OME -- Veteran journalist and writer Oriana Fallaci, a former war correspondent best known for her abrasive interviews and provocative stances, has died, Italian news reports said Friday. She was 76.

Fallaci, who had been diagnosed with cancer years ago, died in a Florence hospital, the Italian agencies ANSA and Apcom said. The reports said that she had been hospitalized for days.

Fallaci, a former Resistance fighter and war corespondent who was hardly seen in public, had lived in New York for years.

During her journalistic career she became known for uncompromising interviews with such world leaders as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Her recent publications - including the best-selling book "The Rage and The Pride," which came out weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 - drew accusations of inciting hatred against Muslims.

Sources suggest that Jane Wyman has died.

Patricia Kennedy Lawford, the sister of President John F. Kennedy and wife of actor Peter Lawford, died at her New York home of complications of pneumonia on Sunday, according to a family statement. She was 82.

"My sister Pat is irreplaceable," Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said in a statement. "Everyone who knew Pat adored her. She was admired for her great style, for her love and support of the arts, her wit and generosity — and for the singular sense of wonder and joy she brought into our lives."

Lawford is survived by four children and 10 grandchildren. Memorial and funeral arrangements are pending

It finally hit the news...

Actor Robert Earl Jones, father of James Earl Jones, dies at 95

ENGLEWOOD, N.J. Actor Robert Earl Jones, a fixture in Broadway shows and movies whose best-known role was as father of actor James Earl Jones, has died.

Jones, who was 96, died September 7th at the Lillian Booth Actors' Home.

Jones was a third-grade dropout from Senotobia, Mississippi, who worked as a sharecropper, then became a boxer before arriving in New York City and taking up acting. The poet Langston Hughes cast him in an early role in the Harlem Suitcase Theatre.

Jones appeared as boxing champion Joe Louis in "Spirit of Youth" and other films and Broadway productions before his career was interrupted in the 1950s when he was blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House un-American Activities Committee.

His movie career resumed by the late 1950s. He had roles in movies including "Odds Against Tomorrow," "Wild River," "The Sting" and "Witness" in a career that lasted into the 1990s. In all, he appeared in more than 20 films.

In addition to his acting, Jones ran marathons, including the New York City marathon in 1996.

Jones is survived by sons James Earl Jones and Matthew Earl Jones and a grandson. Funeral services were private.

Former Mr. Universe turned actor Mickey Hargitay, the onetime husband
of Hollywood bombshell Jayne Mansfield and father of Emmy-winning
actress Mariska Hargitay, has died at the age of 80.

The Hungarian-born Hargitay, who was named Mr. Universe in 1955 and
appeared opposite Mansfield in the 1960 film "The Loves of Hercules,"
died on Thursday, a family spokesman said.

"Words cannot express how saddened we are by the loss of Mickey. At the
same time, we are so grateful for who he was and is to all of us and
for the love he gave us in our lives," the spokesman said. "He will
continue to be a source of inspiration and strength."

A private service has been held.

Born in Budapest in 1926, bodybuilder Hargitay was working in a Mae
West stage revue in the mid-1950s when he met Hollywood film star and
sex symbol Mansfield. The couple married in 1958 and had three children
together before divorcing in the early 1960s.


Mansfield was killed in a 1967 car crash at age 34. All three children
-- Mariska, Zoltan and Mickey Jr. -- were riding in the back seat of
the 1966 Buick Electra but survived the accident.


Mariska Hargitay, 42, won an Emmy last month for her performance in the
NBC crime drama "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." She was nominated
twice before for her role as a detective on the show.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden Oscar-winning Swedish filmmaker Sven Nykvist, who was director Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer of choice, has died after a long illness, his son said. He was 83.

Nykvist died Wednesday in his bed at a Swedish nursing home where he was being treated for aphasia, a form of dementia, said his son, Carl-Gustaf Nykvist. The exact cause of death was not immediately known.

Nykvist won Academy Awards for best cinematography for the Bergman films "Cries and Whispers" in 1973 and "Fanny and Alexander" in 1982.

Nykvist's sense of lighting and camera work made him a favorite of Bergman's after their first collaboration on the 1954 movie "Sawdust and Tinsle," which began a partnership that lasted nearly 30 years.

"Together with Ingmar, he created movie history with those lighting arrangements," said Carl-Gustaf Nykvist, who directed the 2000 documentary "Light Keeps Me Company" about his father.

"He was called 'the master of light' because of the moods and atmospheres he could create with light. It was a near impossibility to create the moods he created."

Nykvist also worked on fellow Swede Lasse Hallstrom's "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and did several movies with Bergman-fan Woody Allen. His last film was "Curtain Call" in 1999.

"Sven Nykvist was somewhat of a father figure for me," Hallstrom told Swedish news agency TT. "He taught me very much during the movies we made together. He was the one who got Americans and the world to realize that lighting could be simple and realistic."

Nyvkist's wife, Ulrika, died in 1982. In addition to his son, he is survived by his daughter-in-law, Helena Berlin, and grand children Sonia Sondell and Marilde Nykvist.

Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.

Vietnam double-agent Pham Xuan An dies
By RICHARD PYLE and MARGIE MASON, Associated Press Writers1 hour, 36 minutes ago
Pham Xuan An, who led a remarkable and perilous double life as a communist spy and a respected reporter for Western news organizations during the Vietnam War, died Wednesday at age 79.

An, who suffered from emphysema, died at a military hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, his son, Pham Xuan Hoang An, told The Associated Press.

An had been in and out of consciousness since being hospitalized in July and fell into a coma days before he died, a doctor at the hospital said. An's wife and four children were at his bedside when he died, his son said.

An had lived in the city, formerly known as Saigon, since South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975.

In the history of wartime espionage, few were as successful as An. He straddled two worlds for most of the 15-year war in Indochina as an undercover communist agent while also working as a journalist, first for Reuters news service and later for 10 years as Time magazine's chief Vietnamese reporter — a role that gave him access to military bases and background briefings.

He was so well-known for his sources and insight that many Americans who knew him suspected he worked for the CIA.

Before Saigon fell to the communists, An worked to help friends escape, including South Vietnam's former security chief who feared death if he was found by northern forces. An later revealed his true identity as a Viet Cong commander, but said he never reported any false information or communist propaganda while in his role as a journalist.

In a 2000 interview with The Associated Press, An said he always had warm feelings for his press colleagues and for the United States, where he attended college at Fullerton, Calif. But deep down he remained a "true believer" in the communist cause as the best way to free Vietnam of foreign control.

"I fought for two things — independence and social justice," he said.

An's political and military contacts made him an essential source for other Vietnamese reporters working for foreign news organizations. He was known as the soft-spoken, chain-smoking oracle of "Radio Catinat," as the Saigon rumor mill was called.

But few, if any, suspected he was a communist spy.

Former media colleagues expressed mixed feelings, from bemusement to a sense of betrayal, after An revealed in the 1980s that he had been a spy.

Outside critics vilified An for his role in espionage activities that may have led to the deaths of many Americans and South Vietnamese. But most of An's ex-colleagues refrained from criticizing his deception.

"If ever there was a man caught between two worlds, it was An. It is very hard for anyone who did not serve in Vietnam in those years to understand the complexity," said David Halberstam, who covered the early years of the war for The New York Times.

Stanley Karnow, a former Time-Life correspondent in Asia and author of the seminal 1983 book, "Vietnam; A History," said that despite his secret role, An was always reliable.

"I was struck by how much he knew and was willing to share," Karnow said. "He said later that his function as a spy was not disinformation, it was to gather the best info he could for them (the Viet Cong)."

An, by his own account, was born near Saigon and at age 16 joined a nationalist movement that later became the communist Viet-Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh.

Following Vietnam's independence in 1954, he served as an aide to Col. Edward Lansdale, the U.S. intelligence officer who played an instrumental role in early U.S. support for the fledgling anti-communist regime in Saigon in the late 1950s. Lansdale was believed to be the model for a main character in Graham Greene's novel, "The Quiet American."

An told ex-colleagues in later years that he made secret trips to the jungle to confer with Viet Cong leaders. He said he knew in advance of major communist initiatives, including the 1968 Tet Offensive and North Vietnam's 1972 invasion aimed at destroying the Saigon regime.

An insisted he remained true as a journalist — never planting false or misleading information, realizing this could reveal his clandestine role.

"The truth was that I knew many things that I never told anyone," he said. "And because of this I was able on a couple of occasions to save Time from major embarrassment by telling them that a certain piece of important information was not true."

His greatest risk of exposure might have been in secretly arranging freedom for another Time staffer who had been captured by guerrilla forces in Cambodia in 1970.

Just days before Saigon fell in 1975, An helped his family to escape along with some Vietnamese news assistants and the former South Vietnamese security chief. But he stayed behind, and his relatives eventually returned.

An's Western connections caused senior Hanoi officials to distrust him despite his wartime record. They sent him to a postwar "re-education" school, and in 1997 refused him an exit visa to take part in a Vietnam War symposium in Washington, D.C.

He sometimes spoke candidly of being disillusioned with Vietnam's victorious leaders. In a meeting with three former American press colleagues in Ho Chi Minh City in 2005, An described them as "much more corrupt" than the Saigon officials he knew during the war.

At the same time he was made a brigadier general in retirement and a few years ago was promoted to major general.

Given his familiarity with the French, Viet-Minh, Viet Cong, South Vietnamese and American armies, An said in the 2000 interview, "I told them they should make me a five-star general. I don't think they understood my sense of humor."

____

AP reporter Richard Pyle, who contributed to this report from New York, covered the Vietnam War for five years and was AP's Saigon bureau chief from 1970-73. Margie Mason reported from Hanoi.

"Today we make everything so complicated. The lighting, the camers, the acting. It has taken me thirty years to arrive at simplicity."

filmed 121 features including:

What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)
Chaplin (1992)
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
Offret (1986) ... aka The Sacrifice
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)
Höstsonaten (1978) ... aka Autumn Sonata (USA)
Pretty Baby (1978)
Locataire, Le (1976) ... aka The Tenant (USA)
Persona (1966)
Såsom i en spegel (1961) ... aka Through a Glass Darkly (USA)
Jungfrukällan (1960) ... aka The Virgin Spring

Favorite bummper sticker seen in the eighties: "Jane Wyman was right."

Joseph Hayes, who wrote the novel “The Desperate Hours,” which he
later turned into a Tony Award-winning play and a movie, died on Sept.
11 in St. Augustine, Fla., where he lived. He was 88.


Mr. Hayes died in a nursing home of complications from Alzheimer’s
disease, said his son Daniel Hayes.

Though Mr. Hayes had already made it to Broadway in 1949 with a
short-lived play, “Leaf and Bough,” he was catapulted to fame with
“The Desperate Hours,” his 1954 suspense novel about a suburban
family taken hostage at home by three escaped convicts. In his review
in The New York Times, the critic Orville Prescott called it “an
expert study of the agonizing dilemma of a group of sharply delineated
and deeply understood characters.”

