Anne Saxelby. No, you probably never heard of her if you didn’t live in New York.
She was one of the people responsible for the growth of American cheese and American cheese making.
In 2006, when Ms. Saxelby opened Saxelby Cheesemongers, the American cheese industry was largely just that: industrial and mass market. Her shop was a daring enterprise that carried only American-made cheeses from small producers.
The space was hardly more than a nook with a refrigerator in the original Essex Market on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Almost immediately, Ms. Saxelby attracted attention among cheese lovers, and especially among chefs in the growing farm-to-table movement.
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“Her passion for celebrating American farmstead cheese influenced a generation of cheese makers, chefs, cheese enthusiasts and friends and changed the way we engage with American foods,” Michael Anthony, the executive chef of Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan and a regular customer, said in an interview.
Steven Jenkins, a former cheesemonger at Fairway Market, said in a statement: “Anne Saxelby was the U.S. ambassador for American cheese makers and their handmade cheeses. Her yearslong, tireless effort to promote them and make them mainstream will forever have its effect, and will long be remembered.”
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She was 40.
Two by way of Lawrence: Brian Goldner, CEO of Hasbro. He was only 58: cancer got him.
Timuel Black, Chicago activist, historian, and war hero. He was 102.
While enduring racism in the military during his two years of service, he’d participate in two of the war’s decisive battles — the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge — as well as the liberation of Paris, earning four Battle Stars and the French Croix de Guerre.
“We went all the way from Normandy up onto the front line of the extermination camps,” he said in that interview on his 100th birthday. “At Buchenwald concentration camp, I saw human beings systematically being cremated.”
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He returned to civilian life with militant views, working as a social worker, high school teacher and as an organizer — with a prominent role in just about every labor, civil rights and political justice movement of the next six decades.
He worked with activists Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois in the 1940s and 1950s, and alongside King in the 1960s. He helped establish the Congress of Racial Equality and the United Packinghouse Workers of America.
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Mr. Black spent most of his life working to fulfill King’s dream. For nearly 30 years, he was a social worker and teacher at Farragut, DuSable and Hyde Park high schools, fighting segregation and discrimination within the school system and helping establish the Teachers Committee for Quality Education. He went to City Colleges of Chicago in 1969, initially as a dean at Wright College. He was vice president at Olive Harvey from 1971 to 1973, and head of communications systemwide from 1973 to 1979. Then he taught cultural anthropology at Loop College until his retirement in 1989.
In 1994, Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett wrote of Mr. Black: “Tim was of a generation that viewed education not only as a vehicle for personal elevation but also as instrument for a people’s liberation … Whenever there was a good crusade against Jim Crow housing, segregated public beaches, job discrimination or the shortchanging of Black students in public schools, there was Tim Black.