1959 Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” became his first million-seller when it reached #6 pop and #1 R&B. The song, written by Charles, would go on to become a rock ‘n’ roll standard and would be recorded in the ’60s by Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bobby Darin.
1963 The Crystals charted with “Then He Kissed Me” (#6 pop).
1969 The Woodstock Festival’s closing night included performances by Richie Havens, Sly & the Family Stone, and Jimi Hendrix. Also appearing during the three-day festival were Joan Baez; Jefferson Airplane; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Santana; Credence Clear Water Revival; Iron Butterfly; Blood, Sweat & Tears; Joe Cocker; Sha Na Na; and John Sebastian. More than half a million people attended, and there were three deaths, two births, and six miscarriages. All that for $7.00.
1971 Five months afer they performed together in San Francisco’s Fillmore West, Aretha Franklin was singing at the funeral of King Curtis, who had been murdered on a street corner four days earlier. Joining Aretha in prayer and song were Cissy Houston and Stevie Wonder.
1973 Temptations member Paul Williams, deep in tax hell and with health and family problems overwhelming him, shot himself to death. He was found in his car a few streets from the Motown offices in Detroit.
1986 Run-D.M.C. performed at a concert in Long Beach, CA, and more than forty people were injured during a riot between rival gangs. It was the group’s sixth concert with audience clashes and contributed to the association of rap with violence.
1990 Miles Davis, George Benson, and B.B. King, among others, performed at the JVC Jazz Festival in Newport, RI.
1993 The King of Pop was accused of child molestation as a police investigation started on this day based on charges brought by a thirteen-year-old’s father. The allegations revolved around activities at Micheal Jackson’s home.
1996 Bobby Brown had another bad day behind the wheel (see April 22) when he crashed his wife Whitney Houston’s Porsche into a street sign in Hollywood, FL. Having only minor neck and leg injuries, he was treated at a local hospital and released.
1938 Blues icon Robert Johnson died in Greenwood, MS, after being poisoned by a vengeful husband four days earlier. His music and guitar style became an influence for future generations of stars such as Muddy Waters, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Elmore James, and Taj Mahal. Johnson, who often performed with the likes of Memphis Slim, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Elmore James, was only twenty-seven when he died.
1962 Little Stevie Wonder’s first single, “I Call It Pretty Music (But the Old People Call It Blues),” was released. It never charted but an original 45 today is an $80 collectible.
1969 The Dells’ re-recording of their hit “Oh, What A Night” (#10 R&B) charted thirteen years after the original.
1969 Appearing at one of music history’s most legendary concerts, Richie Havens performed his song “Freedom” at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in Bethel, NY. The song became an anthem of the times and his performance was included in the movie Woodstock. Another anthem literally was Jimi Hendrix’s interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which became a classic moment of the three-day concert. Jimi, who was paid more than any other performer in attendance ($125,000), was not even listed on the handbills given out for ticket sales.
1969 The Supremes performed at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, CA, with the Jackson 5, who were making their performance debut as a Motown group. Though the press release touted Diana as the discoverer of the group, it was actually Gladys Knightwho first saw them perform and alerted Motown’s Berry Gordy Jr.
1986 Anita Baker, former lead singer of Chapter 8, swept onto the bestseller’s list with “Sweet Love.” After leaving Chapter 8 in 1980, she had taken an office job in Detroit until her chance to record solo came in 1983. “Sweet Love” was her first pop hit.
1986 Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell became the first rap album to reach #1 on the R&B chart.
1997 Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan, Toni Braxton, Rod Stewart, Jon Bon Jovi, and Seal, among others, performed at London’s Wembley Stadium for the Songs & Visions: The Carlsberg Concert ’97 show.
Abbey Lincoln, a singer whose dramatic vocal command and tersely poetic songs made her a singular figure in jazz, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.
Her death was announced by her brother David Wooldridge.
Ms. Lincoln’s career encompassed outspoken civil rights advocacy in the 1960s and fearless introspection in more recent years, and for a time in the 1960s she acted in films, including one with Sidney Poitier.
Long recognized as one of jazz’s most arresting and uncompromising singers, Ms. Lincoln gained similar stature as a songwriter only over the last two decades. Her songs, rich in metaphor and philosophical reflection, provide the substance of “Abbey Sings Abbey,” an album released on Verve in 2007. As a body of work, the songs formed the basis of a three-concert retrospective presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2002.
Her singing style was unique, a combined result of bold projection and expressive restraint. Because of her ability to inhabit the emotional dimensions of a song, she was often likened to Billie Holiday, her chief influence. But Ms. Lincoln had a deeper register and a darker tone, and her way with phrasing was more declarative.
“Her utter individuality and intensely passionate delivery can leave an audience breathless with the tension of real drama,” Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times in 1989. “A slight, curling phrase is laden with significance, and the tone of her voice can signify hidden welts of emotion.”
She had a profound influence on other jazz vocalists, not only as a singer and composer but also as a role model. “I learned a lot about taking a different path from Abbey,” the singer Cassandra Wilson said. “Investing your lyrics with what your life is about in the moment.”
Ms. Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Chicago on Aug. 6, 1930, the 10th of 12 children, and raised in rural Michigan. In the early 1950s, she headed west in search of a singing career, spending two years as a nightclub attraction in Honolulu, where she met Ms. Holiday and Louis Armstrong. She then moved to Los Angeles, where she encountered the accomplished lyricist Bob Russell.
