As I like to do at the end of every year, here are some of the people we said goodbye to in 2007. (With great appreciation to the New York Times for the comprehensive list.)
January
Vincent Sardi Jr., 91, famed Broadway restaurateur, owner of the landmark theater district hangout bearing his name.
Yvonne De Carlo, 84, played Lily on “The Munsters.”
Carlo Ponti, 94, film producer.
Alice Coltrane, 69, jazz pianist, spiritual leader and wife of John Coltrane.
Michael Brecker, 57, prolific jazz saxophonist.
Art Buchwald, 81, newspaper humorist.
Denny Doherty, 66, Mamas and Papas singer.
E. Howard Hunt, 88, agent who organized Watergate break-in during the Nixon administration.
Father Robert Drinan, 86, anti-war Congressman.
February
Molly Ivins, 62, Texas political columnist.
Sidney Sheldon, 89, stage and screenwriter, author of steamy novels, producer of “I Dream of Jeannie.”
Barbara McNair, 72, actress, singer and television personality.
Anna Nicole Smith, 39, famous for being famous.
Hank Bauer, 84, World Series star.
Ray Evans, 92, lyricist of hit songs from movies.
Joseph E. Gallo, 87, winemaker who left the family empire to build his own cheese business.
Dennis Johnson, 52, N.B.A. defensive wizard who played 14 seasons with three teams and took two to championships.
March
Arthur Schlesinger, 89, historian of power.
Thomas F. Eagleton, 77, George McGovern’s running mate for 18 days.
Betty Hutton, 86, film star of ’40s and ’50s.
Ernie Ladd, 68, hall of famer in football and pro wrestling.
Bowie Kuhn, 80, former baseball commissioner, during the onset of the free agent era.
Calvert DeForest, 85, Larry (Bud) Melman on “Letterman.”
April
Eddie Robinson, 88, legendary head football coach at Grambling for more than 55 years.
Barry Nelson, 86, Broadway and film actor.
Roscoe Lee Browne, 81, actor of stage and screen.
Kurt Vonnegut, 84, novelist who caught the imagination of his age.
Don Ho, 76, entertainer who defined the Hawaiian image.
Kitty Carlisle Hart, 96, actress, singer and arts advocate.
David Halberstam, 73, Vietnam reporter and author.
Boris N. Yeltsin, 76, first freely elected leader of Russia.
Jack Valenti, 85, confidant to presidents Kennedy and Johnson and head of the Motion Picture Association of America.
May
Tom Poston, 85, comic actor on stage, screen and television, famous for work on “The Steve Allen Show” and “Newhart.”
Tommy Newsom, 78, jazz saxophonist and arranger, member of Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” orchestra.
Walter M. Schirra Jr., 84, one of the Original 7 Mercury astronauts.
Jerry Falwell, 73, mixed religion and conservative politics.
Charles Nelson Reilly, 76, Tony-winning comic actor, later known for appearing on popular tv game shows. One of the first openly gay performers to grace the airwaves.
June
Clete Boyer, 70, Yankee third baseman on five consecutive pennant winning teams in the 1960’s.
Jim Clark, 84, segregationist sheriff in Selma, Alabama in the 1950’s and ‘60’s who violently defended Jim Crow laws.
Don Herbert, 89, television’s “Mr. Wizard” to science buffs.
Kurt Waldheim, 88, former U.N. chief.
Liz Claiborne, 78, designer who founded a fashion empire.
Joel Siegel, 63, longtime ABC movie critic.
July
Beverly Sills, 78, opera singer, arts administrator and all-American diva, she made opera accessible to the masses.
Lady Bird Johnson, 94, wife of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who described her as “the brains and money of this family”.
Tammy Faye Bakker, 65, emotive televangelist, who along with husband Jim, was the original host of “The 700 Club”.
Ingmar Bergman, 89, Swedish filmmaker considered one of the greatest directors of all time.
Tom Snyder, 71, pioneer of late-night television.
Bill Walsh, 75, coached the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl Championships and invented the West Coast Offense.
August
Merv Griffin, 82, nightclub singer who became a television innovator and producer of “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune”.
Phil Rizzuto, 89, Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop turned broadcaster who spent 53 years with the organization. Beloved by New York sports fans.
Max Roach, 83, master of modern jazz, he reinvented drumming.
Carolyn Goodman, 91, civil rights champion and mother of Andrew Goodman, who along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964..
Michael Deaver, 69, shaped President Ronald Reagan’s image and worked the puppet strings throughout his administration.
Leona Helmsley, 87, hotel queen who gained notoriety for her nasty treatment of employees.
