ANDY ROONEY, MAINSTAY ON ’60 MINUTES’
Andy Rooney at his desk in 1978, his first year as a commentator on “60 Minutes.”. More Photos »
By RICHARD SEVERO and PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: November 5, 2011
Andy Rooney, whose prickly wit was long a mainstay of CBS News and whose homespun commentary on “60 Minutes,” delivered every week from 1978 until 2011, made him a household name, died on Friday in New York City.
Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press
Andy Rooney in 2005.
He was 92 and lived in Manhattan, though he kept a family vacation home in Rensselaerville, N.Y., and the first home he ever bought, in Rowayton, Conn.
CBS News said in a statement that Mr. Rooney died after complications following minor surgery.
In late September, CBS announced that Mr. Rooney would be making his last regular weekly appearance on “60 Minutes” on Oct. 2. After that, said Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News and the program’s executive producer, he would “always have the ability to speak his mind on ‘60 Minutes’ when the urge hits him.”
But a little more than three weeks after that appearance, CBS announced that Mr. Rooney had been hospitalized after developing “serious complications” from an unspecified operation.
Mr. Rooney entered television shortly after World War II, writing material for entertainers like Arthur Godfrey, Victor Borge, Herb Shriner, Sam Levenson and Garry Moore. Beginning in 1962, he had a six-year association with the CBS News correspondent Harry Reasoner, who narrated a series of Everyman “essays” written by Mr. Rooney.
But it was “A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney,” his weekly segment on “60 Minutes,” that made him one of the most popular broadcast figures in the country. With his jowls, bushy eyebrows, deeply circled eyes and advancing years, he seemed every inch the homespun philosopher as he addressed mostly mundane subjects with varying degrees of befuddlement, vexation and sometimes pleasure.
He admitted to loving football, Christmas, tennis, woodworking and Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the few politicians who won his approval because, as an Army general during World War II, he had refused to censor Stars and Stripes, the G.I. newspaper for which Mr. Rooney worked. He also claimed to like shined shoes and properly pressed pants and had machines in his office to take care of those functions, although somehow he always managed to look rumpled.
But he was better known for the things he did not like. He railed against “two-prong plugs in a three-prong society,” the incomprehensibility of road maps, wash-and-wear shirts “that you can wash but not wear,” the uselessness of keys and locks, and outsize cereal boxes that contained very little cereal.
“I don’t like any music I can’t hum,” he grumbled.
He observed that “there are more beauty parlors than there are beauties” and that “if dogs could talk, it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.”
He made clear that he thought Gen. George S. Patton and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom he had known personally, were gasbags. He disliked New Year’s Eve, waiting in line for any reason and the bursars at whatever colleges his children attended.
He once concluded that “it is possible to be dumb and be a college president,” but he acknowledged that “most college students are not as smart as most college presidents.”
On the subject of higher education, he declared that most college catalogs “rank among the great works of fiction of all time,” and that a student of lackluster intellect who could raise tuition money would find it “almost impossible to flunk out.”
Time magazine once called him “the most felicitous nonfiction writer in television.” But Mr. Rooney was decidedly not everyone’s cup of tea.
The New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, for example, took strong issue with Mr. Rooney’s dismissive comments after Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana committed suicide in 1994. It was not surprising, she wrote, that Mr. Rooney “brought to the issue of youthful despair a mixture of sarcasm and contempt,” but it was “worth noting because in 1994 that sort of attitude is as dated and foolish as believing that cancer is contagious.”
Mr. Rooney’s opinions sometimes landed him in trouble. In 1990, CBS News suspended him without pay in response to complaints that he had made remarks offensive to black and gay people.
The trigger was a December 1989 special, “A Year With Andy Rooney,” in which he said: “There was some recognition in 1989 of the fact that many of the ills which kill us are self-induced. Too much alcohol, too much food, drugs, homosexual unions, cigarettes. They’re all known to lead quite often to premature death.” He later apologized for the statement.
