It is a little like steam engine time, but more boring.
Last week was a fairly busy week. This week is shaping up to be less packed, and with the time change, I have more daylight to work with. Which means I may be able to get some pictures for part two of “Day of the .45”, and for another project I’m working on. In the meantime, after the jump and as foretold in the prophecy, more bibliographies…
Kenzaburo Oe, noted Japanese writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Pat McCormick, Olympic diver.
At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, McCormick won the women’s 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform competitions, the only ones being held for women at the time. In 1956 in Melbourne, Australia, eight months after the birth of her first child — and with her husband, Glenn McCormick, as the team’s coach — she won them both again.
Her feat was unequaled until another American, Greg Louganis, captured the 3-meter and 10-meter titles at the 1988 Seoul Olympics four years after doing it in Los Angeles.
Bud Grant, former coach of the Minnesota Vikings. He was 95.
He had a regular-season record of 158-96-5, for a .621 winning percentage, the second-most victories for a Vikings coach. His Vikings won 11 division titles and made it to four Super Bowls, but they never won; they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970, the Miami Dolphins in 1974, the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1975 and the Oakland Raiders in 1977.
His teams were led by the celebrated defensive line known as the Purple People Eaters, headed by Alan Page and Carl Eller, and by an offense that included quarterback Fran Tarkenton and running back Chuck Foreman. He was named N.F.L. coach of the year in 1969 and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1994. He won 10 or more games seven times between the 1969 and 1976 seasons.
Traute Lafrenz (who also went by Traute Lafrenz Page) has passed away at 103.
She was the last surviving member of the White Rose.
The White Rose was short-lived and never counted more than a few dozen members, most of whom were young and idealistic. Ms. Lafrenz (who later in life went by the name Traute Lafrenz Page) carried political leaflets and helped the group gain access to ink, paper and envelopes to produce and disseminate its anti-Hitler tracts, and to urge Germans to turn against the Nazis.
But the response to its activities, peaceful as they were, seemed to betoken the profound intolerance displayed by the Third Reich to any hint of opposition among Germans, even as it pursued the extermination of European Jewry and what it called “total war” against its adversaries.
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While Ms. Lafrenz was a medical student in Hamburg, she met Alexander Schmorell, a central player in the White Rose, who introduced her to the leaders of the group, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, when she moved to Munich to continue her medical studies in the early 1940s.
Other leading players included Christoph Probst, Willi Graf and the group’s older mentor, Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy who was committed to liberal democracy.
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The White Rose’s leaflets began appearing in the summer of 1942, but the project faltered in February 1943 with the arrest of Sophie and Hans Scholl, who were distributing fliers in a university building in Munich when Jakob Schmid, a janitor, spotted them and tipped off the Gestapo. Four days after their arrest, on Feb. 18, 1943, they were executed. Ms. Lafrenz attended her friends’ funeral, even though it was conducted under Gestapo surveillance.
Other members of the White Rose followed the grisly trail to execution; they were among an estimated 5,000 people beheaded under a revival of the use of the guillotine ordered by Hitler. The beheadings continued until January 1945.
Ms. Lafrenz was arrested in March of 1943. She was set to be tried at Bayreuth in April of 1945, but the US Army liberated the prison (and the prisoners) before the trial started.
“Traute Lafrenz was not at the center of the White Rose,” Mr. Waage wrote. “She did not physically write any of the leaflets — but she did just about everything else. She helped lay the foundation for the revitalization of cultural heritage as a weapon against brutality; she helped make the distribution of the leaflets as practical as possible and helped to spread them.”
In the postwar era, Ms. Lafrenz remained stubbornly reticent about her activities. “I was a contemporary witness,” she told Bild Zeitung in 2018. “Given the fates of the others, I am not allowed to complain.” Her daughter Renee told the newspaper that she had not learned of her mother’s wartime struggle until 1970.
Indeed, it was only on Ms. Lafrenz’s 100th birthday, on May 3, 2019, that she was awarded Germany’s Order of Merit, a high civilian honor. The citation said she “belonged to the few who, in the face of the crimes of national socialism, had the courage to listen to the voice of her conscience and rebel against the dictatorship and the genocide of the Jews. She is a heroine of freedom and humanity.”
