March 4, 2012 · 7:44 PM
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IN REMEMBRANCE: 3-4-2012

STAN STEARNS, PHOTOGRAPHER WHO CAUGHT JFK, JR’S SALUTE ON FILM

Stan Stearns/Corbis

John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket on Nov. 25, 1963.

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Published: March 3, 2012

Stan Stearns, whose iconic photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket on Nov. 25, 1963, helped encapsulate a nation’s grief, died Friday at a hospice near Annapolis, Md. He was 76.

Joshua McKerrow/The Capital, via Associated Press

Stan Stearns with a detail from his iconic photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. in 2007.

The cause was lung cancer, his son, Jay Stearns, said.

The story of the famous image, captured while Mr. Stearns was on assignment for United Press International, is known virtually frame by frame to family and friends. Mr. Stearns made sure of that, said Gary Haynes, 76, another U.P.I. photographer working on the day of the president’s funeral.

“I’ve heard several versions of it, which he tended to embellish at bars,” Mr. Haynes said.

Cordoned with a horde of photographers across from the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington that day, Mr. Stearns trained his lens on Jacqueline Kennedy as the coffin neared. She bent toward John Jr. It was his third birthday. She whispered something. And, suddenly, the boy raised his right arm.

“The hand went up. Click — one exposure,” Mr. Stearns told The Times in 2007. “That was it. That was the picture.”

Jay Stearns said his father’s experience covering Mrs. Kennedy allowed him to size up the scene in a way that peers could not.

“My father had an incredible ability to anticipate a moment,” Jay Stearns said in a phone interview. “That photograph was a culmination of him knowing her.”

Stanley Frank Stearns was born May 11, 1935, in Annapolis, Md., to William and Lillian Stearns, who owned a jewelry business. Mr. Stearns spent four years with the Air Force as a photographer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, his son said, before joining U.P.I. in Washington near the end of the Eisenhower administration. He later covered the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon before moving into commercial photography in the 1970s.

Besides his son, Jay, other survivors include a brother, Allan, of Naples, Fla.

In 2007, Mr. Stearns’s signature shot became the center of a controversy after the death of the photographer Joe O’Donnell, whose claim that he had taken the famous picture was repeated in remembrances nationwide.

Mr. Stearns’s colleagues swarmed to set the record straight. In e-mails to former U.P.I. colleagues in 2007, Mr. Stearns offered his own detailed retelling.

After snapping the photograph, Mr. Stearns wrote, he ignored orders to go to Arlington National Cemetery and instead walked the film to the U.P.I bureau himself, convinced he had secured the day’s indelible image. A photo manager in the office was furious, his face turning red, then white, Mr. Stearns said. “You better have the picture of the funeral or you’re fired,” he recalled one boss yelling.

The photo manager paced outside the door as Mr. Stearns processed the film himself — a 17-minute task, he wrote. Finally, Mr. Stearns showed him the image.

“He does have the picture,” the man shouted.

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ANDREW BREITBART, CONSERVATIVE BLOGGER

By

Published: March 1, 2012

Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger and activist who built a national media persona  by putting undercover video on the Internet to bring discredit and disgrace to his liberal targets, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 43.

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Andrew Breitbart employed videos and photos against his liberal targets.

Kathy Willens/Associated Press

Mr. Breitbart spoke during an interview at The Associated Press’ headquarters in June 2011.

The cause was apparently a heart attack, said his father-in-law, the actor Orson Bean. Someone saw Mr. Breitbart collapse on the sidewalk, Mr. Bean added, and when the paramedics arrived they were unable to revive him. Mr. Bean said he believed Mr. Breitbart had a history of heart problems.

Mr. Breitbart was as polarizing as he was popular. On the political right he was hailed in the same breath with Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge as a truth-teller who exposed bias and corruption. On the left, he was derided by many as a provocateur who played fast and loose with the facts to further his agenda.

Among his biggest coups was forcing the resignation of a New York congressman, Anthony D. Weiner. Someone in Mr. Breitbart’s network of tipsters and fans had e-mailed him sexually explicit photos that Mr. Weiner had taken of himself and sent to women online. Mr. Breitbart published some of the photos on his Web site, BigGovernment.com, igniting a firestorm that reached to the highest levels of Congress.