Immediately after the book’s debut, Mr. Hayes joined with an
actor-turned-producer, Howard Erskine, to bring the theatrical version
to Broadway. Their production, based on Mr. Hayes’s adaptation and
starring a young Paul Newman, won the 1955 Tony Award for best play.
Mr. Hayes also developed the novel into a screenplay; the movie,
directed by William Wyler, with Humphrey Bogart in the role that Mr.
Newman originated and Fredric March as the homeowner, won an Edgar
Award in 1956. The film was remade in 1990 by Michael Cimino.

The story recounted in “The Desperate Hours” was inspired by a
number of true episodes around the country. Mr. Hayes was sued several
times by families who claimed he had based his novel on their
experiences, though all of those suits were unsuccessful.

In 1955, for a photographic display accompanying an article about the
Broadway play, Life magazine posed some of the actors in a house
outside Philadelphia, where a similar home invasion had taken place
three years earlier. James J. Hill, the father of the family that had
been taken hostage, sued Time Inc., Life’s parent company, arguing
that the article and photographs had conflated his story with the
fictional, and very different, events in Mr. Hayes’s book, entitling
the Hill family to damages. In 1967, the case went before the United
States Supreme Court, where Mr. Hill was represented by Richard M.
Nixon, then a Wall Street lawyer. The court ruled in favor of Time,
citing the absence of proof of “actual malice.” (Actual malice is a
legal term meaning knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the
truth.) The ruling expanded the proof of malice requirement to cases
involving people who are not public figures but are in the news, a
significant decision in First Amendment law.

Though he never again experienced the success he had with “The
Desperate Hours,” Mr. Hayes continued over the next three decades to
work in theater and write books, most of them crime fiction. With Mr.
Erskine, he directed and produced a comedy, “The Happiest
Millionaire” on Broadway in 1956. In 1962, he wrote a thriller,
“Calculated Risk,” which would be his last play on Broadway.

Mr. Hayes had long collaborated with his wife, Marrijane, on plays and
books, and in 1962 they wrote “Bon Voyage!,” a Disney movie
starring Fred MacMurray. Mrs. Hayes died in 1991.

Joseph Arnold Hayes was born on Aug. 2, 1918, in Indianapolis, the son
of a furniture factory worker. He considered joining the priesthood,
but after a brief, unhappy stint in a seminary, went to Indiana
University. After graduating, he left for New York, where he wrote for
radio and television before his play “Leaf and Bough” was produced
on Broadway.

In addition to his son Daniel, of Georgetown, Fla., Mr. Hayes’s
survivors include two other sons, Gregory, of Atlanta, and Jason, of
Juneau, Alaska; and five grandchildren.

Danny Flores, composer of "Tequila," a huge hit for the Champs in 1958,
has died. He was 77.


Flores, who performed under the name Chuck Rio, lived in Westminster
for years. He died Tuesday, family members said, after suffering for
years from Parkinson's disease.


The classic instrumental featured Flores' instantly recognizable
saxophone line and his periodic growl of the sole lyric - "Tequila!"


Though the song sold millions and has been prominently featured in
movies such as "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," Flores made only a fraction
of what he might have.


A heavy drinker during the early days of the band, Flores signed away
his rights to the U.S. royalties for a pittance. European rights
brought in about $70,000 a year, he said in an interview with the
Register in 2000.


"Everybody is OK with his death, only because he knew that when he died
he was going home to God," said Kirk Munsell, who grew up around Flores
after Munsell's sister Sharee married Flores 33 years ago.


"I think as we leave the church, a lot of people play hymns, but we're
going to play 'Tequila' today," Munsell said of the services held today
at Forest Lawn-Cypress.

Bad Company Original Bassist "Boz" Burrell Dies
Friday September 22, 1:02 pm ET


NEW YORK, NY--(MARKET WIRE)--Sep 22, 2006 -- It is with deep regret and profound sorrow that we announce the death of our dear friend and colleague Raymond "Boz" Burrell, one of the original members and bass player in Bad Company. Boz died on September 21, 2006 at his residence in Spain. We express our gratitude to Boz for his important contribution to Swan Song and to the music of his generation. We extend our sincere condolences to his wife and family.

Composer Sir Malcolm Arnold dies

Sir Malcolm Arnold's output was prolific, including symphonies, concertos, ballet music and more than a hundred film scores.

But while some regarded him as one of the pre-eminent composers of his generation, others saw him as superficial and flippant.

The youngest of five children from a prosperous Northampton family of shoemakers, Malcolm Arnold was a rebellious teenager who was attracted to the creative freedom of jazz.

After seeing Louis Armstrong play in Bournemouth, he took up the trumpet, and at 17, won a scholarship at the Royal College of Music.

By 1943, he was a principal trumpeter with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and, throughout his life, he retained a love of music for brass.

Malcolm Arnold was given exemption from the armed forces during World War II, but his desire to serve became compelling after the death of his brother in the RAF.

However, he was turned down by the parachute regiment and then by the Navy.

When he was finally put into the infantry, he likened it to being relegated from principal trumpeter at the London Philharmonic to performing in a bus band. He ensured his return to civvy street by shooting himself in the foot.

By 1943, his gifts as a composer became apparent when he wrote the overture Beckus the Dandipratt. He followed it with a horn concerto in 1945, a symphony for strings and, in 1948, a clarinet concerto.

Film scores

He then turned mainly to composing, his first symphony being performed in 1950. Three years later, he wrote a Coronation ballet, Homage to the Queen, which was premiered at Covent Garden.

Malcolm Arnold developed a style of music that had a general appeal without being banal. His growing reputation brought him many commissions including film scores.

Among them were Whistle Down the Wind, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and the Bridge over the River Kwai.

The latter won him an Oscar for his brilliant counterpoint melody to the Colonel Bogie march.

In the 1960s, following the breakdown of his marriage, Malcolm Arnold moved to Cornwall with his second wife. By the end of the 1970s though, his life degenerated into alcoholism. It ruined his second marriage.

By 1978, he had written eight symphonies, but his Ninth took several years to complete. Indeed, his life might have ended too but for the loving care of a friend, Anthony Day, to whom his Ninth Symphony is dedicated.

He was knighted in 1993.

Sir Malcolm Arnold's unpretentious music was almost invariably appreciated by performers and audiences alike. He said he wanted to be remembered as an honest composer.

DALLAS -- Professional golfer Byron Nelson, who had the greatest year in the history of professional golf when he won 18 tournaments in 1945, including 11 in a record row, died Tuesday. He was 94.

Career PGA Tour wins leaders Rank Player Wins 1 Sam Snead 82 2 Jack Nicklaus 73 3 Ben Hogan 64 4 Arnold Palmer 62 5 Tiger Woods 53 6 Byron Nelson 52 7 Billy Casper 51 8 Walter Hagen 44 9 Cary Middlecoff 40 T-10 Gene Sarazen 39 T-10 Tom Watson 39

There was no cause of death listed on the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Web site Tuesday. A family friend told the Dallas Morning News Nelson died at his home around noon.

Known as "Lord Byron" because of his elegant swing and gentle manner, Nelson won 31 of 54 tournaments in 1944-45 then at the age of 34 retired after the 1946 season to spend more time on his Texas ranch.

The namesake of the Byron Nelson Classic, Nelson was passed by Tiger Woods for fifth on the all-time career victory list earlier this month. Woods won the Deutsche Bank Championship on Sept. 4 for his 53rd career victory; Nelson has 52.

"When I was playing regularly, I had a goal," Nelson recalled years later. "I could see the prize money going into the ranch, buying a tractor, or a cow. It gave me incentive."

That incentive pushed Nelson to become one of the best players of his era. He won the Masters in 1937 and '42, the U.S. Open in 1939 and the PGA Championship in 1940 and '45.

In 1945, Nelson won a record-setting 11 tournaments in a row, a mark also being challenged by Woods. Woods has won five consecutive PGA Tour events so far this season.

"In this day and age, with this competition, to win 11 in a row would be almost unheard of," Woods said after his fifth straight victory when asked how Nelson's accomplishment compared with others, like Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak.

"What Byron accomplished, that goes down as one of the great years in the history of our sport. ... DiMaggio's record, I see that being broken more than winning 11 in a row."

Woods' next PGA Tour start will be the American Express Championship outside London at the end of September.

He also finished second once in the U.S. Open, twice in the Masters and three times in the PGA. Nelson played in British Open only twice, finishing fifth in 1937.

I have no print source to back this up yet, but I heard a radio report that "Tokyo Rose" has died, the Japanese-American woman who was accused of broadcasting propaganda during WWII.

Chicagoans may or may not realize that she owned the Japanese gift shop at the corner of Belmont/Clark (across from Dunkin' Donuts)



I'll be damned. I just saw him in a shitty horror movie on Svengoolie last week. Don't know where Mariska got the acting chops, because it certainly wasn't from him.

CHICAGO Sep 27, 2006 (AP)— Iva Toguri D'Aquino, who was convicted and later pardoned of being World War II propagandist "Tokyo Rose," died Tuesday of natural causes, said her nephew, William Toguri. She was 90.

Tokyo Rose was the name given by soldiers to a female radio broadcaster responsible for anti-American transmissions intended to demoralize soldiers fighting in the Pacific theater. D'Aquino was the only U.S. citizen identified among the potential suspects.

In 1949, she became the seventh person to be convicted of treason in American history and served six years in prison. But doubts about her possible role as Tokyo Rose later surfaced and she was pardoned by President Gerald Ford in 1977.

D'Aquino was born in Los Angeles on July 4, 1916, to Japanese immigrant parents. She began to use the first name Iva during her school years.

D'Aquino had recently graduated from UCLA and was visiting relatives in Japan when she became trapped in the country at the beginning of World War II, according to a statement Tuesday from a Toguri family spokeswoman, Barbara Trembley.

D'Aquino began working odd jobs to support herself while trying to find a way out of the country. That led to her work on a Japanese propaganda radio show manned by Allied prisoners called "Zero Hour," the statement said.

Using the name "Orphan Ann," D'Aquino performed comedy skits and introduced newscasts.

On April 19, 1945, D'Aquino married a Portuguese citizen of Japanese-Portuguese ancestry.

The FBI and the Army conducted an extensive investigation to determine whether D'Aquino had committed crimes against the U.S. Authorities decided that the evidence then known did not merit prosecution, and she was released.

A subsequent public furor convinced the Justice Department that the matter should be re-examined and D'Aquino was arrested in Yokohama in 1945 and tried.

D'Aquino spent the years following her release from prison living a quiet life on Chicago's North Side.

Ron Yates, dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois, is credited with helping win the pardon. As a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, Yates found D'Aquino's accusers who said they were pressured by prosecutors to lie.

Japanese actor Tetsuro Tamba, best known internationally for playing dapper spymaster Tiger Tanaka in the 1967 James Bond picture "You Only Live Twice," has died in Tokyo. He was 84.

His representatives said he died Monday as a result of heart failure after a bout of pneumonia.

A veteran of more than 300 films, Tamba made his big screen debut in "Murder Suspect" in 1952. He was best known at home for 1974's "The Castle of Sand" and "The Human Revolution," which debuted in 1973.