But the gay newspaper The Advocate subsequently quoted him as saying in an interview: “I’ve believed all along that most people are born with equal intelligence, but blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children. They drop out of school early, do drugs and get pregnant.”
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He said that he had accepted the suspension rather than end his relationship with CBS News. He said that when he was an Army trainee, he had been arrested in the South because he insisted on riding in the back of a bus with some black soldiers who were friends of his.
Many of his colleagues rushed to his defense. “I know he is not a racist,” Walter Cronkite said.
Mr. Rooney was suspended for three months but was brought back after only one. During his absence, the ratings for “60 Minutes” declined by 20 percent and the network received thousands of letters and telephone calls from viewers who missed his commentaries.
Mr. Rooney generated more criticism in 2002, when he said in an interview on a cable sports show that women had “no business” being sideline television reporters at football games because they did not understand football.
He did it again in 2007, with a newspaper column complaining about the current state of baseball. “I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me,” he wrote.
He subsequently acknowledged that he “probably shouldn’t have said it,” but denied that his intent had been to denigrate Latin American players.
Andrew Aitken Rooney was born on Jan. 14, 1919, in Albany, the son of Walter and Ellinor Rooney. His father was in the paper business. After his graduation from Albany Academy, he worked as a copy boy for The Knickerbocker News before attending Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., where he played left guard on the football team (even though he was only 5-foot-9 and 185 pounds) and worked for the weekly newspaper, The Colgate Maroon.
In 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, he was drafted into the Army and used his powers of persuasion to get himself assigned to Stars and Stripes. He did not know much about reporting, but he learned his craft by working with journalists like Homer Bigart, Ernie Pyle and Mr. Cronkite.
He became a sergeant, flew on some bombing missions, covered the invasion of France in 1944 and won a Bronze Star for reporting under fire during the battle of Saint-Lô in Normandy. A year later, he was among the first Americans to enter the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Thekla, Germany.
In collaboration with Bud Hutton, a Stars and Stripes colleague, Mr. Rooney wrote two books: “Air Gunner” (1944), a collection of sketches of Americans who had been stationed in Britain, and “The Story of the Stars and Stripes” (1946).
After his discharge, Mr. Rooney returned to Albany and worked as a freelance writer.
By 1949, he had persuaded Mr. Godfrey to hire him as a writer. He continued writing for several entertainers, but also became involved in news and public affairs when he was asked to write scripts for “The Twentieth Century,” a documentary series narrated by Mr. Cronkite. That led to his long-term association with Mr. Reasoner, which led to his involvement, initially as a writer, with “60 Minutes.”
In the early 1970s, after briefly working for PBS, Mr. Rooney returned to CBS and began appearing on camera in a series of specials, one of which, “Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington,” won a Peabody Award.
Mr. Rooney was as outspoken about CBS, his longtime employer, as he was about everything else. He made no secret of his dislike for Laurence A. Tisch, the network’s chief executive from 1986 to 1995. Protesting Mr. Tisch’s cost efficiencies and job cuts in 1987, Mr. Rooney said CBS News “has been turned into primarily a business enterprise, and the moral enterprise has been lost,” and he threatened to quit if a writers strike against CBS News was not settled.
Although his commentary was mostly written for CBS News, he also had a syndicated newspaper column for three decades, for which he was given a lifetime achievement award in 2003 by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. (That same year he received a similar award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.) He published a number of books, primarily collections of his commentaries, most recently “Out of My Mind” (2006), “And More by Andy Rooney” (2008) and “Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit” (2010).
Mr. Rooney’s wife of 62 years, Marguerite Howard, died in 2004. Mr. Rooney is survived by their four children, Ellen Rooney of London; Martha Fishel of Chevy Chase, Md.; Emily Rooney of Boston; and Brian Rooney of Los Angeles, along with five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Rooney frequently said he considered himself “one of the least important producers on television” because his specialty was light pieces. “I just wish insignificance had more stature,” he once said.
But he put things in perspective in his 1,097th and last regularly scheduled “60 Minutes” appearance.
“I’ve done a lot of complaining here,” he said then, “but of all the things I’ve complained about, I can’t complain about my life.”
