IN REMEMBRANCE: 8-22-2010

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NEW YORK (AP) – Emmy-winning CBS News correspondent Harold Dow, who helped shape the documentary program “48 Hours” and covered the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst and the Sept. 11 attacks, has died. He was 62.

Dow died suddenly Saturday morning in New Jersey, network spokeswoman Louise Bashi said. He lived in Upper Saddle River, N.J., but it wasn’t immediately clear if he’d been at home.

Dow had been a correspondent for “48 Hours” since 1990. His nearly 40 years with the network also included reporting for “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather” and “CBS News Sunday Morning.”

A “48 Hours” report on runaways earned him a George Foster Peabody Award. He also won five Emmys, for work including coverage of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and of American troops’ movement into Bosnia in 1996.

“Insatiably curious, he was happiest when he was on the road deep into a story,” Susan Zirinsky, executive producer of “48 Ho urs Mystery,” said in a statement. “It was his humanity, which was felt by everyone he encountered, even in his toughest interviews, that truly defined the greatness of his work. He was the most selfless man I have known.”

Dow landed an exclusive interview with kidnapping victim Hearst in December 1976, and he had the first network interview with O.J. Simpson following the 1994 killing of his ex-wife. He barely escaped one of the falling twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, the network said.

Dow was a contributor to “48 Hours on Crack Street,” the 1986 documentary that led to the creation of the weekly “48 Hours.” Before that, he had been a co-anchor on “CBS News Nightwatch” and a correspondent and reporter at the CBS News Los Angeles bureau. He started his career with the network as a broadcast associate in 1972.

As a co-anchor and talk-show host for KETV in Omaha, Neb., he was the first African-American television reporter in that city.

He is survived by his wife, Kathy, and their three children.

Mr. Leonard in a self-portrait in New Orleans in 2004. More Photos »

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A resident of Pasadena, Calif., Mr. Leonard died after a short illness, said Geraldine Baum, the director of Herman Leonard Photography.

Mr. Leonard never set out to document the birth of bebop, though he wound up doing just that. He was simply a young jazz lover whose camera gave him entree into the many New York clubs — the Royal Roost, Birdland, Bop City — whose cover charges he could not afford.

Shot in New York between 1948 and 1956 and afterward in Paris, Mr. Leonard’s work was long known only to jazz buffs. More recently, it has enjoyed a renaissance, collected in books and exhibited worldwide.

“He was a master of jazz, except his instrument was a camera,” K. Heather Pinson, the author of “The Jazz Image” (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), a study of Mr. Leonard’s work, said on Tuesday. “His photographs are probably the single best visual representation of what jazz sounds like.”

Spare and stylized, Mr. Leonard’s work captured a world of shadow, silver and smoke: dark interiors, gleaming microphones and, threading through it all, cigarette smoke that leaped and twined as if it were an incarnation of the music itself.

The artists he shot were titans or soon to be, so renowned that each can be conjured with a single name: Ella, Duke, Dizzy, Billie, Miles, Frank. Carefully lighted and meticulously printed, Mr. Leonard’s photos retained the quality of candids, catching his subjects in moments of powerful intimacy.

One of his best-known portrays Ella Fitzgerald, singing in Paris in 1960, eyes closed in fierce concentration, a rivulet of sweat coursing down her cheek. Another shows Frank Sinatra from behind in lonely silhouette. In a third, a still life, the subject is absent altogether: it depicts sheet music, a Coke bottle, a smoldering cigarette and a porkpie hat hanging atop a saxophone case — the implied, unmistakable essence of Lester Young.

By day, Mr. Leonard was a freelance commercial photographer. By night, he haunted the clubs, whose owners admitted him in exchange for marquee publicity stills. He sold occasional pictures, for $10 apiece, to magazines like Down Beat.

But there was little market for jazz photos then. He put his negatives into a box and forgot about them for nearly 30 years.

Herman Leonard was born on March 6, 1923, in Allentown, Pa., and began taking pictures as a boy. In 1947, after wartime service in Burma, he received a bachelor of fine arts in photography from Ohio University. He worked in Ottawa with the distinguished portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh before opening a studio in New York in 1948.

