Our Daily Dead

NY Times
LeRoy Whitfield, a journalist who used a magazine column to chronicle the everyday struggles of people with H.I.V., died last Sunday at North General Hospital in Harlem. He was 36.

The cause was AIDS-related complications, said his brother, Crofton Whitfield.

Mr. Whitfield had written a column titled “Native Tongue” since May 2004 in HIV Plus, a national magazine distributed at doctors’ offices and organizations offering services for people with AIDS. The magazine’s editor, Michael W. E. Edwards, said that Mr. Whitfield’s column was one of the magazine’s most popular features because of the candor with which he shared his own fight against H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Mr. Whitfield learned that he was H.I.V.-positive when he was 19, and he decided to forgo taking the powerful AIDS drugs that have extended the lives of many people with H.I.V. It was a choice that he stood by till the end, even though his doctors advised him to take the medicines, his brother said.

Mr. Whitfield was also a frequent contributor to Vibe magazine and a former senior editor at Poz, another magazine intended for people with H.I.V.

LeRoy Whitfield was born in Chicago on Sept. 19, 1969. In addition to his brother, he is survived by a sister, LaRonya Whitfield.

The world awaits the next development in a possible catastrophic epidemic in the form of title
avian flu, but best we not forget HIV/AIDS is still a calamitous human infection. LeRoy Whitfield chronicled the everyday struggle of infected people, and now he is dead of the disease about which he wrote so passionately.

A few (2004) statistics
for your consideration:
~39.4 million: the number of people estimated to be living with HIV worldwide. This is 50% higher than projected for 2004 in 1991.
~4.9 million: number of newly infected persons each year
~20 million: number of people estimated to have thus far died from AIDS
~12 million: number of African children current estimated to have been orphaned due to AIDS
~6,000: number of young people (15-24 years) who become infected each day
~$14,000-$34,000
: the annual cost of treating an HIV infected patient in the United States.
~1 million: number of people in developing or transitional countries who are receiving any form of HIV therapy. 6 million are estimated to need such therapy.

~Excellent book on what happens during an influenza pandemic: The Great Influenza

~Excellent new novel about influenza: Wickett’s Remedy

Cover your mouth

LA Times
Baker Knight, who wrote almost 1,000 songs from the late 1950s through the 1970s and whose “Lonesome Town” was recorded decades apart by Ricky Nelson and Paul McCartney, has died. He was 72.

Knight died Wednesday of natural causes at his home in Birmingham, Ala., according to his daughter.

When Knight came to Los Angeles in 1958, he met Nelson through a mutual friend. Within six months, Nelson’s version of “Lonesome Town,” a ballad about being lonely in Hollywood, was on Billboard’s Top 10, as was its flip side, “I Got a Feeling,” another Knight tune. In all, Nelson recorded 21 Knight originals.

“I loved ‘Lonesome Town,’ ” McCartney wrote in the liner notes for “Run Devil Run,” an album of covers released in 1999. “It’s like ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ it’s a place we all know.”

Also among the 40-plus artists to record Knight’s tunes were Dean Martin, with “Somewhere There’s a Someone” and “That Old Time Feelin’,” and Elvis Presley with “The Wonder of You,” which became a hit in 1970. Others included Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr. and Mickey Gilley.

Born Thomas Baker Knight Jr. in Birmingham, he learned to play guitar while in the Air Force. He formed a rock band, Baker Knight and the Knightmares, whose height of fame was opening for country stars Carl Perkins and Conway Twitty in a local auditorium in 1956.

After the band split up, Knight moved to L.A. for a movie role that never materialized. He returned to Birmingham in 1985 and began to suffer from agoraphobia and a condition similar to chronic fatigue syndrome, which put his songwriting career on hold.

NY Times
Vivian Malone Jones, who on a blisteringly hot June day in 1963 became one of two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama after first being barred at the door by the defiant governor, George C. Wallace, died yesterday in Atlanta. She was 63.

Vivian Malone Jones’s effort to enroll at the University of Alabama led to George Wallace’s infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” in 1963.
The cause was a stroke, her sister Sharon Malone told The Associated Press.

Her entrance to the university came as the civil rights struggle raged across the South. On June 12, the day after Ms. Jones and James Hood were escorted into the university by federalized National Guard troops, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death in Jackson, Miss.

On May 30, 1965, Ms. Jones became the first black to graduate from the University of Alabama in its 134 years of existence, earning a degree in business management with a B-plus average.

The performance of Governor Wallace, who stood at the doorway of Foster Auditorium flanked by state troopers, fulfilled a campaign pledge stop integration at “the schoolhouse door.”

But historians have written that his defiance was scripted and came with a promise to federal authorities that he would be brief and would soon comply.

At the time, The Tuscaloosa News wrote contemptuously that the governor “squeezed every suspenseful moment of drama from the occasion.”

The students waited in a car, as Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, deputy attorney general of the United States, avoided a direct confrontation. He said to Mr. Wallace: “From the outset, Governor, all of us have known that the final chapter of this history will be the admission of these students.”

Only after the federalized guard troops arrived, four and a half hours after Mr. Wallace’s initial refusal, were the students admitted. Mr. Wallace read a second statement challenging the constitutionality of the court order, then briskly left.

The students entered Foster Hall, registered, went to their dormitories, ate in the cafeteria and experienced no further incidents that day.

In the town of broken dreams
The streets are filled with regret
Maybe down in lonesome town
I can learn to forget

~Baker Knight

It’s 1963, and Governor George Wallace ceremonially stands in the University of Alabama school house door, trying to bar the entrance of Vivian Malone (Jones) who becomes the first black to graduate from the University. This same year, 1963, Eric (Ricky or Rick) Nelson releases his last hit album, “For You.” Another Alabaman, Baker Knight, wrote Rick’s hit, “Lonesome Town” (later successfully covered by Paul McCartney
). Baker Knight suffered from agoraphobia
, a tough condition in “Lonesome Town” (Hollywood).

