I intend this thread as something of a counterpart to my Strange News (http://actuary.ca/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=4472) thread.

If you see an interesting obituary, not necessarily of someone famous, and you think we should know about it, post it here.

I'll start off with this obit of philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser (http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/08/03&ID=Ar01400):

Remembering Sidney Morgenbesser

GARY SHAPIRO gshapiro@nysun.com



Friends and colleagues gathered yesterday at 201 East Broadway for the funeral of Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, who died over the weekend at age 82. The John Dewey Professor emeritus of philosophy, who began teaching at Columbia in 1954, was known for his wit, erudition, and blunt conversational style. A writer once likened him to a cross between Spinoza and Groucho Marx.

In the synagogue paying respects were philosophers Jerry Fodor and Fred Schick; the New Republic literary editor, Leon Wieseltier; Columbia philosophy professor Arthur Danto, with whom Morgenbesser edited a book called “Philosophy of Science” in 1960; Columbia philosopher Isaac Levi; and Victor Navasky, publisher of the Nation magazine, on whose editorial board Morgenbesser had served.

Morgenbesser had an early grasp of both secular and Talmudic knowledge, having earned degrees at Jewish Theological Seminary and the City University of New York before earning a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1956.

[...]

Mr. Silver recalled how he and Morgenbesser “were first drawn together in the crisis of the ’60s.”

During those troubled times on campus, Morgenbesser intervened between the protesters and the police and got “a good hit on the head.” Later asked, when questioned for jury duty, whether the police had ever treated him unjustly or unfairly. “Unfairly yes, unjustly no,” Morgenbesser replied. “The police hit me unfairly, but since they hit everyone else unfairly, it was not unjust,” Mr. Silver recalled Morgenbesser’s response.

Mr. Silver compared Morgenbesser to a Jewish Falstaff: “not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit that is in others.” Mr. Silver described Morgenbesser as a rare individual who could teach others “the simple force of moral attitude.”

[...]

Mr. Shatz said he was not sure if there was a general theory to describe Morgenbesser as philosopher, teacher, friend, humorist, Jew, baseball fan, and moral champion.

He praised Morgenbesser for keeping his lower East Side accent despite teaching uptown. Morgenbesser, he said, once chastised a faculty member for hiding his Jewishness: “Oh, I see your model is ‘Incognito, ergo sum.’”

Mr. Shatz told an anecdote about how Morgenbesser once attended a lecture of philosopher Ernest Nagel and then, at a nearby institution, attended another lecture by Nagel. “What are you doing here?” asked Nagel. “That’s not the first time you asked me a question I can’t answer,” Morgenbesser responded.

Mr. Shatz rattled off a number of Morgenbesser’s witticisms: on not publishing much (“Moses published one book. What did he do after that?”); offered port or sherry while at Oxford, Morgenbesser requested Manishewitz; said pragmatism works in theory but not in practice.

Mr. Shatz said Morgenbesser once said Jewish logic went: ‘If P, so why not Q?” and described Gentile ethics as entailing “ought implies can,” while in Jewish ethics “can implies don’t.”

“Sidney stories” are legion. The Knickerbocker will list a few more: asked about Mao Tse Tung’s view of the law of non-contradiction, Morgenbesser replied, “I do and do not agree.” Asked why there is something rather than nothing, he replied,“Even if there were nothing, you’d still be complaining!” Asked to prove a questioner’s existence, Morgenbesser shot back, “Who’s asking?” He also once cracked a joke about wanting to teach a class on the philosophy of engineering called, “The Abstract and the Concrete.”

The most celebrated Morgenbesser anecdote involved visiting Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin, who noted that it was peculiar that although there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, no example existed where two positives expressed a negative. In a dismissive voice, Morgenbesser replied from the audience, “Yeah, yeah…”

Once a policeman approached Morgenbesser and told him there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser responded that he was leaving the subway and hadn’t lit up yet.When the cop said, “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it,” Morgenbesser replied, “Who do you think you are — Kant?” The cop mistook this German philosopher for a vulgar epithet, and Morgenbesser had to explain it all down at police station.

Another anecdote recalls Morgenbesser’s modesty.A student once interrupted him and said,“I just don’t understand.” “Why should you have the advantage over me?” he responded.

Morgenbesser once talked of three types of umpires: the realist who says,“I call them the way they are”; subjectivist who says, “I call them the way I see them,” and the conventionalist, who declares, “I call them and then they are.”

New York University mathematics professor Sylvain Cappell told the Knickerbocker of Morgenbesser’s explanation of why Jewish intellectuals have so much trouble writing up their ideas: “Their mothers tell them ‘Eat, eat. Talk later.’ They rebel into ‘Talk, talk, I’ll write later.’”

He served as book review editor of the Journal of Philosophy, writing articles in the area of philosophy of science and philosophy of social science. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship and his visiting professorships included stints at Princeton, Rockefeller, Brandeis and Hebrew universities.

Julia.

August 13, 2004
Julia Child, 91, Dies; She Entertained as She Taught Cooking
By REGINA SCHRAMBLING

Julia Child, who mastered the art of French cooking well enough to turn it into prime-time entertainment and who by introducing cassoulet to a casserole culture elevated both American food and television, died today at her home in Santa Barbara, Calif. She would have been 92 on Sunday.

She had been suffering from kidney failure, said a niece, Philadelphia Cousins.

As a cookbook author first and public television star second, Mrs. Child was a towering figure on the culinary front for more than 40 years. Most Americans knew her as the unflappable "French Chef," a tall and twinkly character who in demonstrating classic dishes could make lobster bisque look as easy as toast. But she was also a rarity in a profession characterized by savage backbiting: she was respected as much by her most judgmental peers as by amateurs who would not know a soufflé from a cupcake.

Mrs. Child was not the first dedicated cook to turn cooking into a spectator sport — James Beard preceded her on television in 1945, Dione Lucas in 1948 — but she was the first to understand the seductiveness of a breezy approach to daunting material. Her up-the-scales signature signoff, "bon appetit!" was the first French phrase many Americans ever learned to utter with confidence, much as they came to glorify stew as boeuf bourguignon. She admitted she was "a natural ham," and it was clear that she not only loved the camera but was almost intimate with it.

Mrs. Child, whose "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" has been through numerous editions, was a pop icon virtually from her debut on WGBH in Boston in 1963. She got her start in television at 50, an age youth-crazed producers today would consider well past her sell-by date, and made the cover of Time magazine five years later. Over the decades she was a favorite of comedians, most famously Dan Aykroyd on "Saturday Night Live," who played her boozily bleeding to death while shrieking, "Save the liver." Jean Stapleton even portrayed her in a musical with sung recipes called "Bon Appetit!" in 1989.

But Mrs. Child had more serious cultural side. She was the first public television personality to win an Emmy and also held a George Foster Peabody Award; her other accolades were as disparate as a National Book Award and the Legion d'Honneur from the French government. When she moved from her longtime home in Cambridge, Mass., to a retirement center in her home state of California, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington took her famous kitchen: whisks, stockpots and 800 knives.

For all her expertise at the stove, what made Mrs. Child such an influential teacher was her good-humored insistence that cooking was not brain surgery. If you drop the turkey on the floor, she would say, "You're alone in your kitchen."" Just pick it up and go on with the dressing. And by example she made cooking a respectable profession, for women as well as men.

Mrs. Child also consistently refused to cut her cuisine to fit the current fashion. At the height of the reign of nutrition terror, in the 80's and 90's, when reliable health information seemed to have the shelf life of a baguette, she repeated one mantra: "If you're afraid of butter, use cream." Long before anyone ever put the words French and paradox together, she was advocating red wine and cheese, and the more the better.

Her career was also marked by an integrity not often on display in a business in which loyalty to products lasts only as long as the endorsement dollars. Mrs. Child was always a star, never a spokesman. She prided herself on not granting endorsements, because she was "devoted to public television," and she was not afraid to mock sponsors of her advertising-free programs. She once demonstrated how to break off a part on a Cuisinart to make it less cumbersome to use even as the manufacturer's representatives sat in the audience. And she was known to sue to prevent a restaurant from advertising that it was one of her favorites.

Although she came late to the table, never even attempting to cook before she married at 34, Mrs. Child had no hesitation at adopting the French way of eating, in the case of a pig, every part but the squeal. Her fearlessness made great television: she roasted ducks, sautéed sweetbreads and stuffed sausages into casings with grunts of effort. She stayed with WGBH even after her series became a national success because it gave her the freedom to cook tripe, kidneys and other offal that she said would not fry on commercial television.

Mrs. Child, who was as slim as she was tall, was also French in her insistence on moderation. "People are afraid of French food because of all the cream and butter," she said. "But you don't see all those big fat people over there that you see lumbering around Disneyland."

While she has been credited with inspiring a boom in French restaurants, an explosion of fancy food markets and even the arrival of the Food Network, she insisted her original book and program benefited from "a concatenation of factors" in the early 1960's. It was an era when Jacqueline Kennedy was raising awareness of all things French, and travel to France, which used to take a week by boat, was shortened to mere hours by plane. Duncan Hines cake mixes and Jell-O "salads" may have been far more prevalent than chocolate mousse and vinaigrette, but Americans were ready to embrace French food, at least as it was translated by a charismatic compatriot.

Mrs. Child wrote her masterwork over the better part of a decade in collaboration with Simone Beck and Louise Bertholle, her partners in a cooking school they called L'Ecole de Trois Gourmandes in Paris. They were so bent on producing home-style French cooking at its most rigid and exacting that they included recipes like pressed duck, which required a special machine. Not surprisingly, the manuscript was rejected by Houghton-Mifflin, the publisher that had originally contracted for it. Judith Jones at Alfred A. Knopf read a later, more comprehensive version and decided it was the detailed, lucid, approachable French cookbook that she, and all of America, had been waiting for.

The introduction is Mrs. Child at her most direct: "This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's meals, the parent-chauffeur-den mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat." The book, she wrote, "could well be titled `French Cooking from the American Supermarket. "'

As revolutionary as the book was, it might have only gathered cobwebs in bookstores alongside Escoffier's "Guide Culinaire" if not for Mrs. Child's way with a whisk on camera. Invited onto a book review program on WGBH to talk about "Mastering," she chose to whip up an omelet, beating the eggs in a giant copper bowl. Russell Morash, who became her producer, recalled the sight: "I thought to myself: `Who is this madwoman?"

Viewers were so taken with the frenzy of cooking and relaxed chatter that she was hired to put together 26 segments, for $50 apiece. Stations in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, then New York picked the series up, she said, "and we was made." With help from her multitalented husband, Paul, she appeared on a set replicating a home kitchen and cooked the dishes of the week, then served them to herself, complete with wine. "The French Chef" became the longest-running program in the history of public television; it was followed by "Julia Child & Company," "Dinner With Julia" and other series. One critic, John J. O'Connor in the New York Times, described Mrs. Child as "one of the few relentlessly real people on television."

The unlikely star whipped through quenelles and coquilles St.-Jacques with the greatest of ease, moving on smoothly even after dropping pots or announcing she was about to put a gratin in the refrigerator instead of in the oven where it belonged. Years later, she explained her insouciance by saying she had demonstrated those same dishes many times at her school in France, whose logo she wore on her signature blue shirt, and she had the technique down cold.

All her programs were distilled to what she called fundamental lessons. In browning meat, it was as simple as "hot oil, dry meat and don't crowd the pan." She would cook chicken fricassee and coq au vin side by side to show that they were essentially the same dish, one made with white wine, the other with red. She advised viewers to "plunge right in" in boning a chicken and to "have the courage of your convictions" in flipping a potato pancake. No one ever had to send away for a printed recipe after watching one of her segments.

When she wrote recipes, they were long and detailed because, she said, she felt obligated to insure their success. "A cookbook is only as good as its worst recipe," she said. All 10 of her cookbooks were held up as models of clarity. She was also adamant that cooking was not like free-form jazz: she intended her recipes to be followed to the letter. The one bane of her high-profile career, she once said, was too much mail, especially any letter "from some stupid woman."

Mrs. Child also knew the distinction between chef (skilled overseer of a restaurant kitchen) and cook (herself). The program was titled "The French Chef" only "so it would fit in TV Guide on one line," she said, adding: "I always hoped we'd get one."

Julia Carolyn McWilliams was born Aug. 15, 1912, in Pasadena, Calif. Her father was a wealthy farm consultant and investor; her mother was a housewife with a cook and maid who could make not much more than baking powder biscuits, codfish balls and Welsh rarebit. Julia was the oldest of three siblings, each so tall that their mother boasted that she had given birth to "18 feet of children." Otherwise, she gave no indication that she would lead an outsize life.

She attended Smith College at a time when "women could be either nurses or teachers," she said, and she "had some vague idea of being a novelist or a basketball star." After graduation in 1934 and a stint as a copywriter in between cocktail parties in New York, she returned home, on the way to becoming a slacker decades ahead of her time. According to her biographer, Noel Riley Fitch, in "Appetite for Life" (Doubleday, 1997), her one real job in her hometown, in advertising and public relations, ended when she was fired for insubordination, and rightly so, she always said.

After World War II broke out, she had fantasies of becoming a spy and signed up for intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services and was sent off as a file clerk to Ceylon. There she met Paul Child, the head of a chart-making division who was 10 years older. He was also an artist, a poet and a serious food lover who opened up her taste horizons on their travels in China.

They married in 1946 and spent a year in Washington before Mr. Child was sent to Paris by the United States Information Agency. It was a fateful move, because Mrs. Child by then was struggling to learn to cook and her husband was suffering the consequences. French food immediately took her attempts to a higher plane. Out of those early experiments came her core belief, that cooking was an art to be studied, not picked up on the fly.

She threw herself into studies at the Cordon Bleu and later joined the Cercle des Gourmettes, a club where she met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle.

In 1956, after postings in Marseille, Norway and Germany, the Childs bought a five-bedroom house in Cambridge, drawn to the intellectual stimulation of a university town. They continued to visit Europe frequently, maintaining a home near Grasse, in the south of France.

Over the years, Mrs. Child devoted herself to her television series while writing companion cookbooks, ending with "Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home," in collaboration with Jacques Pépin, in 1999. For the first books, she would test her recipes upstairs in the open kitchen in Cambridge, outfitted with a Garland range, while her husband painted in a studio in the basement. When she called, he would come up to photograph her latest creation to give the illustrator something to draw on.

As Mrs. Child aged, her role in more and more programs was to sit by as other cooks did the sautéing. But her star power was undiminished: on "Julia Child & Company" she made Emeril Lagasse look like a mild-mannered professional. She also had a regular gig on "Good Morning America" on ABC in the 1980's.

Mrs. Child was a breast cancer survivor, a cat lover, a fervent advocate of Planned Parenthood and an unabashed sensualist with a sly sense of humor. One year she and her husband sent out Valentine's cards with a photograph of them together in the bathtub in Paris. One of her last projects was to be a memoir of her years in France.

She always refused to speak evil of fast food but admitted she could live without Mexican cuisine. Overall, she said, she preferred "la cuisine soigné: long, caring cooking." Asked what her favorite meal was, she might mention duck or leg of lamb but would almost always add: "I love good, fresh food cooked by someone who knows what he's doing."

Mrs. Child's obsession with promoting the culinary arts as a profession led to her becoming the first woman inducted into the Culinary Institute of America's hall of fame. She helped establish the American Institute of Wine and Food and, later, Copia: the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts in California. In 1986, after the death of her friend James Beard, she led the effort to buy his townhouse in Greenwich Village and convert it into a nonprofit foundation.

She was also active in the International Association of Culinary Professionals. For her 90th birthday, 20 restaurants across the country staged dinners in her honor to raise money for the group for culinary research in France. Along with lending her kitchen to the Smithsonian, she contributed her huge cookbook collection to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard.

Paul Child died 1994 after a long hospitalization. Julia Child is survived by a sister, Dorothy Cousins, of Mill Valley, Calif., and several nieces and nephews.

To the end, Mrs. Child maintained her image as the ultimate bon vivant, a California girl with easy French tastes. Whenever she was asked what her guilty pleasures were, she responded: "I don't have any guilt."

Despite decades of rumors about her suspiciously relaxed condition on the set, though, she always denied a one-bottle-for-me, one-for-the-pot pattern of cooking. Her husband, in fact, often said that one of his earliest duties was dyeing water with beef extract so that it could pass for red wine — the producers could afford real Burgundy only for the stew, not for the star's glass.

http://nytimes.com/2004/08/13/dining/13CND-CHILD.html

pssst...

