Obituaries -- names from the old Forum

[pbrower2a]

oldest then-living American WWI veteran
Benazir Bhutto, President of Pakistan -- assassinated
Dr. Erich Kastner, last German veteran of WWI
Joyce Carlson, animator for Disney
Bobby Fischer, chess grandmaster and political kook
Suzanne Pleshette, comedienne*
Heath Ledger, actor
Brad Renfro, child film star*
former Indonesian dictator Suharto*
Gordon Hinckley, LDS (Mormon) President
Christodoulos, Greek Orthodox leader
Margaret Truman Daniel, daughter of Harry Truman, and novelist
Shell Kepler, actress

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, meditation guru
Joshua Lederberg, polymath scientist*
Charles Fawcett, player character
Roy Scheider, actor
Tom Lantos, US Congressman and Holocaust survivor
Earl Butz, politician
Imad Mugniya, Hezbollah terrorist and mass-murderer (Roast in Hell!)*
Pearl Witherington, British spy in WWII*
William F. Buckley, editor of  the National Review when it was readable.
Buddy Miles, drummer
Myron Cope, sports announcer (Pittsburgh Steelers)
Luis Edgar Devia Silva, drug trafficker and Marxist rebel in Colombia (Roast in Hell!)*
Janet Kagan, SF writer
Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons
last French survivor of WWI
Arthur C. Clarke, science-fiction author ("2001: a Space Odyssey")
Ivan Dixon, actor and director
Vicki van Meter, young aviator
Paul Scofield, actor*
Richard Widmark, actor
Dith Pran, photojournalist and survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields*
last Turkish veteran of WWI
Charlton Heston, actor
Edward Lorenz, mathematician*
Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD
Mildred Delores Jeter Loving, wife in the marriage in the US Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia
Irving Robbins, entrepreneur (Baskin-Robbins)
Irena Sandler. Polish "Righteous Gentile"*
Hamilton Jordan, political strategist for President Jimmy Carter
John Phillip Law, actor
Robert Mondavi, vintner
Robert Asprin, SF author
Dick Martin, comedian and TV executive "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In"
Sidney Pollack, actor and director*
Harvey Korman, comedian*
Yves Saint-Laurent, clothing designer
Bo Diddley, guitarist*
Franz Kunstler, last Austro-Hungarian veteran of WWI
Jim McKay, sports announcer (Wide World of Sports).
Grigory Romanov, potential alternative to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985*
Eric Wujcik, role-play game designer
Tim Russert, television political journalsit
Cyd Charisse - dancer for Hollywood movies*
George Carlin, stand-up comedian
Leonard Pennario, classical pianist*
former Senator Jesse Helms (Reactionary, North Carolina)

Quote: Originally Posted by Pink Splice

Jesse Helms.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/...lms/index.html
Not to make light of a death, even of someone whose politics I abhor, but I wonder whether one of the last things that he heard was that Barack Obama -- a BLACK MAN -- had a chance to win Jesse Helms' beloved State of North Carolina?

Over his dead body, indeed!

Jesse Helms -- your man in the Senate if you were a racist and male chauvinist supporting tobacco and low wages.

He is a prime example of the operation of the generational theory as a mechanism of history; the exponents of obsolete passions and practices vanish from the scene through discreditation, senescence, and death. Part of progress is the removal of the questionable from history. To be sure that removes some harmless practices like powdered wigs and long written S's as well as nostalgic crazes for the not-so-great musical and artistic fads of youth who have since gone past elderhood into the Great Beyond -- but also such nonsense as "scientific racism", Earth-centered cosmology, feudalism, and slavery. It's certain that someone again will combine Jesse Helms' anti-intellectualism, opportunism, primitivism, and perhaps some now-novel form of bigotry -- perhaps someone now in elementary school.

Sure, we might miss someone like Hubert Humphrey far more... but good causes exist for someone like a Hubert Humphrey getting an early start in electoral politics and going far. Jesse Helms is irreplaceable, if only because his philosophy, useful as it was to some, was obsolete when he expressed it.

Tony Snow, former White House Press Secretary
Michael DeBakey, cardiac surgeon
Estelle Getty, actress*
Jo Stafford, singer from the Big Band era
Norman Dello Joio, composer*
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Soviet dissident and novelist*

Quote:It's hard to overstate the Crisis that the Russians had from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Second World War. I can't imagine anyone going through such times as a teenager (which Solzhenitsyn was during the forced collectivization and the Great Purge) and World War II as a young adult (Solzhenitsyn was 21 at the time of the Nazi invasion of the USSR) without facing severe conflicts about the basic realities of life.

