From cdw at slick.org Wed Jul 1 15:50:41 2009 From: cdw at slick.org (Deathwatch Central) Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 15:50:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Deathwatch] Karl Malden, actor, 97 Message-ID: <20090701225041.79C894F895@slick.org> Oscar, Emmy-Winning Actor Karl Malden Dies at 97 By Adam Bernstein Wednesday, July 1, 2009 Karl Malden, 97, an Academy Award-winning actor who excelled in plainspoken, working-class roles and was memorable as the shy suitor in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and as a brave priest in "On the Waterfront," died July 1 at his home in Los Angeles. No cause of death was reported. With his bulbous nose and thinning hair, Mr. Malden was one of the most recognizable sights in movies and on television for five decades. In the 1970s, he became known to millions of viewers as a veteran police detective who partners with a young inspector, played by Michael Douglas, in the ABC drama series "The Streets of San Francisco." The show led to Mr. Malden's 21-year role as the trench coat-wearing pitchman for American Express who urged customers not to leave home without traveler's checks. He joked that this became his best-known part, although he appeared in more than 70 feature films and television movies and achieved a reputation as one of Hollywood's most versatile actors. Mr. Malden was a steelworker before winning important stage roles on Broadway. He made his greatest mark in Hollywood in the early 1950s as part of a group of New York theater stars -- headed by actor Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan -- who were trying to bring an unpredictable, realistic style of acting to audiences. "I hadn't met anyone that non-actorish before, non-theater-like," Kazan once said of Mr. Malden. "The minute I saw him, I knew he came from something. It turned out to be the steel mills, and it was a thing that was very important for a director, because you feel, 'Here's a person who can play difficult parts, rough parts, physical parts, who doesn't get frightened easily, who's all there when I need him.' " Kazan said Mr. Malden was a great player to have opposite Brando because Mr. Malden could tell Brando to "go to hell" without being intimidated. Kazan directed Mr. Malden and Brando in Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire" on Broadway in 1947 and in the 1951 film version. Mr. Malden won an Oscar for his supporting role as Mitch, who romances an emotionally fragile Southern belle, the sister-in-law of Brando's character, the brutish Stanley Kowalski. Jessica Tandy played the woman onstage, and Vivien Leigh was in the film version. Mr. Malden wrote in a memoir that casting Leigh in the film made it possible for Kazan to use the lesser-known actors from the stage play. "If Jessica had played it, I wouldn't have been in the movie, and neither would Kim Hunter [as Brando's stage wife]. Because Jessica was no star and neither was Brando. But Vivien, who after 'Gone With the Wind' was the biggest thing you ever saw -- she could carry us all." Again working under Kazan, Mr. Malden played the dockside priest who rallies a punched-out prizefighter (Brando) to stand against a corrupt union in "On the Waterfront" (1954). Mr. Malden received another Oscar nomination for his performance. He also brought actress Eva Marie Saint, whom he had known at an acting workshop in New York, to Kazan's attention for what would be her movie debut and Oscar-winning role as Brando's love interest in "On the Waterfront." Perhaps none of Mr. Malden's films received as much publicity as "Baby Doll" (1956), based on two short plays by Tennessee Williams. The film, again with Kazan directing, gave Mr. Malden a rare chance for a leading role. He played a devious Southern cotton gin operator desperate to consummate his marriage to a teenage bride (Carroll Baker). Eli Wallach plays his young rival in business and love, who ultimately cuckolds Mr. Malden's character. The film's plot and provocative advertising -- Baker was shown sucking her thumb and sleeping in a crib -- provoked outrage among Catholic groups. Cardinal Francis J. Spellman said ticket buyers were courting sin. Mr. Malden pointed out that because the marriage between "Baby Doll" and her husband was not consummated "it was the lack of sex that got the picture banned by the Catholic Church." Mr. Malden directed one film, "Time Limit" (1957), about a Korean War court-martial and starring his friend Richard Widmark. The movie received positive reviews, but Mr. Malden said he disliked the office politics required of a director and happily returned to a busy schedule of character roles, including the 1962 musical "Gypsy" and the 1964 John Ford western "Cheyenne Autumn." Mladen George Sekulovich, the son of Serbian immigrant laborers, was born March 22, 1912, in Chicago and raised in Gary, Ind. He changed his name in the late 1930s at Kazan's urging, but Mr. Malden said he felt so guilty that he tried to insert the name Sekulovich wherever possible on film, whether on an office nameplate or shouted out to a fellow TV detective in "The Streets of San Francisco." Mr. Malden excelled in drama and athletics in high school. He twice broke his nose playing basketball, and he was resigned to never