Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Sol M. Linowitz, who played a key role in negotiating the treaties that gave Panama sovereignty over the Panama Canal, died Friday. He was 91.

A lawyer and businessman as well as diplomat, Linowitz died at his home in Washington, according to an announcement from the Academy for Educational Development. Linowitz served as chairman of the nonprofit group since 1990.

Linowitz made a name for himself in key management posts at Xerox Corp. at the time the company’s profits and product were just taking off. He served as chairman of the executive committee, legal counsel and finally as chairman of the board.

In 1966, he put his 35,000 shares of Xerox stock in a trust and had his first diplomatic assignment answering President Johnson’s call to be U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States and U.S. representative on the Inter-American Committee of the Alliance for Progress.

But it was during the Carter administration a decade later that he made his major contributions in government service.

Panama Canal cruises on eBay

NY Times
George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war, died on Thursday night in Princeton, N.J. He was 101.

Mr. Kennan was the man to whom the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II. He conceived the cold-war policy of containment, the idea that the United States should stop the global spread of Communism by diplomacy, politics, and covert action - by any means short of war.

As the State Department’s first policy planning chief in the late 1940’s, serving Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Mr. Kennan was an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, which sent billions of dollars of American aid to nations devastated by World War II. At the same time, he conceived a secret “political warfare” unit that aimed to roll back Communism, not merely contain it. His brainchild became the covert-operations directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.

With five scholarship players and a borrowed band, Bucknell wins, and Kansas title hopes are dead. Way to go
Patriot League!
Mach Madness indeed.

If you do nothing else today, read the obituary of George Kennan, key player in the Marshall Plan, author of the‘Long Telegram’, and important architect of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Sol Linowitz shepparded the Carter administration return of the Panama Canal. Kennan was born the same year construction started on the Canal (today’s ODDassociation, we guess.) Disease was a major impediment to construction of the Canal; however Dr. William Gorgas implemented the measures, mostly mosquito eradication, that led to the control of Yellow Fever
and malaria, and allowed the Canal to be built. Dr. Gorgas (even though he was a general in the army, he preferred to be called ‘Dr.’) was also charged with control of venereal disease
in the U.S. army during World War I. At one point VD accounted for more than one-third of all workdays lost due to illness in the army. Ouch. The medical corps told enlisted men to masturbate instead of using prostitutes. Oh. By law, prostitution and sale of alcohol was illegal within five miles of any military base. One of the consequences was shutting down of Storyville in New Orleans, the birthplace of Jazz. Oh, oh, we’re rambling again. Returning to the Canal, in the 1950’s the U.S. government, as part of Project Plowshare
proposed to use nuclear bombs
to build a sea level canal. One reason that a sea level canal has not been built is concern that Pacific Ocean sea snakes
would get into the Caribbean. The freshwater lake in the current canal prevents the snakes from seeking a Jamaican holiday. By ’sea snakes’, we mean the members of the cobra family of serpents, not ‘other’
. Speaking of cobras, if you haven’t done it already, check out the ODD Exit above about the mortal self-inflicted exit of John Girling.

Have a good day, and be careful what you play with.

LA Times
Lalo Guerrero, the pioneering barrio troubadour whose bilingual repertoire spanned a vast variety of Mexican and American genres over seven decades and earned him worldwide accolades as the Father of Chicano Music, died Thursday. He was 88.

Guerrero, who was suffering from prostate cancer, increasing frailty and memory loss, died at a nursing home in Palm Springs, near his longtime residence. The exact cause of death was not immediately known, relatives said.

The son of blue-collar Mexican immigrants, Guerrero was a self-styled folk musician who made up for his lack of formal training with a witty knack for capturing the everyday joys, sorrows and absurdities of Mexican American life, largely ignored by mainstream pop music. His songs were so emblematic of the bicultural experience during World War II that they were prominently featured in 1977’s “Zoot Suit,” the groundbreaking stage and film musical that dramatized, to Guerrero’s swing-time beat, the persecution and survival spirit of the so-called pachucos.

“The play would not have been possible without his music,” said writer and director Luis Valdez, Guerrero’s nephew. “So many focus on the negative side, but what Lalo captured was the joy of the pachuco experience, the playful vacilon [good times], which no one else had done. That was something that was always unfailing with his work — his great sense of humor and love for life.”

Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero Jr. was born on Christmas Eve 1916 in the Barrio Viejo of Tucson, one of 24 siblings, only eight of whom survived to adulthood. His father worked on the railroads, and his mother taught him to sing and play guitar.

As a teenager, he wrote “Cancion Mexicana,” the first of hundreds of songs recorded on various labels since the 1930s. His trademark was his versatility. He was able to compose and sing in an array of styles, including traditional boleros and corridos, as well as upbeat mambos and boogie-woogies. He also wrote protest songs, such as “Battle Hymn of the Chicano” (1989), and comic parodies, such as “Mexican Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Bus Boys” (1990) and “No Chicanos on TV” (19

LA Times
Dick Radatz wanted to be a starting pitcher. His minor league manager had different plans.

Johnny Pesky turned him into a reliever in 1961 with Seattle of the Pacific Coast League, and Radatz became one of baseball’s most dominant relievers in the early ’60s with the Boston Red Sox.

“The season opens,” Pesky said. “We played five games. He’s in four of them and he saves all four games. From that time on he liked it.”

The 67-year-old Radatz, who struck out Mickey Mantle 44 of the 63 times he faced the New York Yankee slugger, died Wednesday after falling down a flight of stairs at his home in Easton, Mass., and suffering a severe head injury, according to police.

The Bristol County district attorney’s office ruled that Radatz’s death was accidental.

Dick Radatz Memorabilia at eBay.com
Red Sox Memorabilia at eBay.com

LA Times
Philip Lamantia, an American Surrealist poet who helped launch poetry’s Beat generation in San Francisco, has died. He was 77.

Lamantia died March 7 at his home in San Francisco of heart failure, according to Elaine Katzenberger, associate director of City Lights Books, which published several collections of his poetry.

When the city emerged as a home to artists and intellectuals in the mid-1940s, Lamantia was a high school student and one of the youngest published poets of his generation. He was 16 when his first work appeared in View, a respected literary magazine. Soon afterward, his work was included in “VVV,” the Surrealist journal edited by Andre Breton, who referred to Lamantia as “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.”

Despite this promising start, Lamantia never took his place in poetry’s mainstream. From the mid-1950s, his dependence on drugs combined with periods of serious depression limited him. He also shied away from public attention and traveled extensively in Europe, North Africa and Mexico, where he lived for a time with the Cora Indian tribe in Nayarit, experimenting with peyote. Some of his poetry suggests his drug-induced isolation.

NY Times
Andre Norton, a prolific and popular science-fiction and fantasy writer whose central theme was the rite of passage to self-realization undertaken by misfits or displaced outsiders, died yesterday at her home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. She was 93.

The cause was congestive heart failure, Sue Stewart, her friend and caretaker, said.

In more than 130 novels, nearly 100 short stories and numerous anthologies that Ms. Norton edited in the science-fiction, fantasy, mystery and western genres, the theme of alienation and return keeps recurring.

In a typical story, “Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D.” (Harcourt, 1952) - her first science-fiction novel - Fors, a mutant rejected by a postwar society because of his differences, goes in search of a lost city rumored to be free of radiation. Accompanied by a cat with which he communicates telepathically, Fors discovers his own worth through a string of difficult tests.

“Star Man’s Son” was the relatively late start of Ms. Norton’s science fiction career; until then, she had mainly been a novelist writing juvenile historical fiction and adventure stories, under the pen name Andre Norton, chosen because her readers were thought to be exclusively boys

At the time, the market for science-fiction was largely confined to magazines, but with the growth of the genre in book form after 1950, Ms. Norton took the field by storm. Donald A. Wollheim, editor of the paperback house Ace Books, saw her potential in an adult market, acquired the rights to “Starman’s Son,” published it under the title “Daybreak - 2250 A.D.,” eliminating all references to the story and its author as being for young readers, and found himself with a steady seller.

Although Ms. Norton’s subsequent books for Ace sold in the hundreds of thousands, she found herself the victim of a Catch-22: critics of science fiction did not take her seriously because she was considered a juvenile writer and critics of children’s literature dismissed her because she wrote science fiction

More books from Andre Norton
The Prince Commands
Andre Norton memorabilia at eBay.com

NY Times
Ted Rand, a largely self-taught graphic artist who illustrated nearly 80 children’s books after reaching retirement age, died Saturday at his home on Mercer Island, Wash. He was 89.

The cause was cancer, said Gloria Rand, his wife and collaborator on a dozen of those books.

Mr. Rand, who started drawing as a boy in Seattle, made a name for himself doing portraits and earned a living with advertising illustrations. That job led to an invitation from the children’s book writer Bill Martin Jr. to work with him; their long collaboration resulted in “The Ghost-Eye Tree” (Henry Holt, 1985) and other books.

Among Mr. Rand’s most recent credits was the acclaimed “If Not for the Cat” (Greenwillow, 2004), a collection of haiku about animals by the poet Jack Prelutsky. Another book is scheduled for publication this fall by Holt: “A Pen Pal for Max,” written by Gloria Rand about a Chilean boy who finds a friend through a note he leaves in a box of grapes.

Gloria Rand started writing children’s books not long after Ted Rand began to illustrate them. Their first book together was “Salty Dog” (Holt, 1989), about a dog taking the ferry to his owner’s boat shop all by himself. That collaboration remains in print, along with “Mary Was a Little Lamb” (Holt, 2004), “Sailing Home: A Story of a Childhood at Sea” (North-South Books, 2001), “Fighting for the Forest” (Holt, 1999), and “Willie Takes a Hike” (Harcourt, 1996).
Ted Rand memorabilia at eBay.com
More Ted Rand works from Amazon.com

A plenty of passings today with some ODD associations. Andre Norton didn’t need drugs to have a psychedelic experience, through her science fiction, she just created them with her stories of misfits and rites of passage. Speaking of misfits, not so much so for the producers of beat poetry. ‘Peyote anyone?’ may be heard at Lamantia’s memorial reading at Enrico’s Cafe.

Eight out of twenty-four Lalo Guerrero sibs didn’t survive childhood. Yikes, 24 pregnancies, not a record (69), but still impressive. Guerrero was a versatile singer and composer characterized as the Father of Chicano Music. One of his parodies was ‘No Chicanos on TV.’ Today’s quiz, before George Lopez, who pioneered Chicanos on TV before the show jumped the shark ?

Lalo Guerrero was multitalented, but Dick Radatz was a specialist’one, if not the best baseball closers ever. He struck out Mickey Mantle 44 of 63 times, but fell down the stairs and died. Cosmic flyswatter. Here’s you ODDfact of the day, the world record for most steps tumbled down in a stunt fall is 109, held by Martin Shelton.

We probably should place that shy, soft-spoken unpretentious girl with the modest clothing, Lil’ Kim, career ‘On Deck.’ Looks like she will be making some special friends soon.

All right, who just shouted ‘Freebird!’? Cut it out. Put down the Bic lighter and walk slowly, and carefully away. Make sure we can see your hands.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Andre Norton, Peyote, Enrico’s Cafe, Cosmic flyswatter.

LA Times
Mary Elizabeth Cronkite, 89, the wife of former CBS television news anchorman Walter Cronkite, died Tuesday at their New York City apartment, said Julie Sukman, the newsman’s assistant. She was diagnosed with spinal cancer last week.

Known as Betsy Cronkite, she was working as a newspaper columnist in Kansas City, Mo., when she met her future husband, who was working at a local radio station. They were married March 30, 1940. She worked for the Kansas City-based Hallmark company during World War II. At the end of the war, she joined her husband in Brussels and later accompanied him to Moscow, where he worked for two years as a correspondent for United Press.

LA Times
Larry Bunker, a drummer and percussionist who played with a who’s who of jazz giants and fashioned a busy career as a film musician, has died. He was 76.

Bunker died March 8 at Queen of Angels-Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications from a recent stroke, said his wife, Brandyn.

A native of Long Beach, Bunker was musically inclined from an early age and was self-taught on piano, accordion, drums and saxophone. In 1946, he was accepted into the U.S. Army band and played drums and piano while serving at Ft. Ord until his discharge in 1948.

In the early 1950s, he played with trombonist Howard Rumsey at the fabled Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach. From then on, he played with the top names in jazz, including saxophonists Stan Getz, Art Pepper and Gerry Mulligan, and guitarist Barney Kessel. He was also a member of singer Peggy Lee’s band.

NY Times
Herbert L. Seegal, whose analytical approach to courting shoppers at R. H. Macy & Company helped start the chain’s move to a more upscale market in the 1970’s and who trained several of its future leaders, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He was 89.

The cause was pneumonia, said his nephew, Frederic M. Seegal.

As R. H. Macy’s president and chief operating officer from 1972-80, Mr. Seegal made stocking his stores a diagnostic exercise. While many other department store executives relied largely on their personal tastes and instincts, he sought facts, figures, context and demographics.

At one point, his analysis revealed that neckties containing red accounted for roughly 40 percent of tie sales, although they made up a smaller share of the stock. Stores began changing their offerings accordingly.

The mixture today is created from equal parts targeted marketing (or ‘retailology’), the wife of a ‘Voice’ and jazz percussion. This blend begins with things highly planned and prepared for and ends with the core component of jazz: improvisation.

Anyone see any connections to your day to day life here? Anyone? Anyone?. Maybe a red necktie would help.

Ever wonder what being married to an icon would be like? Mary Cronkite lived that role. Hers was no doubt quite the interesting life. And icon might just be the correct word here. The dictionary defines icon as an image or representation as well as one who is the object of great attention. Certainly this fits Mary’s husband. And just to try and tie things up a bit, consider that Walter’s profession and Mary’s early career (as Betsy) both had fixed plans and targets, but often improvisation was key.

And of course we cannot pass up a happy St. Patrick’s Day. Stay Green.