On July 9, 2011, the nation of South Sudan was officially created. Officially known as the Republic of South Sudan, it is recognized by 193 members of the United Nations, making South Sudan the 55th nation on the continent of Africa.
South Sudan and surrounding nations.
The ten states of South Sudan grouped in the three historical provinces of the Sudan: Green – Bahr el Ghazal; Teal – Equatoria; Yellow – Upper Greater Nile.
President Barack Obama, in recognizing the new government of South Sudan, gave the following press release:
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
July 09, 2011
Statement of President Barack Obama Recognition of the Republic of South Sudan
“Today is a reminder that after the darkness of war, the light of a new dawn is possible. A proud flag flies over Juba and the map of the world has been redrawn. These symbols speak to the blood that has been spilled, the tears that have been shed, the ballots that have been cast, and the hopes that have been realized by so many millions of people. The eyes of the world are on the Republic of South Sudan. And we know that southern Sudanese have claimed their sovereignty, and shown that neither their dignity nor their dream of self-determination can be denied.
This historic achievement is a tribute, above all, to the generations of southern Sudanese who struggled for this day. It is also a tribute to the support that has been shown for Sudan and South Sudan by so many friends and partners around the world. Sudan’s African neighbors and the African Union played an essential part in making this day a reality. And along with our many international and civil society partners, the United States has been proud to play a leadership role across two Administrations. Many Americans have been deeply moved by the aspirations of the Sudanese people, and support for South Sudan extends across different races, regions, and political persuasions in the United States. I am confident that the bonds of friendship between South Sudan and the United States will only deepen in the years to come. As Southern Sudanese undertake the hard work of building their new country, the United States pledges our partnership as they seek the security, development and responsive governance that can fulfill their aspirations and respect their human rights.
As today also marks the creation of two new neighbors, South Sudan and Sudan, both peoples must recognize that they will be more secure and prosperous if they move beyond a bitter past and resolve differences peacefully. Lasting peace will only be realized if all sides fulfill their responsibilities. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement must be fully implemented, the status of Abyei must be resolved through negotiations, and violence and intimidation in Southern Kordofan, especially by the Government of Sudan, must end. The safety of all Sudanese, especially minorities, must be protected. Through courage and hard choices, this can be the beginning of a new chapter of greater peace and justice for all of the Sudanese people.
Decades ago, Martin Luther King reflected on the first moment of independence on the African continent in Ghana, saying, “I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment.” Today, we are moved by the story of struggle that led to this time of hope in South Sudan, and we think of those who didn’t live to see their dream realized. Now, the leaders and people of South Sudan have an opportunity to turn this moment of promise into lasting progress. The United States will continue to support the aspirations of all Sudanese. Together, we can ensure that today marks another step forward in Africa’s long journey toward opportunity, democracy and justice.”
The five decades long civil war that tore apart the nation of Sudan, and caused the loss of life in over two and a half million lives, has created not one but two nations. South Sudan, a landlocked country, is bordered on the east by Ethiopia, on the southeast by Kenya, on the southwest by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the south by Uganda, on the west by Central African Republic, and on the north by its former northern half–the nation of Sudan, and the disputed territory of Darfur. South Sudan’s capital is Juba (located in the southern state of Central Equatoria), while Khartoum is the capital of Sudan.
For more information on South Sudan, click here and here.
In the future, I was going to post on the nation of Sudan in one of my “The Flags of Africa” posts, but, with this new development, I will be posting not on one nation, but on two.
Right now, the technology to manufacture oil in refineries lies in the north, in Sudan, and the deposits of oil lie in the south, in South Sudan, which means that oil must travel out of South Sudan to reach the world markets; oil which will provide 98% of South Sudan’s revenue. The area of the Abeyei region, on South Sudan’s northern border, is also in dispute.
Not to be forgotten, is the deadly violence that women still face in South Sudan. The transgressions against human rights for women must be addressed and the new government must bring the perpetrators to justice in a world court, where rape and homicide against women and girls has been tolerated, a legacy from Sudan’s brutal civil war.
I wish this nation of South Sudan well, especially her people who have suffered through so much: the Dinka, Acholi, Lotuhu, Nuer, Shilluk, and the Nuba (who reside mainly in the area located centrally in the country formally known as Sudan. The nation lacks many infrastructures that a developing new nation needs: a high literacy rate, paved roads, health care, strong economy, job and trade skills to sell marketable goods to the world, and viable education.
How life will be for those living in South Sudan remains to be seen, but, many people across the world are praying for the best for South Sudan. The citizens of the is new nation themselves certainly are looking forward to a new, better, and prosperous nation.
UPDATES:
Here is a video on the United Nations welcoming the Republic of South Sudan into the UN. (Video courtesy of Al Jazeera)
Willa Beatrice Brown, a peioneering aviator, was born on January 22, 1906 in Glasgow, KY. She was the first woman commissioned as a lieutenant in the Civil Air Patrol and she was the first Black woman to earn a commercial pilot’s licence, obtaining her licence in 1937. Her efforts were responsible for Congress’ forming the renowned Tuskegee Airmen squadron, leading to the integration of the U.S. military service in 1948.
Willa Beatrice Brown, c. 1941 – 1945, when she was in her thirties: 154. “Willa Beatrice Brown, a 31-year-old Negro American, serves her country by training pilots for the U.S. Army Air Forces. She is the first Negro woman to receive a commission as a lieutenant in the U.S. Civil Air Patrol.” N.d. 208-FS-793-1. (african_americans_wwii_154.jpg)
“Willa Beatrice Brown Chappell made significant contributions to both politics and the field of aviation during her lifetime. Her career began in 1926 as a “commerce” teacher at the Roosevelt High School, Gary, Indiana. She moved to Chicago after receiving tenure and there met Col. John C. Robinson and Cornelius R. Coffey, both pioneer pilots and mechanics. Under their tutelage Willa was able to follow in the steps of her mentor, Bessie Coleman, and later organize the annual memorial fly-over of Bessie Coleman’s grave.
In 1937 Willa earned her pilot’s license, making her the first African American woman to be licensed in the United States. Two years later she married Cornelius Coffey, who would become one of the Tuskegee Airmen. She was also a founding member of the National Airmen Association of America, the sole purpose of which was to lobby Congress for the racial integration of the U.S. Army Air Corps.
In 1941, with her flying service and aviation credentials, the U.S. government named Willa as the federal coordinator of the Chicago unit of the Civil Air Patrol civilian pilot training program. She was ranked an officer in this first integrated unit. Her efforts were directly responsible for the creation of the renowned Tuskegee Airmen, which led to the integration of the U.S. military services in 1948. She was instrumental in training more than 200 students who went on to become Tuskegee pilots.”
The documentary Willa Brown: An American Aviator, presented by the Filmmaker’s Library, chronicles the life story of Ms. Brown as well as the the history of Black American aviation before World War II, the contributions of many individuals who shaped civil rights history, and the film includes rare interviews of some of the actual participants in this little known part of American history.
In 1955, Ms. Brown married the Rev. J.H. Chappell. She became very active in the West Side Community Church in Chicago. In 1972 in recognition of her contributions to aviation in the United States as a pilot, an instructor, and an activist, Ms. Brown-Chappell was appointed to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Women’s Advisory Board.
Ms. Brown-Chappell died on July 18, 1992 at the age of 86.
In 2003, Willa Brown Chappell was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame for her native state of Kentucky.
There is an age-old debate over alcoholism: is the problem in the sufferer’s head — something that can be overcome through willpower, spirituality or talk therapy, perhaps — or is it a physical disease, one that needs continuing medical treatment in much the same way as, say, diabetes or epilepsy?
July 11, 2011
Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times
Christine Pace, an addiction specialist, examined Derek Anderson, a former heroin addict, at the Boston University Medical Center.
Increasingly, the medical establishment is putting its weight behind the latter diagnosis. In the latest evidence, 10 medical schools have just introduced the first-ever accredited residency programs in addiction medicine, where doctors who have completed medical school and a primary residency will be able to spend a year studying the relationship between addiction and brain chemistry.
“This is a first step toward bringing recognition, respectability and rigor to addiction medicine,” said David Withers, who oversees the new residency program at the Marworth Alcohol and Chemical Dependency Treatment Center in Waverly, Pa.
The goal of the residency program, which started July 1 with 20 students at the various schools, is to establish addiction medicine as a standard specialty along the lines of pediatrics, oncology or dermatology. The residents will treat patients with a range of addictions — to alcohol, drugs, prescription medicines, nicotine and more — and study the brain chemistry involved as well as the role of heredity.
