Eydie Gorme
 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Eydie Gorme, a popular nightclub and television singer as a solo act and as a team with her husband, Steve Lawrence, has died. She was 84.

Gorme, who also had a huge solo hit in 1963 with "Blame it on the Bossa Nova," died Saturday. Gorme was a successful band singer and nightclub entertainer when she was invited to join the cast of Steve Allen's local New York television show in 1953.

She sang solos and also did duets and comedy skits with Lawrence, a rising young singer who had joined the show a year earlier. When the program became NBC's "Tonight Show" in 1954, the young couple went with it.

They married in Las Vegas in 1957 and later performed for audiences there.

"Eydie has been my partner on stage and in life for more than 55 years," Lawrence said in a statement. "I fell in love with her the moment I saw her and even more the first time I heard her sing. While my personal loss is unimaginable, the world has lost one of the greatest pop vocalists of all time."

Although usually recognized for her musical partnership with Lawrence, Gorme broke through on her own with the Grammy-nominated "Blame it on the Bossa Nova." The bouncy tune about a dance craze of the time was written by the Tin Pan Alley songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Her husband had had an equally huge solo hit in 1962 with "Go Away Little Girl," written by the songwriting team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King.

Gorme would score another solo hit in 1964, but this time for a Spanish-language recording. Gorme, who was born in New York City to Sephardic Jewish parents, grew up speaking both English and Spanish.

When she and her husband were at the height of their career as a team in 1964, Columbia Records President Goddard Lieberson suggested she put that Spanish to use in the recording studio. The result was "Amor," recorded with the Mexican combo Trio Los Panchos.

The song became a hit throughout Latin America, which resulted in more recordings for the Latino market, and Lawrence and Gorme performed as a duo throughout Latin America. "Our Spanish stuff outsells our English recordings," Lawrence said in 2004. "She's like a diva to the Spanish world."

Gorme and Lawrence, meanwhile, had an impressive, long-lasting career in English-language music as well, encompassing recordings and appearances on TV, in nightclubs and in concert halls.

Throughout it, they stuck for the most part with the music of classic composers like Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and other giants of Broadway and Hollywood musicals. They eschewed rock 'n' roll and made no apologies for it.

Soon after their marriage, the pair had landed their own TV program, "The Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme Show," which was a summer replacement for Allen.

Not long after that, however, Lawrence entered the Army, and Gorme went on the nightclub circuit as a soloist until his return to civilian life two years later.

After his discharge, Lawrence and Gorme quickly reteamed, and their careers took off. They appeared at leading nightclubs in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Las Vegas, combining music with the comedy bits they had learned during their apprenticeship on Allen's show. With nightclubs dwindling in popularity in the 1980s, they moved their act to large theaters and auditoriums, drawing not only older audiences but also the Baby Boomers who had grown up on rock 'n' roll.

Gorme, who was born Aug. 16, 1928, began to seriously consider a music career while still a student at William Taft High School in New York City's borough of the Bronx, where she had been voted the "Prettiest, Peppiest Cheerleader."

After graduation, she worked as a Spanish interpreter for a time but also sang on weekends with the band of Ken Greenglass, who encouraged her and eventually became her manager.

Her first big break came when she landed a tour with the Tommy Tucker band, and she followed that up with gigs with Tex Beneke, Ray Eberle and on radio and television.

Among her radio appearances was one on a Spanish language show, "Cita Con Eydie ("A Date with Eydie"), which was beamed to Latin America by Voice of America. Early in her career, Gorme considered changing her name, but her mother protested. "It's bad enough that you're in show business. How will the neighbors know if you're ever a success?" she told her, so Gorme decided to keep the family name but changed her given name from Edith to Edie. Later, having grown tired of people mistaking it for Eddie, she changed the spelling to Eydie.

Lee Thompson Young
 

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Lee Thompson Young, a former Disney Channel star who appeared on "Rizzoli & Isles," was found dead this morning at the age of 29.

Police confirmed that the versatile young actor died in an apparent suicide of a gunshot wound. TMZ reports that Young’s landlord found him when he did not report to the set of the TNT drama this morning.

When officers arrived to his apartment at the 5000 block of Tujunga Avenue, they pronounced him dead at the scene. There is no word on whether Young left a note, and the coroner is taking over the case.

