Tuesday, April 24, 2018

A00931 - Daedra Charles, Hall of Fame for Tennessee

Daedra Charles, 49, Hall of Fame Center for Tennessee, Dies

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Tennessee center Daedra Charles tangled with Virginia’s Heidi Burge in the 1991 N.C.A.A. championship game in New Orleans. Tennessee won in overtime, 70-67. University of Tennessee Athletics
Daedra Charles, a Hall of Fame basketball player who helped the University of Tennessee win two national championships under its indomitable coach, Pat Summitt, died on Saturday in Detroit. She was 49.
Her death was confirmed by the University of Tennessee, which did not specify the cause.
Charles, who went by the surname Charles-Furlow after her marriage to Anthony Furlow, was a powerful center with a soft touch who became a critical part of the Lady Vols, a team characterized by relentlessness and an unflagging work ethic under Summitt, who by the time she retired had won more games (1,098) than any other Division I college coach, male or female. (She died in 2016 at 64.)
Charles was twice an All-American pick and in 1991 was named the Southeastern Conference’s Female Athlete of the Year. (The male honoree was Shaquille O’Neal, of Louisiana State University.) That same year, she won the Wade Trophy, an annual award given by the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association to the best women’s college player in the country.
Charles went on to play for the United States Olympic Team, winning a bronze medal in the 1992 Games in Barcelona, Spain. She was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007.
The N.C.A.A. did not allow Charles to play as a freshman during Tennessee’s 1987-’88 season because of her low score on the ACT admissions test, but Summitt recruited her anyway, and Charles was appreciative.
“It wasn’t all about ‘I want you to play ball,’ ” Charles was quoted as saying in “Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective,” a 2013 memoir Summitt wrote with Sally Jenkins. “It was, ‘I care about you as a person and an individual and want you to have both, to be successful at both.’ And they never gave up on me.”
Charles trained and studied hard and became an example of enthusiasm and grit for her Tennessee teammates.
President George Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle honored the Lady Vols at the White House in 1991 after Tennessee won the N.C.A.A. championship. From left were Pat Summitt (holding her only child, Tyler, who was born in 1990), Charles and her teammate Dena Head. Barry Thumma/Associated Press
“She was such a strong, mature leader for our team,” Summitt wrote, “that I could actually delegate responsibility for team discipline to her — she became my partner-enforcer on the floor, and you didn’t want to mess with Daedra. She was a muscled six-three center from Detroit, Michigan, whom we called ‘Train,’ which was short for ‘Night Train,’ because she was so forceful around the basket.”
Charles played mostly in reserve as a sophomore, helping the Lady Vols to a 35-2 record that season and scoring 13 points in their 76-60 victory over Auburn in the 1989 N.C.A.A. championship game.
Bridgette Gordon, Charles’s teammate and the tournament most valuable player that year, called her “just a terror for the opponent.”
“She had a nice, soft jumper that she could extend to 15, 17 feet and good hands,” Gordon said in a telephone interview. “She could face up, take people off the dribble — agile enough at that size to get a shot off and get around bigger defenders. She had it all.”
Charles playing against Western Kentucky in the 1991 N.C.A.A. tournament. She was known for both power and a soft touch.University of Tennessee Athletics
The next season, Tennessee compiled a 27-6 record and won the Southeastern Conference title. But the Lady Vols lost to Virginia, 79-75, in overtime, in the regional finals of the 1990 N.C.A.A. tournament.
During her senior season, Charles scored a career high 28 points in two games and pulled down 22 rebounds in another. Tennessee went 30-5 that season and avenged their 1990 defeat by beating Virginia, 70-67, in another overtime game to win the 1991 N.C.A.A. title.
In her three-season college career, Charles averaged 14.2 points and 8.2 rebounds per game and accumulated 1,495 points, 858 rebounds and 95 blocked shots. Tennessee had a record of 92-13 in that period.
After her college career, she played professionally in Japan, France and Italy from 1991 to 1997. At the time, there was no professional league for women in the United States.
“I think it’s a shame that after college we have to go to someone else’s country to play,” she told Newsday in 1993.
But she got her chance to play American pro basketball in 1997, when she joined the Los Angeles Sparks for the inaugural season of the Women’s National Basketball Association. It was her last as a professional.
Daedra Janel Charles was born in Detroit on Nov. 22, 1968. She was a star at St. Martin de Porres High School there and also lettered in volleyball and track and field.
Charles, who lived in Detroit, is survived by her mother, Helen Charles; her sister, Danene; her husband, Mr. Furlow; and their son, Anthonee.
“She was such a strong, mature leader for our team,” Summitt wrote about Charles.University of Tennessee Athletics
After her playing career ended, Charles-Furlow was an on-air game analyst for Comcast Local and a coach and athletics administrator at Auburn and other universities. She was an assistant coach at Tennessee from 2008 to 2010 and then director of character development for the women’s basketball program until 2012.
When she returned to Tennessee, she said, she had a lot to learn, even though she had spent her life around basketball.
“We played 94 feet of defense,” she told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2008. “But we weren’t running and gunning. We didn’t have athletes like that.”
“The game has evolved,” she continued. “That’s such a beautiful thing.”
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A00930 - Beatrix Hamburg, Barrier Breaking Scholar