Pseudolus = Andy Lang

pass it on.

http://stpetetimes.com/2004/08/28/photos/flo-obit.jpg

RIP, my bullheaded love

By JOHN BARRY, Deputy Floridian Editor
Published August 28, 2004

Owen Kenneth Kobin: April 21, 1931-Aug. 11, 2004

LARGO - You could have called Ken Kobin irascible, curmudgeonly or exasperating. His plain-spoken wife Pat preferred "bullheaded." In his obituary. In the St. Petersburg Times. For all the world to see. How could his widow have written such a thing? The answer is rooted in the deepest mysteries of grief, humor and memory. She explains it best herself.

You must have wondered how your obit would go over. Were you worried?

This was my tribute. The thing is, Ken had been in hospice for two years and four months with congestive heart failure. I took care of him at home until the end of last August when he really became violent. I think it was related to the medications; there are so many side effects. I think they enhanced the negative sides of his personality. It meant he had to go into a nursing home. The first one could have been a stage setting for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I'm not kidding. So it was that much sadder. We got him into a nicer one.

Then when Ken died, his face suddenly looked 20 years younger. There was no more grimace. The beauty of that change was a real grace. I could see him again. I wanted to put a tribute in the paper that would remind us of who he had been. I had actually written something two months ago, when he had the beginnings of pneumonia and had gotten pretty ornery with the nursing-home staff. He'd say, "Leave me alone; I just want to watch TV." I'd tell him, "I'm going to write about you." He'd say, "I know you are." So one night I came home and just wrote it. I wondered if I would tick someone off with this, but I thought, "I don't care. I married him."

How would Ken have liked you getting the last word?

I think he would have loved it. I always told him, "Food is your biggest thing. Or maybe TV. Or maybe the dog. Somewhere down the line there's me."

He'd say, "Well, you have your place."

I look at his photo and the mischief in those eyes and the way his jaw is set, and I get it.

In the nursing home, he wasn't much of a talker, but he had always engaged people. We were "home-stay parents" for the ELS Language Center at Eckerd College, which meant we had young people staying with us all the time. He teased them. Always at the dinner table. It caused a great deal of laughter. If you're teased in an American way, you learn your English really fast. He had this impatience. He couldn't restrain himself from telling you what he thought. He couldn't wait in a restaurant line. He had to walk Buster with no leash. If someone said something, he'd say "F-you." If I said something was white, he'd have to say it was black. He was born in Brooklyn. That explains a lot. I used to say he was from another planet.

How'd you get together?

He was really well-liked among people who knew him. He had a voice like silk and could sell anything. He could sell ice to an iceman. I met him when I went shopping for a stereo. I drove him crazy with questions, then I left without buying.

But I went back a month later.

I said, "I was here before and saw the stereo. I want to buy it."

He said, "We don't have it anymore."

I said, "Good, I can't afford it."

But he really did have one and I bought it and he showed me how it went together.

Then he said, "Do you date?"

I said, "Not very well."

He said, "That's okay, I don't really want to go."

That was how it started, 18 years ago.

You weren't kidding about cremating the remote.

The remote is going with him. As well as Bucs and Gators game schedules. (His ashes will be interred at Bay Pines National Cemetery on Sept. 8.) I told his nurses, and they howled. He would never call for help when he was hurting, only when his remote wasn't working. He would walk through the nursing home with it stuck in his belt. So he's taking it with him to heaven.

Edmond Ralph "Ed" Haggar: Dallas clothing executive coined 'slacks'

08:27 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 29, 2004

By JOE SIMNACHER / The Dallas Morning News

Edmond Ralph "Ed" Haggar – the visionary marketer and business executive who coined the term "slacks" – died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer at his Dallas home. He was 88.

For more than 60 years, Mr. Haggar was an integral part of building the business his father founded in 1926 making pants for other companies. He led development of the Haggar brand into a multimillion-dollar corporation that became synonymous with ready-to-wear clothing. His tenure included serving as president of Haggar Clothing Co. for 23 years and 20 years as chairman.

[...]

He joined the family company in 1938 as a salesman for East Texas. In 1942, he was made a vice president and general manager. He helped design the company's new manufacturing plant and corporate office on Lemmon Avenue. In the early 1940s, he started promoting the Haggar brand with an advertising campaign in major magazines, beginning with Life.

At about the same time, Mr. Haggar teamed with legendary Dallas advertising pioneer Morris Hite to coin the term "slacks," his son said. Pants were largely known as trousers until then.

"During the war years, people tried to get more casual during the weekends, during slack time or down time," Eddie Haggar said. "Dad and Morris Hite ... came up with the name slacks."

From 1943 to 1945, Mr. Haggar served as a personnel officer in the Army Air Forces, where he became a captain in the Air Transport Command.

After the war he returned to the family business, where he was named president in March 1948.

In 1951, Haggar became the first slacks manufacturer to advertise on television. In the mid-1950s, the company introduced finished pants, which previously had to be altered to fit.

Mr. Haggar was widely known for his civic work. He had been a trustee of the University of Notre Dame, the University of Dallas and the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

"He was an incredibly personality. He was friendly to everybody from the president of the United States to the guy sweeping the floor," his son said.

Mr. Haggar knew several presidents, beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson, who called the Haggar home to comment on some pants he'd received at the White House.

"I answered the phone," Eddie Haggar said. "I thought his brother [Joe Haggar Jr.] was playing a joke that LBJ was calling."

Mr. Haggar met President Jimmy Carter through his activities with Habitat For Humanity. President Gerald Ford once spent the night at the Haggar home.

Wednesday, former President George Bush sent regrets to the Haggar family.

"Barbara and I mourn the loss of our dear, admired friend Ed Haggar," Mr. Bush said. "Ed accomplished a lot in his life and gave his family and friends so much cheer and love in the process. Dallas has lost a leading citizen – a true point of light – and all of us who knew him have lost a loyal friend. Our respects go out to all the Haggar family."

Mr. Haggar served as a national director for Boys & Girls Clubs of America and the Dallas Citizens Council. He also served on numerous local, regional and national nonprofit boards.

He received awards such as Notre Dame Man of the Year, Jesuit Man of the Year, Humanitarian Award from National Jewish Hospital of Denver, the Herbert Hoover Humanitarian Award from the Boy & Girls Clubs of America and the Edward Frederic Sorin Award, which is given by the University of Notre Dame Alumni Association for distinguished service to the university.

In addition to his son, Mr. Haggar is survived by his wife, Patty Haggar of Dallas; two daughters, Patty Jo Haggar Turner of Dallas and Mary Alice Haggar Stedillie of Deer Trail, Colo.; two other sons, James Joseph "Jimmy" Haggar of Dallas and John Daley Haggar of Castle Rock, Colo.; his brother, Joe Haggar Jr. of Dallas; a sister, Rosemary Haggar Vaughn of Dallas; nine grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Memorials may be made to Jesuit College Preparatory School, the University of Dallas, the University of Notre Dame, Ursuline Academy or a charity of choice.

http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/dn/obituaries/stories/093004dnmethaggarob.5ae79.html

Who reads the obituaries?

Who reads the obituaries?
Usually old people keeping tabs on their friends.

Who reads the obituaries?
People looking for a recently vacated apartment in Manhattan.

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/news/archive/local_18082452.shtml



Posted Oct. 04, 2004

Lambeau Field architect dead at 93

By Terry Anderson
tanderso@greenbaypressgazette.com

Funeral services will be held Wednesday for John Somerville, a longtime civic leader whose architectural firm designed the original Lambeau Field and many prominent landmarks.

Somerville, 93, Allouez, died Saturday at Bellin Hospital, which is also among the buildings designed by his firm — John E. Somerville Associates.

A Marinette native, Somerville began his architectural career during the Great Depression, a profession that stemmed from a love of hand tools and carpentry. He started his own business in Green Bay in 1946 and was a prominent fixture in the business and civic community.

Among the buildings that his firm had a hand in designing: The Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena, ShopKo Hall, The Neville Public Museum, Wisconsin Public Service corporate offices and Green Bay Southwest High School.

Somerville was a past president of the Green Bay Chamber of Commerce, and the Green Bay Area YMCA and played a major role in the founding and site selection for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

In 1994, Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson recognized him for his service to as a member of the Wisconsin Council on Main Street for the revitalization and preservation of De Pere’s downtown.

Who reads the obituaries?
Phoebe's mom when she's updating the phone book.

Betty Hill, 85, gained fame with alien-abduction tale

By The Associated Press

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Betty Hill, whose tale of being abducted by aliens launched her to fame and became the subject of a best-selling book and television movie, has died. She was 85.

Mrs. Hill died at her home Sunday after a battle with lung cancer.

Mrs. Hill claimed that she and her husband, Barney, were abducted by extraterrestrials in New Hampshire's White Mountains on a trip home from Canada in 1961.

The Hills were puzzled when they arrived home and noticed Betty's torn and stained dress, Barney's scuffed shoes, shiny spots on their car, stopped watches and no memory of two hours of the drive.

Under hypnosis three years later, they recounted being kidnapped and examined by aliens.

The couple gained international notoriety after going public with their story, traveling across the country to give speeches and making numerous television and radio appearances.

Their story also became the focus of John G. Fuller's 1966 best-selling book, "Interrupted Journey," and a television movie starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons.

Mrs. Hill retired from UFO lecturing in her 70s and complained that the quest for knowledge about extraterrestrials had become tainted with commercialism. Too many people with "flaky ideas, fantasies and imaginations" were making UFO and abduction reports, she told The Associated Press in a 1991 interview.

"If you were to believe the numbers of people who are claiming this, it would figure out to 3,000 to 5,000 abductions in the United States alone every night," she said. "There wouldn't be room for planes to fly."

She also said media had fueled UFO fiction.

"The media presented them as huge craft, all brightly lighted and flashing, but they are not," she said in a 1997 AP interview. "They are small, with dim lights, and many times they fly with no lights."

Mrs. Hill had gone a bit commercial herself, trying to fight UFO fantasies with a 1995 self-published book, "A Common Sense Approach to UFOs."

Before devoting her life to UFOs, Mrs. Hill had been a state social worker specializing in adoptions and training foster parents. Her husband died in 1969.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002066621_alienobit19.html

Group Captian Frank Carey, RAF (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&targetRule=10&xml=/news/2004/12/09/db0901.xml)

Who reads the obituaries?
Usually old people keeping tabs on their friends.
What's funny is that some of the papers now offer email notification for obituaries. I don't know if you can specify by name, but you can specify categories -- place of birth, etc.

I think that contributors to this thread should bold the parts worth reading.

Latest issue of the Actuary has a tongue-in-cheek article about analyzing age at death, occupation and cause of death from NYT obits. I think the guy should pay more attention to gender of the deceased. :roll:

The New York Times, Sunday, December 13, 1964
Alma M. Werfel: Widow of writer Franz Werfel. She was also married to Mahler and Gropius
Mrs. Alma Mahler Werfel, widow of the writer Franz Werfel and earlier of the composer Gustav Mahler, died Friday in her apartment at 120 East 73d Street. Her age was 85. She had also been married to Walter Gropius, the architect.
Mrs. Werfel, who was once described as "The most beautiful girl in Vienna," recalled in her autobiography that she had always been attracted to genius. She noted that she had once confided to her first husband, Mahler, that what she really loved in a man were his achievements. "The greater the achievements," she told the great German composer, "the more I love him." And genius also seemed to have been attracted to Mrs. Werfel.
The former Alma Schindler, the daughter of Emil J. Schindler, a landscape painter in Austria, she grew up in Vienna surrounded by art and artists. Her intellect, which was nurtured by her brilliant father, complimented her beauty.
She was a 21-year-old music student in 1902 when she met Mahler, who was 41 years old and director of the Court Opera House. He had already made his mark in the music world.
After a short courtship they were married. Alma traveled with her husband on conducting tours in Europe and the United States. They had two daughters, but only one, Anna, survived. She became a sculptor.
While still married to the composer, she met Walter Gropius, then a little known architect. She described him in her diary as an "extraordinarily handsome German," and added that the night of their first meeting wore into sunrise. "There remained no doubt," she wrote, "that Walter Gropius was in love with me and expected me to love him."
Mahler found out about their affair, brought the architect to their home and asked Alma to make a choice. She chose to remain with the compooser, but Gropius continued to write love letters to her. She said in her book "And the Bridge is Love," published in 1958, that Mahler read Gropius's correspondence and "wrote beautiful poems about it."
Mahler died in 1911 and his widow returned to Vienna to live with her parents. One day her father told her of "a poor starving genius" who painted. Later he brought Oskar Kokoschka home to paint her picture. She wrote that after he had finished sketching her he stood up, embraced her and walked out. He then started sending love letters and they became lovers. The affair lasted three years until Kokoschka joined the German Army. Shortly afterward Alma began corresponding with Gropius, who had become successful, and they were married in August 1915. They had a daughter, Manon, who died in her teens.
While still married to Gropius she met Franz Werfel and had a son by him. The child died in infancy. Gropius and Alma finally agreed to divorce in 1918. She then moved in with Werfel, and they were married in July, 1929.
She also wrote in her diary that she was pursued by other geniuses. The following was dated 1926 and referred to a conversation she had with Gerhart Hauptmann, the German drammatist and poet: " 'It's a pity,'he said to me, 'that the two of us don't have a child together. That would have been something You, you my great love....' " 'In another life,' he once told me, 'we two must be lovers. I make my reservation now.' "His wife heard it. 'I'm sure Alma will be booked up there too.' she said flippantly. "He and I only smiled...." She also wrote that other great men who were in love with her were Dr. Paul Kammerer, the biologist, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the Russian pianist and conductor who later married Mark Twain's daughter.
Werfel and Alma fled Nazi Germany in the late nineteen-thirties. Their experiences prompting Franz to write "The Song of Bernadette" and "Jacobowsky and the Colonel." They came to the United States in 1940 and settled in California, where Werfel died in 1945. She moved to New York in 1952.
Besides "And the Bridge is Love," Mrs. Werfel wrote "Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters."


WARNING: The link below is not work appropriate, but it does shed great light on Tom Lehrer's song to Alma.

Alma's bio (http://www.thefab.net/nakidgrrrlz/gw27_alma_mahler.htm)

'I'm sure Alma will be booked up there too.' :D

Who reads the obituaries?
Usually old people keeping tabs on their friends.
What's funny is that some of the papers now offer email notification for obituaries. I don't know if you can specify by name, but you can specify categories -- place of birth, etc.

My mother reads the obits from her home town newspaper everyday. Granted, this town is in India, and she is in Canada.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?050228ta_talk_remnick

POSTSCRIPT
MISS GOULD
Issue of 2005-02-28
Posted 2005-02-21

Six decades ago, not long after being hired by Harold Ross as a copy editor at The New Yorker, a shy young woman, an Oberlin graduate, set to work on a manuscript by James Thurber and soon came across the word “raunchy.” She had never heard of the word and thought it was a mistake. “Raunchy” became “paunchy.” Thurber’s displeasure was such that the young woman barely escaped firing. Later, according to his biographer Harrison Kinney, Thurber wrote that “facetiously” was the only word in English that had all six vowels in order. What about “abstemiously”? the copy editor replied. Thurber, who was not easily impressed, was finally compelled to ask, “Who is Eleanor Gould?”

Miss Gould, as she was known to everyone at the magazine, died last week, at the age of eighty-seven. She worked here for fifty-four years, most of them as its Grammarian (a title invented for her), and she earned the affection and gratitude of generations of writers. She shaped the language of the magazine, always striving for a kind of Euclidean clarity--transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions.

Her devotion to what she called her “reading” was as intense as any writer’s to his writing. She never missed a day of work. Fifteen years ago, when she was seventy-two, she discovered, during a conversation with a colleague, that she had gone completely deaf. She came to the office anyway, riding the bus down Central Park West as she always did. Thereafter, writers and other editors wrote notes to her on scraps of paper. She answered in a birdlike voice, high and a little scratchy, like a gull’s.

Miss Gould occupied various offices over the years, including one that Thurber had decorated by drawing on the walls. Her bookshelf held a row of favorite authorities, including a Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and Theodore Bernstein’s “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins,” and on a dictionary stand was Webster’s Second Unabridged. Wearing thick glasses and an ever-changing array of bright-colored pants and sweaters, she spent the day, and many nights, hovering over her stack of galley and page proofs. Her attention seemed never to waver. She did not daydream. You were unlikely to pass her office and catch her staring off into the canyons of midtown.