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HEAVY D, SMOOTH RAPPER STAR
By JON CARAMANICA
Published: November 8, 2011
Heavy D, the smooth-talking and cheerful rapper who billed himself as “the overweight lover M.C.,” died in Los Angeles on Tuesday. He was 44.
Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press
Heavy D performing at the Grammy Awards in 2009.
The Los Angeles County coroner’s office confirmed the death Tuesday evening, saying that Heavy D had collapsed at his home and was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he died shortly after noon. The cause of death was not known as of Tuesday night, but the Beverly Hills police said that there was no evidence of foul play and that the death appeared to be “medically related.”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Heavy D was one of hip-hop’s most popular and charismatic figures, a girthy slickster who was an eager seducer and was unafraid of the dance floor. He was the frontman of Heavy D & the Boyz, which became the first act signed to Uptown Records, the label that was integral in building the bridge between hip-hop and R&B.
Thanks in part to production from the New Jack Swing auteur Teddy Riley that matched hard-snapping drums with sensual melodies, Heavy D & the Boyz became key figures in the softening of hip-hop’s sharp edges. The group released five albums between 1987 and 1994, three of which went platinum: “Big Tyme” (1989) “Peaceful Journey” (1991) and “Nuttin’ but Love” (1994).
At the time, blending hip-hop and R&B was still something of a novelty, but Heavy D’s work felt seamless. He was a nimble and jubilant-sounding rapper who always chose charm over aggression.
Most of the group’s early hits — songs like “Mr. Big Stuff” and “Gyrlz, They Love Me” — were cheeky, as Heavy D, a flamboyant dresser and an outsize personality, set the template for plus-sized hip-hop Lotharios. By 1991 he had moved on to straightforward love songs like “Is It Good to You” and his group’s biggest hit, “Now That We Found Love,” based on a cover version of a classic O’Jays song by the reggae band Third World.
“Peaceful Journey,” the 1991 Heavy D & the Boyz album, was dedicated to the dancer Trouble T-Roy, one of the Boyz, who died from a fall while the group was on tour in 1990. Mr. Dixon’s death also inspired Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.),” one of hip-hop’s essential tribute songs.
Heavy D was born Dwight Errington Myers on May 24, 1967, in Mandeville, Jamaica, and grew up largely in Mount Vernon, N.Y. His mother worked as a nurse and his father as a movie equipment repairman.
In the mid-1990s he became the president of Uptown Records, and in several other ways his influence extended beyond his albums. He recorded the theme song to the popular comedy variety show “In Living Color”; recorded hit songs with both Michael Jackson (“Jam” in 1991) and Janet Jackson (“Alright” in 1990); and had a hilarious cameo in the video for “One More Chance,” an early hit for the Notorious B.I.G., who followed in Heavy D’s big-man footsteps.
Though Heavy D continued to record music — including a reggae-influenced album, “Vibes,” in 2008 — and performed as a rapper as recently as the 2011 BET Hip-Hop Awards this summer, he was better known in recent years for his acting work. He had recurring roles on TV shows including “Roc,” “The Tracy Morgan Show” and “Boston Public,” and parts in films including “The Cider House Rules” and the current “Tower Heist.”
Survivors include a daughter, Xea.
Elizabeth A. Harris contributed reporting.
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JOE FRAZIER, EX-HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION
Joe Frazier won the undisputed heavyweight title with a 15-round decision over Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden in March 1971, in an extravaganza known as the Fight of the Century. More Photos »
Published: November 7, 2011
Joe Frazier, the former heavyweight champion whose furious and intensely personal fights with a taunting Muhammad Ali endure as an epic rivalry in boxing history, died Monday night at his home in Philadelphia. He was 67.
His business representative, Leslie Wolff, said the cause was liver cancer. An announcement over the weekend that Frazier had received the diagnosis in late September and had been moved to hospice care early this month prompted an outpouring of tributes and messages of support.
