Literotica Cemetary

[JennyOmanHill]

T. Scott Cunningham Dies at 47

http://www.theatermania.com/news/images/19764a.jpg

Actor T. Scott Cunningham has died at age 47 in New York City on Saturday, June 20 from pneumonia and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

His Broadway credits included Design for Living, Tartuffe, and Love! Valour! Compassion!. He was also a founding member of the Drama Department and a member of the Vineyard Theatre. His many Off-Broadway credits included The Dear Boy, Wintertime, The Eros Trilogy, The Country Club, Fit to Be Tied, and Pterodayctyls.

His many national and regional credits included At Home at the Zoo, Take Me Out, Twelve Angry Men, Mamma Mia, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In addition, Cunningham's film and television credits included episodes of Central Park West, Cybill, Maximum Bob, and Law & Order.

He is survived by his partner, Harry Bouvy; his parents Judy and Tim Cunningham; and his brother Kevin.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

TV Legend Ed McMahon Dies

Television legend and longtime 'Tonight Show' sidekick Ed McMahon has passed away. He was 86 years old.

McMahon died shortly after midnight at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. His publicist Howard Bragman didn't give a cause of death, but said Ed had a "multitude of health problems the last few months."

In February, Bragman announced that McMahon had been hospitalized for nearly a month with pneumonia and that other medical problems emerged, though little information was given since then. "It's serious. He's an 85-year old man with a number of medical issues going on," Bragman told Reuters at the time.

McMahon's hospitalization followed a difficult year for the veteran TV celebrity, most famous for his nightly "Heeeeeeere's Johnny!" introduction of Carson for 30 years and for his hosting the TV talent show "Star Search."
In addition to his stints on "The Tonight Show" and "Star Search," McMahon became well-known as the presenter of the American Family Publishing sweepstakes and as a pitchman for numerous commercials, most notably for Budweiser beer.

He also served as the longtime co-host of Jerry Lewis' annual Labor Day telethon benefiting the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Aside from his entertainment career, McMahon was a colonel in the United States Marines, serving during the late 1940s and 1950s.

In recent years, McMahon made headlines due to financial troubles, where his bankruptcy and possible home foreclosure led to him getting more work via commercials.

 

[NaughtyLil1]

Doctor rescued from Antarctica in 1999 dies at 57

Nearly a decade after she was rescued from a remote Antarctic research station after diagnosing herself with breast cancer, Dr. Jerri Nielsen died early Tuesday, her brother said. She was 57.

Jerri Nielsen treated herself for breast cancer while stationed at the South Pole in 1999.

Nielsen had been fighting the latest round of cancer for the past five years, brother Eric Cahill said. She died just before 4 a.m. in Massachusetts, surrounded by her family, he said.

Nielsen caught the nation's attention in 1999, when she found a lump in her breast as a 47-year-old physician stationed at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station.

After finding the lump in June, she diagnosed herself with breast cancer and began treating herself using chemotherapy agents that the U.S. Air Force parachuted to the station the next month.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/23/obit.jerri.nielsen/index.html

 

[Igor_1066]

Farrah Fawcett, 1970s sex symbol, dies aged 62
Thu Jun 25, 2009 1:28pm EDT

* Alluring poster made her an icon of '70s U.S. culture

* Chronicled her final days in TV documentary

* Took on serious roles, as well as sexy ones (Adds details throughout)

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES, June 25 (Reuters) - Actress Farrah Fawcett, the "Charlie's Angels" television star whose big smile and feathered blond mane made her one of the reigning sex symbols of the 1970s, died on Thursday after a long battle with cancer. She was 62.

Fawcett, first vaulted to stardom by an alluring poster of her in a red swimsuit, was diagnosed with anal cancer in late 2006. It spread to her liver in 2007, proving resistant to numerous medical treatments in Germany and California.

"After a long and brave battle with cancer, our beloved Farrah has passed away," Fawcett's long time companion, actor Ryan O'Neal, said in a statement.

"Although this is an extremely difficult time for her family and friends, we take comfort in the beautiful times that we shared with Farrah over the years and the knowledge that her life brought joy to so many people around the world."

Fawcett's death in a Los Angeles hospital came just six weeks after the TV broadcast in May of a video diary she made chronicling her battle with cancer and her final months.

Called "Farrah's Story," the documentary was effectively a self-penned obituary by the actress, who was bedridden and had lost her famous hair by the time it was shown.

O'Neal said she had wanted to tell her story on her own terms.

Fawcett's close friend Alana Stewart, ex-wife of rocker Rod Stewart, told Entertainment Tonight after leaving the hospital on Thursday; "I just lost my best friend. Her death was very peaceful."

Fawcett, born Feb. 2, 1947, in Corpus Christi, Texas, was an art student in college before she began modeling, appearing in shampoo ads.

She started guest-starring on TV in the late 1960s and appeared on the television hit "The Six Million Dollar Man" after marrying the show's star, Lee Majors, in 1974. The couple divorced in the early 1980s.

ANGEL CULTURE

Fawcett's career took off thanks to a poster of her posing flirtatiously with a brilliant smile in a red one-piece bathing suit. It sold millions of copies and led to her being cast in 1976 in "Charlie's Angels," an action show about three beautiful, strong women private detectives.

As the tanned and glamorous Jill Munroe -- part of a trio that included Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson -- Fawcett was the hit show's most talked-about star. She left "Charlie's Angels" after only one season but lawsuit settlements brought her back to guest-star in subsequent years.

Fawcett's face appeared on T-shirts, posters and dolls. She came to epitomize the glamorous California lifestyle and inspired a worldwide craze for blown-out, feathered-back hair.

The New York Times once described that hair as "a work of art ... emblematic of women in the first stage of liberation -- strong, confident and joyous."

"Her hair needed its own phone line," "Charlie's Angels" co-star Smith recalled later.

In late 2008, Fawcett shaved her own hair when it began falling out because of her cancer treatments.

SERIOUS ROLES

While Fawcett's early career was marked by lightweight roles, the actress sought to play down her sex symbol image in more challenging dramas in the '80s.

She earned critical acclaim for her performance as a battered wife in 1984's "The Burning Bed," for which she received the first of three Emmy nominations.

The off-Broadway play and subsequent film "Extremities," in which Fawcett played a woman who takes revenge on a would-be attacker, earned one of her six Golden Globe nominations.

Fawcett posed for Playboy magazine in 1995, the same year she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

She had one son, Redmond, with O'Neal. Redmond O'Neal, now 24, was arrested on several occasions in 2008 and 2009 for heroin and methamphetamine offenses leading to time in jail.

In the last few years, Fawcett appeared frequently on entertainment TV, where she shared details of her battle with cancer.

But she was outraged when news of her deteriorating condition was leaked to tabloid newspapers. A Los Angeles hospital employee was charged in 2008 with stealing and selling Fawcett's medical records, leading to a new California law imposing tighter controls on medical files and stiffer penalties for privacy breaches.

(Additional reporting by Alexandria Sage, Editing by Frances Kerry)

http://www.reuters.com/article/mediaNews/idUSN2550881320090625?sp=true

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Shock and Grief Over Jackson’s Death

Michael Jackson’s brand of pop knew no borders and needed no translation, linking listeners around the world through the accessible corridors of rhythm, beat and dance. And as reaction to his sudden death began to pour in Friday, its extent underscored how far his influence had spread.

From Sydney to Hong Kong, China to Los Angeles, fans, officials and fellow entertainers spoke of their shock and sadness. His music echoed from cafes and car speakers, and everyone from national leaders on down seemed to weigh in.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela called the star’s death “lamentable news,” though he criticized the media for giving it so much attention. The former president of South Korea Kim Dae-jung, who had met Mr. Jackson, said: “We lost a hero of the world.”

In Paris, fans held a ceremony in his honor in front of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame Friday night and planned a memorial moonwalk at the Eiffel Tower for Sunday.

Huge crowds gathered in the shadow of Notre-Dame, linking hands and chanting Mr. Jackson’s name, cheering and sometimes breaking into song. Some held flags adorned with images of Mr. Jackson, and others held up signs.

Fans lighted candles at an spontaneous gathering in Hong Kong, while in the Philippines, a dance tribute was planned for a prison in Cebu, where Byron Garcia, a security consultant, had 1,500 inmates join in a synchronized dance to the “Thriller” video.