playing a romantic leading man. "God knows I didn't have a pretty face to help me get parts, so in order to stay in this profession, I realized early on that I'd better know my business," he wrote in a 1997 memoir, "When Do I Start?" "I strived to be number one in the number two parts I was destined to get." He saved up $300 quickly by accepting the most dangerous jobs at steel mills and then talked his way into a scholarship at Chicago's Goodman Theatre Dramatic School in 1934. He came to New York in 1937 and won a tryout with the Group Theater, then casting Clifford Odets's drama "Golden Boy." It was through the show, in which he played a boxing manager, that Mr. Malden met Kazan. Mr. Malden spent the next decade working steadily onstage. During World War II, he was assigned by the Army to entertain troops in the Moss Hart show "Winged Victory." He won wide acclaim after the war in Kazan's 1947 staging of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," playing a man seeking revenge against a war profiteer. Then came "Streetcar," which propelled him to the front rank of character actors and led to his long Hollywood career. In Hollywood, Mr. Malden was cast as policemen in many of his early films, including Kazan's "Boomerang!" (1947) and Alfred Hitchcock's "I Confess" (1953). He was particularly memorable as the cruel father of baseball player Jim Piersall (played by Anthony Perkins) in "Fear Strikes Out" (1957); the fire-and-brimstone minister in Disney's "Pollyanna" (1960); a sheriff who whips outlaw Brando in "One-Eyed Jacks" (1961); and an inflexible warden in "The Birdman of Alcatraz" (1962), with Burt Lancaster as his famous prisoner. In "Patton" (1970), Mr. Malden played Gen. Omar Bradley to George C. Scott's glory-seeking Gen. George S. Patton Jr. Mr. Malden said he wanted to "really let go" at Scott in one scene where Patton overstepped his authority, but he was told by Bradley, the film's technical adviser, to play the scene calmly. Why would you react calmly, Mr. Malden asked Bradley. "Because I've got one more star on my shoulder than he has," Bradley said. One of Mr. Malden's favorite parts was in "Hotel," a 1967 film based on an Arthur Hailey novel. In playing a hotel thief named Keycase, Mr. Malden said he relished the challenge of making "something with no dialogue come to life." He was nominated four times for an Emmy in "The Streets of San Francisco," and he won for outstanding supporting actor in a limited series or a special for "Fatal Vision" (1984), in which he played the father-in-law of a murderer. He continued to take occasional film and television parts, among them Barbra Streisand's father in "Nuts" (1987) and a priest in an episode of "The West Wing." >From 1989 to 1992, he was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and helped raise millions of dollars to build a library and film research center. In 2004, he received a Screen Actors Guild award for a lifetime of achievement. Survivors include his wife of 70 years, former actress Mona Graham; two daughters, Mila and Carla; three granddaughters; and four great-grandchildren. Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary From cdw at slick.org Wed Jul 1 15:53:21 2009 From: cdw at slick.org (Deathwatch Central) Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 15:53:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Deathwatch] Mollie Sugden, actress, 86 Message-ID: <20090701225321.5F07A4F896@slick.org> Actress Mollie Sugden has died at the age of 86, her agent has said. The TV star, best known for playing Mrs Slocombe in long-running BBC sitcom Are You Being Served?, died at the Royal Surrey Hospital after a long illness. The Yorkshire-born actress's twin sons, Robin and Simon Moore, were at her bedside, agent Joan Reddin said. David Croft, one of the writers of Are You Being Served?, remembered her as a "marvellous character" who would never turn down chances to make people laugh. "She would never refuse any sort of comedy situation no matter how undignified it was she would always go along with it. She was marvellously funny," he said. 'Lovely person' Actor Frank Thornton, who played Captain Peacock in the sitcom, told the BBC she was part of a very happy team. "We all enjoyed each other's company, which, if you're doing comedy, is rather necessary," he said. "You can't play comedy with people you dislike. Mollie, of course, was an excellent comedian." Mollie Sugden had a long and successful acting career Ms Reddin, who began representing Sugden in the 1960s, said the actress had become a "very close friend". "She had had a long illness and various problems but it was very quick in the end. Her twin boys were with her and she faded away. "She was a lovely, lovely person and I never had any trouble with her. She was a great professional." Sugden, who lived in Surrey, was married to fellow actor William Moore. But she never fully recovered from his death nine years ago, Ms Reddin said. "They were very much in love. She started to go down when he died." Born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, in 1922, Sugden attended the local grammar school before training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She went on to serve a long apprenticeship in repertory theatre before television gave her a