Friday, November 1, 2013

Deborah Turbeville, Fashion Photographer

Deborah Turbeville, Fashion Photographer, Dies at 81

Deborah Turbeville, Who Turned Fashion Photography Dark, Dies: Ms. Turbeville, who was 81, suffused her fashion shoots with imagery steeped in decay, dissolution and melancholy.
By 
Published: October 25, 2013
Deborah Turbeville, who almost single-handedly turned fashion photography from a clean, well-lighted thing into something dark, brooding and suffused with sensual strangeness, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 81.

The Collection: A Fashion App for the iPad

The Collection
A one-stop destination for Times fashion coverage and the latest from the runways.

Follow Us on Twitter

NYTimesFashion on Twitter
Follow@NYTfashion for fashion, beauty and lifestyle news and headlines.

Her death, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, was from lung cancer, her agent, Marek Milewicz, said.
Though images like Ms. Turbeville’s — which might include pale, haunted-eyed models in derelict buildings — are practically de rigueur in fashion photography today, they were almost beyond contemplation when she began her work in the early 1970s. She was the only woman, and the only American, in the triumvirate (the others were Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin) that by wide critical consensus changed fashion photography from sedate to shocking.
Ms. Turbeville, who began her career editing fashion magazines, became famous, Women’s Wear Daily wrote in 2009, “for transforming fashion photography into avant-garde art” — a distinction all the more striking in that she was almost completely self-taught.
Her photographs appeared in magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Mirabella; in newspapers including The New York Times; in advertisements for clients like Ralph Lauren, Bruno Magli, Nike, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s; in exhibitions worldwide; and in books, including “Unseen Versailles” (1981), a collection of her photos of the hidden, dusty spaces underpinning Louis XIV’s grand palace.
“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do,” Ms. Turbeville told The New Yorker in 2011. “I’m not really a fashion photographer.”
In mid-20th-century America, fashion photography was about precisely that: fashion. The clothes, vividly lighted, were front and center, with the models chosen for their well-scrubbed, patrician femininity. They looked, as often as not, as if they had just come from tennis at the country club, though reassuringly free of sweat.
Ms. Turbeville’s photos, by contrast, were unsettling, and they were meant to be. In her fashion work, clothes are almost beside the point. In some images the outfits are barely visible; the same is often true of the models, resulting in an elegiac landscape defined more by absence than by presence.
In a de facto commentary on fashion’s manipulation of women, Ms. Turbeville literally manipulated her negatives — scratching them, tearing them, scattering dust on them and otherwise distressing them — to make the finished images redolent of decay. She employed faded color, black-and-white and sepia tones; prints were often deliberately overexposed, rendering her subjects spectral.
The settings were as striking as the subjects. Ms. Turbeville’s photos are awash in ruin: she favored places like grimy, deserted streets, abandoned warehouses and, in the image that nearly 40 years ago horrified the public and cemented her reputation, a decrepit New York bathhouse.
“I can’t deny that I design the background,” Ms. Turbeville told The Times in 1977. “A woman in my pictures doesn’t just sit there. In what kind of mood would a woman be, wearing whatever? I go into a woman’s private world, where you never go.”
By the late 1970s, articles on photography had begun to refer to “the Deborah Turbeville look,” which, as The Times described it in 1977, was “not the kind that mother used to admire in Vogue.”
Unlike other world-renowned fashion photographers, Ms. Turbeville rarely shot the famous, though when she did the results could be startling. In a portrait of Julia Roberts published in The Times Magazine in 2004, Ms. Roberts looks so expressively solemn as to appear on the verge of tears.
For the viewer, the net effect of Ms. Turbeville’s work is one of dreamlike, melancholy beauty. Her images exude an almost palpable sense of longing, with questions about the woeful women they depict — Who are they? Why are they so sad? — hanging unanswered in the air.
Her barren settings leave abundant room for loneliness and loss, and the dissolution they contain is a constant reminder of the passage of time. (“I like to hear a clock ticking in my pictures,” Ms. Turbeville once said.) Her photos seem to depict small, once exquisite worlds that, by the time she clicks the shutter, have already evanesced.
Deborah Lou Turbeville was born in Stoneham, Mass., on July 6, 1932. (Many sources give the year erroneously as 1937 or 1938.) As a young woman she moved to New York, where she was an assistant and sample model to the noted fashion designer Claire McCardell. Afterward, she held editorial positions at Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, though she deplored the work.

