Our Daily Dead

Arnold Edward Lamm: Died at age 98, after 95 good years. A good man who, with his wife Mary, gave the world a Governor willing to see reality and the courage to speak the truth; another son who defines the words “counselor” and “wise”; and a third with a mind of unlimited interest and intellect. Arnie died in his own bed, warm, safe, clean, and surrounded by family.

“It often happens that those of whom we speak least on earth are best known in heaven.” (Caussin)

from the LA Times

Phil Walden, whose Macon, Ga.-based Capricorn Records launched the ]Allman Brothers Band and became known as “the citadel of Southern rock” in the 1970s, has died. He was 66.

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from the NY Times
Leslie Norris, a noted poet born in Wales who most recently was a professor and emeritus poet in residence at Brigham Young University, died here on Thursday. He was 84.

The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, according to the Berg Mortuary in Provo.

Mr. Norris was known for poetry about the power of nature and the universal sensibilities it could represent.

Born George Leslie Norris on May 21, 1921, as a teenager in South Wales, Mr. Norris rode a bicycle from his home to a nearby town to hear a group of poets read their work in a room above a bookstore. Among them was a young Dylan Thomas. Decades later, Mr. Norris would read poetry at the unveiling of Thomas’s memorial stone at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Mr. Norris was the first writer to be named a member of both the Welsh Academy and the Royal Society of Literature in England.

He was first invited to speak at Brigham Young University in the 1970’s. That led to a weeklong seminar and later a yearlong guest professorship. He moved to Utah in 1983 and was named a Brigham Young humanities professor of creative writing and poet in residence, a title he continued to hold after his official retirement in 2003.

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from the NY Times
THE HAGUE, April 11 (Agence France-Presse) — Gerard Reve, considered one of the Dutch postwar literary greats, has died, his partner announced on Sunday. He was 82.

Mr. Reve, whose full name was Gerard Kornelis van het Reve, published his first novel, “De Avonden” (”The Evenings”), in 1947.

An account of the staunch, oppressive environment of the lower-middle-class Dutch in the postwar years, it is considered a classic of modern Dutch literature.

Mr. Reve’s much reprinted and controversial books “Op Weg Naar Het Einde” (”Approaching the End,” 1963), and “Nader tot U” (”Nearer to Thee,” 1966), in which he openly spoke of his homosexuality and his conversion to Roman Catholicism, established him as a public figure in the Netherlands.

“Nader tot U” sparked controversy because Mr. Reve wrote about having sex with God, who appeared to him in the guise of a donkey. He was prosecuted for blasphemy, but cleared in 1968.

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from the NY Times
Helen Cohn, whose suspicions that life could turn peculiar after she said yes to a man named Nudie were confirmed as she helped him in his life’s mission, putting lots and lots of rhinestones on country singers’ suits, died on April 7 in Valencia, Calif. She was 92.

Her granddaughter Jamie Nudie announced her death.

Her husband, Nudie Cohn, got his name when Ellis Island officials botched his real name, Nuta Kotlyarenko. He aspired to show business, beginning his trip to fame by shining shoes in front of the Palace Theater on Broadway.

His young wife, whom he had renamed Bobbie Nudie, possibly with her permission, was present at the creation of Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in North Hollywood, Calif., which opened in 1947. The couple soon found celebrity by selling wildly embroidered, rhinestone-studded duds to cowboy stars, country singers and, yes, Elvis Presley. (A $10,000 gold lamé number made the cover of Rolling Stone and netted a profit of $9,950.)

The shop produced preposterously gaudy clothes, now museum pieces, for Hank Williams Sr., Buck Owens, Clint Eastwood, John Lennon, Roy Rogers, and Dale Evans, a special chum of Mrs. Cohn.

Mrs. Cohn, who clung to her married name legally, helped her husband sew in the early years, juggled the nuts and bolts of the business for a half century, and, most important, usually managed to keep her exuberant tailoring genius pretty near the straight and narrow. The story of how she inspired the logo the company used on its labels for more than 20 years sounds too good to be true, but her granddaughter is sticking to it. One evening in the early 1940’s, she emerged from the boudoir wearing nothing but a cowboy hat, boots and a holster, and coyly asked her husband, “When are you going to make the rest of the outfit?”

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