It was at the suggestion of Mr. Russell, who had become her manager, that she took the name Abbey Lincoln, a symbolic conjoining of Westminster Abbey and Abraham Lincoln. In 1956, she made her first album, “Affair … a Story of a Girl in Love” (Liberty), and appeared in her first film, the Jayne Mansfield vehicle “The Girl Can’t Help It.” Her image in both cases was decidedly glamorous: On the album cover she was depicted in a décolleté gown, and in the movie she sported a dress once worn by Marilyn Monroe.
For her second album, “That’s Him,” released on the Riverside label in 1957, Ms. Lincoln kept the seductive pose but worked convincingly with a modern jazz ensemble that included the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the drummer Max Roach. In short order she came under the influence of Mr. Roach, a bebop pioneer with an ardent interest in progressive causes. As she later recalled, she put the Monroe dress in an incinerator and followed his lead.
The most visible manifestation of their partnership was “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite,” issued on the Candid label in 1960, with Ms. Lincoln belting Oscar Brown Jr.’s lyrics. Now hailed as an early masterwork of the civil rights movement, the album radicalized Ms. Lincoln’s reputation. One movement had her moaning in sorrow, and then hollering and shrieking in anguish — a stark evocation of struggle. A year later, after Ms. Lincoln sang her own lyrics to a song called “Retribution,” her stance prompted one prominent reviewer to deride her in print as a “professional Negro.”
Ms. Lincoln, who married Mr. Roach in 1962, was for a while more active as an actress than a singer. In 1964 she starred with Ivan Dixon in “Nothing but a Man,” a tale of the Deep South in the 1960s, and in 1968 she was the title character opposite Mr. Poitier in the romantic comedy “For Love of Ivy,” playing a white family’s maid. She also acted on television in guest-starring roles in the ’60s and ’70s.
But with the exception of “Straight Ahead” (Candid), on which “Retribution” appeared, she released no albums in the 1960s. And after her divorce from Mr. Roach in 1970, she took an apartment above a garage in Los Angeles and withdrew from the spotlight for a time. She never remarried.
In addition to Mr. Wooldridge, Ms. Lincoln is survived by another brother, Kenneth Wooldridge, and a sister, Juanita Baker.
During a visit to Africa in 1972, Ms. Lincoln received two honorary appellations from political officials: Moseka, in Zaire, and Aminata, in Guinea. (Moseka would occasionally serve as her surname.) She began to consider her calling as a storyteller and focused on writing songs.
Moving back to New York in the 1980s, Ms. Lincoln resumed performing, eventually attracting the attention of Jean-Philippe Allard, a producer and executive with PolyGram France. Ms. Lincoln’s first effort for what is now the Verve Music Group, “The World Is Falling Down” (1990), was a commercial and critical success.
Eight more albums followed in a similar vein, each produced by Mr. Allard and enlisting top-shelf jazz musicians like the tenor saxophonist Stan Getz and the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. In addition to elegant originals like “Throw It Away” and “When I’m Called Home,” the albums featured Ms. Lincoln’s striking interpretations of material ranging from songbook standards to Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
For “Abbey Sings Abbey” Ms. Lincoln revisited her own songbook exclusively, performing in an acoustic roots-music setting that emphasized her affinities with singer-songwriters like Mr. Dylan. Overseen by Mr. Allard and the American producer-engineer Jay Newland, the album boiled each song to its essence and found Ms. Lincoln in weathered voice but superlative form.
When the album was released in May 2007, Ms. Lincoln was recovering from open-heart surgery. In her Upper West Side apartment, surrounded by her own paintings and drawings, she reflected on her life, often quoting from her own song lyrics. After she recited a long passage from “The World Is Falling Down,” one of her more prominent later songs, her eyes flashed with pride. “I don’t know why anybody would give that up,” she said. “I wouldn’t. Makes my life worthwhile.”
A towering figure in the world of music and literature.
Not only was Ms. Lincoln the owner of a beautiful and vibrant voice in her singing, but, she was also an accomplished actress, an artist, a poet and a writer. To me she will always be the voice for millions of Black women, when she spoke so clear and stronge in her famous essay, To Whom Will She Cry Rape?
The world has truly lost an icon of impeccable talent, grace, captivating charisma, and spirit.
PATRICIA NEAL, AN OSCAR WINNER WHO ENDURED TRAGEDY
By ALJEAN HARMETZ
Published: August 9, 2010
Patricia Neal, who made her way from Kentucky’s coal country to Hollywood and Broadway, winning an Academy Award and a Tony, but whose life alternated almost surreally between triumph and tragedy, died on Sunday at her home in Edgartown, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard. She was 84.
Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper in the 1949 film “The Fountainhead.” More Photos »
The death was announced by her family in Edgartown. A friend, Bud Albers, told The Associated Press that Ms. Neal, who also lived in Manhattan, had had lung cancer.
Ms. Neal received her Oscar, as best actress, in 1964, for her performance in “Hud” as the tough, shopworn housekeeper who did not succumb to Paul Newman’s amoral charm. By then she had already endured the death of her first child and a calamitous injury to her infant son, who was brain-damaged in an accident. Then came three strokes, a year after the Oscar, leaving her in a coma for three weeks. Afterward she was semiparalyzed and unable to speak.
