A01024 - Pete Dye, The Picasso of Golf Architecture

Pete Dye, the ‘Picasso of golf architecture,’ dies at 94

Pete Dye in 2012. (Charlie Riedel/AP)

By News Services and Staff Reports 

Jan. 9, 2020 at 8:41 p.m. PST

Pete Dye, who designed some of the world’s most spectacularly beautiful and challenging golf courses, including the celebrated Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass in Florida, died Jan. 9 in the Dominican Republic. He was 94.

A spokesperson for his company, Dye Design, announced the death. He had been battling Alzheimer’s disease for several years.

Mr. Dye never thought golf was meant to be fair, inspiring him to build courses that intimidated the world’s finest players and led to his induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Among his innovations were the forbidding island green on the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass, railroad ties stacked on end to give definition to putting surfaces and devilishly difficult bunkers.

“I think Pete Dye was the most creative, imaginative and unconventional golf course designer I have ever been around,” said Jack Nicklaus, who became a golf course designer under Mr. Dye’s influence. “Pete would try things that nobody else would ever think of doing or certainly try to do, and he was successful at it. If there was a problem to solve, you solved it Pete’s way. In the end, Pete’s way usually turned out to be the right way.”

Pete Dye, right, with golfer Ernie Els in 2012. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)

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His name was turned into an adjective to describe his challenging courses — “Dye-abolical.”

“You can’t mistake a Pete Dye,” said Vijay Singh, who won the 2004 PGA Championship at Mr. Dye’s Whistling Straits course in Wisconsin. “You knew it was his as soon as you played it. He had a different set of rules when he built golf courses and every single one he built was tough.”

Hall of Fame golfer Greg Norman referred to Mr. Dye as the “Picasso of golf architecture” who changed golf-course design in the 20th century.

“While Pete designed to torment the most accomplished professional, his forward tees allowed the most inexperienced to play,” said Herb Kohler, who brought Mr. Dye to Wisconsin to build courses such as Whistling Straits and Blackwolf Run. “He would challenge the professional both physically and mentally, while remarkably accommodating the raw amateur who was learning the game.”

Perhaps Mr. Dye’s best-known design was TPC Sawgrass, where the Stadium Course has held the Players Championship since 1982. It was little more than swampland before the PGA Tour purchased it for $1. Mr. Dye turned it into a course with a distinctively original design.

His wife, Alice Dye, who designed many courses with him and died last February, suggested to him that the short 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass be made into an island green, surrounded as if by a moat and accessible only by a walkway.

The result is a visually striking but frighteningly difficult course that consistently yields entertaining results.

PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan called Mr. Dye “one of the most important course architects of this or any generation.”

Mr. Dye’s courses have held four major championships, and Whistling Straits will be the site of the Ryder Cup this year. The 1991 PGA Championship was held at Crooked Stick in Indianapolis; Whistling Straits hosted the PGA Championship in 2004, 2010 and 2015; and Kiawah Island, which Mr. Dye designed in South Carolina with Nicklaus, was the site of the 2012 PGA Championship, won by Rory McIlroy.

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Suzy Whaley, president of the PGA of America, said Dye “left an imprint on the world of golf that will be experienced for generations, painting wonderful pictures with the land that continue to inspire, entertain and challenge us.”

Paul “Pete” Dye Jr. was born Dec. 29, 1925, in Urbana, Ohio. He served in the Army during World War II and later attended Rollins College in Orlando, where he met his wife.

He sold insurance and was a champion amateur golfer before becoming a full-time golf course architect in 1959.

After studying golf course design in Scotland, Mr. Dye came to the realization that “golf is not a fair game, so why build a course fair?”

He changed golf design in the later part of the 20th century by introducing bunkers of all shapes and sizes, railroad ties as architectural features, unmanicured rough and a general orientation to a more strategic approach to the game.

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Dozens of PGA Tour and LPGA events have been held on Mr. Dye’s courses. He designed more than 100 courses in North America, the Dominican Republic, Israel and Switzerland. He was named to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2008.

A list of survivors could not be confirmed.

“If you were going to play well around his places, you couldn’t fake it,” pro golfer Charles Howell III said. “I would ask him, ‘Mr. Dye, why would you put that bunker right there? What were you thinking?’ And he would look at me and said dryly, ‘Just to [tick] you off.’ ”

A01023 - Mamie Lang Kirkland, Witness to an Era of Racial Terror

Mamie Lang Kirkland died last month at her home in upstate New York. She was the mother of nine, the matriarch of another 158, a longtime saleswoman for Avon Products, and, at the time of her death, at 111, the oldest resident of Buffalo.