The former Philippine first lady, Imelda Marcos, said she cried on hearing the news.

“Michael Jackson enriched our lives, made us happy,” she said in a statement. “The accusations, the persecution caused him so much financial and mental anguish. He was vindicated in court, but the battle took his life. There is probably a lesson here for all of us.”

Quincy Jones, who worked closely with Mr. Jackson on some of his most successful recordings, led tributes from the music world.

“I am absolutely devastated at this tragic and unexpected news,” he said of one of the first black entertainers of the MTV generation to gain a big crossover following.

Paul McCartney told Reuters: “It’s so sad and shocking. I feel privileged to have hung out and worked with Michael. He was a massively talented boy man with a gentle soul. His music will be remembered forever.”

The film directors Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg also paid tribute. Mr. Scorsese told MTV.com: “Michael Jackson was extraordinary. When we worked together on ‘Bad,’ I was in awe of his absolute mastery of movement on the one hand, and of the music on the other. Every step he took was absolutely precise and fluid at the same time. It was like watching quicksilver in motion.

“He was wonderful to work with, an absolute professional at all times, and — it really goes without saying — a true artist. It will be a while before I can get used to the idea that he’s no longer with us.”

Mr. Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly: “Just as there will never be another Fred Astaire or Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley, there will never be anyone comparable to Michael Jackson. His talent, his wonderment and his mystery make him legend.”

The singer Celine Dion said in a statement, “I am shocked. I am overwhelmed by this tragedy. Michael Jackson has been an idol for me all my life.”

Mr. Jackson had been scheduled to begin a comeback tour in London next month, and fans there gathered to mourn. Ben Bradshaw, the British culture secretary, issued a statement to announce his grief in which he said he was “a long-time fan of Michael Jackson and had “Billie Jean” played as the first dance at his civil partnership,” The Guardian reported.

Fans in London danced and sang to Mr. Jackson’s greatest hits Friday night. At Glastonbury, where hundreds were camping in the fields for the annual rock festival in the southwest of England, the news of Mr. Jackson’s death spread quickly and people began sporadically playing his songs at food stalls and in tents. Some bands played tributes to the singer.

The producers and cast of “Thriller — Live,” a tribute show about Mr. Jackson’s life currently in London’s West End, said they had decided to go ahead with Friday’s performance.

In Italy, Friday’s papers carried front-page tributes to the “King of Pop.” La Repubblica called the trajectory of Mr. Jackson’s life “a fairy tale that turned into a nightmare.” Readers sent in notes of thanks, grief and disbelief to the Web site of the newspaper Corriere della Sera.

 

[Burcham]

Ed, Michael and Farah

 

[semen4her]

Ed, Michael and Farah

Don't forget about the world war II vet.

If it wasn't for him there would have been no MJ.

 

[Sonny Limatina]

Don't forget about the world war II vet.

If it wasn't for him there would have been no MJ.

He's not dead yet, you disrespectful scumbag.

Wait...



Ok, now he is. Go on.

 

[Igor_1066]

Another One Down At 50

"une 28, 2009
Billy Mays, TV Pitchman, Dies at 50
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:40 p.m. ET

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Billy Mays, the burly, bearded television pitchman whose boisterous hawking of products such as Orange Glo and OxiClean made him a pop-culture icon, has died. He was 50.

Tampa police said Mays was found unresponsive by his wife Sunday morning. A fire rescue crew pronounced him dead at 7:45 a.m. It was not immediately clear how he died. He reportedly was hit on the head when an airplane he was on made a rough landing Saturday, and Mays' wife told investigators the TV personality didn't feel well before he went to bed that night.

There were no signs of a break-in at the home, and investigators do not suspect foul play, said Lt. Brian Dugan of the Tampa Police Department, who wouldn't answer any more questions about how Mays' body was found because of the ongoing investigation. The coroner's office expects to have an autopsy done by Monday afternoon.

Mays' wife, Deborah Mays, told investigators that her husband had complained he didn't feel well before he went to bed some time after 10 p.m. Saturday night, Tampa police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said.

''Although Billy lived a public life, we don't anticipate making any public statements over the next couple of days,'' Deborah Mays said in a statement Sunday. ''Our family asks that you respect our privacy during these difficult times.''

U.S. Airways confirmed Sunday that Mays was among the passengers on a flight that made a rough landing on Saturday afternoon at Tampa International Airport, leaving debris on the runway after apparently blowing its front tires.

Tampa Bay's Fox television affiliate interviewed Mays after the incident.

''All of a sudden as we hit you know it was just the hardest hit, all the things from the ceiling started dropping,'' MyFox Tampa Bay quoted him as saying. ''It hit me on the head, but I got a hard head.''

McElroy said linking Mays' death to the rough landing Saturday afternoon would ''purely be speculation.'' She said Mays' family members didn't report any health issues with the pitchman, but they said he was due to have hip replacement surgery in the coming weeks.

Born William Mays in McKees Rocks, Pa., on July 20, 1958, Mays developed his style demonstrating knives, mops and other ''as seen on TV'' gadgets on Atlantic City's boardwalk. For years he worked as a hired gun on the state fair and home show circuits, attracting crowds with his booming voice and genial manner.

After meeting Orange Glo International founder Max Appel at a home show in Pittsburgh in the mid-1990s, Mays was recruited to demonstrate the environmentally friendly line of cleaning products on the St. Petersburg-based Home Shopping Network.

Commercials and informercials followed, anchored by the high-energy Mays showing how it's done while tossing out kitschy phrases like, ''Long live your laundry!''

Recently he's been seen on commercials for a wide variety of products and is featured on the reality TV show ''Pitchmen'' on the Discovery Channel, which follows Mays and Anthony Sullivan in their marketing jobs. He's also been seen in ESPN ads.

His ubiquitousness and thumbs-up, in-your-face pitches won Mays plenty of fans. People line up at his personal appearances for autographed color glossies, and strangers stop him in airports to chat about the products.

''I enjoy what I do,'' Mays told The Associated Press in a 2002 interview. ''I think it shows.''

Mays liked to tell the story of giving bottles of OxiClean to the 300 guests at his wedding, and doing his ad spiel (''powered by the air we breathe!'') on the dance floor at the reception. Visitors to his house typically got bottles of cleaner and housekeeping tips.

As part of ''Pitchmen,'' Mays and Sullivan showed viewers new gadgets such as the Impact Gel shoe insert; the Tool Band-it, a magnetized armband that holds tools; and the Soft Buns portable seat cushion.

''One of the things that we hope to do with 'Pitchmen' is to give people an appreciation of what we do,'' Mays told The Tampa Tribune in an interview in April. ''I don't take on a product unless I believe in it. I use everything that I sell.''

Discovery Channel spokeswoman Elizabeth Hillman released a statement Sunday extending sympathy to the Mays family.

''Everyone that knows him was aware of his larger-than-life personality, generosity and warmth,'' Hillman's statement said. ''Billy was a pioneer in his field and helped many people fulfill their dreams. He will be greatly missed as a loyal and compassionate friend.''

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press "

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/200...tml?_r=1&src=twt&twt=nytimes&pagewanted=print

 

[Igor_1066]

Gale Storm Gone

"From the Los Angeles Times

Gale Storm dies at 87; star of '50s sitcoms

The actress came to Hollywood as a finalist in a national talent
contest, then appeared in numerous movies before starring on TV in the
popular 'My Little Margie' and 'The Gale Storm Show.'

By Dennis McLellan

3:20 PM PDT, June 28, 2009

Gale Storm, a Texas native who landed in Hollywood after winning a
national talent search and later shot to the top on television as the
vivacious star of two popular 1950s situation comedies, "My Little
Margie" and "The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna," has died. She was 87.

Storm, who also had a successful recording career during her TV
heyday, died Saturday of natural causes at a convalescent hospital in
the Northern California community of Danville, according to her son
Peter Bonnell.

A summer replacement for "I Love Lucy," "My Little Margie" ran from
1952 to 1955, with Storm starring as the plucky young Margie Albright
and Charles Farrell as her handsome widower father, Vern, who shared
his Fifth Avenue apartment with her.

Although critics generally panned "My Little Margie" as a lightweight
farce, the public fell in love with the mischievous Margie. A 1953
poll of the most popular TV stars listed Storm at No. 2, behind TV
comedy queen Lucille Ball.

