april 2005 > final credits > last link on the left

Jothan Callins >permalink<

Jazz trumpeter

Jothan Callins As a musician and composer, Callins worked with Sun Ra, Lionel Hampton, Lonnie Liston Smith, Chuck Mangione, Stevie Wonder, Sarah Vaughn, Milt Jackson, Grover Washington, Max Roach, and B.B. King. He wrote over 500 original compositions, including "Birmingham Blues," which was performed by the Alabama Symphony Orchestra and NBC's "Tonight Show" band, and was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1979.

In 1978, Callins became the first jazz artist in residence for the Birmingham Public School System. He founded The Birmingham Youth Jazz Ensemble in 1994, and wrote a music history book, "The Birmingham Jazz Community." He was a Alabama Jazz Hall Of Fame Inductee.

April 30, 2005 at age 62.

Lewis G. Zirkle >permalink<

Founder, computer keyboard company

QWERTY In 1969, Zirkle started Key Tronic Corporation which later became one of the largest computer keyboard makers in the world. His company employed 2,800 people in the Spokane, Washington area.

The growth of computer technology turned keyboards into mass-produced commodities. What once sold for $100 soon sold for around $15. Zirkle resisted the idea of shifting production overseas to cut costs, and added manufacturing plants in Ireland and China. He resisted suggestions that he cut jobs in Spokane and shift them to Mexico. However, in 1992 company board members replaced Zirkle with a turnaround specialist who focused on cutting costs and shifting production. Today, the company has about 170 workers in the Spokane area.

April 30, 2005 at age 90.

Norma-Jean Richardson >permalink<

Singer and guitarist

Also known as "The Duchess," Richardon was member of Bo Diddley's band between 1962 and 1966. Diddley (aka Ellas Bates and Ellas McDaniel) taught her to play and how to emulate his sound on the electric guitar. She joined the band just prior to the recording of the "Bo Diddley & Company" in 1962. The following year she played on the classic live "Bo Diddley's Beach Party" LP. In 1963, she played on Diddley's debut UK tour, on a bill that also featured the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and a new pop-sensation known as the Rolling Stones.

April 30, 2005.

Sherman Loudermilk >permalink<

Art Director, TV show host

Sherman Loudermilk Loudermilk was a Marine Corps combat artist who served in World War II when he walked into the studios of Los Angeles' fledgling TV station KTLA Channel 5. After showing his work, he was hired on the spot and built and painted sets for such early shows such as "Beanie and Cecil" and "Frosty Frolics."

In 1948, the station decided to start airing a Western movie program for children, and they wanted a real cowboy to host. They looked no further than their own art department and placed Loudermilk, a 6-foot, 2-inch Texan wearing a white hat, neckerchief, holster and six-gun and put him on the air as 'Cowboy Slim.'

Typical of early television, unusual stunts were the norm. Often a pony was wrestled into the second floor TV studios. During a promotional appearance at the Hollywood Bowl, Loudermilk tried to bulldog a steer by grabbing the animal's horns. The animal sent him into the orchestra pit. Bandleader Tex Williams never spoke to him again.

Surviving his on-air host and 'rodeo' career, Loudermilk continued as an art director for "The Dating Game," "The A-Team," "Simon & Simon," "Battlestar Galactica" and the 1978 miniseries "Centennial," for which he shared an Emmy nomination.

April 30, 2005 at age 92. Alzheimer's disease.

Brook Williams >permalink<

Actor

Williams was the son of actor-playwright Emlyn Williams. Richard Burton was a close family friend and owed his professional debut on British stage and film (1949's "The Last Days of Dolwyn") to Emlyn. Brook and Burton became close friends, and when Burton became a bankable star, Brook became a member of what was known as "Burton's Caravan." They appeared together in over a dozen films during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s including "Anne Of The Thousand Days," "Where Eagles Dare," and "The Wild Geese."

After Burton's death in 1984, Williams appeared in lesser films such as 1988's "Pascali's Island" and "Testimony," and 1995's "England, My England."

April 29, 2005 at age 67. Cancer.

Jim Pash >permalink<

Surfaris saxophonist

The Surfaris helped define the wave of surf music that flooded Top 40 radio in the early 1960s. In 1962, they recorded their hits "Wipe Out" and "Surfer Joe" in a Cucamonga (Los Angeles) recording studio that could be rented for $12.50-an-hour. As fate would have it, Pash did not play on those legendary sessions. His father forced the teenager to work at the family store that night. Pash is at far left.

The Surfaris' biggest hit, an instrumental that opened with an other-worldly giggle followed by the phrase "Wipe out!" was released in January, 1963 and went to Number 2 on the pop charts. The song was re-released in 1964, becoming a hit in American states that had previously banned the song as "too riotous." The song has gone gold nine times and platinum a few more as part of surf compilations and soundtracks. The tune has appeared in movies like "Dirty Dancing" and "Meet the Parents." It has sold everything from Stri-Dex acne medication to Wendy's hamburgers, and the 'laugh' was once sampled in Visa commercials. The song earns about $200,000 a year in royalties. The band's other hit, "Surfer Joe," only reached Number 62 on the charts.

The original five-member band broke up in the mid-1960s. Two decades later, Pash and former lead guitarist Jim Fuller reformed The Surfaris with new members. As with many bands of that era, rival groups with the same name and tenuous claims formed, including one by another Surfaris guitarist, Bob Berryhill.

The Surfaris spawned literally dozens of imitators (the Beach Boys, the Ventures, the Challengers), a feat made possible with the introduction of affordable electric guitars and amplifiers such as those made by Fender. Garage rock soon followed. What also followed were some incredible claims to the legacy of the song. Talk-show host Morton Downey Jr. once bragged about composing the song. John Mason, former head of Nevada's Republican Party and who played in a Surfaris cover band, admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he was "confused" when he made claims to have written the song.

April 29, 2005 at age 56. Congestive heart failure.

Johnnie Stewart >permalink<

Creator of "Top of the Pops"

Johnnie Stewart Decades before music videos, MTV, Much Music and VH1, there was Britain's "Top of the Pops." The show was launched on the BBC on New Year's Day, 1964, and was first filmed in a converted church in Manchester. Each show began with the announcement "It's number one, it's Top Of The Pops." The programme is still broadcast today.

Stewart started in the BBC Radio sound-effects department in 1937. After war service, he returned to produce radio programmes such as "Sing It Again" and "BBC Jazz Club." He claimed he had once booked Frank Sinatra for £50. Stewart transferred to television in 1958 and became the producer of "Juke Box Jury," one of the first popular music programmes on television.

The most exciting era in the history of pop music was starting to crest, and Stewart figured he could take the popular "Teen and Twenty Disc Club" format, which aired on Radio Luxembourg hosted by DJ Jimmy Savile, and adapt it to television. Stewart came up with the title, composed the original theme tune and became the new show's producer. He himself called TOTP "the simplest show in the world and murder on the ears."

The first show featured the Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, the Dave Clark Five, the Hollies and the Swinging Blue Jeans, all miming to their records. Filmed appearances were shown from Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Freddie and the Dreamers and the Beatles. The show's success was instantaneous, and nobody turned down an invitation to appear. When top groups were on tour and unavailable, Stewart's solution was to use nubile dancers gyrating to records of the missing group's hits.

The Musicians' Union objected to groups being required to mime. Stewart argued that audience expected to hear songs played as they were on the record and the sound could not be recreated in the studio. A compromise was reached with the formation of a TOTP orchestra, made up of experienced session musicians. Stewart's only mistake, probably out of his hands, was not to record and store any of the programmes.

For more about Johnnie Stewart and the "Top Of The Pops," visit the Sixties City, Television Heaven and Aircheck Museum web sites.

April 29, 2005 at age 87.

Leonid Khachiyan >permalink<

Professor, computer science

Leonid Khachiyan Khachiyan was a renowned professor of computer science at Rutgers University whose work helped solve how computers process large problems. His work concentrated on the field of linear programming, whose father George Dantzig died May 13, 2005. Linear programming solved such problems as the scheduling of airline flights and financial modelling.

Khachiyan proved the existence of an efficient way to solve computer programming problems to find the best of a finite but huge number of choices a computer can pursue. As a result of his work, he won the Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society in 1982. Khachiyan later studied cyclic games, which have applications in artificial intelligence and matrix games.

April 29, 2005 at age 52. Heart attack.

Richard Freitag >permalink<

Preserver of a WWII submarine

When the USS Silversides, a World War II submarine that sunk 23 enemy ships in the Pacific Ocean was put up for public sale, Freitag went to Washington with $50 and a plan to save it from the scrap heap. The submarine now rests in the Great Lakes Naval Memorial Museum in Muskegon, Michigan, and is America's most-decorated World War II-era submarine still afloat.

As a result of his efforts to bring U.S. Naval history to life, Freitag became a consultant for Hollywood movies such as Frank Sinatra's 1966 film "Assault On A Queen" and the 1981 Wolfgang Petersen film "Das Boot." The premiere of the Sinatra film was held inside the German U-505 submarine that Freitag also oversaw. Freitag also gave museum tours to Britain's Prince Philip and Walt Disney, who was interested in adding a submarine ride to his amusement park attractions.

April 29, 2005 at age 82.

Sean Egan >permalink<

Kinetics professor, mountain climber

At age 63, Canadian doctor Sean Egan set out to become the oldest Canadian to climb Mount Everest. He died on the mountain after leaving Everest's base camp on his way to a lower altitude. He had been suffering from a respiratory infection and was going to seek medical help. As he was heading toward a rescue helicopter, Egan collapsed. It was his third trip to the mountain, and was to be his first summit attempt.

Egan first trekked to Everest in 1998, and returned in 2000 to conduct research projects that included studying the personalities of mountain climbers and sleep difficulties at high altitudes. He taught fitness classes for 27 years as a professor of human kinetics at the University of Ottawa, and held a doctorate in sports psychology. He recently climbed Argentina's Mount Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, as a "warm-up climb" for Everest.

Egan's current mission was to set up a wireless network with a satellite link back to Ottawa. A team of 20 climbers from Ryerson University and the University of Ottawa arrived at the base camp on February 25th, setting up a state-of-the art network of wired and wireless laptops, allowing researchers to swap files and back up data on other laptops, and to video conference with researchers in Ottawa and Toronto. (Information about the network can be found at the Ottawa-based Kanatek Technologies web site. Kanatek sponsored Egan's climb).

On April 11, Egan was the scorekeeper for the world's highest hockey game. The Canadian expedition team defeated a team made up of climbers from Australia, the United States and Nepal on the Khumbu glacier. The game was won 21-13 by Canada, despite an interruption by yaks who decided to cross the rink.

The oldest Canadian to reach Everest's peak is Frank Lutick, who scaled the mountain on October 22, 1998 at the age of 53. The oldest person to reach the top is Yuichiro Miura of Japan, who accomplished the feat on May 22, 2003. He was 70. More than 1,500 people from 65 countries have scaled Mount Everest from either Nepal or Tibet since Sir Edmund Hillary's ground-breaking expedition in 1953. About 185 climbers have died on the mountain.

April 29, 2005 at age 63. Respiratory infection leading to cardiac arrest.

William J. Bell >permalink<

Writer, producer and TV soap creator

William J. Bell Bell will be best remembered for working on soap operas with four-word titles: "As the World Turns," "Days of Our Lives," "Young and the Restless" and "Bold and the Beautiful." He got his start in 1956 as a writer on the "Guiding Light," which was transferred from radio after starting there in the late 1930s. It is now the world's longest-running serial. Bell left GL in 1957 to write ATWT (as fans of the genre refer to such shows -- it seems they have a proclivity for acronyms), and in 1966, he become the head writer for DOOL and helped turn the flagging series into a top audience draw over a four year period. Bell won six Emmy Awards for producing or writing the series.

In 1973, Bell teamed up with his wife, former Chicago news personality Lee Phillip Bell, and came up with Y&R, cashing in on America's burgeoning obsession with youth. Y&R launched the careers of Tom Selleck and David Hasselhoff (who starred in it for seven years). Bell won an additional three Emmy Awards for writing the show (which received six Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series). Bell and his wife struck lightning again in 1987, creating BATB.

Bell's writing and production work amounted to 15,000 episodes of TV daytime drama. The shows he created are watched by over 400 million people in more than 100 countries. His three children are all involved in the work he created. Bill is president of Bell's TV production company. Bradley is head writer and executive producer on BATB and Lauralee is an actress on Y&R. Bell died in his Los Angeles house which had once belonged to millionaire Howard Hughes.

April 29, 2005 at age 78. Alzheimer's disease.

Ed Schantz >permalink<

Grandfather of Botox

Schantz began his career in the U.S. military during World War II, being the first to purify and grow the deadly "red tide" shellfish toxin. In the 1960s, he began looking at a medical use for botulin, the world's most poisonous substance, which causes a fatal form of muscle paralysis called botulism. Schantz thought that the poison could be developed to treat illnesses caused by muscle spasms, such as crossed eyes which are caused by an overactive eye muscle. Schantz was nearly alone in his ability to grow and purify the toxin, and over the decades he refined the toxin like a fine winemaker. Today, Botox is regularly used to smooth facial wrinkles.

April 28, 2005 at age 96.

Lane Nakano >permalink<

Japanese-American actor

Lane Nakano Known in the Japanese-American community primarily as a singer, Nakano starred in one of the more unusual films made in Hollywood history, 1951's "Go For Broke." It was the first major film to feature Japanese-American actors, re-telling the true story of Japanese-American soldiers who fought in Europe during World War II as part of the U.S. 442nd Regimental Combat Team, formed in 1943 with Japanese-American volunteers. The film earned an Academy Award screenplay nomination for director Robert Pirosh, who later went on to create TV's "Combat." Ironically, Nakano and his brother had both served in the 442 Regiment.

Nakano later played bit parts in TV's "Hawaiian Eye" and "Route 66," and his son, screenwriter Desmond Nakano, wrote "Last Exit to Brooklyn," "Bad Moon Rising" and "American Me."

April 28, 2005. Emphysema.

Percy Heath >permalink<

Bassist, Modern Jazz Quartet

The Heath Brothers Heath's bass playing anchored the Modern Jazz Quartet during its entire four-decade existence. He also recorded with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Fats Navarro, Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman, but most of his recording activity from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, and all of his live performances, were with the group simply known to fans as MJQ. Heath was the last surviving member of the quartet. The Heath Brothers, from left, Percy, Jimmy and Albert.

Heath was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. His father was an amateur clarinetist and his mother sang in a church choir. All three brothers became interested in music early in life. Heath took up the bass after he had studied the violin as a child. During World War II, he was a member of the all-Black Tuskegee Airmen. In 1950, he and brother Jimmy both joined Dizzy Gillespie's group. Heath and three other former Gillespie sidemen -- pianist John Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson and drummer Kenny Clarke -- formed the Modern Jazz Quartet.

