Our Daily Dead

LA Times
“First, I must blow the fairy dust on you,” Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, tells the Darling children the first time he guides them aloft. Flying is so easy that there is only one other thing they must do: “Think lovely thoughts.”

Peter Foy understood the lovely thoughts. You could read them on his gleaming face when he operated the ropes, wires and pulleys that sent Mary Martin soaring over a Broadway stage in the 1954 musical version of “Peter Pan,” the J.M. Barrie classic. Foy was the master of stage flight — “aerography,” he called it — who perfected the mechanisms that enabled Martin’s signature flight and those of countless others. He was the technical wizard who sent more Peter Pans on their magical journeys than anyone else in his unusual business.

Foy was the founder of Flying by Foy, a 48-year-old company that specializes in theatrical flying effects. The transplanted Englishman died Feb. 17 of natural causes in Las Vegas, his home for the last four decades. He was 79.

His machines flew just about all the notable Peter Pans, from Jean Arthur and Martin to Sandy Duncan and Cathy Rigby, as well as most of the less-famous ones. He stopped counting at 6,000 productions worldwide.

My heart belongs

LA Times
Henry Grunwald, who began his career at Time magazine as a copy boy, became its top editor and later ran Time Inc.’s vast media empire, has died. He was 82.

Grunwald, who also served as U.S. ambassador to his native Austria, died Saturday of congestive heart failure at his home in New York City.

During his nine years as managing editor — the magazine’s highest position — he led Time through dramatic change, broadening the scope of its journalism and brightening its pages for a generation that was accustomed to getting its news from television. When he stepped down in 1977, Grunwald was considered the second most influential editor in the magazine’s history, behind only its founder, Henry Luce.

He later spent eight years as editor in chief of Time Inc., managing the company through most of the 1980s, before being named ambassador to Austria by President Reagan in 1988. After his two-year diplomatic career, Grunwald wrote two well-received memoirs, the first about his experiences as a refugee who narrowly escaped Nazi forces in Europe, followed by his unlikely rise to prominence in a new country, using a new language.

NY Times
ef Raskin, a computer technology pioneer who started the team that created the Macintosh computer, died Saturday at his home in Pacifica, Calif., at age 61. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Linda Blum.

Mr. Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite apple but altered the spelling for copyright reasons, played a significant role in transforming computers into friendlier machines, helping to catapult them into the commercial sphere. As the 31st employee at Apple Computer, Mr. Raskin advocated forcefully for the company to develop a computer that was easy for people to use, and he headed the Macintosh project starting in 1979.

“At that time, computers were for nerds,” said Bill Atkinson, a software designer who Mr. Raskin recruited to work at Apple in 1978. “You had to be some kind of geek to even want to use a computer. He wanted to make them more usable and friendly to people who weren’t geeks.”

Mr. Raskin left Apple in 1982 after his relationship with Steve Jobs, the company’s co-founder, soured. But he is credited with providing the vision for the Macintosh, the highly accessible and affordable computer that hit stores in 1984.

NY Times
Peter Palazzo, an editorial art director who redesigned The New York Herald Tribune in 1963 and helped start a genre that he called journalistic design, died on Jan. 30 in Glens Falls, N.Y. He would have been 79 on Feb. 2.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Danielle.

In 1963, when Mr. Palazzo was hired to reformat the foundering Sunday edition of The Tribune, most newspapers were rigidly, and often blandly, composed by editors who were not trained as designers or art directors. Originally an advertising designer, Mr. Palazzo was asked to create a typographic format that would distinguish The Tribune from its competitors. He broke with tradition when he combined newspaper layout principals and magazine display presentation, including larger images, increased white space, and elegant headline composition.

It was a calculated risk.

“One must be very careful about tampering” with the readers’ habits, “which have built up over a long period of time,” he wrote in 1964 in Print magazine. But since The Tribune had been steadily losing Sunday circulation to The New York Times, Jim Bellows, editor of The Tribune, took a chance that Mr. Palazzo’s concept to design all the Sunday sections for “individual identification and unified appearance” would transform the archaic-looking pages into something modern that would attract new readers.

Thanks to the ODDity who sent us the following:

Give us this day Our Daily Dead.

“he is gone”the medic said.

Gone he was the Priest did quote.

Gone forever the one of note.

Now it’s Sunday the twenty seventh.

No one has passed the hour eleventh?

For your last bio was on twenty and fifth.

Has the Reaper lost his gift?