His visual style was born of necessity: where most photographers would illuminate a club’s confines with half a dozen lights, Mr. Leonard could afford only two. The result, with backlighting piercing inky blackness, lends his work the quality of moonlight.

Mr. Leonard, who shot with a Speed Graphic, was a master printer. Using an old trick of darkroom alchemy, he soaked unexposed film in mercury to enhance its speed in low light. He astonished pharmacists by ordering thermometers in bulk.

After moving to Paris in 1956, Mr. Leonard worked as a fashion photographer. He later moved to the Spanish island of Ibiza, and it was there, in the 1980s, that he pulled from under his bed the box of negatives.

His book “The Eye of Jazz” was published in France in 1985; in 1988, a show of his jazz photos at a London gallery ignited worldwide interest.

Mr. Leonard was married and divorced three times. He is survived by four children — Mikael, from his relationship with Attika ben-Dridi; Valerie, from his marriage to Jacqueline Fauvreau; and Shana and David, from his marriage to Elisabeth Braunlich — and six grandchildren.

Returning to the United States in the late 1980s, Mr. Leonard eventually settled in New Orleans. Then in 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded his home and destroyed more than 8,000 jazz prints. His negatives were spared: by the time the storm hit, they had been removed to a vault on a high floor of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art there.

A project to digitize and archive the negatives is almost finished, ensuring that Mr. Leonard’s jazz photos will be available for generations. Meanwhile, they can be seen in books like “The Eye of Jazz,” published in English by Viking in 1989; and “Jazz,” to be published in November by Bloomsbury USA.

His work seems destined to endure, colleagues say, for its ability to distill its subjects’ very souls.

“Herman would just catch the moment,” Tony Bennett, a longtime friend, said on Monday. “If he photographed Erroll Garner, that was Erroll Garner; that was his whole spirit.”

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MARIO OBLEDO, HISPANIC RIGHTS LEADER

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: August 20, 2010

He ignited an explosive response in 1998 when he said in a radio interview that Hispanics were on the way to taking over all of California’s political institutions. He suggested that people who did not like it go back to Europe.

In the face of criticism that Hispanics have lagged behind blacks in creating political and civil rights institutions, he created and led many. These included the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Hispanic National Bar Association, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and the National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations.

He was president of the League of United Latin American Citizens and chairman of the National Rainbow Coalition, the leftist political organization that grew out of Mr. Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.

Mario Guerra Obledo was born in San Antonio on April 9, 1932, and grew up in a tiny house on an alley off a dirt street. His father died when he was 5, and he and his 12 brothers and sisters had to hustle to find chores to help supplement welfare to pay the $5-a-month rent and other expenses.

His mother hammered into him the importance of education, telling him that “teachers are second to God.” The pharmacist he started working for at 12 urged him to go to college. His four brothers were convicted of crimes like burglary, robbery and narcotics, but he himself was never jailed, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1982.

“I was involved in everything, I guess, that everyone else was,” he said. “I just never happened to get caught in a serious situation that would embitter me to the point where I would continue in that pattern.”

Mr. Obledo entered the University of Texas at Austin in 1949, then interrupted his studies to enlist in the Navy in 1951. He specialized in radar technology and was on a ship during the Korean War. He returned to the university and graduated with a degree in pharmacy. He worked as a pharmacist while earning a law degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.

One day, another young lawyer, Pete Tijerina, spotted Mr. Obledo dancing with his wife at a dinner for the League of United Latin American Citizens. Mr. Tijerina was pondering how to start a legal organization to fight for the rights of Hispanics.

“I need a guy like him,” Mr. Tijerina recalled thinking in an interview with The San Antonio Express-News in 2001.

The two war men founded the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund with $2.2 million from the Ford Foundation and guidance from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

They had no trouble finding injustices. They filed a suit saying a utility discriminated against Hispanic job candidates by having a height requirement, and they won. They forced schools to desegregate, courts to reform jury selection, swimming pools to integrate and businesses to take down signs barring Mexicans from entering.

“Discrimination was so widespread, I claimed that filing a lawsuit was like picking apples off a tree,” Mr. Obledo told The Express-News.