The move displayed two of Mr. Breitbart’s defining features as a media personality: an eagerness to flout authority, and an innate sense for the viral news story. With the Weiner scandal, Mr. Breitbart, already a cult figure, only solidified his status as a force in his own right.

On Thursday, many of the luminaries he looked up to as a young man paid homage to him. Mr. Limbaugh called him “an indefatigable bulldog for the conservative cause.”

Mr. Breitbart was one of the most aggressive — and controversial — users of blogs to disseminate political information and rumors, and his video methods were new in conservative media. What Mr. Limbaugh was to radio and what Mr. Drudge was to the Internet, Mr. Breitbart was to online video and images.

Mr. Breitbart worked with Mr. Drudge early in his career, helping him staff The Drudge Report. But another media star, Arianna Huffington, gave Mr. Breitbart what turned out to be his biggest break. She hired him in 1997 when she was a conservative commentator in need of research help. She gave Mr. Breitbart a title, director of research, and what he described in his book “Righteous Indignation” as a “bizarre and cloistered office” in her Los Angeles home.

It did not take long for Ms. Huffington to see his value as a tireless employee. He struck up a friendship with her and her mother, who came to regard him as almost a son of her own.

“She would say, ‘Andrew, you’ve got to sleep, got to stop,’ ” Ms. Huffington said in an interview on Thursday. “You could sort of see the destructive side of his incredible passion for whatever he believed in at the time. It was all-consuming.”

Mr. Breitbart was instrumental in helping Ms. Huffington create an early Web presence with a site called Arianna Online. After he left her for The Drudge Report, she reached out to him again. He wrote in his book that he got a call one day in 2004. It was Ms. Huffington. “Do you have any ideas for a Web site?” he quoted her as asking. Mr. Breitbart went on to work with Ms. Huffington and her business partners Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti for the next seven months creating the now heavily trafficked news site The Huffington Post.

Andrew James Breitbart was born on Feb. 1, 1969, in Los Angeles, a month before Gerry and Arlene Breitbart adopted him. He grew up in the exclusive Brentwood section of Los Angeles, an experience he called disjointing.

“Even though it was very much a keep-up-with-the-Joneses enclave, my parents seemed oblivious to all that,” he wrote. “When the first sushi restaurant popped up in our neighborhood in the early 1980s, we had meat loaf that night.”

He was a graduate of Tulane University, having majored in American studies.

Though he described his parents as Republican, he said they were not overtly political. “They came from the Silent Generation,” he said.

Silent Mr. Breitbart was not. As a conservative commentator he was a frequent presence on cable television shoutfests. He seemed to thrive on conflict.

In 2009, Mr. Breitbart started the first in a series of “Big” blogs with names like “Big Journalism,” “Big Hollywood” and “Big Government.” The Web sites gave Mr. Breitbart a big online perch of his own from which to unleash his assaults on liberal causes and figures.

One target, in 2009, was the community organizing group Acorn. A young conservative activist named James O’Keefe had come to Mr. Breitbart with undercover video of Acorn workers apparently offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. In videotaping the encounter, Mr. O’Keefe and a companion had posed as a pimp and a prostitute. Mr. Breitbart eagerly published the tapes, and they went viral. In response, Congress ended grants to Acorn, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.

Mr. Breitbart earned a reputation for being playful but also selective with the facts. In an infamous case in 2010, he helped instigate the firing of an Agriculture Department official, Shirley Sherrod, by publishing a heavily edited video clip of her speaking at an N.A.A.C.P. event. Her comments, as edited, suggested that she had discriminated against a white farmer more than two decades ago.

In the full video, however, she could be heard saying that she had eventually helped the farmer and that she had learned from the experience — that all people must overcome their prejudices. At Mr. Breitbart’s death, she was suing him for defamation.

