MUAMMAR EL-QADAFFI (1942 – 2011)
Unpredictable to the end, Moammar Kadafi ruled Libya for decades
Erratic and mercurial, he fancied himself a political philosopher, practiced an unorthodox, deadly diplomacy and cut an at times cartoonish figure in robes and sunglasses, surrounded by female guards.
He soon evolved into an international troublemaker: His Libya funded guerrilla groups, built a nuclear weapons program and launched terrorist attacks on the West — including the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Then, as the United States began hunting terrorists worldwide, he did a diplomatic U-turn, making oil deals with the West and providing back-channel help for American spy agencies battling international terrorists.
It was the “Arab Spring” uprising against tyrants in the Middle East that ignited an internal rebellion against Kadafi, turned his regime into a NATO target and led to the end of his reign. On Thursday, in his hometown of Surt on the Mediterranean Sea, it was over. He was 69.
The only son of an illiterate Bedouin herder, Kadafi was born in 1942 in a goatskin tent about 20 miles from Surt and spent his early years living the life of desert nomads. His father scrimped and borrowed to send his son to a nearby Muslim school. It was there that Kadafi listened daily to a Cairo radio station that carried speeches by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a pan-Arabist and leader of the independence movement in the Arab world.
“We must go into the army,” Kadafi told his classmates. “That is the only way to make a revolution.”
He was 14 when he led his first demonstration in support of Nasser, and by the time he was 19 he had taken the first step toward formulating a plan to overthrow the corrupt, pro-Western regime of Libya’s King Idris by entering the Royal Military Academy at Benghazi.
Kadafi surrounded himself with fellow conspirators and imposed the same moral standards on them that he demanded of himself: abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, no womanizing or gambling, prayers five times a day. In 1966, he studied armored warfare tactics in Britain, where he learned to speak English.
On Sept. 1, 1969, Kadafi, a 27-year-old signal corps captain in the Libyan army, and his group of “free officers” overthrew Idris, who was out of the country, in a bloodless coup. Kadafi himself went to the state radio station to broadcast the news to the Libyan people.
“Give us your hands. Open up your hearts to us,” he said. “Forget past misfortunes and as one people prepare to face the enemies of Islam, the enemies of humanity…. We shall resurrect our heritage. We shall avenge our wounded dignity and restore the rights which have been wrested from us.”
He moved quickly in an effort to change Libya overnight. He ordered the closure of the United States’ huge Wheelus air base — negotiations were carried out amicably between Washington and Tripoli — and the evacuation of British military bases. He expelled 20,000 Italians and nationalized most of the oil industry. Nightclubs and casinos were shuttered, alcohol was banned, and unmarried women who became pregnant were flogged and sent off to reformatories.
Angered by the amount of time his bureaucrats spent reading newspapers and drinking coffee, he had most of the desks and chairs removed from government offices. The bureaucrats were not fazed; they took to reading their newspapers leaning against the walls and brewing their coffee on the concrete floors.
During his first full decade in power, Kadafi was a popular leader. He invested some of the nation’s $50 billion in annual oil revenue in developing agriculture and building schools, hospitals and housing.
In the 1970s, Kadafi developed his so-called Third Universal Theory. It was his blueprint for a socialistic welfare state in which there would be no laws, no money, no government, no private enterprise. The leader — Kadafi never called himself president — published this philosophy in a slim volume called “The Green Book.”
He managed to attract a group of leftist scholars to Libya in 1979 to debate the wisdom of “The Green Book,” though most impartial observers found it most noteworthy for its naivete and lack of depth. One example from its text: “Woman is a female and man, being a male, does not … get pregnant … [and] is not liable to the feebleness which woman, being a female, suffers.”
Kadafi detested communism as much as capitalism, distrusted the Soviet Union no less than the United States and had little use for the moderate Arab states. In 1984, displeased with his North African neighbors, he sent one of his planes to bomb the state radio station in Sudan and, it is widely believed, one of his ships to sow mines in Egypt’s Gulf of Suez.
