Tuesday, September 30, 2014

A00218 - Bonnie Franklin, 'One Day at a Time' Star

Bonnie Franklin, Steadfast Mom on ‘One Day at a Time,’ Dies at 69


CBS, via Photofest

Bonnie Franklin, left, with Valerie Bertinelli in a 1979 episode of 'One Day at a Time."

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Published: March 1, 2013
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Bonnie Franklin, whose portrayal of a pert but determined Ann Romano on the television show “One Day at a Time” in the 1970s and ’80s spun laughter out of the tribulations of a divorced woman juggling parenting, career, love life and feminist convictions, died on Friday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 69.
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Bonnie Franklin
The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, family members said. They had announced the diagnosis in September.
Ms. Franklin also acted on the stage and in movies and for years sang and danced in a nightclub act. But she was most widely known in the role of Ann Romano, one of the first independent women to be portrayed on TV wrestling with issues like sexual harassment, rape and menopause. Ms. Franklin — green-eyed, red-haired, button-nosed and 5-foot-3 — brought a buoyant comic touch to the part.
Some saw the show as helping feminism enter the mainstream.
“I know it’s just a television show, and I don’t think that I am changing the way the world is structured,” Ms. Franklin told The Washington Post in 1980, but she allowed that “sometimes we strike chords that do make people think a bit.”
“One Day at a Time” ran from December 1975 to May 1984, and its ratings ranked in the top 20 in eight of those seasons and in the top 10 in four. Ms. Franklin was nominated for an Emmy Award and twice for a Golden Globe.
The show’s topicality fell squarely in the tradition of its developer, Norman Lear, who had gained renown for introducing political and social commentary to situation comedy with “All in the Family” and other shows. Its co-creator was Whitney Blake, a former sitcom star who, as a single mother, had reared the future actress Meredith Baxter.
Like Archie and Edith Bunker in “All in the Family,” Ann and her daughters, Julie and Barbara Cooper (Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli), used comedy in the service of grappling with serious and thorny real-world matters.
As a divorced mother who had reverted to her maiden name and relocated to Indianapolis, Ann fought her deadbeat ex-husband for child support, for example. Or she dealt with a daughter deciding whether to remain a virgin.
Some story lines continued for up to four weeks, as when Julie, to Ann’s consternation, dated a man more than twice her age. In one plot twist Ann’s fiancé is killed by a drunken driver. Later she marries her son-in-law’s divorced father.
Comic relief came from the frequent visits of the building superintendent, Dwayne Schneider (Pat Harrington). But Ms. Franklin was said to have pushed the producers toward greater realism, urging them to take on issues like teenage pregnancy and avoid letting the show lapse into comic shtick.
In her 2009 memoir, “High on Arrival,” Ms. Phillips, who had come to the show after gaining notice in the 1973 George Lucas film “American Graffiti,” said that Ms. Franklin did not want “One Day at a Time” to be “sitcom fluff.”
“She wanted it to deal honestly with the struggles and truths of raising two teenagers as a single mother," Ms. Phillips wrote.
By the time the show ended in 1984, Ann’s daughters had grown and married; Ann herself had remarried and become a grandmother.
In interviews. Ms. Franklin said she had refused to do anything that might diminish her character’s integrity. In particular, she said, it was important for Ann not to rely on a man to make decisions. But each year she found herself fighting the same fights.
“And I’m not working with insensitive men,” she told The Boston Globe in 1981. “But the men who produce and write the show still don’t believe me when I present them with the women’s point of view.
“After seven years,” she continued, “I just want to say, ‘C’mon guys, I’m an intelligent person, why don’t you just trust me?’ I’m so tired of fighting. But you can’t give up.”
Bonnie Gail Franklin was born in Santa Monica, Calif., on Jan. 6, 1944, one of five children. Her father was an investment banker while her mother pushed her children toward the performing arts. The family later moved to Beverly Hills, where Ms. Franklin graduated from Beverly Hills High School.
An excellent tap dancer by 9, she performed on “The Colgate Comedy Hour” in 1953. The next year, she played Susan Cratchit on “A Christmas Carol” on the CBS variety show “Shower of Stars.” In 1956 she had uncredited roles in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Wrong Man” and the comedy “The Kettles in the Ozarks.” She turned down an offer to be a Mouseketeer on Disney’s “Mickey Mouse Club” television show.
After attending Smith College in Massachusetts, Ms. Franklin transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she graduated with a major in English in 1966. Her marriage to Ronald Sossi, a playwright, ended in divorce in 1970.
She had her breakthrough as a performer the same year, when she was nominated for a Tony for her 10-minute song-and-dance performance on Broadway as a chorus gypsy in “Applause,” which starred Lauren Bacall.
Ms. Franklin also acted in episodes of other television shows as well as in regional theater and movies, mainly ones made for television, notably playing Margaret Sanger, the women’s rights and birth-control advocate, in “Portrait of a Rebel: The Remarkable Mrs. Sanger,” a 1980 movie on CBS. On the Sanger set, she met the movie’s executive producer, Marvin Minoff. They were married for 29 years before his death in 2009.
Ms. Franklin is survived by her mother, Claire Franklin, and her stepchildren Jed and Julie Minoff.
Twenty-four years after her Sanger portrayal, Ms. Franklin spoke to hundreds of thousands of women at an abortion rights march in Washington.
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A00217 - Sylvia Smith, Memoirist of the Life Banal