After "My Little Margie" ended, Storm starred in "The Gale Storm Show:
Oh! Susanna," in which she played social director Susanna Pomeroy
aboard the luxury liner the SS Ocean Queen. The situation comedy,
featuring Zasu Pitts as the ship's flighty beautician Elvira "Nugey"
Nugent and Roy Roberts as Capt. Huxley, ran from 1956 to 1960.

Storm was a pert and pretty 17-year-old Houston, Texas, high school
senior named Josephine Cottle when she arrived in Hollywood in late
1939 as a finalist in the nationwide "Gateway to Hollywood" talent
contest.

Born on April 5, 1922, in Bloomington, Texas, the auburn-haired Storm
was the youngest of five children whose father died when she was a
year old.

She had played the leads in numerous plays and musicals in school, but
two of her teachers had to push her to enter the "Gateway"
competition.

The winning actor and actress were promised contracts with RKO Studios
and guaranteed a role in a major motion picture. And, as Hollywood
tradition dictated, they would be given new, marquee-suitable names.

During the elimination period in Hollywood, the male and female
finalists acted in scenes broadcast live on Sundays over CBS Radio,
with the home audience spurred to tune in again the following week to
find out:

"Who will be Terry Belmont?"

"Who will be Gale Storm?"

Recalling her win in a Los Angeles Times interview nearly 50 years
later, Storm flashed her trademark dazzling smile and said, "At the
time, I was so impressed, I didn't even see the humor in the name Gale
Storm. It was so exciting and so thrilling. It's like a Cinderella
story."

If young Josephine Cottle was Cinderella, her Prince Charming was her
male co-winner, the newly christened Terry Belmont: Lee Bonnell, a
handsome Indiana University drama student from South Bend, Ind.

In 1941, Storm married Bonnell, who became an insurance executive
after a short-lived film career. Their marriage lasted until Bonnell's
death in 1986 and produced three sons and a daughter: Phillip, Peter,
Paul and Susie.

Beginning with "Tom Brown's School Days" in 1940, Storm appeared in 36
movies over the next dozen years. Dropped by RKO after six months and
two pictures, she appeared in a variety of B-movies at Republic,
Monogram, Allied Artists and Universal.

Among her film credits, which included musical comedies, film noir
dramas and westerns (three with Roy Rogers), are starring roles in
films such as "Freckles Comes Home," "Where Are Your Children?,"
"Campus Rhythm," "G.I. Honeymoon," "Sunbonnet Sue," "Swing Parade of
1946," and "It Happened on 5th Avenue."

But by the early '50s, her movie career was in a slump and she was
resigned to devoting full time to her family when she received a call
from producer Hal Roach Jr., who wanted her for the lead in a proposed
TV series, "My Little Margie."

"Without television, I would still be Gale Storm, housewife and
sometimes bit player," Storm told The Times in 1953.

Her success with "My Little Margie" on television -- and a radio
version with original episodes -- led to her being approached to do a
nightclub act in Las Vegas during the summers of 1953 and 1954. Storm,
who had spent five years studying voice, also sang on numerous TV
variety shows.

After hearing Storm sing on one live TV show, Dot Records president
Randy Wood immediately signed her to his label.

Her first record, the rhythm and blues song "I Hear You Knocking,"
soared to No. 2 on the Billboard chart in 1955. Other Top 20 hits
followed, including "Teenage Prayer," "Memories Are Made of This,"
"Why Do Fools Fall in Love?," "Ivory Tower" and "Dark Moon."

Storm, who received three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
recognizing her work in TV, radio and recording, saw her career
decline dramatically after her second series ended in 1960.

She kept busy with summer stock and dinner theater, starring in
productions such as "Forty Carats," "The Unsinkable Molly Brown,"
"South Pacific," "Finian's Rainbow," "Cactus Flower" and "Plaza
Suite."

"My whole life has been a pattern of success," Storm told The Times in
1981. "So many marvelous things that I would never even have dreamt of
wishing for [have] happened to me."

But there also was an unexpectedly dramatic downside.

In 1980, she returned to the limelight as the commercial spokeswoman
for Raleigh Hills Hospital, the now-defunct alcohol treatment chain
where she had been treated for a serious bout with alcoholism.

Alcoholism, she told The Times in 1988, "is a disease of denial. I had
been the kind of alcoholic -- as so many women are -- that I was so
careful. You talk about a secret drinker."

Professionally, she said, she never took a drink before a performance,
and even socially, if everyone had only a drink or two, so would she.
She could do that, she said, because "I'd fortify myself before I went
out and I'd compensate afterward, as well.

"With me, once it [alcohol] got hold of me, I could go just so many
hours without my body craving and demanding."

She had been in and out of a number of hospitals before she heard of
Raleigh Hills. In 1979, she underwent detoxification at the Raleigh
Hills Hospital in Oxnard, followed by its aversion therapy and
counseling program. Afterward, she said, she never craved alcohol
again.

"It was just like God turned it off. That was it! And it was heaven,"
said Storm, who chronicled her struggle with alcoholism in her 1981
autobiography, "I Ain't Down Yet."

Storm also credited her faith in God for helping her achieve sobriety.

"The spiritual part of my life is the most important," she said.
"That's the source of my strength."

Through it all, she said, her husband offered his support. "It was
absolutely a great marriage," she said.

In 1988, two years after Bonnell's death, Storm married retired ABC
executive Paul Masterson, a widower whom she met through a mutual
friend. They were wed in South Shores Baptist Church in Laguna Niguel,
where Storm sang in the choir. Masterson died in 1996.

In addition to her son Peter, she is survived by sons Phillip and Paul
and a daughter, Susanna Harrigan. She is also survived by eight
grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Services are pending. "

--

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-gale-storm29-2009jun29,0,7502329.story

 

[Igor_1066]

"From the Los Angeles Times
Fred Travalena dies at 66; master impressionist and singer
'The Man of a Thousand Faces' could voice Bugs Bunny as well as Luciano Pavarotti. Travalena, a Vegas performer, talk-show regular and star of his own specials, died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
By Dennis McLellan

10:04 AM PDT, June 29, 2009

Fred Travalena, the master impressionist and singer whose broad repertoire of voices ranged from Jack Nicholson to Sammy Davis Jr. to Bugs Bunny, has died. He was 66.

Travalena, who began being treated for an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2002 and saw the disease return last July after going into remission in 2003, died Sunday at his home in Encino, according to his publicist, Roger Neal. Travalena also was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2003 but had been in complete remission since then.

Dubbed "The Man of a Thousand Faces" and "Mr. Everybody," Travalena emerged on the national stage as an impressionist in the early 1970s.

Over the next three decades, he was a headliner in Las Vegas, Reno and Atlantic City, performed in concerts around the country, appeared on "The Tonight Show" and other talk shows and starred in his own specials, such as "The Many Faces of Fred Travalena" and "Comedy in the Oval Office."

The boyish-faced entertainer is said to have had a repertoire of more than 360 celebrity, political and cartoon-character voices, including Clint Eastwood, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Johnny Mathis, Bruce Springsteen and Luciano Pavarotti.

"I've known impressionists who have reached a wall where they can't do any more [voices]," Travalena told the Omaha World Herald in 1996. "I don't have that problem, thank God."

In one part of his act, Travalena physically and vocally "morphed" into all of the U.S. presidents, from John F. Kennedy up to George W. Bush.

He also was known to sing "Have I Told You Lately" in various voices, including Kermit the Frog ("Have I told you lately that I love you"), Katharine Hepburn ("Have I told you there's no one else above you") and Frank Sinatra ("You fill my heart with gladness . . . ")

The imaginative entertainer even did Sinatra imitating Boy George.

Of Italian and Irish heritage, Travalena was born Oct. 6, 1942, in the Bronx, N.Y., and grew up on Long Island.

When it came to impressions, he had an early role model: his father, a onetime entertainer who sang and performed comedy and impressions.

"He got me doing church shows when I was just a little kid," Travalena recalled in a 1998 interview on "The Crier Report" on Fox News Network. "I used to do an impression of [singer] Johnny Ray."

In school, he said, he learned to deal with bullies by imitating a Martian voice or Porky Pig. And he found he could deflect a teacher's question of why he didn't do his homework by making her laugh with his impression of Crazy Guggenheim, the goofy character played on TV by Frank Fontaine during Jackie Gleason's "Joe the Bartender" sketches.

