Friday, November 29, 2013

Thomas Rees, Plastic Surgeon Who Treated Africa

Thomas Rees, Plastic Surgeon Who Treated Africa, Dies at 86

  • FACEBOOK
  • TWITTER
  • GOOGLE+
  • SAVE
  • EMAIL
  • SHARE
  • PRINT
  • REPRINTS
Dr. Thomas D. Rees, an innovative New York plastic surgeon who helped found the Flying Doctors Service of East Africa, a charity that employs a fleet of small planes to provide medical care and save lives deep in the African bush, died on Nov. 14 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 86.
AMREF USA
Dr. Thomas D. Rees, a New York plastic surgeon, on an outreach mission with his neediest patients, in Africa in an undated photo.
World Twitter Logo.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesworldfor international breaking news and headlines.
AMREF USA
Dr. Rees in an undated photo.

His daughter, S. Elizabeth Rees, said the cause was liver cancer.
New York magazine once referred to Dr. Rees as “one of the fathers of aesthetic surgery in New York,” and he is credited with helping to elevatecosmetic surgery from something one did not really discuss to almost a status symbol. “Teenagers were given a ‘Rees nose’ for Christmas,” he wrote in 1993.
But it was in Africa that he found his neediest patients, an endeavor inspired by a trip he took there in 1956 while on a fellowship in London. A colleague with a farm in Tanzania had invited him down for the warm sun and the chance to see African wildlife.
But while there, as he related in a memoir, he found himself treating a warrior holding his intestines in place with an old blanket after being gored by a charging rhino. Dr. Rees had few instruments with him and no general anesthetic, no antibiotics and no blood plasma. He also had no choice but to operate on the man immediately; there was to be no plane service for a medical evacuation until the next day. The man survived.
“I wasn’t sure why, but I knew my life’s direction had been permanently altered” by the experience, Dr. Rees wrote in the memoir, “Daktari: A Surgeon’s Adventures With the Flying Doctors of East Africa,” published in 2002.
He went on to join Dr. Michael Wood and Dr. Archibald McIndoe in 1957 to found the Flying Doctors. It now operates in 11 countries, offering, among other services, emergency care, vaccinations, surgery to repair congenital deformities and airlift evacuations of critically ill patients.
The Flying Doctors’ founders also set up an umbrella organization called the African Medical and Research Foundation, which has become one of Africa’s largest public health initiatives. In 2005, it was awarded the Gates Award for Global Health.
Dr. Rees wrote 140 medical articles and six medical texts, including “Aesthetic Plastic Surgery,” a two-volume standard. In an interview on Tuesday, Dr. Sherrell Aston, the chairman of the plastic surgery department of Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, called Dr. Rees “one of the true giants in the specialty.”
Dr. Aston said that Dr. Rees, himself a former chairman of the hospital’s plastic surgery department, was one of the first to “openly teach plastic surgery to other plastic surgeons” in the late 1960s and ’70s. To polish his profession’s image, he also seized opportunities to speak to the news media, an activity more conservative physicians disdained.
“There was a time when cosmetic surgery was looked at as being rather frivolous,” Dr. Aston said.
Thomas Dee Rees was born in Nephi, Utah, on Feb. 3, 1927. His father, Don, was head of the biology and zoology departments at the University of Utah, which Thomas entered at 16. He graduated in an accelerated course when he was 19 and earned his medical degree two years later. He served two stints as a Navy officer, one in 1945 and the other in 1957-58.
Dr. Rees trained in general and plastic surgery at the Genesee Hospital in Rochester and New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. He was then chosen for a prestigious fellowship in London with Dr. McIndoe, who had advanced plastic surgery with ingenious treatments for injured British airmen during World War II. Dr. McIndoe worked with his cousin Dr. Harold Gillies, considered the father of plastic surgery.
It was during Dr. Rees’s fellowship in 1956 that Dr. McIndoe said he was planning his annual visit to Africa, where he had a farm near Mount Kilimanjaro. He asked Dr. Rees to come along, and maybe see some animals.
“Archie said it was time to escape the beastly English winter and feel the warmth of the African sun,” Dr. Rees wrote.
There, they met up with Dr. Wood, a colleague from London, who was just starting a plastic surgery practice covering a huge section of East Africa by air. Within five years, the organization they founded had drawn support from Albert Schweitzer, the Aga Khan, Edward R. Murrow and Arthur Godfrey, the radio and television personality, who donated its first plane.
For many years, Dr. Rees spent a month in Africa every year, his daughter said.
Dr. Rees was a professor at the New York University School of Medicine and a former president of the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. He organized an annual symposium that attracts more than 1,000 plastic surgeons from around the world. This year’s event is scheduled for the first week of December.
Dr. Rees’s wife of 63 years, the former Natalie Bowes, an early fashion model with the Ford agency known as Nan Rees, died last year. His son David died in 1990. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his son Thomas Jr. and his brother, J. Richard.
Dr. Rees retired to Santa Fe in the mid-1980s because of osteoarthritis. He became a sculptor, finding inspiration in African people and animals.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Walter White, NAACP Leader