A typical “Gould proof” was filled with the lightly pencilled tracery of her objections, suggestions, and abbreviated queries: “emph?” “ind.,” “mean this?” She confronted the galley proofs of writers as various as Joseph Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, Janet Flanner--well, everyone, really. She did a proof on every nonfiction piece published in the magazine. Even a writer as determinedly vernacular as Pauline Kael, who initially found Miss Gould’s suggestions intrusive, came to accept them—many of them, anyway—with gratitude. Her reading was detached, objective, scientific, as if she somehow believed that a kind of perfection in prose was possible. Like Bobby Fischer’s sense of the chessboard, her feel for English was at a higher level than the rest of us--we editors and writers—could hope to glimpse.

“My list of pet language peeves,” she once told The Key Reporter, the Phi Beta Kappa newsletter, “would certainly include writers’ use of indirection (i.e., slipping new information into a narrative as if the reader already knew it); confusion between restrictive and non-restrictive phrases and clauses (‘that’ goes with restrictive clauses, and, ordinarily, ‘which’ with nonrestrictive); careless repetition; and singular subjects with plural verbs and vice versa.” She was a fiend for problems of sequence and logic. In her presence, modifiers dared not dangle. She could find a solecism in a Stop sign.

Once in a great while, Miss Gould would lose her editorial patience--“No grammar! No sense!” was one exclamation of distress; “Have we completely lost our mind?” she once wrote in the margins of a Talk of the Town galley when the section still used the editorial “we”--but she did not take offense when her suggestions were overruled by another editor or the writer. Miss Gould once found what she believed were four grammatical errors in a three-word sentence. And yet the sentence, by Lawrence Weschler (and, alas, no longer remembered), was published as written.

In some cases, Miss Gould’s suggestions took the ideal of clarity to Monty Python-like extremes. For example, some years ago, she saw the phrase “. . . and now sat stone still, chewing gum throughout the proceedings” and suggested replacing the last bit with “sat stone still except for his jaw, which chewed gum.” Funny, yes, but the correction planted a red flag. Something was wrong, and needed fixing. Her attentions, imperceptible to the reader, made all the difference. Her effect on a piece of writing could be like that of a master tailor on a suit; what had once seemed slovenly and overwrought was suddenly trig and handsome. The wearer stood taller in his shoes.

Especially in the early years of the magazine, there were many office romances and marriages, and, in 1946, Miss Gould married the head of the fact-checking department, Freddie Packard. The two worked for the magazine for a combined ninety-nine years. (Mr. Packard died in 1974.) They had a daughter, Susan, with whom Miss Gould travelled to remote destinations. In her late seventies, after reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s “The Worst Journey in the World,” Eleanor set off with Susan for the Antarctic.

Miss Gould used to tell her friends at the magazine that she wanted to work until she was a hundred. A stroke, which she suffered at her desk, in 1999, forced her to retire. The title of Grammarian was retired with her. In subsequent years, friends at the magazine would visit or send gifts: books, flowers, a basket of cheeses and fruit. But after a while she found such attentions hard to bear. She missed the work that she could no longer do. To one correspondent she sent a beautiful letter, frank and kind, needlessly grateful, which ended with the sentence “Please forget about me.” Of course, we never could and we never will.
— David Remnick

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http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4054912

Hamilton Naki
Jun 9th 2005

ON DECEMBER 3rd, 1967, the body of a young woman was brought to Hamilton Naki for dissection. She had been knocked down by a car as she went to buy a cake on a street in Cape Town, in South Africa. Her head injuries were so severe that she had been pronounced brain-dead at the hospital, but her heart, uninjured, had gone on furiously pumping.

Mr Naki was not meant to touch this body. The young woman, Denise Darvall, was white, and he was black. The rules of the hospital, and indeed the apartheid laws of the land, forbade him to enter a white operating theatre, cut white flesh, or have dealings with white blood. For Mr Naki, however, the Groote Schuur hospital had made a secret exception. This black man, with his steady, dexterous hands and razor-sharp mind, was simply too good at the delicate, bloody work of organ transplantation. The chief transplant surgeon, the young, handsome, famously temperamental Christiaan Barnard, had asked to have him on his team. So the hospital had agreed, saying, as Mr Naki remembered, “Look, we are allowing you to do this, but you must know that you are black and that's the blood of the white. Nobody must know what you are doing.”

Nobody, indeed, knew. On that December day, in one part of the operating suite, Barnard in a blaze of publicity prepared Louis Washkansky, the world's first recipient of a transplanted human heart. Fifteen metres away, behind a glass panel, Mr Naki's skilled black hands plucked the white heart from the white corpse and, for hours, hosed every trace of blood from it, replacing it with Washkansky's. The heart, set pumping again with electrodes, was passed to the other side of the screen, and Mr Barnard became, overnight, the most celebrated doctor in the world.

In some of the post-operation photographs Mr Naki inadvertently appeared, smiling broadly in his white coat, at Barnard's side. He was a cleaner, the hospital explained, or a gardener. Hospital records listed him that way, though his pay, a few hundred dollars a month, was actually that of a senior lab technician. It was the most they could give, officials later explained, to someone who had no diploma.

There had never been any question of diplomas. Mr Naki, born in the village of Ngcangane in the windswept Eastern Cape, had been pulled out of school at 14, when his family could no longer afford it. His life seemed likely to be cattle-herding, barefoot and in sheepskins, like many of his contemporaries. Instead, he hitch-hiked to Cape Town to find work, and managed to land a job tending lawns and rolling tennis courts at the University of Cape Town Medical School.

A black—even one as clever as he was, and as immaculately dressed, in a clean shirt, tie and Homburg hat even to work in the gardens—could not expect to get much further. But a lucky break came when, in 1954, the head of the animal research lab at the Medical School asked him for help. Robert Goetz needed a strong young man to hold down a giraffe while he dissected its neck to see why giraffes did not faint when they drank. Mr Naki coped admirably, and was taken on: at first to clean cages, then to hold and anaesthetise the animals, then to operate on them.

Stealing with his eyes

The lab was busy, with constant transplant operations on pigs and dogs to train doctors, eventually, for work on humans. Mr Naki never learned the techniques formally; as he put it, “I stole with my eyes”. But he became an expert at liver transplants, far trickier than heart transplants, and was soon teaching others. Over 40 years he instructed several thousand trainee surgeons, several of whom moved on to become heads of departments. Barnard admitted—though not until 2001, just before he died—that Mr Naki was probably technically better than he was, and certainly defter at stitching up afterwards.

Unsung, though not unappreciated, Mr Naki continued to work at the Medical School until 1991. When he retired, he drew a gardener's pension: 760 rand, or about $275, a month. He exploited his medical contacts to raise funds for a rural school and a mobile clinic in the Eastern Cape, but never thought of money for himself. As a result, he could pay for only one of his five children to stay to the end of high school. Recognition, with the National Order of Mapungubwe and an honorary degree in medicine from the University of Cape Town, came only a few years before his death, and long after South Africa's return to black rule.

He took it well. Bitterness was not in his nature, and he had had years of training to accept his life as apartheid had made it. On that December day in 1967, for example, as Barnard played host to the world's adoring press, Mr Naki, as usual, caught the bus home. Strikes, riots and road blocks often delayed it in those days. When it came, it carried him—in his carefully pressed suit, with his well-shined shoes—to his one-room shack in the township of Langa. Because he was sending most of his pay to his wife and family, left behind in Transkei, he could not afford electricity or running water. But he would always buy a daily newspaper; and there, the next day, he could read in banner headlines of what he had done, secretly, with his black hands, with a white heart.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8513614/

‘Charlie the Tuna’ creator drowns

By Joe Holley
The Washington Post
Updated: 4:08 p.m. ET July 8, 2005

Tom Rogers, 87, a retired advertising copywriter whose beret- and sunglasses-wearing hipster tuna became an icon of pop culture, died June 24 in Charlottesville, where he lived with his son's family. He drowned while swimming alone in the family's backyard pool....

The Wicked Witch of the West's last flying monkey passes over the rainbow.

Sig Frohlich
(Filed: 11/10/2005)

Sig Frohlich, who has died aged 97, was a bit-part actor for much of his long career in Hollywood, playing messengers, waiters, callboys, clerks and soldiers, rarely earning even a flicker of recognition from viewers over 50 years.

But he achieved some lasting celebrity as one of the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz (1939). This was despite the fact that he was completely disguised in a monkey costume and uttered no words on screen.

The 13 actors playing these unlovely animals, in the service of the Wicked Witch of the West, were originally promised $25 for each time they swooped down screaming from the sky on the heroine, Dorothy (Judy Garland). The director, Victor Fleming, protested that this sum was the usual fee for a whole day's work. But it was agreed that Frohlich, who was an early member of the Screen Actors' Guild, should receive an extra $5 a swoop since he was the one who snatched Dorothy's dog, Toto; and he was paid more for his other scenes with Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch.

Frohlich, the last surviving monkey, found himself constantly questioned about the film, which enjoys such iconic status in the United States that flying monkeys are periodically referred to in The Simpsons. He was a favourite at the Wizard of Oz festival, which is held in the house where Judy Garland was born at Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

Frohlich believed that the great interest was due to the monkeys being the stuff of childhood nightmares. He would recall how the monkeys were trussed up like "Thanksgiving Day turkeys" with special belts around their midriffs; these were attached to wires which could carry them through the sky without being seen on screen.

Not only do the monkeys have the honour of being listed at 94 in the top 100 film monsters of all time, the slim steel tracks in the reinforced rafters of MGM Sound Stage 29 are still in place as a haunting reminder for visitors.

The son of German immigrants, Siegfried Frohlich was born in New York City on June 25 1908. He started out as a screen shifter at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and then became a chorus singer in the many musicals churned out by the studio every month.

In 1935 he was a mutineer in Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Clark Gable, and a gentleman in A Tale of Two Cities. He had his first screen credit in the crime drama Riffraff (1936), with Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy. The following year he was cast in Speed (with James Stewart) and Born to Dance (with Eleanor Powell); he was also a soldier of the evil Emperor Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon series.

In 1938 Frohlich signed a contract with MGM. This led to smaller parts, such as a man lighting a cigarette opposite Ava Gardner in the comedy romance This Time for Keeps (1942) and as Jean Rogers's old flame in Sunday Brunch (1942). But he was so dazzled by the glamour of MGM that he turned down larger roles in two films produced by Monogram.

After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army Air Force to become a B-24 gunner in action over the Pacific. On returning to MGM in 1946 he became Mickey Rooney's stand-in on the set of such films as Killer McCoy (1947), Words and Music (1948), The Strip (1951), The Atomic Kid (1954) and A Nice Little Bank That Should Be Robbed (1958).

Rooney, one of the most difficult stars, disliked hanging around waiting for scenes to be set up. So Frohlich, who was taller and handsomer, though they both shared the same kind of snub nose, did the hanging around, proving every bit as popular with the film crews as Rooney was unpopular. The only time he appeared on screen was in some rear shots after Rooney had hurt his back.

The two were good friends, not least because Frohlich once pushed the pint-sized star to the floor to avoid a piece of stone work falling from the roof. Frohlich continued to substitute for him while appearing in such television series as Kung Fu, and Murder She Wrote.

He played an air traffic controller in Stanley Kramer's film It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World! (1963); appeared in Once is Not Enough (1975), with Kirk Douglas; and in First Monday in October (1981), with Walter Matthau and Jill Clayburgh. His role as a judge in Kevin Costner's American Flyers (1985) and as Debbie Reynolds's business partner in Jo Jo Dancer (1986) were two of his bigger parts.

If some wondered whether he minded the modesty of his career, Frohlich, whose surname means happy in German, had no doubt. He was MGM's most senior star, and he was delighted to sign autographs for visitors to his nursing home. He died on September 30.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/11/db1102.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/10/11/ixportal.html

Edmond Ralph "Ed" Haggar: Dallas clothing executive coined 'slacks'
[snip]
He helped design the [Haggar] company's new manufacturing plant and corporate office on Lemmon Avenue. I've been to the outlet store at that location many times.
Memorials may be made to Jesuit College Preparatory School, the University of Dallas, the University of Notre Dame, Ursuline Academy or a charity of choice.I know quite a few people who graduated from Jesuit. One is now a neurosurgeon (just went to his wedding in May), and another is now a woman. :yikes: Another went to jail.

The Earl of Kimberley
(Filed: 29/05/2002)

The 4th Earl of Kimberley, who has died aged 78, achieved a measure of fame as the most-married man in the peerage; once known as "the brightest blade in Burke's", he worked his way through five wives in 25 years before settling down contentedly with a former masseuse he had met on a beach in Jamaica.

Johnny Kimberley was a jovial extrovert whose interests included shark fishing, UFOs and winter sports - for much of the 1950s he was a member of Britain's international bobsleigh team.

There was a serious side to him too: he played championship tiddlywinks, bred prize pigs, and as a Liberal spokesman in the Lords advised the electorate to vote Conservative, whereupon David (now Lord) Steel sacked him. Once on the Tory benches, he took a keen interest in defence and foreign policy, although not in social reform. "Queers," he declared, "have been the downfall of all the great empires."

However, it was his frequent trips to the altar, and those shortly thereafter to the divorce courts, that most naturally caught the eye of the public. His first marriage, in 1945, was to Diana, daughter of Sir Piers Legh, Master of the King's Household and a former equerry to Edward VIII; Kimberley had met her on a blind date at the Ritz.

The wedding took place at St George's Chapel, Windsor, and was attended by the Queen, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and King George VI, who proposed the toast to the bride and her groom, then a Guards officer.

But Kimberley already knew that he had made a mistake. "I couldn't stop it," he said later, "because the King and Queen were there, and I was in my best uniform." Several years ago, in racy memoirs which were then unpublished, he wrote that on honeymoon he had more fun chasing mice around the bedroom than his new wife, and within a year the marriage was all but over.

"I gave the butler a note to give to her saying that it wasn't going to work out, and that since her mother was sailing for America that night why didn't she go too? That night I found a lovely girl and realised what I'd been missing not having a proper romp. After that, I never stopped."

By now Kimberley was a free-spending, hard-driving member of London's beau monde, taking weekends at Deauville, losing heavily at all-night chemmy sessions with John Aspinall, and bedding as many women as he could.

"Sex. I just couldn't think of anything else," he recalled later. He claimed among his conquests Eartha Kitt and Glynis Johns, and even tipped his hat at Princess Margaret, though she declined the honour. One night, he was caught naked by an irate husband in a hotel cupboard.

His second marriage, in 1949, was to Carmel Dunnett, one of the five daughters of Mickey Maguire, sometime welterweight champion of Australia. Kimberley was introduced to her by her elder sister (a daughter-in-law of Lord Beaverbrook), whose affections he had already enjoyed. They were married at St Moritz, and in 1951 she presented him with an heir, Lord Wodehouse.

"It went quite well for three years," the earl remembered. "Then I found out that she had been knocking off one of my chums. I wasn't all that upset, but it was the fact that one had been made a fool of." They were divorced in 1952. She was later murdered in Spain in 1992 by her third husband, Jeremy Lowndes, who then confessed the crime to Kimberley's son.

Number three was Cynthia Westendarp, a Suffolk farmer's wife whom the earl met at Newmarket. After she contracted polio, he invited her to recuperate at Kimberley, his seat near Wymondham, Norfolk, "and she never moved out". They were married in 1953, and divorced in 1961.

Three years before that, he had sold Kimberley, a Queen Anne brick mansion built on land held by his forebears for five centuries - "it was the easiest way to get rid of Cynthia. All I could think about was buying a new Aston Martin".

Next up was Maggie Simons, a 23-year old fashion model and the daughter of a cafe owner. She refused to sleep with him until he proposed marriage, which he did within a week. They were married in 1961 but "we both drank a fair amount and had fearful fights". Kimberley's fourth divorce came through in 1965. He was 39.

His fifth marriage, in 1970, was to Gillian Raw (nee Ireland-Smith), "and that was a disaster from the word go. She was a very successful girlfriend, but it didn't work as a wife". He had met Janey Consett, a soldier's daughter, in the Caribbean some years before, and now decided to "sugar off" with her instead. Once more divorced, he married her in 1982, and happily it proved to be sixth time lucky.

No other peer had ever had so many wives. Ready as he was with explanations as to the failure of his marriages, the simpler truth was that Kimberley was for much of his life a charming but egotistical, idle and rather weak man who craved attention and sought only pleasure. He was also, as he admitted in 1980 in a debate in the Lords, an alcoholic.