That only begins to describe Ms. Kirkland.

She was also the embodiment of the African-American experience of the 20th century, her life’s long journey altered repeatedly by the racial violence and bigotry coursing through the United States. Lynchings, riots, the Ku Klux Klan — she survived it all, and spent her centenarian years working to ensure that these realities never slipped from collective memory.

Her life helped inspire the creation, in 2018, of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Ala. Both document the country’s history of racial terrorism and encourage social justice.

Ms. Kirkland figures in two of the exhibits, said Sia Sanneh, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit that started the memorials. “Her life was such an inspiration to us,” Ms. Sanneh said. “It embodied all those things.”

Mamie Lang was born on Sept. 3, 1908, in the rural Mississippi town of Ellisville, the daughter of Edward Lang, a laborer and fledgling minister, and Rochelle (Moore) Lang, who minded the family’s rented home. Ms. Kirkland would remember the large peach tree in the yard, and the strange brew concocted by her grandmother that saved her from a typhomalarial fever when she was near death at age 5.

When she was about 7, her father awakened the family to announce that it was time to leave — some local white men were preparing to lynch him and his friend, John Hartfield. The two men slipped out of town that night; Rochelle and the five Lang children, including a nursing baby, escaped by train in the morning.

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Ms. Kirkland, with family members and her supporters from the Equal Justice Initiative, prayed at the approximate spot where John Hartfield, her father’s friend, was lynched in 1919.Credit…Andrea Morales for The New York Times

The family friend, Mr. Hartfield, eventually returned to Ellisville, and in the summer of 1919 he was accused of raping a white woman. Some townspeople set a date for his lynching, a public event that the governor of Mississippi claimed he was powerless to prevent. At an appointed time announced in The Jackson Daily News, crowds gathered near a large gum tree beside the train tracks. There Mr. Hartfield was strung up and hanged, after which his body was riddled with bullets and burned. Body parts became souvenirs.

“Could have been my father,” Ms. Kirkland said in an interview with The New York Times in 2015.

Though the Lang family had fled to East St. Louis, Ill., they still could not outrun the racist violence. In 1917, white men responded to the pressures of changing demographics and job competition by rioting in black neighborhoods, burning down homes and shooting residents. Dozens died, thousands were left homeless, and 9-year-old Mamie was seared by the memory of seeing a deaf man shot dead because he could not hear an order to halt.

The family moved again, this time to Alliance, Ohio, reflecting another aspect of the black experience: the Great Migration of the last century, when six million African-Americans left the rural South for the urban Northeast and Midwest — some seeking economic opportunity, others hoping to escape racial terrorism.

Sometimes it followed them north.

In Alliance, in the 1920s, members of the Ku Klux Klan — whose rallies were casually announced in the local press — came to the family’s home, hoods donned and torches afire, to burn a cross on their lawn. The Langs always wondered what would have happened if armed white neighbors hadn’t arrived to chase away the aggressors.

At 15, Mamie married an itinerant railroad worker named Albert Kirkland, and the couple moved to Buffalo. He found work as a grinder at the Pratt & Letchworth plant; she gave birth to nine children, six of whom reached adulthood, and immersed herself in the First Shiloh Baptist Church, of which she was a foundational member.

After her husband died in 1959, Ms. Kirkland worked as a domestic helper and babysitter before becoming a door-to-door saleswoman for Avon. She never learned to drive, and often attributed her longevity to her faith and those many years walking the Buffalo streets selling beauty products. She was still taking orders until a few weeks before her death on Dec. 28, according to her son Tarabu Betserai Kirkland.

Mr. Kirkland, her youngest child at 70, said that his mother’s experience with Avon helped her to shed her shyness and embrace her ability to connect with people. Over time, he said, she became a kind of door-to-door life coach.

“Folks didn’t want her to leave the house,” Mr. Kirkland said in a phone interview this week. “She would help them figure out ways to manage.”

But there was one place that Ms. Kirkland refused to visit: the state of her birth, where the terror of racism had scarred her childhood. She often said that she didn’t even want to see Mississippi on a map.

Her son had been nudging her to tell her life’s powerful story, and in 2015 he showed her a report by the Equal Justice Initiative called “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” It included an image of an old newspaper’s headline: “John Hartfield Will Be Lynched By Ellisville Mob at 5 O’Clock This Afternoon.”

“We had never seen anything documented about John Hartfield,” Mr. Kirkland said. “For a long time we didn’t know if it was fact or fiction. But then she pointed to my laptop and said, ‘That’s him.’ And chills went up my back.”

