IN REMEMBRANCE: 1-4-2015

DONNA DOUGLAS, THE FAIREST ‘BEVERLY HILLBILLY’

By DAVID STOUT

JAN. 2, 2015

From left: Donna Douglas, Buddy Ebsen, Irene Ryan and Max Baer Jr., in 1963 on the popular show “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Credit CBS

• Donna Douglas, who played the shapely, blue-eyed daughter of the suddenly wealthy mountaineer Jed Clampett on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” the wildly popular television sitcom of a half-century ago, died on Thursday in Baton Rouge, La.

Ms. Douglas, who lived in the Baton Rouge suburb of Zachary, had pancreatic cancer and died in a hospital, her niece Charlene Smith said. Though other sources listed her as 81, Ms. Smith said her aunt was 82.

Ms. Douglas appeared in various movie and television roles before and after “The Beverly Hillbillies,” which ran on CBS for nine seasons. But she was destined to be forever remembered as Elly May Clampett, the lovely ingénue of the Ozarks.

She was chosen for the part from among hundreds of actresses, and in her view it was her small-town Southern upbringing that had made her a natural for the part. During her audition, she was asked to milk a goat.

“I had milked cows before,” she told The Associated Press in 2009. “I figured they were equipped the same, so I just went on over and did it.”

“The Beverly Hillbillies” burst upon the scene on the evening of Sept. 26, 1962. “In tonight’s fun-filled premiere, Buddy Ebsen stars as the head of a proud hillbilly clan that discovers an oil well at home that leads to a new home in Hollywood!” a CBS print advertisement proclaimed. Other cast members included Irene Ryan as the flinty matriarch Granny and Max Baer Jr., as the bumpkin cousin Jethro Bodine.

At its height, in the ’60s, “The Beverly Hillbillies” was a family favorite watched by millions. But by the end of a decade marked by assassinations, urban riots and the Vietnam War, American tastes were moving away from such innocent, cornpone fare, and the series ended in 1971. An effort to revive it in the fall of 1981, through a two-hour movie pilot titled “The Return of the Beverly Hillbillies,” fell flat.

But the show’s fans, many of them children who grew up watching it, remained fond of the series (it was later broadcast in reruns), and long afterward Ms. Douglas would make occasional public appearances in an Elly May costume. She also recorded gospel songs in her later years.

She was born Doris Smith in Pride, La., in September 1932, and graduated from Redemptorist High School in Baton Rouge. She was crowned Miss New Orleans and Miss Baton Rouge in beauty contests.

Her marriages to Roland Bourgeois and Robert M. Leeds ended in divorce. She is survived by a son, Danny Bourgeois; a brother, Emmett R. Smith Jr.; two granddaughters; a grandson and two great-grandchildren.

Ms. Douglas in 2003. Credit Vince Bucci/Getty Images

Ms. Douglas also made a brief but memorable appearance in a classic episode of Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” in 1960. Titled “Eye of the Beholder,” the episode, which takes place in a nightmarish world, is a parable about relative standards of beauty. Ms. Douglas plays a woman whose head is wrapped in bandages after plastic surgery is performed to correct her ugliness; when the bandages are removed, she is revealed to be beautiful, while the doctors and nurses tending her are — by this world’s standards, not theirs — grotesque.

Ms. Douglas also had roles in “Lover Come Back,” a 1961 movie starring Rock Hudson, and “Frankie and Johnny,” a 1966 film in which she and Elvis Presley play riverboat performers.

But she would be forever known as Elly May, even to reporters and headline writers. In 2011, when Ms. Douglas sued Mattel, the manufacturer of the Barbie doll, alleging that the dollmakers had used her likeness without her permission, The New York Times ran an article under the headline, “Feudin’ and Fussin’ Over a ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ Barbie Doll.”

“Y’all get a good intellectual property lawyer now, you hear?” the article began. (The suit was eventually settled. )

Ms. Douglas never resented being typecast.