Solzhenitsyn is not going to fade quickly from the scene. He remains the #1 dissident, now posthumous, of the Soviet Union and as such the primary alternative to the official Soviet explanation of the human condition in the USSR until the 1980s -- or those of émigré writers who had their own axes to grind, such as a desire to restore the Romanov dynasty or establish a right-wing dictatorship that would re-establish the class privilege that their families once had. The official Soviet explanation of things is itself largely discredited, having been forced to fit one narrow view of a self-serving elite. The reality of the Soviet Union was more out of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich than out of the official, glowing story of wise leadership "building Socialism".

He will remain controversial. He was more forgiving of Tsarist Russia and white émigrés than had been popular elsewhere -- among nations once under tsarist dominion. As a Russian patriot and nationalist his literary authority is likely to be used by those who would seek to re-establish Russian hegemony over peoples who have no fond memories of either tsarist or Soviet rule. He denounced the idea that the tsarist order sowed the seeds of the viciousness of the Soviet order and suggested that even the tsarist régime would have likely brought genuine progress without the terror, repression, and bloodletting of Soviet times if it had been given the chance -- contrary to much common perception outside of Russia.

(I, the composer of this post, believe that a right-wing Russia might have approached the brutality and repression of Lenin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev because of the tendency to make the more primitive forms of repression more severe and more pervasive as technology advances. Russia in 1917 was nearly as likely to go to the Hard Right as to the Hard Left, and I could hardly expect the White reactionaries to have established democracy. That some White reactionaries, most infamously the racist "philosopher" Alfred Rosenberg, introduced such bilge as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to a receptive Nazi movement demonstrates that tsarist Russia and the White movement weren't wholly benign. Stalin's unique insanity fueled the terror that only the Nazis, Khmer Rouge, and Iraqi Ba'athists could imitate. I am convinced that a conservative Russia would have fostered economic growth and such progress as widespread literacy and universal schooling -- but likely with inequities enforced with consummate brutality by standards of elsewhere).

Bernie Brillstein, TV executive*
Bernie Mac, comedian
Isaac Hayes, musician*
Don LaFontaine, TV voiceover artist
Bill Meléndez, animator*


[/url]

Quote:[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Mel%C3%A9ndez]José Cuauhtemoc "Bill" Meléndez (November 15, 1916 – September 2, 2008) was a Mexican-born American character animator, film director, and film producer, known for his cartoons for Warner Brothers and the Peanuts series. Meléndez provided the voice of Snoopy and Woodstock in the latter as well.

A native of the Mexican city of Hermosillo, Sonora, Meléndez was educated in U.S. public schools in Douglas, Arizona, and later in Los Angeles at the Chouinard Art Institute (which would later become California Institute of the Arts).

Disney

In 1938, Meléndez was hired by Walt Disney to work on animated short films and feature-length films such as Bambi, Fantasia, and Dumbo. While there, he worked to unionize the rank and file animators he was working with. A member of the Screen Cartoonists' Guild, he left as part of the 1941 Disney animators' strike and never returned as an employee.

Warner Brothers

Three years later, he joined Leon Schlesinger's team at the Warner Brothers studios, where, as a member of the Bob Clampett, Art Davis and Robert McKimson units, he animated on a number of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck shorts (as "J.C. Melendez"). UPA put him on their payroll in 1948 to work on many television commercials, as well as the Gerald McBoing-Boing and Madeline shorts.

Bill Meléndez Productions

After a decade at two smaller production houses, Meléndez founded his own production company in 1964. Bill Melendez Productions helped produce the annually broadcast Christmas special A Charlie Brown Christmas, for which he won an Emmy Award and the George Foster Peabody Award despite having to work on short notice and with a tight budget. Meléndez performed the voice of Snoopy, who normally in the specials does not talk. Melendez was the only animator authorized to work on Charles Schultz's Peanuts characters.

Meléndez went on to do over 75 half-hour Peanuts specials, including the 1989 miniseries This is America, Charlie Brown, as well as four feature-length motion pictures – all with partner Lee Mendelson.