But she learned to walk and talk again with the help of her husband, the British writer Roald Dahl. And in 1968 — despite a severely impaired memory that made it difficult to recall dialogue — she returned to the screen as the bitter mother who used her son as a weapon against her husband in the screen version of Frank Gilroy’s play “The Subject Was Roses.” Once again she was nominated for an Academy Award.
Ms. Neal’s career started swiftly and brilliantly. Before she was 21 she won a Tony and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for her Broadway debut in Lillian Hellman’s “Another Part of the Forest.” Her photograph was on the cover of Life magazine.
Signed by Warner Brothers, she went to Hollywood as the sought-after young actress of her day. She had talent, a husky, unforgettable voice and an arresting presence but no training in acting in front of a camera. Of her movie debut opposite Ronald Reagan in the comedy “John Loves Mary” (1949), Bosley Crowther, the movie critic for The New York Times, wrote that she showed “little to recommend her to further comedy jobs,” adding, “Her way with a gag line is painful.”
Yet Ms. Neal had already been assigned the role that Barbara Stanwyck and other top actresses coveted — the leonine Dominique in the film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s best-selling novel “The Fountainhead” (1949). As Dominique was swept away by the godlike architect Howard Roark, Ms. Neal, at 23, fell in love with the 48-year-old movie star who played Roark, Gary Cooper. Their affair lasted three years but ended when Mr. Cooper chose not to leave his wife and daughter.
“The Fountainhead” was a failure. Ms. Neal saw it at a Hollywood premiere. “You knew, from the very first reel, it was destined to be a monumental bomb,” she said. “My status changed immediately. That was the end of my career as a second Garbo.”
Ms. Neal’s next movie, “Bright Leaf” (1950), an epic story of a 19th-century tobacco farmer played by Cooper, was also a failure. Ill served by Warner Brothers, Ms. Neal acquired screen technique while being wasted in a series of mediocre movies. The exceptions were the screen version of John Patrick’s play “The Hasty Heart” (1950), in which she played a nurse who tries to comfort a dying soldier, and “The Breaking Point” (1950), based on Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not,” in which she played a tramp opposite John Garfield.
“Warners finally let me know they weren’t so keen on my staying on,” Ms. Neal said in an interview. “They didn’t fire me. I took the hint.”
She was 27 and apparently washed up in Hollywood after five years and 13 movies when Hellman insisted that Ms. Neal star in the Broadway revival of her play “The Children’s Hour” in 1952. And it was at Hellman’s house that Ms. Neal met Dahl, then a writer of macabre short stories; they would marry and have five children in a troubled, 30-year marriage.
In 1957, Ms. Neal triumphantly returned to the screen in Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd.” Demonstrating a range she had lacked before, she was praised for her portrayal of a radio reporter who builds the career of a folksy guitarist (played by Andy Griffith)
As the 1950s ended, she appeared to great acclaim in “Suddenly Last Summer” on the London stage and in “The Miracle Worker” on Broadway, then went on to even greater screen success in “Hud” and “In Harm’s Way” with John Wayne. Riding the crest, she signed to star in the John Ford movie “Seven Women.” But at 39 and pregnant with her fifth child, she was struck down by the strokes.
Patsy Lou Neal was born in the coal mining town of Packard, Ky., on Jan. 20, 1926, to a mine manager and the daughter of the town doctor. Ms. Neal grew up in Knoxville, Tenn. At 10, she attended an evening of monologues in the basement of the Methodist church and wrote a note to Santa Claus: “What I want for Christmas is to study dramatics.” By the time she entered high school, Patsy Neal was giving monologues at Knoxville social clubs and had won the Tennessee State Award for dramatic reading.
In 1942, the summer before her senior year, she was chosen to apprentice at the prestigious Barter Theater in Virginia. After two years as a drama major at Northwestern University, she headed to New York, where she worked as an understudy before replacing Vivian Vance in a road company production of “Voice of the Turtle,” which had been produced on Broadway by Alfred de Liagre. He had insisted that this patrician-looking new actress call herself Patricia.
Her big break came as a backwoods girl who allies herself with the devil in a summer stock production of “Devil Takes a Whittler” in Westport, Conn. Eugene O’Neill, who became her mentor, saw the performance, and so did much of the Broadway establishment. In less than 24 hours she had two offers to star on Broadway. Ms. Neal turned down Richard Rodgers’ offer of the lead in “John Loves Mary” for Hellman’s “Another Part of the Forest.”
Hollywood soon beckoned, and she signed a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers that included the starring role in the film version of “John Loves Mary.” In other roles for the studio she played a woman waiting to see if her child survived a plane crash in “Three Secrets” (1950); John Wayne’s love interest in “Operation Pacific” (1951); and Dennis Morgan’s feuding wife in “Raton Pass” (1951).
A contract at Fox followed, and she played opposite Tyrone Power in the espionage thriller “Diplomatic Courier” (1952) and worried through the science fiction film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951). Loaned to Universal, she played a widow courted by Van Heflin in “Weekend With Father” (1951).During her affair with Cooper she became pregnant and had an abortion, according to the autobiography “As I Am” (1988), written with Richard DeNeut. “If I had only one thing to do over in my life,” she wrote, “I would have that baby.”Eager to have children, she married Dahl in 1953, even though she did not love him then, she wrote in her autobiography. A former R.A.F. fighter pilot who became a renowned writer of often darkly humorous children’s books (“James and the Giant Peach,”“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), Dahl took control of Ms. Neal’s life. After their four-month-old son, Theo, was left brain-damaged when his pram was crushed between a taxicab and a bus on a New York street in December 1960, Dahl decided that they would move to the village of Great Missenden in England. Two years later, their eldest daughter, Olivia, who was 7, died of measles encephalitis, perhaps for want of sophisticated medical care that would have been available in a big city.