A few months later, Ms. Kirkland returned to Ellisville with her son, who has been working on a documentary film about his mother’s journey. It was an emotional visit to a place that seemed to have erased the Hartfield lynching from memory. Ms. Kirkland took time to pray at the approximate spot where a mob had killed her father’s friend.

“She always maintained this level of grace and forgiveness,” Mr. Kirkland said. “I’m not sure I could do that.”

In addition to her son, Ms. Kirkland’s survivors include her daughters Juanita Hunter, Beatrice Kirkland, Margaret Kirkland and Jeanette Clinton.

In 2016, the Equal Justice Initiative honored Ms. Kirkland at a fund-raising gala in Manhattan. She and her son worked for weeks on her short speech, in which she planned to tell the young people in the audience that stories like hers needed to be told again and again; that stories like hers were just as important now as they were a century ago; that she should know, because she had been there.

Her speech reflected a resilient optimism; a determination to triumph over tribulation. “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old,” Ms. Kirkland said at the event. “Now I’m 107 — and I’m not frightened anymore.”

Organizers fretted about how their guest would ascend to the stage, and they offered her a wheelchair. She declined, saying that she intended to walk on her own.

And she did.

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Mamie Lang Kirkland, Buffalo's oldest citizen, dies at 111

By Dale Anderson and Mark SommerPublished December 29, 2019|Updated December 30, 2019

 
 
 
 

Sept. 3, 1908 – Dec. 28, 2019

Buffalo’s oldest citizen has died.

Mamie Lang Kirkland was 111 years and 116 days old when she passed away Saturday in her Buffalo home.

She was the second oldest person in New York State, according to Gerontology Wiki.

"She lived a long and fruitful life, and witnessed many of the world's miraculous transitions," said a son, Tarabu Betserai Kirkland. "In her older life the world began witnessing her and her courage and strength and quiet wisdom."

Born Mamie Lang in Ellisville, Miss., about 25 miles north of Hattiesburg, Kirkland was the second of five children born to Edward and Rochelle Lang.

She maintained she died and went to heaven at age 5 after coming down with typhomalarial fever, but was revived with a tea brewed by her grandmother, a midwife and herbalist. It took her a year to learn to walk again.

Kirkland's family fled Ellisville when she was 7 after her father, a Baptist minister, and his friend were threatened with lynching. She vowed never to set foot in Mississippi again.

“My dad came home at 12:30 in the morning,” Kirkland told an interviewer from Equal Justice Initiative in 2015. “And he said, ‘Rochelle, I got to leave. Get the children together, then you leave early in the morning.’ ”

Mamie Lang Kirkland, left, at her 105th birthday party at Schiller Park Senior Center in 2013. (News file photo)

Kirkland's father told them that the friend returned several years later and was hung to death in a public lynching in Ellisville in 1919.

Kirkland's family arrived by train in East St. Louis, Ill., where they spent two years before the violent East St. Louis Race Riots of 1917. They resettled in Alliance, Ohio, where her parents ran a boarding house. They were threatened again, this time by the Ku Klux Klan, whose members burned a cross in their front yard. German neighbors fond of Mrs. Kirkland's father came to the family's defense, hoisting Lugers and rifles to ward off attackers.

She married one of the boarders, a railroad worker named Albert Kirkland, when she was 15 and they moved to Buffalo in 1924. They raised nine children.

After Kirkland's husband, a steelworker in Buffalo, died in 1959, and with only an eighth grade education, she became a sales representative for Avon. A Buffalo News story on centenarians in 2016 noted that Kirkland was still selling Avon products at age 107.

Kirkland was convinced to return to her birthplace in 2015 by her youngest son, Tarabu Betserai Kirkland, a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles. His documentary film, “100 Years from Mississippi,” told the story of her family's flight. A New York Times reporter chronicled her visit in a front-page story.

She was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2016, traveling to New York City to receive its Lynching Legacy Award.

At the ceremony, Kirkland declared, “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old. Now I’m 107, and I’m not frightened anymore.”

She was honored again in 2018 as the oldest lynching survivor at the opening of the Legacy Museum and the Peace and Justice Memorial in Montgomery, Ala. The museum displays photographs and an oral history of her story.

She was known for her jewelry and fondness for the color purple.

Kirkland was an active member of First Shiloh Baptist Church for more than 85 years.

Retired attorney Greg Brown wasn't a blood relative, but he said Kirkland was like a "second mother" to him.