“So many kinds of people relate to Elly May,” she said in the A.P. interview. “So many people love her, and that means a lot to me.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

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EDWARD W. BROOKE III, SENATE PIONEER

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

JAN. 3, 2015

Edward W. Brooke III when he was elected to the Senate in 1966. Credit Frank C. Curtin/Associated Press

• Edward W. Brooke III, who in 1966 became the first African-American elected to the United States Senate by popular vote, winning as a Republican in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts, died on Saturday at his home in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 95.

Ralph Neas, a family spokesman, confirmed the death.

Mr. Brooke won his Senate seat by nearly a half-million votes in 1966 and was re-elected in 1972.

A skilled coalition builder at a time when Congress was less ideologically divided than it is today, Mr. Brooke shunned labels, but he was seen as a centrist. His positions and votes were consistently more liberal than those of his increasingly conservative Republican colleagues.

He opposed the expansion of nuclear arsenals, pushed for improved relations with China and championed civil rights, the legalization of abortion and fair housing policies. He urged Republicans to match the Democrats in coming up with programs to aid cities and the poor.

“Where are our plans for a New Deal or a Great Society?” he asked in a 1966 book, “The Challenge of Change: Crisis in Our Two-Party System.”

Edward W. Brooke III. Credit Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images

He was a thorn in the side of his party’s leader, President Richard M. Nixon. He successfully led the fight against two Nixon Supreme Court nominees whose positions on civil rights were called into question. When Nixon became entangled in the Watergate scandal, Mr. Brooke called for the appointment of a special prosecutor. He was the first Republican senator to demand Nixon’s resignation.

“His presence in the Senate in those years was absolutely indispensable,” said Mr. Neas, who was chief legislative assistant to Mr. Brooke and later president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way. “There were repeated battles during those years. Even some Democrats were retreating on the Senate floor on issues like school desegregation and abortion rights, and Senator Brooke was the one who often single-handedly took on the radical right.”

Still, he disappointed liberals by opposing a program to recruit teachers to work in disadvantaged areas. He sought to deny federal aid to New York City during its financial crisis and resisted changing Senate rules to make filibusters against civil rights legislation easier to stop.

On the issue of the Vietnam War, Mr. Brooke, a decorated combat veteran, was torn, moving from dove to hawk, then back to dove. He was a forceful speaker, often described as gentlemanly and charming, and meticulous about his appearance, sometimes changing clothes three times a day.

His political career began collapsing in 1978. What Mr. Brooke thought would be an amicable divorce from his first wife, the former Remigia Ferrari-Scacco, turned bitter and was played out in the news media, resulting in an admission by Mr. Brooke that he had made a false statement under oath in a deposition.

He lost his bid for a third term to Representative Paul E. Tsongas, a Democrat, who received 55 percent of the vote. Mr. Brooke described the experience as “the lowest point in my life.”

Cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee four months later, he was nevertheless devastated. “Why did it happen?” he said in an interview with The Boston Globe in 2000. “I don’t know. I’ve asked my God that many times. ‘Why, why, why, dear God?’ ”

Mr. Brooke was twice elected attorney general of Massachusetts, the first African-American to be elected attorney general of any state. When President John F. Kennedy heard the news in 1962, on the same day that his brother Edward was elected to the United States Senate, he said, “That’s the biggest news in the country.”

In 1964, as President Lyndon B. Johnson led a Democratic landslide, Mr. Brooke was re-elected attorney general by more votes than any other Republican in the nation. In 1968, he was at the top of many lists of possible Republican vice-presidential candidates. By his own and others’ accounts, he turned down cabinet posts and a seat on the Supreme Court.

The only previous black senators, Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram R. Revels, both Republicans, were elected not by voters but by the Mississippi Legislature in the 1870s.

Mr. Brooke never presented himself as a black politician and grew tired of being called “first this, first that,” he said. He represented all the people of Massachusetts, he said, and wanted no part of being “a national leader for the Negro people.”