Suzy McKee Charnas, noted SF writer. I believe Lawrence mentioned this to me a while back, but I could not find a link I was willing to use. The NYT obit says she passed away January 2nd, but “her death was not widely reported at the time”.
The obit gives a lot of space to her “The Holdfast Chronicles” series.
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The other books in the Holdfast series are “Motherlines” (1978) and “The Furies” (1994). “The Conqueror’s Child” won the 1999 James Tiptree Jr. Award (now called the Otherwise), a literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that explore gender.
She also won two other science fiction and fantasy awards: a Nebula for a novella, “Unicorn Tapestry,” which is a chapter in her 1980 novel, “The Vampire Tapestry,” and the basis for her play, “Vampire Dreams”; and a Hugo, for “Boobs,” a short story.
“Suzy, to me, was a lot like David Bowie,” said Jane Lindskold, a science fiction and fantasy writer who knew Ms. Charnas from a writers’ group in Albuquerque. “She followed her own muse. She could have just written only vampire books, but she did what she wanted to do.”
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Science fiction was not the only genre she explored. In “The Vampire Tapestry,” she created Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire posing as an anthropology professor.Writing in The Washington Post, the fantasy writer Elizabeth A. Lynn praised the novel, saying it “works on many levels — as pure adventure, as social description, as psychological drama and as a passionate exploration of the web that links instinct, morality and culture. It is a serious, startling and revolutionary work.”
The director Guillermo del Toro, who is known for his science fiction and horror films, was an admirer of “The Vampire Tapestry.” He called it “flawless” on Twitter in 2015 and, after Ms. Charnas’s death, said, “It may be her masterpiece.”
The paper of record has a habit of running retrospective obits under the heading “Overlooked No More” for people who didn’t get an obit at the time. To the best of my knowledge, they still have not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.
However, this one struck home for me: Dilys Winn, mystery bookstore founder and writer.
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Winn enjoyed hosting events so much that she sold the bookstore in 1975 and began holding Sunday afternoon mystery talks (admission $5) at the Steinway Concert Hall on the Upper West Side featuring mystery writers, editors and other guest speakers. She organized a 16-day mystery reader’s tour of the United Kingdom, with sites of interest that included the Tower of London, Jack the Ripper’s London neighborhood and the London docks. Excursions to Scotland and Wales provided more opportunities to commune with mystery writers, crime reporters and, supposedly, ghosts.
All the while, Winn was feverishly working on her opus: “Murder Ink.” Published by Workman Press in 1977, it included offbeat essays by established figures and Winn herself (under various nom de plumes), along with character studies, photographs, quizzes and even a guide to “terrible edibles” one might avoid — or seek, depending on the motive. In 1978, the Mystery Writers of America conferred an Edgar Allan Poe award on Winn, and the next year she published a sequel, “Murderess Ink: The Better Half of Mystery.”
I bought my mother a copy of Murder Ink as a present one year, so of course I read it. I loved it. I still think that’s a pretty swell book, and I want to say that’s one of the key books in influencing my lifelong love of mysteries.
“Spot”, or Glen Lockett, noted record producer for SST Records.
As the in-house producer for SST from 1979 to 1985, Mr. Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream — the college-radio mainstream, at least.
He produced or engineered more than 100 albums for SST, including classics like Black Flag’s “Damaged” (1981), Descendents’ “Milo Goes to College” (1982), Meat Puppets’ first album (1982), Minutemen’s “What Makes a Man Start Fires?” (1982) and Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” (1984).
I never got into any of SST’s stuff (I tried listening to Hüsker Dü) but I’ve always liked the SST poster I saw once at a record store in Houston. “Home taping is killing the music industry. Keep up the good work.”
Rick Scheckman. He was David Letterman’s film coordinator.
Scheckman joined Late Night With David Letterman in March 1982, a month after the show debuted on NBC. The writers called on Scheckman so often, he was given a full-time job as film coordinator.
“If 20 minutes before tape time, the writers suddenly came up with a bit that required film of a monkey washing a cat, Shecky knew where to find it,” writer Mark Evanier wrote on his blog.
When Letterman moved to CBS in 1993, Scheckman came along and remained with the Late Show through its 2015 conclusion. For those 33-plus years, his stuff was referred to as “Shecky Footage,” Letterman archivist Don Giller pointed out in a tribute post on YouTube.