An accomplished character actor, Tamba specialized in hard-nosed police detectives and similarly tough underworld bosses.

He appeared widely on television in the 1970s in such series as "G-Men 75" and "Key Hunter" as well as samurai dramas including "The Three Samurai."

Tamba starred in the 1973 big-budget disaster movie "Japan Sinks" and was reportedly invited to make an appearance in the remake, which is showing at Japanese theaters.

Immaculately groomed whenever he appeared in public, Tamba -- whose real name was Shosaburo Tamba -- spent his later years researching the spiritual world and proclaimed himself to be a medium. He wrote books and produced documentaries on the subject.

'Little Bit o' Soul' singer Jamie Lyons dies

The Ohio native heard singing the 1960s garage-rock hit "Little Bit o' Soul" has died.

Music Explosion lead singer Jamie Lyons died of a heart attack Monday at his home in Little River. He was 57.

His former road manager in Columbus, Ohio, says Lyons was powerful on stage and had a way of winning everybody over.

The Music Explosion formed in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1966 and released "Little Bit o' Soul" the following year. The song spent 16 weeks on the Billboard magazine pop chart, peaking at Number Two.

Lyons was originally from Galion, Ohio.

Peter Norman, the Australian sprinter who shared the medals podium with Tommie Smith and John Carlos while they gave their black power salutes at the 1968 Olympics, died Tuesday of a heart attack. He was 64. Athletics Australia chief executive Danny Corcoran announced his death.

Norman won the silver medal in the 200 meters at the Mexico City Games. Smith set a world record in winning the gold medal and Carlos took the bronze, and their civil rights protest became a flash point of the Olympics.

Smith and Carlos stood shoeless, each wearing a black glove on his raised, clenched fist. They bowed their heads while the national anthem played.

"It wasn't about black or white," Carlos said Tuesday. "It was just about humanity, faith in God and faith in making it a better world."

Norman, a physical education teacher, stood on the front podium during the ceremony. He wore a human rights badge on his shirt in support of the two Americans and their statement against racial discrimination in the United States.

"It was like a pebble into the middle of a pond, and the ripples are still traveling," Norman said last year.

Smith, Carlos and Norman drew criticism and threats for their actions, gestures that came in the aftermath that year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

"I was happy to identify with (Smith) and the principles he believed in," Norman was later quoted as saying.

Reached Tuesday at home in Georgia, the 62-year-old Smith said Norman's stand was courageous and resonated long after Mexico City.

"It took inner power to do what he did, inner soul power," Smith said. "It was a weight that is very heavy, and it is still heavy. ... He was a man of solid beliefs, that's how I will remember Peter … he was a humanitarian and a man of his word."

Speaking from his high school counseling job in Palm Springs, Calif., the 61-year-old Carlos said Norman faced his own struggles upon returning to Australia after the Olympics.

"We had our cross to bear here in the United States," Carlos said. "Peter had a bigger cross to bear because he didn't have anyone there to help shield him other than his family. He had to go through agony and torment. He took it like a soldier."

Corcoran said Norman remained heavily involved in sports. Last year, he was reunited with Smith and Carlos at San Jose State for the unveiling of a statue commemorating the 1968 protest.

"That was like God letting us have the roundup," Carlos said. "We had such a family reunion."

Corcoran said, "Whilst only Smith and Carlos were recognized in bronze, as alumni of the university, Peter was, as always, happy to have played his role."

"Peter will be remembered not only for his success as an athlete and his humanitarian gesture in Mexico City, but also for his service to athletics and the community and for his warmth and friendship."

Smith said he talked infrequently with Norman over the years, but they reconnected last year at Smith's home in Los Angeles before the unveiling of the statue, playing music and joking and debating Norman's insistence on being left off the statue.

"He believed in giving himself unto others … he would much rather remove himself and let others take his place," Smith said. "I can understand now, since Peter's gone, he left that vacancy so others could stand in his place, and that was quite awesome."

Norman was a five-time national champion in the 200 and his time of 20.06 seconds in Mexico City still stands as the Australian record.

Carlos said he and Norman had stayed in touch by e-mail.

"His sincerity, his love for humanity, his kind thoughts … those are things that I will remember," Carlos said. "He was a giving person."

Veteran actor Gene Janson, familiar to viewers of WTTW-Ch. 11 as the genial, soft-sell pitchman during the station's pledge drives, seemed a throwback to Old World gentility, his reassuring voice and manners a comfortable blend of sophistication and Midwestern honesty.

The veteran actor, 72, collapsed on stage Wednesday, Oct. 4, in mid-performance during Remy Bumppo Theatre Company's revival of "The Best Man" at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. He was rushed to Lincoln Park Hospital, where he died later surrounded by his family. The cause was a heart attack, according to his son, Christopher.

Buck O'Neil, the goodwill ambassador for the Negro Leagues who fell one vote shy of the Hall of Fame, died Friday night. He was 94.

Bob Kendrick, marketing director for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, said O'Neil died at a Kansas City hospital.

A star in the Negro Leagues who barnstormed with Satchel Paige, O'Neil later became the first black coach in the majors. Baseball was his life -- in July, he batted in a minor-league all-star game.

O'Neil had appeared strong until early August, when he was hospitalized for what was described as "fatigue." He was released a few days later, but readmitted on Sept. 17. Friends said that he had lost his voice along with his strength. No cause of death was immediately given.

"What a fabulous human being," Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson said Friday night. "He was a blessing for all of us. I believe that people like Buck and Rachel Robinson and Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa are angels that walk on earth to give us all a greater understanding of what it means to be human. I'm not sad for him. He had a long, full life and I hope I'm as lucky, but I'm sad for us."


Always projecting warmth, wit and a sunny optimism that sometimes seemed surprising for a man who lived in a climate of racial injustice for so long, O'Neil remained remarkably vigorous well into his 90s. He became as big a star as the Negro League greats whose stories he travelled the country to tell.

He would be in New York taping the "Late Show With David Letterman" one day, then back home on the golf course the next day shooting his age, a feat he first accomplished at 75.

"But it's not a good score any more," he quipped on his 90th birthday.

O'Neil had long been popular in Kansas City, but he rocketed into national stardom in 1994 when filmmaker Ken Burns featured him in his groundbreaking Public Broadcasting Service documentary "Baseball."

The rest of the country then came to appreciate the charming Negro Leagues historian as only baseball insiders had before. He may have been, as he joked, "an overnight sensation at 82," but his popularity continued to grow for the rest of his life.

"He brought the attention of a lot of people in this country to the Negro Leagues," former Washington manager Frank Robinson said. "He told us all how good they were and that they deserved to be recognized for what they did and their contributions and the injustice that a lot of them had to endure because of the colour of their skin."

Few men in any sport have witnessed the grand panoramic sweep of history that O'Neil saw and felt and experienced in baseball. A good-hitting, slick-fielding first baseman, he barnstormed with Paige in his youth, twice won a Negro Leagues batting title, then became a pennant-winning manager of the Kansas City Monarchs.

As a scout for the Chicago Cubs, he discovered and signed Hall of Famers Lou Brock and Ernie Banks.

In 1962, a tumultuous time of change in America when civil rights workers were risking their lives on the back roads of the Deep South, O'Neil broke a meaningful racial barrier when the Chicago Cubs made him the first black coach in the major leagues.

Jackie Robinson was the first black with an opportunity to make plays in the big leagues. But as bench coach, O'Neil was the first to make decisions.

He saw Babe Ruth hit home runs and Roger Clemens throw strikes. He talked hitting with Lou Gehrig and Ichiro Suzuki.

"I can't remember a time when I did not want to make my living in baseball, or a time when that wasn't what I did get to do," he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003. "God was very good to old Buck."

Born in 1911 in Florida, John "Buck" O'Neil began a lifetime in baseball hanging around the spring training complex of the great New York Yankee teams of the '20s. Some of the players befriended the youngster and allowed him inside.

In February 2006, it was widely thought that a special 12-person committee commissioned to render final judgments on Negro Leagues and pre-Negro league figures would make him a shoo-in for the Baseball Hall of Fame. It would be, his many fans all thought, a fitting tribute to the entire body of his life's work.

But when word came from Florida that day that 16 men and one woman had been voted in, he was not among them. For reasons never fully explained, he fell one vote short of the required three-fourths.

Several hundred of his friends and admirers had gathered at the Negro Leagues Museum for what they thought would be a celebration. Instead, they stood in awkward, restless silence as the old man once again -- for how many times in his long, eventful life? -- brushed bitterness aside.

"Shed no tears for Buck," he told them. "I couldn't attend Sarasota High School. That hurt. I couldn't attend the University of Florida. That hurt.

"But not going into the Hall of Fame, that ain't going to hurt me that much, no. Before, I wouldn't even have a chance. But this time I had that chance.

"Just keep loving old Buck."

But among his close friends, few believed that his heart wasn't really broken.

"It is clear the Baseball Hall of Fame has made a terrible error in not inducting Buck on this ballot," Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said. "It is rare that an entire community rallies around a single person, but our city loves Buck, what he stands for and his indomitable spirit.

"Buck O'Neil is a man who has done more than anyone to popularize and keep alive the history of the Negro Leagues."

In the months that followed, O'Neil embarked on an exhausting schedule that had him flying to California, Ohio, Arizona and New York among other stops. He spoke at the induction ceremonies in Cooperstown. In July, he batted in the top and bottom of the first inning of the Northern League all-star game, making him the oldest man ever to play in a professional baseball game.

"He was one of the pioneers of Negro League baseball, and he was one of the guys who never let it die," Oakland third-base coach Ron Washington said. "He was one of the guys that made sure that people knew of all the talent that was in that league. I was quite disappointed when he wasn't inducted into the Hall of Fame, but he made it possible for the ones who were inducted into the Hall of Fame."

O'Neil was especially loved by the very young. In appearances at children's clubs and elementary schools throughout the country, kids of all colour would gather 'round to hear the merry-eyed, grandfatherly figure spin his tales.

Among older African-Americans, however, he would sometimes run into resentment. Why relive the Jim Crow past? Why dredge up bitter memories of segregated lunch counters and public facilities with insulting "whites only" signs?

But O'Neil would fire right back.

"It's very important that we know our history. We have to do that," he said. "I would remind them of a time when baseball was a source of joy for them. Then as we talked about it, they would remember who they were with, even what they wore to the games.

"I would tell them this is not a sad story. It's a celebration!"

In the forward to O'Neil's autobiography in 1996, Burns wrote of his amazing ability to see the goodness in his fellow man.

"His life reflects the past and contains many of the bitter experiences that our country reserved for men of his color, but there is no bitterness in him," he said.

"It's not so much that he put that suffering behind him as that he has brought gold and light out of bitterness and despair, loneliness and suffering. He knows he can go farther with generosity and kindness than with anger and hate."

O'Neil has no children; his closest living relative is a brother, Warren O'Neil.

how'd you like to be the asshole who kept Buck O'neil out of the Hall of Fame

that fucker should lose his right to ever vote again

I guess you could say, and you'd be right, that his numbers as a player or as a coach weren't sufficient. But then someone should show you all the good O'Neill did and then punch you in the nuts.