Deborah Turbeville, Fashion Photographer, Dies at 81

Published: October 25, 2013
(Page 2 of 2)
“I’d get a note from some senior fashion editor saying, ‘We find your arrival half an hour late for Bill Blass appalling,’ ” Ms. Turbeville told The Independent, the British newspaper, in 1993. “I just stopped going.”

The Collection: A Fashion App for the iPad

The Collection
A one-stop destination for Times fashion coverage and the latest from the runways.

Follow Us on Twitter

NYTimesFashion on Twitter
Follow@NYTfashion for fashion, beauty and lifestyle news and headlines.
She began taking photographs on her own in the 1960s, and in 1966, having had no previous instruction, enrolled in a six-month workshop taught by the photographer Richard Avedon and the art director Marvin Israel.
“If it hadn’t been for the two of them, I wouldn’t have taken my photography seriously,” Ms. Turbeville told The Times Magazine in 1981. “It was so out of focus and terrible. The first evening in class, they held up pictures. They said, ‘It isn’t important to have technique, but you must have an idea or inspiration, and we feel the only one who has is this person who’s never taken a photograph before.’ I became very unpopular in the class.”
In 1975 Ms. Turbeville produced an image that would become, The Independent wrote in 1993, “one of the most famous fashion photographs of the last 50 years.” Part of a swimsuit shoot for Vogue, it showed five listless women leaning against the walls of a shower room in a condemned New York bathhouse.
Writing in The Times late that year, Hilton Kramer reviewed an exhibition at Hofstra University that included the image, calling it “one of the most beautifully composed pictures in the show,” but going on to say, “Yet its ‘Marat/Sade’ imagery leaves one wondering if we have not moved beyond the boundaries of fashion photography.”
The reaction from others was even more strident.
“People started talking about Auschwitz and lesbians and drugs,” Ms. Turbeville recalled in an interview quoted in the 1991 book “Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945,” by Martin Harrison. “And all I was doing was trying to design five figures in space.”
Ms. Turbeville won an American Book Award in 1982 for “Unseen Versailles,” a project for which she had been recruited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday. The volume, with an introduction by the novelist Louis Auchincloss, documented the echoing, long-disused backstairs rooms that visitors never see. (To heighten their autumnal aspect, Ms. Turbeville smuggled in armfuls of dead leaves.)
She and Mr. Auchincloss also collaborated on “Deborah Turbeville’s Newport Remembered” (1994), which captured the vanished Gilded Age in all its crumbling particulars.
Among her other books are “Wallflower” (1978), a collection of misty, death-imbued fashion photographs; “Studio St. Petersburg” (1997), shot in Russia; “Casa No Name” (2009), shot in Mexico, where she long had a home; and “Deborah Turbeville: The Fashion Pictures” (2011).
Ms. Turbeville, who lived part of each year in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, is survived by a brother, Thomas.
She also maintained an apartment in the Ansonia, the Beaux-Arts pile on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There, she left generations of old paint unstripped, speckled mirrors unsilvered, threadbare tapestry unrestored and tattered curtains unmended.
Posted by at No comments:

Ibrahim Abatcha, Chadian Politician

Ibrahim Abatcha (1938 – February 11, 1968) was a Muslim Chadian politician reputed of Marxist leanings and associations. His political activity started during the decolonization process of Chad from France, but after the country's independence he was forced to go into exile due to the increasing authoritarinism of the country's first President Francois Tombalbaye. To overthrow Tombalbaye he founded in Sudan in 1966 the FROLINAT, of which he was the first leader and field commander. Two years later he was killed in a clash with the Chadian Army.

Originally from Borno (a province of the British colony of Nigeria), Abatcha was born into a family with a Muslim background in the French colony of Chad at Fort-Lamy (today N'Djamena) in 1938, and learned to speak French, English and Chadian Arabic, but not to write Classical Arabic, as he did not study in a Qur'anic school. He found work as a clerk in the colonial administration and became a militant trade unionist.

Abatcha entered politics in 1958, becoming a prominent figure in the new radical Chadian National Union (UNT), mainly a split from the African Socialist Movement (MSA) by promoters of the No-vote in the referendum on Chad's entry into the French Community. The party's followers were all Muslims, and advocated Pan-Africanism and socialism. Towards the end of the colonial rule, Abatcha was jailed for a year either for his political activities or for mismanagement in the performance of his duties.

After independence in 1960, Abatcha and his party staunchly opposed the rule of President Francois Tombalbaye, and the UNT was banned with all other opposition parties on January 19, 1962. After that Abatcha was briefly imprisoned by the new Chadian government.

After his release, the UNT cadres decided that if the political situation in Chad became too unbearable to allow the party to survive, it would be wise to send out of the country some party members so that the organization would in any case maintain its existence. Thus Abatcha, who held the position of second adjutant secretary-general of the UNT, was sent in 1963 to Accra, Ghana, where he was later joined by UNT members Aboubakar Djalabo and Mahamat Ali Taher. By going into exile, the UNT members meant also to ensure their personal safety and organize abroad an armed revolt in Chad. As part of the means to preserve the unity of the movement, Abatcha wrote for the UNT a policy statement; this draft was to be the core of the official program of the FROLINAT.

Abatcha led the typical life of the Third World dissident in search of support in foreign capitals, first residing in Accra, Ghana, where he received his first military training and made friends among members of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon that had found asylum there. The Cameroonians helped him attend conferences organized by international Communist groups.


After leaving Accra in 1965, Abatcha started traveling to other African capitals always seeking support for his project of beginning an insurgency against Tombalbaye. The first capital he reached in 1965 was Algiers, where the UNT had already a representative, probably Djalabo. His attempts were unsuccessful, as were those made from there to persuade the Chadian students in France to join him in his fight. From Algiers, he traveled to Cairo, where a small secret committee of anti-government Chadian students of the Al-Azhar University had formed. The students in Cairo had developed a strong political sensitivity because they had come to resent that the degrees obtained by them in Arab countries were of no use in Chad, as French was the only official language. Among these students, Abatcha recruited his first supporters, and with the help of the UPC Cameroonian exiles contacted the North Korean embassy in Egypt, which offered him a military stage. Seven Cairo students volunteered, leaving Egypt in June 1965 and returning in October; these were to be with Abatcha the first military cadres of the rebels. Abatcha with his "Koreans" went then to Sudan in October 1965.

Once in Sudan, Abatcha found fertile ground for further recruitment, as many Chadian refugees lived there. Abatcha was also able to enroll in his movement former Sudanese soldiers, including a few officers, of whom the most distinguished was to become Hadjaro Senoussi. He also contacted Mohamed Baghlani, who was in communication with the first Chadian insurgents already active in Chad, and with the insurgent group Liberation Front of Chad (FLT).

A merger was negotiated during the congress at Nyala between June 19 and June 22, 1966 in which the UNT and another rebel force, the Liberation Front of Chad (FLT) combined, giving birth to the FROLINAT, whose first secretary-general was agreed to be Abatcha. The two groups were ideologically ill-fitted, as they combined the radicalism of the UNT and the Muslim beliefs of the FLT. FLT's president, Ahmed Hassan Musa, missed the conference because he was imprisoned in Khartoum; Musa suspected with some reason that Abatcha had deliberately chosen the moment of his incarceration to organize the conference due to his fear of FLT's numerical superiority over the UNT. As a result, once freed Musa broke with the FROLINAT, the first of many splits that were to plague the history of the organization. Thus Abatcha had to face from the beginning a level of considerable internal strife, with the opposition guided by the anti-communist Mohamed Baghlani.

The unity was stronger on the field, with Abatcha and his so-called Koreans passing to Eastern Chad in mid-1966 to fight the government, and El Hadj Issaka assuming the role of his chief-of-staff. While his maquis were badly trained and equipped, they were able to commit some hit-and-run attacks against the Chadian army, mainly in Ouaddai, but also in Guera and Salamat. The rebels also toured the villages, indoctrinating the people on the future revolution and exhorting youths to join the FROLINAT forces.

The following year Abatcha expanded his range and number of operations, officially claiming in his dispatches 32 actions, involving prefectures previously untouched by the rebellion, that is Moyen-Chari and Kanem. Mainly due to Abatcha's qualities as both secretary-general and field-commander, what had started in 1965 as a peasant uprising was becoming a revolutionary movement.

On January 20, 1968 Abatcha's men killed on the Goz Beida-Abéché road a Spanish veterinarian and a French doctor, while they took hostage a French nurse. Abatcha disavowed this action and ordered his men to free the nurse. However, due to these actions, on February 11, Abatcha was tracked down by the Chadian army and killed in a clash.

Abatcha's death was the end of an important phase in the history of the FROLINAT and more generally of the rebellion. Abatcha had been the one generally acceptable leader of the insurrection. After him, the FROLINAT was more and more divided by inner rivalries, making it more difficult to provide the insurgents with a coherent organization.
Posted by at No comments:

Hans Ephraimson-Abt, Air Crash Victims' Crusader

Hans Ephraimson-Abt, Air-Crash Victims’ Crusader, Dies at 91


Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Hans Ephraimson-Abt in New York in 1997.

By
Published: October 26, 2013

Hans Ephraimson-Abt, who became an internationally known advocate for families of air-crash victims after the death of his daughter on Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down by Soviet fighter planes in 1983, died on Oct. 18 in Short Hills, N.J. He was 91.


National Twitter Logo.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @NYTNational for breaking news and headlines.
Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

The cause was heart failure, his son, Hans, said.
A commercial 747 bound from New York to Seoul, South Korea, KAL 007 was shot down near Sakhalin Island, off the coast of Siberia, on Sept. 1, 1983, after straying accidentally into Soviet air space. All 269 people aboard were killed.
The Soviet Union long maintained that the flight was a spy plane sent by the United States, and the attack endures in public memory as one of the last, bitterest engagements of the cold war.
Afterward, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was in the vanguard of establishing a unified movement to aid air-crash victims’ families. In work that occupied him to the end of his life, he traveled the world, testifying, lobbying and meeting with government officials, airline executives and bereaved families.
“Hans fought for people who didn’t have a voice and didn’t know that they needed a voice,” Deborah A. P. Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a telephone interview. “He turned his own tragedy into advocating for all air travelers, to make sure that their families were taken care of and treated with respect after an accident.”
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt, who was fluent in a string of European languages, assisted not only the families of KAL 007 passengers, but also those of victims of many later crashes, including Pan Am Flight 103, which was destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he advised relatives of passengers aboard the hijacked planes, in particular the families of passengers from Germany, where he was born and brought up.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was the longtime chairman of what was known early on as the American Association for Families of KAL 007 Victims; reflecting its expanded purview, the association more recently became the Air Crash Victims Families Group, of which he was the spokesman.
In 1983, when KAL 007 families chose to band together after the crash, there were few avenues for obtaining support. Responding to air crashes — from notifying relatives and keeping them abreast of recovery efforts to providing emotional assistance — was then the duty of the airlines, a state of affairs that in the view of Mr. Ephraimson-Abt and his colleagues needed to be remedied.
In the 30 years since, as a result of their work, significant advances on behalf of victims’ families have been made.
In 1996, Congress passed the Aviation Disaster Family Assistance Act, which empowered the National Transportation Safety Board to notify the families and the Red Cross to help care for them.
The next year, a new international aviation agreement raised the amount for which an air carrier was liable when an international flight crashed. The previous limit, set in 1966, capped carriers’ liability at $75,000 per passenger, except in rare cases where families could prove the airline guilty of willful misconduct.
The 1997 agreement, which Mr. Ephraimson-Abt helped broker, raised the cap to $139,000. For families seeking greater damages, the new agreement also relieved them of the burden of proving willful misconduct.
Near midnight on Aug. 30, 1983, a 23-year-old Alice Ephraimson-Abt boarded KAL Flight 007 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. A recent graduate of Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where she had majored in East Asian studies, she was headed, via Seoul and then Hong Kong, to Beijing. In China, she planned to teach English and study Mandarin.
After a refueling stop in Alaska on Aug. 31, Flight 007 took off for Seoul. By the time it was spotted by the Soviets on Sept. 1, it had deviated hundreds of miles off course.
After the plane was shot down, many victims’ families were not notified directly. Mr. Ephraimson-Abt heard about the crash from a hotel manager in Hong Kong, whom he had enlisted to look after his daughter on her arrival there.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt immediately phoned Korean Air Lines. The airline, he said afterward, hung up on him.
“To this day,” he said in 1996, testifying before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, “Korean Air Lines has not informed me of the death of my daughter.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt’s son said that to his knowledge, the airline had still not communicated with the family.


 

Hans Ephraimson-Abt, Air-Crash Victims’ Crusader, Dies at 91

Published: October 26, 2013
(Page 2 of 2)
In an e-mail on Friday, a spokeswoman for the airline, now known as Korean Air, wrote, “Unfortunately, people who were at the airline in 1983-84 have retired, and no one in the present administration has any recollection of events then.”


National Twitter Logo.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @NYTNational for breaking news and headlines.
Twitter List: Reporters and Editors
Hans Eduard Ephraimson-Abt was born in Berlin on March 7, 1922, to a Jewish family. When World War II broke out, he was studying hotel management in Switzerland; he remained there, in a series of refugee camps, until the end of the war. After moving to the United States in 1950, he was reunited with his parents, who had managed to evade the Nazis.
In New York, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt spent several years directing the press department of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany. He later worked as an international business consultant.
After his marriage to Christine Anger ended in divorce in the early 1970s, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt reared Alice and her two younger siblings in Saddle River, N.J.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many Soviet documents became public for the first time. Among them was the transcript of Flight 007’s cockpit recorder, which had been retrieved by Soviet divers in October 1983. The Soviet Union had long denied the recorder’s existence.
In 1992, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt led a delegation of victims’ families to Moscow, where the Russian president, Boris N. Yeltsin, gave them the transcript.
The transcript, which captured KAL 007’s last moments, made it clear that the plane did not explode immediately after it was hit by two Soviet air-to-air missiles, as had been generally supposed. Instead, it remained aloft for some minutes before plunging into the sea.
“We have been struggling for years to know what happened to our loved ones,” Mr. Ephraimson-Abt told The New York Times after receiving the transcript. “Now we face the agonizing recognition that their death was neither painless nor instant.”
In 1997, a federal jury awarded Alice Ephraimson-Abt’s survivors $2.1 million in compensation for her death. Out-of-court settlements by families of other KAL 007 passengers had ranged from $75,000 to $10 million, The Associated Press reported that year.
For his work on behalf of crash victims’ families, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt received the Order of Merit from Germany last June.
Besides his son, Hans, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt, who lived most recently in Ridgewood, N.J., is survived by a daughter, Viviane Ephraimson-Abt, and three grandchildren.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was sometimes asked why he chose to become involved in air disasters beyond the one that took his daughter’s life. His response was simple.
“No one looked after our families,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. “We decided it would be a good idea if we looked after families in other crashes.”
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Sid Yudain, Creator of "Roll Call"