In 1979, he directed a made-for-TV animated version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with Warner Bros. for the Children's Television Workshop.

Amongst the other comic strip characters he animated were Cathy and Garfield, as well as the 1992 special Frosty Returns.

Other work

In addition to animation, Meléndez was once a faculty member at the University of Southern California's Cinema Arts Department.

---

Don Haskins, who changed the way basketball is played:

B

Quote:y RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: September 8, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/sp...n]Don Haskins, the Hall of Fame coach who transformed college basketball when he started five black players on a Texas Western team that defeated an all-white University of Kentucky squad for the 1966 N.C.C.A. championship, died Sunday. Haskins, who lived in El Paso, was 78.

“I just played my five best players,” Haskins once said in recalling Texas Western’s stunning 72-65 triumph over Kentucky. “In my mind, kids were kids, and I had some that could play.

“I didn’t really know until after the game and I got bushels full of hate mail how important that game was,” he added.

As the longtime college basketball coach Rick Majerus once put it: “It was one of the most socially meaningful victories in the history of sports. The Schmeling-Louis fight of college basketball.”

.....

The five Texas Western starters — Bobby Joe Hill, David Lattin, Willie Worsley, Harry Flournoy and Orsten Artis — did more than triumph over one of college basketball’s most storied programs in the Kentucky Wildcats, coached by the renowned Adolph Rupp and led that season by Pat Riley. The victory drew attention to the racially exclusionary policies in the Southeastern Conference and elsewhere, and it contributed to the collegiate recruitment of black players nationally.

David Wallace, novelist

(This is about when a bunch of large business started dying in what looked like a replay of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929).

Richard Wright (Not the author -- one of the founding members of Pink Floyd).*
Stan Winston, special effects expert*
Miroslav Havel, master of the art of (Waterford) Glass*
Paul Newman, one of the greatest actors ever*
Boris Yefimov, propaganda cartoonist for the Soviet Union, and one of the last prominent figures of the Lost Generation (age 107 in 2008).*
House Peters, Jr. ("Mr. Clean")

---

Roy K. Moore -- FBI investigator*

Quote:By HOLBROOK MOHR
Associated Press Writer


JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- Roy K. Moore, an FBI agent who oversaw investigations into some of the most notorious civil rights-era killings, including those depicted in the movie "Mississippi Burning," has died. He was 94.

Moore's daughter, Sandra Giglio, said he died Sunday in a Madison, Miss., nursing home of complications from pneumonia and other ailments.

Moore, a former Marine and native of Oregon, had established a solid reputation in the FBI when bureau director J. Edgar Hoover sent him to Mississippi in 1964 after the disappearance of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

Nearly two months later, their bodies were dug out of an earthen dam in Neshoba County. "Mississippi Burning," released in 1988 and starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, was based on the case.

Bill Minor, a veteran Mississippi journalist who covered the civil rights struggles, said Monday that Moore established the first "full-fledged FBI bureau" in Mississippi and set his sights on the Ku Klux Klan.

"Those who underestimated the bulldog determination of Roy Moore and the corps of agents he assembled - many of whom had never been to Mississippi when Moore got the job - made a mistake," Minor wrote in a 1971 article republished in his 2002 book "Eyes on Mississippi."

Nineteen men were indicted in 1967 on federal charges of violating the civil rights of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. Seven were tried and convicted and served six years or less in prison.

The federal trial ended in a hung jury for Edgar Ray Killen, a part-time preacher and saw mill operator. However, the case was reopened decades later and Killen was convicted of manslaughter in state court in 2005 and sentenced to 60 years in prison.

Giglio said Moore was respected by his law enforcement colleagues.

"The men that worked for him said he was tough and strict but they really respected his work ethic," Giglio said. "And he was a good dad and he was a good husband. His job took him away a lot and demanded a lot, but he was there for us."

Moore retired from the FBI in 1974 and worked as a security expert in the banking industry. He also stayed active in civic organizations, his daughter said.

Giglio said Moore made such an impression on her husband and her sister's husband that both men joined the FBI after getting to know him.

"I guess he was a pretty good recruiter in that way," she said.

Services for Moore are at 2 p.m. Friday at Wright and Ferguson Funeral Home in Ridgeland, Miss.

© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Edie Adams, actress and singer.
Tony Hillerman, novelist
Studs Terkel, journalist and author*
Marilyn Ferguson, New Age writer.
Madelyn Dunham, grandmother of Barack Obama, who would soon be elected President of the United States
Michael Crichton, author
three terrorists executed Indonesia for the Bali bombings (Roast in Hell!)*
Miriam Makeba, South African musician
Mitch Mitchell, rock drummer
Betty Jones, entrepreneur (the Slinky).
Joern Utzon, Danish architect -- Sydney Opera House
world's oldest person at the time
Odetta Holmes, folk singer
Betty Page, actrress
Van Johnson, actor*
Majel Barrett Roddenberry, voice actor (computer voice in Star Trek)
Paul Weyrich, guru of American right-wing politics*
W. Mark Felt, FBI agent, "Deep Throat" in exposure of Watergate scandal
Mark Everett, child actor gone very bad (criminal), hostage standoff*
Yueri Glazkov, Soviet cosmonaut*
Eartha Kitt, entertainer*
Samuel Huntington, historian*

Quote:Samuel P. Huntington died at age 81:


Originally Posted by Harvard University


'One of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years'

By Corydon Ireland

Harvard News Office

Samuel P. Huntington - a longtime Harvard University professor, an influential political scientist, and mentor to a generation of scholars in widely divergent fields - died Dec. 24 on Martha's Vineyard. He was 81.

Huntington had retired from active teaching in 2007, following 58 years of scholarly service at Harvard. In a retirement letter to the President of Harvard, he wrote, in part, "It is difficult for me to imagine a more rewarding or enjoyable career than teaching here, particularly teaching undergraduates. I have valued every one of the years since 1949."

Huntington, the father of two grown sons, lived in Boston and on Martha's Vineyard. He was the author, co-author, or editor of 17 books and over 90 scholarly articles. His principal areas of research and teaching were American government, democratization, military politics, strategy, and civil-military relations, comparative politics, and political development.

"Sam was the kind of scholar that made Harvard a great university," said Huntington's friend of nearly six decades, economist Henry Rosovsky, who is Harvard's Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Emeritus. "People all over the world studied and debated his ideas. I believe that he was clearly one of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years."

"Every one of his books had an impact," said Rosovsky. "These have all become part of our vocabulary."

Jorge Dominguez, Harvard's vice provost for International Affairs, described Huntington as "one of the giants of political science worldwide during the past half century. He had a knack for asking the crucially important but often inconvenient question. He had the talent and skill to formulate analyses that stood the test of time."

Huntington's friend and colleague Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, called him "one of the giants of American intellectual life of the last half century."

To Harvard College Professor Stephen P. Rosen, Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs, "Samuel Huntington's brilliance was recognized by the academics and statesmen around the world who read his books. But he was loved by those who knew him well because he combined a fierce loyalty to his principles and friends with a happy eagerness to be confronted with sharp opposition to his own views."

Huntington, who graduated from Yale College at age 18 and who was teaching at Harvard by age 23, was best known for his views on the clash of civilizations. He argued that in a post-Cold War world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nation states, but from cultural and religious differences among the world's major civilizations.

Huntington, who was the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, identified these major civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), Hindu, Japanese, and "Sinic" (including China, Korea, and Vietnam).

"My argument remains," he said in a 2007 interview with Islamica Magazine, "that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states."

Huntington first advanced his argument in an oft-cited 1993 article in the journal Foreign Affairs. He expanded the thesis into a book, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," which appeared in 1996, and has since been translated into 39 languages.

To the end of his life, the potential for conflict inherent in culture was prominent in Huntington's scholarly pursuits. In 2000, he was co-editor of "Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress." And just before his health declined, in the fall of 2005, he was beginning to explore religion and national identity.

"His contributions ranged across the whole field of political science, from the deeply theoretical to the intensely applied," said Putnam, author of a lengthy appreciation of Huntington in a 1986 issue of the journal PS: Political Science and Politics. "Over the years, he mentored a large share of America's leading strategic thinkers, and he built enduring institutions of intellectual excellence."

And Putnam added a personal note. "What was most rare about Sam, however, was his ability to combine intensely held, vigorously argued views with an engaging openness to contrary evidence and argument. Harvard has lost a towering figure, and his colleagues have lost a very good friend."

Timothy Colton, the Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies at Harvard, remarked on his old friend's breadth of intellectual interests. He used the American political experience as a pivot point (Huntington's doctoral dissertation was on the Interstate Commerce Commission), but soon deeply studied a globe-spanning range of topics.

"He was anchored in American life and his American identity, but he ended up addressing so many broad questions," said Colton, who had Huntington as a Ph.D. adviser at Harvard in the early 1970s. "His degree of openness to new topics and following questions where they take him is not as often found today as when he was making his way."

Huntington's first book, "The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations," published to great controversy in 1957 and now in its 15th printing, is today still considered a standard title on the topic of how military affairs intersect with the political realm. It was the subject of a West Point symposium last year, on the 50th anniversary of its publication.

In part, "Soldier and the State" was inspired by President Harry Truman's firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur - and at the same time praised corps of officers that in history remained stable, professional, and politically neutral.

In 1964, he co-authored, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Political Power: USA-USSR," which was a major study of Cold War dynamics - and how the world could be shaped by two political philosophies locked in opposition to one another.

Brzezinski, a doctoral student at Harvard in the early 1950s who was befriended by both Huntington and Rosovsky, was U.S. National Security Adviser in the Carter White House from 1977 to 1981. In those days, said Rosovsky, the youthful Huntington, though an assistant professor, was often mistaken for an undergraduate.

According to his wife Nancy, Huntington was a life-long Democrat, and served as foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in his 1968 presidential campaign. In the wake of that "bitter" campaign, she said, Huntington and Warren Manshel - "political opponents in the campaign but close friends" - co-founded the quarterly journal Foreign Policy (now a bimonthly magazine). He was co-editor until 1977.

His 1969 book, "Political Order in Changing Societies," is widely regarded as a landmark analysis of political and economic development in the Third World. It was among Huntington's most influential books, and a frequently assigned text for graduate students investigating comparative politics, said Dominguez, who is also Antonio Madero Professor of Mexican and Latin American Politics and Economics. The book "challenged the orthodoxies of the 1960s in the field of development," he said. "Huntington showed that the lack of political order and authority were among the most serious debilities the world over. The degree of order, rather than the form of the political regime, mattered most."

His 1991 book, "The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century" - another highly influential work - won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and "looked at similar questions from a different perspective, namely, that the form of the political regime - democracy or dictatorship - did matter," said Dominguez. "The metaphor in his title referred to the cascade of dictator-toppling democracy-creating episodes that peopled the world from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, and he gave persuasive reasons for this turn of events well before the fall of the Berlin Wall."

As early as the 1970s, Huntington warned against the risk of new governments becoming politically liberalized too rapidly. He proposed instead that governments prolong a transition to full democracy - a strand of ideas that began with an influential 1973 paper, "Approaches to Political Decompression."

Huntington's most recent book was "Who Are We? The Challenges of America's National Identity" (2004), a scholarly reflection on America's cultural sense of itself.

Samuel Phillips Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City. He was the son of Richard Thomas Huntington, an editor and publisher, and Dorothy Sanborn Phillips, a writer.

Huntington graduated from Stuyvesant High School, received his B.A. from Yale in 1946, served in the U.S. Army, earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1951, where he had taught nearly without a break since 1950.

From 1959 to 1962, he was associate director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. At Harvard, he served two tenures as the chair of the Government Department - from 1967 to 1969 and from 1970 to 1971.

Huntington served as president of the American Political Science Association from 1986 to 1987.

Huntington was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs from 1978 to 1989. He founded the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, and was director there from 1989 to 1999. He was chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 1996 to 2004, and was succeeded by Jorge Dominguez.

Huntington applied his theoretical skills to the Washington, D.C., arena too. In 1977 and 1978, he served in the Carter White House as coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council. In the 1980s, he was a member of the Presidential Commission on Long-Term Integrated Strategy.

Huntington is survived by his wife of 51 years, Nancy Arkelyan Huntington; by his sons Nicholas Phillips Huntington of Newton, Mass. and Timothy Mayo Huntington of Boston; by his daughters-in-law Kelly Brown Huntington and Noelle Lally Huntington; and by his four grandchildren.

There will be a private family burial service on Martha's Vineyard, where Huntington summered for 40 years.

In the spring, there will be a memorial service at Harvard. Details are pending.


As I recall, Howe and Strauss had plenty of references to his theories.

Harvard's color is crimson -- right?

Quote:Last edited by pbrower2a; 12-27-2008 at 11:54 PM.

Some of the intellectual foundation of Howe and Strauss' theory.