Still, Ms. Neal continued to work in film and in guest appearances on television. In “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), she played an older woman who supports a young writer (George Peppard) who falls in love with the gentlemen’s escort Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn).
Ms. Neal survived the strokes in 1965 because of the knowledge Dahl had acquired during the years when Theo had eight brain operations. After the shunt that drained fluid from Theo’s brain kept clogging, Dahl worked for two years with a retired engineer and a neurosurgeon to design and manufacture a better one, the Wade-Dahl-Till valve.
When Ms. Neal collapsed in their rented Beverly Hills house, Dahl knew enough about her symptoms to call one of the leading neurosurgeons in Southern California. Fourteen days after a seven-hour operation, the neurosurgeon told Dahl that his wife would live. But he added, “I’m not sure whether or not I’ve done her a favor.”
Dahl badgered his wife into getting well, pressing her to walk, holding things out of her reach until she managed to ask for them and arranging for hours of physical and speech therapy. She learned to read again. Six months after her brain operation, Ms. Neal gave birth to a healthy daughter, and Dahl insisted that a brace be taken off her shoes.
Early in 1967 Dahl announced that she was ready to perform and that she would give a speech in New York that spring at a charity dinner for brain-damaged children. Terrified, Ms. Neal worked day after day to memorize the speech, which she delivered to thundering applause. As she wrote in her autobiography, “I knew at that moment that Roald the slave driver, Roald the bastard, with his relentless scourge, Roald the Rotten, as I had called him more than once, had thrown me back into the deep water. Where I belonged.”
A few months later Frank Gilroy and Ulu Grosbard, the writer and director of “The Subject Was Roses,” flew to Great Missenden. “We didn’t know whether she could memorize a line,” Mr. Grosbard said after “The Subject Was Roses” was finished. “The memory element was the uncertain one. But when we started to shoot, she hit her top level.”
The story of Ms. Neal’s illness and recovery was made into a television movie in 1981, with Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde playing Pat and Roald. Two years later, Ms. Neal and Dahl were divorced after Ms. Neal discovered that her husband had been having a long affair with one of her best friends. Dahl died in 1990.
Ms. Neal is survived by her children Tessa, Ophelia, Theo and Lucy; a brother, Pete Neal; a sister, Margaret Ann VandeNoord; 10 grandchildren and step grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.
In her later years Ms. Neal was often seen in guest roles in television series like “Little House on the Prairie” and “Murder, She Wrote.” In 1999 she had a small role as the title character — a wealthy Southern dowager who commits suicide — in Robert Altman’s comedy “Cookie’s Fortune.”
Ms. Neal also put much time and energy into raising money for brain injured children and adults and establishing the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in Knoxville, Tenn. In dozens of speaking engagements, she demonstrated that a brain injury was not necessarily the end of life or of joy.
“I can’t see from one eye,” she said in 1988. “I’ve been paralyzed. I’ve fallen down and broken a hip. Stubbornness gets you through the bad times. You don’t give in.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 11, 2010
An obituary on Tuesday and in some copies on Monday about the actress Patricia Neal misspelled the middle name of her sister, who survives her. She is Margaret Ann VandeNoord, not Margaret Anne VandeNoord.SOURCE
That voice.
I have loved the way Ms. Patricia Neal spoke, whether it was in a film, or an interview. Even later her stroke, her voice still conveyed to me the same timber I had come to love.
Her films with the late Paul Newman, Hud, and The Day The Earth Stood Still, with the late Michael Rennie, will always be my two favourite Patricia Neal films. I especially loved her in the pilot of The Waltons. Entitled, The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, her portrayal of Olivia Walton is unforgettable.
But, here’s my favourite secne, the eggnog from the Baldwin Sisters (“I don’t allow whiskey in this house!”), when Olivia Walton (Patricia Neal) sent John-Boy out to find their father, who was coming home on a bus. (News was received that the bus crashed during a snowstorm, and everyone in the Walton household was worried that their father might have been killed on the bus.)
David L. Wolper, an award-winning movie and television producer best known for the groundbreaking mini-series “Roots,” died on Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 82.
August 12, 2010
Laurie Wierzbicki/BEI for Warner Bros., via Reuters
Dan Wolper at the 25th anniversary screening of “Roots“ in 2002.
The cause was congestive heart failure and complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Dale Olson, Mr. Wolper’s publicist.
Mr. Wolper produced hundreds of films and television shows, including the hit 1983 mini-series “The Thorn Birds,” a romantic drama set in Australia, with Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward. But the work with which he was most closely associated was “Roots,” shown in eight parts on ABC in 1977.
The saga of an African-American family’s journey from Africa to slavery and emancipation, based on the best-selling book by Alex Haley, “Roots,” with a cast including LeVar Burton, Ben Vereen and many others, was not the first mini-series, but it was the first to have a major influence not just in the ratings but in American culture. One of the highest-rated entertainment programs in television history, it went on to win nine Emmy Awards and ignited a lively national discussion about race.
