Literotica Cemetary
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Former Republican NC Sen. Jesse Helms dies at 86
RALEIGH, N.C. - Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died on the Fourth of July.
He was 86.
"It's just incredible that he would die on July 4, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men," said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey, the chairman of The Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C.
Helms died at 1:15 a.m, the center said. He died in Raleigh of natural causes, said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton.
"He was very comfortable," Broughton said.
Funeral arrangements were pending, the Helms center said.
"America lost a great public servant and true patriot today," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said few senators could match Helms' reputation.
"Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in," McConnell said in a statement.
Helms, who first became known to North Carolina voters as a newspaper and television commentator, won election to the Senate in 1972 and decided not to run for a sixth term in 2002.
"Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?" Helms wrote in a 1959 editorial that foretold his political style.
As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of illnesses, including a bone disorder, prostate cancer and heart problems, and he made his way through the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared an end. In April 2006, his family announced he had been moved into a convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.
Helms' public appearances had dwindled as his health deteriorated. When his memoirs were published in August 2005, he appeared at a Raleigh book store to sign copies, but did not make a speech.
In an e-mail interview with The Associated Press at that time, Helms said he hoped what future generations learn about him "will be based on the truth and not the deliberate inaccuracies those who disagreed with me took such delight in repeating."
"My legacy will be up to others to describe," he added.
Helms served as chairman of the Agriculture Committee and Foreign Relations Committees over the years at times when the GOP held the Senate majority, using his posts to protect his state's tobacco growers and other farmers and place his stamp on foreign policy.
His opposition to Communism defined his foreign policy views. He took a dim view of many arms control treaties, opposed Fidel Castro at every turn, and supported the contras in Nicaragua as well as the right-wing government of El Salvador. He opposed the Panama Canal treaties that then-President Carter pushed through a reluctant Senate in 1977.
As Castro's fierce critic, Helms helped create legislation in 1996 to strengthen U.S. restrictions against the Caribbean island's communist government.
The Helms-Burton law bars the United States from normalizing relations with Cuba as long as Castro or his brother Raul — who has been president since February — are involved in government. That law also sought to pressure other nations not to do business with Cuba, a condition protested by Mexico and other third nations.
Early on, his habit of blocking nominations and legislation won him a nickname of "Senator No." He delighted in forcing roll-call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and other cultural issues.
In 1993, when then-President Clinton sought confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust. "I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that," he said in a newspaper interview at the time. "If you want to call me a bigot, fine."
After Democrats killed the appointment of U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle, a former Helms aide, to a federal appeals court post in 1991, Helms blocked all of Clinton's judicial nominations from North Carolina for eight years.
Helms occasionally opted for compromise in later years in the Senate, working with Democrats on legislation to restructure the foreign policy bureaucracy and pay back debts to the United Nations, an organization be disdained for most of his career.
And he softened his views on AIDS after years of clashes with gay activists, advocating greater federal funding to fight the disease in Africa and elsewhere overseas.
But in his memoirs, Helms made clear that his opinions on other issues had hardly moderated since he left office. He likened abortion to the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves," he wrote in "Here's Where I Stand."
Helms never lost a race for the Senate, but he never won one by much, either, a reflection of his divisive political profile in his native state.
He knew it, too. "Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The mighty ultraliberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and commentators and columnists have struck out again," he said in 1990 after winning his fourth term.
He won the 1972 election after switching parties, and defeated then-Gov. Jim Hunt in an epic battle in 1984 in what was then the costliest Senate race on record.
He defeated black former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 in racially tinged campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumbling up a job application, these words underneath: "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."
"The tension that he creates, the fear he creates in people, is how he's won campaigns," Gantt said several years later.
Helms also played a role in national GOP politics — supporting Ronald Reagan in 1976 in a presidential primary challenge to then-President Ford. Reagan's candidacy was near collapse when it came time for the North Carolina primary. Helms was in charge of the effort, and Reagan won a startling upset that resurrected his challenge.
"It's not saying too much to say that had Senator Helms not put his weight and his political organization behind Ronald Reagan so that he was able to win North Carolina, there may have never been a Reagan presidency," Cobey said. "Most people feel like there would have never been a President Reagan had it not been for Jesse Helms."
During the 1990s, Helms clashed frequently with Clinton, whom he deemed unqualified to be commander in chief. Even some Republicans cringed when Helms said Clinton was so unpopular he would need a bodyguard on North Carolina military bases. Helms said he hadn't meant it as a threat.
Asked to gauge Clinton's performance overall, Helms said in 1995: "He's a nice guy. He's very pleasant. But ... (as) Ronald Reagan used to say about another politician, `Deep down, he's shallow.'"
Helms went out of his way to establish good relations with Madeleine Albright, Clinton's second secretary of state. But that didn't stop him from single-handedly blocking Clinton's appointment of William Weld — a Republican — as ambassador to Mexico.
Helms clashed with other Republicans over the years, including fellow Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana in 1987, after Democrats had won a Senate majority. Helms had promised in his 1984 campaign not to take the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, but he invoked seniority over Lugar to claim the seat as the panel's ranking Republican.
He was unafraid of inconveniencing his fellow senators — sometimes all of them at once. "I did not come to Washington to win a popularity contest," he once said while holding the Senate in session with a filibuster that delayed the beginning of a Christmas break. And he once objected to a request by phoning in his dissent from home, where he was watching Senate proceedings on television.
Helms was born in Monroe, N.C., on Oct. 18, 1921. He attended Wake Forest College in 1941 but never graduated and was in the Navy during World War II.
In many ways, Helms' values were forged in the small town where his father was police chief.
"I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year's Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day," Helms wrote in a newspaper column in 1956.
He took an active role in North Carolina politics early on, working to elect a segregationist candidate, Willis Smith, to the Senate in 1950. He worked as Smith's top staff aide for a time, then returned to Raleigh as executive director of the state bankers association.
Helms became a member of the Raleigh city council in 1957 and got his first public platform for espousing his conservative views when he became a television editorialist for WRAL in Raleigh in 1960. He also wrote a column that at one time was carried in 200 newspapers. Helms also was city editor at The Raleigh Times.
Helms and his wife, Dorothy, had two daughters and a son. They adopted the boy in 1962 after the child, 9 years old and suffering from cerebral palsy, said in a newspaper article that he wanted parents.
RALEIGH, N.C. - Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died on the Fourth of July.
He was 86.
"It's just incredible that he would die on July 4, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men," said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey, the chairman of The Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C.
Helms died at 1:15 a.m, the center said. He died in Raleigh of natural causes, said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton.
"He was very comfortable," Broughton said.
Funeral arrangements were pending, the Helms center said.
"America lost a great public servant and true patriot today," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said few senators could match Helms' reputation.
"Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in," McConnell said in a statement.
Helms, who first became known to North Carolina voters as a newspaper and television commentator, won election to the Senate in 1972 and decided not to run for a sixth term in 2002.
"Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?" Helms wrote in a 1959 editorial that foretold his political style.
As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of illnesses, including a bone disorder, prostate cancer and heart problems, and he made his way through the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared an end. In April 2006, his family announced he had been moved into a convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.
Helms' public appearances had dwindled as his health deteriorated. When his memoirs were published in August 2005, he appeared at a Raleigh book store to sign copies, but did not make a speech.
In an e-mail interview with The Associated Press at that time, Helms said he hoped what future generations learn about him "will be based on the truth and not the deliberate inaccuracies those who disagreed with me took such delight in repeating."
"My legacy will be up to others to describe," he added.
Helms served as chairman of the Agriculture Committee and Foreign Relations Committees over the years at times when the GOP held the Senate majority, using his posts to protect his state's tobacco growers and other farmers and place his stamp on foreign policy.
His opposition to Communism defined his foreign policy views. He took a dim view of many arms control treaties, opposed Fidel Castro at every turn, and supported the contras in Nicaragua as well as the right-wing government of El Salvador. He opposed the Panama Canal treaties that then-President Carter pushed through a reluctant Senate in 1977.
As Castro's fierce critic, Helms helped create legislation in 1996 to strengthen U.S. restrictions against the Caribbean island's communist government.
The Helms-Burton law bars the United States from normalizing relations with Cuba as long as Castro or his brother Raul — who has been president since February — are involved in government. That law also sought to pressure other nations not to do business with Cuba, a condition protested by Mexico and other third nations.
Early on, his habit of blocking nominations and legislation won him a nickname of "Senator No." He delighted in forcing roll-call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and other cultural issues.
In 1993, when then-President Clinton sought confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust. "I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that," he said in a newspaper interview at the time. "If you want to call me a bigot, fine."
After Democrats killed the appointment of U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle, a former Helms aide, to a federal appeals court post in 1991, Helms blocked all of Clinton's judicial nominations from North Carolina for eight years.
Helms occasionally opted for compromise in later years in the Senate, working with Democrats on legislation to restructure the foreign policy bureaucracy and pay back debts to the United Nations, an organization be disdained for most of his career.
And he softened his views on AIDS after years of clashes with gay activists, advocating greater federal funding to fight the disease in Africa and elsewhere overseas.
But in his memoirs, Helms made clear that his opinions on other issues had hardly moderated since he left office. He likened abortion to the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves," he wrote in "Here's Where I Stand."
Helms never lost a race for the Senate, but he never won one by much, either, a reflection of his divisive political profile in his native state.
He knew it, too. "Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The mighty ultraliberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and commentators and columnists have struck out again," he said in 1990 after winning his fourth term.
He won the 1972 election after switching parties, and defeated then-Gov. Jim Hunt in an epic battle in 1984 in what was then the costliest Senate race on record.
He defeated black former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 in racially tinged campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumbling up a job application, these words underneath: "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."
"The tension that he creates, the fear he creates in people, is how he's won campaigns," Gantt said several years later.
Helms also played a role in national GOP politics — supporting Ronald Reagan in 1976 in a presidential primary challenge to then-President Ford. Reagan's candidacy was near collapse when it came time for the North Carolina primary. Helms was in charge of the effort, and Reagan won a startling upset that resurrected his challenge.
"It's not saying too much to say that had Senator Helms not put his weight and his political organization behind Ronald Reagan so that he was able to win North Carolina, there may have never been a Reagan presidency," Cobey said. "Most people feel like there would have never been a President Reagan had it not been for Jesse Helms."
During the 1990s, Helms clashed frequently with Clinton, whom he deemed unqualified to be commander in chief. Even some Republicans cringed when Helms said Clinton was so unpopular he would need a bodyguard on North Carolina military bases. Helms said he hadn't meant it as a threat.
Asked to gauge Clinton's performance overall, Helms said in 1995: "He's a nice guy. He's very pleasant. But ... (as) Ronald Reagan used to say about another politician, `Deep down, he's shallow.'"
Helms went out of his way to establish good relations with Madeleine Albright, Clinton's second secretary of state. But that didn't stop him from single-handedly blocking Clinton's appointment of William Weld — a Republican — as ambassador to Mexico.
Helms clashed with other Republicans over the years, including fellow Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana in 1987, after Democrats had won a Senate majority. Helms had promised in his 1984 campaign not to take the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, but he invoked seniority over Lugar to claim the seat as the panel's ranking Republican.
He was unafraid of inconveniencing his fellow senators — sometimes all of them at once. "I did not come to Washington to win a popularity contest," he once said while holding the Senate in session with a filibuster that delayed the beginning of a Christmas break. And he once objected to a request by phoning in his dissent from home, where he was watching Senate proceedings on television.
Helms was born in Monroe, N.C., on Oct. 18, 1921. He attended Wake Forest College in 1941 but never graduated and was in the Navy during World War II.
In many ways, Helms' values were forged in the small town where his father was police chief.
"I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year's Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day," Helms wrote in a newspaper column in 1956.
He took an active role in North Carolina politics early on, working to elect a segregationist candidate, Willis Smith, to the Senate in 1950. He worked as Smith's top staff aide for a time, then returned to Raleigh as executive director of the state bankers association.
Helms became a member of the Raleigh city council in 1957 and got his first public platform for espousing his conservative views when he became a television editorialist for WRAL in Raleigh in 1960. He also wrote a column that at one time was carried in 200 newspapers. Helms also was city editor at The Raleigh Times.
Helms and his wife, Dorothy, had two daughters and a son. They adopted the boy in 1962 after the child, 9 years old and suffering from cerebral palsy, said in a newspaper article that he wanted parents.
blueyz22
Wandering through life...
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- Jan 6, 2008
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/12/obit.snow/
Former White House spokesman Tony Snow diesStory Highlights
NEW: President calls Snow "a devoted public servant and a man of character"
Former Bush press secretary died of cancer at 53
One-time Fox commentator recently had joined CNN
Snow resigned White House job, saying he needed higher income
Next Article in Politics »
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former White House press secretary Tony Snow -- who once told reporters "I'm a very lucky guy" -- died at the age of 53 early Saturday after a second battle with cancer.
Tony Snow responds to reporters at an October 2006 White House news conference.
1 of 3 Snow, who had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments for a recurrence of the disease, left his White House job September 14, 2007, and joined CNN in April as a conservative commentator.
President Bush said Saturday that he and first lady Laura Bush were "deeply saddened" by Snow's death.
"The Snow family has lost a beloved husband and father. And America has lost a devoted public servant and a man of character," the president said in a statement.
"It was a joy to watch Tony at the podium each day."
Snow's successor, White House press secretary Dana Perino, said, "The White House is so deeply saddened by this loss. He was a great friend and colleague and a fantastic press secretary. And his dear family is in our thoughts and prayers."
In 2007, Chief of Staff Josh Bolten had told senior White House staffers that unless they could commit to staying until Bush leaves office in January 2009, they should leave by Labor Day 2007, so Snow resigned.
In parting comments to reporters at his final White House news conference, Snow said, "I feel great."
He also called the job "the most fun I've ever had."
Snow said he was leaving the White House position to make more money for his family. His White House salary was $168,000.
Snow was first diagnosed with colon cancer in February 2005. His colon was removed, and after six months of treatment, doctors said the cancer was in remission.
A recurrence of the illness was diagnosed 11 months after he began the White House media job, and he underwent five weeks of treatment before resuming his daily briefings to the press corps. He was greeted with applause upon his return.
"Not everybody will survive cancer," Snow told the reporters, "but on the other hand, you have got to realize you've got the gift of life, so make the most of it. That is my view, and I'm going to make the most of my time with you."
Perino announced March 27, 2007, that Snow's cancer had recurred, and said doctors had removed a growth from his abdomen the day before.
Bush tapped Snow to replace Scott McClellan in April 2006.
Snow had been an anchor for "Fox News Sunday" and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, which he joined in 1996. He also hosted "The Tony Snow Show" on Fox News Radio.
Snow took a significant pay cut to take the job of press secretary and talked publicly about the financial sacrifices he made. He explained he felt he needed to make more money to help his family, which included children readying for college.
Snow was known for his candor.
In a November 11, 2005, column, Snow wrote that Bush's "wavering conservatism has become an active concern among Republicans, who wish he would stop cowering under the bed and start fighting back against the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Wilson."
"The newly passive George Bush has become something of an embarrassment," Snow's column said.
"I asked him about those comments," joked the president at the time of Snow's appointment. "And he said, 'You should have heard what I said about the other guy.'"
Bush said Snow's long career as a journalist helped him understand "the importance of the relationship between government and those whose job it is to cover the government."
Robert Anthony Snow was born June 1, 1955, in Berea, Kentucky, and was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. When he was 17, his mother died of colon cancer. She was 38.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Davidson College near Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1977, Snow pursued graduate work in philosophy and economics at the University of Chicago.
He worked as an editorial writer and editor at several newspapers, including The Washington Times and the Detroit News. He wrote a column in Detroit, and later wrote a syndicated column.
Snow joined the administration of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, in 1991, first as chief speech writer and later as deputy assistant to the president for media affairs.
Snow became a television personality when he launched his news shows on Fox in 1993.
When he returned to work April 30, 2007, after the second cancer diagnosis, a usually articulate and loquacious Snow stumbled to find words.
"You never anticipate this stuff," he said. "It just happens."
"I want to thank you all. It really meant the world to me. Anybody who does not not believe that thoughts and prayers make a difference, they're just wrong."
He then prefaced a discussion of his health by saying, "I'm a very lucky guy."