Kadafi’s attempts at economic and political reform also withered as his government became increasingly decentralized. Libya was largely run by local “revolutionary” committees that were inept and corrupt.
Despite the troubles at home, where he was known by many names, including Colonel and Brother Leader, Kadafi began to cause mischief further afield, giving money to guerrilla groups and reportedly attempting to stage coups against other African leaders. Libya was swiftly earning a reputation as a dangerous, rogue state.
He was linked to an attack on a Berlin disco frequented by U.S. soldiers that left two servicemen dead and prompted Reagan to bomb Libya in 1986, an attack that killed Kadafi’s adopted daughter. Two years later, Tripoli was implicated in the bombing of the Pan Am 747 over Scotland. Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, an alleged Libyan intelligence officer, was convicted in 2001.
Kadafi agreed to pay nearly $3 billion in compensation to families of the airline bombing victims. Megrahi was released from prison in 2009 for medical reasons, drawing criticism in Britain that a deal with Kadafi had been struck to protect European businesses and trade.
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 startled Kadafi. Worrying that his own regime could be in jeopardy, he denounced weapons of mass destruction and offered to open his nuclear program to international inspectors. The move helped ease economic sanctions against Libya and put Kadafi in the spotlight as leaders such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Tripoli in 2004.
“It was strange, given the history, to come here and do this and of course I am conscious of the pain that people have suffered as a result of terrorist actions in the past,” Blair said of his meeting with Kadafi. “But the world is changing and we have got to do everything we possibly can to tackle the security threat that faces us.”
President George W. Bush announced the gradual restoring of diplomatic relations between the United States and Libya. Condoleezza Rice visited Libya in 2008, the first secretary of State to make that journey in more than half a century. A U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks advised Rice that, although Kadafi avoids making eye contact, he was a voracious consumer of news and eager for the chance to “share with you his views on global affairs.
Things weren’t going well for Kadafi inside Libya. His political and economic reforms were seen as ruses by a population stifled by repression and limited opportunities.
In recent years, the country had watched schools, hospitals and other institutions built by the oil money fall into disrepair. His son Seif Islam “implicitly criticized” his father’s regime, according to one U.S. cable published by WikiLeaks.
Kadafi himself blamed his government for corruption but it was largely seen as posturing.
The eastern part of the country around the city of Benghazi, a long-simmering anti-Kadafi stronghold, grew more restive. Major tribes, the key to power in Libya, grew increasingly wary of him. Kadafi had lost his touch with manipulating clan loyalties with money and power.
Kadafi underestimated the rage against him as protests that began in eastern Libya flared across the country. Rebels pushed toward Tripoli from the east and west and battled his beleaguered army and band of mercenaries.
The leader’s vicious assaults on his own people — his forces fired antiaircraft guns at civilians and shot worshipers near mosques — stunned the world. Much of the military and many Libyan diplomats and officials abandoned him as tens of thousands of people died.
As the revolt spread over the ensuing months, Kadafi became increasingly cornered. He was indicted by the International Criminal Court, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombardments of government military forces strengthened the bands of poorly equipped and ill-trained rebels.
Yet, the leader remained defiant. Addressing thousands of Libyans in Tripoli’s Green Square in July, he threatened to dispatch Libyan suicide bombers to Europe in retaliation for the NATO bombings. “I told you it is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Kadafi said.
He disappeared from public view, releasing video speeches until finally, as rebels closed in, transmitting only audio messages from hiding.
“I say to crusader cowards, I live in a place you cannot reach,” he said during one broadcast. “I live in the hearts of millions…. If you kill my body, you cannot kill my soul.”
All along, he was unmoved by calls for his ouster, arguing that his authority transcended any official title.
“Moammar is not a president to leave his post,” he said. “Moammar is leader of the revolution until the end of time.”
PHOTOS: Moammar Kadafi | 1942 – 2011
Fleishman reported from Cairo and Kraft from Los Angeles.