Known as Smokin’ Joe, Frazier stalked his opponents around the ring with a crouching, relentless attack — his head low and bobbing, his broad, powerful shoulders hunched — as he bore down on them with an onslaught of withering jabs and crushing body blows, setting them up for his devastating left hook.
It was an overpowering modus operandi that led to versions of the heavyweight crown from 1968 to 1973. Frazier won 32 fights in all, 27 by knockouts, losing four times — twice to Ali in furious bouts and twice to George Foreman. He also recorded one draw.
A slugger who weathered repeated blows to the head while he delivered punishment, Frazier proved a formidable figure. But his career was defined by his rivalry with Ali, who ridiculed him as a black man in the guise of a Great White Hope. Frazier detested him.
Ali vs. Frazier was a study in contrasts. Ali: tall and handsome, a wit given to spouting poetry, a magnetic figure who drew adulation and denigration alike, the one for his prowess and outsize personality, the other for his antiwar views and Black Power embrace of Islam. Frazier: a bull-like man of few words with a blue-collar image and a glowering visage who in so many ways could be on an equal footing with his rival only in the ring.
Ali proclaimed, “I am the greatest” and he preened how he could “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Frazier had no inclination for oratorical bravado. “Work is the only meanin’ I’ve ever known,” he told Playboy in 1973. “Like the man in the song says, I just gotta keep on keepin’ on.”
Frazier won the undisputed heavyweight title with a 15-round decision over Ali at Madison Square Garden in March 1971, in an extravaganza known as the Fight of the Century. Ali scored a 12-round decision over Frazier at the Garden in a nontitle bout in January 1974. Then came the Thrilla in Manila championship bout, in October 1975, regarded as one of the greatest fights in boxing history. It ended when a battered Frazier, one eye swollen shut, did not come out to face Ali for the 15th round.
The Ali-Frazier battles played out at a time when the heavyweight boxing champion was far more celebrated than he is today, a figure who could stand alone in the spotlight a decade before an alphabet soup of boxing sanctioning bodies arose, making it difficult for the average fan to figure out just who held what title.
The rivalry was also given a political and social cast. Many viewed the Ali-Frazier matches as a snapshot of the struggles of the 1960s. Ali, an adherent of the Nation of Islam who had changed his name from Cassius Clay, came to represent rising black anger in America and opposition to the Vietnam War. Frazier voiced no political views, but he was nonetheless depicted, to his consternation, as the favorite of the establishment. Ali called him ignorant, likened him to a gorilla and said his black supporters were Uncle Toms.
“Frazier had become the white man’s fighter, Mr. Charley was rooting for Frazier, and that meant blacks were boycotting him in their heart,” Norman Mailer wrote in Life magazine after the first Ali-Frazier bout.
Frazier, wrote Mailer, was “twice as black as Clay and half as handsome,” with “the rugged decent life-worked face of a man who had labored in the pits all his life.”
Frazier could never match Ali’s charisma or his gift for the provocative quote. He was essentially a man devoted to a brutal craft, willing to give countless hours to his spartan training-camp routine and unsparing of his body inside the ring.
“The way I fight, it’s not me beatin’ the man: I make the man whip himself,” Frazier told Playboy. “Because I stay close to him. He can’t get out the way.” He added: “Before he knows it — whew! — he’s tired. And he can’t pick up his second wind because I’m right back on him again.”
In his autobiography, “Smokin’ Joe,” written with Phil Berger, Frazier said his first trainer, Yank Durham, had given him his nickname. It was, he said, “a name that had come from what Yank used to say in the dressing room before sending me out to fight: ‘Go out there, goddammit, and make smoke come from those gloves.’ “
Foreman knocked out Frazier twice but said he had never lost his respect for him. “Joe Frazier would come out smoking,” Foreman told ESPN. “If you hit him, he liked it. If you knocked him down, you only made him mad.”
Durham said he saw a fire always smoldering in Frazier. “I’ve had plenty of other boxers with more raw talent,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1970, “but none with more dedication and strength.”