“In the past, the specialty was very much targeted toward psychiatrists,” said Nora D. Volkow, the neuroscientist in charge of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “It’s a gap in our training program.” She called the lack of substance-abuse education among general practitioners “a very serious problem.”
Schools offering the one-year residency include St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, the University of Maryland Medical System, the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Boston University Medical Center. Some, like Marworth, have been offering programs in addiction medicine for years, simply without accreditation.
The new accreditation comes courtesy of the American Board of Addiction Medicine, or ABAM, which was founded in 2007 to help promote the medical treatment of addiction. The group aims to get the program accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, a step that requires, among other things, establishing the program at a minimum of 20 schools. But it would mean that the addictions specialty would qualify as a “primary” residency, one that a newly minted doctor could take right out of school.
Richard Blondell, chairman of the training committee at the ABAM, said the group expected to accredit an additional 10 to 15 schools this year.
The rethinking of addiction as a medical rather than strictly psychological disease began about 15 years ago, when researchers discovered through high-resonance imaging that drug addiction resulted in actual physical changes to the brain.
Armed with that understanding, “the management of folks with addiction becomes very much like the management of other chronic diseases, such as asthma, hypertension or diabetes,” said Dr. Daniel Alford, who oversees the program at Boston University Medical Center. “It’s hard necessarily to cure people, but you can certainly manage the problem to the point where they are able to function” through a combination of pharmaceuticals and therapy.
Central to the understanding of addiction as a physical ailment is the belief that treatment must be continuing in order to avoid relapse. Just as no one expects a diabetes patient to be cured after six weeks of healthy diet and insulin management, Dr. Alford said, it is unrealistic to expect most drug addicts to be cured after 28 days in a detox facility.
“It’s not surprising to us now that when you stop the treatment, people relapse,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that the treatment doesn’t work, it just means that you need to continue treatment.” Those physical changes in the brain could also explain why some smokers will still crave a cigarette 30 years after quitting, Dr. Alford said.
If the idea of addiction as a chronic disease has been slow to take hold in medical circles, it could be because doctors sometime struggle to grasp brain function, Dr. Volkow said. “While it is very simple to understand a disease of the heart — the heart is very simple, it’s just a muscle — it’s much more complex to understand the brain,” she said.
Boosting interest in addiction medicine are a handful of promising new pharmaceuticals, most notably buprenorphine (sold under brand names like Suboxone), which has been proven to ease withdrawal symptoms in heroin addicts and subsequently block cravings, though it causes side effects of its own. Other drugs for treating opioid or alcohol dependence have shown promise as well.
Few addiction medicine specialists advocate a path to recovery that depends solely on pharmacology, however. “The more we learn about the treatment of addiction, the more we realize that one size does not fit all,” said Petros Levounis, who is in charge of the residency at the Addiction Institute of New York at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital.
Equally maligned is the idea that psychiatry or 12-step programs are adequate for curing a disease with physical roots in the brain. Many people who abuse drugs or alcohol do not have psychiatric problems, Dr. Alford noted, being quick to add, “I think there’s absolutely a role for addiction psychiatrists.”
While each school has developed its own curriculum, the basic competencies each seeks to impart are the same. Residents will learn to recognize and diagnose substance abuse in patients, conduct brief interventions that spell out the treatment options and prescribe medications to help with withdrawal and recovery. The doctors will also be expected to understand the legal and practical implications of substance abuse.
Christine Pace, a 31-year-old graduate of Harvard Medical School, is the first addiction resident at Boston University Medical Center. She got interested in the subject as a teenager, when she volunteered at an AIDS organization and overheard heroin addicts complaining about doctors who could not — or would not — help them.
Earlier this year, when she became the in-house doctor at a methadone clinic in Boston, she was dismayed to find the complaints had not changed. “I saw physicians over and over again pushing it aside, just calling a social-work consult to deal with a patient who is struggling with addiction,” Dr. Pace said.
One of her patients is Derek Anderson, 53, who credits Suboxone — as well as a general practitioner who 6 years ago recognized his signs of addiction — with helping him kick his 35-year heroin habit.
“I used to go to detoxes and go back and forth and back and forth,” he said. But the Suboxone “got me to where I don’t have the dependency every day, consuming you, swallowing you like a fish in water. I’m able to work now, I’m able to take care of my daughter, I’m able to pay rent — all the things I couldn’t do when I was using.”
“The goal of the residency program, which started July 1 with 20 students at the various schools, is to establish addiction medicine as a standard specialty along the lines of pediatrics, oncology or dermatology. The residents will treat patients with a range of addictions — to alcohol, drugs, prescription medicines, nicotine and more — and study the brain chemistry involved as well as the role of heredity.”
Interesting article.
What with the vicious destruction caused by the monumental failure known as the War on Drugs (which really translates into the War on the Black Community & the Poor), so many people who should have been given medical treatment to combat this illness were instead sent to prison.
Once upon a time in America’s history, drugs were legal. Yes, cocaine [for flatulence, ulcers and sores] , heroin, an opium derivative [as a cough medicine for children].
Pre-war Bayer heroin bottle, originally containing 5 grams of Heroin substance.
Old advertisement for Bayer pharmaceuticals, uses pre-1904 company logo.
Marijuana [for nausea, labor pains, rheumatism], opium/morphine [as an abortifactant], laudanum, now known as Tincture of Opium [an opium-based painkiller], used by nursing mothers to quiet babies, and as an analgesic and cough medicine—all were legal drugs used in many forms, all were consumed by your average Jane Doe, for health reasons, and all were dispensed with their doctor’s approval.***
SOURCE:
***Information from the Merck’s Manual, 1899, reprint of the original manual on the 1ooTH Anniversary re-issue in 1999.
Needless to say, there were drug addicts then,
as there are now, all facing the same withdrawals, pain and dependence on the drugs.
Then decades later came the monstrousWar on Drugs which has done more harm than good. This started at the beginning of the last century, when the fear of legal drug used was addressed with the following: the Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906 [which created the federal agency now known as the Food & Drug Administration], the Harrison Tax Act of 1914 and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. The war escalated when President Richard Milhouse Nixon started his campaign to end drug usage in America. In this year of the 40TH Anniversary of the so-called War on Drugs (a term coined by Nixon in 1973 during his administration, and with the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration), drug users should be given job-training, substance abuse counseling, job opportunities, and psychiatric counseling. A non-criminal approach to drugs is more proactive than a criminalized draconian beat down on those suffering from drug addiction. The dismal, hateful War on Drugs has been a collossal failure.
America’s government and judicial systems will have to come to terms on the following linchpin: legalizing and regulating drugs; there is no more shoving the head into the sand over this issue. Then again, which drugs should be legalized? Which drugs should not? How will they be classified–and how will they be dispensed pharmaceutically? And at what level under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act(aka, Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970)?
If drugs are legalized, what effect would this have on the illegal sellers of drugs? What effect on law enforcement, especially the so-called drug task forces which depend on federal funds allocated to them? Money spent on so-called drug task forces (which are nothing but stormtroopers in Black communities) and addict incarceration that would be better spent on treatment for addicts–how would that money be funded to treatment programs to help the addicted? Fewer funds on the pathetic War on Drugs, and more money to help addicts would be more proactive.
Also, what about the uninsured addicted? How will they receive treatment when many do not have insurance, often the first thing that is asked of the patient, by staff, nurses, physicians, and hospitals? How will they be insured by insurance companies, especially with the stigma placed on drug addicts? Since physicians’ financial payment comes mostly from insurance, how many addicts will be turned away from treatment because they do not have insurance? How will this affect the big pharmaceutical companies that manufacture drugs that are the bread-and-butter lifeline of their financial gains?
People who have succumbed to the addiction of drugs need what they were receiving in this country, at the beginning of the last century up to the 1970s and 1980s with drug treatment programs. Putting people in prison for drug usage when their crime was using drugs in a non-violent act, fills up the prisons with people who need medical treatment for their drug addictions.
More of Europe’s HarmReductionAct, and less of America’s punitive and contempt towards the humanity of drug addicts with the eradication of mandatory drug sentencing.
The prisons are too full now with the sentencing of drug users.
Free up that space for those who really should be in prison. . . .
Betty Ford, the outspoken and much-admired wife of President Gerald R. Ford who overcame alcoholism and an addiction to pills and helped found one of the best-known rehabilitation centers in the nation, died Friday in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 93.
July 9, 2011
Eddie Adams/Associated Press
Betty Ford and former President Gerald R. Ford at the White House in 1977. More Photos »
Her death was confirmed by Chris Chase, Mrs. Ford’s biographer.