Butch van Breda Kolff, 84, fiery basketball coach.
Richard Jewell, 44, mistakenly accused in the Atlanta Olympic bombing in 1996, the episode would ruin his life.
September
Luciano Pavarotti, 71, leading operatic tenor of his generation.
Miyoshi Umeki, 78, first Asian performer to win an Oscar in her first Hollywood film “Sayonara” in 1957.
Jane Wyman, 90, star of film and TV, she was the first wife of President Ronald Reagan.
Joe Zawinul, 75, jazz fusion pioneer.
Marcel Marceau, 84, renowned mime.
October
Al Oerter, 71, Olympic discus champion.
George Grizzard, 79, actor noted for performing in the plays of Edward Albee.
Joey Bishop, 89, comedian and television performer, he was the last surviving member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack.
Adm. William Crowe, 82, led Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Reagan Administration.
Deborah Kerr, 86, actress of Hollywood’s golden age who’s sultry role in the film “From Here to Eternity” changed her on-screen persona.
Robert Goulet, 73, actor and singer, he played Lancelot in the original Broadway production of “Camelot.”
November
Paul W. Tibbets Jr., 92, pilot of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the final days of World War II.
Norman Mailer, 84, towering writer with matching ego who burst on the scene in 1948 with the book “The Naked and The Dead.”
Ian Smith, 88, defiant white leader of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) who once proclaimed white rule in Africa would endure 1,000 years.
Sean Taylor, 24, Washington Redskins safety, on his way to a Pro Bowl season before being murdered in his own home by burglars.
Bill Willis, 86, guard with the Cleveland Browns, who helped break the color barrier in pro football in 1946.
Henry J. Hyde, 83, powerful House Republican who led impeachment of Clinton.
Roger B. Smith, 82, led General Motors in turbulent times, subject of Michael Moore’s documentary “Roger & Me”.
Evel Knievel, 69, legendary daredevil and last of a breed of exhibitionists who performed seemingly for the shear thrill of it.
December
Ike Turner, 76, R&B singer and former husband of Tina Turner, whose talents as a musician were eclipsed by his reputation as an abusive spouse.
Dan Fogelberg, 56, soft-rock star in the 70s.
Michael Kidd, choreographer for Broadway and Hollywood.
Oscar Peterson, 82, jazz’s piano virtuoso.
Benazir Bhutto, 54, former prime minister of Pakistan.
Actor Roscoe Lee Browne, whose rich voice and dignified bearing brought him an Emmy Award and a Tony nomination, has died. He was 81.
Browne died early Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after a long battle with cancer, said Alan Nierob, a spokesman for the family.
Browne’s career included classic theater to TV cartoons. He also was a poet and a former world-class athlete.
His deep, cultured voice was heard narrating the 1995 hit movie “Babe.” On screen, his character often was smart, cynical and well-educated, whether a congressman, a judge or a butler.
Born to a Baptist minister in Woodbury, N.J., Browne graduated from historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he later returned to teach comparative literature and French. He also was a track star, winning the 880-yard run in the 1952 Millrose Games.
Browne was selling wine for an import company when he decided to become a full-time actor in 1956 and had roles that year in the inaugural season of the New York Shakespeare Festival in a production of “Julius Caesar.”
In 1961, he starred in an English-language version of Jean Genet’s play “The Blacks.”
Two years later, he was The Narrator in a Broadway production of “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe,” a play by Edward Albee from a novella by Carson McCullers. In a front page article on the advances made by blacks in the theater, the New York Times noted that Browne’s understudy was white.
He won an Obie Award in 1965 for his role as a rebellious slave in the off-Broadway “Benito Cereno.”
In movies, he was a spy in the 1969 Alfred Hitchcock feature “Topaz” and a camp cook in 1972’s “The Cowboys,” which starred John Wayne.
“Some critics complained that I spoke too well to be believable” in the cook’s role, Browne told The Washington Post (nyse: WPO - news - people ) in 1972. “When a critic makes that remark, I think, if I had said, ‘Yassuh, boss’ to John Wayne, then the critic would have taken a shine to me.”
On television, he had several memorable guest roles. He was a snobbish black lawyer trapped in an elevator with bigot Archie Bunker in an episode of the 1970s TV comedy “All in the Family” and the butler Saunders in the comedy “Soap.” He won an Emmy in 1986 for a guest role as Professor Foster on “The Cosby Show.”
In 1992, Browne returned to Broadway in “Two Trains Running,” one of August Wilson’s acclaimed series of plays on the black experience. It won the Tony for best play and brought Browne a Tony nomination for best featured (supporting) actor.