As did many Letterman behind-the-scenes staffers, Scheckman often wound up in front of the camera, playing, for example, Elvis Presley; a naked man in the shower with a copy machine; a fan of Star Wars and Pokémon; and himself, getting shot by Bruce Willis (“Yippee ki yay, Shecky!!”), as seen in another tribute video.
Tributes from Mark Evanier and Leonard Maltin.
Otis Taylor, of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Over an 11-year career that began in 1965, when Kansas City was one of the top teams in the American Football League, Taylor was one of quarterback Len Dawson’s key offensive targets. (Dawson died last year at 87.) Tall and acrobatic with soft hands, he was the prototype for the big receivers who would come to dominate the position.
In 1966, his breakout season, Taylor caught 58 passes for 1,297 yards, an average of 22.4 yards a catch. Five years later, after the A.F.L.’s merger with the N.F.L was finalized, Taylor led the league with 1,110 receiving yards, and United Press International named him the N.F.L.’s player of the year.
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When the Chiefs faced the Vikings in Super Bowl IV on Jan. 11, 1970, it was their second appearance in the championship game. They had lost to the Green Bay Packers, 35-10, in the first Super Bowl.
The Vikings were 13 ½-point favorites, but the Chiefs handled them easily. Kansas City was leading, 16-7, late in the third quarter when Dawson tossed a short pass to Taylor. He shook off a tackle from Earsell Mackbee, a cornerback; faked Karl Kassulke, a safety; and ran in for a 46-yard touchdown. Their 23-7 victory would be the Chiefs’ only Super Bowl win until 2020; they won the championship again last month.
“That’s it, boys!” Chiefs coach Hank Stram said gleefully from the sideline. “Otis!”
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In his rookie season, when he started four of Kansas City’s 14 games, he caught 26 passes for 446 yards. He emerged as a star the next season, and over his career he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times and was a first-team All-Pro twice.
He caught a total of 410 passes in his career for 7,306 yards, with 57 touchdowns. He ranks third in Chiefs history in receiving yards, after Tony Gonzalez and Travis Kelce.
Wayne Shorter, saxaphone player and composer.
His career reached across more than half a century, largely inextricable from jazz’s complex evolution during that span. He emerged in the 1960s as a tenor saxophonist and in-house composer for pace-setting editions of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis Quintet, two of the most celebrated small groups in jazz history.
He then helped pioneer fusion, with Davis and as a leader of Weather Report, which amassed a legion of fans. He also forged a bond with popular music in marquee collaborations with the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, the guitarist Carlos Santana and the band Steely Dan, whose 1977 song “Aja” reaches a dynamic climax with his hide-and-seek tenor solo.
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Mr. Shorter often said he was drawn to music because it has “velocity and mystery.” A lifelong fan of comic books and science fiction, he kept a shelf crowded with action figures and wore T-shirts emblazoned with the Superman “S” logo. In his later years, he cut the figure of a sage with a twinkle in his eye, issuing cryptic or elliptical statements that inevitably came back to a sense of play.
“Don’t throw away your childish dreams,” he said in 2012. “You have to be strong enough to protect them.”
Throughout his career he refused to hew too closely to any tradition except that of fearless expedition. “The word ‘jazz,’ to me,” he liked to say, “only means ‘I dare you.’”
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In total, Mr. Shorter won 12 Grammy Awards, the last bestowed this year for best improvised jazz solo, for “Endangered Species,” a track, written with Ms. Spalding, from the album “Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival,” where he performed in a quartet with her, Terri Lyne Carrington and Leo Genovese.
He also received a lifetime achievement honor from the Recording Academy in 2015. He was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and a 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. He received the Polar Music Prize, an international honor recognizing both pop and classical music, in 2017. And he was among the recipients of the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors, in a class that also included the composer Philip Glass.
Greta Andersen, long-distance swimmer. She was 95.
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Christopher Fowler, author. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
FotB RoadRich sent over a nice obit for David Rathbun. He spent 26 years with Cirrus Aircraft, and did a lot of work on the SR20, SR22, SR22T, and the SF50 Vision Jet.
Richard Anobile. I had not heard of him previously, but his story is relevant to my interests.
This was in the days before VCRs, DVDs, and widespread availability of older movies for easy viewing. Most famously, he got involved with Groucho Marx.