Sid Yudain, 90, Dies; Created Congress’s Community Newspaper

By 
Published: October 26, 2013
  • FACEBOOK
  • TWITTER
  • GOOGLE+
  • SAVE
  • E-MAIL
  • SHARE
  • PRINT
  • REPRINTS
Sid Yudain, who created what he called a community newspaper — Roll Call — for what he called “the most important community in the world, probably” — Congress — died last Sunday at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 90.
Enlarge This Image
United Press International
Sid Yudain in 1980.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Lael.
Mr. Yudain had scant experience as a professional journalist — he had been a reporter in Hollywood — when he arrived in Washington in 1951 to work as a press secretary for Representative Albert P. Morano, a freshman Republican from his home state, Connecticut. He quickly recognized, however, that senators, representatives and the people who worked for them had no convenient way of learning about one another. At a start-up cost of $90, he began publishing a slender weekly out of his Congressional office in 1955.
Roll Call quickly became a small-town bible, a chronicle of the benign activities of the locals, with need-to-know tidbits about births and deaths, retirements and weddings, personnel changes to Congressional staffs and pictures of elected officials on vacation proudly displaying the fish they had caught.
It covered more serious things as well — filibusters and changes in Senate rules and the manipulations behind committee assignments, for example — but rarely legislation, at least in the early years.
When Lyndon B. Johnson, then a senator from Texas, had a heart attack less than a month after Roll Call made its debut, he wrote in it about his recovery. Vice President Richard M. Nixon wrote an obituary for a favorite doorman.
Mr. Yudain described Roll Call as a hybrid: part local newspaper, part trade paper, part movie fan magazine, part New Yorker.
“One of the things we had that we got some criticism for was, we ran a Hill pinup every week,” Mr. Yudain recalled in a 2011 interview with Roll Call. “Regardless of the criticism, congressmen loved it. It was the first thing they looked at in the paper. A big change from looking at The Congressional Record and all the blah blah blah of speeches.”
Sidney Lawrence Yudain was born in New Canaan, Conn., on May 6, 1923, the seventh of eight children born to Morris Yudain and the former Berta Jaffe, who emigrated as newlyweds from Russia in 1907. His father owned a clothing store and later a real estate brokerage. The family had a journalistic bent.
“For some reason or other, we were all spirited kids, but we didn’t have real fights,” Mr. Yudain recalled in an interview with Roll Call in 2005. “When we got mad at each other, we published these newspapers. We had a little Remington portable typewriter — I guess it was one of the first ones that came out, and we all learned how to use it, even when we were really small — and we published these newspapers, writing editorials against each other instead of staging fists or rocks or something.”
Mr. Yudain, who never went to college, joined the Army after graduating from New Canaan High School. During World War II, he was stationed in Malibu, Calif., where he established a base newspaper. After the war he remained in Southern California, working as a Hollywood columnist for a Connecticut newspaper and writing freelance articles about movies and movie stars for fan magazines.
Mr. Yudain was a bachelor until age 50. He met Lael Bairstow, an aide to Senator William B. Saxbe, an Ohio Republican, in 1972 on a junket to Spain. They married in 1973. In addition to her, Mr. Yudain is survived by a son, Raymond; a daughter, Rachel Kuchinad; and three grandchildren.
Roll Call was published with a skeleton staff, and Mr. Yudain wrote much of the copy himself. His column “Sid-Bits” was the progenitor of the current, more corporate Roll Call gossip blog, “Heard on the Hill.”
In 1986, Mr. Yudain sold Roll Call to Arthur Levitt, then the chairman of the American Stock Exchange. Since 1992, the paper, with more robust coverage of legislative policy, has been owned by the Economist Group, which bought CQ (a k a Congressional Quarterly) as a companion publication in 2009.
Roll Call’s print edition is published four times a week and has a circulation of more than 22,000. The company says its Web site, rollcall.com, has 1.5 million unique visitors a month.
The neighborliness that Mr. Yudain encouraged, both in his work and in his personal dealings, had numerous side effects. The pianist and political humorist Mark Russell told The Washington Post he was discovered by Mr. Yudain when he was working at a Washington strip club. Mr. Yudain got him a job in a hotel lounge frequented by politicians and aides.
“He saw the Hill as a friendly neighborhood, and Roll Call was the neighborhood paper,” Mr. Russell told The Post.
But Mr. Yudain began to change his mind as the weather in Congress grew stormier and the members more careerist.
“During the 1950s and 1960s, it was an honor to serve your country,” he said to The New York Times in 1985. “Today, most of these people who come here are starting their careers. It’s a steppingstone to another job.”
Previously, he said, legislators “got by on their own — on their wits, their brains, their ability to charm an audience, mesmerize a rally.
“There wasn’t any TV, and they didn’t have a lot of staff people to tell them what to say,” he said. “They had to be raconteurs, thinkers, statesmen, showmen. Now a person only has to comb his hair the right way and say what someone has written for them.”
Posted by at No comments:

Allan Stanley, Toronto Maple Leafs Star

Allan Stanley, 87, Dies; Helped Maple Leafs Win 4 N.H.L. Titles


Associated Press
Allan Stanley, third from left, celebrates with his father, William, and teammates after the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Chicago Black Hawks to win the Stanley Cup in 1962.

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK

Published: October 23, 2013
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Save
  • E-mail
  • Share
  • Print
  • Reprints
Allan Stanley, a Hall of Fame defenseman who helped the Toronto Maple Leafs win four Stanley Cups in the 1960s, died on Oct. 18 in Bobcaygeon, Ontario. He was 87.