"It is with great sadness that I announce that Lee Thompson Young tragically took his own life this morning," said Young's long-time manager Jonathan Baruch in a statement.

"Lee was more than just a brilliant young actor, he was a wonderful and gentle soul who will be truly missed. We ask that you please respect the privacy of his family and friends as this very difficult time."

OH no! That's heartbreaking. I loved his character on Rizzoli and Isles. He was a good actor. He did a lot with a small but regular part. So appealing as an actor. I just hate to hear that.

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Marian McPartland, Jazz Pianist and NPR Radio Staple, Dies at 95

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By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: August 21, 2013

Marian McPartland, the genteel Englishwoman who became a fixture of the American jazz scene as a pianist and, later in life, hosted the internationally syndicated and immensely popular public radio show “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz,” died on Tuesday at her home in Port Washington, N.Y. She was 95.

Ms. McPartland was a gifted musician but an unlikely candidate for jazz stardom. She recalled in a 1998 interview for National Public Radio that shortly after she arrived in the United States in 1946, the influential jazz critic Leonard Feather, who himself was born in England and who began his career as a pianist, said, “Oh, she’ll never make it: she’s English, white and a woman.”

Mr. Feather, she added, “always used to tell me it was a joke, but I don’t think he meant it as a joke.”

The odds against any woman finding success as a jazz musician in the late 1940s and early ’50s were formidable, but Ms. McPartland overcame them with grace. Listeners were charmed by her Old World stage presence and captivated by her elegant, harmonically lush improvisations, which reflected both her classical training and her fascination with modern jazz.

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By 1958 she was well enough known to be included in Art Kane’s famous Esquire magazine group photograph of jazz musicians, the subject of Jean Bach’s 1994 documentary, “A Great Day in Harlem.” One of the few women in the picture, she stood next to her friend and fellow pianist Mary Lou Williams.

Ms. McPartland’s contributions to jazz were not limited to her piano playing. An enthusiastic and articulate spokeswoman for the music, she lectured at schools and colleges and wrote for Down Beat, Melody Maker and other publications. (A collection of her essays, “All in Good Time,” was published in 1987 and reissued in 2003.) Most notably, for more than 30 years her “Piano Jazz” was one of the most popular jazz shows ever on the radio.

The show, produced by South Carolina’s public radio network, made its debut on NPR in 1978. The format was simple: an informal interview interspersed with extemporaneous duets.

“I didn’t have any idea I’d be good at something like this,” Ms. McPartland told The Associated Press in 2000. “I certainly never thought people would know me because of my voice.” But she proved a natural.

As its title suggests, “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz” was originally a show about piano players. But the guest list came to include vocalists, among them Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett and even Willie Nelson and Elvis Costello, as well as trumpeters, saxophonists and other instrumentalists.

Jazz pianists remained the focus, however, and over the years Ms. McPartland played host to some of the most famous, from the ragtime pioneer Eubie Blake to the uncompromising avant-gardist Cecil Taylor. She gamely played duets with all of them, even Mr. Taylor, whose aggressively dissonant approach was far removed from Ms. McPartland’s refined melodicism.

“I just did the kind of thing he does,” she said. “Or else I went in the opposite direction, and that sounded fairly interesting too.”

“Piano Jazz” was heard on more than 200 radio stations all over the world. It received a Peabody Award in 1983.

Ms. McPartland recorded her last show in September 2010, although she did not officially step down as host until November 2011; “Piano Jazz” has continued with reruns and guest hosts.

Marian McPartland was born Margaret Marian Turner in Windsor, England, on March 20, 1918. She began picking out melodies on the family piano when she was 3, and at 17 she entered the Guildhall School of Music in London.

In 1938, over her parents’ strong objections, she left school to go on tour with a four-piano vaudeville act. “My mother said, ‘Oh, you’ll come to no good, you’ll marry a musician and live in an attic,’ ” she recalled in 1998. “Of course, that did happen.”

While on a U.S.O. tour in 1944 she met the American jazz cornetist Jimmy McPartland in Belgium; they married in early 1946, and she moved with him to Chicago later that year.

Ms. McPartland worked for a while in her husband’s group, but he was a tradition-loving Dixieland musician and she was more interested in the harmonically sophisticated new sounds coming from New York City, where the McPartlands moved in 1949.