The news of her death at Eisenhower Medical Center brought statements of condolence from President Obama, former Presidents George Bush, George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, and Nancy Reagan, the former first lady.
“She was Jerry Ford’s strength through some very difficult days in our country’s history,” Mrs. Reagan said, “and I admired her courage in facing and sharing her personal struggles with all of us.”
Few first ladies have been as popular as Betty Ford, and it was her frankness and lack of pretense that made her so. She spoke often in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, endorsed legalized abortion, discussed premarital sex and revealed that she intended to share a bed with her husband in the White House.
When her husband’s voice failed him the morning after he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in 1976, it was she who read the official concession statement with smiling grace. And when Mr. Ford died in December 2006, it was Mrs. Ford who announced his death. The six days of national mourning returned her to a spotlight she had tried to avoid in her later years, living in Rancho Mirage, Calif., a golf community southeast of Palm Springs, and tending to her clinic there, the Betty Ford Center.
The country’s affection for Betty Ford transcended party lines. It began in earnest slightly more than two months after Gerald Ford became president in August 1974, following President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Mr. Ford had been vice president for less than 10 months, named by Nixon to succeed Spiro T. Agnew, who had resigned in disgrace over accusations of bribery and tax evasion. On Sept. 28, 1974, Mrs. Ford had a radical mastectomy after doctors discovered cancer in her right breast.
Courage Against Cancer
Within days, 10,000 letters, more than 500 telephone calls, more than 200 telegrams and scores of floral arrangements poured into the White House and into her suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital. In the months that followed, tens of thousands of American women, inspired by Mrs. Ford’s forthrightness and courage in facing her illness, crowded into doctors’ offices and clinics for breast-cancer examinations.
After leaving the hospital, Mrs. Ford underwent chemotherapy treatment for two years. In November 1976, her physician announced that she had made a complete recovery.
Mrs. Ford was once asked if she felt sorry for herself during the trauma of losing her breast.
“No! Oh, no — heavens, no,” she replied. “I’ve heard women say they’d rather lose their right arm, and I can’t imagine it. It’s so stupid. I can even wear my evening clothes.”
She advised women facing such an operation to “go as quickly as possible and get it done.”
“Once it’s done,” she said, “put it behind you and go on with your life.”
Breast cancer was only one of the medical battles Mrs. Ford won.
Confronting Addiction
Her dependency on pills began in 1964 with a medical prescription to relieve constant pain from a neck injury and a pinched nerve. Her drinking, which became troublesome as she was faced with her husband’s frequent absences on political business, grew increasingly serious as Mr. Ford’s Congressional career advanced. Her loneliness was compounded by low self-esteem and a debilitating self-consciousness about things like her lack of a college degree.
“Now I know that some of the pain I was trying to wipe out was emotional,” she recalled in “Betty: A Glad Awakening” (1987), the second volume of her autobiography written with Ms. Chase. Going back to the days when her husband was a Michigan congressman and minority leader in the House of Representatives, she remembered that “on one hand, I loved being ‘the wife of’; on the other hand, I was convinced that the more important Jerry became, the less important I became.”
In 1978, the year after leaving the White House, her husband, children, doctors and several friends confronted her about her drinking and her abuse of pills. She refused to acknowledge that a problem existed, calling her family “a bunch of monsters,” but she eventually entered the Long Beach Naval Hospital in California for treatment.
The Betty Ford Center, dedicated on Oct. 3, 1982, was a direct result of Mrs. Ford’s victory over her alcoholism and addiction. Set on 14 acres on the campus of the Eisenhower Medical Center 11 miles southeast of Palm Springs, the center was a nonprofit venture spearheaded by Mrs. Ford and Leonard K. Firestone, an industrialist and former ambassador to Belgium who raised a major part of the money.
The center’s philosophy, drawn from the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, is based on peer interaction and learning to identify and express feelings. Many celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Mary Tyler Moore, Mickey Mantle and Darryl Strawberry, spent time there.
“It’s hard to make anyone understand what it’s like to have your name on something, to be given credit for things you haven’t done,” Mrs. Ford wrote. “I’ve been at meetings where someone turned and thanked me, and I hugged the person and said, ‘Don’t thank me, thank yourself, you’re the one who did it, with God’s help.’ From the beginning, we have wanted every patient at the center to feel, ‘I’m important here, I have some dignity.’ ”
Betty Ford was good at doing the things that every first lady does: accompanying her husband on tours and public ceremonies and holding dinners and parties. Her parties usually lasted past midnight as she danced from one partner to another.
But unlike many other wives of presidents, Mrs. Ford rarely hesitated to make public her views on touchy subjects. She held a White House news conference announcing her support of the Equal Rights Amendment; the mail response ran three to one against her. In 1975, appearing on “60 Minutes,” she said she “wouldn’t be surprised” if her daughter, Susan, had a premarital affair; the mail was four to one against her. Her husband jokingly told her later that the comment had cost him 20 million votes in the 1976 election, she said.
A decade later, reminiscing with Margaret Truman for Ms. Truman’s book “First Ladies,” she voiced regret over that television appearance. Later that year, despite her advocacy for abortion rights, she reined herself in. She said nothing about the Republican platform that called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.
She also told Ms. Truman that she had warned her husband not to pardon Nixon, a more definitive statement than one she made in “The Times of My Life” (1978), the first volume of Mrs. Ford’s autobiography. In that book she said she had known that a pardon would be unpopular but that she had supported it anyway.
“I think it had to be done,” she wrote. Nevertheless, she said, she believed it cost her husband the election.
Mrs. Ford said she had been influential in President Ford’s appointments of Carla Hills as secretary of housing and urban development and Anne Armstrong as ambassador to Britain. She was unsuccessful, however, in urging him to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.
She was, in her own words, “more of a hawk” than her children on the war in Vietnam. Although she said she believed men and women should give two years of service to the country, she confessed she was “very relieved” when her sons drew high draft-lottery numbers.
A Relaxed White House
Mrs. Ford brought a relaxed touch to the White House within days of moving in. She asked why the staff never returned a greeting and was told that President Nixon and the first lady, Pat Nixon, had preferred them to be as silent and invisible as possible. An immediate change went into effect, to the degree that during family meals the president and the butler compared golf scores. And when Mrs. Ford returned from her mastectomy, the staff lined up with signs reading, “We love you, Betty.”
She disliked other manifestations of Mrs. Nixon’s formal tastes, particularly the choice of stiff furniture, which had replaced the more comfortable Kennedy ambience from the early ’60s. Although she left the décor as it was, she could not resist a bit of deviltry. A ceramic bowl in the Yellow Oval Room was supported by two Greek goddesses, one of them with her hands out. “Every time I went through,” Mrs. Ford said, “I used to put a cigarette between her fingers.” Her mischievous side also surfaced after her husband complained that she was too thin. Borrowing a skeleton from a hospital, she dressed it in her hat and coat and sat it in a bedroom chair to welcome him.
Later, when she was no longer first lady, she was criticized in some circles for having a facelift almost immediately after overcoming her addictions. She wanted, she said, a fresh new face for her new life. She later thought that some of the resentment stemmed from the fact that she could no longer be perceived as a victim — of cancer, drugs and drink. “It was easier to be sorry for me, to feel superior to me, and therefore to root for me,” she said. “We all like to cheer an underdog. But I’d stopped being an underdog; I’d gotten myself in hand.”
Elizabeth Anne Bloomer was born on April 8, 1918, in Chicago to William S. Bloomer and the former Hortense Neahr. She always wanted to be called Elizabeth but ended up with Betty, Bet or Bets. She was the youngest child and the only girl in a family of three children. Her father was a traveling salesman in conveyor belts for factories. The family moved to Grand Rapids, Mich., when she was 2.
The Bloomers were financially comfortable, lived in a fashionable area and spent summers at Whitefish Lake. She began dancing lessons when she was 8, and for two summers after graduation from high school she attended Bennington School of the Dance at Bennington College in Vermont. At 14, she was confirmed as an Episcopalian (her mother’s religion; her father was a Christian Scientist) and began working on Saturdays, for $3, as a model for Herpolsheimer’s department store.
At 20, she was in New York, living on the fringes of Greenwich Village and attending dance classes with Martha Graham. She also joined her troupe.
Dance was always a major interest, and Mrs. Ford said many times that she was disappointed that she had never been quite good enough to be a first-rate dancer. When she went to China with her husband in 1975, however, she enchanted the Chinese by kicking off her shoes and dancing in her stocking feet at a Beijing school.