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.

In 1918, he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.

White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.

Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly known as the "Harlem Renaissance", the period was one of intense literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of black American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people from across the nation, as did New York City in general.

White was the author of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). His non-fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945), his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African-American boxer.

***

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.
In 1918 he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.[1]


Early life and education[edit]

White was the fourth of seven children born in Atlanta to George W. White and Madeline Harrison. They belonged to the influential First Congregational Church, founded after the Civil War by freedmen and the American Missionary Association, based in the North. Of all the denominations in Georgia, the Congregationalists were among the most socially, politically and financially powerful.[2] Membership to First Congregational was the ultimate status symbol in Atlanta.[2] Among the new middle class of blacks, both of the Whites ensured that Walter and each of their children got an education. When White was born, George had graduated from Atlanta University and was a postal worker, an admired position in the federal government.[3] Madeline had graduated from Clark University and became a teacher.
Of mixed race with African and European ancestry on both sides, White's appearance showed his high proportion of European ancestry. He emphasized in his autobiography, A Man Called White (p. 3): "I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." Five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white. All in his family were light-skinned, and his mother Madeline was also blue-eyed and blonde.[4] It has been suggested that her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, a concubine and slave, and Dilsia's master William Henry Harrison, who much later became president of the United States. Madeline's mother Marie Harrison was one of Dilsia's mixed-race daughters by Harrison, and her father Augustus Ware was a white man.[5] White and his family identified as Negro and lived among the Atlanta Negro community. George and Madeline took a kind but firm approach in rearing their children, encouraging hard work and regular schedules.[6] In his autobiography, Walter relates that his parents ran a strict schedule on Sundays; they locked him in his room for silent prayer, a time so boring that he all but begged to do homework. His father forbade Walter from reading any books less than 25 years old, so he chose to read Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope by the time he was 12.[7] When he was 8, he threw a rock at a white child who called him a derogatory name for drinking from the fountain reserved for Blacks.[7] Events such as this shaped Walter's self-identity. He began to develop skills to pass for white, a device he used later to preserve his safety as a civil rights investigator in the South.[7]

Career[edit]

White was educated at Atlanta University, a historically black college. WEB Du Bois had already moved to the North before White enrolled, but Du Bois and Walter’s parents knew each other well.[8] Du Bois had taught two of Walter’s older brothers at Atlanta University.[8] Du Bois and Walter White later disagreed about how best to gain civil rights for blacks, but they shared a vision for the country. After graduating in 1916 from Atlanta University, White took a position with the Standard Life Insurance Company, one of the new and most successful businesses started by African Americans in Atlanta.
He also worked to organize a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Atlanta; the organization had been set up several years before and White was supportive of their work. He and other leaders were successful in getting the Atlanta School Board to support improving education for black children, who were kept in segregated schools that were traditionally underfunded by the white-dominated legislature.
At the invitation of James Weldon Johnson, a 25-year-old White moved to New York City, and in 1918 started working at the national headquarters of the NAACP. WEB Du Bois and other leaders of the NAACP eventually got over their concerns about his youth. Walter White took to the ranks of secretary assistant of the NAACP, eventually becoming an undercover agent in lynching investigations. With his keen investigative skills and light complexion, Walter White proved to be the NAACP's secret weapon against white mob violence.[9] White passed as white as a NAACP investigator, finding both more safety in hostile environments, and gaining freer communication with whites in cases of violations of civil and human rights, such as lynchings and hate crimes. He became involved in KKK groups in the South in order to expose those involved in lynchings and other murders. On one occasion he escaped on a train after learning of threats that a black man "passing for white" was being hunted down to be lynched.
To become a popular leader, he needed to fend off the appeal of Marcus Garvey and display a skillful verbal dexterity. His successor at the NAACP, Roy Wilkins suggested "White was one of the best talkers I've ever heard."[10]
Throughout his career, Walter White spoke out against segregation and discrimination while also suppressing manifestations of nationalism. Most notably, Walter White and WEB Du Bois' 1934 conflict was over the latter's endorsement of blacks' voluntary separation within United States society.[11]

