Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Kitty Dukakis, Wife of 1988 Presidential Nominee, Dies at 88

      by

      Married to Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, she became a proponent of electroshock therapy after unsuccessful treatments for alcoholism and depression.Kitty Dukakis, an activist first lady of Massachusetts and humanitarian who overcame alcoholism and depression with the help of electroconvulsive therapy, then became a proponent of the treatment with her husband, Michael S. Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor and the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, died on Friday night at her home in Brookline, Mass. She was 88. Her son, John, said the cause was complications of dementia. Mrs. Dukakis “lived a full life fighting to make the world a better place and sharing her vulnerabilities to help others face theirs,” her family said in a statement.Mrs. Dukakis was a longtime activist on behalf of underdogs and people who struggled. Among the subjects most important to her was continuing education on the Holocaust. She was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 to the first President’s Commission on the Holocaust, which sought to create a national memorial and museum; when that panel was replaced a decade later by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, she was appointed to the council by President George H.W. Bush.“Perhaps in the entire history of civilization, the Holocaust was the most important object lesson in man’s inhumanity to man,” she told the National Governors Association in 1983.Few political wives have been as forthright as Mrs. Dukakis in sharing the intimate details of their struggles with addiction and depression. She wrote two books that revealed in painful detail her early dependence on diet pills, how alcoholism later took over her life and how she turned, at age 64, to electroshock therapy to treat the crippling depression that she said had long been masked by her drinking.Her successful electroshock treatment led her and her husband to publicly advocate for the effectiveness of the procedure, and even to hold support groups at their home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      George Foreman, Boxing Champion and Grilling Magnate, Dies at 76

      by

      He claimed a world title in his 20s and again in his 40s, and then made millions selling grills.George Foreman, a heavyweight boxing champion who returned to the sport to regain his title at the improbable age of 45, and parlayed his fame and amiable personality into a multimillion-dollar grill business, died on Friday. He was 76.His family announced his death on his Instagram account. The family statement did not give a cause or say where he died.When Foreman returned to the ring after 10 years away, there was skepticism that a fighter of his years could beat any younger fighter, much less come back to the top of the game. But in 1994, he beat the undefeated Michael Moorer to reclaim the world title, shocking the boxing world.Foreman’s career spanned generations: He fought Chuck Wepner in the 1960s, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali in the ’70s, Dwight Muhammad Qawi in the ’80s and Evander Holyfield in the ’90s.And his popularity helped him make millions selling grills after his retirement.George Edward Foreman was born Jan. 10, 1949, in Marshall, Texas, to Nancy Ree (Nelson) Foreman and J.D. Foreman, a railroad construction worker. As an adult, he learned that his biological father was a man named Leroy Moorehead.Foreman was candid about being a bully and a petty criminal in his youth. After dropping out of school, he joined the Job Corps at 16. At 17, he tried his hand at boxing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Robert E. Ginna Jr., Whose Article Bolstered U.F.O. Claims, Dies at 99

      by

      A founding editor of People, he also served as editor in chief of Little, Brown and produced films. But his public image was defined by a 1952 story for Life.Robert E. Ginna Jr., a founding editor of People magazine, a book editor and a film producer whose 1952 Life magazine article provoked a frenzy by validating the idea that flying saucers might exist and could have visited Earth from outer space, died on March 4 at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y.His death was confirmed by his son, Peter St. John Ginna. He was 99.Mr. Ginna (pronounced gun-NAY) enjoyed a wide-ranging, eight-decade career. As the editor in chief of Little, Brown, he persuaded the acclaimed novelist James Salter to shift from screenplays to books and discovered Dr. Robin Cook as an author of thrillers. He also produced movies and was part of the team that started People as a highbrow showcase for profiles of cultural figures like Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, but quit when the magazine descended into what he viewed as celebrity fluff.To the general public, though, he was perhaps best known for an article he wrote with H.B. Darrach Jr. for the April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine. The cover featured an alluring photograph of Marilyn Monroe under the headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”The April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine featured a seductive photo of Marilyn Monroe juxtaposed with the now-infamous headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”Philippe Halsman/Life Magazine, via Magnum PhotosTo Mr. Ginna’s eternal dismay, the article made him a target for U.F.O. buffs and kooks. Headlined “Have We Visitors From Space?,” it examined 10 reports of unidentified flying object sightings, followed by an unequivocal assessment from the German rocket expert Walther Riedel: “I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis.”While reports of U.F.O.s in the late 1940s were often trivialized, Phillip J. Hutchison and Herbert J. Strentz wrote in American Journalism in 2019: “By the early 1950s, however, more substantial human-interest features embraced the idea that U.F.O. reports might correspond to extraterrestrial Earth visitors. A widely cited April 7, 1952, Life magazine feature titled ‘Have We Visitors From Space?’ represents one of the most influential examples of the latter trend.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Slick Watts, N.B.A. Fan Favorite and Headband Pioneer, Dies at 73