Another of Mr. Wolper’s productions, “The Hellstrom Chronicle” (1971), a film concerned with mankind’s real and imagined difficulties with insects, won an Academy Award.
Mr. Wolper was also a tireless showman and a flamboyant organizer of major events. He oversaw the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, replete with sky divers, break dancers and 84 pianists playing music by George Gershwin. He again dazzled an international television audience when he choreographed a celebration in New York Harbor on July 4, 1986, to observe the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, in which several thousand rockets were set off amid a backdrop of hundreds of tall ships gracing the harbor around the statue.
Mr. Wolper initially made his mark as a producer of documentaries and later focused on fictionalized accounts of historical events. He drew his share of criticism: it was sometimes suggested that his documentaries were not sufficiently probing, that his so-called docudramas took too many liberties with the facts, that he was more showman than historian. In 1966 Jack Gould, the television critic of The New York Times, noted that some financiers and government officials had been permitted an advance look at Mr. Wolper’s CBS documentary “Wall Street: Where the Money Is.”
“Wolper is incredibly naïve if he fails to understand the consequences of allowing participants in a controversial news story to have the right of advance approval,” Mr. Gould wrote. Mr. Wolper admitted that he had let the officials see the film or read his script before it was broadcast, but insisted he had made no deletions and was not asked to make any.
Critics were also cool to many of his big-screen productions, which included “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969), “I Love My Wife” (1970) and “One Is a Lonely Number” (1972), although he received good reviews for some, notably “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” (1971) and “L.A. Confidential” (1997), which won two Oscars.
“The Bridge at Remagen” (1969), about a World War II battle in Germany, was probably the Wolper movie that attracted the most attention — not for what was on the screen, but because his production company was run out of Czechoslovakia when the Soviet Army invaded.
Mr. Wolper scored an early success in 1963 with the television documentary “The Making of the President 1960,” based on Theodore H. White’s best-selling book about John F. Kennedy’s quest for the White House. It won four Emmys, including program of the year.
Other noteworthy television projects in the 1960s included the series “Biography,” “Hollywood and the Stars” and “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” In the 1970s he branched out into sitcoms, producing “Chico and the Man” and “Welcome Back, Kotter” with James Komack.
David Wolper (he had no middle name, but used the middle initial L to distinguish himself from an uncle also named David Wolper) was born on the East Side of Manhattan on Jan. 11, 1928, the only child of Irving S. Wolper, a businessman, and the former Anna Fass. As a teenager he spent a lot of time watching movies, and people noticed that he had a knack for selling things.
Upon graduation from Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, he entered Drake University in Des Moines, remained there a year, then transferred to the University of Southern California for two more years. He left the university at the end of his junior year because he thought he could make money by purchasing old movies and selling them to television stations all over the country. He was right.
In 1958, sensing that the footage shot of the Soviet satellite Sputnik would be worth something, he purchased 6,000 feet of it from Artkino, the official Soviet distributor, and used it as the basis for a documentary, “The Race for Space,” which he sold to more than 100 stations in the United States after all three networks turned it down.
Making documentaries for television, he soon learned, was not easy. The networks had large news and public affairs departments staffed by seasoned journalists, and network executives tended to be wary of documentaries produced by outsiders.
Undaunted, Mr. Wolper began Wolper Productions on a shoestring. The company’s early projects included “The Rafer Johnson Story” (1961), “Hollywood: The Golden Years” (1961) and “D-Day” (1962). Reviews were mixed, but viewers were receptive. By the mid-1970s Wolper Productions had grown from two people in a one-room office to more than 200 employees using 40 cutting rooms.
In 1971 Mr. Wolper produced “Appointment With Destiny,” a series that mixed historical footage with dramatic re-enactments. John J. O’Connor, writing in The Times, criticized it as “pure fiction cleverly masquerading as reality.” Mr. Wolper responded in a letter to the editor: “How else can we approach the past? Shall we leave it, defeated and ignorant, because we cannot fully reconstruct it any more than we can relive it?”
Married three times, Mr. Wolper is survived by his wife of 36 years, the former Gloria Hill; two sons, Mark and Michael, and a daughter, Leslie, by his second wife, the former Margaret Dawn Richard; and 10 grandchildren.
Mr. Wolper remained active as a producer of mini-series and documentaries well into the 1990s. Besides “The Thorn Birds,” his noteworthy later productions included “North and South” (1985). In 2002 he revisited his most famous production with the television special “Roots: Celebrating 25 Years.”
Mr. Wolper was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 1989. In 2003 he published his autobiography, written with David Fisher. Its title was “Producer.”
It was truly groundbreaking in television history, and on the nights of January 23-30, 1977, millions tuned in to ABC to see the “Saga of an American Family”.
David Wolper gave the world a mini-series that had many viewers talking on America’s history of slavery and racism.
Roots originally aired on ABC for eight consecutive nights from January 23 to January 30, 1977. Episodes 1, 2, 6, and 8 were each two hours long while episodes 3, 4, 5, and 7 were each one hour long. The miniseries has since been re-edited to six 90 minute episodes for VHS, and later for DVD release.
It was the catalyst that started dialogue about a subject that many considered taboo, (and still do), and that many in Hollywood would not care to undertake. But, Mr. Wolper paved the way for Hollywood—-and America to confront the shame of this nation and Roots tackled the subject of slavery in a way that was not saccharine. The ending may have been too uplifting for some viewers, but, the mini-series showed the indominatable spirt that endured in many enslaved Black people who never gave up, or over, to the evil institution of American race-based slavery.