The New York Times said he portrayed “the wry perspective of one who believes that human folly knows few bounds and certainly no racial bounds. The performance is wise and slyly life-affirming.”
Browne also wrote poetry and included some of it along with works by masters such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William Butler Yeats in “Behind the Broken Words,” a poetry anthology stage piece that he and Anthony Zerbe performed annually for three decades.
Associated Press Writer Polly Anderson in New York contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 Associated Press
Last week, President George W. Bush delivered a televised speech to the nation in which he attempted to convince the American people that more troops needed to be sent to Iraq in order to bring stability to that region, following the U.S. invasion three years ago, subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein, escalation of partisan religious and ethnic tension and complete breakdown of any semblance of order and government.
Without spelling out how stability would be achieved or how long it would take, the President wanted support for a vague plan to keep a military presence in the middle of what most experts now see as a civil war. Meanwhile the cost of the war continues to grow, now approaching the five hundred billion dollar mark.
Forty years ago, the United States was engulfed in a similar unwinnable internal conflict in Vietnam, that divided American sentiments, cost thousands of lives, and hundreds of millions of dollars. Just as now, important domestic issues were being cast aside as federal funds were diverted to the war effort. Then as now, political leaders talked of insuring the redevelopment of a foreign nation they had helped to destroy, while ignoring the growing needs of people at home struggling to get by.
On April 4, 1967, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a speech at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned, at Riverside Church in New York City. It was one of his first public statements in opposition to the Vietnam War, which resulted in some criticism in many quarters. But Dr. King felt he had to speak out, as a man of faith and a man of principle, against an action he felt was crippling the country, economically and spiritually.
Not surprisingly, the words he spoke four decades ago, are just as appropriate now as they were then. Here is an excerpt:
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
Read the full speech, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence here.
New York City is awash in jazz musicians, jazz fans and jazz news this week.
First, some 8,000 educators, musicians, industry executives, media and students from 45 countries are in town through Saturday for the 34th Annual Conference of the International Association for Jazz Education.
The four-day conference will feature a 75,000 square-foot music industry exposition, commission premieres, technology presentations, research papers, award ceremonies, and performances by over 500 of the worlds most respected professional jazz groups and musicians. In addition, a number of top school groups from France, Denmark, Australia, United Kingdom, Israel, Kazakhstan, Canada, and the United States are scheduled to perform.
On Friday, January 12, the IAJE Conference will host the 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Awards Concert. Beginning in 1982, and every year since, the NEA Jazz Masters Award has been conferred on a handful of living legends that have made major contributions to jazz. Recognized as the nations highest honor for the field of jazz, the award to date has been given to 87 great figures in American music. The awards concert will feature performances by The Dizzy Gillespie All Star Band, under the direction of Slide Hampton, and the Clayton Brothers Quintet.
Jazz fans that cant be there in person can hear on-site reports and interviews with musicians by listening to Newark, New Jersey-based jazz radio station WBGO, either locally or over the Internet.
Had you been listening this morning, you would have heard the announcement that Wynton Marsalis, the Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the musical director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, will be taking over as host of the centers syndicated radio program, Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio. The weekly broadcast heard on over 240 public radio stations, had been hosted for 14 years by newsman and jazz fan Ed Bradley, who passed away last November.
Finally, Lincoln Center was the site earlier today of the unveiling of a new United States Postage Stamp honoring the First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald. The new 39-cent stamp bearing her likeness becomes the 30th in the Black Heritage commemorative series, which includes among others, James Baldwin, Alvin Ailey and Paul Robeson, noted on these pages at the time of their unveiling. One of Fitzgeralds musical collaborators on several truly memorable recordings, the great pianist Oscar Peterson, was also honored with a postage stamp in his native Canada.
How to Order the First Day of Issue Postmark
Customers have 60 days to obtain the first day of issue postmark by mail. They may purchase new stamps at The Postal Store Website at www.usps.com/shop, by telephone at 800-STAMP-24 and at their local Post Office. They should affix the stamps to envelopes of their choice, address the envelopes (to themselves or others) and place them in a larger envelope addressed to:
ELLA FITZGERALD STAMP
POSTMASTER
421 EIGHTH AVE RM 2029B
NEW YORK NY 10199-9998
After applying the first day of issue postmark, the Postal Service will return the envelopes through the mail. There is no charge for the postmark. All orders must be postmarked by March 10, 2007.
One hundred and fifty million Ella Fitzgerald stamps were printed.