Outside of work, Snow played the guitar, saxophone and flute, and was in a band called Beats Workin' with other Washington professionals.
Snow is survived by his wife, Jill Walker, and three children.
Former White House spokesman Tony Snow diesStory Highlights
NEW: President calls Snow "a devoted public servant and a man of character"
Former Bush press secretary died of cancer at 53
One-time Fox commentator recently had joined CNN
Snow resigned White House job, saying he needed higher income
Next Article in Politics »
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former White House press secretary Tony Snow -- who once told reporters "I'm a very lucky guy" -- died at the age of 53 early Saturday after a second battle with cancer.
Tony Snow responds to reporters at an October 2006 White House news conference.
1 of 3 Snow, who had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments for a recurrence of the disease, left his White House job September 14, 2007, and joined CNN in April as a conservative commentator.
President Bush said Saturday that he and first lady Laura Bush were "deeply saddened" by Snow's death.
"The Snow family has lost a beloved husband and father. And America has lost a devoted public servant and a man of character," the president said in a statement.
"It was a joy to watch Tony at the podium each day."
Snow's successor, White House press secretary Dana Perino, said, "The White House is so deeply saddened by this loss. He was a great friend and colleague and a fantastic press secretary. And his dear family is in our thoughts and prayers."
In 2007, Chief of Staff Josh Bolten had told senior White House staffers that unless they could commit to staying until Bush leaves office in January 2009, they should leave by Labor Day 2007, so Snow resigned.
In parting comments to reporters at his final White House news conference, Snow said, "I feel great."
He also called the job "the most fun I've ever had."
Snow said he was leaving the White House position to make more money for his family. His White House salary was $168,000.
Snow was first diagnosed with colon cancer in February 2005. His colon was removed, and after six months of treatment, doctors said the cancer was in remission.
A recurrence of the illness was diagnosed 11 months after he began the White House media job, and he underwent five weeks of treatment before resuming his daily briefings to the press corps. He was greeted with applause upon his return.
"Not everybody will survive cancer," Snow told the reporters, "but on the other hand, you have got to realize you've got the gift of life, so make the most of it. That is my view, and I'm going to make the most of my time with you."
Perino announced March 27, 2007, that Snow's cancer had recurred, and said doctors had removed a growth from his abdomen the day before.
Bush tapped Snow to replace Scott McClellan in April 2006.
Snow had been an anchor for "Fox News Sunday" and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, which he joined in 1996. He also hosted "The Tony Snow Show" on Fox News Radio.
Snow took a significant pay cut to take the job of press secretary and talked publicly about the financial sacrifices he made. He explained he felt he needed to make more money to help his family, which included children readying for college.
Snow was known for his candor.
In a November 11, 2005, column, Snow wrote that Bush's "wavering conservatism has become an active concern among Republicans, who wish he would stop cowering under the bed and start fighting back against the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Wilson."
"The newly passive George Bush has become something of an embarrassment," Snow's column said.
"I asked him about those comments," joked the president at the time of Snow's appointment. "And he said, 'You should have heard what I said about the other guy.'"
Bush said Snow's long career as a journalist helped him understand "the importance of the relationship between government and those whose job it is to cover the government."
Robert Anthony Snow was born June 1, 1955, in Berea, Kentucky, and was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. When he was 17, his mother died of colon cancer. She was 38.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Davidson College near Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1977, Snow pursued graduate work in philosophy and economics at the University of Chicago.
He worked as an editorial writer and editor at several newspapers, including The Washington Times and the Detroit News. He wrote a column in Detroit, and later wrote a syndicated column.
Snow joined the administration of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, in 1991, first as chief speech writer and later as deputy assistant to the president for media affairs.
Snow became a television personality when he launched his news shows on Fox in 1993.
When he returned to work April 30, 2007, after the second cancer diagnosis, a usually articulate and loquacious Snow stumbled to find words.
"You never anticipate this stuff," he said. "It just happens."
"I want to thank you all. It really meant the world to me. Anybody who does not not believe that thoughts and prayers make a difference, they're just wrong."
He then prefaced a discussion of his health by saying, "I'm a very lucky guy."
Outside of work, Snow played the guitar, saxophone and flute, and was in a band called Beats Workin' with other Washington professionals.
Snow is survived by his wife, Jill Walker, and three children.
blueyz22
Wandering through life...
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2008
- Posts
- 1,109
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5884576.html
July 12, 2008, 7:36AM
Dr. Michael DeBakey: 1908-2008
'Greatest surgeon of the 20th century' dies
By TODD ACKERMAN and ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
RESOURCES
Images from a medical pioneer's career Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey, internationally acclaimed as the father of modern cardiovascular surgery — and considered by many to be the greatest surgeon ever — died Friday night at The Methodist Hospital in Houston. He was 99.
Methodist officials said DeBakey died of natural causes. They gave no additional details.
Medical statesman, chancellor emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine, and a surgeon at The Methodist Hospital since 1949, DeBakey trained thousands of surgeons over several generations, achieving legendary status decades before his death. During his career, he estimated he had performed more than 60,000 operations. His patients included the famous — Russian President Boris Yeltsin and movie actress Marlene Dietrich among them — and the uncelebrated.
"Dr. DeBakey singlehandedly raised the standard of medical care, teaching and research around the world," said Dr. George Noon, a cardiovascular surgeon and longtime partner of DeBakey's. "He was the greatest surgeon of the 20th century, and physicians everywhere are indebted to him for his contributions to medicine."
Debakey almost died in 2006, when he suffered an aortic aneurysm, a condition for which he pioneered the treatment. He is considered the oldest patient to have both undergone and survived surgery for it. He recovered well enough to go to Washington earlier this year to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the nation's two highest civilian honors.
He remained vigorous and was a player in medicine well into his 90s, performing surgeries, traveling and publishing articles in scientific journals. His large hands were steady, his hearing sharp. His personal health regimen included taking the stairs at work and a single cup of coffee in the morning.
DeBakey's death was mourned Friday night by the leaders of Methodist and Baylor. Methodist President Ron Girotto said, "He has improved the human condition and touched the lives of generations to come. We will greatly miss him." And Baylor President Dr. Peter Traber added that "he set a standard for preeminence in all areas of his life that those who knew him and worked with him are compelled to emulate. And he served as a very visible reminder of the importance of leadership and giving back to ones community."
Debakey was born in Lake Charles, La., in 1908, a month before Ford began making Model Ts and a quarter-century before the discovery of bacteria-fighting drugs. His genius helped shape surgery and health care as we know it. While still in medical school, he developed the roller pump for the heart-lung machine. DeBakey invented many of the procedures and devices — more than 50 surgical instruments — used to repair hearts and arteries today.
He is widely credited with laying the foundation for the Texas Medical Center in Houston by recruiting pre-eminent doctors and researchers and giving the city an international reputation for leading-edge health care. He was a maverick, running afoul of the Harris County Medical Society for insisting that surgeons be certified by the American Board of Surgery. At the time, it was common for general physicians to operate.
"DeBakey built a department of surgery at Baylor and at The Methodist Hospital, which was to become one of the most celebrated in the world, a galaxy of young stars," the late author Thomas Thompson wrote in 1970 in Hearts: Of Surgeons and Transplants, Miracles and Disasters Along the Cardiac Frontier. "In a city where 25 years ago there was practiced medicine of the most mediocre sort, there sprung up in a swampy area six miles south of downtown ... one of the handful of distinguished medical centers in the world."
He invented and refined ways to repair weakened or clot-obstructed blood vessels using replacements made from preserved human blood vessels, and later, with artificial ones. He is credited with the first successful surgical treatment of potentially deadly aneurysms of various parts of the aorta. He co-authored one of the earliest papers linking smoking and lung cancer in 1939.
During World War II, serving in the office of the U.S. Surgeon General, DeBakey's work led to the development of mobile surgical hospitals, called MASH units. He helped President John F. Kennedy lobby for Medicare; he recommended creation of the National Library of Medicine, subsequently authorized by Congress. In 1963 DeBakey won the Lasker Award for Clinical Research, considered the U.S. equivalent of a Nobel.
"At times he could act like the meanest man in the world. He didn't let you breathe," said Dr. John L. Ochsner of New Orleans, who trained under DeBakey and whose father, Dr. Alton Ochsner, was DeBakey's mentor at Tulane University School of Medicine. DeBakey baby-sat the four Ochsner children, including John, and let them do chin-ups on his arm.
Said John Ochsner, "The thing that made him so mad all the time was he was trying to conquer the world and every minute was so important to him. He didn't have time for frivolity at all."
Patients and their families saw him otherwise. To them, DeBakey was a healer with quiet authority who seemed to work miracles. Enfolding a patient's hands in his, the patient's face would relax, some recalled.
He was pained by the breakup in 2004 of the historic, 50-year marriage between Baylor and Methodist, which dissolved over disagreements about the future of the institutions. DeBakey said the breakup made no sense and hurt both parties. Friends described him as "heartbroken" about the split and in an interview earlier this year he said the description was not inaccurate.
In 2003, his MicroMed DeBakey LVAD was implanted in a 10-year-old girl, the youngest patient in the world to receive the device. In 2004, a special child-sized version became available for children as young as 5. DeBakey developed the device, which boosts the heart's main pumping chamber, in collaboration with heart surgeon Dr. George Noon and NASA.
"The man has an incredible mind and an incredible grasp of details," said former MicroMed CEO Travis Baugh . "He's also never stopped inventing. We are working on a project with him a new way of attaching sutures to the heart.'"
The power to intimidate and awe
In his prime — and it was an unusually lengthy prime — DeBakey, with his sharp-nosed profile and dark brown eyes, had the power to intimidate and awe his acolytes. In surgery, DeBakey was famous for his withering remarks, delivered in a velvety Louisiana drawl, directed at the anxious and ambitious residents operating alongside him.
John Ochsner recalled how, if an operation was going slowly, DeBakey might ask, ''Am I the only one here doing anything?"
Or a clumsy resident might prompt DeBakey to say, ''Do you have two left hands?"
If DeBakey was displeased by the progress of a procedure, he would remark with an air of faint disgust, ''I am surrounded by incompetence."
DeBakey's trainees cringed at his criticism but, among themselves, recounted the barbs in a sometimes dead-on imitation of the revered surgeon. Ochsner, now chairman emeritus of the Department of Surgery at Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, said DeBakey's stern manner came from a desire to prepare his students for the demanding career that lay ahead.
''He's not hard to work with if things are done right," said Noon, DeBakey's colleague of more than three decades, in a 1995 interview. ''He was hard on people who slacked off or made mistakes. But he was so busy. He had to depend on people, and he could be tough. But he was always tough for a reason."
Family roots in Lake Charles, La.
DeBakey was the eldest of five children born to Lebanese immigrants Raheehja and Shaker Morris DeBakey. Shaker Morris DeBakey was a well-to-do businessman and pharmacist in Lake Charles who invested in real estate and rice farming. Michael DeBakey grew up with his brother and three sisters in a large house two blocks from the public school with maids, butlers and gardeners.
The DeBakeys ate healthy foods — fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, seafood, rice and beans. They didn't smoke or drink. They encouraged their children to check out books from the library every week. At dinnertime, the family chatted about things that happened at the drugstore or the doings of politicians who sought out Shaker's advice.
"You could not get a word in edgewise until one of our parents announced who had the floor," DeBakey recounted to a reporter in 1997. "It was very stimulating."
Each Sunday after services at their Episcopal church, the DeBakeys would take clothing to a nearby orphanage. One time, the give-away bundle included DeBakey's favorite cap. When the youngster protested, his mother sat him down and said, "You have a lot of caps. These children have none."
"It made a great impression on me," he said.
DeBakey's mother also taught him one of his future career's essential skills — sewing. He would help her repair items headed for the orphanage. He also learned to tat, using a little bobbin to make lace. Years later, in the 1950s, DeBakey would introduce artificial arteries made from Dacron; he sewed the prototype on his wife's sewing machine using fabric purchased at Houston's downtown Foley's.
He went to medical school at Tulane after graduating as valedictorian from his high school class. During his senior medical school year, he developed the roller pump, a device which two decades later became a crucial component of the heart-lung machine used on patients during open-heart surgery.
As a surgery resident at New Orleans' Charity Hospital, DeBakey caught his first glimpse of a living human heart — pink and pulsating in the chest of a knifing victim.
''I saw it beating and it was beautiful, a work of art,'' DeBakey said in 1987. ''I still have an almost religious sense when I work on the heart. It is something God makes, and we have yet to duplicate."
Later, at Charity Hospital, DeBakey experienced a potentially catastrophic near-miss — he accidentally punched through a patient's aorta — which gave him an appreciation for the steadying influence of his mentor, Alton Ochsner.
He and Ochsner were operating in an amphitheater with a full audience of visiting surgeons. DeBakey was on one side of the patient, Ochsner on the other. DeBakey was attempting to lift up the aorta, which had been weakened by infection "when I suddenly realized, with a gripping terror, that I had entered the aorta."
DeBakey whispered this to Ochsner, who calmly instructed DeBakey to leave his finger over the hole. Ochsner stitched it up, and no one realized a near-fatal accident had occurred.
During the late 1930s, DeBakey married his first wife, Diana, a nurse he met in New Orleans. They had four sons: Michael, Ernest, Barry and Denis. When he came to Houston in 1948 to head up Baylor's surgery department, he moved his family into a home near Rice University, only five minutes from the Texas Medical Center, so he wouldn't waste time commuting. He never moved from that home.
Diana DeBakey died of a heart attack in 1972. They had been in Mexico for a medical meeting, staying with a close relative of the President of Mexico. They ate well and stayed up late, and when the DeBakeys got back home, Diana was complaining of an upset stomach.
At that time, gastrointestinal problems were not widely recognized as a heart attack symptom in women. When her discomfort worsened, DeBakey had her admitted to the hospital to find out what was wrong. While DeBakey was in surgery on someone else, he got a call that there was an emergency. When he reached his wife's bedside, she had died.
Three years after her death, DeBakey married German film actress Katrin Fehlhaber, whom he met through Frank Sinatra. They had a daughter, Olga. In 1978, DeBakey was hospitalized for smoke inhalation sustained in rescuing his daughter after a Christmas tree caught fire in his home, he told the New York Times.
A disciplined, hard-working life
The workaholic DeBakey rarely slept more than five hours a night, awaking at 5 most mornings to write research papers or read medical journals. He rarely drank, never smoked, ate sparingly — mostly salads, late in life — and didn't watch television. Lean and nearly 6 feet tall, he weighed the same as he did in 1926 when he graduated from high school — about 160 pounds. He spent much of his adult years in light-blue scrubs, and wore a pair of gleaming-white cowboy boots for the operating room. He liked to say that he conducted the presidency of Baylor between cases.
In 1948, when DeBakey came to Houston, he had turned the Baylor job down twice. The fledgling school had moved to Houston from Dallas just five years earlier, and Baylor students were scattered all over the city doing their clinical rotations, a situation that didn't appeal to DeBakey. He finally was persuaded to come when Hermann Hospital promised the school a 20-bed surgical service, according to Ruth SoRelle's history of Baylor, The Quest for Excellence.
The Hermann deal fell through, and DeBakey nearly left. But the Truman administration asked DeBakey to transfer Houston's Navy hospital into aVeterans Administration hospital, an idea championed by DeBakey that evolved into the national VA system. There, DeBakey's students started the city's first surgical residency program.
DeBakey's program was legendary for cutting its participants off from all contact with the outside world. As a DeBakey trainee, Dr. Edward Lefrak once spent 91 consecutive days on duty in the cardiovascular intensive care unit, missing the birth of one of his children, sleeping when he could in the patient recovery ward. Lefrak's rotation was supposed to last just 30 days, but DeBakey had a tendency, when things were going well, to keep arrangements unchanged.
''It was like a compliment,'' said Lefrak, medical director of cardiac surgery at the Inova Heart and Vascular Institute in Falls Church, Va. ''But then, on the other hand, it was another 30 days."
From colleagues to rivals
One of the most talked-about events of DeBakey's life was his legendary feud — more Arctic freeze than hot-tempered spat — with Dr. Denton Cooley, his one-time close collaborator. DeBakey hired Cooley in 1951 after the Houston native finished his training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
In 1965, DeBakey participated in a federally funded program to design an artificial heart. Within a few years he had a device that some physicians felt was ready for human trials, but DeBakey believed it needed more work.