#1 R&B Song 1981: “I’m In Love,” Evelyn “Champagne” King
Born: Buster Brown, 1911; Bill Pinkney (the Drifters), 1925; Bobby Day (Bobby Byrd, the Hollywood Flames), 1934; Nesbert “Stix” Hooper (the Crusaders), 1938; Bobby Caldwell, 1951
1953 The Prisonaires, five inmates from the Tennessee State Penitentiary, had their debut disc, “Just Walkin’ In the Rain,” issued on SunRrecords. Lead singer Johnny Bragg had been helped with his diction during their June recording session by a young would-be vocalist who was hanging around the studio. The teen’s name was Elvis Presley.
1964 The Four Tops debuted on the charts with “Baby, I Need Your Loving,” which reached #11. They would go on to have forty-five hit 45s through 1988. The quartet originally signed with Motown records for a $400 advance.
1981 After a man was hot and killed returning from Stevie Wonder’s concert at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, CA, Stevie gave his gold album for Hotter Than July to the young man’s girlfriend.
1992 Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” reached #1 pop today and stayed for a precedent-setting thirteen weeks. Whitney Houston broke the record when her “I Will Always Love You” topped the charts for fourteen weeks in 1993.
1992 Mary J. Blige’s first single “You Remind Me” peaked at #29 on the pop charts while going on to #1 R&B. Mary, who sang in a Pentecostal church choir while living in Savannah, GA, started her pursuit of a musical career with a demo she did of Anita Baker’s “Caught Up in the Rapture” on a Yonkers, NY, shopping mall karaoke machine.
1998 Obviously a good day for Mary J. Blige, her fifth album, The Tour, topped off at #7 R&B. Three of Mary’s five albums (What’s the 411?, My Life, and Share My World) had reached the top spot between 1992 and 1997.
1998 Richie Havens, who performed at both Woodstock concerts and the twenty-fifth anniversary Woodstock ’94, returned yet again to a Day in the Garden, a festival to commemorate the original achievement on its thirtieth anniversary.
I missed posting about the important milestone of the 45TH Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.
So many Black people and their allies who put their lives on the line for the right to exercise this most cherished of American freedoms.
Here is a retrospective on the painful path that was trod by those who would take nothing for their journey in their quest to obtain what they had a right to as U.S. citizens.
An act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes.
Obverse of the Great Seal of the United States
VRA
Colloquial name(s)
Voting Rights Act
Enacted by the
89th United States Congress
Effective
August 6, 1965
Citations
Public Law
89-110
Codification
Legislative history
Introduced in the Senate as S 1564 by Mike Mansfield (D–MT) and Everett Dirksen (R–IL) on March 18, 1965
Committee consideration by: Judiciary
Passed the Senate on May 26, 1965 (77-19)
Passed the House with amendment on July 9, 1965 (333-85)
Reported by the joint conference committee on July 29, 1965; agreed to by the House on August 3, 1965 (328-74) and by the Senate on August 4, 1965 (79-18)
Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965
Civil rights protestors challenging the bankruptcy and brutality of Jane Crow segregation.
Protestors carrying American flag sin the Selma to Montgomery, Alabama March, 1965.
May 7, 1963: Birmingham Police arrest Parker High School student Mattie Howard in front of the Carver Theatre. Youths became an integral part of the civil rights movement when the Children’s Crusade began on May 2.
NEWS FILE/NORMAN DEAN (SOURCE)
May 3-9, 1963: Youths are pummeled by water from a fire hose during a Children’s Crusade demonstration in downtown Birmingham. (SOURCE)
President Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6,1965.
1965 – Voting Rights Act Voting has In 1965, however, the Voting Rights Act was passed, and it suspended in certain areas the use of literacy tests and similar devices as prerequisites to. Conflict between Private and Public Rights of the Law For example, specific …Voting Rights Act Voting has In 1965, however, the Voting Rights Act was passed, and it suspended in certain areas the use of literacy tests and similar devices as prerequisites to. Conflict between Private and Public Rights of the Law For example, specific Amendments to the US Constitution address issues such as voting rights for all regardless of race, gender or ethnicity and national Gang Prevention Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act workshop is designed to …
Mar 7, 1965 – He died eight days later. To protest, activists decided to march from Selma to the state’s Capitol in Montgomery. The confrontation on March 7, 1965, or Bloody Sunday, led to the Voting Rights Act. “It’s a very important case, because his death led to the …He died eight days later. To protest, activists decided to march from Selma to the state’s Capitol in Montgomery. The confrontation on March 7, 1965, or Bloody Sunday, led to the Voting Rights Act. “It’s a very important case, because his death led to the voting rights march,” District Attorney Michael W. Jackson said Wednesday in an interview. “This event helped trigger the Voting Rights Act, which helped enfranchise a lot of people. I’ma direct benefit of it.”