In a statement Saturday, Kirsten Hughes, the spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Republican Party, said, “The Massachusetts Republican Party is proud to have had Senator Brooke as one of our party’s leaders, and we extend our deepest condolences to his family.”

Edward William Brooke III was born on Oct. 26, 1919, in Washington. He was the third child and only son of the former Helen Seldon and Edward W. Brooke II, a lawyer for the Veterans Administration and a Republican, as most blacks were then.

He grew up in “a cocoon,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Bridging the Divide: My Life” (2007). He had a stable home, firm religious guidance — he was an Episcopal altar boy — and a good education, attending Dunbar High School, a prestigious black school in Washington.

Surrounded by middle-class blacks, he wrote, he rarely encountered direct racial discrimination, although when the Washington opera was closed to blacks his mother took him to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Mr. Brooke earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Howard University in 1941. A reservist during college, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant after Pearl Harbor in 1941 and joined the all-black 366th Combat Infantry Regiment.

The regiment was assigned to guard duty in Italy; combat was reserved for whites. “An insult to our dignity,” Mr. Brooke wrote. Put in charge of special events, he brought opera and the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis to his troops.

After black troops were allowed to serve in combat, Mr. Brooke became a scout assigned to go behind enemy lines to aid Italian partisans. He rose to captain and received the Bronze Star and the Combat Infantryman Badge. But the sting of segregation in the armed forces left him eager to leave the Army. “In some respects,” he said in an interview, “the German prisoners of war fared better than Negro soldiers.”

President Obama with Mr. Brooke when he received a Congressional Gold Medal in 2009. Credit Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

After his discharge, Mr. Brooke enrolled at Boston University School of Law, where he became an editor of the Law Review. He also corresponded with Ms. Ferrari-Scacco, an Italian woman he had met during the war, and she came to Boston. They married in 1947.

A year after Mr. Brooke began practicing law in the predominantly black Roxbury section of Boston, he returned to Boston University to earn a master’s degree in law.

In 1950, persuaded by friends, he ran for state representative in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, as was legal then. He won the Republican nomination but was buried in a Democratic landslide in the general election. He ran and lost again in 1952.

In 1960, Mr. Brooke won the Republican nomination for Massachusetts secretary of state, becoming the first black to be nominated for statewide office in Massachusetts. He was defeated by the Democrat, Kevin H. White, whose campaign issued a bumper sticker saying, “Vote White.”

The new governor, John Volpe, a Republican, appointed Mr. Brooke chairman of the Boston Finance Commission. He turned what had been an ineffectual post into a crusading one, uncovering a scandal involving the illegal disposal of public land.

Two years later, in 1962, Mr. Brooke won the Republican nomination for attorney general by a razor-thin margin over Elliot L. Richardson, a future attorney general of the United States. In the general election, the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Francis E. Kelly, hired blacks to drive through white suburbs yelling that they planned to move in as soon as Mr. Brooke won.

Mr. Brooke was the only statewide Republican winner.

In 1963, Mr. Brooke fought civil rights groups that were calling on students to boycott school to protest segregation in Boston. He said it was his job to enforce state laws, which required children to go to school.

In 1964, Mr. Brooke refused to support the Republican presidential nominee, Barry M. Goldwater, or to be photographed with him. Mr. Brooke said he was serving not just his conscience but also the best interests of the party, which he believed should be more liberal.

Massachusetts voters were hardly put off by his liberal views: In 1966, he handily defeated his Democratic opponent in the Senate race, former Gov. Endicott Peabody.

On the opening day of Congress in 1967, Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts’ senior senator, escorted Mr. Brooke down the Senate’s center aisle to a standing ovation. When Mr. Brooke got his first haircut on Capitol Hill, he integrated the Senate barbershop.

After losing to Mr. Tsongas, Mr. Brooke resumed private law practice in Washington and became chairman emeritus of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In 1988, he was investigated for using his influence to win a client millions of dollars in federal subsidies for rehabilitation of low-income housing. An aide pleaded guilty to charges in the case, but Mr. Brooke was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing.