Her mother persuaded her to return to Grand Rapids in 1941, but not before she had modeled on Seventh Avenue and for the John Robert Powers modeling agency. Back home, she became a fashion coordinator for the store in which she had been a teenage model. In her spare time, she taught dance to underprivileged and disabled children.
The following year, she married William C. Warren, a furniture dealer. The marriage ended in divorce in 1947, and she did not ask for alimony. When Mr. Ford became vice president and his wife’s first marriage was disclosed, Mrs. Ford was asked why she had kept it a secret. She hadn’t, she said: “No one ever bothered to ask.”
Some months after her divorce, she began dating Gerald R. Ford, a lawyer with political ambitions and a man she described as “probably the most eligible bachelor in Grand Rapids.” He proposed in February 1948. “He’s a very shy man and he really didn’t tell me he loved me,” she wrote. “He just told me he’d like to marry me — I took him up on it immediately.”
They were married on Oct. 15, 1948, while he was running his first race for a seat in the House. The ceremony took place on a Friday so that Mr. Ford’s plans to go to a Northwestern-Michigan football game the following day would not be disrupted. (He had played center for Michigan.) The groom was 35; the bride, 30. They spent their two-day honeymoon at Republican Party rallies.
Mr. Ford won the election. “We came to Washington for 2 years and stayed for 28,” Mrs. Ford said. Their first son, Michael, was born in 1950 while the Fords lived in an apartment in Georgetown. By 1952, when John, known as Jack, was born, they had moved to an apartment in suburban Northern Virginia. Steven was born in 1956, a year after the Fords’ split-level house in Alexandria, Va., was completed. Susan, their only daughter, came along the next year.
“From the outside, our life looked like a Norman Rockwell illustration,” Mrs. Ford said at one point. Nevertheless, by 1962, she was seeing a psychiatrist twice a week because, as she put it, “I’d lost my feeling of self-worth.”
“I think a lot of women go through this,” she said. “Their husbands have fascinating jobs, their children start to turn into independent people and the women begin to feel useless, empty.”
Later, when she accompanied her husband on campaign trips more frequently, she acknowledged that that, too, was not all fun. At one point, she recalled, she was in an airport and “through clenched teeth said: ‘I don’t want anyone to come over and talk to me. I just want to sit here all alone and finish this cigarette.’ ”
Shortly after leaving the White House, the Fords built a 15-room house bordering the 13th fairway of the Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage. The couple also acquired a second home, an elaborate ski lodge in Vail, Colo. Mrs. Ford remained active in the Betty Ford Center and in feminist causes.
In addition to her four children, she is also survived by seven grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.
“I am an ordinary woman who was called onstage at an extraordinary time,” she wrote in the prologue to her first autobiography. “I was no different once I became first lady than I had been before. But through an accident of history, I had become interesting to people.”
Cuban guitar player and song-writer Manuel Galban in January 2010 during a presentation at the Art National School in Havana, Cuba.
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: July 8, 2011
Manuel Galbán, a Cuban guitarist best known for his work with the all-star ensemble Buena Vista Social Club and its various offshoots, died on Thursday in Havana. He was 80.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said World Circuit Records, the British label for which he most recently recorded.
Mr. Galbán was not on the 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club,” produced by the American guitarist Ry Cooder, which created an international sensation by showcasing a number of veteran musicians who were virtually unknown outside Cuba. But he quickly became part of the extended Buena Vista Social Club family after Mr. Cooder tracked him down in 1999 to play on an album by Ibrahim Ferrer, one of the Buena Vista singers.
He went on to collaborate with Mr. Cooder on the album “Mambo Sinuendo,” which won a Grammy as best pop instrumental album in 2004, and to record with the bassist Orlando Cachaito López and other Buena Vista musicians.
Mr. Galbán made his initial splash in the 1960s as the guitarist with the vocal group Los Zafiros, which mixed traditional Cuban music with calypso, rhythm and blues and other styles. During his decade-long tenure, Los Zafiros was among the most popular groups in Cuba and developed an international following.
“Mr. Galbán was one of the wonders of Cuban music in the 1960s,” Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote in 2003. “His playing pulled together two almost contradictory approaches: the floating reverb of surf guitar and the percussive, snapping sound of the tres, the small guitar that’s a fulcrum between rhythm and melody in Cuban son groups.”
In an interview published this year in the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma and reprinted in English on the newspaper’s Web site, Mr. Galbán explained his approach to the guitar: “I combine fast passages with arpeggios, while making appropriate use of the bass strings. In that way I give the sensation that more than one musician is playing.” It was this unusual approach that led Mr. Cooder, who played a crucial role in the later phase of Mr. Galbán’s career, to call him a “guitar wizard.”
Buena Vista Social Club, an ensemble organized by Mr. Cooder that took its name from a membership club where many of its musicians had performed in pre-Castro Cuba, was the subject of a celebrated 1999 documentary directed by Wim Wenders.
Born in 1931 in the small fishing town of Gibara, Cuba, Mr. Galbán began his professional career — playing piano and drums as well as guitar — with the Villa Blanca Orchestra in 1944. He moved to Havana in 1956 and joined Los Zafiros in 1963. After leaving Los Zafiros in 1972 (the group disbanded shortly afterward), he worked with Cuba’s national music ensemble and toured for more than two decades with Grupo Batey.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Manuel Galban, along with the talented musicians and singers of the Buena Vista Social Club, remained unknown to millions of people throughout the world until Ry Cooder introduced new listeners to their beautiful Afro-Cuban songs and music. Here is Mr. Galban’s “Drume Negrita” from the album Mambo Sinuendo:
Because of the embargo against Cuba, begun under the Kennedy administration, these celebrated musicians and singers remained known only to those in Cuba who heard them through the years as they honed their skills at their social club in Havana, Cuba. But, in a way, that worked out for the BVSC in the end.
Some of the members of the club have passed on—Ibrahim Ferrar, Reuben Gonzales, Compay Segundo—but, some still live to delight the world with their accomplished style and virtuoso achievements.
Rest in peace, Mr. Galban.
Rest in peace.
Here are some of my favourite BVSC selections, first up Chan Chan:
Another great one, this time from Ms. OmaraPortuondo, her version of Drume Negrita and Veinte Anos:
Drume negrita
Que yo va a comprar nueva cunita
Que tendrá capite’ y también ca’cabe’
Si tu drume yo te traigo un mamey muy colorao
Si no drume yo te traigo un babalao
Que da pau pau
A la negrita se le salen
Los pies de la cunita
Y la negra Merce’ ya no sabe que hace’
Drume negrita
Que yo va a compra’ nueva cunita
Que tendrá capite’ y también ca’cabe’
Si tú drume yo te traigo un mamey muy colorao’
Si no drume yo te traigo un babalao’
Que da pau pau.
Sleep My Little Black Baby Children’s Song (English)
Sleep my little black baby
And I will buy for you a new baby crib
That should have a top cap and also a bell
If you sleep I will bring you a very red mamey*
If you don’t I will bring you a babalao**
That will give you pau pau***
The feet of the little black baby
Come out of her crib
And the black Merce’ doesn’t know what to do
Sleep my little black baby
And I will buy for you a new baby crib
That should have a top cap and also a bell
If you sleep I will bring you a very red mamey
If you don’t I will bring you a babalao
That will give you pau pau.
*A mamey is a type of fruit that grows in Cuba
**A babalao is a Santeria priest
***Pau may mean a stick, or bread. Dar pau pau means to wack.
And this one, so lively, so exquisite, it makes you want to get up and dance:
And this lovely and sublime piano instrumental by the late Ruben Gonzalez:
Prince Twins Seven-Seven, a prominent Nigerian artist and leading representative of the Oshogbo School, whose brightly colored, intricately patterned paintings evoked the world of Yoruba folklore and religion, died on June 16 in Ibadan, Nigeria. He was 67.
July 5, 2011
Anthony Hart Fisher/Indigo Arts Gallery
Prince Twins Seven Seven
July 5, 2011
Courtesy of Indigo Arts Gallery
“Blessed Fisherman Family and Golden Fish,” Prince Twins Seven-Seven, 2006
The cause was complications of a stroke, Harriet B. Schiffer, his dealer, said.
Prince Twins Seven-Seven changed his birth name, Olaniyi Osuntoki, to signal his status as the sole surviving child of his parents’ seven sets of twins. “They believed that I was the reincarnation of twins they had lost,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 2001.
“Prince” was more than a flourish. His grandfather was king of Ibadan in the 1890s and, until the artist became seriously ill, he was about to be installed as chief of his clan, the Osuntoki.