After the group disbanded temporarily, Heath began working with his brother Jimmy and his youngest brother Albert, a drummer, as The Heath Brothers. They specialised in a loose, freewheeling brand of jazz different from the dignified and restrained work of MJQ. The Heath Brothers remained together until the Modern Jazz Quartet reunited in the early 1980s for a highly lucrative series of concerts in Japan. The MJQ stopped playing in 1997, and the Heath Brothers then reformed.

Connie Kay, who replaced original MJQ drummer Clark in 1955, died in 1994. Milt Jackson died in 1999, and John Lewis died in 2001.

April 28, 2005 at age 81. Bone cancer.

Charles Pratt >permalink<

Producer

Pratt was the producer or executive producer for 22 feature films and a dozen television movies. Among his more well-known titles were 1971's "Willard," 1972's "Ben" and 1973's "Walking Tall," the first title in its trilogy that he oversaw. Pratt also produced 1979's "The Great Santini," which earned Robert Duvall an Academy Award nomination for best actor and a supporting actor nomination for Michael O'Keefe.

After working for the Chicago Tribune, several Chicago and New York radio stations, NBC-TV and General Foods, Pratt joined Atlanta-based Cox Broadcasting, (Cox Communications). Cox had just acquired Bing Crosby Productions, and Pratt became its head of production and later, president. "Ben" spawned the Michael Jackson hit song of the same name. The firm also produced 1975's "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud," which was popular on the soft-porn circuit due to its ample display of nudity.

April 27, 2005 at age 81. Cancer.

Reginald (Red) Horner >permalink<

Hockey player

Reginald (Red) Horner Horner was the oldest living member of the National Hockey League Hall of Fame, and the oldest living former NHLer. He spent his entire career in Toronto, playing for both the Toronto Marlies and the Maple Leafs. Horner spent 12 seasons on the Maple Leafs defence, two of them as team captain, playing 490 regular season games recording 42 goals and 110 assists. He won a Stanley Cup in 1932.

Horner was known as the Leaf's "policeman," earning a total of 1264 penalty minutes. He led the NHL in penalty minutes for a record eight consecutive seasons from 1932-33 to 1939-40. He once collected 17 penalty minutes in the first 20-minute period of a game, and in 1935-36 he set a record that lasted for 20 years, with 167 penalty minutes in 43 games. Retiring in 1940, Horner worked as a linesmen for two seasons until a back problem ended his hockey involvement.

April 27, 2005 at age 95.

Gordon Shaw >permalink<

Linking music to thinking

Shaw gained national attention in 1993 when he reported that a group of college students who listened to Mozart saw their IQs increase substantially. He never cared for the attention his work generated, complaining that headlines like "Mozart's Music Makes You Smarter" oversimplified his studies. The resulting mania was dubbed the "Mozart effect."

Originally an expert on particle physics who had studied under Hans Bethe, Shaw began studying classical music's effect on higher-level thinking after a chance reading of a 1973 paper on brain theory. He devised a computer model used to match musical notes to brain patterns. The result was not only Mozart, but something that resembled Western classical music. Shaw wondered that if brain activity sounded like music, what would happen if the equation was reversed and music was used to stimulate the brain? Listeners saw their IQ levels rise as much as nine points, but the increases only lasted 10 minutes.

Prenatal music classes and classical CDs for toddlers soon became the rage. Florida lawmakers called for state-funded child-care centers to play Beethoven daily and the state of Georgia handed out classical CDs to new mothers.

Shaw speculated the music was "a warmup exercise" for parts of the brain that perform high levels of abstract thinking. Shaw suffered a backlash in the academic community when other scientists reported they could not duplicate the results he uncovered.

April 26, 2005 at age 72. Kidney cancer.

Hasil Adkins >permalink<

Rockabilly wildman

Hasil Adkins When Adkins was growing up, hearing Hank Williams and others on the radio, he assumed that the one named musician played all the instruments himself. So it was that he set the template for his own musical career. Guitar, harmonica, drums and other foot-rhythm instruments all were mastered by Adkins - after a fashion.

Known to his fans as "The Haze," Adkins was the original star of Norton Records, a label built around the primal recordings he produced beginning in the 1950s. His screaming vocals and freestyle approach to rhythm made him a cult favorite among rockabilly fans. He recorded continuously and claimed to have written more than seven-thousand songs. His records were released in very small quantities, and he was barely known outside his hometown but for a small fanbase in Europe who kept the rock-a-billy rage alive. When the Cramps did an early 1980s remake of "She Said," Adkins' records suddenly became hot again.

Adkins soon became a symbol of American musical primitivism. Critics called his songs "some of the most enthusiastically demented records in the annals of rock 'n' roll." His voice was described as garbled and often resembled the talking-in-tongues trance state popular in Appalachian churches. However, musicologist Nick Tosches asserted: "Like the Bible and toilet paper, the music of Hasil Adkins belongs in every household."

His songs "Chicken Walk" and "The Hunch" were the basis of short-lived dance crazes in the 1960s. His other hits included "Poultry in Motion," "Chocolate Milk Honeymoon," and "Boo Boo The Cat."

Adkins lived his entire life in the same three-room shack. He suffered from manic depression and insomnia, a condition not helped by his daily consumption of two gallons of coffee. He enjoyed hunting and guns -- at one concert he pulled out his pistol and shot at a noisy ventilator fan.

Incredibly, one recipient of Adkins' music was Richard Nixon, who in 1970 received a tape of Hasil's tunes from Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd. It would be hard to imagine the President actually listening to the tape with even a hint of understanding, but he thanked Byrd with a note saying, "I am very pleased by your thoughtfulness in bringing these particular selections to my attention."

Adkins was the subject of the documentary "The Wild World of Hasil Adkins." He appeared in several films including "Die You Zombie Bastards!" Explaining his sound, Adkins once said, "I didn't try to be primitive -- I just had bad microphones."

April 26, 2005 at age 67.

Maria Schell >permalink<

Actress

Maria Schell Schell once took Hollywood by storm, portraying the enigmatic Grushenka, a role once sought by Marilyn Monroe, in Richard Brooks' 1958 movie "The Brothers Karamazov." And just as suddenly, Schell chose obscurity, only to return years later in dozens of small but memorable character roles. Maria's brother Maximilian Schell is best known for his roles in "Judgement At Nuremberg" and "Heidi" (he is also the godfather of actress Angelina Jolie).

Schell first appeared at age 16 in the 1942 Swiss film "The Quarry." She did not appear in another film until 16 years later. Shell also starred in "The Hanging Tree" opposite Gary Cooper in 1959 and "Cimarron" with Glenn Ford in 1960. Retirement was short-lived, with Schell returning to acting in 1968, playing Albert Speer's mother in the television production "Inside the Third Reich." She appeared with her brother in the 1974 thriller "The Odessa File," and she played one of the members of the Krypton ruling council in 1978's "Superman."

Schell was recognised as the best actress at the Cannes film festival in 1954 for her work in "The Last Bridge." Schell won eight Bambi Awards (Germany's Oscar) including seven consecutive wins. She received a Lifetime Achievement Bambi in 2002.

Schell last appeared publicly in February, 2002 at a presentation of the documentary film "My Sister Maria," produced by brother Maximilian. She was greeted by a minutes-long ovation from the audience. Her last years were spent isolated from public view. Close associates said she surrounded herself with 11 television sets playing her own favourite starring roles.

April 26, 2005 at age 79. Pneumonia.

Mason Adams >permalink<

Actor, jam spokesman

Mason Adams will be remembered for two roles. As an actor, he is best known as Los Angeles Tribune editor Charlie Hume on the Ed Asner TV series "Lou Grant." The Grant character was spun off the quintessential sixties series "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," where Asner played WJM-TV's news director. It is rare that a dramatic series has been successfully spun off from a situation comedy, but the top-rated "Lou Grant" show ran for five seasons, from 1977 to 1982. Adams received three Emmy Award nominations for his role. In 1979, a Florida newspaper conducted a poll of the most trusted men in America, and Adams' Charlie Hume ranked with legendary CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite.

Adams will also be long associated as the spokesman for the J. M. Smucker Company, makers of jams and jellys. The product's tag line, that Adams made memorable over a thirty year run, "With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good" was created by Jay Schulberg, who died January 12, 2005. The line became a part of modern vernacular, earning a spoof on Saturday Night Live. Ironically, another jelly celebrity, Jason Byce, died February 13, 2005.

Adams's first success came in starring roles in the radio serials of the 1940's and 50's. He headed "Pepper Young's Family" for 14 years, and also starred in several episodes of "Batman," "Gasoline Alley," "Inner Sanctum," and in radio's "Superman" he played the Kryptonite-wielding Atom Man. Despite his fatherly image, Adams also played some mean bad guys, such as he did in the film "F/X," a 1986 surprise hit.

April 26, 2005 at age 86.

Robert J. Schiffer >permalink<

Makeup artist

Robert J. Schiffer Bob Schiffer's first makeup job was as a teenager working on the 1932 Marx Brothers comedy "Horse Feathers." He retired from the Walt Disney Studios in 2001 after working there for 33 years (but continued to serve as a consultant). Inbetween those two career bookends, Schiffer worked with a literal galaxy of stars.

Schiffer worked on 1935's "Becky Sharp," the first feature-length three-colour film. One of his early jobs was applying body make-up to hundreds of extras who were thrown to the lions in 1935's "The Last Days of Pompeii." He worked on most of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. With a reputation as an expert in women's makeup, Schiffer worked for Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, and Ingrid Bergman, and evenutally became Rita Hayworth's exclusive makeup artist. He is redited with pioneering the 1940s fashion for pencil-thin eyebrows.

Schiffer had a long association with Burt Lancaster, most notably creating Lancaster's character for 1962's "The Birdman of Alcatraz." Schiffer aged Lancaster's character from 18 to 80 - a process that took 2 1/2 hours a day. He persuaded Lancaster to shave his head, duplicating his hair with a toupee. He made rubber bags for his eyes, and a rubber chin. Lancaster's face was stretched with tape, and then released to add wrinkles.

In addition to nearly two hundred Hollywood credits, Schiffer also helped create disguises for espionage and law-enforcement agencies. He helped with camouflage work in World War II, and in 1961, during the Bay of Pigs invasion, he made up American operatives to look more 'Cuban.' He created mock wounds for hundreds of marines and sailors as part of battlefield training exercises. In 2001, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild. He continued to work well into his eighties.

April 26, 2005 at age 88. Complications from a stroke.

Florence Van Stockum >permalink<

Super centenarian

Florence was born in England in 1894. She married Reginald George Bareham, who was one of 20,000 killed July 1, 1916 -- the first day of fighting in the Battle of the Somme during World War I. Two days later, Van Stockum's son Reginald was born. Florence had joined the military service and helped found the Women's Royal Air force, serving as a taxi transport driver until the end of the war.

In 1920, she married Anton William Van Stockum and the couple moved to the United States. During World War II, Van Stockum served as a district president of U.S. War Bond drives and with the American Red Cross. Van Stockum, living in Forida when she died, was thought to be the state's oldest person and one of the oldest in the nation. She was one of only 60 super centenarians (those over the age of 110) worldwide whose age had been verified by the Gerontology Research Group.

April 25, 2005 at age 111.

Howard Benedict >permalink<

Aerospace writer

Howard Benedict In his 37-year career with the Associated Press, Benedict covered more than 2,000 missile and rocket launches, including 65 human flights from Alan Shepard's historic "Light this candle!" ride in 1961 to the 34th space shuttle mission in 1990.

Benedict became the first AP reporter to be given the title "aerospace writer." He helped set the standard for space writing, developing terminology to explain the complex field of space travel in everyday English. He introduced such early space terms as "orbits," "retrofire," "multistage rockets," and "rendezvous," which referred to two spacecraft meeting in space.

April 25, 2005 at age 77.

Kay Snelgrove >permalink<

School-girl spy

The man they called Intrepid ... had a woman behind him. Meet Kay Snelgrove, a teenaged schoolgirl living in Boston during the early years of World War II. She often visited Saint John, New Brunswick to visit friends and family. What she was actually doing was ferrying coded messages from Britain's war office to American president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Snelgrove grew up in a rarefied circle. Her father was a government consultant so close to the centre of power that she called prime minister Mackenzie King "Uncle Mac." When the family lived in Montreal, she called a neighbour "Elliott" even though his full name was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Her family sent her to Emerson College in Boston, where she studied with a great-grandson of Davy Crockett. While on a visit home, Snelgrove became part of history. She met a man who swore her to secrecy, and then found out she had been conscripted her to serve her country with her father's blessings. Soon she was carrying white envelopes across the Canada/U.S. border as the King's Courier.

Snelgrove never knew the contents of those sealed packets, but they ultimately drew the United States into World War II. Before one trip across the border, she was told to memorize a combination of numbers and letters. They translated into the message "A large flotilla of Japanese battleships is headed for either Pearl Harbor or San Francisco, estimated time of arrival Dec. 6 or 7." It was through Snelgrove that Britain knew America would soon be at war.

The impact of her covert work was felt decades later. Snelgrove required therapy to help her with deal with recurring nightmares of the human devastation of war. She occasionally gave her daughter odd words of advice on how to kill a man with a hatpin.

In 1976, William Stephenson wrote A Man Called Intrepid, based on his work running the largest intelligence operation in history on behalf of British prime minister Winston Churchill. Snelgrove could finally reveal her war-time work to her family, although she most wanted to discuss it with her father, who first drew her into the footnotes of history. However, Thomas Martin died in 1972.

Snelgrove eventually became head of the classified ad department for the Brampton Daily Times, a small town newspaper in Ontario. She got the job by including the name of family friend Ken Thomson as a reference. Thomson owned the chain of papers which the Daily Times was part of. Snelgrove's daughter, Mary Norwood, said her mother never saw her role in the war as heroic. "She sure loved her country. She loved being a Canadian."

April 25, 2005 at age 84. Alzheimer's disease.

Michael Rogers >permalink<

Director of film music for Universal Pictures

Rogers was the executive director of film music for Universal Pictures Music. He began his lifelong association with music in the 1960s as a drummer in various Los Angeles bands. He landed the position of copyist at Columbia Pictures Music in the 1970s, working on such TV shows as "Fantasy Island," "T.J. Hooker," "Police Woman" and "Police Story." In 1981 he became head of the music library for Universal Pictures. There he was responsible for music preparation and licensing on TV shows and movies ranging from "Knight Rider" to "Jurassic Park." He continued those duties when he joined the studio's music publishing company, MCA Music, negotiating licensing fees for its catalog of songs and scores.

A native of Southern California, Rogers was the son of jazz bandleader Shorty Rogers. He was a 36-year member of the Los Angeles Musician's Union, Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians.

April 25, 2005 at age 55. Cancer.

Wes Montgomery

Edmonton radio legend

April 25, 2005 at age 66. Cancer.

Rusty's Roundup at Entertainment Insiders >permalink

Added April 25, 2005 -- a summary of movie & TV folks you might not have heard of.

