JIM KELLY, STAR OF MARTIAL ARTS MOVIES
Published: July 1, 2013
- Jim Kelly, who added an Afro, street swagger and a few memorable one-liners to martial arts movies in the 1970s, most notably in a prominent role alongside Bruce Lee in “Enter the Dragon,” died on Saturday in San Diego. He was 67.
Warner Brothers, via Everett Collection
Jim Kelly in “Black Belt Jones” (1974). He was also prominent in blaxploitation.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, via Associated Press
Mr. Kelly in 1973 in a scene from “Enter the Dragon.”
The cause was cancer, said his former wife, Marilyn Dishman.
In a genre dominated by Asian faces and settings, Mr. Kelly’s roles often emphasized what was most obviously distinctive about him: he was a handsome and chiseled black man who knew karate at a time when most prominent black fighters were boxers. He wore his hair in a meticulous mushroom Afro, flashed more curls on his taut chest and dispensed stilted bravado in between blows.
In “Enter the Dragon,” when the evil Mr. Han warns him that he will eventually be defeated in a fight, Mr. Kelly’s character, known as Mr. Williams, flashes a smile and responds that defeat will not faze him because he will “be too busy looking good.”
Decades later, when he joined other cult stars at autograph shows, fans would ask him to repeat his best-known lines, some of which are not printable in a family newspaper.
“Enter the Dragon” was a box-office success and made Mr. Kelly a new star in two rising genres: martial arts and blaxploitation, both of which emphasized violent action. Critics were not always impressed. In a brief review of “Black Belt Jones,” in 1974, A. H. Weiler of The New York Times wrote that “the succession of clashes and explicit street language tend to become repetitious and as unwittingly comic as the cast’s largely mechanical performances.”
Mr. Kelly made several other movies through the early 1980s, including “Three the Hard Way,” in which he co-starred with Jim Brown and Fred Williamson, and “Black Samurai.”
James Milton Kelly was born in Millersburg, Ky., on May 5, 1946. He spent part of his youth in San Diego but graduated from Bourbon County High School in Kentucky, where he starred in several sports, including track and football. He briefly attended the University of Louisville.
Mr. Kelly and Ms. Dishman divorced in 1968. Mr. Kelly’s survivors include a daughter from that marriage, Sabrena Kelly-Lewis. Complete information on survivors was unavailable.
In a 2010 interview with Salon, Mr. Kelly said he began studying martial arts in 1964, learning the Okinawan Shorin-Ryu style of karate from Parker Shelton in Lexington, Ky. He later studied in Chicago before receiving his black belt in Southern California. In 1971, he won the middleweight division title at the Long Beach International Karate Championships.
Two years later, after receiving one small film role playing a martial arts instructor, Mr. Kelly appeared in “Enter the Dragon” after being cast at the last minute when another actor dropped out.
“I broke down the color barrier,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2010. “I was the first black martial artist to become a movie star.”
Those eyes.
That body.
That ‘fro.
Jim Kelly could always be counted on to give a memorable performance in his movies.
The first time I became acquainted with Mr. Kelly was in the movie Enter the Dragon, which also starred the incomparable Bruce Lee and John Saxon.
His scenes with the evil Mr. Han (“Been practicing, Mr. Hand Man!”; “Man, you’re right out of a comic book.”) were awesome and his intensity he brought to his roles was great. When Jim Kelly was in a movie, you knew you were in for a treat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeoUSI9Y9cU
or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8djo3gz06M
and this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRjOB4qy4zo
His being cast at the last minute in Dragon may have been serendipity, but for those of us, his many fans, it was a wonderful blessing.
He will be missed.
Rest in peace, Mr. Kelly.
Rest in peace.
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TED HOOD, CHAMPION OF AMERICA’S CUP AND INNOVATOR IN YACHTING
Ted Hood, left, with Don McNamara on Nefertiti, which Hood designed and captained during the 1962 America’s Cup defender trials.
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: July 4, 2013
- Ted Hood, a yachtsman, sailmaker, rigging builder and boat designer, not to mention a helmsman who captained Courageous, the 1974 America’s Cup winner, died on June 28 in Middletown, R.I. He was 86.
Associated Press
Bill Ficker, far left, captain of Intrepid, winner of the America’s Cup in 1970, checking sails with Hood, second from left, off the coast of Newport, R.I.
The death was confirmed by his son Richard, who said his father had contracted pneumonia and had had heart problems.
A lifelong sailor, Hood was 7 years old when he jerry-built his first sailboat, fitting a mast and centerboard into a flat-bottom rowboat. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he began repairing sails to help pay for college, using his grandmother’s sewing machine in a bedroom of the family home in Marblehead, Mass. After discovering that sails, then largely made of cotton canvas, were often badly sewn or sloppily cut, he took them apart and remade them into stauncher products that improved the performance of boats.