taste of fame - and it was while treading the boards in 1956 that she met her husband. Sugden starred alongside Wendy Richard in Are You Being Served? They married two years later, when she was 35 and he was 39. Their twin sons were born six years later. Sugden found early TV success with comedy series Hugh and I in 1962 and in Coronation Street as the gossiping Nellie Harvey. But it was The Liver Birds in the late 1960s and early 1970s that enabled her to make her first real impact, as Nerys Hughes' snobbish mother Mrs Hutchinson. And then in 1972 came Are You Being Served? and the role she became best known for - the blue-rinsed Betty Slocombe, with her affectation of middle-class gentility and her outrageous use of the double-entendre. Sugden went on to have her own slot on consumer programme That's Life and even found new fame in the US where re-runs of Are You Being Served? transformed both Sugden and co-star John Inman into cult figures in the early 1990s. Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary From cdw at slick.org Sun Jul 5 09:19:12 2009 From: cdw at slick.org (Deathwatch Central) Date: Sun, 5 Jul 2009 09:19:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Deathwatch] Allen Klein, record label owner, 77 Message-ID: <20090705161912.A29BE4F89B@slick.org> Former Beatles, Stones manager Allen Klein dies By Dean Goodman Dean Goodman Sun Jul 5 LOS ANGELES (Reuters) ? Infamous record label owner Allen Klein, who played a key role in the demise of the Beatles and also nabbed control of some of the Rolling Stones' best-known songs, died in New York on Saturday after a battle with Alzheimer's disease, a spokesman said. He was 77. During a career spanning more than 50 years, the New Jersey-born accountant enjoyed a reputation as a savvy gangster-like figure. His ruthless business practices were reviled by many, but he also earned grudging respect for bullying labels into giving rich deals to his clients. "Don't talk to me about ethics," he told Playboy magazine in 1971. "Every man makes his own. It's like a war. You choose your side early and from then on, you're being shot at. The man you beat is likely to call you unethical. So what?" It did not hurt his reputation when he was sentenced to two months in prison in 1979 for tax evasion. He once said John Lennon hired him to protect his interest in the Beatles because he and wife Yoko Ono wanted "a real shark -- someone to keep the other sharks away." His company, ABKCO Music & Records, is one of the biggest independent labels in an industry controlled by multinational corporations. The spokesman said it would remain family-controlled. Two of Klein's three adult children work at the company, including son Jody who runs ABKCO. (The acronym stands for Allen and Betty Klein Co., Betty being his wife.) Its assets include recordings by the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Herman's Hermits, Bobby Womack, the Kinks, Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and many others. The publishing arm boasts more than 2,000 copyrights including compositions by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Cooke, Womack, Ray Davies of the Kinks and Pete Townshend of the Who. SAM COOKE TO BEATLES Klein broke into the music business by auditing record labels on behalf of clients including Bobby Darin and Connie Francis. When he found they were owed royalties, he took half of the difference as a fee. His first big management client was Sam Cooke, for whom he negotiated a lucrative recording deal in 1963 that gave the soul star unprecedented control over his own catalog. Klein, who was already representing "British Invasion" artists such as the Animals, Dave Clark Five and Herman's Hermits, set his sights on the Rolling Stones, who were laboring under an onerous deal. He renegotiated their pact in 1965, and ended up managing the group for about five years -- taking a 20 percent fee. The Stones eventually tired of Klein. But the only way to break free of him was to give up the rights to their master recordings and rights to such timeless tunes as "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash." "In some ways Allen Klein was very much ahead of his time," Jagger said in the 1989 Stones documentary "25x5." "We lasted about three or four years with him, really, though the ramifications of that still continue to this day." Richards was more philosophical, describing their experience with Klein as "the price of an education." By then, Klein was focused on the ultimate prize, the Beatles. He offered his help to Lennon in early 1969, when the Fab Four's idealistic Apple Corps. label was fast draining the fractured group's coffers. George Harrison and Ringo Starr also warmed to his pitch, but Paul McCartney was fiercely opposed. He preferred the expertise of his father-in-law, high-powered New York attorney Lee Eastman. Amid a series of complex maneuverings that also have consequences to this day, Klein unsuccessfully tried to secure control of the Beatles' copyrights on behalf of the group. Michael Jackson ended up with the rights 16 years later. Klein did score a rich recording deal for the Beatles, but relations within the group were past frayed, and it dissolved in 1970. That year, Harrison "honored" Klein in a rough version of his song "Beware