Then, to international acclaim in 1969, Cooley performed the first implantation of an artificial heart into the chest of 47-year-old Haskell Karp, a dying heart surgery patient. Karp lived with the heart in his chest 65 hours before dying shortly after a heart transplant.
Cooley's fame was quickly tarnished after DeBakey said the heart was identical to one under development in the Baylor labs, and that Cooley had used it without permission.
Cooley said he and Dr. Domingo Liotta, who also designed artificial hearts in DeBakey's lab, had built the heart privately, and that he had no choice but to use the heart because the patient's life was in jeopardy.
After the incident, the American College of Surgeons voted to censure Cooley, and, amid a dispute with the trustees of Baylor, Cooley resigned from the institution. The two men never collaborated again and rarely spoke. DeBakey changed his focus and decided funds would be better spent developing pumps to assist failing hearts. Such devices became the mainstream treatment for patients with failing hearts.
The episode ''stole DeBakey's shot at a Nobel Prize," Methodist heart surgeon Mike Reardon said in 2004. ''What Mike needed was one crowning event to make him a candidate. And that was going to be the artificial heart."
But the two buried the hatchet last year. Cooley inducted DeBakey into his surgical society and, in a surprise, DeBakey accepted, telling his former colleague he was touched by the gesture. Earlier this year, DeBakey returned the favor, granting Cooley membership in his surgical society. In April, when DeBakey was given the Congressional Gold Medal, Cooley made the trip to Washington too.
For a man who outlived most of his peers, he seemed surprisingly unphilosophical about death, appearing to view it as a personal enemy. Losing a patient put him in a black mood and set his mind spinning with thoughts of what he might have done differently.
''You fight (death) all the time, and you never really can accept it," he once said. ''You know in reality that everybody is going to die, but you try to fight it, to push it away, hold it away with your hands."
DeBakey was preceded in death by his sons, Houston lawyer Ernest O. DeBakey, who died in 2006, and Barry E. DeBakey, who died in 2007. In addition to his wife, Katrin, and their daughter, Olga, DeBakey is survived by sons Michael DeBakey of Lima, Peru, and Denis DeBakey, of Houston; and sisters Lois and Selma DeBakey, both medical editors and linguists at Baylor.
July 12, 2008, 7:36AM
Dr. Michael DeBakey: 1908-2008
'Greatest surgeon of the 20th century' dies
By TODD ACKERMAN and ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
RESOURCES
Images from a medical pioneer's career Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey, internationally acclaimed as the father of modern cardiovascular surgery — and considered by many to be the greatest surgeon ever — died Friday night at The Methodist Hospital in Houston. He was 99.
Methodist officials said DeBakey died of natural causes. They gave no additional details.
Medical statesman, chancellor emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine, and a surgeon at The Methodist Hospital since 1949, DeBakey trained thousands of surgeons over several generations, achieving legendary status decades before his death. During his career, he estimated he had performed more than 60,000 operations. His patients included the famous — Russian President Boris Yeltsin and movie actress Marlene Dietrich among them — and the uncelebrated.
"Dr. DeBakey singlehandedly raised the standard of medical care, teaching and research around the world," said Dr. George Noon, a cardiovascular surgeon and longtime partner of DeBakey's. "He was the greatest surgeon of the 20th century, and physicians everywhere are indebted to him for his contributions to medicine."
Debakey almost died in 2006, when he suffered an aortic aneurysm, a condition for which he pioneered the treatment. He is considered the oldest patient to have both undergone and survived surgery for it. He recovered well enough to go to Washington earlier this year to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the nation's two highest civilian honors.
He remained vigorous and was a player in medicine well into his 90s, performing surgeries, traveling and publishing articles in scientific journals. His large hands were steady, his hearing sharp. His personal health regimen included taking the stairs at work and a single cup of coffee in the morning.
DeBakey's death was mourned Friday night by the leaders of Methodist and Baylor. Methodist President Ron Girotto said, "He has improved the human condition and touched the lives of generations to come. We will greatly miss him." And Baylor President Dr. Peter Traber added that "he set a standard for preeminence in all areas of his life that those who knew him and worked with him are compelled to emulate. And he served as a very visible reminder of the importance of leadership and giving back to ones community."
Debakey was born in Lake Charles, La., in 1908, a month before Ford began making Model Ts and a quarter-century before the discovery of bacteria-fighting drugs. His genius helped shape surgery and health care as we know it. While still in medical school, he developed the roller pump for the heart-lung machine. DeBakey invented many of the procedures and devices — more than 50 surgical instruments — used to repair hearts and arteries today.
He is widely credited with laying the foundation for the Texas Medical Center in Houston by recruiting pre-eminent doctors and researchers and giving the city an international reputation for leading-edge health care. He was a maverick, running afoul of the Harris County Medical Society for insisting that surgeons be certified by the American Board of Surgery. At the time, it was common for general physicians to operate.
"DeBakey built a department of surgery at Baylor and at The Methodist Hospital, which was to become one of the most celebrated in the world, a galaxy of young stars," the late author Thomas Thompson wrote in 1970 in Hearts: Of Surgeons and Transplants, Miracles and Disasters Along the Cardiac Frontier. "In a city where 25 years ago there was practiced medicine of the most mediocre sort, there sprung up in a swampy area six miles south of downtown ... one of the handful of distinguished medical centers in the world."
He invented and refined ways to repair weakened or clot-obstructed blood vessels using replacements made from preserved human blood vessels, and later, with artificial ones. He is credited with the first successful surgical treatment of potentially deadly aneurysms of various parts of the aorta. He co-authored one of the earliest papers linking smoking and lung cancer in 1939.
During World War II, serving in the office of the U.S. Surgeon General, DeBakey's work led to the development of mobile surgical hospitals, called MASH units. He helped President John F. Kennedy lobby for Medicare; he recommended creation of the National Library of Medicine, subsequently authorized by Congress. In 1963 DeBakey won the Lasker Award for Clinical Research, considered the U.S. equivalent of a Nobel.
"At times he could act like the meanest man in the world. He didn't let you breathe," said Dr. John L. Ochsner of New Orleans, who trained under DeBakey and whose father, Dr. Alton Ochsner, was DeBakey's mentor at Tulane University School of Medicine. DeBakey baby-sat the four Ochsner children, including John, and let them do chin-ups on his arm.
Said John Ochsner, "The thing that made him so mad all the time was he was trying to conquer the world and every minute was so important to him. He didn't have time for frivolity at all."
Patients and their families saw him otherwise. To them, DeBakey was a healer with quiet authority who seemed to work miracles. Enfolding a patient's hands in his, the patient's face would relax, some recalled.
He was pained by the breakup in 2004 of the historic, 50-year marriage between Baylor and Methodist, which dissolved over disagreements about the future of the institutions. DeBakey said the breakup made no sense and hurt both parties. Friends described him as "heartbroken" about the split and in an interview earlier this year he said the description was not inaccurate.
In 2003, his MicroMed DeBakey LVAD was implanted in a 10-year-old girl, the youngest patient in the world to receive the device. In 2004, a special child-sized version became available for children as young as 5. DeBakey developed the device, which boosts the heart's main pumping chamber, in collaboration with heart surgeon Dr. George Noon and NASA.
"The man has an incredible mind and an incredible grasp of details," said former MicroMed CEO Travis Baugh . "He's also never stopped inventing. We are working on a project with him a new way of attaching sutures to the heart.'"
The power to intimidate and awe
In his prime — and it was an unusually lengthy prime — DeBakey, with his sharp-nosed profile and dark brown eyes, had the power to intimidate and awe his acolytes. In surgery, DeBakey was famous for his withering remarks, delivered in a velvety Louisiana drawl, directed at the anxious and ambitious residents operating alongside him.
John Ochsner recalled how, if an operation was going slowly, DeBakey might ask, ''Am I the only one here doing anything?"
Or a clumsy resident might prompt DeBakey to say, ''Do you have two left hands?"
If DeBakey was displeased by the progress of a procedure, he would remark with an air of faint disgust, ''I am surrounded by incompetence."
DeBakey's trainees cringed at his criticism but, among themselves, recounted the barbs in a sometimes dead-on imitation of the revered surgeon. Ochsner, now chairman emeritus of the Department of Surgery at Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, said DeBakey's stern manner came from a desire to prepare his students for the demanding career that lay ahead.
''He's not hard to work with if things are done right," said Noon, DeBakey's colleague of more than three decades, in a 1995 interview. ''He was hard on people who slacked off or made mistakes. But he was so busy. He had to depend on people, and he could be tough. But he was always tough for a reason."
Family roots in Lake Charles, La.
DeBakey was the eldest of five children born to Lebanese immigrants Raheehja and Shaker Morris DeBakey. Shaker Morris DeBakey was a well-to-do businessman and pharmacist in Lake Charles who invested in real estate and rice farming. Michael DeBakey grew up with his brother and three sisters in a large house two blocks from the public school with maids, butlers and gardeners.
The DeBakeys ate healthy foods — fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, seafood, rice and beans. They didn't smoke or drink. They encouraged their children to check out books from the library every week. At dinnertime, the family chatted about things that happened at the drugstore or the doings of politicians who sought out Shaker's advice.
"You could not get a word in edgewise until one of our parents announced who had the floor," DeBakey recounted to a reporter in 1997. "It was very stimulating."
Each Sunday after services at their Episcopal church, the DeBakeys would take clothing to a nearby orphanage. One time, the give-away bundle included DeBakey's favorite cap. When the youngster protested, his mother sat him down and said, "You have a lot of caps. These children have none."
"It made a great impression on me," he said.
DeBakey's mother also taught him one of his future career's essential skills — sewing. He would help her repair items headed for the orphanage. He also learned to tat, using a little bobbin to make lace. Years later, in the 1950s, DeBakey would introduce artificial arteries made from Dacron; he sewed the prototype on his wife's sewing machine using fabric purchased at Houston's downtown Foley's.
He went to medical school at Tulane after graduating as valedictorian from his high school class. During his senior medical school year, he developed the roller pump, a device which two decades later became a crucial component of the heart-lung machine used on patients during open-heart surgery.
As a surgery resident at New Orleans' Charity Hospital, DeBakey caught his first glimpse of a living human heart — pink and pulsating in the chest of a knifing victim.
''I saw it beating and it was beautiful, a work of art,'' DeBakey said in 1987. ''I still have an almost religious sense when I work on the heart. It is something God makes, and we have yet to duplicate."
Later, at Charity Hospital, DeBakey experienced a potentially catastrophic near-miss — he accidentally punched through a patient's aorta — which gave him an appreciation for the steadying influence of his mentor, Alton Ochsner.
He and Ochsner were operating in an amphitheater with a full audience of visiting surgeons. DeBakey was on one side of the patient, Ochsner on the other. DeBakey was attempting to lift up the aorta, which had been weakened by infection "when I suddenly realized, with a gripping terror, that I had entered the aorta."
DeBakey whispered this to Ochsner, who calmly instructed DeBakey to leave his finger over the hole. Ochsner stitched it up, and no one realized a near-fatal accident had occurred.
During the late 1930s, DeBakey married his first wife, Diana, a nurse he met in New Orleans. They had four sons: Michael, Ernest, Barry and Denis. When he came to Houston in 1948 to head up Baylor's surgery department, he moved his family into a home near Rice University, only five minutes from the Texas Medical Center, so he wouldn't waste time commuting. He never moved from that home.
Diana DeBakey died of a heart attack in 1972. They had been in Mexico for a medical meeting, staying with a close relative of the President of Mexico. They ate well and stayed up late, and when the DeBakeys got back home, Diana was complaining of an upset stomach.
At that time, gastrointestinal problems were not widely recognized as a heart attack symptom in women. When her discomfort worsened, DeBakey had her admitted to the hospital to find out what was wrong. While DeBakey was in surgery on someone else, he got a call that there was an emergency. When he reached his wife's bedside, she had died.
Three years after her death, DeBakey married German film actress Katrin Fehlhaber, whom he met through Frank Sinatra. They had a daughter, Olga. In 1978, DeBakey was hospitalized for smoke inhalation sustained in rescuing his daughter after a Christmas tree caught fire in his home, he told the New York Times.
A disciplined, hard-working life
The workaholic DeBakey rarely slept more than five hours a night, awaking at 5 most mornings to write research papers or read medical journals. He rarely drank, never smoked, ate sparingly — mostly salads, late in life — and didn't watch television. Lean and nearly 6 feet tall, he weighed the same as he did in 1926 when he graduated from high school — about 160 pounds. He spent much of his adult years in light-blue scrubs, and wore a pair of gleaming-white cowboy boots for the operating room. He liked to say that he conducted the presidency of Baylor between cases.
In 1948, when DeBakey came to Houston, he had turned the Baylor job down twice. The fledgling school had moved to Houston from Dallas just five years earlier, and Baylor students were scattered all over the city doing their clinical rotations, a situation that didn't appeal to DeBakey. He finally was persuaded to come when Hermann Hospital promised the school a 20-bed surgical service, according to Ruth SoRelle's history of Baylor, The Quest for Excellence.
The Hermann deal fell through, and DeBakey nearly left. But the Truman administration asked DeBakey to transfer Houston's Navy hospital into aVeterans Administration hospital, an idea championed by DeBakey that evolved into the national VA system. There, DeBakey's students started the city's first surgical residency program.
DeBakey's program was legendary for cutting its participants off from all contact with the outside world. As a DeBakey trainee, Dr. Edward Lefrak once spent 91 consecutive days on duty in the cardiovascular intensive care unit, missing the birth of one of his children, sleeping when he could in the patient recovery ward. Lefrak's rotation was supposed to last just 30 days, but DeBakey had a tendency, when things were going well, to keep arrangements unchanged.
''It was like a compliment,'' said Lefrak, medical director of cardiac surgery at the Inova Heart and Vascular Institute in Falls Church, Va. ''But then, on the other hand, it was another 30 days."
From colleagues to rivals
One of the most talked-about events of DeBakey's life was his legendary feud — more Arctic freeze than hot-tempered spat — with Dr. Denton Cooley, his one-time close collaborator. DeBakey hired Cooley in 1951 after the Houston native finished his training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
In 1965, DeBakey participated in a federally funded program to design an artificial heart. Within a few years he had a device that some physicians felt was ready for human trials, but DeBakey believed it needed more work.
Then, to international acclaim in 1969, Cooley performed the first implantation of an artificial heart into the chest of 47-year-old Haskell Karp, a dying heart surgery patient. Karp lived with the heart in his chest 65 hours before dying shortly after a heart transplant.
Cooley's fame was quickly tarnished after DeBakey said the heart was identical to one under development in the Baylor labs, and that Cooley had used it without permission.
Cooley said he and Dr. Domingo Liotta, who also designed artificial hearts in DeBakey's lab, had built the heart privately, and that he had no choice but to use the heart because the patient's life was in jeopardy.
After the incident, the American College of Surgeons voted to censure Cooley, and, amid a dispute with the trustees of Baylor, Cooley resigned from the institution. The two men never collaborated again and rarely spoke. DeBakey changed his focus and decided funds would be better spent developing pumps to assist failing hearts. Such devices became the mainstream treatment for patients with failing hearts.
The episode ''stole DeBakey's shot at a Nobel Prize," Methodist heart surgeon Mike Reardon said in 2004. ''What Mike needed was one crowning event to make him a candidate. And that was going to be the artificial heart."
But the two buried the hatchet last year. Cooley inducted DeBakey into his surgical society and, in a surprise, DeBakey accepted, telling his former colleague he was touched by the gesture. Earlier this year, DeBakey returned the favor, granting Cooley membership in his surgical society. In April, when DeBakey was given the Congressional Gold Medal, Cooley made the trip to Washington too.
For a man who outlived most of his peers, he seemed surprisingly unphilosophical about death, appearing to view it as a personal enemy. Losing a patient put him in a black mood and set his mind spinning with thoughts of what he might have done differently.
''You fight (death) all the time, and you never really can accept it," he once said. ''You know in reality that everybody is going to die, but you try to fight it, to push it away, hold it away with your hands."