Encouraged by her husband, she formed a trio and found work at the Embers, an East Side nightclub, in 1950. Two years later she began what was supposed to be a brief engagement at the Hickory House, one of the last surviving jazz rooms on the city’s once-thriving 52nd Street nightclub row. That booking turned into an eight-year residency.

The McPartlands’ marriage ended after two decades, but they remained close friends and continued to work together occasionally. The divorce, she was fond of saying, did not take. She helped care for him when he had lung cancer, and they remarried shortly before he died in 1991.

Her survivors include two grandchildren.

Ms. McPartland recorded for Savoy, Capitol and other labels in the 1950s and ’60s, but in 1969, disenchanted with the business, she formed her own record company, Halcyon. “It was quite a job,” she told one interviewer. “I used to actually go to a record store like Sam Goody and tell them, ‘I need that money you owe me.’ ”

Halcyon released 18 albums in 10 years and had a roster that included her fellow pianists Teddy Wilson and Earl Hines as well as Ms. McPartland herself, but her career as an executive ended when she signed with Concord Jazz in 1979. She remained a Concord artist until she stopped recording, just a few years before her death.

The bare-bones accompaniment of bass and drums was always Ms. McPartland’s preferred format, but she also appeared in concert with symphony orchestras, and in 1996 she recorded an album of her own compositions, “Silent Pool,” on which she was accompanied by a string orchestra.

That album provided a rare showcase for an underappreciated aspect of her talent: although she told The New York Times in 1998 that she “never had all that much faith in myself as a composer,” she was a prolific songwriter whose work was recorded by Peggy Lee, Mr. Bennett, Sarah Vaughan and others. She performed her symphonic work “A Portrait of Rachel Carson” with the University of South Carolina Symphony Orchestra in 2007.

In her last years Ms. McPartland received numerous honors. She was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2000, given a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2004, inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2007 and named a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2010.

And she continued playing almost to the end. Reviewing her appearance at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Manhattan the night before her 90th birthday in 2008, Nate Chinen wrote in The Times, “Ms. McPartland still has her pellucid touch and her careful yet comfortable style.”

Unlike some jazz musicians of her generation, Ms. McPartland never became set in her ways; her playing grew denser and more complex with time, and even late in life she was experimenting with new harmonic ideas. “I’ve become a bit more — reckless, maybe,” she said in 1998. “I’m getting to the point where I can smash down a chord and not know what it’s going to be, and make it work.”

Tony-winning actress Julie Harris dies at 87
 

Julie Harris, 87, one of the great stage actresses of the last half-century who amassed five Tony awards and was also renowned for her film work, died Aug. 24 at her home in West Chatham, Mass.

In a career of durability, longevity and versatility, time and her own gifts transmuted her roles from troubled tomboy to appealing ingénue to scheming older woman. Presidential wife Mary Todd Lincoln, poet Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare’s Ophelia were all portrayed with panache and verve by Julie Harris.

She was the wistful, lonesome pre-adolescent Frankie in Carson McCullers’s “The Member of the Wedding” on Broadway and in Hollywood. The film performance more than 60 years ago earned her an Academy Award nomination.

The year the movie came out, 1952, she created the devil-may-care Sally Bowles on Broadway in “I Am a Camera,” winning the first of her Tony awards.

Broadway appearances also included “The Lark” in 1955, in which she played Joan of Arc and appeared as Joan on the cover of Time magazine. She was in “Forty Carats” in 1968 and “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln” in 1972. She played Mrs. Lincoln in the stage and film versions.

In the movies, her work on “East of Eden” with James Dean was credited by director Elia Kazan with bringing out the best in her often difficult co-star. She was in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” and she and Paul Newman acted in “Harper,” a private-eye drama. She was also known for “Reflections in a Golden Eye.”

A Tony recognized her portrayal of the reclusive New England poet Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst.” An audio recording of that role won her a Grammy Award for best spoken-word recording.

She was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005.

At a ceremony in the White House, President George W. Bush said: “It’s hard to imagine the American stage without the face, the voice and the limitless talent of Julie Harris. She has found happiness in her life’s work, and we thank her for sharing that happiness with the whole world.”

That work also included many television appearances, most notably in “Knots Landing,” in which she was a scheming Southern belle.

Known for her sensitivity, she was quoted as saying that “God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other. . . . It’s a way of expressing our humanity.” She was also a gritty survivor of surgery after a backstage fall, of at least one stroke, and of breast cancer. Chemotherapy continued while she played in the long-running “Knots Landing.”