Just to be technical, that would be "assholes" in its plural form.

This is a sad day. A graceful man is gone. The guy had every reason to be bitter, but he didn't do it. He just kept going on.

Hunter loses battle with cancer

Paul Hunter has died at the age of 27 after a battle with cancer. The Leeds player was taken into the Kirkwood Hospice in Huddersfield last Friday and died on Monday evening.The three-time Masters champion was diagnosed with dozens of neuro endocrine tumours on the lining of his stomach in March 2005.
Hunter would have been 28 on Saturday. He leaves a wife, Lindsey, and a daughter, Evie Rose, who was born on Boxing Day of last year.

Former world champion John Parrot was among the first to pay tribute. "Paul certainly brought a touch of glamour to the game - they called him 'the Beckham of the baize'," Parrot told BBC Five Live. "And his performances at Wembley were fantastic. To win three titles was tremendous. He was a happy-go-lucky man, always played with a smile on his face and never had a bad word to say about anyone."

Stephen Hendry, the seven-times world champion, added: "I'm absolutely devastated by the news. "He's got a young family and he had a fantastic future in front of him. It's everyone's worst nightmare and puts everything into perspective." Willie Thorne, a BBC commentator and former professional, said: "Deep down I think we all thought he was going to beat the disease. "He was one of the best-looking snooker players we ever had and had a heart like a lion. He lit up the stage when he played, was a very flamboyant player and there will be a big hole in everybody's hearts for the next year or so."

And World Snooker chairman Sir Rodney Walker added: "Paul was a man who had everything going for him - an outstanding talent, good looks, fame, riches, charm and a beautiful wife. "This shows us just how quickly life can change. It's a bitter blow for snooker, but most importantly for his family, and our thoughts are with them."

Hunter turned professional at the age of 16 in 1995 and won his first major title, the 1998 Welsh Open, at the age of 19. He also won the Welsh title in 2002 and picked up the British Open trophy the same year. But he will be best remembered for his exploits at Wembley. Hunter recovered from 7-3 down to beat Fergal O'Brien 10-9 in the 2001 final after finding inspiration with wife Lindsey during the midway interval. Hunter won eight of 11 frames in the evening session and what he jokingly called his 'plan B' became the stuff of legend. He also fought back from 5-0 down to beat Mark Williams 10-9 in the final a year later. And he completed a hat-trick of Masters victories in 2004 when he came from 7-2 down to beat Ronnie O'Sullivan 10-9.

A splash of wedding photos in Hello magazine confirmed Hunter as a sportsman who transcended his chosen pursuit to achieve celebrity status. He should have reached the 2003 World Championship final, where he led Ken Doherty 15-9 in the semi-finals before the Irishman stormed back to win 17-16. And Thorne believes Hunter would have certainly won the World Championship if cancer had not struck. "Anyone who wins the Masters back-to-back is a great player," said Thorne. "Paul Hunter was a great player and I'm sure that he would have been a future world champion, without a doubt."

Despite chemotherapy treatment, Hunter continued to compete professionally but won only one match last season and fell from fifth to 34th in the rankings.

Born: 14/10/1978
Turned pro: 1998
Major titles: Welsh Open ('98, '02), Masters ('01, '02, '04), British Open ('02)
Family: Wife Lindsey, daughter Evie Rose
Died: 9/10/2006

LOS ANGELES - Ed Benedict, a legendary animator who put life, love and laughter in TV cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble and Yogi Bear, has died at the age of 94.

Benedict died in his sleep on Aug. 28 in Auburn in Northern California, his longtime friend and fellow animator David K. Sheldon confirmed Tuesday.

"He was quite an interesting fellow, that's for sure," Sheldon said. "He was the main character designer for all the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw."

Benedict, who worked at MGM, Universal and other studios on short, theatrical cartoons, joined Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera soon after the pair launched their groundbreaking Hanna-Barbera TV animation studio in the late 1950s. Among his many designs for them were the characters for their first series, 1957's "The Ruff & Reddy Show."

For "The Flintstones," the story of a "modern Stone Age family," Benedict not only designed the hapless cavemen Fred and Barney, but also their long-suffering wives, Wilma and Betty, and the show's clever array of Stone Age houses and gadgets, including the characters' foot-powered cars.

"The Flintstones," one of the first cartoon series created for adults as well as children, debuted in 1960 and was an immediate hit. Forty-six years later, Fred and Barney remain squarely in the public consciousness as pitchmen for various products, including Flintstones' vitamins.

"It would not be an exaggeration to say that a large part of H-B's success in TV animation is owed to Benedict's incredibly appealing and fun character designs," cartoon historian Jerry Beck wrote in a tribute posted on the Web site cartoonbrew.com

Without the time and budget that were lavished on classic theatrical cartoons, TV animated comedies had to leave out beautiful backgrounds and lifelike movement in favor of witty dialogue and stories with vivid characters.

"Benedict's designs are both simple — they needed to be to accommodate the strenuous demands of limited TV animation — and highly sophisticated, containing that indefinable drawing quality that gives a drawing charm and personality," Amid Amidi wrote in his book "Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation."

Before joining Hanna-Barbera, Benedict worked for another cartoon legend, Tex Avery, at both Universal and MGM studios. At MGM, where Hanna and Barbera also worked, he was the lead layout artist and designer on "Deputy Droopy" and other popular theatrical shorts.

He also worked with "Woody Woodpecker" creator Walter Lantz on several shorts, including "The Dizzy Dwarf" and "Unpopular Mechanic."

Benedict, who was preceded in death by his wife, Alice, had requested that his ashes be scattered over California's Carmel Bay.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Did he not also invent Ed Benedicts which later became Eggs Benedict?

Yaba Daba Do!

Danièle Huillet, the French-born filmmaker who, in collaboration with her husband, Jean-Marie Straub, created some of the most challenging and intensely debated motion pictures of the modernist era, died on Monday at the home of friends in the Loire Valley in France. She was 70.

The cause was cancer, Agence France-Presse reported. Ms. Huillet, who lived in Rome with her husband, was visiting France for treatment of her illness.

Their latest film, “Ces Rencontres Avec Eux” (“These Encounters With Them”), is scheduled to open in France on Wednesday. In the film, nonprofessional actors recite from the Italian writer Cesare Pavese’s “Dialogues With Leuco” while standing in a forest. It was presented in competition in September at the Venice Film Festival, where the couple received a special award for “the innovative aspect of the cinematographic language” of their body of work.

Among the best-known films of Straub-Huillet, as the couple was known in critical shorthand, are “The Chronicle of Anna-Magdalena Bach” (1967), an approach to the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach as seen through the journals of his wife; and “Class Relations,” a 1984 film based on Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, “America.”

As filmmakers, Mr. Straub and Ms. Huillet belonged to the generation that produced the French New Wave, although their work took a radically different direction. Their aesthetic, grounded in the philosophical materialism of Marx and Engels, was one of extreme realism that resisted superfluous embellishments and editing effects. Their work has been extensively analyzed and argued about in many books and film journals.

Shooting most often in black-and-white, in extreme long takes either from a fixed camera position or in carefully choreographed tracking shots, the filmmakers tried to be faithful to the landscapes or interiors in which their films were set, presenting them whole, with little editing or distortions of spatial relationships.

The texts they chose were taken from both classical sources (Pierre Corneille for “Othon,” 1969) and modern ones (Arnold Schoenberg’s opera “Aaron and Moses,” filmed in 1975). Read by a narrator, either onscreen or off, the texts were placed in counterpoint to concrete images, creating a sense of language as a solid, sensual phenomenon itself.

Danièle Huillet (pronounced hwee-YAY) was born in Paris on May 1, 1936, and attended the Lycée Jules Ferry. She gained a reputation for intellectual independence early. According to one often-cited anecdote, when applying to Idhec, as France’s national film school was known in the 1950’s, she refused to submit the required entrance essay on the grounds that the film she was asked to analyze, Yves Allégret’s “Manèges,” was unworthy of serious consideration.

In 1954, she met and soon married Mr. Straub, a kindred spirit from Lorraine. She later joined him in exile in Germany when Mr. Straub left France rather than serve in the Algerian war. It was there that the couple made their first short film, “Machorka-Muff” (1963), and their first feature, “Not Reconciled” (1965), both based on texts by the novelist Heinrich Böll about the survival of Nazism in postwar German life.

Their next film, “The Chronicle of Anna-Magdalena Bach,” was their first international success. It remains the only Straub-Huillet film available on DVD in the United States. Shot largely in the actual locations where Bach lived and worked, and featuring the musician Gustav Leonhardt playing period instruments, the film created a moving contrast between the material conditions of Bach’s life and the transcendent quality of his music.

In the 1970’s, the pair moved to Rome, where they established a famously disordered household filled with the stray cats and dogs that they could not resist taking in. They had no children. Italy quickly became part of their cultural storehouse, and they made their first film based on Pavese’s writing, “From the Clouds to the Resistance,” in 1979.

Famously combative, solidly built and never without a Brechtian cigar, Mr. Straub enjoyed playing bad cop at festival press conferences to Ms. Huillet’s softer, more conciliatory personality.

Never willing to abide by the rules of commercial filmmaking, the couple financed their work through an elaborate network of film and television producers, often underwritten by state film funds. Even as they became institutions on the festival and museum circuit, they projected the brash, provocative aspect of eternal Young Turks, always willing to upset any and all apple carts in the immediate vicinity.

In a tribute published yesterday in the French newspaper Libération, the critic Olivier Seguret expressed the fears of many admirers of Straub-Huillet: “Dead, Danièle Huillet kills us twice, because her passing probably means that Straub will never film again.”

ROME (AFP) - Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, best known for his 1966 epic "The Battle of Algiers", died at the age of 86, ANSA news agency reported.

Pontecorvo is widely considered one of Italy's greatest post-World War II directors.

"The Battle of Algiers", a film on the Algerian fight for independence from French colonial rule which was banned in France for years, won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 1966.

Pontecorvo also directed the acclaimed "Queimada" with Marlon Brando about a slave revolt on a Caribbean island.

Two of his films were nominated for an Academy Award.

Pontecorvo was a chemistry student before turning to journalism. He became a member of the underground communist party in the early 1940s during the Mussolini dictatorship and joined the antifascist movement in 1943.

He headed the Venice film festival from 1992 to 1996.

Comedy legend Belson dies
Emmy winner teamed with Marshall on 'Van Dyke,' 'Lucy'

By GARRY MARSHALL

Jerry Belson's former writing partner Garry Marshall remembers his longtime friend.
Jerry Belson, the funniest man in the world, has died.

That's how his comedy peers referred to the 68-year-old Belson, who died of cancer Oct. 10 in Los Angeles.

A memorial service will be held Oct. 23 at 4 p.m. at the Falcon Theater, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank, Calif.

Belson was known as the writer's writer. He received 12 Emmy noms, winning three times for "The Tracey Ullman Show," "Tracey Takes On..." and "The Dick Van Dyke Show." He also did regular punch-up on "Cheers" and was a producer on "The Drew Carey Show" and a producer-director on "The Odd Couple."