A dancer and singer, Prince Twins Seven-Seven found his calling as an artist in the 1960s when he became part of an experimental school in the city of Oshogbo run by Ulli Beier, a German linguist who became a promoter of African culture, and his wife, Georgina.
He began drawing in pen and ink on paper, but soon began using ink and paint on large sheets of laminated plywood. His subject matter was Yoruban myths, many of them recited to him by his mother, but others absorbed through the novels of Amos Tutuola and Daniel O. Fagunwa. In a consciously naïve style, he depicted village scenes, animals and deities, especially the goddess Oshun, filling in outlines and borders with jewel-colored patterns based on traditional textiles.
“Twins was the great modernist of the Yoruba tradition,” said Henry Glassie, an emeritus folklore professor at Indiana University and the author of “Prince Twins Seven-Seven: His Art, His Life in Nigeria, His Exile in America” (2010). “He turned back to tradition, just as Kandinsky or Klee did, but in his context drew on Yoruban sources to figure out an escape from tradition into modernity.”
Taiwo Olaniyi Osuntoki Oyewale was born on May 3, 1944, in the village of Ijara. As a young man, he danced with a traveling medicine show that sold Superman Tonic. He later formed a band, for which he was the lead singer and occasional drummer, and which recorded a number of hit records; he continued to perform and record throughout his life. Like his artwork, his music was rooted in folk tradition.
In 1964 he crashed a party at the Oshogbo art school and soon became integrated into its group of artists. After an exhibition of his work was mounted in Oshogbo, he moved to Lagos and later to London. His work was included in the 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre” (“Magicians of the Earth”) at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
He came to the United States in the late 1980s and settled in the Philadelphia area, although he traveled abroad frequently. His life entered a turbulent period, filled with drinking and gambling, he said. Destitute, he found work as a parking-lot attendant for Material Culture, a large Philadelphia store that sells antiquities, furnishings and carpets.
When the owner learned that Prince Twins Seven-Seven was an artist, he had him decorate the store’s wrapping paper. Later, he was given a small room to use as a studio.
His career rebounded. In 2000, the Indianapolis Museum of Art opened a wing devoted to contemporary African art with an exhibition featuring his work, which was also included in an exhibition that year at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian.
In 2005, after being nominated by President Olosegun Obaganjo of Nigeria, Prince Twins Seven-Seven was named one of Unesco’s Artists for Peace, a position that gave him new international visibility.
Prince Twins Seven-Seven, who lived in Ibadan and Oshogbo, is survived by many wives, children and grandchildren.
July 8, 2011 | Sky & Telescope‘s premier space-science reporter muses on his long association with the Space Shuttle after witnessing its final launch at 10:29 a.m. EDT on Friday, June 8, 2011. > read more
July 7, 2011 | NASA’s next-generation space observatory is already woefully over budget and behind schedule. But if Congressional money-minders have their way, the project will be killed outright in the months ahead. > read more
July 5, 2011 | When the little asteroid 2011 MD zipped within 8,000 miles of Earth in late June, dynamicists realized they need to change the way they compute such close flybys. > read more
July 8, 2011 | On Tuesday, July 12th, Neptune will have completed one full circuit around the Sun since its discovery on the night of Sept 23-24, 1846. > read more
June 30, 2011 | Look low in the west at sunset to spy fleet Mercury, toward southwest for Saturn, and in the south for red-hued Antares, the “rival of Mars.” > read more
July 5, 2011 | With bright stars all night and amateur-astronomical enthusiasm all day, America’s biggest coalition of astronomy clubs held a bang-up annual convention. > read more
April 14, 2011 | Want to gaze at the Milky Way all night or peer into the eyepiece of a 12-foot-tall telescope? Then escape the city lights and head for the nearest “star party.” > read more
The abolitionist’s July 4, 1852, speech is among his greatest. Colorlines editor Kai Wright says Douglass’ message then–that America has made a “hollow mockery” of its founding ideals–remains urgent.
It’s hot. The sun is shining. And there’s more than bad news in our neighborhoods. Share images of YOUR summer loving with Colorlines! Email them to us now!
Tweet memes like #TeamLightSkin are the latest example of our insistence that skin-tone obsession is just personal preference. Akiba Solomon unravels the research that proves it’s not.
In just 5-7 minutes, you can help Colorlines.com continue to improve. Your free gift for completing the survey is a download of the hilarious, award-winning album “Face Full of Flour” by W. Kamau Bell.
Declaring yourself a “sovereign citizen” exempt from government authority and tax obligations must be something of a rush – until that government decides to slap handcuffs on you.
Consider the case of Marshall Edwin Home, 81, a self-described multibillionaire and dispenser of highly questionable financial advice who on March 16 filed to run for mayor of Tucson, Ariz. Evidently relying on “sovereign” rationale, Home – on the very same day he declared himself a mayoral candidate – filed documents in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court seeking to place the United States itself into bankruptcy, asserting that he personally had a $3 billion claim against the federal government. (Home withdrew from the mayoral race in June.)
The government doesn’t look too kindly on phony bankruptcy claims. On July 1, Home was arrested and charged with two counts of making false claims in bankruptcy. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
According to the government’s press release, Home operated the “Individual Rights Party; Mortgage Rescue Service,” through which he would charge clients $500 to “make the foreclosure process stop.” The government alleges that on his website Home told clients that their property “would become part of his ‘larger overall bankruptcy liquidation.’” That means, according to the federal complaint, that “Home filed or caused to be filed 173 false claims against the United States … total[ing] over $2.5 trillion.” The criminal complaint is linked to two of those claims, one for $2.5 billion and another for $50 million.
“The anti-government paranoia of so-called ‘sovereign citizens’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when they use their false claims and fraudulent practices to rip off others,” U.S. Attorney Dennis K. Burke said in the press release.
Sovereign citizens generally believe they can remove themselves from the jurisdiction of state and federal government, so that they don’t need to pay taxes or use any form of government documentation, such as driver’s licenses or automobile license tags. Some sovereigns believe they can discharge debts by accessing secret accounts supposedly created by the government in their names at birth – accounts that, of course, don’t exist.
Among Home’s clients was John Apostolou, a Greek immigrant who rose from cook to owner of Giordano’s Pizza, a popular Chicago-based chain of 45 restaurants nationwide. During the course of 23 years, Apostolou’s various businesses amassed $45.5 million in bank debts and faced bankruptcy. Apostolou turned to Home for help and, apparently at Home’s direction, filed a series of legally bogus affidavits in court. One asserted that Apostolou and his wife, who co-owns the business, don’t recognize U.S. currency and are free of any legal constraints. Another sought to terminate Apostolou’s bankruptcy by alleging bank fraud and other misdeeds. In May, a clearly annoyed bankruptcy judge seized control of the restaurant chain from the Apostolous, placed it in the hands of a trustee, and barred Apostolou from setting foot in the establishment. Proceedings are still under way.
Though Apostolou claimed he didn’t read the documents Home directed him to file, as of mid-June he still believed Home could deliver him from financial ruin, even promising to give Home a share of the business should he regain control. Home filed papers with the bankruptcy court claiming to have a $150 million lien against Giordano’s – apparently part of a scheme to get the pizza chain back for the Apostolous. “My claim is solid, legal and secured,” Home told the Chicago Tribune at the time. “I will be in control of the business. You can count on it.”
About all Home can count on right now is that he is in a world of trouble.
With more than a dollop of irony, Home told the Tucson Weekly that he had entered the mayoral race because of “all the lies and the deceits. How about all the thievery? There doesn’t seem to be any integrity in the government.”
One might wonder about Home’s claim of being a multibillionaire. Could that merely be based on his $3 billion claim against the U.S. government? He wouldn’t go into details when pressed by the Tucson Weekly.
“That’s private,” Home told the newspaper. “I’ve been described as a multi-billionaire. We’ll leave it at that. Why? You can’t accept it at that?”
Okay, you don’t won’t to have your so-called rights infringed upon, so you tie up the federal and state court’s time with bogus “bankruptcy” claims and you make your own homemade drivers licences and licence plates?
Well, when the cops stop you, arrest you, and you get convicted and sent to the Big House for fraudalent licences, hope you are happy when they put you to making licence plates for the state.
But, not so fast.
Since you do not recognize U.S. currency, you can turn down any state-issued pay for making licence plates.
What the heck, you don’t need the money anyway, right?
Wilma Glodean Rudolph, was an Olympic gold medalist. At the Rome Olympics, September 5, 1960, Ms. Rudolph made her mark in track when she became the first American woman ever to win three gold medals.