Ali himself was conciliatory when Frazier’s battle with cancer became publicly known. “My family and I are keeping Joe and his family in our daily prayers,” Ali said in his statement over the weekend. “Joe has a lot of friends pulling for him, and I’m one of them.”
And when word reached him that Frazier had died, Ali, in another statement, said: “The world has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration.”
Billy Joe Frazier was born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Laurel Bay, S.C., the youngest of 12 children. His father, Rubin, and his mother, Dolly, worked in the fields, and the youngster known as Billy Boy dropped out of school at 13. He dreamed of becoming a boxing champion, throwing his first punches at burlap sacks he stuffed with moss and leaves, pretending to be Joe Louis or Ezzard Charles or Archie Moore.
At 15, Frazier went to New York to live with a brother. A year later he moved to Philadelphia, taking a job in a slaughterhouse. At times he battered sides of beef, using them as a punching bag to work out, the kind of scene used by Slyvester Stallone in the film “Rocky,” though Stallone said that he drew on the life of the heavyweight contender Chuck Wepner in developing the Rocky character.
Durham discovered Frazier boxing to lose weight at a Police Athletic League gym in Philadelphia. Under Durham’s guidance, Frazier captured a Golden Gloves championship and won the heavyweight gold medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
He turned pro in August 1965, with financial backing from businessmen calling themselves the Cloverlay Group (from cloverleaf, for good luck, and overlay, a betting term signifying good odds). He won his first 11 bouts by knockouts. By winter 1968, his record was 21-0.
A year before Frazier’s pro debut, Cassius Clay won the heavyweight championship in a huge upset of Sonny Liston. Soon afterward, affirming his rumored membership in the Nation of Islam, he became Muhammad Ali. In April 1967, having proclaimed, “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong,” Ali refused to be drafted, claiming conscientious objector status. Boxing commissions stripped him of his title, and he was convicted of evading the draft.
An eight-man elimination tournament was held to determine a World Boxing Association champion to replace Ali. Frazier refused to participate when his financial backers objected to the contract terms for the tournament, and Jimmy Ellis took the crown.
But in March 1968, Frazier won the version of the heavyweight title recognized by New York and a few other states, defeating Buster Mathis with an 11th-round technical knockout. He took the W.B.A. title in February 1970, stopping Ellis, who did not come out for the fifth round.
In the summer of 1970, Ali won a court battle to regain his boxing license, then knocked out the contenders Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena. The stage was set for an Ali-Frazier showdown, a matchup of unbeaten fighters, on March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden.
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Each man was guaranteed $2.5 million, the biggest boxing payday ever. Frank Sinatra was at ringside taking photos for Life magazine. The former heavyweight champion Joe Louis received a huge ovation. Hubert H. Humphrey, back in the Senate after serving as vice president, sat two rows in front of the Irish political activist Bernadette Devlin, who shouted, “Ali, Ali,” her left fist held high. An estimated 300 million watched on television worldwide, and the gate of $1.35 million set a record for an indoor bout.
Frazier, at 5 feet 11 1/2 inches and 205 pounds, gave up three inches in height and nearly seven inches in reach to Ali, but he was a 6-to-5 betting favorite. Just before the fighters received their instructions from the referee, Ali, displaying his arrogance of old, twice touched Frazier’s shoulders as he whirled around the ring. Frazier just glared at him.
Frazier wore Ali down with blows to the body while moving underneath Ali’s jabs. In the 15th round, Frazier unleashed his famed left hook, catching Ali on the jaw and flooring him for a count of 4, only the third time Ali had been knocked down. Ali held on, but Frazier won a unanimous decision.
Frazier declared, “I always knew who the champ was.”
Frazier continued to bristle over Ali’s taunting. “I’ve seen pictures of him in cars with white guys, huggin’ ‘em and havin’ fun,” Frazier told Sport magazine two months after the fight. “Then he go call me an Uncle Tom. Don’t say, ‘I hate the white man,’ then go to the white man for help.”
For Frazier, 1971 was truly triumphant. He bought a 368-acre estate called Brewton Plantation near his boyhood home and became the first black man since Reconstruction to address the South Carolina Legislature. Ali gained vindication in June 1971 when the United States Supreme Court overturned his conviction for draft evasion.