Former Los Angeles Times Africa correspondent David Lamb contributed to this report.
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PIRI THOMAS, AUTHOR OF ‘DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS’
Published: October 19, 2011
Piri Thomas, the writer and poet whose 1967 memoir, “Down These Mean Streets,” chronicled his tough childhood in Spanish Harlem and the outlaw years that followed and became a classic portrait of ghetto life, died on Monday at his home in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 83.
Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times
Piri Thomas in 1971. His memoir was an influential portrait of life in Spanish Harlem.
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Signet Books
The 1967 memoir, “Down These Mean Streets,” was a best seller and eventually a staple on high school and college reading lists.
The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Suzie Dod Thomas, said.
The memoir, a best seller and eventually a staple on high school and college reading lists, appeared as Americans seemed to be awakening to the rough cultures that poverty and racism were breeding in cities. A new literary genre had cropped up to explore those conditions, in books like “Manchild in the Promised Land,” by Claude Brown, and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”
“Down These Mean Streets” joined that list. The memoir, Mr. Thomas wrote on his Web site, had “exploded out of my guts in an outpouring of long suppressed hurts and angers that had boiled over into an ice-cold rage.”
The novelist Daniel Stern, reviewing the book in The New York Times, called it “another stanza in the passionate poem of color and color-hatred being written today.”
In the memoir, Mr. Thomas described how he was brought up as the only dark-skinned child among seven children, the son of a Puerto Rican mother, Dolores Montañez, and a Cuban father, Juan Tomás de la Cruz. His dark skin, Mr. Thomas recalled, made him feel like an outlier in his own family and neighborhood, where he was taunted about this looks. Even his father, he felt, preferred his lighter-skinned children.
He described the bravado, or “machismo,” that he affected on the streets. Protecting his “rep” led him to “waste” people who insulted him, he wrote. He sniffed “horse” — heroin — even though he knew the consequences. “The world of street belonged to the kid alone,” he wrote. “There he could earn his own rights, prestige, his good-o stick of living. It was like being a knight of old, like being 10 feet tall.”
As a merchant seaman in the Jim Crow South, he wrote, he persuaded a white prostitute to sleep with him because, he told her, he was really Puerto Rican, not black. He then enjoyed stunning her by telling her she had just slept with a black man.
He returned home while his mother was dying in a poor people’s ward at Metropolitan Hospital and resumed his old ways — selling and using drugs and robbing people. In one holdup he wounded a police officer and landed in prison for seven years, a harrowing time he vividly evoked. It was in prison that he finished high school and began thinking about writing. He found, he wrote, that words could be used as bullets or butterflies. He called writing “the Flow.”
“It came very naturally,” he told an interviewer. “I promised God that if he didn’t let me die in prison, I would use the Flow.”
The book, with its harsh language and scenes, was banned by some schools but soon became assigned reading in many others. The poet Martin Espada said its influence was enormous.
“Because he became a writer, many of us became writers,” Mr. Espada said. “Before ‘Down These Mean Streets,’ we could not find a book by a Puerto Rican writer in the English language about the experience of that community, in that voice, with that tone and subject matter.”
Carolina González, a professor of literature at Rutgers University, said her students continue to find the book “very immediate and descriptive of their lives.”
After the memoir Mr. Thomas spent much of the rest of his life lecturing about it. He also wrote two novels, “Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand” (1972) and “Seven Long Times” (1974), several plays and the collection “Stories From El Barrio” (1979). He also set his poetry to music.
John Peter Thomas was born on Sept. 30, 1928, in Harlem Hospital, where he was given the Anglo-Saxon name. “They wanted to assimilate me,” he said in an interview in 1995. “Whoever heard of a Puerto Rican named John Peter Thomas?” His mother called him Piri.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Peter Stacker and Ricardo Thomas; four daughters, SanDee Thomas, Raina Thomas, Tanee Thomas and Renee Shank; three stepchildren, Michael and Laura Olenick, and David Elder; seven grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren.
