RIP

[Parker]

Margaret Thatcher Dies at 87

Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to ever serve as prime minister of the United Kingdom, has died at the age of 87. A spokesperson announced that she had a stroke, though she had been in poor health in recent years and was reportedly suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

A family statement (via the BBC) said "It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning."

[Kobi]

NEW YORK — Annette Funicello, who became a child star as a perky, cute-as-a-button Mouseketeer on "The Mickey Mouse Club" in the 1950s, then teamed up with Frankie Avalon on a string of '60s fun-in-the-sun movies with names like "Beach Blanket Bingo" and "Bikini Beach," died Monday. She was 70.

The pretty, dark-haired Funicello was just 13 when she gained fame on Walt Disney's television kiddie "club," an amalgam of stories, songs and dance routines that ran from 1955 to 1959.

Cast after Disney saw her at a dance recital, she appeared in mouse ears, a pleated skirt and a turtleneck sweater emblazoned with her first name. She soon became the most popular Mouseketeer in the cast, receiving 8,000 fan letters a month, 10 times more than any of the 23 other young performers.

When "The Mickey Mouse Club" ended, Annette (as she was often billed) was the only club member to remain under contract to the studio. She appeared in such Disney movies as "Johnny Tremain," ''The Shaggy Dog," ''The Horsemasters," ''Babes in Toyland," ''The Misadventures of Merlin Jones" and "The Monkey's Uncle."

She also became a recording star, singing on 15 albums and hit singles such as "Tall Paul" and "Pineapple Princess."

Outgrowing the kid roles by the early '60s, Annette teamed with Avalon in a series of movies for American-International, the first film company to exploit the burgeoning teen market.

The shift in teen tastes begun by the Beatles in 1964 and Funicello's first marriage the following year pretty much killed off the beach-movie genre.

But she was somehow never forgotten though mostly out of the public eye for years. She and Avalon staged a reunion in 1987 with "Back to the Beach." It was during the filming that she noticed she had trouble walking — the first insidious sign of MS.

When it was finally diagnosed, she later recalled, "I knew nothing about (MS), and you are always afraid of the unknown. I plowed into books."

Her symptoms were relatively mild at first, but gradually she lost control of her legs, and she feared people might think she was drunk. So she went public with her ordeal in 1992.

She wrote of her triumphs and struggles in her 1994 autobiography, "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" — the title taken from a Disney song. In 1995, she appeared briefly in a television docudrama based on her book. And she spoke openly about the degenerative effects of MS.

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She was one of my crushes early in life. Loved the beach movies but Ski Party was my favorite. Wonder what ever happened to Eric Von Zipper? Thanks for the memories.

[Kobi]

Jonathan Winters – an improvisational genius and the comedic spiritual godfather to a generation of younger comics, including Robin Williams, Jim Carrey and the late Andy Kaufman – died of natural causes Thursday night.

Known for the wild array of characters he could create in a flash – his naughty old lady Maude Frickert was a Tonight Show headliner who routinely broke up hosts Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson – Winters, playing doltish truck driver Lennie Pike, stole the all-star 1963 movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World out from every name comedian who was breathing at the time.

Dayton, Ohio, native, Winters dropped out of high school to join the Marines, with whom he served in the Pacific during World War II. After the war he deejayed on radio station back in his hometown, where he could never quite deliver the weather in a straight fashion.

"About the third day, I decided that I'd interview myself," he recalled years later for a PBS special, Pioneers of Television, saying he wished "to gamble a little bit with this so-called career. So I said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we have a wonderful gentleman here … Sir Edmund Denler. [He's] flown a secret flight aircraft all the way from London to Labrador, Labrador here to Dayton, and just wonderful to have you here, sir …' "

The radio station owner was not amused. The radio audience was.

A shot on CBS's Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts led to other spots on network TV and then on Broadway, in the revue Almanac. His true launching pad, in 1956, was the weekly TV variety The Jonathan Winters Show. And though it was hard to contain him on the small screen – records and clubs were his forte – Winters returned the medium back in 1981, to play Robin William's son on the last season of ABC's Mork and Mindy.

Truly a comedian's comedian, Winters received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1999. On a personal level, his wife of 60 years, Eileen, died, age 84, in early 2009, according to a friend's published remembrance. He is survived by two children, Lucinda Winters and Jay Winters.

Later in life, Winters credited much of his early success to the savvy TV hosts who grabbed him and put him on the air in the early '60s. According to Winters, they would say: "One thing about Winters, you never knew what he's going to say or do."