"Although she didn't have letters, she had a common sense and an ability to talk and relate to people," Brown said. "She was a very devout Christian but she wasn't just a Sunday Christian. She practiced it all the time and with people in a helping way. She was like a counselor or a mentor or helper to people. She also did this as an Avon delivery lady, where she came upon people who needed not only their beauty products but her wise counsel."

She also rarely missed a chance to vote.

Kirkland's life encompassed 20 presidents, including the first black president, something she never expected to happen in her lifetime.

“People died so I can vote. Years ago, people didn’t have a chance to vote,” Kirkland told The Buffalo News in 2014, when she was interviewed at her polling place at Canisius College. “I’m 106 and I get out to vote. The young and old should do the same, because it means a lot to everyone.”

Attorney and artist LeRoi Johnson recalled the guidance Kirkland provided when he and Tirabu Kirkland, then known as Albert Jr., were seeking to improve educational opportunities for minorities at Canisius College as freshmen in 1967. The two co-founded the Afro-American Society, and they pushed the administration to admit more minority students, add black history courses, provide a scholarship program for minority students and to offer tutorials to incoming freshmen to better prepare them for the rigors of college.

"She spoke to us about the need for doing things for others, not just for yourself, and also about the value of education," Johnson recalled. "She said to set your goals high and understand what you're doing and what you want to accomplish, and not to settle for less.

"Everything we planned at her dinner table – along with the good home-cooked food she fed us – happened," Johnson said.

Survivors include four daughters, Juanita Hunter, Beatrice Kirkland, Margaret Kirkland and Jeanette Clinton; a son, Tarabu Betserai Kirkland; and 158 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Services will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at First Shiloh Baptist Church, 15 Pine St. Burial will be in Pine Ridge Cemetery.

A01022 - Sultan Qaboos, Long Serving Ruler of Oman

Sultan Qaboos, who transformed Oman into a regional power broker, dies at 79

Sultan Qaboos bin Said in 2010. (Mohammed Mahjoub/AFP/Getty Images)

By 

Brian Murphy 

Jan. 11, 2020 at 5:11 a.m. PST

Oman’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who took power in a 1970 palace coup against his father and then guided the country from medieval-style feudalism toward the embrace of globally oriented policies that hastened modernization and broadened the country’s political influence, died Jan. 10 at 79.

The state-run Oman News Agency announced his death on its official Twitter account but did not disclose further details. Qaboos had left Oman temporarily at least twice since 2014 to receive treatment in Germany for undisclosed medical issues, and he traveled to Belgium for a medical checkup last month.

The death of the longest-serving ruler in the Arab world, and one of the world’s longest-ruling autocrats, opened issues of succession in Oman, which occupies the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The country also holds a strategic enclave across from Iran at the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the route for tankers carrying about one-sixth of the world’s oil supply.

Without children or brothers — Oman does not permit one of his sisters to rule — Sultan Qaboos had no direct heir. He refused to publicly name a possible successor from within his clan, which has ruled Oman for nearly 250 years.

Sultan Qaboos bin Said in January. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Pool/Reuters)

But a successor was quickly announced by Oman state television: Haitham bin Tariq al Said, who served as the sultan’s culture minister.

Sultan Qaboos (pronounced KAH-boos) was born on Nov. 18, 1940, and he was the only son of Oman’s ruler, Sultan Said bin Taimur. His childhood was lonely and cloistered, and his father was mostly absent. He grew up in a palace, able to access books and records but otherwise forbidden from talking to his teachers about anything but his studies. He was prohibited from playing in the sea, just yards from his home.

His father had led the country since the early 1930s and kept it as it had been for centuries: Most of the capital, Muscat, was lit by lanterns at night, there were only a few miles of paved roads, and slavery was permitted. Oman’s status in the world was largely defined by its place in legend as the home of Sinbad, its modest exports of aromatic frankincense, and its colorful turbans influenced by centuries of trade with South Asia and East Africa.

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Said bin Taimur grew increasingly cut off from his subjects, especially after an assassination attempt in 1966. His son had been sent to Britain at 16, where he attended the Sandhurst military academy and briefly served in the British army. Upon his return to Oman in 1964, he lived under virtual house arrest under orders from his paranoid father. He grew increasingly frustrated with his father’s policies of isolation and his utter rejection of modernity despite oil resources.

In 1970, he deposed his father in a coup backed by Britain, which had a stake in Oman’s oil fields and sought a freer hand to put down rebel factions in the country. The new ruler presented himself in public, symbolizing a new era for the nation’s 750,000 inhabitants, who had not seen its sultan in person for years or even decades.