      by

      An undrafted, 6-foot-1 point guard with patchy hair, he made an enduring fashion statement and became seen as the ultimate Seattle SuperSonic.Slick Watts, an unheralded, undersized, patchy-haired point guard who turned his obstacles into springboards, endearing himself to fans of the Seattle SuperSonics long past the team’s existence and helping to invent the headband as a basketball fashion signature, has died. He was 73.His son Donald announced the death on social media on Saturday in a statement that did not provide further details. In 2021, Watts had a major stroke, and he spent recent years dealing with lung sarcoidosis, an inflammatory condition.Watts played for the SuperSonics for just four and a half seasons, from 1973-78. Though he helped lead the team to its first playoff berth, he was not around in 1979 for the team’s first and only finals victory.Still, fans and fellow players held him in a singular regard.In 2012, decades after his retirement — and four years after the team moved and became the Oklahoma City Thunder — a Seattle rap duo called the Blue Scholars made Watts’s name the title of a song about the Sonics. James Donaldson, a Sonics center in the 1980s, told The Seattle Times after Watts’s death, “He epitomized the Seattle SuperSonics.”That reputation came from a combination of pluck and generosity.Watts’s basketball origins were modest. He was an impressive collegiate shooter, averaging 22.8 points per game and shooting 49 percent from the field. But he was just 6-foot-1 and played for Xavier University of Louisiana, alittle-known historically Black Catholic university in New Orleans (not Xavier University of Cincinnati). He went undrafted in 1973.That might have been the end of his basketball career, except for the fact that Watts’s college coach, Bob Hopkins, was a cousin of Bill Russell, the Celtics great then coaching the Sonics. He secured Watts a professional tryout. The team was already loaded with shooting talent, so Watts devoted himself to passing. Russell offered him a $19,000-a-year contract, paltry by N.B.A. standards.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Roy L. Prosterman, 89, Dies; Worked to Secure Land for the Rural Poor

      by

      Seeing land rights as the key to lifting up the impoverished, he pushed authoritarian governments as well as emerging democratic ones to distribute farmland.Roy L. Prosterman, a lawyer who left a lucrative corporate law practice to champion land reform in the underdeveloped world, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Seattle. He was 89.His death was announced by the Seattle land-rights institute Landesa, of which he was a founder. The organization did not specify a cause.Mr. Prosterman worked with governments in some 60 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America over nearly six decades, crafting plans to give a degree of ownership to peasant families. Sometimes the governments he worked with obtained land by expropriating large tracts, with compensation to the owners. At other times, the government simply gave away land it owned.Seeing land rights as the key to lifting up the world’s millions of rural poor people, he pushed authoritarian governments in places like Vietnam and El Salvador, as well as emerging democratic ones in countries like India, to distribute farmland to impoverished farmers.Mr. Prosterman, center, conducting interviews in China in an undated photo. Beside him is Tim Hanstad, his longtime colleague and a co-founder of Landesa.via LandesaIn an obituary, Landesa said that millions of people had benefited from the programs created by Mr. Prosterman and his group. Landesa, which was founded in 1981 as the Rural Development Institute at the University of Washington and became an independent organization in 1992, was “an early, and often lonely, voice recognizing the importance that access to land and security of land has in uplifting the lives of the poor in agrarian economies,” the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in the preface to “One Billion Rising: Law, Land and the Alleviation of Global Poverty” (2009), a book edited and partly written by Mr. Prosterman.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Junior Bridgeman, N.B.A. Player Turned Mogul, Dies at 71

