Sheena, Queen of the Slut People,” Ms. McClanahan saw the character differently — as a woman who mainly just talked about sex.

As for Ms. McClanahan herself, she wasn’t a vamp, she told People magazine; she liked to grow tomatoes and make quilts.

Still, in her book, she offered “fun in bed quotients” for married and unmarried lovers. And she had a pat answer when asked if she was like Blanche: “Well, Blanche was an oversexed, self-involved, man-crazy, vain Southern belle from Atlanta — and I’m not from Atlanta.”

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CHRIS HANEY, AN INVENTOR OF TRIVIAL PURSUIT

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: June 2, 2010

Trivial Pursuit, think of himself?

  • Question: How did Chris Haney, an inventor of the board game
June 3, 2010    

The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

Chris Haney, left, with Scott Abbott. The two men created Trivial Pursuit.

Answer: As a rock star.

“It’s like we became rock stars,” he told Maclean’s magazine in 1993, repeating a comment he had made in several interviews. “People still shake in their boots when they meet us.”

And why not? Mr. Haney, a rumpled Canadian high school dropout, joined with a fellow journeyman journalist, Scott Abbott, to create a phenomenon — a board game that tests a player’s grasp of wickedly inconsequential trivia. In the 1980s, Trivial Pursuit was outselling Monopoly.

By the time Mr. Haney died in Toronto on Monday at 59, more than 100 million copies of the game had been sold in as many as 26 countries and in at least 17 languages, with estimated sales of well over $1 billion. And Mr. Haney, who had battled through financial hardship in pursuit of his dream, wound up owning golf courses, vineyards and racehorses.

Hasbro, which bought the intellectual rights to Trivial Pursuit for $80 million in 2008, confirmed Mr. Haney’s death. The company did not give a cause, except to say that he had suffered from a long illness.

The original Trivial Pursuit, introduced in 1981, involved answering 6,000 trivia questions on 1,000 cards, coded by categories like history and entertainment. (They have been updated and modified many times since, and many variations of the game have been introduced.)

Original questions could be tough: “Who was Howdy Doody’s twin brother?” (Double Doody.)

Or easy: “What chemical is used to keep swimming pools clean?” (Chlorine.)

Mr. Haney especially liked quirky questions: “What’s the largest diamond in the world?” (A baseball diamond.)

The game was a hit with baby boomers in particular and has always tended to play on their nostalgia. Indeed, Time magazine reported that the cast of “The Big Chill,” the 1983 movie about a reunion of friends from the 1960s, loved to play Trivial Pursuit on the set.

Christopher Haney was born in Welland, Ontario. (The exact date is uncertain, but references agree on his age, 59.) He dropped out of high school at 17 and later said that he regretted it — that he should have dropped out at 12. His father worked for a news agency, The Canadian Press, and got him a job there as a copy boy. He later took over its photo desks in Ottawa and Montreal, then moved to The Montreal Gazette as a picture editor.

On the evening of Dec. 15, 1979, Mr. Haney and Mr. Abbott, who was then a sportswriter for The Canadian Press, were playing Scrabble. Mr. Haney wondered aloud whether the two of them could invent a game as good.

Contrary to legend, they were neither in a tavern nor on their 18th round of beers. They were actually at Mr. Haney’s home in Montreal and on their first beers when Mr. Haney suggested a game based on trivia, they told The Hamilton Spectator in 1993. By the time Mr. Haney was opening the refrigerator to fetch their second beers, they were already mentally designing the board.

Their next step was to go to a Montreal toy fair and present themselves as a reporter-photographer team. They peppered game experts with questions and came away with what Mr. Haney called “$10,000 worth of information.”

They then brought in Mr. Haney’s brother John, who in turn brought in a friend, a fellow hockey enthusiast. But they needed more investors and turned to friends in their newsrooms. One problem, according to The Globe and Mail of Canada, was that people had heard they were “con artists.” As an example, the newspaper pointed to a chain letter the men had started that proved profitable for the originators but not to those down the line.

They nonetheless succeeded in raising $40,000 from 32 investors. Mr. Haney’s mother was not among them, however: he had talked her out of investing for fear she would lose her money.

On a trip to Spain, Mr. Haney worked 16-hour days writing questions, by his account, provoking some investors to suggest that they were paying for his vacation. An unemployed artist helped with the design. But things did not immediately work out: buyers at toy fairs in Montreal and New York were cool to the concept. Mr. Haney began to have panic attacks, he told The Globe and Mail.

But after a manufacturer was found and the game was released in Canada, word-of-mouth support began to build. Then the game took off, racking up nearly $800 million in sales in 1984. An estimated one in five American households bought the game, with Selchow & Righter, the makers of Parcheesi and Scrabble, owning the American license at the height of the game’s popularity in the mid-’80s. Ownership then bounced from company to company, including Parker Brothers, until Hasbro bought the rights in 2008.

Mr. Haney’s marriage to his first wife, Sarah, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Hiam Haney; his sons, John and Thomas; his daughter, Shelagh; and a brother and a sister.

Mr. Haney fought and won a 13-year legal battle against a man who said he had given him the idea for Trivial Pursuit when Mr. Haney picked him up hitchhiking. He won another suit against an author who claimed that Mr. Haney had taken questions from his books, something Mr. Haney readily acknowledged.

The judge’s reasoning: You can’t steal trivia.

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MURRAY STEIN, CRUSADER AGAINST WATER POLLUTION

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: June 4, 2010

  • Murray Stein, who for more than 20 years led the federal government’s fight against water pollution and did much to overcome the prevailing attitude that the nation’s waterways could serve as sewers, died May 24 at his home in Falls Church, Va. He was 92.
Gladwyn Hill/The New York Times

Murray Stein at the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland in 1965.