“The Marx Bros. Scrapbook,” published two years later, was a more ambitious project, and it brought Mr. Anobile into closer contact with Groucho, then in his 80s, through an introduction by his agent.
In addition to excerpts from his many hours of interviews with Mr. Marx, the book included photographs and illustrations, as well as playbills, reviews, advertisements, family scrapbook entries and pages from film scripts. Mr. Anobile also interviewed the other two surviving Marx brothers, Gummo (who left the group long before they started making movies) and Zeppo, as well as friends like the comedian Jack Benny.
I’m going to note here that used paperback copies of this are available on Amazon for reasonable prices.
Getting back to Groucho and Mr. Anobile, there was a problem:
But Mr. Marx regretted the publication of his raw opinions of people like his brother Chico (“All he could do was shoot the piano keys”); Noël Coward and Truman Capote (whom he tarred with gay slurs); George M. Cohan (“a no-good Irish son of a bitch”); S.J. Perelman, who contributed to the scripts of two Marx Brothers films (“I hated the son of a bitch and he had a head as big as my desk”); and Marilyn Monroe, who had a small role in “Love Happy” (1949), the brothers’ last film.
In late 1973, Mr. Marx sought an injunction in New York State Supreme Court to stop the distribution of the book, although it had already been delivered to bookstores nationwide. He argued that it contained “defamatory, scandalous, obscene and inflammatory matter” and that Mr. Anobile had assured him that he was going to turn his raw language into respectable prose.
Whatever it was he had said — to paraphrase a song he had sung in “Horse Feathers” (1932) — he was against it.
To prove that Mr. Marx said what he had said, Mr. Anobile brought the tapes of their interviews into court. In a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 1974, he recalled cautioning Mr. Marx not to say anything during the interviews that he did not want to see published.
He added, “He signed a jacket of the book, ‘This is a wonderful book, Richard, thanks to you.’”
Mr. Marx — who staged one of his depositions in a Manhattan hotel suite wearing a shirt patterned with the titles of Marx Brothers films and bearing the slogan “Money talks” — never got the injunction or the $15 million in damages that he had demanded.
Mr. Anobile told the blog Brain Dead and Loving It in 2018 that the case was settled after Mr. Marx’s death in 1977.
Ted Bell, author. He wrote spy thrillers featuring the “Alex Hawke” character, and wrote a couple of YA time-travel historical novels featuring “Nick McIver”.
He wasn’t someone I’ve read, but I do recall seeing his books in the supermarket racks: as I’ve noted before, that’s always a good sign of success for a writer.
Charlie Thomas, Drifter. But not one of the original Drifters:
Mr. Thomas became a Drifter by chance. He was singing with the Crowns, an R&B group, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1958 when they came to the attention of George Treadwell, the manager of the original Drifters, who were also on the bill.
After one of the Drifters got drunk and cursed out the owner of the Apollo and the promoter of the show, the music historian Marv Goldberg wrote, Mr. Treadwell, who owned the name, fired all its members and replaced them with members of the Crowns, including Mr. Thomas and Ben Nelson, who would later be known as Ben E. King, and rechristened them the Drifters.
This is not to say that he wasn’t talented or successful:
Mr. King had written “There Goes My Baby” for Mr. Thomas to sing. But Mr. Thomas froze at the studio microphone, according to Billy Vera’s liner notes for “Rockin’ and Driftin’: The Drifters Box” (1996), and Mr. King took over. The song rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959.
The hits continued for several years, as the Drifters became one of the most successful groups of the era. They followed “There Goes My Baby” with songs like “This Magic Moment,” “Up on the Roof,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “On Broadway” and “Saturday Night at the Movies.” “Save the Last Dance for Me” was their only song to reach No. 1.
I hadn’t been buying anything for a while, because I was in the “no purchasing anything for yourself” holiday period.
But we went out for a bit over the MLK weekend, and I ran across some things at Half-Price Books. After the jump, some previously undocumented purchases…
Lawrence sent over a link to this item that’s currently up for auction at Heritage Auctions.
Sometime between 1970 and 1972, Ernest Tidyman, who was riding high on the success of “Shaft”, thought it’d be a cool idea to do a “Shaft” newspaper comic strip. So he got together with Don Rico, who was an old-time Marvel Comics guy. Rico did a lot of work for Marvel’s precursors (Timely Comics and Atlas Comics) during the 1940s and 1950s, and is credited as a co-creator of Natasha “Black Widow” Romanova.