“Despite our oil revenues, my father kept the country in poverty,” he said in a rare interview at the time. Said bin Taimur was exiled to Britain and died in 1972.

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“Qaboos was really a nation-builder,” said Abdullah Baabood, an Omani native and professor of gulf regional studies at Qatar University. “He took a place of tribal rivalries and a patchwork of regions and gave it a sense of nationhood.”

Sultan Qaboos also leaves a country that has followed — but not entirely mimicked — the stunning metamorphoses across the gulf Arab states.

He shunned the skyscrapers and extravagances of nearby Dubai and Abu Dhabi, stressing that Muscat and other cities should generally retain their traditional character and architecture as much as possible, even as five-star resorts and international brands moved in.

While other gulf states tried to outshine one another with malls and theme parks, Oman concentrated on cultural firsts for the region. Among them: a world-class opera house inaugurated by Plácido Domingo conducting Puccini’s “Turandot,” and a symphony orchestra that reflected the sultan’s lifelong appreciation for music and his interest in the lute and pipe organ.

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Countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates hired teams of branding consultants and built world-spanning airlines. Sultan Qaboos was content to cultivate cottage industries such as building traditional wooden sailing vessels, known as dhows, and reviving the tradition of Arab perfume-making with a high-end fragrance house, Amouage.

In November 2014, as the sultan was receiving medical care, he put his imprimatur on a new magazine dedicated to the Arabian camel.

In Washington, Oman maintains the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, whose missions include funding scholarships for Americans to study in Oman.

Sultan Qaboos shared one overriding trait with other gulf region leaders: a tight grip on power that allowed no room for dissent or open political debate. And, like several other rulers in the region, he was forced into rare concessions by unrest inspired by the Arab Spring.

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In 2011, protests broke out in Oman calling for more job opportunities for young people, in a country where nearly half the population is under 25. The demonstrations led to unprecedented clashes with security forces. In response, Sultan Qaboos stepped in with promises of 50,000 civil-service jobs and slightly more power for an advisory panel, known as the Shura Council.

Still, the reforms only went so far. Anyone daring to challenge authority risked arrest, including crackdowns for social media posts.

Sultan Qaboos and his handpicked inner circle continued to climb in importance for Washington as middlemen for dealings with Iran.

Oman negotiated the release of three Americans who were detained by Iran in 2009 along its border with Iraq and charged with espionage. Oman also played other important messenger roles, including during U.S.-led talks on Tehran’s nuclear program and in helping free 15 British sailors captured by Iranian naval forces in 2007.

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At the same time, Sultan Qaboos fostered close ties with Iran both publicly and away from official channels.

Near the Strait of Hormuz, the sultan’s security forces turned a blind eye to Iranian smugglers carrying goods such as televisions and ovens across the Persian Gulf on speedboats. In March 2014, Oman signed a 25-year accord to import Iranian natural gas.

The high-profile diplomacy and dealmaking did little to open a window into the private life of the sultan.

He was perhaps the most enigmatic figure in the fraternity of gulf leaders. Sultan Qaboos, who favored traditional robes and occasionally donned a ceremonial dagger, did not seek another wife after a brief marriage to a cousin, Nawwal, in the 1970s. He mostly eschewed international travel in favor of his palaces in Muscat and Salalah, a southern port with lush flora fed by the Indian Ocean monsoons.

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Sultan Qaboos shared little of his personal or political life in public, but leaked U.S. diplomatic cables offered some hints about his priorities. They stressed the need for education, greater participation of women in civic affairs and Oman’s goal of diversifying its oil-based economy.

He displayed a long-range view of regional affairs, at times noting the growth of al-Qaeda’s Yemen-based branch as the top security challenge for years to come. He also took a pragmatic approach to Iran.

“Iran is a big country with muscles and we must deal with it,” he was quoted as saying in a 2008 State Department cable made public by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

A devoted Anglophile much of his life, Sultan Qaboos also showed increasing openness to Washington.

In 1979, he permitted U.S. forces to use an Omani air base as the staging ground for a failed attempt to rescue Americans held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

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After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Oman served as a base for U.S. warplanes during the initial U.S. military push into Afghanistan, media and research reports said. Several years later, then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney went fishing aboard the sultan’s yacht.

In a rare 2008 interview with Kuwait’s Al-Seyassah newspaper, Sultan Qaboos waxed poetic on what he called Oman’s “renaissance” under his rule.

“The sun has risen on our country, and we will regain our previous fame and strength and become a country worthy of respect and appreciation,” he was quoted as saying.