Marriage and family[edit]

White married Gladys Powell in 1922. They had two children, Jane White, who became an actress on Broadway and television; and Walter Carl Darrow White, who lived in Germany for much of his adult life.
The Whites' long marriage ended in divorce in 1949.[12]
White generated public controversy by his marriage to Poppy Cannon, a white South African magazine editor. Many of his black colleagues and acquaintances were offended. Some said he had always wanted to be white; others said he had always been white.[13]
His ex-wife and children broke off with the couple. White's sister said that he wanted all along simply to pass as a white citizen.[13] His son changed his name from Walter White Jr. to Carl Darrow, signifying his disgust and desire to separate himself from his father.[13]
After the brouhaha, Walter White published an article in Look Magazine entitled "Has science conquered the color line?" It described a new scientific breakthrough that allowed for skin lightening, with the suggestion that such changes would eliminate the color line.[13] By describing "Whiteness as a solution for something to be aspired to, he profoundly insulted the people he had given his life to and all but destroyed his own enormous legacy." [13] He later defended the article by saying that he had intended it satirically. He wanted individual character to matter more than skin color, and wanted people of all skin tones "to realize the full range of possibilities within themselves and not just exercise the easy politics of race."[14]

NAACP[edit]

Investigating riots and lynchings[edit]

White used his appearance to increase his effectiveness in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the American South. He could "pass" and talk to whites, but also identified as black and could talk to members of the African-American community. Such work was dangerous. “Through 1927 White would investigate 41 lynchings, 8 race riots, and two cases of widespread peonage, risking his life repeatedly in the backwaters of Florida, the piney woods of Georgia, and in the cotton fields of Arkansas.”[15]
In his autobiography, A Man Called White, he dedicates an entire chapter to a time when he almost joined the Ku Klux Klan undercover. White became a master of incognito investigating. He started with a letter from a friend that recruited new members of the KKK.[16] After back and forth correspondence between him and Edward Young Clark, leader of the Ku Klux Klan, it became apparent Clark was interested in White joining.[16] White was eventually invited to Atlanta, Georgia to meet with other Klan leaders, but politely declined for fear if his true identity were found out, he would be killed.[16] White used this access to Klan leaders to further his investigation into the "sinister and illegal conspiracy against human and civil rights which the Klan was concocting."[16] After deeper inquiries into White's life, Edward Young Clark stopped sending signed letters; instead White was threatened by anonymous letters stating his life would be in danger if he ever divulged any of the confidential information.[17] By this time however, White had already turned the information into the Department of Justice and New York Police Department.[17] White understood undermining the strong hold of mob violence would be crucial to progressing his cause.
One of the first riots he investigated was that of October 1919 in Elaine, Arkansas, where white vigilantes and Federal troops in Phillips County killed more than 200 black sharecroppers. The case had both labor and racial issues. The white militias had come to the town and hunted down blacks in retaliation for the killing of a white man. He was killed in a shootout at a church where black sharecroppers were meeting on issues related to organizing with an agrarian union.
White was granted credentials from the Chicago Daily News. That enabled him to obtain an interview with Governor Charles Hillman Brough of Arkansas, who would not have met with him as the representative of the NAACP. Brough gave White a letter of recommendation to help him meet people, and his autographed photograph.
White was in Phillips County for only a brief time before his identity was discovered; he took the first train back to Little Rock. The conductor told him that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start", because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nigger down here passing for white and the boys are going to get him."[18] Asked what they would do to him, the conductor told White, "When they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!"[18] "High yellow" was a term used at the time to refer to white-appearing blacks, mostly those of mixed-racial descent.
White published his findings about the riot and trial in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender and The Nation, as well as the NAACP's own magazine The Crisis. Governor Brough asked the United States Postal Service to prohibit the mailing of the Chicago Defender and The Crisis to Arkansas, while others attempted to enjoin distribution of the Defender at the local level.
The NAACP put together a legal defense of the men convicted and carried the case to the Supreme Court. Its ruling overturned the Elaine convictions and established important precedent about the conduct of trials. The Supreme Court found that the original trial was held under conditions that adversely affected the defendants' rights. Some of the courtroom audience were armed, as were a mob outside, so there was intimidation of the court and jury. The 79 black defendants had been quickly tried: 12 were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death; 67 were condemned to sentences from 20 years to life. No white man was prosecuted for the many black deaths.[19]