Mr. Brooke was divorced from his first wife, Remigia, in 1979. She died in 1994.

He is survived by their daughters, Remi Cynthia Brooke Goldstone and Edwina Helene Brooke Petit, and four grandchildren. Mr. Brooke married Anne Fleming in 1979, and she survives him, as does their son, Edward.

In May 2008, the television newswoman Barbara Walters revealed in a memoir that she and Mr. Brooke had begun a clandestine romance in 1973. After telling him in a letter that she would divulge the affair in her book, he wrote back “a very nice note,” Ms. Walters said.

In 2004, Mr. Brooke was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, whose administration he frequently criticized over the war in Iraq, the antiterrorism legislation called the USA Patriot Act, and its opposition to same-sex marriage.

In September 2002, Mr. Brooke learned that he had breast cancer. He was one of about 1,500 American men to receive that diagnosis every year. After a double mastectomy, he was declared cancer free. He then spoke out to warn men — particularly black men, who are statistically more susceptible — about the danger of breast cancer.

Although Mr. Brooke had sought to de-emphasize his race, he remained concerned about racial progress.

“My fervent expectation,” he wrote in his autobiography, “is that sooner rather than later, the United States Senate will more closely reflect the rich diversity of this great country.”

Correction: January 4, 2015
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary erroneously attributed a distinction to Mr. Brooke. He was the first black senator to be returned to office, not the only one. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey was returned to office last year.

Lynette Clemetson, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting.

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EDWARD HERRMANN, ACTOR WITH A NOBLE AIR

By BRUCE WEBER

DEC. 31, 2014

Edward Herrmann, left, and Kevin Kline in the 2002 film “The Emperor’s Club.” Credit Demmie Todd/Universal Studios

• Edward Herrmann, a stalwart American actor of patrician bearing and earnest elocutionary style who became familiar across a spectrum of popular entertainment, from movies and television shows to plays, audiobooks and advertisements, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 71.

The cause was brain cancer, his son, Rory, said.

Well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and, especially in later years, hefty, Mr. Herrmann could be formidable or friendly, authoritative or milquetoast, insistent or obsequious. He was often cast in the role of an affluent or privileged personage; he played lawyers, judges, headmasters, executives, a lot of millionaires.

More often than most actors, he had a tuxedo — or at least a suit — as a costume, but his characters could be comic or dramatic, as likely to be stuffed shirts as genuinely commanding men.

He played Nelson Rockefeller in the 1995 Oliver Stone film “Nixon.” Early in his career his best known role was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a pair of television movies in the 1970s, “Eleanor and Franklin,” about Roosevelt’s courtship of his distant cousin (played by Jane Alexander), and “Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years.” He played President Roosevelt again in the 1982 movie version of the musical “Annie,” directed by John Huston, and he was the voice of Roosevelt in the recent Ken Burns documentary, “The Roosevelts; An Intimate History.”

Edward Herrmann with, from left, Alexis Bledel, Lauren Graham and Kelly Bishop in a scene from the sixth season of “Gilmore Girls.” Credit Scott Humbert/Warner Brothers

But he might be better known lately — especially for younger television viewers — as Richard Gilmore, the doting, upper-crust grandfather of the Connecticut Gilmores on the popular series “Gilmore Girls.” Mr. Herrmann himself lived in Salisbury, Conn.

Individual roles aside, Mr. Herrmann had a career of astonishing volume, testament to a workingman’s enthusiastic temperament and a reliable set of actorly gifts. He had an “Oh yeah, that guy” kind of ubiquity, having appeared in well over 100 movies and television shows, including recurring roles in “St. Elsewhere,” “The Practice,” “Oz,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Harry’s Law” and “The Good Wife.”

And his voice — mellifluous, clear, teacherly but never overbearing — was seemingly everywhere. He was a host or narrator for myriad documentaries on the History Channel. He narrated the public broadcasting mini-series “Liberty! The American Revolution” (1997). He was the voice of Dodge automobile commercials for most of the 1990s.