DeBakey was preceded in death by his sons, Houston lawyer Ernest O. DeBakey, who died in 2006, and Barry E. DeBakey, who died in 2007. In addition to his wife, Katrin, and their daughter, Olga, DeBakey is survived by sons Michael DeBakey of Lima, Peru, and Denis DeBakey, of Houston; and sisters Lois and Selma DeBakey, both medical editors and linguists at Baylor.
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Actress Evelyn Keyes dies at 91 in California
By BOB THOMAS, Associated Press Writer
Sat Jul 12, 1:37 AM ET
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Evelyn Keyes, who played Scarlett O'Hara's younger sister Suellen in "Gone With the Wind" and counted director John Huston and bandleader Artie Shaw among her famous husbands, has died. She was 91.
Keyes' personal life often overshadowed her acting career. Besides her often turbulent marriages to Shaw and directors Huston and Charles Vidor, she lived with the flamboyant producer Mike Todd for three years during his preparation and filming of "Around the World in 80 Days." She played a cameo role in the movie and helped on publicity.
Todd sent her to the premiere in Caracas, then called her abruptly from Paris with this message: "Listen, I have to tell you. I've fallen in love with Elizabeth (Taylor)."
"Oh well, nothing lasts forever," she philosophized in 1977. "The good part was that I invested all my money in `Around the World in 80 Days,' and that set me up for life."
Keyes gave a frank account of her romances and marriages in her 1977 autobiography, "Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister." Her role in the 1939 classic led to a contract at Columbia Pictures and stardom.
Among her notable roles: as Robert Montgomery's lover in "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941), the Ruby Keeler role as Al Jolson's wife in "The Jolson Story" (1946), and as Dick Powell's wife in "Mrs. Mike" (1949).
She also starred in B pictures that were later praised by movie critics as prime examples of film noir: "Johnny O'Clock" (1947), "The Killer That Stalked New York" (1950), "The Prowler" (1951), "99 River Street" (1953) and "The Big Combo" (1955).
By BOB THOMAS, Associated Press Writer
Sat Jul 12, 1:37 AM ET
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Evelyn Keyes, who played Scarlett O'Hara's younger sister Suellen in "Gone With the Wind" and counted director John Huston and bandleader Artie Shaw among her famous husbands, has died. She was 91.
Keyes' personal life often overshadowed her acting career. Besides her often turbulent marriages to Shaw and directors Huston and Charles Vidor, she lived with the flamboyant producer Mike Todd for three years during his preparation and filming of "Around the World in 80 Days." She played a cameo role in the movie and helped on publicity.
Todd sent her to the premiere in Caracas, then called her abruptly from Paris with this message: "Listen, I have to tell you. I've fallen in love with Elizabeth (Taylor)."
"Oh well, nothing lasts forever," she philosophized in 1977. "The good part was that I invested all my money in `Around the World in 80 Days,' and that set me up for life."
Keyes gave a frank account of her romances and marriages in her 1977 autobiography, "Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister." Her role in the 1939 classic led to a contract at Columbia Pictures and stardom.
Among her notable roles: as Robert Montgomery's lover in "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941), the Ruby Keeler role as Al Jolson's wife in "The Jolson Story" (1946), and as Dick Powell's wife in "Mrs. Mike" (1949).
She also starred in B pictures that were later praised by movie critics as prime examples of film noir: "Johnny O'Clock" (1947), "The Killer That Stalked New York" (1950), "The Prowler" (1951), "99 River Street" (1953) and "The Big Combo" (1955).
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http://www.mercurynews.com/sports/ci_9868213
Former Yankee Murcer, 62, dies
Wood won't pitch in All-Star Game
Mercury News Wire Services
Article Launched: 07/13/2008 01:38:04 AM PDT
Bobby Murcer, a five-time All-Star outfielder who spent nearly four decades with the New York Yankees as a player, executive and announcer, has died. He was 62.
The Yankees said Murcer died Saturday due to complications from a malignant brain tumor. He was surrounded by family at Mercy Hospital in his hometown of Oklahoma City, the team said.
Murcer was diagnosed with a brain tumor Dec. 24, 2006, and had surgery that week in Houston. He returned to the broadcast booth last year and briefly this season.
Murcer hit .277 with 252 home runs and 1,043 RBIs in 17 seasons. The Yankees traded him to the Giants in October 1974 for Bobby Bonds. The Giants sent him to the Chicago Cubs in February 1977. The Cubs dealt him back to the Yankees in June 1979.
Mercer made the All-Star team in both leagues and won a Gold Glove.
"He was a tough man," Yankees Manager Joe Girardi said. "He was a great Yankee, but probably more importantly he was a great friend. He always put others first. He played the game the right way. He got what life was about, and that was making life better for the people around you."
Yankees closer Mariano Rivera said: "He touched everybody."
Former Yankee Murcer, 62, dies
Wood won't pitch in All-Star Game
Mercury News Wire Services
Article Launched: 07/13/2008 01:38:04 AM PDT
Bobby Murcer, a five-time All-Star outfielder who spent nearly four decades with the New York Yankees as a player, executive and announcer, has died. He was 62.
The Yankees said Murcer died Saturday due to complications from a malignant brain tumor. He was surrounded by family at Mercy Hospital in his hometown of Oklahoma City, the team said.
Murcer was diagnosed with a brain tumor Dec. 24, 2006, and had surgery that week in Houston. He returned to the broadcast booth last year and briefly this season.
Murcer hit .277 with 252 home runs and 1,043 RBIs in 17 seasons. The Yankees traded him to the Giants in October 1974 for Bobby Bonds. The Giants sent him to the Chicago Cubs in February 1977. The Cubs dealt him back to the Yankees in June 1979.
Mercer made the All-Star team in both leagues and won a Gold Glove.
"He was a tough man," Yankees Manager Joe Girardi said. "He was a great Yankee, but probably more importantly he was a great friend. He always put others first. He played the game the right way. He got what life was about, and that was making life better for the people around you."
Yankees closer Mariano Rivera said: "He touched everybody."
Johnny_Ray_Wilson
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Estelle Getty Dies at 84
Estelle Getty of 'Golden Girls' fame dies at 84
Tuesday, Jul 22, 2008
Estelle Getty has died at the age of 84. Her son, Carl Gettleman, says she died early Tuesday at home in Los Angeles.
Enlarge image Enlarge By Lennox McLendon, AP file
Estelle Getty has died at the age of 84. Her son, Carl Gettleman, says she died early Tuesday at home in Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES — Estelle Getty, the diminutive actress who spent 40 years struggling for success before landing a role of a lifetime in 1985 as the sarcastic octogenarian Sophia on TV's The Golden Girls, has died. She was 84.
Getty, who suffered from advanced dementia, died at about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday at her Hollywood Boulevard home, said her son, Carl Gettleman of Santa Monica.
"She was loved throughout the world in six continents, and if they loved sitcoms in Antarctica she would have been loved on seven continents," her son said. "She was one of the most talented comedic actresses who ever lived."
The Golden Girls, featuring four female retirees sharing a house in Miami, grew out of NBC programming chief Brandon Tartikoff's belief that television was ignoring its older viewers.
Three of its stars had already appeared in previous series: Bea Arthur in Maude, Betty White in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rue McClanahan in Mama's Family. The last character to be cast was Sophia Petrillo, the feisty 80-something mother of Arthur's character.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Los Angeles | Golden Girls | Sophia
When she auditioned, Getty was appearing on stage in Hollywood as the carping Jewish mother in Harvey Fierstein's play Torch Song Trilogy. In her early 60s, she flunked her Golden Girls test twice because it was believed she didn't look old enough to play 80.
"I could understand that," she told an interviewer a year after the show debuted. "I walk fast, I move fast, I talk fast."
She came prepared for the third audition, however, wearing dowdy clothes and telling an NBC makeup artist, "To you this is just a job. To me it's my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80." The artist did, Getty got the job and won two Emmys.
It culminated a long struggle for success during which Getty worked low-paying office jobs to help support her family while she tried to make it as a stage actress.
"I knew I could be seduced by success in another field, so I'd say, 'Don't promote me, please,'" she recalled.
She also appeared in small parts in a handful of films and TV movies during that time, including Tootsie,Deadly Force and Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story.
After her success in The Golden Girls, other roles came her way. She played Cher's mother in Mask, Sylvester Stallone's in Stop or My Mom Will Shoot and Barry Manilow's in the TV film Copacabana. Other credits included Mannequin and Stuart Little (as the voice of Grandma Estelle).
The Golden Girls, which ran from 1985 to 1992, was an immediate hit, and Sophia, who began as a minor character, soon evolved into a major one.
Audiences particularly loved the verbal zingers Getty would hurl at the other three. When McClanahan's libidinous character Blanche once complained that her life was an open book, Sophia shot back, "Your life's an open blouse."
Getty had gained a knack for one-liners in her late teens when she did standup comedy at a Catskills hotel. Female comedians were rare in those days, however, and she bombed.
Undeterred, she continued to pursue a career in entertainment, and while her parents were encouraging, her father also insisted that she learn office skills so she would have something to fall back on.
Born Estelle Scher to Polish immigrants in New York, Getty fell in love with theater when she saw a vaudeville show at age 4.
She married New York businessman Arthur Gettleman (the source of her stage name) in 1947, and they had two sons, Carl and Barry. The marriage prevailed despite her long absences on the road and in The Golden Girls.
Getty was evasive about her height, acknowledging only that she was "under 5 feet and under 100 pounds."
In addition to her son Carl, Getty is survived by son Barry Gettleman, of Miami; a brother, David Scher of London; and a sister, Rosilyn Howard of Las Vegas.
Estelle Getty of 'Golden Girls' fame dies at 84
Tuesday, Jul 22, 2008
Estelle Getty has died at the age of 84. Her son, Carl Gettleman, says she died early Tuesday at home in Los Angeles.
Enlarge image Enlarge By Lennox McLendon, AP file
Estelle Getty has died at the age of 84. Her son, Carl Gettleman, says she died early Tuesday at home in Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES — Estelle Getty, the diminutive actress who spent 40 years struggling for success before landing a role of a lifetime in 1985 as the sarcastic octogenarian Sophia on TV's The Golden Girls, has died. She was 84.
Getty, who suffered from advanced dementia, died at about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday at her Hollywood Boulevard home, said her son, Carl Gettleman of Santa Monica.
"She was loved throughout the world in six continents, and if they loved sitcoms in Antarctica she would have been loved on seven continents," her son said. "She was one of the most talented comedic actresses who ever lived."
The Golden Girls, featuring four female retirees sharing a house in Miami, grew out of NBC programming chief Brandon Tartikoff's belief that television was ignoring its older viewers.
Three of its stars had already appeared in previous series: Bea Arthur in Maude, Betty White in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rue McClanahan in Mama's Family. The last character to be cast was Sophia Petrillo, the feisty 80-something mother of Arthur's character.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Los Angeles | Golden Girls | Sophia
When she auditioned, Getty was appearing on stage in Hollywood as the carping Jewish mother in Harvey Fierstein's play Torch Song Trilogy. In her early 60s, she flunked her Golden Girls test twice because it was believed she didn't look old enough to play 80.
"I could understand that," she told an interviewer a year after the show debuted. "I walk fast, I move fast, I talk fast."
She came prepared for the third audition, however, wearing dowdy clothes and telling an NBC makeup artist, "To you this is just a job. To me it's my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80." The artist did, Getty got the job and won two Emmys.
It culminated a long struggle for success during which Getty worked low-paying office jobs to help support her family while she tried to make it as a stage actress.
"I knew I could be seduced by success in another field, so I'd say, 'Don't promote me, please,'" she recalled.
She also appeared in small parts in a handful of films and TV movies during that time, including Tootsie,Deadly Force and Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story.
After her success in The Golden Girls, other roles came her way. She played Cher's mother in Mask, Sylvester Stallone's in Stop or My Mom Will Shoot and Barry Manilow's in the TV film Copacabana. Other credits included Mannequin and Stuart Little (as the voice of Grandma Estelle).
The Golden Girls, which ran from 1985 to 1992, was an immediate hit, and Sophia, who began as a minor character, soon evolved into a major one.
Audiences particularly loved the verbal zingers Getty would hurl at the other three. When McClanahan's libidinous character Blanche once complained that her life was an open book, Sophia shot back, "Your life's an open blouse."
Getty had gained a knack for one-liners in her late teens when she did standup comedy at a Catskills hotel. Female comedians were rare in those days, however, and she bombed.
Undeterred, she continued to pursue a career in entertainment, and while her parents were encouraging, her father also insisted that she learn office skills so she would have something to fall back on.
Born Estelle Scher to Polish immigrants in New York, Getty fell in love with theater when she saw a vaudeville show at age 4.
She married New York businessman Arthur Gettleman (the source of her stage name) in 1947, and they had two sons, Carl and Barry. The marriage prevailed despite her long absences on the road and in The Golden Girls.
Getty was evasive about her height, acknowledging only that she was "under 5 feet and under 100 pounds."
In addition to her son Carl, Getty is survived by son Barry Gettleman, of Miami; a brother, David Scher of London; and a sister, Rosilyn Howard of Las Vegas.
NaughtyLil1
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- Apr 26, 2004
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- 19,039
'Last Lecture' professor dies at 47
Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose "last lecture" about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.
Randy Pausch emphasized the joy of life in his "last lecture," originally given in September 2007.
Pausch died at his home in Virginia, university spokeswoman Anne Watzman said. Pausch and his family moved there last fall to be closer to his wife's relatives.
Pausch was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in September 2006. His popular last lecture at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007 garnered international attention and was viewed by millions on the Internet.
In it, Pausch celebrated living the life he had always dreamed of instead of concentrating on impending death.
"The lecture was for my kids, but if others are finding value in it, that is wonderful," Pausch wrote on his Web site. "But rest assured; I'm hardly unique."
The book "The Last Lecture," written with Jeffrey Zaslow, leaped to the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists after its publication in April and remains there this week. Pausch said he dictated the book to Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal writer, by cell phone. The book deal was reported to be worth more than $6 million.
At Carnegie Mellon, he was a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design, and was recognized as a pioneer of virtual reality research. On campus, he became known for his flamboyance and showmanship as a teacher and mentor.
The speech last fall was part of a series Carnegie Mellon called "The Last Lecture," where professors were asked to think about what matters to them most and give a hypothetical final talk. The name of the lecture series was changed to "Journeys" before Pausch spoke, something he joked about in his lecture.
He told the packed auditorium he fulfilled almost all his childhood dreams -- being in zero gravity, writing an article in the World Book Encyclopedia and working with the Walt Disney Co.
The one that eluded him? Playing in the National Football League.
"If I don't seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you," Pausch said.
He then joked about his quirky hobby of winning stuffed animals at amusement parks -- another of his childhood dreams -- and how his mother introduced him to people to keep him humble: "This is my son, he's a doctor, but not the kind that helps people."
Pausch said he was embarrassed and flattered by the popularity of his message. Millions viewed the complete or abridged version of the lecture, titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," online.
Pausch lobbied Congress for more federal funding for pancreatic cancer research and appeared on "Oprah" and other TV shows. In what he called "a truly magical experience," he was even invited to appear as an extra in the new "Star Trek" movie.
He had one line of dialogue, got to keep his costume and donated his $217.06 paycheck to charity.
Pausch blogged regularly about his medical treatment. On Feb. 15, exactly six months after he was told he had three to six months of healthy living left, Pausch posted a photo of himself to show he was "still alive & healthy."
"I rode my bike today; the cumulative effects of the chemotherapy are hurting my stamina some, but I bet I can still run a quarter mile faster than most Americans," he wrote.
Pausch gave one more lecture after his Carnegie Mellon appearance -- in November at the University of Virginia, where he had taught from 1988 to 1997.
Pausch often emphasized the need to have fun.
"I mean I don't know how to not have fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there's no other way to play it," he said in his Carnegie Mellon lecture. "You just have to decide if you're a Tigger or an Eeyore. I think I'm clear where I stand on the great Tigger/Eeyore debate. Never lose the childlike wonder. It's just too important. It's what drives us."
Born in 1960, Pausch received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon.
He co-founded Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, a master's program for bringing artists and engineers together. The university named a footbridge in his honor. He also created an animation-based teaching program for high school and college students to have fun while learning computer programming.
In February, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences in California announced the creation of the Dr. Randy Pausch Scholarship Fund for university students who pursue careers in game design, development and production.
Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose "last lecture" about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.