He appeared in a command performance on an episode of "Laverne & Shirley," in which he somehow played his eyeballs as a musical instrument to the tune of "If You Knew Suzy."

Belson and I were considered one of the top comedy writing teams of the '60s and '70s, creating memorable episodes of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," "The Lucy Show," "The Danny Thomas Show," "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.," "The Joey Bishop Show" and "Hey Landlord."

We went on to create TV specials for Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, as well as a Danny Thomas special for which we won the Writers Guild Award.

Our crowning achievement in television was Emmy-nommed classic comedy "The Odd Couple." Together we created a style that inspired generations of comedy writers.

Belson's film credits include "Smile," "The Grasshopper," "The End" and "Fun With Dick and Jane." He also wrote and directed "Surrender" and the cult pic "Jekyll and Hyde ... Together Again."

During his long association with directors Steven Spielberg and Michael Ritchie, he worked on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Always," "Semi-Tough" and "Fletch."

Belson's fast-paced, savage and smart comedy somehow managed to celebrate the human condition while mocking the futility of life. He was always on the lookout for pretension, once commenting upon observing an insecure Hollywood hotshot, "He's the only man I know who swaggers into a room on his knees."

Born and raised in the border town of El Centro, Calif., his sole ambition was to leave town. Immediately after receiving his high school diploma, he dashed to his pre-packed car and drove directly to Hollywood.

After struggling for a few years as a magician, comicbook writer and drummer, he finally broke into writing with a Danny Thomas script at the age of 22.

He is survived by his wife, actress Jo Ann Belson; two daughters; a son; two grandchildren; a sister, screenwriter-novelist Monica Johnson; and a brother, radio personality Gordon Belson.

Donations may be made to Loving Paws Assistance Dogs, a nonprofit organization that trains dogs to assist children who are physically disabled.

Recently featured in a GOP talking point...

Former U.S.-Rep. Studds dies at 69

Former U.S. Rep. Gerry Studds, the first openly gay person elected to Congress, died early Saturday at Boston Medical Center, several days after he collapsed while walking his dog, his husband said.

Studds fell unconscious Oct. 3 because of what doctors later determined was a blood clot in his lung, Dean Hara said.

Studds regained consciousness, remained in the hospital, and seemed to be improving. He was scheduled to be transferred to a rehabilitation center, but his condition deteriorated Friday and he died at about 1:30 a.m. Saturday, Hara said.

Hara, who married Studds shortly after gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts in 2004, said Studds was a pioneer who gave courage to gay people everywhere by winning re-election after publicly acknowledging his homosexuality.

"He gave people of his generation, or my generation, of future generations, the courage to do whatever they wanted to do," he said.

Studds was first elected in 1972 and represented Cape Cod and the Islands, New Bedford, and the South Shore for 12 Congressional terms. He retired from Congress in 1997.

In 1983, Studds acknowledged his homosexuality after a former Congressional page revealed he'd had a relationship with Studds a decade earlier.

Studds was censured by the House for having sexual relations with the page. He acknowledged having sex with a 17-year-old male page in 1973 and making sexual advances to two others and admitted an error in judgment, but did not apologize.

Tex-Mex Singer Freddy Fender, 69, Dies
By Associated Press
6 hours ago

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas - Freddy Fender, the "Bebop Kid" of the Texas-Mexico border who later turned his twangy tenor into the smash country ballad "Before the Next Teardrop Falls," died Saturday. He was 69.

Fender, who was diagnosed with lung cancer in early 2006, died at noon at his Corpus Christi home with his family at his bedside, said Ron Rogers, a family spokesman.

Over the years, he grappled with drug and alcohol abuse, was treated for diabetes and underwent a kidney transplant.

Fender hit it big in 1975 after some regional success, years of struggling _ and a stint in prison _ when "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" climbed to No. 1 on the pop and country charts.

"Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" rose to No. 1 on the country chart and top 10 on the pop chart that same year, while "Secret Love" and "You'll Lose a Good Thing" also hit No. 1 in the country charts.

Born Baldemar Huerta, Fender was proud of his Mexican-American heritage and frequently sung verses or whole songs in Spanish. "Teardrop" had a verse in Spanish.

"Whenever I run into prejudice," he told The Washington Post in 1977, "I smile and feel sorry for them, and I say to myself, `There's one more argument for birth control.'"

"The Old Man upstairs rolled a seven on me," he told The Associated Press in 1975. "I hope he keeps it up."

More recently, he played with Doug Sahm, Flaco Jimenez and others in two Tex-Mex all-star combos, the Texas Tornados and Los Super Seven.

He won a Grammy of Best Latin Pop Album in 2002 for "La Musica de Baldemar Huerta." He also shared in two Grammys: with the Texas Tornados, which won in 1990 for best Mexican-American performance for "Soy de San Luis," and with Los Super Seven in the same category in 1998 for "Los Super Seven."

Among his other achievements, Fender appeared in the 1987 motion picture "The Milagro Beanfield War," directed by Robert Redford.

In February 1999, Fender was awarded a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame after then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush wrote to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce endorsing him.

He said in a 2004 interview with The Associated Press that one thing would make his musical career complete _ induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

"Hopefully I'll be the first Mexican-American going into Hillbilly Heaven," he said.

Fender was born in 1937 in San Benito, the South Texas border town credited for spawning the Mexican-polka sound of conjunto. The son of migrant workers who did his own share of picking crops, he also was exposed to the blues sung by blacks alongside the Mexicans in the fields.

Always a performer, he sang on the radio as a boy and won contests for his singing _ one prize included a tub full of about $10 worth of food.

But his career really began in the late '50s, when he returned from serving in the Marines and recorded Spanish-language versions of Elvis Presley's "Don't Be Cruel" and Harry Belafonte's "Jamaica Farewell." The recordings were hits in Mexico and South America.

He signed with Imperial Records in 1959, renaming himself "Fender" after the brand of his electric guitar, "Freddy" because it sounded good with Fender.

Fender initially recorded "Wasted Days" in 1960. But his career was put on hold shortly after that when he and his bass player ended up spending almost three years in prison in Angola, La., for marijuana possession.

After prison came a few years in New Orleans and a then an everyday life taking college classes, working as a mechanic and playing an occasional local gig. He once said he sang in bars so dingy he performed with his eyes shut "dreaming I was on `The Ed Sullivan Show.'"

"I felt there's no great American dream for this ex-Chicano migrant farm worker," he told the AP. "I'd picked too many crops and too many strings."

But his second break came when he was persuaded to record "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" on an independent label in 1974 and it was picked up by a major label. With its success, he won the Academy of Country Music's best new artist award in 1975. He re-released "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" and it climbed to the top of the charts as well.

Cristina Balli, spokeswoman for the Narciso Martinez Cultural Arts Center in San Benito, said Fender illustrated the diversity of Mexican-American and Latino musicians.

"We have our feet in different worlds and different cultures," she said. "We have our roots music ... but then we branch out to other things, pick up different styles. I think he was the precursor to Los Lonely Boys."

Fender's later years were marred by health problems resulting in a kidney transplant from his daughter, Marla Huerta Garcia, in January 2002 and a liver transplant in 2004. Fender was to have lung surgery in early 2006 until surgeons found tumors.

"I feel very comfortable in my life," Fender told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in August. "I'm one year away from 70 and I've had a good run. I really believe I'm OK. In my mind and in my heart, I feel OK. I cannot complain that I haven't lived long enough, but I'd like to live longer."

Rogers said Fender will be brought back to San Benito for a funeral and memorial services. Details on the arrangements were pending.

Before The Next Teardrop Falls

Wasted Days And Wasted Nights

Jim Glennon, who was the cinematographer for the majority of episodes of
DEADWOOD, has died, I was informed by a fellow cast member tonight. He was
the son of Bert Glennon, who was the cinematographer on such classics as
STAGECOACH, the original TEN COMMANDMENTS, RIO GRANDE, and the original
HOUSE OF WAX. Jim's own credits include ABOUT SCHMIDT, ELECTION, CITIZEN
RUTH, and CARNIVÁLE as director of photography, and as camera operator on
ALTERED STATES, THE CONVERSATION, ORDINARY PEOPLE, and TRUE CONFESSIONS. He
was the location DP on RETURN OF THE JEDI.

More importantly, he was an absolutely splendid human being, one of the
truest gentlemen it has been my pleasure to know in this business. He was
kind, funny, vastly encouraging, and unfailingly upbeat. In the four years
since I began work on DEADWOOD, I never once recall seeing him without a
smile, and he rarely let a take go by without a compliment to someone
involved.


There's nothing wrong with Hollywood that a dozen Jim Glennons wouldn't
cure.


RIP, my friend.


Jim Beaver

Playboy editor Michelle Urry passed away this week after a battle with ocular melanoma. She was 66.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Urry graduated from UCLA as an English major and dress shop owner. After selling her shop, she relocated to New York to gain work as a designer. She quickly changed scenery again, heading to Chicago at the behest of a friend who suggested Playboy and its possible design work potential.

Playboy offered her secretarial work instead and, insulted, Urry declined. She was soon after offered the job of "bunny department assistant," a position with the possibility of upgrade to the editorial department. After a short while at this job, she transferred yet again to receptionist at the Playboy mansion, where she was told she may become a cartoon editor in a year's time.

From the early 1970s until her death, Urry sorted through more than 1,000 cartoons a week to come up with a couple dozen to appear in the monthly magazine, then sent them to Hugh Hefner for the final selection. Her taste -- seasoned by a girlhood of reading comic books, the study of the history of cartoons and experience as a fashion designer -- helped shape the famous look of Playboy's cartoons.

Brian Walker, curator of a 1984 exhibition of Playboy cartoons at the Museum of Cartoon Art in Rye Brook, N.Y., wrote that "perhaps with the exception of The New Yorker, Playboy has been the only publication to maintain excellence in the field."

Playboy's cartoons were certainly sexier than The New Yorker's, but they also reflected a cheekier, more anti-establishment sensibility that Hefner has said presaged and reflected the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s. Urry assembled a worldwide stable of artists who captured this worldview.

In an interview on Tuesday, Hefner said that occasionally Urry would persuade him to use a cartoon he had initially rejected. He also praised her ability to communicate with cartoonists, whose artistic egos often needed massaging.

Urry's first husband, Steven Urry, a sculptor, died in 1993. She is survived by her husband, Alan R. Trustman, a screenwriter, and a son, Caleb Urry.

Urry is survived by her husband, Alan R. Trustman, and one son.

http://www.twingalaxies.com/index.aspx?c=19&id=1398

Doris Self Dies in Auto Accident
At 81, she was the world's oldest video game competitor

Plantation, FL - October 6, 2006 -- Doris Self, the world's oldest video game competitor, has passed on, dying from injuries suffered in an automobile accident in Plantation, Florida on October 3, 2006.