He added: "I don't think they sweated my being dirty … or embarrassing … they knew I would be funny."

And was he ever.

[Kobi]

Frank Bank, who played the clumsy bully Clarence "Lumpy" Rutherford on the popular 1957-1963 series Leave It to Beaver, died Saturday, one day after his 71st birthday.

Born in Los Angeles, Bank first appeared on screen as the very young Will Rogers in the 1952 Warner Bros. biopic The Will Rogers Story, and then managed to deliver other TV roles at the same time he was appearing on Leave It to Beaver.

Once the gentle sitcom about childhood was canceled, Bank continued to make sporadic TV appearances, including those on The Hollywood Squares, Family Feud, the 1983 TV movie Still The Beaver (it spawned The New Leave It to Beaver series, which ran four years) – although, in 1972, he had entered an entirely different profession: as a stock-and-bond broker.

According to a 1998 PEOPLE profile, Bank learned to handicap horses and read The Wall Street Journal during breaks on the Beaver set, where he taught himself "everything there was to know about tax-free bonds." Within three years of getting started, he says, he was earning $300,000 a year at an L.A.-based company.

[puddin']

an ordinary man who did extraordinary things. this is what a hero looks like. i had da honour o' callin' him a friend.

r.i.p. mr. betts... you are well loved and truly missed.


http://www.examiner.com/article/bria...t-3-the-leader

[Greyson]

Sal Castro, teacher who led '68 Chicano student walkouts, dies at 79

By Teresa Watanabe

April 15, 2013

Salvador Castro, a social studies teacher who played a leading role in the historic 1968 Chicano student walkouts protesting rampant bias and inequalities in the Los Angeles Unified School District, died Monday, the district announced. He was 79.

Castro, known as “Sal,” was a Lincoln High School teacher who guided student walkouts at five predominantly Mexican American schools on the Eastside in what came to be seen as a milestone in community activism. The students demanded bilingual education, ethnic studies and other changes at a time when the curriculum largely ignored Mexican American history and educators forbid Chicano students to speak Spanish and often steered them toward menial jobs rather than college despite strong academic abilities, according to the district.

Castro was arrested and charged with conspiracy to disrupt public schools and disturb the peace for his alleged role in guiding the “blowouts.” But the charges were eventually dropped and he came to be hailed as a courageous civil rights leader. Salvador B. Castro Middle School was named after him several years ago.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...,4019352.story

Many of you know I got my K-12 education in the L.A. Unified School District. What I have highlighted above I experienced it personally. My High School counselor, Mr. Cole, flat out told me this when I told him I wanted to take some classes to prepare for college. "You are a Mexican. You are good with your hands. You should look at a vocation, not college." I share many things with all of you about discrimination I have experienced in my life. I do this not because I am competing in the "Opression Olympics" but because I hope you have found me to be credible through the years and you realize a fellow traveler, me, is sharing with you, it really did and does happen.

I am thankful for many activist that came before me and my generation and the ones that will follow us. There is crossover for many of us in the complexity of who we are and there are commonalities. We all know happiness and sorrow. I really believe most of us want to do better for our world, planet.

[Kobi]

DALLAS (AP) -- Pat Summerall, the NFL player-turned-broadcaster whose deep, resonant voice called games for more than 40 years, has died at the age of 82.

Summerall was part of network television broadcasts for 16 Super Bowls. His last championship game was for Fox on Feb. 3, 2002, also his last game with longtime partner John Madden. The popular duo worked together for 21 years, moving to Fox in 1994 after years as the lead team for CBS.

Summerall played 10 NFL seasons (1952-61) with the Chicago Cardinals and New York Giants. He started doing NFL games for CBS in 1964. He also covered the PGA Tour and tennis.

[Glenn]

Richie Havens has passed!

[Kobi]

YONKERS, N.Y. — Prominent feminist Mary Thom, a writer and former editor of Ms. magazine who also was an avid motorcyclist, crashed while riding on a highway and was killed, her nephew said Saturday. She was 68.

Thom was one of Ms. magazine’s founding members and served as an editor there for about 20 years, leaving in 1992. She also was an author who wrote a book about the history of Ms. and was a co-author, with Suzanne Braun Levine, of an oral history of former congresswoman and activist Bella Abzug.

Most recently, Thom was the editor-in-chief of the Women’s Media Center’s features department, which produces reports and commentaries by national and international contributors.