Sylvia Smith, Memoirist of the Life Banal, Dies at 67


Rex USA

Sylvia Smith, whose badly written, boring memoirs of her life as a secretary became huge hits in Britain and elsewhere.

By 

Published: March 2, 2013

Sylvia Smith — who dropped out of high school at 15, never married, lived most of her life in London rooming houses, never had a great adventure or suffered a great misfortune, and never read books by most accounts — began writing her memoirs in her late 40s, when illness and a government disability pension had allowed her to quit the last of a long series of secretarial jobs, most of them as a temp.
It was an unlikely foundation for a literary career. Just as unlikely was the literary stir she created with her first book, “Misadventures,” published in 2001 when she was 55 after years of work and hundreds of rejection letters.
The book, a plainly written, deadpan chronicle of an ordinary life, seemed to push the allowable boundaries of ordinary, entering an edge-of-space world where critics quarrel over literary metaphysics. Reading “Misadventures,” they were divided over whether they saw a bad joke or a kind of outsider-art masterpiece in a passage like this:
“Early in December, Carol asked me, ‘What day is Christmas?’ I replied, ‘I don’t know.’ The following morning she told me, ‘Christmas Day is on the 25th of December.’ I replied, ‘I know that, but I thought you meant what day of the week.’ She didn’t believe me.”
In another passage, Ms. Smith described training as a hair dresser. She liked it well enough. Then one day she “got put off when I was shampooing an old lady’s hair and my fingernails got caught in a growth.”
One critic said the “unremitting banality” of “Misadventures” had put “another nail in the coffin of our cultural life.” In the other camp, reviewers said Ms. Smith had written an existential classic, a work of dry, mordant wit that pricked the fakery in most celebrity-memoir writing.
Comparisons were drawn with George and Weedon Grossmith’s deadpan comic masterpiece, “The Diary of a Nobody,” and with Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” Though not quite a best seller, “Misadventures” nevertheless sold about 15,000 copies.
Ms. Smith, who died on Feb. 23 in a hospital outside London, at 67, said she had intended her books simply to be “hysterically funny” She often laughed out loud while writing them, she said, and never gave a thought to existential philosophy.
“I just liked writing books and wanted to get published,” she said.
She published two more memoirs, “Appleby House” (2003) and “My Holidays” (2004). She had completed a fourth installment of her memoirs, still unpublished, and started on a fifth when she became too ill to keep working a few months ago, said Caroline Dawnay, her literary agent. The cause of death was pulmonary disease, she added.
Ms. Dawnay had come to know Ms. Smith through Jeremy Lewis, an author of literary biographies, who in the 1990s was employed part time by a London publishing house as a reader. He was skimming through unsolicited manuscripts one day, he recalled in an e-mail on Thursday, when he plucked Ms. Smith’s from “the slush pile” and started reading.
“It was a fairly unwholesome-looking document,” Mr. Lewis wrote, “yellowing and dog-eared and bashed out on an old manual typewriter, and I assumed I would read a few pages at most and give it a quick heave-ho.
“To my amazement,” he wrote, “I found myself gripped by this simply written, blow-by-blow account of what was, by most standards, a numbingly tedious everyday life.”
Her reflection-free narratives had a convincing authority, he added. “She created a world that was — to her admirers, at least — credible, self-contained and self-sufficient.” He took the manuscript to Ms. Dawnay, who shopped it around for two years before finding a publisher, Canongate, willing to accept it.
After “Misadventures,” the publisher brought out “Appleby House,” which Ms. Smith had written first, then consigned to a closet after repeated rejections.