Jacques Poitrenaud - French filmmaker
Jaime Fernandez - award-winning Mexican actor
Jerry Moss - property master
John O’Hare - actor and playwright
John Lattanzio - set construction coordinator
Kim Moo-saeng - South Korean actor
Philippe Volter - French actor
Ryan Effner - property master and special effects technician
Samantha Downing - actress
William Pancake Jr. - special effects technician

Charles Kuentz >permalink<

Soldier

Charles Kuentz Kuentz was the last surviving German veteran of World War I, having fought for Kaiser Wilhelm II at Ypres and Arras, and at the Eastern Front against the armies of Tsar Nicholas II.

As a result of the territorial claims made over his home region of Alsace-Lorraine in France, he fought against Germany in the Second World War. Kuentz devoted the final years of his life to visiting schools and giving lectures promoting peace. Last year he completed his memoirs for military archives.

Announced April 24, 2005 at age 108.

Romano Scarpa >permalink<

Italian creator for Disney comics

Romano Scarpa Scarpa was the first Italian Disney creator to have his works published in the United States. Joining Arnoldo Mondadori, the publisher who had the Italian rights to Disney comics, in 1953, he added to the Disney universe many new characters, several of whom have been adopted by other writers both in Italy and abroad. For decades Italian Disney fans followed the antics of Kildare Coot, Donald Duck's crazy cousin, Brigitta McBridge, Scrooge McDuck's girlfriend, and Gideon McDuck, a newspaper editor and Scrooge's brother.

Scarpa took over the duty of creating original Disney stories for the Italian market from Floyd Gottfredson. Scarpa would sometimes base his stories on movies (such as Frank Capra's 1937 "Lost Horizon") and some of his stories became the basis of Ettore Scola's 1968 comedy "Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?"

For more about Romano Scarpa and his work, visit Frank Stajano's tribute to the illustrator and story-teller.

April 23, 2005 at age 77.

J.B. Stoner >permalink<

White supremacist

J.B. Stoner At age 18, Stoner revived a dormant chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A few years later he headed the Stoner Christian Anti-Jewish Party. Stoner was a suspect in the 1958 bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, but he wasn't indicted until 1977.

Stoner was convicted in 1980 on the basis of venomous statements he made at the time. A mostly white jury found him guilty in 90 minutes. Stoner appealed the verdict and vanished for five months in 1983 when his appeals ran out. Stoner turned himself in and served 3 1/2 years before he was paroled in 1986.

Earlier, in 1964, Stoner followed Martin Luther King Jr. to Florida to organise a counter-demonstration. After King's assassination, the FBI considered Stoner a suspect. Ironically, Stoner later became the appeals attorney for James Earl Ray, King's alleged assassin, and spent years trying to get the case against Ray overturned.

Stoner's legacy will be found in the statements he made and the viewpoint he represented. A 1946 newspaper article quoted Stoner as saying that "being a Jew [should] be a crime punishable by death." He called Hitler too moderate, blacks a branch of the ape family and Jews "vipers of hell." Incredibly, he described himself as "the candidate of love" during his campaign for Georgia governor in 1970, one of many unsuccessful efforts at elective office. During a campaign for the United States Senate in 1972, Stoner won a fight before the Federal Communications Commission allowing him to use the word "nigger" in commercials.

Bedridden in a nursing home and partly paralysed, Stoner remained unapologetic, saying: "A person isn't supposed to apologise for being right." He never married, once telling an interviewer that any woman "would be too dumb" for him.

April 23, 2005 at age 81. Complications from pneumonia.

Jimmy Woode >permalink<

Jazz bassist

Jimmy Woode In his early years, Woode was the house bassist at a club in Boston. There he performed with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Earl "Fatha" Hines. In 1955, a chance two-week gig as a replacement in Ellington's band turned into a five-year engagement.

Woode's time with Ellington resulted in some of the Duke's best moments at the end of the bandleader's career, such as the fabled Newport Jazz Festival performance on July 7, 1956. Woode appears on Ellington's soundtrack music for Otto Preminger's 1959 courtroom drama "Anatomy Of A Murder."

After leaving Ellington's band in 1960, he immigrated to Europe and spent much of the rest of his life in Sweden, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. There he became a charter member of Europe's most successful jazz orchestra, the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band, remaining with it from its inception in 1960 until it disbanded in 1973. He spent much of the rest of his playing life in Europe, only returning to the U.S. in 2001. Another Clarke-Boland Big Band alumni, Benny Bailey, died April 14, 2005.

April 23, 2005 at age 78. Heart attack.

Sir John Mills >permalink<

Actor

If British Cinema had a face, it would be John Mills. Handsome and dapper, he was often the war hero, either as the gentleman officer or the working class soldier, or the noble Englishman, always intent on doing the decent thing. With a career spanning six decades and over 100 films, Sir John Mills was the last of the knighted British actors that once included Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir Alec Guinness, Sir John Gielgud, and Sir Peter Ustinov.

Mills made his film debut as a sailor in the 1932 comedy "The Midshipmaid." In 1992, he almost went blind after the retinas in both eyes failed while he was touring with a one-man show in 1992. He made his final film appearance in 2003 in "Bright Young Things."

Born Lewis Ernest Watts on February 22, 1908 in Felixstowe, eastern England, Mills started in the theater at the age of 19, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where his talent was spotted by Noel Coward. Mills played in 1939's "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," and co-starred with Noel Coward in David Lean's 1942 World War II drama "In Which We Serve" (the first of five films Mills did with Lean, including 1946's "Great Expectations").

Mills maintained his favourite movie was the 1960 production "Tunes of Glory," in which he co-starred with Alec Guinness. He won an Oscar as best supporting actor a decade later for "Ryan's Daughter," directed by Lean. "It was weird," Mills was quoted, "I just thought I'd been wasting my time for the past 55 years learning all these millions of lines, and then getting an Oscar for not speaking."

Mills had a minor role in Madonna's 1987 film "Who's that Girl?" At the age of 95, he had a cameo role as the man snorting cocaine at a party.

Among his many other roles, Mills starred in "Quatermass," "The Colditz Story," "Scott of the Antarctic" and "Gandhi." In failing health, Mills continued to take small roles in a wide range of film projects -- from Kenneth Branagh's 1996 "Hamlet" to Rowan Atkinson's 1997 comedy "Bean."

Mills also fathered one of Britain's leading theatrical families. Son Jonathan is a screenwriter. Daughters Juliet and Hayley are successful actresses, who first appeared at an early age in some of their father's productions. John and Hayley appeared together in seven films, most notably 1959's "Tiger Bay," 1961's "The Parent Trap" and 1966's "The Family Way." Hayley's son, Crispian Mills, was the lead singer of Kula Shaker, a UK 1960's-retro pop band.

Mills was made a Commander of the Order of British Empire in 1960, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1977, and was given a special Fellowship honour by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in 2002.

April 23, 2005 at age 97. Chest infection.

Arnie Lawrence >permalink<

Jazz saxophonist

Arnie Lawrence Lawrence grew up in Brooklyn and first played professionally in the Catskills at age 12. He worked in Los Angeles for two years in the early 1960s, and had a stint with Chico Hamilton's band (he he can be heard on one of Hamilton's better-known albums, "The Dealer").

By 1963, Lawrence returned to New York, working with Clark Terry, and in 1967 he joined the house band of Johnny Carson's "Tonight" show as lead alto player. He stayed with the show until it moved to Los Angeles in 1972. In the balance of the decade he worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Liza Minnelli, and Blood, Sweat and Tears.

Lawrence's biggest impact on the jazz world was as an educator. In 1986, he helped found the jazz and contemporary music program at the New School in Manhattan, becoming a full-time faculty member. The program became known for a less than academic approach by taking student beyond the walls of the institution and into the jazz scene of the city.

In 1997, Lawrence moved to Israel and founded the International Center for Creative Music in Jerusalem. There he attempted to bridge the Jewish and Arab worlds through jazz education, and did not care what the backgrounds of his student were. The Center was not accredited, had no tuition, diplomas or age requirements. He also ran a small club called Arnie's Jazz Underground, and played with Jewish and Palestinian musicians. Political tensions brought an end to that practice.

April 22, 2005 at age 66. Lung and liver cancer.

Chris Muller >permalink<

Hang glider

Hang glider The Muller family of Cochrane, Alberta has lost two of its members to the sport of hang-gliding. Seven years ago, Willi Muller died in a paragliding crash near Chelan, Washington. His son Chris died while competing in the Flytec U.S. Nationals in Groveland, Florida.

Chris, a champion glider, was at the end of the 113-kilometre/70 mile race when he appeared to have gone down while trying to grab a bag of money the racers had placed atop a pylon as part of a $100 side bet. A strong wind may have caught Muller's glider, causing it to slam into the ground. Speeds during the race often reach 100 km/60 miles per hour. Muller was seventh in the race of 105 competitors. The nine-day event serves as the precursor to the sport's world championships.

On July 8, 1998 Willi Muller was in a competition when he crashed shortly after takeoff from Chelan Butte mountain. The 53-year-old fell about 15 metres onto some boulders and sustained fatal chest injuries. Chris learned to glide at a young age, and had his first tandem soaring flights with his dad when he was five years old. He flew his first hang-gliding solo at 13. Muller held world records and the title of Canadian national paragliding champion several times. His fourth championship came in 2000 by breaking his own Canadian distance record flying 244 kilometres/150 miles during an eight-hour flight through the mountains.

April 22, 2005 at age 29. Crash.

John F. White >permalink<

Public TV pioneer

This is PBS White was president of the National Educational Television and Radio Center, the forerunner of PBS, from 1958 to 1969. The Center was created in 1952 as a clearinghouse for university-based stations to exchange programs. In 1954, the center began producing five hours of its own programs, which it recorded on kinescope and mailed to stations.

In 1955, White arrived in Pittsburgh to become general manager of WQED. Founded the year before, WQED was America's first community-owned TV station. Under White, the Center moved to New York, dropped its radio programming and grew into NET, National Educational Television. By the time White left the organization, it had 161 affiliated stations across the country.

White then became president of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan. He held that post until 1980.

April 22, 2005 at age 87.

John Marshall >permalink<

Filmmaker

Described as a visual anthropologist, Marshall dedicated his life to documenting the lives of the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Africa. He was a pivotal figure in the development of the cinema verite form of filmmaking. Marshall was the cameraman on Frederick Wiseman's classic 1967 exposé "Titicut Follies," kept from public eye for years due to its portrayal of abuses of the mentally ill at the hands of the guards and doctors at Massachusetts' Bridgewater State Hospital. He also worked with documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker of "Don't Look Back" fame.

Spending over 50 years with the Ju/hoansi bushmen, Marshall shot more than a million feet of film, resulting in at least 30 documentary films. As a result of his work, the Namibian government committed to make conditions better for the bushmen.

April 22, 2005 at age 72. Cancer.

Joseph E. Bogen >permalink<

Neurosurgeon

The popular notion of left brain - right brain thinking patterns have come about as a result of Bogen's surgical interventions to control epilepsy. In the early 1960s, Bogen developed a surgery technique which severed the nerve fibres of the corpus callosum, a connecting bundle of more than 200 million nerves, thereby limiting an epileptic seizure to only one of the brain's two hemispheres.

As a result of Bogen's experiments, it became established that the left brain hemisphere controls the right side of the body and vice versa. His work helped identify the right brain as intuitive, imaginative and nonverbal, while the left brain is considered logical, analytical, rational and verbal.

April 22, 2005 at age 78.

Philip Morrison >permalink<

Physicist

Philip Morrison Morrison delivered the nuclear age in the back seat of his Dodge. While working for the Manhattan Project in 1945, he carried the plutonium core of the first atomic bomb in a special carrying case studded with rubber bumpers from Los Alamos to the "Trinity" site in the New Mexico desert. Like so many other scientists involved with the Project, he devoted the rest of his life to the efforts of peace.

After his work in Los Alamos, Morrison did research in cosmology. His insights into microwave radiation opened the window for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, in 1959 after he proposed that radio telescopes could be tuned to specific frequencies to search for signals from elsewhere in our galaxy. The home version of the project now has 5 million volunteers.

In 1969 in San Francisco, Morrison and Manhattan Project associate Frank Oppenheimer helped create that city's Exploratorium, the unique hands-on science museum whose presentation technique has been copied around the world.

In 1977, Morrison wrote and narrated the 1977 film "Powers of Ten," similar in nature to Molecular Expressions' on line exhibit. In 1987, Morrison hosted PBS' six-part series "The Ring of Truth," one of the most widely viewed public TV series.

April 22, 2005 at age 89.

Robert Farnon >permalink<

Film composer

Robert Farnon Canadian-born Farnon wrote the music for more than 40 films, including "Spring In Park Lane," "Maytime in Mayfair" and "Captain Horatio Hornblower RN." He also wrote for the TV shows "The Prisoner," "Secret Army," "The Champions," "Colditz" and "A Man Called Intrepid."

While still in his teens, Farnon became a household name through his work on radio, especially on the long-running Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series The Happy Gang. He occupied the lead trumpet chair in Percy Faith's CBC Orchestra and contributed vocal arrangements for the show. During a brief stay in the United States, he came to the attention of Paul Whiteman and Andre Kostelanetz. It was not rare for him to be asked to join a jam session with Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson.

After World War II, Farnon came to England, eventually working alongside Glenn Miller and George Melachrino. The Robert Farnon Orchestra began to broadcast regularly on BBC radio and television, supporting stars such as Vera Lynn and Gracie Fields. His orchestrations were often copied by leading arrangers on both sides of the Atlantic. Andre Previn called Farnon: "The greatest living writer for strings." John Williams ("Star Wars" et al) also acknowledged his debt to Farnon, as did Henry Mancini. Farnon arranged and conducted Frank Sinatra's only British album "Great Songs From Great Britain." He also worked with Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, José Carreras and Tony Bennett.

Farnon's older brother played with Spike Jones, and younger brother Dennis achieved fame through his quirky scores for the "Mr. Magoo" cartoons. Robert Farnon won four Ivor Novello awards, including one for Outstanding Services to British Music in 1991, a Grammy award in 1995, and he was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1998.

April 22, 2005 at age 87.

Feroze Khan >permalink<

Olympic gold medalist

Olympic Rings Khan was the oldest Olympic gold medalist and one of Pakistan's most famous field hockey players. He won a gold medal at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics while representing India. He migrated to Pakistan a few years after India gained independence from Britain in 1947. Khan celebrated his 100th birthday last year and was recognised by the International Olympic Committee as the oldest known living Olympic gold medal winner.

Khan, a skillful inside right and center forward, was born in Jalandhar, India. He started playing hockey using a tree branch. He took the title of oldest Olympic gold medalist after the United States' James Rockefeller died in early 2004. Rockefeller had won a gold medal in rowing in the Paris Olympics in 1924. During the Amsterdam Games, Khan led India to a 9-0 victory against Belgium by scoring five goals, including a hat-trick.

April 21, 2005 at age 100.