During the postwar years, cotton sails, which were prone to stretching and disintegrating, began to give way to Dacron, a new synthetic fabric. Hood and his father, Ralph Stedman Hood, an engineer and chemist, experimented with various chemical treatments of the new material and came up with a process for making their own sailcloth, which had a tighter weave and held its shape better than many commercial cloths.
By the 1970s their company, Hood Sailmakers, was serving sailors worldwide. Its sails were used by every America’s Cup winner from 1958 to 1977.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Hood, who also made spars and designed innovative rigging, built a series of racing yachts, which he skippered to myriad victories in top-flight competition. In a six-race series sponsored by the Southern Ocean Racing Conference in 1974, his 37-foot sloop, the Robin Too II (a successor to Robin and Robin Too), triumphed over Ted Turner’s Lightnin’, which finished second, and 109 others. The same year, as skipper of the Courageous, he successfully defended the America’s Cup, shutting out a boat from Australia, Southern Cross, in four consecutive races.
Something of a legend among yachtsmen for his physical strength as well as his knowledge of yacht hardware and sailing technique, Hood was often sought by his competitors for advice and aid. During the 1962 America’s Cup defender trials, Hood, who was captain of a boat he designed, Nefertiti, helped a rival captain, Bus Mosbacher, make adjustments in his sails. Mosbacher’s boat, Weatherly, won the competition between them and went on to successfully defend the cup against the Australians.
“Oh, I wanted to win, but against the best possible boat,” Hood said afterward. “And I’d rather have lost to Bus than to the Aussies.”
Frederick Emmart Hood was born in Beverly, Mass., on May 5, 1927, and grew up in nearby Danvers and Marblehead, where he graduated from Marblehead High School. Except for a brief period after the war when he attended Wentworth Institute in Boston intending to become a builder and contractor, his focus was on sailing.
“Ted was born in May, so he was about a month old before the yachting season began and we got him into a boat,” his father told The New Yorker in 1967. “I think he missed that month — he’s been trying to make up for it ever since.”
Hood married Susan Blake in 1955. She had never sailed before they met at a yacht club dance, but she later crewed for him. She survives him, as do their daughter, Nancy Hood MacLeod; three sons, Richard, Frederick (known, as his father was, as Ted) and Robert; and eight grandchildren.
In the 1980s, Hood sold his sailmaking business to concentrate on boat design and building and moved to Portsmouth, R.I., where he began building power boats and created a line of water-jet-powered yachts. His later projects included a line of power catamarans. He continued to live in Portsmouth until his death.
Mosbacher, who captained not only Weatherly in 1962 but also another America’s Cup winner, Intrepid, in 1967, told The New Yorker: “You can’t imagine how comforting it is to have Teddy on a boat with you. You know that a whole area of important things has an expert eye looking at it. He’s at the heart of things — checking halyard tensions, setting sheet leads in the right place, adjusting leech lines to improve the flow of the sail.
“Most people are pretty happy when they’ve got things adjusted and going a little better for them than the other guy. Ted isn’t. I think he’s got somewhere in his head a perfect suit of sails on a perfect rig on a perfect hull, and every time he sets foot on a boat he tries to get a little closer to them.”
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WILLIAM H. GRAY III, PASTOR AND LAWMAKER
Published: July 2, 2013
- William H. Gray III, a third-generation Baptist minister from Philadelphia who won a seat in Congress in 1978 and rose to become the highest-ranking black lawmaker in the country, died on Monday in London. He was 71.
Agence France-Presse
William H. Gray III in 1994 with President Bill Clinton.
He died while attending the Wimbledon tennis tournament with his son Andrew, said William Epstein, who was Mr. Gray’s communications director in Congress. Mr. Epstein said that Mr. Gray had not been ill and that the cause was not immediately clear.
Mr. Gray, who served in the House from 1979 to 1991, was a persistent voice for equal rights, education and services for the poor, in the United States and abroad. He pressed for more economic aid for Africa and was a leading critic of South African apartheid, helping shape United States policy, including sanctions, against that country. He led the House Budget Committee in the 1980s, and his fellow Democrats selected him as majority whip in 1989, the third-ranking House leadership position.
Two years later, Mr. Gray surprised many people when he resigned to become president and chief executive of the United Negro College Fund. He went on to lead the nonprofit group to record fund-raising.
“Bill Gray was a trailblazer,” President Obama said in a statement, “the first African-American to chair the Budget Committee and to serve as the majority whip.”
Six years before he was elected to Congress, Mr. Gray became pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philadelphia, and he would serve as pastor for 35 years. He succeeded his father, William H. Gray Jr., who preached there for 22 years, and his grandfather, William H. Gray Sr., who served from 1925 until his death in 1949. While in Congress, he would return to Philadelphia on weekends to preach.
Mr. Gray had not held elected office when he first ran for a House seat, in 1976, challenging the longtime incumbent, Robert N. C. Nix Sr., in the Democratic primary. Mr. Gray, who had once worked in Mr. Nix’s office, lost by fewer than 400 votes. Two years later, after accusing Mr. Nix of losing touch with his district, he won easily.
Mr. Gray was frustrated in his first years in Congress, giving up his seat on the Budget Committee in 1981 after complaining that Democrats were more interested in making deals with Republicans than in spending money on social services.
“It was clear that the Democratic leadership felt they did not want or need the liberal vote,” he said in an interview with Newsday in 1985.
But Mr. Gray returned to the committee in 1983 and eventually became known as a skilled negotiator and consensus-builder. When he became budget chairman, in 1985, some lawmakers asked whether a black representative from a district that was 80 percent black could see beyond the needs of his constituents.
“I face what all blacks go through,” Mr. Gray said in The New York Times in 1985. “People see your skin before they see anything else, and sometimes that’s all they see. But you’ve got to keep on truckin’ and hope you have the chance to demonstrate excellence.”
He added, “If I do an effective job as chairman, I will break down a barrier and demonstrate that race is not an obstacle to heading a major financial committee or winning a leadership post.”
William Herbert Gray III was born in Baton Rouge, La., on Aug. 20, 1941. He spent part of his childhood in Florida, where his father was president of Florida Normal and Industrial College, in St. Augustine, and later Florida A&M College, now university, in Tallahassee. The congressman received his bachelor’s degree from Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pa., and divinity degrees from Drew Theological Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary. He worked as a minister at Union Baptist Church in Montclair, N.J., for much of the 1960s while teaching at several colleges.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed Mr. Gray as a special adviser on Haiti.
In addition to his son Andrew, survivors include his wife, the former Andrea Dash; two more sons, William IV and Justin; his mother, Hazel; and several grandchildren.
Late in his Congressional career, some news reports raised questions about Mr. Gray’s financial arrangements, including those with his church, but the F.B.I. said the congressman was not the target of an investigation and he was never charged. Some critics speculated that the questions prompted his resignation, or that Mr. Gray wanted to make more money to pay for the education of his growing sons.
“If I wanted money, I would not have become a preacher; I wanted mission,” Mr. Gray said in his first sermon after announcing his resignation, in June 1991. “If I wanted money, I would not have become an educator; I wanted mission. If I wanted money, I would not have gone into public service; I wanted mission. I have never been motivated by money. The reason I am changing careers to be head of the United Negro College Fund is because of its mission.”
According to the fund’s Web site, Mr. Gray raised more than $2.3 billion while he led the fund, from 1991 to 2004.
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DOUGLAS C. ENGELBART, VISIONARY WHO INVENTED THE COMPUTER MOUSE
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: July 3, 2013
- Douglas C. Engelbart was 25, just engaged to be married and thinking about his future when he had an epiphany in 1950 that would change the world.
SRI International
Douglas C. Engelbart with an early computer mouse in 1968, the year it was unveiled.
The “Mother of All Demos”
Bits Blog
Clips of Douglas C. Englebart’s 1968 demonstration of a networked computing system, which included a mouse, text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing. Read more…
Related
Two Men, Two Visions of One Computer World, Indivisible (Dec. 8, 1991)
Engelbart Forms a Foundation (Sept. 5, 1988)
From the Magazine
-
Innovation: Who Made That Mouse?(June 16, 2013)
He had a good job working at a government aerospace laboratory in California, but he wanted to do something more with his life, something of value that might last, even outlive him. Then it came to him. In a single stroke he had what might be safely called a complete vision of the information age.
The epiphany spoke to him of technology’s potential to expand human intelligence, and from it he spun out a career that indeed had lasting impact. It led to a host of inventions that became the basis for the Internet and the modern personal computer.
In later years, one of those inventions was given a warmhearted name, evoking a small, furry creature given to scurrying across flat surfaces: the computer mouse.
Dr. Engelbart died on Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton, Calif. His wife, Karen O’Leary Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure.
Computing was in its infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Someone would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers. Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in science fiction. But it was germinating in Dr. Engelbart’s restless mind.
In his epiphany, he saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols — an image most likely derived from his work on radar consoles while in the Navy after World War II. The screen, he thought, would serve as a display for a workstation that would organize all the information and communications for a given project.
It was his great insight that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power. He called the approach “bootstrapping” and believed it would raise what he called their “collective I.Q.”
A decade later, during the Vietnam War, he established an experimental research group at Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI and then SRI International). The unit, the Augmentation Research Center, known as ARC, had the financial backing of the Air Force, NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Department. Even so, in the main, computing industry professionals regarded Dr. Engelbart as a quixotic outsider.
In December 1968, however, he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, one of a series of national conferences in the computer field that had been held since the early 1950s. Dr. Engelbart was developing a raft of revolutionary interactive computer technologies and chose the conference as the proper moment to unveil them.