He joined the Harvard Law School faculty as a teaching fellow for eight months in 1975. Then Governor Brown of California named him secretary of health and welfare. He held the post for seven years, and sharply increased the number of minorities working in the agency. After losing badly in his bid for California’s Democratic nomination for governor, he practiced law, consulted and kept a generally low profile.

Mr. Obledo is survived by his wife and nine brothers and sisters.

Saying he was alarmed at what he saw as rising anti-Hispanic sentiment in immigration and education, he re-emerged in the late 1990s to take on issues as diverse as the exclusion of a Latino float from a Fourth of July parade and cutbacks in bilingual education — not to mention that Taco Bell Chihuahua.

Mr. Obledo’s arguments were far from simplistic. In 1987, he wrote a letter to The Los Angeles Times protesting proposals to raise excise taxes on gasoline, liquor and cigarettes. He said such taxes disproportionately harmed the poor, because their incomes were smaller and the taxes were the same for everyone.

He accepted The Times’s editorial argument that such taxes would help limit consumption and that this was good. But he then zeroed in for the kill: “Is it our government’s intention to deny these everyday items only to the poor?”

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STANLEY SIMON, WHO ASSISTED VETERANS

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: August 16, 2010

Mr. Simon, Bulova’s industrial relations director, shepherded the school into being. Long before the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 made such amenities familiar, he oversaw the construction of a building specifically tailored to the needs of disabled people. 

A handsome neo-Georgian structure designed by the Boston architectural firm Perry, Shaw & Hepburn, the Bulova school was on 62nd Street in Woodside. It had ramps and wide doorways to accommodate wheelchairs, and cork floors to give traction to crutches, among other features. In the lobby, murals depicted the history of timekeeping. 

The school charged no tuition in its early years; the craft it taught could be performed sitting down and, most important, rendered its students fully employable. 

Within months of its opening, jewelers around the country had pledged more than 1,400 jobs to Bulova school graduates. 

Mr. Simon also opened a branch of the school at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington; he later traveled to France to advise the French Red Cross on starting a watchmaking program there. 

Stanley Simon was born in Manhattan on July 7, 1917. In 1936, at 18, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Romance languages cum laude from Harvard. Afterward, he worked on Wall Street before joining Bulova in 1943. 

On Aug. 23, 1944, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia attended the laying of the school’s cornerstone, inscribed, “To serve those who served us.” 

The next year, the school admitted its first class, about 20 men from across the country, who were housed with their families in apartments nearby. For most, as The New York Times later wrote, the school “was their first postwar experience outside hospitals.” 

Several students had lost legs. One, a former Brooklyn pipefitter named Ralph Padavano, had lost an arm: he was provided with a special prosthesis, which he helped design, that let him hold delicate watch parts without crushing them. 

In 1946, after a year’s instruction, the men graduated. They were the first of many hundreds of graduates in the decades that followed, nearly all of whom went on to jobs in watch repair or allied fields like precision toolmaking. 

In 1957, with the Paralyzed Veterans of America, the Bulova school started the National Wheelchair Games, held for many years on the school’s grounds. 

Mr. Simon became a vice president of Bulova in 1950; after Arde Bulova’s death in 1958, he left the company to open an international business consultancy. 

A longtime trustee of the Bulova school, Mr. Simon served on many corporate boards, including those of Vornado Realty Trust and Marcal Paper. 

Mr. Simon’s wife, the former Marcelle Kramer, whom he married in 1939, died in 1996. A son, Frederick, died in 2007. Besides his sister, Mrs. Miller, he is survived by three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. 

The Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking endured for more than 50 years. The Korean War brought new pupils. So did Vietnam. Over time, the school admitted disabled civilians and, eventually, the nondisabled; its curriculum was broadened to include jewelry making. 

But by the end of the century, the waning demand for skilled artisans had made it impossible to hang on. The school closed in the late 1990s; the building is now home to the Queens stake (similar to a diocese) of the Mormon Church. 

It was not so much that the school Mr. Simon helped found had outlived its usefulness. It was, rather, from all appearances, that it had fallen victim to the prevailing culture, in which what is broken is not repaired but simply cast aside.