During a stint in the Army's Special Services, Travalena won the All-Army Entertainment Award for best singer and once impersonated President Lyndon Johnson's voice on the base theater's answering machine to announce the movies and show times.

Although he told the New York Times in 1989 that he was "headed for the commercial art field," Travalena said: "That wasn't getting me up in the morning, and I couldn't get show business out of my mind."

At one point after launching his career as a singer, he and his singer wife, Lois, were performing together at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C.

As recounted in a 1989 New York Times story, Lois surprised her husband by spontaneously asking the audience, "How'd you like to hear Fred do impressions?"

He went on to impersonate Dean Martin, Paul Lynde, Jim Nabors and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

"People liked it," he later said.

Travalena reportedly was performing at a resort hotel in the Catskills when impressionist Rich Little was in the audience. After the show, Little congratulated Travalena and later recommended him for a spot in British celebrity journalist David Frost's show at the Riviera in Las Vegas.

Travalena joined Little, Frank Gorshin and other impressionists as a regular on the "ABC Comedy Hour," the 1972 comedy-variety show, which was known in reruns as the "ABC Comedy Hour Presents the Kopycats."

In 1974, he opened for Shirley MacLaine at the old MGM Grand and later opened for other Vegas performers such as Mathis, Davis, Wayne Newton and Andy Williams.

Travalena's talent for vocal mimicry led to a side career dubbing offensive dialogue in feature films bound for airing on television -- including Pesci in "Casino," De Niro in "Brazil" and Sean Connery in "Just Cause."

Travalena made occasional guest appearances on TV series such as "The Love Boat" and "Murphy Brown," as well as on "Hollywood Squares" and other game shows. He also did voices on a number of TV cartoon series and appeared in the 1978 movie "The Buddy Holly Story."

In more recent years, he turned to songwriting and singing and released CDs including "We All Need Love Today" and "The Spirit of America."

For a man of so many voices, re-finding his own voice as a singer was something of a challenge.

"That really scared me for awhile," he told the Reno Gazette-Journal in 1999. "I'd wanted to expand into singing, and two years ago I told my drummer to book a studio. The night before the session, I was ready to cancel.

"I asked myself, 'Who is Fred Travalena? Where is that 19-year-old kid who was a singer? What is my sound?' I just had to get used to it."

Travalena received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005.

He is survived by his wife of 39 years, Lois; sons Fred IV and Corey; and a granddaughter, Sophia.

Funeral services will be private

A public memorial service is being planned.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com




Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times"

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-fred-travalena30-2009jun30,0,3185079,print.story

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Managua Mayor Arguello, ex-boxing champ, dies

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — Managua Mayor Alexis Arguello, a three-time world boxing champion, was found dead at his home Wednesday, his Sandinista Party's Radio Ya said.

Radio Ya said coroners were conducting an autopsy on the 57-year-old mayor to determine the cause of death, but it appeared to be a suicide. The La Prensa newspaper reported he was found with a gunshot wound to the chest.

The Hall of Fame boxer was the top fighter of the 20th century in his weight class, according to a panel of experts assembled by The Associated Press in 1999.

The death of Arguello prompted President Daniel Ortega to announced he was canceling a trip to Panama for the inauguration of President-elect Ricardo Martinelli.

Arguello fought against the Sandinista government in the 1980s after it seized his property and bank account, according to the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

But he joined the party to win the mayorship of the capital in 2008, though opponents alleged the vote was fraudulent.

"We are upset," said presidential spokeswoman, Rosario Murillo, who declined to give details about the death. "This is a heartbreaking announcement. He was the champion of the poor, an example of forgiveness and reconciliation."

Born in 1952, the Hall of Fame boxer fought 14 world champions and in 1981 he became the sixth man in boxing history to win a title in three weight divisions — featherweight, super featherweight and lightweight — according to the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Arguello returned Sunday from Puerto Rico where he honored the late baseball Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

The Ventures' guitarist Bob Bogle dies

http://oldschoolmusiclover.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/bob-bogle.jpg

The Ventures' lead guitarist, Bob Bogle, died on Sunday, June 13, in Tacoma, Washington. He was 75.

The co-founder of the American instrumental rock band, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, was reportedly struck ill suddenly.

During their lengthy career, The Ventures sold more than 100 million albums worldwide. They are credited with heavily influencing the surf music genre, and were known as "The Band that Launched a Thousand Bands".

One of their biggest hits was the theme from popular television series 'Hawaii Five-O'. They also hit Number Two on the US Billboard chart in 1960 with 'Walk, Don't Run'.

Bogle, a former masonry worker, co-founded The Ventures with Don Wilson in 1958 in their native Tacoma.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Fayette Pinkney, of the 3 Degrees

http://www.soulfuldetroit.com/archives/6593/6205.jpg

On Saturday, Miss Pinkney, 61, of Lansdale, died of acute respiratory failure at Lansdale Hospital.

In a statement, Philadelphia International Records founders Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff said Miss Pinkney and the Three Degrees "were our Philly sound version of Motown's Supremes - but bigger and stronger and melodic."

"She had a very strong and soulful voice," they said. "She was part of the original vocals for the hit song we recorded with her and the Three Degrees called 'When Will I See You Again.' . . . She will truly be missed by all of us as a member of one the world's greatest soulful female groups."

Her brother, Nathaniel, said she had a far longer career out of the spotlight.

After leaving the group, Miss Pinkney was a project coordinator for Opportunities Industrialization Center in North Philadelphia from 1979 to 1983.

In 1984, he said, she earned a master's degree in human services, which required no undergraduate degree, from Lincoln University.

After working as a personnel coordinator, Miss Pinkney was at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania from 1989 to 1994, first as an administrative assistant, then an education coordinator.

Most recently, her brother said, she was an intake counselor for United Healthcare Services in Philadelphia, from 2001 to last month.

Besides her brother, Miss Pinkney is survived by nephew Milford Pinkney and niece Michele Pinkney.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Actor Karl Malden dies at 97

http://imgcache.allposters.com/images/MMPH/266082.jpg

Karl Malden, an Oscar- and Emmy-winning actor perhaps best remembered for his role as Detective Lt. Mike Stone on the '70s TV series The Streets of San Francisco, has died of natural causes. He was 97.

Born Mladen Sekulovich, the former steel-mill worker and World War II vet with an average-Joe mug (and bulbous nose) emerged in the 1950s in a number of notable film performances.

He won an Oscar for his portrayal of Blanche's earnest suitor Mitch in the 1951 adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (he'd previously played the part on Broadway), and received another nod for his role as streetwise Father Barry in 1954's On The Waterfront. He followed with turns in Baby Doll (1956), How the West Was Won (1962), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), and Patton (1970), among many others.

In 1972, Malden successfully switched mediums with a full-time gig on the ABC drama The Streets of San Francisco. As Lt. Stone, the gruff, widowed homicide detective who was partnered with Michael Douglas' Inspector Keller, he nabbed four Emmy nominations.

Audiences also got to know him during commercial breaks: In the '70s and '80s, he starred in ads for American Express Travelers Cheques, uttering the famous line: "Don't leave home without them." Malden, who claimed an Emmy in 1984 for the TV movie Fatal Vision, also served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1989 to 1992; he last appeared on screen in a 2000 episode of The West Wing.

In his personal life, Malden was married to actress Mona Graham for more than 70 years, which stands as one of Hollywood's longest marriages.

 

[Igor_1066]

"California-born Broadway star Harve Presnell dies
July 1, 2:27 PM · Jana J. Monji - LA Theater Reviews Examiner


Harve Presnell might not be as well known as Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett, but in 1960, he created the role of Johnny Leadville Brown in the musical "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," opposite Tammy Grimes (who won a Tony) and went on to star opposite Debbie Reynolds in the 1964 movie version. He was 75.

The Richard Morris (book) and Meredith Wilson (music and lyrics) musical ran from November 1960 to February 1962 for a total of 532 performances according to the Internet Broadway Database. He would return to Broadway in the 1970s as a replacement in the musical "Annie" as Oliver Warbucks.

Born in Modesto, California on September 14, 1933, Presnell had operatic training. Besides Daddy Warbucks and Brown, he played Rhett Butler in the musical "Scarlett" on the West End.