In the Ken Burns series “The Civil War,” she gave voice to diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut.

Julia Ann Harris was born in the prosperous Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Mich., on Dec. 2, 1925. Her father, William Pickett Harris, was an investment banker. Her mother, Elsie, was a nurse. She was impressed by plays they saw in Detroit, and in her teens , unwilling to remain at home and do what was expected of a young woman of her background, she enrolled in the Yale School of Drama. In 1945 she left in mid-semester for a role in a Broadway show, which flopped, sending her back to New Haven.

She made her home on Cape Cod. Reference works indicated that three marriages ended in divorce. She had one son.

Muriel Siebert, a Determined Trailblazer for Women on Wall Street, Dies at 80
 

Muriel Siebert, who became a legend on Wall Street as the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the first woman to head one of the exchange’s member firms, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 80.

Ms. Siebert, known to all as Mickie, cultivated the same brash attitude that characterized Wall Street’s most successful men. She bought her seat on the exchange in 1967, but to her immense anger, she remained the only woman admitted to membership for almost a decade.

She was one of the pioneers in the discount brokerage field, as she transformed Muriel Siebert & Company (now a subsidiary of Siebert Financial) into a discount brokerage in 1975, on the first day that Big Board members were allowed to negotiate commissions.

She also was the first woman to be superintendent of banking for New York State, appointed by Gov. Hugh Carey in 1977. She served five years during a rocky time when banks were tottering and interest rates were skyrocketing.

Ms. Siebert was known, to her delight, as a scrapper who refused to acknowledge defeat. She donated millions of dollars from her brokerage and securities underwriting business to help other women get their start in business and finance.

When she was honored for her efforts in 1992, Ms. Siebert used the luncheon celebration to warn that it was still too soon for women to declare victory in the battle for equality on Wall Street.

“Firms are doing what they have to do, legally,” she said. “But women are coming into Wall Street in large numbers — and they still are not making partner and are not getting into the positions that lead to the executive suites. There’s still an old-boy network. You just have to keep fighting.”

She continued fighting the old-boy network all her life. She was one of the first women, in the early 1970s, to fight to end the sexist practices then prevalent in Manhattan social clubs, spurred by an experience she had at the Union League Club. She had arrived there for a board luncheon meeting of the Sales Executive Club and was not allowed in the elevator.

“I had to go through the kitchen and walk up the back stairs,” she recalled. She was so angry during the meeting that her male colleagues asked what was wrong. When the lunch was finished, they tried to take her down in the elevator with them. When she was again rebuffed, they joined her in walking down the stairs and through the kitchen.

That experience, and other similar episodes, led her to testify before government bodies about the discriminatory policies of many New York clubs. In time, women were permitted to become members. This was particularly important because of the deal-making and networking done at these clubs.

Ms. Siebert also successfully lobbied in 1987 to get a ladies’ room on the seventh floor of the New York Stock Exchange, near the entrance to the luncheon club she frequented. She accomplished this in her typical fashion. She warned the exchange’s chairman that if a ladies’ room was not on the floor by the end of the year, she would arrange for a portable toilet to be delivered. The room was installed, and women no longer had to trek down a flight of stairs.

She once explained her strategy for dealing with obstacles: “I put my head down and charge.”

Muriel Faye Siebert was born in Cleveland on Sept. 12, 1932, the second of two daughters of Irwin Siebert, a dentist, and his wife, Margaret. She attended Western Reserve University for two years but left in 1952 before graduating because her father became ill.

She came to New York in 1954, she once said, “with $500, a Studebaker and a dream.” She was hired as a $65-a-week trainee in the research department at Bache & Company.

“The way it worked, everybody who was already there got to give the new kid one of their junk industries,” she told The New York Times in 1992. “I got airlines, I got motion pictures — things nobody wanted in those days.”

She changed jobs three times because she said men doing the same work were being paid more than she was. She also discovered when job hunting that when the New York Society of Security Analysts sent out her résumé under the name Muriel Siebert, she received no inquiries, but when the society later distributed it under the name M.F. Siebert, the results were quite different.

She eventually decided to strike out on her own and become the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She was turned down by the first nine men she asked to sponsor her application before a 10th agreed.