Jimmy Thompson >permalink<

Actor

Jimmy Thompson would have remained a a minor and obscure British actor were it not for the fact he was once successfully sued by Liberace for suggesting the pianist was a homosexual.

In 1956, Thompson was performing in musical revues in London's West End. He was known for a devastating impersonation of Liberace in the show "For Amusement Only." He later repeated the sketch on "Sunday Night at the London Palladium." A Daily Mirror columnist, when reviewing the show, called the American pianist a "sugary mountain of jingling claptrap" and a "sugar plum fairy." Liberace sued the Mirror for libel, and Thompson was called to give evidence in the case, making him in instant celebrity.

Liberace told the court "I had the idea that Mr. Thompson's impersonation might be unkind, making fun of my clothes or the way I comb my hair but I had no idea he was inferring I was a homosexualist." Liberace won £8,000 damages against Daily Mirror and then sued Thompson. They settled out of court with an apology and a donation to charity.

Thompson moved on to television work in 1957, hosting the wildly popular BBC kids show Pinky and Perky. He also starred in BBC2's first colour play, "Lieutenant Tenant," as well as "The Benny Hill Show." He appeared in three of the "Carry On" films and 1965's "Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines."

April 21, 2005 at age 79.

Gene Frankel >permalink<

Acting coach, off-Broadway director

Gene Frankel An early member of the Actors Studio, Frankel began his career as an actor, but soon moved behind the scenes and became a prolific Broadway presence during the 1950s and 1960s.

Frankel's biggest critical success was his 1961 production of Jean Genet's avant-garde drama "The Blacks," a groundbreaking all-black production that included the talents of James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett Jr., Maya Angelou and Godfrey Cambridge. The show ran for more than three years and 1,400 performances, later touring Europe. It was the first of several politically engaged dramas he staged during the 1960s, including "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" an off-Broadway hit in 1969.

Between 1961 and 1975, Frankel directed seven Broadway productions, including "A Cry of Players" with Anne Bancroft, Frank Langella and René Auberjonois, and the controversial Arthur Kopit drama "Indians" with Stacy Keach and Raul Julia. He then worked extensively on regional theater circuits and in Europe, and directed several of his productions for television. For much of his career Frankel taught acting, writing and direction at his small off-off-Broadway theater in Greenwich Village. For more about Frankel, visit his Theatre and Film Workshop web site.

April 20, 2005 at age 85. Heart failure.

Kurt Rebmann >permalink<

Prosecutor

Rebmann was West Germany's chief federal prosecutor in the 1970s and 1980s. He became Germany's top prosecutor in July, 1977 after his predecessor, Siegfried Buback, was murdered by members of the Red Army Faction, a criminal gang better known as the Baader-Meinhof group. Although targeted by the group, Rebmann resolved not to be intimidated. After Buback's assassination, the RAF kidnapped and murdered Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the head of West Germany's industry federation in September, 1997. A month later, associates of the group hijacked a Lufthansa Boeing 737 with 86 passengers and five crew aboard. The West German envoy who brokered the release of the hostages, Hans-Juergen Wischnewski, died February 24, 2005.

April 20, 2005 at age 80.

Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen >permalink<

Jazz bassist

Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen The bassist known as 'The Great Dane with the Never Ending Name' was one of the most well-respected artists on the international jazz scene, and may have been the most famous musician born in Denmark. One of many superb European bassists to emerge during the 1960s, Pedersen originally studied piano before starting to play bass with Danish groups when he was 14. At the age of 17, he was offered a position in Count Basie's Orchestra but turned it down, fearing a permanent residency in the United might make him eligible to be drafted into the Vietnam War.

As the house bassist at the Club Montmartre in Copenhagen and as a member of the Danish Radio Orchestra, Pedersen played with Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Dexter Gordon, and Bud Powell. In the 1970s, Pedersen formed a duo with Kenny Drew, and was an occasional member of the Oscar Peterson Trio. He made hundreds of recordings and accompanied jazz greats like Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Dizzy Gillespie, Toots Thielemans, Lee Konitz and Ella Fitzgerald.

Pedersen, who sometimes called himself by his intials, NHØP, was named the world's best bass player by Melody Maker magazine in 1977. Pedersen used the same bass for 40 years and his dexterity with it was amazing. He was able to play transcriptions of Paganini violin pieces by developing his own pizzicato techniques, using three or four fingers of his right hand. He received the Nordic Council's Music Prize in 1990, The Ben Webster Prize in 1999, and the Legend of Jazz prize Django d'Or in 2002.

April 20, 2005 at age 58. Heart attack.

George Cosmatos >permalink<

Director

Despite working with some of cinema's greatest names, Cosmatos himself remained relatively obscure despite the company he kept. He first worked as an assistant director on 1960's "Exodus," and 1964's "Zorba the Greek." After directing films in Europe for two decades, he will be best remembered for "Rambo: First Blood Part II," the 1985 film that starred Sylvester Stallone as a maverick Vietnam vet. The film grossed more than $300 million worldwide to become one of the biggest hits of the decade.

In 1993, Cosmatos was called in as a replacement for director Kevin Jarre on the troubled production of "Tombstone." Starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer, the film's grosses doubled those of a competing film of the same story ("Wyatt Earp" with Kevin Costner).

Cosmatos' Euro work was distinguished primarily by the star power he attracted. His 1970 film "Beloved" starred Raquel Welch and Jack Hawkins. 1973's "Massacre in Rome" paired Richard Burton and Marcello Mastroianni. "The Cassandra Crossing," made in 1976, featured Sophia Loren, Richard Harris, O.J. Simpson, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Fond of aerial shots, Cosmatos was almost killed in a helicopter crash during its making. In 1979, he snagged Roger Moore, Telly Savalas, David Niven, Claudia Cardinale and Elliott Gould for "Escape to Athena." His last film was 1997's "Shadow Conspiracy" with Charlie Sheen and Donald Sutherland.

In addition to speaking six languages, Cosmatos had a passion for books. However, he lost his sight in 2003 after an operation to remove a cyst. His library, which included many first editions of 19th and 20th-century writers, fetched $1.2 million at auction with Sotheby's in London. He died in Victoria, British Columbia where he had lived for the last 24 years.

April 19, 2005 at age 64. Lung cancer.

Herman Kohlman >permalink<

Jim Garrison's assistant

When Kohlman was an assistant to Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison, he tried to talk his boss out of the futile prosecution of local businessman Clay Shaw in connection with the assassination of President Kennedy. Garrison contended the elaborate conspiracy behind JFK's murder was hatched in New Orleans, with Shaw, a retired International Trade Mart Director, at the centre. Shaw was acquitted by a jury that deliberated less than an hour. No one else was tried as a result of Garrison's investigation or from the findings of the Warren Commission.

The greatest legacy to come from Garrison's prosecution was the first public showing of the Zapruder film, one of possibly several home movies taken of the assassination. Prior to the trial of Clay Shaw, only selected frames of the film were printed in Life Magazine (and incorrectly sequenced). The first-ever, mass audience, public TV showing of the Zapruder film in motion occurred in March, 1975 during the late-night TV show Goodnight America, hosted by Geraldo Rivera.

April 19, 2005 at age 76.

Richard 'Rick' Lewis >permalink<

Silhouette

When asked to name a 'doo-wop' song, most people would cite "Get A Job," the 1958 number #1 hit for the Silhouettes. Rick Lewis was the last surviving member of that group. Lewis, a tenor, began singing as a youngster in the Philadelphia Boys' Choir and joined the Gospel Tornadoes in 1956. Lewis convinced the other members of the group -- lead Bill Horton, baritone Earl Beal and bass Raymond Edwards -- to switch from gospel to rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll. Originally calling themselves the Thunderbirds, the group derived their ultimate name from a then current hit record by the Rays, "Silhouettes".

Their signature tune, "Get A Job" was inspired by Lewis' mother, who admonished Rick after returning from military duty. The four members of the group wrote the song themselves and created the "sha na na na" and "dip dip dip dip" doo-wop hooks which remain synonymous with the genre today. The song was immediately picked up by Dick Clark for play on American Bandstand. There were 200,000 orders for the single after its first play on the show. In the wake of their hit, the Silhouettes crossed America in packaged show tours, appearing on national television and photographed for Life magazine.

The Silhouettes never scored a second nationally charting single but they did carry on a lot longer than most people think, continuing to perform and even record right to the end of the 1960s with at least two of the group's four original members present at any time. Ironically, the group called it quits when Sha Na Na became favourites of the rock & roll revival boom, using a name derived from the Silhouettes' signature song. Lewis was preceded in death by Horton (1995), Edwards (1997), and Beal (2001). In 1993, the Silhouettes won a lifetime achievement award in the Doo-Wop Hall of Fame.

April 19, 2005 at age 71. Kidney failure.

Ruth Hussey >permalink<

Actress

Ruth Hussey If it wasn't for Hollywood's 'first three stars' billing system, Hussey would be a household name. In 1940, she starred in King Vidor's "Northwest Passage," behind Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, and Walter Brennan. That same year, she starred in George Cukor's "The Philadelphia Story," behind Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. However, for that film, her work was recognised by an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. She lost to Jane Darwell, who played Ma Joad in "The Grapes of Wrath."

From the late 1930s until 1960, Hussey made over three dozen films and appeared in an equal number of television shows. She began her show-business career as a local Rhode Island radio fashion commentator. Her first movie role in the 1937 Spencer Tracy film "Big City" was uncredited. Three years later, she was his leading lady in "Northwest Passage." Her last feature film was in 1960, playing Bob Hope's wife in "The Facts of Life."

Admittedly unambitious, Hussey let her career fade by the early 1950s. She practiced watercoloring, and designed her family weekend house at Lake Arrowhead, California. The three-story house was 28 feet in diameter, conforming to her husband's request for a round home.

April 19, 2005 at age 93. Complications from an appendectomy.

Stan Levey >permalink<

Drummer

The name Stan Levey is not well known, even within jazz circles -- but his credentials are staggering. A right-hander who played left, Levey was one of the very few white drummers involved in the formative years of be-bop and was in great in demand on the jazz scene of the 1950s. He played with Dizzy Gillespie's group at the age of 17, and soon after he went to New York to play with Charlie Parker and Oscar Pettiford. Gillespie was berated by fellow black musicians for having a white drummer in his band. "Show me a better black drummer and I'll hire him," said Gillespie. He went on to play on over 2000 recordings, working with almost every big name in the music business. For example ...

Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Errol Garner, Miles Davis, George Shearing, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Zoot Simms, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt, Gerry Mulligan, Vince Guaraldi, Lee Konitz, Bud Shank, Art Pepper, Charlie Barnett, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Quincy Jones, Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Skitch Henderson, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone ("I'd like to forget that," Levey once said), Barbara Streisand, The Supremes, Vic Damone, Nancy Wilson, Nat King Cole, and Sarah Vaughn to name but a few.

Levey's work was also heard on the big and small screens. He has over 300 motion pictures credits, working with Lalo Schifrin, Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Andre Previn and others. His 3000 television credits includes performances on Batman, Mission: Impossible, Mannix, The Munsters and The Addams Family. Levey was satisfied he had finally played with all his heroes and stopped playing in 1973, devoting his energy to his long time hobby of photography.

April 19, 2005 at age [80].

Alex Smart >permalink<

Record-setting rookie

His National Hockey League career barely rates a mention, but his first game on the ice left an impression on fans and an entry in the record books that still stands.

Smart had been playing for five seasons with the Montreal Sr. Canadiens when he got the call from the city's NHL franchise. In his first big league game on January 14, 1943, Smart scored two goals only 14 seconds apart late in the second period. He scored a third goal in the final frame, helping the Habs defeat the Chicago Black Hawks 5-1. Smart also picked up an assist in the game.

Smart set the record as the first NHL rookie to score a hat trick in his first NHL game. The feat has only been matched once -- by Real Cloutier of the Quebec Nordiques in 1979. However, Smart only scored two more goals and two more assists over the next seven games and the Brandon, Manitoba-born flash-in-the-pan was returned to Senior hockey. Over a six year period in the lesser leagues, Smart scored 86 goals and 188 points over 183 games, playing for the Montreal Royals and Montreal Vickers. After his hockey career, Smart enjoyed a 45-year career working for the Goodyear Tire Company -- continuing his association with rubber.

April 18, 2005 at age 86.

Rick Blight >permalink<

Hockey player

Rick Blight A native of Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, Blight was a first-round draft pick for the Vancouver Canucks in 1975 and played with them until 1981, afterwhich he played a season for the Los Angeles Kings. Blight was drafted into the NHL after playing with the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Junior League. In three seasons with the Wheaties, he scored 141 goals and 175 assists for 316 points in just 200 games played.

Blight retired from playing hockey in 1983 and began a career as a stockbroker and marketing consultant, as well as managing the family farm in his native Manitoba. On April 3, 2005, Blight disappeared. Two weeks later, on April 18, 2005 Blight was found dead in his pickup truck in a field on the farm.

April 18, 2005 at age 49. Suspected heart attack.

Helen Liu Fong >permalink<

Googie architect

Helen Liu Fong Born in Los Angeles' Chinatown, Fong was an architect who translated post-World War II optimism into distinctive designs for such restaurant chains as Denny's, Bob's Big Boy and Norms. A leading practitioner of the Googie style, Fong made upswept roofs, boomerang angles and attention-grabbing neon beacons the visual icons of an era. She was most associated with the interior design of restaurants, which blended coziness inside buildings meant to evoke a vision of the future. Fong joins Paul B. Clayton, another prominent Googie figure who died February 14, 2005, in that last booth of the coffee shop in the sky.

April 17, 2005 at age 78. Cancer.

James A. Houston >permalink<

Artist

James A. Houston Houston was born in Toronto. He first met the Inuit people in 1948 on a sketching trip to the Canadian Arctic. They showed him their carvings and he ended up living among them for 14 years. Through his subsequent work, he brought an appreciation of Inuit art to audiences around the world. With the help of the Canadian Handcrafts Guild of Montreal, Houston and his wife Alma began buying works from northern producers and shipping them south to sell. They put on their first exhibition in Montreal in 1949. It sold out in three days. Today, trade in Inuit art runs to more than $10 million annually.

Houston was a master designer at the renowned Steuben Glass Company of New York, where he worked for the past 43 years. Among his best known works were "Arctic Fisherman," a sculpture showing an Inuit fisherman preparing to spear a fish in the water, and "Trout & Fly," in which a fish leaps to catch a gold fly. He was also the author of 17 children's books and several books for adults on the Inuit people and stories. Houston won the Canadian Library Association's Book of the Year award three times, and his novel "White Dawn" was turned into a 1974 film which starred Louis Gossett Jr.

In 1974, Houston was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada for his role in representing the interests of Inuit artists and craftspeople. In 1992, he was chosen as one of the 125 most influential Canadians in history.

April 17, 2005 at age 83. Complications from a heart attack.