Randy Pausch emphasized the joy of life in his "last lecture," originally given in September 2007.
Pausch died at his home in Virginia, university spokeswoman Anne Watzman said. Pausch and his family moved there last fall to be closer to his wife's relatives.
Pausch was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in September 2006. His popular last lecture at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007 garnered international attention and was viewed by millions on the Internet.
In it, Pausch celebrated living the life he had always dreamed of instead of concentrating on impending death.
"The lecture was for my kids, but if others are finding value in it, that is wonderful," Pausch wrote on his Web site. "But rest assured; I'm hardly unique."
The book "The Last Lecture," written with Jeffrey Zaslow, leaped to the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists after its publication in April and remains there this week. Pausch said he dictated the book to Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal writer, by cell phone. The book deal was reported to be worth more than $6 million.
At Carnegie Mellon, he was a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design, and was recognized as a pioneer of virtual reality research. On campus, he became known for his flamboyance and showmanship as a teacher and mentor.
The speech last fall was part of a series Carnegie Mellon called "The Last Lecture," where professors were asked to think about what matters to them most and give a hypothetical final talk. The name of the lecture series was changed to "Journeys" before Pausch spoke, something he joked about in his lecture.
He told the packed auditorium he fulfilled almost all his childhood dreams -- being in zero gravity, writing an article in the World Book Encyclopedia and working with the Walt Disney Co.
The one that eluded him? Playing in the National Football League.
"If I don't seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you," Pausch said.
He then joked about his quirky hobby of winning stuffed animals at amusement parks -- another of his childhood dreams -- and how his mother introduced him to people to keep him humble: "This is my son, he's a doctor, but not the kind that helps people."
Pausch said he was embarrassed and flattered by the popularity of his message. Millions viewed the complete or abridged version of the lecture, titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," online.
Pausch lobbied Congress for more federal funding for pancreatic cancer research and appeared on "Oprah" and other TV shows. In what he called "a truly magical experience," he was even invited to appear as an extra in the new "Star Trek" movie.
He had one line of dialogue, got to keep his costume and donated his $217.06 paycheck to charity.
Pausch blogged regularly about his medical treatment. On Feb. 15, exactly six months after he was told he had three to six months of healthy living left, Pausch posted a photo of himself to show he was "still alive & healthy."
"I rode my bike today; the cumulative effects of the chemotherapy are hurting my stamina some, but I bet I can still run a quarter mile faster than most Americans," he wrote.
Pausch gave one more lecture after his Carnegie Mellon appearance -- in November at the University of Virginia, where he had taught from 1988 to 1997.
Pausch often emphasized the need to have fun.
"I mean I don't know how to not have fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there's no other way to play it," he said in his Carnegie Mellon lecture. "You just have to decide if you're a Tigger or an Eeyore. I think I'm clear where I stand on the great Tigger/Eeyore debate. Never lose the childlike wonder. It's just too important. It's what drives us."
Born in 1960, Pausch received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon.
He co-founded Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, a master's program for bringing artists and engineers together. The university named a footbridge in his honor. He also created an animation-based teaching program for high school and college students to have fun while learning computer programming.
In February, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences in California announced the creation of the Dr. Randy Pausch Scholarship Fund for university students who pursue careers in game design, development and production.
blueyz22
Wandering through life...
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http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/tv/story/615525.html
Broadway, soap opera star Larry Haines dies at 89
Posted on Wed, Jul. 23, 2008
The Associated Press
DELRAY BEACH, Fla. -- Larry Haines, a two-time Daytime Emmy winner for his 35-year role on the soap opera "Search for Tomorrow," has died. He was 89.
Haines, who also had a successful career on Broadway, died July 17 at a Delray Beach hospital where he had been admitted a week earlier, his attorney and friend, Tom Dachelet, said Wednesday.
The actor played Stu Bergman on "Search for Tomorrow" for almost the show's entire run from 1951 to 1986, missing only the first two months.
Stu was the neighbor and best friend of Joanne Gardner Barron, later Joanne Tourneur, the character at the center of most of the show's plot lines over the years. She was played by Mary Stuart for the entire 35 years.
The soap opera, which was first on CBS, later on NBC, was the longest-running daytime drama in television when its last episode aired in December 1986.
Haines credited the longtime appeal of the show to "basically believable characters that people kind of took to."
In an Associated Press interview at the time, he said he felt that quality was lost in its final years as more outlandish plot developments were written.
"Soap opera is a story," he said. "It should be a continuing story, rather than disoriented, meaningless adventures."
Haines won Daytime Emmys for his role in 1976 and 1981, and in 1985 was presented with a special recognition award for his longevity on the series.
He also appeared for shorter periods on "Another World" and "Loving."
"Doing a daytime show requires a great deal more concentration than people give us credit for," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1967. "Every episode is like opening night because it's a new script every day."
He was generally billed as A. Larry Haines in his Broadway appearances. He was twice nominated for Tonys, for "Promises, Promises," the 1968 musical version of the film "The Apartment," and "Generation," a 1965 play starring Henry Fonda.
He also was in the 1962 Broadway comedy "A Thousand Clowns," as the brother of free-spirited Jason Robards, "Twigs," a 1971 program of four one-act plays starring Sada Thompson; and the 1978 "Tribute," which starred Jack Lemmon.
He appeared as a card player in the 1968 film version of "The Odd Couple," and made guest appearances on the TV series "Maude" and "Kojak," among others.
He was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Early in his career, he was an actor on radio series, including the popular horror series "Inner Sanctum," which famously opened with the sound of a creaking door.
Haines is survived by a niece. His first wife, Gertrude Haines, second wife, Jean Pearlman Haines, and daughter Debora all preceded him in death.
Broadway, soap opera star Larry Haines dies at 89
Posted on Wed, Jul. 23, 2008
The Associated Press
DELRAY BEACH, Fla. -- Larry Haines, a two-time Daytime Emmy winner for his 35-year role on the soap opera "Search for Tomorrow," has died. He was 89.
Haines, who also had a successful career on Broadway, died July 17 at a Delray Beach hospital where he had been admitted a week earlier, his attorney and friend, Tom Dachelet, said Wednesday.
The actor played Stu Bergman on "Search for Tomorrow" for almost the show's entire run from 1951 to 1986, missing only the first two months.
Stu was the neighbor and best friend of Joanne Gardner Barron, later Joanne Tourneur, the character at the center of most of the show's plot lines over the years. She was played by Mary Stuart for the entire 35 years.
The soap opera, which was first on CBS, later on NBC, was the longest-running daytime drama in television when its last episode aired in December 1986.
Haines credited the longtime appeal of the show to "basically believable characters that people kind of took to."
In an Associated Press interview at the time, he said he felt that quality was lost in its final years as more outlandish plot developments were written.
"Soap opera is a story," he said. "It should be a continuing story, rather than disoriented, meaningless adventures."
Haines won Daytime Emmys for his role in 1976 and 1981, and in 1985 was presented with a special recognition award for his longevity on the series.
He also appeared for shorter periods on "Another World" and "Loving."
"Doing a daytime show requires a great deal more concentration than people give us credit for," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1967. "Every episode is like opening night because it's a new script every day."
He was generally billed as A. Larry Haines in his Broadway appearances. He was twice nominated for Tonys, for "Promises, Promises," the 1968 musical version of the film "The Apartment," and "Generation," a 1965 play starring Henry Fonda.
He also was in the 1962 Broadway comedy "A Thousand Clowns," as the brother of free-spirited Jason Robards, "Twigs," a 1971 program of four one-act plays starring Sada Thompson; and the 1978 "Tribute," which starred Jack Lemmon.
He appeared as a card player in the 1968 film version of "The Odd Couple," and made guest appearances on the TV series "Maude" and "Kojak," among others.
He was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Early in his career, he was an actor on radio series, including the popular horror series "Inner Sanctum," which famously opened with the sound of a creaking door.
Haines is survived by a niece. His first wife, Gertrude Haines, second wife, Jean Pearlman Haines, and daughter Debora all preceded him in death.
JennyOmanHill
trying hard to be mindful
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Bruce Adler, Tony-Nominated Actor, Dies at 63
http://www.playbill.com/images/photos/bruceadler.jpg
Bruce Adler, the scion of Yiddish theatre family who went on to have much success on the Broadway stage, winning two Tony Award nominations, died in the early hours of July 25, said his close friend, actor Mike Burstyn. Mr. Adler had been battling liver cancer for several years. He was 63.
A canny, rubber-faced and physically agile comic actor, Mr. Adler made his Broadway debut playing the itinerant peddler Ali Hakim in the 1979 revival of Oklahoma! directed by William Hammerstein. The following decade brought Broadway appearances in the short-lived original comedy Oh, Brother! and the equally brief 1987 revival of the 1920s play Broadway.
He found his greatest success in the early 1990s, netting Tony nominations for his work in Those Were the Days (1990) and Crazy for You (1992). The former, a revue, was a project close to his heart: a collection of songs and sketches from the days when Second Avenue was a bustling showbiz thoroughfare known at the Yiddish Rialto, and his parents were two of its stars. The revue included songs by such one-time Yiddish theatre luminaries as Sholom Secunda and Joseph Rumshinsky. Mr. Adler himself provided "additional material."
Crazy for You was also a throwback, in a way. The old-fashioned musical was composed of extant songs by George and Ira Gershwin, linked together by a new book by playwright Ken Ludwig. The show was a smash. Mr. Adler played a Ziegfeld-like impresario named Bela Zangler, and many critics cited as a highlight "What Causes That?," an obscure Gershwin comic number that the actor performed with precise comic timing with co-star Harry Groener. New York Times critic Frank Rich called him a "fine, acerbic clown." He spent four years with the production and later re-created his performance at the Paper Mill Playhouse.
Mr. Adler was the son of actors Julius Adler and Henrietta Jacobsen. His maternal grandparents, Joseph and Bessie Jacobson, were also actors, as were two uncles. Like many Yiddish celebrities of the day, his parents were treated like royalty along Second Avenue. As a child, he dined often with his parents at the Café Royal, a mecca for Yiddish talent of the day, and tromped up and down the stairs to the second-floor clubhouse at the Hebrew Actors Union building on E. 7th Street, where his father played cards and gossiped for many hours. "It was a home away from home for us," recalled Mr. Burstyn. He began performing at the age of three, and danced and sang on stage with Molly Picon when he was a barely a teenager.
Mr. Adler also performed extensively in regional theatre. He played in Cole Porter's Red, Hot and Blue at the Paper Mill Playhouse in 2001 and St. Louis' summer theatre, the Muny, in Anything Goes, in 1999. Other roles include Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof, Fagin in Oliver!, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, Bill Snibson in Me and My Girl, Hysterium in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast, and famed lyricist Sammy Cahn in Come Fly With Me. He toured in his own one-man evening Song and Dance Man, which celebrated all of his performing heroes.
http://www.playbill.com/images/photos/bruceadler.jpg
Bruce Adler, the scion of Yiddish theatre family who went on to have much success on the Broadway stage, winning two Tony Award nominations, died in the early hours of July 25, said his close friend, actor Mike Burstyn. Mr. Adler had been battling liver cancer for several years. He was 63.
A canny, rubber-faced and physically agile comic actor, Mr. Adler made his Broadway debut playing the itinerant peddler Ali Hakim in the 1979 revival of Oklahoma! directed by William Hammerstein. The following decade brought Broadway appearances in the short-lived original comedy Oh, Brother! and the equally brief 1987 revival of the 1920s play Broadway.
He found his greatest success in the early 1990s, netting Tony nominations for his work in Those Were the Days (1990) and Crazy for You (1992). The former, a revue, was a project close to his heart: a collection of songs and sketches from the days when Second Avenue was a bustling showbiz thoroughfare known at the Yiddish Rialto, and his parents were two of its stars. The revue included songs by such one-time Yiddish theatre luminaries as Sholom Secunda and Joseph Rumshinsky. Mr. Adler himself provided "additional material."
Crazy for You was also a throwback, in a way. The old-fashioned musical was composed of extant songs by George and Ira Gershwin, linked together by a new book by playwright Ken Ludwig. The show was a smash. Mr. Adler played a Ziegfeld-like impresario named Bela Zangler, and many critics cited as a highlight "What Causes That?," an obscure Gershwin comic number that the actor performed with precise comic timing with co-star Harry Groener. New York Times critic Frank Rich called him a "fine, acerbic clown." He spent four years with the production and later re-created his performance at the Paper Mill Playhouse.
Mr. Adler was the son of actors Julius Adler and Henrietta Jacobsen. His maternal grandparents, Joseph and Bessie Jacobson, were also actors, as were two uncles. Like many Yiddish celebrities of the day, his parents were treated like royalty along Second Avenue. As a child, he dined often with his parents at the Café Royal, a mecca for Yiddish talent of the day, and tromped up and down the stairs to the second-floor clubhouse at the Hebrew Actors Union building on E. 7th Street, where his father played cards and gossiped for many hours. "It was a home away from home for us," recalled Mr. Burstyn. He began performing at the age of three, and danced and sang on stage with Molly Picon when he was a barely a teenager.
Mr. Adler also performed extensively in regional theatre. He played in Cole Porter's Red, Hot and Blue at the Paper Mill Playhouse in 2001 and St. Louis' summer theatre, the Muny, in Anything Goes, in 1999. Other roles include Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof, Fagin in Oliver!, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, Bill Snibson in Me and My Girl, Hysterium in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast, and famed lyricist Sammy Cahn in Come Fly With Me. He toured in his own one-man evening Song and Dance Man, which celebrated all of his performing heroes.
Agent99
The spy who came
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2002
- Posts
- 5,151
Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of Soviet gulag, dies
By DOUGLAS BIRCH, Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.
Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday at his home near Moscow, but declined further comment.
Through unflinching accounts of the years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.
And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
Beginning with the 1962 short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS'-ihn) devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.
His non-fiction "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.
But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.
The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.
After a triumphant return from exile in the U.S. in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn't read his books.
During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.
But under Vladimir Putin's 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn's vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.
Putin argued, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can't be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions.
Putin's successor Dmitry Medvedev sent condolences after news of Solzhenitsyn's death, Russian media reported.
"Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking," Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. "For one thousand years, Russia has belonged to such a category."
Born Dec. 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II. In the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin in a letter to a friend, referring to him as "the man with the mustache."
He was sentenced to eight years in labor camps -- three of which he served in a camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan that was the basis for his first novel. After that, he served three years of exile in Kazakhstan.
That's where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn't be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin's gulag — a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon.
He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan.
The first fruit of this labor was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.
The book was published in 1962 by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book — which went through numerous revisions — was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language.
After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred.
"A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country," he wrote in "The First Circle," his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin's "special camps" for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential.
Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest.
The novel "Cancer Ward", which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life. In this case, the subject was his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until June 1956.
In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. "A man sprouts a tumor and dies -- how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?"
He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin's reign.
"Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs — and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades — and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people — and they believed it?"
The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, prisoner.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author's life after decades of work. The academy cited "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."
Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the "Gulag" trilogy appeared in Paris.
"During all the years until 1961," Solzhenitsyn wrote in an autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation, "not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known."
The following year, he was arrested on a treason charge and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of the regime of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Solzhenitsyn then made his homeland in America, settling in 1976 in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, with his wife and sons.
Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life's work, a multivolume saga of Russian history titled "The Red Wheel."
Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn longed for his native land. Neither was he enchanted by Western democracy, with its emphasis on individual freedom.
To the dismay of his supporters, in his Harvard speech he rejected the West's faith "Western pluralistic democracy" as the model for all other nations. It was a mistake, he warned, for Western societies to regard the failure of the rest of the world to adopt the democratic model as a product of "wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension."
Some critics saw "The Red Wheel" books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire.
"Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the gulag, had exposed his major weaknesses," D.M. Thomas wrote in a 1998 biography, theorizing that the intensity of the earlier works was "a projection of his own repressed violence."
Then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and the treason charge was finally dropped in 1991, less than a month after a failed Soviet coup.
Following an emotional homecoming that started in the Russian Far East on May 27, 1994, and became a whistle-stop tour across the country, Solzhenitsyn settled in a tree-shaded, red brick home overlooking the Moscow River just west of the capital.
While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak "the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before."
He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming Yeltsin for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, his tolerance of the rising influence of a handful of Russian billionaires — who were nicknamed "oligarchs" by an American diplomat.