The exchange told her that if she was admitted, her seat would cost $445,000, and in an unprecedented move, the exchange insisted that she get a bank to lend her $300,000 of the total price. The banks, in turn, refused to lend her the money unless the exchange admitted her. “There would be no loan until I was accepted, and I couldn’t be accepted without the loan,” she said.

After nearly two years she got the loan, from Chase Manhattan, and she was elected to the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 28, 1967. It proved to be a historic day but one that was not soon repeated. “For 10 years,” Ms. Siebert said, “it was 1,365 men and me.”

She continued to encounter resistance, and not only because she was a woman. Ms. Siebert also encountered anti-Semitism, which at the time, she said, was not uncommon in the trust departments she dealt with.

In 1969, she founded Muriel Siebert & Company, becoming the first woman to own and operate a brokerage firm that was a member of the New York Stock Exchange. On May 1, 1975, after the federal government did away with fixed commissions for brokers, Ms. Siebert declared her company a discount brokerage firm.

Two years later she put her company in a blind trust and accepted Governor Carey’s appointment as state superintendent of banking. Her five-year term was controversial, as she took the lead in engineering mergers and acquisitions. But in the end she liked to say that no New York bank failed during her tenure.

In addition to the Albany post, she directed New York City’s Municipal Credit Union, its Urban Development Corporation and its Job Development Authority.

In 1983, Ms. Siebert returned to Muriel Siebert & Company after losing a bid for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate; she was beaten by Assemblywoman Florence M. Sullivan, who was then defeated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic candidate.

In 1996, she took her firm public through an unorthodox merger with J. Michaels, a Brooklyn chain of furniture stores. As part of the arrangement, she liquidated the assets of J. Michaels and named the holding company the Siebert Financial Corporation, of which she owned a 97.5 percent share; the remaining 2.5 percent was former J. Michaels stock and was publicly held.

Ms. Siebert, who never married or had children, is survived by a sister, Elaine Siebert.

Ms. Siebert, who was often sought out for pungent quotes as a market pundit and occasional critic of Wall Street practices, produced an autobiography in 2002, “Changing the Rules: Adventures of a Wall Street Maverick.”

In 2007, she celebrated the 40th anniversary of buying a seat on the New York Stock Exchange by ringing the closing bell.

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Darren Manzella, gay soldier who challenged 'don't ask, don't tell,' killed in NY car accident
 

Darren Manzella, a gay combat medic discharged from the Army after criticizing the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy in a 2007 television interview, has died in a traffic accident in western New York. He was 36.

The Monroe County Sheriff's Office said Manzella was driving on Interstate 490 in suburban Rochester about 8:30 p.m. Thursday when his vehicle sideswiped a car. Deputies said he stopped his vehicle, got out and began pushing the car from behind. He was then hit by an SUV, pinning him between the two vehicles.

Manzella's appearance on "60 Minutes" from the combat zone in Iraq was followed by his discharge in 2008 for violating the since-rescinded policy prohibiting service members from openly acknowledging they're gay.

After the television appearance and his return from Iraq, Manzella did media interviews, each a potential violation of the policy.

"This is who I am. This is my life," Manzella said at a Washington news conference before his discharge. "It has never affected my job performance before. I don't think it will make a difference now. And to be honest since then, I don't see a difference because of my homosexuality."

Manzella said he first told a military supervisor about his sexual orientation in August 2006, while working in a division headquarters at Fort Hood, Texas. Three weeks later, his battalion commander told him an investigation had been closed without finding "proof of homosexuality." A month later, he was sent to Iraq.

His supporters said the overseas assignment demonstrated how the military was arbitrarily enforcing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy during the war.

Manzella enlisted in the Army in 2002. He was awarded the Combat Medical Badge for service in Iraq. When he was discharged, he was a sergeant serving at Fort Hood with the 1st Cavalry Division.

Manzella lived in the Chautauqua County town of Portland; he and his partner were married in July.

David Frost, known for Nixon interview, dies
 

LONDON (AP) — Veteran British journalist and broadcaster David Frost, who won fame around the world for his TV interviews with former President Richard Nixon, has died, his family told the BBC. He was 74.

Frost died of a suspected heart attack on Saturday night aboard the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship, where he was due to give a speech, the family said.