Wheeler Lipes >permalink<

Accidental surgeon

Wheeler Lipes Lipes was a 22-year-old high school dropout when he joined the U.S. Navy in 1936. On September 11, 1942, he was serving as a pharmacist's mate aboard the submarine Seadragon in the hostile South China Seas when seaman Darrell Rector complained about a pain in his belly. Lipes examined Rector and determined his appendix was about to burst. At the time, doctors were not assigned to submarines. As the only medical professional on board, Lipes was ordered by his captain to operate. At 120 feet below the ocean's surface, Lipes collected a team and used whatever supplies he could find.

He converted a dining table into an operating table. Bent tablespoon handles became retractors to hold open the incision and abdominal muscles. The seaman who anesthetised Rector poured ether through gauze and a tea strainer. Franz P. Hoskins, who attended medical school after the war, learned later that "you can do an appendectomy with three ounces of ether. I used three pints on the Seadragon." His work made the sub's whole crew woozy. The operation lasted 2 1/2 hours, and it turned out that the appendix was gangrenous.

George Weller, a correspondent for The Chicago Daily News, received a Pulitzer Prize for his article in December, 1942 about the surgery. The 'event' was recounted in the 1943 Cary Grant movie "Destination Tokyo," and the 1958 Clark Gable film "Run Silent, Run Deep." "The Pharmacist's Mate," a TV production based on Weller's newspaper account, was broadcast in 1950. The appendectomy was also a popular "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" feature.

The patient, Rector, returned to duty but died two years later when the submarine Tang was destroyed by its own torpedo. He was among 78 crewmen lost aboard when it sank off Formosa in October 1944. Despite the success of the operation, Lipes was ostracised by Navy Medical Corps physicians. Even though he had been obeying his captain's orders, there was talk of a court-martial by an outraged U.S. surgeon general. In February 2005, the Navy finally awarded Lipes the Purple Heart.

April 17, 2005 at age 84. Pancreatic cancer.

Don Ray >permalink<

TV composer

Don Ray worked for CBS TV for nearly 30 years, composing and providing music for shows like "General Electric Theater," "Playhouse 90," "Twilight Zone," "Rawhide" and "Hawaii Five-O" (for which he was nominated for an Emmy). He worked as a staff composer and conductor since 1956.

Ray also served as music director from 1965 to 1980 of the COTA Symphony, which specialised in new and rediscovered music. He was a frequent guest conductor with the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra and a staff conductor for the Los Angeles Bureau of Music. In 1978 he created a film-scoring program for UCLA. In 1983, Ray wrote the Orchestration Handbook as a reference for composers, and in 1986 he helped found the Pacific Composers Forum. Ray also scored music for several silent films recently shown on the Turner Classic Movies channel.

April 16, 2005 at age 79. Infection.

Ida Libby Dengrove >permalink<

Portraitist

CAPTION If your portrait was being drawn by Libby Dengrove, you just had to know that you were in big trouble. Some of her subjects included David Berkowitz, John W. Hinckley Jr. and John J. Gotti. Dengrove was a courtroom artist, and she captured some of crime's most notorious faces for television.

In 1972, NBC News advertised for a courtroom artist. This was long before cameras were allowed inside the halls of justice. Dengrove heard about the job, grabbed her sketchpad, hopped aboard a Manhattan-bound train and walked into NBC Studios without an appointment. During her interview, she drew sketches of the person in front of her. She was hired on the spot.

Dengrove worked for NBC from 1973 to 1986. Some of her sketches, meant for television, also turned up on the front pages of newspapers. Her work won two Emmy awards -- for the Son of Sam trial of David Berkowitz and again for the Murder at the Met trial of Craig S. Crimmins, the stagehand convicted of slaying the violinist Helen Hagnes Mintiks. She also sketched the trial of Jean Harris for the murder of Dr. Herman Tarnower, and documented court appearances by John Lennon and General William C. Westmoreland.

Dengrove fell victim to crime in 1982 when one of her eighty courtroom sketches was stolen from a lobby show at the United States Court House. A portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was gone from its place high up on a wall (she had caught the couple in pastel in 1975, when deportation charges against Lennon were dropped). Her usual procedure was to keep originals after they were taped for broadcast. "They took it like they took the Mona Lisa," she noted at the time. "They removed it from the frame and left the frame and mat on the lobby floor. Somebody must have climbed on a chair."

April 16, 2005 at age 86. Alzheimer's disease.

Kay Walsh >permalink<

Actress, wife of David Lean

Kay Walsh In 1936, while filming "The Secret of Stamboul," Walsh met David Lean, then a fledgling film editor. She later went on to star in some of his best-known films, including 1942's "In Which We Serve," 1944's "This Happy Breed," and 1948's "Oliver Twist."

The second of David Lean's six wives, Walsh was also a skilled writer. She is credited with devising two of the best-remembered scenes in her husband's work -- the climax of "Great Expectations" (often cited as better than that conceived by Charles Dickens), and the wordless opening sequence of "Oliver Twist." When Lean edited Anthony Asquith's version of 1939's "Pygmalion," Walsh wrote additional dialogue for the film so seamlessly that it was said that Bernard Shaw never noticed.

After divorcing Lean in 1949, Walsh married Dr. Elliott Jaques, a leading psychologist who coined the phrase "mid-life crisis." She continued to work in films and television until the early 1980s, notably in 1972's "The Ruling Class," opposite Peter O'Toole. She made her last film appearance in 1981's "Night Crossing" with John Hurt, which was based on the true story of a family who escaped from East to West Berlin by hot-air balloon.

April 16, 2005 at age 93.

Laura Canales >permalink<

Tejano music pioneer

Before Selena, there was Laura Canales. It was Canales who paved the way for women to infiltrate the genre of Texas border music known as Tejano. Before Canales, women were rare on the Tejano stage. She came of age when local dance bands were mixing keyboards into the Mexican-style polka known as conjunto - creating the Tejano sound now common at parties and festivals throughout Texas.

In 1977, Canales and three former members of her band Los Unicos y El Conjunto Bernal formed Snowball & Company, which released an album that rose to tenth on Billboard's "Hot Latin" chart. Her 1990 album "No Regrets" stayed on the charts for 13 weeks. In 2000, she was part of the first class of inductees into the Tejano ROOTS Hall of Fame.

April 16, 2005 at age 50. Pneumonia arising from a gall bladder operation.

John Fred Gourrier >permalink<

Playboy

John Fred It's not often that a one hit wonder has two chances at success. Gourrier formed his first group, the Playboys, while he was still in high school in the 1950s, recording a song titled "Shirley." The song made the Louisiana charts and he was invited to do the Alan Freed show in New York. After that show he got a call from Dick Clark to be on American Bandstand. He told him he couldn't do it because he had to go home to play in a basketball game in a state championship race. When disc-jockeys realised the band was not black but white, they stopped playing the record. Gourrier cut other singles that were not as successful, working at times with Mac Rebennack and the Jordanaires .

Nearly a decade later, Gourrier formed John Fred And His Playboy Band. They took the name of the Beatles song "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" and punned it into the 1968 hit "Judy in Disguise With Glasses." The title was inspired by seeing girls in Fort Lauderdale sporting large sunglasses which disguised their features. Recorded in New Orleans with the Fats Domino band, it knocked another Beatles song, "Hello Goodbye," off the number #1 spot on the charts. It remained there for two weeks.

April 15, 2005 at age 63.

Margaretta Scott >permalink<

Actress

Although Margaretta Scott first appeared on stage in 1926, her public career began and ended on television -- with the bookends coming sixty years apart. Inbetween those times, she appeared in nearly fifty films, including 1936's "Things To Come," 1944's "Fanny By Gaslight" and 1970's "Crescendo." She was also the last surviving signatory on the document that created Equity, the British actors' union.

After first appearing on stage at the age of 14 in Romeo And Juliet, Scott was the first woman to appear in Shakespeare on television in the 1930s. While her performance was not preserved, a few recordings of those early days of UK television are available at the TV Dawn site.

Scott was most recently best known as Mrs. Pumphrey in the television series "All Creatures Great And Small." Her last appearance was in Catherine Cookson's "The Moth" in 1997.

April 15, 2005 at age 93.

Yvedt Matory >permalink<

Surgeon

Matory was a cancer surgeon who harnessed the internet to shorten patients' hospital stays. She was a pioneer in the field of using computers, video hookups, and other remote monitoring equipment to allow patients to spend more time recovering at home and less time in the hospital.

April 15, 2005 at age 48. Complications from melanoma.

Benny Bailey >permalink<

Jazz trumpeter

Benny Bailey Bailey left his native Cleveland in the 1940s and went to Los Angeles, eventually landing a gig in a band led by drummer Scatman Crothers. Crothers later went on to become a versatile movie actor. While in LA, he also played with Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker.

Bailey toured with pianist Jay McShann, and during a stop in Chicago, he joined Dizzy Gillespie's new big band. The band's 1948 European tour was the stuff of legend, and Bailey appeared on the historic recordings the band made at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. After the tour Bailey returned to Cleveland, joining vibraphone player Lionel Hampton, who Bailey travelled with for five years.

Quincy Jones formed a big band to take to Europe, and Bailey joined the tour which soon became a financial disaster. Musicians were stranded in Paris when the money ran out, and Jones struggled to find the band work and put together a punishing series of one-night stands. Seeking to "get away from all the drugs and stuff being used in America," Bailey moved to Germany in 1961, recording and playing with saxophonist Eric Dolphy.

Bailey became a European fixture, playing with bands and orchestras in Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. For ten years he was a member of the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band.

When Bailey played, he would cock his head alarmingly to one side. This was the result of a permanent effect on his posture due to reading complex sheet music under poor lighting conditions. The pose did not affect his ability to play.

Bailey occasionally returned to the U.S. for rare peformances and recordings during the 1990s. He died in his home in Amsterdam. Clark-Boland Big Band founder Jimmy Woode died April 23, 2005.

April 14, 2005 at age 79.

George J. Murtaugh Jr. >permalink<

Attorney

With just one year under his belt in Chicago's Cook County state attorney office, Murtaugh was the lawyer chosen to give the opening statement in the trial of Richard Speck. Speck was on trial for murdering eight student nurses in 1966. The trial captured international attention. Murtaugh took 75 minutes to explain how Speck systematically murdered the nurses one by one. His presentation created such tension and emotion in the courtroom that the judge called for a recess after he was done instead of calling for the public defender to present his argument.

On April 15, 1967, after 49 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Speck guilty of the murders. The court was cleared and Judge Paschen gave Speck the death sentence. When the U.S. Supreme Court changed its ruling on capital punishment, Speck was re-sentenced to 50-100 years in prison, but he died December 5, 1991 from a massive heart attack.

Murtaugh went on to become one of the top criminal defense lawyers in Chicago. In his private practice his clients often were former policemen and politicians. For more about Speck, visit Court TV's Crime Library.

April 14, 2005 at age 65. Brain tumour.

Johnnie Johnson >permalink<

Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer

Johnny B. Goode On New Year's Eve 1952, Johnnie Johnson's band, Sir John's Trio, was to play a gig at the Cosmopolitan Club in St. Louis, Missouri. A band member called in sick [reported variously as a saxophonist or a guitarist] and Johnson hired Chuck Berry as a last-minute replacement. That was the beginning of a decades-long partnership, sparked perhaps because Berry had a car and Johnson didn't.

Johnson composed music on piano and Berry converted it to guitar. Together they wrote "Roll Over Beethoven," "No Particular Place To Go," "Maybellene," "Sweet Little Sixteen" and "Back in the U.S.A." Legend has it that Berry's classic "Johnny B. Goode" was named after Johnnie Johnson.

The song became one of Berry's greatest hits, a song so infectious that NASA blasted it into space on a time capsule to provide a sample of Earth music on the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977. Voyager will take about 40,000 years to come close to another star.

Johnson and Berry parted ways in the early 1970s, and the self-taught piano player then performed with a who's who of rock and blues musicians, including Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley.

In 2000, Johnson sued Berry, seeking a share of royalties and proper credit for more than 57 songs the men composed together. A federal judge dismissed the suit in 2002, ruling that too many years had passed since the disputed songs were written.

Johnson was lifted from obscurity when he appeared in Taylor Hackford's 1987 documentary "Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll," made to celebrate Chuck Berry's 60th birthday. Keith Richards, the Stones guitarist featured in the documentary, became one of Johnson's chief supporters. Richards said the key signatures in Berry's songs are familiar to pianists and the horn players Johnson had featured in his combo, but that are seldom used by guitarists.

Through the efforts of Richards, Eric Clapton, John Sebastian (of the Lovin' Spoonful) and Terry Adams (of NRBQ), Johnson won recognition from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001 in the new category devoted to sidemen.

April 13, 2005 at age 80. Suffered recently from pneumonia and a kidney ailment.

Richard H. Popkin >permalink<

Expert on skepticism

It is often said that we live in an age of skepticism. Richard Popkin proved that healthy disbelief has been with us for centuries.

In 1960, Popkin wrote his book "The History of Scepticism From Erasmus to Spinoza." He continued to update it until 2003. Popkin also attracted mainstream attention with his 1966 book "The Second Oswald: The Case for a Conspiracy Theory," about the John F. Kennedy assassination. In the book, Popkin challenged the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in fatally shooting the president in Dallas, 1963.

Popkin also examined clues from the Bible and other religious writings pointing toward an apocalypse and "rapture," or ascent to heaven after 1,000 years. When the end of the world failed to materialise, Popkin theorised that the non-event led to development of radical religious and survivalist cults such as the Branch Davidians of the Waco, Texas.

April 13, 2005 at age 81. Emphysema.

Salvador 'Tutti' Camarata >permalink<

Musician, composer and arranger

Salvador 'Tutti' Camarata If you look up 'diverse' in a dictionary ...

Camarata's career was so wide ranging it's hard to believe all his achievements occurred in a single life. In the early 1930s, he worked as an arranger for saxophonist and bandleader Charlie Barnet before joining the Tommy Dorsey band as lead trumpeter. He is credited with arranging the Dorsey hits "Tangerine," "Green Eyes" and "Yours." It was Dorsey who gave him the nickname "Tutti." Camarata also arranged music and played trumpet for Bing Crosby, Jimmy Dorsey, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday.

In 1945, Camarata accepted an invitation to work on films for producer J. Arthur Rank in England. He set up London Records, an American Decca subsidiary devoted to British artists. He recorded Vera Lynn, Ted Heath and Mantovani. London Records eventually became the home to leading rock bands, including the Moody Blues, Ten Years After and the Rolling Stones.

Camarata returned to the United States in 1950, doing more work for Decca and acting as musical director for television specials featuring Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Vic Damone.

In 1958 Camarata became co-founder and musical director of Disneyland Records, for which he produced 300 discs over the course of 16 years. He is credited with helping Annette Funicello develop a distinctive and salable sound when some at Disney wanted to dub her voice in her movies. Funicello became a minor pop star as a result.