Yeltsin's reign, Solzhenitsyn said, marked one of three "times of troubles" in Russian history — which included the 17th century crises that led to the rise of the Romanovs and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.
The author's last book, 2001's "Two Hundred Years Together," addressed the complex emotions of Russian-Jewish relations. Some criticized the book for alleged anti-Semitic passages. But the author denied the charge, saying he "understood the subtlety, sensitivity and kindheartedness of the Jewish character."
Yeltsin's successor Putin at first had a rocky relationship with Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Russian president in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on Russia's oligarchs. Putin was also a veteran of the Soviet-era KGB, the agency that, more than any other, represented the Soviet legacy of repression.
But the two men, so different, gradually developed a rapport. By steps, Putin adopted Solzhenitsyn's criticisms of the West, perhaps out of a recognition that Russia really is a different civilization, perhaps because the author offered justification for the Kremlin's determination to muzzle critics, to reassert control over Russia's natural resources and to concentrate political power.
Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia was following its own path to its own form of democratic society. In a June 2005 interview with state television, he said Russia had lost 15 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union by moving too quickly in the rush to build a more liberal society.
"We need to be better, so we need to go more slowly," he said
Following the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. He is survived by his wife, Natalya, who acted as his spokesman, and his three sons, including Stepan, Ignat, a pianist and conductor, and Yermolai. All live in the United States.
By DOUGLAS BIRCH, Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.
Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday at his home near Moscow, but declined further comment.
Through unflinching accounts of the years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.
And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
Beginning with the 1962 short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS'-ihn) devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.
His non-fiction "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.
But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.
The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.
After a triumphant return from exile in the U.S. in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn't read his books.
During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.
But under Vladimir Putin's 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn's vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.
Putin argued, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can't be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions.
Putin's successor Dmitry Medvedev sent condolences after news of Solzhenitsyn's death, Russian media reported.
"Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking," Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. "For one thousand years, Russia has belonged to such a category."
Born Dec. 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II. In the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin in a letter to a friend, referring to him as "the man with the mustache."
He was sentenced to eight years in labor camps -- three of which he served in a camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan that was the basis for his first novel. After that, he served three years of exile in Kazakhstan.
That's where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn't be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin's gulag — a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon.
He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan.
The first fruit of this labor was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.
The book was published in 1962 by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book — which went through numerous revisions — was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language.
After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred.
"A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country," he wrote in "The First Circle," his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin's "special camps" for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential.
Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest.
The novel "Cancer Ward", which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life. In this case, the subject was his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until June 1956.
In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. "A man sprouts a tumor and dies -- how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?"
He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin's reign.
"Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs — and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades — and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people — and they believed it?"
The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, prisoner.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author's life after decades of work. The academy cited "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."
Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the "Gulag" trilogy appeared in Paris.
"During all the years until 1961," Solzhenitsyn wrote in an autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation, "not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known."
The following year, he was arrested on a treason charge and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of the regime of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Solzhenitsyn then made his homeland in America, settling in 1976 in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, with his wife and sons.
Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life's work, a multivolume saga of Russian history titled "The Red Wheel."
Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn longed for his native land. Neither was he enchanted by Western democracy, with its emphasis on individual freedom.
To the dismay of his supporters, in his Harvard speech he rejected the West's faith "Western pluralistic democracy" as the model for all other nations. It was a mistake, he warned, for Western societies to regard the failure of the rest of the world to adopt the democratic model as a product of "wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension."
Some critics saw "The Red Wheel" books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire.
"Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the gulag, had exposed his major weaknesses," D.M. Thomas wrote in a 1998 biography, theorizing that the intensity of the earlier works was "a projection of his own repressed violence."
Then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and the treason charge was finally dropped in 1991, less than a month after a failed Soviet coup.
Following an emotional homecoming that started in the Russian Far East on May 27, 1994, and became a whistle-stop tour across the country, Solzhenitsyn settled in a tree-shaded, red brick home overlooking the Moscow River just west of the capital.
While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak "the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before."
He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming Yeltsin for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, his tolerance of the rising influence of a handful of Russian billionaires — who were nicknamed "oligarchs" by an American diplomat.
Yeltsin's reign, Solzhenitsyn said, marked one of three "times of troubles" in Russian history — which included the 17th century crises that led to the rise of the Romanovs and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.
The author's last book, 2001's "Two Hundred Years Together," addressed the complex emotions of Russian-Jewish relations. Some criticized the book for alleged anti-Semitic passages. But the author denied the charge, saying he "understood the subtlety, sensitivity and kindheartedness of the Jewish character."
Yeltsin's successor Putin at first had a rocky relationship with Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Russian president in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on Russia's oligarchs. Putin was also a veteran of the Soviet-era KGB, the agency that, more than any other, represented the Soviet legacy of repression.
But the two men, so different, gradually developed a rapport. By steps, Putin adopted Solzhenitsyn's criticisms of the West, perhaps out of a recognition that Russia really is a different civilization, perhaps because the author offered justification for the Kremlin's determination to muzzle critics, to reassert control over Russia's natural resources and to concentrate political power.
Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia was following its own path to its own form of democratic society. In a June 2005 interview with state television, he said Russia had lost 15 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union by moving too quickly in the rush to build a more liberal society.
"We need to be better, so we need to go more slowly," he said
Following the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. He is survived by his wife, Natalya, who acted as his spokesman, and his three sons, including Stepan, Ignat, a pianist and conductor, and Yermolai. All live in the United States.
Faneros
USA
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- Mar 16, 2007
- Posts
- 11,086
Singer, songwriter Isaac Hayes dies at age 65
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Isaac Hayes, the pioneering singer, songwriter and musician whose relentless "Theme From Shaft" won Academy and Grammy awards, died Sunday afternoon, the Shelby County Sheriff's Office said. He was 65.
A family member found him unresponsive near a treadmill and he was pronounced dead an hour later at Baptist East Hospital in Memphis, according to the sheriff's office. The cause of death was not immediately known.
In the early 1970s, Hayes laid the groundwork for disco, for what became known as urban-contemporary music and for romantic crooners like Barry White. And he was rapping before there was rap.
His career hit another high in 1997 when he became the voice of Chef, the sensible school cook and devoted ladies man on the animated TV show "South Park."
Steve Shular, a spokesman for the sheriff's office, said authorities received a 911 call after Hayes' wife and young son and his wife's cousin returned home from the grocery store and found him collapsed in a downstairs bedroom. A sheriff's deputy administered CPR until paramedics arrived.
"The treadmill was running but he was unresponsive lying on the floor," Shular said.
The album "Hot Buttered Soul" made Hayes a star in 1969. His shaven head, gold chains and sunglasses gave him a compelling visual image.
"Hot Buttered Soul" was groundbreaking in several ways: He sang in a "cool" style unlike the usual histrionics of big-time soul singers. He prefaced the song with "raps," and the numbers ran longer than three minutes with lush arrangements.
"Jocks would play it at night," Hayes recalled in a 1999 Associated Press interview. "They could go to the bathroom, they could get a sandwich, or whatever."
Next came "Theme From Shaft," a No. 1 hit in 1971 from the film "Shaft" starring Richard Roundtree.
"That was like the shot heard round the world," Hayes said in the 1999 interview.
At the Oscar ceremony in 1972, Hayes performed the song wearing an eye-popping amount of gold and received a standing ovation. TV Guide later chose it as No. 18 in its list of television's 25 most memorable moments. He won an Academy Award for the song and was nominated for another one for the score. The song and score also won him two Grammys.
"The rappers have gone in and created a lot of hit music based upon my influence," he said. "And they'll tell you if you ask."
Hayes was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
"I knew nothing about the business, or trends and things like that," he said. "I think it was a matter of timing. I didn't know what was unfolding."
A self-taught musician, he was hired in 1964 by Stax Records of Memphis as a backup pianist, working as a session musician for Otis Redding and others. He also played saxophone.
He began writing songs, establishing a songwriting partnership with David Porter, and in the 1960s they wrote such hits for Sam and Dave as "Hold On, I'm Coming" and "Soul Man."
All this led to his recording contract.
In 1972, he won another Grammy for his album "Black Moses" and earned a nickname he reluctantly embraced. Hayes composed film scores for "Tough Guys" and "Truck Turner" besides "Shaft." He also did the song "Two Cool Guys" on the "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America" movie soundtrack in 1996.
Additionally, he was the voice of Nickelodeon's "Nick at Nite" and had radio shows in New York City (1996 to 2002) and then in Memphis.
He was in several movies, including "It Could Happen to You" with Nicolas Cage, "Ninth Street" with Martin Sheen, "Reindeer Games" starring Ben Affleck and the blaxploitation parody "I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka."
In the 1999 interview, Hayes described the South Park cook as "a person that speaks his mind; he's sensitive enough to care for children; he's wise enough to not be put into the 'whack' category like everybody else in town — and he l-o-o-o-o-ves the ladies."
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Isaac Hayes, the pioneering singer, songwriter and musician whose relentless "Theme From Shaft" won Academy and Grammy awards, died Sunday afternoon, the Shelby County Sheriff's Office said. He was 65.
A family member found him unresponsive near a treadmill and he was pronounced dead an hour later at Baptist East Hospital in Memphis, according to the sheriff's office. The cause of death was not immediately known.
In the early 1970s, Hayes laid the groundwork for disco, for what became known as urban-contemporary music and for romantic crooners like Barry White. And he was rapping before there was rap.
His career hit another high in 1997 when he became the voice of Chef, the sensible school cook and devoted ladies man on the animated TV show "South Park."
Steve Shular, a spokesman for the sheriff's office, said authorities received a 911 call after Hayes' wife and young son and his wife's cousin returned home from the grocery store and found him collapsed in a downstairs bedroom. A sheriff's deputy administered CPR until paramedics arrived.
"The treadmill was running but he was unresponsive lying on the floor," Shular said.
The album "Hot Buttered Soul" made Hayes a star in 1969. His shaven head, gold chains and sunglasses gave him a compelling visual image.
"Hot Buttered Soul" was groundbreaking in several ways: He sang in a "cool" style unlike the usual histrionics of big-time soul singers. He prefaced the song with "raps," and the numbers ran longer than three minutes with lush arrangements.
"Jocks would play it at night," Hayes recalled in a 1999 Associated Press interview. "They could go to the bathroom, they could get a sandwich, or whatever."
Next came "Theme From Shaft," a No. 1 hit in 1971 from the film "Shaft" starring Richard Roundtree.
"That was like the shot heard round the world," Hayes said in the 1999 interview.
At the Oscar ceremony in 1972, Hayes performed the song wearing an eye-popping amount of gold and received a standing ovation. TV Guide later chose it as No. 18 in its list of television's 25 most memorable moments. He won an Academy Award for the song and was nominated for another one for the score. The song and score also won him two Grammys.
"The rappers have gone in and created a lot of hit music based upon my influence," he said. "And they'll tell you if you ask."
Hayes was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
"I knew nothing about the business, or trends and things like that," he said. "I think it was a matter of timing. I didn't know what was unfolding."
A self-taught musician, he was hired in 1964 by Stax Records of Memphis as a backup pianist, working as a session musician for Otis Redding and others. He also played saxophone.
He began writing songs, establishing a songwriting partnership with David Porter, and in the 1960s they wrote such hits for Sam and Dave as "Hold On, I'm Coming" and "Soul Man."
All this led to his recording contract.
In 1972, he won another Grammy for his album "Black Moses" and earned a nickname he reluctantly embraced. Hayes composed film scores for "Tough Guys" and "Truck Turner" besides "Shaft." He also did the song "Two Cool Guys" on the "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America" movie soundtrack in 1996.
Additionally, he was the voice of Nickelodeon's "Nick at Nite" and had radio shows in New York City (1996 to 2002) and then in Memphis.
He was in several movies, including "It Could Happen to You" with Nicolas Cage, "Ninth Street" with Martin Sheen, "Reindeer Games" starring Ben Affleck and the blaxploitation parody "I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka."
In the 1999 interview, Hayes described the South Park cook as "a person that speaks his mind; he's sensitive enough to care for children; he's wise enough to not be put into the 'whack' category like everybody else in town — and he l-o-o-o-o-ves the ladies."
blueyz22
Wandering through life...
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2008
- Posts
- 1,109
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/08/09/obit.bernie.mac.ap/index.html
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Bernie Mac, the actor and comedian who teamed up in the casino heist caper "Ocean's Eleven" and gained a prestigious Peabody Award for his sitcom "The Bernie Mac Show," died Saturday at age 50.
Bernie Mac, 50, was nominated for a Grammy for "The Original Kings of Comedy."
more photos » "Actor/comedian Bernie Mac passed away this morning from complications due to pneumonia in a Chicago area hospital," his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles.
The comedian suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease that produces tiny lumps of cells in the body's organs, but had said the condition went into remission in 2005. He recently was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia, which his publicist said was not related to the disease.
Mac's brand of comedy caught flak when he was heckled during a surprise appearance at a July fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate and fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama.
Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine, Mac joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language. The performance earned him a rebuke from Obama's campaign. Watch how Steve Harvey remembers Bernie Mac »
But despite controversy or difficulties, in his words, Mac was always a performer.
"Wherever I am, I have to play," he said in 2002. "I have to put on a good show."
Mac worked his way to Hollywood success from an impoverished upbringing on Chicago's South Side. He began doing standup as a child, and his film career started with a small role as a club doorman in the Damon Wayans comedy "Mo' Money" in 1992. In 1996, he appeared in the Spike Lee drama "Get on the Bus."
Don't Miss
Comic had been said to be recovering
iReport.com: Share your appreciation of Bernie Mac
He was one of "The Original Kings of Comedy" in the 2000 documentary of that title that brought a new generation of black standup comedy stars to a wider audience.
"The majority of his core fan base will remember that when they paid their money to see Bernie Mac ... he gave them their money's worth," Steve Harvey, one of his co-stars in "Original Kings," said Saturday.
Mac went on to star in the hugely popular "Ocean's Eleven" franchise with Brad Pitt and George Clooney.
Comedian Carl Reiner, who also appeared in "Ocean's Eleven" and its two sequels, said Saturday that he was "in utter shock," because he thought Mac was improving. "He was just so alive. I can't believe he's gone," he said.
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Bernie Mac, the actor and comedian who teamed up in the casino heist caper "Ocean's Eleven" and gained a prestigious Peabody Award for his sitcom "The Bernie Mac Show," died Saturday at age 50.
Bernie Mac, 50, was nominated for a Grammy for "The Original Kings of Comedy."
more photos » "Actor/comedian Bernie Mac passed away this morning from complications due to pneumonia in a Chicago area hospital," his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles.
The comedian suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease that produces tiny lumps of cells in the body's organs, but had said the condition went into remission in 2005. He recently was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia, which his publicist said was not related to the disease.
Mac's brand of comedy caught flak when he was heckled during a surprise appearance at a July fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate and fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama.
Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine, Mac joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language. The performance earned him a rebuke from Obama's campaign. Watch how Steve Harvey remembers Bernie Mac »
But despite controversy or difficulties, in his words, Mac was always a performer.
"Wherever I am, I have to play," he said in 2002. "I have to put on a good show."
Mac worked his way to Hollywood success from an impoverished upbringing on Chicago's South Side. He began doing standup as a child, and his film career started with a small role as a club doorman in the Damon Wayans comedy "Mo' Money" in 1992. In 1996, he appeared in the Spike Lee drama "Get on the Bus."
Don't Miss
Comic had been said to be recovering
iReport.com: Share your appreciation of Bernie Mac
He was one of "The Original Kings of Comedy" in the 2000 documentary of that title that brought a new generation of black standup comedy stars to a wider audience.
"The majority of his core fan base will remember that when they paid their money to see Bernie Mac ... he gave them their money's worth," Steve Harvey, one of his co-stars in "Original Kings," said Saturday.
Mac went on to star in the hugely popular "Ocean's Eleven" franchise with Brad Pitt and George Clooney.
Comedian Carl Reiner, who also appeared in "Ocean's Eleven" and its two sequels, said Saturday that he was "in utter shock," because he thought Mac was improving. "He was just so alive. I can't believe he's gone," he said.