Known both for an amiable personality and incisive interviews with leading public figures, Frost's career in television news and entertainment spanned almost half a century. He was the only person to have interviewed all six British prime ministers serving between 1964 and 2007 and the seven U.S. presidents in office between 1969 and 2008. Outside world affairs, his roster ranged from Orson Welles to Muhammad Ali to Clint Eastwood.

Frost began television hosting while still a student at Cambridge University. He went on to host the BBC's satirical news show "The Week That Was" in the early 1960s, and, later, a sketch show called "The Frost Report" and a long-running BBC Sunday show, "Breakfast with Frost." His signature, "Hello, good evening and welcome" was often mimicked.

While popular in Britain and beginning to launch a career on U.S. television, Frost did not become internationally known until 1977, when he secured a series of television interviews with Nixon.

The dramatic face-to-face was make-or-break both for him and for the ex-president, who was trying to salvage his reputation after resigning from the White House in disgrace following the Watergate scandal three years earlier. At the time, it was the most widely watched news interview in the history of TV.

The interviewer and his subject sparred through the first part of the interview, but Frost later said he realized he didn't have what he wanted as it wound down.

Nixon had acknowledged mistakes, but Frost pressed him on whether that was enough. Americans, he said, wanted to hear him own up to wrongdoing and acknowledge abuse of power — and "unless you say it, you're going to be haunted for the rest of your life."

"That was totally off-the-cuff," Frost later said. "That was totally ad-lib. In fact, I threw my clipboard down just to indicate that it was not prepared in any way ... I just knew at that moment that Richard Nixon was more vulnerable than he'd ever be in his life. And I knew I had to get it right."

After more pressing, Nixon relented. "I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life," he said.

The dramatic face-off went on to spawn a hit play. And in 2008, a new generation was introduced to Frost's work with the Oscar-nominated movie "Frost/Nixon," starring Michael Sheen as Frost and Frank Langella as Nixon.

Frost was born on Apr. 7, 1939, the son of a Methodist preacher. Besides hosting, he set up his own company, which gave birth to many more popular British programs.

"Breakfast with Frost" ran on the BBC for 12 years until 2005, and the game show "Through the Keyhole" from 1987 to 2008. He had recently been working for Al Jazeera International.

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Deliberately used an old pic of him cuz this is how I remember him.

Jessie Lopez De La Cruz, a longtime leader in the national farmworker movement
 

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) -- Jessie Lopez De La Cruz, a longtime leader in the national farmworker movement, has died. She was 93.

The United Farmworkers of America says De La Cruz died in Kingsburg, Calif., on Labor Day. She was one of the union's first female members and organizers in the Fresno area.

De La Cruz organized workers in the fields, participated in grape boycotts and testified on outlawing the short-handled hoe, which required workers to bend over at the waist for the entire day.

She also worked with the UFW in campaigns across the state and with the union Cesar Chavez at his office at La Paz in Keene. She also became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

Born in Anaheim, Calif., she became part of the UFW in her 40s, after Chavez visited her Parlier home to speak with farmworkers about forming a union and invited her to join.

In addition to her work as a union organizer, De La Cruz taught English to migrant workers and served on the executive board of the California Rural Legal Assistance, which provides legal services.

Friends and family say De La Cruz was known for her humility and devotion to improving the lives of farmworkers. Even in her 90's, De La Cruz would often ask to be taken to political rallies.

Her life has been documented in books, news articles and in a 1998 miniseries titled, "A Will of Their Own."

"Jessie De La Cruz was an icon of the farm worker movement," the UFW said in a statement. She "embodied Cesar Chavez's conviction that ordinary people have within them the ability to do extraordinary things."

Judith Glassman Daniels
 

UNION, Maine (AP) — Judith Glassman Daniels, who blazed a trail for women in the publishing world and became the first woman to serve as top editor of Life magazine, has died at the age of 74.

Daniels served in senior editing positions at The Village Voice, New York magazine, Time Inc. and Conde Naste over a career that spanned 35 years in New York before she retired with her husband to Maine in 2004.

During her career, Daniels oversaw creation of a magazine for executive women called Savvy at a time when magazines catered to stay-at-home moms, and she helped to found the Women's Media Group in New York. At Life, she oversaw the publication's 50th anniversary.

Her husband called her "a real pioneer."

"She really was one of the women who broke the glass ceiling that allowed women to rise high in the publishing world," Webb said from their home on Tuesday.