Frazier defended his title against two journeymen, Terry Daniels and Ron Stander, but Foreman took his championship away on Jan. 22, 1973, knocking him down six times in their bout in Kingston, Jamaica, before the referee stopped the fight in the second round.
Frazier met Ali again in a nontitle bout at the Garden on Jan. 28, 1974. Frazier kept boring in and complained that Ali was holding in the clinches, but Ali scored with flurries of punches and won a unanimous 12-round decision.
Ali won back the heavyweight title in October 1974, knocking out Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire — the celebrated Rumble in the Jungle. Frazier went on to knock out Quarry and Ellis, setting up his third match, and second title fight, with Ali: the Thrilla in Manila, on Oct. 1, 1975.
In what became the most brutal Ali-Frazier battle, the fight was held at the Philippine Coliseum at Quezon City, outside the country’s capital, Manila. The conditions were sweltering, with hot lights overpowering the air-conditioning.
Ali, almost a 2-to-1 betting favorite in the United States, won the early rounds, largely remaining flat-footed in place of his familiar dancing style. Before Round 3 he blew kisses to President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, in the crowd of about 25,000.
But in the fourth round, Ali’s pace slowed while Frazier began to gain momentum. Chants of “Frazier, Frazier” filled the arena by the fifth round, and the crowd seemed to favor him as the fight moved along, a contrast to Ali’s usually enjoying the fans’ plaudits.
Frazier took command in the middle rounds. Then Ali came back on weary legs, unleashing a flurry of punches to Frazier’s face in the 12th round. He knocked out Frazier’s mouthpiece in the 13th round, then sent him stumbling backward with a straight right hand.
Ali jolted Frazier with left-right combinations late in the 14th round. Frazier had already lost most of the vision in his left eye from a cataract, and his right eye was puffed and shut from Ali’s blows.
Eddie Futch, a renowned trainer working Frazier’s corner, asked the referee to end the bout. When it was stopped, Ali was ahead on the scorecards of the referee and two judges. “It’s the closest I’ve come to death,” Ali said.
Frazier returned to the ring nine months later, in June 1976, to face Foreman at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. Foreman stopped him on a technical knockout in the fifth round. Frazier then announced his retirement. He was 32.
He later managed his eldest son, Marvis, a heavyweight. In December 1981 he returned to the ring to fight a journeyman named Jumbo Cummings, fought to a draw, then retired for good, tending to investments from his home in Philadelphia.
Both Frazier and Ali had daughters who took up boxing, and in June 2001 it was Ali-Frazier IV when Frazier’s daughter Jacqui Frazier-Lyde fought Ali’s daughter Laila Ali at a casino in Vernon, N.Y. Like their fathers in their first fight, both were unbeaten. Laila Ali won on a decision. Joe Frazier was in the crowd of 6,500, but Muhammad Ali, impaired by Parkinson’s syndrome, was not.
In addition to his son Marvis and his daughter Jacqui, Frazier is survived by his sons Hector, Joseph Rubin, Joseph Jordan, Brandon Marcus and Derek Dennis; his daughters Weatta, Jo-Netta, Renae and Natasha, and a sister. His marriage to his wife, Florence, ended in divorce.
Long after his fighting days were over, Frazier retained his enmity for Ali. But in March 2001, the 30th anniversary of the first Ali-Frazier bout, Ali told The New York Times: “I said a lot of things in the heat of the moment that I shouldn’t have said. Called him names I shouldn’t have called him. I apologize for that. I’m sorry. It was all meant to promote the fight.”
Asked for a response, Frazier said: “We have to embrace each other. It’s time to talk and get together. Life’s too short.”
Fascination with the Ali-Frazier saga has endured.
After a 2008 presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, the Republican media consultant Stuart Stevens said that McCain should concentrate on selling himself to America rather than criticizing Obama. Stevens’s prescription: “More Ali and less Joe Frazier.”