Presnell wasn't in the original Broadway cast of the 1951 Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical "Paint Your Wagon," but when it was made into a film with Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin in 1969, he sang "They Call the Wind Maria." "On film, he was played William H. Macy's father-in-law in the 1996 "Fargo," and General George C. Marshall in Steven Spielberg's 1998 "Saving Private Ryan."

On TV, he was in the 1996-2000 series "The Pretender" as Mr. Parker, in the 1993-1997 "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" as Sam Lane (five episodes), and the 1998-2003 "Dawson's Creek" as Arthur "A.I." Brooks. He was also one of the stars of the short-lived 2007 "Andy Barker, P.I." series. He made appearances on "Monk" and "ER" and other TV series.

Presnell had a beautiful baritone voice and warm and winning presence. It's a shame we don't have more footage of him in musicals. In 1965, he won a Golden Globe award together with George Segal and Topol as the most promising newcomers. Presnell arrived when the so-called Golden Age of Musicals was over, but was a popular character actor."


http://www.examiner.com/x-3896-LA-T...liforniaborn-Broadway-star-Harve-Presnel-dies

 

[Igor_1066]

"UK comedy actress Mollie Sugden dies at 86
Thu Jul 2, 2009 5:49am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - British actress Mollie Sugden, best-known for her role as Mrs Slocombe in the television comedy series "Are You Being Served?," has died at the age of 86.

Her agent Joan Reddin told newspapers Sugden died on Wednesday after a long illness. "She was a lovely, lovely person. She was a great professional," Reddin said.

With her hair highly coiffed and referring frequently to her "pussy," Sugden played the bossy Mrs Slocombe throughout the run of the BBC's innuendo-laden Are You Being Served? between 1972 and 1985.

Re-runs of the show in the United States in the 1990s gained her a new audience overseas.

"She was great fun, a very good actress, very versatile. She could play serious stuff and comedy," said Frank Thornton, who played opposite Sugden in the series as the stuffy floorwalker Captain Peacock.

"It was a very happy show to work on -- you can't play comedy with people you dislike," he told BBC television.

Mark Freeland, head of BBC comedy, said she was one of television's iconic funny women.

"Her daftly enormous purple rinse and never-to-be-forgotten catchphrase are the stuff of comedy legend," he said.

Sugden had also found success in the BBC TV comedy series "The Liver Birds" and played an occasional role as pub landlady Nellie Harvey in the long-running ITV soap opera "Coronation Street."

(Reporting by Tim Castle; Editing by Steve Addison)"

http://www.reuters.com/article/peopleNews/idUSTRE5611LD20090702

 

[Jagged]

Mollie Sugden

Are You Being Served? Was such a funny show, and despite being done in the 1970's and 80's it is timeless. Mollie Sugden Was a very funny lady in the series. If you have the chance watch your local PBS station and you will probably see her and the rest of the crew, and you will laugh. I could say a lot of complementary things, but I say what they say in the theater.....Thank you for the evening. Right now I'm sure she is having a few good laughs with John Iman another actor from the series who passed in 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_Being_Served?

 

[JennyOmanHill]

McNair Shot and Killed

Former Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens quarterback Steve McNair was shot and killed in Nashville, police have confirmed.

McNair, 36, and an unidentified woman were found dead in a condominium complex, a Nashville police spokesman told reporters at a news briefing near the property.

Investigators did not yet know the circumstances of the shooting, spokesman Don Aaron said.

"At this point, we don't know the circumstances of these shooting deaths," Aaron said. "The investigation is going to be conducted by the police department's centralized homicide unit. Those detectives have assembled here at the scene. The condominium still has to be processed. There is a lot of work yet to be done. It's going to take many hours to process the scene. I don't have any answers for you now as to what's happened, who's responsible, what the circumstances are."

Aaron said that police had tentatively identified the woman but did not release her name, pending confirmation of that identification and notification of her family.

No one had been arrested for the shooting, said Aaron, who indicated that investigators were questioning visitors to the condo complex to see if they had any information.

"We are saddened and shocked to hear the news of Steve McNair's passing today," Titans owner Bud Adams said in a written statement released by the team. "He was one of the finest players to play for our organization and one of the most beloved players by our fans. He played with unquestioned heart and leadership and led us to places that we had never reached, including our only Super Bowl. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family as they deal with his untimely passing."

McNair played 13 NFL seasons, the first 11 for the Houston Oilers and Titans franchise and the final two for the Ravens.

He threw for 31,304 career yards and 174 touchdowns, and was the NFL's co-most valuable player with Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning in the 2003 season. McNair was a three-time Pro Bowl selection and led the Titans to a Super Bowl appearance in the 1999 season. They lost to the St. Louis Rams, falling one yard shy of a tying touchdown on McNair's last-second completion to wide receiver Kevin Dyson.

"There was nobody who didn't like Steve McNair," former Ravens offensive coordinator Jim Fassel said today. "He was probably one of the most easy-going guys I've ever been around.

McNair was plagued by injuries throughout his career and retired after playing in six games for the Ravens in the 2007 season.

McNair was known as "Air McNair" for his prolific passing as a young player who made his mark in the NFL after playing in college at Alcorn State. By the end of his NFL career, he was known more for his toughness as a player. Wide receiver Derrick Mason, who played with McNair with both the Titans and Ravens, said in a televised interview today that McNair should be remembered as the toughest quarterback of his time.

"I saw countless times, going into the training room on Monday and seeing him on the table and seeing ice everywhere and trainers working on him, just to try to get him back for next Sunday," Mason told ESPN. "And he would be that way for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, sometimes even Thursday. And then on Friday he'd do a little [in practice], but still be able to go out there Sunday and play as if he wasn't hurt. It amazed me to see somebody, especially at that position, to be so tough and to play through all that he went through, with the injuries."

Ravens General Manager Ozzie Newsome said in a written statement: "This is so, so sad. We immediately think of his family, his boys. They are all in our thoughts and prayers. What we admired most about Steve when we played against him was his competitive spirit, and we were lucky enough to have that with us for two years. He is one of the best players in the NFL over the last 20 years.... He was a great player, one of the toughest of competitors, and a tremendous teammate, who was a leader on the field and in the locker room, especially to the young players."

The Ravens indicated they were working on a statement by linebacker Ray Lewis but Lewis was highly upset by the news.

According to a biography on his foundation's website, McNair had homes in both Nashville and his native Mt. Olive, Miss.

McNair had opened a new restaurant in Nashville in June, located near Tennessee State University.

According to McNair's biography on his foundation's website, McNair was married in 1997 and had four sons. The police indicated that the woman found dead with McNair was not his wife, Mechelle.

 

[Igor_1066]

"Robert McNamara, Architect of Vietnam War, Dies at 93

By Thomas W. Lippman
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, July 6, 2009 9:07 AM


Robert Strange McNamara, the former secretary of defense whose record as a leading executive of industry and a chieftain of foreign financial aid was all but erased from public memory by his reputation as the primary architect of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, died early this morning at age 93.

Family members said McNamara died at his home in Northwest Washington. They did not give a cause of death.

McNamara was secretary of defense during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. In that capacity he directed a U.S. military buildup in Southeast Asia during the critical early years of a Vietnamese conflict that escalated into one of the most divisive and bitter wars in U.S. history. When the war was over, 58,000 Americans were dead and the national social fabric had been torn asunder.

Before taking office as secretary of defense in 1961, McNamara was president of Ford Motor Co. For 13 years after he left the Pentagon in 1968, he was president of the World Bank. He was a brilliant student, a compulsive worker and a skillful planner and organizer, whose manifest talents carried him from modest circumstances in California to the highest levels of the Washington power structure. He was said to have built a record of achievement and dedication in business, government and public service that few of his generation could match.

After his retirement from the bank in 1981, he maintained an exhausting schedule as director or consultant to scores of public and private organizations and was a virtual one-man think tank on nuclear arms issues.

But more than 40 years after the fact, he was remembered almost exclusively for his orchestration of U.S. prosecution of the war in Vietnam, a failed effort by the world's greatest superpower to prevent a communist takeover of a weak and corrupt ally. For his role in the war, McNamara was vilified by harsh and unforgiving critics, and his entire record was unalterably clouded. For the rest of his life, he would be haunted by the Vietnam ghosts.