Daniels was born in Cambridge, Mass., and was raised in Brookline, Mass. She set off for New York after getting her English degree from Smith College, rising through the ranks in magazines.

Patricia O'Toole, who worked for Daniels as a writer and editor at Savvy, said Daniels was naturally curious and loved writing and editing. And writers loved to work for her, she said.

"Everybody wanted to please Judy," said O'Toole, a biographer and professor in New York. "Sometimes when there's a boss like that it's because they have to please them because otherwise there's going to be hell to pay. But Judy wasn't like that at all. You wanted to please her because she was such a good coach. She had very high editorial standards, and she'd help you measure up."

John MacMillan, editorial director at Smith College, where Daniels was a longtime member of the Smith Alumnae Council, called Daniels a "change-maker" who was helped the next generation of women get ahead.

"She was thinking about the issues facing successful professional women long before they were trendy, like work-life balance and the pressure that women face to get ideas heard," he said. "She was thinking about those way back in the 1970s and '80s."

Daniels and Webb had ties to Maine before moving to the state permanently.

Daniels became active in the Maine Women's Policy Center, the Women's Lobby and the Maine Humanities Council. She also served as chairwoman of Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport.

Tom Clancy
 

NEW YORK (AP) - Tom Clancy, whose high-tech, Cold War thrillers such as "The Hunt for Red October" and "Patriot Games" made him the most widely read and influential military novelist of his time, has died. He was 66.

Clancy arrived on best-seller lists in 1984 with "The Hunt for Red October." He sold the manuscript to the first publisher he tried, the Naval Institute Press, which had never bought original fiction.

A string of other best-sellers soon followed, including "Red Storm Rising," ''Patriot Games," ''The Cardinal of the Kremlin," ''Clear and Present Danger," ''The Sum of All Fears," and "Without Remorse."

RIP Chuck Smith
 

RIP Chuck Smith ..pastor of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa..Author,Speaker,father,grandfather.pastor..he moved from an old tent to a mansion today.

Marcia Wallace, actress from 'The Simpsons' and 'The Bob Newhart Show', dies at 70
 

As Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons, Marcia Wallace may be the only 4th-grade teacher to have the same student for 24 years. Before that, she was beloved as Carol Kester, the lovelorn, wisecracking secretary on The Bob Newhart Show.

Wallace’s work as the cynical, abused, and sarcastic Mrs. Krabappel won her an Emmy for outstanding voice actress in 1992, and was nominated for outstanding guest actress in a comedy for Murphy Brown, playing the most efficient of the journalist’s constantly changing secretaries — reprising her role as Carol Kester. Adding to the joke, Newhart also made an appearance on that episode.

Born and raised in Creston, Iowa, the daughter of a shopkeeper, she moved to New York after college to pursue stage acting. She started her onscreen career making regular appearances on The Merv Griffin Show, and in 1971 had bit parts on Bewitched, Columbo, and The Brady Bunch.

A year later, The Bob Newhart Show made her a star. Her flame-haired, feisty, and free-spirited receptionist was a counterpoint to Newhart’s buttoned-down psychiatrist. She played the role of Carol Kester in 139 episodes from 1972-1978.

After that, Wallace became a regular on a litany of gameshows such as Match Game, Hollywood Squares, and The $25,000 Pyramid. She guest starred on single episodes of Magnum, P.I., Gimme a Break!, and Murder, She Wrote, among many others, and had a recurring role as Mrs. Caruthers on Full House. She also had a small role in the 1989 film Teen Witch and became a popular voice-over actress in animated shows, playing characters on Darkwing Duck and Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Later, she also co-starred as the housekeeper on the short-lived 2001 Comedy Central spoof of President George W. Bush That’s My Bush!

But it was the droll, chain-smoking, semi-defeated Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons that would give Wallace her defining role. Originally set up as a Nurse Ratched-like nemesis of trouble student Bart Simpson, she evolved into one of the richest, and most nuanced characters on the series.

The actress was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985 but fought it back and became a prominent activist and advocate for early detection procedures. In 2007, she won the Gilda Radner Courage Award from Roswell Park Cancer Institute for her decades of work for the cause.

She was married for six years to hotel owner Dennis Hawley, until his death in 1992 from pancreatic cancer. The couple had one son, Michael Hawley, and Wallace wrote about her illness, the loss of her husband, and the challenges of motherhood in her 2004 autobiography Don’t Look Back, We’re Not Going That Way. Despite tackling dark issues, readers acclaimed the book for its sense of humor and optimism.

