Our Daily Dead

“Alex we’ll take Dan’s and Moderism for $1,000 please.” The Answer is…

By way of Market-Day Daily World News comes that Dan Saxon Palmer, an architect who designed Modernist tract homes for Southern California in the 1950s, has died in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 86.

Aye, tis Dan you can thank for those lovely homes you and your friends grew up in.

Palmer and his partner William Krisel began designing the “Modernist” homes, which featured post-and-beam construction with lots of glass and open floor plans that connected the living room, dining room and kitchen, in 1950. The buildings featured clean, simple lines on the inside and outside of the buildings.

“They took on one of the great problems of Modernism, which was to create good, decent contemporary housing that was affordable for the masses,” architectural historian Alan Hess said. “Palmer and Krisel did it, and on a large scale and keeping the inherent qualities of Modernism.”

Remember to take the architectural tour next time you find yourself wandering LA.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Dan Saxon Palmer, architect, tract homes, Southern California, died, Modernist

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

There are things to do in Denver when you aren’t dead. Check into the new Tribal Paths: Colorado’s American Indians, 1500 to Today exhibit for example.

Or if you find yourself in Philly, then head into the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic exhibit. The museum PR says “The Gross Clinic, acclaimed as the greatest American painting of the nineteenth century, has been an icon of Philadelphia since it was painted in 1875.”

Omaha? You’re in Omaha? Well, try the Omaha Old Market then. Pick us up some steaks too while your there will you?

What about spending time in Fargo? Try visiting the Trollwood Park at Broadway/37th Ave. N. Our birthday(s) are due soon so get us a bangle or two will you?

There you stood
on the edge of your feather,
Expecting to fly.
While I laughed,
I wondered whether
I could wave goodbye,
Knowin’ that you’d gone.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Denver, Tribal Paths, Colorado, Thomas Eakins, Gross Clinic, Philadelphia, Omaha, steaks, Fargo, Trollwood Park, Expecting to fly