Her memorial services will be held at the Plantation United Methodist Church, 1001 Northwest 70th Avenue, Plantation, FL 33313 at 11:00 AM Saturday, October 7th. Cards and flowers are welcome. At her request, she will be cremated and her ashes will be taken out on a casino boat and dropped into the ocean. For more information on the services, please call the Plantation United Methodist Church at (954)584-7500.

Doris Self was the Matriarch of the video game world. She was a major star in the burgeoning video game industry, the senior member of a growing cadre of gaming celebrities who represent the modern electronic era, which, some say, has grown to nearly $35 billion in annual gross income.

And, according to the Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records, Doris was the oldest person to actively pursue video game world records, competing against gamers one-quarter her age.

And, now she is gone. Doris Self was 81.

Doris first gained notoriety in 1983 when she achieved a world record score of 1,112,300 points on the classic arcade game Q*Bert during Twin Galaxies' 1983 Video Game Masters Tournament, an event that was conducted for the Guinness Book of World Records. She was 58 years old then, the oldest person up to that time to capture a video game world title. Though she later lost the Q*Bert high-score title in 1985, she remained Twin Galaxies' record holder for "oldest" champion until 2003, when John Lawton of Weirs Beach, NH, age 72, broke the world record on the classic arcade video Depth Charge. In an interview conducted in 2005, Doris laments: “I was sad when I lost the title I had held for twenty years. “Then I got a call from gaming legend Billy Mitchell, who offered to loan me a Q*bert machine to practice on and win back my title. Billy made me promise that I would give up poker and practice Q*bert everyday.”

Doris remained undeterred by the loss of her title and spent the next two years on a quest to regain her title as the "oldest" world champion. From the moment that Mitchell delivered the Q*Bert machine to Doris’ house, Doris, ate, drank and slept Q*Bert, practicing day and night to break the Q*bert record. Mitchell, famous for being designated the "Video Game Player-of-the-Century" at the 1999 Tokyo Game Show, later said: “I could recognize a champion a mile away and believed Doris could win back her title. I like helping people like Doris to excel, reaching their highest potential.”

Doris and Billy Mitchell became best friends. She was a regular visitor to Billy’s family business, Rickey’s Restaurant in Hollywood, Florida, the home of “Rickey’s World Famous Sauce,” the hot sauce brand that Billy created and marketed internationally. Doris was so close to Billy that she bequeathed to him her most treasured item: the little stuffed Q*Bert doll that she placed atop the Q*Bert machine whenever she played. That doll traveled far and wide. With Billy Mitchell in tow, she subsequently embarked on three major trips to play Q*Bert in front of Twin Galaxies' referees, who planned to verify her accomplishment if she broke the record on Q*Bert.

In the summer of 2005, Doris attended the Classic Gaming Expo in London, where she doggedly pursued the Q*Bert title, in spite of major distractions caused by the media circus that surrounded her. Though her vivacious personality made her the star of the Expo, jetlag and fatigue prevented her from attaining a new world Q*Bert record. Next, in April, 2006, during a Twin Galaxies event called: Who's the Toughest Gun in the Dodge City of Video Games, Doris matched scores with her chief Q*Bert rival, Kelly Tharp of Indiana, who was less than half her age. Though neither player broke the world record, Doris proved herself the equal of this much younger player.

To Doris, Q*Bert was more than just a game; it was therapy. According to Ann Ennis, Doris' sister, Doris would play Q*Bert five nights per week from 1-3:00 AM in the morning as an alternative to taking pills for sleeping. And, on the last night of her life, it was no different. Ann Ennis heard Doris playing for hours, practicing into the night.

Born in Cambridge on September 18, 1925, Doris graduated from Burdette College in Boston. From early on, Doris had a knack for making history. At 19, she became one of the first female flight attendants at Eastern Airlines, graduating in 1945 as a member of Eastern Airlines’ first class of airline stewardesses. Later, in 1954, while working with legendary air ace Eddie Rickenbacker, she co-organized ‘The Silver Liners,’ history’s first association for ex-stewardesses. Today, the DC-3 Doris used to fly on is hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

She later married Paul Self, an Eastern pilot and raised two children. Then in her 50s, after Paul passed away in 1980, Self discovered video arcades. To cheer her up one day, Doris’ daughter took her to a movie and then to a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant for pizza. It was there that Doris first met Q*Bert. Within a few games, she was hooked. A new lifestyle was now forming for Doris, one that found her visiting arcades after 11:00 PM -- after the children had gone home -- to play Q*bert, her favorite game. Q*Bert is a strange little title featuring a daffy-looking creature who hops around on a grid made up of dozens of colorful cubes. The cubes change color with each hop, and the goal is to make them all the same color, while dodging a variety of critters who are trying to devour poor little Q*bert.

Her last few days were among her busiest. "Her last weekend was absolutely full," says sister Ann. "On Friday night, we went to the Hard Rock Casino at Seminole Indian Village in Hollywood, FL, spending $100 at the gambling tables. Then we went home. Doris and myself were conservative. Even though Doris has been to casinos in every state, both of us felt $100 was plenty to lose in a casino."

On Saturday, Doris met with the 'Silver Liners' at a local yacht club in Ft. Lauderdale to discuss plans for an annual Christmas Charity called "The Flight to the North Pole," which benefited disabled children. The Santa Claus for this annual event is the CEO for "Spirit Airlines."

On Tuesday, her last day, she played hostess to one dozen friends, elderly retirees who all shared the same passion for poker and bridge. They started arriving by 9:00 AM and were finished playing by 1:30 PM. Next they had an appointment to play poker at the local country club. But first, Doris paused to let the dogs out and put away the food before getting into her car to catch up to her friends who had already gathered at the Lago Mar Country Club, a six-mile drive away. There, six old friends waited for Doris to join them in some hands of poker, a decades-old tradition among their group of retirees. One of the elderly players was eagerly waiting for Doris to replace her so she could switch over to a table specializing in bridge.

Because Doris was an extremely punctual person, her friends began to worry when she failed to appear on time. After one hour, the poker club broke up early to go look for Doris. Her sister Ann was the first to find Doris. At the corner of Doris's street, which intersects with a major road, she spied a two-vehicle accident surrounded by ambulances and tow trucks. The automobile that proved to be her sister's car was so wrecked that she could only identify it by the license plate. Doris had been wearing her seat belt and her air bag did deploy, but the wreckage was so great that she died instantaneously of a broken neck.

Services are on Saturday, October 7th. At her request, she will be cremated, ridden out on casino boat and dropped into the ocean. She loved the water, having been a lifeguard for many years, still spending many hours at a time in her pool at her house. She was in the pool with her sister as recently as Sunday.

The Q*bert machine will be returned to Billy Mitchell, who had presented it to Doris on a "lifetime" permanent loan. Walter Day, founder of Twin Galaxies says: “The machine will be outfitted with a special memorial plaque created by the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard, that will identify the game as Doris' Q*Bert machine, commemorating its role in video game history. When the video game industry matures enough to have its own ‘Hall of Fame,’ this machine will become part of its historic collection.”

In one of her last interviews, Doris said: "My bridge-playing girlfriends have no idea of all the adventures I have been through. They think my Q*bert quest is strange, but this is my life and I feel like I’ve packed four lifetimes into my years and don’t plan to stop now.”

Doris is survived by a sister, Ann Ennis of Ft. Lauderdale and a daughter, Kerri Self, of Fort Lauderdale, FL, who is an Executive Director at Primus Telecom.

Emmy Award-winning Daryl Duke, best known for directing the 1983
television miniseries The Thornbirds, has died at age 77.


Duke died at his home in West Vancouver on Saturday after a battle with
pulmonary fibrosis.


The Vancouver native's career in film and television spanned five
decades in Canada and the United States.


Duke began his career at the National Film Board before moving to the
CBC.


Duke won many awards, including an Emmy Award for best director of a
dramatic program and a Canadian Film Award -now the Genie Awards --
for best director of a feature film.
He was granted an honourary doctorate from BC's Simon Fraser University
and also received ACTRA's John Drainie Award for distinguished
contribution to broadcasting and a Directors Guild of Canada lifetime
achievement award.


A member of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Broadcast Hall of
Fame, Duke spent much of his life advocating for and defending free
speech and individual rights and freedoms.


In 1983, The Thorn Birds, a 10-hour television mini-series directed by
Duke, dominated the airwaves.


Daryl originated the first television shows from the CBC's station in
Vancouver, CBUT, which went on the air in December, 1953.


There he produced and directed variety programs, classical music
series, dramas and public affairs documentaries for West Coast
audiences and for the national broadcaster.


He also produced episodes of the acclaimed public affairs series, "This
Hour Has Seven Days."


Duke was also one of the founders of Vancouver's CKVU television
station.


Duke is survived by his wife Anne-Marie Dekker, sons Brian and David,
stepson Michael Favelle and nine grandchildren.


A public memorial will be held, the location and date to be announced.

Jane Wyatt, the lovely, serene actress who for six years on "Father Knows Best" was one of TV's favorite moms, has died, her publicist said Sunday. She was 96.

Wyatt died Friday in her sleep of natural causes at her Bel-Air home, according to publicist Meg McDonald. Her death also was confirmed by Bernard Johnson of the funeral home Gates, Kingsley & Gates Moeller Murphy Funeral Directors.

Wyatt had a successful film career in the 1930s and '40s, notably as Ronald Colman's lover in 1937's "Lost Horizon."

But it was her years as Robert Young's TV wife, Margaret Anderson, on "Father Knows Best" that brought the actress her lasting fame.

She appeared in 207 half-hour episodes from 1954 to 1960 and won three Emmys as best actress in a dramatic series in the years 1958 to 1960. The show began as a radio sitcom in 1949; it moved to television in 1954.

"Being a family show, we all had to stick around," she once said. "Even though each show was centered on one of the five members of the family, I always had to be there to deliver such lines as `Eat your dinner, dear,' or `How did you do in school today?' We got along fine, but after the first few years, it's really difficult to have to face the same people day after day."

The Anderson children were played by Elinor Donahue, Billy Gray and Lauren Chapin, and all grew up on the show. In later years critics claimed that shows like "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie and Harriet" presented a glossy, unreal view of the American family.

In defense, Wyatt commented in 1966: "We tried to preserve the tradition that every show had something to say. The children were complicated personally, not just kids. We weren't just five Pollyannas."

It was a tribute to the popularity of the show that after its run ended, it continued in reruns on CBS and ABC for three years in primetime, a TV rarity. The show came to an end because Young, who had also played the father in the radio version, had enough. Wyatt remarked in 1965 that she was tired, too.

"The first year was pure joy," she said. "The second year was when the problems set in. We licked them, and the third year was smooth going. Fatigue began to set in during the fourth year. We got through the fifth year because we all thought it would be the last. The sixth? Pure hell."

The role wasn't the only time in her 60 years in films and TV that Wyatt was cast as the warm, compassionate wife and mother. She even played Mr. Spock's mom in the original "Star Trek" series and the feature "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home."

She got her start in films in the mid-'30s, appearing in "One More River," "Great Expectations," "We're Only Human" and "The Luckiest Girl in the World." When Frank Capra chose her to play the Shangri-la beauty in "Lost Horizon," her reputation was made. Moviegoers were entranced by the scene — chaste by today's standards — in which Colman sees her swimming nude in a mountain lake.