"Helping to liberate Brussels in 1944 was the beginning of my downfall," he wrote. After capturing an almost inexhaustible supply of Champagne, he kept a crate in his tank, regularly refreshing himself from it with a tin mug. "I spent much of the war tight and when it was over I couldn't stop."

By the 1970s, it had begun to affect his health, and he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He later became vice-president of the World Council on Alcoholism and a member of the National Council on Alcoholism.

As it was, this did not prevent him in his later years from consuming a bottle of white wine each day, although, as he pointed out, this was an improvement on the years when he counted himself "insane". "After all," he reasoned, "no normal person would try to drive a car up the steps of the Grand Hotel in Brighton."

John Wodehouse was born on May 12 1924. His father, the 3rd Earl, was a well-known polo player and former MP who had won an MC on the Marne. His kinsman, P G Wodehouse, stood godfather to young Johnny.

Both of Johnny's parents had an eye for the opposite sex. His mother had already been twice married, and Johnny was her third child. He had a rather lonely childhood, spending large parts of his school holidays on his own with his nanny at Kimberley, which had been visited in 1578 by Elizabeth I.

The family traced their line back to an ancestor knighted by Henry I, and took their mottoes - "Strike Hard" and "Agincourt" - from those of a forebear who had fought with Henry V. They were prominent in Norfolk affairs from the 16th century, and in 1611 received a baronetcy.

In 1797, the Kimberleys were raised to the barony, and in 1866 the 3rd Lord Wodehouse, the Liberal politician and diarist, was created an earl. As Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Kimberley diamond field was named for him.

Johnny was sent to Eton, and first acquired "my taste for feminine flesh" from "an old dear I paid a couple of quid to while up in London". At 17, he inherited the titles when his father was killed in a German air raid. He then went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, but his studies were cut short when, at 19, he got drunk in a nightclub and "accidentally enlisted in the Grenadier Guards". He finished the war as a lieutenant.

In the 1950s, he ran a successful public relations business that had clients such as Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and "that bald bugger" (Yul Brynner); his tea-boy was the future gossip columnist Nigel Dempster. In these years, he acquired a reputation as a rackety motorist, and was frequently fined by the police. He also killed a pedestrian he claimed not to have seen crossing the road in Piccadilly.

After selling Kimberley, the earl moved to Jamaica, where he sold land to wealthy Americans. Later he concentrated on his duties in the Lords, leading a campaign in the late 1970s for repayment of money docked during the war from the pay of POWs to take account of local "camp currency".

From 1976, he was a member of the Lords' All Party Defence Study Group, and from 1992 until the expulsion of the hereditary peers in 1999 was its president. He was also president of the Falmouth Shark Angling Club. Latterly he had lived in Wiltshire.

In 2001, he eventually published a version of his memoirs as The Whim of the Wheel. He died on May 26.

Looking back on his life as a roue, Lord Kimberley admitted: "I'm not very proud of what I've done." He believed that his marriages had taught him "that you have to work very, very hard at them". "If you strive for perfection," he considered, "eventually you'll find it."

He is survived by his sixth wife and by the four sons of his marriages. He is succeeded in the titles by his eldest son, John Armine, Lord Wodehouse, a computer programmer.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/05/29/db2901.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2002/05/29/ixopright.html

OK, this was the best part of that whole obit:
There was a serious side to him too: he played championship tiddlywinks,

Frederic Arthur (Fred) Clark, who had tired of reading obituaries noting other's courageous battles with this or that disease, wanted it known that he lost his battle as a result of an automobile accident on June 18, 2006. True to Fred's personal style, his final hours were spent joking with medical personnel while he whimpered, cussed, begged for narcotics and bargained with God to look over his wife and kids. He loved his family. His heart beat faster when his wife of 37 years Alice Rennie Clark entered the room and saddened a little when she left. His legacy was the good works performed by his sons, Frederic Arthur Clark III and Andrew Douglas Clark MD, PhD., along with Andy's wife, Sara Morgan Clark. Fred's back straightened and chest puffed out when he heard the Star Spangled Banner and his eyes teared when he heard Amazing Grace. He wouldn't abide self important tight *censored*. Always an interested observer of politics, particularly what the process does to its participants, he was amused by politician's outrage when we lie to them and amazed at what the voters would tolerate. His final wishes were "throw the bums out and don't elect lawyers" (though it seems to make little difference). During his life he excelled at mediocrity. He loved to hear and tell jokes, especially short ones due to his limited attention span. He had a life long love affair with bacon, butter, cigars and bourbon. You always knew what Fred was thinking much to the dismay of his friend and family. His sons said of Fred, "he was often wrong, but never in doubt". When his family was asked what they remembered about Fred, they fondly recalled how Fred never peed in the shower - on purpose. He died at MCV Hospital and sadly was deprived of his final wish which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a double date to include his wife, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to crash an ACLU cocktail party. In lieu of flowers, Fred asks that you make a sizable purchase at your local ABC store or Virginia winery (please, nothing French - the *censored*) and get rip roaring drunk at home with someone you love or hope to make love to. Word of caution though, don't go out in public to drink because of the alcohol related laws our elected officials have passed due to their inexplicable terror at the sight of a MADD lobbyist and overwhelming compulsion to meddle in our lives. No funeral or service is planned. However, a party will be held to celebrate Fred's life. It will be held in Midlothian, Va. Email fredsmemory@yahoo.com for more information. Fred's ashes will be fired from his favorite cannon at a private party on the Great Wicomico River where he had a home for 25 years. Additionally, all of Fred's friend (sic) will be asked to gather in a phone booth, to be designated in the future, to have a drink and wonder, "Fred who?"
Published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on 7/9/2006.http://www.legacy.com/TimesDispatch/DeathNotices.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=18382676

:lol:

Hey, I could attend this party... it's right down the street from me. :-)

Woah... that's two obituaries in this thread to which I have been local... in different states, even!

King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV
(Filed: 11/09/2006)

His Majesty King Taufa'Ahau Tupou IV of Tonga, who died yesterday aged 88, was the benign feudal ruler of the South Pacific kingdom known since the days of Captain Cook as the Friendly Islands.

The son of Queen Salote, who endeared herself to Londoners when she came over for the Coronation in 1953 and drove smiling through the rain in an open carriage, the King was the world's only Methodist sovereign and for many years, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's heaviest.

A jovial man-mountain of energy, he was 6ft 4in tall and at his peak weighed some 35 stone [Pseu: that's 490 pounds!]. Although he belonged to a people famous for feasting, he was sometimes troubled by his size: "In his heart," as one of his aides once put it, "His Majesty is a thin man." But cutting down did not come easily. "My doctor's put me on a diet," the King said in 1999. "I'm only allowed to eat three yams a day. But a yam can be 6ft long."


When the King, who succeeded his mother in 1965, came on visits to London he would sometimes decline the use of his Embassy's Mercedes (number plate TON 1), preferring a more commodious Rolls-Royce — with, as he explained, "more leg room".

The kingdom of Tonga is a group of some 150 palm-fringed, coral-decked Polynesian islands in the South Pacific about 1,000 miles north-east of New Zealand. Captain Cook first visited Tonga in the 1770s, and until gaining independence in June 1970 the islands constituted a self-governing British protected State under the terms of a Treaty of Friendship concluded in 1900.

In a foreword to The Friendly Islanders (1967) by Kenneth Bain, the King described how Tongans have trouble with time.

While their days of the week are calculated on the 180° meridian, so that the same days are maintained as in Australia and other parts of the eastern hemisphere, the hours of the day are based on 165° west longitude. Instead of Tongan time being 11 hours behind GMT, it is 13 hours ahead. "All this tends to confuse strangers," the King wrote, "but it is the normal Tongan way of life."

While other South Sea island groups have experienced political turmoil this century, Tonga has remained stable; in 1990 there was widespread consternation in the islands over rumours of a plot to topple the King.

And the King, who ruled through his Privy Council and whose family occupied a third of the seats in the legislative assembly, realised that the system of Tonga's government appeared archaic. "Some might think that our constitution seems at first sight a trifle unfair," he once conceded.

"But you have to remember." he went on, "that when our first King George united the islands in 1845, he was doing so on behalf of the people themselves. He was not grabbing power on behalf of other aristocrats.

He was ridding the islands of the despots and the villains and the robber-barons. And he installed a kindly and caring royal line, of which I have the honour to be the latest. My people love me. I love them and care for them. It is as simple as that."

The King was born Crown Prince Tupouto'a Tungi on July 4 1918 at the Royal Palace in Tonga's capital Nuku'alofa on the sacred island of Tongatapu. He was the eldest son of Queen Salote Tupou III and Prince Uiliami Tupoulahi Tungi, prime minister of Tonga from 1923 until his death in 1941.

The Crown Prince belonged to the 43rd generation of direct descendants of Aho'eitu, the first Tui Tonga (supreme ruler) who lived in the 10th century. More distantly, he descended from the sky god Tangeroa.

But it was his great-great-great grandfather King George Tupou I who, in the 19th century, gathered the Tongan tribes together and, with the help of Methodist missionaries (who converted him in 1831), founded the kingdom in 1845.

As a small boy Crown Prince Tungi attended Tupou College, where he was influenced by a Methodist missionary minister, Dr AH Wood. He then went to Newington College, a Methodist school in New South Wales, where he showed himself a fine sportsman and broke the pole-vault record. [Pseu: I assume that's the record for driving the pole deeper into the ground than anyone else.]

After school he went to Sydney University, graduating with a Law degree. He introduced surfing to Tonga and became a keen diver.

After the Second World War, during which he leased tracts of his land to the British Government for airfield construction, the Crown Prince married, in 1947, the beautiful Princess Mata'aho.

Two years later Queen Salote appointed him prime minister of Tonga, and also assigned to him the portfolios of foreign affairs, agriculture, education and works.

Subsequently, he also served as ministerial head of the justice and auditing department, minister of radio and telephonic communications, chairman of the Broadcasting Commission, and chairman of the Copra and Produce Boards, established to oversee the marketing of the country's principal products.

"I'm a bit of a Pooh-bah, you know," said the Crown Prince in 1962, "except that I don't cut off any heads."

He was crowned King on his 49th birthday, July 4 1967, in the royal chapel in Nuku'alofa. The ceremony, the first coronation in Tonga since Queen Salote's in 1918, was part Methodist and part Tongan, with elements derived from the Coronation his mother had famously attended at Westminster Abbey in 1953.

The King was crowned by the royal chaplain, the Reverend George Harris. The crown was adorned with a carved, six-pointed star cut from the koka tree under which all the old Kanokupolu kings, Taufa'ahau's tribal ancestors, were installed.

Originally, the King had wished to be crowned wearing the traditional tapa (tree bark) clothes of his country, but his advisers persuaded him that European dress would be more appropriate.

Under his European-style coronation robes he wore a uniform, based on a British general's full-dress uniform, made by Gieves, of Savile Row. The Queen wore a dress of cream and gold brocade with a short train, made by the two sisters who ran the Bond Street salon Madame Raie.

In the days beforehand islanders poured into the capital, bringing pigs of all sizes, crates of chickens, and tons of yams and kava roots for the week-long feasting. The daily menu consisted of around 1,000 pigs and 1,000 chickens, saddles of mutton, barons of beef, turtle steaks, fish, crayfish and crabs — all cooked in vast earthenware ovens.

The food was served on woven palm stretchers — called polas — each one 14ft long and 4ft wide and piled nearly 3ft deep with food.

As well as the feasting, there was tremendous dancing and music-making. For weeks before, dancers had been rehearsing the laka-laka (a conga-style dance) to produce a display, in supple body and hand movements, telling the story of the coronation. Nose flautists had been practising the haunting melodies with which they awoke the King and Queen in a dawn serenade on coronation day.

On the day after the coronation (at which the Duke of Kent represented the Queen), there was a sacred kava — the taumafa kava — at which the 33 nobles of Tonga installed their monarch as the 21st Tu'i Kanokupolu. For this, a seven-hour ceremony, the King wore a 700-year old ta'ovala, the traditional Tongan grass or tree-bark mat worn around the waist.

Like his mother the King was a passionate believer in education, and helped to ensure that his people were among the most literate people in the South Pacific. He was also a great believer in the use of the abacus to teach mathematics. "I teach my own children on the abacus," he once said. "They enjoy it and are far ahead of their fellow pupils."

He himself enjoyed reading Western literature — preferring scientific works to fiction — and was always interested in new technology. He even wrote a textbook of music which was for many years used in Tongan schools.

He considered the monarch's right to appoint one third of the legislature as the only certain means of ensuring that the better-educated Tongans got into the government. "The intelligentsia," he said some years after ascending the throne, "are not the best campaigners. We have not had one person with a degree elected — they have all been appointed by me."

The King was careful, too, to protect his other rights. In 1969 he was swift to annul the marriage of his daughter, Princess Siulikutapu, to a Tongan commoner, Siosiva (Joshua) Liaivaa. It was, the King declared, unlawful for a member of the royal family to marry without his consent. Shortly afterwards, the Princess married the King's ADC, Major Kalaniuvalu Fotofili.

In recent years the King had been seen as increasingly autocratic, and a pro-democracy movement had formed in Tonga calling for constitutional reform.

The King had great admiration and friendship for Britain and the Royal Family. After his and Queen Mata'aho's first trip to London after Queen Salote's death in 1967, they became regular visitors.

The Queen and Prince Philip and Princess Anne visited Tonga in March 1970, and in 1981 the King came to England for the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer, bringing presents of dumb valets[Pseu: ???] made to his own design and a bedspread worked by Queen Mata'aho.

The King had four sons and a daughter. His eldest son and successor, Crown Prince Tupouto'a, passed out of Sandhurst in 1968 and for a time studied Economics at Oxford University.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2006/09/11/db1101.xml

The Queen and Prince Philip and Princess Anne visited Tonga in March 1970, and in 1981 the King came to England for the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer, bringing presents of dumb valets[Pseu: ???] made to his own design and a bedspread worked by Queen Mata'aho.
Probably "dumbwaiter". I just checked and was surprised that the first definition of dumbwaiter is "a portable serving table or stand".

http://www.anthropology.com.sg/store/images/TOKYO_DUMBVALET.jpg
.

Robert Rosenthal, Leader in Bombing Raids and Lawyer at Nuremberg, Dies at 89

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: April 29, 2007

Robert Rosenthal, a highly decorated pilot in World War II who helped usher in a new kind of warfare, the strategic bombing of Germany, in which huge bombers scraped the ice-cold stratosphere while serving as easy targets for enemy fighters and ground guns, died on April 20 in White Plains. He was 89.

The cause was multiple myeloma, his son Steven said. Mr. Rosenthal lived in Harrison, N.Y.

He flew 52 missions over Germany as a bomber pilot, twice survived being shot down and won 16 decorations, including the Distinguished Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism.”

On one mission, his B-17 Flying Fortress was the only one in his group of 13 to return. On another, he was shot down and broke his right arm and nose. The next time he was shot down, he broke the same arm.

On Feb. 3, 1945, Rosie, as he was known, led the entire Third Division, an armada of 1,000 B-17s, on a raid on Berlin. He was later an assistant to the United States prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, Robert H. Jackson.

Mr. Rosenthal served in the Eighth Air Force, the bomber command created a month after Pearl Harbor to bring Germany’s war machine to a halt through high-altitude strategic bombing. The idea was that long-range, fast-moving bombers could fly unescorted into enemy territory and rain down destruction with impunity.

But there were too few support planes, among other unforeseen difficulties, and the bombers proved to be a fat target for more numerous German fighters and antiaircraft guns. Casualties were enormous; only submarine crews in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate.

Mr. Rosenthal, a 25-year-old newly minted lawyer, had sought out the challenge. He enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, and, when offered noncombat duties, insisted that he be sent to fight.

“I couldn’t wait to get over there,” he said in an interview with Donald L. Miller for the book “Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany” (2006).

“When I finally arrived, I thought I was at the center of the world, the place where the democracies were gathering to defeat the Nazis,” he continued. “I was right where I wanted to be.”

Robert Rosenthal was born in Brooklyn on June 11, 1917, and went to school in the borough’s Flatbush neighborhood. He was captain of the football and baseball teams at Brooklyn College, from which he graduated in 1938. He graduated summa cum laude from Brooklyn Law School. He had a job at a law firm in Manhattan when World War II started.

After his flight training, Mr. Rosenthal was assigned to the Eighth Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group, later known as “The Bloody Hundredth.” He was stationed at a base in East Anglia in England.