Despite Mr. Thomas’s hardships, Olga Luz Tirado, his onetime publicist, said he had retained a sense of humor. She recalled taking him to a reading in Brooklyn in the 1990s. “On the way back I took a wrong turn and said to him, ‘Piri, I think we’re lost,’ ” she told a reporter. “He asked, ‘We got gas?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said: ‘We ain’t lost. We just sightseeing!’ ”
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PETE RUGOLO, ARRANGER AND COMPOSER
Published: October 19, 2011
Pete Rugolo, the chief arranger for the Stan Kenton Orchestra in its late-1940s heyday and a prolific composer and arranger for television and film, including the series “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” “The Fugitive” and “Run for Your Life,” died on Sunday in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 95.
Capitol Records, via Reuters
Pete Rugolo, left, with the singer Nat King Cole, one of a long list of recording stars for whom he wrote arrangements.
Mr. Rugolo (pronounced ROO-guh-lo) was still in uniform, leading the Army band at Fort Scott in San Francisco, when he handed a half-dozen arrangements to his idol Stan Kenton at the Golden Gate Theater. When he left the service, he was hired by Kenton and went on to write more than a hundred arrangements for that big band, helping establish the progressive sound of its peak years.
After Kenton dissolved the group in 1949, Mr. Rugolo became the music director of Capitol Records in New York. There, in addition to producing Harry Belafonte’s early pop records and the Four Freshmen, he signed the Miles Davis Nonet, which played arrangements by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and others.
In three days of sessions, he helped produce a dozen 78s by the group that introduced a cooled-down interpretation of bebop. The records sold poorly at the time, but Mr. Rugolo lobbied Capitol to release nearly all of them in 1957 on a 12-inch LP, “Birth of the Cool,” one of the landmark albums in jazz.
Mr. Rugolo also recorded dozens of his own albums and wrote arrangements for a long list of singers that included Nat King Cole, June Christy, Dinah Washington and Mel Tormé. He later became a highly sought-after composer and arranger for television and film.
He made his mark in television at a time when noirish urban detective series and Henry Mancini’s groundbreaking music for “Peter Gunn” opened the way for jazzy big-band scores. He wrote the theme music for “The Thin Man,” “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” “The Fugitive” and “Run for Your Life,” and the scores for many episodes of shows as varied as “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers,” “Alias Smith and Jones” and “M*A*S*H.”
Pietro Rugolo was born on Dec. 25, 1915, in San Piero Patti, Sicily. His father, who played the baritone horn, took the family to the United States five years later and settled in Santa Rosa, Calif., where his son learned to play French horn and classical piano and listened intently to the big bands of Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa and Ray Noble on the radio.
Mr. Rugolo earned a bachelor’s degree in music education from San Francisco State College in 1939 and planned to become a teacher, but pursued graduate work at Mills College in Oakland when he found out that the avant-garde composer Darius Milhaud would be teaching there.
After receiving a master’s degree from Mills and working as a composer and arranger for a band led by the guitarist Johnny Richards, he was drafted into the Army, where the band members at Fort Scott included Paul Desmond, later the saxophonist in the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
The first Stan Kenton records came out while Mr. Rugolo was in the service. “When I heard them, I just loved the sound of the band,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1993. “I started copying the music down from the records and began writing that way; my band sounded like a young Stan Kenton Orchestra.” Mr. Rugolo’s arrangements, building on the orchestra’s aggressive, blasting style, moved into the complex harmonic and rhythmic territory that defined the Kenton sound of those years.
In the early 1950s, Mr. Rugolo was a staff composer and arranger for MGM studios and the West Coast musical director of Mercury Records. While at Mercury, he recorded several albums under his own name using unusual combinations of instruments, including “Reeds in Hi-Fi,” “Ten Trumpets and Two Guitars” and “Ten Saxophones and Two Basses.”
In the 1960 film “Where the Boys Are,” an experimental combo plays several compositions by Mr. Rugolo, which the group’s way-out leader, Frank Gorshin, dubs “dialectic jazz.” The readers of Down Beat magazine voted Mr. Rugolo best arranger five times between 1947 and 1954.