Scottsboro Trial[edit]

Walter White’s first major struggle as leader of the NAACP centered on the Scottsboro Trial and the NAACP battle against communism. The Scottsboro trial was a high profile case that the NAACP and Walter White could use to increase their following. Weeks after White secured his new position, nine black teenagers looking for work were arrested after a fight with a group of white teens as the train both were riding on passed through Scottsboro, Alabama.[20] Two white girls were also found who accused the nine black teenagers of rape. Locked in a cell awaiting trial, the "Scottsboro boys looked to be prime lynching material: dirt poor, illiterate, and of highly questionable moral character even for teenagers." [20] Because the Communist party and the NAACP had long been battling for the black community's support and leadership over the black population, Scottsboro was an important battle ground for these two groups.[21] The Communist party had to devastate black citizens' faith in the NAACP to assume sole control of leadership, and they saw a Scottsboro victory as a way to solidify this superior role over the NAACP.[21] Their case against the NAACP was easier when Walter White and other leaders were second in approaching the case after the International Labor Defense.[22] Ultimately, the case was a synopsis of conflicting ideals between the two organizations. To White, “Communism meant that blacks have two strikes against them: blacks were aliens in white society where skin color was more important than initiative or intelligence, and blacks would also be Reds which meant a double dose of hatred from white Americans”.[23] White believed the NAACP could not in any way be associated with the Communist Party for this reason. Ultimately the Communist leaders failed in solidifying their position. White stated, "The shortsightedness of the Communist leaders in the United States (led to their eventual failure); Had they been more intelligent, honest, and truthful there is no way of estimating how deeply they might have penetrated into Negro life and consciousness.[24] White meant the Communist's philosophy of branding anyone opposed to their platform was their failure. He believed the NAACP had the best defense council in the country, yet the Scottsboro boy's families chose to go with the ILD partly because they were first on the scene.[24] White believed in capitalistic America and used the Communist propaganda as leverage to promote his own cause in securing civil liberties. He advised white America to reconsider their position of unfair treatmtent because they might find the black population choosing radical alternative methods of protest.[25] Ultimately, White and other NAACP leaders decided to continue involvement with the Scottsboro boys since this was only one of many efforts they had.[26] In his autobiography, Walter White gave a critical summary of the injustice in Scottsboro, "In the intervening years it had become increasingly clear that the tragedy of a Scottsboro lies, not in the bitterly cruel injustice which it works upon its immediate victims, but also, and perhaps even more, in the cynical use of human misery by Communists in propagandizing Communism, and in the complacency with which a democratic government views the basic evils from which such a case arises. A majority of Americans still ignore, the plain implications in similar tragedies." [27]

Anti-Lynching Legislation[edit]