JennyOmanHill
trying hard to be mindful
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Hollywood producer Bernie Brillstein dies at 77
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood producer and talent manager Bernie Brillstein, whose movie credits include "The Blues Brothers" and "Happy Gilmore," has died of lung disease at age 77, his company said on Friday.
Brillstein died on Thursday night in Los Angeles from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Brillstein Entertainment Partners said in a statement.
He was a talent manager early in his career and helped guide the rise to stardom of Muppet creator Jim Henson, comic actors John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd and "Saturday Night Live" creator Lorne Michaels. He served as executive producer on many films including "The Blues Brothers," starring Belushi and Aykroyd, as well as TV comedies like the 1990s hit "NewsRadio."
"With his boundless passion, energy and wisdom, Bernie inspired the culture and success that we're blessed with today," Jon Liebman, chief executive officer of Brillstein Entertainment Partners, said in a statement.
The management and production company Brillstein founded in 1969 grew into a powerhouse of Hollywood comedy.
In 1991, he partnered with producer Brad Grey to form Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, which later changed its name to Brillstein Entertainment Partners. Grey left in 2005 to run the Paramount Pictures movie studio.
A New York native, Brillstein was introduced to show business by his uncle, Jack Pearl, a star in the Ziegfield Follies stage show. He began his career in the mail room at the William Morris Agency, a talent company.
Brillstein is survived by his wife and five children.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood producer and talent manager Bernie Brillstein, whose movie credits include "The Blues Brothers" and "Happy Gilmore," has died of lung disease at age 77, his company said on Friday.
Brillstein died on Thursday night in Los Angeles from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Brillstein Entertainment Partners said in a statement.
He was a talent manager early in his career and helped guide the rise to stardom of Muppet creator Jim Henson, comic actors John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd and "Saturday Night Live" creator Lorne Michaels. He served as executive producer on many films including "The Blues Brothers," starring Belushi and Aykroyd, as well as TV comedies like the 1990s hit "NewsRadio."
"With his boundless passion, energy and wisdom, Bernie inspired the culture and success that we're blessed with today," Jon Liebman, chief executive officer of Brillstein Entertainment Partners, said in a statement.
The management and production company Brillstein founded in 1969 grew into a powerhouse of Hollywood comedy.
In 1991, he partnered with producer Brad Grey to form Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, which later changed its name to Brillstein Entertainment Partners. Grey left in 2005 to run the Paramount Pictures movie studio.
A New York native, Brillstein was introduced to show business by his uncle, Jack Pearl, a star in the Ziegfield Follies stage show. He began his career in the mail room at the William Morris Agency, a talent company.
Brillstein is survived by his wife and five children.
NaughtyLil1
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Buchenwald liberator, American hero dies at 83
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/14/buchenwald.liberator/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
James Hoyt delivered mail in rural Iowa for more than 30 years. Yet Hoyt had long kept a secret from most of those who knew him best: He was one of the four U.S. soldiers to first see Germany's Buchenwald concentration camp.
James Hoyt Sr. was one of the four U.S. soldiers to first find the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Hoyt died Monday at his home in Oxford, Iowa, a town of about 700 people where he had lived his entire life. He was 83.
His funeral was Thursday at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Oxford, with about 100 people in attendance. The Rev. Edmond Dunn officiated and recalled time he spent with Hoyt and his wife.
"I used to go over to have lunch with Doris and Jim, and I would sit across from Jim at the kitchen table and think, 'Before me is a true American hero,' " he said.
Hoyt had rarely spoken about that day in 1945, but he recently opened up to a journalist.
"There were thousands of bodies piled high. I saw hearts that had been taken from live people in medical experiments," Hoyt told author Stephen Bloom in a soon-to-be-published book called "The Oxford Project."
"They said a wife of one of the SS officers -- they called her the Bitch of Buchenwald -- saw a tattoo she liked on the arm of a prisoner, and had the skin made into a lampshade. I saw that."
Pete Geren, the secretary of the U.S. Army, said the sacrifice Hoyt made for his country so many years ago should never be forgotten.
"It's important that we don't allow ourselves to lose him," Geren told CNN by phone. "It's the memory of heroes like James Hoyt and the memories of what they've done that we must ensure that we keep alive and share with the current generation and future generations.
"Mr. Hoyt, as a young man, saw unspeakable horrors when he was one of the soldiers to discover the Buchenwald concentration camp, and those are experiences as a country and a world we can never forget.
"You think back on a young man 19 years old and to have the experience that he had," Geren said, his voice dissolving before finishing his thought.
The discovery of Buchenwald, on April 11, 1945, began the liberation of more than 21,000 prisoners from one of the largest Nazi concentration camps of World War II.
The official U.S. military account of the liberation called the camp "a symbol of the chill-blooded cruelty of the German Nazi state," where thousands of political prisoners were starved and "others were burned, beaten, hung and shot to death."
"There is reason to believe that the prompt arrival of the 6th Armored Division ... on the scene saved many hundreds and perhaps thousands of lives," it said.
As a private first class in the U.S. Army, Hoyt was just 19 when he and his three comrades -- Capt. Frederic Keffer, Tech. Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk and Sgt. Harry Ward -- found Buchenwald in a well-hidden wooded area of eastern Germany.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/14/buchenwald.liberator/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
James Hoyt delivered mail in rural Iowa for more than 30 years. Yet Hoyt had long kept a secret from most of those who knew him best: He was one of the four U.S. soldiers to first see Germany's Buchenwald concentration camp.
James Hoyt Sr. was one of the four U.S. soldiers to first find the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Hoyt died Monday at his home in Oxford, Iowa, a town of about 700 people where he had lived his entire life. He was 83.
His funeral was Thursday at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Oxford, with about 100 people in attendance. The Rev. Edmond Dunn officiated and recalled time he spent with Hoyt and his wife.
"I used to go over to have lunch with Doris and Jim, and I would sit across from Jim at the kitchen table and think, 'Before me is a true American hero,' " he said.
Hoyt had rarely spoken about that day in 1945, but he recently opened up to a journalist.
"There were thousands of bodies piled high. I saw hearts that had been taken from live people in medical experiments," Hoyt told author Stephen Bloom in a soon-to-be-published book called "The Oxford Project."
"They said a wife of one of the SS officers -- they called her the Bitch of Buchenwald -- saw a tattoo she liked on the arm of a prisoner, and had the skin made into a lampshade. I saw that."
Pete Geren, the secretary of the U.S. Army, said the sacrifice Hoyt made for his country so many years ago should never be forgotten.
"It's important that we don't allow ourselves to lose him," Geren told CNN by phone. "It's the memory of heroes like James Hoyt and the memories of what they've done that we must ensure that we keep alive and share with the current generation and future generations.
"Mr. Hoyt, as a young man, saw unspeakable horrors when he was one of the soldiers to discover the Buchenwald concentration camp, and those are experiences as a country and a world we can never forget.
"You think back on a young man 19 years old and to have the experience that he had," Geren said, his voice dissolving before finishing his thought.
The discovery of Buchenwald, on April 11, 1945, began the liberation of more than 21,000 prisoners from one of the largest Nazi concentration camps of World War II.
The official U.S. military account of the liberation called the camp "a symbol of the chill-blooded cruelty of the German Nazi state," where thousands of political prisoners were starved and "others were burned, beaten, hung and shot to death."
"There is reason to believe that the prompt arrival of the 6th Armored Division ... on the scene saved many hundreds and perhaps thousands of lives," it said.
As a private first class in the U.S. Army, Hoyt was just 19 when he and his three comrades -- Capt. Frederic Keffer, Tech. Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk and Sgt. Harry Ward -- found Buchenwald in a well-hidden wooded area of eastern Germany.
Faneros
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NFL players union chief Upshaw dies at 63
AP
updated 13 minutes ago
NEW YORK - Gene Upshaw, the Hall of Fame guard who during a quarter century as union head helped get NFL players free agency and the riches that came with it, has died. He was 63.
Upshaw died Wednesday night at his home in Lake Tahoe, Calif., of pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed only last Sunday, the NFL Players Association said Thursday. His wife Terri and sons Eugene Jr., Justin and Daniel were by his side.
“Few people in the history of the National Football League have played the game as well as Gene and then had another career in football with so much positive impact on the structure and competitiveness of the entire league as Gene,” former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said.
AP
updated 13 minutes ago
NEW YORK - Gene Upshaw, the Hall of Fame guard who during a quarter century as union head helped get NFL players free agency and the riches that came with it, has died. He was 63.
Upshaw died Wednesday night at his home in Lake Tahoe, Calif., of pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed only last Sunday, the NFL Players Association said Thursday. His wife Terri and sons Eugene Jr., Justin and Daniel were by his side.
“Few people in the history of the National Football League have played the game as well as Gene and then had another career in football with so much positive impact on the structure and competitiveness of the entire league as Gene,” former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said.
JennyOmanHill
trying hard to be mindful
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Dave Matthews Band sax player LeRoi Moore dies
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dave Matthews Band saxophone player LeRoi Moore, one of the group's founding members and a key part of its eclectic jazz-infused sound, died Tuesday from sudden complications stemming from injuries he sustained in an all-terrain vehicle accident in June. He was 46.
Moore died at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, according to a statement released on the band's Web site. The statement did not specify what led to his death.
Moore was initially hospitalized in late June after the accident on his farm outside Charlottesville, Va. He was later discharged and had recently returned to his Los Angeles home to begin a physical rehabilitation program when complications forced him back to the hospital on July 17, the band said.
Galina Shinder, a nursing supervisor at Hollywood Presbyterian, said the hospital could not release any details.
Ambrosia Healy, the band's publicist, said the band's show Tuesday night in Los Angeles was not canceled. Saxophonist Jeff Coffin, who played with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, had been sitting in for Moore during the band's summer tour.
Moore, who liked to wear his trademark dark sunglasses at the bands' live concerts, had classical training but said jazz was his main musical influence, according to a biography on the band's Web site.
"But at this stage I don't really consider myself a jazz musician," Moore said in the biography. Playing with the Dave Matthews Band was "almost better than a jazz gig," he said. "I have plenty of space to improvise, to try new ideas."
Lead singer Dave Matthews credited Moore with arranging many of his songs, which combine Cajun fiddle-playing, African-influenced rhythms and Matthews' playful but haunting voice.
The band formed in 1991 in Charlottesville, Va., when Matthews was working as a bartender. He gave a demo tape of his songs to Moore, who liked what he heard and recruited his friend and fellow jazzman Carter Beauford to play drums, and other musicians.
The group broke out of the local music scene with the album "Under the Table and Dreaming." The band won a Grammy Award in 1997 for its hit song "So Much to Say" off its second album "Crash." Other hits include "What Would You Say," "Crash Into Me" and "Satellite."
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dave Matthews Band saxophone player LeRoi Moore, one of the group's founding members and a key part of its eclectic jazz-infused sound, died Tuesday from sudden complications stemming from injuries he sustained in an all-terrain vehicle accident in June. He was 46.
Moore died at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, according to a statement released on the band's Web site. The statement did not specify what led to his death.
Moore was initially hospitalized in late June after the accident on his farm outside Charlottesville, Va. He was later discharged and had recently returned to his Los Angeles home to begin a physical rehabilitation program when complications forced him back to the hospital on July 17, the band said.
Galina Shinder, a nursing supervisor at Hollywood Presbyterian, said the hospital could not release any details.
Ambrosia Healy, the band's publicist, said the band's show Tuesday night in Los Angeles was not canceled. Saxophonist Jeff Coffin, who played with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, had been sitting in for Moore during the band's summer tour.
Moore, who liked to wear his trademark dark sunglasses at the bands' live concerts, had classical training but said jazz was his main musical influence, according to a biography on the band's Web site.
"But at this stage I don't really consider myself a jazz musician," Moore said in the biography. Playing with the Dave Matthews Band was "almost better than a jazz gig," he said. "I have plenty of space to improvise, to try new ideas."
Lead singer Dave Matthews credited Moore with arranging many of his songs, which combine Cajun fiddle-playing, African-influenced rhythms and Matthews' playful but haunting voice.
The band formed in 1991 in Charlottesville, Va., when Matthews was working as a bartender. He gave a demo tape of his songs to Moore, who liked what he heard and recruited his friend and fellow jazzman Carter Beauford to play drums, and other musicians.
The group broke out of the local music scene with the album "Under the Table and Dreaming." The band won a Grammy Award in 1997 for its hit song "So Much to Say" off its second album "Crash." Other hits include "What Would You Say," "Crash Into Me" and "Satellite."
JennyOmanHill
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Veteran thesp played Sho'nuff in 'Last Dragon'
Character actor Julius Carry dies at 56
Character actor Julius Carry died Aug. 19 in Los Angeles of pancreatic cancer. He was 56.
He had recurring roles on TV shows including "Two Guys And Girl," "Boy Meets World," "Grown Ups," "The District," "Cosby," "Murphy Brown," "It's A Living" and "Duet."
Carry appeared in more than 100 guest roles including "Hill Street Blues," "Jag," "Spin City" and "Moesha."
He also appeared as the villain Sho'nuff in the cult pic "The Last Dragon." Other feature credits included "The New Guy," "Moving," "World Gone Wild," "The Man With The Red Shoe" and "The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh."
Born in Chicago, his first screen credit was in "Disco Godfather."
Carry is survived by his wife Naomi.
Character actor Julius Carry dies at 56
Character actor Julius Carry died Aug. 19 in Los Angeles of pancreatic cancer. He was 56.
He had recurring roles on TV shows including "Two Guys And Girl," "Boy Meets World," "Grown Ups," "The District," "Cosby," "Murphy Brown," "It's A Living" and "Duet."
Carry appeared in more than 100 guest roles including "Hill Street Blues," "Jag," "Spin City" and "Moesha."
He also appeared as the villain Sho'nuff in the cult pic "The Last Dragon." Other feature credits included "The New Guy," "Moving," "World Gone Wild," "The Man With The Red Shoe" and "The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh."
Born in Chicago, his first screen credit was in "Disco Godfather."
Carry is survived by his wife Naomi.
JennyOmanHill
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U.S. Rep. Tubbs Jones Dies After Hemorrhage
A Cleveland Clinic official said Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio has died.
Clinic spokeswoman Eileen Sheil said Tubbs Jones died at 6:12 p.m. Wednesday after suffering a brain hemorrhage caused by an aneurysm that burst and left her with limited brain function.
Local television station WEWS reported that the hemorrhage was in an inaccessible part of Jones' brain.
The 58-year-old Tubbs Jones was the first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress and a strong critic of the Iraq war. She suffered the hemorrhage while driving her car in her east side district Tuesday evening.
The television station reported that a statement from Huron Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic and Tubbs Jones' family read, "Throughout the course of the day and into this evening, Congresswoman Tubbs Jones' medical condition declined. Medical doctors and neurosurgeons from Huron Hospital and Cleveland Clinic sadly report that at 6:12 p.m. Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones died.
Cleveland Heights police said Tubbs Jones' car was observed traveling east on Mayfield Road at about 9 p.m. in a weaving fashion. The officer activated the cruiser's emergency lights and attempted to pull the vehicle over. The vehicle started rolling across the southbound lanes.
Police said Tubbs Jones was found in "obvious medical distress."
Tubbs Jones was set to be a superdelegate at next week's Democratic National Convention in Denver.
She was one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's biggest supporters during the primaries. She threw her support to Sen. Barack Obama in June.
A Cleveland Clinic official said Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio has died.
Clinic spokeswoman Eileen Sheil said Tubbs Jones died at 6:12 p.m. Wednesday after suffering a brain hemorrhage caused by an aneurysm that burst and left her with limited brain function.
Local television station WEWS reported that the hemorrhage was in an inaccessible part of Jones' brain.
The 58-year-old Tubbs Jones was the first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress and a strong critic of the Iraq war. She suffered the hemorrhage while driving her car in her east side district Tuesday evening.
The television station reported that a statement from Huron Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic and Tubbs Jones' family read, "Throughout the course of the day and into this evening, Congresswoman Tubbs Jones' medical condition declined. Medical doctors and neurosurgeons from Huron Hospital and Cleveland Clinic sadly report that at 6:12 p.m. Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones died.
Cleveland Heights police said Tubbs Jones' car was observed traveling east on Mayfield Road at about 9 p.m. in a weaving fashion. The officer activated the cruiser's emergency lights and attempted to pull the vehicle over. The vehicle started rolling across the southbound lanes.