Aug 6, 1965 – President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965. (Broadcast media note: Vanderbilt has a campus broadcast facility with a dedicated fiber optic line for live TV interviews and a radio ISDN line) VOTING RIGHTS ACT RESONATES …
From Media Advisory — Voting Rights Act resonates today: Vanderbilt black …
sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/news/releases/2005/07 …
Oct 19, 1965 – SELMA, Ala., — An Al abama judge has ruled that the 1965 Voting Rights Act. which resulted in the sending of feder al voting examiners into a score of Southern counties to register Negroes, is unconstitutional. Circuit Judge Jumes Hare, in a ruling Monday, declared the law to be in …
From 1965 Voting Rights Act Ruled Unconstitutional By Alabama Judge Hare .
news.google.com/newspapers?id=YSgmAAAAIBAJ …
Oct 22, 1965 – WASHINGTON — The government, voking a rarely used constitutional power, asked the Supreme Court yesterday to affirm constitutionality of the 1969 Voting Rights Act. The Justice Department action also asks the court to end obstruction of the voting law by Alabama, Mississippi and …
From High Court Asked To Affirm 1965 Voting Rights Act .
news.google.com/newspapers?id=q_EnAAAAIBAJ …
Nov 6, 1965 – The Supreme Court Friday night permitted South Carolina to file an original suit contesting constitutionality of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. High Court Agrees to Hear Suit. Testing Voting Rights Act Validity. WASHINGTON So-The Supreme Court Friday night permitted South Caro– lina to …
From High Court Agrees to Hear Suit Testing Voting Rights Act Validity
pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/501037472 …
Nov 24, 1965 – A panel of three Federal judges ruled today that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 must be presumed constitutional and that state court injunctions against … II The Federal judges said it s the duty of the probate judges “to comply in all respects with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. …
From U.S. COURT BACKS VOTING RIGHTS ACT; Voids Alabama Injunctions …
select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res …
Dec 5, 1965 – The Civil Rights Commission found Saturday that much of the South is beginning to comply with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, hut urged new federal action in some areas. Despite Apparent Success, US Commission Urges New Federal Action for Some Areas. BY DON IRWIN. Times Staff Writer …
From South Complying With Vote Law, Study Shows
pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/501255082 …
Jun 30, 1982 – By MICHAEL PUTZEL Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) – Calling the right to vote ” the crown jewel of American liberties,” President Reagan yesterday signed a quarter – century renewal of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. ‘ After witnessing the four – minute signing ceremony …
From Reagan renews Voting Rights Act of 1965
digitalnewspapers.libraries.psu.edu/default …
Yes, those were powerful days. Days when many Black people left their homes, and never knew if they would return alive to their loved ones.
Powerful days, when young Black school children were bowled over by high pressure water hoses that could peel the skin off their innocent bodies.
Powerful days when many Black people challenged a racist nation, when Black people demanded their rights as citizens—-to be able to vote.
The Voting Rights Act is often forgotten but, its impact is lasting, when the precious privilege we all enjoy to vote is something that should never be treated with callous disregard nor ignored.
We all have the right to vote, but, lest we forget————-the many who put their lives on the line so that we may have that most beautiful of rights as American citizens.
Talk about delusional. Terry Nichols continues to believe that he is a princess in a high castle, and not a Supermax prisoner serving multiple life sentences for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, including 19 children.
Once again, Nichols is attempting to rattle his tiny cage over the food served at the federal facility he calls home in Florence, Colo., where the 55-year old will likely spend the rest of his days. The Oklahoman newspaper reports that in July, Nichols wrote yet another legal memo demanding that the prison respect his “Christian” dietary needs. According to the paper, Nichols believes Christ wants him to subsist on raw, non-processed foodstuffs, such as uncooked vegetables, unpeeled fruit and whole-grain bread. The paper quotes Nichols’ memo as arguing, “God created our foods to be consumed in their whole unrefined state.”
To draw attention to his ongoing nutritional nightmare, Nichols has conducted three hunger strikes since February, at least one of which was ended when prison authorities jammed an IV tube into Nichols’ emaciated arm.
In order to pay for his Christian specialty diet, Nichols is asking that his $14.5 million restitution order — handed down on top of his life sentences for his role in the bombing — be lifted. According to The Associated Press, Nichols is currently allowed to spend just $25 a month.
This is not the first time Nichols has made a stink about Supermax food. As reported in Intelligence Reportlast summer, Nichols in April 2009 filed a gratuitously scatological lawsuit complaining that prison food made him suffer “chronic constipation, bleeding and hemorrhoids.”
For which an uninterested nation was forgiven for responding, “And your point is?”
1961 The Marvelettes’ first single, “Please Mr. Postman,” was released. It delivered to the tune of #1, their only #1 of a twenty-three hit career.
1961 Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” spent its second week at its peak of #8 pop, adding fuel to the worldwide “Twist” fire.
1961 The Mar-Keys performed their instrumental hit “Last Night” on American Bandstand.
1965 The most soulful White duo on the music scene, the Righteous Brothers charted with “Unchained Melody,” climbing almost as high on the R&B charts (#6) as they did on the pop charts (#4).
1985 Micheal Jackson drove a wedge into his relationship with Paul McCartney when he outbid the ex-Beatle for the ATV Music Publishing catalog, which contained more than 250 Lennon/McCartney songs. The price was $47.5 million. Michael had no trouble paying for the catalog, as he had received a royalty check three months earlier from Epic Records for more than $58 million.
1992 Tony Williams, lead singer of the famous Platters, died of emphysema at his New York home. His last live performance was with his wife, Helen, and son, Ricky, as Tony Williams & the Platters on New Year’s Eve, 1991, in Thailand. He was sixty-four.