Walter White was also a strong proponent and supporter of anti-lynching bills. Because of his first hand experience he was well versed in the motivation of Southern Whites to complete such heinous acts. One of White’s many surveys showed 46 of 50 lynchings during the first six months of 1919 were black victims, 10 of whom were burned at the stake.[28] After the great 1919 Chicago riot, White concluded the causes of such violence were not rape, as had been rumored, but rather the result of "prejudice and economic competition." [29] This was also the conclusion of a city commission that investigated the riots; it noted that ethnic Irish had led the anti-black attacks.
Newspapers reported a decreasing number of southern lynchings in the late 1910s, but postwar violence in Northern and Midwestern cities increased under the competition of returning veterans, immigrants and African Americans for work and housing. Walter White investigated one particularly horrific example of the sadistic events in 1918. He found evidence that in Lowndes and Brooks counties, Georgia, "The killings (of many black citizens) ended with a pregnant black woman being tied to a tree and burned alive after which (the mob) split her open, and her child, still alive, was thrown to the ground and stomped by some of the members”.[30]
White lobbied for federal anti-lynching bills during his time as leader of the NAACP. In 1922, the Dyer anti-lynching bill was passed by the House, the “first piece of legislation passed by the House of Representatives since Reconstruction that specifically protected blacks from lynchings”.[31] Congress never passed the Dyer bill, as the Senate was controlled by Southerners who opposed the bill. White sponsored other civil rights legislation, also defeated by the Southern bloc: the Castigan-Wagner bill of 1935, the Gavagan bill of 1937, and the VanNuys bill of 1940. It did, however, take a monumental effort on Southerners' part both financially and politically to take the Castigan-Wagner bill out of consideration and to defeat the Gavagan bill.[31] White had become a powerful figure, and James F Byrnes of South Carolina stood on the Senate floor and said, “One Negro has ordered this bill to pass. If Walter White should consent to have this bill laid aside its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard."[31] White's word was the only thing that kept the bill before Congress. It would be easy to conclude White and the NAACP failed in their attempts to secure anti-lynching legislation, but they were able to secure the all-important public support for their cause. By 1938, a Gallup poll found that 72% of Americans and 57% of Southerners favored an anti-lynching bill.[32] Because of his strong push for antilynching legislation, White had created a strong alliance of groups that believed in the same basic ideals of civil liberty which in turn formed the basis of the modern Civil Rights Movement.[32]

Attacks on Paul Robeson[edit]

During the McCarthy era, White did not openly criticize McCarthy’s campaign in Congress against communists, which was wide-ranging. During this era, American fears of communism were heightened and the FBI had been trying to classify civil rights activists as communists. White feared a backlash on this issue might cost the NAACP its tax-exempt status and lead to equating civil rights with Soviet Communism.[33] He criticized singer/activist Paul Robeson, who was accused of pro-Soviet leanings. Together with Roy Wilkins, then editor of The Crisis, he arranged for distribution of Paul Robeson: Lost Shepherd, a leaflet discounting Robeson that was written under a pseudonym.[34]

Literary career[edit]

Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly known as the "Harlem Renaissance", the period was one of intense literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of black American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people from across the nation, as did New York City in general.
Writer Zora Neale Hurston accused Walter White of stealing her designed costumes from her play The Great Day.[35] White never returned the costumes to Hurston although she repeatedly asked for them by mail.[36]
White was the author of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). His non-fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945), his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African-American boxer.

Awards and honors[edit]

***

Walter White, in full Walter Francis White (born July 1, 1893—died March 21, 1955), foremost spokesman for African Americans for almost a quarter of a century and executive secretary (1931–55) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He waged a long and ultimately successful campaign against the lynching of blacks by white mobs in the United States.
Despite his blond hair and blue eyes, denoting that only a fraction of his ancestry was African American, White chose to go through life as a black. At age 25 he joined the NAACP national staff as assistant executive secretary under James Weldon Johnson, whom he succeeded as executive secretary. White’s principal objective became the abolition of lynching. Aided by his fair skin, he made on-the-spot investigations of lynchings and race riots and conducted a vigorous, sustained drive for enactment of a federal antilynching law. Although no such law was enacted, the climate of public opinion was markedly changed by his investigations and exposés. In 1918, when he joined the NAACP staff, 67 persons, all but 4 of them blacks, were lynched. In the year of his death, 1955, there were only three recorded lynchings, and none had occurred in the five previous years. Lynchings had become a rarity and were soon to disappear from the American scene.
In an early assault on discrimination in voting rights, White in 1930 almost single-handedly succeeded in influencing the U.S. Senate to reject by a 41–39 vote President Herbert Hoover’s nomination of Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Parker was on record as being opposed to black suffrage.) At the outbreak of World War II, White assisted labour leader A. Philip Randolph in pressing for a U.S. Fair Employment Practices Committee (June 1941) that would act to ban discrimination in government and wartime industry.
White’s writings include two fictionalized accounts of a Southern lynching: The Fire in the Flint (1924) and Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929). His autobiography, A Man Called White, was published in 1948.

