Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Zhu Qiaomei, 94, China’s oldest surviving sex slave from World War II, who had fought for compensation from the Japanese government, died Sunday in Shanghai, China’s state media reported. The cause of death was not announced.

She was among seven women on Shanghai’s Chongming Island, in the Yangtze River, known to have been forced to work as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers during the war. Her ordeal lasted more than two years.

Zhu was among a group of former sex slaves from various Asian countries who filed a class-action lawsuit against the Japanese government in 2000 in the District Court of Washington, D.C.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the case, initially rejected, to be reconsidered in light of a ruling last year that a federal law allows American courts to hear old disputes over such things as wartime crimes unless the suits are barred by treaties.

A court document said Zhu lived at home during the war but was forced to work in a military brothel and raped repeatedly by soldiers stationed nearby. Afterward, Zhu suffered from a series of health and psychological problems.
The comfort women: Sex slaves of Japanese imperial forces

NY Times
ugh W. Nibley, a Mormon religious scholar who was one of the most active and outspoken defenders of Mormon writings and teachings, died yesterday at his home in Provo, Utah. He was 94.

A spokesman for the family, Chris Thomas, said Dr. Nibley had been in declining health in recent months.

Though not a member of the formal hierarchy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dr. Nibley, a professor emeritus of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, was regularly called on by senior church officials to research and respond to questions about or criticisms of Mormon teachings.

Unlike many previous Mormon defenders, Dr. Nibley used his training as a historian to support Mormon beliefs, making academic examinations of the origins and documentation of events and people in Mormon history. He focused his expertise on the Mormon Church’s most sacred texts, particularly the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price, a collection of the writings of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.

NY Times
Robert Koff, a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet and a concert violinist who performed on modern and Baroque instruments, died on Tuesday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 86.

His family said that he had been ill for two years.

Mr. Koff, along with the violinist Robert Mann, the violist Raphael Hillyer and the cellist Arthur Winograd, formed the Juilliard String Quartet in 1946, at the request of the composer William Schuman, who was president of the Juilliard School.

Schuman’s mission for the ensemble was that it would champion contemporary music as part of a rounded repertory and that, as Juilliard’s resident quartet, it would coach younger chamber ensembles. Although none of the original players remain in the lineup (the last to leave was Mr. Mann, who retired in 1997), for nearly six decades the group has maintained its affiliation with the Juilliard School and its original commitment to new music.

As the group’s original second violinist, Mr. Koff helped shape its sound when the Juilliard Quartet was establishing itself as the pre-eminent American chamber ensemble, and he performed on many of the group’s classic recordings, including its first traversal of the six Bartok quartets, which was recorded in 1950 and recently reissued by Pearl, an English historical label. Mr. Koff left the group in 1958 when he became director of performance activities at Brandeis University.
Bartok:String Quartets

NY Times
Harry M. Simeone, a conductor and arranger whose choral singers helped popularize Christmas evergreens like “The Little Drummer Boy,” died on Tuesday at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 94 and lived on the Upper East Side.

The death was announced by his family.

Mr. Simeone, who spent a career working for and with headliners like Fred Waring and Bing Crosby, became known on his own in the late 1950’s with the Harry Simeone Chorale. Its recordings of Christmas songs sold in the hundreds of thousands and were ubiquitous in homes and public places.

The most successful was his group’s rendition of “The Little Drummer Boy,” adapted from a Czech carol. Translated into English in 1941, it was first recorded in 1957 by the Jack Halloran Singers. According to Songfacts, a professional database, , a disagreement over the release of that record brought the song and the singers to Mr. Simeone for a redo.

Originally titled “Sing We Now of Christmas,” the album on the Holiday label that included “Drummer Boy,” turned into an instant holiday classic when it appeared in 1958, and made the Top 40 charts in the United States until 1962. Since then “The Little Drummer Boy” has been recorded by artists from Bing Crosby, paired with the rocker David Bowie, to the Pipes and Drums and Military Band of the Royal Scots Guards.
The Little Drummer Boy [Polygram]
Wonderful World of Christmas
The Magic of Christmas
10 Classic Christmas Favorites

NY Times
Harald Szeemann, an influential Swiss museum curator whose groundbreaking exhibitions helped redefine his profession, died last Friday in the Ticino region of Switzerland. He was 71.

His death was announced by the Venice Biennale and the Kunsthaus Zürich, for which he worked.

Mr. Szeemann was often said to be the first independent, or freelance, curator. He invented the curator as art star, a globe-trotting, deal-making, usually male impresario of large-scale exhibitions that bore the imprint of a single vision and succeeded or failed on the strength of site-specific works executed specially for the show.

Mr. Szeemann was the first curator to mount large surveys of the fertile breakdown of art mediums that began in the 1960’s, and the first to have complete control over the sprawling Documenta exhibitions, which are held every five years or so in Kassel, Germany. He was known for shows that not only mixed genres and generations, but sometimes included historical documents and scientific innovations.

He favored artists that he considered outsiders and visionaries, and saw himself as one too. He once said that he wanted an exhibition of his to be “not just a group show, but a temporary world.”
Harald Szeemann, un cas singulier
Etienne-Martin
Museum der Obsessionen

Another Morman star in the list today with perhaps a dark side as well. Certainly Mr. Nibley wrote extensively on his faith, but were there problems at home too? We trust in your ability to make up your own minds on the issue.

Meanwhile there is much in the way of music and art today too. Quartets, chorales and a curator who invented himself as an art star. Perhaps the music and art will help quiet the roar around you - a brief pause in our otherwise busy lives.

And then there is Zhu Qiaomei. A sad tale of enslavement and abuse.

And of course we appreciate your thoughts: Contact Us.

NY Times
Simone Simon, the French actress of near-feline beauty best known to American audiences for her haunting role in the 1942 RKO horror film “Cat People,” died on Tuesday in Paris. She was 93.

Her death was announced by her friends and family to Agence France-Presse.

In “Cat People” Ms. Simon played a Serbian-born wife who fears that when her passions are aroused she will turn into a panther that kills. Her casting in this film and its mostly unrelated sequel, “The Curse of the Cat People” (RKO, 1944), was probably inspired by her role as the devil’s emissary in “All That Money Can Buy” (RKO, 1941), an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in which Ms. Simon’s character steals a good man from his wife.

Ms. Simon made one other film for RKO, “Mademoiselle Fifi” (1944), an adaptation of two Guy de Maupassant stories about a French laundress who defies occupying German forces during the Franco-Prussian war. Although it was not a hit in the United States, it was the first American film to be shown in France after the Normandy invasion.

Ms. Simon was born on April 23, 1911, in Bèthune, France, to Henri Louis Firmin and Erma Maria Domenica Giorcelli. She grew up in Marseilles. After working briefly in Paris as a fashion designer and model, she made her stage debut in 1931 in the operetta “Balthazar.”
Mademoiselle Fifi
Simone Simon memorabilia at eBay.com

NY Times
Jimmy Young, a former heavyweight boxer who beat George Foreman and fought Muhammad Ali and Ken Norton in the 1970’s, died on Sunday. He was 56.

A spokeswoman for Hahnemann University Hospital announced his death. The Philadelphia Daily News reported that he died of heart disease after six days in the hospital.

The 6-foot-1, 210-pound Young compiled a 35-18-3 record with 12 knockouts, fighting from 1969 to 1990.

He was a quick, stylish fighter, but he lacked a knockout punch.

“He was brilliant,” Bert Randolph Sugar, the boxing historian, said. “The problem is that he was in one of the best classes of heavyweights ever, and all the other stars had bigger punches.”

Young lost a unanimous 15-round decision to Ali on April 30, 1976, in Landover, Md., in a bid to capture Ali’s heavyweight championship, a verdict that was booed by most of the crowd.

“To beat Ali in those days,” Young once said, “you really had to beat him bad, you know what I mean?”
Jimmy Young memorabilia at eBay.com

NY Times
Dr. Nathan Wright Jr., an Episcopal minister and scholar who was an early and prominent advocate of black power, died on Tuesday at his home in East Stroudsburg, Pa. He was 81.

The cause was kidney disease, his son Chi said.

Dr. Wright’s greatest fame came in 1967, when he was chairman of the National Conference on Black Power in Newark, held in the wake of race riots there. With 1,100 delegates representing 42 cities and 197 black organizations, the meeting showed a change in the civil rights movement’s tactics, toward demanding group rights rather than individual rights, much as generations of immigrants had done, but this time more vociferously.

The conference called for the creation of black national holidays, black universities and a “buy black” effort. It advocated looking into the possibility of dividing the United States into two countries, one black and one white.

In reviewing “Ready to Riot,” one of the 18 books written by Dr. Wright, in 1968, J. Anthony Lukas said in The New York Times Book Review that the meeting “sounded the first prolonged trumpet blast in the black power campaign.”
Black power and urban unrest;: Creative possibilities
Soweto diary: The free elections in South Africa : featuring the orginial poetry of Nathan Wright, Jr
Ready to riot
Let’s work together
What Black politicians are saying

NY Times
Ara Berberian, a warm-voiced bass who sang for 20 years at the Metropolitan Opera, died early Monday in his sleep at his winter home in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 74.

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

Mr. Berberian’s operatic repertory included more than 100 roles, from Pimen and Varlaam in Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” to Don Basilio in “The Barber of Seville.” He sang everywhere from New York to Tel Aviv, San Francisco to Japan. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1979, appearing in Meyerbeer’s “Prophète,” and continued to appear there for more than 300 performances, until a final “La Bohème” in 1997.

He was not exclusively an opera singer. Other notable credits included the 1964 studio recording of “Oklahoma!,” in which he sang Jud Fry to John Raitt’s Curly; and a performance of the national anthem before a World Series game in 1984, when the Detroit Tigers were playing the San Diego Padres, an experience he described as more exciting than his Met debut.

Born on May 14, 1930, in Detroit to Armenian parents, Mr. Berberian attended the Culver Military Academy in Indiana before continuing on to the University of Michigan, where he studied economics and then earned a law degree; he practiced law for a year. Mr. Berberian, whose uncle had been a professional boxer, also flirted with a career in sports, pitching for the minor-league Kansas City Athletics before deciding in favor of classical music. He did remain in touch with the baseball world through a Culver classmate, George Steinbrenner.

NY Times
Uli Derickson, the Trans World Airlines flight attendant honored for saving passengers’ lives in 1985 by both confronting and mollifying terrorist hijackers, died on Friday at her home in Tucson. She was 60.

Ms. Derickson was still working as a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines when she received a diagnosis of cancer in 2003, her son, Matthew Derickson, said in announcing her death.

On June 14, 1985, when a pair of Lebanese gunmen commandeered a T.W.A. flight from Athens to Rome, Ms. Derickson took the lead in protecting the 152 passengers and crew members.

Though the two hijackers spoke almost no English, Ms. Derickson was able to speak with one of them in German and occasionally calm him by singing a German ballad he requested. She won the hijackers’ pity for one passenger by explaining that his daughter had been delivered by a Lebanese doctor.

She also intervened during beatings, often putting herself in harm’s way.

Triumph over Terror on Flight 847

The Independant
Harry Baird, actor: born Georgetown, British Guiana 12 May 1931; died London 13 February 2005.

Harry Baird’s portrayal of the terrified black youth who is victimised by the police in the film Sapphire helped to launch him into a decade of regular acting work, including an appearance in the comedy caper The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine. Never a leading player, Baird eventually found the going tough as a black “jobbing” actor in Britain, and the roles dried up. By the mid-1970s his acting career was over.

He was born in Georgetown, Guyana (then British Guiana), in 1931 and educated in Canada and Britain. He began his acting career in 1955 as an exotic “attendant” in the West End musical Kismet and with a small film role as the wrestler Jamaica in Carol Reed’s A Kid for Two Farthings.

For just over a decade he alternated occasional West End and repertory appearances with film and television work, his television credits including a regular role as Atimbu in White Hunter (1958-60), the BBC series Hurricane (1961), several supporting roles in Danger Man (1964-65) and, as Lt Mark Bradley, the science-fiction classic “UFO” (1970). Stage work included Jean Genet’s The Blacks (Royal Court, 1961), A Wreath for Udomo (Lyric, Hammersmith, 1961) and Ogodiveleftthegason (Royal Court, 1967).

In films, a brief, uncredited appearance stood out. In 1959 Baird is clearly visible in J. Lee Thompson’s Tiger Bay as the bridegroom in the first black wedding depicted in a British film. It is a non-speaking role, and easily overlooked, but significant when compared to some of the other, stereotypical roles the British film industry offered him, such as the “warrior leader” in Tarzan the Magnificent (1960) and the “Nubian” in Road to Hong Kong (1961). Other film roles, sometimes uncredited, ranged from Killers of Kilimanjaro (1959) to the Hammer horror The Oblong Box (1969) and included Bryan Forbes’s The Whisperers (1967), The Touchables (1968, as a gay wrestler called “Lillywhite”) and The Italian Job (1969, as “Big William”), now a cult favourite. In 1960 Baird began acting in Italian films, and in the 1970s his film career ended in Italian westerns, such as Four Gunmen of the Apocalypse (1975).

NY Times
uillermo Cabrera Infante, a Cuban novelist in exile whose lavishly textured prose conjured the country he knew before the revolution he once supported, died on Monday at a hospital in London, where he had lived for 39 years. He was 75.

The cause was septicemia, a blood infection, his family and a spokeswoman for his Spanish literary agent told The Associated Press.

G. Cabrera Infante, as he signed most of his work, was a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, journalist and translator. He first broke into print as a film critic in Cuba.

He was best known for his hefty, autobiographical and imaginatively and bawdily humorous novels, “Three Trapped Tigers” (1971) and “Infante’s Inferno” (1984). In them he painted the Havana of his youth, torn between the waning dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and the rise of Fidel Castro’s promising new Cuba.

Most recently, in the United States, he published “Guilty of Dancing the Chachachá” (2001), three stories he wrote in Spanish and translated himself, set in Havana as Mr. Castro’s leadership took hold. A reviewer for The New York Times, Charles Wilson, said that the dialogues of the third story, from which the book took its title, gave “a vivid sense of the frustrations the new government posed for writers and artists.”

NY Times
Former Gov. S. Ernest Vandiver, who won office vowing that “no, not one” black child would enter a white classroom in Georgia but went on to preside over peaceful desegregation, died on Monday at his home in Lavonia, Ga. He was 86.

His death was announced by his family through the office of Gov. Sonny Perdue.

Governor from 1959 to 1963, Mr. Vandiver was elected on an anti-integration platform, but at a critical moment he persuaded lawmakers to repeal a statute requiring schools to be closed rather than desegregated.

His stand was credited with sparing the state the turbulence that swept much of the South in that period, but it cost him political support. He left office in 1963 when his four-year term ended, and said later that keeping the schools open was “political suicide.”

His “no, not one” phrase had been devised by his strategists to counter criticism from segregationists after he said that integration of Georgia’s schools should “evolve.”

NY Times
eggie Roby, who was one of the finest and most durable punters in National Football League history, died yesterday in Nashville. He was 43.

Nancy Knox, a business associate, said Roby collapsed after a morning shower and was pronounced dead at St. Thomas Hospital. She said a doctor at the hospital told her that Roby apparently had a heart attack.

Roby, a big man for a punter, at 6 feet 3 inches and 258 pounds, spent 16 seasons in the N.F.L. and had a career average of 43.3 yards a punt. He played for the Miami Dolphins (1983-92), the Washington Redskins (1993-94), the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (1995), the Houston Oilers and their successors, the Tennessee Titans (1996-97), and the San Francisco 49ers (1998). He appeared in three Pro Bowl games.
Reggie Roby memorabilia at eBay.com

The Independant
Karl Martin Weschke, painter: born Taubenpreskeln, Germany 7 June 1925; three times married (two sons, three daughters); died Hayle, Cornwall 20 February 2005. The artist Karl Weschke lived for more than 40 years in an isolated house on the tip of Cape Cornwall, near Land’s End. An entrenched individualist, Weschke was never part of the St Ives school of colourful abstraction, though some of its practitioners were his friends and neighbours. His art owed more to German Expressionism and to the continuing relevance of ancient myths, reinterpreted through the rugged Cornish landscape. Weschke took pride in pitting himself against nature: not taming it, but cohabiting with it, if not always amicably. The view from his studio was over the desolate moors with their crops of bracken or gorse, to the long rollers of the Atlantic. He loved and respected the sea, both as diver and artist, and painted it in many moods. He was a great debunker. When asked once by a student whether it was the beautiful Cornish light that had inspired him to live where he did, he snorted dismissively, “Cornish light? I’ve got a 60-watt light-bulb and I keep the curtains closed.” He admitted to not having perhaps the sunniest of dispositions, though counted himself moody but optimistic. His was a strong personality - by turns enthusiastic, impatient, irate, mischievous, or utterly charming. The blond boyishness of his youth transmuted in later life to a startling resemblance to Picasso. He was powerfully attracted to women, and was married three times. He was the father of four children - Benjamin, Lucas, Laura and Rachel - and, when relationships didn’t work, had no hesitation in bringing the children up on his own, while still continuing to paint. (Their needs came first: painting was done at night. Hence the crack about Cornish light.) He had little patience for people who claimed it wasn’t possible to have children and be an artist
Karl Weschke: Portrait of a painter

As with yesterday, another player in the Civil Rights struggle has left us, S.E. Vandiver. In general, if you made your mark in the 50s or 60s, you are on-deck. NFL punter Reggie Roby died in the shower. We ODDfellows regard the shower as a great place to have ideas come to us, but we guess it’s not without risk. The painter Karl Weschke is described as having been ‘Powerfully attracted to women.’ Well ALLRIGHT! Not the worst epitaph. It certainly beats ‘innocent by-stander’ –something the ODDfellows certainly don’t want in their epitaph.

Our Aspen reporter is back, and has this to say about Hunter Thompson’s demise: ‘I did hear from several people that he was very tough on his wife, as you can imagine….that the coroner refuses, for some reason, to do a toxicology test, and that, generally, people sort of hold the sheriff somewhat accountable for letting him get away with so much shit over the years…ie. Jail time and forced rehab.’ You read it here folks. We thank the good DR for his candid report.