      by

      He became an entrepreneur during a solid career with the Milwaukee Bucks. He later bought hundreds of fast-food outlets, a Coca-Cola bottling business and Ebony and Jet magazines.Junior Bridgeman, who followed a strong N.B.A. career with a remarkable run as an entrepreneur, acquiring hundreds of fast-food restaurants, a Coca-Cola bottling business and a minority stake in the Milwaukee Bucks, his team for a decade, died on Tuesday in Louisville, Ky. He was 71.The cause was a cardiac event, a family spokesman said. Mr. Bridgeman had been talking to a reporter for a local television station during a charity event at the Galt House Hotel when he said he felt that he was having a heart attack, the spokesman said, and he was taken to a hospital, where he died.Mr. Bridgeman’s business success brought him a net worth of $1.4 billion this year, Forbes magazine said, putting him in “rare air alongside Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and LeBron James as the only N.B.A. players with 10-figure fortunes.”Mr. Johnson, writing on X after the death, recalled that Mr. Bridgeman, a former small forward, had “one of the sweetest jump shots in the N.B.A.” Mr. Bridgeman, he added, had helped create a blueprint for “so many current and former athletes across sports that success doesn’t end when you’re done playing.”Mr. Bridgeman was not a major star during his 12 seasons in the N.B.A., 10 with the Bucks and two with the Los Angeles Clippers. But he stood out as a sixth man who provided a scoring boost off the bench for a Milwaukee team that largely excelled under Coach Don Nelson. From 1975 to 1987, Mr. Bridgeman averaged 13.6 points a game.Mr. Bridgeman on the bench during a game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Washington Bullets in the early 1980s. He played for the Bucks for a decade.Focus on Sport/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Anne Kaufman Schneider, 99, Ardent Keeper of Her Father’s Plays, Dies

      by

      She shepherded the works of George S. Kaufman from the 20th century into the next, encouraging regional theater productions and helping to steer two of them to Broadway.Anne Kaufman Schneider, who shepherded the plays of her father, George S. Kaufman, a titan of 20th-century American theatrical wit, into the 21st century with an acerbic sagacity all her own, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99.Her executor, Laurence Maslon, confirmed her death.“Headstrong girls are difficult,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider once told The New York Times, “but that was the source of my good relationship with my father. And it started early. Because there wasn’t any baby talk. We went to the theater together starting when I was 4. Now I have made his work my agenda in life.”George Kaufman’s stellar career as a hit-making playwright and stage director included winning two Pulitzer Prizes — one, in 1937, for “You Can’t Take It With You,” a comedy he created with his most constant collaborator, Moss Hart; the other, in 1932, for “Of Thee I Sing,” a satirical political musical co-written with Morrie Ryskind to a score by George and Ira Gershwin.George S. Kaufman, left, with Moss Hart, his most constant collaborator, in 1937, the year their play “You Can’t Take It With You” won the Pulitzer Prize.Underwood Archives/Getty ImagesEven so, after his death in 1961 at the age of 71, Kaufman was a hard sell for theatrical revivals.“Very little happened at all,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider once recalled, “until Ellis Rabb revived ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ for the A.P.A./Phoenix Theater in 1965. Ellis proved that these are classic American plays.” (Founded by Mr. Rabb, an actor and director, the A.P.A., formally the Association of Producing Artists, was a Broadway entity notable for mounting revivals after it merged with the Phoenix Theater, another Broadway house.)Ms. Kaufman Schneider proceeded to oversee her father’s renaissance over the next 50-plus years — a term of service that outdistanced his own living stewardship of his career.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      James Reason, Who Used Swiss Cheese to Explain Human Error, Dies at 86

      by

      Mistakes happen, he theorized, because multiple vulnerabilities in a system align — like the holes in cheese — to create a recipe for disaster.The story of how James Reason became an authority on the psychology of human error begins with a teapot.It was the early 1970s. He was a professor at the University of Leicester, in England, studying motion sickness, a process that involved spinning his subjects round and round, and occasionally revealing what they had eaten for breakfast.One afternoon, as he was boiling water in his kitchen to make tea, his cat, a brown Burmese named Rusky, sauntered in meowing for food. “I opened a tin of cat food,” he later recalled, “dug in a spoon and dolloped a large spoonful of cat food into the teapot.”After swearing at Rusky, Professor Reason berated himself: How could he have done something so stupid?The question seemed more intellectually engaging than making people dizzy, so he ditched motion sickness to study why humans make mistakes, particularly in high-risk settings.By analyzing hundreds of accidents in aviation, railway travel, medicine and nuclear power, Professor Reason concluded that human errors were usually the byproduct of circumstances — in his case, the cat food was stored near the tea leaves, and the cat had walked in just as he was boiling water — rather than being caused by careless or malicious behavior.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More