Never a star, Wyatt enjoyed career longevity with her reliable portrayals of genteel, understanding women. Among the notable films:

"Buckskin Frontier" (with Richard Dix), "None But the Lonely Heart" (Cary Grant), "Boomerang" (Dana Andrews), "Gentleman's Agreement" (Gregory Peck), "Pitfall" (Dick Powell), "No Minor Vices" (Dana Andrews), "Canadian Pacific" (Randolph Scott), "My Blue Heaven" (Betty Grable, Dan Dailey) and "Criminal Lawyer" (Pat O'Brien).

"Father Knows Best" enjoyed such lasting popularity in reruns and people's memories that the cast returned years later for two reunion movies. She also remained active on other projects, such as "Amityville: The Horror Goes On" in 1989, and in charity work.

When Young died in 1998, Wyatt paid tribute to him as "simply one of the finest people to grace our industry."

"Though we never socialized off the set, we were together every day for six years, and during that time he never pulled rank (and) always treated his on-screen family with the same affection and courtesy he showed his loved ones in his private life," she said.

Wyatt was born in Campgaw, N.J., into a wealthy family in 1910, acccoring to McDonald, her publicist. Her father, an investment banker, came from an old-line New York family, her mother was a Van Rensselaer and wrote drama reviews. They gave their daughter a genteel upbringing, with her schooling at the fashionable Miss Chapin's school and Barnard College.

She left college after two years to apprentice at the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Mass. For two years she alternated between Berkshire and Broadway, appearing with Charles Laughton, Louis Calhern and Osgood Perkins.

While acting with Lillian Gish in "Joyous Season" in 1934, she got a contract offer from Universal Pictures. She agreed, on condition she could spend half each year in the theater.

During college days, Wyatt had attended a party at Hyde Park, N.Y., given by the sons of Franklin D. Roosevelt. There she met a Harvard student, Edgar Ward. In 1935 she married Ward, then a businessman, in Santa Fe, N.M. They had two sons, Christopher and Michael.

Runaways drummer Sandy West dies
Drummer Sandy West, from the '70s all-female rock band The Runaways, has died of lung cancer aged 47.

The influential musician was diagnosed a year ago and she died in a hospice in San Dimas, east of Los Angeles.

Lead singer Cherie Curry said: "It will never be the same for me again to step up on stage because Sandy West was the best and I will miss her forever."

West started The Runaways with Joan Jett in 1975. They went on to have hits with Cherry Bomb and Born to be Bad.

"We shared the dream of girls playing rock and roll. Sandy was an exuberant and powerful drummer," said Jett.

"I am overcome from the loss of my friend. I always told her we changed the world," she added.

Before the band broke up in 1979, The Runaways toured the world several times, often headlining with opening acts like Tom Petty and Cheap Trick.

West went on to perform as a drummer, guitarist and vocalist with The Sandy West Band.

Her manager, Mara Fox, is hoping to publish the musician's memoirs which she wrote before she died.

PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. Veteran character actor Arthur Hill is dead at 84.

Hill's dozens of television and movie appearances included the title role in the T-V series "Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law."

Hill's friend Walter Seltzer reports the actor died Sunday at a Pacific Palisades care facility after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

Hill hadn't worked in the motion picture or television business since 1990. He was a well-known face on T-V, appearing on "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "The Defenders," "Ben Casey," "The Untouchables," "The Nurses," "The F-B-I," "Mission Impossible," "The Fugitive" and "Marcus Welby, M-D."

He was the star of "Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law" from 1971 to 1974.

Hill also appeared in the films "Harper," "The Ugly American," "The Andromeda Strain" and "A Bridge Too Far."

Born in Saskatchewan, Hill served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and attended the University of British Columbia, where he studied law but was lured to the stage.

Nelson de la Rosa


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_de_la_Rosa

Nelson de la Rosa (June 1968 – October 22, 2006) was an actor from the Dominican Republic who measured 54 centimeters tall (about 1 1/2 feet).

De la Rosa starred in a 1987 feature horror film made in Italy called Ratman. During the 1990s Nelson continued his path to international success by becoming a staple guest at Venevision's television show Sabado Sensacional in Venezuela, and, later on, he would be invited as a guest to Don Francisco's show, Sábado Gigante, and to other Univision shows. His popularity took him to other Hispanic countries such as Puerto Rico, Mexico, Spain and others. He married, and had a son.

In 1996, he had a minor role in the Hollywood production, The Island of Dr. Moreau, where he shared lines with Marlon Brando, among others. This role is said to be the inspiration for the Austin Powers movie character, "Mini-Me". Another very popular appearance was in the video for the song A mover el coolo of the Argentine hip hop group Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas. De la Rosa had been reached by many American media operators and television shows, such as ESPN and others, for a feature about his life. So far, however, no plans to film a documentary about him have been completed.

De la Rosa befriended Boston Red Sox pitcher and fellow Dominican Pedro Martínez, who began to take de la Rosa to playoff games held in Boston during the 2004 MLB playoffs.

He had recently been a main attraction in the "Hermanos Mazzini" and "Las Águilas Humanas" circuses, which marketed him as the Guinness World Record-holder for world's smallest man at 54 cm (21.25 inches) [1], though this organization does not endorse this claim [2].

While no official diagnosis of the cause of de la Rosa's short stature is known, it has been speculated that he was born with the genetic syndrome MOPD II (microcephalic osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II)[3]. The primary symptoms of the syndrome include extreme proportional short stature, as well as distinct facial features similar to those exhibited by Nelson de la Rosa. A recent documentary by Granada Television highlighting the syndrome was aired on TLC several times in 2006. [4] There are approximately 100 known cases of MOPD II in the world at this time, spread throughout various races and ethnic backgrounds.

He died of unknown causes at the age of 38, October 22, 2006 in Providence, RI, USA, and was survived by his wife and nine-year-old child. An autopsy is expected and he could be delivered back to the Dominican Republic, allegedly to be displayed in a museum.

Former major league pitcher Joe Niekro, Houston's career victory leader, died Friday, Astros president Tal Smith said. He was 61.

The two-time 20-game winner suffered a brain aneurysm Thursday and was taken to South Florida Baptist Hospital in nearby Plant City, where he lived. He later was transferred to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he died.

"It came as a real shock to us," Smith said. "He was a great guy. He had a real spark and a great sense of humor."

Smith said Niekro did not have an active role with the Astros but kept in contact with many of his former Houston teammates.

Niekro, father of San Francisco Giants first baseman Lance Niekro, won 221 games in his career but never became as well known as his Hall of Fame brother, Phil.


Like his older brother, who won 318 games, Joe Niekro found success after developing the knuckleball and pitched into his 40s. They had a combined 539 major league victories, a record for brothers.

Smith said he was told of Niekro's death by Enos Cabell, one of the Niekro's Astros teammates.

"Enos said he just visited with him a few weeks ago in Cooperstown," Smith said. "Enos said he seemed healthy and full of life. This just came as a sudden shock."

Niekro won a franchise-best 144 games in 11 seasons with the Astros from 1975 to 1985, when he was traded to the New York Yankees. He was an All-Star in 1979, when he went 21-11 with a 3.00 ERA and followed up with a 20-12 record in 1980.

He beat the Dodgers in a one-game playoff that clinched Houston's first postseason berth in 1980. Seven years later, in his 21st season, he finally appeared in the World Series with the Minnesota Twins.

Niekro was born on Nov. 7, 1944 in Martins Ferry, Ohio. A third-round draft pick of the Cubs in 1966, he broke into the majors in 1967 and appeared in 702 games, including 500 starts, in 22 years with the Cubs, Padres, Tigers, Braves, Astros, Yankees and Twins.

Niekro, who once was suspended for getting caught on the mound with a nail file in his back pocket, pitched his final game in April 1988 - at age 43. He finished 221-204 with a 3.59 ERA, including 144-116 with a 3.22 ERA for the Astros.

Smith said the team was waiting on funeral arrangements before deciding how to honor Niekro.

"He played a very prominent role in our first trip to the playoffs (in 1980)," Smith said. "He was very popular with our fans, and he was truly one of our all-time greats."

Looks like a bad weekend for sports figures. Following Niekro's death, ESPN reports that Red Auerbach died today.

And former heavyweight contender Trevor Berbick was murdered with chop wounds to his skull.

i guess that was the final tko...

Tom Kneale (better known as Nigel Kneale) died on Sunday 29 October 2006 aged 84. To many he was the godfather of television science fiction, a literary genius, and one whose work for Hammer Film Productions was of immeasurable importance to the development of the company.

Established myth has Kneale born on the Isle of Man in April 1922, and although he grew up on the island, he was in fact born in Lancashire, England. Kneale spent time as an actor and a writer of prose before commencing work as a scriptwriter for the BBC.

It was whilst at the BBC in the early 1950s that Nigel Kneale wrote the ground-breaking serial The Quatermass Experiment. It was event television, emptying the streets and pubs for the six weeks of its duration. Hammer director Anthony Hinds saw the first episode, and by the time of the second instalment's broadcast, had secured a deal with the BBC for Hammer to make a film version.

Hammer's decision to make The Quatermass Xperiment was probably the most important the company would ever make. Director Val Guest cut the script down from a three hour epic to a taught 80 minute chiller, pitting Brian Donlevy's Quatermass against the creeping unknown that comes to earth in the space rocket. The company's first X picture proved a runaway success and would cause Hammer to look towards further macabre projects kickstarting the gothic horror cycle with The Curse of Frankenstein.

Nigel Kneale would go on to become one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He developed a knack for prescient visions of our dystopia. The live broadcast of Kneale's adaptation of Nineteen Eighty Four prompted questions in parliament in response to its shocking imagery. The themes would be picked up again in his 1960s tv play The Year of the Sex Olympics, as the nation is kept in check by a constant deluge of reality tv, and overt sex and violence.

Kneale would continue to cast his shadow over science fiction television throughout the next fifty years. He once watched an episode of the BBC's Doctor Who only to see a virtual copy of one of his Quatermass serials. Following a stint in Hollywood in the 1980s, in the 1990s Kneale turned down a request to contribute to popular US show The X-Files.

His association with Hammer was secured with the acquisition of the Quatermass property. Following the successes of The Quatermass Xperiment, Hammer were quick to put Quatermass 2 into production following its BBC broadcast, again with Val Guest at the helm. And in 1967 Hammer would finish off the trilogy with their adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit.

Kneale also adapted his own BBC serial The Creature for Hammer as The Abominable Snowman in 1957 and wrote the final script for Joan Fontaine vehicle The Witches in 1966. Hammer Film Productions' Chairman Larry Chrisfield said "He made a huge contribution to Hammer's history and we are greatly indebted to him".

And yet the ghost of Quatermass never quite eluded Kneale. A fourth series emerged from Euston films in 1979 and a radio series was made in the 1990s around the same time that a remake of the original Experiment was on the cards. In 2005 the BBC attempted a live broadcast of the story. Quatermass became a spokesperson for the fears of a nation, faced with the looming threat of the unknown, combating the foreigner and coming face to face with the alien in all of us.