Okay, we’re back after some semi-death defying antics that involved horses and the Red River. Take it from us, parts of the Texas Panhandle isn’t just another country, it’s another world. In the motel parking lot, met a broken up bull rider from Wyoming who is now a cowboy evangelical preacher. He lives out of a Chevy Nova that had two saddles in the back (a spare, or just hoping to get lucky?). Passed on the offer to hear him preach, Childress County is dry (except for Tell, where there may be some sort of liquor store’follow the pickup trucks on Saturday night), and what’s a poor sinner to do? If you have an interest in how cowboys become broken up bull riders, check out rodeo.

On today’s list we have a man who made Peter Pan fly, another who made computers friendly, someone who made newspapers more readable, and the last who transformed Time. A common genius in making the complex simple.

The man who helped give us the Apple Macintosh died of cancer of the pancreas. Pancreatic cancer is nasty stuff. Its symptoms are cryptic, and often don’t appear until the cancer has already spread, and thus is incurable. Although pancreatic cancer accounts for less than 2% of all cancers, it is the fourth leading cause of cancer death. Jack Benny, Fiorello LaGuardia, John D. MacArthur, Michael Landon, Harry Blackstone Jr., Juliet Prowse, Count Basie, Johannes Brahms, Vince Edwards, Henry Mancini, Dizzy Gillespie, Rex Harrison, and Fred Gwynne all died of
pancreatic cancer. Like we said, nasty stuff.

LA Times
Peter Benenson, the British lawyer who founded the human rights organization Amnesty International with his stated goal “to condemn persecution regardless of where it occurs or what are the ideas suppressed,” has died. He was 83.

Benenson died Friday night at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, of pneumonia, Amnesty International USA spokesperson Wende Gozan said Saturday. Benenson had been in ill health for several years.

With a social conscience developed in early childhood, he laid the foundation for Amnesty International in 1961 after becoming incensed over an article he read about the imprisonment of two students in Portugal. The youths were sentenced to seven years after their arrest at a Lisbon cafe for drinking a toast to liberation from then-dictator Antonio Salazar.

Benenson set off for the Portuguese Embassy in London to protest, but suddenly decided to get off the subway at Trafalgar Square and went inside the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields to think.

“I went in to see what could really be done effectively, to mobilize world opinion,” he told his friend and former Amnesty International spokesman Richard Reoch, according to a statement issued Saturday by Reoch. “It was necessary to think of a larger group which would harness the enthusiasm of people all over the world who were anxious to see a wider respect for human rights.”

Peter Benenson: Taking a Stand Against Injustice Amnesty International (People Who Have Helped the World)
Torture in the Eighties (Amnesty International Report)

LA Times
Hans-Juergen Wischnewski, 82, a German politician best known as the negotiator in the 1977 hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner to Somalia by leftist terrorists, died Thursday at a Cologne hospital from an infection, said his spokesman, Arnold Joosten.

Born in East Prussia, now part of Poland, Wischnewski was a metal worker by training. He entered politics after World War II and built up contacts, notably in the Arab world and Latin America, that helped him repeatedly as a crisis mediator.

When hijackers commandeered a Lufthansa airliner in 1977 to Mogadishu, Somalia, to force the release of three jailed Red Army Faction leaders, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt sent Wischnewski as his envoy.

West German anti-terrorist commandos eventually stormed the jet and rescued the 86 hostages. The next day, the kidnapped head of West Germany’s industry federation was found dead in a car, apparently killed by Red Army Faction members.

Wischnewski remained active under the conservative government of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who succeeded Schmidt in 1982. Wischnewski mediated the freedom of eight West Germans seized by rebels in Nicaragua in 1986.

LA Times
Atef Sedki, 75, a former prime minister who helped steer Egypt toward a market-oriented economy, died Friday, the semi-official Middle East News Agency reported.

Sedki, whose 10-year term was longer than any other Egyptian prime minister, died of complications from a heart condition, the agency said.

He had a severe heart attack late last year and was treated in Egyptian and French hospitals.

An economist and lawyer, Sedki began his career as cultural attache at the Egyptian Embassy in Paris. He also taught finance and law at Cairo University. He gained respect for balancing the need for reform with state support that millions of Egyptians rely on.

When President Hosni Mubarak name him prime minister, he told Sedki to modernize the state-controlled economy. Sedki then began a restructuring program that privatized hundreds of state-owned enterprises.

In 1993, Muslim extremists tried to assassinate him with a car bomb in Cairo. Sedki survived, but the blast killed a 12-year-old girl and several of her classmates as they were walking down the street.

NY Times
Gwendolyn Knight, a painter and sculptor from the 1930’s who emerged from the shadow of her husband, the painter Jacob Lawrence, late in her life, died on Feb. 18 at her home in Seattle. She was 91.