He also recorded dozens of audiobooks, including “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, Laura Hillenbrand’s best-seller “Unbroken,” David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, Walter Isaacson’s “Einstein: His Life and Universe” and Roger Ebert’s memoir “Life Itself.”

Edward Kirk Herrmann was born in Washington on July 21, 1943. His mother was the former Jean O’Connor; his father, John Anthony Herrmann, was an engineer who worked for automobile and railroad companies. He grew up in Grosse Pointe, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, and later graduated from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where he indulged an incipient Anglophilia, conceived a passion for 17th-century British playwrights and poets, and began acting. He later spent three years in Texas, at the Dallas Theater Center, which he once called a kind of “medieval guild” where everyone was responsible for every aspect of a production.

“You could make all kinds of mistakes and it wouldn’t damage you irreparably, like it would in New York,” he said.

 

Edward Herrmann and Jane Alexander in “Eleanor and Franklin,” a 1976 television movie. Credit ABC, via Photofest

Mr. Herrmann made his Broadway debut in 1972 in “Moonchildren,” a bitter comedy by Michael Weller whose cast also included James Woods, Jill Eikenberry, Kevin Conway and Christopher Guest. Set in a university town in the mid-1960s, it was described by Clive Barnes in The New York Times as “the first Broadway generation gap comedy that is seen from the young side of the gap.”

In 1976, Mr. Herrmann won a Tony award as a featured actor in George Bernard Shaw’s early work of social criticism, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” playing Frank Gardner, a young man socially entangled with the title character, a prostitute turned madam (played by Ruth Gordon), and her daughter (Lynn Redgrave).

“Edward Herrmann, though physically wrong for Frank, gives a stunning performance,” the critic John Simon wrote in The Times, “his movements a model of sardonic poise, his timing and intonations always surprising — but surprising with their idiomatic rightness.”

Mr. Herrmann appeared on Broadway a handful of other times, including in a 1980 revival of “The Philadelphia Story,” in which he played opposite Blythe Danner; and “Plenty” (1983), David Hare’s drama about disillusionment in postwar Britain seen through the lens of a withering marriage, for which he was nominated for a second Tony.

Among his better known films are “The Paper Chase” (1973), about first year Harvard law students; “The Great Gatsby” (1974), starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, in which he played Klipspringer, one of Gatsby’s eccentric, mooching guests; Warren Beatty’s “Reds” (1981), about the early 20th-century journalist and radical sympathizer John Reed, in which Mr. Herrmann played Reed’s friend and editor, Max Eastman.

He also appeared in Woody Allen’s Depression-era fantasy, “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), about a character walking off a movie screen into the real world; “Overboard” (1987), in which Mr. Herrmann played the rich husband of an heiress (Goldie Hawn) who falls off a boat and suffers a bout of amnesia; “Richie Rich” (1994), about the richest kid in the world (Macaulay Culkin), in which Mr. Herrmann played the father, Richard (of course) Rich; and “The Emperor’s Club” (2002), the story of a prep schoolteacher (Kevin Kline) and his students; Mr. Herrmann was the headmaster.

His first marriage, to Leigh Curran, ended in divorce. In addition to his son, Mr. Herrmann is survived by his wife, the former Star Lynn Hayner, whom he married in 1994; two daughters, Ryen Alaire Herrmann and Emma Madison Herrmann; a brother, John; and a granddaughter.

Besides his acting, Mr. Herrmann was an avid collector of military memorabilia and a restorer of classic automobiles.

Correction: December 31, 2014
An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the title of a television show on which Edward Herrmann had a recurring role. It was “Grey’s Anatomy,” not “Gray’s Anatomy.” It also misspelled, in several instances, Mr. Herrmann’s surname as Hermann.