Camarata had been renting facilities to record the Disney albums and wanted to start his own studio on the Disney lot to control costs. Disney wasn't interested. As a result, Camarata found a location on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and opened Sunset Sound Recorders in 1960. During the early years, the studio turned out recordings for a number of popular Disney films, including "101 Dalmatians," "Bambi", "Bedknobs & Broomsticks" and "Mary Poppins." Later, artists such as the Rolling Stones, Prince, Van Halen, Miles Davis, k.d. lang, Sheryl Crow, Tony Toni Tone, Alanis Morrissette, Beck and The Wallflowers recorded at the facility. Camarata's son currently runs the studio.

In the 1970s, Camarata orchestrated and conducted a series of albums for the London label that showcased the work of Bach, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

April 13, 2005 at age 91.

George A. Molchan >permalink<

Little Oscar

Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener ... He may have been small, but he sure was big. In the early 1950s, Molchan was working as a bookkeeper for the Pepsi Cola Company when he received a call from Meinhardt Raabe, the Munchkin coroner in the movie "The Wizard of Oz." Molchan and Raabe had met as teenagers. Raabe was working as one of several living "Oscar" mascots for the Oscar Mayer Company, known for its hot dogs -- or weiners. The company was adding five more Wienermobiles to a promotion they started in the 1930s, and Molchan's height -- 44 inches or 10 wieners high -- and his outgoing personality landed him the job. Molchan was an Oscar for the next 35 years.

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s Molchan, dressed completely in white, would travel daily in the 27-foot long, 10-foot-high hot-dog vehicle, appearing at retailers, schools, orphanages, parades and children's hospitals.

Being an Oscar Mayer wiener wasn't all fun and play. There once was a night when college students spread gallons of mustard over the Wienermobile. On another occasion, someone stole it. In 1971, the company halted use of the Wienermobile (it has since been revived with a V-8, 6.0 Liter 350 Vortec 5700 Engine). Molchan was then asked to represent the company as Little Oscar at its restaurant in Disney World. When Molchan retired in 1987, the company also retired the character. At the sight of a Wienermobile parked outside the funeral home, mourners began singing "Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener ..."

April 12, 2005 at age 82. Alzheimer's disease.

Robert Granville >permalink<

FBI agent

Granville headed the FBI team that arrested Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on July 17, 1950 in New York City. The Rosenbergs became the first civilians executed for spying in U.S. history.

After World War II, a wave of concern regarding the Communist infiltration of American society swept over the United States. The period is now known as the age of McCarthyism, named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led a campaign to investigate persons thought to be involved in subversive and anti-American activities. McCarthy's search led all the way to Hollywood.

Granville was first involved in a Cold War case against Judith Coplon, a young analyst at the Justice Department. She was accused in 1949 of passing government secrets to the Soviets through her lover, Valentin A. Gubitchev, an engineer and official at the United Nations. Although found guilty in two trials, her conviction was overturned because Granville had arrested her without a warrant.

The Rosenbergs were charged with providing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Julius was accused of obtaining and passing on information gleaned from his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, a former machinist at the atomic weapons center in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the site of the Manhattan Project. In March, 1951 the Rosenbergs were convicted and sentenced to death. They were executed in June of 1953.

For more about the sensational and controversial trial of the Rosenbergs, visit Court TV's Crime Library.

April 12, 2005 at age 89. Stroke.

Rusty's Roundup at Entertainment Insiders >permalink<

Added April 12, 2005 -- a summary of movie & TV folks you might not have heard of.

Blanchette Brunoy - French actress of seven decades
Francisco Laudadio - Italian film director
Ira Katz - special effects technician that invented 'Spectrasmoke'
June Easton - dialect coach
Margo Skinner - actress
Michel Grisola - French film critic turned actor
Takao Zushi - Japanese character actor

Jerry Byrd >permalink<

Steel guitar legend

Jerry Byrd

Steel Guitar Hall of Fame member Jerry Byrd was born in Lima, Ohio, yet as a child he developed a passion for Hawaiian music. He soon became a session staple at King Records, backing up Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, Rex Allen and Red Foley. In 1950, he became a regular on Foley's NBC television program, and from 1954 to 1956, he was featured on the Nashville-based series Home Folks. In 1968, Byrd moved to Hawaii to focus exclusively on the state's native music. Byrd so impacted the sound of traditional Hawaiian music that most people think the steel guitar was an authentic folk instrument, even though the sound was imported from the mainland. Today, if you hear Hawaiian music featuring a steel guitar, it is simply players duplicating Byrd's stylized delivery. His Hall of Fame plaque reads "The Master Of Touch And Tone."

April 11, 2005 at age 86.

John Bennett >permalink<

Actor

John Bennett Bennett was a staple on British television, and was best known playing Billy Bush in the mid-1960s soap opera "Honey Lane." The show was a response to the success of "Coronation Street" and was the forerunner of the series "EastEnders."

Bennett made his screen debut in the 1960 heist film "The Challenge" which starred Jayne Mansfield. Among his 150 film and TV show credits: "Lawrence of Arabia," "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," "The House That Dripped Blood," "Henry VIII and His Six Wives," "Eye of the Needle," "The Fifth Element," "Minority Report" and "The Pianist." He provided the voice of Holly in the animated film "Watership Down," and had TV roles in "The Forsyte Saga" and "Doctor Who."

April 11, 2005 at age 75.

John Brosnan >permalink<

Science-fiction writer, film critic

Brosnan wrote several well-regarded books about film: James Bond in the Cinema (1972); Future Tense: The Cinema Of Science Fiction (1978); and most of the film entries for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979). He also published at least 23 science-fiction and horror novels. The best known of these horror tales is probably Bedlam (1992), the film version of which ("Beyond Bedlam") gave Elizabeth Hurley one of her first main roles. Two of his other books were turned into the films "Carnosaur" and "Proteus."

April 11, 2005 at age 57. Acute pancreatitis.

Maurice Hilleman >permalink<

Vaccine research pioneer

They were once diseases that affected millions -- causing death in a great many cases: mumps, measles, chicken pox, meningitis, pneumonia and hepatitis A and B. When Maurice Hilleman's own daughter contracted the mumps in 1965, he set out to develop a vaccine so others wouldn't have to suffer.

Hilleman developed 8 of the 14 vaccines now routinely recommended. His measles vaccine alone is estimated to prevent 1 million deaths worldwide every year. In all, he is credited with having developed more human and animal vaccines than any other scientist, nearly 40 vaccines in number. Hilleman overcame immunological hurdles to combine vaccines, so that one shot could protect against several diseases. He is also credited as the first to prevent a human cancer, developing a vaccine for hepatitis B, which is one of the primary causes of liver cancer.

Raised on a farm in Montana, Hilleman credited much of his success to his boyhood work with chickens, whose eggs form the foundation of many vaccines. Much of modern preventive medicine is based on his work, though he never received the public recognition of a Salk, Sabin or Pasteur. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan presented him with the National Medal of Science, America's highest scientific honour.

April 11, 2005 at age 85. Cancer.

Faith McNulty >permalink<

Author

In the late 1970s, McNulty was asked by her editor at New Yorker magazine to write about the case of Francine Hughes, a battered Michigan housewife, who killed her husband by setting him on fire after he passed out from drinking. (Hughes was acquitted of murder by reason of temporary insanity). McNulty's usual beat at the magazine was wildlife stories and children's books.

The book McNulty eventually wrote was "The Burning Bed: The True Story of an Abused Wife." It became the 1984 NBC-TV movie "The Burning Bed," featuring a dressed-down Farrah Fawcett as the star. The film won eight Emmy nominations.

During World War II, McNulty worked for the Office of War Information in London and then returned to New York City, becoming a copy girl at the New York Daily News. She also was a reporter and researcher for Life magazine, and wrote for Audubon magazine. In 1953, she joined the New Yorker as a writer for the "Talk of the Town" section.

April 10, 2005 at age 86.

Samuel P. Massie Jr. >permalink<

Chemistry professor

While studying for his doctoral degree, Massie worked on the Manhattan Project making liquid compounds of uranium for the atomic bomb. He later conducted pioneering silicon chemistry research, investigating antibacterial agents. At the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, he was awarded a patent for chemical agents effective in battling gonorrhea, and received awards for research in combating malaria and meningitis. He also worked on drugs to fight herpes and cancer, and developed protective foams against nerve gases.

Massie was the first black person to teach at the U.S. Naval Academy and was named one of the 75 premier chemists of the 20th century, along with Marie Curie, George Washington Carver, Kodak founder George Eastman and DNA researchers James Watson and Francis Crick.

April 10, 2005 at age 85. Dementia.

Wally Tax >permalink<

Singer, The Outsiders

Outsiders

Tax was the lead singer for the legendary Dutch sixties psychedelic band The Outsiders. Critics compared them to England's The Pretty Things, and they mixed a punky folk-rock sound with unpredictable production touches such as mandolins, harpsichords and found radio static. The Outsiders scored hits all over Europe and sold 2 million records in the United States. Pre-punk bands like The Stooges and grunge icons such as Nirvana included Outsiders songs on their play lists.

After The Outsiders split, Tax started his own band called Tax Free. They recorded their self-titled first record in New York with guest appearances by John Cale of the Velvet Underground. The Dutch Outsiders are not to be confused with the Cleveland group that had a Top Ten hit in 1966 with "Time Won't Let Me."

April 10, 2005 at age 57.

George Salverson >permalink<

Writer

Salverson was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's first-ever Radio Drama Editor. During radio drama's golden age, he wrote about a thousand plays in a career that began in 1945 and lasted well after the arrival of television. He worked on dozens of series over the years, often turning out a one-hour original radio play a week for live broadcast. Salverson never ran out of ideas, and often took inspiration from events in the news. His radio dramas dealt with social issues in the same way TV documentaries or extended news stories serve today.

Salverson referred to his work as "documentary drama for radio." He applied the same technique when he wrote for television, tackling such issues as unemployment among the over-aged and over qualified, or biographic material such as Banting and Best's discovery of insulin. His 1967 documentary, "Air Of Death," dealt with air pollution in Canada and resulted in a lawsuit. Spending six months helping CBC's lawyers prepare for the case, Salverson used to joke that it was the only time he had steady work. CBC won the suit.

Salverson's first radio job was reading the news at CFAR in Flin Flon, Manitoba. Proud of his role, he worked in a suit. His news career highlight occurred on December 7, 1941 when he told the 7,000 people of Flin Flon of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His mother, Laura Goodman Salverson, wrote and published 10 books, of which two won the Governor General's Award.

April 9, 2005 at age 89. Injuries sustained in a fall.

Jean Denton >permalink<

Cemetary publicist

As publicist for Forest Lawn cemeteries, Denton became so well known in Los Angeles newsrooms during the 1940s that one editor dubbed her "Madonna of the Mortuaries."

During World War II, as a result of a bad marriage, Denton developed a stutter. She decided the best way to cure the stutter was to get a job as a telephone operator. She did, and the stutter disappeared. Denton then applied for a job at Forest Lawn, the famous cemetery organisation, even though she was deathly afraid of corpses and death. She thought she'd be good at publicity. She got the job and ended up becoming well known in newsrooms, bringing around death notices as well as items of interest (and getting Forest Lawn's name into the newspapers).

In 1950, Denton returned to a more lively world, working for Desilu Studios, handling publicity for Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball.

April 9, 2005 at age 85. Breast cancer.

Mary Olga Moore >permalink<

Actress, singer

Mary Olga Moore It's hard to imagine a time when a book written by a prostitute would make headline news. Such was the case in 1972 when Xaviera Hollander ("the most powerful madam in New York City") wrote "The Happy Hooker." The book was a bestseller, and Hollander's appearances to promote the book drew record crowds. Mary Moore sang the title song for the 1975 movie based on the book, which starred Lynn Redgrave. Moore also had a bit part in the film.

Mary's husband was Robin Moore, who wrote the books "The Green Berets" and "The French Connection," which were both turned into movies. Robin wrote the lyrics for the song "The Happy Hooker."

April 9, 2005 at age 54.

Charles McAtee >permalink<

Execution supervisor

Forty years ago, Charles McAtee, then Kansas State's director of penal institutions, supervised the capital punishment of two men whose murders of a western Kansas family inspired the Truman Capote book In Cold Blood. On April 14, 1965, McAtee witnessed the hangings of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, who had murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, outside Garden City, in 1959. A 1967 movie of the murders starred Robert Blake and Scott Wilson. The executions were among the last four performed in the state.

Capote's In Cold Blood was the first factual telling of a murder case done in novel format, a medium Capote created with the publication of his story in 1965. The movie based on his work garnered four Oscar nominations (direction, cinematography, score and screenplay). The book and movie was a sensation in the 1960s, as it presented the story as a first-person account. The book stunned an audience not yet used to Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Clifford Olsen or Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. For more about the Clutter clan murders, visit Court TV's Crime Library.

April 8, 2005 at age 76. Leukemia.

John Keyston >permalink<

Physicist, NATO scientist

During Britain's naval battles in World War II, it was John Keyston who developed the expertise to win the war below the waves. His work with underwater explosions earned him the naming of Officer of the Order of the British Empire in King George VI's New Year's honours list of 1946. However, British pride kept him from an assigment in the United States, and Keyston left his country, eventually settling in Canada by way of Rhodesia and India.

Keyston made his name by understanding how explosions underwater behave differently. His work saw advances in torpedo and depth-charge design when anti-submarine warfare was crucial to Britain's defence and the Allied war effort. Prior to the war, Keyston won the praise of Albert Einstein for his work on the electrical properties of gases.

After the war, Keyston was offered a position in the United States. The UK government saw the offer as 'poaching' and would have none of it, claiming Keyston's departure would be harmful to its scientific interests. Keyston then left Britain for Southern Rhodesia to become a research director of the Central African Council. In 1949, Keyston served as a scientific adviser to the newly formed Indian Navy. He then moved his family to Canada to become chief superintendent of the Naval Research Establishment in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

The early 1950s were expansion years for the Royal Canadian Navy, with the Cold War and the Korean War fueling government funding. By 1952, about 40 cents of every tax dollar was being spent on defence. Keyston, now a Canadian citizen, oversaw the design and building of HMCS Bras d'Or, Canada's first hydrofoil, as well as research into variable-depth sonar and cathodic protection of ships.

Keyston soon held such positions as director of NATO's technical centre in the Netherlands as part of Supreme Headquarters Allied Command Europe (SHAPE). In 1967, he was appointed NATO's director of armaments and defence research. He retired from military life in 1973.

April 8, 2005 at age 96.

Onna White >permalink<

Choreographer

Onna White

There is no Oscar for choreography, but Onna White managed to win one anyway. White won the Oscar for her outstanding work choreographing 276 dancers for 1968's "Oliver!" which won best picture and best director. Her Oscar award was actually for recognition of her life's work in filmmaking.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had a category called 'dance director' in the 1930s, but since then they only celebrated choreography three times through honourary Oscars to White, Gene Kelly and Jerome Robbins. Other honourary recipients have included Chuck Jones, Sophia Loren, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Walt Disney and organisations such as the National Film Board of Canada and Eastman Kodak.