National Hockey League

Rangers

Devils

Islanders

His death was confirmed by Monk Funeral Home in Bobcaygeon. Stanley, who stood taller than six feet and weighed about 180 pounds, was nicknamed Snowshoes for his lumbering skating style. But he was an anchor on defense against Hall of Fame shooters like Ted Lindsay, Stan Mikita and Bobby Hull.
In a 21-season career, Stanley played with the Rangers, the Chicago Blackhawks (then known as the Black Hawks), the Boston Bruins, the Maple Leafs and the Philadelphia Flyers, recording 100 goals and 333 assists in 1,244 regular-season games.
Stanley played 10 seasons with Toronto, including the team’s dynasty years in the 1960s, when they won three straight titles, from the 1961-62 through 1963-64 seasons. He and his teammate Tim Horton were central to one of the National Hockey League’s most lauded defensive units, which included Carl Brewer, Bobby Baun and, starting in 1965, Marcel Pronovost.
“Allan was one of the best ‘angle’ defensemen,” Johnny Bower, a former Maple Leafs goalie and teammate of Stanley’s, said in an online feature for the Hockey Hall of Fame. “If Gordie Howe was coming down the wing, he would steer him to such a bad angle that there was no way that Howe could score a goal on you.”
During the sixth and final game of the 1967 Stanley Cup finals against the heavily favored Montreal Canadiens, Stanley made a critical contribution at center in a face-off. In the final minute, Toronto was leading, 2-1, and the Canadiens had pulled their goalie, allowing six of their players to try to score.
Toronto Coach Punch Imlach called on Stanley to take on the Montreal captain, Jean Beliveau, when the puck was dropped near the Maple Leafs’ goal. Stanley anticipated when the puck would hit the ice and slammed into Beliveau. The puck bounced off their skates to Toronto center Red Kelly, who passed to Bob Pulford. Pulford fed the puck to George Armstrong, who hit Montreal’s empty goal with a 75-foot shot, sealing Toronto’s victory. The team has not won the Stanley Cup since.
Herbert Allan Stanley was born in Timmins, Ontario, on March 1, 1926. He was mentored by his uncle, the Hall of Fame player Barney Stanley. (No records indicate that the Stanley family is related to Sir Frederick Arthur Stanley, the former governor general of Canada and the namesake of the Stanley Cup.)
Stanley made his N.H.L. debut with the Rangers during the 1948-49 season. He was the team captain for a time, but during the 1953-54 season he endured so much jeering from the Madison Square Garden crowd that he was demoted to the Western Hockey League. He returned to the Rangers for part of the next season before he was traded to Chicago.
Stanley scored a career-high 10 goals in his first season with Chicago, but he was sent to Boston in 1956. He sustained a knee injury in the 1956-57 season and missed the playoffs; Boston lost to Montreal in the finals. The Bruins gave up on Stanley after losing to the Canadiens in the finals the next year as well.
“They said my legs were gone, but they just didn’t realize that’s the way I skated,” Stanley told The Toronto Star in 1987.
In 1958, he was traded to Toronto, where he played for a decade.
He retired after the 1968-69 season with the Flyers. Returning to Ontario, he and his wife, Barbara, started one of the first hockey camps for youths. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1981.
He has no immediate survivors.
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Hal Needham, Stuntman and Director

Hal Needham, Stuntman and Director of Action Films, Dies at 82

Universal Studio, via Getty Images
Hal Needham, left, with the actors Burt Reynolds, center, and Jerry Reed on the set of “Smokey and the Bandit” in 1977.
By 
Published: October 26, 2013
  • FACEBOOK
  • TWITTER
  • GOOGLE+
  • SAVE
  • E-MAIL
  • SHARE
  • PRINT
  • REPRINTS
Hal Needham, a veteran Hollywood stuntman who later embarked on a less risky career as a director of action movies including“Smokey and the Bandit” and “The Cannonball Run,” both of which starred his friend Burt Reynolds, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82.
Enlarge This Image
Jim Ruymen/Reuters
Mr. Needham accepting a lifetime achievement award.

The death was confirmed by his manager, Laura Lizer, who said he had recently learned he had cancer.  
During the course of his career, Mr. Needham said in a speech at the Academy Awards in 2012, he broke 56 bones, including his back twice. He punctured a lung, had a shoulder replaced and knocked out several teeth. He invented several new stunt methods and devices — among them the introduction of air bags for breaking falls, prompted by watching pole-vaulters — as “a way to save myself some trips to the hospital,” he said.
“Hal Needham was a great stunt coordinator, director, and an icon,” Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote on Twitter on Friday. “I’m still grateful he took a chance with me in ‘The Villain,’ ” he said, of the 1979 film that Mr. Needham directed. “I’ll miss him.”
Mr. Needham was born in 1931 and, as he told it at the Academy Awards in 2012, raised “way back in the hills of Arkansas during the Great Depression.” His father was a sharecropper. As a boy, Mr. Needham fished and hunted squirrels with a rifle. He later moved with his family to St. Louis.
After his discharge in the 1950s from the United States Army as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, he began a career that spanned hundreds of movies and television shows across five decades.
In a 2011 interview on the NPR program “Fresh Air,” Mr. Needham said he moved to Southern California after being discharged and went back to pruning trees, what he had done before entering the service. He broke his ankle and, after he recuperated, a fellow former paratrooper got him a stunt job on a television show. His next assignment involved aerial stunts, some upside down, on “The Spirit of St. Louis,” which starred James Stewart.
At first he appeared primarily in television and movie westerns, including “Gunsmoke”and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” leaping to and from galloping horses. On one occasion, he said later, he landed so hard on the roof of a stagecoach that he crashed through it. Mr. Needham was also involved in stunt work on “Little Big Man” and“Chinatown,” and he coordinated the stunts for “Have Gun — Will Travel,” starring Richard Boone.
In the 1970s, Mr. Needham turned his attention to car stunts, he said in the NPR interview in 2011, and collaborated often with Mr. Reynolds, whom he had met when they both worked in television. “Smokey and the Bandit” was Mr. Needham’s directorial debut in 1977. He went on to direct 19 other movies. 
He won a scientific and engineering Oscar in 1986 for the development of a camera car. Later he was given a governor’s award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “You’re looking at the luckiest man alive,” Mr. Needham said in his acceptance speech. 
His memoir, “Stuntman,” was published in 2011.
Mr. Needham is survived by his wife, Ellyn; two sons, Danny and David; seven grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Johannes Van Der Kemp, Missionary in South Africa

Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp (b. May 17, 1747, Rotterdam – d. December 15, 1811, Cape Town) was a military officer, doctor and philosopher who became a missionary in South Africa.

The second son of Cornelius van der Kemp, Rotterdam's leading reformed clergyman, and Anna Maria van Teylingen, he attended the Latin schools of Rotterdam and Dordrecht. He subsequently enrolled at the University of Leiden in 1763 where he studied medicine, but when his elder brother Didericus was appointed as professor of church history he abandoned his studies.

Van der Kemp joined the dragoon guards and fathered an illegitimate child, Johanna (‘Antje’), whom he brought up himself. In 1778 he fell in love with Christina (‘Stijntje’) Frank (d. 1791). He lived with her for a year before being reprimanded by the Prince of Orange on this irregular state of affairs. As a result he both married Stijntje, on 29 May 1779, and quit the army.

Returning to his medical studies again, this time in Edinburgh, he completed his Medical Doctorate within two years. He also prepared for publication a treatise in Latin on cosmology, entitled Parmenides which was published in 1781. He returned to the Netherlands, where he practiced as a doctor first in Middelburg and then near Dordrecht. On June 27, 1791, his wife and daughter Antje were drowned in a yachting accident from which he only just escaped. As a result of this incident he experienced an emotional conversion back to the reformed Christianity of his family.

Van der Kemp served as a medical officer during the revolutionary campaigns in Flanders and then as hospital superintendent at Zwijndrecht, near Dordrecht. Whilst there in 1797 he came to hear of the formation of the London Missionary Society.

After making contact with the London Missionary Society, Van der Kemp helped found the Dutch version, Nederlandsche Zendinggenootschap. He was ordained in London in November 1798 and began recruiting men for the society. He sailed from London in December 1798 as one of the first three agents sent by the society to the Cape colony in South Africa, arriving in March 1799.

Whilst there in 1799, Van der Kemp published the first work in book-form in South Africa, which was an 8-page translation, into Dutch, of the London Missionary Society's letter that he brought out to the inhabitants of the Cape. Printed by V.A. Schoonberg most likely on J.C. Ritters press.

Once in South Africa, after working at Gaika's Kraal near King William's Town he journeyed beyond the eastern frontier of the colony to work among the Xhosa under Chief Ngqika. From the Xhosa he received the name Jank' hanna (‘the bald man’). War between Cape Colony and the Xhosa soon drove him back and from 1801 onwards he worked exclusively within the colony, mainly with dispossessed Khoikhoi. In 1803, he established a mission settlement for vagrant Khoikhoi at Bethelsdorp where local farmers accused him of harboring lawless elements. He countered with a list of alleged ill-treatment of the Khoikhoi by local farmers, but the evidence proved unsatisfactory and the farmers were acquitted.

On April 7, 1806, Van der Kemp married Sara Janse, a freed slave 45 years his junior, and had four children with her. This situation and his attitudes caused great opposition from within the colony, and he was for a time ordered by the government to leave Bethelsdorp.

Armed with a background in European and classical philology, he pioneered in the study of Xhosa and Khoikhoi languages.

Van der Kemp was recalled to Cape Town by the Governor in 1811 and died soon afterwards.

Sarah Millin, one of the most popular English-language novelists in South Africa during her lifetime wrote The Burning Man about the life of van der Kemp. The life of Johannes van der Kemp during his mission in Bethelsdorp is included in the novel Praying Mantis by André Brink.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)