Alabama’s Crimson Tide
football team is undefeated, so we thought we’d make some sort of ODDassociation, but stars refuse to come into proper alignment. About the best we can do is something about football, and 1963 being a big year for Rick. In addition to his releasing his hit album, Ricky married Kristen Harmon, daughter of Michigan football legend, Tom Harmon
(and sister of Hunky Mark Harmon
.) Michigan did play Alabama in the 2000 Orange Bowl (Michigan won by one point in overtime—who cares.) Nope, doesn’t work.

How about twins? Ricky and Kristen’s twin son’s Matthew and Gunnar
are strumming their guitars in semi-obscurity and have a very bad website (not to be confused with another obscure twin singing duo, the Nelson Twins who also have a bad website
) . Just a minute, hold it, hold it—maybe we’re on to something. Obscure acts and siblings–that’s it. What’s the best movie ever about obscure brother acts? Why of course, The Fabulous Baker Boys
! Beau and Jeff Bridges ooze pathos and Michelle Pfeiffer on top of a piano, brings down the house (oh we love those clichés) singing, “Making Whoopee.” Baker Brothers to Barker Knight, we’re full circle. Okay, so we’re limping home.

Time to take our thiamine
.

NY Times
Richard Stone Reeves, a prominent portrait painter whose subjects were all extremely beautiful if a trifle on the horsey side, died on Friday in Greenport, N.Y. Mr. Reeves, widely considered one of the premier equestrian artists in the world, was 85 and made his home in Greenport.

Mr. Reeves’s daughter, Nina Stone Reeves, confirmed the death.

Commissioned by leading owners and breeders around the world, Mr. Reeves painted more than a thousand of the finest thoroughbreds in a career that began in the late 1940’s. His roster of subjects read like a Who’s Who of horseflesh: Affirmed, Buckpasser, Cigar, Dark Star, Forego, Genuine Risk, John Henry, Kelso, Nijinsky II, Northern Dancer, Ruffian, Seattle Slew, Secretariat, Spectacular Bid.

His list of patrons, equally impressive, included W. Averell Harriman, Paul Mellon, Allaire duPont, Harry Guggenheim and the Aga Khan. In 1982 President Ronald Reagan presented Queen Elizabeth II with a special edition of Mr. Reeves’s book “Decade of Champions” (1980), which included a commissioned watercolor by him of the queen’s champion racehorse Dunfermline.

Done in oil on canvas, Mr. Reeves’s paintings were neo-Romantic in style, setting sleek-coated muscular horses against pastoral backgrounds. Sometimes he included the jockey in his gleaming silks, and over the course of his career Mr. Reeves captured some of the best riders in the world, among them Ron Turcotte, Lester Piggott and Bill Shoemaker.

NY Times
Tobin Armstrong, the managing partner of the 50,000-acre Armstrong Ranch and an influential figure among Texas Republicans and cattlemen, died Friday in Houston. He was 82.

His death was announced by the ranch management in Kingsville, near Corpus Christi.

Mr. Armstrong grew up on the ranch, established by his great-grandfather in 1852, and attended the University of Texas and Texas A&M University.

In 1978 he became the special assistant for government appointments of Gov. William P. Clements, a Republican. He was a past president of the Santa Gertrudis Breeders International and sat on the board of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association for 48 years.

Mr. Armstrong is survived by his wife of 55 years, Anne Legendre Armstrong, a former ambassador to Britain and former chairwoman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; three sons, Barclay, of Houston, James, of Upperville, Va., and Tobin Jr., of Houston; two daughters, Katharine Armstrong, of Austin, Tex. and Sarita Hixon, of Houston; a sister, Lucie C. Armstrong, of Tarpley, Tex.; and 11 grandchildren.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0941831698/002-8775021-2086417?v=glance&n=283155&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316517453/002-8775021-2086417?v=glance&n=283155&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2

NY Times
PROVIDENCE, R.I., Oct. 12 (AP) - Jack White, a reporter whose article on President Richard M. Nixon’s underpayment of income taxes won a Pulitzer Prize and prompted Nixon to state, “I am not a crook,” died on Wednesday at his home on Cape Cod. He was 63.

His death was announced by WPRI-TV in Providence, where he worked as chief investigative reporter.

Mr. White was working for The Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin in 1973 when he used tax documents and a tip to establish that Nixon had failed to pay a large part of his income taxes in 1970 and 1971. Nixon ultimately agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes, and Mr. White won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671528378/ourdailydeadc-20/002-8775021-2086417?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2

Things are a little slow today on the dying side of the human experience; nevertheless, we bring you word of the death of a painter of horses (Richard Stone Reeves), a puncher of cows (Tobin Anderson), and bugger of presidents (Jack White).

Earlier this week, fueled by a few short-chain hydrocarbons
, we ODDfellows engaged in a spirited (oblique reference or bad pun) discussion re. the death of good classical composers (a form of ancestor envy). Here is a response we received, that we think sums it up quite nicely:

Reflecting on (the) query: what happened to the brain pool that produced such prodigious creations in the 15th Century (symphonic pieces composed for a hundred carefully coordinated musical instruments, to quote your example), I don’t think the species has deteriorated all that much.

As I inarticulately stated the thesis, when you take your best brains out of technology and put them into litigation, you have a society in decline. Don’t expect many symphonies. What can be done to reverse the process?

Our correspondent ends with “cheers.” Cheers indeed.

Your dog is ugly
.