Obituary: PW Botha

As prime minister and president of South Africa, PW Botha had a mild reformist streak, but made it clear that he was not prepared to hand over the country to the black majority.

The changes he made were designed to help ensure the continuation of white control in the face of mounting domestic and international pressures.

An Afrikaner, Pieter Willem Botha was born into a deeply religious and highly political family of Orange Free State farmers.

As a National Party MP for the Cape constituency of George from 1948, he helped implement the government's apartheid policies.


Botha was defence minister from 1966 to 1979, and it was during these years that he gained his reputation as a hawk.

He deployed forces to destabilise the country's Marxist neighbours, and worked to increase the military budget by 20 times, thereby undermining the international arms embargo against South Africa.

As prime minister and later the country's first executive President, Mr Botha told his people: "We must adapt or die."

State of emergency

Some apartheid laws were relaxed, but this reformist instinct was generally attributed to a desire to preserve the pre-eminence of whites by giving limited concessions to other races.

He later proposed that parliaments be set up for the coloured (mixed race) and Indian populations, though not for the blacks.

It caused a split in the National Party and provoked an increasingly aggressive response from the black population.

As a result, thousands of people were held without trial during states of emergency imposed by Botha at various times between 1986 and 1989.

Botha announced in February 1986 that the concept of apartheid was outdated, and promised more sharing of political power.

But then, in May, he sanctioned raids on alleged African National Congress bases in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana - a move widely seen as a slap in the face for the West.

Suspended sentence

Mr Mandela was taken out of jail for a meeting with Botha. But the president rejected worldwide appeals for him to be released, because he would not renounce violence.

Perhaps concerned by the growth in support among the white electorate for extreme right-wing parties, Botha also imposed a ban on celebrations to mark Mr Mandela's 70th birthday.

In 1989, after a bitter power struggle, Botha resigned the presidency and, in a final act of spite, refused to appoint his successor, FW De Klerk - the white leader who did see out apartheid, as acting president.

In 1998 he was fined and given a suspended five-year jail term for ignoring a summons to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

It had wanted to question him about his role as head of the State Security Council, which was found to have sanctioned the killing of anti-apartheid activists.

Botha was in office during the period when the policy of separating whites and blacks by government decree became increasingly unsustainable.

He was a cautious conservative by nature. At the end of his tenure he was following policies that had estranged many whites and yet not brought the reforms desired by many blacks.


PW Botha
1916: Born 12 January
1948: Elected MP
1966: Appointed defence minister
1978: Prime minister of South Africa
1989: Resigned the presidency

Si Simmons, the former Negro leagues baseball player who was believed to be the longest-living professional ballplayer in history, died Sunday in at a retirement home in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 111.

His death was announced by a spokeswoman for the retirement home.

A Philadelphia native, Simmons was a left-handed pitcher for the local Germantown Blue Ribbons beginning in either 1912 or 1913, in the primordial and poorly recorded days of organized black baseball. He played for Germantown and other clubs for many years after that, including the New York Lincoln Giants of the Eastern Colored League in 1926 as well as the Negro National League’s Cuban Stars in 1929.

The fact that Simmons was still alive was unknown to baseball’s avid research community until the summer of 2006, when a genealogist discovered he was living in the St. Petersburg, Fla., nursing home.

“I had a good curveball and a good fastball,” Simmons told The New York Times in September. Paid about $10 a game to play, Simmons added that he might have been good enough to play in the major leagues, but did not consider even asking for a tryout. “It was useless to try,” he said.

“A lot of good black players, but they couldn’t play in the league,” he said. “So that was it. After Jackie Robinson came up, they found out how good they were and started recruiting. You have to give them a chance to play.

“Negroes had a lot of pride. They felt like baseball, that was the greatest thing in the world for them. You had some great players in those days. Biz Mackey. Pop Lloyd. Judy Johnson. Scrappy Brown, the shortstop. We played against all those players.”

The discovery of Simmons made him a minor baseball celebrity. To celebrate his 111th birthday on Oct. 14, the Center for Negro League Baseball Research organized a party at Simmons’s nursing home that attracted 300 people, including 39 former Negro leagues players.

Carl Boles, who later played the outfield on the 1962 San Francisco Giants, presented Simmons with a plaque from the Society of American Baseball Research that recognized him as the oldest living professional ballplayer ever. And the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, - whose games Simmons still occasionally attended with his church group, gave him an official jersey with No. 111 on the back.

Simmons spent the afternoon regaling attendees with stories of the old Negro leagues, of his having played against legends like Lloyd, Johnson and Mackey. He often described Lloyd as “the second Honus Wagner.”

“It was a thrill to watch players like that,” he told The Times. “After a while they were in the big leagues, playing ball, which you thought would never come. But eventually it did come. And that was the greatest thing of my life when I saw these fellows come up and play big league baseball.”

Simmons retired from baseball in the early 1930’s.

Silas Simmons was born on Oct. 14, 1895. After his career in baseball, he became a porter and later assistant manager of a Plainfield, N.J., department store. He retired to St. Petersburg in 1971 with his second wife, Rebecca, who died in 1999. Simmons also outlived all of his five children.

NEW YORK - William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and other novels whose explorations of the darkest corners of the human mind and experience were charged by his own near-suicidal demons, died Wednesday. He was 81.

Styron's daughter, Alexandra, said the author died of pneumonia at a hospital in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. Styron, who had homes in Martha's Vineyard and Connecticut, had been in failing health for a long time.

"This is terrible," said Kurt Vonnegut, a longtime friend. "He was dramatic, he was fun. He was strong and proud and he was awfully good with the language. I hated to see him end this way."

A handsome, muscular man, with a strong chin and wavy dark hair that turned an elegant white, Styron was a Virginia native whose obsessions with race, class and personal guilt led to such tormented narratives as "Lie Down In Darkness" and "The Confessions of Nat Turner," which won the Pulitzer despite protests that the book was racist and inaccurate.

His other works included "Sophie's Choice," the award-winning novel about a Holocaust survivor from Poland, and "A Tidewater Morning," a collection of fiction pieces. He also published a book of essays, "This Quiet Dust," and the best-selling memoir "Darkness Visible," in which Styron recalled nearly taking his own life.

Styron was a liberal long involved in public causes, from supporting a Connecticut teacher suspended for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance to advocating for human rights for Jews in the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, Styron was among a group of authors and historians who successfully opposed plans for a Disney theme park near the Manassas National Battlefield in northern Virginia.

Although he was often cited along with Vonnegut and Norman Mailer as a leading writer of his generation, he produced little over the past 15 years. Styron was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after "Sophie's Choice," which came out in 1979. He did remain well connected, whether socializing with President Clinton on Martha's Vineyard or joining Arthur Miller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a delegation that met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2000.

"He was always generous to me as a younger writer," said E.L. Doctorow, who, like Styron, has been published for decades by Random House. "He stood in my mind as a sort of writerly presence, an iconic Southern writer."

The son of a shipbuilder, William C. Styron Jr. was born in Newport News, Va., to a family whose history extends to colonial Virginia. He was awed by the torrential fiction of fellow Southerner Thomas Wolfe and knew by his late teens he wanted to be a writer. His own life offered strong material.

At age 13, his mother died, transforming him into a "hell raiser" with an unhealable wound of guilt. He served as a lieutenant in the Marines during World War II and in 1945 was stationed in Okinawa. He was to take part in the invasion of Japan and didn't expect to come out alive.

The battle never took place; the United States dropped the atom bomb instead.

"Some of my problems I think came from a continuing anguish over my mother's death and if I had gotten shot it would have been, I suppose, some kind of completion. It's hard to say how that would have worked out," Styron told The Associated Press in a 1990 interview.

"When I was a young Marine platoon leader, there was this incredible sense of fate. The myth at that age is you're going to live forever. Well, I never believed that and my friends didn't. I thought I was going to die."

After the war, Styron graduated from Duke University and moved to New York, where he worked briefly as a copy editor at McGraw-Hill until the publisher fired him "for slovenly appearance, not wearing a hat, and reading the New York Post."

With extra free time and financial help from his family, Styron was able to complete "Lie Down in Darkness," detailing the destruction of a Southern family in a tempest of alcoholism, incestuous longing, madness and suicide. It is told in the third person — except for the final passage, a soliloquy by the daughter, Peyton Loftis, in the moments before she commits suicide by jumping out a window.

Styron was recalled to the Marines in 1951, just as "Lie Down in Darkness" was being published, and his second book — "The Long March" — drew on his experiences at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He took a lengthy tour of Europe after his discharge, offering moral and literary support for the founding of The Paris Review and meeting his wife, the poet Rosa Burgunder, with whom he had four children.

After publishing the novel "Set This House on Fire," in 1960, Styron turned to what had been a lifelong obsession: Nat Turner and the slave revolt of 1831. As a child, Styron lived near where the uprising had taken place and he never forgot a brief, harsh reference to Turner in his grade school history book.

In the early 1960s, "intensely aware that the theme of slave rebellion was finding echoes" in the growing Civil Rights movement, he worked on a fictional account of Turner, who Styron concluded was both hero and madman. "The Confessions of Nat Turner," published in 1967, earned Styron the Pulitzer Prize, but also fulfilled his friend James Baldwin's prediction that "Bill's going to catch it from black and white."

Styron was called "psychologically sick" and "morally senile." He was criticized for making Turner an "indecisive and emasculate wimp" and condemned for even writing the book, with some saying a white, Protestant Southerner could not truly understand or explore the thoughts of an African slave.

The novel was furiously condemned in a 1968 book, "William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond." Styron's reply: Writers of fiction have a duty to "meditate" on history and bring understanding through imagination.

Styron turned to the Holocaust for the novel "Sophie's Choice," which won the National Book Award and was later made into an Academy Award-winning movie starring Meryl Streep. Based partly on Styron's years in New York, "Sophie's Choice" is narrated by a young Southerner who meets a Polish-Catholic survivor of the war and learns of her sufferings in a Nazi concentration camp.

Once again Styron was the target of critics, who said he could not possibly navigate the feelings of a woman, a Jew or a survivor of the camps.

Styron would claim vindication in 2002 when the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, an organization led by his friend, the businessman Fred Schwartz, gave the author its third annual Witness to Justice Award. "This award sort of clears the air for me," he told the AP in a 2002 interview. "It is a kind of solid validation for me of what I tried to do as a novelist."

But he also had enemies from within to conquer. In late 1985, suffering from depression that only worsened when he was prescribed the drug Halcion, Styron narrowly stopped short of killing himself and instead checked into a hospital. In a brief book, "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness," Styron discussed his own experiences — including speculating that some of his early characters grew out of his own depression — and other writers who have suffered from mental illness.

"Death ... was now a daily presence, blowing over me in cold gusts," he wrote in his memoir. "I had not conceived precisely how my end would come. In short, I was still keeping the idea of suicide at bay. But plainly the possibility was around the corner, and I would soon meet it face to face."