Sylvia Smith, Memoirist of the Life Banal, Dies at 67

Published: March 2, 2013

(Page 2 of 2)
As in all her books, “Appleby House” — the title comes from a rooming house she lived in during the 1980s — chronicles her life with detachment and thoroughness, like a bookkeeper keeping a ledger of lives’ loose ends: the marital histories of friends, lists of gifts from Christmases past, a roster of people who had aged badly since she had last seen them at the pub, the names of childhood pets in the order of their deaths.
“There was a single bed against the far wall,” she writes of her room, “and everything was shabbily furnished in either red or white, with the walls, wardrobe, wall cupboard, bedside chest of drawers and fridge in white, and two armchairs, the carpet and curtains in red.”
On her first meeting with the owners: “He looked much younger than her, but I was later to find he simply looked younger than his years.”
On comforting a neighbor who had lost her job: “As I couldn’t help her, I said, ‘Sit down. I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ ”
About apportioning her visits to her parents, who were separated: “I would visit my father every other Sunday, as he lived alone. I would see my mother the last Saturday of each month — she shared a flat with her sister.”
Sylvia Smith was born on May 2, 1945, “in a hospital in Walthamstow, six days before the end of the Second World War,” she wrote in “Misadventures.” “I grew up an only child, as my elder brother, who was born the year before me, died of convulsions when he was 3 days old.”
Her father, Reginald, was a wire worker who made fireplace grates; her mother, Lilian, worked in a factory. Ms. Smith had no known survivors.
Her literary celebrity was short-lived, and not very lucrative. After a round of television appearances and interviews, the public gradually accepted that she was neither a publisher’s gimmick nor a literary hoaxer but rather exactly who she said she was — a former office temp who wanted to be a writer — and the debate over her work died down.
For a time, however, Ms. Smith was able to enjoy the life of an author. In September 2001, she and her agent visited New York to promote her books. She was interviewed and feted. But perhaps as an omen of her literary eclipse, she found the level of interest in her work disappointing and became eager to return home. She booked a flight for Sept. 12. Her plans, however, were postponed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“Something always goes wrong when I go on holiday,” she told Ms. Dawnay.
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A00216 - Caldwell Jones, Philadelphia 76er Center



Former Sixer standout Caldwell Jones dead at 64

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Sep 29, 2014
By The Philadelphia Tribune
caldwell.image
 ATLANTA — Caldwell Jones, a standout veteran NBA and ABA center, died on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014 after suffering a heart attack while playing golf. He was 64.
Jones played 14 seasons in the NBA and three in the ABA. He spent six seasons with the 76ers before being traded to the Houston Rockets for Moses Malone.
“We are truly saddened to learn of the passing of a special member of the Sixers family, Caldwell Jones,” said 76ers CEO Scot O’Neill. “He was a consummate teammate, a friend to many and a player who was beloved and respected throughout the league. Our franchise and fans will always remember the impact and contributions Caldwell made to the city of Philadelphia.
“On behalf of our entire organization, we extend our deepest condolences to the entire Jones family during this difficult time.”
Jones made the 1975 ABA All-Star Game, and he spent six seasons with the Sixers starting in 1976. He was sent to the Houston Rockets in 1982, then played for the Portland Trail Blazers from 1985 to 1989. Jones finished his playing career with the San Antonio Spurs in 1989-1990, where he served as a mentor for David Robinson. His three brothers, Charles, Wil and Major, all also played in the NBA. All of the Jones brothers attended Albany State University.