Although Ms. Knight did not begin to exhibit formally until the 1970’s and was long known as the wife of Mr. Lawrence, a leading visual chronicler of the African-American experience, she began painting when she was young and was still setting out in new directions in old age.

This was evident in her first retrospective, titled “Never Late for Heaven: The Art of Gwen Knight,” at the Tacoma Art Museum in 2003. Having devoted most of her career to oil portraits of friends, figure studies of dancers, and watercolor and gouache landscapes that seemed to be companion pieces to her husband’s work, she suddenly began in the 1990’s to draw horses and cats from memory - quick, lyrical sketches rendered as etchings and monoprints.

“It wasn’t necessary for me to have acclaim,” she told Charles H. Rowell in an interview for Callaloo magazine in 1988. “I just knew that I wanted to do it, so I did it whenever I could.”

LA Times
Robert Kearns, the inventor of intermittent windshield wipers, who won multimillion-dollar judgments against Ford and Chrysler for using his idea, has died. He was 77.

Kearns died of cancer Feb. 9 at his home in suburban Baltimore, his family said.

In 1967, Kearns received several patents for his design for wipers that paused between swipes, making them useful in light rain or mist. The invention allows the driver to set the interval at which the wiper sweeps the window.

He shopped his invention around to various automakers but did not reach a licensing deal with any of them. Carmakers eventually began offering intermittent wipers, however, as standard or optional equipment.

Kearns sued Ford Motor Co. in 1978 and Chrysler in 1982, claiming patent infringement.

LA Times
Bill Potts, a jazz pianist, composer and arranger who scored “The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess,” a vibrant version of the Gershwin folk opera, died of cardiac arrest Feb. 16 at a hospital in Plantation, Fla. He was 76.

Largely a self-taught musician, Potts developed an arranging style that was bold, brassy and swinging. In many ways, his “Jazz Soul” album, written when he was 30, was a precocious interpretation of Gershwin standards. Tunes such as “Summertime” had typically been recorded as slow ballads with a vocal interlude.

In contrast, the 1959 “Jazz Soul” album became a large-scale and boisterous project featuring such jazz heavyweights as Harry Edison, Zoot Sims, Charlie Shavers and Bill Evans.

Potts wrote his arrangements while recuperating from a car accident that left him in a body cast for months.

Under the leadership of producer Jack Lewis, Potts studied the original score and listened to a stack of “Porgy and Bess” versions.
Jazz Soul of Porgy & Bess
Porgy & Bess & Bye Bye Birdie
555 Feet High

NY Times
John Ebstein, an industrial designer employed by Raymond Loewy, the “father of streamlining,” who led the team that created the Studebaker Avanti sports car and influenced the look of products including Lucky Strike cigarettes and Greyhound buses, died on Feb. 18 in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He was 92.

The cause was a heart attack, his son, Peter, said.

Mr. Ebstein contributed to the design of space capsules, Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives and Air Force One, but his most notable achievement was supervising the team of young designers that in two weeks in 1961 created the Avanti for the Studebaker-Packard Corporation.

The radically styled, powerful sports coupe did not fulfill its intended purpose of saving its maker from financial collapse, but it became revered among automobile enthusiasts and design devotees as one of the world’s most consummate sports cars. It was built in the 1963 and 1964 model years.

The Avanti, which means “forward” in Italian, had a Coke-bottle shape, with a narrowing in the middle that inspired European racing cars for a generation. It could hold four passengers and had two doors, a long hood, a host trunk, an asymmetrical power bulge on the hood, virtually no chrome trim and no fins. The interior was inspired by aircraft flight decks, with numerous toggle switches on the console.

NY Times
Edward Patten, a member of the Grammy-winning group Gladys Knight and the Pips, died on Friday at a hospital in suburban Detroit. He was 66. The cause was a stroke he suffered a few days ago, said William Guest, his cousin, another member of the group. Gladys Knight and the Pips - made up of Ms. Knight; her brother, Merald (Bubba) Knight; and their cousins, Mr. Guest and Mr. Patten - recorded for Motown from 1966 to 1973 and for Buddah Records from 1973 to 1977. The group later recorded for CBS until it broke up, in 1989. The group, whose hits included “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Midnight Train to Georgia,” won four Grammys and was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Mr. Patten, a native of Atlanta, was one of the founders of Crew Records, based in Detroit and Atlanta, and sang backup for the label’s recording artists, said Denise Fussell, a spokeswoman for Crew.
The Pips memorabilia at eBay.com