Frazier’s true feelings toward Ali in his final years seemed murky.
The 2009 British documentary “Thrilla in Manila,” shown in the United States on HBO, depicted Frazier watching a film of the fight from his apartment above the gym he ran in Philadelphia.
“He’s a good-time guy,” John Dower, the director of “Thrilla in Manila,” told The Times. “But he’s angry about Ali.”
In March 2011, however, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the first Ali-Frazier fight, Frazier said he was willing to put the enmity behind him.
“I forgave him for all the accusations he made over the years,” The Daily News quoted Frazier as saying. “I hope he’s doing fine. I’d love to see him.”
But as Frazier once told The Times: “Ali always said I would be nothing without him. But who would he have been without me?”
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YVONNE MCCAIN, PLAINTIFF IN SUIT ON SHELTER FOR HOMELESS FAMILIES
Published: November 2, 2011
Yvonne McCain, a once-homeless mother of four whose years of living in a fetid, ramshackle welfare hotel in Midtown Manhattan led to a landmark court ruling requiring the city to provide decent shelter for homeless families, died Saturday in her rent-subsidized, middle-income apartment on Staten Island. She was 63.
Nancy Siesel/The New York Times
Yvonne McCain in her Staten Island apartment.
The cause was cancer, her daughter Tameika McCain said.
Ms. McCain was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit originally called McCain v. Koch. Except for hers, the names on the class-action suit changed three times as new mayors took office. The case, filed in 1983, was finally settled by the city and the Legal Aid Society in 2008.
But the primary issue was settled in 1986, when the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan ruled that New York City could not deny emergency shelter for homeless families with children. Previous cases had established the right of single homeless men and women to shelter.
In that ruling, the appellate court said that thousands of children were subject “to inevitable emotional scarring because of the failure of city and state officials to provide emergency shelter.”
Nearly 40 more proceedings would wind through trial and appeals courts over the next 22 years, as both sides wrestled over issues like whether the city was meeting basic standards of habitability. When the final settlement was reached, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said it marked “the beginning of a new era” in which “we can all move forward in our shared commitment to effectively meet the needs of homeless families.”
On Monday, Steven Banks, the chief lawyer of the Legal Aid Society, who had led the McCain case, said, “The import of the settlement, and in a sense Ms. McCain’s life, is that no matter who the mayor is now or in the future, tens of thousands of homeless children and their families are entitled to a roof over their heads.”
That was certainly not always so for Ms. McCain.
She and her children were evicted from their Brooklyn apartment in 1982 after she withheld rent because her landlord refused to make repairs. They ended up in a filthy, dilapidated hotel in Herald Square.
“They put us in a room on the 11th floor,” she said in 1992, adding that both sides of the mattresses were stained with urine. “I remember calling my mother and asking if she could bring me newspapers to put over the mattresses. I stayed up worrying that the kids didn’t climb out the windows, because there were no bars.”
Ms. McCain, a battered woman, spent four years in that hotel. As the case crawled through the courts, she bounced from shelter to city-supported apartment and back. Her estranged husband once found her and broke her nose.
She and the children moved into the subsidized two-bedroom apartment on Staten Island in 1996.
Ms. McCain went on to work as a nurse’s aide. In 2005, she received an associate’s degree in human services from Borough of Manhattan Community College. In recent years, she worked in the college’s health service office.
The success of her case surprised her. When the lawsuit was first filed, Ms. McCain recalled in 2003, “I thought we were going to get new mattresses and guardrails on the windows and that’s it.”
“I never imagined that this suit would end up being so helpful to so many people.”
Born in Harlem on Oct. 25, 1948, Ms. McCain was the only child of Lillie McCain and John Henry Bonds. Besides her daughter Tameika, she is survived by another daughter, Tyeast Fullerton; four sons, Darryl Jones, Phillip McCain, Robert McCain and Jonathan McCain; 19 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Tameika McCain said her mother had found peace on Staten Island.
“My mom loved this apartment,” she said. “She said she was never going to leave it, never going to be homeless again.”
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 