August 11, 2010 | It’s been 40 years since Apollo astronauts returned with dusty chunks of the Moon — samples that offer conflicting views of lunar history. > read more
July 30, 2010 | Venus, Mars, and Saturn dance in the west after sunset, while soon afterward giant Jupiter rises in the east — all that, and Perseid meteors too! Host: S&T’s Kelly Beatty. (6MB MP3 download: running time: 6m 48s) > read more
August 6, 2010 | Step outside as evening twilight fades, and you’ll find brilliant Venus, along with fainter Mars and Saturn, shining low in the west. > read more
August 13, 2010 | The Perseid meteors are still active late tonight! Meanwhile, the triangle of Venus, Saturn, and Mars continues to morph low in evening twilight. > read more
August 13, 2010 | There’s star parties and star parties — and then there’s Stellafane. Inaugurated in 1926, the Stellafane Convention is probably the longest-running star party in North America, if not the world. > read more
The suspect in the racially-motivated serial murders in Flint, Michigan has been captured by police. The following article is an update on the story I posted on August 11, 2010.
A suspect in a string of 18 stabbings that terrorized people across three states and left five dead was arrested in front of startled passengers at an airport gate as he tried to board a plane for Israel, officials said Thursday.
A judge in Flint, Mich., where the attacks began in late May, signed a warrant Thursday charging Elias Abuelazam, 33, with assault with intent to murder in connection with a July 27 stabbing.
Antwoine Marshall, 26, of Flint, the victim of that attack, told The Associated Press that the FBI visited him at 3 a.m. to show him a picture of the man arrested in Atlanta, and he identified him as the assailant.
Marshall said he was going into his apartment building when the assailant approached and asked for help fixing his car. He was stabbed twice when he opened the hood. Three of his organs were cut, and he has a long scar from his chest to his pelvic area.
Marshall said he wants to “retaliate” but “I’ll let God handle it. Every time I look at my scar, I get angry.”
In Michigan, Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said authorities still don’t know the motive. Most victims were black, and police have said the attacks may have been racially motivated, though Leyton said there was no evidence of that.
Atlanta police said they went to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport at the request of Michigan State Police and paged Abuelazam over the intercom as he waited to board a Delta Air Lines flight to Tel Aviv.
Passengers on that flight said as they arrived in Tel Aviv that he was tense and talking on his cell phone when he was arrested at the boarding gate shortly before takeoff. They said six police officers led him away without incident.
“He was talking on the phone. I didn’t hear what he said,” Romi Shaked, who was on the plane, told The Associated Press. “I just saw him talking to different people and moving around and sitting in different seats.”
Leyton said Abuelazam’s uncle bought him the plane ticket, which cost about $3,000, and is now cooperating with police.
The suspect has ties to Flint and to Leesburg, Va., the site of three similar attacks last week, Leesburg Police Officer Chris Jones said.
“While this is a key step in the investigation, there are still many issues that need to be addressed before we identify this individual as the person responsible for this horrific crime spree,” Jones said.
Police in Arlington, Va., said Abuelazam was arrested there during a routine traffic stop last week.
Arlington Detective Crystal L. Nosal said police realized he was wanted on a simple assault warrant in Leesburg, about 30 miles away, but a magistrate released him on personal recognizance, meaning he was responsible for returning to court.
Leyton, the Michigan prosecutor, said the Arlington stop was for failure to obey a highway sign and police found a knife in the driver’s side door and a hammer on the floor of Abuelazam’s 1996 green and gold Chevrolet Blazer. A hammer was used in one attack in Virginia, on a 19-year-old man in a parking lot.
Police impounded the Blazer, which matched a vehicle described by some stabbing victims who survived, then gave it back to Abuelazam, Leyton said.
According to court records in Loudoun County, where Leesburg is located, Abuelazam was arrested in December 2007 and charged with felony gun possession. Those charges were dropped the next year.
He was also charged with misdemeanor assault in 2008, and had a court date scheduled next week.
Abuelazam is an Israeli citizen who is living in the U.S. with a green card, Leyton said.
Police had focused their hunt on Flint — where 16 stabbings took place — until Leesburg police reported three attacks. Authorities in Toledo, Ohio, say a stabbing in that city Saturday appears to be linked to the violent spree.
In Mount Morris Township, near Flint, a few dozen people who heard about the arrest gathered outside a convenience store where Abuelazam worked. One yelled that the owner should have been suspicious. Police cleared the parking lot.
“He was a good guy. All of my employees, we never thought nothing about the guy,” said Abdulla Farrah, manager of Kingwater Market.
Farrah said Abuelazam worked there for about a month before leaving Aug. 1. He said investigators looked at store video Wednesday.
Jessica Abuelazam, an Arlington, Texas, woman who identified herself as Elias’ ex-wife, said she was struggling to cope with the news too.
“I’m shocked,” she said in a phone interview. “I’m trying to figure out what’s going on.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, a task force led by the Michigan State Police and including the FBI had received 469 tips.
The attacks began in late spring and police said they usually followed a pattern: The suspect approached black men late at night on lonely urban roads and asked for directions or help with a broken-down car. Then, without warning, he pulled out a knife and struck. Then, he sped away, leaving them for dead.
The brazen nature and the frequency of the attacks — the assailant struck an average of about once every four days since the first stabbing in May — has terrified some of those in cities he’s already targeted.
The youngest victim was 17; the oldest was 60. They ranged in size from 5-foot-4 inches and 120 pounds to 6-foot-1 and 190 pounds.
Slide Show 
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