In addition to his daughter, Gina, of Beverly Hills, Calif., he is survived by his wife, the former Edye Gaffney; two sons, Peter Rugolo Jr. and Tony Rugolo, both of Sherman Oaks; and three grandchildren.
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PAUL LEKA, A SONGWRITER OF ‘NA NA HEY HEY’
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: October 23, 2011
Paul Leka, a songwriter and producer who worked with many recording stars but who was best known for writing the chanting chorus of “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye),” a No. 1 hit in 1969 that was reborn in the 1970s as a sports arena anthem, died on Oct. 12 in a hospice near his home in Sharon, Conn. He was 68.
Joseph Bly
Paul Leka
The cause was lung cancer, said his brother, George.
Mr. Leka made his name in the Tin Pan Alley tradition, writing or arranging songs for other people. He wrote and produced “Green Tambourine,” a No. 1 hit in 1967 for the psychedelic soft-rock band the Lemon Pipers; signed REO Speedwagon to its first record contract; and produced four of Harry Chapin’s albums, including 1974’s “Verities & Balderdash” containing the song that was Chapin’s lone No. 1 hit, “Cat’s in the Cradle.”
In 1969, Mr. Leka was helping a longtime friend from Bridgeport, Conn., Gary DeCarlo, fill the B-side of a single he was recording for Buddah. With Mr. Leka on keyboards, they started with a song they had written years before, a bluesy shuffle called “Kiss Him Goodbye.” But it filled only two minutes of playing time, and to make sure disc jockeys would not play it — instead of Mr. DeCarlo’s A-side — they decided to add a chorus to stretch it to four minutes, beyond the time limit of most radio formats.
“I started writing while I was sitting at the piano, going ‘na na na na, na na na na …’ ” Mr. Leka told Fred Bronson, the author of “The Billboard Book of Number One Hits.” “Everything was ‘na-na’ when you didn’t have a lyric.” Mr. DeCarlo added the “hey hey.” They chanted the chorus at the beginning and end of the original song, and as an added poison pill left the dummy lyrics in.
The record company decided to release it nonetheless as the A-side of a 45 by Steam, a fictitious group name the two men invented for the record. The song reached No. 1 in late 1969 and enjoyed a happy radio life span. Then it came back.
In 1977 the organist for the Chicago White Sox, Nancy Faust, began using the song to stoke the crowd into taunting an opposing team when, say, a visiting player struck out or a visiting pitcher was removed or the team was about to lose.
It is unclear how it spread, but within a few years the chant was heard at sports events everywhere, more ubiquitous than “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” since fans sing it at football and soccer games, too.
“It’s a song where a guy wants a girl, but she’s going out with someone else,” Mr. DeCarlo said in a phone interview on Friday. “It’s basically a sad situation, but we made it upbeat. The guy sounds like he’s going to come out ahead. That’s why I think it caught on. It gives you a lift.”
Paul Theodore Leka was born on Feb. 20, 1943, in Bridgeport, one of four children of Theodore and Dhimitra Leka, immigrants from Albania. His father worked as a short-order cook. Soon after he started taking piano lessons, Paul was writing songs, and by age 16, his brother said, he was trying to sell them to music publishers in New York.
He worked for Mercury, Elektra and CBS Records and later opened his own recording studio in Bridgeport, where he helped produce songs for Gloria Gaynor, Stevie Wonder and Kris Kristofferson and others.
Besides his brother, his survivors include his wife, Engjellushe; their son, Alexander; two children from a previous marriage, Derek and Heather; and a sister, Evelyn Kreta.
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ANITA CASPARY, NUN WHO LED BRWAKAWAY FROM CATHOLIC CHURCH
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: October 18, 2011
Anita Caspary, the onetime mother superior who led the largest single exodus of nuns from the Roman Catholic Church in American history, died on Oct 5 in Los Angeles. She was 95.