From the day in 1961 when he burst upon the Washington scene as a political unknown selected by Kennedy to be secretary of defense, McNamara's trim figure, slicked-back hair and rimless glasses made him instantly recognizable, a Washington monument whose interests covered everything from nuclear war to the fiscal health of local governments.

At the Pentagon, he reorganized the military bureaucracy, built up the country's nuclear arsenal, and instigated a massive campaign to end racial discrimination in off-base housing. At the World Bank, he was often described as "the conscience of the West," for his relentless efforts to persuade the industrialized world to commit more capital to improving life in the have-not nations. In retirement, he avoided celebrity-for-hire appearances on the lecture circuit and the television talk shows, devoting his time and talent instead to improvement of education, government and health in this country and abroad and writing when he thought he had something to say.

He served as secretary of defense longer than anyone else, and in that role he was a key figure in such major crises as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile confrontation with the Soviet Union. He changed the balance of nuclear forces in the world with the development of the multiple-warhead missile.

But his reputation foundered in Vietnam, a then-little-known country halfway around the world. Many Americans held him largely responsible for the futile and humiliating military adventure there--a responsibility he accepted in a controversial 1995 memoir of the war.

It was "McNamara's war," matching his technology, statistics, weaponry and organization charts against a peasant army from a small, impoverished country. The peasants won. In retrospect, it could be seen that McNamara's can-do, technological approach to military issues might have been perfectly suited to a conflict against the Soviet Union in Europe, but it led him into disastrous miscalculations in the jungles and paddies of Vietnam.

On his first visit to South Vietnam in 1962, before most Americans had heard of the place and before the involvement of American combat forces, McNamara said that "every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war."

It was a statement often quoted by his critics in later years, because it seemed to encapsulate the fallacy of his approach. American troops did prevail in many of the big battles and the United States did win the war by every statistical measurement on the Pentagon charts that McNamara so admired. But the numbers--even the few that were accurate--had little to do with the political reality on the ground.

In fact, despite his addiction to charts, statistics and briefings in which the United States and its ally in Saigon were always winning, McNamara privately had a broader appreciation of what was happening in Vietnam. As early as 1964, after Buddhist uprisings that shook Saigon's political structure, he observed that the Viet Cong had "large indigenous support" and were held together by "bonds of loyalty." In 1966, even as the buildup of U.S. forces continued and Cold War tensions gripped Europe, he said it was "a gross oversimplification to regard Communism as the central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped word . . . The United States has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so."

McNamara acknowledged late in his Pentagon tenure that the bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh trail supply line could not cripple the Vietcong because the Vietcong hardly needed any supplies other than ammunition. But as critics pointed out and as he admitted many years later, he was unable or unwilling to translate these assessments into policy reversals that would extricate Johnson administration from the Asian morass.

The harshest critic of all, David Halberstam, describing McNamara's trips to Saigon, wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" that McNamara, the ultimate technocrat, was "a prisoner of his own background . . . unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities. Since any real indices and truly factual estimates of the war would immediately have shown its bankruptcy, the McNamara trips became part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie."

In Halberstam's judgment, McNamara "did not serve himself or his country well. He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool."

Chester L. Cooper, a senior official at the State Department when McNamara was at Defense, wrote in "The Lost Crusade" that McNamara's brilliant staff and his "unique ability to grasp and synthesize a vast mass and variety of information made him the best informed official in Washington." But McNamara's insistence on dealing with Vietnam in the same way he dealt with other issues led him into miscalculations, Cooper said. Cooper summarized McNamara's approach in one memorable portrait:

"His typical trip involved leaving Washington in the evening and, after a 24-hour journey and a 13-hour time change, arriving at Saigon at eight in the morning. The Secretary would emerge from the plane and suggest graciously that his fellow-travelers take a half-hour or so to wash up and then join him at a 9 o'clock briefing at MACV [Military Assistance Command Vietnam] headquarters. There, for the next three hours, they were expected not merely to add up figures but to absorb a rapid-fire series of complicated military briefings liberally seasoned with charts, graphs, maps, and the inevitable sequence of slides. While we less adaptable beings desperately attempted to make sense out of the mass of information, McNamara queried every apparent inconsistency and was usually well ahead of the briefers."

The problem was that as the war escalated the briefings grew increasingly irrelevant to what was really happening. McNamara tolerated, even encouraged, a system in which optimistic Washington analysis dictated the content of the briefings, rather than the other way around.

For all his participation in the great events of his time, it was the Vietnam war, always the war, that shaped the nation's perception of McNamara and his performance, and eventually eroded his credibility. When he said, in 1966, that manpower requirements and draft calls would be reduced in the following year, hardly anyone seemed to believe him. When he told congress that the purpose of bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail was to reduce North Vietnamese troop infiltration into the South, newspaper analysts pointed out that the Pentagon's own charts showed infiltration was increasing.

An incident that reflected the temper of those tense, bitter years occurred in November, 1966, when McNamara traveled to Harvard for an informal discussion with undergraduates. He was mobbed by about 800 jeering students, who blocked his car and cried "murderer."

The secretary, never apologetic, climbed atop his car, in shirtsleeves despite the New England chill, and told the crowd, "I spent four of the happiest years of my life on the Berkeley campus, doing some of the things you do today. But I was tougher than you, and I'm tougher than you are now. I was more courteous then, and I hope I'm more courteous today."

It is inaccurate to portray McNamara as an unreconstructed hawk to the bitter end; his early doubts became known after the war. But he failed to persuade the president and such hard-line White House insiders as Walt W. Rostow to moderate their views. He succeeded only in hastening his own ouster from the Cabinet, and because he waited 20 years after the fall of Saigon in 1975 to go public with his confession of error about the war, he retained his reputation as a technocrat committed to firepower above all else.

McNamara later dismissed as "absurd" and "baloney" suggestions that he devoted himself to helping Third World countries through the World Bank to atone for his record in Vietnam. But he never attempted to defend himself against critics of his role in Vietnam, or to justify the escalation there. For more than two decades after leaving the Pentagon he avoided the topic of Vietnam in his public statements.

Even when testifying under oath, as he did in the 1984 trial of a libel suit against CBS filed by the former U.S. troop commander in Vietnam, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, McNamara remained resolutely non-judgmental about the conduct of the war. He testified that unlike Westmoreland and senior White House officials at the time, he began to believe as early as 1965 or 1966 that the war "could not be won militarily." But he added, "I say this without saying that I was right and they were wrong."

In a 1983 interview, he said he went to the Mall to see the memorial to the more than 58,000 troops killed in Indochina shortly after it was dedicated in 1982, but he declined to say what he felt when he read the names. "I just don't want to talk about it," he said. "Those are personal things." He skirted the topic of Vietnam even in long interviews with his biographer, Deborah Shapley.

It was what one would have expected of McNamara, who preferred an analytical, unemotional approach to every issue. With his characteristic penchant for dispassionate analysis, he said he would have been interested in a careful, scholarly study of the war, of the decisions that were made and of what the alternatives might have been, without regard to his personal sentiments or motivation.

That was the book he finally produced, to a storm of criticism and controversy, in 1995. In his memoir of the war titled "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," McNamara said he and his senior colleagues were "wrong, terribly wrong" to pursue the war as they did. He acknowledged that he failed to force the military to produce a rigorous justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood Asia in general and Vietnam in particular, and kept the war going long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the courage or the ability to turn President Johnson around.

Once again McNamara was vilified by critics who said he should have spoken up when it might have made a difference and accused him of salving his conscience with a last-minute conversion.

Publication of that book opened some kind of intellectual floodgate for McNamara; he developed a virtual fourth career of organizing and participating in seminars about the war--about who did what and why, and about how doing something else might have meant, if not a different outcome, at least less death. In 1999 he published a book about this quest for the truth about the war, with a title signaling that he did not find it: "Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy."

Thus in the final years of his life, the war again took over the reputation of a man whose life in many ways had embodied the American dream.

McNamara was born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco, where his father was sales manager for a wholesale shoe company. He demonstrated academic brilliance from the time he was in elementary school, and achieved straight As in high school. At the University of California in Berkeley, where he studied economics and philosophy, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa after his sophomore year.

After graduation in 1937, he went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, where he earned his MBA degree in 1939. He went back to the west coast for a year, to work for the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse & Co., and during that time he married a former classmate, Margaret Craig. (She died in 1981.)

