Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Paul Nash, a composer and guitarist who created orchestral jazz works, site-specific compositions for New York public spaces and educational programs for New York public school students, died on Thursday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 56 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications of a brain tumor, said Julia Reinhart, his business associate and the director of the Manhattan New Music Project, the ensemble Mr. Nash led.

Mr. Nash grew up in the Bronx and played in rock bands during his high school years. He attended the Berklee College of Music and, after graduating in 1972, headed to San Francisco, where he earned a master’s degree in composition at Mills College in 1976. In the San Francisco area, he formed his first large group, the Paul Nash Ensemble, and went on to help form the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra, which included a string quartet that used public grants to commission new works from contemporary composers.
Discography

NY Times
Max Velthuijs, a Dutch author and illustrator whose playful stories of Frog and friends have provided children worldwide with parables about prejudice, fear, charity and love, died on Tuesday in the Netherlands. He was 81 and lived in The Hague.

The cause was lung cancer, his family told Agence France-Presse.

Mr. Velthuijs (pronounced VELT-house) wrote and illustrated more than 20 children’s books, many featuring the curious and trusting Frog, painted in simple lines and dressed in red-and-white-striped shorts. In straightforward stories that have been translated into at least 14 languages, Mr. Velthuijs captured childhood experiences while offering life lessons to children as young as 3.
More books from Amazon.com

NY Times
Dr. Sidney Carter, a Columbia University neurologist and clinician who helped to found and define the field of pediatric neurology in the 1950’s, died on Jan. 16 in a nursing home in Mashpee, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 92.

He had had a series of strokes, his family said.

At a time when children with epilepsy and other neurological disorders were primarily treated by pediatricians, Dr. Carter set out to establish training programs and certifications for neurologists to diagnose and treat diseases among children. After arriving at Columbia as an instructor in neurology in 1947, he observed that specialists for children were uncommon at any hospital.
Neurology of infancy and childhood

NY Times
Maurice McDonald, the Dallas police officer who arrested Lee Harvey Oswald little more than an hour after the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Thursday. He was 76.

Mr. McDonald, who was known as Nick, died of complications of diabetes in Hot Springs, Ark., said his wife, Rose McDonald.

Officer McDonald arrived at Dealey Plaza minutes after Kennedy was shot. Shortly afterward, he was sent to a movie theater where a suspicious person had been reported.

As Officer McDonald approached the suspect in the darkened theater, Oswald rose from his seat and struck him, then pushed a pistol into the officer’s abdomen and pulled the trigger. The gun’s hammer was blocked by the flesh of Officer McDonald’s palm, he later recounted.

The Independant
Raymond Peterson, singer: born Denton, Texas 23 April 1939; married (four sons, three daughters); died Smyrna, Tennessee 25 January 2005.

In the early Sixties, the BBC steadfastly refused to broadcast records that it considered in bad taste. In particular, the corporation banned so-called “death discs”, so that recording one was a sure way to court controversy. Death discs included “Ebony Eyes” (Everly Brothers), “Teen Angel” (Mark Dinning), “Leader of the Pack” (Shangri-Las) and “Terry” (Twinkle), but the best-known is “Tell Laura I Love Her”, sung by Ray Peterson, the story of a dying stock-car racer’s love for his girlfriend.
Ray Peterson memorabilia at eBay.com

We have a very foggy start to our day here; murky and grey outside. Just the sort of weather that makes you want to crawl back into bed and sleep awhile longer. Our list today is clear at least - music, history and lives dedicated to helping children.

We have jumps from frogs to jazz, ballads to brains and a moment where the flesh of a palm decides an outcome.

LA Times
Robert Dwan, who directed Groucho Marx throughout the entire 14-year run of his popular “You Bet Your Life” quiz show on radio and television, has died. He was 89.

Dwan died Friday of complications related to pneumonia at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, his family said.

“You Bet Your Life,” which debuted on radio in 1947 and aired on television from 1950 to 1961, provided an ideal format for Marx’s rapier wit as he interviewed contestants before they played a question-and-answer quiz.

As director, Dwan staged the performance and supervised the editing.

NY Times
Philip Johnson, at once the elder statesman and the enfant terrible of American architecture, died Tuesday at the compound surrounding the Glass House, the celebrated residence he built for himself in New Canaan, Conn. He was 98.

His death was disclosed by David Whitney, his companion of 45 years.

Often considered the dean of American architects, Mr. Johnson was known less for his individual buildings than for the sheer force of his presence on the architectural scene, which he served as a combination godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator and cheerleader. His 90th birthday, in July 1996, was marked by symposiums, lectures, an outpouring of essays in his honor and back-to-back dinners at two venerable New York institutions he had played a major role in creating: the Museum of Modern Art, whose department of architecture and design he joined in 1930, and the Four Seasons restaurant, which he designed as part of the Seagram Building in 1958.

“Enfant terrible”. From French meaning ‘terrible child’. Philip Johnson is tagged below as an enfant terrible because he stirred things up and was unconventional. I wasn’t familiar with the man nor his work, but he certainly appears to have had an impact. The Times devoted several pages to his life. Robert Dwan on the other hand stood next to greatness for many years (no doubt doubled over in laughter most of the time). I added a few interesting Groucho books along side Mr. Dwan’s book. Maybe”enfant terrible”applies to Groucho as well. Est il pas aussi?

LA Times
Art Stamper, 71, a leading fiddle player who performed with the Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, died Sunday in Louisville, Ky., after a four-year battle with throat cancer.