Mr. Miller wrote that Mr. Rosenthal never talked about his passion to risk everything to fight Nazis. A rumor arose that he had relatives in German concentration camps. When asked directly, he replied, “That was a lot of hooey.”

He said: “I have no personal reasons. Everything I’ve done or hope to do is because I hate persecution. A human being has to look out for other human beings or there’s no civilization.”

His third mission was to bomb Münster on Oct. 10, 1943. After the American support fighters reached their range and returned home, the 13 bombers in the group were attacked by some 200 German fighters. The skies were filled with flak and flames, creating “an aerial junkyard,” according to a gunner.

Mr. Rosenthal’s plane dropped its bombs, but had two engines out, a gaping hole in one wing and three injured gunners. He put the 30-ton bomber through a harrowing series of evasive maneuvers and somehow made it back to England. None of the other 12 planes did.

In September 1944, Mr. Rosenthal’s plane was hit by flak over France and he made a forced landing, dulling his consciousness as well as breaking his arm and nose. He did not remember how, but the French resistance got him back to England.

On a February 1945 mission to bomb Berlin, he was shot down and rescued by Russians on the outskirts of the city. He was sent back to England on a circuitous route that wound through Poland, Moscow, Kiev, Tehran, Cairo, Greece and Naples.

That turned out to be his last mission, as the European war soon ended. He volunteered to fight in the Pacific, and was training to fly B-29s in Florida when Japan capitulated.

Mr. Rosenthal returned to his law firm, but seized the chance to join the team prosecuting Nazis in Nuremburg. On the ocean voyage to Germany, he met another lawyer on the prosecutorial staff, Phillis Heller, whom he married in Nuremberg.

In addition to her, he is survived by his sons Steven, of Newton, Mass., and Dan, of White Plains; his daughter, Peggy Rosenthal, of Manhattan; four grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.

As part of his duties during the trials, Mr. Rosenthal interviewed Hermann Goering, commander of the German air force and the second-highest-ranked Nazi during most of the war, and Wilhelm Keitel, the top German general.

“Seeing these strutting conquerors after they were sentenced — powerless, pathetic and preparing for the hangman — was the closure I needed,” he said. “Justice had overtaken evil. My war was over.”

Mr. Rosenthal always wondered about the unexploded cannon shell found rolling around in one of his plane’s tanks after the Münster raid. Had a slave laborer in a Nazi munitions factory sabotaged the shell? http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/obituaries/29rosenthal.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Louis M. Balfour, a retired newspaper Linotype operator and a researcher of the history of the deaf, died June 8 of complications from pneumonia at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. He was 98.
Mr. Balfour, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, was born the fourth of seven children in Baltimore and spent his early years in the 1400 block of E. Fayette St. He later moved with his family to Pittsburgh, Chicago and finally Richmond, Va.

Born deaf, Mr. Balfour and his sister, Ida, who was also deaf at birth, were sent to the Virginia School for the Deaf in Staunton.

While at the school, he earned Eagle Scout status and learned the trade of Linotype operator.

He graduated from the school in 1930 at a time when jobs for Linotype operators were scarce because of the Depression, so he worked as a Boy Scout leader and wallpaper hanger with his father and grandfather.

From 1942 to 1944, Mr. Balfour worked as a printer at newspaper plants in the Washington area and for the Army Map Service from 1944 to 1948, when he became a Linotype operator at the old Washington Times Herald.

He subsequently worked at The Washington Post and for 19 years at the old Washington Evening Star. He retired in 1974.

He was a 60-year member of Columbia Typographical Union 101-12.

Throughout much of his life, Mr. Balfour researched and compiled data on deaf education and deaf people who worked as peddlers.

He was a well-known figure at the District of Columbia Historical Society, and his papers are archived at Gallaudet University, where they are open to the public without restriction for research, family members said.

The collection, which consists of approximately 22,100 pages, spans the years 1926 to 2003, and includes letters, clippings, certificates, diaries, poems, receipts, greeting cards, postcards, manual alphabet cards produced by deaf peddlers, research notes and business cards.

The focus of much of the collection is on the history of deaf education and those individuals associated with the subject ranging from the 1940s through the 1990s.

"Louis was an extraordinary and zealous man. It is very fortunate that the Gallaudet archives holds his papers, and we are most grateful that he donated them to the archives," wrote Michael J. Olson, a deaf Gallaudet archivist and technician, in an e-mail response to questions. "Many times I begged him to donate them, and he resisted until he finally decided to donate them."

The largest single subject covered in Mr. Balfour's papers is the history of deaf people who worked as peddlers.

"From what I have seen among his papers, he worked feverishly on writing letters to people, especially congressmen and federal authorities, to encourage them to make laws against deaf peddlers selling ABC cards," Mr. Olson wrote.

"Not only that, he also wrote to superintendents and principals of schools for the deaf and deaf organizations about the exploitation of deaf peddlers," he wrote.

"It is my feeling that Louis probably educated people to understanding the deaf peddler's way of life and also that deaf people are not like that stereotype. He believed that deaf people have a normal life the same as other people. They are educated and have families and jobs," Mr. Olson wrote.

"He believed that hard work and perseverance would lead to a successful living rather than peddling. My dad figured if he could pull himself up by his bootstraps, others could, too," said a daughter, Patricia B. Smith of Towson.

Mr. Balfour was a member of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf, the Connecticut Historical Society, Gallaudet Alumni Association and the Virginia Historical Society.

In 1938, he married the former Mildred White and the couple lived in Chevy Chase for many years.

"She was a beautiful, petite Baptist deaf woman who remained his loving bride until she passed away in 2004," Mrs. Smith said. "They had four children, all hearing."

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. July 6 at Hunt Valley Church, 13015 Beaver Dam Road, Hunt Valley.

Also surviving are two sons, Robert W. Balfour of Greencastle, Pa., and L. Timberlake "Tim" Balfour of Silver Spring; another daughter, Josephine C. Kulik of Littleton, Colo.; and a grandson.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/obituaries/bal-md.ob.balfour15jun15,0,6997714.story?coll=bal-news-obituaries

this one struck me:
Many times I begged him to donate them, and he resisted until he finally decided to donate them.

wow...

Terry Major-Ball, who has died aged 74, first came to the attention of the nation in November 1990 on the night that his younger brother John became Prime Minister.

Reporters gathered outside his house in Wallington, Surrey, hoping for some insights into the life of the new Tory leader who had emerged from unpromising south London beginnings to succeed Margaret Thatcher. He would later recall how furious he was about some of the things the commentators were saying that evening about his father, a former circus clown and garden gnome manufacturer. Yet, when he went outside to speak to ITV's News at Ten in a dazzling pool of light, it was a disaster.

"My face looked bloated and I seemed drunk," he wrote in his autobiography Major Major (1994), ghostwritten by James Hughes-Onslow. "What on earth can people have thought? In fact I hadn't consumed anything stronger than a cup of tea. It was a useful lesson to me that you can't be too careful with the media dragon."

In fact, Major-Ball was to become a media favourite throughout his brother's premiership, despite the efforts of the Downing Street press office to curb his eccentricities. The book, too, received an ecstatic reception: "exquisitely funny" wrote Auberon Waugh; "one of the great comic books of the year, or any year" thought John Wells; while Private Eye's reviewer, hailing it as an unquestionable classic, wrote that it "makes you proud to be English. No foreigner could dream of such a masterpiece. It is one of the most distinctive products of our great civilisation, up there with Durham Cathedral, the Elgar cello concerto, Adnam's bitter and the double-decker bus. When John Major has been quite forgotten this book will, if there is any justice, be shelved between The Young Visiters and The Diary of a Nobody."

Major-Ball became a regular at book launches and was generous with quotations when reporters rang. Though diarists were often told by his wife Shirley that he was busy "tiling the bathroom", or engaged in some other home improvement project, he seldom failed to come to the telephone to deal with some piffling query.

Despite this he could be scathing about some journalists, writing of The Spectator columnist Paul Johnson that: "It must be terribly frustrating for Mr Johnson that time has moved on, so that we now have a Prime Minister who doesn't listen to him any more. After a lifetime of vacillation he must feel all washed up, rather as I did when the garden ornaments business collapsed." Having seen another journalist on television - "it was Lord Rees-Mogg or Richard Littlejohn" - describe his father as a "failed trapeze artist", Major-Ball consulted Hughes-Onslow. The latter discovered that the journalist in question was Charles Moore, then editor of The Sunday Telegraph. "James said he was at the same school as Mr Moore and gave me his home number, telling me to give him a hard time." But Moore was out when Major-Ball rang, and his wife so charmed him that he felt unable to complain. Still, he asked: "How would Charles Moore fare on the trapeze, I wonder, if he hadn't decided to pursue a more disreputable profession?"

So effusive was he that he described reporters yawning on the end of the line, and said that they would not ring him unless they had half an hour to spare. He pointed out, however, that his brother had once been interviewed for two hours by a journalist for a piece which never appeared. "Two hours, what a waste!" he wrote. "I could have painted a door in that time."

But despite his long-windedness he was totally loyal to the PM, and kept to himself some explosive secrets, such as Major's affair with Edwina Currie, his relationship with an older woman who was a friend of his mother, and the fact that their house in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, was owned by a secret older half-brother.

Terry (he was christened simply Terry, not Terence) Major-Ball was born on July 2 1932 and brought up at Worcester Park, south west London, where his parents owned a bungalow. His father, Tom Ball, called himself Tom Major when he was in a circus, but combined the two names when he started his business. His mother Gwen was a dancer. Having failed his 11-plus, unlike his older sister Pat and younger brother John, Terry attended Stoneleigh East Central Secondary Modern School. "I have no regrets about this, because it turned out to be a good school with an excellent headmaster," he wrote; but he confessed that he was sorry never to have acquired the educational qualifications for lucrative employment.

During the war the family was evacuated to Norfolk, where Terry got on well with the older German prisoners of war held nearby. The younger ones were more troublesome: "the final straw came when Mother caught a few of them outside the back door trying to teach baby John the Nazi salute."

By the time he left school after the war, his elderly father's health was failing, and Terry spent much time struggling to save the family business when he would have been wiser to seek work elsewhere. After the collapse of Major's Garden Ornaments, he had a variety of menial jobs, making plastic pipes and reading meters for the electricity board. He met his wife Shirley while working at Woolworths in Brixton.

Life never ran smoothly for him, but he managed to maintain a veneer of cheerfulness despite serious bouts of depression which sometimes incapacitated him. There is no doubt that the great excitement of his life was his brother John, who had once been his assistant in the family firm, becoming prime minister.

He was fêted by the Evening Standard which, noting that he had never flown in an aircraft, or been abroad except on National Service (in Germany, with the Medical Corps), or stayed in a hotel, organised for Major-Ball to fly first class to New York and stay in Manhattan. He met Liza Minelli in Joe Allen's and found New York cabbies unfailingly obliging. He told John about his adventures. He "listened politely and with genuine interest. Then he said, 'Sorry, Terry, I must go now. I'm due at a meeting, in the Cabinet Room.'

"As he left his flat to go downstairs, I thought once again how very little time for relaxation there is in the busy life of a Prime Minister."

Later Major-Ball went to Christchurch, New Zealand, to open a garden gnome festival, and to Melbourne for a flower show. He once told an Australian radio interviewer: "I don't know how people can say I or my brother are grey characters when both our parents were music hall comedians."

He visited Utah and Alaska for the Daily Express, to which he also contributed a column, and he made a BBC2 programme, A Postcard to my Brother, about his travels in France, Germany and Poland.

When John Major left Downing Street in 1997 Terry would say, only half in jest, that he was yesterday's man, and his vicarious fame dwindled. He remained, however, very fondly regarded by journalists, who found him unfailingly helpful and decent. As the former PM embarked on his autobiography and on global lecture tours, he found that much of the research had already been done by Terry for his book.

Major-Ball carried on with his tireless DIY schemes, and occasionally commented in newspaper diaries. Sometimes, while paving the front garden, he would look up at passing aircraft and say to himself: "I used to be up there once."

In 2003 Terry Major-Ball disappeared from the spotlight as quickly as he had appeared, moving to Somerset. There was speculation that he had been removed from the public eye to prevent him from talking to the press. Some thought that horse had bolted 13 years earlier. He was suffering from prostate cancer and died in a hospice at Chard on March 13, though news of his death did not emerge until yesterday.

He is survived by his wife Shirley (née Wilson) and by a son and a daughter.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2007/04/21/db2101.xml

David Muffett, who has died aged 88, applied the skills he had honed when dealing with cannibals in colonial Africa to battling education ministers and teaching unions in his role as chairman of Hereford and Worcester County Council education committee.

A huge, lumbering bear of a man, 6ft 2in tall and nearly as broad, with a booming voice and bristling moustache, Muffett looked rather like a cross between Falstaff and Captain Mainwaring.

He spent 16 years in the colonial service in northern Nigeria, where he claimed to have been one of only two Britons whose name passed into the native Hausa language: "Aka yi masa mafed" (literally "One did to him Muffett"), meaning "Justice caught up with him".

Muffett liked to regard himself as a hard-riding "bush DO" (district officer) of the old school and he allowed nothing to stand in the way of justice and good administration. Yet although he was ebullient and thick-skinned, he was always sensitive to local tradition.

In 1960 he apprehended the Tigwe of Vwuip, a northern Nigerian tribal chief who had eaten the local tax collector. The Tigwe had apparently been so impressed by the man's ability to acquire money on demand that he had — understandably — decided to try to assimilate his powers.
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It was not so much this particular misdemeanour that bothered Muffett; what really worried him was the fact that a UN delegation was due to visit the area, and "I wasn't about to have one of them eaten. I considered that it would be a highly retrogressive step."

The Tigwe, who was surprised to learn that the colonial authorities disapproved of his eating habits, was duly sent to jail — but only "until the delegation had departed beyond the reach of his culinary aspirations."

Muffett often seemed to have magical powers of his own. He was once shot at with poisoned arrows, all of which miraculously missed his bulky frame, though one lodged in the pommel of his saddle.

On another occasion a witch doctor who had pronounced a curse upon him fell down dead the next day, an event which, Muffett recalled, greatly enhanced his standing among the local population.

Later in life, setting a fine example of the sort of old-fashioned local government Tory who believed in leading from the front and running a tight ship, Muffett served as chairman of Hereford and Worcester education committee from 1982 to 1993.

Even though budgetary constraints were tight, he was determined to improve the pupil-teacher ratio, even if that meant drastic surgery in other areas.

At his insistence, the committee took the controversial step of withdrawing funding from the county school meals service in order to pay for around 100 new teachers. While many schools lost their in-house catering service, he encouraged the staff, with one-off grants, to set up on their own as private caterers, which many did successfully.

The Times Educational Supplement observed: "Depending on your taste, he runs the most cost-effective/mean education authority in the country" — a verdict which Muffett took as a compliment.

Muffett gave short shrift to incompetents and "pointy-headed bureaucrats" and took a tough line with the teaching unions. In 1987, after the NAS/UWT had called a half-day strike without giving notice, he sued the union for £48,000 damages under the Industrial Relations Act and won.

Afterwards, walking away from the High Court, he was accosted while lighting up a celebratory cigar by a tabloid journalist. "Are you anti-union, Dr Muffett?" the man demanded to know. "I'm not anti-union, Buster," Muffett replied, giving the man a friendly jab in the ribs. "I'm pro-kids." The quote made front-page headlines the next day.

Muffett got on well with his first Tory education secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, but he crossed swords with some of his successors, notably Kenneth Baker and John Patten.

In 1987 he intervened during the education debate at the Tory party conference to warn Baker that the government's obsession with disciplining Left-wing councils was threatening chaos in the excellent services run by Conservative councils, and that "immense and lasting damage" could be done to millions of children.

In 1992, disillusioned with what he saw as the Conservatives' betrayal of local government, he left the party, explaining in an open letter to his electors in Hartlebury, Ombersley and Fernhill Heath, near Droitwich, that although he could no longer support the government, he remained "a High Tory of the old school, one who 'fears God and honours the King' (and hardly anyone else besides)". He was re-elected in 1993 as an Independent.

David Joseph Mead Muffett was born on March 6 1919 and educated at Sebright School, Wolverley, in Worcestershire. Commissioned into the Loyal Regiment (North Lancashire) Special Reserve in 1939 as a second lieutenant, he spent the war on almost continuous active service; he saw action at Anzio, Florence and Monte Grande before going on to Palestine, Syria and Egypt.