*****
Caldwell "Pops" Jones (August 4, 1950 – September 21, 2014) was an American professional basketballplayer.
Jones was drafted from Albany State College (Georgia) by the Philadelphia 76ers with the 14th pick in the 1973NBA Draft. He played 3 seasons in the American Basketball Association and 14 seasons in the NBA, most extensively with the Philadelphia 76ers.
Jones led the ABA in blocked shots in the 1973-74 season, and played in the 1975 ABA All-Star Game. He shares (with Julius Keye) the ABA's all-time record for blocked shots in a game with 12.[1]
His brothers, Charles Jones, Wil Jones and Major Jones, all played at Albany State and in the NBA.

Biography[edit]

The most prominent of four brothers who played in the NBA, Caldwell Jones was best known as the least flamboyant member of the high-powered Philadelphia 76ers teams of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Playing alongside Julius Erving and company, Jones didn’t need to score much with Philadelphia, so he concentrated on rebounding, shotblocking, and defense. A lanky yet strong 6-foot-11 pivotman, his hustle, board work, and defense kept him in professional basketball for 17 years.
Playing in his final season at age 39, he was the fifth-oldest NBA player ever to have suited up at the time. He finished with 10,068 points (in the NBA and the American Basketball Association), but it had taken him 1,227 games to rack them up. No other player who scored 10,000 points had ever needed more than 1,200 games to do so.
“Everybody likes to look at the glorified part of the game, like scoring points,” Jones told USA Today in 1990. “But there is a lot more to the game. I look at myself like an offensive lineman. Someone has to open the holes for the 1,000-yard rushers.” “What do I think of Caldwell Jones? When he retires, I think they should have a farewell tour for him,” Larry Brown, Jones’s coach with the San Antonio Spurs, told USA Today.
Jones grew up in McGehee, Arkansas, a member of a very tall family. The 6-foot-3 Caldwell Jones, Sr., and his wife, 5-foot-11 Cecelia, had eight children. Their shortest child was Clovis, the only daughter, who measured in at 6-foot-3. Four of the Jones boys played in the NBA: Wilbert (6-foot-8, one season each with the Indiana Pacersand the Buffalo Braves, plus seven seasons with three ABA teams), Caldwell (five NBA and three ABA teams), Major (6-foot-9, five seasons with the Houston Rockets, one with the Detroit Pistons), and Charles (6-foot-9, 15 seasons total with Philadelphia, the Chicago Bulls, the Washington Bullets, Detroit and the Houston Rockets). Two other brothers played minor league basketball.
In the 37 NBA seasons accumulated by the four Jones brothers, only once did a Jones post a scoring average in double figures—Wilbert did it in 1976–77 with the Pacers, tallying 13.0 points per game. (However, between them the brothers had several double-figure scoring seasons in the ABA.)
Oliver Jones was the first of the Jones brothers to play basketball at Albany State in Georgia (and later became head coach for 28 years at the school).[2] Five other brothers, including Caldwell, followed. For 18 straight seasons, a Jones occupied the center position for the Albany hoopsters.
Given these similarities, it was difficult to keep up with the Joneses. But it was Caldwell who most distinguished himself. He began in 1973–74 with the ABA’s San Diego Conquistadors, coached by Wilt Chamberlain. During three ABA seasons (including short stints with the Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis), Jones averaged 15.8 points, hitting a career high of 19.5 points per game in 1974–75. “I was a gunner,” he later told the Dallas Morning News. “Every time I caught the ball I shot it.”
With the ABA-NBA merger prior to the 1976–77 season, Jones landed with Philadelphia. His days as a gunner were over. “We had so much talent on those 76er teams that [Coach] Gene Shue said all he wanted his centers to do was play defense and rebound. I had no argument with that,” Jones later told the Portland Oregonian...“We were winning and that’s the name of the game. And it’s kept me around for 16 years.”
In Jones’s first season with Philadelphia, the team was particularly explosive. Erving (21.6 ppg), George McGinnis (21.4), Doug Collins (18.3), and Lloyd B. Free (later World B. Free) (16.3) propelled the squad to a 50-32 regular-season record and an NBA Finals meeting with the Portland Trail Blazers. Jumping out to a two-game lead, the Sixers appeared to be headed for the title, but the Trail Blazers rallied for an astounding four-games-to-two Finals win. For the season, Jones averaged 6.0 points and 8.1 rebounds and finished sixth on the team in minutes played. He also ranked fifth in the league in blocked shots with 200.
Philadelphia won the Atlantic Division again in 1977–78 but lost to Washington in the Eastern Conference Finals. Jones averaged 5.4 points (ninth on the team) and 7.0 rebounds (third). That season marked the emergence of Darryl Dawkins, with whom Jones shared minutes in the pivot during the following seasons.
In 1978–79 the 76ers slipped a bit, finishing second in the Atlantic Division to Washington and losing to the San Antonio Spurs in the conference semifinals. Jones averaged 9.3 points (his highest average at Philadelphia) and 9.6 rebounds and was ninth in the league in blocks with 157.
The 76ers reached the NBA Finals in 1980. Erving scored 26.9 points per game on the season, and Jones was a defensive force, pulling down 11.9 rebounds per game, fourth in the league, and blocking 162 shots, seventh in the league. Although Philadelphia finished behind the Boston Celtics in the regular season, the Sixers tore through the playoffs before coming up short against the Los Angeles Lakers in the Finals.
Caldwell Jones and teammate Bobby Jones (no relation) were NBA All-Defensive First Team selections for the next two seasons, and the Sixers made another trip to the NBA Finals and battled the Lakers in 1982. Philadelphia again fell in six games. After the season, the 76ers sent Caldwell Jones to Houston in a deal that broughtMoses Malone to Philadelphia. The Sixers won the championship the following season.
Jones played two seasons in Houston (joining his brother Major on the Rockets squad), one in Chicago, four in Portland, and one in San Antonio. Primarily he was a reserve, called upon to spell the starting center, grab some rebounds, and play some defense. “I’m like a spare tire on the Cadillac,” he told USA Today in the twilight of his career. “I’m just sitting around in the trunk, waiting to get put on the car if one of the fancy tires blows out".
Jones died of a heart attack while at a driving range in Stockbridge, Georgia on September 21, 2014. He was 64 years old.[3][4]