The subtitle for the book was “How I overcame a rocky childhood, a nervous breakdown, breast cancer, widowhood, fat, fire and menopausal motherhood and still manage to count my lucky chickens.”
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This woman was one of my early crushes. Sigh.

RIP Doris Lessing
 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...essing-dies-94


Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning author of The Golden Notebook and The Grass is Singing, among more than 50 other novels ranging from political to science fiction, has died aged 94.

Twitter reacted quickly to the news, a shock to many despite her great age. The author and critic Lisa Jardine described it as "a huge loss"; the agent Carole Blake described her as an "amazing writer and woman"; and the writer Lisa Appignanesi wrote: "One of our very greatest writers has left us this past night, RIP."

The writer Bidisha tweeted: "Doris Lessing: prolific multi-genre genius dies in sleep after writing world-changing novels and winning Nobel. Not bad at all."

Born in Iran, brought up in the African bush in Zimbabwe – where her 1950 first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was set – Lessing had been a London resident for more than half a century. In 2007 she arrived back to West Hampstead, north London, by taxi, carrying heavy bags of shopping, to find the doorstep besieged by reporters and camera crews. "Oh Christ," she said, on learning that their excitement was because at 88 she had just become the oldest author to win the Nobel prize in literature. Only the 11th woman to win the honour, she had beaten that year's favourite, the American author Philip Roth.

Pausing rather crossly on her front path, she said "one can get more excited", and went on to observe that since she had already won all the other prizes in Europe, this was "a royal flush".

Later she remarked: "I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."

The citation from the Swedish Academy called her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

Her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook was described as "a feminist bible", and her fellow laureate J M Coetzee called her "one of the great visionary novelists of our time" .

Psychic Sylvia Browne
 

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Sylvia Browne, a psychic whose frequent appearances on shows such as "Larry King Live" and "The Montel Williams Show" made her a popular personality, has died at a hospital in San Jose, Calif., hospital officials confirmed on Thursday. She was 77.

Browne said she believed in reincarnation and could help people communicate with their dead loved ones as well as see the future. She was a regular on "The Montel Williams Show," where she fielded questions on topics ranging from marriage and careers to ghosts.

Browne was criticized after telling the mother of Ohio kidnapping victim Amanda Berry on the show in 2004 that her daughter was dead. Berry and two other women were later found alive. They had been held captive for years.

Browne grew up in Kansas City, Mo., where her psychic abilities began to manifest themselves at the age of 3, according to an obituary on her website.

She founded two nonprofits, The Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research and the Society of Novus Spiritus, and was the author of dozens of books, many of which appeared on the New York Times Bestsellers list, according to the obituary.

Her 2009 book, "Temples on the Other Side," was intended to help people understand where they go after they die, she told Montel Williams.

"So you just don't float around," she said. "You can go to the Hall of Messengers, where you can talk to Jesus ... You can go to the Hall of Reconnection, where you can connect with someone you love."

In a statement included in the obituary on Browne's website, Williams called her a friend. "A beacon that shined for so many was extinguished today, but its brightness was relit and will now shine forever for many of us from above," he said.

Browne is survived by her husband, Michael Ulery, two sons and a sister, according to the obituary.

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I liked watching this woman on Montel. Very colorful personality.

Nelson Mandela
 

Madiba
 

I thought I'd be prepared for this day but I find I'm just not.

This was once attributed to Mandela, but apparently, it was written by someone else. Either way, when I think of Mandela, I think of this. (I once taught it to a class of 10-11 year olds when I was working as a volunteer teacher at the Waldorf Steiner school in Jerusalem. My son was the only Palestinian student amongst 20 or so Israeli kids, so it's always had a special place in my heart.)

RIP.

Our Deepest Fear
By Marianne Williamson


Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us;
It's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we're liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

Travel peacefully, Nelson Mandela
 

I am so grateful for the gain, and so sorrowful for the loss. I'm choosing to focus on the gains, with tremendous love, hope and respect.

I don't know how to attach an actual link but this is a beautiful song with its message realized.

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opUEIVlG1BQ"]Hugh Masekela Bring Back Nelson Mandela - YouTube[/nomedia]