of Darkness" with the line "beware of ABKCO." "It might have ended up being prophetic. But at the time it was just a little joke," Harrison told Reuters in 2000. Indeed, Harrison and Klein reunited in 1971 to put on the all-star Concert for Bangladesh shows at Madison Square Garden in New York. It took a decade for the funds to reach the refugees because of complex tax problems. In addition to his children and wife, Klein is survived by his longtime girlfriend Iris Keitel, an ABKCO executive. His funeral will take place in New York on Tuesday. (Reporting by Dean Goodman; editing by Bill Trott and Todd Eastham) Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary From cdw at slick.org Mon Jul 6 11:20:36 2009 From: cdw at slick.org (Deathwatch Central) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 11:20:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Deathwatch] Robert McNamara, Former Defense Secretary, 93 Message-ID: <20090706182036.38B464F895@slick.org> McNamara dies, career haunted by Vietnam war By Charles Aldinger Mon Jul 6 WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara died on Monday aged 93. He will be remembered most as the leading architect of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. "His age just caught up with him," his wife Diana told Reuters. "He was not ill. He died peacefully in his sleep." McNamara also forged brilliant careers in industry and international finance, but his painful legacy remains Vietnam. More than anyone else except possibly President Lyndon Johnson, McNamara became to anti-war critics the symbol of a failed policy that left more than 58,000 U.S. troops dead and the nation bogged down in a seemingly endless disaster in Southeast Asia. Pundits came to call the conflict "McNamara's War." With his slicked-back hair and rimless glasses, he became a familiar face to the nation as one of "the best and the brightest" assembled by President John Kennedy to form his policy-making brain trust. But he left the Cabinet in 1968 under pressure from Johnson. By then disillusioned with the war, McNamara had criticized U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. He spent the rest of his life trying to explain the U.S. role in Vietnam and apologizing for his mistakes, becoming the subject of an Academy Award winning documentary, "The Fog of War." In the film, he discussed the difficult decision-making process during the Vietnam conflict as well as his Pentagon role in the Cuban missile crisis. He first came to prominence as one of the "Whiz Kids" who revitalized Ford Motor Co. after World War Two and ended his public career as president of the World Bank. To those jobs, as well as defense secretary, the dynamic McNamara brought a driving ambition, a phenomenal memory for statistics and a quick, efficient grasp of facts. McNamara was named defense secretary by Kennedy in 1961 and held the post longer than anyone before or since. He put his corporate organizational skills to use in trying to modernize the Pentagon during the Cold War. BLOCKING COMMUNISM But more and more, Vietnam became his focus. He made several fact-finding visits there in the early days of the U.S. military buildup, which Washington saw as the only way to block a communist takeover of Southeast Asia. Theodore White, in his book "The Making of the President 1968," said McNamara argued behind the scenes that the United States must not slip quietly into the war -- that the decision must be brought before Congress and the issue debated openly. But Kennedy authorized a small-scale increase in troop strength and, after his assassination in 1963, Johnson bowed to pressure from his generals and began a major buildup that finally had more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. McNamara, convinced the war could be ended by Christmas 1965, threw his energies into effective execution of Johnson's policies but miscalculated resistance to U.S. intervention both in Vietnam and at home. In late 1967 he criticized the decision to bomb North Vietnam in retaliation for strikes on U.S. bases in the south. Johnson decided to remove him the following year, offering him the presidency of the World Bank. In 1971, the classified and highly sensitive Pentagon Papers, an official record of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, were leaked to The New York Times. In "McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon," Henry Trewhitt wrote that McNamara ordered the study to provide material that might help future generations avoid the mistakes made in Vietnam by intelligent, well-intentioned men like himself. "When its contents broke in the press, however, his pleasure at seeing the record clarified was badly diminished by his shock that the two administrations (Kennedy and Johnson) had been deceitful about escalating the war," Trewhitt wrote. McNamara was quoted as saying: "My God, does anyone think I would have commissioned this if reasonable men could conclude that it shows me to be a liar?" FIGHTING POVERTY At the World Bank, McNamara conducted a crusade against poverty and directed an expansion of World Bank influence. When he took over the independent United Nations affiliate in 1968, the bank was making only $1 billion in annual loan commitments to Third World nations. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1981, his last day in office, it lent $11.5 billion. McNamara shifted the emphasis of the bank's lending from heavy industry to basics like farming and population control. Robert Strange McNamara was born in San Francisco on June 9, 1916, to Robert James McNamara, a wholesale shoe salesman, and the former Clara Nell Strange, both of British ancestry. A brilliant student, he graduated from the University of California in 1937 and earned a masters degree from Harvard Business School, where he joined the faculty in 1940. While employed at the Pentagon in 1946, he and nine colleagues sent a prospectus to 20 firms, offering themselves as a "package deal" to any company needing managers. Ford, then in financial trouble, accepted the 10, all statistics experts nicknamed "the Whiz Kids." McNamara rose to the presidency of Ford by 1960. On taking early retirement from the World Bank in 1981, McNamara kept an office in Washington where he joined dozens of corporate boards, including the Washington Post. He was also a member of the Trilateral Commission which promoted cooperation between Europe, Japan and the United States. McNamara married Margaret Craig, a fellow student at the University of California, who died of cancer just before he left the World Bank. They had a son and a daughter. And in 2004, at age 88, he married his Italian-born sweetheart, Diana Masieri Byfield in Assisi, Italy. Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary From cdw at slick.org Fri Jul 17 23:24:38 2009 From: cdw at slick.org (Deathwatch Central) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:24:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Deathwatch] Walter Cronkite, former CBS news anchor, 92 Message-ID: <20090718062438.7FD354F8C1@slick.org> Former CBS anchor 'Uncle Walter' Cronkite dead at 92 http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/17/walter.cronkite.dead/index.html (CNN) -- Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman known as "Uncle Walter" for his easygoing, measured delivery and "the most trusted man in America" for his rectitude and gravitas, died Friday night in his New York home, CBS reported. Cronkite was 92. "Walter was always more than just an anchor. He was someone we could trust to guide us through the most important issues of the day; a voice of certainty in an uncertain world," President Obama said in a statement Friday. "He was family. He invited us to believe in him, and he never let us down. This country has lost an icon and a dear friend, and he will be truly missed." His career spanned much of the 20th century, as well as the first decade of the 21st. The native of St. Joseph, Missouri, broke in as a newspaper journalist while in college, switched over to radio announcing in 1935, joined the United Press wire service by the end of the decade and jumped to CBS and its nascent television news division in 1950. He also made his mark as an Internet contributor in his later years with a handful of columns for the Huffington Post. "He was the consummate television newsman," Don Hewitt, the onetime executive producer of the "CBS Evening News," told CNN. "He had all the credentials to be a writer, an editor, a broadcaster. There was only one Walter Cronkite, and there may never be another one." Cronkite covered World War II's Battle of the Bulge, the Nuremberg trials, several presidential elections, moon landings, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon's administration. At times he even made news: A 1977 question to then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat about Sadat's intent to go to Israel -- at the time considered a nonstarter because of the lack of a treaty between the two countries -- received a surprising "yes" from the Egyptian leader. Soon after, Sadat traveled to Jerusalem, a trip that eventually led to the Camp David Accords, which included a peace deal between Israel and Egypt. At his height of influence as CBS anchorman, Cronkite's judgment was believed so important it could affect even presidents. In early 1968, after the Tet Offensive, Cronkite traveled to Vietnam and gave a critical editorial calling the Vietnam War "mired in stalemate." Noting Cronkite's commentary, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." Johnson announced he would not seek re-election less than two months later. Cronkite's own name was often floated as a presidential possibility -- wishful thinking on the part of some pundits, because Cronkite had little desire to enter politics once he'd become a successful anchorman. He became, however, an outspoken critic of what he saw as flaws in government and broadcast journalism. He disliked the current war in Iraq, telling Esquire magazine, "Indeed, we are in another Vietnam. Almost play by play. It's a terrible mistake that we're in Iraq, and it's a terrible mistake to insist on staying there." And he disliked the corporatization of news. "The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed," he wrote in his 1996 memoir, "A Reporter's Life." In a 2005 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, he observed, "The misfortune with broadcasting today is that all -- even including your network, which is dedicated to the news -- do not take enough time to give