[Kobi]

Joyce Brothers, a former academic psychologist who long before Drs. Ruth, Phil and Laura was counseling millions over the airwaves, died on Monday at her home in Fort Lee, N.J. She was 85.

Dr. Joyce Brothers, as she was always known professionally — a full-name hallmark of the more formal times in which she began her career — was widely described as the mother of mass-media psychology because of the firm, pragmatic and homiletic guidance she administered for decades via radio and television.

Historically, she was a bridge between advice columnists like Dear Abby and Ann Landers, who got their start in the mid-1950s, and the self-help advocates of the 1970s and afterward.

Throughout the 1960s, and long beyond, one could scarcely turn on the television or open a newspaper without encountering her. She was the host of her own nationally syndicated TV shows, starting in the late 1950s with “The Dr. Joyce Brothers Show” and over the years including “Ask Dr. Brothers,” “Consult Dr. Brothers” and “Living Easy With Dr. Joyce Brothers.”

She was also a ubiquitous guest on talk shows like “The Tonight Show” and on variety shows like “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”

She was a panelist on many game shows, including “What’s My Line?” and “The Hollywood Squares.” These appearances had a fitting symmetry: It was as a game-show contestant that Dr. Brothers had received her first television exposure.

Playing herself, or a character very much like herself, she had guest roles on a blizzard of TV series, from “The Jack Benny Program” to “Happy Days,” “Taxi,” “Baywatch,” “Entourage” and “The Simpsons.”

She also lectured widely; had a call-in radio show, a syndicated newspaper column and a regular column in Good Housekeeping magazine; and wrote books.

Dr. Brothers arrived in the American consciousness (or, more precisely, the American unconscious) at a serendipitous time: the exact historical moment when cold war anxiety, a greater acceptance of talk therapy and the widespread ownership of television sets converged. Looking crisply capable yet eminently approachable in her pastel suits and pale blond pageboy, she offered gentle, nonthreatening advice on sex, relationships, parenting and all manner of decent behavior.

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One of my childhood crushes.

[Kobi]

BOISE, Idaho (AP) - Allen Derr, an Idaho lawyer who won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling to bolster anti-discrimination protections for women, died Monday in Boise. He was 85.

On Nov. 22, 1971, the Supreme Court justices issued their Reed vs. Reed decision, holding states cannot discriminate against people because of their gender. It marked a departure from the era when courts often excluded women from full participation in important civil affairs.

His client, Sally Reed, a woman challenging her estranged husband over which of them should be appointed to oversee their son's estate following his suicide, was fighting to overturn an Idaho courts' decision based on an 1864 Idaho law: If more than one person claimed to be equally entitled to be trustee, "males must be preferred to females."

Characteristically humble, Derr described his role in the case in 2011 as nothing extraordinary.

"I was just doing my job," he said two years ago, on the 40th anniversary of the decision when he was honored by at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., alongside the lawyer who wrote Reed's legal brief: Current Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The decision in Reed vs. Reed has been celebrated in the 2001 book by historians Alan Brinkley and James McPherson, "Days of Destiny," as among a handful of uncelebrated events that nonetheless changed the course of history.

Derr remembered clearly Sally Reed's frustration when she came into his office in Boise, seeking help.

"When she came to me, she'd just been turned down by the probate court, in a very short, one-page decision," he said. "She was hurt and outraged."

Derr's basic argument was simple. The U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment forbade such discrimination.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing the unanimous decision, agreed.

"To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment," Burger wrote.

[Kobi]

James Gandolfini, whose portrayal of a brutal, emotionally fragile mob boss in HBO's "The Sopranos" helped create one of TV's greatest drama series and turned the mobster stereotype on its head, died Wednesday in Italy. He was 51.

Gandolfini played mob boss Tony Soprano in the groundbreaking series that aired from 1999 to 2007. His performance was indelible and career-making, but he refused to be stereotyped in other roles as the bulky mobster who was a therapy patient, family man and cold-blooded killer.

After the series concluded with its breathtaking ending that left viewers guessing, Gandolfini's varied film work included "Zero Dark Thirty" and comedies such as "In the Loop," a political satire. He voiced the Wild Thing Carol in "Where the Wild Things Are."

Gandolfini also shared a Broadway stage in 2009 with Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis and Marcia Gay Harden in a celebrated production of "God of Carnage," where he earned a Tony Award nomination for best actor. He also was in "On the Waterfront" with David Morse.

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Loved this guy as Tony. Loved the Soprano's.