"When I joined the forces at the age of 19," Muffett recalled, "the major said to me: 'Muffett, you are born to be a leader'. By God he was right." By the time he was 22, he had been promoted to the rank of major.

After the war Muffett joined the Colonial Administrative Service as a cadet and sailed out to Nigeria. An able administrator, he undertook the first investigation of migratory labour in the country; ran the 1952 Northern Region census; and was chief electoral officer for the Northern Region in the 1959 federal election.

In 1958 he attended the Nigerian constitutional conference at Lancaster House as the Northern Delegation's adviser on electoral and minority affairs.

In 1960-61 he served as resident-in-charge of the Northern Cameroons.

Fluent in the Hausa language, Muffett forged close bonds of trust and friendship not only with traditional tribal chiefs but also with the emerging political elite, in particular with Alhaji Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, who was murdered in 1966.

He retired from what had by then become Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service in 1963, having spent his last year inquiring into the financial affairs of Kano Native Authority. His report, which has not been published, led to the abdication of the Emir, Alhaji Sir Muhammadu Sanussi, an event which was greeted with popular approbation.

On retirement from the service, Muffett was awarded a research fellowship at Harvard's Centre for International Affairs, where he became a friend of the deputy director, Henry Kissinger. Subsequently, he joined the faculty of Duquesne University at Pittsburgh where he took a doctorate and became professor of African studies.

He published several books, including Concerning Brave Captains, a history of the British occupation of Kano; Empire Builder Extraordinary, a biography of Sir George Goldie, the Manx administrator who played a major role in the founding of Nigeria; and Let Truth Be Told, an account of the Nigerian military coup and counter-coup of 1966.

Muffett was proud of the achievements of empire but contemptuous of British government policy towards Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, maintaining that "all the Foreign Office cared about were the white settlers. They never gave a damn for the indigenous population." He was deeply hostile to apartheid.

On final retirement to England in 1978 he settled near Droitwich and was elected to Hereford and Worcester County Council in 1980.

David Muffett, who died on September 30, was appointed OBE in 1960.

He married, in 1950, Kathleen Judd, who survives him with their two daughters and a son.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2007/10/13/db1301.xml

Died in 2007? Reads more like 1907 or maybe at a stretch, 1957. Interesting fella. Suppose he could have ordered pants like LBJ?

]Richard Knerr, 82; co-founded Wham-O, maker of the Hula Hoop and Frisbee [and Slip-n-Slide!][/B]

Richard Knerr, co-founder of Wham-O Inc., which unleashed the granddaddy of American fads, the Hula Hoop, on the world half a century ago along with another enduring leisure icon, the Frisbee, has died. He was 82.

Knerr died Monday at Methodist Hospital in Arcadia after suffering a stroke earlier in the day at his Arcadia home, said his wife, Dorothy.

With his boyhood best friend, Arthur "Spud" Melin, Knerr started the company in 1948 in Pasadena. They named the enterprise Wham-O for the sound that their first product, a slingshot, made when it hit its target.

A treasure chest of dozens of toys followed that often bore playful names: Superball, so bouncy it seemed to defy gravity; Slip 'N Slide and its giggle-inducing cousin the Water Wiggle; and Silly String, which was much harder to get out of hair than advertised.

When a friend told Knerr and Melin about a bamboo ring used for exercise in Australia, they devised their own version without seeing the original.

They ran an early test of the product in 1958 at a Pasadena elementary school and enticed their test subjects by telling them they could keep the hoops if they mastered them.

They seeded the market, giving hoops away in neighborhoods to create a buzz and required Wham-O executives to take hoops with them on planes so people would ask about them.

Wham-O soon was producing 20,000 hoops a day at plants in at least seven countries, while other companies made knockoffs. Within four months, 25 million of the hoops had been sold, according to Wham-O.

In the 1985 book "American Fads," Richard A. Johnson wrote that "no sensation has ever swept the country like the Hula Hoop."

The craze also provided a significant business lesson.

"In April of 1958, people were standing around the block at department stores that were waiting to get their shipment," Knerr's son, Chuck, told The Times. "By September, you couldn't give them away. Once every household had two or three, it was over because they lasted forever."

Wham-O toys often had an air of originality that Knerr called the "wow" factor. He defined it as the moment when "you're . . . showing it off and everybody says, 'What's that? What's that?' "

The company founders experienced their own "wow" moment when former Air Force pilot Fred Morrison was spotted at the beach playing with his invention, the Pluto Platter. They bought the rights, modified it and renamed it Frisbee before releasing it in 1958.

The name may have come from a comic strip called "Mr. Frisbie" or from the Frisbie Pie Co. tins that reportedly inspired the disk's invention. Both versions of the story have been attributed to Knerr.

Initially, Frisbees were marketed by word of mouth on college campuses, and more than 100 million were sold in 30 years. A professional model went on sale in the 1960s, and the team sport known as Ultimate Frisbee soon was played on college campuses. Frisbee Dog World Championships have been held since 1975.

"We didn't want it used as a toy," Melin told the Pasadena Star-News in 1998. "We wanted it to be a sport."

Tom Wehrli, who has a canine Frisbee museum in his Chicago basement, called the company's story "pure Americana."

"Wham-O sold about 230 different items. Our grandparents, guaranteed, touched a Wham-O product," Wehrli told The Times.

In 1982, the founders sold the company for $12 million to Kransco Group Cos. Mattel Inc. bought Wham-O in 1994 and resold it to a group of investors in 1997.

Richard Knerr was born June 30, 1925, in San Gabriel.

As a teenager, he met his future business partner, Melin, and the two remained lifelong friends. They went to USC together, and Knerr earned a bachelor's degree in business in the late 1940s.

Neither wanted to work for their fathers -- Knerr's sold commercial real estate and Melin's was in the lumber business.

The duo started a business training falcons. To teach the birds to dive at prey, they lobbed meatballs with a homemade slingshot.

"I don't want a bird, one prospective customer said, but I'd sure like a slingshot like that," Knerr said in Fortune Small Business magazine in 2003.

So they bought a band saw and made slingshots in the Pasadena garage of Knerr's parents. They also sold other novelty hunting tools such as boomerangs and crossbows.

Within a few years, they were making about $100,000 a year and moved their company to a building in San Gabriel.

At Wham-O, the duo -- when they weren't taking bets on who could bounce the Superball into the wastebasket -- remained wildly open to ideas.

"You can't tell whether the fish will bite if you don't drop a line in the water," Knerr was fond of saying.

The approach could result in flops, such as the do-it-yourself fallout shelter, marketed at the height of the Cold War for $119, or the kit with plastic great white shark teeth that came out when the movie "Jaws" did in 1975.

"He and his partner, and everyone they worked with . . . were like the Rat Pack and characters from 'MASH,' with oversized personalities," Chuck Knerr said. "If it wasn't about fun, he wasn't interested."

Knerr, who was known to linger in toy stores, told The Times in 1994: "If Spud and I had to say what we contributed, it was fun. But I think this country gave us more than we gave it. It gave us the opportunity to do it."

Melin died in 2002.

In addition to his wife, Dorothy, whom he married in 1979, Knerr's survivors include his three children from a first marriage that ended in divorce, Melody Knerr, Chuck Knerr and Lori Gregory; two stepchildren, Richard Enright and Jeanne Stokes; and eight grandchildren.

Services will be private.

Instead of flowers, the family suggests donating to the Braille Institute Auxiliary of Pasadena Tribute Fund, 615 S. Madison Ave., Pasadena, CA 91106 or to the American Heart Assn., www.americanheart.org.

valerie.nelson@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-knerr17jan17,0,4039385,full.story?coll=la-home-obituaries

Marie Smith, the last speaker of the Eyak language, died on January 21st, aged 89 (http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=348996&story_id=10640514)http://www.economist.com/images/20080209/0608OB.jpg

Beyond the town of Cordova, on Prince William Sound in south-eastern Alaska, the Copper River delta branches out in silt and swamp into the gulf. Marie Smith, growing up there, knew there was a particular word in Eyak, her language, for the silky, gummy mud that squished between her toes. It was c'a. The driftwood she found on the shore, 'u'l, acquired a different name if it had a proper shape and was not a broken, tangled mass. If she got lost among the flat, winding creeks her panicky thoughts were not of north, south, east or west, but of “upriver”, “downstream”, and the tribes, Eskimo and Tlingit, who lived on either side. And if they asked her name it was not Marie but Udachkuqax*a'a'ch, “a sound that calls people from afar”.

Upriver out of town stretched the taiga, rising steadily to the Chugach mountains and covered with black spruce. The spruce was an Eyak dictionary in itself, from lis, the neat, conical tree, to Ge.c, its wiry root, useful for baskets; from Gahdg, its blue-green, flattened needles, which could be brewed up for beer or tea, to sihx, its resin, from which came pitch to make canoes watertight. The Eyak were fishermen who, thousands of years before, were thought to have crossed the Bering Strait in their boats. Marie's father still fished for a living, as did most of the men in Cordova. Where the neighbouring Athapaskan tribes, who had crossed the strait on snowshoes, had dozens of terms for the condition of ice and snow, Eyak vocabulary was rich with particular words for black abalone, red abalone, ribbon weed and tubular kelp, drag nets and dipping nets and different sizes of rope. One word, demexch, meant a soft and treacherous spot in the ice over a body of water: a bad place to walk on, but possibly a good one to squat beside with a fishing line or a spear.

This universe of words and observations was already fading when Marie was young. In 1933 there were 38 Eyak-speakers left, and white people with their grim faces and intrusive microphones, as they always appeared to her, were already coming to sweep up the remnants of the language. At home her mother donned a kushsl, or apron, to make cakes in an 'isxah, or round mixing bowl; but at school “barbarous” Eyak was forbidden. It went unheard, too, in the salmon factory where Marie worked after fourth grade, canning in industrial quantities the noble fish her people had hunted with respect, naming not only every part of it but the separate stems and shoots of the red salmonberries they ate with the dried roe.

As the spoken language died, so did the stories of tricky Creator-Raven and the magical loon, of giant animals and tiny homunculi with fish-spears no bigger than a matchstick. People forgot why “hat” was the same word as “hammer”, or why the word for a leaf, kultahl, was also the word for a feather, as though deciduous trees and birds shared one organic life. They lost the sense that lumped apples, beads and pills together as round, foreign, possibly deceiving things. They neglected the taboo that kept fish and animals separate, and would not let fish-skin and animal hide be sewn in the same coat; and they could not remember exactly why they built little wooden huts over gravestones, as if to give more comfortable shelter to the dead.

Mrs Smith herself seemed cavalier about the language for a time. She married a white Oregonian, William Smith, and brought up nine children, telling them odd Eyak words but finding they were not interested. Eyak became a language for talking to herself, or to God. Only when her last surviving older sister died, in the 1990s, did she realise that she was the last of the line. From that moment she became an activist, a tiny figure with a determined jaw and a colourful beaded hat, campaigning to stop clear-cutting in the forest (where Eyak split-log lodges decayed among the blueberries) and to get Eyak bones decently buried. She was the chief of her nation, as well as its only full-blooded member.

She drank too much, but gave it up; she smoked too much, coughing her way through interviews in a room full of statuettes of the Pillsbury Doughboy, in which she said her spirit would live when she was dead. Most outsiders were told to buzz off. But one scholar, Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, showed such love for Eyak, painstakingly recording its every suffix and prefix and glottal stop and nasalisation, that she worked happily with him to compile a grammar and a dictionary; and Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker was allowed to talk when she brought fresh halibut as a tribute. Without those two visitors, almost nothing would have been known of her.

As a child she had longed to be a pilot, flying boat-planes between the islands of the Sound. An impossible dream, she was told, because she was a girl. As an old woman, she said she believed that Eyak might be resurrected in future. Just as impossible, scoffed the experts: in an age where perhaps half the planet's languages will disappear over the next century, killed by urban migration or the internet or the triumphal march of English, Eyak has no chance. For Mrs Smith, however, the death of Eyak meant the not-to-be-imagined disappearance of the world.

http://kwout.com/cutout/s/vq/qs/2uk.jpg

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/24/AR2008032402799.html

Al Copeland, 64; Founder Of Popeyes Chicken Chain

Al Copeland, 64, who became rich selling spicy fried chicken and was notorious for his flamboyant lifestyle, died March 23 at a clinic near Munich.

The founder of the Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken chain learned shortly before Thanksgiving that he had a malignant salivary gland tumor. His death was announced by his spokeswoman, Kit Wohl.

After growing up in New Orleans, Mr. Copeland sold his car at 18 for enough money to open a one-man doughnut shop. He went on to spend 10 modestly successful years in the doughnut business.

The opening of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in New Orleans in 1966, however, caught Mr. Copeland's eye. Inspired by KFC's success, he used his doughnut profits to open a restaurant in 1971 called Chicken on the Run. ("So fast you get your chicken before you get your change.")

After six months, Chicken on the Run was still losing money. In a last-ditch effort, Mr. Copeland chose a spicier Louisiana Cajun-style recipe and reopened the restaurant under the name Popeyes Mighty Good Fried Chicken, after Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman's character in the film "The French Connection." The chain, which grew from that restaurant, became Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken.

In its third week of operation, Mr. Copeland's revived chicken restaurant broke the profit barrier. Franchising began in 1976, expanding the chain to more than 800 stores in the United States and several foreign countries by 1989.

In 1983, he founded Copeland's of New Orleans, a casual dining, Cajun-style restaurant. In the next two decades, the chain expanded as far as Maryland and west into Texas. He also started Copeland's Cheesecake Bistro, Fire and Ice restaurants, and Al's Diversified Food & Seasonings, a line of specialty foods and spices for national restaurant chains.

In March 1989, Popeyes, then the third-largest chicken chain, bought Church's Chicken, the second-largest behind KFC. The two chains, operated separately, gave Mr. Copeland more than 2,000 locations.

The Church's purchase was heavily financed, however, and escalating debt forced Mr. Copeland's company to file for bankruptcy in 1991. Although he lost Church's and Popeyes in the bankruptcy, he retained the rights to some Popeyes products, which he manufactured through his Diversified Foods & Seasonings plants, along with a few Popeyes stores.

Mr. Copeland frequently made headlines away from his business empire. His hobbies included racing 50-foot powerboats, touring New Orleans in Rolls Royces and Lamborghinis, and outfitting his Lake Pontchartrain home with lavish Christmas decorations, including 500,000 lights and a three-story-tall snowman. The display drew a lawsuit in 1983 from neighbors who said the resulting traffic held them hostage in their homes.

Mr. Copeland and his third wife, Luan Hunter, were married at the New Orleans Museum of Art on Valentine's Day 1991. As they left the ceremony, rose petals were tossed from a helicopter, and fireworks exploded over the building.

The original presiding judge at their divorce, Ronald Bodenheimer, pleaded guilty to promising a custody deal favorable to Mr. Copeland in return for a possible seafood contract and other benefits. Two of Mr. Copeland's associates and Bodenheimer went to federal prison for participating in the conspiracy. Mr. Copeland was never personally accused of participating in the scheme.

His survivors include five sons, four daughters, a brother and 13 grandchildren.

He had a life long love affair with bacon, butter, cigars and bourbon.

Sounds like someone I should have partied with.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080602/ap_on_re_us/pringles_burial

Ashes of Pringles can designer buried in his work
Mon Jun 2, 12:19 PM ET



CINCINNATI - The man who designed the Pringles potato crisp packaging system was so proud of his accomplishment that a portion of his ashes has been buried in one of the iconic cans.

Fredric J. Baur, of Cincinnati, died May 4 at Vitas Hospice in Cincinnati, his family said. He was 89.

Baur's children said they honored his request to bury him in one of the cans by placing part of his cremated remains in a Pringles container in his grave in suburban Springfield Township. The rest of his remains were placed in an urn buried along with the can, with some placed in another urn and given to a grandson, said Baur's daughter, Linda Baur of Diamondhead, Miss.

Baur requested the burial arrangement because he was proud of his design of the Pringles container, a son, Lawrence Baur of Stevensville, Mich., said Monday.

Baur was an organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co.

Baur filed for a patent for the tubular Pringles container and for the method of packaging the curved, stacked chips in the container in 1966, and it was granted in 1970, P&G archivist Ed Rider said.

Baur retired from P&G in the early 1980s.