In 1940, he returned to Harvard as an assistant professor. When the United States entered World War II, he volunteered for military service, but was initially rejected because of weak eyesight. He worked closely with the military, however, teaching courses for officers and serving as a consultant to the Army Air Corps on the establishment of a statistical system for the control of logistical operations.

He took a leave from Harvard to go to England on a military mission in 1943, and there he was finally granted a commission and accepted into the service as a captain.

In three years of active duty, he traveled in several Asian countries. He later said that it was the experience of visiting Calcutta during a famine, when there were as many dead people in the streets as live ones, that first stirred his interest in trying to improve conditions in the poorest nations.

McNamara and his wife were relocated from Calcutta to Washington during a serious polio epidemic in 1945, and both contracted the disease. His was a mild case, but hers required eight months in the hospital and another year in a back brace recovering her muscle strength.

McNamara left the service in 1946 with the Legion of Merit decoration and the rank of lieutenant colonel. Instead of returning to Harvard, he joined with nine other Air Force statistical control experts who offered their services as a group to various corporations. This extraordinary ploy resulted in all ten being hired as a team by Ford Motor Co.

Ford was admittedly plagued by deficient management at the time, and Henry Ford II, chairman of the board, sent the ten into every department to study operations and make recommendations. Their unending questions at first earned them the snide appellation "Quiz Kids," after a radio program of the period that featured bright youngsters, but their performance soon changed the title to "whiz kids."

Several of the "whiz kids" made careers at Ford; McNamara rose fastest and highest. Though his specialty was the application of statistics to management, he was also credited with a sense of public taste that led him to bring out new models that scored great success in the market.

Starting as manager of Ford's office of planning and financial analysis, he rose to controller, assistant general manager of the Ford division, general manager of the division, and vice-president in charge of all car and truck divisions. In 1957 he was named a director of the corporation, and in 1960 he succeeded Henry Ford 2d as president--the first president who was not a member of the Ford family.

During his tenure, McNamara was credited with enhancing the company's market position by emphasizing sleek, expensive cars that appealed to affluent buyers, in addition to the basic transportation that had been the company's staple product. His biggest success was in tripling the sales of the Thunderbird, by converting it from a sports car to an expensive four-door model.

He had been president of Ford only a month when Kennedy offered him the post as secretary of defense. When he left to join New Frontier cabinet, he said he was relinquishing $3 million in personal profits he would have realized from his stock options had he remained with Ford.

Henry Ford 2d said of him as he left that "if he is allowed to do as good a job for the country in this new assignment as he has been able to do for our company in a series of previous assignments over the past 15 years, the gain, measured in terms of the national interest, will make it easier for the Ford Motor Co. to sustain the loss of his leaving."

While he was at Ford, the McNamaras stayed out of the Grosse Pointe social orbit dominated by the auto industry. They lived in Ann Arbor, where they cherished the academic atmosphere around the University of Michigan. Once they got to Washington, it became more difficult for McNamara to insulate his family from the demands of his job, and except for skiing vacations in Colorado it often seemed that he was on duty all the time.

"Bob lives an 'on-call' kind of life," his wife once said. When he had time to himself, McNamara tended to spend evenings with his wife and a few close friends, not on Washington's party circuit. The McNamaras kept their three children out of the news.

At the Pentagon, McNamara quickly put his own stamp on the sprawling military bureaucracy in what amounted to a management revolution. He centralized control, broke down the traditional fiefdoms of the individual services, and imposed multi-purpose, multi-service weapons on the brass.

According to an account published in The Washington Post at the time, "he shook all five floors of the Pentagon in his search for the tools he needed to get a firm grip on the biggest military establishment in the world . . . McNamara brought in computers to help with the spade work, hired systems analysts to comb through the technical points and then list the pros and cons for the generalists, reassessed the war plans, regrouped weapons into programs."

The Kennedy administration came into office vowing to close the "missile gap," the apparent Soviet lead in strategic nuclear weapons. McNamara later acknowledged that there was no "missile gap"--he said it was based on "a total misreading of the information"--but by that time the United States had greatly expanded its nuclear arsenal and the Soviets had responded in kind.

According to critics such as John Edwards, in his book "Superweapon," the U.S. actually had nuclear superiority over the Soviets in 1960, and the American buildup only convinced Moscow that this country was seeking the ability to attack the Soviet Union with impunity.

The American nuclear buildup, Edwards said, "far exceeded the forces developed by the Soviet Union in the first half of the sixties. The secretary himself later judged that the American buildup contributed to the dramatic expansion of Soviet forces."

McNamara sponsored development of missiles that could carry up to 14 nuclear warheads each, giving the U.S. the ability to strike more and more Soviet targets without adding any more missiles and the capability of launching more warheads than the Soviets could fend off. This, McNamara later acknowledged, was substantially responsible for the nuclear arms race.

"I have no question," he said in a 1982 interview, "but that the Soviets thought we were trying to achieve a first strike capability. We were not. We did not have it. We could not attain it; we didn't have any thought of attaining it. But they probably thought we did." Their response, he said, provoked a counter-response by the United States, and the cycle became self-perpetuating.

McNamara's tenure was punctuated by sensitive strategic decisions and political controversies over difficult issues: a national debate over whether to build an anti-ballistic missile system (in which McNamara's role was to wage a rear-guard bureaucratic campaign against it, despite demands from the military establishment to go ahead); the development of the Poseidon submarine-launched missile; his decision to override the military professionals and award a contract for building the F-111 bomber to General Dynamics Corp. instead of the Boeing Co.; his proposal to require all young Americans, drafted or not, to devote a year or two to public service.

He was at the center of Washington decision-making during the 1962 confrontation with Moscow over the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Fidel Castro's Cuba. After a retrospective discussion of those dramatic days with his Soviet counterparts in 1989, McNamara wrote in a Newsweek essay about the crisis that "as I left President Kennedy's office to return to the Pentagon, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night"--so great was the threat of nuclear war. All parties to the confrontation in Cuba, McNamara wrote, were guilty of gross miscalculations and errors that nearly resulted in a catastrophe. A quarter-century later, he wrote, "It is inconceivable to me that we should be content to continue on the present path of East-West confrontation for another 40 years. The risks of disastrous military conflict, so dramatically demonstrated by our re-examination of the Cuban missile crisis, are totally unacceptable." The hardware-loving strategist of the Cold War had come full circle.

McNamara never publicly broke with Johnson over the war in Vietnam, but a gradual process of disillusionment seemed to set in as he lost control of tactics to the generals. In one well-publicized incident, he rejected a list of bombing targets that the military officers wanted to hit, including targets near Hanoi and other civilian population centers. The joint chiefs off staff went over his head to Johnson, and the president authorized the strikes.

Even when he resigned to move to the World Bank, McNamara remained publicly loyal, staying on as secretary for a transition period of several months until his successor, Clark Clifford, took over in early 1968. During that interval, the Viet Cong staged the Tet Offensive, the nationwide uprising in South Vietnam's cities that shocked American public opinion by demonstrating the hollowness of all the Pentagon's claims of military success.

Unlike other high government officials who seemed to spend their years out of power waiting around Washington for a chance to get back in, once he moved from the Pentagon to the World Bank McNamara threw himself into his new assignment with zest, and concentrated on using the bank's resources to help alleviate the poverty of the most backward nations.

The year before he took over the bank, it had a staff of 767 and made 60 loans totaling about $954 million. In the last fiscal year of his tenure, a staff of 2400 made about 250 loans, totaling $11.7 billion. And yet he wanted more, and importuned the industrialized nations to expand their commitments.

As president of the bank, he could have given a speech a day if he wanted to, but he chose a low profile and private persuasion. "I just don't give a damn whether I'm on TV or not," he said. "I just am uninterested in personal publicity. I've had all I need. Other people in town have different objectives."

He limited his public appearances to one or two a year because, he said, he only wanted to speak out when he had "new ideas" to offer, and "I don't get those ideas so frequently as to require me to speak out on them." His technique was to choose his spots, decide what message could best advance the objectives he was pursuing at the bank, and take his time deciding what to say.

He spent a year, for example, thinking about what to say in a 1982 speech at the University of the Witwatersrand, in apartheid South Africa. Then he told his audience that America's "century of delay in moving to end our shameful discrimination toward black Americans . . . was without question the most serious mistake in our entire history, and the hard truth is that all Americans will continue to a heavy price for it for decades to come." He urged South Africa not to make the same mistake.