David S. Smith/Associated Press
Anita Caspary in 1970.
Her death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Immaculate Heart Community, a lay Christian group that she and the 300 nuns who followed her established in 1970 after their break with the church.
The cause of the schism, though nominally about dress codes and bedtimes, was understood on both sides as a matter of church law. Dr. Caspary viewed the Vatican II reforms of the early 1960s as a mandate for nuns to assert more control over their own lives. Her boss, Archbishop James Francis McIntyre of Los Angeles, did not.
Dr. Caspary always contended that she and other members of her order, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, never wanted to renounce their vows. In a 2003 memoir, “Witness to Integrity,” she said they had been virtually forced into it by the intransigence of Cardinal McIntyre, who adamantly refused to let them teach in archdiocese schools unless they wore habits and adhered to a host of traditional regimens governing when they prayed, when they went to bed, and what books were appropriate for nuns to read.
The cardinal cited pre-Vatican II law and centuries-old church tradition. To permit the changes proposed by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart would in effect lead “our convents to become hotels or boarding houses for women,” he wrote in a letter to the Vatican quoted in his official 1996 biography.
The conflict between Dr. Caspary and the cardinal lasted several years. By her account, it proved to be the ultimate test of the spirit in which she was initiated when she took her vows in 1936 as Sister Humiliata, a religious title meaning humbled.
Convinced that they were being given no other options, and being asked to forsake the promise of Vatican II, Dr. Caspary and the other nuns broke away to establish the Immaculate Heart Community, an unofficial Christian communal organization that continues to provide services in the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The organization confirmed her death, at age 95.
Sandra M. Schneiders, a professor emeritus at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif., who has written on what the news media came to call the Immaculate Heart “rebellion,” said in an interview Monday that the changes forbidden by Cardinal McIntyre were being widely adopted in other dioceses nationwide as a result of Vatican II reforms.
“It’s not like the Immaculate Heart women were doing anything outlandish,” she said. “All these changes were taking place without incident in the majority of dioceses around the country. Cardinal McIntyre simply was saying, ‘Not in my diocese.’ ”
Cardinal McIntyre, a protégé of Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, had been a vocal opponent of the reforms during the Vatican Council’s meetings. “He has been described by more than one Vatican observer as the most reactionary prelate in the church, bar none — not even those of the Curia,” an article in The New York Times said in 1964.
In her memoir, Dr. Caspary struggled for nunlike equanimity in writing about him. He was “stubborn, paternalistic, authoritative, frugal and puritanical,” she said. “But he was also a hard-working, dedicated churchman who left monuments in his archdiocese in brick and mortar.”
Anita Marie Caspary was born Nov. 4, 1915, in Herrick, S.D., the third of eight children of Jacob and Marie Caspary. The family moved to Los Angeles, where she received her bachelor’s degree in English at Immaculate Heart College in 1936. She entered the convent the same year, and taught high school English while studying toward a master’s degree at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in 1948 from Stanford.
She was president of Immaculate Heart College, which was operated by her order, from 1958 to 1963. (The school continued to operate after the schism in 1970, but closed in 1980.) After the break with the church, she taught at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and served on the staff of the Peace and Justice Center of Southern California.
She wrote poetry throughout her life, and had completed a volume she hoped to publish shortly before she died.
Her survivors include three sisters, all living in California: Gretchen DeStefano of Los Alamitos, Marion Roxstrom of Newport Beach and Ursula Caspary Frankel of Costa Mesa.
The Immaculate Heart Community was founded on democratic principles, with an elected board of directors, that are still observed. Some of its members live together in a residence, but most live on their own. All contribute 20 percent of their wages to support what Dr. Caspary described in interviews as “a new way of people being together.”
The community has not grown. It counts 160 members today.
In a 1972 interview with The Times, however, Dr. Caspary said she felt she was part of a cultural flourishing larger than a single enterprise.
“We’ve had an extraordinary experience for women,” she said. “We’ve worked through the problem of liberation. We worked our way out of an oppressive situation.”