Many on the left, like the liberal Web site Media Matters, often portrayed Mr. Breitbart as a caricature. Indeed, there was an element of performance art to what Mr. Breitbart did that could make him seem coarse and crude. He was often profane, and it was not uncommon to find him in rumpled shirts and torn jeans.

But in reality he was a more complex figure. He supported gay rights and once served on the board of GOProud, an organization for conservatives dedicated to gay and lesbian causes. His friends described him as a deeply committed father to his four children and a loyal husband to his wife, Susie.

And while he often railed against what he called corrupt mainstream media, he also knew that he needed them to further his own legitimacy. When he released the Weiner photos, he partnered with ABC News because, he said, he knew it would lend an imprimatur of authority.

He is survived by his wife; a daughter, Mia; and three sons, Samson, Charlie and William Buckley.

He was true to his reputation right up until he died. At 11:25 p.m. on Wednesday he sent out a Twitter message to someone who had taken issue with one of his comments. Mr. Breitbart had referred to him using a vulgarity “cause I thought you were being intentionally disingenuous,” he wrote. “If not I apologize.”

Ian Lovett, Brian Stelter and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

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JOE THOMPSON, WHO HELPED PRESERVE THE BLACK STRING BAND

By

Published: March 1, 2012

“I got the name of being a pretty good fiddle player,” Joe Thompson once said. “I even been to Carnegie Hall playing fiddle.”

Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos

Joe Thompson, a fiddle player, is credited with preserving the black string band.

He also played at the Kennedy Center in Washington and at folk festivals from coast to coast, including one at the Smithsonian. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a National Heritage Fellowship. And he is credited with helping to keep alive an African-American musical tradition — the black string band — that predates the blues and influenced country music and bluegrass.

Yet until 1973, when he was in his mid 50s, not many people outside North Carolina had ever heard him play.

Mr. Thompson always said death would come when “the good Lord sends the morning train,” and the train arrived on Feb. 20. He died at 93 in a nursing home in Burlington, N.C., said Larry Vellani, a musician and a friend of Mr. Thompson’s.

He was born not far from there, in north-central North Carolina, and one of his earliest memories was of squirming on the floor as his father played the fiddle, according to an account given to the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award Program. His father had learned the instrument from his own father, a slave, and taught him in turn. Joe Thompson made the strings for his first fiddle from screen-door wires, and by the time he was 7, he was playing a real fiddle at dances while propped on a wooden chair, his feet not yet reaching the floor.

Later on he and his brother Nate and a first cousin, Odell Thompson, formed a string band, with Nate and Odell on banjos, and well into their teens they played their music — something like square dance music, only more rhythmic — all over North Carolina.

“People loved to see us come,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview with American Legacy magazine in 2008. “Every year we would shuck corn and strip tobacco, then hoop it up with a big dance.”

Then came World War II, and Mr. Thompson, entered the Army, serving in a segregated unit in Europe driving a bulldozer. After the war, fiddling became less and less a part of his life. By the postwar years, black string bands were, at most, a local hobby. Mr. Thompson bought a four-room house on an unpaved country road and began a 38-year stint working in a furniture factory.

That was where he was in 1973, Mr. Vellani said, running a rip saw, when Kip Lornell, then a graduate student in ethnomusicology, decided to check out rumors that some masters of the old-time string-band music were still around. Stopping by Mr. Thompson’s house, he heard him and his cousin play — his brother had moved to Philadelphia by then — and urged them to look into performing at folk music festivals that were springing up.

They did, and soon they were invited to perform across the country, from Massachusetts to Washington State. They played in Australia. In 1989, they recorded “Old-Time Music from the North Carolina Piedmont” for the Global Village label. The musical folklorist Alan Lomax included the three Thompsons in his American Patchwork documentary film series. And in 1990 Joe and Odell Thompson were onstage at Carnegie Hall as part of its Folk Masters program.

Mr. Thompson was in fine fettle. “Holding his bow about five inches from the end, Joe Thompson draws a scratchy, rakish tone from his fiddle, full of higher overtones,” Jon Pareles wrote of the performance in The New York Times. “He breaks melodies into short phrases and often adds double-stops that suggest modal harmonies.”

After Odell Thompson died in car accident in 1994, Joe almost quit. But he went on to record a solo album, “Family Tradition,” on the Rounder label in 1999. He received the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2007 and performed that year at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

String-band music, which combines fiddle, banjo and sometimes other instruments, owes much to African-American traditions. Banjos originally came from Africa, and though violins are European in origin, slaves were taught to play them for their masters as early as the 17th century. Paul F. Wells a former president of the Society for American Music, wrote in the Black Music Research Journal that slaves were most likely the earliest musicians to combine violin and banjo.

In the 19th century, both whites and blacks — sometimes separately, sometimes together, as in Mr. Thompson’s Piedmont region — created the exuberant music that both black and white string bands played, the white bands at square dances and the black bands at their own dances, called “frolics.”

But there were differences. Black fiddlers played in a style that was more rhythmic, syncopated and African in character, and called the tunes “Negro jigs.” As music became more commonly recorded in the 1920s, the black string-band tradition receded. Black music was veering toward the blues, while white string bands were categorized as “hillbilly,” playing music that is acknowledged to be the precursor of today’s bluegrass and country music. The influence of black string bands on white country musicians slipped from memory.

As if this slight wasn’t enough, Mr. Thompson complained in a 2004 interview with a North Carolina newspaper that when Elvis Presley started singing the blues, “people thought that was white people’s music, too.”

“That messes black people up,” he said.

Joseph Aquilla Thompson was born on Dec. 9, 1918, on a farm near Mebane, N.C., where he lived most of his life. Mr. Vellani said in an interview that a stroke Mr. Thompson had in 2001 had hurt his fiddling but not his strong singing voice.

Mr. Thompson’s first wife, the former Hallie Evans, died in 1987. He is survived by his wife, the former Pauline McAdoo Mebane; his sons Arthur James Snead and Hassel McCoy Evans; four stepchildren; eight grandchildren; 14 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.

The Thompsons may have been the last black string band still active, said Wayne Martin, folklife director for the North Carolina Arts Council. But Mr. Thompson planted a seed for the future. In 2005, three young musicians started coming to his house every Thursday to learn the old ways. They formed a band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, “mostly as a tribute to Joe,” they said. Their 2010 album, “Genuine Negro Jig,” won a Grammy for best traditional folk album.

“He lived long enough for people to get what it was he had to share,” Mr. Vellani said.

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DAVY JONES, A SINGER IN THE MONKEES

via Reuters

The Monkees in their heyday: from left, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, Davy Jones. Not pictured, to the far right, is Micky Dolenz. Mr. Jones died on Wednesday at age 66.

By

Published: February 29, 2012

Davy Jones, by long-held public consensus the handsomest and most popular of the Monkees, the collectively young, longhaired, wildly famous and preternaturally buoyant pop group of the 1960s and afterward, died on Wednesday in Indiantown, Fla. He was 66.

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Mike Gray/European Pressphoto Agency

Davy Jones of the Monkees performed live at the Manchester Apollo last May.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, his publicist, Helen Kensick, said.

Created in 1966, the Monkees comprised Mr. Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The group sold millions of records. Its recording of “Daydream Believer,” by John Stewart, became a No. 1 single, as did its recording of “Last Train to Clarksville,” by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, and its cover of Neil Diamond’s “I’m a Believer.”

Though the Monkees officially lasted only until the early ’70s, they reconvened sporadically for decades. For much of that time Mr. Jones also toured as a solo singer-songwriter; among his last performances was one on Feb. 18 at B. B. King Blues Club & Grill in Manhattan.

For all the Monkees’ chart-topping acclaim, the group never pretended to be anything other than what it was: a smoke-and-mirrors incarnation of a pop group reminiscent of that mop-topped one from Liverpool, created for a benignly psychedelic American TV sitcom.

Broadcast on NBC, “The Monkees” lasted just two seasons, from September 1966 to March 1968, and featured Messrs. Jones, Dolenz, Nesmith and Tork as members of a freewheeling, fun-loving, beach-house-dwelling, up-and-coming pop group. The show won two Emmys in 1967: for outstanding comedy series and, to the director James Frawley, for outstanding directorial achievement in comedy.

To this day, its theme song is hard-wired into the baby-boomer brain:

Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees,

and people say we monkey around.

But we’re too busy singing

to put anybody down.

While the four did much of their own singing, they were relatively unbusy playing. Though each played an instrument — growing more proficient with time — most of the instrumentals on their albums were supplied by studio musicians. (On one album, “Headquarters,” released in 1967, the Monkees played their instruments themselves.)

The group’s critical reception was not unsurpassed. In 1967, in an article about one of the Monkees’ relatively rare live concerts of the period, at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, The New York Times said:

“Frequently during the performance, sound that resembled the lowing of a sick cow hovered over the stadium. This turned out to be one of those horns often heard at Shea Stadium during baseball games. It didn’t seem to hurt the musical evening.”

But the critics could not dim the profuse enthusiasm of fans, who were overwhelmingly young, female and shrieking — tweeners before the word was applied to that demographic.

This adulation (and in later years nostalgia) kept the Monkees going, in various incarnations, on and off for decades. Last year three-quarters of the group, absent Mr. Nesmith, briefly toured Britain and the United States before cutting the tour short because of unspecified internal dissension.

The group’s frontman and the only actual Englishman of the four, Mr. Jones was inclined to elicit the loudest shrieks of all. An index of his appeal was his guest appearance on a memorable episode of “The Brady Bunch” from 1971 entitled “Getting Davy Jones.” In it, Mr. Jones, playing himself, saves Marcia, the family’s eldest daughter, from social ruin by attending her prom.

Television and the stage were actually Mr. Jones’s original vocations.

David Thomas Jones was born on Dec. 30, 1945, in Manchester, England. A child actor, he appeared on “Coronation Street,” the British soap opera that went on the air in 1960 and is still running, and in the police drama “Z Cars.” After his mother’s death when he was a teenager, he abandoned acting. Slight of build — he stood not much more than 5 feet tall in his prime — he began to train as a jockey.

Lured back into the theater a few years later, he played the Artful Dodger in the West End musical “Oliver!” When the production moved to Broadway in 1963, he reprised the role (billed as David Jones), earning a Tony nomination as best featured actor in a musical.

Appearing with the cast of “Oliver!” on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Jones had a transformative moment. After the cast sang, he heard wild cheering. But alas it was not for them: it was for the Beatles, also booked on the show that day.

“I thought: Is that what happens when you’re a pop singer?” Mr. Jones told The Palm Beach Post in 2004. “I want to be part of that!”

His work on Broadway led to guest roles on a few mid-’60s television shows, including “Ben Casey” and “The Farmer’s Daughter.” He was signed to a contract with Columbia Pictures/Screen Gems Television, which produced “The Monkees.”

Mr. Jones, who had homes in Hollywood, Fla., and Beavertown, Pa., spent his later years touring; acting occasionally on television shows like “My Two Dads” and “Boy Meets World”; raising horses; and recording, including the well-received solo album “Just Me” (2001), which featured his original songs.

Whatever Monkeedom still attached to him (and it was considerable) did not dismay him.

“People ask me if I ever get sick of playing ‘Daydream Believer’ or whatever,” he told The Chicago Daily Herald, a suburban newspaper, in 2006. “But I don’t look at it that way. Do they ask if Tony Bennett is tired of ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’?”

Mr. Jones’s first marriage, to Linda Haines, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Anita Pollinger. His survivors include his third wife, Jessica Pacheco; two daughters from his first marriage, Talia Jones and Sarah McFadden; two daughters from his second marriage, Jessica Cramar and Annabel Jones; three sisters, Hazel Wilkinson, Lynda Moore and Beryl Leigh; and three grandchildren.

The other three members of the Monkees also survive.

Perhaps Mr. Jones’s most enduring legacy takes the form of a name. The name belongs to another English musician, who burst on the scene some years after the Monkees. This man, too, had been born David Jones. But thanks to the Monkees’ renown, he knew he would have to adopt another name entirely if he was to have the hope of a career.

So he called himself David Bowie.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

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