us all of the facts and the background." "Walter was truly the father of television news. The trust that viewers placed in him was based on the recognition of his fairness, honesty and strict objectivity," said "60 Minutes" correspondent Morley Safer in a statement. "And of course, his long experience as a shoe-leather reporter covering everything from local politics to World War II and its aftermath in the Soviet Union." Mike Wallace, "60 Minutes" correspondent emeritus, said simply: "We were proud to work with him -- for him -- we loved him." Premiere journalist of 20th century is born Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 4, 1916. His father was a dentist, and Cronkite, who admired the man greatly, grew his famous mustache in emulation of his father. The family moved to Kansas City soon after, and when he was 10, moved again to Houston, Texas. He remembered being attached to news at an early age, from delivering newspapers to starting a high school publication. Cronkite attended the University of Texas in Austin, but dropped out of college in 1935 after gaining a full-time job as a newspaper reporter. He moved to Kansas City for a radio job at KCMO, where he was famed for his broadcasts of football game recreations. He would use wire reports about football games to broadcast what sounded like live, play-by-play commentary on the match. It was in Kansas City that he also met his future wife, Betsy Maxwell, in the summer of 1936. The two married in 1940 and enjoyed almost 65 years of marriage. Betsy Cronkite died in 2005. "She was one of the most beautiful people I ever saw in my life," he said in a PBS special. "I saw her for the first time ... coming down the hall ... and I fell in love before I ever knew her name, or what she did, or if I whether I would ever see her again in life." Cronkite had a short stint with the United Press in 1937 -- "the KCMO experience," he wrote in "A Reporter's Life," "had cooled any thought I had that radio might be an interesting medium in which to practice journalism" -- but nevertheless, he joined an Oklahoma City station within a year to broadcast University of Oklahoma football games. After a detour with Braniff Airlines, he went back to the UP and the newspaper reporting he loved. In 1942, after the United States' entry into World War II, he became a war correspondent, part of an elite corps of correspondents dubbed "the Writing 69th." As part of that unit, he accompanied a bomber on D-Day (the mission was thwarted by cloud cover) and flew on a number of dangerous sorties. After the war, he became the chief UP correspondent at the Nuremberg Trials for war crimes. He was widely admired; CBS tried to lure him into its Edward R. Murrow-led fold during the war, but Cronkite preferred being a newspaperman. Cronkite opened UP's Moscow, Russia, bureau after the war, but when the wire service tightened up on his salary in 1948, he decided to go back to radio at the urging of a friend who owned a radio station. He was the Washington correspondent for a radio group. Two years later, CBS came calling again, and this time Cronkite took the network up on its offer. Into television news But now the medium was television. Cronkite became the anchor of WTOP-TV, armed with little more than wire reports and his own skills, he recalled in his memoir. Two years later, he broke into the national consciousness with his work at the 1952 political conventions, serving as CBS' "anchorman" -- a word coined to describe Cronkite's role as point person for the network's correspondents. Though there's some dispute as to who coined the word, Cronkite's influence was noted: in Sweden at the time, he recalled, anchormen were called "cronkiters." But CBS News had a deep bench. The division was led by Murrow throughout the 1950s, and a number of other famous names -- Eric Sevareid, Douglas Edwards, Howard K. Smith -- were part of the team. Cronkite distinguished himself as CBS' lead space reporter as the United States and Soviet Union launched the space race. He never lost his taste for the beat, working with CNN on shuttle launches as recently as John Glenn's return mission in 1998. In 1962, Cronkite took over as anchor of CBS' "Evening News" from Edwards. Television news was still in its infancy; the broadcast Cronkite delivered was 15 minutes long, dependent on sometimes day-old film, and in black and white. But with the Cold War, civil rights movement and the increasing rapidity of communications, the news business was changing. On September 2, 1963 -- Labor Day -- Cronkite's broadcast became a half-hour; the centerpiece was an extended interview with President John F. Kennedy. A little less than three months later, Kennedy was assassinated. Cronkite's coverage of that event, including a rare display of emotion on camera -- as he broadcast the news of Kennedy's death from the CBS newsroom -- helped cement his status. However, for the first half of the 1960s, Cronkite's broadcast was No. 2 to NBC's "Huntley-Brinkley Report," hosted by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. It wasn't until later in the decade that Cronkite and CBS overtook the NBC team for the No. 1 position, a mark it would hold for the rest of Cronkite's 19-year tenure. "Uncle Walter" increasingly became the most-admired figure in the news media. His sign-off, "And that's the way it is," became a national catch-phrase. His coverage of moon missions was legendary, with his ability to anchor, unperturbed, for hour upon hour, earning him the affectionate nickname "Old Iron Pants." Another rare example of Cronkite showing emotion on air was the joy he expressed at Apollo 11's 1969 moon landing: "Man on the moon!" he exulted, rubbing his hands in delight. 