Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Dr. Jonathan Drummond-Webb, a pediatric heart surgeon featured on national television for his transplants and other cardiac surgery on children, was found dead Sunday in his Little Rock, Ark., home. He was 45.

Drummond-Webb committed suicide by taking an overdose of medication, according to Arkansas Children’s Hospital, where he had been chief of pediatric and congenital cardiac surgery for the last three years.

Friends said the doctor, who once described himself as “a bit of an extreme personality,” suffered a sudden bout of depression. He had been diagnosed with a rare tissue cancer on his hip in 2001, but was successfully treated with surgery.

LA Times
Metropolitan Anthony Gergiannakis, spiritual leader of Greek Orthodox Christians in California and six other Western states, died Saturday of cancer. He was 69.

A resident of San Francisco, he had been hospitalized for several weeks at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento where he died, according to Father Paul Schroeder, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco.

Metropolitan Anthony, as he was widely known, became the first bishop of the newly created Metropolis, or diocese, in 1979 and was named metropolitan, a title similar to that of a Roman Catholic cardinal, in 1997. During his 25 years in church leadership in California, he increased the number of parishes from 47 to 68. Currently there are about 250,000 Greek Orthodox in the San Francisco Metropolis and some 2.5 million nationwide, Schroeder said.

LA Times
Doug Ault, 54, who hit two home runs in the first game in Toronto Blue Jays history in 1977, has died.

Ault was found dead Wednesday at his home in Tarpon Springs, Fla., a few miles from the Blue Jays’ spring training quarters in Dunedin.

The team provided no further details about his death.

Memorabilia at eBay…

LA Times
, 95, a prominent matriarch of the Mohegan tribe, died Wednesday in Uncasville, Conn.

Tantaquidgeon and her sister Gladys, 105, were 10th-generation descendants of Uncas, the Mohegan “sachem,” or chief, who settled at Fort Shantok.

The last full-blooded Mohegans, the sisters together were credited with helping the tribe gain federal recognition.

In the 1990s, Ruth Tantaquidgeon organized a large collection of family memorabilia, which helped establish the Native American tribe’s lineage.

NY Times
Alexander Marshack, a self-taught anthropological researcher who first interpreted certain Stone Age artifacts as primitive calendars, advancing the notion that prehistoric man was more inventive than previously thought, died on Dec. 20 at the Jewish Home and Hospital in Manhattan. He was 86 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Elaine.

In the 1960’s, using novel scientific techniques, Mr. Marshack analyzed small incisions in plaques of bone, in southwest France, which dated from the Paleolithic Period, about 30,000 years ago, in the latter part of the last ice age.
The world in space;: The story of the International Geophysical Year

Ice Age art, 35,000-10,000 B.C: American Museum of Natural History, May 24, 1978-January 15, 1979

Recent papers

NY Times
Sir Angus Ogilvy, a prominent British businessman and financier closely tied to the royal family by friendship and by marriage to Princess Alexandra, Queen Elizabeth’s popular first cousin, died Sunday at a hospital near his London home. He was 76.

The British news media reported that he had died of cancer. His last public appearance was in February 2003, when he accompanied his wife on an official visit to Thailand.

Sir Angus was a son of a Scottish nobleman, the 12th Earl of Airie, Ogilvy being the family name. He married Princess Alexandra at Westminster Abbey in 1963, an event of great pageantry.

Newsday
Susan Sontag, one of America’s most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights, died today of leukemia. She was 71.

The author of 17 books translated into 32 languages, she vaulted to public attention and critical acclaim with the 1964 publication of “Notes on Camp,” written for Partisan Review and included in “Against Interpretation,” her first collection of essays, published two years later.

Sontag died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Sontag wrote about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism, Bunraku puppet theater and the choreography of Balanchine, as well as portraits of such writers and intellectuals as Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti.

Memorabilia at eBay…
More books…

LA Times
Mel Gabler, a small-town Texan who exerted an outsize influence on the textbooks that American elementary and secondary schools adopt, died Dec. 19 at a hospital in Tyler, Texas. He suffered a massive brain hemorrhage after a fall at his home two days earlier. He was 89.

For more than 40 years, Gabler and his wife, Norma, pored over textbook publishers’ offerings looking for factual errors and examples of what they deemed liberal bias.

90 errors in Texas textbooks that publishers and the Texas Education Agency insist are correct

What Are They Teaching Our Children?

Are textbooks harming your children? Norma and Mel Gabler take action-and show you how!

NY Times
Anne Truitt, a sculptor and writer widely admired for her painted, columnar structures and for her published journals about her life as an artist, died on Thursday at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington. She was 83 and lived in Washington.

The cause was complications of abdominal surgery, said her dealer, Renato Danese.

Anne Truitt: Sculpture 1961-1991

Anne Truitt,: Sculpture and drawings, 1961-1973

Memorabilia at eBay…
VHS: Reggie White: The Minister of Defense

Reggie White Green Bay Packers Autographed Throwback Jersey with Minister of Defense Inscription

Mounted Memories REGGIE WHITE AUTO 8×10 PHOTO-FREE STANDARD GROUND SHIPPING

NY Times
James J. Ling, a plucky Texan whose dazzling financial acrobatics and steely nerve helped make him one of the early leaders in the drive to build giant American conglomerates, died on Dec. 17 at his home in Dallas. He was 81.

The cause was esophageal cancer, Charles Ling, his brother, said.

Mr. Ling, known as Jimmy, collected companies the way boys collect baseball cards as he built the nation’s 14th-biggest company, LTV, in just 14 years. During the 1960’s, he was one of several top business people, like Harold Geneen of International Telephone and Telegraph and Charles G. Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western Industries, who engaged in relentless pursuit of ever more sweeping conglomerates.

NY Times
George Russell Barber, one of the last surviving chaplains from the U.S. landing at Omaha Beach on D-day during World War II, has died. He was 90.

Barber died Dec. 17 at Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital in Whittier of causes associated with old age, according to his son, Don Barber.

On June 6, 1944, as Allied forces landed in Normandy, Barber was one of four chaplains at Omaha Beach with the Army’s 1st Infantry Division.

American troops encountered the fiercest resistance of any Allied force on D-day from German gun emplacements on the cliffs overlooking the beach. According to his son, Barber spent a bloody and chaotic day ministering to the wounded and dying, then dug a foxhole near the cliffs and bedded down for the night.