For the event, he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display onto a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour, he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.
In contrast to the mainframes then in use, a computerized system Dr. Engelbart created, called the oNLine System, or NLS, allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic library.
The conference attendees were awe-struck. In one presentation, Dr. Engelbart demonstrated the power and the potential of the computer in the information age. The technology would eventually be refined at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Apple and Microsoft would transform it for commercial use in the 1980s and change the course of modern life.
Years later, people in Silicon Valley still referred to the presentation as “the mother of all demos.” It took until the late 1980s for the mouse to become the standard way to control a desktop computer.
U.S. Patent Office
Patent design from Dr. Engelbart for the first computer mouse.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press
By the late 1980s, the modern mouse became the standard way to control a PC.
Douglas Carl Engelbart was born in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 25, 1925, to Carl and Gladys Engelbart. He spent his formative years on a farm in suburban Portland, graduated from high school in 1942 and attended Oregon State College. Toward the end of World War II, he was drafted. He spent two years in the Navy, one of them in the Philippines, as a radar technician.
One day he was in a reading library on a small island when an article titled “As We May Think” caught his eye. The article, by Vannevar Bush, a physicist and inventor who oversaw the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, described a universal information retrieval system called Memex. The idea stuck with Dr. Engelbart, and he made it his life’s work.
After returning to Oregon State and graduating, he was hired to work at Ames Research Center, a government aerospace laboratory in California run by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, NASA’s forerunner. While there, working as an electronics technician, he saw how aerospace engineers started with small models of their designs and then scaled them up to full-size airplanes.
The idea of scaling remained with him. After getting his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and starting work at SRI, he wrote a seminal paper on the importance of scaling in microelectronics. He presented it in 1960, a year after the invention of the planar transistor, which had improved the electrical output of transistors and made them cheaper to manufacture and available to a mass market.
Dr. Engelbart grew convinced that computers would quickly become more powerful and that there would be enough processing power to design the Memex-like Augment system that he envisioned. He was proved right.
The idea for the mouse — a pointing device that would roll on a desk — occurred to Dr. Engelbart in 1964 while he was attending a computer graphics conference. He was musing about how to move a cursor on a computer display.
When he returned to work, he gave a copy of a sketch to William English, a collaborator and mechanical engineer at SRI, who, with the aid of a draftsman, fashioned a pine case to hold the mechanical contents.
Early versions of the mouse had three buttons, because that was all the case could accommodate, even though Dr. Engelbart felt that as many as 10 buttons would be more useful. Two decades later, when Steve Jobs added the mouse to his Macintosh computer, he decided that a single button was appropriate. The Macintosh designers believed in radical simplicity, and Mr. Jobs argued that with a single button it was impossible to push the wrong one.
(When and under what circumstances the term “the mouse” arose is hard to pin down, but one hardware designer, Roger Bates, has contended that it happened under Mr. English’s watch. Mr. Bates was a college sophomore and Mr. English was his mentor at the time. Mr. Bates said the name was a logical extension of the term then used for the cursor on a screen: CAT. Mr. Bates did not remember what CAT stood for, but it seemed to all that the cursor was chasing their tailed desktop device.)
The importance of Dr. Engelbart’s networking ideas was underscored in 1969, when his Augment NLS system became the application for which the forerunner of today’s Internet was created. The system was called the ARPAnet computer network, and SRI became the home of its operation center and one of its first two nodes, or connection points. (The other node was at the University of California, Los Angeles. Two others followed, at the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara.).
Dr. Engelbart saw his ARC group grow rapidly after 1969. At the height of the Vietnam War, it swelled to more than 50 researchers — a significant number of them young men who had taken to computing in part to avoid the military draft.
The group disbanded in the 1970s, and SRI sold the NLS system in 1977 to a company called Tymshare. Dr. Engelbart worked there in relative obscurity for more than a decade until his contributions became more widely recognized by the computer industry. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-M.I.T. Prize and the Turing Award.
His first wife, the former Ballard Fish, died in 1997. Besides his wife, his survivors include his daughters, Gerda and Christina Engelbart and Diana Mangan; a son, Norman; and nine grandchildren.
Dr. Engelbart was one of the first to realize the accelerating power of computers and the impact they would have on society. In a presentation at a conference in Philadelphia in February 1960, he described the industrial process of continually shrinking the size of computer circuits that would later be referred to as “Moore’s Law,” after the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.
Speaking of the future, he said, “Boy, are there going to be some surprises over there.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 3, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the original name of the research group SRI International. It was Stanford Research Institute, not Stanford Research International. It also misidentified one of Mr. Engelbart’s inventions. What he called “the bug” is now known as the cursor, not the mouse.
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 
Such a beautiful tribute to Jim Kelly.
Thank you.