A member of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, Stamper was a native of Hindman in eastern Kentucky and a longtime resident of Shepherdsville, near Louisville. His father, Hiram, was an accomplished old-time musician, and Stamper followed suit at age 9. He was a professional by 16 and joined Ralph and Carter Stanley’s band in 1952, just in time to help define a new genre of music eventually called bluegrass.

Stamper retired from a full-time music career in 1956 to raise a family. He returned to music full-time in 1978, sitting in with a variety of bands, including Monroe’s, and recording two highly regarded albums: “The Lost Fiddler” and “Goodbye Girls, I’m Going to Boston.”

LA Times
Consuelo Velazquez, a pianist and composer whose yearning romantic ballad “Besame Mucho” became a pop standard and a personal anthem for innumerable couples separated during World War II, died Saturday in Mexico City. Although some sources reported her age as 84, her son, Sergio Rivera, said she was 88. The cause of death was a respiratory ailment resulting from a fall at her home last October. She had been in intensive care since November. A classically trained pianist, Velazquez was best-known as the composer of swooning boleros, or love songs, including “Amar y Vivir” (”To Love and to Live”) and “Verdad Amarga” (”Bitter Truth”).
Amar Y Vivir
Amarga Verdad
Solamente Consuelo Velazquez

LA Times
Retired U.S. District Judge William Augustus Bootle, who issued a string of historic civil rights rulings in the 1960s, including the order allowing blacks to enter the University of Georgia, died Tuesday at his home in Macon, Ga. He was 102.

Dee Mitchell, administrative assistant at Snow’s Memorial Chapel, confirmed Bootle’s death.

Among Bootle’s rulings were ones integrating buses and school systems and ensuring blacks’ place on voter rolls. Macon’s federal courthouse was named for him in 1998.

Bootle “took the lead in bringing about the elimination of segregation in the field of education and otherwise,” Carl Sanders, Georgia’s governor from 1963 to 1967, said Tuesday.

“At the time, most politicians didn’t appreciate his attitude and his decisions,” said Sanders, 79.

“But in the long run, when you look back on the result of what he was trying to do, you can’t help but admit and admire the courage and the legal fortitude that he expressed at that particular time in the history of our state and the country.”

LA Times
Sir William Deakin, 91, a historian who founded St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, died Saturday in Var, France, British newspapers reported. No cause of death was given.

During World War II, Deakin served in Britain’s Special Operations Executive behind enemy lines, and led the first British mission to Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. Deakin’s report on Tito’s group persuaded the British government to withdraw support from one group of partisans, the Chetniks, and back Tito instead.

Born in London, Deakin was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. Before World War II, he taught history and worked as a research assistant to Winston Churchill.

After the war, he spent four years helping Churchill write his account of the conflict.
The brutal friendship: Mussolini, Hitler, and the fall of Italian fascism
British Political and Military Strategy in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe in 1944
The six hundred days of Mussolini
Imperial Germany and the “Holy War” in Africa, 1914-1918 (Montague Burton lecture on international relations)
The Embattled Mountain

NY Times
vor G. Balding, one of three British brothers who gained international fame as polo stars in the 1930’s, when the sport attracted large crowds and wide press coverage, died on Thursday at his home in Camden, S.C. He was 96.

His death was announced by his family.

Mr. Balding, along with his brothers Barney and Gerald, played polo in the United States throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, mostly at the famed Meadow Brook Club in Westbury on Long Island, then the national center of the sport. Those decades are considered the golden age of polo, as special passenger trains brought spectators from New York for international matches. Though polo has had an aura of wealth and privilege, its origins were hardly rarified: it is believed to be a descendant of a competition among Mongol tribesmen, whose rendition of the sport involved whacking a human head up and down a field.
The endless chukker: 101 years of American polo

NY Times
Dr. William Trager, who opened a path for modern malaria research by discovering how to grow its most lethal parasite in the laboratory, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.

The cause was believed to be a heart attack, his son, Leslie Trager, said.

In 1976, Rockefeller University announced that Dr. Trager had found a way to culture Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly of four forms of malaria, in a medium of human blood.

The World Health Organization immediately expressed optimism that the discovery would quickly lead to a vaccine against the disease, which was then killing about a million children a year. But that goal is still proving maddeningly elusive, while malaria and the mosquitoes carrying it have developed resistance to many modern drugs and pesticides. It is again killing about a million a year, most of them children in Africa.

The Independant
Patricia Rowlands, actress: born London 19 January 1934; married Malcolm Sircom (one son; marriage dissolved); died Hove, East Sussex 22 January 2005.

Although she reached her widest audience with her appearances in nine of the immensely popular “Carry On” comedies, the talents of the actress Patsy Rowlands were known to theatregoers years earlier.

She made her West End début with a notable performance in Sandy Wilson’s Valmouth (1959), and she was part of the “New Wave” of talent that invigorated both stage and screen in the Sixties. She worked with such key figures of the period as Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, Harold Pinter and N.F. Simpson, but despite such prestigious credits and enormous respect within the profession, it is probably true to say that her talents were under- appreciated until she became part of the “Carry On” team.

We have quite the mix today - from the “Sport of Kings” to one of the world’s most intractable diseases, then over to bluegrass music and “swooning boleros” only to be followed by historical civil rights in Georgia and some history surrounding WWII. At least we had the sense to end today with a bit of comedy.

Somewhere it seems I read that the huge expense of polo was due mainly to the large stable of ponies one has to keep. Having neither stable, nor ponies (nor Kings to be frank) I can only pass along this tidbit and I am willing to be wrong.

Stay well, mind those mosquitos, keep laughing and email us at admin@ourdailydead.com with any nominees for the On Deck crowd.