Varnette Honeywood, Whose Art Appeared on ‘Cosby Show’
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: September 16, 2010
Varnette P. Honeywood, an artist whose brilliantly colored collages, paintings and prints presented a warm, upbeat picture of black American life and whose paintings were prominently displayed in the living room of the Huxtable home on “The Cosby Show,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 59.
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Ms. Honeywood painted “The River That Flows Through Time” for Spelman College’s 125th Anniversary celebration in 2006. |
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The cause was cancer, Joyce Faye Allen, a cousin, said.
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Courtesy of Bobby Holland
Varnette Honeywood. |
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Ms. Honeywood, whose bright colors and simplified forms were strongly influenced by narrative artists like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, developed a socially conscious style of genre painting that showed black Americans in familiar settings: interacting with family members, gathering at church, socializing on a front porch.
“You can depict segregation, starving and homelessness,” Mr. Cosby told The Washington Post in 1997. “But in Varnette’s work you can see teenagers doing homework, a family cooking a meal, girls doing their hair.”
She drew inspiration in her early work from the area around McComb, Miss., where her grandparents lived. Later, assembling semiabstract forms into complex patterns, she depicted daily life in the neighborhoods around her in Los Angeles.
“Like many black children in L.A., I was taken back to Mississippi in the summers,” she told the reference work Contemporary Black Biography. “I grew up in the Black Arts Movement; was exposed to black artists; and I see myself as part of that legacy.”
Her work found its way to “The Cosby Show,” where it reached an audience of millions, after Mr. Cosby’s wife, Camille, saw a line of note cards, posters and prints that Ms.Honeywood and her older sister, Stephanie, sold through their company, Black Lifestyles.
The Cosbys began collecting Ms. Honeywood’s work in the early 1980s. Several of her paintings were featured prominently on the set of “The Cosby Show,” and she created the mural that served as a backdrop for Mr. Cosby’s show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”
In the 1990s she collaborated with Mr. Cosby on the 12 titles in the series “Little Bill Books for Beginning Readers,” creating the characters and providing the illustrations. The books provided the basis for “Little Bill,” the animated series broadcast on CBS from 1999 to 2004, for which she served as a consultant.
Varnette Patricia Honeywood was born on Dec. 27, 1950, in Los Angeles. Her parents were elementary school teachers who had migrated from Louisiana and Mississippi.
At 12 she began studying art at the Chouinard Art Institute. She continued studying art at Spelman College in Atlanta, from which she received a bachelor’s degree in 1972. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of Southern California in 1974, she taught art and helped design multicultural arts and crafts programs for use in the public schools.
In the mid-1970s she and her sister founded Black Lifestyles, one of the first art and greeting-card companies devoted to black themes.
Her 1974 painting “Birthday” was one of several featured on “The Cosby Show.” Her work also appeared in the television series “Amen,” “227” and “A Different World.”
“Certain art in our culture depicts a down feeling about how African-American people are treated,” Mr. Cosby told The Washington Post in 1997. “They are poor and needy or need help in righting the wrongs. Varnette’s work lets us not forget the personal joys.”
VARNETTE HONEYWOOD, ARTIST WHOSE WORKS WERE FEATURED ON ‘THE COSBY SHOW’
By Valerie J. Nelson
Friday, September 17, 2010
Varnette P. Honeywood, an artist who gained fame when her vivid and joyful portraits of everyday lives of blacks were prominently featured on TV’s “The Cosby Show,” died Sept. 12 of cancer at a Los Angeles hospital. She was 59.
As a black artist, Ms. Honeywood was “extraordinarily important,” partly for the visibility “The Cosby Show” gave her but also because young people were inspired by her “exuberant and positive images of black culture,” said Paul Von Blum, emeritus professor of African American studies at the University California at Los Angeles.
When it came to hanging her stylized prints in the home of the Huxtables — the fictional black family at the heart of “The Cosby Show” — artist and sitcom went together “like a slice of pie and a plate,” said Bill Cosby, star of the show that aired on NBC from 1984 to 1992.
“She truly captured the feel of family love,” Cosby told the Los Angeles Times. “Her work had depth and storytelling. She just knocked it out of the ballpark every time.”
Varnette Patricia Honeywood was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 27, 1950. At Spelman College in Atlanta, a historically black women’s college, she had planned to major in history but switched to art after being encouraged by a drawing teacher and fellow students.
Soon she began developing the signature style that she sometimes described as “figurative abstraction.” Brilliant colors and intricate designs were a hallmark of her oil paintings and collages, and many of her pieces have an African component, whether they show the cultural tradition of movement or incorporate African-influenced prints that she often wore.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Spelman in 1972, she received a master’s in education and a teaching credential from the University of Southern California in 1974.
Ms. Honeywood was frustrated by her inability to gain traction in the art world when Cosby and his wife, Camille, discovered her work.
Impressed with her entrepreneurship and images, they became collectors and she was asked to submit art for the pilot of “The Cosby Show.” Three works remained on the set for the entire run and others were rotated through, according to a 1992 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article.
Ms. Honeywood had no immediate survivors.
— Los Angeles Times
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KEVIN MCCARTHY, FAMED ACTOR OF THE SCI-FI CLASSIC ‘INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS’
By ANITA GATES
Published: September 12, 2010
Correction Appended
Kevin McCarthy, the suave, square-jawed actor who earned accolades in stage and screen productions of “Death of a Salesman” but will always be best known as the star of the 1956 science fiction movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” died Saturday at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. He was 96 and lived in Sherman Oaks, Calif.
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Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956). |
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His death was confirmed by his daughter Lillah McCarthy.
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Kevin McCarthy. |
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Mr. McCarthy, whose sister was the celebrated author Mary McCarthy, was 35 and a veteran of seven Broadway plays when Elia Kazan cast him as Biff, the shallow, elder son of Willy Loman, in the London stage production of “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 drama about illusion and the common man. His portrayal of Biff in the 1951 film version earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
Five years and four forgettable films later Mr. McCarthy was cast in a low-budget B movie about a small California town where the residents are gradually replaced by pods from outer space. The pods, resembling giant cucumbers, bubble and foam as they slowly turn into creepy, emotionless duplicates of the townspeople.
Miles Bennell (Mr. McCarthy), a handsome bachelor doctor, and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), a beautiful local divorcée, spend the movie trying to escape podification (mostly just by staying awake; the transformation takes place while people are sleeping) and warn others.
The movie, selected for the National Film Registry in 1994 and named one of the Top 10 science fiction films of all time by the American Film Institute in 2008, came to be regarded as a metaphor for the paranoia of the era’s Communist witch hunts.
But the film’s leading man, like many moviegoers at the time, saw it differently, as a warning about mindless conformity.
“I thought it was really about the onset of a kind of life where the corporate people are trying to tell you how to live, what to do, how to behave,” Mr. McCarthy told The Bangor Daily News in Maine in 1997.
Over the decades Mr. McCarthy came to embrace the cult immortality he achieved with “Body Snatchers,” but he cheerily played hundreds of other roles in feature films and on television (including multiple appearances on series from “Studio One” in the 1950s to “The District” in 2000) and continued his stage career. He toured the United States as Harry S. Truman in the one-man show “Give ’Em Hell, Harry” for two decades.
Kevin McCarthy was born on Feb. 15, 1914, in Seattle, the son of Roy Winfield McCarthy and the former Therese Preston. Both parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and their four children were sent to live with relatives in Minneapolis. After five years of near-Dickensian mistreatment, described in Ms. McCarthy’s memoirs, the youngsters moved in with their maternal grandfather.
After graduating from high school in Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy studied at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an eye toward a diplomatic career. He changed his mind, however, and transferred to the University of Minnesota, where he became interested in acting.
After moving to New York he made his Broadway debut in 1938 in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” His career was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as a military police officer. After his discharge he became an early member of the Actors Studio, New York’s bastion of Method acting.
Despite his film and television success Mr. McCarthy never abandoned the stage. The 18 Broadway productions in which he appeared included Moss Hart’s “Winged Victory” (in which he was billed as Sgt. Kevin McCarthy), the political drama “Advise and Consent,” Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Kurt Vonnegut’s irreverent “Happy Birthday, Wanda June.”
Mr. McCarthy matured quickly into roles as judges, generals, politicians and other men of power — sometimes not very nice ones. On “Flamingo Road,” the soapy 1980s television series, he was a greedy small-town Florida millionaire. On the screen, in “The Best Man” (1964), he was a presidential candidate’s henchman, specializing in dirty tricks, and he played a similarly ignoble political type in “The Distinguished Gentleman” (1992). In “Innerspace” (1987) he was a devious industrial spy, in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976), a grabby publicist.
And although he did relatively little science fiction after “Body Snatchers,” he did star in the horror comedy “Piranha” (1978) as a mad scientist breeding killer fish. He also made a cameo appearance in the 1978 remake of “Body Snatchers,” playing a man who throws himself at the car driven by Donald Sutherland (the remake’s star), shouting, “Help! They’re coming! Listen to me!” and sounding much like his character in the original film.
His bad guys weren’t always all bad. He was a roguish poker player in “A Big Hand for the Little Lady” (1966) and Marilyn Monroe’s attractive but distant ex-husband in “The Misfits” (1961).
Mr. McCarthy continued acting well into his 90s. His last screen appearances were in 2009 in “Wesley,” (2008), an 18th-century costume drama, and the short film “I Do.”
He married the actress Augusta Dabney in 1941, and they had three children. They divorced in 1961. (Ms. Dabney died in 2008.) In 1979 he married Kate Crane, a lawyer, and they had two children. Ms. Crane survives him, as do three daughters, Lillah, of Los Angeles; Mary Dabney McCarthy, of Cape Cod; and Tess McCarthy, of New York City; two sons, James Kevin McCarthy of San Diego and Patrick McCarthy of Portland, Ore.; a stepdaughter, Kara Lichtman of Boston; a brother, Preston; and three grandchildren. Mr. McCarthy’s sister died in 1989.
Interviewers rarely asked him about subjects beyond “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” (He loved to tell the story about leaving Ms. Wynter a nostalgic trans-Atlantic telephone message: “Becky, it’s Miles. Wake up!”) But in 1991 he told a critic for The San Diego Union-Tribune about his feeling that purposeful employment was a remedy for many ills. “I try to get as much work as I possibly can,” Mr. McCarthy, then 77, said. “I love to work. I love to be in things.”
Correction: September 20, 2010
A picture caption last Monday with an obituary about the actor Kevin McCarthy carried an incorrect credit. The photograph, of Mr. McCarthy and Dana Wynter in the 1956 movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” was from Allied Artists, not United Artists. (The photograph was also erroneously credited on Aug. 12, 2007, and on Nov. 19, 2000.
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Harold Gould, Longtime Character Actor
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: September 13, 2010
Harold Gould, a widely recognizable character actor in film and television who specialized, especially late in his career, in playing suave, well-dressed gentlemen in popular sitcoms, died Saturday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 86.
The cause was prostate cancer, said Jaime Larkin, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture and Television Fund. Mr. Gould lived at its retirement community.
Mr. Gould was probably best known for two television roles in which he played dignified, self-possessed and understanding men trying to look out for the women in their lives. In the 1970s, on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and later on its spinoff, “Rhoda,” he played Martin Morgenstern, the father of Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper), the best friend of Mary Richards (Ms. Moore). It was a role for a charmer; Martin was the patient and consoling parent, a foil for his brassy wife, Ida (Nancy Walker).
A decade and a half or so later, he was a regular guest star on “The Golden Girls” as a sweetly dashing widower who courts, more or less successfully, the sweetly ditzy Rose Nylund (Betty White).
Mr. Gould, who had a Ph.D. in dramatic speech and literature from Cornell, taught acting in college before he became a professional actor. But in spite of his late start, few actors can boast a résumé as long.
Mr. Gould appeared in theater productions on and Off Broadway in New York and in regional theaters around the country, including “King Lear” at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 1992. He played dozens of character roles in movies, including the dapper grifter Kid Twist in “The Sting” (1973), the Oscar-winning buddy picture that starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford as con men; a Russian count in Woody Allen’s send-up of epic literature, “Love and Death” (1975); and a greedy corporate executive named Engulf in Mel Brooks’s 1976 slapstick comedy, “Silent Movie.”
But Mr. Gould was most of all a fixture on television with a familiar face, with or without what came to be his signature mustache. In the 1960s he appeared on “Dennis the Menace,” “The Donna Reed Show,” “Hazel,” “National Velvet,” “Perry Mason,” “Mister Ed,” “Dr. Kildare,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Virginian,” “12 O’Clock High,” “The Fugitive,” “Judd for the Defense” and “Hogan’s Heroes,” among other shows. In 1965, he played Marlo Thomas’s father in the pilot episode of “That Girl.” (Lew Parker played the part in the series.)
In the 1970s, in addition to his stints on “Mary Tyler Moore” and “Rhoda,” he was seen on “Cannon,” “Mannix,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Medical Story,” “Police Story,” “Family,” “Soap” and “The Love Boat.” In a 1972 episode of “Love, American Style” that was the progenitor of the hit series “Happy Days,” he played Howard Cunningham, the Middle American father of the Middle American son played by Ron Howard; in the series the father was played by Tom Bosley.
In the 1980s Mr. Gould appeared on “St. Elsewhere,” “Webster,” “Trapper John, M.D.,” “L.A. Law” and “Night Court”; in the 1990s, on “Dallas,” “Lois and Clark,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Felicity”; and in this century on “The King of Queens,” “Judging Amy” and “Cold Case.”
Harold Vernon Goldstein was born in Schenectady, N.Y., on Dec. 10, 1923. His father worked for the Post Office. Harold served in the Army during World War II, seeing action in France as a mortar gunner. On his return he graduated from New York State College for Teachers (now the State University at Albany) and enrolled in the graduate drama program at Cornell. He taught drama at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Va., and the University of California, Riverside.
Mr. Gould is survived by his wife, the former Lea Shampanier, whom he married in 1950; a daughter, Deborah; two sons, Joshua and Lowell; and five grandchildren.
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Ronald Walters, Rights Leader and Scholar
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: September 14, 2010
Ronald W. Walters, who organized one of the nation’s first lunch-counter sit-ins to protest segregation as a young man and went on to become a leading scholar of the politics of race, died Friday in Bethesda, Md. He was 72 and lived in Silver Spring, Md.
The cause was cancer, his wife, Patricia Turner Walters, said.
Dr. Walters was 20 and president of the local youth chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. when he and a cousin, Carol Parks, organized a sit-in at the Dockum Drug Store in downtown Wichita, Kan. That was in July 1958, two years before students in Greensboro, N.C., staged the sit-ins that are often credited with starting the movement in many Southern cities.
Every morning for three weeks, the protesters in Wichita returned to the drugstore, sitting silently until closing time, despite constant taunting. Finally the owner relented and agreed to serve black customers, saying he was losing too much money as a result of the sit-in. That protest received scant national attention, and it was only in 2006 that Dr. Walters received an N.A.A.C.P. award for his role in organizing it.
By then he had made a significant mark on the civil rights movement — as a teacher, an author, a television commentator and an adviser to activists and politicians.
“He was an indispensable part of the brain trust of the movement,” Vernon E. Jordan, the civil rights leader and lawyer, said on Monday. “He was there for all of us, at the other end of the phone, if we needed his thinking, his synthesis of racial issues, political issues, economic issues. And he was always at the ready to get on the train to help the cause.”
Dr. Walters, who for 13 years until his retirement last year was director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, was a deputy campaign manager and debate adviser for the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s presidential bid in 1984. In the early 1970s, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Congressional Black Caucus, and he subsequently served as a staff adviser to Representative Charles Diggs, Democrat of Michigan, the first chairman of the caucus.
Dr. Walters wrote 13 books and scores of articles on racial politics. In “White Nationalism, Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community” (2003), he analyzed the resurgence of conservatism among whites.
Sixteen years before, in “Black Presidential Politics in America: A Strategic Approach,” Dr. Walters had envisioned the possibility of an African-American president and laid out the steps that such a candidate would have to take to reach the White House.
Patricia Walters recalled the night President Obama was elected two years ago: “We were stunned, elated and immediately fell into each other’s arms and started crying. My husband looked me in the eyes and said, ‘This is the vision I was trying to present when I wrote the book, that this was a great possibility.’ ”
Ronald William Walters was born in Wichita on July 20, 1938, the oldest of seven children of Gilmar and Maxine Fray Walters. His father was a career Army officer and later a professional bassist; his mother was a civil rights investigator for the state.
Besides his wife, he is survived by three brothers, Duane, Terence and Kevin, and two sisters, Marcia Walters-Hardeman and Sharon Walters.
Dr. Walters graduated from Fisk University with a degree in history in 1963 and went on to earn a master’s in African studies in 1966 and a doctorate in international studies in 1971, both from American University. He taught at Syracuse University in the late 1960s, was a visiting professor at Princeton and a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard and, in 1969, became the first chairman of Afro-American studies at Brandeis University. From 1971 to 1996 he taught at Howard University, including 15 years as chairman of its political science department.
Dr. Walters wrote a weekly syndicated column that appeared in many newspapers. Last month, in his last column, he recalled the “progressive spirit of the original nonviolent march” on Washington in August 1963, “which held out the hope of racial reconciliation and that America would finally cash a check of justice that would allow all of us to invest in the great project of democracy.”
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Arrow, Soca Musician
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 16, 2010
SAN JUAN, P.R. (AP) — Arrow, a soca musician who won global fame with his 1983 hit “Hot Hot Hot,” died on Wednesday at his home on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. He was 60.
The cause was complications of brain cancer, said his brother, Justin Cassell, a singer-songwriter who often collaborated with him.
Arrow, whose real name was Alphonsus Cassell, was among the best-known artists of Caribbean-born soca, a fusion music with roots in calypso.
“Calypso is political, tropical, slower,” Arrow told The Associated Press in a 1996 interview. “Soca is dance. ‘Feeling Hot Hot Hot.’ ” Many North Americans also heard the song in a cover version by Buster Poindexter.
Alphonsus Cassell was born on Nov. 16, 1949, into a musical family. In the 1970s he was influenced by the Trinidadian musician the Mighty Sparrow, long the international king of calypso. He was crowned Calypso King at Monterrat’s annual Christmas carnival four times before focusing on an international career.
In 1975 Arrow released “Monique,” a fusion of calypso with the cadence rhythms of Guadeloupe and Martinique. In later albums he continued to mix and match dance rhythms, adding bits of Dominican merengue, Venezuelan and Cuban salsa, Jamaican reggae, hip-hop, African music and American rock and country. His songs also moved away from calypso’s traditional role as social and political comment.
In the 1980s he performed on tours in Africa, the United States, Europe and Japan.
Arrow is survived by four children and two grandchildren.
“My first three or four albums were very strong lyrically,” he told The New York Times in 1989, “but that kind of song lacked commercial appeal. People want music to enjoy themselves with. This is the whole message of my music: ‘Have a good time, enjoy yourself.’ ”
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Edwin Newman, Journalist
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: September 15, 2010 Twitter
Edwin Newman, the genteelly rumpled, genially grumpy NBC newsman who was equally famous as a stalwart defender of the honor of English, has died in Oxford, England. He was 91.
He died of pneumonia on Aug. 13, but the announcement was delayed until Wednesday so that the family could spend time grieving privately, his lawyer, Rupert Mead, said. He said Mr. Newman and his wife had moved to England in 2007 to live closer to their daughter.
Mr. Newman, recognizable for his balding head and fierce dark eyebrows, was known to three decades of postwar television viewers for his erudition, droll wit and seemingly limitless penchant for puns. (There was, for example, the one about the man who blotted his wet shoes with newspapers, explaining, “These are The Times that dry men’s soles.”) He began his association with NBC in the early 1950s and was variously a correspondent, anchor and critic there before retiring in 1984.
An anchor on the “Today” show in the early 1960s and a familiar presence on the program for many years afterward, Mr. Newman also appeared regularly on “Meet the Press.” He won seven New York Emmy Awards for his work in the 1960s and ’70s with NBC’s local affiliate, WNBC-TV, on which he was a drama critic and the host of the interview program “Speaking Freely.”
He also moderated two presidential debates — the first Ford-Carter debate in 1976 and the second Reagan-Mondale debate in 1984 — and covered some of the signal events of the 20th century, from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Mr. Newman’s best-known books, both published by Bobbs-Merrill, are “Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English?” (1974) and “A Civil Tongue” (1976). In them he declared what he called “a protective interest in the English language,” which, he warned, was falling prey to windiness, witlessness, ungrammaticality, obfuscation and other depredations.
But Mr. Newman “was never preachy or pedantic,” Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of the NBC “Nightly News,” said in a statement.
“To those of us watching at home,” Mr. Williams added, “he made us feel like we had a very smart, classy friend in the broadcast news business.”
Edwin Harold Newman was born in New York City on Jan. 25, 1919, the second of three children of Myron Newman and the former Rose Parker.
He graduated from George Washington High School in Washington Heights in Manhattan and in 1940 earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin, where he worked on the campus newspaper. He was briefly a graduate student in American government at Louisiana State University before finding work in print journalism. (Ink was something of a family business: Mr. Newman’s older brother, Morton, known professionally as M. W. Newman, was for many years a prominent reporter at The Chicago Daily News.)
Edwin Newman’s first journalism job was as a “dictation boy” in the Washington bureau of the International News Service, where he took down information from reporters in the field. He next joined United Press, to which he returned after serving in the Navy from 1942 to 1945. He later worked in the Washington bureau of the progressive New York newspaper PM before joining the Tufty News Service, founded in 1935 by Esther Van Wagoner Tufty, a noted Washington journalist.
In 1947 Mr. Newman joined the Washington bureau of CBS News, where he helped the commentator Eric Sevareid prepare his nightly radio broadcasts. Two years later he moved to London to work as a freelance journalist, joining NBC as a correspondent there in 1952. He went on to become the network’s bureau chief in London, Rome and Paris before settling in New York in 1961.
Mr. Newman was fond of saying that he had “a spotless record of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” as he told Newsweek in 1961. There was the time in 1952, for instance, that he left London for Morocco, only to learn on arriving that King George VI of England had just died.
But in fact Mr. Newman helped cover numerous historic events, among them the shootings of Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. He announced the death of President John F. Kennedy on NBC radio.
He also narrated many well-received NBC television documentaries, including “Japan: East Is West” (1961) and “Politics: The Outer Fringe” (1966), about extremism.
His role as a moderator for presidential debates seemed only fitting, for it was the dense thicket of political discourse, Mr. Newman often said, that helped spur him to become a public guardian of grammar and usage.
“Amtrak”; the non-adverbial use of “hopefully” (he was said to have had a sign in his office reading, “Abandon ‘Hopefully’ All Ye Who Enter Here”); “y’know” as a conversational stopgap; a passel of prefixes and suffixes (“de-,” “non-,” “un-,” “-ize,” “-wise” and “-ee”); and using a preposition to end a sentence with.
This prescriptive approach to English did not win favor everywhere. In an article in The Atlantic in 1983, the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg took Mr. Newman and the author Richard Mitchell to task for writing “books about the language that rarely, if ever, cite a dictionary or a standard grammar; evidently one just knows these things.”
Mr. Newman’s other books include a comic novel, “Sunday Punch” (Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Other honors are an Overseas Press Club Award in 1961 and a Peabody Award in 1966.
His survivors include his wife, the former Rigel Grell; a daughter, Nancy Drucker; and a sister, Evelyn Newman Lee.
Despite his acclaim, Mr. Newman’s constitutional waggishness kept him from taking himself too seriously. In 1984, the year he retired from NBC, he appeared on the network as a host of “Saturday Night Live.” (One of the show’s sketches portrayed a distraught woman phoning a suicide hot line. Mr. Newman answers — and corrects her grammar.) A few years before that he delivered the news, in front of a studio audience, on David Letterman’s NBC morning show. He was also a guest on the game show “Hollywood Squares.”In 1996 Mr. Newman shocked the journalistic establishment by serving as the anchor of the USA cable channel program “Weekly World News,” a short-lived television version of the supermarket tabloid. Among the “news” items Mr. Newman introduced was a report on a South Seas island tribe that worshiped the boxing promoter Don King.
“Apparently it is thought that my presence lends some authority,” Mr. Newman told The Washington Post that year. He added, “If I’m leading into a story about a couple with a poltergeist in their lavatory, I have to do it soberly.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 15, 2010
An earlier version gave the incorrect date for Mr. Newman’s death. It was Aug. 13, not Monday, Sept. 13.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
. Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese Nationalist Leader, Dies at 79 (Sept. 2, 1969)
. Frank Capra, Academy Award-Winning Director, Dies at 94 (Sept. 3, 1991)
. Albert Schweitzer, Doctor Who Won Nobel Peace Prize, Dies at 90 (Sept. 4, 1965)
. Margaret Sanger, Leader of Campaign for Birth Control, Dies at 86 (Sept. 6, 1966)
. Everett McKinley Dirksen, Political Phenomenon, Dies at 73 (Sept. 7, 1969)
. Mao Tse-tung, Communist Ruler of China, Dies at 82 (Sept. 9, 1976)
. Nikita S. Khrushchev, Communist Ruler of Soviet Union, Dies at 76 (Sept. 11, 1971)
. William McKinley, 25th U.S. President, Dies at 58 (Sept. 14, 1901)
. Robert Penn Warren, Poet and Author, Dies at 84 (Sept. 15, 1989)
. Jean Piaget, Swiss Psychologist, Dies at 84 (Sept. 17, 1980)
. Sean O’Casey, Irish Playwright, Dies at 84 (Sept. 18, 1964)
. Fiorello H. La Guardia, Three-Time Mayor of New York, Dies at 64 (Sept. 20, 1947)
. Ring Lardner, Sports Writer, Author and Playwright, Dies at 48 (Sept. 25, 1933)
. Emily Post, Writer and Arbiter of Etiquette, Dies at 86 (Sept. 25, 1960)
. Miles Davis, Jazz Genius, Dies at 65 (Sept. 28, 1991)
. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Dashing Fighter for Canada, Dies at 80 (Sept. 28, 2000)
. Ross Granville Harrison, Yale Zoologist, Dies at 89 (Sept. 30 , 1959
Ann
You are a very thought provoking author. This is a brilliant blog.