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BOB HALL, HARLEM GLOBETROTTER WHO RELISHED THE SHOWMAN ROLE

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK

JAN. 1, 2015

Bob Hall was a key showman for the Harlem Globetrotters from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s. Credit Harlem Globetrotters

• Bob Hall, a key showman for the Harlem Globetrotters, basketball’s barnstorming comedy troupe, from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s, died on Dec. 24 near his home in Detroit. He was 87.

His wife, Kittie Barksdale-Hall, said the cause was complications of cancer.

Hall joined the Globetrotters in 1949, one year before Chuck Cooper, Nat Clifton and Earl Lloyd integrated the National Basketball Association. At the time, the team was one of the few on which a talented black basketball player could earn a living.

Hall started playing with Goose Tatum, who helped him become a master of “reams,” or ball-handling legerdemain. According to the Globetrotters’ website, Hall played more than 5,000 games in almost 90 countries with teammates like Connie Hawkins, Marques Haynes and Wilt Chamberlain. (Hawkins and Chamberlain went on to play in the N.B.A.)

Hall was small by Globetrotter standards, “only six-foot-two but built like a Sherman tank,” Ben Green wrote in his history of the team, “Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters.” Nicknamed Showboat, Hall took over as the on-court ringmaster when Tatum left the team in 1955.

One of Hall’s specialties was launching one-handed, no-look, behind-the-back passes with fearsome accuracy.

“He was without a doubt the best one-handed ball handler that ever came to the Globetrotters,” Meadowlark Lemon, the famed Globetrotter showman who played with Hall, said in an interview on Tuesday. “He’d say, if you were a young rookie, ‘Don’t turn your back on me, young fellow, or you’ll get hit in the head.’ ”

Despite his size, Hall was also an artful rebounder, Lemon said.

“One time some guy tried to block him out, and he ran up his back,” he said. “He was standing up on his shoulder rebounding.”

Hall mainly played on the Globetrotters’ Western team. (There were multiple touring squads for much of the organization’s history; Lemon was the Eastern team’s showman for much of Hall’s career.) But he also accompanied the team abroad.

In 1959, he joined Lemon, Chamberlain and others on a trip to the Soviet Union, where they played a series of exhibition games under K.G.B. escort and met the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. The tour was the subject of a short documentary by ESPN last April.

“He just wowed them,” Lemon said of Hall’s effect on the Soviet crowds.

Robert Alfred Hall was born in Detroit on Sept. 30, 1927. He grew up there playing ball at the Brewster Wheeler Recreation Center, Joe Louis’s old stamping ground. He dropped out of school after his mother was widowed so he could work to support their large family (he had eight siblings).

He traveled to Chicago to try out for the Globetrotters and was recruited on the spot.

Hall married Kittie Barksdale in 1969. He is also survived by two sisters, Frances Myler and Leontine Person.

Hall was a player and coach for the last few years of his career with the Globetrotters. He retired in 1974, and in 1998 the team named him a “Legend.”

Like most Globetrotters of his era, Hall had to find work, in his case with youth programs and the Michigan prison system, after he retired. In a 2011 interview with a group called Pre-1960 Original Harlem Globetrotters Organization, he said that he and his teammates had little choice but to accept whatever compensation the team offered.

“Wasn’t nothing else you could do — complain too much, they have somebody take your place,” he said. “And there wasn’t too many teams you could go to. If you leave the Globetrotters you’re going one place: home.”

Asked what he would say to a modern-era N.B.A. star like Shaquille O’Neal or LeBron James, he said, “You came along at the right time.”

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CHRISTINE CAVANAUGH, PIGLET’S VOICE IN ‘BABE’

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DEC. 31, 2014

Christine Cavanaugh arriving for the 1996 Academy Awards at the Music Center in Los Angeles. Credit Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press

• Christine Cavanaugh, a prolific voice actress whose characters included the lovable piglet Babe in the 1995 movie of the same name, died on Dec. 22 at her home in Cedar City, Utah. She was 51.

Her sister, Deionn Masock, confirmed her death, saying the cause was not known.