Beatrix Hamburg, Barrier-Breaking Scholar, Is Dead at 94

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Beatrix Hamburg, an important researcher on child development and psychology and the first black woman to graduate from Yale Medical School, in an undated photograph.CreditNational Academy of Medicine
By Neil Genzlinger
Beatrix Hamburg, who after breaking racial barriers at two major colleges became an important researcher in child development and psychology, working on subjects like school violence and peer counseling for students, died on April 15 in Washington. She was 94.
Her son-in-law, Peter Brown, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Hamburg was the first self-identifying black woman to graduate from Vassar College, in 1944, and in 1948 she became the first black woman to graduate from the Yale Medical School.
Her lengthy professional résumé included professorships at Stanford’s School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Along with her husband, David Hamburg, she was a DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar at Weill Cornell Medical College, also in New York.
Dr. Hamburg’s research focused on young people and the importance of examining their needs and psychological development in the modern age. This was particularly evident in “Learning to Live Together: Preventing Hatred and Violence in Child and Adolescent Development,” a 2004 book written with her husband.
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Here they examined two often dueling human instincts — to be wary of unknown forces and to cooperate in order to survive. And they warned against education that warped formative minds, whether overtly, as in Nazi Germany, or more subtly, as when an us-against-them mentality is cultivated based on nationalistic, racial or other group divisions.
“As we have seen in many places over many generations, it is possible to shape youngsters in hateful ways, prepared for large-scale killing even at the expense of their own lives,” they wrote. “Education for hatred is a harsh reality of history, amplified now by immensely enhanced capacities for destruction. Surely there is no attractive future for humanity in this direction — indeed, perhaps no future at all.”
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Beatrix Ann McCleary was born on Oct. 19, 1923, in Jacksonville, Fla. Her father, Minor, was a doctor who died when she was a toddler. Her mother, the former Beatrix Ann Downs, took her to New York, where Beatrix’s grandparents lived, and reared her with a strong emphasis on education.
That paid off when Vassar, playing catch-up to some other prestigious colleges, became determined to shake its all-white label (although a black student who identified as white had graduated there in 1897).
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“I was informed by a Methodist minister that at Vassar they wanted to find a black student,” Dr. Hamburg said in a 2011 video interview, “and he was going to suggest me. So I was in essence recruited to go there.”
Beatrix McCleary Hamburg '44CreditVideo by Vassar
The college did not assign her a roommate at first, she recalled years later, “because they didn’t know how I would work out.” But she found ready acceptance at Raymond House, her residence hall on the campus, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., although her Vassar years were not without awkwardness.
“I represented the Negro Problem — in capitals — and the Raymond students were interested in that problem and in seeing that Vassar solved it successfully,” she told The Vassar Quarterly in 1946. “That I should be thought of, at least at first, as the representative of a problem race rather than as an individual was natural; it was also sometimes difficult.
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Dr. Hamburg in an undated family photograph. At Vassar she met Eleanor Roosevelt. “So that was another activist lady, in addition to my mother, who was very important in my life,” she said.
“The most amusing of these difficulties was that everyone assumed I was an authority on all things Negro,” she continued. “I was bombarded with questions about the Negro theater, Negro political problems and opinions, African lore, Negro music, and so on indefinitely. I answered all the questions I knew anything about and some I didn’t. But it’s an odd thing about my education in a predominantly white college that it made me learn more about Negroes than I knew when I came.”
While at Vassar she met Eleanor Roosevelt, who was on the college’s board of directors when Dr. Hamburg was a student representative to the board.
“She was a big role model for me,” Dr. Hamburg said. “So that was another activist lady, in addition to my mother, who was very important in my life.”
If adjusting to being black on a white campus was a theme of her Vassar years, at Yale Medical School there was a different obstacle.
“It wasn’t a very big deal to be an African American at Yale, but it was much more of a challenge to be a woman there,” she said in another video interview. “I didn’t notice this at Vassar because it was all women, but in medical school, a woman, when a question was tossed out, would answer it, and it would be as if talking into the wind — hadn’t happened. Later on a man would say the same thing — the same thing! — and they’d say, God, John, that was so fabulous.”
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At Yale, she met David Hamburg, a fellow medical student. They married in 1951. He survives her, along with a son, Eric, a filmmaker; and a daughter, Margaret Hamburg, who was Food and Drug Administration commissioner under President Barack Obama.
Beatrix Hamburg’s research dealt with a wide range of issues, including diabetes in children and teenage pregnancy. All of her work demonstrated an appreciation for the stresses of being a child in a complex modern world. A 1972 paper written with Barbara B. Varenhorst reported the results of an experimental peer-counseling program that trained high school and junior high school students to help other students.
“Peer counselors were not conceived of merely as academic tutors,” the authors wrote, “but viewed as assistants in solving personal problems; teaching social skills; giving information about jobs, volunteer opportunities, and mental health resources in the community; acting as models; developing friendships; acting as a bridge to the adult world for disaffected students; and finally, over a period of time, serving as agents of change where the school atmosphere is characterized by coldness and indifference.”
That same understanding of the difficulties young people face was evident in “Violence in American Schools,” a 1998 compilation she edited with Delbert S. Elliott and Kirk R. Williams. It argued that ending shootings and other forms of school violence required a coordinated effort involving not just schools, but also families and the community at large.
The year after that book came out, the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado occurred. In an interview with The Boston Globe that year, Dr. Hamburg talked about what parents could do to keep their children from turning to violence.
“They should recognize they’re smaller players in the lives of their kids than they ever have been, with the impact of peers, TV and the internet,” she said. “But it’s very important to be warm, to be attentive, to listen, to teach them respect, and to deal with them in a mode — when kids get angry and yell — that exemplifies conflict resolution at home.”
“Avoid allowing them to become tyrants in the home,” she added. “Hang in there. And recognize you can’t do it all.”
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