Police said Tubbs Jones was found in "obvious medical distress."
Tubbs Jones was set to be a superdelegate at next week's Democratic National Convention in Denver.
She was one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's biggest supporters during the primaries. She threw her support to Sen. Barack Obama in June.
JennyOmanHill
trying hard to be mindful
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'Gone With the Wind' Actor Crane Dies
AP
ATLANTA (Aug. 25) - Fred Crane, the one-time actor whose Southern accent won him a slot as one of Scarlett O'Hara's beaux and the opening line in "Gone With the Wind," has died.
Armed with that deep Southern accent, Fred Crane scored the bit part of a lifetime in 'Gone With the Wind' as Stuart Tarleton, seated to the right of Vivien Leigh, delivering the opening line of the 1939 classic. Crane was 90.
Crane, who played one of the Tarleton twins in the 1939 classic, was 90. His wife, Terry Lynn Crane, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he died on Thursday of complications from diabetes. She declined to give details.
Crane was reportedly the last living male actor who had a credited role in the movie.
The couple had lived in Barnesville south of Atlanta, where they operated Tarleton Oaks. The bed and breakfast was named for his character in the film, Brent Tarleton.
The other Tarleton twin was played by George Reeves, who later gained TV immortality as Superman.
Born in New Orleans, Crane stumbled into his role on "Gone With the Wind." He was not yet an actor when he accompanied a cousin who wanted to audition for the movie.
The casting director liked the 20-year-old's Southern twang, and he wound up being cast.
The film opens with Crane's character asking O'Hara, played by Vivien Leigh: "What do we care if we were expelled from college, Scarlett? The war is going to start any day now, so we'd have left college anyhow."
Her reply to Crane and Reeves contains one of the movie's classic lines: "Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream."
Crane also had roles in the 1949 Cisco Kid movie "The Gay Amigo," and acted on television during the 1960s. He also hosted a classical music radio show in Los Angeles for 40 years.
He did not attend the 1939 premiere of "Gone With the Wind" and for decades he did not exploit his role. But Crane did channel his character later, at Tarleton Oaks, located in a 19th century mansion.
He sold the business, as well as his own movie memorabilia, last year.
Crane was married five times and is survived by four children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
AP
ATLANTA (Aug. 25) - Fred Crane, the one-time actor whose Southern accent won him a slot as one of Scarlett O'Hara's beaux and the opening line in "Gone With the Wind," has died.
Armed with that deep Southern accent, Fred Crane scored the bit part of a lifetime in 'Gone With the Wind' as Stuart Tarleton, seated to the right of Vivien Leigh, delivering the opening line of the 1939 classic. Crane was 90.
Crane, who played one of the Tarleton twins in the 1939 classic, was 90. His wife, Terry Lynn Crane, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he died on Thursday of complications from diabetes. She declined to give details.
Crane was reportedly the last living male actor who had a credited role in the movie.
The couple had lived in Barnesville south of Atlanta, where they operated Tarleton Oaks. The bed and breakfast was named for his character in the film, Brent Tarleton.
The other Tarleton twin was played by George Reeves, who later gained TV immortality as Superman.
Born in New Orleans, Crane stumbled into his role on "Gone With the Wind." He was not yet an actor when he accompanied a cousin who wanted to audition for the movie.
The casting director liked the 20-year-old's Southern twang, and he wound up being cast.
The film opens with Crane's character asking O'Hara, played by Vivien Leigh: "What do we care if we were expelled from college, Scarlett? The war is going to start any day now, so we'd have left college anyhow."
Her reply to Crane and Reeves contains one of the movie's classic lines: "Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream."
Crane also had roles in the 1949 Cisco Kid movie "The Gay Amigo," and acted on television during the 1960s. He also hosted a classical music radio show in Los Angeles for 40 years.
He did not attend the 1939 premiere of "Gone With the Wind" and for decades he did not exploit his role. But Crane did channel his character later, at Tarleton Oaks, located in a 19th century mansion.
He sold the business, as well as his own movie memorabilia, last year.
Crane was married five times and is survived by four children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
blueyz22
Wandering through life...
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,410922,00.html
Dr. Dre's 20-Year-Old Son Found Dead
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Dr. Dre
LOS ANGELES — Rapper and hip-hop producer Dr. Dre's 20-year-old son has died, a spokesperson for Dr. Dre said in a statement on Tuesday.
"Dr. Dre is mourning the loss of his son Andre Young Jr. Please respect his family's grief and privacy at this time," the spokesperson said.
Young Jr., who was named after his father, was found dead Saturday by his mother at their home in suburban Woodland Hills, county coroner's Lt. John Kades said.
An autopsy was performed Monday, but the cause of death wasn't likely to be determined for eight weeks while toxicology tests are done, Kades said.
Young was discovered in his bed at around 10:30 a.m. Saturday by his mother, who attempted to rouse him, the coroner's spokesperson told MTV News. Young was unresponsive, so she called paramedics, who responded to the scene. After their efforts to revive him failed, he was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to the coroner's spokesperson, Young had spent the previous evening with friends. His mother told police that he'd returned home Saturday at around 5:30 a.m., and that she'd heard him in his bedroom. Police said they did not suspect foul play.
Dr. Dre's 20-Year-Old Son Found Dead
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Dr. Dre
LOS ANGELES — Rapper and hip-hop producer Dr. Dre's 20-year-old son has died, a spokesperson for Dr. Dre said in a statement on Tuesday.
"Dr. Dre is mourning the loss of his son Andre Young Jr. Please respect his family's grief and privacy at this time," the spokesperson said.
Young Jr., who was named after his father, was found dead Saturday by his mother at their home in suburban Woodland Hills, county coroner's Lt. John Kades said.
An autopsy was performed Monday, but the cause of death wasn't likely to be determined for eight weeks while toxicology tests are done, Kades said.
Young was discovered in his bed at around 10:30 a.m. Saturday by his mother, who attempted to rouse him, the coroner's spokesperson told MTV News. Young was unresponsive, so she called paramedics, who responded to the scene. After their efforts to revive him failed, he was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to the coroner's spokesperson, Young had spent the previous evening with friends. His mother told police that he'd returned home Saturday at around 5:30 a.m., and that she'd heard him in his bedroom. Police said they did not suspect foul play.
Faneros
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Former Blazers Kevin Duckworth dies
Former Blazers Kevin Duckworth dies
Aug 26, 10:42 am EDT
GLENDEN BEACH, OREGON (TICKER) —Kevin Duckworth, a two-time All-Star who played on two Western Conference-winning teams with Porland Trail Blazers, has died. He was 44.
Duckworth died Monday evening in Glenden Beach. The cause of death has not been released.
Duckworth played with the Trail Blazers from 1986-1993 and was a key member of Portland teams which reached the NBA Finals in 1990 and 1992. The gentle 7-footer was affectionately known to Blazers fans as simply “Duck.”
“Today is an extremely sad day for the Trail Blazers team,” Blazers president Larry Miller said. “Kevin will be remembered by fans as one of the most popular and recognizable players to ever were the Blazers uniform, but to people who knew him, he’ll be remembered as one of the warmest biggest-hearted.”
Duckworth, who was named the league’s Most Improved Player in 1988, averaged 11.8 points and 5.8 points during his 11-year career.
Following his player career which ended following the 1997 season, Duckworth remained in the Portland area, where he was an avid fisherman, outdoorsman and skilled carpenter.
“This is a devastating loss,” said Traci Rose, the Blazers vice president of community relations. “To this day, Duck is adored throughout this state and remains a brother to his teammates and to Trail Blazers staff. We will forever miss our beloved 00.”
Former Blazers Kevin Duckworth dies
Aug 26, 10:42 am EDT
GLENDEN BEACH, OREGON (TICKER) —Kevin Duckworth, a two-time All-Star who played on two Western Conference-winning teams with Porland Trail Blazers, has died. He was 44.
Duckworth died Monday evening in Glenden Beach. The cause of death has not been released.
Duckworth played with the Trail Blazers from 1986-1993 and was a key member of Portland teams which reached the NBA Finals in 1990 and 1992. The gentle 7-footer was affectionately known to Blazers fans as simply “Duck.”
“Today is an extremely sad day for the Trail Blazers team,” Blazers president Larry Miller said. “Kevin will be remembered by fans as one of the most popular and recognizable players to ever were the Blazers uniform, but to people who knew him, he’ll be remembered as one of the warmest biggest-hearted.”
Duckworth, who was named the league’s Most Improved Player in 1988, averaged 11.8 points and 5.8 points during his 11-year career.
Following his player career which ended following the 1997 season, Duckworth remained in the Portland area, where he was an avid fisherman, outdoorsman and skilled carpenter.
“This is a devastating loss,” said Traci Rose, the Blazers vice president of community relations. “To this day, Duck is adored throughout this state and remains a brother to his teammates and to Trail Blazers staff. We will forever miss our beloved 00.”
JennyOmanHill
trying hard to be mindful
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David Freeman, '100 Things' Co-Author, Dies at 47
Published: August 26, 2008
NEW YORK -- David Freeman, an ad executive with Grey, Kirshenbaum & Bond and TBWA/Chiat/Day who co-authored "100 Things to Do Before You Die," passed away Sunday, Aug. 17, after falling and hitting his head in his home in Venice, Calif. He was 47 years old.
Mr. Freeman began his career with Cochrane Chase Livingston in Orange County. He moved to New York in 1986 to work with Grey Advertising and later became a part of an award-winning team at K&B.
In 2002, Mr. Freeman moved back to Los Angeles where he joined TBWA/Chiat/Day as the founder and director of The Disruption Consultancy, which represents over two dozen brand names, including Visa, Adidas and Sony PlayStation. He was known for his imaginative approach to business, identifiable in his agency's creed of "disruption" as positive growth.
Outside of the ad realm, Mr. Freeman was an avid traveler, a passion he extended to his co-authorship of the book.
Carisa Bianchi, president of TBWA's Los Angeles office, characterized Mr. Freeman as a "true individual," and someone whose outlook was invaluable, not only to the agency but the industry on the whole. "Dave represented everything we valued about disruption and creative thinking," she said. "He brought a sensibility to the business that got people to look at the world a little differently."
Ms. Bianchi said that plans for an annual in-office memorial are currently under way, and will revolve around Mr. Freeman's book -- a competition of sorts to see which employee can check the most off his list each year.
Mr. Freeman is survived by his father Roy Freeman and his wife Barbara Carr Freeman, his sister Virginia Freeman Robb and her husband, Don, and their son, Owen Clay.
Published: August 26, 2008
NEW YORK -- David Freeman, an ad executive with Grey, Kirshenbaum & Bond and TBWA/Chiat/Day who co-authored "100 Things to Do Before You Die," passed away Sunday, Aug. 17, after falling and hitting his head in his home in Venice, Calif. He was 47 years old.
Mr. Freeman began his career with Cochrane Chase Livingston in Orange County. He moved to New York in 1986 to work with Grey Advertising and later became a part of an award-winning team at K&B.
In 2002, Mr. Freeman moved back to Los Angeles where he joined TBWA/Chiat/Day as the founder and director of The Disruption Consultancy, which represents over two dozen brand names, including Visa, Adidas and Sony PlayStation. He was known for his imaginative approach to business, identifiable in his agency's creed of "disruption" as positive growth.
Outside of the ad realm, Mr. Freeman was an avid traveler, a passion he extended to his co-authorship of the book.
Carisa Bianchi, president of TBWA's Los Angeles office, characterized Mr. Freeman as a "true individual," and someone whose outlook was invaluable, not only to the agency but the industry on the whole. "Dave represented everything we valued about disruption and creative thinking," she said. "He brought a sensibility to the business that got people to look at the world a little differently."
Ms. Bianchi said that plans for an annual in-office memorial are currently under way, and will revolve around Mr. Freeman's book -- a competition of sorts to see which employee can check the most off his list each year.
Mr. Freeman is survived by his father Roy Freeman and his wife Barbara Carr Freeman, his sister Virginia Freeman Robb and her husband, Don, and their son, Owen Clay.
Faneros
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Triathlete dies after bike crash in Santa Barbara
Fri Aug 29, 1:37 AM ET
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - Barbara Warren, one of the world's elite endurance athletes in her age group and one-half of a well-known pair of triathlete twins, has died after breaking her neck in a bike crash at the Santa Barbara Triathlon. She was 65.
Warren, of San Diego, died Tuesday at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital when her family told doctors to take her off a ventilator, her twin sister Angelika Drake told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Warren crashed her bike on a downhill road about halfway through the 34-mile cycling section of the race on Saturday, race director Joe Coito said.
Warren was paralyzed from the neck down and was breathing with the aid of the ventilator. Drake said her sister told the family by blinking and nodding that she wanted to die.
Fri Aug 29, 1:37 AM ET
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - Barbara Warren, one of the world's elite endurance athletes in her age group and one-half of a well-known pair of triathlete twins, has died after breaking her neck in a bike crash at the Santa Barbara Triathlon. She was 65.
Warren, of San Diego, died Tuesday at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital when her family told doctors to take her off a ventilator, her twin sister Angelika Drake told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Warren crashed her bike on a downhill road about halfway through the 34-mile cycling section of the race on Saturday, race director Joe Coito said.
Warren was paralyzed from the neck down and was breathing with the aid of the ventilator. Drake said her sister told the family by blinking and nodding that she wanted to die.
JennyOmanHill
trying hard to be mindful
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- 11,151
Former Formula One Champ Dies
MONTEREY, Calif. (Aug. 28) - Phil Hill, the only American-born Formula One champion, died Thursday of complications from Parkinson's disease. He was 81.
The 1961 Formula Open champion and a three-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winner, Hill died at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, said friend John Lamm, a noted automotive photographer and editor-at-large with Road & Track magazine.
"He raced at a time when racing was extremely dangerous and got through it all without a serious injury," Lamm said. "He had an extraordinary mechanical sense. He was very much in tune with the car."
Hill won the 1961 Formula One title by a point over Wolfgang von Trips, the Ferrari teammate who was killed in the team's final race of the year. Hill won three F1 races, taking the Italian Grand Prix in 1960 and 1961 and the Belgian Grand Prix in 1961.
"I, as well as all employees of Ferrari are extremely saddened by the news of the passing of Phil Hill, a man and a champion who gave so much to Ferrari," Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo said. "Phil and I have always kept in touch throughout the years and I know I will miss his passion and love for Ferrari very much."
Mario Andretti is the only other American F1 champion. He was born in Italy.
After retiring as a driver in 1967, Hill worked as a racing commentator for ABC and a contributing editor for Road & Track magazine, and devoted time to classic cars and auto restoration.
Hill, born in Miami on April 20, 1927, grew up in Santa Monica and attended the University of Southern California.
He's survived by wife Alma, son Derek, daughter Vanessa Rogers, stepdaughter Jennifer Delaney and four grandchildren.
MONTEREY, Calif. (Aug. 28) - Phil Hill, the only American-born Formula One champion, died Thursday of complications from Parkinson's disease. He was 81.
The 1961 Formula Open champion and a three-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winner, Hill died at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, said friend John Lamm, a noted automotive photographer and editor-at-large with Road & Track magazine.
"He raced at a time when racing was extremely dangerous and got through it all without a serious injury," Lamm said. "He had an extraordinary mechanical sense. He was very much in tune with the car."
Hill won the 1961 Formula One title by a point over Wolfgang von Trips, the Ferrari teammate who was killed in the team's final race of the year. Hill won three F1 races, taking the Italian Grand Prix in 1960 and 1961 and the Belgian Grand Prix in 1961.
"I, as well as all employees of Ferrari are extremely saddened by the news of the passing of Phil Hill, a man and a champion who gave so much to Ferrari," Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo said. "Phil and I have always kept in touch throughout the years and I know I will miss his passion and love for Ferrari very much."
Mario Andretti is the only other American F1 champion. He was born in Italy.
After retiring as a driver in 1967, Hill worked as a racing commentator for ABC and a contributing editor for Road & Track magazine, and devoted time to classic cars and auto restoration.
Hill, born in Miami on April 20, 1927, grew up in Santa Monica and attended the University of Southern California.
He's survived by wife Alma, son Derek, daughter Vanessa Rogers, stepdaughter Jennifer Delaney and four grandchildren.
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