Sylvia Browne, Self-Proclaimed Psychic

Sylvia Browne Dies at 77; Self-Proclaimed Psychic

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Save
  • Email
  • Share
  • Print
  • Reprints
Sylvia Browne, a self-proclaimed psychic who claimed to be able to see into the past, the future and the afterlife — and who saw many of her books ascend best-seller lists — died on Wednesday in San Jose, Calif. She was 77.
HarperOne, via Associated Press
Sylvia Browne
Arts Twitter Logo.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @nytimesarts for arts and entertainment news.
Arts & Entertainment Guide
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
Her death, announced on her website, was confirmed by Leslie Kelsay, a spokeswoman for Good Samaritan Hospital, where Ms. Browne died. No cause was given.
Psychics tend to be sure of themselves, and Ms. Browne was no exception. She said she could reach back centuries to speak to the dead. She claimed to have helped police departments find murder suspects and their missing victims. She often took credit for accurately predicting that the government intern Chandra Levy would be found dead in Rock Creek Park in Washington — though law enforcement officials had been searching that area since shortly after she was reported missing in May 2001.
More than once, with the television cameras rolling, Ms. Browne told the parents of a missing child that their son or daughter was dead — sometimes she would say precisely where — only for the child to be found alive later. In 2004, she told the mother of the Ohio kidnapping victim Amanda Berry that her daughter was dead. Ms. Berry, held captive for more than a decade, was rescued this May.
Although Ms. Browne often appeared on shows like “Larry King Live” and was a regular guest on “The Montel Williams Show,” much of her income came from customers who paid $700 to ask her questions over the telephone for 30 minutes.
She was frequently taken to task by skeptics, most notably the professional psychic debunker James Randi. But the questions raised about her abilities did not damage her appeal as an author.
She published more than 40 books, and many were mainstays on The New York Times’s best-seller list. Among the most popular titles were “Secrets & Mysteries of the World,” “If You Could See What I See,” “Insight” and “End of Days,” which featured her interpretation of various end-of-the-world prophecies.
Sylvia Browne was born Sylvia Shoemaker on Oct. 19, 1936, and grew up in Kansas City, Mo. “Her powers manifested themselves when she was 3 years old,” according to the website of the Society of Novus Spiritus, a Gnostic Christian organization she founded in 1986.
Her biography on that site says she earned a graduate degree in English at an unspecified university and worked for 18 years as a teacher in a Catholic school, and that she trained as a hypnotist and “trance medium.”
Survivors include her husband, Michael Ulery; two sons from a previous marriage, Christopher and Paul Dufresne; three grandchildren; and a sister, Sharon Bortolussi.
Ms. Browne released many videos through her website. In 2012, she made a brief video that she said was intended to put at ease people who were concerned that the world would end on Dec. 12.
“Although I do believe that the world will sustain itself, I don’t believe we’re going to be here after about 95 years,” she said. “People get very concerned about that, but it’s not going to be some type of horrible monster coming out of the sea and eating you or tearing your flesh off and throwing people down into a pit of hell. A loving God would not do that to anybody. You have to think logically.”

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Michael Weiner, Baseball Union Executive Director

Michael Weiner, Peacemaking Leader of Baseball Union, Dies at 51




Michael Weiner, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, who forged agreements with the club owners that enhanced drug testing and brought years of labor peace to the game after decades of strife, died on Thursday at his home in Mansfield Township, N.J. He was 51.