The comic strip never sold, unfortunately. Which is a shame, as I think I would have read the heck out of a “Shaft” newspaper comic when I was a small boy. It almost certainly would have been more interesting than “The Amazing Glacial Spider-Man”.
And think of the crossover opportunities with other strips! Mary Worth suspects one of her neighbors is selling smack, so she calls her old friend John Shaft to investigate. Shaft goes back to Africa…and teams up with The Phantom.
To give you some idea of the way my mind works, I had a terrific idea last night. Casca, the Eternal Mercenary, winds up in Harlem in the 1970s…and teams up with Shaft to fight crime. Sadly, this idea is probably infeasible for intellectual property reasons, but if the current authors of the Casca series want to take a run at it, they have my blessing.
This is another rabbit hole that I attribute to McThag: the Casca book series.
I remember the Casca books from when I was a teenager: I never bought any, but I remember seeing them around.
I actually saw a bunch of them (if memory serves, it was eight or nine out of the first dozen) at Half-Price Books a month or so ago. I thought about buying them, but there were a little expensive, and this was during the “not buying anything for myself” time period.
Things I did not know until I read McThag’s post and looked up the books:
I may have to go back to Half-Price and see if they still have those Casca books.
Paul La Farge, author. He wasn’t someone I’d heard of before, but he sounds interesting:
Mr. La Farge’s novels and short stories defied easy categorization, but they were all characterized by a sort of writer’s derring-do.
“With each novel he would set out, and then it would become clear to him that he had set what seemed like an impossible formal challenge for himself,” Ms. Stern, the artistic director of the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, said by email, “but he would keep on, wrestling forward and sideways and backwards, and eventually the story and its form would be inextricable in a way that was awe-inspiring and yet felt inevitable.”
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Mr. La Farge began “Haussmann: Or the Distinction” (2001) by presenting it as a translation of an unearthed French text from 1922. The novel goes on to tell a made-up tale about the real-life French official Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who oversaw the redesign of Paris in the 1800s.“The Facts of Winter” (2005) was another exercise in fiction-as-reality. Mr. La Farge presented it as his translation of a minor French poet, Paul Poissel, whom he had invented out of whole cloth.
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“Luminous Airplanes” (2011), about a San Francisco programmer who returns to upstate New York to sort through his dead grandfather’s possessions, is perhaps the most realistic of Mr. La Farge’s novels, but it had its own unexpected element: Readers were invited to go to a website where Mr. La Farge posted elaborations on and continuations of the story.
His most recent novel, “The Night Ocean” (2017), again takes a real historical figure — the writer H.P. Lovecraft — and weaves a story around him.
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Lance Kerwin. Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “The Fourth Wise Man”, and “Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy”.
Yukihiro Takahashi, drummer and vocalist for the Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Mr. Takahashi and Yellow Magic Orchestra, which he founded in 1978 with the musicians Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, were often ranked alongside the German electronic group Kraftwerk as pioneers in electronic music and significant influences on emergent genres like hip-hop, New Wave and techno.
Yellow Magic Orchestra was among the first bands to employ in live shows devices like the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer and the Moog II-C synthesizer, which they used to complement Mr. Hosono’s funky guitar and Mr. Takahashi’s tight, driving drums.
Unlike their German counterparts, who leaned into the avant-garde nature of electronic sound and referred to themselves as automatons, Yellow Magic Orchestra found ways to bend it toward pop music, blending in elements of Motown, disco and synth-pop.
In a 1980 appearance on the television show “Soul Train,” the band performed a souped-up version of Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up,” after which a bemused Don Cornelius, the show’s host, interviewed Mr. Takahashi. Kraftwerk, it might go without saying, never appeared on “Soul Train.”
Jonathan Raban, writer.
Mr. Raban’s literary narratives of the places he visited and the people he met combined travelogue, memoir, reportage and criticism. What he was not, he insisted, was a travel writer.
“Travel writing seems to me a too-big umbrella, full of holes to let the rain in,” he told Granta magazine in 2008. “Anyone commissioned by a newspaper to write up meals and hotels in foreign holiday resorts is a travel writer. Anyone who does a guidebook is a travel writer.”