Games of the XVII Olympiad. Women’s athletics, from right to left at the 200m finish: Wilma Rudolph of the United States 1st, Barbara Lerczak-Janiszewska of Poland 3rd and Judith Heine of Germany 2nd. Credit : IOC Olympic Museum Collections
That achievement established her as one of the outstanding female athletes of the world.
The twentieth of twenty-two children, Ms. Rudolph was born June 23, 1940, in St. Bethlehem, Tennessee, near Clarksville, TN, to Ed and Blanche Rudolph. Polio at fours years of age, and scarlet fever and double pneumonia had left her with little chance ever of walking, but with her family’s love, care, and help, and Wilma’s dogged determination, she was able to discard her brace and corrective shoes by the time she was twelve years old. By age sixteen, six-foot-tall “Skeeter,” as she was nicknamed, had already been named an All-State player in basketball and had won a bronze medal at the 1956 Melbourne, Australia Olympics in the 4-by-100 meter relay. Just two years later, Ms. Rudolph believed her dreams of a college education and Olympic gold medal were over when she discovered she was pregnant.
With the support of legendary coach Edward S. Temple, Ms. Rudolph attended Tennessee State University on a full track scholarship.
In 1960, she returned to the Olympics and won gold medals in the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, and 4-by-100-meter relay. She held records in all three events at the time she retired from amateur competition in 1962.
Her speed and graceful beauty earned her many more nicknames: the Italians nicknamed her “La Gazzella Negra” (the Black gazelle); the French, “La Perle Noir” (the Black Pearl). Her fast timing records earned her another name, the “Tornado”.
After graduating from Tennessee State University in 1963, Ms. Rudolph married her high school sweetheart, Robert Eldridge, with whom she had four children before they divorced in 1976; Yolanda (1958), Djuanna (1964), Robert, Jr. (1965), and Xurry (1971). After her divorce she worked as a teacher, coach, and director of youth foundations, finally settling in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Ms. Rudolph is one of the most celebrated athletes of all time. During her competitive years, she was voted the United Press Athlete of the Year (1960) and the Associated Press Woman of the Year (1960, 1961). She received the James E. Sullivan Award (1961) and the Babe Didrickson Zaharias Award (1962). Ms. Rudolph’s later honors include induction into the Black Sports Hall of Fame (1973), the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame (1980), and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame (1983). In 1984, she was one of five sports stars selected by the Women’s Sports Foundation as America’s Greatest Women Athletes.
During a period of re-emergence of the female athlete, Ms. Rudolph had a significant effect. She was one of the first major role models for both Black and female athletes, and her success and popularity during the 1960 Olympics gave a tremendous boost to women’s track in the United States. (Remember, this was before Title IX was enacted.) In addition, her celebrity broke gender barriers in previously all-male track-and-field events such as the Millrose Games and the Penn Relays. We will never know what records Ms. Rudolph might have reached because female athletes in her day were not able to make a living in their sport. Ms. Rudolph retired from running at the age of twenty-two, far younger than mature female athletes in the 21ST Century peak in their sports.
Although remembered primarily for her Olympic achievements, Ms. Rudolph made significant contributions to the Civil Rights movement as an activist, and contributions through her work with youth. In 1977, her autobiography, Wilma, was published and adapted for a television movie.
1.
Wilma by Wilma Rudolph (Mass Market Paperback – Nov 8, 1977)
2.
Wilma Starring Shirley Jo Finney, Cicely Tyson, Jason Bernard, et al. (Jan 16, 2007)
She headed the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, a nonprofit organization she started in 1981 to train young athletes.
In July, 1994, not long after her mother’s death, Ms. Rudolph was diagnosed with brain and throat cancer. On November 12, 1994, Ms. Rudolph died from cancer at the age of 54. Thousands turned out to pay their respects at her funeral. On August 11, 1995, Tennessee State University dedicated its new six-story dormitory the Wilma G. Rudolph Residence Center. In 1997, Tennessee Governor Don Sundquist proclaimed June 23 to be known as Wilma Rudolph Day in Tennessee.
The most poignant honor was bestowed on Ms. Rudolph when upon the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Berlin, Germany in 1994, the Berlin American High School was given over to the citizens of Berlin becoming the Gesamtschule Am Hegewinkel. In the summer of 2000, the school was renamed Wilma Rudolph Oberschule in her honor.
In recognition of her accomplishments, the United States Postal Service on July 14, 2004, issued a 23-cent Distinguished American Series postage stamp.
REFERENCES:
Black Women in America, Darlene Clark Hine, et. al.
Margaret Tyzack, a stalwart British actress who won myriad awards for her stage performances, including a Tony, but who was best known in the United States for her roles in the public television series “The Forsyte Saga” and “I, Claudius,” died on Saturday in London. She was 79.
June 28, 2011
Zoe Dominic
Margaret Tyzack in 1990 in “Lettice and Lovage.”
Her death was announced by her agent, Pippa Markham, who did not specify a cause.
Ms. Tyzack, was first and foremost a theater performer whose stage résumé was long and formidable. She won a Laurence Olivier Award, the London equivalent of a Tony, for playing the boozy, fiercely distressed Martha in a 1981 revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
She won another Olivier two years ago as Mrs. St. Maugham, the haughty grandmother of an unruly granddaughter, in Enid Bagnold’s arch, emotionally incisive 1950s comedy “The Chalk Garden,” a performance that Charles Spencer, writing in The Guardian of London, called “perhaps the greatest performance of her long career.”
Her Mrs. St. Maugham was “at once imperious, funny and spiteful,” Mr. Spencer wrote. “Her acting is an object lesson in comic timing, and she delivers the epigrammatic dialogue with superb panache.”
Ms. Tyzack appeared twice in featured roles on Broadway. In 1983, as the Countess of Rousillon in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” she was nominated for a Tony. Her next Broadway role, in 1990, was Lotte Schoen, a travel agency bureaucrat who plays foil to a flamboyantly eccentric tour guide (played by Maggie Smith), in Peter Shaffer’s comedy “Lettice and Lovage.”
That production appeared first in London, and was almost kept from opening in New York because of union rules that require special permission for the casting of foreign actors in Broadway productions, permission that is usually granted only to international stars of indisputable singularity or box-office drawing power.
Ms. Smith, who was given dispensation, refused to appear on Broadway unless Ms. Tyzack was also allowed to join the cast, arguing that their onstage chemistry and Ms. Tyzack’s gifts fulfilled the requirement of singularity. Actors’ Equity, the union, finally agreed. Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, called Ms. Tyzack’s performance “flawless,” and she won a Tony for it.
Ms. Tyzack first came to prominence in 1967, when she appeared as Winifred, sister of Soames Forsyte, the lead character in “The Forsyte Saga,” a 26-week series produced by the BBC that traced the fortunes of an upper-middle-class British family through 40-some years on either side of the turn of the 20th century.
A hoity-toity soap opera about hoity-toity people, it was hugely popular; English churches were said to have rescheduled Sunday evening services so that congregants would not have to choose between worshiping and watching. Acquired by American public television in 1969, it proved to be equally popular in the United States, though without reports of religious disturbance.
Ms. Tyzack also appeared in the title role of “Cousin Bette,” a BBC series based on the Balzac novel about a manipulative spinster, and in “I, Claudius,” based on Robert Graves’s novel about the life of the Roman emperor Claudius (played by Derek Jacobi). Ms. Tyzack played Antonia Minor, Claudius’s mother.
Ms. Tyzack was born on Sept. 9, 1931. Sources differ as to her birthplace, but most indicate it was in Essex, east of London. She attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began her professional career in the early 1950s at a repertory company in central England, where she spent two years performing in a play a week for nearly 50 weeks a year, a veritable apprenticeship in professional acting.
“We weren’t spoiled or indulged,” she said in a 2009 interview. “It was very hard work, and the paying customer came first. It was expected that they would hear every word, even if they were sitting far from the stage. If you were warned for inaudibility on Wednesday and still couldn’t be heard on Thursday, you’d be sacked on Friday. You had to learn quickly.”
Ms. Tyzack was married to Alan Stephenson, a mathematics professor; they had a son, Matthew. Complete information about survivors was not available.
She appeared in a handful of movies, including two directed by Stanley Kubrick, “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “A Clockwork Orange.” More recently she appeared in Woody Allen’s “Match Point.”
Ms. Tyzack’s final stage role was Oenone, the elderly nurse to the queen, in Nicholas Hytner’s 2009 production of “Phèdre” at the National Theater in London, which starred Helen Mirren. It was the year she won the Olivier for “The Chalk Garden,” and she used the attention to make public statements about the dearth of significant theatrical roles for older women. The roles being written for them, she was widely quoted as complaining, amounted to a load of clichéd old nonsense. She was sick of being offered parts where the characters were old and crone-like or withering away, she said.
“If you watch TV or listen to the radio for a week, you would get the impression that everyone over the age of 60 has no control over their faculties,” she said to one reporter. To another she said, “I don’t want us to be treated with kid gloves, but a fraction of respect would come in handy.”
My first encounter with the inimitable acting qualities of Ms. Margaret Tyzack was with the Masterpiece Theater public television miniseries, I, Claudius.
As the proud and stalwart daughter of Marc Antony, she exemplified enduing strength, as the mother of the slow-witted son Claudius, she was short-tempered and impatient, even as the mother of the wanton Livila (Cladius’s sister), she showed great restraint in locking her daughter up to die when found guilty of mureder and adultery. Such were the acting capabilities of Ms. Tyzack. She left you in awe of her skills as an actress, and decades later you would still remember the impact she had on you.
Edith Fellows, a child star of the 1930s who was known for playing orphans and urchins but whose own life was more Dickensian than that of any character she portrayed, died on June 26 in Los Angeles. She was 88.
She died of natural causes, her daughter, Kathy Fields Lander, said.
Ms. Fellows belonged to the generation of small, bright-eyed actors whose on-screen antics — for an hour or two, at least — were meant to sweep Depression-era clouds away. Though overshadowed by contemporaries like Shirley Temple, Jane Withers and Jackie Cooper, she worked with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including Bing Crosby, W. C. Fields and Gene Autry.
Her most famous role was as Patsy, the waif Mr. Crosby befriends in the 1936 musical “Pennies From Heaven.”
Reviewing the picture in The New York Times, Frank S. Nugent wrote: “The chief honors properly belong to little Miss Fellows. Hers really is an exceptional performance for a youngster, skirting the perils of bathos in her tender scenes and playing her rebellious ones with comic impertinence.”
Her dozens of dozens of other films include “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch” (1934), with Mr. Fields; “And So They Were Married” (1936), with Melvyn Douglas and Mary Astor; and “Five Little Peppers and How They Grew” (1939), along with several of its sequels.
Ms. Fellows’s personal story — involving a confidence man, disappearing parents, a draconian guardian and a headline-making court battle complete with allegations that she was once offered for sale — is a window onto the hazards of child stardom in the heyday of the studio system. It is not so much a whatever-happened-to as it is a how-could-this-have-happened-at-all?
None of it would have happened had the young Ms. Fellows not been so dreadfully pigeon-toed. The only child of Willis and Harriet Fellows, Edith Marilyn Fellows was born in Boston on May 20, 1923; her mother abandoned the family a few months afterward.
At 2, Edith, moved to North Carolina with her father and paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Fellows. As a toddler there, she took dancing lessons to correct her gait.
At 4, Edith, who also sang, was spotted by a talent scout. For $50, he said, he could arrange a Hollywood screen test. She and her grandmother boarded the train.
In Hollywood, they found an empty lot at the address the scout had given them. Edith’s grandmother was too proud to return home and admit she had been swindled.
She took a series of housecleaning jobs, leaving Edith with a local family. The family’s son was an extra in pictures, and one day Edith accompanied him to the studio. She was soon cast in “Movie Night” (1929), starring the comedian Charley Chase.
More films followed, including “Daddy Long Legs” (1931), “The Rider of Death Valley” (1932) and “Jane Eyre” (1934), in which she played Mr. Rochester’s ward, Adele.
By 1935, when her performance opposite Claudette Colbert and Mr. Douglas in “She Married Her Boss” landed her a seven-year contract with Columbia Pictures, Edith Fellows, at 12, was a star.
That stardom had come at a cost, for Edith’s grandmother ran her career with an iron hand. She was not to play with her schoolmates, as she might fall and mar her pearly skin. She was not to shout, as it could strain her voice.
Over time, her grandmother cut her off from anyone who might be a malign influence, which by her reckoning appeared to be nearly everyone. Even Edith’s father, who had joined them in California, was eventually deemed superfluous and sent packing.
One day in the mid-1930s, there was a knock at the door. On the doorstep was Edith’s mother, come for her daughter — or, more precisely, for her daughter’s earnings.
A bitter custody battle ensued, and accounts of it saturated newspapers nationwide in the summer of 1936. Edith’s mother claimed that the girl had been abducted by her grandmother, a charge that the authorities of the period took seriously in the wake of the Lindbergh kidnapping four years before.
She also asserted that Edith’s father had once tried to sell her to a dancing school for $5,000.
Ultimately, the judge awarded custody of Edith to her grandmother and ordered her earnings placed in trust.
Ms. Fellows would see little of the money: When she turned 21 and requested her earnings — estimated at more than $100,000 — she was given a check for $900.60. Her grandmother had died several years earlier; to the end of her life, her daughter said on Friday, Ms. Fellows believed her mother had somehow managed to drain the account.
Ms. Fellows continued making movies through the early 1940s, but by then she was no longer a child. Demand for tiny grown-up film actresses (her adult height was 4 feet 10 1/2 inches) was negligible.
She turned to stage work, appearing on Broadway in “Louisiana Lady,” a short-lived 1947 musical, and “Uncle Willie,” a comedy starring Menasha Skulnik that ran for several months in 1956-57.
One night in the late 1950s, performing in a New York charity show, Ms. Fellows became paralyzed with fear. “I saw the spotlight on me, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, why doesn’t it go away?,’ ” she recalled in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” (1984), a book about Hollywood’s child actors by Dick Moore, who, as Dickie Moore, was one of them.
A psychiatrist diagnosed stage fright and prescribed Librium. Ms. Fellows was dependent on the drug, along with Valium and alcohol, for years afterward. She earned her living as an operator for telephone answering services.
Then, in the late 1970s, a friend wrote “Dreams Deferred,” a play based on her life, for a Los Angeles community theater. He asked Ms. Fellows to play the central character, a woman much like herself.
Her performance, in 1979, led to a string of guest appearances on television shows in the 1980s and early ’90s, including “Simon & Simon,” “St. Elsewhere” and “Cagney & Lacey.”
Her renewed career, Ms. Fellows later said, let her quit pills and alcohol cold turkey.
Ms. Fellows’s first marriage, to the talent agent and producer Freddie Fields, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Hal Lee. Besides her daughter, Ms. Lander, from her marriage to Mr. Fields, survivors include a grandchild.
As Ms. Fellows recounted afterward, her professional renaissance almost did not happen. Awaiting her entrance in “Dreams Deferred” on opening night, she feared the spotlight would fill her with dread as it had in New York more than 20 years before. The playwright had promised to leave the stage door open in case she needed to flee.
She looked out from the wings. The spotlight shone down like a benediction, and Ms. Fellows walked onstage.
Elaine Stewart, a sultry Hollywood actress who was promoted as a “dark-haired Marilyn Monroe” for her roles in 1950s films like “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “The Adventures of Hajji Baba,” died on Monday at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 81.
Everett Collection
Elaine Stewart with Mickey Rooney in “A Slight Case of Larceny” (1953).
She died after a long illness, her agent, Fred Wostbrock, said.
Ms. Stewart, who was later a television game show hostess, appeared in 18 movies in the ’50s, inspiring reviews that described her as “slinky,” “voluptuous” and “a temptress.”
In a one-minute scene in “The Bad and the Beautiful,” Ms. Stewart saunters barefoot onto a staircase, martini in hand, in a skintight evening gown, “offering convincing proof to Lana Turner that Kirk Douglas was indeed dallying with another dame,” Cue magazine wrote in 1953.
“It was enough to deluge executives at MGM with mail asking who the girl was, what was her next picture and where had she been hiding herself,” the article continued.
The next year, opposite John Derek, Ms. Stewart played Princess Fawzia in “The Adventures of Hajji Baba,” a fable of a fortune-seeking youth who bets he can lure away the caliph’s daughter, who resists restrictions and wants to choose her own husband. With its sword fights, desert chases and kisses in the moonlight, the movie has become something of a cult classic.
When she played Charleen, the adulterous wife in “The Tattered Dress” — a 1957 crime drama about a cynical lawyer who believes he can sway juries with legal trickery — A. H. Weiler wrote in The New York Times, “Elaine Stewart is provocative enough in that ‘tattered dress’ to distract an avowed misogynist.”