'Most trusted man in America' In 1972, a poll named him "the most trusted man in America." The anchorman had been one of the few TV journalists to note the import of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's reporting on Watergate and helped prompt CBS into following the story aggressively. The network broadcast two extended segments on the affair just before the 1972 election. Cronkite was helped immensely by CBS' then White House correspondent, Dan Rather, who became one of Nixon's least favorite reporters with his determined questioning at White House press conferences. Rather's and Cronkite's lives would cross again several years later. By the end of the 1970s, television news had become news itself, with Barbara Walters' million-dollar ABC contract in 1976 making headlines. The race to succeed Cronkite, who was nearing 65 and announced his forthcoming retirement in 1980, became a national focus. In the end, Rather won the battle to succeed Cronkite over Roger Mudd, who was Cronkite's regular fill-in. Cronkite gave his last "Evening News" broadcast on March 6, 1981. His successor had a number of up-and-down years, which Cronkite watched from a distance. The two anchors were not "especially chummy," Cronkite once said. In his later years, Cronkite -- who became a CBS board member -- distinguished himself with various news specials, but was disappointed he wasn't allowed to take a greater role at CBS. "I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since," he once said. He had planned to do documentaries for the network, as well as continue his summer science series "Walter Cronkite's Universe," but the series was canceled in 1982, and CBS was devoting fewer resources to documentaries. He also stayed physically active, an energetic tennis player and sailor. Cronkite received dozens of awards during his life, including a number of Emmys and Peabodys. In 1981, he was awarded the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by Jimmy Carter. He also played himself in movies and on TV, including memorable episodes of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Murphy Brown." But he never lost his zest for reporting, nor his opinions about the news media. His daughter, Kathy, played a Patty Hearst-like character in the scabrous 1976 movie "Network," a film Cronkite said "was all comedy" to him, though he shared beliefs in its message. He disparaged what he called "fluff" and constantly exhorted news departments to focus on hard news -- without opinion. "Our job is only to hold up the mirror -- to tell and show the public what has happened," he once said. Cronkite is survived by his three children, Nancy, Kathy and Walter III "Chip"; and four grandchildren. Many thanks to TheLenGuy for posting this obituary From cdw at slick.org Mon Jul 20 10:51:07 2009 From: cdw at slick.org (Deathwatch Central) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:51:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Deathwatch] Frank McCourt, author, 78 Message-ID: <20090720175107.5DEF24F897@slick.org> Thanks to a long-time reader for prodding me to send this out! Frank McCourt dies at 78; late-blooming author of 'Angela's Ashes' The Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his grim childhood in an Irish slum was written after he retired as a New York City schoolteacher. By Dennis McLellan July 20, 2009 Frank McCourt, the retired New York City schoolteacher who launched his late-in-life literary career by tapping memories of his grim, poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir "Angela's Ashes," died Sunday of cancer. He was 78. FOR THE RECORD: A complete list of McCourt's surviving family members was not immediately available. He is survived by his third wife, Ellen; his daughter, Maggie; his brothers, Malachy, Alphie and Michael; and three grandchildren. McCourt, who was recently treated for melanoma and then became gravely ill with meningitis, died at a hospice in New York City, his brother Malachy told the Associated Press. "I'm a late bloomer," a 66-year-old McCourt told the New York Times shortly after publication of "Angela's Ashes" in 1996. McCourt, the Brooklyn-born son of Irish immigrants who returned to Ireland with the family during the Depression when he was 4 years old, had spent three decades teaching English and creative writing in the New York public school system. At elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where he taught for many years, he had always advised his creative writing students to write about their own lives and families. But McCourt didn't write his award-winning personal tale of growing up in grinding poverty in a slum in Limerick, Ireland -- his self-described "epic of woe" that concluded when he immigrated to the United States at 19 -- until several years after he retired as a teacher in 1987. Described in