Born in Inverness, Nova Scotia, Canada, White was also nominated eight times for Tonys but never won. Her first Tony nomination came in 1958 for her work on "The Music Man," starring Robert Preston (she also choreographed the film version). Her other film credits include "Bye Bye Birdie," "The Great Waltz" and "Pete's Dragon."

April 8, 2005 at age 83.

Yoshitaro Nomura >permalink<

Japanese film director

Yoshitaro Nomura

He made 89 movies in three decades, and his 1974 thriller "Castle of Sand" has been cited by critics as one of Japan's best films ever. Yoshitaro Nomura has also been hailed as the father of Japanese film noir.

Working frequently with his country's best-selling mystery writer, Seicho Matsumoto, they made eight films together including 1957's "The Chase," "Castle of Sand" (which picked up the special jury's prize at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1975) and 1978's "The Demon." Nomura was a fan of American detective novels, turning Ellery Queen's "Calamity Town" into his 1979 film "Three Undelivered Letters," and Agatha Christie's "The Hollow" into his 1985 "Dangerous Women."

After directing his last movie in 1985, Nomura worked as a producer and mentor to other Japanese directors. In 1995, the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun.

April 8, 2005 at age 85. Pneumonia.

Floyd Devroy >permalink<

Salesman

Now how much would you pay? You've seen his products on TV. They weren't available in any stores. And they were usually a limited time offer. Floyd Devroy spent years slogging through sales lists and trade shows, eventually finding success when he marketed the Headhugger, the first portable headphone radio. He also came up with the car cozy, the mineral magnet, the sun zapper, the first inflatable airbed, the rotating car-wash brush and split-saddle bike seat. But wait, there's more ...

His company currently markets a solar-powered ventilator that rids cars of stuffy, smelly air; a heated travel blanket that plugs into a car lighter; a magnet that clamps onto household pipes and furnaces and rids them of built-up sediment and calcium; and a glare shield that attaches to car visors.

April 7, 2005 at age 74. Heart and lung failure.

George Lymburn >permalink<

War veteran and actor

At the age of 19, Lymburn enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force and was given command of a B-24 bomber. As part of 445th Bomb Group, he flew some missions led by actor-turned-pilot Jimmy Stewart. On March 6, 1944, Lymburn's plane took a direct hit during a bomb run over Berlin. Lymburn ordered his 10-man crew to bail out, but he and his tail gunner stayed with the bomber and crash-landed. Captured by German troops, Lymburn spent 14 months at Stalag Luft 1 as a POW. Lymburn passed the time by memorizing and reciting plays and poetry to his fellow soldiers.

Returning state-side, Lymburn attended Yale Drama School, received a bachelor's degree in theater arts from Rollins College in Florida and enrolled in the graduate school of theater at UCLA. Lymburn then appeared on shows during television's infancy in the 1950s and 1960s, including "Playhouse 90," "The Fugitive" and "Bewitched." His movie credits included "Marty," "The Natural," "Mrs. Doubtfire," "Basic Instinct" and "The Rock," in which he was a double for Sean Connery.

April 7, 2005 at age 81. Stroke.

Jose Melis >permalink<

Bandleader

Jose Melis Melis, a classically trained pianist, was serving in the United States Army in charge of a 40-member orchestra when he met Jack Paar, who was also serving. Melis was a child prodigy, first studying piano in his native Cuba when he was three years old. After his military service, Melis was recruited by Paar as musical director for a string of variety shows that were to make Paar a legend in American broadcasting - first with CBS and then, from 1957 through 1962, on NBC's "Tonight" show, which was renamed "The Jack Paar Show" in 1959. Melis wrote the music for Paar's "Tonight" show theme.

Besides conducting the show's orchestra, Melis appeared frequently on the air, bantering and joking with Paar, becoming something of a late-night television personality in his own right. Melis recorded or performed with Frank Sinatra, Clark Terry, Tito Puente and others, and also appeared as a soloist with the Boston Pops and several regional symphony orchestras across the nation.

April 7, 2005 at age 85. Respiratory infection.

Paul K. Perry >permalink<

Polling innovator

Dewey Defeats Truman In the 1948 U.S. presidential election, pollsters predicted that Thomas E. Dewey would defeat Harry Truman. Truman had been placed second in the most recent of polls. The mistake and the photograph of Truman holding a copy of The Chicago Tribune is now history. At the time, the polling industry was in its infancy, and the error was a near fatal blow to its credibility.

Perry pieced through the disaster of the stunningly wrong predictions and came up with several innovations: conducting polls later in the election cycle, making the surveys more random, devising a system to identify likely voters, and coming up with ways to allocate undecided voters to candidates.

Perry implemented the practice of polling some people secretly and others openly (more controversial candidates did better among secret responders). He was one of the first polling experts to emphasize making second calls to people who were not home for the first call, and he also devised techniques to survey voters as they left polling places.

April 7, 2005 at age 95. Cerebral hemorrhage.

Eleanor Stier >permalink<

Single mother

By the age of 16, Stier was living on her own after a falling-out with her mother. She had slept in the janitor's closet at a nursing clinic where she worked for about a month before someone noticed and gave her a bed to sleep in. Stier attended the Rhode Island School of Nursing and worked as a nurse in area hospitals and nursing homes until she was well into her 70s.

In the 1950s, she met John F. Nash while she was caring for him as a patient. Nash, who battled schizophrenia and won a Nobel Prize in economics, was the subject of the 2001 Oscar-winning film "A Beautiful Mind." The movie did not mention Stier or the son she had with Nash, John David Stier, now 51. For a woman who raised her child as an unmarried single mother in an era when it carried a heavy stigma, that was not a bad thing, her son said. "She was pleased not to be embarrassed about it," John Stier said of his mother's reaction to the movie. Stier retired from nursing in 1996.

April 6, 2005 at age 84.

Prince Rainier of Monaco >permalink<

Long before Charles and Diana, and to a much lesser extent Charles and Camilla, there was another royal wedding that captured the world’s imagination.

Nearly fifty years ago, the ruler of the smallest and richest country in the world married a starlet from Hollywood. It was a fairy tale come true, but with a tragic ending. For more about his life and times, visit the Link Link Prince Rainier tribute page.

April 6, 2005 at age 81. Lung infection, heart and kidney failure.

Bruce Faraday >permalink<

Physicist

Now you see it ... Faraday's best known work can't be seen - at least not by radar. In the late 1970s he managed a team of scientists and technicians who developed radar absorbing magnetic material that was turned into rubberized sheets and built into planes. Known as "Project Newboy," the research would eventually be applied to stealth technology.

Faraday worked for nearly 40 years at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, beginning in the acoustics division in 1948. He later became head of the Radiation Effects Branch, where he studied radiation damage from nuclear and laser weapons. He retired from the lab in 1986.

April 5, 2005 at age 85. Heart attack.

Dale Messick >permalink<

Cartoonist, Brenda Starr

Like the cartoon character she drew, Dale Messick fought her way to the top of a man's profession. As a reporter, Messick was sick and tired of covering nothing but ice-cream socials. She wanted a job with action, like the men reporters had. So she created the role in the form of Brenda Starr, reporter for the Daily Flash.

The strip began its run in 1940, and was one of the first created by a woman. She altered her first name (Dalia) and sent her work out under the more gender-ambiguous Dale Messick. An impossibly glamorous redhead, Starr's appearance was inspired by Rita Hayworth, with great legs balanced on high-heeled shoes, Dior-style clothing that no woman would dare wear to a newspaper office, and a balcony you could do Shakespeare from.

Messick hired other people to draw cars and other mechanical contraptions, animals and nature scenes. For four decades, only she drew Brenda Starr's face and body. Whenever Messick drew in cleavage or a navel, the comic-strip syndicate would erase it. She was once banned in Boston after showing Brenda smoking a polka-dot cigar.

During World War II, Brenda Starr was an ace reporter, chasing spies and other ne'er-do-wells in cities and jungles, fighting off sharks and giant squids. She also sold war bonds.

"Brenda Starr" was adapted for the screen several times. In 1945, it appeared as a serial with Joan Woodbury. A 1976 TV movie starred Jill St. John. A 1986 movie starring Brooke Shields and Timothy Dalton was so bad it was not released until 1992. Messick warned everyone she met not to see it. A 1991 documentary film, "Funny Ladies," featured her work.

In 1995, Messick was the only woman among 20 comic-strip creators chosen to appear on U.S. postage stamps honouring the 100th anniversary of the form. Messick received the National Cartoonist Society's Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.

At its peak in the 1950s, "Brenda Starr" appeared in 250 papers and is still syndicated by Tribune Media Services. Messick retired from drawing the strip in the mid-1980's, and it was passed on to other artists, all women.

April 5, 2005 at age 98.

Debralee Scott >permalink<

Actress

Scott's first credited role was that as Bob Falfa's (Harrison Ford) girlfriend in the 1973 film "American Graffiti." In the 32 years since that film was released, only one other cast member, Wolfman Jack, has died. Scott's next notable appearances were on the TV shows "Welcome Back Kotter," in the role of 'Hotsy Totsy,' and "Mary Hartman Mary Hartman." A decade later, she appeared in two of the "Police Academy" movies.

Scott was a frequent face on game shows "The $20,000 Pyramid" and "Match Game" in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She reportedly dated former Beatle Ringo Starr. She was the sister of Scott Bushnell, who produced many of director Robert Altman's films.

Scott was engaged to John Dennis Levi, a police officer with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who was killed in the 2001 9/11 attacks in New York City. Levi last called Scott from the basement of the World Trade Center as he searched for evidence. Recently Scott had moved to northern Florida to help care for an older sister. A week before her death, Scott mysteriously went into a coma for three days, and later died of natural causes.

April 5, 2005 at age 52.

Denny D. Duesenberg >permalink<

Car designer

It's a Duesey! In 1913 the Duesenberg Brothers, Fred and August, founded the Duesenberg Automobile & Motors Company primarily to build sports cars. Duesenberg cars were considered the best cars built at the time, and were made entirely by hand. A "Duesey" won the Indianapolis 500 in 1922, 1924, 1925, and 1927.

Although the Duesenberg brothers were world-class engineers, they were unable sell a mass produced vehicle. The company went bankrupt and closed in 1922. Errett Lobban Cord, the owner of Cord Automobile and Auburn Automobile bought the company for the Duesenberg Brothers' engineering skills in 1925 and the brand name to produce luxury cars. In 1928, The Model J Duesenberg was first available at the New York Car Show. Only the chassis was displayed since the interior and mechanics of the car would be custom made by hand to the owner's specifications. The car had a top speed of 150 mph (241 km/h). The Duesey became one of the most famous cars in America, owned by the rich and famous, among them Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo and the Duke of Windsor.

In 1930, the first car Denny and his father built won the Indianapolis 500 three times. Duesenberg ceased production in 1937 after Cord's financial empire collapsed. Four hundred twenty-seven Model Js and SJs had been produced between 1928 and 1937, and in all 650 Duesenbergs had been made. Denny retired from Dearborn American Road Ford in 1979 after 24 and a half years of service.

April 5, 2005 at age 91.

Judith Weiner >permalink<

Film & TV casting director

Weiner worked in the casting and talent department of the UPN television network since 1999. She oversaw casting on all UPN projects, including comedy and dramatic series as well as movies and specials. Over 35 years, she cast "Family Ties," "Brooklyn Bridge," "SOAP," "The Golden Girls," "Ally McBeal" and "The Practice." She also worked on TV movies and feature films with producers including John Hughes, Marcy Carsey & Tom Werner and Norman Lear.

April 5, 2005 at age 58. Ovarian cancer.

Monty Matthews >permalink<

Founding member, the Jordanaires

Monty Matthews

Monty and his brother, Bill Matthews, teamed up with Culley Holt and Bob Hubbard to form the Jordanaires in 1948. They worked in Nashville with Red Foley. Monty left the group in 1953, and by 1955, they settled into their best-known lineup -- Gordon Stoker, Neal Matthews (no relation), Hoyt Hawkins and Ray Walker.

The Jordanaires got their big break when Elvis Presley, a longtime fan, invited the group to back him after receiving his recording contract from RCA Victor. Elvis honoured his promise to keep them as his backup singers, and they worked with him until 1970, appearing in many of his films and on his gospel recordings. The Jordanaires were inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1998, and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. The group was also honoured for singing on more top ten recordings than any other vocal group by the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. Monty later became an ordained minister.

April 5, 2005 at age 77.

Ray Josephs >permalink<

Journalist, adventurer, author

Tiring of his job at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Josephs talked his bosses into posting him as a gossip columnist in Buenos Aires on a five-week assignment to find former Philadelphians living in the Amazon and the Andes. While there, Josephs met actress Evita Duarte and wrote a book, "Argentine Diary," that was critical of her husband, Juan Peron.

While hardly a threshold for political intrigue, he became so smitten with cosmopolitan Buenos Aires that he stayed there for five years. Josephs worked as a gossip columnist for the English-language Buenos Aires Herald as well as a freelance reporter for the New York Herald, and Time and Variety magazines. He nightclubbed with Orson Welles, and worked as a recruiter for the Allies, helping to destroy a print of a Leni Riefenstahl film that had been imported from Germany for propaganda purposes. After learning that Argentine taxi drivers were really plainclothes policemen, he decided it would be in his best interest to leave the country.

Josephs turned to writing books such as "How to Make Money from Your Ideas" and "Streamlining Your Executive Workload." In 1955 he wrote "How to Gain an Extra Hour Every Day" which sold nearly 2.5 million copies. It was based on questionnaires he sent to people in various lines of work and offered hundreds of time-saving work methods. He cited President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the usefulness of picking out the next day's wardrobe the night before. He also found a businessman who liked to conduct meetings where everyone stayed standing, the idea being that they were inclined to ramble when seated comfortably. In later years, Josephs' International Public Relations Company included clients Toshiba, General Motors, French oil company Elf Aquitaine and the Concorde, the supersonic plane, when it was seeking landing rights in New York.

April 5, 2005 at age 93. Kidney cancer.

Saul Bellow >permalink<

Author

Saul Bellow

Solomon Bellows was born in Lachine, Quebec, just outside Montreal. He dropped the final "s" from his last name and changed his first name to Saul when he began publishing his writing in the 1940s. Growing up during the depression, Bellow saw people going to libraries and reading books because they were trying to keep warm -- they had no heat in their houses. The impression of the working poor being exposed to ideas would form the template of his writing career.

Bellow was the first writer to win the National Book Award three times. In 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Humboldt's Gift." That same year Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, cited for his "human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture." He was only Canadian-born author to win the prize.

In 1984, he returned to Lachine when the Municipal Library changed its name to Bibliotheque Municipale Saul Bellow. In December of 1999, Bellows became a father at age 84. The baby was born to Bellow and his fifth wife. He had three sons from previous marriages. His novel "Seize the Day" was turned into a movie in 1986, and he appeared as himself in Woody Allen's 1983 film "Zelig."