In retirement, McNamara maintained an office on K street and worked, by his own count, with 55 corporations, universities, foundations and other groups in which he was interested.

"I'm not wealthy, but I don't have to do anything I don't want to do," he said, "and I decided not to do anything that doesn't meet two criteria: expand my understanding of the world, and allow me to apply whatever understanding I have in some productive way."

He was a director of The Washington Post Co., Royal Dutch Shell and several other companies, a trustee of the Ford Foundation and California Institute of Technology, and chairman of the Overseas Development Council, a nonprofit organization that sought increased American understanding of economic and social problems in the developing countries.

In 1982, he diverted his attention from global concerns long enough to serve as chairman of the Greater Washington Research Center's task force on local government, which conducted a thorough examination of the finances of Washington-area governments and warned of revenue shortfalls to be faced in the mid-1980s. With careful planning, he said, the local jurisdictions could meet those gaps without drastic service cutbacks or fiscal gimmicks of the kind that brought turmoil to other cities.

McNamara is survived by his second wife Diana, who he married in 2004, and his three children: Craig McNamara, of Winters, Ca.; and Kathleen McNamara and Margaret Pastor, both of Washington. "

http://celebritydeathbeeper.com/6885622.html

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Tennis Player Montcourt Dies Day After Ban Starts

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July 7 (Bloomberg) -- Mathieu Montcourt, a 24-year-old professional French tennis player, died last night of undetermined causes just as he began a ban for gambling on the sport.

His death was announced by the French Tennis Federation on its Web site.

Paris-born Montcourt, who was ranked as high as 104th by the ATP World Tour, and who was rated the 19th player in France, had begun a ban yesterday for gambling on tennis matches in 2004. He hadn’t bet on his own matches.

Montcourt was ranked 119th in the world, having won $81,418 so far this year and played his last match in the semifinals of a Challenger Tour clay court event in Rijeka, Croatia. He earned more than $374,000 since turning professional in 2002. He was eliminated in the second round of the French Open in May by Radek Stepanek in four sets.

The righthander played mostly on clay court.

Earlier in May, the Court of Arbitration for Sport reduced his eight-week suspension for online betting on tennis matches by two weeks. The Lausanne-based court upheld a $12,000 fine.

Montcourt was suspended by the ATP World Tour, the governing body of the men’s tennis tour, on Aug. 11 for betting $192 on 36 tennis events between June and September 2005. In his appeal to the Swiss court, Montcourt argued that his suspension and fine should be reduced because he wasn’t aware of the rules at the time.

Although the CAS said the player should have been aware of the rules, the court cut his suspension because he had gambled only small amounts and never bet on his own matches.

A year ago, tennis investigators found 45 matches in the past five years that needed to be studied because of “unusual betting patterns,” the sport’s governing bodies said at the time.

 

[KindaKinky]

I blame this on Ed. When he reached the afterlife with Carson, Johnny probably wanted to revive his talk show and needed dead guests. The Eternal Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson…

The Grim Reaper's been too busy lately.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Food Industry's Oscar Mayer Dead at 95

I blame this on Ed. When he reached the afterlife with Carson, Johnny probably wanted to revive his talk show and needed dead guests. The Eternal Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson…

The Grim Reaper's been too busy lately.

He must be hungry as well.


MADISON, Wis. (July 8) - Oscar G. Mayer, retired chairman of the Wisconsin-based meat processing company that bears his name, has died at the age of 95.

Mayer's wife, Geraldine, said he died of old age Monday age at Hospice Care in Fitchburg.

He was the third Oscar Mayer in the family that founded Oscar Mayer Foods, which was once the largest private employer in Madison. His grandfather, Oscar F. Mayer, died in 1955 and his father, Oscar G. Mayer Sr., died in 1965.

Mayer retired as chairman of the board in 1977 at age 62 soon after the company recorded its first $1 billion year. The company was later sold to General Foods and is now a business unit of Kraft.

Mayer's first wife, Rosalie, died in 1998. He married Geraldine Fitzpatrick in 1999.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Judo Olympian Capo dies at 48

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (July 7) - Two-time judo Olympian Rene Capo has died of lung cancer. He was 48.

USA Judo in Colorado Springs said Capo died Monday in Chicago. He lived in Naperville, Ill.

Capo competed at the 1988 and 1996 Olympics. Last year, he placed fifth at the USA Judo Senior National Championships. Two months after that competition, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Capo was a Cuban emigre who grew up in Hialeah, Fla. He also played college football at the University of Minnesota, where he was a defensive tackle from 1979 to 1982 and shared a team record for sacks.

Capo is survived by two sons, Alex, 11, and Anthony, 8.

 

[JennyOmanHill]

Ex-Beatles, Rolling Stones manager Klein dies

NEW YORK (AP) — Music manager Allen Klein, a no-holds-barred businessman who bulldozed his way into and out of deals with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, died last Saturday, a publicist for his company said. He was 77.

Klein, who was one of the most powerful figures in the music business in the 1960s but ended up feuding with some of his biggest clients, died at his New York City home of Alzheimer's disease, said Bob Merlis, publicist for ABKCO Music & Records.

An accountant known for his brashness, temper and tenacity in tracking down royalties and getting better record deals, Klein garnered clients including Sam Cooke, Bobby Darin and Herman's Hermits.

But he became most famous — and later infamous — for signing on the Rolling Stones and then the Beatles. Both arrangements eventually spurred lawsuits, with some Beatles fans blaming Klein for contributing to the tensions that broke up the group.

Klein was convicted of tax fraud in 1979 and served two months in prison for failing to report income from sales of promotional records by the Beatles and other groups; the records were supposed to be given away. The Rolling Stones grew so infuriated with Klein — whose company still owns an enormous chunk of their 1960s songs — that Mick Jagger once chased him down the hall of a posh hotel.

Klein was reputed to be the basis for the slick manager "Ron Decline," played by Jon Belushi, in the parodic 1978 film "The Rutles," and the inspiration for John Lennon's bitter 1974 song "Steel and Glass."

Regardless, Klein remained "very proud of the position he was in and what he was able to do with the different artists he was able to work with," Merlis said.

Klein began building his reputation by auditing record companies' books and finding unpaid royalties for Darin and other artists. After meeting Cooke in 1962, he helped the soul singer secure a then-unusual level of control over his music and finances.

"I never wanted to be a manager," he told The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., in 2002. "It was going over the books that I loved. And I was good at it."

That helped him win over the Rolling Stones, who hired him in the mid-1960s. He helped the group negotiate a new contract with its label, but the relationship soured after Klein bought the rights to the band's 1960s songs and recordings from a former manager.

He was fired in 1970, but the animosity continued for decades, culminating in dueling lawsuits over rights and royalties and a 1984 trial. Jagger testified in a federal court in New York that Klein "wanted a hold on us, on our futures" — and that a 1974 discussion about money ended with a shouting Jagger chasing Klein down a corridor at London's Savoy Hotel. The lawsuit was settled soon after, with Klein keeping the song rights but agreeing to pay royalties promptly.

In the meantime, Klein had set his sights on managing the Beatles and saw his chance when their longtime manager, Brian Epstein, died in 1967.

The group hired Klein in 1969 over the objections of Paul McCartney, who preferred his father-in-law, Lee Eastman.

But his relationship with the Beatles was bitter and short-lived. The group broke up the next year, and McCartney sued his bandmates in an effort to break free from Klein, an action once unthinkable among the harmonious foursome. McCartney went on to revile Klein in a 1997 biography, "Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now."

The other Beatles lost faith in Klein and sued him in the mid-1970s. Lennon sent him off in song in "Steel and Glass," which describes how "your mouthpiece squawks as he spreads your lies."

Klein was born in Newark on Dec. 18, 1931, and spent several years in an orphanage after his mother's death during his infancy. He was later raised by a grandmother and an aunt.

Klein graduated from Upsala College and served in the U.S. Army before joining a Manhattan accounting firm, according to his company.

He started his own firm, which later became ABKCO, in the late 1950s. Besides managing music, he co-produced 1971's "The Concert for Bangladesh," a forerunner of modern charity concerts, and films including 1978's "The Greek Tycoon," starring Anthony Quinn and Jacqueline Bisset.

He is survived by a longtime companion, Iris Keitel; his estranged wife, Betty; three children, four grandchildren and a sister.