Frank Franklin II/Associated Press
Michael Weiner at a news conference in 2011, the year he negotiated a five-year labor agreement with Major League Baseball.
Mr. Weiner, whose death was announced by the players association, had brain cancer. He announced in August 2012 that he had a brain tumor but continued in his post through the union’s representation of players implicated this year in the Biogenesis drug scandal.
Tony Clark, the union’s director of player services and a former major league first baseman, was promoted to the newly created post of deputy executive director in late July, becoming the second in command, a week after Mr. Weiner held a news conference during the All-Star break to discuss the Biogenesis case and his medical condition.
He had lost the ability to walk and to use his right arm.
“What I look for each day is beauty, meaning and joy,” Mr. Weiner said, “and if I can find beauty, meaning and joy, that’s a good day.”
While undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, Mr. Weiner relinquished his second position of general counsel last February.
In November 2011, Mr. Weiner’s union and the baseball owners reached a five-year labor agreement giving Major League Baseball the most comprehensive drug-testing program of any pro sports league in North America.
An outgrowth of baseball’s steroid era, the agreement permits the blood testing of ballplayers for human growth hormone, a prescription substance that can speed recovery from injuries.
The accord was initially limited to testing during spring training, the off-season and instances of reasonable cause during the season. But labor and management agreed last January to start general unannounced testing during the regular season as well.
They also adopted a sophisticated testing regimen to detect abnormal testosterone levels in players’ bodies.
“Players want a program that is tough, scientifically accurate, backed by the latest proven scientific methods and fair,” Mr. Weiner said.
The 2011 agreement was Mr. Weiner’s third as the union’s lead negotiator. He headed the union after the long and often tumultuous tenures of Marvin Miller, a pioneering figure in the sports labor movement, and Donald Fehr, who took over the union leadership after the brief tenure of Ken Moffett, a former federal labor mediator, and retained it until retiring in December 2009.
Mr. Fehr is now the head of the N.H.L. players union.
An informal presence at the bargaining table, partial to blue jeans, flannel shirts with no necktie, and high-top Chuck Taylor All-Stars, Mr. Weiner pressed his points without a hard edge. He was known for his mastery of contract details and his willingness to listen to and consider — though not necessarily accede to — management’s arguments.
When Mr. Weiner was preparing to succeed Mr. Fehr, he remarked how “there has been a greater acceptance by the owners and by the commissioner’s office of the role the union has in the game and in the business.”
Rob Manfred, Weiner’s management counterpart as baseball’s executive vice president for labor relations, said at the time that he regarded Mr. Weiner as “tough and smart, but also fair.”
“Over the years, we have found creative ways to bridge our differences,” Mr. Manfred told The New York Times.
When Mr. Weiner called the team labor representatives together to announce he was being treated for a brain tumor, Drew Storen, the Washington Nationals pitcher and player representative, remarked, “He’s a guy who is so sharp, and he’s such a powerful person, but he’s so humble and easy to talk to.”
Barry Meister, a longtime player agent, told ESPN in 2009 that Mr. Weiner was particularly adept at marshaling his facts in salary arbitration hearings without flaunting his intellect or injecting ego into the proceedings.
“Michael is a genius,” Mr. Meister said, “but he’s a regular genius.”

Michael Weiner, Peacemaking Leader of Baseball Union, Dies at 51

(Page 2 of 2)
Michael S. Weiner was born on Dec. 21, 1961, in Paterson, N.J., where his father, Isaac, founded a construction company. The eldest of three children, he grew up in Pompton Lakes, N.J., rooting for the Yankees, and he played third base for his high school baseball team.
He graduated from Williams College with a degree in political economy in 1983 and from Harvard Law School in 1986.
After leaving Harvard, Mr. Weiner spent two years as a clerk to Judge H. Lee Sarokin of the United States District Court in Newark. He later credited the judge’s genial demeanor in the courtroom with influencing his approach to collective bargaining, which he felt could be conducted without acrimony, notwithstanding the high stakes and often complex issues.
Mr. Weiner’s path to the players union began after Judge Sarokin introduced him to his friend Larry Fleischer, the general counsel of the N.B.A. players union and its former president. Mr. Fleischer in turn brought Mr. Weiner to the attention of Mr. Fehr, who hired him as a baseball union lawyer in September 1988.
Mr. Weiner was named the union’s general counsel in 2004, but two years before that he took the lead in negotiating a contract with ownership. He was the union’s chief negotiator as well for the labor agreements reached in 2006 and 2011.
The current agreement will assure labor peace through 2016, giving baseball uninterrupted play since the 232-day strike of 1994-95 that brought cancellation of the ’94 World Series. That walkout came after a series of strikes or lockouts dating to 1972.
Mr. Weiner’s survivors include his wife, Diane Margolin, and three daughters, Margie, Grace and Sally.
Last January, Mr. Weiner reflected on the state of baseball labor relations.
“Most of the time that I’ve been here, there’s been some kind of crisis,” he told The Star-Ledger of Newark. “Either collusion, or bargaining, or issues with the drug program, with Congress and things like that. At this point, we always have issues, but we don’t have that real crisis. And that’s something to be proud of.”