*****
Caldwell "Pops" Jones (August 4, 1950 – September 21, 2014) was an American professional basketball player.  Jones played 14 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and three in the American Basketball Association (ABA). 
Jones was drafted from Albany State College (Georgia) by the Philadelphia 76ers with the 14th pick in the 1973 NBA Draft. He played 3 seasons in the American Basketball Association before joining the 76ers.  Jones then spent six seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers before being traded to the Houston Rockets for Moses Malone.
Jones led the ABA in blocked shots in the 1973-74 season, and played in the 1975 ABA All-Star Game. He shares (with Julius Keye) the ABA's all-time record for blocked shots in a game with 12.
He spent six seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers before being traded to the Houston Rockets for Moses Malone.

 Jones made the 1975 ABA All-Star Game, and he spent six seasons with the Sixers starting in 1976. He was sent to the Houston Rockets in 1982, then played for the Portland Trail Blazers from 1985 to 1989. Jones finished his playing career with the San Antonio Spurs in 1989-1990, where he served as a mentor for David Robinson. His three brothers, Charles Jones, Wil Jones and Major Jones, also played in the NBA. All of the Jones brothers attended Albany State University.
Caldwell Jones, a standout veteran NBA and ABA center, died on Sunday, September 21, 2014 after suffering a heart attack while playing golf. He was 64.

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