Our Daily Dead

By way of the Courier News Online web site comes notice that Charlotte T. Reid, former pop singer and U.S. Representative, died at age 93. She once described herself has having five careers.

“She was a pop singer, a wife and mother, a U.S. representative, a member of the Federal Communications Commission and a businesswoman. Add to that a longtime Aurora icon, and key figure in the Fox Valley Republican Party.”

Reid, 93, died this past Wednesday, January 23, 2007. Born Charlotte Thompson in Kankakee, she lived most of her life in Aurora.

“The one thing about my mother is that she was as gracious and nice to everybody, whether it was the president of the United States or a janitor,” said Patricia Reid Lindner, one of Reid’s two daughters. Reid Lindner is a Republican state representative from Sugar Grove. “She always treated everybody the same.”

“That openness and ability to relate to people is what former Aurora Mayor Albert McCoy remembered about Reid on Thursday. McCoy was Aurora mayor from 1965 to 1977, and Reid represented Aurora and five northern Illinois counties for about five years of that time.”

“Reid also studied music and voice in Chicago, and was a featured vocalist with the NBC Radio show, Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, which originated in Chicago. She appeared under the professional name of Annette King. She also sang on other NBC radio shows, like Club Matinee (1937-1946) and Sunday Dinner at Aunt Fannie’s. “

“Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin’ trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.”
~~ by Steve Goodman,
with perhaps the best known version by Woody’s boy Arlo Guthrie

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Charlotte T. Reid, pop singer, died, Kankakee, Steve Goodman, Arlo Guthrie

From the Sydney Morning Herald we find that Dora McDonald, faithful secretary for the Reverend Martin Luther King, has died.

“WHEN Dora McDonald became the Reverend Martin Luther King’s personal secretary in 1960, she was entrusted with his secrets and counted on to look after his family if something happened to him.

“It was McDonald who often took late-night calls from King when he couldn’t sleep, who typed his manuscripts and speeches, and who told Coretta Scott King that her husband had been assassinated.”

McDonald said that a secretary was a keeper of secrets. “[King] could talk to me about anything, possibly things he wouldn’t even burden Coretta with,” she said. “When he was hurting, I was hurting.”

When McDonald was approached by King to work for him in 1960, she was working as a secretary at a financial company.

She became a loyal friend to King. In turn, he confided in her. When President John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963 McDonald received a call from a reporter seeking a statement from King. When she called King, she said, his voice was calm and sad. “Dora,” King said, “that is how I am going to die, too. There is no way to be protected when they are out to get you. Now, with all the Secret Service, the FBI and the Dallas police around to protect the president, they still got him.”

There were good times, too. In 1964 when McDonald told King he would have to wear a morning suit to receive his Nobel Prize, he asked what such a suit was. Told it was like the suits the Kennedys wore at the president’s funeral, he said: “I will not wear a suit with those funny-looking striped pants.” He did.

“’The wheel goes around because the center is at rest,’ says an old Quaker maxim. Dora was our center, which helped the wheel go around.”—Andrew Young

Dora has a new book out titled Secretary To A King. The Hill Street Press web site has this to say about the book:

McDonald best explains this unique, almost familial aspect of her memoir when she writes that “my book is different from other memoirs of King because is encompasses the everyday as well as the epic moments—and it is perhaps in the everyday tones that King’s nature is best revealed and the historical record of his position on some key matters and other people will be corrected.” Thus, the book will have a broad interest, both to a general readership (including young readers) and to scholars. Includes over 30 photographs, many never before published.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Dora McDonald, faithful secretary, Reverend Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, assassinated, Andrew Young

Our buddies at the LA Times tell us that Daniel N. Finegood, the “prankster” known for creative alterations of Hollywood sign has died at age 52.

“The first time Danny Finegood played a word game with the Hollywood sign, he hung curtains to make it read Hollyweed. That was Jan. 1, 1976 — the day the state’s relaxed marijuana law took effect.

“The prankster and friends obscured consonants to coin Holywood for Easter later that year and Ollywood to protest the hero worship of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987.