 

His daughter Judith Sloane confirmed his death.

Mr. Stein, who retired in 1976, was something of a diplomat without portfolio, traveling from state to state with the difficult mission of seeking compliance through steps that avoided penalties or court action. His technique was to preside over hearings at which local officials and corporate executives were confronted with evidence of pollution and then invited or cajoled into adopting remedial programs.

It was not easy. Most polluters were reluctant to cooperate, much less spend millions of dollars to remediate. State officials often challenged the constitutional right of the federal government to intervene.

Mr. Stein usually dealt with resistance through soft-spoken amiability. His standard lines were: “We’re dealing with facts subject to scientific measurement. Once we get agreement on the facts, the solutions will present themselves.”

In 1967, he presided over a conference in Manhattan during which federal and state officials agreed on a 1972 deadline for ending water pollution in the Hudson River.

A year later, he negotiated an agreement in which officials from four states bordering Lake Michigan unanimously approved a program that called for full treatment of all waste, chlorination of effluent to further purify it and a ban on the dumping of all dredging materials into the lake.

Sometimes Mr. Stein pushed for precautionary measures. He was the principal negotiator of an agreement in 1966 in which officials from California and Nevada approved an unusual engineering program to prevent pollution of Lake Tahoe, one of the world’s clearest bodies of water. As federal authority over water-pollution control was reorganized and transferred from one agency to the next between 1955 and 1971, Mr. Stein also made the shifts: from the Public Health Service to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to the Department of the Interior and to the Environmental Protection Agency.

William D. Ruckelshaus, the first E.P.A. administrator, depended on him. In a 2005 profile of Mr. Ruckelshaus, The Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, said, “In the course of his travels, Murray Stein had learned where all the worst water pollution problems were, and when Bill Ruckelshaus wanted to move out with an aggressive enforcement program, Murray could tell him where to begin.”

Born in Brooklyn on Oct. 16, 1917, Mr. Stein was one of two children of Leonard and Mary Newmark Stein. His father was a food distributor to grocery stores, his mother a clerk at Macy’s. Mr. Stein studied at City College of New York for two years before moving to Washington. During World War II, he served as a medic in the Army.

After the war, while completing his bachelor’s degree at George Washington University, and earned his law degree there in 1949.

Mr. Stein’s wife of 65 years, the former Anne Kopelman, died in 2005. Besides his daughter Judith, he is survived by another daughter, Toby Mullvain, and two grandchildren.

Not all of Mr. Stein’s dealings with local officials were amiable.

In 1969, he was aboard a boat inspecting the Passaic River in New Jersey when it ran aground on putrid muck lining the river bottom. The boat was soon freed, but an argument ensued. “This is not a pristine, babbling brook,” a state official told Mr. Stein. “This is an industrial river.”

“Industrial river is a euphemism for open sewer,” Mr. Stein replied, adding that the river was “a disgrace to the United States.”

SOURCE

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JOHN W. DOUGLAS, LAWYER WHO CHAMPIONED CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: June 4, 2010

“I Have a Dream” speech.

John W. Douglas, a lawyer who championed civil rights and human rights as an assistant United States attorney general in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and later in private practice, died Wednesday at his home in Washington. He was 88.

The cause was complications of a stroke, said his son, Peter.

Mr. Douglas led the Justice Department’s Civil Division from 1963 to 1966. In 1963, he was designated by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to represent the government in planning for the Aug. 28 March on Washington, during which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic

For five weeks that summer, Mr. Douglas worked with the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and other planners of the march, and with government agencies like the Washington Police Department, coordinating logistics and security for the event. Attended by approximately 250,000 people, it was one of the largest demonstrations ever held in the capital.

Mr. Douglas left the Justice Department in 1966 to help manage the fourth and last Senate campaign of his father, Paul H. Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, who was defeated that year by Charles H. Percy, a Republican.

In the fall of 1970, Mr. Douglas was co-chairman of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law when it sent dozens of volunteers into the South to take legal action against “in school” segregation of black children in newly integrated school systems.

Mr. Douglas cited testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity indicating that many black students had been placed in separate classes and barred from extracurricular activities.

While a partner in the Washington-based law firm Covington & Burling, Mr. Douglas was involved with many other legal advocacy efforts. He was co-chairman of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and president of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. From 1978 to 1986, as chairman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he promoted arms control and disarmament.

In the 1980s, Mr. Douglas joined human rights and election-monitoring missions to foreign countries. He traveled to South Africa in 1985 with Senator Edward M. Kennedy to demonstrate against apartheid. He went to Chile in 1986 to protest the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and traveled to Namibia three times from 1988 to 1990 as a member of a group that observed elections leading to independence from South Africa.

John Woolman Douglas was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 15, 1921; the family later moved to Chicago. Before running for electoral office, his father was a professor of economics at Swarthmore, Amherst and the University of Chicago. His mother, Dorothy, was a professor of economics and sociology at Smith, Columbia and later Hofstra University.

Mr. Douglas graduated from Princeton in 1943, then enlisted in the Navy and served as a PT boat officer in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. He earned his law degree from Yale in 1948 and two years later, as a Rhodes scholar, received a doctorate in politics from Oxford. From 1951 to 1952, he was law clerk to Justice Harold H. Burton.

Mr. Douglas’s wife of 62 years, Mary St. John, died in 2007. Besides his son, Peter, he is survived by a daughter, Kate Torrey; a brother, Paul; a half-sister, Jean Bandler; four grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

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