April 5, 2005 at age 89.

Ura Koyama >permalink<

Japan's oldest person

Japan ranks among countries with the world's longest lifespans. In 2003, Japanese women set a new record for life expectancy, at 85.3 years, while men could expect to live 78.3 years. Experts say a traditional fish-based, low-fat diet may be the Japanese secret to long life.

According to the UCLA-based Gerontology Research Group, which tracks "supercentenarians" (those over 110) Koyama was the second-oldest person in the world. She was born August 30, 1890. The world's eldest is Hendrikje Van Andel of the Netherlands, who was born June 29, 1890. An American now is in second place, according to the supercentenarian-trackers. She is Bettie Wilson, born September 13, 1890. The oldest person in Japan, according to its Health Ministry, is now Yone Minaga, 112, who was born January 4, 1893.

April 5, 2005 at age 114. Pneumonia.

Edward Bronfman >permalink<

Canadian businessman

In the late 1980s, Edward Bronfman's 40 publicly traded companies accounted for more than 10 per cent of the Toronto Stock Exchange's value. With assets worth an estimated $100 billion, he helped control the largest conglomerate in Canada. In 1990, the 360 companies under the control of the Bronfman's was twice the number of companies owned by the Canadian government itself.

Edper, the holding company he formed with brother Peter, once held Noranda Inc., Trizec Corp., London Life, Royal Trust, Royal LePage, Bramalea Inc., Labatt Beer, Falconbridge and MacMillan Bloedel. They also owned the Montreal Canadiens from 1971 to 1978, when the team won the Stanley Cup four times.

Edward, born in Montreal, was the son of Allan Bronfman and nephew of Samuel Bronfman, founder of Seagram Co. Edward and Peter were known as the "poor cousins" because they were shut out of the distillery firm after their father died. Samuel ensured that his own sons, Charles and Edgar, would control the Montreal-based distillery which made its fortune selling liquor to the Americans during the Prohibition era.

Edward sold about a quarter of his shares in Edper in 1989 to the conglomerate's senior managers, and Peter died of cancer in 1996. There are no longer any Bronfmans actively involved in Brascan (formerly EdperBrascan Corporation).

Edward set up a mulit-million dollar endowment for research into mood disorders after his sister Mona committed suicide in 1950 at age 26, after suffering from post-partum depression. He also set up the Edward Bronfman Family Foundation Research Clinic in Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis in Toronto. Edward's eldest son, Paul Bronfman, a Toronto film and television producer, has MS. Bronfman received the Order of Canada in 2000 for his charitable work. Another Bronfman son, Samuel, was kidnapped in August, 1975 and was released after his father paid the demanded ransom.

April 4, 2005 at age 77. Colon cancer.

Roberta Nichols >permalink<

Aerospace and automotive engineer

Zoom zoom Growing up as the only child of a Douglas Aircraft Co. engineer, Nichols would often follow her father to junkyards, learning to weld and helping to work on his vintage cars. She soon became a pioneer in the male-dominated profession of engineering.

After earning a bachelor's degree in physics, and a master's and doctorate in environmental engineering, she began working as a mathematician at Douglas Aircraft and in computer technology at the Space Technology Lab Inc. While working for Aerospace Corp., she provided technical direction for Air Force space programs dealing with weapons systems and air-quality problems.

In 1978, Nichols formed the State of California's synthetic fuels office and single-handedly converted a Ford Pinto station wagon to run on methanol. Ford learned of her work and hired her. With her help, Ford delivered its first fleet of methanol vehicles to California in 1981. Nichols is the holder of three patents for the Flexible Fuel Vehicle. She worked extensively on methanol, ethanol, natural gas and electric vehicles, and began experimenting with hybrid electric and gasoline vehicles. In 1994 she drove Ford's electric Ecostar van in the 600-mile American Tour de Sol, believed to be the world's largest electric and solar vehicle road rally. She finished second, behind another Ecostar.

Racing wasn't new to Nichols, and her initial interest in "funny fuels" was not to curb air pollution, but to enhance the performance of internal-combustion engines. From 1966 to 1969, Nichols held the women's world record for quarter-mile drag boat racing. She also raced hydroplanes and vintage cars -- among them a 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300-SL Gullwing and a methanol-powered 1929 Model A Ford (achieving 190 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah). Nichols was the first woman chosen as a fellow by the Society of Automotive Engineers among the organisation's 80,000 members worldwide.

April 3, 2005 at age 73. Leukemia.

Rusty's Roundup at Entertainment Insiders >permalink<

Added April 3, 2005 -- a summary of movie & TV folks you might not have heard of.

Ashini Kibibi - Kenyan actress and writer
Carolyn Coates - actress
Charles Antalosky - actor
Chuck Myall - set designer and theme park ride designer
Dragoljub Milosavljevis - Yugoslav actor
Hideaki Sekiguchi - Japanese punk rocker
Ozren Depolo - Croatian composer
Raymond Mercer - technical advisor for "Dragnet"
Sandy Ward - veteran character actor
Sharyn Lane - writer/producer/actress
Sivad - WHBQ TV Monster of Ceremonies

Betty Bolton >permalink<

Actress

With the passing of Betty Bolton, one of the last surviving links to pre-1920s London theatrical revues is now gone. Bolton was once hailed as "the youngest actress on the London stage."

Bolton was nothing if not versatile, performing in revues, straight plays, radio, films, recordings, even early television when in 1932 she made an appearance in the very first, experimental transmission along with Betty Astell, Fred Douglas and others. Bolton's name is well known to 78rpm record collectors. As a dance-band vocalist, solo comedienne, and occasional torch singer, her recording career stretched only from 1929 to 1935 but she made records for 11 labels. She retired from the theatre during the 1930s, after the birth of her daughter.

April 2, 2005 at age 99.

Pope John Paul II >permalink<

For an entire generation, there has only been one pope. The charisma of John Paul II's personality outshone all those of his predecessors, so much so that living memory is challenged to recall anyone else holding the pontificate. The impact of his role as head of the Catholic Church and a figure in world politics will likely take another generation to measure. Karol Józef Wojtyla died April 2, 2005 at approximately 9:37 pm Vatican time.

For more about this unique figure in world history, visit the Last Link John Paul II tribute page.

Marilyn Levine >permalink<

Sculptor of leather

Marilyn Levine Born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Levine earned bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She studied art at the University of Regina and moved to San Francisco where she became a prominent ceramic sculptor, known for deceptively realistic renditions of leather goods.

Her work was initially seen as a three-dimensional equivalent of "photo realism," and is now found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. She taught art at UC Berkeley and the University of Utah, and lectured at universities in the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea and Europe. She earned awards from three ceramics societies and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

April 2, 2005 at age 69. Mucosal melanoma.

Cheryl Barrymore >permalink<

Agent

Cheryl Barrymore

Cheryl Barrymore acted as an agent for her husband throughout their two-decades-plus years of marriage. Michael Barrymore was one of Britain's most popular television show hosts. The couple divorced in 1997 when Michael revealed that he was gay.

In April, 2001 Michael was questioned by police about his role in the death of Stuart Lubbock, who was found drowned in his swimming pool following a late-night 'gay sex and drink and drugs session.' Michael, who had been smoking a joint in a bedroom, fled the scene and checked into a rehab facility the next day. Although Barrymore was cleared of any involvement in the man's death, he was later 'cautioned' for possessing cannabis and smoking it at the party. In 2002, Cheryl accused Barrymore of lying at the inquest into Lubbock's death when he said he could not swim, and therefore could not attempt to rescue 31-year-old from the pool. Michael now lives in New Zealand. Once one of the highest-paid performers on British television, he filed for bankruptcy in 2004.

Cheryl continued her showbusiness career representing Rebecca Loos, who made nearly $2 million from interviews after claiming to have bedded England soccer captain and Posh Spice husband David Beckham. In 2004, the producers of UK's Big Brother approached Cheryl to take part in the reality show to reunite her with Michael Barrymore. She declined the invitation.

April 1, 2005 at age 56. Cancer.

Harald Juhnke >permalink<

Germany's Frank Sinatra

He did it his way.

Juhnke was one of Germany's best-loved stars of television, film and stage. His later years were clouded by his battle with the bottle and his deteriorating mental state. His death sparked a wave of tributes, even from German President Horst Koehler. The news of his passing stopped reports of the Pope's failing health from monopolising German media coverage.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Juhnke made dozens of feature films. The peak of his career came during the 1970s as an actor and presenter. While hosting the ZDF television show "Musik ist Trumpf" (Music is Trump), he emulated Sinatra's style and dress, capping his schtick with a German cover of Frank's "My Way." Juhnke also dubbed Marlon Brando's voice in German films. He made headlines in 1997 when he insulted a security guard in a Los Angeles hotel with the 'n-word' when drunk, for which he later apologised.

April 1, 2005 at age 75. Dementia and alcoholism.

Jack Keller >permalink<

Songwriter

Jack Keller got his break when he joined Don Kirschner's Aldon Music publishing company. The outfit was located in New York's Brill Building, a literal sweatshop with teams of songwriters sequestered in small rooms equipped only with pianos, churning out pop hits around the clock. The likes of Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart all turned out more songs per square foot in the building than anywhere else on the planet. The facility was also home to Colpic/Colgems Records. Collectively, the enterprise was known as "Tin Pan Alley."

Keller and Howard Greenfield wrote "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" and "My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own," both No. 1 hits for Connie Francis in 1960, and "Venus in Blue Jeans" for Jimmy Clanton. Keller wrote Bobby Vee's "Run To Him" and "Please Don't Ask About Barbara."

Aldon Music was purchased by the TV production company Screen Gems, and as a result, Keller and Greenfield wrote the theme song for the company's shows such as "Bewitched," "Hazel" and "Gidget." In 1966, Screen Gems developed a show around four made for TV musicians, and Keller served as producer for the theme song and first album of "The Monkees." Boyce and Hart, Keller's partners from the Brill days worked extensively with the pre-fab band, and Neil Diamond (another Brill alumni) wrote their biggest hit "I'm A Believer."

April 1, 2005 at age 68. Leukemia.

Lazarre Gionet >permalink<

World War I veteran

Gionet was the last surviving New Brunswick veteran of the First World War. Gionet was a farmer and fishermen who joined the army as a private when he was 20, serving two years of combat duty in Europe. Gionet and his late wife, Lauza, had nine children, one of whom was killed in the Second World War. There are now five Canadians left out of 620,000 who served in the First World War.

April 1, 2005 at age 108.

Stuart Martin >permalink<

TV broadcaster pioneer

WCAX-TV

Martin brought television to Vermont in 1954 when WCAX-TV Burlington went on the air. With help from his stepfather, Charles P. Hasbrook, Martin brought the station to life after serving in World War II in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Martin was posted in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany as a signal intelligence officer, responsible for establishing or revamping radio direction-finding procedures and equipment. WCAX-TV is a CBS affiliate, a station that is unusual in today's media world because it has remained family owned since its start, maintaining a commitment to local news in a small market. Martin was driving himself into the station's office as recently as three weeks ago.

April 1, 2005 at age 91.

William Reckert >permalink<

Transcriber

William Reckert As a U.S. federal transcriber for Justice Department investigations, Reckert spent more than 50 years and untold hours listening to tape recordings of undercover agents and court testimony, transcribing them into flawlessly typed documents. His job title was "closed microphone reporter," a person who sat in on official proceedings, repeating the official testimony verbatim into a recording mask. The recordings were later transcribed at a typewriter or computer. The job required unwavering attention and unfailing accuracy. Reckert was known for turning in letter-perfect work. He was also blind since birth.

While at boarding school, Reckert's son received a letter a week from his father, typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter. In nine months, he had one spacing error. When Reckert retired with 53 years of federal service, he had accumulated 5,500 hours of unused sick leave.

While transcribing material related to the Watergate investigation, it was Reckert who discovered the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap in a secret recording of Oval Office conversation between President Richard Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. Reckert called special prosecutor Leon Jaworski's office about the gap, and a big, black limousine soon arrived. The person at the centre of the gap, Rose Mary Woods, died January 22, 2005.

April 1, 2005 at age 77. Congestive heart failure.

final credits - april 2005

reflecting lives that have contributed to modern culture

Jothan Callins >permalink<

Lewis G. Zirkle >permalink<

Norma-Jean Richardson >permalink<

Sherman Loudermilk >permalink<

Brook Williams >permalink<

Jim Pash >permalink<

Johnnie Stewart >permalink<

Leonid Khachiyan >permalink<

Richard Freitag >permalink<

Sean Egan >permalink<

William J. Bell >permalink<

Ed Schantz >permalink<

Lane Nakano >permalink<

Percy Heath >permalink<

Charles Pratt >permalink<

Reginald (Red) Horner >permalink<

Gordon Shaw >permalink<

Hasil Adkins >permalink<

Maria Schell >permalink<

Mason Adams >permalink<

Robert J. Schiffer >permalink<

Florence Van Stockum >permalink<

Howard Benedict >permalink<

Kay Snelgrove >permalink<

Michael Rogers >permalink<

Wes Montgomery

Rusty's Roundup at Entertainment Insiders >permalink

Charles Kuentz >permalink<

Romano Scarpa >permalink<

J.B. Stoner >permalink<

Jimmy Woode >permalink<

Sir John Mills >permalink<

Arnie Lawrence >permalink<

Chris Muller >permalink<

John F. White >permalink<

John Marshall >permalink<

Joseph E. Bogen >permalink<

Philip Morrison >permalink<

Robert Farnon >permalink<

Feroze Khan >permalink<

Jimmy Thompson >permalink<

Gene Frankel >permalink<

Kurt Rebmann >permalink<

Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen >permalink<

George Cosmatos >permalink<

Herman Kohlman >permalink<

Richard 'Rick' Lewis >permalink<

Ruth Hussey >permalink<

Stan Levey >permalink<

Alex Smart >permalink<

Rick Blight >permalink<

Helen Liu Fong >permalink<

James A. Houston >permalink<

Wheeler Lipes >permalink<

Don Ray >permalink<

Ida Libby Dengrove >permalink<

Kay Walsh >permalink<

Laura Canales >permalink<

John Fred Gourrier >permalink<

Margaretta Scott >permalink<

Yvedt Matory >permalink<

Benny Bailey >permalink<

George J. Murtaugh Jr. >permalink<

Johnnie Johnson >permalink<

Richard H. Popkin >permalink<

Salvador 'Tutti' Camarata >permalink<

George A. Molchan >permalink<

Robert Granville >permalink<

Rusty's Roundup at Entertainment Insiders >permalink<

Jerry Byrd >permalink<

John Bennett >permalink<

John Brosnan >permalink<

Maurice Hilleman >permalink<

Faith McNulty >permalink<

Samuel P. Massie Jr. >permalink<

Wally Tax >permalink<

George Salverson >permalink<

Jean Denton >permalink<