I swear I searched the AO for "Pringles" before posting this but didn't see any recent results... turns out I was still searching thread titles only from my initial efforts to find this thread :oops:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/15/beth-what-can-we-do/

Beth Rickey collapsed and died alone on a motel room floor in Santa Fe on Friday night, a pitcher of ice tea in her hands. She was just 53. She had been ill for 13 years, mostly with a mysterious virus she had picked up on a church mission trip to Mexico. Debilitated, she had run through her life savings. Philanthropic help was on the way, but not in time.

It was a sad end for one of the bravest women you could ever meet. There had been a time, back in the early 1990s, when journalists and academicians, Jewish leaders and evangelicals, conservative and liberal, all proclaimed her a heroine. They were right.

Beth Rickey, perhaps more than any single person, helped stop the meteoric political rise of neo-Nazi David Duke. People today may forget what a political force Duke had become in Louisiana back then. With three weeks remaining in the 1991 race for governor, Duke had been in a statistical dead heat in the polls against ethically challenged former three-term governor Edwin Edwards. And Duke had the momentum.

What Duke could never escape, though, was all the evidence that he truly was a neo-Nazi, rather than what he claimed to be: a next-generation Reaganite conservative with a long-ago tawdry Ku Klux Klan past that he had thoroughly put behind him. Much of that evidence was unearthed by Beth Rickey.

Ms. Rickey had been a conservative Republican activist since her teenage years in Lafayette, La. She had interrupted her doctoral studies to work on a state legislative special election in early 1989 for businessman John Treen, brother of former Gov. David C. Treen. It was supposed to be a sleepy by-election -- until Duke caught fire.

Ms. Rickey began researching him, past and present, and realized sooner than almost anybody else that Duke was both more sinister than ordinary redneck racists and far more politically savvy. She made it her mission to stop him.

Duke won that state legislatve election in 1989 by a scant 227 votes, a 1 percent margin. Ms. Rickey didn't quit. She secretly followed him to a national Populist Party (neo-Nazi) convention in Chicago to which he had said he would not go, and she audiotaped him making a racist speech.

She publicized the recording. Then she arranged for private eyes to visit Duke's home-district legislative office, where they found him selling Nazi books. She publicized that. She was a member of the Republican State Central Committee, so she introduced a resolution to censure Duke.

It was tabled because of a technicality (the committee could officially "censure" only one of its own members, and Duke wasn't on the committee) but the publicity again embarrassed Duke and helped catalyze other statements from Republican officials denouncing him. Everywhere Mr. Duke turned, Ms. Rickey was there to demonstrate that his neo-Nazi links were not just well in the past, but continuing still.

For her efforts, Ms. Rickey started getting anonymous death threats -- enough so that she eventually had to hire security guards to watch her apartment. Bizarrely, she also started getting calls, supposedly friendly, from Duke himself.

Duke liked to think of himself as an intellectual. It was a weakness of his, a vanity. He could not accept that an "intellectual" doctoral student like Ms. Rickey could reject him. He invited her to get ice cream with his daughters. He took her to lunch. Strangely, he called her on the phone late at night. He let down his guard, stopped trying to pretend to be a mainstream conservative and started instead trying to convince her that his theories on race and culture were correct. Blacks were dangerous, he said, but not really the problem. The real problem was the Jews. They were satanic. And so hatefully on.

A bleary-eyed Ms. Rickey, on the other end of the phone, kept her tape recorder running.

Again, she publicized the tapes. Again, she received death threats.

At the end of 1989, Ms. Rickey and two liberal academicians along with a moderate evangelical minister decided that it would take a concentrated organization to defeat Duke. It is hard to believe, unless you were there, just how effective Duke was at manipulating the media. He was telegenic and glib, with a preternatural ability to turn any hostile interview to his advantage while hitting populist hot buttons again and again. And Louisiana was a poor state, with a poor educational system. Demagoguery worked. It would take savvy planning to stop him.

Ms. Rickey and the others called a meeting of a broad spectrum of activists, and then another. At the second meeting, on a cold and wet November evening, they elected a highly diverse, 10-person board. It featured Ms. Rickey and another Republican, liberal scholars, Jewish activists, Christian ministers and others. At the third meeting, they named it the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism. LCARN's research, political ads and publicity efforts against Duke eventually garnered international acclaim. The organization hounded Duke at every step. And finally, just in the nick of time in 1991, Duke's balloon popped. Edwards ended up winning by a monumental landslide, 61.2 percent to 38.8 percent. Duke never recovered politically, and years later he ended up in jail for tax fraud and mail fraud.

Ms. Rickey continued, in myriad ways, standing on principle in public and private life. At the end of 1996, however, she got sick when returning from the mission to Mexico. She later developed other ailments, including Crohn's disease. Many of her admirers tried to help her through the years, but she fell victim to one disaster after another.

She ended up destitute in Santa Fe, 900 miles from home. At about 3:30 Friday afternoon, a wonderful social worker told her on the phone that she definitely would find help. An hour later, the social worker found a philanthropist willing to step in. The philanthropist immediately phoned Ms. Rickey's number, but reached only voice mail.

Back in 1989 through 1991, though, when it made a huge difference to a state gone haywire, Beth more than answered the call.

Frank Coghlan Jr., Child Actor of Silent Era, Dies at 93 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/arts/television/04coghlan.html)

Was also the kid who "Shazam!"ed into Captain Marvel.

Frank Coghlan Jr., Child Actor of Silent Era, Dies at 93

By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: October 3, 2009

Frank Coghlan Jr., a freckle-faced child actor of silent movies who in the sound era thrilled Saturday matinee audiences by shouting “Shazam!” and mutating into the superhero Captain Marvel, died on Sept. 7 at his home in Saugus, Calif. He was 93.

He died of natural causes, his son, Patrick, said.

Junior Coghlan, as he was usually billed, did not actually become Captain Marvel in the 12-part serial “Adventures of Captain Marvel,” which Republic Pictures released in 1941. He played Billy Batson, the boy who meets a shaman in Siam who teaches him to transform himself into the superhero.

It was actually Tom Tyler who emerged as Captain Marvel, after Billy’s “Shazam!” moment, a giant flash and a billow of white smoke. (Although Mr. Coghlan was 25 at the time, his youthful looks and rather high-pitched voice allowed him to play the younger character.) Billy the boy and Captain Marvel, in a tight red costume with a yellow lightning bolt on the chest, would morph back and forth during the episodes, each 15 to 20 minutes long.

“It’s considered by many aficionados as the best cliffhanger serial of all time,” Bruce Goldstein, the director of repertory programming at Film Forum, the movie house in the South Village, said in an interview. “What a great fantasy for kids: a kid who turns into a superhero.”

Junior Coghlan had already made his name in movies when he was really a child. Starting at 3 as a crawl-on in a Western serial called “Daredevil Jack,” he had been an extra, played bit parts or had significant roles in more than two dozen silent movies.

“If you went to the movies in those days, you couldn’t help but know him, even though he was never a major star,” the film critic and historian Leonard Maltin said in an interview.

In 1925 the director Cecil B. DeMille signed little Frank to a five-year contract. “When DeMille saw Junior’s publicity stills, he stated, ‘Junior Coghlan is the perfect example of a homeless waif,’ ” according to the Web site Goldensilents.com.

“He had a spunk and an innocence,” Mr. Maltin said. “He would not be the one playing a juvenile delinquent.”

Yet in one of his first talkies, Mr. Coghlan played James Cagney’s hoodlum as a boy in “The Public Enemy” (1931), about a criminal’s rise in the Prohibition era.

Frank Edward Coghlan Jr. was born in New Haven on March 15, 1916, the only child of Frank and Katherine Coyle Coghlan. The family moved to California when Frank Jr. was a baby and, soon after, all three were working as extras in silent films.

Mr. Coghlan’s wife of 31 years, the former Betty Corrigan, died in 1974. His second wife, Letha Schwarzrocks, died in 2001. Besides his son, Patrick, of Saugus, Calif., he is survived by three daughters, Cathy Farley of Gold Hill, Ore.; Judy Coghlan of Seal Beach, Calif.; and Libbey Gagnon of Long Beach, Calif.; and six grandchildren.

Mr. Coghlan served as a naval aviator in World War II. He later headed the Navy’s motion picture cooperation program, acting as a liaison with Hollywood studios. After 23 years in the Navy, he returned to acting in bit parts in movies, on television and in television commercials.

Mr. Coghlan often appeared at conventions and seminars for movie buffs in his later years and was pleased that many people remembered his role in the Captain Marvel series.

His license plate said “Shazam,” Mr. Maltin said.

http://www.startribune.com/nation/80495172.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD 3aPc:_Yyc:aUUISurvivor of 1906 San Francisco quake dies at age 107

Associated Press
Last update: January 2, 2010 - 8:23 AM


SAN FRANCISCO - Jeanette Scola Trapani, one of the oldest survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, has died at age 107.


Dolores Legge says her mother had been suffering from pneumonia and passed away at her home in El Dorado Hills on Monday.


She says Mrs. Trapani had clear memories of the disaster, including the terrible smell of the smoke from the burning city, even though she was only four years old at the time.


Mrs. Trapani was born on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill on April 21, 1902 and she was raised in the city.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/business/03allina.html

Curtis Allina, Executive Who Put Heads on Pez, Is Dead at 87

By MARGALIT FOX

Curtis Allina, a candy company executive who presided over a powerful innovation in marketing that was less about the candy itself than it was about the container it came in — and who in unintended consequence created a universe of enraptured, determined and by their own account fanatically obsessed collectors — died Dec. 15 at his home in Olympia, Wash. Mr. Allina, who helped bring the world the modern Pez dispenser, was 87.

The cause was heart failure, his son, Johnny, said.

For nearly three decades after World War II, Mr. Allina was the vice president in charge of United States operations at what is now Pez Candy. In 1955, at his urging, what had been an austerely packaged Austrian confection for adults took on vibrant new life as a children’s product.

That year, the first character dispensers, as they are known in the parlance of Peziana, were issued, giving birth to what is today a highly collectible pop-cultural artifact. Instantly recognizable, the dispensers are slim plastic containers, usually anthropomorphic in design, whose heads — modeled after those of TV characters, cartoon figures or historical personages — flip back to disgorge brick-shaped pieces of candy.

Driven in large part by baby-boomer nostalgia, Pez dispensers are now a staple of eBay and the ubiquitous subject of conventions, Web sites, newsletters, books and even a museum, the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia in Burlingame, Calif. They have been featured in movies; a memorable “Seinfeld” episode (in which Elaine ruins a piano recital by laughing uncontrollably at the sight of a Pez dispenser); and a 2006 documentary, “PEZheads: The Movie,” which explores the Pez-collecting phenomenon.

Today, Pez Candy, based in Orange, Conn., sells tens of thousands of dispensers each year in 80 countries.

A Pez dispenser is a simple little machine: back snaps the head, out pops the candy, and the head flicks shut again with a satisfying click. But oh, the variations, from a spate of licensed characters to those designed by Pez. For serious collectors, the most highly prized dispensers, long discontinued, are elusive objects of desire that can run to thousands of dollars apiece.

Hundreds of different dispensers are extant. (“Hundreds” is a conservative estimate, for collectors count minute alterations in a dispenser’s shape or color as meaningful in ways civilians do not.) They include Popeye Pez, Pokémon Pez and Paul Revere Pez; SpongeBob Pez and Elvis Pez (in several historical variants, from ’50s boyish through ’70s dissipated); Mozart Pez, Hello Kitty Pez and Mickey Mouse Pez.

Precisely whose idea it was to put heads on Pez dispensers — previously headless, unadorned and tastefully Viennese — is the subject of continuing debate among Pez historians. In a telephone interview, David Welch, the author of “Collecting PEZ” (Bubba Scrubba Publications, 1994), said that in researching his book he encountered half a dozen possible candidates, Mr. Allina among them. This much, Mr. Welch said, is certain:

“The idea came from the United States. And for the idea to have come out of the United States and made it to Austria where it could be approved, Allina was the only guy who could have made that happen.”

Curtis Allina was born Aug. 15, 1922, in Prague, and raised in Vienna. Between 1941 and 1945, he and his family, Sephardic Jews, were forced into a series of concentration camps. Mr. Allina emerged at war’s end as his family’s sole survivor in Europe. Making his way to New York, he worked for a commercial meatpacker before joining Pez-Haas, as the company’s United States arm was then known, in 1953.

Pez was invented in 1927 by Eduard Haas III, a Viennese food-products mogul. Small, rectangular and mint-flavored (the name is a contraction of pfefferminz, the German word for peppermint), the candy was marketed to adults as an alternative to smoking. Originally sold in tins, Pez was repackaged in the late 1940s in plain, long-stemmed dispensers meant to suggest cigarette lighters.

Introduced into the United States in the early 1950s, Pez sold fitfully. Then someone thought of remarketing it as a children’s candy, in fruit flavors, packed in whimsical dispensers. It fell to Mr. Allina to persuade the home office in Vienna, by all accounts a conservative outfit that took sober pride in its grown-up mint.

Mr. Allina prevailed, and the first two character dispensers, Santa Claus and a robot known as the Space Trooper, were introduced in 1955. Unlike today’s plain-stemmed, headed-and-footed dispensers, both were full-body figures, completely sculptured from top to toe.

Mr. Allina, who left Pez in 1979, was later an executive of Au’Some Candies.

Mr. Allina’s first marriage, to Hanna Hofmann, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Hannelore; two children from his first marriage, Babette Allina and Johnny Allina; two children from his second marriage, Tanya Carlson and Alexia Allina; and three grandchildren.

His legacy also includes hundreds of Pez-related Web sites, dozens of conferences with names like the Swedish Pez Gathering and the Slovenian Pez Convention, and scores of organizations, from Lone Star Pez (in North Texas) to the Association Française des Collectionneurs de Pez. There is a collector in Oklahoma who owns a Pez-dispenser-encrusted automobile, and thousands of others around the world, it is entirely safe to assume, who dream Pez-infused dreams at night.

Perhaps all this renders moot the question of who came up with the now-familiar dispenser in the first place.

“Whose idea was it? Who the hell knows,” Mr. Welch, the Pez historian, said. “Who was more important in getting it done? Allina.”

saw this over thanksgiving

http://www.mottandhenning.com/obit/glasscock-albert/

Albert R. “Dick” Glasscock age76, of Springfield, IL passed away on November 19, 2009 at Villa Health Care East in Sherman, IL.

Survived by Spouse – Amy
Daughter – Carol ( Ron) Woodrum of Athens
Grandsons – James (Jennifer) Woodrum
Andrew ( Amy) Woodrum
Timothy (Valerie) Woodrum
Great-granddaughters – LeAnna, Alli, Kailey, Reese, Makayla,
Alexandra and Teagan
Brothers – Duane (Kay) Glasscock of Seattle, WA
Loren (Pat) Glasscock of Oreana
Lovell ( Merl) Glasscock of Burleson, TX
Kenneth (Chris) Glasscock of Indianapolis, IN

Several Nieces & Nephews and Great Nieces & Nephews

Mr. Glasscock was born June 12, 1933 on the family farm in rural Springfield the son of Bert and Gladys Terry Glasscock.

He married Anna M. “Amy” Simpson on December 30, 1955.

He is preceded in death by his parents, his sister Berdine Glasscock Soenksen and two brothers Charles and Jonathan Glasscock.

Dick graduated from Athens High School in 1951 and attended Springfield College of IL and Lincoln Land Community College.

Dick worked for the U.S. Postal Service as a clerk in Springfield prior to his retirement and served his country in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean conflict. He was a member the Sherman United Methodist Church, American Legion and V.F.W. and former member of the Elks Club and Postal Clerks Union.

He enjoyed wintering in Florida, traveling, fishing, playing cards and spending time with family and friends.

Visitation will be held Monday November 23, 2009 at Mott & Henning Funeral Home from 4:00 until 7:00 P.M. and where funeral services will be held Tuesday November 24, 2009 at 10:00 A.M.

Rev. Mike Pennell will be officiating.
Burial will be at Indian Point Cemetery
Memorials: Sherman United Methodist Church, Athens Volunteer Fire Department or Charity of Choice.

saw this over thanksgiving

http://www.mottandhenning.com/obit/glasscock-albert/

why are the kids' names accompanied by names of the opposite sex? Did they all get sex change operations or something?

A recent extended family funeral had the following in the obit:

"...XXX's son Kim was accompanied by his wife Tommie"

This was followed by a flurry of emails questioning the gender of both.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-obit-gabriel-13-jan13,0,3003069.story

Jan C. Gabriel, 1940-2010: Drag-strip radio ad announcer famous for 'Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!'


Jan C. Gabriel died Sunday.