“Babe,” which was filmed in Australia, follows the adventures of an orphaned piglet who learns to herd sheep on a farm. It was an international hit and earned a raft of awards, including an Oscar for best visual effects.

Besides Babe, Ms. Cavanaugh lent her voice to many cartoon characters of the 1990s, including Chuckie Finster in Nickelodeon’s “Rugrats” and Dexter on the Cartoon Network’s “Dexter’s Laboratory.”

She also acted on several television shows, including “Cheers,” “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “ER,” and appeared in the Tom Cruise movie “Jerry Maguire” (1996).

Christine Josephine Sandberg was born on Aug. 16, 1963, in Layton, Utah. She attended Utah State University and the University of Hawaii, where she met Kevin Cavanaugh. Their marriage, in 1985, ended in divorce.

She retired from voice acting in 2001 and moved back to Utah to be closer to her family. Elizabeth Daily provided the voice of Babe in the 1998 sequel, “Babe: Pig in the City.”

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HATEWATCH: IN RACIALLY TROUBLED ARKANSAS CITY, BATTLE OF THE BILLBOARDS REIGNITES

In Racially Troubled Arkansas City, Battle of the Billboards Reignites

By Don Terry on December 31, 2014 – 11:05 am

This time, there is no doubt who put up the latest racially charged billboard in Harrison, Ark., a nearly all-white city in the Ozarks that is struggling for its soul.

The Ku Klux Klan did it.

In the fall of 2013, a billboard went up on the edge of Harrison, repeating in big black letters against a yellow background the white nationalist mantra “Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White.”

The sign brought national media attention to the city and its history of racial hostility to African Americans. But no one claimed responsibility for the sign. The man who owned the billboard company declined to say who paid to lease the space.

The Harrison Community Task Force on Race Relations, which has been working mightily for 12 years improve race relations and the city’s reputation, put up two signs of its own: “Love your neighbor.”

In March of 2014, another racially charged billboard was added just below the yellow sign. It featured a picture of a smiling white family and read, “Beautiful Town, Beautiful People, No Wrong Exits, No Bad Neighborhoods.”

The signs stayed up until about four weeks ago when they were replaced by billboards for the local McDonald’s and a Baptist church, saying everybody was welcome.

The Task Force celebrated, figuring – hoping – that the Harrison billboard wars were finally over, “because there are so many good things and great people in Harrison to focus on,” Task Force member Layne Ragsdale told Hatewatch Tuesday.

But on Monday, a new “pro-white” billboard went up in the city in a different spot, “an even better location than the others,” Thomas Robb, the longtime leader of the Knights Party, one of the longer-lived KKK organizations in the country, chortled on the white nationalist Web forum, Stormfront.

The new sign proclaims, “It’s NOT Racist to [HEART] Your People.”

Below those words is a website address that links to KKKRadio.

Billy Roper, a former neo-Nazi-turned-Klansman, wrote on Stormfront Monday that “the Anti-White elites were celebrating the fact that the previous two billboards were removed in town.”

“Haven’t they heard,” he added, “that you can’t keep a good Klan down?”

The Knights Party, also known as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has long been associated with Harrison, primarily because it uses a Harrison mailing address, although its headquarters is actually 15 miles outside of the city of 13,000 residents. In his Stormfront posts about the new sign, Robb said he wanted the Task Force “to celebrate and do their Hi-Fives” about the racially charged signs coming down before hitting them with the new billboard.

“We could have put the billboards up the next day,” he smirked, “but it is more fun to allow them to be puffed up and then prick their bubble.”

He added that he is looking to put up another sign on Interstate 40 in Russellville, near Arkansas Tech. “I already have the OK from the billboard company,” Robb wrote, “but we need a little of this stuff $$. Anyone want to help?”

Ragsdale of the Task Force told Hatewatch today that when she first heard about the new billboard going up she hoped it was a joke. “But it’s real,” she sighed. “They’re still trying to smear the community with their opinions. They’re trying to pretend they’re the voice of Harrison. It just gets so old. Move on, already.”

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