David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills & Nash and The Byrds. This seems to be breaking news: hattip on this to Lawrence. (Edited to add: NYT obit.)
Arthur Duncan, noted tap dancer.
There were more renowned tap dancers during his long career — Bill Robinson, Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines among them — but only Mr. Duncan had a regular national television showcase like the one he had on Saturday nights on the popular if square Welk show, from 1964 to 1982.
“‘Lawrence’ was not the hippest show around,” Mr. Hines told The Daily News of New York in 1989, when he was headlining “An Evening of Tap” at Carnegie Hall with Mr. Duncan and other dancers, including Bunny Briggs, Brenda Bufalino and Savion Glover. “But I’ll tell you, when nobody was home, I’d tune in, hoping to catch Arthur.”
He added, “He’s one of the most underrated dancers around, and a lot of that has to do with the association of the show. But other dancers know he’s great — and for a while he was the only one keeping tap in the public eye.”
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“He did a number almost every day, and he could always count on knocking me out when he did ‘Jump Through the Ring,’” Ms. White wrote in her 1995 autobiography, “Here We Go Again: My Life in Television, 1949-1995.”
But broadcast during the Jim Crow era, some Southern stations threatened to boycott the show because of Mr. Duncan’s presence on it, a response that came as a “frightfully ugly surprise,” she wrote.
In the 2018 documentary “Betty White: First Lady of Television,” Mr. Duncan said, “People in the South resented me being on the show, and they wanted me thrown out.”But Ms. White did not yield.
“I’m sorry, but, you know, he stays,” she recalled saying to NBC. “Live with it.”
Paul Johnson, noted conservative British historian.
A writer of immense range and output, capable of 6,000 words a day when in harness, Mr. Johnson modeled his career after earlier English men of letters, like Thomas Babington Macaulay and G.K. Chesterton. With an affable prose style and supreme confidence in his own opinions, he was happy to deliver forceful judgments on almost anything: the tangled politics of the Middle East, his personal quest for God or the cultural meaning of the Spice Girls.
The author or the editor of more than 50 books, Mr. Johnson alternated between large histories (of Christianity, Judaism, England, the United States, the middle years of the 20th century, art) and slim biographies of eminences from the ancient or more immediate past (Socrates, Jesus, Edward III, Elizabeth I, George Washington, Mozart, Napoleon, Darwin, Churchill, Eisenhower, Pope John XXIII.)
Writing more for a popular audience than for the approval of specialists, he filtered his wide reading through an ethical lens. As a historian, he looked back to the Victorians, for whom readable prose was as crucial as archival research, and, like those old-fashioned moralists, he was fond of hierarchies. Whether the subject was Renaissance sculptors or American humorists, no era, nation, religion, politician, event, building or piece of art or music was safe from his need to compare and rank.
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Lawrence emailed an obit for William Consovoy, prominent lawyer.
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Mr. Consovoy often led the charge in attacking existing laws in court or defending new ones. In 2020 alone, he argued against an extension of the deadline for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin, the re-enfranchisement of felons in Florida and a California plan to send absentee ballots to all registered voters.
He was equally involved in efforts to strike down affirmative action by colleges and universities. He played a supporting role in Fisher v. the University of Texas, a case that originated in 2008 and came before the Supreme Court twice. In both instances, the university successfully defended its plan to automatically admit in-state students who had graduated in the top 10 percent of their class.
Mr. Consovoy then worked closely with Mr. Blum on cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that their affirmative action programs — and, by extension, college and university affirmative action programs generally — were unconstitutional.
Those cases, brought on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions, an organization that Mr. Blum founded, reached the Supreme Court last fall. By then, Mr. Consovoy was too ill to argue them himself, so two of his partners did instead. The court is widely expected to decide in favor of Students for Fair Admissions before the end of the term, most likely in June.
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Lisa Marie Presley. THR. Pitchfork.
Constantine II, Olympic gold medalist (sailing, 1960) and the last king of Greece.
A lot of this took place shortly before or shortly after I was born, but it’s an interesting story I was previously not aware of.
…public support faded after he tried to influence Greek politics, machinations that led to the collapse of the newly-elected centrist government of Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou.
Constantine appointed a series of defectors from Mr. Papandreou’s party as prime minister without holding elections, a widely unpopular chain of events that became known as “the Apostasy.”