Or as he might say, "Sunday! Sunday!! SUNDAY!!"

The voice of the once ubiquitous radio commercials for "Smoking U.S. 30" drag strip, Mr. Gabriel was also the longtime announcer at the old Santa Fe Speedway and the producer of "Super Chargers," a nationally syndicated motor sports television show.

He was 69 when he died of complications from polycystic kidney disease on Jan. 10 in his Lombard home, said his friend and business partner Denise Dorman.

The commercials for the U.S. 30 drag strip in northwest Indiana were conceived by the track's owner, Ben Christ, who wanted to make sure everyone knew his business was open on Sunday.

Christ enlisted Steve Cronen of Starbeat Recording Studios in Deerfield to produce an ad that conveyed the excitement of racing while leaving no question as to the day of the event.

"It proved very difficult to do," Cronen said. He recalled that some 50 announcers auditioned and were turned down, their voices simply not vibrant enough, before Mr. Gabriel was called in.

A disc jockey who got his start doing sock hops, he had gained notice in racing circles with scintillating descriptions of the action at Santa Fe Speedway in Willow Springs. He read Christ's script once, and Cronen knew he had his man.

"It was the excitement, the way he delivered that line. No one else was able to do that," Cronen said. "That's because he really loved racing."

The script originally called for two announcers to trade intonations of "Sunday!"

But the Scully tape recorder Mr. Gabriel used for his first take was set up with a delay that allowed him to handle the line himself, Cronen said.

Christ liked it, and through the 1980s Mr. Gabriel came in every week during racing season to produce fresh commercials for both U.S. 30 and tracks around the country that Christ owned, making "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!" a national phenomenon of sorts.

The spots ended with an echoing, "Where the great ones run!" also read by Mr. Gabriel.

A native of Wisconsin who grew up in Palos Heights and graduated from Sandburg High School, Mr. Gabriel produced commercials for Community Discount stores and worked behind the microphone at WJOB in Hammond.

Always fascinated by racing, he drove cars briefly in the 1960s and called the action at Santa Fe from 1968 to 1982. Beginning in 1982, he was for 12 years the producer and host of "Super Chargers," which, in addition to covering all forms of racing, was described by Dorman as "an oddball mash-up of celebrities and motor sports."

Viewers tuning in might see baseball great Reggie Jackson at motorcycle racing school or actor Chuck Norris with Bears legend Walter Payton participating in a speedboat race. The show also provided serious coverage of stock car and drag racing.

Through his production company, TV One Inc., Mr. Gabriel helped popularize monster truck competitions in the 1980s.

Through his many accomplishments, he never tired of being best known for "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!"

Mr. Gabriel's first three marriages ended in divorce.

He is survived by his wife, Teresa, and a daughter, Amanda.

A service will begin at noon Sunday. For information, call Dorman at 630-845-4694.

nice

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/nyregion/21yitta.html

WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.

Her descendants range in age from a 75-year-old daughter named Shaindel to a great-great-granddaughter born Feb. 10 named Yitta in honor of Mrs. Schwartz and a great-great-grandson born Feb. 15 who will be named at a bris on Monday. Their numbers include rabbis, teachers, merchants, plumbers and truck drivers. But these many apples have not fallen far from the tree: With a few exceptions, like one grandson who lives in England, they mostly live in local Satmar communities, like Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Kiryas Joel, near Monroe, N.Y., where Mrs. Schwartz lived for the last 30 years of her life.

Mrs. Schwartz had a zest for life and a devotion to Hasidic rituals, faithfully attending the circumcisions, first haircuts, bar mitzvahs, engagements and weddings of her descendants. With 2,000 people in the family, such events occupied much of the year.

Whatever the occasion, she would pack a small suitcase and thumb a ride from her apartment in Kiryas Joel to Williamsburg or elsewhere.

“She would appear like the Prophet Elijah,” said one of her daughters, Nechuma Mayer, who at 64 is her sixth-oldest living child, and who has 16 children and more than 100 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “Everybody was fighting over her!”

There were so many occasions that, to avoid scheduling conflicts, one of her sons was assigned to keep a family calendar. But her family insists that Mrs. Schwartz had no trouble remembering everyone’s name and face.

Like many Hasidim, Mrs. Schwartz considered bearing children as her tribute to God. A son-in-law, Rabbi Menashe Mayer, a lushly bearded scholar, said she took literally the scriptural command that “You should not forget what you saw and heard at Mount Sinai and tell it to your grandchildren.”

“And she wanted to do that,” he said, without needing to add her belief that the more grandchildren, the more the commandment is fulfilled. Mrs. Schwartz gave birth 18 times, but lost two children in the Holocaust and one in a summer camp accident here.

She was born in 1916 into a family of seven children in the Hungarian village of Kalev, revered as the hometown of a founder of Hungarian Hasidism. During World War II, the Nazis sent Mrs. Schwartz, her husband, Joseph, and the six children they had at the time to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

At the shiva last month, another Bergen-Belsen survivor recalled her own mother dying at the camp; Mrs. Schwartz took it upon herself to prepare the body according to Jewish ritual, dig a grave and bury the woman.

“For her it was a matter of necessity,” Nechuma Mayer said of her mother’s actions.

When the war ended, the family made its way to Antwerp, Belgium. There, Mrs. Schwartz put up refugees in makeshift beds in her own bombed-out apartment.

In 1953, the Schwartzes migrated to the United States, settling into the Satmar community in Williamsburg. She arrived with 11 children — Shaindel, Chana, Dinah, Yitschok, Shamshon, Nechuma, Nachum, Nechemia, Hadassah, Mindel and Bella — and proceeded to have five more: Israel, Joel, Aron, Sarah and Chaim Shloime, who died in summer camp at age 8. Sarah came along after Mrs. Schwartz had already married off two other daughters.

While her husband sold furniture on Lee Avenue, Williamsburg’s commercial spine, Mrs. Schwartz, who never learned English well, tended the family. She sewed her daughters’ jumpers with mother-of-pearl buttons and splurged for pink-and-white blouses — 20 for 99 cents each — at that late lamented discount emporium on Union Square, S. Klein.

With so many children, Mrs. Schwartz had to make six loaves of challah for every Sabbath, using 12 pounds of dough — in later years, she was aided by Kitchenaid or Hobart appliances. (Mrs. Mayer said her mother had weaknesses for modern conveniences, and for elegant head scarves.) For her children’s weddings, Mrs. Schwartz starched the tablecloths and baked the chocolate babkas and napoleons.

After her husband died 34 years ago, relatives said, Mrs. Schwartz never burdened others with her new solitude.

“We didn’t feel even one minute that she was a widow,” Mrs. Mayer said. “She used to say, ‘When there are so many problems in life, I should put myself on the scale?’ ”

Mrs. Schwartz did not want her children to collect photographs of her and, given that modesty, her family was reluctant to provide more than one to accompany this article. “Just keep me in your heart,” she used to say. “If you leave a child or grandchild, you live forever.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/nyregion/30buck.html?src=me&ref=general


It was for decades the most enduring piece of ephemera in New York City and is still among the most recognizable. Trim, blue and white, it fits neatly in the hand, sized so its contents can be downed in a New York minute. It is as vivid an emblem of the city as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television.
Enlarge This Image (javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/04/30/nyregion/30buck_CA0.html','30buck_CA0_html','width=382,heig ht=580,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes'))
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/30/nyregion/30buck_CA0/30buck_CA0-articleInline.jpg (javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/04/30/nyregion/30buck_CA0.html','30buck_CA0_html','width=382,heig ht=580,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes'))
Leslie Buck in 1991.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/30/obituaries/30buck2_inline/30buck2_inline-articleInline-v2.jpg
The Anthora cup, created by Leslie Buck.


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It is, of course, the Anthora (http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=Anthora&more=date_all), the cardboard cup of Grecian design that has held New Yorkers’ coffee (http://www.nytimes.com/info/coffee/?inline=nyt-classifier) securely for nearly half a century. Introduced in the 1960s, the Anthora was long made by the hundreds of millions annually, nearly every cup destined for the New York area.
A pop-cultural totem, the Anthora has been enshrined in museums; its likeness has adorned tourist memorabilia like T-shirts and ceramic mugs (http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&source=imghp&q=%22Greek+Coffee+Cup%22&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=). Like many once-celebrated artifacts, though, the cup may now be endangered, the victim of urban gentrification.
The Anthora seems to have been here forever, as if bestowed by the gods at the city’s creation. But in fact, it was created by man — one man in particular, a refugee from Nazi Europe named Leslie Buck.
Mr. Buck, a retired paper-cup company executive, died on Monday, at 87, at his home on Long Island, in Glen Cove. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son Robert said. Mr. Buck, previously a longtime resident of Syosset, N.Y., also had a home in Delray Beach, Fla.
The Anthora has spawned a flock of imitations by competitors over the years, but it was first designed by Mr. Buck for the Sherri Cup Company in Kensington, Conn.
Mr. Buck’s cup was blue, with a white meander ringing the top and bottom; down each side was a drawing of the Greek vase known as an amphora (http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/Pottery/shapes/amphorae.htm). (“Anthora” comes from “amphora,” as filtered through Mr. Buck’s Eastern European accent, his son said.) Some later imitators depict fluted white columns; others show a discus thrower.
On front and back, Mr. Buck emblazoned the Anthora with three steaming golden coffee cups. Above them, in lettering that suggests a Classical inscription, was the Anthora’s very soul — the motto. It has appeared in many variant texts since then; Mr. Buck’s original, with its welcome intimations of tenderness, succor and humility, was simply this:
We Are Happy
To Serve You.
Though the Anthora no longer dominates the urban landscape as it once did, it can still be found at diners, delis and food carts citywide, a squat, stalwart island in a sea of tall, grande and venti (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/001677.html). On the street, it warms the harried hands of pedestrians. Without the Anthora, “Law & Order” could scarcely exist.
Laszlo Büch was born on Sept. 20, 1922, to a Jewish family in Khust (http://www.columbiagazetteer.org/main/ViewPlace/69974), then in Czechoslovakia. (It is today in Ukraine.) His parents were killed by the Nazis during World War II; Laszlo himself survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
After the war, Mr. Buck made his way to New York, where he Americanized his name and ran an import-export business with his brother, Eugene, who had also survived the camps. In the late 1950s or thereabouts, the brothers started Premier Cup, a paper-cup manufacturer in Mount Vernon, N.Y.
Leslie Buck joined Sherri Cup, then a startup, in the mid-’60s. Originally the company’s sales manager (for a time, he was its entire sales force), he later became its director of marketing.
Sherri was keen to crack New York’s hot-cup market. Since many of the city’s diners were owned by Greeks, Mr. Buck hit on the idea of a Classical cup in the colors of the Greek flag. Though he had no formal training in art, he executed the design himself. It was an instant success.
Mr. Buck made no royalties from the cup, but he did so well in sales commissions that it hardly mattered, his son said. On his retirement from Sherri in 1992, the company presented Mr. Buck with 10,000 specially made Anthoras, printed with a testimonial inscription.
Besides his son, Robert, and brother, Eugene, Mr. Buck is survived by his wife, the former Ella Farkas, whom he married in 1949; two daughters, Beverly Eisenoff and Linda Rush; and four grandchildren.
In recent years, with the gentrification of the city and its brew, demand for the humble Anthora has waned. In 1994, Sherri sold 500 million of the cups, as The New York Times reported afterward. In 2005, the Solo Cup Company (http://www.solocup.com/Default.htm), into which Sherri had been absorbed, was selling about 200 million cups a year, The Times reported.
Today, Solo no longer carries the Anthora as a stock item, making it only on request. Other companies still turn out versions of the cup, though not in the quantities of its 20th-century heyday.
But given the tenacious traditionalism of many locals (“Avenue of the Americas,” anyone?), it is safe to assume that the Anthora and its heirs will endure, at least for a while, in the city’s steadfast precincts. For some time to come, on any given day, somewhere a New Yorker will be cradling the cup, with its crisp design and snug white lid, the stuff of life inside (http://www.afactor.net/kitchen/coffee/kaffeeKantate.html).

Doodle dude, dead (http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/08/02/2010-08-02_morrie_yohai_90_inventor_of_the_cheez_doodle_di es.html)

Morrie Yohai, who died of cancer at age 90 last week, was a mystic, a World War II Marine pilot and a philanthropist. But he’ll probably be remembered most as the creator of the Cheez Doodle.

So how did he come up with the iconic snack? After World War II, Yohai took over his father’s snack-food business at the Old London Melba toast factory in the Bronx. The business already made Cheese Waffles, caramel popcorn and other snacks but wanted something new, Newsday reported.

"We were looking for another snack item," Yohai told Newsday in a 2005 interview. "We were fooling around and found out there was a machine that extruded cornmeal and it almost popped like popcorn."

Yohai said they decided to chop the cornmeal product into small pieces and coat it with cheese. "We wanted to make it as healthy as possible," he said, "so it was baked, not fried."

The name Doodle occurred to him as they sat round a table sampling various kinds of cheese for snacks.

Yohai was born in Harlem in 1920. After he graduated from the Wharton School of business, he took a job at the Grumman aircraft factory on Long Island. During World War II, Yohai left work to enlist in the Navy and become a pilot.

His son, Robbie Yohai, of Berkeley, Calif., told Newsday, "He decided since he was making planes, he figured he could fly a plane." He said his father had never taken an airplane ride. "The first time he was ever in an airplane, he was the co-pilot."

Morrie Yohai transferred to the Marine Corps and served as a pilot in the South Pacific, transferring injured troops and cargo back and forth.

"He was excited by the experience," his son said. "He was happy to be a Marine and was very proud of it."

In 1949, Yohai began his career at the snack food factory in the Bronx.

Evetually, Yohai sold the company to Bordon. His new title was group vice president in charge of snacks. He told Newsday that his job involved sitting around a conference table with other executives and selecting the toys inside Cracker Jack boxes.

After Borden relocated to Columbus, Ohio, Yohai left the firm. He started teaching at the New York Institute of Technology, becoming the associate dean for the school of management.

"It turned out that he loved teaching," Robbie Yohai told Newsday. "He could see he was making a difference in a lot of these young peoples’ lives."

In later years, Yohai studied Torah and Jewish mysticism. He took up writing, and penned more than 500 poems and published two books of poetry.

He was a member of Temple Beth El in Great Neck. His philanthropic work included founding the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival.
"His life took many turns," said his daughter, Bab Yohai of Oakland, Calif. "He did whatever he set his mind to and he was incredible."

In addition to his two children, he is survived by his wife, Phyllis, and his two sisters, Bea Forrest of Chicago and Lorraine Pinto of Mexico City, and a grandchild, Jasmine Yohai-Rifkin. He was predeceased by another sister, Lillian.

The man who invented the cheese doodle has died. To celebrate his life, everyone at the funeral left an orange fingerprint on his coffin. .

Godspeed, little doodle!

This obituary is interesting in the way it is written:

Kaye Cowher (http://www.makli.com/kaye-cowher-0049100/)


Kaye Cowher the wife of Bill Cowher and a former player of basketball passed away this Friday. The lady was suffering from skin cancer. She had been suffering from this dangerous disease for quite along time and finally she lost her life. All her friends and family members are very sad and full of tears. The family members (http://www.makli.com/kaye-cowher-0049100/#) believe that her absence has left a huge space in their lives which can never be filled. She has three grieved daughters (http://www.makli.com/kaye-cowher-0049100/#) namely Meagan, Lindsay and Lauren. Bill himself is very sad on loosing his wife and he is also hurt due to the fact that her daughters are motherless now and they are having a tough time.
Kaye Cowher met Bill in North Carolina State when both of them were students. They fell in love with each other and later on they got married. Though Kaye Cowher is known due to her husband but she also has her own separate identity as she is a former player of

Women’s Professional Basketball (http://www.makli.com/kaye-cowher-0049100/#) League. She played three seasons in the professional league and later on she discontinued play due to other activities. She wanted to give more time to her husband. She is remembered by the moment when her husband’s team lost an important match and she gave him a big hug in order to give him hope.
She will always be remembered as a great basketball player and a loving wife. She has a big role in the success of her husband’s professional life.

the cowher obit is written by a 6th grader, right?

Maybe it was written by a Chapel Hill grad.

The man who invented the cheese doodle has died. To celebrate his life, everyone at the funeral left an orange fingerprint on his coffin..

Jimmy Fallon is a day late:

Morrie Yohai, the man who created the Cheez Doodle, has died at the age of 90. His remains were placed in an urn — and sealed with a chip clip.