“In his final round of wordplay, Finegood made a political statement against the Persian Gulf War by draping plastic sheeting over the 50-foot-high letters to form Oil War in 1990.

“Finegood, who viewed his hillside handiwork as environmental sculpture, died of multiple myeloma Monday at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, said his wife, Bonnie. He was 52.”

If you are interested in ordering a poster of the “Hollyweed” sign, please visit Daniel and family’s Hollyweed.net web site.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Daniel N. Finegood, Hollywood, marijuana, Oliver North, Oil War, environmental sculpture, multiple myeloma

By way of ESPN … Jack Lang, a Hall of Fame baseball writer who for two decades had the pleasant assignment of telling players they’d been elected to Cooperstown, died Thursday. He was 85.

“A fixture on the New York scene who covered Jackie Robinson’s major-league debut, Lang was honored by the Hall in 1986 with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award ‘for meritorious contributions to baseball writing.’ At his speech in Cooperstown in 1987, he poked fun at his talent.”

“I’m sure there are an awful lot of English teachers … in my early years that must be whirling in their graves at the thought that I won an award for writing,” he said.

Many elite players knew Lang for another reason.

“As Billy Williams said, ‘You’re the good-news man,’” Lang said in his speech.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Hall of Fame, Cooperstown

By way of the Missoulian (and hordes of others)…Eleanor McGovern, whose husband George McGovern served as a U.S. senator from South Dakota and ran for president, died Thursday morning at the family’s home in Mitchell, according to a Mitchell funeral home. She was 85.

George McGovern, a former congressman and senator, was a leading opponent of the war in Vietnam. He was the Democratic nominee for president in 1972, losing to Richard Nixon.

In a 2005 interview with the Argus Leader newspaper in Sioux Falls, S.D., she explained her approach to family life and politics.

“I was determined to help with George’s career, not only by taking responsibility for the family, but by contributing ideas,” she said. “In fact, I never considered it ‘George’s’ career — it was ours.”

From the McGovern Center web site:

Eleanor came to the forefront of national awareness during Senator McGovern’s 1972 Presidential campaign. George has described her as his most helpful critic and most trusted adviser. And as one of his key strategists, she shared in both the victories and the defeats associated with the fight for causes in which she believed deeply. As the wife of a presidential nominee, Eleanor broke new ground by campaigning on her own across the country.

An accomplished speaker, she stirred crowds from coast to coast and appeared frequently as a guest on network television and radio discussions dealing with national and international issues. Her high profile permanently transformed public perception of the role and value of political spouses.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Eleanor McGovern, George McGovern, president, Richard Nixon, McGovern Center

From the Houston Chronicle comes this chronicle about writer Daniel Stern, whose “…witty fiction plumbed the vagaries of the human heart, died Wednesday in Houston after a short illness.” He was 78. Since 1992 Stern had taught in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where he was a Cullen Distinguished Professor of English.

In an era when literary writers typically emerged from academia, Stern enjoyed a varied career. Born into a poor Jewish family in 1928, he grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side. At the age of 10 or 11 he discovered the cello and seemed headed for a life of music. At 17 he skipped his high school graduation to go on the road behind jazzman Charlie Parker.

“He spent a year playing with the Indianapolis Symphony, during which time he began writing stories. Although he studied at various institutions, including Columbia University and the Juilliard School, he never earned a college degree.”

“In 1953 he published The Girl With the Glass Heart, the first of his nine novels. His most important novels include Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die? (1963), an early contribution to literature of the Holocaust, and After the War (1965), which focuses on postwar experimentation by young people trying to make up for lost time.”

“The late 1980s marked a watershed in Stern’s writing. He published Twice Told Tales, stories organized in a fresh, imaginative way. Stern took famous works like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener or Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and wove their themes into a new context. ‘What got my pulses racing,” he wrote, “was this idea: that a text by a writer of the past whom I loved, even a nonfiction work, could be basic to fiction; as basic as a love affair, a trauma, a house, a mother, a landscape, a lover, a job or a sexual passion.’”

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Daniel Stern, died