The increasing instability culminated in a coup led by a group of army colonels in 1967, considered one of the darkest moments in Greece’s modern history. It set off seven years of a brutal dictatorship for which many Greeks still blame the former king.
Constantine initially accepted the junta before attempting a counter-coup in December of the same year. When it failed, he was forced to flee to Rome, where he spent the first years of his exile.
After the dictatorship ended in 1974, Greece’s new government called a referendum on the monarchy, and 69 percent of Greeks voted to abolish it. The vote effectively deposed Constantine and ended a monarchy that had ruled Greece since 1863, except for the period from 1924 to 1935, when it was first abolished and then restored.
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His relationship with the Greek authorities after his dethroning remained prickly. In 1994, the Socialist government passed a law stripping him of his nationality and expropriating the former royal family’s property. Constantine took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, which in 2002 ordered Greece to pay him and his family nearly $15 million in compensation, a fraction of what he had sought. He accused the government of acting “unjustly and vindictively.”
“They treat me sometimes as if I’m their enemy,” he said in 2002. “I am not the enemy. I consider it the greatest insult in the world for a Greek to be told that he is not a Greek.”
The former king could have regained a Greek passport by adopting a surname, which the government demanded that he do to acknowledge that he was no longer king. But he insisted on being called only Constantine, and continued to cast himself as king and his children as princes and princesses.
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In 1964, he married Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark, who became queen.
She survives him, as do their five children: Alexia, Pavlos, Nikolaos, Theodora and Philippos; nine grandchildren; and two sisters, Sofia, the former queen of Spain, and former Princess Irene.
Bernard Kalb, former foreign correspondent for CBS, NBC, and the NYT.
He reported for The Times from 1946 to 1962, for CBS during the next 18 years (during which he joined his brother, Marvin, on the diplomatic beat) and as NBC’s State Department correspondent from 1980 to 1985. Then, for nearly two years, he served in the Reagan administration’s State Department — a stint that ended contentiously.
As a CBS correspondent in 1972, Mr. Kalb accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on the trip to China that proved to be a major step in the normalization of relations between the two nations. He also made virtually every overseas trip with Henry A. Kissinger, Cyrus R. Vance, Edmund S. Muskie, Alexander M. Haig Jr. and George P. Shultz during their tenures as secretary of state.
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Russell Banks, novelist.
Joyce Meskis, former owner of The Tattered Cover.
In addition to creating a bookstore famed for its vast selection and bibliophile-friendly atmosphere, Ms. Meskis often took a stand in matters related to censorship and the First Amendment. Sometimes those positions were not easy ones to embrace.
In 1991, for instance, when she was president of the American Booksellers Association, she testified against the proposed Pornography Victims Compensation Act, a bill introduced by Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, that would have allowed victims of sex crimes to sue distributors of pornography, including bookstores, if they could demonstrate that pornography influenced their attacker. Opponents of that bill (which died in committee) were sometimes labeled pro-pornography, but Ms. Meskis knew the real issue was that the law would make bookstores wary of selling anything controversial.
Similarly, the case she took to the Colorado Supreme Court some two decades ago pitted her against law enforcement officials, who were trying to build a case against a customer suspected of making methamphetamine. In 2000 the police found two books on drugmaking in a trailer home used as a meth lab; they also found an envelope with Ms. Meskis’s bookstore listed as the return address. Hoping to link the drugmaking to the recipient whose name was on the envelope, they sought Ms. Meskis’s sales records — and, though her stand read as pro-drug to some, she again saw the bigger picture.
“This is about access to private records of the book-buying public,” she told The New York Times in 2000. “If buyers thought that their records would be turned over to the government, it would have a chilling affect on what they buy and what they read.”
In 2002 the State Supreme Court ruled that both the First Amendment and the Colorado Constitution “protect an individual’s fundamental right to purchase books anonymously, free from governmental interference.”
Adam Rich. Other credits include “CHiPs”, “Silver Spoons”, and “Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star”.
Owen Roizman, cinematographer. “The French Connection”, “The Exorcist”, and “Network”? Wow.
Art McNally, NFL official credited as being “the father of instant replay”.
Earl Boen. Other credits (he has 291 as an actor: man worked) include video game spun offs from a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Battle Beyond the Stars”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, and “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”.