Newsweek as "the publishing industry's Cinderella story of the decade," "Angela's Ashes" rose to No. 1 on bestseller lists, was translated into more than 20 languages and sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. It also won the Pulitzer for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was turned into a movie in 1999. In the process, "Angela's Ashes" propelled its author from obscurity to fame and fortune. The white-haired publishing sensation made the rounds of the talk shows, was the subject of a "60 Minutes" profile and was in constant demand as a speaker because, as Newsweek pointed out in 1999, "he's witty, articulate and he's got the perfect Irish brogue: lyrical but penetrable." "At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids," McCourt told the Hartford Courant in 2003. "I just wrote the book and was amazed and astounded that it became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. It still hasn't sunk in." When he returned to the U.S. in 1949, he told Newsweek, "all I had was this story. It took me two years and all my life to write it." The oldest of seven children, McCourt was born Aug. 19, 1930. His parents were young Irish immigrants. His heavy-drinking laborer father was unable to find work in the Depression, and the couple moved back to Ireland, where conditions were much worse. The family lived in Limerick -- in "one of the juiciest slums this side of Bombay," McCourt wrote -- where their small, dank home was next to a smelly, rat-infested privy shared by the other families on the block. McCourt's infant sister had died of unknown causes while they were still in New York, and about a year after the family arrived in Ireland, McCourt's young twin brothers died of pneumonia six months apart. At 10, McCourt himself was hospitalized for typhus. Whenever McCourt's father did manage to briefly land a job, he spent his pay drinking in pubs. During World War II, he left to try to find work in a munitions factory in England but rarely sent his pay home. McCourt's long-suffering mother -- the Angela of the book's title -- sought help from the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and sometimes was forced to beg. McCourt, who began stealing bread and milk for the family, dropped out of school at 14 and took a number of menial jobs, including delivering telegrams. "I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed," McCourt told the Hartford Courant. "Her generation and my generation, to a certain extent, were never proud of having grown up in poverty and adversity. We always wanted to give people the idea that we grew up in kind of middle-class, or lower-middle-class, circumstances." After arriving in the U.S. in 1949, McCourt got a job as a houseman at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. Drafted into the Army during the Korean War, he spent two years in Germany. Although he didn't have a high school education, he later said, he was "fairly well read" and managed to "talk" his way into New York University. After graduating in 1957, he got a job teaching English at a vocational and technical high school on Staten Island. A decade later, he received a master's degree from Brooklyn College. As a teacher, McCourt would regale his students with his horrifying and often hilarious tales of his childhood in Ireland. In the late '60s, he tried to write a book about his early years but considered his effort "appalling" and set it aside. "I was going through my James Joyce period, studied and affected," he told the New York Times in 1997. "I was still struggling to find my voice. "All along, I wanted to do this book badly. I would have to do it, or I would have died howling." It wasn't until 1994, after observing his young granddaughter, Chiara, developing her vocabulary that McCourt discovered a way to best tell his story: through his eyes as a child. Storytelling came naturally to McCourt, whose skills were nurtured over pints of Guinness at places such as the Lion's Head tavern in Greenwich Village, which was a hangout for newspapermen and authors such as Pete Hamill and Norman Mailer. "We were all storytellers growing up," McCourt said of his family in a 2000 interview with the Toronto Sun. "That's all we had. There was no TV or radio. We'd sit around the fire and make up stories. My dad was a great storyteller. We'd mention a neighbor, and he'd make up a story. "But I also had to be a great storyteller to survive teaching. I spent 30 years in the classroom. When you stand before 170 teenagers each day, you have to get and keep their attention. Their attention span is about seven minutes, which is the time between commercials. So you have to stay on your toes." In the mid-1980s, McCourt and his actor brother Malachy wrote and began performing in "A Couple of Blaguards," a two-character comedy musical revue about their early years. McCourt also wrote " 'Tis: A Memoir," a 1999 sequel to "Angela's Ashes," covering his life in the U.S.; and "Teacher Man," a 2005 memoir about his years as a schoolteacher. Married and divorced twice, he married his third wife, publicist Ellen Frey, in 1994. Besides his wife and his brother Malachy, McCourt's survivors include a daughter, Maggie, from a previous marriage. Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary