Notable Passings

[Connery]

Great thread, Connery, thank you.

Thank you very much...

 

[Connery]

Alvin Lee, British Blues-Rock Guitarist, Dies at 68

"Alvin Lee, whose fire-fingered guitar playing drove the British blues-rock band Ten Years After to stardom in the 1960s and early ’70s, died in Spain. He was 68.

Mr. Lee was not as well known as other emerging British guitar stars of the era, including Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and perhaps even Albert Lee, with whom he was occasionally confused (and with whom he once recorded alongside Jerry Lee Lewis). But he was among the nimblest when it came to musicianship.

On his Gibson ES-335 Mr. Lee could shift instantly from speedy single-string leads to rhythmic riffs while doing his best to sing like his American blues heroes. He grew up listening to his father’s Big Bill Broonzy and Lonnie Johnson records in Nottingham, England..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/a...arist-of-ten-years-after-dies-at-68.html?_r=0

Ten Years After - I'm Going Home

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW5M5xljdCI]Woodstock - Ten Years After - I'm Going Home(Live) - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Connery]

Lillian Cahn, Creator of the Coach Handbag

"Lillian Cahn, who founded the Coach Leatherware Company in a Manhattan loft in 1961 with her husband, Miles, and went on to help produce the “shopping bag” tote and other handbags that have become ubiquitous accessories in the wardrobes of well-heeled American women, died in Manhattan. She was 89.

Men’s leather wallets and billfolds were the company’s original line of business. At Mrs. Cahn’s suggestion, her husband began producing a line of women’s handbags in the early 1960s at their small West 34th Street factory, working with a thicker yet flexible kind of cowhide often used in making baseball gloves.

“I scoffed at first,” Mr. Cahn said in an interview. “In New York, there were a lot of handbag companies, and at that time stores were all buying knockoffs of bags made in Europe. But my wife prevailed. Mrs. Cahn suggested the design for what became the first successful Coach bag: a tote modeled on a type of paper shopping bag she had used as a girl in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to deliver homemade noodles to customers, one of a series of small businesses her family started during the Depression. “It became a classic,” Mr. Cahn said. “We started having loyal customers.”

Mr. Cahn went on to create the dozen other handbag designs that became the first generation of the Coach line. Mrs. Cahn became the company’s showroom impresario and media agent."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/business/lillian-cahn-creator-of-the-coach-handbag-dies-at-89.html

The Coach bags were actually designed by Bonnie Cashi. "Among other achievements, Bonnie Cashin is best known for taking the fashion world by storm with her designs of Coach Handbags and thus revolutionizing the handbag industry.

After an era of dark, dull accessories in the fashion world, she began introducing bright colors that matched her fashion views of the time."
All About Coach Purses

 

[Harry Dresden]

the Wrestling world lost one of their most memorable characters.....

once you see him....you wont forget him.....especially the little kids....

Paul Bearer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Connery]

Dirk Coetzee, South African Official Who Led Apartheid-Era Killings

Dirk Coetzee, who led a South African police hit squad that killed antiapartheid activists, and who eventually confessed to his crimes as his country began shifting away from official racial segregation, died at a hospital in Pretoria. He was 67.

Mr. Coetzee was a divisive and complicated figure: a convicted murderer and a whistle-blower whose detailed accounts of a violently corrupt police force shed new light on South Africa’s racist government. His confession prompted accusations that he was an opportunist, out to protect himself when political winds began to change. But he was also viewed as brutally honest in a culture of cover-ups.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Coetzee was a captain for the South African security police at Vlakplaas, a 100-acre farm on the outskirts of Pretoria, where police officers were trained in counterinsurgency to help defend white control in other African countries. Yet under Mr. Coetzee and other leaders, officers at Vlakplaas also led a war within South Africa. Mr. Coetzee oversaw multiple killings of antiapartheid activists, including members of the African National Congress, which the government had outlawed. He sometimes recruited black South Africans to join the force and carry out killings.

It was one of those black South Africans, a former police officer named Almond Nofomela, who first revealed the actions of Vlakplaas in 1989 and implicated Mr. Coetzee in a number of killings. Among them was the murder in November 1981 of Griffiths Mxenge, a black lawyer linked to the Congress. He had been stabbed more than 40 times and his throat had been slit.

The allegations prompted Mr. Coetzee to flee the country and, in an interview with Mr. Pauw, the journalist, to confess to having led the death squad."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/w...es-at-67-led-apartheid-era-killings.html?_r=0

 

[Connery]

Mildred Manning, ‘Angel’ of Corregidor

"Mildred Dalton Manning grew up poor on a Georgia farm. Her mother made all the family clothes on an old sewing machine. Hoping to escape a life of poverty, she attended nursing school during the Depression and became a nurse at a hospital in Atlanta.

She enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps in 1939. “I joined the Army to see the world,” she told The Courier News of Bridgewater, N.J., some 60 years later. “And what I saw was a prison camp.”

Mrs. Manning was among the Army and Navy nurses of World War II known collectively as the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor. When the Japanese were overrunning the Philippines in early 1942, the nurses treated wounded, dying and disease-ridden soldiers under heavy enemy fire, in one of the darkest chapters of American military history.

A total of 66 Army nurses were taken into captivity by the Japanese after the Americans’ final outpost, on the island of Corregidor, fell in May 1942. They spent most of the war under guard at Japan’s Santo Tomas internment camp for foreign nationals in Manila, where they faced near-starvation and were ravaged by disease and malnutrition while treating nearly 4,000 men, women and children."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/u...rse-held-as-japanese-pow-dies-at-98.html?_r=0

A brief discussion about these brave women.

The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor: 70 Years Later

"...Maude Davison, ran the camp hospital that ministered to soldiers, nurses and captive civilians. Over the course of two years, Nesbit and Davison maintained morale by imposing structure within their ranks, requiring nurses to work at least four-hour shifts each day—even as the Japanese cut the POWs’ daily rations to 700 calories. The calorie deprivation became so bad that some nurses reportedly prepared weeds, roots and flowers, which they sautéed in cold cream.

Back home, Hollywood romanticized the nurses’ situation in patriotic movies such as “So Proudly We Hail,” starring Claudette Colbert. The reality was quite different, however. “Let me tell you, there was nothing romantic about it,” nurse Helen Cassiani Nestor would recall during a 1999 interview with the Associated Press. Still, she said, “our group proved [women] could go into the field and carry on and do a good job. People need to know that..."
The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor: 70 Years Later

The Angels of Bataan | Soldiers Magazine

 

[Connery]

Arthur Storch, Stage Director

Arthur Storch, an exacting and successful director on Broadway and in regional theater, who once asked Eugène Ionesco to rewrite a play and goaded a young Aaron Sorkin to work harder, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 87.

His Broadway credits included “The Owl and the Pussycat,” with Alan Alda and Diana Sands (1964); “The Impossible Years,” with Alan King (1965); and “Tribute,” with Jack Lemmon (1978). He also directed experimental Off Broadway works featuring Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson and Al Pacino, who like him were alumni of the Actors Studio.

In 1974, in need of a break after a series of ambitious flops, Mr. Storch accepted a job with a dual role: leader of the undergraduate theater program at Syracuse University and artistic director of the faltering stage company affiliated with it.

As an actor Mr. Storch was probably best known for his role as the outmatched psychiatrist in “The Exorcist” (1973). "
http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/theater/arthur-storch-theater-director-is-dead-at-87.html

Storch and Jack Lemmon

 

[Connery]

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, Anti-Hitler Plotter

"Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, believed to be the last surviving member of an elaborate plot to kill Adolf Hitler during World War II, died at his home in Munich. He was 90.

Like many Germans involved in efforts to kill Hitler, Mr. von Kleist was a soldier — a lieutenant in the German Army — but his family had long been active in the German resistance. In January 1944, he was 22 and recuperating in Berlin from wounds he suffered in combat when he was approached by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg to join an assassination plot.

At the time, Lieutenant von Kleist led a unit that was scheduled to meet with Hitler to show him new Army uniforms. Colonel von Stauffenberg asked Lieutenant von Kleist to take along hidden explosives, which he would then detonate at the meeting. “The next morning, my father said, ‘Why are you here again?’ “ Mr. von Kleist recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I have difficult decisions I have to make.’ He said, ‘What is it?’ And I told him. And he said at once, ‘Yes, of course you have to do it,’ and I said, ‘Yes, but I have to blow up with the colonel.’

“He got up from his chair, went to the window, looked out of the window for a moment, and then he turned and said: ‘Yes, you have to do that. A man who doesn’t take such a chance will never be happy again in his life.’ ”

Lieutenant von Kleist agreed to go through with the plan, but Hitler canceled at the last moment — he frequently changed his schedule late in the war — and Colonel von Stauffenberg and others began devising a new plan.

In July 1944, as other conspirators in the plot were being discovered and arrested, Colonel von Stauffenberg, whose Army role gave him access to top leaders, decided to leave a bomb under a table during a meeting of Hitler and his aides at Wolf’s Lair, his field headquarters in East Prussia. Lieutenant von Kleist was among several conspirators whose job was to wait in Berlin to be ready to stage a coup once Hitler’s death was confirmed. Mr. von Kleist recalled the waiting that day as “a fantastic atmosphere when history is bending on the edge of a knife.”

When the bombing took place, on July 20, four people were killed, but Hitler was only slightly injured. The conspiracy was quickly discovered, and Colonel von Stauffenberg was among those who were arrested and shot to death late that night. Nazis eventually killed more than 5,000 people associated with or supportive of those involved in the plot. Mr. von Kleist’s father was arrested July 21 and killed by the Nazis in Plötzensee Prison in April 1945."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/w...eist-anti-hitler-plotter-dies-at-90.html?_r=0

 

[Connery]

Peter Banks, Original Guitarist of Yes

Peter Banks, one of the founders of the popular British rock band Yes, died at his home in London. He was 65.

Mr. Banks, a guitarist influenced as much by jazz as by rock, formed Yes in 1968 with the bassist Chris Squire, the singer Jon Anderson, the keyboardist Tony Kaye and the drummer Bill Bruford. The band’s name was Mr. Banks’s idea.

Yes was one of the first and most successful purveyors of what came to be called prog (short for progressive) rock, an adventurous style far removed from the simplicity of early rock ’n’ roll, with complex melody lines and unusual time signatures that required considerable virtuosity to master.

Its best-known songs — all recorded after Mr. Banks left the band — include “Roundabout,” “I’ve Seen All Good People” and “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” a No. 1 hit for a later version of the band in 1983.

Prog rock began to fall out of favor in the late 1970s, but Yes has remained popular; the band, which has gone through various incarnations, continues to tour and record.

Mr. Banks played on the band’s first two albums, “Yes” and “Time and a Word,” before leaving to form Flash. He was replaced by Steve Howe, who remained with Yes for 11 years and has reunited with the band several times since then. Mr. Banks went on to record and perform with Flash and other bands, and to release several solo albums.

The current version of Yes issued a statement calling Mr. Banks “a huge piece of the fabric that made Yes what it is.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/arts/music/peter-banks-a-founder-of-yes-dies-at-65.html

 

[Connery]

Ruth Ann Steinhagen obsessed fan who shot player, inspired movie 'The Natural,' dies age 83

Ruth Ann Steinhagen was so obsessed with Philadelphia Phillies player Eddie Waitkus she shot and seriously wounded him. The story began with what appeared to be just another young woman's crush on Eddie Waitkus, the Chicago Cubs' handsome first baseman. So complete was this crush that the teenager set a place for Waitkus, whom she had never met, at the family dinner table. She turned her bedroom into a shrine to him and put his photo under her pillow.

After the 1948 season, Waitkus was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies — a fateful turn. "When he went to the Phillies, that's when she decided to kill him," Theodore said in an interview.

Steinhagen had her chance the next season, when the Phillies came to Chicago to play the Cubs at Wrigley Field. She checked into a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel where he was staying and invited him to her room.

"We're not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about," she wrote in a note to him after a game at Wrigley on June 14, 1949.

It worked. Waitkus arrived at her room. After he sat down, Steinhagen walked to a closet, said, "I have a surprise for you," then turned with the rifle she had hidden there and shot him in the chest. Theodore wrote that she then knelt by his side and held his hand on her lap. She told a psychiatrist afterward about how she had dreamed of killing him and found it strange that she was now "holding him in my arms."

Obsessed fan who shot player, inspired movie 'The Natural,' dies

 

[Connery]

Erwin Harris, Ad Executive Who Seized Cuban Assets

"Mr. Harris, a Yonkers-born World War II veteran who died in Miami on March 9 at 91, probably did not tip the scales of history. But from 1960 to 1961, armed with nothing more than a court order from a Florida judge and accompanied by local sheriff’s deputies, he scoured the East Coast confiscating Cuban government property — including the state airplane Fidel Castro parked in New York while on a visit.

It was a dogged mission in pursuit of compensation for what he said Mr. Castro owed him: $429,000 in unpaid bills stemming from an advertising campaign promoting Cuban tourism.

At different times, Mr. Harris seized two Cubana Airlines passenger planes, five cargo planes, a Cuban Navy vessel and a boatload of 1.2 million Cuban cigars arriving in Tampa, Fla. In Key West, he appropriated train cars carrying 3.5 million pounds of cooking lard bound for Havana. Temporary lard rationing in Cuba ensued.

In September 1960, he took control of Mr. Castro’s personal government plane while Mr. Castro was in New York for a 10-day official visit, and began arranging to have it auctioned. (“Cuban Airliner Seized Here,” trumpeted the front page of The Daily News.) The Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, stepped in to replace the plane Mr. Harris had snatched, and on Sept. 28, a reporter watching Mr. Castro board the Soviet aircraft at Idlewild Airport (now Kennedy International) described him as smiling “almost defiantly.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/u...d-cuban-assets-dies-at-91.html?pagewanted=all

Erwin Harris with a plane he had seized. With a court order, he confiscated Cuban government property in 1960 and '61.

 

[Grandma]

Interesting.

 

[Connery]

Harry Reems, star of pornographic film ‘Deep Throat

"Harry Reems, who co-starred in the 1972 pornographic movie “Deep Throat,” a film that brought pornography to mainstream audiences and became a pop culture phenomenon, died March 19 at a veterans’ hospital in Salt Lake City. He was 65.

Mr. Reems’s wife, Jeannie, confirmed the death. The cause of death has not been determined, but Mr. Reems was suffering from multiple medical issues, including pancreatic cancer.

After leaving the Marine Corps in the late 1960s, Mr. Reems began his acting career off-Broadway and then in sex films. He would go on to appear in more than 100 pornographic movies, including “Forced Entry” and “The Devil in Miss Jones.” But it was his role as the male lead in “Deep Throat” that made him a household name.

He had initially been approached to serve as lighting director on the low-budget film, which was about a woman (played by Linda Lovelace) who finds her most erogenous zone to be in her throat. When the leading man did not show up, Mr. Reems jumped into the role and was paid $100 to play the doctor who helps Lovelace diagnose her unusual condition.

The film became a sensation in large part because of law enforcement’s constant raiding of the theater where it was being shown in New York. Then a New York judge ruled the movie obscene, which drew national headlines and constant references on late-night talk shows. During the unfolding Watergate scandal, “Deep Throat” became the code name for the secret source of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

In 1974, the FBI arrested Mr. Reems and others associated with the film on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute obscenity across state lines. Their convictions were later overturned, reportedly because the film was made before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling on “contemporary community standards” on decency."
Harry Reems, star of pornographic film ?Deep Throat,? dies at 65 - The Washington Post

 

[Connery]

George Lowe dies at 89; climber was on Everest expedition with Hillary

After Sir Edmund Hillary's historic ascent of Mt. Everest, everyone knew Hillary's name. Far fewer knew about his indispensable partner, George Lowe.

Hillary and his friend Lowe were the only two New Zealanders on the 1953 expedition to the top of the world's highest peak. If they could have had their way, they would have trekked to the summit together, but a number of circumstances, including the politics of giving two non-Brits on a British-led team the prime roles, conspired to leave Lowe among the unsung.


Hillary and Lowe were almost cut off the team by expedition leader John Hunt. But Hunt reinstated them at the urging of the English climbers, who recognized that the New Zealanders' alpine skills were formidable. Both Hillary and Lowe led the way through the icefall. But it was Lowe, who wielded an ice ax with legendary skill, who cut the route up the daunting glacial wall known as the Lhotse Face. And it was Lowe who helped cut the steps to the final camp 1,000 feet below the mountain's summit on May 28, 1953.

The next day, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal reached the 29,035-foot peak. When Hillary returned to camp, he met Lowe, walking toward him with soup and emergency oxygen. "Well, George," Hillary recalled saying, "we knocked the bastard off."

Lowe and Hillary "climbed together through life, really," said travel writer Jan Morris, who was part of the Everest expedition as a journalist. "And when it came to the point near the summit, George had to play a subsidiary role. He climbed very high, he climbed to top camp and said goodbye to Hillary, then helped him come down. He played a very important role."

Hillary often referred to Lowe in his autobiographies as a pillar of strength. "Calm and competent, he rode through the storm like a great ocean liner," Hillary wrote. "With his strong hand on the rope, I knew I couldn't fall far."

Almost 4,000 people have now successfully climbed Everest, according to the Nepal Mountaineering Assn., but that 1953 expedition remains one of the iconic moments of 20th-century adventure. Morris said she was now the only survivor of the 1953 group.

She said Lowe was "a gentleman in the old sense — very kind, very forceful, thoughtful and also a true adventurer, an unusual combination."
George Lowe dies at 89; climber was on Everest expedition with Hillary - Los Angeles Times

"George Lowe on the wireless radio, with Edmund Hillary listening in alongside."

"Looking down into the Western Cwm from the Lhotse Face. The Southwest Ridge of Everest, Lhotse, and the long ridge of Nuptse form a cirque of high mountains that almost encloses a unique formation known as the Western Cwm." Photo: George Lowe, 1953

Mount Everest Expedition 1953

 

[Connery]

Joe Weider, titan of bodybuilding who mentored Arnold Schwarzenegger

"Joe Weider, a legendary figure in bodybuilding who helped popularize the sport worldwide and played a key role in introducing a charismatic young weightlifter named Arnold Schwarzenegger to the world, died March 23 in Los Angeles. He was 93.

A bodybuilder with an impressive physique himself, Mr. Weider became internationally known as a behind-the-scenes guru to the sport. He popularized bodybuilding and promoted health and fitness worldwide with such publications as Muscle and Fitness, Flex and Shape.

“I knew . . . that sooner or later people would recognize that the human body is the highest form of art,” Mr. Weider once told the Los Angeles Times.

Mr. Weider created one of bodybuilding’s preeminent events, the Mr. Olympia competition, in 1965, adding to it the Ms. Olympia contest in 1980, the Fitness Olympia in 1995 and the Figure Olympia in 2003.

He relentlessly promoted Schwarzenegger, who won the Mr. Olympia title a then-record seven times, including in 1980 and every year from 1970 through 1975. “Every sport needs a hero, and I knew that Arnold was the right man,” he said.

Mr. Weider brought Schwarzenegger to the United States early in his career and helped train the future Republican governor of California.

Schwarzenegger said Mr. Weider helped land him his first movie role, in the forgettable film “Hercules in New York,” by passing off the Austrian-born weightlifter to the producers as a German Shakespearean actor."
Joe Weider, titan of bodybuilding who mentored Arnold Schwarzenegger, dies at 93 - The Washington Post

 

[Connery]

Phil Ramone, record producer to stars

"Phil Ramone, the veteran record producer whose work with A-list artists including Barbra Streisand, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon made him one of the most respected figures in the music industry, died Saturday at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Billboard reported. He was 79.

Ramone was hospitalized last month following an aortic aneurysm.

Born in South Africa, Ramone studied classical violin at New York's Juilliard School before moving behind the board. His extensive credits include Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks," Billy Joel's "52nd Street" and Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years," for which he shared the Grammy Award for album of the year. Throughout his career Ramone won 14 Grammys.

More recently he'd helmed "Just a Little Lovin'," Shelby Lynne's 2008 tribute to Dusty Springfield, and Tony Bennett's "Duets II" set from 2011. He also reteamed that year with Simon for the acclaimed "So Beautiful or So What." Ramone is also credited with a number of technical innovations, including helping to popularize the compact disc.

"Our industry has lost an immense talent and a true visionary and genius," Recording Academy President Neil Portnow said in a statement. "Everyone who encountered Phil came away a better person for it, professionally and personally.""
Phil Ramone, record producer to stars, dead at 79 - latimes.com

Phil Ramone Paul McCartney