Elsy Steinberg was born in Montclair, N.J., on May 31, 1930. She was a teenager when she signed a contract with the Conover modeling agency and changed her name. Soon after, the movie producer Hal Wallis offered her $200 a week to play a nurse in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy “Sailor Beware.” Among her other film credits are “Young Bess” (1953), “Take the High Ground!” (1953), “Brigadoon” (1954) and “Night Passage” (1957). In the 1960s, she appeared on several television dramas, among them “Bat Masterson” and “Perry Mason.”
Ms. Stewart married the Emmy Award-winning game show creator Merrill Heatter in 1964. In 1972, she became hostess of the Heatter-Quigley game show “Gambit,” with Wink Martindale as M.C. She was later the hostess of the company’s nighttime production “High Rollers,” working with Alex Trebek.
Ms. Stewart is survived by her husband; a son, Stewart; and a daughter, Gabrielle.
A significant moment in Ms. Stewart’s career came in 1953, when — reclining, with bedroom eyes — she filled the cover of the March 23 Life magazine. The headline: “Budding Starlet Visits the Folks in Jersey.”
Lorenzo Charles, whose dunk in the final seconds of the 1983 National Collegiate Athletic Association national championship game propelled North Carolina State University to victory over Houston and himself to the realm of basketball legend, died Monday when the charter bus he was driving crashed in Raleigh, N.C. He was 47.
June 29, 2011
Associated Press
Lorenzo Charles’s famous dunk won the 1983 national championship.
North Carolina State announced the death. It occurred on Interstate 40 as Charles was driving a bus for Elite Coach. News reports said the bus, which had no passengers, veered off the highway and sustained heavy damage to its front end.The police did not immediately comment on how or why the accident occurred. Charles had been a bus driver for 10 years.
His moment came in his sophomore year, when he leapt to rebound a teammate’s shot that fell short of the basket and jammed the ball through the hoop, giving the Wolfpack a 54-52 victory.
Like the clutch performances of Michael Jordan for the University of North Carolina the year before and Christian Laettner for Duke in 1992, Charles’s game-winner has become emblematic of the N.C.A.A. tournament. It has been shown thousands of times on television, as has the image of the victorious N.C. State coach, Jim Valvano, darting across the court looking for someone to hug. Charles said that not a day passed that he was not asked about it.
The title game, in Albuquerque on April 4, 1983, pitted the Wolfpack against a Houston team that had been ranked No. 1 in the nation. The high-flying Cougars were led by the future Hall of Famers Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler.
The Wolfpack, by contrast, had a 17-10 regular-season record. In beating Houston, they became the first team to win a national championship after losing 10 games.
When N.C. State guard Dereck Whittenburg hoisted a 30-foot desperation shot with only seconds remaining, Charles was directly under the hoop. He said many times that he immediately knew it would fall short. After his dunk, he glanced at the clock and saw there were two seconds left. He later said he had never understood why the Cougars did not call a timeout.
“At the time, I didn’t realize the magnitude,” Charles said in a 1996 interview with The Daily News of New York. “I didn’t realize what I had done.”
Lorenzo Emile Charles was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 25, 1963, and grew up in the Starrett City housing project near Jamaica Bay. Growing to 6 feet 7 inches, he played basketball for Brooklyn Technical High School, from which he graduated.
In 1983, before advancing with his team to the N.C.A.A. finals, Charles sealed a 71-70 victory in an Atlantic Coast Conference tournament game against Wake Forest with a 3-point play. In the N.C.A.A. tournament, he hit two free throws with 23 seconds left to beat Virginia, 63-62, in the West Region final.
Charles played two more years at N.C. State, finishing with 1,535 points. He was the 41st pick in the 1985 National Basketball Association draft, by the Atlanta Hawks. He played only 36 games for the team, averaging 3.4 points.
Charles then played professionally in Europe and South America and for minor league teams. In the early 2000s, he coached the Fargo-Moorhead Beez, a North Dakota team in the Continental Basketball Association.
He is survived by his parents, a sister and a daughter, an N.C. State spokesman said.
George C. Ballas loved tending to his lawn with meticulous care, but the 200 or more trees crowding a two-acre expanse behind his house in Houston posed a problem: how to get around the bulging roots and manicure close enough to achieve the near perfection he desired.
July 2, 2011
George Ballas owned a dance studio before his invention.
Then one day in 1971 he took his car to a car wash and was watching those whirling soapy brushes sweeping the grime away. Aha! Could something like that trim the grass and slash the weeds around the trees, between the rocks and under the fences?
Back home, Mr. Ballas poked holes in a tin can, strung strands of fishing line through the holes, attached the contraption to a rotary lawn edger, and the Weed Eater was born — or what is more generally known as the weed whacker, a device that has reshaped the landscaping industry and delighted amateur gardeners.
Mr. Ballas died on June 25 in Houston at the age of 85, his son Corky said.
Mr. Ballas’s invention has become “one of the crucial tools to our industry, especially for landscaping,” Mark Fisher, director of horticulture at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, said on Thursday. “Of your landscape and turf crews, everybody has one.”
For those professionals and for everyday gardeners, Mr. Fisher said, “It’s like putting the icing on the cake because it’s really the last thing you do for that final trimming, so everything looks crisp and clean.”
Horticulture was not Mr. Ballas’s primary passion. He was the owner of a dance studio in Houston with 43,000 square feet of space and more than 100 instructors. But after he perfected his invention, he started the Weed Eater Corporation, promoted it on television nationwide and built a business that was eventually bought by Emerson Electric. There are now many Weed Eater models and sizes.
Several feet long, the typical device has controls in the handle and an electric motor at the trimmer head, which houses a coiled, plastic cord that spins and cuts like a scythe at extremely high speeds inside protective guards. (Some models are gasoline-powered and started with pull cords, much like a lawn mower.)
George Charles Ballas was born in Ruston, La., on June 28, 1925, one of three children of Charles and Maria Lymnaos Ballas. Besides his son Corky, who has performed on the television show “Dancing With the Stars,” Mr. Ballas is survived by his wife of 60 years, the former Maria Marulanda; another son, George Jr.; three daughters, Michelle Pritchard, Maria Jamail and Lillian Miles; a brother, Peter; and seven grandchildren.
Mr. Ballas enlisted in the Army when he was 17 and served as a bombardier during World War II. After the war, he worked for both the Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire dance studio franchises. Then, in the late 1950s, he opened his studio in Houston.
Corky Ballas said his father was something of a perfectionist: “He timed everything. He could swipe that tree in less than 60 seconds and not harm that tree. He would cut 10 trees in 10 minutes and go off to work. He liked being known as the Weed King.”
The United Nations’ (UN) International Day of Cooperatives recognizes and reaffirms the role of cooperatives in economic, social and cultural development and in the achievement of social policy objectives.
The United Nations’ (UN) International Day of Cooperatives is observed on the first Saturday of July each year. Some of the day’s goals are to increase awareness on cooperatives, as well as strengthen and extend partnerships between the international cooperative movement and other supporting organizations including governments.
Cooperatives around the world celebrate the International Day of Cooperatives in many ways. Activities include: messages from the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) and the UN translated into local languages for worldwide distribution; news articles and radio programs publicizing the awareness of the day; fairs, exhibits, contests and campaigns focused on the topics related to the day; meetings with government officials, UN agencies and other partner organizations; economic, environmental, social and health challenges (such as tree planting); and sponsored cultural events such as theatres and concerts.
Public life
The UN’s International Day of Cooperatives is a global observance and not a public holiday.
Background
Cooperatives are important in the world’s economic and social development. Based as on the principle of cooperation, cooperatives help create new ethics and values in business and economics. In 1895 ICA was formed and since 1927 it observes the first Saturday of July as International Cooperative Day. In 1994 the United Nations recognized and reaffirmed that cooperatives were vital in the world’s economic, social and cultural development. However two years earlier – on December 16, 1992 – the UN General Assembly proclaimed the first Saturday of July 1995 as the International Day of Cooperatives, marking the centenary of ICA’s establishment.
Symbols
The United Nations’ logo is often associated with marketing and promotional material for this event. It features a projection of a world map (less Antarctica) centered on the North Pole, enclosed by olive branches. The olive branches symbolize peace and the world map represents all the people of the world. It has been featured in colors such as white against a blue background or blue against a white background.
Promotional material used to publicize the day included images featuring an array of colors similar to those of a rainbow. These colors are linked with those that are used by ICA, which, together with the UN and other organizations, plays a big role in promoting and coordinating events for the day.
![[Map: Abyei, Sudan]](https://i2.wp.com/media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2008/05/26/GR2008052600098.gif)
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